The Scott Horton Show is brought to you by books, particularly Kesslin Runs, a new dystopian novel about the very near future by the great Charles Featherstone.
Kesslin Runs.
Also, No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussein Badakchani and The War State by Mike Swanson about the rise of the military industrial complex in America after World War II.
He also gives great investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com.
When you follow his advice, you'll want to get some precious metals, gold and silver and etc. from Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
That's at rrbi.co.
Also, check out Zencash at zencash.com or zensystem.io.
It's a great digital currency, but it's also a messaging app and a document transfer app and all kinds of great stuff, too.
Learn all about it at zencash.com.
Then, there's Tom Wood's Liberty Classroom.
If you sign up from the link on my page at scotthorton.org, I'll get a little bit of a kickback there.
Check this out.
Speaking of scotthorton.org, if you'd like expanddesigns.com to build you a new 2018 model website, go to expanddesigns.com.
You'll save $500.
Also, don't forget the bumpersticker.com.
Stickers for your band or your business at very reasonable prices.
High quality stuff there.
It used to be my company back when the bumpersticker.com.
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.
But we ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We'd 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 the great Sheldon Richman, my partner at the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org and regular contributor also at antiwar.com.
The latest is called A Glimmer of Hope in Bleak Palestine.
Welcome back to the show, Sheldon.
How you doing, man?
Doing fine, Scott.
Always glad to be with you.
Very happy to have you here.
And listen, before we get too far into the start of this, I don't have any other guests on the subject today, but I got to mention that the Israelis have been bombing the hell out of the Gaza Strip.
Again, I just saw a tweet where in the Hebrew version of Haaretz, they're outright admitting that they're targeting civilians in order to pressure them politically speaking against Hamas.
And the translation by Tamara Nasser on Twitter is, after the rocket was fired at Bershiva, the IDF began to attack civilian targets, including population centers, with the goal of causing the residents to understand the price of escalation and placing Hamas in a problematic situation.
That's a direct quote from Haaretz, which is basically the New York Times of Israel there.
Now stated policy of punishing civilians, including they killed a woman who was nine months pregnant and her little girl last night, her I think 18 month old little daughter.
That's the situation that we're talking about and the perpetual collective punishment and oppression of the people of Palestine.
80% of the population of Gaza are refugees from the ethnic cleansing campaigns of 48 and 67, and their children and grandchildren.
And in fact, right around at least half or some say even a majority of the population of the Gaza Strip are actually minors.
So they couldn't possibly be responsible for electing Hamas back in 2006 when Connolly or I set them up to do so, et cetera.
So anyway, I don't know.
I don't have another opportunity to cover that on the show today.
And since we're talking about Israel-Palestine, I wanted to start with that and bring that up that this is not some academic exercise.
These people basically have the rights of chattel slaves, although the Israelis don't work them like slaves.
They want them to just disappear.
But they have no rights, no civil legal protections whatsoever.
No, they're just prisoners.
So much for the claim by the now officially declared state of the Jewish people that Israel is superior to its neighbors or to the Palestinian groups because they never target civilians.
They always claim that.
So much for that.
And as Avigdor Lieberman, now the defense, who's been a defense minister for a while in the government, says there are no noncombatants or innocent people in Gaza.
He's declared that.
And we have lots of other similar statements.
We have the Minister of Justice, what's her name, Shaked, saying they really ought to kill all the pregnant women because they just give birth to snakes.
So how much do we need to know?
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
So a little bit of reality now.
You got a glimmer of hope for me.
Let's hear it.
Yeah, I agree.
It's a tough I have a tough sell.
And in light of the news you just repeated, it's sort of even bleaker than it's been in in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, not to mention the Palestinians who are technically citizens in within Israel itself.
But the the glimmer of hope I tried to point out was that in the in the person of one, Khaled al-Sabawi, he's a 35 year old child or man now, son, I should say, of refugees from 1948 from the Nakba.
They lived in a well, he wasn't born yet.
His father was still a child.
And grandmother lived in Salama, a village east of Jaffa in Israel, in the newly declared Israel, 1948.
They were driven from their homes and driven into Gaza where they were refugees.
And while in Gaza in 1956, Israel invaded Gaza so much for the claim that Israel didn't bother Gaza before Hamas, which doesn't even come into existence till the 80s.
But in 1956, Israel, England, Britain and France invaded Egypt.
And part of that was Israel's sending ground forces into into Gaza, where they searched and ransacked homes of Palestinians who were who had taken refuge there after being driven out of their villages in other parts of Israel.
And they confiscated after doing a search of the house, they confiscated a piece of paper, which was the deed to the home and 50 acre farm that the Sabawi family owned in in that village in Israel.
Apparently, that's what they were looking for.
Because as Sabawi tells the story in a very good TED talk, which I linked to in my piece, when they found this file, this file folder with the paper underneath, under a cushion in a couch on a couch, they immediately left.
That's apparently that's what they were looking for.
So these people lost their home.
Eventually, Sabawi's father, Mohammed al-Sabawi, he grew up and they left Gaza on their way to Canada.
Now, Khaled al-Sabawi was born in Kuwait, I guess before the family then moved to Canada, where his parents could could raise their kids.
And his father, after a while moved back to Gaza to start one of the most successful insurance companies, sorry, moved to the West Bank, where he set up a very successful insurance company, obviously catering to Palestinians who were living there.
And his father had gotten a doctorate at a university and so was a very educated man.
Himself got in trouble with the Palestinian Authority for criticizing and was detained later on.
Meanwhile, his son Khaled went to, Canadian, of course, went to the university at this point, went to the University of Waterloo, got advanced degrees, studied computer science.
But when he got out, he decided his eye was attracted to something else, namely geothermal energy.
And he became an expert in that.
And then he returned to the West Bank and set up two companies.
One as a geothermal company, because he wanted to provide low-cost energy to the people in those in the occupied territories.
And he also set up, and this was really the subject of my article, he set up a company, these are for-profit companies, called Tabo, T-A-B-O, which is the Arabic word for title deed, in other words, land deed.
And what he set out to do was to, in order to keep the Israelis from building settlements on land that is supposedly under home rules, to some extent, by the Palestinians under the Oslo Accords, namely Area A and B, Areas A and B in the West Bank, he thought if we could get those land, those parcels, those farms, those homes registered officially, then it would be tougher for Israel to build settlements, because Israel was claiming anything that wasn't registered or occupied, or even if it was occupied, they drove people out.
But certainly if it wasn't registered, they just sort of went in and said, we claim this land in the name of the Jewish people, this belongs to the Jewish people.
And there was almost no barrier to them building settlements, which they've done in Area C, which is the lion's share of the West Bank and also East Jerusalem.
So he set out on this Herculean task to find who the last owners of these abandoned lands were, or at least the heirs of those owners, get their consent, take people out with GPS technology to plot the land, to mark the boundaries.
And then when the owners didn't want the land to live on, they'd emigrated or settled somewhere else, arranged for the sale of land to people, Palestinians who did want to buy the land.
And they, as a result, have made quite a few parcels available now at a much lower cost because the land is very expensive.
It's like around the cities, the larger towns in the West Bank, it could be a million dollars for a quarter acre.
And so he's accomplished this despite barriers from not only from Israel, and there were barriers from Israel, but also from the Palestinian Authority, which again was just, you know, Palestinian Authority is a security subcontractor for Israel set up under the Oslo Accords, meaning Israel didn't like the bad press and the expense of having to do the dirty work of controlling intifadas and other forms of resistance to its occupation.
So they cut a deal with Yasser Arafat, who's since died and been replaced by Mahmoud Abbas, of course.
And his cronies, which can number like 100,000 people or more, made VIPs out of them to various extents, gave them money and then said, okay, here's what you do.
You police the Palestinians and keep them from complaining and uprising against the occupation.
And that's what's happened ever since.
That was 20, you know, more than 20 years ago.
The 90s is when the Oslo Accords come in.
And so he actually was getting, Sabawi was actually getting hampered and impeded by, he says, individuals.
He doesn't want to blame everybody in the Palestine Authority, but he says individuals were corrupt and they threw obstacles in the way and actually blocked and shut down at one point the whole program that was registering Palestinian land and therefore legitimizing, in the eyes of the law, Palestinian ownership of property.
He went to the International Court of Justice and actually won a decision against those Palestinian authorities.
So he's gone ahead and he's at work on this as we speak, and getting land into the hands of Palestinians and it's registered, you know, so they have at least some protection against it being taken in order for Israel to build Jewish only settlements.
Well, I think it's really important that you and, well, that he and now you are emphasizing about the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and how irrelevant that is.
I mean, not in terms of the process, obviously it makes an extra row for him to hoe, but how that really has nothing to do with it.
And you could hear, you know, apologists for Israel say, oh, well, you know, the PA sells them out and doesn't do this and that.
So it's all their fault in the same way that you hear them say, well, how come the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Jordan don't help them and do something, you know, which is basically just changing the subject, right?
It's like blaming African chiefs for slavery, but not the people who bought the slaves from them, you know, this kind of thing.
You hear these kinds of excuses.
And yet back to your previous article, Palestinians are individual human beings.
It doesn't matter what horrible, corrupt, you know, pseudo government this Palestinian Authority, it's certainly not a government of a state.
They don't have independence in any way there.
It was created, as you say, by, you know, under the Oslo Accords and, you know, regular, you know, experts on this subject from the Palestinian point of view, like Ramzi Baroud are, you know, relentlessly critical of the Palestinian Authority and talk exactly about just how corrupt they are and how they do not represent.
Abbas hasn't stood for election.
His term has expired years and years and years ago.
There's no even semblance of a pretension of popular sovereignty, if you even believe in such a thing at all, in the West Bank.
So, you know, people might want to hide behind that and say, well, you know, the PA isn't doing the right thing or this or that.
So therefore, the Israelis remain blameless.
And yet, the real point is here, this guy, Sabawi recognizes this and is going on ahead anyway.
Well, that's right.
And Baroud calls the PA, the Palestinian Authority, a quizzling administration.
Don't forget, all sort of external matters are controlled by Israel, even in these two areas that have some degree of self-rule.
But the self-rule, it's not really self-rule, that's really a misleading phrase, because it's really ruled by Israel's subcontractor.
That's right.
In other words, the PA are basically trustees in this Israeli-run prison where the Palestinians live.
They get money from the West, from Europe, the United States, from Israel, the PA does.
And they have, oh, see, the second Oslo Accords, you know, filled in some details.
And what, according to Gideon Levy, the great journalist and columnist for Haaretz, points out, the second accord under Oslo was pretty much, you know, little more than setting up a VIP program for Abbas's people.
Because there's different, there's like three or four tiers of VIPs within his, you know, within his appointees, the people that, you know, the cronies who, quote, run the administration.
And VIP, what VIP means is, depending on your level of VIP, you have different requirements for travel, like going into Israel, or maybe even getting to Gaza, than regular Palestinians have.
So it's just a privileged system.
It has nothing to do with the welfare of the Palestinian people.
It had to do with the welfare of the politicians, basically.
And you're right, you say about the Arab leaders historically, you know, they've exploited opportunistically the Palestinians.
They seem to champion them when that was to the interest of the rulers, like King Hussein and King Hussein's son, El Jordan, King Abdullah.
In fact, if you go back to 47, 48, the King of Jordan colluded, and I use that term deliberately, and there's a book with that in the title, colluded with the new Israeli government, or the soon-to-be Israeli government, because it hadn't yet declared independence, to make sure the Palestinians didn't get a state.
The Israeli leaders, led by Golda Meir, said to the King of Jordan, look, you take the West Bank, because that was supposed to be an independent Palestinian state under the UN recommendation.
By the way, it was only a recommendation.
It was not an act by the UN.
But they said, look, you take that, and we get the rest.
And Gaza, they left to Egypt, although I don't think there was a formal agreement, but until 67, Egypt administered Gaza.
So it was a deal.
It was a deal between the King of Jordan, then at that point called Transjordan, until 67, or I guess until 48.
So it was a deal to deprive the Palestinians of their own separate state, even under the very bad UN recommendation, which gave over half the land to the Israelis, and the best land to the Israelis.
And then the Israelis used that, of course, as a license to drive as many Palestinians as they could out of, well, it ended up being out of 78% of all of Palestine.
So even if Jordan hadn't done what it did, the Palestinians would have only ended up with 22% of Palestine.
Or under the partition, they were supposed to get, what, like 44%.
Even there, they were getting less than half.
But they ended up only with half of the original partition recommendation.
So they've been screwed royally by all sides.
And yeah, the Arab leaders, and I agree with you completely.
You can't say, well, the Arab leaders mistreated the Palestinians.
It's true.
Jordan slaughtered them at one point.
Syria has not been nice to them.
Nobody's been nice to them.
But how does that in any way justify what Israel did?
I mean, it can't.
The Palestinians are innocent victims in all this.
And the fact that they're screwed by people who are Arabs doesn't give Israel any license at all.
That's all at scotthorton.org slash donate.
And also anybody donating $5 or more per month there.
If you already are, or if you sign up now, you'll get keys to that new Reddit group as well.
Already got about 50 people in there and it's turning out pretty good.
Again, that's reddit.com slash Scott Horton show.
If you're already donating or you're a new donor, just email me scott at scotthorton.org and I'll get you the keys there.
And hey, do me a favor.
Give me a good review on iTunes or Stitcher, or if you liked the book on amazon.com and the audio book is also on iTunes and I sure would appreciate that.
And listen, if you want to submit articles to the Libertarian Institute, please do.
And they don't have to be about foreign policy.
My email address is scott at scotthorton.org.
Well, and of course, you know, and we brought this up before, but it's really worth watching if people haven't seen it, the leaked footage from Israeli settlers where Benjamin Netanyahu was apparently accidentally recorded mocking Bill Clinton and how he completely screwed Bill right in the face and got whatever he wanted out of him.
And the big point is, well, the famous quote, if people want to find it, is America is easily moved.
80% of them support us.
It's absurd, which boy, you got that right.
But then what he's really talking about is, yeah, so then I told Bill Clinton, well, don't worry, you know, we just need to keep this sovereignty over Area C, the security zone, but they can have the rest of it and it'll be perfectly fine.
And then yuck, yuck, yuck, Area C is two thirds of the West Bank or more.
And so, you know, I basically lied to Bill about that and he went along with it.
And then at the end of the day, and then that was where the settler says, well, geez, if you really use and abuse the president of the USA so badly, might that not end up backfiring on us?
And that's where he laughs and mocks the American people for being so stupid as to continue to support Israel.
Yeah.
And let's be clear about this Area C. We've talked about this before, but I think it needs to be emphasized because it's easy to sort of visualize this incorrectly.
These three areas in the West Bank now, we're only talking about West Bank, we're not talking about East Jerusalem, which is like, you know, next door, it's actually part of the West Bank, but think about it.
I mean, it's, you know, there aren't natural lines there.
It was all what was regarded as Palestine.
But under Oslo, these three areas were created A, B and C. And, you know, if you don't know anything, but you just hear this, you may think, okay, it's like three blocks, right, stacked on top of each other.
North, you got A, in the middle, you got B, the bottom, you got C. Well, C, as you point out, is the lion's share of the West Bank.
It's over 60%.
That's where right now the settlements are.
But it's not a self-contained like block on the southern end of the West Bank.
Anybody can pull up a map of this on the internet very easily.
It's all over the West Bank, surrounding the towns, the larger towns of the Palestinians and other, you know, farmland.
You know, it encircles.
So it pervades.
Area C pervades all of the West Bank.
And that is completely under the control, internally and externally, by the Israeli military.
A and B, like I say, have different degrees of so-called self-rule, but obviously, it's not democratic, like you said.
But they're cut off from each other.
You know, it's like an archipelago.
That's why people say today, if you, there's a problem with setting up two states, because it's, there's no way the Palestinians could have a viable state.
They have this archipelago of areas in A and B, plus Gaza, which is the other side of the country, has that.
How do you have a viable state when it's not even contiguous?
Right.
So, well, in fact, there's even a newer settlement that's gone up just in the last couple of years that finally completes the separation of East Jerusalem from the West Bank, where the corridor itself is now shut down.
Right.
And East Jerusalem has formally been annexed.
The West Bank has not been formally annexed.
But as many people point out, Norman Fickelstein in particular, you know, when you've occupied territory that you acquired in war for 50 years, that's not an occupation anymore.
That's a de facto annexation.
Occupation is typically temporary, right?
Two countries go to war, one seizes some territory from the other, and then the war ends with a settlement.
And under international law, the territory occupied is supposed to go back to where it came from.
That's the typical way.
And you're not allowed to hold territory acquired by war, whether it's a defensive war, by the way, an offensive war.
International law doesn't make a distinction.
You're supposed to settle the differences and give the land back.
You know, the UN passed a resolution after 1967 saying, okay, you know, you need to do a land for peace deal now.
Give the land back in return for, you know, peace guarantees by the Palestinians.
But Israel never intended to give.
And we could just see that in their conduct and things they've said over 50 years.
They never intended to give all of it back.
Maybe they were willing to give some of the West Bank or leave it to the Palestinians.
But they were always planning to control it.
And as years have gone on, of course, the religious element of Israel, which was a minority element, at least in the earlier days, has been emboldened now.
And they, you know, they claim that's all holy land.
It's Samaria and Judah, Judea.
They don't call it the West Bank.
They regard it as part of the holy land, you know, the Eretz Israel.
And don't want to see any of it go back.
And that's where we are today.
And in the last election, Netanyahu said, hey, just forget all this two-state stuff.
It's from the river to the sea.
We'll be under the control of Israel from now on.
So it is absolute annexation and even in name, really.
We should point out, too, that Israel is claiming the Jordan River Valley.
And so that puts Israeli forces between, you know, the Jordan River and Jordan's on the country of Jordan, kingdom of Jordan's on the other side.
And, you know, the places where the Palestinians live.
There's now Israel is in between those.
So it's on both sides plus all through.
It's all over the West Bank.
Hey, but I want to get back to Khalid Al Shabawi in just a second, but I wanted to mention, I don't know if you saw this, but Ahed Tamimi's mother complained actually about her being singled out for all this attention and said, you know, it's because she's got whiter skin and blue eyes and uncovered hair, and that it's basically a sign of racism or racial prejudice that she's even getting all this attention.
People are writing letters and sending messages saying, wow, she really reminds me of my daughter and this kind of thing.
And Ahed Tamimi's mom is complaining and saying, yeah, but you know, what about the rest of these kids too, man, being persecuted in this same kind of way.
And so I thought that that was nice because I think, you know, probably a lot of critics, and I've seen critics saying, oh yeah, well, you know, people only care about her because she's whiter or whatever.
And I think of course that's true to a degree.
And yet at the same time, hey, if that's what it takes to be a symbol that Americans, particularly since it's the U.S. government that underwrites every bit of this on the part of the Israelis and helping them get away with this persecution that, you know, maybe we could take it and then continue to make that same example.
I mean, I never would recommend putting the lightest skins Palestinians first, but I have for years said that, you know, the more Western their dress, the better it is, right?
They need DC shoes, logos on their shirts and they need Levi's jeans and they need, the more they look like Americans in that sense and, and separate themselves from a stereotype of like some Saudi chic in a robe or this kind of thing, that, that is what it will take to humanize them in the eyes of the American people.
And so, you know, it's, it's good that I guess I like the fact that the Palestinian side of the story recognizes that that's not fair.
Even her own mother says, you know, you caring about her just because of how white she looks is unfair to the rest of the people of Palestine.
At the same time, you know, that's why the Israelis are terrified of her.
That's why they locked her in prison for eight months is because, and, and even Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador said that the whole Tamimi family are all a bunch of crisis actors.
And the whole thing is that they don't even exist.
They're fake.
Don't even believe it's all Pollywood and this kind of thing, because they're terrified that the American majority would say, well, wait, with skin that white and eyes that blue and hair that blonde, maybe she is, I don't know, half a human being deserving of some legal protections for her natural rights, the way we would conceive them.
And so, you know, I don't know exactly what you think about that, you know, as far as, you know, Tamimi serving as this poster child for, for Palestinian rights.
Um, but it seems at least it's important, right.
And she's out of prison now and she's, you know, bravely continuing to speak out against the persecution of all Palestinians.
So I don't know.
What do you think of that situation?
Well, you, you make a good point.
And I, I, I accept your point about this kind of seeing it both sides from both sides.
Uh, uh, you're right.
Uh, uh, this, this young, uh, well, she's a girl actually.
She, I guess she doesn't count as a woman.
She's under 18.
Isn't she?
Uh, right.
Yes.
She just turned 17 in jail.
My gosh, you could, you could mistake her for an American.
It's exactly right.
And so I can see both sides of it.
It might've gotten some Americans attention who otherwise wouldn't have cared.
Uh, uh, but, but the mother of course also makes a very important point.
We do need to break through that and, and teach Americans that Palestinians are people, uh, and, uh, and individual human beings with rights, just like, uh, they're, I mean, this has been a problem for Palestinian leadership right along and, and maybe it's unfair to put it that way that, you know, the Israeli spokespeople, and this isn't true of all of them, but certainly the, the most, most of the Israeli spokes people that Americans have seen from the beginning and certainly, uh, beginning in 67, when, when things really break, you know, into the, uh, American consciousness, you know, you saw people who were, uh, men and women who were many of them from America, born in America.
Golda Meir was born in America.
Uh, well, I know she was actually born in America.
She was raised in Milwaukee, lived in Milwaukee, was an adult, was a school teacher in Milwaukee, spoke perfect English.
Abba Eben, who was the foreign minister, who's, who's all over TV during the 67 war before the UN and, uh, and speaking for, on behalf of the Israeli government, spoke with an English accent, Americans could relate.
Uh, they wore suit and ties and Western clothing.
Uh, Yasser Arafat, on the other hand, you know, always wore, uh, a military jacket and, uh, cause he wanted to have the image of a, of a, of the guerrilla, right?
The guerrilla fighter.
Uh, and he wore the keffiyeh, the, the checkered, uh, which has become the symbol really of the, of the Palestinian struggle, but he always wore it over his head and wrapped around his, his neck.
And, um, you know, on the one hand, he can see his point.
He's wants to say, this is a liberation movement, which it was, but it wasn't the best PR move.
And, you know, I don't claim to be any kind of authority on PR moves by the Palestinians, but, but, um, those are the types of people of Palestinians who got on TV.
When Americans put Palestinians on TV, you don't see them on TV much anyway, but when you do, it's usually someone with a heavy accent.
Once in a while, Hanan Ashrawi, of course, who speaks beautiful English and is a great spokesperson, a great spokeswoman, but often it's somebody who's difficult to understand, uh, because, uh, you know, the, they don't speak English a lot.
They, maybe they weren't educated in the West.
So it has worked against the Palestinian struggle.
You know, even when Arafat quoted Thomas Jefferson in the declaration of independence and his UN speech in 1974, you know, that didn't, that didn't make any impact because of how he was dressed.
And, you know, he had a heavy accent.
It was hard to understand.
Uh, and so that, yeah, that has definitely worked to the disadvantage of Palestinians, uh, whether things would have gone differently.
I mean, don't forget the, the Israel lobby and the, just the sympathy to Israel and the plight of Jews in Europe, uh, you know, did a lot to create sympathy for the state of Israel.
And so a lot of Americans, not just American Jews, but most Americans didn't even want to hear the other side.
They just thought, no, there, there, there can't be another side.
Uh, the Israelis must be right about this.
And, uh, and so I don't know that the Palestinians would have had a better chance before the American public, even if they had done everything, uh, you know, in the PR, in a PR way that we're kind of suggesting here, but, uh, no, the, the mother makes a great point, but like you said, maybe it did wake a few people up.
Right.
Yeah.
And for those, you know, Hey, there are many more hundreds, more Palestinian children, minors in Israeli military prison, where just like the stories of the totalitarian Soviet union and Nazi Germany, the Gestapo come in the middle of the night, like the boogeyman and snatch these children out of their beds like monsters, and then try them, try them with ironic quotes in a Guantanamo ridiculous star chamber, uh, situation in a military trial where the whole thing is conducted in Hebrew.
And then these children, you know, I was just reading a thing the other day.
Um, in fact, it's a tweet thread before I got kicked off of Twitter temporarily there.
Um, there was this thread that I was retweeting of this guy, uh, posting the testimonials of these children and how, you know, they're, uh, the way that they're treated and held in solitary and bound to a chair and interrogated for hours and hours and hours.
Oh, and the chair it's, and this may be the Palestinian chair, quote unquote, from, uh, from Abu Ghraib prison that the Americans were, um, you know, copying from the Israelis where it's tilted down in front.
And so then there's this constant strain on their arms, tied behind their back to the chair and all this kind of thing.
It's torture.
If any, um, well, I guess it would be legal for American cops to do this, but if any American civilian did this to another American civilian, they'd go to prison for, uh, the way the Israelis treat these children.
And it is, it's, it's the definite, I mean, if it's not totalitarianism, what else is?
There's the way that these people are forced to live.
And these methods go back to what the British used against the Palestinians in the, in the, in the thirties, when they were, uh, re resisting, uh, British imperial rule.
Cause Britain was, uh, pretty much, you know, got the, uh, the Zionist program going with the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
But then, uh, you know, they were, uh, they were bringing in European Jews to, uh, to help fulfill the, uh, the Zionist program, even though the Brits might not have called it a state, uh, they, they might've called it a Jewish homeland, uh, the, the planners and the, uh, like Ben-Gurion and the others that are actually, uh, you know, uh, piloted the Zionist program, they had a state in mind.
So they knew what they were doing and they got a helping hand from, from Britain, even if late in the game, Britain began to restrict the immigration because things were getting so out of hand for the British, uh, troops who had to do the policing duty.
But they used the same kind of rules.
They would break into houses, they would destroy homes, they would, uh, you know, grab people and detain them without charge.
And Israel just picked up on that when the Brits left and the Brits did not treat the Israel, the, the, well, they were pre-Israelis at that point in 47 or 48.
They didn't treat the British, the Israelis the same way, the Jews the same way.
They didn't confiscate guns the way they did from, uh, from the, uh, Palestinians.
Uh, so the Israel just sort of picked up where the British left off, which, you know, helps to explain why there's always been this resentment and resistance to, to Israeli rule.
They just saw it as, you know, one imperial, Western imperial power handing off the baton to the next one, which is what was, I mean, the, the, the early Zionist appeal to the imperial power saying, let us take over Palestine.
We'll be the forward post for civilization and for your empires, you know, against these so-called savages, that's what they call them, savages, uh, meaning the, uh, Arabs.
So why wouldn't the Palestinians see it as simply a continuation?
Of course it was.
The, the, the idea that this is somehow anti-Semit, anti-Semitism is, is to call it that, it's just to betray a complete ignorance of history, to say, oh, the Arabs, the Palestinians just hate Jews.
They didn't hate Jews before the Zionist project.
There were Jews living there for a very long time in that, in that area.
And of course, as we've talked about, we talked about the thing last time, two weeks ago, the, uh, the Palestinians descend from all the populations that have been in Palestine, uh, and Judah from, you know, the, the biblical times from way before, uh, you know, the birth, the birth of Jesus, we're going to use that calendar, uh, their descendants from those people, they never got emptied out.
They mixed, mixed as new people came in and conquered.
Of course, there was lots of, uh, uh, intermarriage and, and mixing and, uh, and children being born.
So, uh, Palestinians today are not sort of pure blood, uh, of anybody, but who is, I mean, the Americans aren't pure blood either.
Uh, but there, but in a way it's misleading to call them Arabs because they were already there when the Arabs came from the Arabian desert in the seventh century.
It reminds me of when Helen Thomas was on the, the Joy Behar show on CNN.
And she was saying, well, listen, you know, this is where we're from and this and that.
And, and the Israelis didn't have the right to do what they did and expel all these people.
And Joey Behar says, but that's antisemitism.
And Helen Thomas says, no, dear.
See, I'm a Semite.
You're not a Semite.
Your people are from Poland.
Okay.
Let me explain how this works.
I'm Lebanese.
And Joey Behar is just like, huh?
I don't understand.
Yeah.
You don't understand.
Exactly.
And by the way, I want, uh, people really should go and look at this, um, this thread.
It's the, the guy on Twitter, his handle is a man in the sun.
And it's from August the third.
He has this thread where he talks about the treatment of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli military.
And it's absolutely sickening.
It's just sickening.
And I'm sorry.
So now let's get back real quick to, um, to this great piece because, uh, the big question and we're over time, but I don't care.
Um, the big question is what difference is this making?
Is it going to make, can it make here, uh, securing individual property deeds for these people who live in a lawless situation?
Well, uh, Sabawi believes, and you can, again, I refer you to his Ted talk on this.
He's done two Ted talks.
So make sure you're watching the right one.
The other one is about the, his geothermal, geothermal energy.
Uh, but the one about the Tabo program, uh, points out that, uh, it would be an obstacle.
It would be much easier if the lands unregistered, it's much easier if Israel decides to say, screw Oslo, Oslo, we want to build settlements in A and B, to areas A and B. Uh, Sabawi is, is, uh, convinced that this would be a pretty formidable obstacle.
Now, you know, who knows?
Israel has not let such obstacles stop, uh, stop them, stop it before.
And so, uh, it may not work out the way he thinks, but he feels it's the best deal going.
And what I think is interesting, interesting, so interesting about him for libertarians, especially, is that here he is fighting for individual property.
Now, I like to point out that, uh, the, the, the, uh, the case against Israel that's been made by people over the years, and a lot, a lot of those have been, been, uh, what we think of as left-wingers, right?
People who aren't generally friendly to individual property rights, but their, their case for the Palestinians has always implicitly been pro-property rights, because, you know, they would say Palestinians were driven from their homes, and not just homes in the sense of homeland, from their houses, from their land.
And a lot of times people have pointed out the refugees or their children still carry keys to those homes.
Now, those homes, uh, had their locks changed, or in a lot of cases just knocked down because the whole, whole villages, 400, 500 villages, were just paved over and started up again.
But people still carry the keys as a symbol.
This was my father's home, or my grandfather's home.
That's a property right, that's a libertarian appeal.
So here is Sabawi, and I don't know what he knows about libertarianism, it's just common sense.
He says this land needs to be registered to reflect the, the truth, that these were owned by in, these parcels were owned by individuals who lost them through an act of injustice.
So he wants to reestablish it.
The other thing he does, which is very, I think, very hopeful, and, and it's, it's discussed in my piece, he's, he's, he attacks donor aid, in other words, outside just donations from NGOs and governments.
And this is a case that libertarians have been making for a long, long time.
The great economist P.T. Bauer, Peter Bauer, great free market economist who died a long time ago now, was all, was a group, was the, you know, best critic we've ever had of foreign aid, how corrupting it is.
All it does is empower leaders.
It doesn't empower people.
It doesn't lead to real economic growth.
In fact, it produces bubbles.
It gives the illusion of economic growth, because some people say, hey, look, look around Ramallah, it's booming.
And he, and Sabawi says, it's just donor aid.
It's not sustainable.
If the aid weren't there, it wouldn't happen.
They have no real economy, because Israel won't permit it.
So aid is corrupting.
And so he's against it.
He wants enterprise, he's an entrepreneur after all.
So he wants property rights, entrepreneurship.
I mean, that's sounds like he's talking about free markets.
I haven't seen him use the phrase, but that's what he's talking about.
And that should, that should excite libertarians, because finally, we have at least an emerging libertarian leader.
He's only 35, he's a very young and attractive guy.
Watch this talk.
He's funny, and yet he's hard hitting on the occupation and then the corruption of the PA.
But here he is talking about basically individualism, which doesn't have, you know, which in no way conflicts with the idea of Palestinian solidarity.
We talked about this two weeks ago, right?
An individual can be fully immersed in a community and like his community, love his community, have some, you know, kindred feeling toward it, but still be an individual.
There's no conflict there.
Some libertarians, I think, get that wrong.
But he seems to see it.
And I've gotten to make contact with him sort of indirectly over social media, but I would really love to have a conversation with the guy.
Right.
And, you know, I was just reading and, you know, me as an economist, I'm really a great anti-war guy.
But I was reading this great interview with Guido Holtzmann by Jeff Deist in the New Austrian.
And he was talking about, you know, the real difference between libertarianism and old liberalism.
And that is basically Ludwig von Mises and how he put property as absolutely central.
And that even, you know, in old style liberalism, property is important, but there's all these other things and this and that.
And Mises said, no, no, no.
Everything comes down to individuals own themselves.
And then they own that which they justly acquire.
And then every other thing flows from there.
And anything that's in violation of the rights of property is a violation of human rights.
And that that is the core.
That is the key.
That's why us libertarians are right about everything is because we have our first premise.
Correct.
Well, that's right.
I mean, just think about it for a second.
People on the left who don't like property are uncomfortable with the idea of property and land or anything else.
I guess they allow for property rights and toothbrushes and stuff like that, hairbrushes.
But land seems to be their big problem.
But they also support, they also say they support autonomy and being able to chart your own course in life.
Well, how can you divorce those two things?
Think about think about a person trying to chart his own course in life, but he can't through trade or through homesteading of land that no one is using and hasn't used for a very long time or never used.
How can you chart your own course if you're barred from acquiring, you know, a home and a parcel?
You can't do it.
We need things.
We're not ghosts.
This is the Mises point.
We're not disembodied spirits.
We're material.
We live in a material world.
We need to use things if we're going to live and prosper.
And so that's where property rights come from.
And sure, it's exclusive.
It's exclusionary in the sense that if someone owns a house, they can say who comes in and who doesn't come in.
That's certainly true.
But that doesn't lead to a society of exclusion because people are drawn to trade.
We talked about this even longer ago because I did an article about the freedom of association being a liberal value.
The fight has always been for greater association, not the right to exclude, although that's implied, but that wasn't the main thrust.
It's not the right to not associate with people.
It's the right to associate with anyone I damn well please, whether it's by hiring them or working with them or buying from them or selling to them or renting to them.
I don't see I have autonomy and self-determination—I stress that term—without property rights.
And Sabawe seems to see that.
That's great.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for coming back on the show, Sheldon.
It's great as always.
I always love it and look forward to the next one.
All right.
Appreciate it.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
You guys, that is The Great Sheldon Richman.
You can find this piece at the Libertarian Institute and also at antiwar.com.
A Glimmer of Hope in Bleak Palestine, all about the great work of Khaled al-Sabawi.
And also check out Sheldon's latest book.
He's got a newer one coming out, but this one is America's Counter-Revolution, The Constitution Revisited.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
