Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at FDR.
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 hacked.
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 us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying 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, it's time for our regular Friday interview with the great Sheldon Richman, my partner at the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org, and every Friday he writes his article, TGIF, The Goal is Freedom.
And also cheddar potato skins.
And yeah, so this one is the Trump Kushner delusion on Palestine.
Lots of great stuff on Israel-Palestine lately.
Welcome back, Sheldon.
How you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Glad to be back.
So, one state, two state, or something else entirely.
What's going on here, man?
One state, two state, red state, blue state.
That may be the title of a coming article.
There you go.
Yeah, in this case it's red when red stands for the right, as it does in America now.
I hope I don't get sued by the state of Dr. Seuss.
You might.
The way the intellectual property laws are now, you know.
But what's going on is, of course, there have been a lot of articles about this.
Last month, just a couple days ago, really, Trump sent his envoy, his chief envoy, the man with the wide open portfolio on everything, namely his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to travel the Middle East along with his assistant, Jason Greenblatt.
And Jason Greenblatt was once the chief legal officer for the Trump Organization.
So he was, in other words, Trump's lawyer.
He's also a guy who has proudly boasted that Trump doesn't see the Israeli settlements in the West Bank as an obstacle to peace.
It's very easy for Trump to say that.
Anyway, and along with the U.N. ambassador, sorry, the ambassador to Israel, Trump's ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who was Trump's bankruptcy lawyer before this, were sent on a trip to the Middle East to talk to important people as they formulate their great plan.
It sounds like you're talking about the script for a satire of a movie that's coming out or something.
Donald Trump and his son-in-law and his bankruptcy lawyer and this settler kook.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I'd like to call Jared Kushner the de facto godson of Netanyahu, of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, because he's known him since he was a kid and once actually gave up his bed for Netanyahu and slept in the basement when Netanyahu was a guest in his family's house.
His father is an old friend of Netanyahu.
Anyway, they're formulating a plan which is to accomplish the deal of a century, of the century, namely to bring peace and reconciliation to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
So we're getting indications of what this plan is going to be.
There have been various discussions by people who have been in on meetings and have heard things from the meetings.
And to be a little more solid source, Jared Kushner himself gave an interview to the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds.
So we have it right from the son-in-law's mouth about what's going on.
And what seems to be shaping up, it's very interesting, is a regional approach to solving what seems like the insoluble, although it's not really insoluble, problem between the Palestinians and the Israelis.
Now a regional approach sounds good, but it's not really good.
It only sounds good for the first couple of seconds when you hear the phrase, because it by nature is going to de-emphasize the Palestinians' plight.
If you call it regional, now you're looking at, oh, big issues and not the little issue.
I have quotes around these, of course, these terms.
The Palestinians' ongoing misery and subjection to brutality and humiliation through the occupation.
And when you fill in the details, we see what the regional approach really comes down to.
Because you know that Jared Kushner's best friend forever is the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, who is kind of running things.
I think his father is sort of beginning to suffer senility or dementia or something.
And so he's the guy in charge.
He's the guy that's killing all those kids and other people in Yemen and having them die from not only bombing, bombing of weddings and whatnot, but also cholera, the kids being exposed to cholera.
They're all getting together because they have, and Netanyahu and the Israeli government, they all have a common interest not in solving the, not in helping out the Palestinians, of course, but in screwing Iran, in other words, targeting Iran, isolating Iran.
That's their big interest.
So the deal that's shaping up is the Saudis and the rulers of the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, Sisi, that brutal dictator Sisi who overthrew an elected government and is a big, also a good friend of Trump's, they want to, quote, deliver the Palestinians.
The idea is to have them deliver the Palestinians in this grand bargain which is really designed simply to get Iran, isolate Iran, and who knows what.
We know there have been talk about plans for regime change.
Trump officials openly talk about it.
And friends of Trump keep appearing before that crazy cult, the MEK, talking about how next year they're going to hold, the MEK will hold its meeting in Tehran, presumably meaning the Ayatollahs will be gone.
So once again, through this, the Palestinians are further, you know, de-emphasized, put on a further back burner because the focus is on Iran.
Now, what are they going to do for the Palestinians?
Let's say for, not to the Palestinians, just to give them for a second the benefit of the doubt.
The idea is, well, and Jared Kushner says this in his interview, they'll promise the Palestinians outside investment money for infrastructure, for things that will produce jobs because that's what they really care about.
According to Kushner, and he says this in the interview, they're not really interested in what he calls politicians' talking points.
What they care about is jobs.
And, you know, it's almost like somebody running for president of the United States and talking to an American audience, right?
Jobs and better roads.
And if you give them that, they'll forget about these little talking points.
Little talking points, by the way, bear an eerie resemblance to what the Americans celebrated just the other day, two days ago on July 4th, because the talking points relate to freedom, independence from the colonial brutality and humiliation of the Israeli occupation.
In other words, those are minor talking points.
If you had told the rebels in 1776 that this idea of independence and, you know, kind of running your own affairs, that's just talking points.
Let's have the British invest in the Americans so we have better jobs and stuff.
I'm not sure you'd get a good reception.
But that's what they're going to try to sell to the Palestinians.
And Israel's all for it because it, again, marginalizes the Palestinians.
It takes pressure off them.
And to the extent that attention is on the bogus threat from Iran, Netanyahu and most people in Israel are very happy because it means people aren't thinking about the Palestinians.
You know, oh, there's this greater danger.
We can't think about the Palestinians now because of Iran.
Iran's always, you know, for a very long time has been used by Israeli politicians to take people's minds off and the world's mind off of the Palestinians.
And, of course, it suits the Saudis.
They claim to be worried about Saudi, Iran.
I just don't think they want a rival.
And they're afraid that someday the U.S. may decide, hey, you know, Iran really could be an ally of the U.S.
I mean, in a lot of ways it's better than Saudi Arabia.
Women can drive.
Women can actually go to medical school and stuff like that.
It's much more Western, even with the Ayatollahs in charge, than Saudi Arabia is.
I mean, there are like 25 synagogues, I think, in Tehran and a big Jewish hospital.
I don't think there are any synagogues in Riyadh and certainly not a Jewish hospital.
So that's what's happening.
The Palestinians are going to be made to chumps.
And, of course, they won't be able to accept this.
They won't get a real state.
They won't get a real territory that they can govern themselves because they'll get some of the West Bank.
But that really means, you know, a series of isolated, non-contiguous villages that are cut off from each other because the Israeli wall, which is still being built, is snaking through the West Bank.
It's not along the old 67 border.
It goes deep into the West Bank, and it separates those communities, and it separates Palestinians from farmland and, you know, groves, olive groves.
And basically walls off the growing Israeli settlements in this more southern part of the West Bank.
So that's going to be the state with a capital not in Jerusalem.
Don't forget.
Now Trump has endorsed Netanyahu's claim and basically the Israeli claim.
I don't want to just put this on Netanyahu.
That implies that there's like a Labor Party is better about this.
It's not.
I mean, there are true Israeli liberals, but they're very far and few between.
Trump has basically signed on to Netanyahu's position that Jerusalem is the eternal and undivided capital of Israel.
The U.S. embassy is now there.
And so that means the Palestinians, even when they get this sort of paper state, won't have East Jerusalem as their capital.
They're going to get a suburb of Jerusalem, outside of Jerusalem, that's near this big garbage dump, landfill, that stinks from what I read.
And that's, by the way, where a couple of a Bedouin tribe, which is having its, probably going to have its villages bulldozed by the Israelis, are going to be shifted to this little suburb outside of Jerusalem.
So this is a big fraud, this idea that there's going to be this great plan to bring peace.
The Palestinians won't be able to accept it.
And the Israelis actually won't really accept it either, but they'll play cute about it.
They'll let the Palestinians reject it.
They'll be more vague, and then that way the Palestinians will be branded rejectionists, but not the Israelis.
But the Israelis really don't want any kind of Palestinian state on the West Bank, none at all.
And that's why they're not full-throated about a two-state solution, because they don't really want a two-state solution.
Now, Kushner seems to be banking on the fact that Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is unpopular among Palestinians.
And that he even said he had the goal to say the reason Abbas boycotted the envoy's tour last month was because he's afraid that if this plan is submitted to the Palestinians, they will accept it and therefore reject Abbas.
So this is totally crazy.
Abbas is unpopular.
Kushner's right about that.
But he's not unpopular because he's been unwilling to compromise with the Israelis.
If anything, he's unpopular because he's been too willing to compromise.
The Palestinians have made compromise after compromise and have gotten bupkis.
They've gotten nothing.
In fact, the number of settlers in the West Bank has doubled since the 90s when the Oslo Accords were signed.
And really all the Oslo Accords did was let the Palestinian – the old Fatah become the Palestinian Authority and do the dirty work of policing the Palestinians, which includes torture, imprisonment, and repression of resistors to the occupation, rather than have Israeli soldiers do it, because it's bad PR.
There's bad YouTube videos of all this stuff.
So it was let the Palestinians do the dirty work.
So now the Israelis have created this privileged class of Palestinians in Ramallah, which is kind of where the headquarters of the PA is, this privileged class of VIPs.
There's various tiers of VIPs.
And they get – of course they get a lot of money because they get money from America and Europe, I guess.
They get Western money to support them.
Except their own people are living in crappy conditions and are being beaten up by other Palestinians because the Israelis turned over security to them.
So this is where things stand.
And if Trump and Kushner and Greenblatt and Friedman think this is going to bring peace and harmony to the Middle East, they're just deluded.
I don't think they really believe it.
They can't possibly believe it.
Well, that's the question, right?
Is this any – All right, y'all.
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Different than in the year 2000, where they're offered a deal they can't possibly accept, as you said.
Just so that they can kick the can down the road further and say, See, it's all the Arabs' fault that they won't accept it.
Every time we try to give them a state, they rather have a conflict than complain.
That's what they said then.
Seems pretty transparent, right?
Here's your garbage dump for your capital after it's already too late.
You'll never have East Jerusalem, as you said.
Apparently the stench there is unbearable, from what I read.
I try to, in a very brief form, go through some of that history of the biased account of this ongoing so-called peace process.
And let me give this example for people who aren't too familiar with how this works.
In 1999, Bill Clinton and his government offered Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia a chance to avoid war.
It was called the Rambouillet Peace Accord.
And what it said was, you will surrender unconditionally, and allow American and or other NATO troops to occupy your entire country and do whatever we want with you.
In other words, it was an offer that he couldn't possibly accept, so that he would reject it, so that they would have an excuse then to say, see, he won't negotiate, now we have no choice to bomb.
And it was pretty transparent at the time.
Even on TV, they made fun of him for it.
But anyway, so that's kind of how this works, and that's what we've seen here in Israel-Palestine over and over again.
This is the consistent story presented to Americans, and I guess much of the world, certainly Europe, I guess, maybe less so, there may actually be more candor in Europe, about the history of this so-called peace process.
Because if you just watch TV or just read the main papers and don't go looking for anything alternative, you're going to believe that the Palestinians are just, you know, cutthroats and terrorists, and they say no to everything, and they won't give an inch on anything.
And the Israelis have been, you know, super generous.
So every apparent concession by the Israelis is, you know, cheered on as amazingly generous.
Every time the Palestinians turn it down, it just shows, you know, that they're dogmatic rejectionists, fanatical rejectionists.
And any concession that the Palestinians have made, which I can say something about in a moment, which have been substantial, they're never even reported.
And I go through some of them.
So, look, we've been led to believe over and over again, although it's very easy to read the debunking of this by people who are involved, that the Palestinians in 2000 at Camp David under Clinton, the final year of the Clinton presidency, a super generous offer was made to Yasser Arafat, and that he turned it down.
And, of course, the back story here is that in order to get Arafat to the meeting, because he was suspicious anyway, he was told that if this meeting fails, if there's no agreement coming out of it, you will not be demonized.
Clinton gave him his insurance.
Well, they made an offer they couldn't possibly accept.
And, by the way, the Israelis didn't accept it either.
And yet, and he was demonized.
Clinton broke his promise, another broken Clinton promise, and demonized Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians for rejecting it.
By the way, that wasn't the end of the process, because a year later, they were still meeting.
And then the Israeli election was coming along after that.
So those were then, Israel then left the talks.
So if you look at the whole story, it's not the way it's appeared.
The Israelis, their concessions tend to be of this nature.
They come in with bottom line.
Here's what we want.
We cannot go below this.
And it's pretty extravagant.
They want to demilitarize Palestinian state.
Israel demands to be in charge of the security of the Palestinian state.
The Palestinians don't get to defend themselves against Israel.
But Israel gets to surround the state and be in charge of security to protect themselves from the Palestinians.
See, in this story, the Palestinians are the ones who have to prove their worthiness.
They have the burden of proof.
Israel doesn't have to prove anything, which is kind of funny when you go back and read the origins of Israel, the ethnic cleansing and then the 1967 war, where they ran people off their land and grabbed increasing amounts of land.
So it's a little funny that the Israelis don't have to prove they're civilized, but the Palestinians have to do that.
And, of course, it's impossible for them to do it because they're constantly being squeezed by the Israelis.
So it proves the Israeli point.
So the Israelis will – whenever the Israelis modify one of their bottom line demands, that's then called an amazingly generous offer, which the Palestinians turn down.
On the other hand, we're never told about the concessions the Palestinians have made over a long period of time.
In 1974, Yasser Arafat was invited to speak to the General Assembly of the United Nations.
It was a historic event.
You can find – I linked to the speech in my piece, but you can easily find it online.
It's an amazing speech to read.
Whatever else you may think of Arafat and things that – tactics they engaged in, some of them, of course, highly objectionable.
But if you read this, it's very interesting.
Now, it does call for one state, but one secular state where all people, regardless of their religion or non-religion, have the same rights.
He goes on at length about that.
He also goes on at length about how Jews and Muslims live together in the Middle East reasonably peacefully, predominantly peacefully for many, many, many years.
He compares it favorably to the treatment Jews got in Europe for so many years, for such a long time.
In other words, though, I mean, it's important because the narrative is that, no, the Palestinian demand is that all the Jews die and that they're going – they swear to God they're going to push them all into the sea and take Palestine back for the Arabs.
In the languages, they'd be driven into the sea.
That's always been the scare slogan used by defenders of Israel.
I heard it growing up all the time, the Arabs want to drive us into the sea.
So in 74, Arafat is a one-state guy, one secular democratic state.
He wasn't tested.
You may say, well, he didn't mean it.
It was never tested.
In the late 80s, the Palestinians changed to two states.
So instead of demanding that Israel itself change, they never said what should go on internally in Israel.
I mean, they might have had some language about equal rights for Palestinians inside Israel, but I think that wasn't what they were – the focus was on the occupied territories, which were acquired in 67, of course, by war, which is illegal under international law.
You're not allowed to acquire territory by war, by force.
And as Norman Fickelstein likes to point out, if you look at the international law, it doesn't say by aggressive war.
It says by war.
So even if you think the 67 war was defensive, which it wasn't, but if you think it was, it still doesn't justify hanging on to territory.
You've got to immediately sit down and talk about giving it back, which, of course, the Israelis, they've sat down, but they've never wanted to give it back.
So by 88, the Palestinians are now two-state, two-staters, with their state consisting of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Now, that is 22 percent of what was mandate Palestine that was given to – or given to – that Britain took after World War I.
That was embodied in the League of Nations.
They've now gone from wanting, in a democratic, secular way, 100 percent to 22 percent.
Where is that ever called generous?
Where is it even described, much less getting an adjective like generous?
Now they've even gone back further because in talks late in the Bush administration, the Bush II administration, and then even under Obama, the new Palestinian position was – and you can find this.
I linked to an article with the details by Norman Fickelstein.
The PA, the Palestinian Authority position was, OK, look, here's what you can do.
Israel, you can keep 60 percent of the settlements, 60 percent of the settlements.
That would account for 2 percent of the West Bank.
They're saying we won't fight about that.
You can have the 60 percent of the settlements.
They're attached by roads, and we can always build a bridge if settlements need to be attached.
All they asked in return was a land swap of an equivalent amount of land nearby.
That was their offer.
When did you ever hear that offer described, number one, or described as generous, number two?
Hey, can I butt in here just to add that it's not just the Palestinian Authority, a.k.a. the PLO, PLA there.
It's Fatah.
It's also Hamas.
I mean, I've seen Hamas.
I know you know.
You've written about this.
And I've seen them on Charlie Rose, not the leader, but one of the top leaders, saying that, yes, of course, we're settling for 22.
We will recognize 67 borders if we can have them.
That's right.
They have done that.
That's true.
They have done that.
And they have joined in, attempted to join in unity governments or governance with the PA.
Now, look, the PA is corrupt.
I'm not in favor of them.
I think they have just become quislings under Oslo, which was really the point.
I mean, Oslo didn't do very much but set up the PA and give it all kinds of privileges and money, which hardly advanced the position of the Palestinians.
But nevertheless, that offer is on the table.
And, of course, it gets the back of Israel's hand, which means it gets the back of the Americans' hand because the Americans are fully in Israel's court.
And the only change with Trump is he's – maybe this is to his credit – he's more honest about being totally the advocate for Israel.
Now, he did have a passing line in one of the presidential debates that says something like, hey, I have to look evenhanded.
I can't condemn one's lie.
Notice he said I have to look evenhanded.
He didn't say he has to be evenhanded.
Which inspired a lot of ridiculous faith and terror on behalf of the war party too.
Oh, my god.
He said something about being fair.
We've got to stop him.
Yes, and a few people who are a little too eager to praise Trump grabbed on that as if that was some revolutionary statement.
I won't name any names.
However, during that same presidential campaign, he gave a speech to AIPAC, which could have been given by any Republican or Democratic politician.
Yeah.
Let me ask you about – so the old – Sheldon, the old Saudi peace plan was basically a fair two-state solution.
And now is that officially over as we move into the new Jared peace plan here?
Well, I guess under MBS, Mohammed – you know, the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, I guess it is.
Right.
In the – what was it?
The early 90s, there was this grand bargain.
That was a regional approach, but it didn't select the Palestinians.
The Gulf states, the Arab states offer – and I think Iran endorsed it too.
The Gulf states offered this grand bargain to finally settle all this stuff, and it was going to be a two-state solution on the 22-78 percent split.
That, I guess, is going by the wayside because bin Salman is – seems to be interested in going after Iran more than anything else.
And so he's willing to – and he's already got a basically open relationship with Netanyahu in Israel to target Iran.
And so the Palestinians are expendable in their view, which means the Palestinians aren't going to accept this.
So what's left for the Palestinians?
If this goes through, if this is the offer, there's going to be another intifada and who knows what.
But they're leaving the Palestinians no choice.
Man.
And they're in despair from what I read.
They basically have lost all hope.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know what they're supposed to do.
Thomas Friedman said, you know what?
If you guys would just do a massive nonviolent protest and demand to be let back in, then all good thinking Israelis will have to rally to your side in fairness.
And then, yeah, that didn't happen.
I don't know.
What are they supposed to do?
Look, most Israelis – and I'm not exaggerating – most Israelis don't like Palestinians.
Palestinians are not – they're an inferior group, race, whatever you want to call it, ethnic group, nationality.
They are disparaged.
They don't belong on the land.
Most of the land in Israel and Israel within the seven borders is off limits to Arabs because this is Jewish land.
You've got to remember, even the ones that are atheists still believe this is – and there are a lot of Jewish people, atheists who call themselves Jews.
You can decide whether that makes any sense to be a Jewish atheist.
But we'll leave that argument aside.
They – the whole Zionist project, the whole Israeli project has been – and this was their term – to redeem the land.
In other words, make sure it's not in non-Jewish hands, that it's in Jewish hands.
And it's administered by the government, the Jewish National Fund and some other agencies which are tied to the government but are not strictly government agencies.
And the whole idea is to make sure non-Jews, especially Arab non-Jews, can't own the land or even in most cases rent apartments and stuff or farmland.
So they don't want the Palestinians to have anything.
The problem is it's been called a peace process and it should be called a justice process.
Because look, I have no trouble believing Israel wants peace.
They would love if every Palestinian peacefully left and went to Jordan or to somewhere else, Lebanon.
Yeah.
Or Egypt.
And by the way, what's shaping up for Gaza is kind of similar to what they did with Oslo.
Yeah.
Because part of the deal seems to – The problem is we're so over time here and I've got to go.
We can keep going forever.
I was looking for a good place to stop but there is no good place to stop.
But it's such an important article and, yeah, let's follow up.
You know what?
You should write a thing about the Egyptian side of this.
We'll talk about that next week.
What do you think?
Okay.
Very good.
All right.
Thanks very much, Sheldon.
You're great, man.
My pleasure.
Talk to you next week.
All right.
That's our good friend Sheldon Richman, LibertarianInstitute.org.
This one is his TGIF for July the 6th, 2018.
The Trump-Kushner delusion on Palestine.
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