Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to 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 had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they 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, introducing Yossi Gurvitz.
He is a journalist and a blogger who writes regularly for Mondoweiss.net.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Fine, thank you.
How are you?
I'm doing really good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show today.
So, well, what a bunch of interesting election results over there in Israel.
The piece at Mondoweiss.net is called The Crumbled Throne.
That is the throne of King Bibi, as they call him, Benjamin Netanyahu.
But it's still too close to call.
Avigdor Lieberman is the kingmaker and nobody knows what he's decided yet.
The last time I checked, I saw the Times of Israel said he's going to endorse Gantz of the Blue and White Coalition.
But I'm not sure if that has taken place yet.
Can you update us on the results of the elections there?
Yes, the president will call the party leaders for consultation next week.
Time as yet unknown.
And then each party will tell the president who they support for the office of PM.
Between now and then, Lieberman has time enough to change his plans.
And he has done so in the past.
So nobody knows.
All right.
Now, do I have it right that if either major coalition would side, would try to include the Arabs in a coalition, then they would definitely have all the seats that they need, the joint list.
They would have all the seats they need to take a leadership role.
But the tradition is that they're not allowed to be part of a ruling coalition that any side would rather lose and let someone else take the leadership than enter into a coalition with the non-Jewish parties.
Is that correct?
That is basically correct.
The right wing is not interested in any way in a coalition with the other parties.
And the center will probably crumble if it does.
I mean, there is likely for a strong likelihood for parts of white, white, blue to leave their party if it joins a coalition with the other parties.
So, in other words, it wouldn't put them over the top.
It would be a detriment because the other members of the coalition would not stand for that.
They would rather lose than win with an alliance with the Arabs.
A divided party.
And they will have enough party members to do so.
All right.
Now.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
So, the best case scenario regarding the other parties is supporting a coalition from outside the coalition.
And so, as you write here, that makes Avigdor Lieberman racist, extraordinary and suspected gangster with no enemies alive, as you put it here, is the kingmaker.
Yeah.
All right.
So, tell the people a little bit about Avigdor Lieberman.
He's kind of like Joe Lieberman, only meaner.
Avigdor Lieberman is a convicted child beater and former hoodlum who participated in several attacks on Israeli leftists who became Netanyahu's right hand man in the 90s.
Then, like just about anyone who became Netanyahu's right hand man, he grew to despise him and created his own party.
He was in and out of every government since, I think, 2001.
And he often left them at suspicious points or joined them at strange points.
He was not convicted of many crimes, particularly of money laundering, but there was a strange number of disappeared witnesses.
And his daughter came into some millions.
Nobody could adequately explain how.
And after 15 years of investigating those cases, the prosecution basically gave up about three years ago.
So, he is now in a position to decide who will become the prime minister.
Amazing.
All right.
Now, so if we take it back, well, a couple more points about him, right?
He's the guy who said that any Palestinian citizens of Israel, we're not talking about the occupied, but the Palestinian citizens of Israel, any of them convicted of a violent crime against a Jew should be beheaded.
And said that when Hosni Mubarak, the sock puppet, didn't want to come and visit Jerusalem, you know, they had perfectly good relations, but he didn't want to come and visit Jerusalem.
And so, Avigdor Lieberman said, well, maybe we should just bomb the Aswan Dam and flood Cairo.
And is he really that crazy or what?
It's a good question.
And, you know, people don't have a good answer to that because he can play the crazy guy.
And then people say that when he's actually in a coalition, he acts responsibly.
Then again, he does nothing, you know, in government.
You know, he's been in government for about 20 years now.
And, you know, he can't point to a single success, a single issue he managed to deal with.
When he began his career as defense minister, which was at the time unthinkable, at the beginning, the army guys said he was, well, he was responsible in conversations.
And he looked OK, but then he began trashing the army for being too soft on Palestinians.
And a few months of that, he quit.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Now, so part of the reason that they had to call this new election, right, was because Netanyahu was unable to form a government last spring and it was because Lieberman refused to join his coalition.
And that came down to a fight between right-wing groups.
His secular right-wing party, Yisrael Betanu, and then I guess, was it Shas or the other Orthodox parties that want the religious to remain exempt from the draft was the big thing, right?
Both sides were fighting over draft law, which truth to be told is not going to be enforced in any way.
There is simply not a possibility of enforcing it.
I'm sorry.
Lieberman insisted on that law.
The ultra-Orthodox parties went up on their hind legs and said, not going to happen.
And Lieberman said, then I'm not going to join the coalition.
Everyone thought he was kidding, you know, until about three days before Netanyahu had his last chance to form a government.
And then they realized he's serious.
And at the time they didn't have much to do.
And then Netanyahu stole the election because according to law, the next guy, which would be Gantz, had to have a chance of forming a government.
Netanyahu, using his pet Knesset speaker, managed to force an election, which was unnecessary and possibly illegal.
And now I forget, I'm sorry, if it was your article or something else I was reading that was saying that, you know, in some ways, as ironic as it sounds, as weird as it sounds to say it, because Lieberman is secular, he actually is somewhat of a liberal compared to some of the right-wing religious parties, even though there's nothing liberal about them.
He actually, in some senses, is to the left of Likud and they're more right-wing partners.
But so does that mean that the Times of Israel is right, that essentially there's no way that Lieberman is going to go back in with Netanyahu and the religious parties?
He's almost certain to endorse Gantz at this point, no?
Almost certain is correct, but not certain.
Now, Lieberman voters are secular, mostly people from the former Soviet Union and children of people from the Soviet Union, and they are much more secular than the mainstream.
But Lieberman never had a problem sitting with religious parties in a coalition.
He did so time and again.
And I think this time he went too far.
So perhaps it's possible he will actually pay a price at the polls if he, at the wrong moment, joins Netanyahu's coalition.
But maybe he bets that he won't.
Nobody knows.
We have someone who is – the only predictable about him is that he will be unpredictable.
Right now, before we switch to Netanyahu and his fortunes and this whole thing, a little bit more about Lieberman here.
Could you specify a little bit about what is his policy for the annexation and the official recognition of the past annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, if not Gaza as well?
I know that the religious parties say, well, this is Judea and Samaria and the Bible says we can have it.
But he being a secularist, but his being a secularist means that he has somewhat of a different agenda for the West Bank in terms of land swaps and this and that.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, for starters, he is a settler.
He lives in Nukdim, which is a settlement.
His position is that he will swap the Palestinian territories within Israel.
There are large numbers in the center of Israel of Palestinian towns, and he will swap them for the settlements.
He will give those territories to the Palestinian territory and by so doing deny the Israeli-Palestinians their citizenship.
Needless to say, Israeli-Palestinians are not very happy with this proposition.
But neither are the ultra-religious and the national religious because they consider Judea and Samaria to be holy land and holding it is essential in their view for the arrival of the Messiah.
So they're not happy about swapping settlements and Palestinian-Israelis.
Yeah.
Now, but so that means he's against the idea of annexing the entire West Bank because that would mean including too many Palestinians officially under Israeli rule.
So it's better to just sort of swap this and that, but keep most of the Palestinians in their Bantu stands under the pseudo status quo kind of thing there, right?
Yeah.
As opposed to the Netanyahu position or the further right-wing religious position, which is go ahead and annex all this land, including all the people that they hate so much and wish weren't there.
Nobody actually knows what is the Netanyahu plan because Likud went through the last three elections without publishing a party platform.
So they actually have no official position.
They seem to be in support of the slow annexation which is going on.
Netanyahu during the campaign said he will consider annexing the Jordan Valley, and he put on a pretty unrealistic map of it.
But nobody thinks he can actually do it without major consequences.
So everything is returning to the status quo of slow Israeli annexation, and most Israelis are trying not to think about it too much.
Yeah, it seems like if the issue gets forced either way, it becomes a real problem that the status quo is the best choice that they have as far as continuing to get away with it and without ever really drumming up enough opposition to turn it around.
As bad as that is, but anyway.
Okay, so now I don't know if you saw this thing yesterday by Chemi Shalev in Haaretz where he was saying he's comparing Netanyahu to Richard Nixon and saying he's toast.
And part of this story doesn't get that much coverage in the United States, and we think of Netanyahu really much more in terms of his actual policies and his gloating that September 11th was good for Israel, just like the war in Iraq and stuff like that.
But it's this kind of lower level corruption, theft and bribery and cover-ups and this kind of thing that really have a lot to do with his seeming downfall here.
It's not completely too late for him, obviously, but I wonder what you think of all of that.
Well, I think it's unfair to compare Nixon to Netanyahu because if you recall the elections of 1960, basically Nixon conceded even though the Kennedys did some shenanigans in Illinois, which basically stole the election.
And Texas too.
No question.
Is Netanyahu ever doing that?
Never putting country above party?
You're saying that when Nixon got the election stolen from him but decided to not make an issue about it for the good of the country, that that makes him in a class far above Benjamin Netanyahu who would have fought like a dog with Kennedy over it, huh?
Yeah.
You know, Nixon had his own problems and we all know how he ended.
And he was in charge of many war crimes in Indochina.
But he did have successes and he did speak to the – he did went to China.
And at the end of it, he resigned.
OK, that's not something Netanyahu is ever going to do.
Well, and now how much trouble is he in legally, really?
That depends on the judge.
Yeah, no, basically because he hasn't yet been indicted but he's likely to be indicted soon of several corruption charges.
One of them is almost clearly bribery because it's complicated to explain it, but he basically gave Telecom Mangate several concessions worth about billions in Israeli currency.
In return for this – well, this guy was also in control of several news outlets, some of them very popular.
And Netanyahu demanded good coverage of himself, his wife and his son in return for those concessions.
And he got it.
And then wasn't part of that story tied up with the paper that – Sheldon Adelson's paper?
No, that's another one.
The guy he's actually being investigated about is called Shaul Alovich.
No investigation as of yet has been directed against Sheldon Adelson, even though his paper is basically bribery of voters.
It should be legal.
And the courts have kept saying time and again that there isn't enough proof to show that Adelson's paper is actually bribery.
But this might change.
At the moment there are no investigations, but I know there are lawyers who are going to the Supreme Court and demanding to reopen the case.
And now it might sound crazy to the American audience to think that a prime minister could be really punished by the law.
But the previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, went to prison, right?
And various Israeli presidents have been imprisoned as well for their crimes.
For this kind of corruption, not state crimes, but for their own personal crimes, right?
Yeah, several ministers.
The only president who went to prison did so because of rape.
That's something we like to talk about.
But Ehud Olmert, he went to prison for like two years for some bribery kind of thing, right?
Yeah, several cases of bribery, one of which he was acquitted of.
Now the story here though is that Netanyahu is trying desperately to get re-elected so that then he can pass a law saying that he can never be prosecuted for his previous crimes, that he'll have this kind of immunity from now on?
Not just while he's prime minister?
There are several versions of an immunity law he was thinking of.
Everyone agrees he can be convicted if he's not a prime minister, but he was sure he would win the election.
And what he was thinking of doing was to say a prime minister cannot be indicted, and then get himself elected in two years as president.
And so to get up to nine years of immunity.
And then, you know, who would care?
Right.
Well, he's already been prime minister longer even than David Ben-Gurion.
So he's got the record there.
I don't know why he doesn't just declare himself ruler for life or something like that.
Probably would get away with that.
This wouldn't pass.
I'm sorry?
This wouldn't pass yet.
No.
Well, and you say here, you call it the crumbled throne.
You're saying his goose is cooked one way or the other here.
Even if he survives in the short term here, his political future is essentially null.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I don't think he can become prime minister at this point.
And even if he joins Gantz in the government and claims some position as a minister, such as foreign minister, in a few weeks he will be indicted.
And at that point, he would not be able to serve as a minister.
So every newspaper today was speaking about a pardon.
And if you recall, that's how the Nixon affair wound it up.
And some saying it's bad.
Some people saying it's good.
I think it's awful.
But people are speaking about a deal in which Netanyahu will step down, admit to several corruption offenses, and then get pardoned.
And everyone will brisk a sigh of relief and go on.
I don't think he will go that way.
Yeah.
You think there's a real chance that he could go to prison?
If he's convicted, yes.
That's amazing.
I mean, there's nothing like the rule of law like that in America, where someone as powerful as him could, that any prosecutor would dream of indicting him in a million years.
You know, they talk about, well, lock her up or whatever.
Yeah, right.
As though the former president's wife could ever be prosecuted in any court in this land, no matter what.
Same thing for Donald Trump or anyone else at that level here.
There's just no way.
That's where politics comes and intervenes, and the law falls completely silent.
But that would be great to see, especially Netanyahu in prison.
Out of all the Israeli politicians I'd like to see in jail, he's certainly the first.
But now, go ahead.
I mean, Gantz might be second on the list here.
This is a guy that bragged in his campaign last spring that he bombed Gaza back into the Stone Age.
Yes, and he did.
He did.
Twice, right?
In 2012 and 2014.
He was the general in charge of that mass killing.
Yeah.
This is the leftist.
This is the moderate.
The centrist, I guess.
Not the leftist, but he's the more liberal candidate in this election.
I don't know if you saw his ad, but it was horrible.
It was streets bombed out of existence.
Basically rubber.
And then there was a count of the bodies of the dead Palestinians.
It was unbelievable.
Wow, they actually had the body count in the ad?
Yeah.
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
I mean, and that just goes to show you the body politic in Israel altogether, that this is his best chance at credibility, or at least he thinks.
Him and his PR firm sat around and decided that this is how to prove to the Israelis that he's good enough to be their leader.
Look at all these war crimes I committed against helpless, innocent, unarmed civilians.
Well, at the time he ran this ad, he was already under attack by Netanyahu for being too soft on Palestinians.
So we had to shut him up.
There was a case in 2014 when one of the Israeli units was attacked, several APCs were destroyed, and the army was asking for all out bombardment of the area.
And Gad said no, because there would be massive civilian casualties, and he only allowed artillery fire, not the entire B-52s or something.
Then Netanyahu ran against him and said that he was soft on Palestinians and willing to kill Israeli soldiers in order to save civilians.
So Gad came out with this body count ad.
I love that accusation.
He's willing to risk Israeli soldiers just to save Palestinian civilians' lives.
What a coward.
And that was Netanyahu's public line against him that he had to defend himself from by saying, no, look at all these civilians I killed.
Welcome to Israel.
And we know of, you know, because I remember we were there, we were watching.
This was, as they announced it then, they called it the Da'iya Doctrine, named after the neighborhood in Lebanon, where they decided, just like Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, that we'll just go ahead and target civilians and we'll unleash terror bombings.
And that'll teach them to support Hezbollah in that case.
And then the doctrine was then used again in Gaza.
This is what you get for being near someone in Hamas.
And then they turn around to the other side of their mouth and say, oh, no, all those people are human shields, which means what?
Their lives are forfeit?
Apparently so.
But, you know, this doctrine, which is now called the Da'iya Doctrine, was actually invented in the 90s, early 90s, by Yehud Barak.
And he used it in Lebanon.
He was specifically firing at civilians because he wanted their towns destroyed and he wanted them to become refugees.
And so they would put pressure on the Lebanese government, which would then put pressure on Hezbollah.
He was directly targeting civilians.
And he was a part of the, this time he was running as part of the Meretz party.
And then so this is back to the present day, this Yehud Barak, he actually didn't do very well.
He's essentially a non-entity in Israeli politics.
Now, maybe it was his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein that helped knock him down a peg there at the end, his close business relationship with him.
As far as we know, but maybe worse.
But so now, as far as Gantz goes, let's say that Netanyahu finally does fizzle out and has to leave Israeli politics and maybe even go to prison.
And Gantz becomes the prime minister.
Other than bragging about killing Gazan civilians, does he say that he has a plan for the future of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, any of these things at all?
Are they pretending that it's still the Oslo peace process?
No, they're thinking about one sided annexation while evacuating several settlements and telling the Palestinians to deal with it.
That's basically the plan.
So not much, more or less the status quo, but no big changes.
No big changes.
No big changes.
No independent Palestinian state.
Israeli forces remaining on the Jordan River, some river it is.
And basically, yeah, keeping as it is.
Well, OK, so would it be fair to say that on the bright side, he must be essentially a weaker politician than Netanyahu and less persuasive when it comes to, less capable when it comes to, you know, American politics and European politics and the kinds of things that Netanyahu really excels at?
Well, I, for one, never actually believed Netanyahu excels at American politics, certainly not European politics.
I think this guy basically understands your Republican Party, but he's unaware of the disdainful of the Democratic Party.
So he's basically acting as a Republican and this is costing him.
I don't think he's that much of an American specialist as he claims he is.
Well, I agree with you about that.
But at the same time, you look at all he gets away with with American help.
I just wonder if you think that Gantz might be less capable than that, hopefully.
I mean, he seems like a weaker character overall.
I don't know.
Not necessarily a weaker character.
Let me say a weaker public personality, you know, because that means a lot more in politics.
Right.
You know, Netanyahu has been here for 30 years.
He was elected.
He was first elected in 88.
OK, that's his view.
He will find his, he will find his tune.
I must say that so far since the elections, he's been acting much better than anyone expected.
You know, he was a very bad, very bad candidate.
Gantz you're talking about, right?
Yeah.
Go ahead.
He had a Biden level guff system.
But once the election was over, he was cool and he handled things very correctly and carefully.
So I don't know if he sucks as a candidate, but he may be good as a prime minister.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I hesitate to dance on Netanyahu's grave too soon because, you know, I'm betting on him if I got to bet that somehow he's going to pull this out.
But I sure hope I'm wrong about that.
And, you know, I ain't pro-Gantz, but I am for Netanyahu less future and see if, you know, maybe things could be a little bit less worse, you know.
I think that in a way they might be because we would stop talking about Netanyahu all the time.
He was, he basically ate the last day kid and made us speak about him and him and him and nothing else.
And once he's gone, maybe we'll, you know, get back to dealing with the issues which are truly part of our lives.
Yeah, exactly right.
Occupation.
Now, this will take some time because Netanyahu did everything he could to make this traumatic.
But we may have a chance.
Well, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today, Yossi.
Well, if you want to, if you want me again, I'll be happy to.
OK, great.
You guys, that's Yossi Gurvitz.
He is a journalist and a blogger who writes regularly for Mondoweiss.net.
Thanks again.
Thank you.
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.
