04/15/16 – Stephen Zunes – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, April 17th, 2016.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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And introducing Dr. Steven Zunis, he is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, and, well, writes all about, well, global politics, and especially American foreign policy on a regular basis.
We reprint a lot of it at antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Great to be with you again.
Very good to have you back on the show.
And so, last night was the big debate in Brooklyn between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
And the subject of Palestine came up, Israel and Palestine.
And Bernie Sanders is getting a lot of praise around the internet today, at least, for standing up for the Palestinians in a way that, as far as I know, is being accurately characterized as more and better than anyone ever has in a presidential debate or on that level of American politics before.
I wonder what you think of that, first of all.
Yeah, I think it was pretty impressive.
Bernie is Jewish, and he considers himself a Zionist.
He worked on a kibbutz as a young man, lived in Israel, and so he cares about the future of Israel, and has been very disturbed at the far right-wing government in power, their treatment of the Palestinians, the continued occupation, their refusal to allow for a Palestinian state, their colonization, illegal colonization of occupied territory with these settlements, and the killing of nearly 1,500 civilians in the war in 2014 in Gaza.
And he's been quite frank about those things, and it was – and just before the New York primary, where there's a large percentage of Jewish voters, for him to be as forthcoming as he was was quite impressive.
Not just forthcoming, but he actually pressed the issue.
I mean, he really pushed Hillary Clinton to acknowledge that the Israel killing 1,500 Palestinian civilians was a disproportionate use of force.
She refused to do so, which is a little scary, but it was not – that he was willing to make this a major issue, and I think that that indicates not just that Bernie Sanders' integrity, but I think also that it illustrates there's a big shift in Jewish public opinion on this, especially among younger Jews.
Polls show that a large number of younger Jews either do not consider themselves Zionist, or if they do, they are like Bernie Sanders, and they support the more moderate pro-peace forces and don't support the Israeli government like many non-Jewish politicians like Hillary Clinton do.
Well, you know, Bernie Sanders, for some reason, even when he's saying stuff that I disagree with, at the part where he strays off message, it always seems disingenuous to me.
I just assume that he knows better than the parts where he gets it wrong.
Like for example, describing the war of 2014 as a response, in any sense, to something that Hamas or anybody in the Gaza Strip had done.
When Israel started that war, fair and square, plain and simple, beginning with the hoax that some three kidnapped and murdered Israeli young men were still alive, and that the Israeli government was looking for them as they went killing people and stealing and destroying property and turning life upside down for people in the West Bank for three weeks and, in fact, shot missiles into the Gaza Strip before Hamas or whoever, Islamic Jihad or whoever it was, ever responded with a single rocket in 2014.
He knows that.
And yet, at the time, he voted for the Senate resolution saying, poor little Israel, you know, defend yourself from evil Hamas trying to conquer you with their homemade rockets.
Actually, he didn't.
It was a unanimous consent resolution, and the unanimous consent resolution is one where technically he could have objected and forced a roll call vote, but he may not have even been on the floor at the time.
Often Senate leaders will push these things through when opponents aren't present.
So unanimous consent doesn't literally mean unanimous.
It's a voice vote, people who happen to be on the floor, and he also may, even if he was on the floor, he might have figured that maybe having it as unanimous consent wouldn't be as bad as if it was like 98 to 2 or something.
So, but again, I think, I mean, clearly, you know, whoever started it was wrong for Hamas to log rockets into civilian areas of Israel, and it was wrong for Israel to bomb civilian neighborhoods.
Both sides committed war crimes.
Israel is certainly far, far worse.
I hope I didn't sound like I was justifying either side.
I was just talking chronology is all.
Yeah, yeah.
But the thing is, you know, whether or not Bernie knew that, and he is sometimes weak on the details in foreign policy because he focuses most of their energy on domestic issues.
The thing is, in a debate like that, you don't have time to really go into the fine points of history.
You only have 30 seconds or whatever to make your point.
Indeed, Hillary Clinton made some outrageous statements about how Israel offered peace and a two-state solution at Camp David in July 2000, when in fact the U.S.-Israeli proposal was not the so-called generous offer that her husband tried to portray it as at all.
It was further than Israel had gone up to that point, but it would have divided the West Bank into four non-contiguous regions, with Israel controlling everything in between including the movement of people and goods.
Israel can continue to controlling not just movement of people from the Palestinian state into Israel, which of course they would have a right to do, but from Palestinian state into Jordan or into Egypt or between the sections of the Palestinian state.
It would not have been – I mean, no Palestinian leader could have accepted that.
And now, it served as a basis of some further talks in December and January, which did actually come pretty close to making the establishment of a viable Palestinian state possible.
But it was Israel that backed away from that.
In fact, President Abbas has on several occasions said that he would accept the terms of those proposals, but the current Israeli government has rejected it.
And yet, here's Hillary Clinton trying to rewrite history and saying that it was the Palestinians that rejected a viable two-state solution.
And stop right there for just a second, because I want to go back to the negotiations of 2000.
We'll get back to Hillary in just a moment here.
But that is – it's not just her myth, is it, Stephen?
That's something that virtually is official history of the world, at least according to the view of Washington, D.C., and everybody on TV, that, oh, yeah, you know what?
They gave Yasser Arafat everything, but he was just such a terrorist.
He would rather have reasons to be a terrorist than actually do the right thing for his people and let them have their own Palestinian state.
It's all his and their fault.
Yeah, it is quite amazing.
Even Robert Mallory, who was the assistant – I mean, he was the second – number two guy in the U.S. negotiation team, he's admitted that the whole thing was rigged.
He admitted that it was not Arafat's fault.
He wrote a whole book about it.
He had an article in The New York Times.
So, I mean, stuff is out there.
But Bill Clinton and the Republicans and the leading Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and others, have perpetuated this myth as well, and the irony, of course, was that when Bill Clinton initially invited Arafat to Camp David, Arafat said, we're getting close, but I don't think we're ready for a final push yet, and Bill Clinton said to Arafat, we'll just try and see if it works, and if it doesn't work out, I won't blame you.
And of course, that's exactly what he did, Clinton lied.
And so, in fact, it was that very narrative of the United States that allowed the Israeli right wing to win the next election, because it enabled Likud to say to people, the more moderate people in labor, saying, hey, look, even the United States agrees that gaining compromise and moderation doesn't work, so we just need to have an iron fist and crack down and kill all those Palestinians, that kind of thing.
So the US is very much responsible for the rise of the right wing in Israel, and here you have Bernie Sanders, who's one of those old school labor Zionists, you know, who still has this kind of idealistic view of a more benign democratic Israel, saying, hey, this is terrible, we can't continue supporting this kind of thing.
But it appears that the probable Democratic nominee is allying herself with the right wing Israeli government, and then you have these Republicans who are talking this kind of crazy millenialist Christian thing that we need to have Israel smiting everybody and taking over the whole region for Christ to come again, and it's really a sad testament on the state of things, especially, again, given that public opinion polls show that more and more Americans are actually ready to take a more balanced perspective nowadays.
And it's interesting, because, you know, I'm a college professor, so I'm around students who are politically involved, and it's interesting that nowadays Israel-Palestine is like Central America and South Africa were to students back in the 80s.
It's something that they really care about, they're mobilizing about.
And so, you know, to have a Democratic nominee take as hard a line a position on Israel-Palestine as Hillary Clinton does, that would be the equivalent in, say, 1984 of, say, Walter Mondale who was a Democratic nominee that year supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa or supporting the Nicaraguan Contras or the Salvadoran Junta.
It would have been like, back then, students would have said, well, screw this, you know, I'm not going to support the Democrat either.
And so, you know, she's...
The thing is...
But Geraldine Ferraro is a woman, and that's what's important.
Yeah, there's this myth that, you know, a Democrat can go as hard right as they want on Israel-Palestine and it won't hurt or it will help.
I mean, there's another example of Hillary Clinton's living back in the 90s or before, you know, that she doesn't realize that the Democratic base has really, really shifted.
I mean, who would have thought that this 74-year-old Jewish socialist, you know, who's been running a not a particularly good campaign and is screwed up in a whole number of ways, but despite all that, you know, is running practically neck and neck with her.
I mean, there's a big shift in American politics right now that she and the Democratic Party establishment just do not recognize.
Right.
And, you know, what's funny, too, is go back to the 90s.
Wasn't there a giant scandal right around 1999-2000 when First Lady Hillary Clinton said, or was it when she was running for Senate, I guess?
I'm lost.
Maybe you can help me.
But she said, yeah, one day there's got to be a two-state solution.
And the needle scratched off the record and everyone was all upset and said, this is the first time that an American at this level of power had dared to say that, yeah, of course, that's the goal that we're working toward here.
And then George W. Bush actually said that the settlements had to go and that eventually there needed to be a Palestinian state himself.
It wasn't quite as controversial when he said it, I guess, because no one believed he meant it for a minute.
But isn't that right, that she kind of caused a controversy back when?
I think when she was still First Lady for saying that.
Yeah, yeah, she wasn't the first person to say that.
Well, that was the pretend scandal anyway.
But running for Senate in New York, it was kind of a big deal.
But she's backtracked on some of those initially fairly timid statements, even those statements that she made.
In fact, you know, she consistently criticized George W. Bush from the right when he was president.
I mean, when he called for a freeze in the settlements, for example, you know, she criticized him when he said we need to stop the cycle of violence.
She said, oh, it wasn't a cycle.
It's Palestinian violence and Israeli self-defense.
I mean, you know, again, here, you know, the Democrats, you know, I think appropriately, you know, talk, you know, talk about how awful George W. Bush's foreign policy is.
But here they're about to nominate someone who either agree with him or was even worse on a lot of the key foreign policy issues.
And now another claim of hers last night was that, hey, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip.
And you know, those animals, they turned it into a den of terrorists.
And so all poor Israel can do is defend themselves.
And so whose fault is that?
I'm roughly paraphrasing, but not too roughly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's a historical on a number of levels.
First of all, when a territory is effectively under siege, that's effectively surrounded, it is still, and people can't come and go, you know, as they will, that is still legally speaking an occupation.
So the Gaza Strip is still under Israeli occupation under international law.
And so they, you know, they've gotten this, they haven't drawn from all the territory in the sense that there's a huge strip as kind of a no-go zone where farmers and kids and others have been shot for coming, coming too close.
And the also Gaza, Gaza came, Hamas came in to Gaza, took over Gaza, because George W.
Bush tried to get some elements in Fatah to stage a coup against the coalition government that the Palestinians then had.
And Hamas got wind of it.
And you know, they had that three-day war between Fatah and Hamas, and Hamas ended up seizing the Gaza Strip.
Now why is, why has Hamas gotten the kind of support they have?
Well, if you look back at the time, the Camp David Accords, Hamas only had 15% Palestinian support.
And there's not, historically, you have not had much of this hardline Islamist politics in Palestine relative to a number of countries in the region.
But a number of things happened, including, of course, there was the corruption and aptitude of Arafat's administration and that kind of stuff.
But a lot of that had to do with the fact that the, under the U.S.-led peace process, the Israelis ended up taking more and more and more land.
The economic situation got worse and worse and worse for Palestinians.
And Hamas could say, hey, look, you know, Fatah and Abbas and those guys, they tried to compromise, they tried to make peace, they tried to do what the Americans said and stop the armed struggle and said, you know, let's cooperate with the Americans, at least we'll have the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a viable independent state alongside Israel.
And look, none of this is happening.
And it's just getting worse and worse and worse.
So we might as well go all out and try to get the whole thing through armed struggle.
And at this point, we had nothing to lose.
And I don't agree with that myself, but, you know, there was a lot of Palestinians who thought, why not?
You know, and and so Hamas would not be the kind of force that they were.
No way they would have taken over Gaza Strip if it weren't for the fact that the U.S. continued to support the Israeli occupation, colonization, were not honest brokers in the peace process.
Well, and there's this quote from Dov Weissglass, who was an advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu, pointing that the purpose all along of the disengagement was to freeze the peace process, that basically anything to take one large and Gaza, of course, is not nearly as important to the settlers as the West Bank is.
Right.
So anything to just throw a giant wrench in the gears so that the Oslo process is basically thwarted because you have you know, they're divided and conquered, basically.
And then and I mean, that's really something he says freezes.
He says, put it in formaldehyde.
I guess he should have said liquid nitrogen to keep his metaphor straight, but still pretty good there.
It's worked pretty well.
And can you describe for the people very briefly what that see what you mean by that, to say that the people of Gaza are surrounded and besieged?
Yeah, well, Israel bombed and destroyed their airport.
There's no no way of getting out there by air.
There's you know, that the Israel controls 80 percent of the border and the military junta in Egypt is complying by pretty much sealing off the other border and a few medical goods and others can get things emergency.
Things can get in and out and not enough, but enough to keep people from totally starving and dying.
And the Israeli Navy blockades the sea.
So, you know, again, I mean, in many ways, it's like a like a medieval town, you know, being surrounded, you know, by by an army.
And then here's the craziest thing she said last night was saying, see, they've destroyed the economy.
You know, Hamas cannot run it, run the economy there.
It's like, how can you run an economy in that kind of thing?
I mean, at least Bernie Sanders had the decency to say, hey, there's 40 percent unemployment.
It's a mess there.
We've got to respect the dignity of the Palestinians.
I mean, he gave her all that opportunity just to, you know, backtrack a little bit and she just doubled down on on these hard line, hard line myths.
And now.
So here's the other thing.
And this it almost seems to go without mention in in these debates.
I guess they got to it a little bit, but she was the secretary of state for four years and she was in charge of doing a lot of things and she was in charge of not doing a lot of things.
I mean, if you look at Obama's failed, you know, at best half hearted attempts to negotiate peace in Palestine, it's John Kerry who did the work that failed.
She didn't even try.
What did she do at all?
No, not much.
She didn't mention that in in in in in 2012, there is another flare up of fighting.
Not as bad as in 2009, 2014, but it looked like you could escalate to that.
And she she helped, you know, she sat down and helped negotiate a, you know, a cease fire.
That's, you know, that and that's that was a good thing.
But I it was the initiative very much came from Obama to to get her to do that.
And I but generally in terms of overall, you know, working on a lasting settlement or anything like that.
I mean, I'm I'm not aware of anything that that Hillary Clinton did.
And you know, John Kerry did take a pretty, pretty aggressive effort about a year ago.
And you know, Israel balked.
And I think and I am upset at the Obama administration did not hold his feet to the fire and it was more public about, you know, pointing out the obvious fact that it was it was the Israelis, not both sides that that failed to compromise.
But he put, you know, Kerry did put a lot of time, a lot of effort to do to try to move things forward much more, a lot more than Hillary Clinton ever did.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is a little bit off topic, but only halfway.
And that is when President Obama himself asked the president of Brazil to work with the Turks to try to iron out an Iranian nuclear deal on a fuel swap of their 20 percent rich uranium as a big first step toward a complete nuclear deal.
And the Turks and the Brazilians announced that they had accomplished it.
The secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, immediately put out a press release undermining the negotiation and laughing it off, saying, we'll never go with that whenever it came out later.
They complained that Obama asked us to do it in the first place, but it was too late.
She had already completely and no question on whose behalf she was asking, acting either.
Yeah.
She's undermined Obama on a number of things.
And I mean, for example, within the coup in Honduras, the White House immediately used the word coup.
And Hillary Clinton refused to say that and actually worked to undermine efforts by the Organization of American States and others to bring the democratically elected president back into office.
In fact, as recently as this past week, she doubled down in this New York Daily News interview and claimed that the coup was not illegal.
And Western Sahara is another example where she basically was supporting the Moroccan occupation and their dubious autonomy plan they're proposing, while Obama recognizes that there can't be peace there unless the people of that occupied territory have the right of self-determination.
They can choose autonomy if they want, but they should have the option of independence, which Hillary Clinton is pretty much ruling out.
So yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing the various books that are going to come out by former Obama administration officials about some of the stuff that went on between Obama and Clinton when she was at the State Department, because I have a feeling she's not going to look very good.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, as long as I have you for about one or two more minutes here, what about her push?
And remember, immediately after leaving office as Secretary of State in the beginning of the second term in 2013, she put it in the New York Times that, yeah, me and Petraeus tried as hard as we could to get Obama to escalate support for the terrorists in Syria, but he wouldn't do it.
She bragged.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And as much as she was successfully able to undermine Obama's policies, there are many areas, including Syria, where she was unsuccessful.
And I think we're looking, in many respects, to a return to the Bush-Cheney era of U.S. unilateralism and of supporting some of the most excessive actions of U.S. allies.
I mean, what's amazing is that here Barack Obama has bombed no less than seven Muslim countries since coming to office.
And the refrain we keep hearing from Clinton is, we need to be more assertive and more aggressive and more willing to use military force in the region and beyond.
And that, I would argue, is pretty scary.
Right.
And you know, what's really unfortunate here, you mentioned earlier Sanders' lousy campaign and its many drawbacks, that kind of thing.
He has failed to make hay of her foreign policy record, especially of her time.
I mean, he mentions Libya and Syria occasionally, but mostly he says, well, she voted wrong back 13 years ago, and nobody even remembers, you know, her vote on Iraq, as though the Iraq war is over, right, when it's still going on.
When he could simply explain the war that handed half of Iraq to Iran and the other half to Osama's sons, who now have, you know, ruined everything for everyone and got the entire 21st century off on the wrong foot for humanity because of her.
And you know what I mean?
He doesn't explain.
He doesn't really put responsibility on her.
He just goes, well, I voted no on her.
Frankly, it's been, I mean, I'm playing the vote for Bernie Sanders in the upcoming California primary, but I must say, I've been very frustrated at the way he has not taken advantage of many of the foreign policy issues where Hillary Clinton is vulnerable, because I really think the majority, not just the majority of Democrats, but I think the majority of the American people would be much more in line with Sanders thinking than that of Hillary Clinton.
And he's no real dove.
He has a very hawkish record, but just can't compare to her.
She's Liz Cheney, for crying out loud.
Really?
Yeah.
That's the thing of it.
All right.
Listen, you're great.
Thank you so much for coming back on my show, Stephen.
Appreciate it.
Enjoy being with you again.
Take care.
All right.
So that is the great Stephen Zunis.
He's a professor of political science and international studies, politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco.
And he's also the author of Western Sahara and Tinderbox, U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism.
All right, y'all.
And that's Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm Scott Horton here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
My full interview archive is at scotthorton.org, sign up for the podcast feed there and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.