09/16/16 – Stanley L. Cohen – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing Stanley L. Cohen.
He is a lawyer and human rights activist who's done extensive work in the Middle East and Africa.
He's got a website of his own, a blog called Caged But Undaunted.
That's at cagedbutundauntedatwordpress.com.
And here he's got this article for Al Jazeera, reprinted at Al Jazeera anyway, Harder Times for Palestine If Clinton Wins the U.S. Election.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks for inviting me.
Pleasure to be with you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
I followed your work for a little while.
I'm glad we've finally had a chance to speak here.
Before we get into Hillary in Palestine, and there's a lot to discuss there, and I really want to hear from you on that, I was hoping that I could get you to tell us the story of your efforts to save Peter Kasich.
This comes up on the show a lot, usually in terms of the differences and the sames between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and whether they might ever come back together again as a single force, especially after ISIS loses Mosul eventually here pretty soon and that kind of thing.
But it's such an important story, and all I know of it is the Guardian's version of it, so I sure would like to hear your version of the story of how you came to attempt to negotiate the release of Peter Kasich from the Islamic State, an effort which eventually failed, although apparently no fault of your own here.
Well, look, I've lived, spent half my adult life, worked in the Middle East for decades, represented Hamas for years, done work with Hezbollah, done work with Gitmo guys, tried Bin Laden's son-in-law's case in the Southern District of New York, go back, done lots of stuff in international human rights forums and jurisdictions overseas, so I've got a lot of, for lack of a better word, connections.
I know a lot of people, diverse people, different types of groups, groups that don't like each other, Sunni, Shia, groups that are fighting each other, but I've pretty much earned respect from a lot of the major players on the ground.
And it was at a time when literally every week ISIS, or every two weeks, was doing their show and executing human rights workers, aid workers, civilians, religious civilian, quote-unquote, opponents and enemies.
And from nowhere, I was getting ready to try a case, I got a call from two Palestinians who I didn't know, but from Saba Shatila, where I've done work over the years, and Kassig had done aid work there.
After he left the military, he had decided he wanted to get involved with international human rights and aid work, and he was in Saba Shatila and doing some really dynamic and good stuff, just before he was captured and developed a lot of close friendships with people that respected him and indeed loved him.
So they called me, and I didn't know them, and we talked at length, and they asked whether there was anything I might be able to do with people in the region to save Kassig's life.
And we talked about it, and in all honesty, it was, I'll try, but I was getting ready to start a trial, so it really, I hate to admit it, it got put on the back burner at that point.
I thought about it, I really didn't do much more at that point.
I finished the trial, and small world, about three days after I finished the trial, I got a friend of mine, an activist that I've known for 25 years who called me up and from nowhere said to me, was there something I could do to help with Kassig?
And he was upset because veteran groups had really not played an active role in trying to save Kassig himself.
And so I got these two phone calls from two completely different worlds within two weeks.
So I said, let me give it a try.
So I made some phone calls to some people in Kuwait, made some phone calls to people connected to al-Qaeda, and they reached out to Nusra, reached out to ISIS, and the next thing you know, I get a call back saying, yeah, I mean, there's room to talk, let's see what we can do.
You know, I reached out to the government for the first time in my entire career.
I've ever, you know, as an activist, as an attorney, as someone who has fought the government for decades, I reached out to a federal prosecutor that I'd done a bunch of terrorism cases with, who I trusted, and said, look.
And I recounted the story to him, and he said to me, all I was looking for was not support, clearance, approval, or anything, but I wanted to make sure I had decided that if certain ground rules could be reached, I would give it a shot.
And I needed to get someone in DOJ to use their connections to see if I can get those ground rules settled.
So this federal prosecutor...
Ground rules, in other words, meaning a promise from the government that they're not going to try to prosecute you for associating with the people that you're associating with.
I wasn't even worried about that.
I didn't want to get droned.
Yeah, even worse, right?
Okay.
You know, the bottom line was I was going to show up in the midst of al-Qaeda, of Nasri, of ISIS.
I was going to be traveling overseas.
I didn't want any interference from the feds.
I was working on getting some guarantees from ISIS at the moment that nothing was going to happen to Kassig.
I was not concerned about them prosecuting me at all.
I wasn't concerned about getting a benefit from it.
I wasn't looking to barter an exchange.
Just, I'm going overseas, get out of my way, but there could come a time where I need to speak to someone about something.
I need a point person.
That's what it was.
Sure.
Yeah, and that makes perfect sense, that you would talk with them first to make sure they know what page you're on and all that.
You know, so I ended up developing not a relationship, but the deputy director of the FBI who was in charge of international terrorism, quote-unquote, in the Middle East, is a guy who I only knew as Charlie, became sort of a point person.
It was interesting because it was constant effort by the feds to involve themselves more and more, to insinuate themselves more and more, and there was constant pushback from me in which I would say, look, stay out of my way.
Just get out of my way.
There may come a time where some things are going to have to happen.
I'll let you know.
Until then, see you later, guys.
That's the way it worked.
I spent six weeks in Kuwait, in Jordan, in Kuwait, going back and forth.
I was dealing with Abu Makdisi, who is probably the most influential mufti in the Muslim world, who was at one point described as the grand mufti of al-Qaeda, who had been involved in a very public dispute with Tariq bin Ali, a former student of his, who was the mufti or the religious leader of ISIS.
He had been in prison for a short period of time in Jordan, but he was sort of the most respected guy in the region when it came to religious tenets and what was going on.
He was actually the imam who threw al-Qaeda basically out of Iraq in 2003 and said, that's it.
Zakaria was banished, and ISIS spun out of there.
So we dealt with him, and we dealt with groups in Kuwait, and we dealt with Gitmo guys.
The only thing I required from ISIS before I left was a guarantee that nothing was going to happen to Kes while we were involved in negotiations.
I wasn't going overseas unless there were commitments and guarantees, and we got it.
Fine, come and talk.
So I spent six weeks in Kuwait and Jordan, back and forth.
Just to be clear, you're saying they followed through on their promise to delay the murder of Kassig while you were negotiating.
There was progress made.
We were clearly making progress.
We had reached the point where Mukdisi, who was being monitored by Jordanian intelligence and security because he had been in prison there and was obviously a player, and there was a very public fight going on between al-Qaeda and Nusra and ISIS, and he was involved in it.
He wasn't allowed to have any communication or contact with groups that he had to talk to, and that's one area where I reached out to Charlie, the contact, to say, look, if this is going to happen, you need to call Jordanian intelligence off and give this guy some breathing room and do what he's got to do.
And they initially did.
And there were a series of phone calls and discussions, and there were ongoing talks about not just trying to save Kassig, but in the long term, putting together a vehicle by which civilians could be taken off of the slaughter table in the region.
This is the same protocol and the same group of guys who had saved some two dozen U.N. workers that Nusra and some guys from ISIS had grabbed three months before, and they had saved these guys' lives.
So this was for real.
This was a real protocol that had the possibility of not just perhaps saving Kassig, but putting together a non-state function process where aid workers and civilians were not going to be grabbed, not going to be targeted, and discussions were underway.
And we were making inroads.
Word around the region was it was promising.
This was not a situation where ISIS was demanding money or where ISIS was demanding the release of prisoners or where ISIS was demanding any sort of quid pro quo.
This was an attempt to try to ratchet it down.
You've got to keep in mind it just wasn't Peter Kassig in custody at that time, but a number of other civilians.
Moving along we were when suddenly, from nowhere, I left Jordan having been involved in a series of discussions with Mukdisi and ISIS for about a week.
I went back to Kuwait because I had to speak to some people in Kuwait and bring them up to date about what was going on.
And I suddenly got a phone call in the middle of the night that Mukdisi had been arrested Jordanian intelligence.
And I reached out to Charlie, reached out to people in DOJ, and we were clearly sandbagged.
There was no allegation of him violating any of the agreements, of him engaging in any conduct that they weren't aware of.
Jordanian intelligence picked him up.
It could not have happened without the direct approval of the United States government at the highest level.
And with Mukdisi out of the scene, everything that we had spent six, seven weeks working on collapsed.
Good faith disappeared.
People saw a trap.
Some people felt that I had set Mukdisi up.
He doesn't worry about that.
That's not a problem.
And it's interesting because the government, both the U.S. and the Jordanian governments went to great pains to suggest that, well, this is never going to work.
Mukdisi was not going to be able to pull it off.
And he had violated certain conditions, which is not true.
But the irony is, a month or two later, when the Jordanian pilot was captured by ISIS, Mukdisi was reached out to by Jordanian intelligence released to try to negotiate saving him.
At the end of the day, from what I understand from contacts and what I've heard in the region from other people, a decision was made at the highest levels in the United States and in Jordan that they did not want this to work.
That they were fearful that if this worked, their rapprochement between ISIS and al-Qaeda and Nasseri in the long run would not be in the best interests of the West and of Jordan and of the United States.
And they literally made a decision to let Kassig die.
And he was executed.
And from there, there were other Kassigs, and there were still hostages being held.
And at day's end, to my dying day, I will remain convinced that this was a decision, a cold, calculated decision made, that this guy would be thrown under the bus because it was more important to maintain the political approach that the government was using.
And, you know, the postscript.
A month later, or three weeks later, King Abdullah of Jordan is invited to the White House where he signs a new contract for $10 billion to fight ISIS, and we know that turned into a joke.
So that's what the Kassig effort was about.
I am convinced we could have saved him.
I'm convinced it might have changed the course of the way ISIS was dealing with civilians and aid workers.
And I'm convinced that there were powerful persons in government hours and in the Middle East didn't want it to happen.
Yeah.
All right.
So, yeah, certainly there's a lot there.
I guess, first of all, I did not reread the whole Guardian story.
I mean, I read it when it came out, but that was what I remember from them was their conclusion was just what you said.
In fact, I think they even said that it must have been that the FBI had told the Jordanians, hey, let's pull the plug on this thing while you were out of town.
And it seems like, on the face of it, I mean, obviously this guy was brutally murdered.
As you say, they were throwing him under the bus at that point.
But you can see their point of view, too, though, right?
That, oh, no, in order to try to save Kassig, Stanley Cohen is on the verge of negotiating a healing of the rift between al-Qaeda and ISIS.
And we'd rather keep our enemy divided if it comes to that.
Or maybe we'd rather keep using al-Qaeda in Syria against Assad for another couple of years while treating ISIS as the bad guys.
And so you're going to confuse that issue, to put it more cynically.
Well, I've got to tell you, I don't think there was ever going to be a reproach, Mark.
I think what was of greater concern to the U.S. government and to the Jordanians was the fact that they feared empowering non-state actors in the region.
Because, you know, it's been decades that we, you know, state actors do our bidding.
Yeah, you had Jesse Jackson went to Syria and saved the U.S. pilot, and every once in a while some other non-state actors have become involved.
But basically we have, you know, dragged unto ourselves the total narrative of what's unfolding on the ground.
The guys that were most heavily involved, and it's interesting, because these were six, seven, eight, nine guys that had been in Gitmo, guys that had been in Bagram, been in Kandahar, and been tortured.
And one would at first blush think these are guys who would hate the United States.
But it was never about that.
It was about people in the region did not want to see civilians drawn into this.
I don't think there would have ever been reproach, Mark.
You've got a battle for the hearts and soul of the region.
And, you know, I just think that was madness by the U.S. government.
Look, we're talking about the same people that brought us weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
So when it comes to common sense.
On that point, though, at least, you know, the Guardian story makes it seem like, and I'm sure this is oversimplified to a degree, I guess, but that this split between Magdisi and Ben Ali that, I think you said, Ben Ali was his former student.
And the way that they put it here was that if you could work out healing in the relationship between these two men, that that would really be a big step toward healing the rift between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State altogether.
But you reject that?
Yeah, I don't buy that.
Listen, I was privy to the discussions being held between Magdisi and Ben Ali.
I heard what was going on.
It was translated for me.
It was clear in my mind that, you know, there were some personal issues going on between the prize students and the former Grand Mufti.
There was a lot going on that had little to do with geopolitical consequences.
Magdisi made it very clear he was opposed to what ISIS was doing.
He wasn't speaking as a representative of al-Qaeda, but as a highly respected imam in the Islamic world.
He was opposed to it.
He had publicly criticized it and challenged it.
I don't think there was a snowball chance in hell of Magdisi embracing ISIS and where they were going.
The bottom line was that he was reaching out to Ben Ali and saying, look, these attacks on civilians, on aid workers, on religious leaders, they must stop.
They are serving as convenient excuses for attacks on Muslims all over the region.
They must stop.
It's aberrant, it's hateful, and it's un-Islamic.
I never heard Magdisi in private or in discussions with Tariq Ben Ali say anything in any way, shape or form that would lead anyone to conclude he wanted a rapprochement, expected a rapprochement, or that one would develop.
So do you think that the FBI, the CIA, those guys, that they mistakenly were afraid that that was really going to happen, like in the Guardian piece, or it really was just an excuse for shutting down your efforts because this is the State Department's job, not yours, Stanley Cohen?
I think it's probably a combination of both.
I think there were true believers who feared, without real sound basis, that a rapprochement might happen.
I think there were State Department people who were upset that Stanley Cohen and a group of guys from Gitmo and ex-Al Qaeda guys were in the region doing what they were supposed to do and couldn't do.
They had grown very used to hostage situations where there were demands for millions of dollars and the release of political prisoners.
None of that was happening.
This was a straight humanitarian effort.
Look, it's got to stop, let Kassig go, and move on.
So I think it's a combination of both.
I also think that there were some people in the State Department, perhaps the FBI, more so maybe DOJ, who were thrilled with the idea of compromising Cohen, because they knew that there would be people in the region that would see this fall apart, and McPheecy getting arrested would find that I'd even been in discussions with the FBI, would say, see, we can't trust Cohen.
He works for them.
So I think that was a factor that played into his way.
Right, because again, going back to previously, you have represented these very controversial groups in court in New York City, and they got a real grudge against that, the feds do.
The DOJ has a vendetta against you that to see you discredited in the region would affect your future business and their future business of having to deal with you.
Yeah, it's absolutely true.
Ultimately, it was wasted energy on their part, because folks in the region still trust me.
I subsequently continue to have discussions with folks in the region.
People still reach out to me.
They understand very well that forces that would throw their own citizen under the bus, knowing he's going to be beheaded or who knows what ended up actually happening, and stories about Peter Kasich, would in a heartbeat move to discredit, to undercut activists, human rights speakers, folks that have opposed U.S. foreign policy for years.
I think what also drove them nuts was they couldn't quite wrap their arms around the idea that there was Cohen out trying to save the life of an ex-Special Forces guy from Iraq.
And that's out of their own ignorance.
They just didn't get it.
It's never been for me about which flag, but about fundamental human rights.
And attacks on civilians, attacks on aid workers, no matter what their background are, is off the table.
Of course.
Well, I want to mention this.
It's just one other thing.
It shouldn't really matter either way, I guess.
But it's not just historical here.
This is personal for the show, too, because Peter Kasich was a friend of my friend Mitch Prothero, the reporter for McClatchy Newspapers, who's now at BuzzFeed.
This was not just a guy that got killed.
This was his buddy that was murdered, that you were almost able to save if our government hadn't screwed it up.
So that's just an extra little thing there, that this is actually a friend of a guy that I know.
Well, there's a postscript to this that's kind of moving.
I got a phone call from, quote, Charlie at about 4 o'clock in the morning, and I was getting ready to catch a flight two days later to go back to Kuwait to begin discussions again.
We thought we had bought more time.
And I got a call from Charlie, who said to me he heard something bad had happened overseas, and could I speak to my people?
And I reached out to folks in Kuwait who initially told me, no, that's just story.
It's not true.
But they'd get back to me.
And they got back to me about an hour later and said, I'm sorry.
We waited too long, and, yes, he's been executed.
And I spent the next hour, hour and a half on the phone talking to Charlie, because I'm not being critical of Charlie.
Charlie, again, he's the FBI or DOJ liaison guy.
He was the FBI liaison.
He's a guy that had a major role in the Middle East at that time.
He'd been involved in other hostage situations.
And, you know, we spent an hour talking over Kassig's loss.
And I don't think – I believe Charlie was sandbagged.
When I found out that Mukdisi had been arrested by the Jordanian intelligence and called him in the middle of the night, he either should have won the Academy Award for being full of shit or was taken by surprise.
This was a decision that was made at the very highest level.
Someone decided Peter Kassig could be murdered, and he was.
Jesus.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them, but still.
If you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
And, again, the number one reason that their excuse that they would say was such a danger that it would be understandable, all's fair in love and war and all that, is that ISIS and al-Qaeda could have come back together again over Kassig, and you're saying that that's just not credible whatsoever.
Yeah, I think that's, the earth is flat, the earth is flat, the earth is flat.
I don't trust any of these guys, and this is another example where, you know, their own intelligence.
You know, the interesting thing is, people in the region, people on the ground, who knew the movements, who knew the breakup, who knew what this was about, they knew there was zero chance of that happening.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, do you have time?
Can we switch to Hillary in Palestine here for a minute?
Sure, sure.
So, this is a very important article that you've written here, and, you know, it's important that it's written by a guy named Cohen, too.
Everybody knows that you're a white supremacist if you criticize Israel, unless you're a liberal Jew, then you can say whatever you want.
So, go ahead and tell the people the truth about Hillary Clinton and the future of Israel and Palestine.
Look, the longer version, because Al Jazeera, who I've written pieces for, before, you know, edited it out, the longer version is on my blog, Caged But Undaunted.
It's not just about Clinton.
It's not just about, you know, look, this is not a pro-Trump article.
This is not even an anti-Clinton article.
It's not a pro-Stein article.
It's a very simple article that says, look, that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, like people in power, have embraced Israel since 1948.
And it ain't going to change.
And Clinton has a particular position on Israel that is not just incredibly supportive of it, but has closed down for decades the possibility of, quote-unquote, a two-state solution, the notion that she wants to see a unified Jerusalem as the capital of Israel with the U.S. Embassy, the notion that she rejected the Goldstone Report, which was critical of Israel, the notion that she has opposed BDS as a, quote, somewhat anti-Semitic movement, the notion that she doesn't see it as an occupation, the notion that she doesn't see apartheid speaks volumes about what's going to happen with Hillary Clinton in the White House in the next four years.
But, you know, it's interesting.
Because as my longer piece talks about, people have misconstrued the way Obama has dealt with Netanyahu and Israel.
And yes, Obama has ranted and raved at times and challenged Israel and Netanyahu in particular in public, but at the end of the day, he's given Israel more money than any other president in the history of the United States, the history since 1948.
So AIPAC smiles.
So, you know, the article I wrote had to say, look, folks, you know, enlightened liberals, whether it's Trump, whether it's Clinton, we have to understand that the policy that has been underway for decades is not going to change at this point.
I wrote a piece in Al Jazeera that went viral about a month earlier called BDS is a war that Israel won't win, which talks about the BDS movement and its importance and how it can affect a positive change in a peaceful manner and fashion in Palestine in the area of the dispute that's going on for 70 years.
And this was a follow-up.
This is a follow-up that, look, I was critical of Sanders.
I'm critical of Clinton.
I've been critical of Trump.
You know, I'm someone who has spent a lot of time in the region for many years.
I've dealt with all the major players there.
I've had an opportunity to get a hands-on, on-the-ground, close-up look at the issues.
I've dealt with people, negotiated various situations.
And we are on a no-win track that is turning into a train wreck that's going to even grow worse.
And for those people who think that Hillary Clinton is going to make a difference, she has a record of supporting Zionism like no other politician in the United States the last 20, 25 years.
She has a record of supporting Netanyahu.
She has a record of supporting the Likud.
She has a record of opposing Palestinian self-determination that is as bad or worse than any other politician in the last 20, 30 years.
Well, you know, you point out in the article here that in a way it's worse because you know she knows better, right?
Like Trump probably couldn't find the West Bank or the Jordan River on a map, but she knows everything about it, and she used to actually sometimes be a little bit good on it only to abandon all those positions.
So can you talk a little bit about that, what she used to say?
Well, yeah, I don't know.
There were times where, you know, she's made comments as Secretary of State and even before Secretary of State as the First Lady where she went to Gaza and she went to the West Bank and she'd met with NGOs and she's met with Palestinian leaders and she's talked about the need to find a peaceful resolution based upon equality and justice, which would factor in the right of return.
She's talked about the religious freedoms of Muslims in Quds, East Jerusalem.
She has called as Secretary of State the settlements as problematic.
But at the end of the day, she's a politician who read the way the winds were blowing and right now the winds are blowing directly to Tel Aviv.
All right, now, so back to the disaster part, though, and this is obviously something that informed people are debating about all the time, is whether or not Israel itself, Netanyahu's government particularly, have that country on a path to national suicide where they're going to end up annexing the West Bank and then they'll have to either make it one man, one vote and a real democracy and no longer a Jewish state, or at that point there will be no more pretending that there's some temporary occupation.
It'll be an outright apartheid system that will even be difficult to justify in American politics and could lead to what has seemed impossible for a long time, which would be the actual destruction of Israel.
Well, let me put it this way.
First of all, 90% of the West Bank is either de facto or de jure annexed right now in violation of international law.
There are 800,000 illegal so-called settlers living in the West Bank.
Less than 10% of the West Bank is under the control, and that's even an illusory of the Palestinian Authority.
I do not believe there's a snowball's chance in hell of a two-state resolution.
I think it's either going to end up being a one-state or a binational state resolution.
I think you're right.
I think that Netanyahu and the Likud party have a messianic complex I'm frightened of, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist guy.
I think that they've reached a point that nothing is off the table.
I do not see the destruction of the state of Israel.
I do see already, and I have for 20 years, an apartheid system that's much worse than South Africa.
I think between BDS and the International Criminal Court and increasing litigation, civil suits being brought against Israeli leaders throughout the world, Israel's reaching a point where it's going to have to make a decision.
It's going to either violate more international criminal conducts and codes, which they're capable of doing, or it's going to have to figure out a way that truth and reconciliation commissions are the only way home.
The real problem is in what people...
Every time this is raised, Israel starts screaming, oh, anti-Semitism, self-hating, all the petty nonsense names they like to throw around.
You take the Palestinian apartheid, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, and occupation off the table, the vast majority of tension and fighting and problems in the Middle East is done.
You've got 1.8 billion Muslims in the world.
Most of them are not even in the Middle East.
Most of them are in Southeast Asia.
Palestine and what's going on to 11 million stateless Palestinians for 68, 69 years, has been a red flag for not just Muslims, but progressives and activists throughout the world.
It has created a very unstable region.
It has triggered battles.
It has created tension that explodes periodically.
You cannot expect to run a system based upon ethnic cleansing, occupation, and apartheid.
In public view, day in, day out for decades, and expect that people in the region and people in the world are going to sit by passively and just allow it to happen as if this is some secret which occurred 100 years ago.
So it's been a tripwire, and it's only going to grow worse.
Events in Gaza are growing more.
I'm very close to lots of people in Gaza.
I speak to them regularly.
They are more horrific day by day.
Events in the West Bank are more horrific.
Let's see what happens when the International Criminal Court begins the formal investigation of Israel, and I suspect they will.
Israel is going to have to come to grips with the fact that the Nuremberg Tribunal of the Nazis really was a mirror image of what they're about to go through if international laws applied.
Yeah, well, that ain't never going to happen because, like you said, it's either our choices or either Trump or Hillary, and they've got ultimate veto power over all of that.
Well, except the International Criminal Court increasingly is flexing its muscles, and the reality of it is if the ICC seeks to freeze assets, seeks to issue arrest warrants, that triggers a whole battery of treaty requirements, not in the United States, but largely in the rest of the West, which really begins to shut Israel down.
And the BDS movement is having a tremendous impact.
No matter how much Israel says it's not, they just allocated $200 million again last week for their cyberspace guys, their hackers, to try to rebut it.
They're spending upwards of a billion dollars a year now to try to beat back the BDS movement, and they're failing.
So Israel, you know, it thinks it could keep just jumping up and down like it's Sparta indefinitely with a strategy that if given enough time they could take 100% of the West Bank and Palestinians are going to go away.
They ain't.
They're there to stay.
They're going to fight.
They're going to fight in a variety of ways, and increasingly people in the rest of the world are supporting them.
Yeah, well, that's certainly true.
I guess I wonder if you think that it'll ever come to the point, I mean, we are talking about the Netanyahu-Lieberman government here.
I wonder whether you think that they'll just do another Nakba and just force-march the people of the West Bank into the Jordan River and tell them, hope you can swim, buddy, and that'll just be the end of that.
Yeah, no, that ain't happening.
That ain't happening.
I mean, there have been lines drawn in the sand.
They're going to slowly but surely torture, which they've done.
I mean, the collective punishment, which makes life unbearable for so many, particularly in the Gaza Strip, 1.8 million people that get 1,000 calories a day, that have post-traumatic distress order among their kids of 90%, that don't have medicine, that have electricity four hours a day.
The theory is let's torture Palestinians for as long as we possibly can, drive them out, and see if we can keep a vichy government in play.
That's the theory.
And it's not going to work.
In other words, we've got forever.
So as long as they don't give up control of the West Bank, it doesn't matter if there's still a bunch of millions of Palestinians living there or not.
Well, the reality of it is I am convinced that either whether it's a one-state resolution or a binational state, that eventually there will be the day of the one person, one vote, with no official state religion, with equal protection.
And I think that increasing numbers of Israelis are coming to grips with that.
All right.
Well, and so one more point there, and then I'll let you go.
Yuri Avnery says that it's almost civil war inside Israel between the left and the right, that the only real division between the left and the right is what to do about the occupations, really, and that they hate each other more than ever over that.
And it's the execution of this wounded Palestinian and the trial of the soldier that did it that's got even the generals coming out.
They're prosecuting him, and they're saying Israel is on a suicidal course.
And then you have Lieberman and Netanyahu are at least more or less, and I guess in the case of Lieberman, outright taking the side of the soldier.
And I was reading Yuri Avnery, and he was saying this is looking more and more like an Israeli civil war.
Never even mind the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Well, what's happened is increasingly Israel is now shutting down universities, Israeli universities.
When I say shutting them down, controlling what can be taught, what can be read.
Increasingly, Israeli journalists are being targeted.
Increasingly, NGOs, and not just leftist, so-called leftist NGOs, are being closed, are being investigated.
Increasingly, Israel is beginning to feed onto itself.
And there are Jews in Israel that are not going to put up with it.
The left is finally beginning to play an active role.
And you hit it right in the head.
I'd like to think in the best of worlds it's really about waking up and supporting the rights of justice and self-determination and human rights for Palestinians.
But it's not as much that as it is at this point.
Increasing numbers of Israelis have come to grips with the fact that there is a hard, ugly, largely Western-funded, Western-rooted settler movement.
People that are coming from Brooklyn, people that are coming from California, people that are coming from France.
These are not Sabros, these are not native-born, that have moved and have successfully taken over the direction of where Israel is going, and it's self-destructive.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's funny because as much as we complain about the Israel lobby and their effect on American politics, it's Americans like Sheldon Adelson who financed the Likud party in Israel.
Oh, yeah.
Well, listen, you know, I...
It's a vicious triangle there.
I've got to tell you, right about now, this time of year, you begin to see airplanes by the dozens landing in Kennedy Airport with Hasidic Jews getting off the planes with their kids, the settlers coming back because school has begun in New York City.
So that, you know, the summer away, the romp in Israel is finished.
You know, the other interesting thing is about the settlements, is there was an interesting piece that was written a few years ago that really didn't take off that talked about how half the settlements, if not more, are empty during the winter there, with security companies driving around just maintaining the integrity of the property, because they really are like condominiums, second homes for well-to-do people that are traveling from the United States, traveling from Europe, traveling from other parts of the world to go to the Holy Land for the summer to hang out, you know, to be one with God, whatever that means.
On somebody else's property.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate you coming on the show and talking with us about this stuff, Stanley.
It's been very good.
My pleasure.
Thanks for inviting me any time.
Just give me a shout.
Thanks, man.
Take care.
Will do.
Thanks again.
Bye-bye.
This is Stanley L. Cohen, a lawyer and human rights activist.
You can find his blog at cagedbutundaunted.
I think that's a reference to his time in IRS prison there.
They got him for a minute, but he's relatively free again.
That's cagedbutundaunted.wordpress.com.
And find this one at Al Jazeera.
Harder times for Palestine if Clinton wins the U.S. election.
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