06/30/16 – Ben Ehrenreich – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Ben Ehrenreich.
He is the author of the new book, The Way to the Spring, Life and Death in Palestine.
Welcome to the show, Ben, how are you?
I'm good, Scott, how are you doing this morning?
I'm doing real good, except that I haven't read your book, which bums me out.
I really wish I had got a chance to read it, but I have been reading some of the articles that you've been writing, and I guess excerpts that they've been publishing.
There's this one at the London Review of Books, Shortcuts.
And then there's, very importantly, at politico.com, How Israel is Inciting Palestinian Violence.
That one told from the point of view of an Israeli soldier, which we're definitely going to talk about.
But I guess, first of all, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself, and how you ended up in the position of living in the West Bank and writing this book?
Sure, yeah, I'm a writer.
My two previous books have been novels, but I've been writing journalism for nearly 20 years, and reporting from all over the U.S. and all over the world.
And in 2011, my travels took me for the first time to the West Bank, to work on a piece about the role of water in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
And while I was there, I went for one afternoon to a village called Nabi Saleh, which is a little bit outside of Ramallah, about 20 minutes outside of Ramallah, where, at that point for two years, they had been holding demonstrations every Friday to protest the seizure of a spring, a water spring, by the settlers who lived across the valley in a settlement called Halamish.
And I was sufficiently intrigued by that one day, which was a dramatic one.
I mean, the protests are always, really without exception, put down with a great deal of violence by the Israeli army.
And that day was a particularly crazy one.
And I was interested enough that I pitched a story about Nabi Saleh to an editor at the New York Times magazine, and to my surprise and delight, they agreed to it.
And I went back and spent several weeks in that village in the summer of 2012, and then went back again in 2013.
At that point, I realized that I was sufficiently interested, and it kind of felt like I had just scratched the surface and wanted to keep reporting, not just from Nabi Saleh, but from other places around the West Bank.
And I wrote a book proposal and ended up moving to Ramallah in June of 2013 and staying for a little more than a year.
And the book that I've just published, The Weight of the Spring, is a result of that time and comes out of the reporting that I was doing while I was there.
Okay, now, I read one review this morning that I thought was really important.
I'm glad that they mentioned it.
Well, I read a few different reviews of it, but this one, I'm glad they mentioned this, that in the book, you say immediately, forget objectivity.
I'm a human man.
I'm subjective with eyes.
I'm looking out of them.
And, by the way, just to even call it the West Bank instead of Judea and Samaria means you've already chosen a side.
There's no way, really, to discuss this issue from Kang and Kodos' just-arrived-in-orbit kind of perspective when you actually live there and see what's going on.
Yeah, I think the discourse around objectivity in journalism has always been a highly problematic and deceptive one that really functions more to hide biases than it does to evade them.
But I don't know if there's anywhere that I've ever worked that's truer than Palestine.
By saying Palestine, I've chosen sides.
By saying Palestine rather than Israel and the occupied territories or whatever other term you choose to use.
And certainly by making the choice to live in Ramallah and to live among Palestinians rather than to live in Tel Aviv or in Jerusalem, which is what most Western journalists do when they work in the region, also meant to take sides.
We don't accuse the mainstream American journalists who live in Tel Aviv but report from the West Bank of a lack of objectivity because they've chosen to live on the Israeli side.
But I knew that by doing the opposite I would certainly be called out by people and I wanted to head that off from the very beginning.
Yeah, well, that's certainly fair enough.
And of course, it doesn't mean at all, it doesn't imply in any way that, oh, so now you're lying and you're just trying to make the Palestinians' case for them or anything like that.
Although, of course, that would, I guess, again, be an attacker's attempted spin on it.
But you're still doing reporting and talking about what it is that you saw, what it is that you know, what it is that your interviewees had told you and the rest of it.
So go ahead and tell us.
Tell us about life on the West Bank.
Tell us about some of the characters in your book that you profile, whatever you want.
Yeah, I'll say, just to add to what you're saying, I have a good friend, a journalist friend, who a couple of years ago articulated to me better than I've ever heard before, which is the issue should never be objectivity, which is kind of mythic quality, but transparency, that you assume that journalists, like every other human being on the planet, has opinions and is vetted in a certain social situation.
And you can't try to avoid that and get around it, but what you can do is be honest about where you're coming from so that readers or viewers or listeners can know what they're getting.
So I tried to be as scrupulously honest as I could about where I stood in all this.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I mean, if your bias was, look, what can I say?
I'm on the Israeli side here, then just as well.
I think it makes you more believable when you admit your bias rather than trying to bury it and pretend it doesn't exist.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
And, you know, I think unfortunately a lot of the stuff that we read and see and hear in the American media has that unspoken entrenchment in an Israeli narrative that it doesn't ever admit to and kind of hides under the sheet of objectivity.
But so the book, you know, ends up being about, in part, Nabi Saleh.
And I was really curious to trace out how the resistance in this village worked.
It's this absolutely tiny village that has suffered great losses for its decision to stand up against the occupation, not just during the demonstrations but during the week.
There are frequent raids on the village by the Israeli army, which means, you know, you wake up in the night with a couple dozen soldiers at your door and then come in and, you know, potentially trash your house and arrest your children.
And, you know, many people in the village have been injured.
Many have been arrested.
Two young men from the village, Mustafa Tamimi and Rushdi Tamimi, were killed by Israeli soldiers, which is a really extraordinary loss in a village that size.
And despite all this, the people there kept going.
They kept fighting.
Every Friday they kept going out and making this same walk, trying to go from the center of the village to the spring.
And I was, you know, one of the things that I was trying to get to the bottom of is why do they do this?
What does it mean to keep doing this when all they would have to do to just kind of suffer the baseline humiliations that everyone else in the West Bank suffers would be to stop doing this every Friday?
And yet they didn't stop.
So in some ways the whole book is an exploration of that question, like what does it mean to resist an enemy, an opponent who is so infinitely stronger than you?
Because, you know, compared to anyone in the West Bank and any sort of agglomeration of forces in the West Bank as it exists right now, you know, the Israeli armies and the Israeli state is just infinitely better equipped and stronger.
And, you know, so I asked the same question in a few other places.
I went to the city of Hebron, which is the one city in the West Bank in which there's a permanent population of settlers, which leads to all matter of tensions and violence and absurdities because that means, of course, that there are also Israeli soldiers living in the city and controlling the lives of the Palestinians who live there.
And I went also, spent also time in a small Palestinian village in the south Hebron hills called Umm al-Khair, which is also suffering a sort of slow squeeze at the hands of the Israeli military and the settlers who live beside them.
And the book, just because of timing, ended up also tracing out the arc of John Kerry's attempt to get the peace negotiations going, which began in 2013 while I was there and ended fairly disastrously and was followed by the events of the summer of 2014, you know, which leading up to the war on Gaza late that summer, which killed 2,200 Palestinians, 500 of them children, and more than half of them civilians.
So the arc of the story is in many ways a painful one.
Yeah, and ever since, right, has been.
Now tell me, when it comes to Kerry in 2013, is there anything to report there?
I'm kind of curious.
It sort of seemed like, yeah, yeah, yeah, and then Rice held a PR op at Annapolis, and then so what?
Was there actually something?
I think what was worthy of reporting was the sort of the charade of it all, you know.
It was all being very seriously reported in this country.
And while at the same time in the Israeli and Palestinian press, and not just in the press, but if you talk to anybody there, you know, everybody thought it was hopeless and absurd.
It seemed like everybody except John Kerry and his advisors and perhaps the New York Times was convinced that it was absolutely fruitless and would inevitably end in grave disappointment, which, of course, it did.
And, you know, unfortunately, that grave disappointment also, I think, led the way for the war that summer.
But, yeah, you know, I think here it's not knowing the situation intimately from the U.S.
It's easier to see U.S.-led peace negotiations as a kind of good faith effort to solve things.
And certainly from the Palestinian point of view, you know, people know very well the role of the U.S. in this conflict and know that the U.S. is funding Israel with $3.1 billion of military aid every year, which means the U.S. is not a bystander in this conflict.
The U.S. is an active participant in the hostilities.
And no matter what Israel does, those checks keep coming.
So the idea then that the U.S. could be some kind of honest broker and could kind of be outside of this enough that it could, you know, make the necessary hard demands of both Palestinians and Israelis alike is just patently absurd.
You know, it's kind of like, you know, somebody comes to you and asks you for some money so they can buy some bullets, and then they go off and kill some people.
And they come back and you say, you know, you really shouldn't have killed some people.
And they say, yeah, I need more money.
And you keep giving them money, and this keeps happening.
And you keep saying, oh, you know, you really shouldn't kill all those people.
Why don't you give them more money for more bullets and more guns?
This is the role the U.S. plays.
And we are, you know, certainly not just an enabler, but I think at this point, unquestionably, one of the players in a very violent and ugly game.
All right.
Well, as long as we're talking about the politics of it, do the Paris talks mean anything as far as – well, my understanding, I guess, Ben, is that since Oslo, America has staked out that position that, you know, we are the, in italics, third-party negotiator here.
And the fact that we never get anywhere, notwithstanding, but we've monopolized that position.
But so do the Paris talks indicate any real change in that, do you think?
No, I don't think so.
No, I don't think any of the, you know, various attempts to get talks going again are particularly meaningful.
You know, I think at the moment, as long as Israel knows, which the Israeli government knows extremely well, that there will be no consequences for their actions, then there's no reason for them to make any – to negotiate, to compromise.
Whatever they do, the checks keep coming from the U.S.
And they – there's no pressure on them at all that would lead them to change their policies or their actions.
All right, now, so back to the village here, Nabi Saleh, where their spring has been stolen.
This is something that we do hear about from time to time.
But whenever we do hear about it, it makes it seem like maybe there's really a lot more nonviolent protests and resistance and civil disobedience than we ever get to hear about on any regular basis.
But I wonder if that's really true.
I mean, certainly I've never heard of the protest every Friday for giving us our spring back here until talking to you.
But what about in the rest of the West Bank?
Because, of course – I'm sorry, one more thing.
TV has it that, you know, Palestinians only exist when they, you know, come out of the ether to attack an innocent Israeli.
Otherwise, they are not really there, you know.
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Yeah, I mean, for the most part, you know, we read about the region in the American press when there is some act of violence against Israelis.
But, you know, what we are not informed about, unless you really take the trouble to look at other news sources online, is, you know, that there are absolutely daily acts of violence of various sorts against Palestinians by Israelis, by the Israeli military, by Israeli settlers, et cetera, et cetera.
And they have to be pretty giant before they make the news.
And for the most part, they don't.
As to, you know, nonviolent demonstrations, in Nabi Saleh, it didn't start in a vacuum.
It was part of a movement which began in the early 2000s.
And the villages that this movement began in were all clustered along the path of the wall.
You know, in the Second Defat, beginning in 2002, Israel started to create, you know, this separation barrier.
In some places, it's an eight-meter-high concrete wall.
In other places, it's a chain-link fence surrounded by razor wire.
And the path of it goes deeply inside the West Bank in most places.
You know, the official logic for it was that it would provide security and prevent Palestinians from sneaking across into Israel to, you know, attack Israeli civilians.
But it was built not along the green line that separates the West Bank and Israel, but for the most part, deeply inside it.
It actually cuts off almost 10 percent of the West Bank's land mass and puts it on the Israeli side.
And what this meant on a, you know, small-scale level was that it cut through individual villages and took people's agricultural land from them.
And, you know, literally took people's land and, you know, went through people's land.
So during the Second Defat in the early 2000s, while in other parts of the West Bank, people were fighting with suicide bombs or fighting with Kalashnikovs and engaged in active military conflict, some villages decided to take a completely different tactic and to march without weapons to stage sit-ins, to stage unarmed protests against the military as the military was attempting to take their land to build the wall.
You know, sitting in front of bulldozers, staging various, you know, creative forms of protest that would keep the eyes of the world on their struggle and bring to the world's attention what was happening.
Listeners might know the name of one of those villages, even if they haven't been to the region, which is Bilein, which became quite famous after a documentary made about it called Five Broken Cameras.
It was quite successful here and was actually nominated for an Academy Award.
And that all started in the early 2000s and Nabi Saleh sort of borrowed this tactic in 2009, although they were nowhere near the wall.
Their issue was initially just this spring.
And for the most part, this tactic has, that movement has kind of faded a bit.
And some of the villages, they've stopped protesting and some of them, they continue.
But I think, I don't think it's too pessimistic to say that in the next few years we're going to see that movement ending.
I think it's had some really enormous accomplishments, you know, in terms of bringing the attention of the world to what's happening there.
But I think it's also extremely difficult to sustain week after week after week after week, you know, with such fierce opposition.
Yeah.
And by the world, you mean everywhere it's set between Canada and Mexico.
But, yeah.
Yeah.
Although, you know, as I've been I've been traveling this last week to talk about the book and have been pretty amazed at everywhere I go, how many people, you know, know something about these these struggles, despite the fact that they're not reported on much in the mainstream press.
And and are really eager to talk about this stuff.
You know, I think for years in the U.S. there's been this silence imposed by the media and by the political elites that, you know, only one side of this issue can be discussed.
And it's really clear to me that that's changing and that people are really frustrated with that and really want to hear other perspectives and want to talk about this in a new way.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there are a lot of political issues where the gap between the reality and the narrative is so great that when you figure it out, wait, the Israelis are occupying the Palestinians, then.
Well, man, it's kind of shocking.
People get upset a little bit that all this time I thought the poor little Israelis were just trying to get by and the Palestinians wouldn't stop attacking them with all their terrorism.
And yet now I'm figuring out now I've seen a map and now I get it a little bit that that's, you know, really can be an eye opening thing for people, I think.
And so and yeah, you're right.
I mean, that that message certainly is getting out, you know, mostly because the Internet going around traditional forms of media and all that.
Yeah.
And I think even even within traditional media, I think the discrepancy in power and violence is so extreme that you don't have to be that critical of your reader or listener to to figure out that something's wrong.
You know, the way that the Gaza war was sold to to the US, which was very much, I think, through an Israeli narrative that they're attacking us with missiles.
Therefore, we have to defend ourselves.
We have no choice, I think, to to a lot of Americans, even despite the attempts of, you know, the cable news, for instance, to to really, you know, entirely frame this in those terms.
People saw, you know, the body count jumping and jumping every day.
And by the end of it, more than 2000 Palestinians have been killed and six Israeli civilians.
And when you have numbers that stark, it's pretty hard to keep that spin machine going in an effective way.
And I think people have a harder and harder time accepting the official spin and the official narrative.
And I think 2014 was really a what you call it, watershed kind of event there, too, where because of Twitter and Facebook and 3G, the Palestinians were able to get their story out and around the government and the traditional media in such a way.
I think that was the real turning point.
That was the first time that the Palestinians really got to have their say in a in a way that Americans could hear it.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think social media did mean that stories were getting out about various, you know, really horrible things that were happening that summer.
And, you know, that when when seen without the filter that the that the media tends to put them through, we're just pretty stark and brutal.
Yeah, well, I really hope I can get to your book and and read all about the war.
I don't we're almost out of time.
And and the war itself of 2014 is a huge topic there.
But so I guess it's OK.
We'll just wrap up with this story that you wrote in Politico, or I'm not sure if it's a book excerpt or which here, but how Israel is inciting Palestinian violence inside the oppressive and far reaching occupation designed to give the Palestinians the, quote, fear.
Feeling of being chased.
And this is really a story told from the point of view of an Israeli soldier and what he learned about what it means to occupy the West Bank and Jerusalem.
Am I right?
Yeah, the article in question was an excerpt.
It was sort of an odd beast because it was an excerpt that Politico then asked me to adapt.
So it reads as if it was written, you know, as an article just relevant to current events, because there are a couple of paragraphs before and after it relating it to things that had happened recently, such as the shootings in Tel Aviv that week.
But but it does come from a section of the book, which is more about things that happened in the city of Hebron and the soldier in question, a man named Aaron Afrati, talks about the things he saw and did and was ordered to do while a young soldier stationed in Hebron.
And, you know, he's an interesting guy.
He his experiences in Hebron and elsewhere in the West Bank ended up leading him to, you know, he came from a, you know, a very strongly Zionist family and had never had cause to question the justice of the occupation or the righteousness of the Israeli army until he began to serve.
And what he experienced was was so counter to his his his values and his conscience that he ended up after leaving the military, becoming an activist and, you know, now spends a lot of his time telling his stories to audiences around the world to try to give people some understanding of what goes on there.
And he's actually not too unique in that.
Am I right about that?
No, no.
You know, there's there's a group in Israel called Breaking the Silence, which is made up of former soldiers.
And the group basically collects testimony from soldiers about the things they've they've done and seen while serving in the in the military.
And the group was actually founded by a bunch of then still young men who had all served in Hebron as well.
And they were there during the Second Tifada and also did some things that did not sit well with them, to put it mildly, and felt that they they had to, you know, quite literally break the silence and get Israeli society talking about the things that that, you know, their children were being ordered to do.
You know, service in the military is compulsory in Israel.
Everyone, everyone does it.
And they've been really invaluable in a lot of ways, because they've collected, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of testimonies from soldiers and published a great deal of them, published various reports, made them available to the public.
And for this, they've also drawn a lot of ire, and especially this last year have been really fiercely attacked by the Israeli government and the Israeli right in an attempt to discredit them.
And some of the things it's doing in the West Bank and in Gaza are so awful that even its own soldiers can't, you know, can't can't bear it.
Right.
I mean, yeah, even on the face of it, it's not like, oh, yeah, well, Israeli soldiers are particularly disloyal.
No, that's not it.
There must be something else going on here.
Like, oh, the missions that they're going on are not meeting enemy soldiers in the field.
It's not even martial law.
It's beyond martial law.
It's war law occupation over civilians forever.
That's their mission.
And that's why they turn on their government and and try to inform the rest of the citizens about what they're doing is wrong.
And just I just real quick, this one anecdote out of here of making the school teachers stripped to their underwear at the checkpoint in front of all of their children, their students, and make them just wait there for hours just to humiliate him.
This kind of everyday little humiliations like that.
Ask any American to put themselves in that position.
That's what the occupying power in your county is doing to you and to your people.
How tolerable that would be.
It's absolutely insane.
And then as you point out, as he explains in this article, that's really the mission is to let them know that like slaves on the plantation or something, that they are damn dogs and that they do not have a right and they better not expect to have one respected.
Yeah, yeah.
I think for from a distance, if you don't know much about it, the idea of military occupation sounds like, oh, well, there's, you know, there's foreign troops, you know, there's troops on their soil.
And we don't really think about it much more than that.
And we may think about it in terms of, you know, a an attempt for Israel to preserve its own security and fight terrorism, et cetera, et cetera.
But we're not, for the most part, aware of the ways in which it functions on a daily level, which is, as you say, to really to systematically humiliate an entire population.
And I think the calculation behind this is that they will then be too filled with despair and too beaten down and too afraid to fight back.
But it doesn't work.
And, you know, I think any even slightly observant student of history will tell you that that kind of brutality never works, that, you know, you can't keep pushing people down like that without eliciting exactly the response that you're trying to prevent, which is having people fight you back because people don't like to be humiliated.
And when you try to drive people to despair, it drives them to desperate acts against you.
That's Ben Ehrenreich, freelance journalist and novelist.
And the brand new book is The Way to the Spring, Life and Death in Palestine.
And I really do hope that you guys will check out this one at Politico, How Israel is Inciting Palestinian Violence.
We ran on Antiwar.com a few days ago.
Thank you very much, Ben, for your time today.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.
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