05/26/16 – Philip Weiss – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Philip Weiss.
He keeps the great and very important and influential blog Mondo Weiss, the War of Ideas in the Middle East.
And he's got a great stable of writers there doing a ton of great work.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you, sir?
Good, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
And by the way, that reminds me, I have in the pile your, I guess, kind of monograph about your stay in the West Bank.
And I know we talked about your article when you got back from your trip and wrote it up.
But I actually have your full write-up of that on the pile here.
I need to get to it and get a full interview out of that.
But could you tell us the name of that and how people can get it?
You'll see it on the site.
It's called Among the Settlers.
And it's about sort of what it's like being on the West Bank with settlers.
It's trying to see it from their point of view a little bit.
But in doing so, I feel that I conveyed just what an extreme culture and ideology Israel has created with the occupation, with the settlement project, and indeed with the ideology of Zionism at this point in modern history.
It's a very dangerous ideology.
And that, I think, is why we're seeing some kind of convulsive events right now, both in Israel and in the Democratic Party, and maybe the Republican Party, over these questions.
And I hope when I say monograph, I hope that doesn't make it sound like it's a little booklet or something.
It's actually a big, it almost looks like a really well-done brochure for a corporation or a...
I think monog...
Yeah.
Thanks.
I think monograph was just fine, Scott.
Well, anyway, I mean, I want to get across it.
It's like a magazine.
It's like a very high-quality, glossy paper magazine kind of thing, you know.
I want people to read the thing.
That's the point.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Okay.
And now listen, so there's a lot going on, as you say over there, way too much to even cover here.
But you've got a bit of a narrative, I think, going on in the last few days here, and also with your co-author, Yakov Hersh, who's been writing there at Mondoweiss, about some things going on in the West Bank.
And then, of course, as always, New York Times, the newspaper of record, their coverage and or lack thereof, you know, what's really going on and your perspective versus the common narrative here in the United States and all that.
So could we, I guess, start, is it you think proper to start with the story of the video of the execution of the wounded Palestinian and the reaction to that?
Could you?
Yes.
Yes.
Go ahead.
Well, let me start by saying that for decades, Israel has killed people at checkpoints in the occupied territories, for decades.
And so that happened on March 24th.
A medic in an Israeli-occupying army unit went up to a Palestinian who was wounded, lying on the ground, and shot him in the head, executed him.
And so what's unusual is that kind of a la the Rodney King video, this one was on video, eh?
So L.A. police were beating people up for years, but suddenly it's on video.
That changes everything.
And this has catalyzed a tremendous argument inside the Israeli establishment in this sense.
When this murdering medic killed this Palestinian who was incapacitated and who had been accused of attacking a soldier, but he was now wounded, lying on the ground, couldn't move, went up and executed him.
When that happened, the political establishment in Israel, led by Netanyahu, essentially embraced this medic and said, you've got to understand the context.
You know, these Palestinians hate us.
You know, they want to kill all Jews, and these are our children out there.
And Netanyahu even called the medic's family, when after the medic was charged by the Israeli army with a crime, Netanyahu called the medic's family.
On the other hand is the military establishment, which has a terrible occupation to run, and is trying to be halfway professional about it and saying, hey, we can't be executing Palestinians.
We're living alongside these people, we're oppressing them, but if you're going to go and start executing them on video and saying that's fine, we've got a giant problem.
You know, an incapacitated man around the world, this would be seen as a war crime, just no question.
And the political leadership is embracing this guy.
So this fundamental shift has happened, and what's significant about the shift is not just, you know, an argument over tactics, but the language of the shift.
So that first, the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army, a guy named Golon, gave a speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day saying that some strains in Israeli society are reminiscent of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany.
So this criticism that's generally made on the left, or in anti-Israel circles, which is a completely legitimate criticism, that some of Israel's behavior is reminiscent of Nazis, and that the left and anti-Israel people are told, you can't call them Nazis, one of the top generals, lieutenant generals in this society, a leading military figure is saying, our society is demonstrating certain trends that are reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
We are demonizing, he was essentially saying, we are demonizing Palestinians the same way that Nazis demonize Jews, and we know how that ends.
It does not end well.
You cannot demonize and make another people subhuman, and that is what the political people are doing.
He was essentially saying all that.
Netanyahu flipped out when the speech was given, and he called in the defense minister, Moshe Yalon, a really tough guy, surely a war criminal in his own right, a hard guy, and said, you've got to do something about this guy, Golon, what he said.
You can't let him say that this is Nazi Germany.
Yalon, the defense minister, ended up quitting over this, and he made his own statement of about extremist and fascistic elements in Israeli society.
So what you are seeing now is a divide between one part of the establishment, these military professionals, and Netanyahu and the political people, who are totally supported by the Israeli people.
The Israeli people are demonstrating these same racist attitudes in polls, and yet the military people are very worried about it, and they're warning that it's like fascism, creeping fascism.
And this has become a global story, and there's even been talk, the Israeli press is treating it as apocalyptic, that we're seeing this major shift inside the leadership, reminiscent of other shifts in Zionist political culture over the last hundred years, but a major shift that might even signify a non-Zionist element arising inside Israeli society.
You may see people saying the problem is Zionism, because that is the problem.
Zionism puts Jews ahead of other people.
And so this is a major earthquake, I think, inside Israeli society, and some in the Israeli press have even said there could be a military coup.
Now, will there be one?
Who knows?
Who knows where this is going?
But I think that it is a major development, and I am hopeful that it could signify some progress inside that society, where there may actually begin to be reforms toward an actual democracy, and not a quote-unquote Jewish democracy, which is, you know, like the unicorn that was outside my window this morning.
All right.
Well, listen, so there's a ton to go over there, but I guess the first thing is, could you please define Zionism as you mean it?
Because it seems to mean anything from, yeah, there could be an Israel, to Israel's eastern border should be Persia.
Yeah.
I think that, you know, just to digress for a second, we all know that communism had a lot of different meanings in the 20th century.
And there were some kind of idealists who were communists in the 20th century.
Well, by late in the 20th century, or midway through the 20th century, communism had a very clear definition, and that was Stalinism.
That is what defined communism in the 20th century.
And that meant purges, that meant prisons, that meant slaughters, that meant oppression.
So this term and ideology that had a lot of different meanings became very solidified around one meaning, and that is what's happened to Zionism.
Zionism means, essentially, the return by Jewish people to the biblical land of Zion, and that has meant, at its most innocent, religious people in Europe who want to go back to the land of the Bible that they celebrate in the Passover Seder.
They want to return there.
What it soon became was the need for a Jewish state inside historical Palestine, and then ultimately became this expansionist and racist state that Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders created.
They created Israel in 1948 with ethnic cleansing.
They maintained the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians through a racist two classes of citizenship, one for Jews and one for non-Jews, and that's what Zionism is now.
It's a racist system that pushes Palestinians out of their homes, destroys their homes, takes their land, and then justifies the...and when Palestinians do what they have an absolute right to do, which is to resist occupation with knives or whatever, when they resist occupation, these people kill them on the street, and they celebrate it.
And that is what Zionism is.
And the other aspect of Zionism that I need to mention is that Zionism could not exist without American support.
And I think that, partly because of these convulsions inside Israel, partly because of our work, you know, getting the word out to the American street via the internet, via radio, you know, blogs, and even Bernie Sanders' fundraising camp, you know, his efforts, because of these...we're getting the word out, the Americans are waking up to what Zionism is, and more and more Americans are saying, I do not want to be supporting this system with my dollars, and recognizing that we are absolutely vital to the maintenance of this racist system.
Well, yeah, you're certainly onto something there about a big change coming, if only because the narrative has been so far off of the truth for so long.
Once people find out a little bit about who's occupying who over there, they're pretty shocked and upset to find out that they've been bamboozled all this time.
Yeah, but Scott, you and I, you have said this to me for the last seven, eight years.
Are you optimistic?
I mean, you, it didn't, you know, you didn't have to go to school, you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to understand what you, the reality that you came to understand.
Yeah, you just needed to have access to some other sources of information.
I'm basically just agreeing with you that we are making progress here, I think.
Oh, so you agree that we are.
I'm sort of in the tunnel, so, you know, I feel like it's happening.
I mean, it's obviously happening because it's on the front page of the New York Times today that the Democrats are going to be fighting over Israel.
You know, that's a great thing.
Yeah, that's definitely true.
And that's, you know, due to Sanders' influence there, which is really great, because in that, you know, only Nixon can go to China and shake hands with Mao Zedong since Bernie Sanders can take on Netanyahu and at least more right-wing Zionism all he wants, I don't know if he'll really take advantage of that, but he sure could and get away with it like hell, you know?
Yeah, because he's Jewish, I mean, partly.
Yeah, absolutely.
And also, but...
Well, not only that, he's almost a Jewish caricature in a way, like, he's from Brooklyn and he looks and he talks just like Larry David and everything with his hands and he's way too Jewish to be accused of anything along, you know, negatively there.
Yeah, well, they'll accuse him nonetheless.
Yeah, I mean, they might try, but I just think he'll just laugh it off and could.
Yeah.
I mean, well, because I don't put any stock in the guy really to do the right thing, but I mean, much of it anyway, but if he did, he would have firm footing to defend himself, that's all.
Yes, and let's be clear about what the most important part of his revolution is with respect to this issue.
He is raising money online.
He is not going to the traditional sources of funding for the Democratic Party, which is, you know, it's labor, it's women, and it's Jews.
That is what Emily's List will tell you.
That is what the forward Jewish newspaper will tell you.
It's that the traditional sources of funding are labor, women, and Jews, and labor and women don't care about foreign policy and rich Zionist Jews do, and so that structure is breaking up because Bernie Sanders is able to raise money at $27 a pop from the American street and the American Jewish community is changing and younger Jews are part of a coalition or part of a widespread, I guess, cohort in the American population that's saying, wait, we do not want to pay for another slaughter of 500 children by Israel in Gaza.
Well, you know, this is something that you covered on your blog, but I don't think I've had a chance to discuss with you yet, and that was a poll or a series of polls or something that you guys covered about the attitudes of young Jews, and I guess particularly young Jewish American students, and how they're more anti-Zionist than anybody else in America, I guess, at least of people who've heard of it.
Some of the numbers, they refuse to call it a democracy.
They refuse to call it Western civilization.
They refuse to call it anything that they care about.
They'll be damned, and it seemed like, you know, that what was really going on there was because they were Jewish, they were interested enough to know the first thing about it, and once they learned the first thing about it, they were outraged, whereas most people don't really know anything about it because they don't have any real reason to, you know?
Yeah, they're not getting indoctrinated the way that, I mean, they are getting indoctrinated in a broad media sense, but, you know, these young Jews are the ones who are going into Hebrew schools and on birthright trips and being told, this is your homeland, and don't look over there where, you know, they're blindfolding and handcuffing a Palestinian worker for, you know, coming late to the checkpoint or whatever, or not addressing an 18-year-old Israeli soldier with appropriate respect.
So these young Jews have seen this, they're getting indoctrinated, and they're refusing to be indoctrinated.
Yeah.
It's the backlash, again, the difference, the ratio between the Frank Luntz narrative and the actual truth once you get your hands on a little bit of it about who's occupying whom there.
Right.
And the great thing is that when that group emerges, when it's not just like, you know, a nutcase like me, which they can always, you know, marginalize people as nutcases who are individuals, when it's this broad trend inside Jewish life, then the anti-Semitism charge goes out the window, because, obviously, they've used that against you, they've used that against Walden Mearsheimer, whenever anyone criticizes Israel, they're an anti-Semite.
Well, what are you going to do when, you know, you've got this army of young Jews who are saying, not in my name, I don't like apartheid, I don't like Jim Crow, I don't like racism.
Right.
All right, so now back to the kookery and insanity going on in Israel right now.
This is something we've seen in America, too, lately, the part about the military actually restraining the civilians.
Jeez, we really don't want to bomb Assad for al-Qaeda in Syria, boss.
Could you please back down from that, they said.
Wow.
And Iran before that, right?
Wow.
Ray McGovern really pointed out in the Syria 2013, it was Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said publicly, well, jeez, I don't know why we've got to do this right now.
Yeah.
Which meant, hey, this is on you, President, if you decide to do it, I've got deniability kind of thing.
That's a pretty big thing, and that's what you're talking about here, and then you said the word coup, and I'd like you to go back to the source for that, because this article was by, I guess, an Israeli national security wonk that was published in the New York Times, so he must not be too ideological of wingers, certainly not of the left-wing variety, and he was saying that they're so concerned about Netanyahu and, I guess, his little inner cabinet doing something crazy, that they kind of joke about it now, but maybe they're half serious when they talk about removing him from power, and not because he's cutting their budget, but because he wants to actually use them in ways that they are not that adventurous.
Right.
Right.
And he was, part of their opposition stems from the fact that in 2010, he was thinking, these guys are opposed to, quote-unquote, superfluous wars, and in this article that you quote from this wonk, you know, they say things like, we were against the slaughter in Gaza in 2014, but he wanted to do it for ideological reasons.
And so you have, they are implying that this guy is a madman who is slaughtering 500 children for ideological reasons, when there's no security purpose in it.
Similarly, that he was threatening, or was planning, in their view, a possible attack on Iran in 2010, which they were against.
And this speaks to a very important issue that Americans should think about, which is that, who was against the Iran deal?
This Iran deal that went through last year, there was only one person, really, there was only one force that was against that Iran deal, and that was the Israel lobby and Netanyahu.
And they screwed up the American discourse for months on this.
They caused everyone to bend over backwards, to kiss their behind over this question, and what you had was this kind of guy who was really operating on his own, in an almost dictator-like manner, and his own military was for the Iran deal, was saying, it's a done deal, we accept the Iran deal, they're not going to get nuclear weapons, they're not suicidal, Iran.
And meanwhile, you have this Netanyahu able to manipulate the United States, just as he said in 2002, the United States is something that can be easily moved.
Well, he easily moved us last year, and I think that that charade is part of what has contributed to the growing American fury over the special relationship with Israel, which has been, you know, Hillary Clinton is doubling down on every day.
Well, and you know, I mean, when you have, and do I have this right, I only have this second hand, but did you see that Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister and former Defense Minister of Israel, and in Netanyahu's government, also used the F-word and said that Israel is hurting fascism here.
Yes, yes, and you know, again, consider that, what about when we said that?
What about when Americans said that?
What about when Max Blumenthal said that?
And you know, completely marginalized in American society for saying that, American discourse by the media for it.
And how upset has Ehud Barak got to be?
I mean, the eye on, maybe if people want to write that off as professional jealousy and anger or something, it sounded pretty heartfelt to me.
And you imagine, I'm repeating myself, but same conversation with Phil Geraghty, you imagine an American Secretary of Defense absolutely slamming the new incoming Secretary of Defense as representing the death of the Republic and then in the advent of right wing fascist radicalism in D.C. and in the military or, you know, who's going to protect us?
I mean, that's the way Yalon was talking about Avigdor Lieberman, his replacement, and what that symbolized.
That's like, it's a pretty severe level of panic.
What is it exactly that they're worried about?
It seems like just another day of facts on the ground over here.
But they seem to be really upset about, is it the Lieberman addition to the coalition more than anything else?
You've put your finger on a couple of things here, Scott, typically.
You have really nailed a couple of points that really deserve to be explained.
And the point is, you think it's just facts on the ground.
Yeah.
To an outside observer, it's just more facts on the ground when they kill someone.
And in fact, what Yakov Hersh says is it's not facts on the ground, it's myths in the mind that they are worried about.
These practical military leaders are worried that the Israeli public is so behind Netanyahu in embracing this murdering medic, this guy was a medic who executed this person, that they have become, the population has become brainwashed that these really are intermenship, lesser people.
That's why they're bringing out these fascist things and Nazi analogies.
Because they see what their people are embracing.
They see an ideology that is dehumanizing another people and making them the enemies of Jews that deserve anything that happens to them.
And that is something you cannot control.
That is fascism.
And so that's why they flipped out.
And I think that the other thing that you put your finger on is, what if an American said this?
What if John Kerry, let's imagine a Bob Gates or an Ashton Carter quitting, quitting the job of defense secretary and making these allegations.
And then, then imagine the New York Times coming out the next day and saying, oh, nothing to look at.
Not a big deal.
And guess what?
The replacement, this right wing replacement that the president has put in is a very practical man.
He's an ideologue.
Avigdor Lieberman, the guy they replaced him with in Israel, he threatened to blow up the Aswan Dam in Egypt on one occasion.
So he's a nut.
And here you have the New York Times saying, well, he's a practical person.
This is just a political reshuffle.
So the New York Times is helping to cover up for and act as if this is an ordinary business when you yourself, I mean, without, you know, much, you know, you haven't looked into this carefully, but it's obvious to you that this is a fairly dramatic and fundamental upheaval inside the kind of political class and also the ideological roots of this society.
Yeah, it's really, again, yeah, back to the New York Times.
It's amazing the difference between their narrative about what's notable about what's going on here.
I mean, really just the way you told the story at the beginning.
You know, there was this execution and then the politicians said this and then the general said that and then the politicians flipped out and then there was a resignation.
They never had an article in the New York Times that explained all that.
No, no, no.
A lot of people are afraid.
This is just the history of the last two weeks and three weeks is what we're talking about here.
Yes.
Yeah.
And they've covered up the murdering medic.
I mean, they did that story somewhat, but this has been convoluted.
You know, here you have a medic executing someone on the street, you know, and the population supporting him and the prime minister coming out with a statement saying these are our children who are serving us like this.
So we can't condemn them.
I mean, what head of state could excuse a racial execution, which is what this was, by saying these are our children, you know, without getting the scorn of the world?
And yeah, an important point, too, there about the military, basically, you know, big part.
I mean, maybe there's some heartfelt what have you in here, but it sounds more like, you know, the way you characterize it is they're worried about popping the public relations bubble here, that the Netanyahu and his public support can push this so far where even the Americans have to back off support, that kind of thing, which jeopardize their eventual control over all that land between the river and the sea, which is still their goal, too.
They just don't want to be so ham handed about it that they ruin their chance and end up having to pull out.
Exactly.
I think and consider, too, that they have done this incredible sales job.
The propagandists for Israel and the United States have done a sales job of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East and a Jewish democracy and whatever else it is that is threatened by this.
When you have a country in which the military leaders are saying this guy has started superfluous wars and was threatening to start a superfluous war with Iran, only seeks belligerent solutions to problems and is created an ideology that's fascistic and reminiscent of the Nazis.
When you have that degree of convulsion, you know, I don't know if there's any going back right now.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's something that Max Blumenthal said to me on the show years ago, I guess back when he was writing Goliath, was he said, oh, man, if you think about America in its most insane panic of early 2002 level stupidity and fear and aggression kind of attitude, that is Israel's just stuck like that permanently and it's only going to get worse from here because everything they do just makes matters worse, makes their enemies hate them more and want to resist them more.
And they'll never stop crying that they're the victim of every bit of resistance against them.
And just forget it.
I mean, if it was a math problem, it would say, you know, humanity loses at the end or whatever.
But there's no solution here.
No, there isn't.
And and that's the problem is that when you have these major generals talking about Nazism and you have the American Israel lobby saying, oh, everything's fine, it's a democracy, oh, look at all the what an open democracy.
And these guys are talking about a possible coup.
There's a real cognitive dissonance.
I think that a lot of people are waking up to what Max was trying to tell us a while ago.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your work and you're bringing together of all the great writers that you feature there at Mondo Weissman.
It's really great stuff.
You guys do.
Thanks, Scott.
That's the grateful Weiss, Mondo Weiss dot net.
And check out Adam Horowitz and Dan Cohen and all the other greats there, Mondo Weiss dot net.
All right.
Thanks, y'all.
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