01/26/16 – Philip Weiss – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
All right, introducing our friend Phil Weiss, keeper of the Mondo Weiss blog.
I say it that way because there are a lot of great writers there besides him, and he's one of them, but so are a lot of others.
I really hope that you guys will sign up for the morning email and the rest of it and keep a very close eye on the Mondo Weiss blog.
It's really great stuff all the time.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you?
Great.
Thanks, Scott, for having me.
Very happy to have you here, and I'm happy to interview you about something that you've written far better than what I originally invited you on about, which the essay that you wrote about the politics and all that, maybe we could even get into it at the end, but I don't know.
Who cares about care?
The important thing is this thing that you've written, Among the Settlers, and now I guess part two is up there, you just told me during the break as well, and this is about your recent trip to the West Bank, and do I understand you right, sir, that you've been to the West Bank before, but you always stayed with Palestinians, and now this is the first time that you stayed with Jewish settlers on the West Bank and learned all about the situation from their point of view.
Is that correct?
Yeah, that is.
I've always been curious about getting into settler life.
I never thought I could.
And Airbnb, I learned last year, was putting up, allowing people to visit the settlements, and I used that service, and I went to four settlements, spent five days in the West Bank.
Altogether around ten settlements I was in with my hosts going around.
And I think it's actually related to the politics in this sense.
John Kerry has spent some political capital recently, so has the American ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, in saying, hey, you've got, in so many words, they haven't said it explicitly, you've got a discriminatory system in the West Bank against Palestinians, you have a one-state reality between the river and the sea, the two-state solution seems to be over.
I was there, I witnessed it firsthand, it's apartheid, and it's never going away.
These people want this, they say, and I think the settlers make this argument very convincingly, they did to me, that Israeli society is behind them.
Israeli society is not going to challenge the occupation, even the so-called liberal Zionists don't raise the issue of the peace process, they don't want a Palestinian state.
These people, 600,000 of them, are there to stay, and we really, our press has failed us, and John Kerry has actually been in front of the press on this, our press has failed to explain to Americans that the two-state solution is over, these people are living there, it's one state, we've got to figure out a better way, or they do, and we should certainly not be supporting what's going on there.
Yeah, it is, I guess that is what's the most notable thing about it, is that he would dare to say that, and I guess, I wonder why, I mean, because his point is already that it's too little, too late, right?
Well, you know, the thing is, if you read both Shapiro and Kerry's speeches, they're pretty careful, they don't go quite that far, it's just a couple of comments in there in each case.
I mean, Kerry has said there's this one-state reality that's taking hold, absolutely, it's been taking hold for a long time.
What's remarkable is that, the sort of stream of vituperation that you get from Israelis when they even suggest this in international forums, and that same stream of vituperation is what I think has kept the American press from going near this question, they don't want to alienate the Israelis, there are a lot of Zionists in the American press who want to believe in this dream castle Israel that will be preserved through a two-state solution.
It's not happening, and honest observers have got to start relaying this to the American public so that we can move on to the reality and try to, you know, distance ourselves from this occupation, which is not going away.
Well, and so, in the article you quote one of the settlers explaining about the wall, that the wall is not for security, because after all, a great many of the settlers, and I guess I was unaware of this, a great many of the settlers live on the Palestinian sides of the walls, wherever they are, scattered, you know, as snakes through the West Bank, and you know, if they wanted a fight, they could come and fight us, you know, there's no wall between us.
Right.
That's not what it's about.
It's about what?
Well, he said that it's about keeping as many Jews inside Israel and as few palace filthy Arabs, as he said, the government regards Palestinians, he does not regard them that way, but keeping as few filthy Arabs on the other side so that they won't be able to vote in Israeli elections.
This is a guy who works closely with Palestinians all the time as a security guard when they're working building houses inside settlements, and he says that, you know, he admits that the guys that he, who pay him, Palestinians pay him to guard them, to protect the settlers from them inside the settlements, and it's an absurd system.
They can't vote.
They can't even drive in the settlements without getting a pass.
They can't walk into the settlements, the Palestinians.
I saunter into these settlements without a question asked.
It's a clear apartheid system, and as the settler admitted to me, it's wrong that they can't vote.
My friend, Ahmed, he can't vote.
That's bad.
And, you know, but they, every settler I talked to has no plan in mind for the time that these people can vote in any near future until they accept the Jewish state of Israel or other such absurd demands of people who are living under a government that they don't have any consent to.
Well, and I think it comes up a couple of times in the piece here that the bottom line is there would be a civil war if some pretend labor government in the future said, all right, settlers out.
The army wouldn't obey the orders, or maybe half of them would, and the other half would go to war against them.
It's just not going to happen.
It's not going to happen, and the time that it did happen in 2006 when they removed some settlers from Gaza, you know, I think 7,000 settlers were removed on that occasion, and, you know, they all, the settlers now say, well, look what happened in Gaza.
They're never going to, and the whole society, whole of Israeli Jewish society says, hey, we did it in Gaza.
We're not going to do it again because we don't want to create a hostile Palestinian entity on the West Bank.
We don't want a Palestinian state.
I think that that is actually a broad consensus inside Israeli society.
Which is why Sharon did it, too, and did it that way.
That certainly, yes.
I've heard that.
I don't know if you've been around for that, but I've certainly heard that argument, yeah, that he wanted to keep the West Bank in formaldehyde, as they put it.
Right.
Yeah, I actually have a quote here.
I won't bore you, but there's, yeah, that's what they said.
This is a way to freeze the peace process and make sure that it never is carried out by doing it unilaterally the way they did, or whatever.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but the West Bank, Judea, and Samaria, this is much more important in the minds of the religious settlers than the Gaza Strip ever was, right?
I think it is, yes.
They certainly, they, I mean, look, they have this religious ideology.
You know, you and I are not Bible thumpers, so it's hard to know how much of this gets dreamed up anyway as an ideology, but yes, they have an ideology that this is the land of Israel, this is the Judean hills, this is Judea, this is where a Jew belongs, and they will promote that to you.
I mean, it's complete integration of church and state, which even some of the reasonable people among them seem to despair about.
They realize what a demon has been created through this religious colonial project.
And I mean, the thing that, I mean, you see is that, yes, there would be, they say that they would rise up if anyone tried to remove them, and I have no doubt about that.
They're leading lives that, they've been there for two and three generations, their children are, you know, building houses next to them, their grandparents are buried there.
They're just, you know, they're not leaving, and the Israeli society generally knows they're not leaving, and so for anyone to pretend that there's an actual viable Palestinian state will be created, it's just, it's horse manure.
And the more that Americans begin to understand this, the more our policy can shift to adjust to this reality.
And I think that that policy means separation from Israel.
All right, now, well, good time to take this break, and we're going to pick up that conversation, America's relationship with Israel during this occupation, as it relates to the occupation, with the great Philip Weiss from Mondoweiss blog, right after this show, mondoweiss.net.
Hey, Al Scott here.
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Right here, talking with Philip Weiss from the Mondo Weiss blog.
He just got back from a tour of the West Bank settlements, Airbnb, settlement style there.
And, well, he's talking about his observations of the one state reality and the death of the two state solution, apparently, quite some time ago.
And then where we stopped at the break, you were mentioning the all-important U.S. role in the conversation that's got to be had here about American culpability in this.
Because after all, that's why Mohammed Atta signed up with Osama bin Laden to kill 3,000 Americans, was because America paid for the Israelis to occupy and persecute the Palestinians.
Yeah, I agree with you.
His biographer wrote it, so.
Right.
And, you know, in fact, I was, in one settlement I was at, I didn't put this in the article, but my host said, you see that hill over there?
There's a resident of that hill that you guys are paying room and board for.
I said, who's that?
Sirhan Sirhan, he said.
He left this part of Palestine and became, was so angry at Bobby Kennedy that he went and killed him in 1968.
And so I think that there has been a long, you know, there's obviously this is, our support for Israel has embroiled us in a conflict that I don't think we really have a dog in that hunt.
Or if we do, it's on the human right, it should be the human rights cause, which is that of the Palestinian oppressed peoples.
Just as we ended up siding with the black people who had no rights in South Africa.
This is what we should be doing here, too.
Yeah.
And the thing is, it's especially interesting to me for right wingers who support all this when Israel has a very socialist economy and, and health care for all and free education for all in ways that conservatives don't support in the United States, but it's American money paying for it all.
Right.
Or am I overstating the extent of that?
Well, I don't know if we pay for it all, but we certainly subsidize that economy.
Their economy is a very socialist one, much more so than Americans would support here, right?
I don't know about that, actually, because I think that they started out socialist.
I mean, they, I certainly, I think they have a better health care system than we've got in terms of providing health care.
But I think there's a lot of, well, better meaning taxpayers pay for it rather than customers.
You got it.
You got it.
So that's not better to me necessarily, but it's making a point that this is, you know, when they say America pays, you know, a third now of Israel's military budget every year and these dollars are fungible, he could just as easily say, we're paying for their socialist state so that they can afford this military, but then a right winger will cry.
That is an interesting line.
I would be curious to see why, I mean, it is, I guess I'm waiting for Trump to say that, you know, Trump has said a couple of other things that are a breath of fresh air on the wall.
He's said that Hillary supports a wall in Palestine that discriminates against people, but she's against the one that he would put on the Mexican border.
So I think for a wall against that one only for this one too, but no, I understand your point though.
Yes.
That's fine.
So I don't know.
I mean, I wonder how much of this is going to break out in the next, you know, in this political cycle we're in.
I'm hoping a lot.
I mean, I've always looked to the Democratic Party because they're the base is the values of the base.
Progressive values are completely, you know, opposed by Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.
I mean, that is a, it's an apartheid state.
And yet the Democratic Party is more supportive of Israel than just about anybody.
Do you think there's a change coming in terms of official annexation of the West Bank?
And let's stop pretending here kind of thing.
I don't think so.
I think that what I observed was that people said that, look, the liberal left side completely understands we're not leaving.
They're not even talking about the peace process.
They folded in with Netanyahu.
There's a broad center in Israeli public life, but the elites are always going to talk about a Palestinian state because they have to.
Netanyahu will even will continue to talk about a Palestinian state.
So I think that what they hope for is just that this kind of apartheid situation of managed conflict will continue to just drag along.
And when you say have to, you mean because of international politics, not because of domestic politics?
Oh, no, no, no.
I think that domestically everyone's in on the joke and they're just winking off the rest of the world.
I mean, when people say that there is still going to be a two state solution or we got to boycott settlement goods, they're not really talking about the society I saw, which is one where there's broad support among the Jewish public included in throughout Israel and the settlements for the settlements as an extension of the Zionist dream.
The same thing that Israelis or Jews were doing, Zionist Jews were doing 80 and 100 years ago in the Galilee, they're now doing in the Judean hills.
They're building heavily fortified places.
People are openly carrying semi-automatic rifles around these places because they fear for their lives.
And that's just what Zionism is about.
It's about extending the Jewish presence in the land of Israel.
I mean, Zionism stood for a lot of things, I should say.
There were some very idealistic strands of Zionism, too.
This is what it's turned out to be, sort of like talking about the dreams of communism under Stalin.
Communism worked out in a certain way, Zionism has worked out in a certain way, and it ain't pretty.
Yeah.
Well, now, so in the last elections, Netanyahu admitted the truth domestically, I guess he should have just said it in Hebrew or something, but he did say that, no, there will always only be one Israel between the river and the sea, which seemed to be pretty much a proclamation of, you know, one step beyond just de facto annexation at that point, even.
But so I guess what you're saying, though, is as long as they don't make that final step, then they can call it something less than outright apartheid.
They can just keep pretending someday, someday, someday there will be an independent Palestine and never admit that, no, it's all just Israel with the Palestinians as the rights-less and the occupied within it.
Right.
I think that that is their game right now, that they can't state that openly because the wave of international isolation would just mount enormously.
Now that wave is starting anyway, as it should, because people see through the hypocrisy.
But as one settler said to me, you know, there's what you think, and then there's what you say and what you write.
And Netanyahu doesn't mean any of this, it's just lip service.
And so I think that increasingly you see foreign leaders beginning to call them on this.
And the wave of Palestinian stabbing attacks, you know, these young people really giving up their lives to oppose occupation by attempting to stab soldiers and sometimes civilians, too.
Yes.
I think that that is drawing attention to this very cruel and brutal conditions.
Isn't that straight out of the Bible, too?
I think you and I might have talked about this years ago in the context of suicide terrorism, that it's in the Bible, that this is what Jewish, whatever they were called, they had a name for them, I forget, who would attack the Roman soldiers.
There'd be three Roman soldiers, they knew they were going to die, but they'd stab one and then get stabbed, right?
I got to look that up.
You know, Scott, I've got a Bible right here on my desk, you know, and maybe it's going to take me a little while to find it.
I'm the least biblically literate person you've ever met, I admit that.
But I learned that from somebody who knew what they were talking about, I'm pretty sure.
I like it.
I like it.
And in fact, that was like part of what, you know, according to the mythology was what, you know, angered the Romans so much that they ended up, you know, kicking them right out that they fought back when they should have bided their time or that kind of thing was part of the story.
Well, and certainly Jewish terrorism was a large factor in the creation of the Jewish state.
You know, Israel was founded in part because the colonists was forced out of the colonists being, you know, the British had the mandate from the League of Nations to, you know, sort of supervise these two populations.
And the Israelis, the Jews wanted them out of there.
So they committed a lot of acts of terrorism in 1946 and 47.
And you know, the British said no mass and they got out.
So you can understand why I mean, I can understand why Palestinians are doing what they're doing.
I don't approve of it, but it's certainly not a surprise.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, that's all I meant to say, too, was, yeah, you know, you can look at any of these things like it's just a social experiment or something.
What happens if we cut off capital to this neighborhood?
Will the crime rate go up?
Yep.
You know, that's kind of thing.
What will happen if we occupy these people?
You know?
Yes.
Yes.
And, you know, as Dennis Ross says, there's never been a benign occupation.
Why is Dennis Ross, Israel's lawyer, working in the United States government?
You know, or has he been so steadily for administration after administration?
It's because of the Israel lobby.
And I think that's really at the heart of this.
All right, so please go to Mondoweiss.net and read it.
Among the Settlers, part two is up there now as well.
Thank you.
Really great work that you've done here, Phil.
Appreciate it, man.
All right.
We'll see you tomorrow.
Thanks.
Talk to you soon.
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