For Pacifica Radio, July 29th, 2018.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, it is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, the editorial director of antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org, more than 4,700 interviews now going back to 2003, and you can follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
Alright you guys, introducing the great Ramsey Baroud.
He is the author of My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, and the latest is called The Last Earth.
And he writes, of course, at palestinechronicle.com and ramseybaroud.net, and we run almost everything he writes at antiwar.com as well.
The latest is Jewish Nation State Law, Why Israel Was Never a Democracy.
Welcome back to the show, Ramsey.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm doing great.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
Very happy to have you on the show, as always, my friend.
And just yesterday, the Israelis killed an 11-year-old boy at the Gaza border.
Today, Ahed Tamimi was finally released from her military detention cell and sent back.
There's just so much going on, and the backdrop of all of this, I guess the reason why they killed this 11-year-old boy and had locked up this 16-year-old girl is because that's what it takes to keep Israel a so-called Jewish democracy.
And yet, do I understand it right, this new Jewish Nation State Law that the Knesset passed last week, it doesn't even have the word democracy in it anywhere, does it?
That's precisely correct, yes, and that's what makes it different.
I mean, we know for a fact that Israel really was never a democracy in the first place, but there's always been this kind of attempt, or at least kind of a faint attempt, at striking some kind of a balance between democracy and the Jewish identity of the state.
They convinced themselves that they really mastered the art of finding that balance.
It's an exception, of course.
No country in the world ever claimed to be an ethno-nationalist state and democratic state at the same time, at least not in any convincing manner.
Israel has, and we applaud it for such a long time.
The American media and American governments, you know, kind of bragged about Israel's model of democracy, its uniqueness, and they supported Israel's right to be a Jewish state while at the same time speaking fondly of Israel's model of democracy.
Well, that kind of ended on July 19th.
The word democracy wasn't even mentioned once, as you stated, in the Jewish nation-state law, a new basic law.
As you know, Israel does not have a constitution, and that's a whole different discussion.
But they passed these laws, they call them the basic laws, and it kind of really allows the majority, which is always dominated by Jewish members of society, to inflict whatever punishment they want on their minorities and get away with it.
And the latest basic law is, you know, saying that only Jews matter, nobody else does.
Jewish rights is protected anywhere in the world.
The Jewish identity, the Jewish history, you know, the Hebrew language, the Star of David, these are our symbols, this is our language.
And everything else is relegated or not mentioned at all, including the Arabic language that is now not an official language, but rather a special language, which really ultimately means nothing.
And the word democracy is not mentioned once.
So I do not understand how can anyone, now that we know that, well, apartheid exists in a practical way and has existed for a long time, now it's official.
Now we have a law that really can be seen as the law of apartheid in Israel.
And yet somehow you will have these pseudo-intellectuals in American media still somehow maintaining the argument that Israel is democratic, even though Israel itself says, we don't really care about this anymore.
Well, now, so democracy is kind of a loaded term, right?
I mean, at the bottom line, it just means majority rule.
But then in Western civilization, it has all these other connotations as well, such as the protection of the rights of minorities, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and this kind of thing.
And so now, so the occupied territories aside for a moment, in 1948 was the Nakba, where 750,000 Palestinians or more were driven out of their homes.
Hundreds and hundreds were massacred in a terror campaign to really convince the rest to flee.
And, you know, it seems like someone could make an argument that as wrong as that was on the face of it, at least it was tenable, at least with a 80-20 super duper majority Jewish population, that they could have a Jewish state and a democracy and, you know, protecting the rights, even including the broader definition of democracy, protecting the rights of Arab, Christian and Muslim and Jewish minorities there, that that basically was a situation, as they've claimed it all along, where Israel is a Jewish state and a democratic state at the same time.
But so you're not really talking about the occupation of the Palestinian people on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, basically being under the control of the Israeli state and yet having no representation in it.
We're just talking about inside so-called Israel proper, inside the green line at this point.
And I wonder, what is the point?
If they actually do have a super duper majority that can never be overthrown, where there are Arab political parties, but no one will ever form a coalition with them to give them any power in the Knesset, why not just leave well enough alone?
What's even the point of this?
Right.
I mean, it's important that we try to understand how Israel defined the term Jewish, Scott, for a long time and how they controlled the debate around the term Jewish, that if you try to argue with or against the use of the Jewish identity, you will find yourself in the category of being anti-Semitic.
And they have this on purpose.
They have done it on purpose because it's a very convoluted definition here.
They have kind of navigated or rather manipulated the term in such a way that it could mean identity, national identity, religion, ethnicity.
It could mean any of these things or all of these things.
And they use it in any way and applied it in any way that that really served their purpose.
So Israel, even before this law, from the very, very beginning, it was never a state of its citizens as any democracy in the world would be or should be.
But rather, it's a state of the Jews, whether they are in Israel, historic Palestine, today's Israel, or in Serbia or in Argentina.
So even when Israel was supposedly capable of maintaining a degree of democracy, it really wasn't.
And the basis of it, it really wasn't.
And I'm not saying this in frustration or just making random accusations.
I'm thinking in terms of liberal democracy or liberal democratic models, whether in anywhere in the West.
So that's one issue.
The thing about the new law that is particularly different than I spoke about this in my latest article is that the emphasis on Jewish settlements.
Now, you would say, but wait a minute, Jewish settlements, illegal settlements, contrary to international law, have been built in the West Bank and East Jerusalem for the last 50 years.
Why is this going to make any difference?
And there is this emphasis on the need of the government to encourage Jewish settlements.
They're not talking about Jewish settlements in the West Bank, mind you, Scott.
They are talking about segregation within Israel itself.
In fact, now, now there is this de facto segregation.
There is this de facto apartheid that exists in Israel itself.
You know, the 1948 borders, right?
Even hospital wards are segregated.
Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, had a fantastic report about the segregation of hospitals.
Even Jewish mothers are kept away from Arab mothers while delivering babies in Israeli hospitals.
But the law before this struck this particular point out, called for the establishing of Jewish neighborhoods and Jewish towns within Israel itself, in which Arabs and other minorities, Druze and others, are not allowed to be, to live there.
Now, they struck this particular element down and they replaced it with the word encourage to encourage the establishment of these segregated neighbors.
Now, because these things already exist, even, even graveyards are already segregated and apartheid is effectively happening throughout the country.
This particular stipulation kind of gives a government blessing to apartheid within Israel itself.
So in other words, not only does Israel officiate apartheid, but the, but we're not talking about the West Bank anymore.
We are talking about throughout Israel and, and Palestinians, whether living in the West Bank or, you know, within the so-called green line within Israel, Israel itself are all subjected to the same rules from now on.
Well, now you talk here about the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel, where they have documented 65 different Israeli laws that discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens in Israel.
Oh, and then this includes in the occupied territories as well.
But so how different is this than the way it already was, right?
It already was legal to deny housing to Arabs.
If you want to keep your town a quote unquote, pure Jewish town, whatever that means.
It already was illegal for Bedouins to live basically anywhere without the bulldozers coming and driving them out from hither and yon within, again, within Israel.
So what difference actually is made here?
It is, it's the difference being for example, what Trump has done to officially you know, we know that 90% there's 90% drop in Muslim migration or Muslims visiting the United States.
Now we might experience this on a daily basis, but when you have a law that says Muslims from these countries or in general are not allowed to come to the United States, then you have a law.
You officiate an existing racist or an existing unlawful practice.
Now it becomes lawful.
The main, the main difference that this law does, it officiates an existing apartheid and existing racist regime and makes it one that is legal and defensible, not just in politically, but as far as the Supreme Court is concerned.
You see, because in Israel, the Supreme Court has been, you know, as George W. Bush used to have this favorite term, the decider, he was the decider.
The Supreme Court is the decider.
Whenever there is an issue that made it, uh, that politicians disagree on what, what makes this Jewish and democratic or not, the Supreme Court was the one that found the balance.
It kind of really kept the defining that term and that balance in any way they found legally fitting as far as Israel's basic laws.
Now they are saying we don't need the Supreme Court anymore because it's now the law of the land.
So whatever the view of judges, whatever, you know, the, the judicial system things, it doesn't matter.
It's the law of the land.
It's now legal to enshrine these kinds of racist laws.
So in a way it doesn't change anything, but it also changes everything, right?
It doesn't change anything on the ground as far as Palestinians are concerned because they've already been experiencing this on a daily basis for all of these years, but it now becomes legal.
And here's another interesting thing that I'd like to add to this, and I mentioned this in the article is the fact that in apartheid regime, apartheid South Africa, for example, the laws of the 1950s, the, the, the Nuremberg laws in Germany, 1935 the fascist lie in Italy laws in Italy in the 1930s it's not a single law, but you usually have a single law that creates the foundation for all other laws.
And now Israel has created with the seemingly a short worded law.
They have created a foundation of apartheid.
This in history will be remembered as the most important law that enshrined apartheid in Israel.
And this is going to be followed by many, many bills and mark my words for it, Scott, and we are going to be meeting and talking again.
Many, many bills will follow that will add to this and clarify and solidify the existing apartheid that was pushed through this law.
Yeah.
Well, and like you say, never even mind the West bank.half the population under the control of the Israeli government are not Jewish at all.
I guess I'm not exactly sure the proportions, but something like what, 80% of those have no representation in the Israeli government whatsoever.
Even though as we talked about the Palestinian citizens of Israel and their political parties have no power in the Knesset anyway.
That's right.
And you know, commenting on, on the Arab members of Knesset, I just feel strongly that the almost contributing to the illusion of Israel's democracy because Israel keeps bragging, look, we have our members of Knesset standing and yelling at the podium and they are allowed to do so.
Well, at the same time, they really have zilch zero influence on outcomes.
Um, it, I think it would be such a good idea perhaps for the, uh, the representatives of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel perhaps to take a stance and to leave the Knesset because they are really being used in this massive Zionist propaganda that Israel still somehow maintains an element of democracy because they are there.
But things are getting a lot worse for their community and perhaps it would be better for them to organize and mobilize outside as opposed to validate the Israeli political system.
Now, I don't know if you saw this, but one of the members of the Knesset, or it may have even been, uh, one of the ministers in the Netanyahu government said, you know, we really made a mistake with this law because we should have included the Druze.
They're all right.
We like them, but nevermind the Christians and the Muslims.
But you know why they like the Druze, right?
It's not because of the Druze who they are as a, as a, as a religion or ethnic minority or whatever.
They like the Druze because the Druze, um, some of the Druze are participating in the Israeli army and they have their own Druze units within the Israeli army.
That's the only reason that they felt, well, if they have the sense of allegiance, I mean, imagine they are dying for our country, they are fighting our dirty wars and we are saying that they don't matter.
They don't exist as far as our laws are concerned.
And this is why this whole hoopla over the Druze really, it's not the respect of the Druze or Druze tradition or way of life whatsoever.
It's really about the element of the Druze participating in the Israeli, in the IDF.
Yeah.
Um, and so can you talk a little bit about, uh, the apartheid laws as they are the, the smaller ones before this one came in and put the big rubber stamp on it all about housing discrimination, for example, religious discrimination.
You mentioned about how women delivering babies are kept in separate parts of the hospital and this kind of thing.
That's right.
And this has been happening, um, so very slowly over the years and, and, and that takes us back to the point, why does Israel have no constitution?
Uh, there were, there were, uh, back in, in 19 in the early 1950s there was a ministerial committee that was assigned the responsibility of establishing and constitution for Israel, but they failed.
They argued and argued and they failed.
And the reason that they failed is they wanted to keep the laws lucid, open for interpretation that would allow Israel to create new facts on the grounds, if you will, and to assign these new facts on the ground with, with, um, um, any laws that would allow Israel to maintain them.
Which is kind of funny because why don't they just do like us and have a constitution and then pretend it doesn't exist anyway?
Right.
I'm sure that someone must have had that genius idea as well, but, but that's really what happened.
So as a result, instead of doing that, they decided, you know what, let's create these very, very useful kind of little trick.
We'll call it the basic laws and we establish whatever laws.
And we know that we can always back it up because we are the majority and we will always make sure that the demographic Jewish majority is always maintained and, and, and the Arabs are kind of kept on the margins.
And they have done.
They have passed numerous basic laws.
Whenever there is an opportunity to do so, they pass these laws.
Now the other reason the constitution was in there is, is, is again, because it, it, you can't, you can't declare a certain set of principles about democracy and human rights and so forth and so on.
And you'll find yourself being challenged every time you try to pass a new law at the Supreme Court.
So they did not want to have that sort of intellectual and legal basis.
And that's where the basic laws are.
And this is why you have 65 laws according to Adala, which means justice, the, the, the, the human rights group in, in Palestinian Arab human rights groups in Israel that, that really tries very hard to, to kind of convey this reality to the rest of the world through these constant reports of what are these laws and what are they doing to the Arab minority in particular?
Now, yes, there are laws that, that discriminate against gay communities are laws that discriminating is Druze against Bedouins and so forth and so on.
But really the main target here is the Palestinians without living in the West Bank or living in, in, in Israel itself.
The idea is to encourage them to leave.
The idea is to keep them on the margins.
The idea is to keep them less educated, less, um, having this access to healthcare, this access to political rights.
So you have, um, uh, several million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who have no rights to vote.
Uh, for example, Palestinians who are living within Israel itself, even though they have rights to vote, they are being pushed in these kinds of neighborhoods and these communities and these areas that, that are marginalized politically.
Unemployment is very high.
The government doesn't spend much money on them as much as they spend on, on, on Jewish communities.
Um, so somehow the, the make sure that their, their economic status is always lowered and, and their rights are always, um, in comparison to Jewish rights, uh, is, is kept, is kept in check.
Um, to that, that the, the relationship between Palestinians in Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank is severe at, at all times and so forth, um, to basically to destroy the Palestinian community from within.
And they have done so really sadly successfully to the point that there is this fragmentation that's happening to the Palestinian community because of the draconian Israeli laws and because the Supreme Court always finds it fair to rule, uh, on, on, on behalf of the Jewish majority and against Palestinian Arabs.
You know, I was reminded recently of this old quote of Thomas Jefferson saying, what difference does it make to me if my neighbor believes in one God or 10, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
And so, and that, you know, obviously raising the question of the single state solution here, which I know you favor, and, and now we can go ahead and include, uh, the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem and all the rest in this too, that if the only actual job of the Israeli government was to be the security force for all the people of historic Palestine and to protect their equal rights, then what difference would it make whether the prime minister was a Palestinian or a Lithuanian Jew?
That's right.
In that sense.
But you know that the idea of Israel is established around the concept that it has to be a safe haven for Jews now in practical sense, which it could be anyway, right?
If it's, you know, safe haven for anybody who wants to live there.
If the law guaranteed equal rights for all, of course, of course.
Now we know practically it's not.
And, and why, why should it be if you create these kinds of racist, violent laws that push people to the brink, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe the best way to actually create a safe environment for all is to create truly a safe environment for all, as opposed to for some and not for others.
You cage Palestinians behind walls, you trap them behind checkpoints, you put them under siege, you experiment with your latest weapons on them.
You accuse them of their own victimization.
You humiliate them.
You pass these constant laws that is downgrading their status in society.
You deprive them of every political rights, needless to say, of their freedom to move, to go to hospitals, to get educated, to get married.
Because really there is one of the 65 laws we were talking about.
It's a law that prohibits Palestinians from within Israel to marry Palestinians in the West Bank in the sense that they don't give you a residence.
So if I am in Ramallah, I fell in love and married a girl in Galilee or in Nazareth, I cannot move there with her.
Therefore she could move perhaps somewhere else and lose her residence, but she would have to leave the country.
So these are the kind of laws you push people, you trap people, you are destroying an entire nation and you are saying, still you are responsible for my security.
And I feel unsafe because of you, Hanan Ashrawi, the great Palestinian intellectual and politician said once that we are the only country in history that is responsible for the safety and security of our own colonizer.
It just doesn't make sense.
Now I want to mention this again, and I know I mentioned this in a previous interview, but I really want people to go and look at the film Killing Gaza by Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen, two nice Jewish boys who went to Gaza during the slaughter in 2014.
And the film is just testimonials, it's just Palestinians explaining and none of them say a single negative thing about Jews anywhere.
They sound just like any Texan or any Californian or any American would sound if someone came and kicked them off their land and they see this dirt, this dirt, this is my land, this belongs to me, that house that you're living in, that's my grandma's house, I want it back.
It's not anti-Semitism.
It's pure just humanity.
That's all it is.
That's right.
And yes, I encourage people to watch that particular movie.
But also what I like about that film is its ability to really kind of transcends all these political argumentations and just listen to people, talk to people, ordinary people, because they are the best conveyors of their own reality.
Right.
So now let me ask you one more thing here, and I'm sorry, we're a little bit short on time.
But Norman Finkelstein, who is certainly an ally of the Palestinians, who wants a two-state solution very bad, his argument is that, listen, international law says that the Israeli state, such as it is, has a right to be how it is.
And international law also has ruled, the different global courts, whichever they're called, have ruled that they have to get out of the West Bank and Gaza and let the Palestinians have their independent state.
So if international law is being invoked in saying the Israelis are breaking it the way that they're persecuting the people of Palestine, then if that's the standard, then the standard should also be, and the Palestinians should have to recognize that international law says that you're going to have to settle for your 22% of historic Palestine.
So what do you say to that?
I think Norman is speaking of a past reality that doesn't exist anymore.
And I think as intellectuals, we have to be lucid enough with our thinking that we have to adjust our thinking based on the changing, rapidly changing reality.
The fact is, the term Israeli occupation, and I did not know that until recently, is actually not supposed to be an insult, or the term Israeli occupation is an international term.
It's international law term that is there to govern the relationship between the occupied and the occupier.
It is something that was in the Hague regulations and the Geneva conventions and all of this.
It was a temporary process, something that should not be lasting more than three to five years, not 50 years.
So we are talking about references to a reality that has already been changed and overwhelmed by circumstances out of everybody's control.
And here we are, all coexisting, or rather existing, in this piece of land.
There are half a million Jewish settlers living and breeding and building in our land, taking more than half of our water in the West Bank.
There are millions of our people living in Israel itself, 2 million, 1.8 million Palestinian Arabs living in so-called Israel proper, you see.
So you have this reality that is so very involved.
It's not the kind of thing where you can come and draw a line and say, here's a Palestinian state and here's an...
It's like you're trying to repeat what happened in India in 1947, where this is major ethnic cleansing of various ethnic groups from India to Pakistan, Pakistan to India, and so forth and so on.
This is not a reality that anybody should be championing, not Norman or anybody else.
Yes, international law had certain vision and view of how to fix things, and it started with the division of Palestine over 70 years ago.
None of this actualized.
And a whole new reality, a host of new factors, it changed the reality demographically, politically, physically on the ground.
Are we still going to hold on ideas and illusions that were never implemented or even meant to be implemented in the first place, or shouldn't we try to imagine a future that is possible and doable in which both people, both nations can coexist within the same piece of land and find a political formulation, a legal formulation that could make this happen?
Here's a novel idea, democracy, a country for all of its citizens and so forth.
So we are championing one state simply because it's the only just and fair and possible solution Those who would say one state is not possible, they need to understand that we are already there.
The only difference is that we are governed by two different sets of laws.
When they discriminate against the Arabs in favor of the Jewish majority, we need to change the papers.
We need to rewrite the ink on the papers in order for us to live as equal in that land.
I think that's possible.
All right, you guys, that's Ramzi Baroud.
He is the editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
That's at PalestineChronicle.com.
He writes at RamziBaroud.net and at Antiwar.com.
And he's the author of My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, Gaza's Untold Story, and the latest is The Last Earth, a Palestinian Story.
Thank you so much for your time again on the show, Ramzi.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
All right, Shaul, and that's it for Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Find my full interview archive at ScottHorton.org and follow me on Twitter at ScottHortonShow.
See you next week.
