06/09/16 – Ramzy Baroud – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Ramsey Baroud, media consultant and an internationally syndicated columnist and editor of PalestineChronicle.com.
His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, Gaza's Untold Story, and we run him regularly at AntiWar.com, in fact, including today, The Paris Peace Gambit, Everyone Gains Except the Palestinians, typical.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Ramsey?
Doing well.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Very happy to have you back on the show here, and yeah, I haven't actually heard too much of the Paris talks.
I'm really glad you wrote this thing.
There's been some news stories about it, but very few opinion pieces really discussing it.
What exactly is going on in Paris right now?
Or what was going on last week, I guess?
Right.
June 3rd, I think, was the first day of the conference.
It was the first time, really, and I think this is important to note, since the Americans kind of took charge of the so-called peace process in the early 1990s, beginning in Madrid, since that date, it was really the first time that we see any other country, any other international power to step forward and to try to take charge of maintaining or being involved in that conflict in any way.
The U.S. has been in charge and has been clearly demarcated that it is the one, the so-called peace broker, and countries can get involved to support, to sympathize, to encourage, to get involved at any level, but not to take leadership.
The French decided to take leadership, but I'm not really as excited about it as it may seem, simply because I think the French have their own calculations, and the Americans are basically very fatigued by the entire thing.
Well, so what's the French calculation here?
I mean, why pretend if they don't really want to do something here, if this is the first time they've stuck their neck out in 20 years?
Right, right.
I think we have to look into domestic affairs in France itself, to kind of like starting to understand why this is happening.
France has been involved in recent, the last five years, in the Middle East, North Africa, more than any other time in their history, I would say maybe since World War II.
The French have been non-intervention, unlike the U.S. and its own policy in the region.
We remember the conflict that happened between France and the United States when the Americans wanted to go to Iraq and invade that country in 2003, and there was a risk that took years for it to heal, maybe until Barack Obama came to power.
But recently, things have been changing, I would say, since Sarkozy, and then now with Hollande.
The reason it's been changing is that the French feel that their interests in the region, in the Middle East, are being threatened, and they needed to get involved.
They got involved in Libya, in Mali, in Syria, and so on.
So it is important for them, they can't, I mean, we understand, you know, this is why I call it the peace process, you know, it's a charade, basically.
And we need to understand that in order for you to be involved in the Middle East, you've got to be part of the charade somehow.
It's not about finding peace and justice for the Palestinians, or a conflict resolution, it's actually about maintaining the business itself.
You can't play a leadership role in the region as France or the United States if you are not involved in the peace process.
So the French have a lot of interest, a lot of business interest, a lot of political and military interest now in the region, and they can't be on the sidelines.
I think that's one very important issue, aspect of why the French are getting involved.
But the other important aspect, I think, has to do with domestic French politics.
Terrorism is on the rise, a lot of violence in France.
France has a community of over 5 million Muslims that are very much French Muslims, civil generations Muslims, and they feel very strongly about Palestine.
The wisdom has been a lot of these terrorist acts use Palestine or the Palestinian cause to justify violence, and therefore they needed to appease, or perhaps not appease, that's not the right term, but rather to kind of really try to send a message that not only we are cracking down on terrorism and we are doing all of this, we are also trying to help out in Palestine somehow.
So I think they are just really trying to kind of sort out some domestic politics and to appear that they are actually doing something about this conflict in Palestine that has generated so much fury and so much anger among so many Muslims the world over.
Yeah.
Well, now, so this whole thing about the peace process being a big joke and having everything to do with the process and nothing to do with peace is pretty much the consensus view on the planet Earth right now.
This isn't really fooling anybody anymore, is it, other than it's just the TV news people and that's enough?
Is that it?
That's it.
I mean, it's like, I think it's like having a membership in a prestigious club, you know, to be invited, say, you know, by the French to come and participate in the Paris Conference.
It's just, it's an honor.
It just means, wow, we are being taken seriously as an entity, as an institution, as individuals.
And it's been that way, really.
I mean, remember the big signing of Oslo in the White House lawn in September 1993 and how the selection of who were to be invited and who's to be excluded.
It was almost, you know, really more like a prestige than actually trying to think in, you know, proper way to find a solution to this bloody conflict that's been going on for many years.
And that's what it is.
And this is why you haven't heard much about it, because the American media is interested in it insofar as American interests.
So if American interests are really not being satisfied in any way, why should they care?
The Israelis are not interested in it at all at this point.
They are actually not interested in any kind of peace or talks or anything, because simply Netanyahu reached a point that his local constituents are far more important than sustaining or entertaining American ideas and, you know, and playing the American political game.
I mean, the Palestinians, really, the Palestinian leadership, when I say Palestinians, I'm not talking about the people and the media either, I'm talking about the Palestinian leadership.
They are the only ones who really seems to be very energetic and very excited about it because they are desperate for any form of validation.
They are entrapped in this matrix of Israeli occupation in the West Bank.
They are running out of money.
Everybody is focusing on Syria and Libya and Yemen.
And they have been neglected.
And I think it's kind of was this opportunity to put them back in the limelight for a couple of days.
Yeah, I could see that they need just the validation because they don't really have anything else that they can brag about as success whatsoever.
So but hey, look at us.
We're rubbing shoulders with our enemies.
So that's pretty neat.
Right.
That's right.
And and, you know, I think it's important to also know that the Palestinian people are just furious.
I mean, we have an intifada going on.
There's an uprising going on.
Kids are just getting desperate.
You know, you have these stabbings and all of this.
You know, this is a nation that lives under the boots of soldiers and military occupation and bloody murder every single day.
So they are just reaching the point where they they neither have a national project that they are part of, that their leadership does not represent them.
They are not democratically elected.
They feel that their voices are being muffled.
They are under siege all the time.
So as a result, there is this violence that's just basically people just trying to break out of the walls and the checkpoints and all of this.
And the Palestinian leadership understands that if this violence reaches a point of a critical mass, say goodbye to the Palestinian Authority.
The whole charade is over.
They burned out the buildings and their offices and and the police officers will just join the resistance.
And that's the end of it.
So there is this dread, there is this fear in the Palestinian leadership that their days are numbered.
So this is why, in my opinion, the French conference came at an extremely important and sensitive juncture for the Palestinian Authority, because Palestinians are now trying to think past this.
It just doesn't serve its purpose anymore.
Even for the Israelis, it's not serving a purpose anymore.
So who's sustaining it?
Why is it there anyway?
I mean, the way you describe it, too, it doesn't sound like this is going to relieve much pressure at all.
Do you think that the status quo?
I mean, I guess it is an intifada right now, but maybe a low level one.
What do you think is the near term future here with this?
Because obviously, as you said, the Israelis aren't giving an inch on this.
They even said outright in here, we don't have any even any interest in this multilateral negotiation.
Let the Palestinians come to us and we'll deal bilaterally, which means, you know, the captive and his prisoner negotiating, which is never going to mean anything.
Exactly, Scott.
And the reason, you know, that this is really not going to deliver, you know, this whole conference is not going to serve more than just this kind of immediate, you know, feel good moment that here we are, we are in the limelight and we are being covered in the media again.
It's just, you know, it's part of Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority and his symbolic victory.
He's been achieving all of these symbolic victories.
My gosh, we have this huge list of symbolic victories we've achieved in the last few years under Mahmoud Abbas, you know, recognitions in various institutions and in the U.N., you know, you know, the status of Palestine has been updated to something else and so forth and so on.
So he keeps going back to the West Bank and he keeps saying, look, now we are members of the sports international whatever in Sweden.
I mean, nobody really cares.
There's nothing practical that has changed on the ground, nothing tangible that the people can feel.
To the contrary, they are losing more land, they are losing more lives, they are losing more freedom.
And he keeps talking about this.
This is why I've been kind of watching, you know, kind of reading the Palestinian official narrative on the peace conference.
And it's just incredible the degree of of, you know, the charade amongst them.
I mean, just Saeb al-Riqat speaks about, you know, finally there's a flicker of hope.
Flicker of hope of what?
How?
What are the mechanics of this hope?
And isn't this what you said, Saeb al-Riqat, about Oslo in 1993 and again in 95 and in 2000?
Flicker of hope.
You're feeding your people this nonsense and you are trying to tell them that we are serving a purpose because here we are following yet another lead.
But this has been going on for 25 years and they have lost everything.
So you are going to start another charade of another 25 years instead of actually going back and and revising your national project, coming up with a liberation, national liberation project like, you know, the anti-apartheid South Africa, you know, uniting your people, talking to Hamas, finding solutions within your rank and then coming to the world and say, listen, these are our demands and we are going to fight for them.
We will find peaceful means to fight.
We'll do whatever.
But this is what we stand for.
We have none of that, zero of that.
And instead, they just keep going from one institution to the other.
And and they just keep going back home empty handed.
Well, now, in previous articles, you've written a lot about what you call the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and you really describe them.
I mean, it's hard to do, you know, in just analogies or metaphors or whatever.
But you you basically describe them as trustees in the prison.
But they work for the Israeli government, not in any way for the Palestinian people.
Right.
And it's not like they are even denying it.
I mean, you know, it's very strange of how they are open about it.
You know, the head of the Palestinian security forces in the West Bank a few months ago made this statement when he said, you know, we have plotted this number of attacks on on is on the Israeli army and we have arrested this number of Palestinian resisters.
And we have just it was incredible.
You would really think that the one who is reading that statement is the head of the idea, the head of the Israeli Defense Forces.
But this is the head of the Palestinian Security Forces talking and bragging about how he is doing everything in his hour to keep the Palestinians confined and to prevent prevent protest, to prevent mobilization, to prove and he wasn't sapped.
Everything is cool.
Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, speaks about it also proudly on Israeli television.
You know, we are searching the school bags of Palestinian children.
I mean, what message are you telling the world that your children, your little cute little children in the West Bank and Ramallah and Hebrew and Nablus are carrying knives to stab Israelis?
Is that your message?
Extremely embarrassing and disorganized and really has, you know, does not have the air of national leaders with a project that doesn't extremely corrupt group of people.
And I think culture has a lot to do with it.
And I mean, the culture of corruption, it feeds on itself.
You know, you create you create an authority and you sustain it with a lot of money and you become dependent on the money.
They are constantly being fed from donors, countries, from the Saudis and the Americans and everybody else.
And then they kind of reach the point where they are sustaining this lifestyle that is exuberant and exciting and they will see and they don't want to let go because they know that what is this silly nonsense that Ramzi is talking about?
What national project?
We lose everything because to fight for your freedom, it means that, you know, we're talking about prison and death and and all of that.
We don't want to lose everything for your nonsensical liberation project.
This is why it's just it's just it has been embedded in them as a culture.
They don't see it.
The vast majority of Palestinians see it.
They point at them and say, these are collaborators, they are traitors.
They sold us out, you know, and they will never bring us anything good at this point.
We need to.
But here's the struggle.
The struggle is that the Palestinian Authority is not just corrupt, it's working with Israel and you have this kind of double occupation that the Palestinians are suffering from the Israeli military occupation, but also the Palestinian Authority security forces that are working hand in hand to sustain the show up.
Now, I don't know if you saw this, but the mayor of Tel Aviv put out a statement, obviously not justifying the violence to Palestinians murdered for Israelis in a restaurant in Tel Aviv.
I think it was yesterday, I guess.
And the mayor of Tel Aviv came out again, clearly not trying to rationalize the violence or anything, but just explaining that we've got these people locked up.
They're imprisoned and we've kept them like this for forty nine years now.
We can't do that.
You can't do that and expect for this kind of thing not to happen.
So, you know, I thought that was important.
I mean, the tweet when I saw it was how come American media can't admit that if the mayor of Tel Aviv can?
And again, it's not a rationalization.
It seems stupid to me to attack innocent civilians.
That just makes the Palestinians look like the bad guys, which plays right into the Hasbara of why the Palestinian aggressors won't leave the poor little Israelis alone.
But anyway, I thought that was an important point that the Tel Aviv mayor gets it now, at least.
It's amazing.
That's also happening by other Israeli officials.
I mean, even Ahud Barak had recently described Israel as a country that is moving quite fast towards fascism.
Prior to that, it was, I think, the head of the Israeli army that described the atmosphere in Israel similar to that in Germany prior to the rise of Hitler.
And every time a statement of this kind is being made, you know, the Israeli, you know, political establishment immediately kind of like clusters and try to kind of attack the person who who made these statements and so forth and so on.
I mean, you've seen just recently there was a fundamental change in the Israeli military establishment when Yigal Alon, the former defense minister of Israel, been fired basically from his position and the position is being given to Avigdor Lieberman, the extreme notorious fascist Israeli politician.
So Israeli society is moving really quite rapidly towards an abyss, a very, very dark abyss of fascism and apartheid.
And some Israelis are actually speaking out.
They are not speaking out out of love for Palestinians, mind you.
They are speaking out because they know that they are also reaching a point of self destruction.
You know, they are happy to sustain the situation as is.
If it doesn't cross certain red lines, but they are crossing it and crossing it fast.
I mean, they are cracking down on Israeli organizations, NGOs, civil society, Beth Salem, Checkpoint Watch.
All these organizations are now suffering the wrath of the Israeli police.
They are being denied funds.
They are being restricted in their travels and so forth and so on.
So Israelis, yeah, you're right.
They are increasingly speaking out, but not enough because Israeli society, you know, as a whole is actually moving towards the light, as we kind of see from the current formation of their government, really the most right wing government in the history of that country.
Yeah, well, especially to see their national security state basically panicking over the form of the civilian government right now is pretty, pretty telling.
As you said, for example, the the words of the former defense minister about the new one.
This is not how Americans talk about their secretaries of defense, no matter what, basically.
Right.
But we had the previous one saying, oh, my God, it's the end of our society about the new guy.
That's right.
That's absolutely right.
And, you know, I think the generation of the clever Zionists, you know, the the old generation of Zionists of the, you know, the the 30s and 40s just died out, basically.
I mean, Shimon Peres, I would say is the last of that.
And you have this new generation, you know, the Netanyahu and then and his ilk.
It's a whole different thing.
I mean, they are, you know, they carry extremely fascist ideas.
Lieberman talks about the beheading of Palestinian, the beheading of the families of any Palestinian who attacks Israel, the beheading of the families.
And then when he was questioned about that after he became the defense minister, he said it might be a little bit too early to consider that.
But it's not wrong morally.
But it might be, you know, maybe this is not the right time to talk about this or to talk about as he threatened to assassinate the prime minister of Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh and so forth.
So, yeah, I don't see any positive change happening within Israeli society.
And as we discussed earlier, the Palestinian authorities at this point really serve no other value but to sustain the Israeli occupation.
All right now, so let's talk about a little bit of one state, two state stuff for a little while here.
Am I right?
Is it is it too late for a two state solution, really?
I mean, if you had, for example, a real change of heart in Israeli civil society and a new plan and they really were ready to swap this and that settlement for this and that territory inside the old Green Line and whatever, could that really be arranged or are we living now so far into the future here in 2016 that the settlements and the so-called Israeli territory carved out inside the West Bank is just too much to ever realistically be reversed for such a deal?
Well, to start with, I think the whole discussion of the two state solution was immoral to begin with when it was still feasible.
There was, in fact, a time where it was still feasible in the sense that the West Bank was intact and Gaza was intact.
And and they discussed the possibility of perhaps doing some land swapping and connecting Gaza with the West Bank via the Nakav, you know, in the south.
And, you know, you can more or less have an entity, more or less have an entity of some sort that you can say it's a continuous entity.
But I think it was immoral in the sense that that means that the separation of the Palestinian population, those who are living in Israel, it's going to be the end of the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees and so forth.
But but at one point, it was still feasible in the sense that the West Bank was an entity that, you know, a chunk that would actually be drawn on a map.
Now, what you see in terms of the current map, the West Bank, you kind of see it as a chunk, but that's really not the real map that exists today.
The map that exists today.
And I do recommend that your listeners actually go and just find a map that has the the location of the Israeli settlement and the bypass road within.
And I'm talking about permanent structures here, permanent settlements and permanent rules.
I'm not talking about checkpoints.
That will even make things even a lot more interesting and complicated.
Just the existing, you know, structure that means that the West Bank is actually has been narrowed down to tiny little pieces and dots and many, many little disconnected entities.
I would even say that the South African analogy of the townships doesn't even compare to what's happening in the West Bank.
So the West Bank as one entity doesn't exist anymore.
Right.
What exists is just little areas that are populated by Palestinians in major cities connected via all sorts of roundabout sort of ways.
The vast majority of the West Bank is located in what the Israelis call Area C.
That's about 65 percent of the West Bank.
And that's where the major settlements are being based.
So for there to be a proper two state solution based on the old, old vision of a two state solution, it means that you are looking here at the transfer of over half a million Jewish settlers out of the West Bank and out of East Jerusalem back to Israel and the complete demolishing of all these settlements that are some of them are like Kuriat Arban and some of these settlements in Jerusalem.
They are actually as large as Tel Aviv itself.
I don't see that happening and I don't see any simple land swap that's going to actually take care of that.
But not just that.
In some strange way, it was Israel that actually made the one state solution the only possibility.
It's either that or bust.
It's either that or there will be no nothing to speak of.
Palestinians will be enslaved and oppressed for the rest of eternity or a one state solution in the sense that their life is now so interacting, so intersecting to the point that the Israelis cannot sustain themselves without the West Bank aquifers, for example, the Palestinian demographics, the relationship of the West Bank to Jerusalem in terms of the holy places, the commercial hubs, in order for you to actually create this disconnect.
It means that the Palestinians are going to suffocate.
It's just not going to work out.
And even the Israelis cannot sustain themselves without certain dependency on the West Bank and its water and so forth.
The odd thing is that in practice we have been coexisting.
I mean, well, not coexisting, but we have been living in the same space that is Palestine, Israel.
You know, the Israelis are in the West Bank.
And the Palestinians are also citizens, Palestinian, the original citizens of today's Israel.
You know, it's there.
But we are governed by two sets of rules.
That's what makes life extremely difficult.
So as Ramzi, I have different status, different relationship to the space than they do.
What we have been really demanding is that we know that the two state solution is over.
You made it impossible anyway.
And since we are already living within this space and we are already more or less sharing unfairly, really, some of us are getting a lot more than the others in terms of their allocation of water and space and freedom and access and licenses to build and so forth.
Can we just restate the rules, rewrite the laws in a way that will allow us to be equal within this space of land in which we are already all living there anyway?
Can we demolish the checkpoints and open the roads so that we can all go anywhere we want within this same country in which we are all living?
So it's really all about changing the relationships between both people living in that space.
You want to call it one state solution.
You want to call it whatever it is.
I don't frankly, I don't even care anymore.
It's about it's about rights.
It's about basic human rights for the people who are coexisting within this space.
That's what Palestinians, I think, we read.
This is where I think the Palestinian Authority got it wrong with the Palestinian leadership.
They are fighting over little things that don't even matter anymore.
While in reality, I feel like there should be a new Palestinian narrative that is unified around the one state.
Yeah, OK, well, so here's I mean, one, the obvious objection is they won't let you have independence in the West Bank.
They sure as hell aren't going to let you just live wherever you want inside so-called Israel proper.
There would be another Nakba before Israel stops being a Jewish state, democracy or otherwise.
They're keeping their super duper majority and they'll keep it that way with fire.
And everybody knows that.
So what about that?
Well, I mean, if you think about it, every apartheid nation that existed, whether in South Africa or in Namibia or Mozambique or, you know, wherever wherever it was in the past, every colonizing power, every occupation force had that same exact same mindset.
I will not change the situation from what it is today.
And I will fight you until the last drop of my blood in order for me to achieve my objective.
And things actually do change, you know, so do change because reality forces itself, because there are certain things in life that are unsustainable.
It's just not sustainable in the 21st century to have hundreds of thousands of soldiers roaming the streets with guns and bullets and bombs and frightening children and shooting at young men and putting people behind walls and fences like animals.
You just can't do that.
And it's just becoming even the Americans find it frustrating.
And frankly, I think the Americans are happy that the French are, you know, we're organizing that conference because the Israelis are becoming a liability, a huge liability, really, on the Americans or anybody who's championing their cause.
There will be a point in which there is enough international awareness, international civil society awareness and involvement that it becomes extremely difficult to sustain that enterprise, exactly as it was the case in South Africa in the early 1990s.
There was just a point where the white establishment, the apartheid establishment in South Africa, realized that it is impossible for us to sustain this.
Now, don't forget that apartheid in South Africa did not just exist for 50 years, like in the early 50s.
These are the apartheid laws that existed since then.
But prior to that, for hundreds of years, there was colonialism, British, Dutch colonialism that existed for hundreds of years, South Africa, and then the apartheid laws were enacted in the early 1950s.
And yet you go to South Africa, it's quite a different country now.
So we can't let that dissuade us from carrying on with the struggle because we know it's a generational struggle.
It might not end in Ramzi's life or even his children, but we know we are pushing in the right direction.
As long as we are pushing in the right direction and there's enough momentum and there's enough involvement, eventually the situation is going to change.
All right, well, listen, I want to stop it now, even though we have to continue this conversation another time.
But I want the interview to be short enough that I can play it on KPFK on Sunday morning.
So we'll stop it here and we'll pick it up at the 1-2 state debate next time.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show, Ramzi.
I really appreciate it.
Yes, of course, Scott.
Thank you so much.
Take care.
All right, so that's the great Ramzi Baroud.
We run him all the time at Antiwar.com.
He also keeps Palestine Chronicle.com.
And his latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, Gaza's Untold Story.
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