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We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing our good friend, Philip Weiss.
He runs the website Mondoweiss.net, and he's got a great bunch of writers there.
And to overly simplify it, it's liberal Jewish anti-Zionism, American liberal Jewish anti-Zionism, mostly anyway.
And just covering what's going on in Israel, Palestine, covering the politics of the Israeli government.
And of course, the Israel lobby and the neocons here in the United States and all the rest of that's really great stuff.
You should sign up for their morning email like I do.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
I really happy to have you on here and there's so much going on, but there's some breaking news and it's really important and so much to learn from the context of this story.
Ahed Tamimi, as you guys are reporting here at Mondoweiss today, has pled in a plea bargain and has agreed, well, they're serving her with eight months in prison, in a military prison for slapping a soldier in occupied Nabi Salah, as the headline reads here.
So can you go ahead and explain the situation?
Who's this young lady?
Well, this teenage girl.
And and what's the deal?
This girl lives in a small village in Palestine that settlers have taken the land of to build a settlement on.
And they've taken the only source of water, the main source of water, a traditional, always the traditional source of water for the village, a spring the settlers have taken.
And so the village has been protesting this for many years and an illegal Israeli Jewish settlement.
And last December, this Ahed Tamimi, her cousin was shot in the face, Mohamed Tamimi, 15 years old during a protest.
And an hour later, she saw a soldier who was on her property and she went up to him and was screaming at him and then started slapping him.
Uh, no problem.
You know, this happens.
A lot of this stuff happens in the occupation all the time.
But a few days later, video of this was posted by Ahed's mother and it was seen as a giant humiliation to Israeli authority.
It became a scandal inside Israel.
The idea that a 16 year old girl would slap an Israeli, heavily armed Israeli soldier.
She doesn't have any arms at all.
Ahed Tamimi, I mean, firearms, sidearms.
And so she was arrested a couple of days after the video went up back in December of 2017, three months ago, and has been in jail ever since.
And her mother was put in jail for incitement for filming the incident.
And today, finally, we get an answer on this.
She's going to spend eight months in prison for slapping this soldier.
Bear in mind, at the very same time, Israeli authorities are doing military authorities and civil and political authorities are doing everything they can to lower the sentence of an Israeli soldier who shot and killed a Palestinian who was lying incapacitated on the ground in the occupation.
So that guy, the sergeant, who was also a medic who shot this Palestinian man of 21, will end up serving around, probably end up serving around nine months in prison.
And Ahed Tamimi for slapping, and that's for killing someone, an execution, cold-blooded execution of a wounded man lying on the ground.
Ahed Tamimi for slapping a soldier will serve roughly the same amount of time.
That, in a nutshell, is all you need to know about the Israeli occupation.
This society has gone off the rails, Israel.
They have no clue about how they appear internationally.
They are utterly righteous.
Almost the entire Jewish society is completely righteous about both these sentences.
First, the idea that Elor Azaria, the sergeant, should be gotten out of prison.
And on the other hand, the idea that the 16 year old, now 17 year old Palestinian girl should spend months, years in prison for humiliating a heavily armed soldier.
Yeah.
And then it was some prominent writer, or was it a government official who said that the punishment ought to be exacted against her, you know, in the dark of night in her prison cell, obviously saying that she should be gang raped by Israeli soldiers?
And then that was kind of acceptable?
That wasn't too far to the right or what?
No, again, that's...
And who was it that wrote that?
Help me with that.
Ben Caspit, a leading Israeli political journalist, said that.
It wasn't a government official, but...
No, but Naftali Bennett, who's the head of the Jewish Home Party, a leading settler's party and a minister of education, he said she should spend, I think he said she should spend 10 years the rest of her life in prison.
I'll try to find that as we're talking.
So, but this society truly has gone, I mean, they talk about ethno-nationalism in the United States, intolerance in the United States, creeping fascism in the United States.
Excuse me, it's all there in Israel, going gangbusters.
Man.
And now, so this is the thing, too.
It really, how completely neurotic and insane is this, that instead of saying, look at how tall and strong and brave our soldiers are with their self-restraint, that when a Palestinian youth throws a temper tantrum, they keep their cool and take a slap and turn the other cheek.
And instead of that, they cry, oy, the humiliation, you know, as though the Palestinians are completely putting the Israelis in their place and how they can't.
Oh, my God, it's like they're being conquered by the Palestinians for this 16 year old girl to get away with defending herself on her own front lawn.
It's crazy, especially when the opposite narrative is so obvious.
It's right there.
It is.
That is a great point.
And I forget about the most moral army in the world.
Look at our restraint, you know?
Yes, yes.
And, you know, it's interesting when you say that, because I remember when the incident happened, there was that murmur from the liberal Zionists, from Peace Now and from J Street and other kind of liberal Zionist groups.
Oh, look at the restraint.
Look at this model of a soldier doing what he should do and not responding to this provocation.
It was ground out in an instant.
And it is a psychosis.
It is this sense of we are the victims.
That's crazy in its own way, too, right?
When they really are the bad guy aggressors here.
But I'm just saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The whole restraint narrative itself was absurd because here's this guy, you know, armed to the teeth on someone else's property and they've just shot her cousin in the face, you know, and maimed him.
It's just it's the whole thing is grotesque.
Certainly that's the lie we could have settled for, right?
Like like declaring victory and coming home from Afghanistan.
Who cares if it's really a victory or not?
Just call it that and back down.
Chill out.
You know, what's the point of escalating this thing?
It's crazy to do it.
By the way, I got to say, I've been reading your book Fool's Aaron, man, and I think it is fantastic.
I just I've never seen the case put together so well in terms of the geopolitics that region from one arena to another.
You just go through it and you do it calmly and with precision.
It's just wonderful journalism.
And I I've got to do more to shout this from the rooftops, man.
But congratulations.
Well, thanks very much for that, dude.
I really appreciate a lot.
And I think, as you know, that means a hell of a lot to me.
Coming from you, I deserve it.
All right.
Well, you hear that, everybody liked it.
Yeah.
Audio book now available.
OK, so, yeah, thanks for that now.
OK, so this thing is really making a difference to stick with the head to Mimi story.
This then 16 year old, now 17 year old girl, still a minor in in the foreign in the custody of this foreign military.
And, you know, I was interviewed and I mentioned because it matters to me.
It sticks out because I was trained.
I was raised in American public school to know that the hallmark of totalitarianism besides torture, as Rand Paul put it so perfectly the other day, is it's when the NKVD or the Gestapo goons come and take you from your home in the middle of the night and then you're never seen again or nobody knows what happens or you have to go out to the gulag or whatever it is that happens to you and how they do this to children.
They kidnap them out of their beds at three or four in the morning like monsters out of some story.
I agree with you.
And and if somebody had said that on some interview and I was attacked by I don't know who somebody some Zionist on Twitter, that's just not true.
And it's like, really?
Well, you ought to read the paper, dude, because, yeah, it is.
They do this constantly.
And that's what they did to her.
They came and got her four o'clock in the morning out of the dead asleep.
Yeah.
Now, what is young lady, young girl?
Really?
You know, certainly if she was a white American girl, she would be a girl, not not to be tried as an adult or something, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I mean, you see the way this whole village is traumatized by this.
This violence has been visited on them for years.
And why?
Because they're protesting the fact their spring was taken, their source of water was taken away from them.
It's crazy.
And yeah, there are hundreds of children who in the last year who have been detained.
I don't know how many are in custody right now.
I think it is several dozen.
But Israel regularly grabs these kids in the middle of the night, accuses them of rock throwing, wants them to dime out their parents.
It's just it's really a sick form of, quote unquote, thuggery.
I mean, it's not justice.
And as you point out, it's a hallmark of a totalitarian society that they would never do this.
Would they ever do this?
The question is, would they ever do this to Israeli Jews?
And the answer is absolutely not.
Obviously, unless the person was like a serial killer or was a danger to society.
These are kids who are resisting occupation.
Yeah.
Well, this is the thing, I think, and this is part of the reaction against Akai Tamimi is that she's got sort of kind of blonde hair and she's got blue eyes.
And the Israel lobby, I think, and they've said this outright, I think, that, you know, oh, great.
Here comes a Palestinian who looks kind of like an American girl.
And so this could be a real problem for us, that the American people might, for an instant, see a Palestinian as half a human being and maybe maybe ask the question of, wait, why is it that if this girl is a Palestinian, how come she's under arrest by Israeli military forces since they never really explained the fact of the occupation to the American people at all?
And they might start to wonder that, oh, well, wait, how can we call them the only democracy in the Middle East when fully half of the population under their jurisdiction have no rights whatsoever, much less political ones?
Absolutely.
Yeah, there's and although rest assured, you know, the media have not been covering the Akai Tamimi case.
I mean, this is a this is a girl who has spent three months in jail for slapping a soldier and the with no due process.
You know, every once in a while they have a hearing and then they say, we're going to close this military proceeding.
It's in her interest for it not to be publicized.
She says, I want to publicize.
No, they don't want to publicize.
And the American press are going right along with it.
It's just it is criminal.
And it's the situation you describe is one that you just can't convey in the mainstream press here.
It's apartheid and half the people don't have any rights.
Hey, I'll check it out.
The audio book has finally been released.
Just go to Fool's Errand dot US.
That's the shortcut.
I'll take you over to the Amazon page.
And very soon, actually, I got a brand new website going up at Scott Horton dot org.
And so soon you'll be able to buy that audio book directly from me.
But for now, you can still get it at Audible and at Amazon dot com.
The audio book of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And yes, it's read by me.
And I'm sorry it took so long.
I picked the hell out of it trying to get it ready for you guys.
And then plus it took them forever after I submitted it to finally release it.
But anyway, there you go.
Fool's Errand dot US.
Amazon dot com to search for my name, Scott Horton, Fool's Errand.
And the audio book is up there for you.
Also, of course, available in paperback and Kindle if you want the eleven hundred and fifty footnotes.
Well, listen now to go ahead and nitpick this thing.
Yes.
The the civilian population and I guess whatever organized force that they can come up with, too.
They have the right under international law to resist this occupation.
And that includes this girl has the right.
In other words, she has the right to take a rifle and blow an IDF soldier's head off if she can in the defense, not just of her immediate life and property, but in defense against the occupation itself.
Now, that doesn't recommend that necessarily.
It says that legally speaking, she has every right to a collective self-defense when we're talking about a foreign military occupation.
But then to nitpick it further, they're on her front lawn, literally her front lawn, not figuratively her front lawn.
Literally, they're on her front lawn.
And then to nitpick it even further, as you guys have reported at Mondo Weiss dot net, the soldier put his hands on her first or maybe it was a female soldier.
May I have a confused slapped her in the face first and she literally hit back second.
So there's just no way to weasel in some kind of thing where she's the aggressor here.
It doesn't fit in the story no matter which way you try to, you know, turn it.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the crucial point you're making is that international law recognizes the right to resist an occupation and that they don't say it has to be nonviolent resistance, as you point out.
And as you and I have discussed before, how would you and I respond in this country if someone took our source of water, confiscated it, took it illegally and was put up, started putting up houses on our land?
I think I know how Americans would respond to that.
And the fact is that Palestinians have been deprived of that tool for whatever reason.
There's a site, an international kind of agreement that we're not going to criticize Israel.
So you can't start blowing up military targets because then you're a terrorist.
So the Palestinians have dealt with that public relations issue by resorting almost universally to nonviolent resistance.
And I even think the slapping counts as nonviolent resistance.
Some might disagree, but, you know.
It's an open hand slap.
I mean, for real, it is.
It's a symbolic thing more than anything else, especially when you're talking about a grown man soldier taking it.
Yeah, a guy carrying a rifle covered with, you know, padding and he's got a helmet on and it's nuts.
OK, but now, so maybe Ahed Tamimi is not just a symbol of the oppression of the Palestinians and their brave resistance, but also of this kind of coming to a head.
Now, maybe obviously that's overstating it, but you had a piece about this guy Ron Lauder, and that last name is familiar to me.
This is who's this and what's so important about this thing that he wrote in The New York Times?
It was The Times, right?
Thanks for bringing this up.
I mean, again, this is sort of this is real Kremlinology of the Israel lobby.
But as just as Kremlinology was a really important thing to be doing when the Soviet Union was around, we have to study minor turns inside the Israel lobby.
And this one's a huge one.
Ron Lauder is a conservative Jewish leader.
He's head of the World Jewish Congress.
He's 74.
He has stood up for Israel again and again.
He loves Israel.
He's an heir to that cosmetics fortune, I guess, or perfume fortune.
And he came out with an op-ed in The New York Times this week saying, guess what?
Israel is isolating itself.
It has itself to blame through this destructive settlement project for threatening its own existence.
It is.
And it's becoming a semi-theocratic state, too, which is alienating world Jewry.
Now, these are fairly mild statements in as much as these things have been true for a long time.
And he's waken up a little late, but more than a little late.
We have stated these things, you know, for 10, ever since my my site's been around, we've been stating these things.
Progressives and realists of all description and have have been saying that Israel is practicing apartheid in the West Bank.
None of that.
All those voices are meaningless.
Next to a Jewish leader of such an important organization who has supported Zionism from the get go, coming out and saying Israel, you're doing it to yourself.
It's not the BDS movement, the boycott movement.
It's not Palestinians, although they should have, you know, should be coming to the table, all this bull feathers.
But he is blaming Israel for its increasing isolation.
And that is a huge moment.
It's in The New York Times.
And I don't know if I don't think he it's a desperate attempt to revive the two state solution.
I think the two state solution is dead and gone.
But just the same, it suggests that there may finally be this kind of civil war inside the organized Jewish community and Zionist community over what Israel has become.
In fact, the day after he published this editorial, he had an encounter with Naftali Bennett, that education minister I mentioned a few minutes ago, in which Bennett was very angry at him and said, what are you doing, man?
And said, keep don't don't endorse me because I'll lose five seats in the Knesset.
And he's right, because there is going to be a it's it's one part of Israeli leadership versus another.
Those who say that we've got to give up the settlements against those who say we're hanging on to the settlements and the side that said we're hanging on to the settlements includes Netanyahu and almost all the elected leadership.
And so louder is a very important affection.
It's I don't know where it's going to go, but it does suggest that these fractures that we've been observing in the Israel lobby over this criminal occupation for 50 years, these cracks are starting to turn into major fissures.
And now.
So the World Jewish Congress, how influential of an organization is that?
You know, I don't even know.
I mean, it's just it's one of them that counts.
You know, it's on the board.
It's a member of the Conference of Presidents.
And this guy has a lot of standing louder.
He's been a supporter of Likud, Netanyahu's party, and he's he's just been for Israel blindly for many years.
And that's why it's so important, I think.
And it's going to it's caused an earthquake inside the criminology of the Israel lobby.
It's caused this earthquake for Palestinians.
It's not going to change their lives for American foreign policy.
It's not going to change that for a long time.
Any of those things.
But so what's his problem then?
I mean, I think he just sees he sees the reality that Israel is going is get is turning into a pariah state.
Well, but as you said, that's kind of been the case all this time.
Do you think that there was I mean, one thing that you've been writing a lot about lately and how this was a big theme at AIPAC was that they're losing the young generation, that young American Jews are progressive and leftist.
And they just won't have it.
Yeah.
And is that you think that's part of what's driving?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
He blamed Israel.
You're alienating these young Jews, he said.
You're fostering assimilation as if Israel is causing young American Jews to marry non-Jews, which it partly is because that's how they've defined Judaism.
Unfortunately, the Jewish establishment has defined Judaism these days as support for Israel.
Everything they say about Islam being dedicated to terrorism, you know, which is a crock.
I mean, obviously, there are elements of radical Islam that support terrorism.
It's much truer of the Jewish establishment that it has married Zionism, which is a militant Jewish nationalism.
And they have helped to hollow out the religion.
And that's the tragedy from my standpoint as someone who grew up Jewish.
And, you know, I'm not a religious person, but, hey, those are my people.
And they used to stand for something I believed in.
And look what they did to it.
Yeah.
Now, so back years ago when Max Blumenthal was writing Goliath, I remember talking with him.
This would have been probably during the Mavi Mamar of 20.
This was the second one.
No, it was the first one where they supposedly had sticks.
Right.
And so the narrative inside Israel was that these terrorist invaders were coming to invade Israel with sticks.
And right.
And so the brave IDF fended them off.
Huh?
May 2010.
Yeah.
May 2010.
Right.
And so but Max Blumenthal was, I guess, in Jerusalem or maybe he was in Tel Aviv or something at the time.
And so he did some interviews with some people at a basically at a pro-war protest or whatever, you know, big rally.
And it's actually the little kid.
And it's not that Max Blumenthal is really exploiting the kid.
It was fair because what it was, was the narrative was so fractured and nonsensical that it only could have made sense to a five year old.
So the five year old says the terrorists, they had sticks and they came to invade us.
And then the thing.
But he was actually repeating the narrative perfectly.
It was just only he would go through it all without smirking or whatever.
You know what I mean?
But anyway, so Blumenthal, I'm off on a tangent.
But it was so crazy.
And that's the point I'm trying to get to.
You talk about off the rails and all this.
And Blumenthal said then that, man, this entire society is like 10 clicks to the right of American Republicans.
Like you have no idea how absolutely batshit it is in this country right now with the narratives of the persecution of the Israelis and the necessity of all of their militarism and oppression of the Palestinians and everything else that they do.
And that it's just completely bananas.
He said, I think he said it was like, you know, America in 2002 forever, you know, just as bad, as insane as these kind of politics can be on a permanent basis.
And Gideon Levy gave this great talk at the Israel lobby, anti-Israel lobby conference, I guess you could say, that Wermia and Irmet put on just a few weeks ago there in DC.
And that was really what he was saying, too, was that he said the only anti-occupation leftists, well, the only anti-occupation people at all, pro-peace people at all in the entire Israeli political society are the very far leftists that have no influence whatsoever.
So you have, you know, Bette Salem and you have Yuri Avnery and whatever, but they just have absolutely no sway, no political organization or authority whatsoever.
And everybody else is just different shades of right wing and further and further right wing nationalists, greater Israel types.
And there's nobody to stop them, he said, except the rest of the world to make them stop.
If the Americans would stop supporting them, then they would have to give up the occupation immediately.
And so that's right.
You really agree with that?
Levy said that, yes, someone would tell these Israelis who are living such good lives that they couldn't go shopping in Gallery Lafayette in Paris and in Macy's in New York.
The occupation would be over in 10 seconds.
Yeah.
You know, there was arguing for BDS.
I'm sorry.
In other words, arguing for BDS.
Yes.
And, you know, the thing is that the remarkable thing about the totalitarian society that you've been describing, which I denied for a while, I couldn't believe it was that bad.
It is that bad.
The way that these people have stood behind massacres, behind that cold-blooded assassination of the Palestinian line on the street that I mentioned to start with, the counterpart to that is look at our Congress.
I mean, our Congress is sold on this whole thing.
And, you know, what's the far left in our Congress?
It's Dianne Feinstein saying, I wish you wouldn't demolish these houses in the occupation, Israel, that this this is going to hurt your image in the world.
And she's maybe got 10 senators or who or who will sign along on such a statement.
So the recognition of what this society has become not only does not exist in our mainstream media, but the political support for it is almost universal.
And that's the role of the Israel lobby.
That's the role of Ron Lauder's group.
That's why I insist that that kind of minor change is important, because they hold the power here.
These organized Jewish groups that have supported this project for, I don't know, 80 years, 50 years, 40 years, what doesn't really matter.
They they are behind it blindly and their kids are starting to rebel.
And that is what is going to change things.
I mean, unfortunately, it it is a very elite type politics we're talking about.
A lot of people don't have a vote, but these organized Jewish groups, I think, hold the power here.
And it's defections from within their own ranks generationally, as you described, that are fostering this change.
And it's going to be too late for any two state solution.
Well, we'll see what happens if they really do ruin the Iran deal, the nuclear deal, and end up causing a major conflict there, because there's really no constituency for that anywhere in America except the Israel lobby.
Yes, I agree.
And I mean, it's sort of like when Obama said, hey, there's only one country that's against this deal in the world.
And I would be abrogating my constitutional duty if I was going to side with Benjamin Netanyahu.
And, you know, by the way, what was Chuck Schumer say to a Jewish group earlier this week?
I voted against this deal because it was bad for Israel.
It was a threat to Israel.
So.
I mean, this is, of course, nonsense, by the way, but anyway.
Yeah, it is nonsense.
It's part of the same psychosis.
If a society can be unhinged by a 16 year old girl whose land has been stolen from her and her cousin has just been shot in the head, maiming him, slapping a soldier.
And a society can perceive that girl as a greater threat, you know, than the rule of law.
Well, of course, they're going to say the same.
They're going to regard the Iran.
They're going to think that Iran is, you know, ready to wipe them off the map.
And it is a psychosis.
And of course, it comes out of the Holocaust or whatever.
But it's just it should not be affecting policy to the degree it is.
We got to get these lunatics away from it.
And unfortunately, they're only getting closer with now.
People are saying John Bolton might be getting a job at the White House.
Oh, God, can you imagine?
Well, I can't imagine.
Yeah, we all can't imagine the whole world burning to the ground.
Yeah.
And I mean, look at those characters in your book.
I mean, the ones who, you know, none of them went to jail.
You know, that's the amazing thing.
A lot of the stuff they did during the war, quote unquote, greater, you know, war on terror.
They never suffered the consequences legally, American officials.
And so they'll always be with us.
All right, you guys, here's who supports this show.
First of all, the great Mike Swanson.
He wrote this incredible book called The War State about the rise of the permanent military industrial complex and the new right after World War Two.
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Listen, before I let you go, I wonder if we can talk a little bit about the move of the American embassy to Jerusalem and American recognition officially of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Now, if I understand it right, and you have to help me make sure I get it right, the Congress has had as American policy since the 90s that we officially recognize the entire city of Jerusalem as the undivided eternal capital of Israel.
But presidents can sign a waiver and not actually implement that in any real way as long as they want to, which has now ended.
Is that basically right?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
You got that right.
And it just shows that the Congress is in the bag on this and has been on the bag.
And, you know, blaming Trump for this, which is a good thing to do.
We should blame Trump for it.
Nonetheless, you know, excuses the fact that Congress has been pushing this incredible policy for 20 years.
In a way, it's like refusing to declare war and instead authorizing the president to decide to have a war if he wants to.
And really, it is their responsibility, but they kind of diffuse it in a half-assed way by splitting it with the president like that.
Yeah.
And obviously, you know, Jerusalem is this place that's holy to three religions.
Jerusalem is a place that Herzl, the founder of Zionism, promised the pope, promised the sultan, promised the czar, promised the Kaiser, all the leading powers of Europe.
He promised them this will be international if we establish a Jewish state.
Jerusalem is an international city.
When the partition resolution was passed by the U.N. in 1947, it said Jerusalem is an international city.
It is not part of either state.
And now we are, you know, going along with this Zionist expansionist vision and saying Jerusalem is part of the, quote unquote, Jewish state.
Palestinians happily or rightly have said this destroys the peace process, which was a joke anyway, and we're not playing ball anymore.
You took the biggest issue and just gave it away.
Right.
Just like that.
Well, but man, I mean.
Not that the peace process was worth anything, but what a huge step, even if it has finally discredited the fake peace process, it hasn't replaced it with anything worthwhile.
And how are they ever going to back down from this?
They can't.
Right.
So what's the fate of the East?
And and especially, you know, the site of what could become the third temple here.
I mean, is that really part of what's going on here?
Do you think that they're going to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque and try to rebuild the third temple and all that?
No, I don't think they'll do that.
But I mean, I've been wrong about how extremist Israeli society and leadership is in the past.
I don't think they're going to carry that out.
It would just be it strikes me as insane.
But I should say that let's let's cite the fact that Gideon Levy thanks Donald Trump for doing this because it does end this masquerade of a peace process.
You know, for years, the United States has been getting away with saying, oh, we're just pursuing a peace process.
And Israel just keeps grabbing land and pushing people off their land, ethnic cleansing, occupation, never ending.
And meanwhile, they get to say we're involved in a peace process.
You know, we just are working out these issues.
And happily, as Gideon Levy says, Trump has removed that sort of charade.
So in other words, as long as they don't seize the holy sites and that kind of thing, who cares if it's the eternal capital of Israel?
As long as we're getting a one state solution and it's the capital of Israel, Stein, and everybody has equal rights there, then put your political capital wherever you want at that point.
Yeah, that's the argument.
Yeah, I well, I mean, first, the peace process has been a fraud and a very cruel fraud.
So removing the pretense around that is a good thing.
I think secondarily, as you point out, realists who look at what is going on there, realists look at the fact that there are 650,000 Jewish settlers on land that was supposed to be a, quote unquote, Palestinian state, which is a fraction of the land that was the U.N. said would be a Palestinian state 70 years ago.
Realists look at this situation and think you're never pulling those Jewish settlers out.
It's one state.
Let's not deceive ourselves about this.
And let's move on to the struggle for equal right to give everyone in that one state equal rights.
Just what many other societies have gone through are going through.
Israel has to go through to accept that this kind of hated minority, which isn't really a minority anyway, should have equal rights to the chosen people.
And so I think that is a that process is underway.
We any realist understands that's where we're at.
And so the yeah, I guess you're I hadn't thought about it.
But yeah, ultimately, Jerusalem will be the capital of that one state.
So, you know, get the ball rolling.
Yeah, I just came up with that, too.
But yeah, it's good.
It makes sense when you think it through.
But so but here's the problem, right, is that the Israeli Jews are absolutely terrified that it's not just that they would have to recognize the rights of the Palestinians is that they would lose their power over them.
And then what might they do?
And so unknown future of likely revenge by people who they've been mercilessly oppressing all this time, why we're better off continuing to mercilessly, mercilessly oppress them.
As Thomas Jefferson said, we have the wolf by the ears.
We can't hold him or let him go.
Not that he has a right to hold the wolf by the ears in the first place.
By the way, they're not wolves, they're humans.
But still, I didn't know that.
That's a great line, because, yeah, the equivalent from Israelis I've heard is we have our boot on their neck and they have a knife.
You know, we can't take our boot off their neck.
So, yeah, I mean, what can you say about that?
I never heard that one before.
I'm going to quote that.
That's just an apocryphal saying in Israel.
No, I've heard it.
I mean, people will say that it's not apocryphal.
It's the kind of thing people, it's an argument and it's not a good argument, as you and I know, and it's never going to forestall a movement for justice.
It's never going to forestall resistance to occupation or attempts to get your property back when it's been stolen from you.
Well, I mean, it sure is going to continue to motivate resistance to that resistance, though, right?
I mean, it's a real rock in a hard place thing.
And never mind the morality of the situation.
I'm just saying, realistically speaking, the Israeli Jews have, you know, and this is the whole paradox of the thing, right, is the ethnic cleansing campaign in 48 worked.
They had an 80-20 supermajority.
But when they seized the rest of Palestine, they seized all the people, too.
They didn't get rid of all the Palestinians that live in the West Bank and Gaza.
They had to keep them.
They couldn't get away with that much in 67, I guess.
But so now it's basically a 50-50 split.
So they can't really maintain, or maybe they can for some period of time, maintain an apartheid system where fully half the population don't have civil rights.
But it doesn't seem like that can maintain that long.
I don't know.
Do they even have a plan or what the hell do you think is even the plan?
John Bolton said on The Hill this week, well, you just got to give portions of the West Bank to Jordan and give Gaza to Egypt.
That's really what they have in mind, ultimately, is creating bantustans that they can offload onto Arab, neighboring Arab countries.
And, you know, as you pointed out in your book and you make very clear, this this business has really been hurting the United States for a long time.
It was item number two in Osama bin Laden's list of grievances.
It animated people across the Arab world.
And it's going to continue to do so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And again, 9-11 hijackers themselves, the Hamburg cells, the Hamburg cell, Ata and bin al-Sheib obsessed with Palestine and Lebanon and America's responsibility for Israel's aggression there.
High.
And as you as you say, highly educated men.
Yeah, man.
So, well, listen, I'm so behind on everything.
I think I must be missing some important question about it.
You got it.
Yeah.
Did we get it all?
I think we did, Scott.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Coming back on the show.
I really appreciate it, Phil.
OK, and count on me to be telling people more about Fool's Aaron because you deserve it.
And I mean, people should be reading that book.
Cool, man.
Well, thanks again for that.
I really do appreciate it.
OK, very much.
Talk to you soon.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Phil Weiss.
And not just because he likes my book so much, but that to the great Phil Weiss, Mondoweiss.net.
And, you know, for years he wrote for the New York Observer back when a long time ago.
And I'm not sure what all.
But now for the last decade and more, he's run Mondoweiss, news and opinion about Palestine, Israel and the United States.
And it's just great stuff every day.
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