10/07/15 – Rob Bryan – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Sign up for the podcast feed at scotthorton.org for the archives.
Live here, noon to two, at the Liberty Radio Network, on the Liberty Radio Network, and at it.
All right, our guest today is Rob Bryan.
He's a freelance journalist from New York, and he wrote this piece for Mondoweiss.net.
It's called, The Refreshing Bluntness of Aylet Shackett.
Welcome to the show.
Rob, how are you doing?
I'm good.
How are you?
Thanks for having me.
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Who is Aylet Shackett, and what is so refreshing about her bluntness?
Well, she is a far right-wing politician in Israel.
She was recently appointed the justice minister.
She's part of a party called Jewish Home, which is led by a guy named Naphtali Bennett.
And, you know, I make the comparison in the article.
It's sort of useful to think of her almost as Israel's version of Trump.
And, incidentally, I think Trump is actually a little bit different.
And, incidentally, I think Trump is actually pretty popular over there.
But, you know, she talks a lot about what she calls the infiltrators, or immigrants, asylum seekers, people coming from Sudan and Eritrea seeking asylum in Israel.
And she's very determined to keep them out and also to, you know, deprive Palestinians of basic civil rights.
And she sort of became notorious, actually, before she became justice minister, for sharing a Facebook post that was written by this kind of extremist settler.
And he referred to Palestinians as snakes and said that, basically, we should wipe them out and we should kill their mothers and destroy their houses so that they can't raise any more snakes.
So she became sort of infamous for basically using this, you know, genocidal rhetoric against Palestinians.
Yeah, now, that is an amazing quote.
Although, I don't know how many points you take off for it being sort of a retweet rather than her own words.
Which, when I first had heard that, I thought, wow, those were her words, was the way it was originally reported.
Or, at least, the way I took it.
Yeah, I think it was published.
That was the first published example of those words, even though they weren't technically hers.
Oh, I see.
So, the first published version.
Well, and, you know what, however many points you take off for it being not exactly her own words, but just the first time that anyone put that out in public or whatever, still, that's a lot of points already, the bad way, for what the quote actually says here.
I mean, when you say snakes, that's a specific reference to the children, right?
To their babies.
Right, yeah.
And, you know, a lot of sort of genocidal rulers over the years have used that kind of rhetoric in terms of the people they're trying to wipe out.
They refer to them as vermin or snakes.
It's a way to sort of make them seem subhuman.
And, of course, the mothers of the martyrs, they don't get to be individuals themselves.
You know, they only exist in order to create more martyrs.
And martyrs, of course, is a sarcastic term for Palestinian resistance, people who must be killed by the Israeli side.
They don't have any of their own agency.
They're just here to create more enemies for us, so their lives are forfeit, too.
Right, basically.
Incredible.
And then here's the other thing I like about this, and I'm sorry, we're going to move on to the rest of your article and everything here, but before we leave this quote, I think it's just worth pointing out here, if people look at it, especially at the beginning, the way that she uses the term peoples, the whole people, czar, the enemy, the whole people, this and that, these kind of collectivist terms, they're actually ridiculous when you read about them in a contemporary context.
If you were talking about some extinct faction of American Indians that don't exist anymore and you were to say, oh, they were a people who lived in the Phoenix Valley before they were all exterminated, or something like that, you could say a people in that kind of context, maybe, but even then it's clumsy phrasing, right?
A people, you know?
But the way she uses it in order to collectivize and dehumanize all Palestinians is just so ham-handed and blatant.
I just, I like it, you know, basically.
The lesson is so clear there.
Individuals have human rights.
Collectives can be characterized as demon enemies that must be destroyed with ease.
And that's exactly what she's up to, but in the most kind of overly simplistic way.
Like when you watch a TV commercial from the 1950s or something and it just seems so corny and lame, you know?
Mm-hmm.
Horrible.
All right.
Sorry.
Now, so then you went and saw her give a talk in Israel, I mean, in New York.
Is that right?
Yeah, at the Yeshiva University Museum.
And how did it go?
It was kind of weird.
I mean, it was very small.
It was maybe 30 people or so, and they were just kind of sitting in chairs in this big atrium of this museum.
And she was talking with a Cardozo professor.
Cardozo is the law school associated with Yeshiva University, and that's more of a secular law school.
So Yeshiva University undergrad is more of a religious Jewish institution, and then the law school tends to be more secular.
But anyway, so it was this woman, Professor Stone, Suzanne Stone, who was talking to Ayelet Shaked, and it was almost like I compared it to something you'd see in a bookstore.
It was this very sort of like casual discussion, but it was all about this thing called Shemitah, which is part of the Jewish tradition.
Shemitah was raised kind of more like secular Jewish, so I didn't know that much about it.
But I was reading about it.
It's basically the Jewish sabbatical year that also functions as kind of like Jubilee.
So it's debt forgiveness.
And she basically supported, which I actually think, you know, in another context would be a good thing, debt forgiveness for all these people who, it turns out, were totally incapable of paying back their debt.
So she gave debt relief to 30,000 people, and that was a big focus of the talk.
She didn't really address the snake's remark, but she did talk a lot about African immigrants who arrived here on foot, and one of the craziest parts of the talk to me, and I mentioned it in the article, is when she said, you know, Israel is not like the U.S. It's not a nation of immigrants.
And I just thought, you know, that was just like the craziest thing I'd ever heard, right?
How many people busted out laughing when she said that?
Nobody.
That's the other thing.
I mean, I think everyone there was pretty much sort of seemed to be on her side, besides the guy at the end who I mentioned.
But it seemed to be a pretty conservative crowd.
And I think, yeah, I mean, first of all, like, you know, Israel obviously was started pretty much entirely by Jewish refugees, and also the founding of Israel in 1948, what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, itself created about 700,000 Palestinian refugees who are now arguing for the right of return.
So on a lot of levels, including a religious level, which I mentioned as well, you know, the story of Moses fleeing slavery in Egypt, you know, journeying across the Sinai Desert to the Promised Land, that's also, of course, the story, the religious story of Israel.
So on many different levels, Israel is a country of refugees, of immigrants, and for her to just dismiss that or, you know, deny it entirely was kind of incredible.
Yeah.
Well, and, well, let me ask you this.
She accepted her premises of the demographic threat to the Jewish supermajority there.
Does she even have a point?
How many refugees are we even talking about here?
I mean, she claims that it would be millions and that you would have Syrian refugees, and it could be a lot of refugees.
But the question is, yeah, do you need to basically, as she acknowledges, and this is, again, why I say it's refreshing that she's so blunt about it, unlike more, you know, liberal, kind of liberal Zionist Israeli politicians, they try to sort of hide it a little bit.
But basically, the idea is that if you don't have, like you said, you know, a Jewish majority, then in a democracy, it ceases to be a Jewish state.
So you need at least over 50% Jewish, basically.
Ideally, to Zionists, you have, you know, a comfortable majority, like 60, 70, or more.
I think Israel is about 80% Jewish now.
So that's what she said during the clock.
Actually, I'm not entirely sure about that.
But, so, in any case, yeah, I mean, if you see that demographic threat as threatening the Jewish state and, you know, wanting it to be destroyed, I think that's sort of a mischaracterization.
It doesn't necessarily mean, you know, at least from my point of view, I don't wish harm on anyone in that region.
But I think they should be able to live together, ideally, in a secular democratic state that doesn't discriminate on the basis of religion.
So I tend to be more, you know, a one-state solution person.
There are, you know, there is an argument to be made for two states.
But to me, the real crux of the issue is that you need equal rights for everyone, and obviously that's not the case.
Yeah, and that the Israeli solution is no solution, just facts on the ground of perpetual war and terror.
Right, sort of slowly occupying or slowly settling, you know, the West Bank and kind of just annexing more and more land.
All right, now hold it right there because I actually kept you into the break here.
But let's finish up the break and then let the live audience hear the rest of this discussion too.
All right, sounds good.
Okay, right back in a second.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I know I'm really bad about sticking to these hard brakes.
I need soft brakes is what I need, but what a hassle that would be.
Anyway, talking with Rob Bryan.
He's written this piece at Mondoweiss.net, which, you know what?
There's about 10 or 15 things at Mondoweiss.net that you need to see this week, okay?
So just head on over there for me, okay?
All right, thank you.
Sorry, I don't mean to sound patronizing.
Do it for your own good if you feel like it.
This is one of them.
The refreshing bluntness of Eilat Shackett.
And she is basically the Justice Minister.
That means she is the Attorney General of Israel, basically, for intents and purposes.
It's a parliamentary system over there, but she's in that post.
And boy, is she refreshingly blunt, as Rob is explaining.
She's not shy at all about basically explaining what amounts to, if it was in America, what we would call a white supremacist point of view.
Rob?
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, it's sad, honestly, that this has become the case.
In a certain way, it does sort of follow just from the logic of Zionism itself.
Because if you say that a state's religious character is more important than its democratic character, then that's the result you have.
The same thing is true in a place like Saudi Arabia.
If it's a Muslim first, then, well, in that case, not really democratic at all.
But, you know, to me, I think democracy has to come first.
And in Israel, that's really just blatantly not the case.
I mean, even just looking at a place like the West Bank, where so many people are living under occupation, subject to the laws of Israel, and yet don't have the right to vote, where people are incarcerated or convicted at a rate of over 99%, that's obviously not democracy.
So I think what you're seeing in Israel now, unfortunately, is this kind of gradual erosion of democracy.
And you see it in Netanyahu's Likud party, but you see it maybe even more clearly in the parties that are even further to the right.
And, you know, remember, Netanyahu was considered by many to be the most right-wing Prime Minister ever.
But not Tali Bennett's party, a Jewish home, which Ayelet Shaked is a part of.
And also, Israel is our home, which has an almost identical name, but that's Avigdor Lieberman's party.
That's another far right-wing party.
And, yeah, you hear a lot of the rhetoric that you would hear from Donald Trump, from white supremacists, or, you know, quote-unquote white nationalists, who are always warning of this threat of the other, the outsider, the immigrant, the infiltrator, as Shaked says.
So, yeah, I think, you know, it's definitely scary, scary speech.
Well, and it's funny here.
You've got to admit, as you write it, you know, with hyphens, even using the phrase, quote, the other, to describe those issues, you've got to, you know...
I was like, did I hear that correctly?
Are you honestly using...
Yeah, it's like she has the demagogue script, but she was supposed to...
That's in parentheses and, you know, like stage direction.
She's supposed to fill in her own specific, you know, term there and forgot to.
Right, yeah.
Amazing.
Yeah, this is someone who hasn't read much Edward Said, I don't think.
Probably not.
May not be familiar with that use of the term.
Yeah, I mean, that's really something else.
And, of course, I mean, I don't know, this usually goes without saying, I'm not sure why, either because it's too obvious or because you're not supposed to say it or whatever, but this is especially ironic because we're talking about Jews.
And they're the ones that everybody's always calling the other.
And so at least they got to notice the irony here or something, right?
But no, it's like they just keep going, like they're living in this fantasy world.
Well, I don't know if you know, there's the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who had a great quote about it.
He's the guy who wrote Mouse, which is this graphic novel based on his dad's experience in the Holocaust.
And he described Israel as having, it's like kids that get PTSD from being abused by their parents, and then they do the same thing to their kids.
So, you know, in a way, there's, yeah, it is hypocritical and ironic and all that, but it makes a weird kind of sense.
It's like, you know, when they feel, I think the mentality is really one of paranoia.
It's everyone's out to get us.
You know, Iran is trying to kill us.
Hamas is trying to kill us.
Hezbollah, everyone's trying to kill us.
The Palestinians at large, as she said, you know, everyone's coming to get us.
And so the only way to defend ourselves and to protect ourselves is to strike first, to respond, you know, tenfold to every aggression against us, and to maintain this occupation, which is, yeah, it's really unfortunate.
And hopefully there'll be more pressure on them in the future to change their ways.
Yeah, I guess, well, have you ever been over there?
Yeah, actually, kind of embarrassing, but I went on Birthright, which is basically the Israel propaganda tour for American Jews.
So I saw Israel, but it was obviously a very sort of one-sided view of it.
Well, I mean, that's kind of the side that I'm interested in.
I mean, the way that you characterize it there sounded like from experience, and all I've ever seen is that documentary Defamation, where they really make Israel sound like it's America 2002 permanently, you know, where virtually every day we're just one day away from the next Holocaust, and you're all going to die, and there's enemies everywhere, and, boy, if you actually have paranoid schizophrenia, you might as well jump off a cliff, because the fear never stops coming.
Yeah, and another thing is, you know, It really is like that, though, you're saying.
You're basically agreeing with the thesis of that film, that it really is like that, it seems like that.
Yeah, and there are certain things that were really odd to me.
For one, the idea that Iran just wants to kill all the Jews.
There are people that really say that.
And, you know, if Iran wanted to kill every Jew in the world, they would start with the Jews living in Iran, which, you know, there are plenty of Jews living in Iran today who are not being massacred or anything like that.
And the second thing is, you know, you would hear this from Israelis, people saying, you know, the only safe place for Jews is Israel.
By the way, everyone's trying to kill us all the time.
I kind of wanted to say, you know, I grew up in New York, Jewish, and I always felt pretty safe, like most of the American Jews I know in this country.
Obviously, anti-Semitism exists here, too, but, you know, I think we all felt relatively safe, certainly safer than Israelis seem to feel.
But there's this sort of, like, weird cognitive dissonance, like everyone's trying to kill us all the time, but also this is the only safe place for us, which never really added up to me.
Yeah, well, and that does sound very American to me, too, the part about everybody trying to kill us, and let's just start with that, and let's never ask why.
You know, let's never get around to whoever did what to anyone.
It's always, you know, the poor little us and the other coming to get us.
Sure.
Yeah, now, it's important, as you mentioned there, that Netanyahu, he's relying on Shackett and Naftali Bennett and all these people to his right.
That's who he made his coalition with, is everybody to the right of him in order to create this government.
So that represents a real shift from the way it was before, where they usually always had to ally with labor somehow, right?
And not like labor's really any better, but at least in spirit they're a little bit, you know, I don't know.
Yeah, no, I think from what I've heard, it's pretty much the most right-wing coalition government in Israel's history.
And now, do you know much about what's going on with the breaking out of the new conflict in East Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque and what some are saying is the beginning of the third intifada over there right now?
You know, I'm not that up on it, honestly.
That's a bit of a blind spot for me, but I know that Shackett was talking a little bit about the controversy over the Temple Mount and Jews not being allowed on the Temple Mount, which he said was absurd.
But remind me of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Remind you of the what?
What you were referring to.
Oh, just the escalation of the conflict there.
I mean, over at Mondoweiss, they've been doing a great job.
And there are a lot of writers at Mondoweiss, and there's been quite a bit of coverage of people being killed on both sides and clashes breaking out.
Some are calling it a third intifada.
I just was trying to take your temperature on the issue, basically, and see what you thought of it, I guess.
I mean, this is a place that's been fought over for a long time, obviously.
I don't think that there's any real easy solution.
I think, in the end, Israel kind of calls the shots.
So I was reading, like Abbas said recently, that he didn't want any escalation or whatever.
But the truth is, Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, they don't have that much clout, really, when it comes to these issues.
So the question is, like, how much leverage do the Palestinian people have in a situation like this?
And the answer is really none.
I mean, they don't have a state to back them up.
Abbas is supposed to represent them as more of a figurehead than anything.
And so, yeah, I don't really know how that is going to get resolved.
And Israel is going to basically do what it wants.
Yeah, you know, I'm interested in finding out which of the different political parties, the different right-wing ones, are actually interested in escalating and changing this issue.
I saw where Netanyahu said, no, the status quo for the Authority and what all happens at the mosque there is going to remain, which is, I think, the biggest indication that something terrible is about to happen, probably.
But then, you know, I guess the right-wing parties, like some of them are just Russian right-wing nationalists who aren't really religious, who are very secular, right?
And then there are others who are...
Right, that's like the Abigdor, Lieberman crowd.
Yeah, sure, and then I'm sure there are, I guess I don't know this, but I assume that there are factions of the religious right-wingers who would be very against changing the status of the mosque for religious reasons.
That we're, you know, supposedly between Temple 2 and Temple 3 here, and you're not supposed to build the third one yet, and this and that, and so they would want to leave the status quo for whatever religious reasons.
So I don't know, and I wonder if anybody knows, anyone in America can explain, just who among the Israeli right are that interested in changing the status quo there.
Because it does seem like there's a pretty radical faction.
I just wonder how much support they have for trying to basically, I think ultimately what they want to do, right, is to tear down the mosque and build the third temple there.
Right, and this is, again, like it's a little bit of a blind spot for me, but I know there's also been some, I think, disagreement among Jews, among more orthodox Jews and more secular Jews.
And when I saw Ayelet Shaked, she talked about how there's this quote-unquote discrimination against Jews on the Temple Mount, and it's absurd that we're not allowed to pray there.
But she also said she didn't want any dramatic policy changes.
So I think at the end of the day, they would rather just de-escalate it and not have it turn into a full-fledged thing.
But again, that's really in the hands of Israel.
They're the ones who are, I think, pulling the shots in this situation.
Yeah.
All right, well, I've already kept you over time, so I'll let you go.
But thanks very much for the great interview, Rob.
I appreciate it.
Oh, absolutely.
Thanks for having me.
I'd love to come back anytime.
All right, good deal.
Well, keep writing interesting stuff, and I will have you back then.
Absolutely.
Thanks.
All right, y'all, that is Rob Bryan.
He's a freelance journalist from New York, and here he is at mondoweiss.net, the refreshing bluntness of Ayelet Shaked.
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