For Pacifica Radio, September 29, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the editorial director of AntiWar.com.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at ScottHorton.org.
Okay, before I introduce today's guest, let me first just explain real quick.
This show, of course, is completely nonpartisan.
Your host has supported the impeachment of the last five presidents, and the current president is no exception to that.
However, I would like to say that I think the current scandal, the son of Russiagate, which itself was a hoax, essentially is a hill of beans compared to Donald Trump's worst crimes, and that is the illegal, unauthorized, traitorous genocide in Yemen, a war that is deliberately designed to starve the civilian population of the country into submission, a war that is directly benefiting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, fighting against their enemies, the Houthis, a war that not only is unauthorized by Congress, but a war that the U.S. House and Senate have both passed resolutions condemning and invoking the War Powers Act to force to an end, resolutions which Donald Trump vetoed, which he had no right to veto, only to obey.
And he should be impeached and removed from office and prosecuted, along with Barack Obama, who started that war, for war crimes.
And of course, because Barack Obama started the war in 2015, that's why this will not be one of the articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, and it's why he'll survive.
And it's why the precedent will be set again, just like with Richard Nixon.
Any crimes committed by a president with his office, and with the organs of the U.S. state, are permissible.
So that being said, it's time to introduce this week's guest.
It's my good friend, the great Sheldon Richman, executive editor at the Libertarian Institute, and author of the brand new book, Coming to Palestine.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Sheldon?
I'm doing fine, and thank you very much for the invitation.
All right.
Well, very happy to have you here.
And we have this very important subject to talk about today, as covered in your new book, Coming to Palestine, about the real history of the story of the creation of the Israeli state after World War II, and the situation that the Palestinians continue to find themselves in to this day as the result of that.
And in this book, it's a collection of essays that you wrote over a period of about 25 years, covering this true history, and compiled in a way that really tells the story very well.
So I guess I'll start with asking you about your background and your early education about Zionism, and how you came to change your mind about it.
Okay.
I'm very happy to.
Actually, the first of the articles, I believe, is dated 1988, which would make it 31 years.
And so there's some from that early period, and then there's some much more recently, and then there's sort of a gap in between when I wasn't writing about this issue, just to give a little background.
Okay, my own personal background is, I think, a very typical middle-class American Jewish background, brought up in Northeast Philadelphia.
And a heavily Jewish section of Northeast Philadelphia.
And my parents were, religiously speaking, conservative Jews.
They were also sort of mildly conservative politically, but that's not relevant here.
So we weren't Orthodox, and we weren't Reform.
We were kind of in that middle position.
And I'm not sure I heard the word Zionist in those early days, but we were certainly very, very pro-Israel.
I was taught that Israel was very important.
We weren't planning to move to Israel.
A hardcore Zionist, it seems to me, is kind of obligated to move there.
But that wasn't really true of American Jews.
Anyway, I was brought up being very loyal to Israel.
I went to Hebrew school, and in my classrooms, there was an American flag in one corner and an Israeli flag, the state of Israel flag, in the other corner.
There was a map of Israel, and I learned to sing the Israeli national anthem, the Hatikvah, at Hebrew school.
But as time went on, my views changed.
As I got into my 20s, I became exposed to the other side of the story.
And I read and I talked to people, and I ended up realizing that the story that I had been given is really almost entirely the opposite of the truth.
And the way I like to put it, if you take sort of the standard version that most Americans, not just Jewish Americans, that most Americans absorb from their culture and turn it upside down, turn it on its head, you're much closer to the truth.
So was there one particular event or one particular teacher or one particular thing that really got through to you that, wow, there's something much more to this story than I've been led to believe?
I think the very first thing I heard was a lecturer talking about the history of imperialism and colonialism, British and French and then later sort of American neocolonialism.
And the question of Israel-Palestine came up.
I don't remember being the one asking it.
And the person said that most of that land was acquired by, became the state of Israel was acquired by driving people off land and very little of it had been purchased.
And I went from there and read about it and realized, indeed, that was the case, something I never heard.
When growing up, I heard, oh, no, the land was purchased.
We never heard anything about what's known as the Nakba, the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 and 1948.
And actually some of that goes back earlier.
People were driven off farmland.
I never heard about that.
We were told, you know, not in any detail, that these were legitimately purchased lands.
So it's all fine.
It's, in a sense, private property, which was then sort of pooled into this new Jewish state.
As I read, I realized that only about 6% of the land had been purchased by 1948.
And even a lot of those purchases are objectionable because they were purchases from feudal absentee landlords.
And the people who were living and working that land for many generations, I mean many generations, you know, thousands of years, were driven off and not even hired back as employees because it was their only Jews were going to be hired.
If you're going to build a Jewish state, you don't give employment to non-Jews.
So farmers got kicked off land that they were the de facto owners of and then not even allowed to work there as, you know, tenants or just farmhands.
You know, I work from John Locke's views that the way you acquire, the owner of the land is what would be called, you know, what's known as the tiller of the soil.
The real owner is the person who works the land, who transforms it, not some absentee feudal landlord who got it as a political favor from a sultan or some ruler, which is how lots of land is owned in Latin America and was owned in England and, you know, lots of other places.
So I then realized that, no, this is not the result of peaceful voluntary transactions.
It's the result of war and other forms of aggression and oppression.
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All right, so now you don't have to be raised Jewish in Hebrew school or any of that in America.
I mean, just regular exposure to American media and culture.
I think we're all kind of brought up with the idea somehow, even if it's not explained in much detail, that this was a land without people for a people without land.
It makes a great cliche and everything.
And so, you know, fancy that.
No one ever settled the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.
It's wide open.
And it does just so happen that there are a lot of European Jews who had just survived the Holocaust and needed a place to go.
And I thought it was interesting that the king of Saudi Arabia had recommended to Franklin Roosevelt previously that you should give them the best part of Germany.
You know, if anybody owed him some land, give him, you know, the northwest.
I don't know.
But instead they gave him this land where a bunch of Arabs lived, or as it was perceived.
I know it's more complicated than that.
But they did this while at the time perpetuating this myth that there really was no one there.
So it wasn't just like, oh, well, they're just Arabs.
We can do this to them.
They kept it a secret, essentially, from the American people.
Certainly, as you said, you'd never even heard of this, never mind the real true story of the Nakba, but that there even had been one.
Well, you know, Lord Balfour and the British rulers, you know, at the time of World War I, knew there were Arabs in Palestine.
They just said, the hell with them.
We don't need to consult them.
They're not important.
So they knew there were Arabs.
Herzl's people knew.
Theodor Herzl was considered the founder, father of the Zionist movement.
He sent emissaries to Palestine when he was first trying to launch his movement, and they came back and said, guess what, boss?
This ain't a land without a people.
So it's not like anybody was ignorant of it.
But you're right.
Growing up, that's all I heard.
This is a land.
It's a beautiful phrase, right?
A land without a people, for a people without a land.
And then I would hear, and the Jews, we, you know, it was done in the we.
We have made the desert bloom.
It's wonderful.
Not realizing that the Jaffa orange, which is, Jaffa is an Arab town, was world famous from the 19th century.
It was exported to the whole world.
I mean, they made the desert bloom.
Where did this orange come from?
Where was that?
So it made no sense.
It's just a myth.
I mean, and, you know, myth-making, of course, is not exclusive to Zionism or the Jewish people.
Every, quote, people is based on a whole lot of mythology.
So, you know, it's nothing specific, really.
So that's what's so shocking when you first encounter what I regard as the truth.
And if you read a wide variety of sources, you know, you'll see that this is really, you know, the story.
I mean, the other side doesn't ever meet it.
Look, in fact, in the 1980s, when the government opened, the Israeli government opened up its archives and let historians in, there was a whole raft of books from younger Jewish-Israeli historians known as the New Historians, Benny Morris, Tom Segev, Alain Pape, Avi Shlaim, a whole bunch of them.
And they started telling the truth.
I mean, take Benny Morris, for example, because I think he's kind of a great example.
He says it was ethnic cleansing.
Of course it was ethnic cleansing.
Now, the funny thing is he says it's too bad they didn't finish the job.
He says, of course it had to be ethnic cleansing.
How do you have a Jewish state without ethnic cleansing?
He says it's as if the Americans had never slaughtered the Indians.
You think it would be America today, the great country?
He approves of it, but he doesn't deny the facts.
Now, he does quibble about, well, was this an overall plan or was it more a contingency?
I think it's pretty clear that it was a plan.
Morris has been answered on that.
But there's no disputing anymore, seriously, although some people still will deny it, that there was a Nakba, there was an ethnic cleansing, there was 750,000 Palestinians, men, women, children, driven from their homes and several hundred massacred in different places, most notoriously Deir Yassin, which was a village near Jerusalem, which was paved over and turned into a Jewish village.
And 400 villages suffered that fate, wiped off the map and recreated as Jewish towns and villages.
That's the real story, and it's very shocking.
It's so shocking that most people won't believe it because they never heard it before.
A lot of people have an attitude, that can't be true because I never heard it before.
When you think about that for a second, it makes no sense.
But a lot of people operate on that premise.
If I haven't heard it by now, let's say they were an adult, then it must not be true.
Well, it's true.
Boy, they got their first premise wrong, that truth is the order of the day and that everything ends up coming to light somehow or what have you, without any digging or effort necessary.
But that's not the real world at all on any issue, any important one, certainly in the matters of the creations of states back decades ago.
Come on.
Right, there's an entire machinery dedicated to myth-making for the sake of the concentration of political power and the protection of that power.
That's true in the case of Israel and the Zionist movement before there was an Israel because they intended to create a state, so they got a head start.
They didn't wait for the state to be established.
And so we need to approach it that way and understand and open one's mind.
Just because you didn't hear something before can't mean it must be wrong.
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I'm talking with Sheldon Richman, author of the new book, Coming to Palestine.
So let's talk about the 1967 war because I think in just descriptive terms, amoral terms, the Nakba worked.
They created an 80-20, super-duper Jewish majority inside what we now call the Green Line or Israel proper, which meant that they could be a Jewish democracy, as you quoted Benny Morris saying there.
That's why they did the ethnic cleansing campaign, so that they could have that.
But then in 1967, they conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
And I think they did kick a couple hundred thousand people out of the West Bank, in fact.
But compared to the overall numbers, essentially, they didn't.
Essentially, they took possession of all this land and all of the Palestinians who lived on it as well.
And then that situation has remained since 1967.
For more than 50 years now, they have essentially annexed the land all along, but not the people, and have kept them under this situation of military occupation.
Can you explain how this works?
Well, for one thing, to correct what everybody knows, you know, there's that famous saying, it's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble.
It's what we know that ain't so, famous quote.
So most people, quote, unquote, know that Israel was the victim of an aggressive war from Egypt and Syria and Jordan in 1967.
And in fact, that's not true.
There's a chapter in my book, and again, you can find this.
You can find many, many Israeli leaders in their memoirs, whatnot, saying that was not a defensive war.
First of all, Israel struck first.
It destroyed the air forces of these countries when their planes were on the ground.
Now, you could say, well, it was preemptive.
They knew the Arab countries were going to strike.
Now, they never thought the Arab countries were going to strike.
There's all kinds of reasons to understand why that's the case.
So it was not defensive.
It was a completion of the plan.
Look, they wanted the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which is what was acquired in 67.
They wanted that from the beginning.
But in 47, 48, it was out of reach.
And in fact, the Israelis, the Zionists, it wasn't Israel yet, cut a deal with the king of Jordan to make sure no Palestinian state arose in 1948.
They said, look, you take the West Bank, and I'm sure they're under their breath saying, for now, you can have it for now.
Because King Abdullah, who was the current king's great-grandfather, wanted to be the king of all the Arabs.
He had ambitions to be king of all the Arabs.
So he said, I don't want there to be a new Palestinian state.
I want that territory.
So Israel said, OK, you take it.
And so we won't fight with you, and you won't fight with us.
And Gaza, I'm not sure why they didn't grab Gaza then, but Egypt came into possession of Gaza, which it never annexed.
But Israel wanted those territories.
So in 67, it grabbed them, plus the Golan Heights, which was Syrian territory at Israel's border up there in the north.
So they grabbed those territories and have played land for peace games ever since.
The UN passed a resolution saying there's got to be land for peace now.
In other words, in return for pledges of peace from all the Arabs, you give this land back, and Israel just sort of played games about it.
They kind of say, OK, that's fine.
We'll sit down and talk.
But then, like you say, they de facto annexed the West Bank.
Today, under Oslo, the Oslo agreement, there are some areas which have sort of internal, some autonomy run by the Palestinian Authority.
But the Palestinian Authority under Oslo is simply an agent of the Israeli government.
The Israeli government has, in other words, contracted out repressive, quote, repressive security responsibilities to the Palestinian Authority.
It's sort of like a quizzling government operating on behalf of Israel.
And then Israel controls about 60 percent of it.
There are settlements, and there are Jewish-only settlements, Jewish-only roads.
And it's been, you know, over the years it's been building a wall, not along the border, the old border between the West Bank, the old line between the West Bank and Israel, but it snakes through the West Bank, separating Palestinian homes from their farms, isolating Palestinian villages.
So if they didn't undo that and sort of said, OK, look, the Palestinians can have something like a state, it's just a bunch of little disconnected villages, Bantustans, you know, they called them in the context of South Africa.
So it would be a joke.
In other words, Israel has destroyed the idea that there could be two states, if that's what people prefer.
It's been really bad.
They've also annexed the Golan Heights, of course, with Trump's blessing.
And let's talk about Gaza for a second.
You know, they did occupy Gaza for a time, and they even had settlements built.
And then under, I guess, Ariel Sharon, they decided this is too much trouble.
So they took out the settlements, which upset the settlers there, and they withdrew the army.
And so people say, OK, look, they withdrew from Gaza.
Isn't that a good thing?
Well, no.
It's as if prison guards in a prison, you know, left the prison, locked the doors, and put walls and fences around the prison.
You don't then say, well, I guess the prisoners are liberated, the guards aren't there anymore.
No, they're on the outside.
They're on the perimeter, and they don't let anything in or out.
They don't want to let in or out anything or anyone.
So it's an open-air prison.
It's been called by, you know, critics, Israeli critics of that policy, a concentration camp or a ghetto.
And I think it qualifies.
Well, Sheldon, people say, why are you singling out Israel?
So why are you singling out Israel?
The idea that Israel is singled out is related to the idea that there's a double standard, right?
Israel is judged by one standard, and everybody else is judged by—every other country is judged by another standard.
And then that, of course, slides right into, so therefore you must be anti-Semitic.
That's the charge.
There are many reasons for the attention that I give and many other people give to Israel, and I'll name one.
And I agree with Shlomo San, the great writer.
People should read his books.
Three very important books.
Israel is the only country that I know of that, in principle, is not the state of all of its citizens.
Now, I don't mean that every state treats all of its citizens fairly and equally.
But Israel is the only state, in principle, that does not regard all of its citizens equally.
Because Israel discriminates against Palestinian Arab citizens, people who were there who didn't get driven out in 47, 48.
And on the other hand, Jews everywhere in the world, whether they were ever anywhere near Israel, much less being born there, can be citizens tomorrow just by showing up.
So no other state has a policy like that, where it's not the state of its citizens, even in terms of principle.
Not just practice, but principle.
But it is the state of people who are nowhere near there, have no intention of going there.
Why?
If their mothers were Jewish.
That does deserve being singled out.
So what's all this talk about one state and two state and BDS and the future of the Israeli state, Sheldon?
And what's your position?
Well, yeah, there's a real problem here, because any path you take holds some risks.
I mean, look, my ideal, and of course, this is not about my preferences.
I don't live there, and I am not going to presume to tell the Palestinians what they should favor.
I mean, I think they should favor liberalism, good old-fashioned classical liberalism, where everybody has the same rights and everybody is tolerated and basically left alone to engage in peaceful, voluntary relations with other people.
So I will presume to say that that ought to be the case.
But one state, two state, my own personal preference would be the no-state solution, but that's not on the menu, unfortunately.
So here's the question.
If you do two states, if that is to have any shot at working, you'd have to take out the settlements.
And will the settlers put up with that?
Will the people, will there be a political upheaval?
Will the Israeli government be tossed out?
You'd have to do that.
You'd have to take down the wall.
And by the way, the International Court of Justice in 2004 said the settlements and the wall and simply the occupation are illegal.
You're not allowed to gain territory through war, and you're not allowed to move your citizens into that territory afterwards, after the war.
So that would be one, at least, you know, theoretical way to do it.
But again, what about the political upheaval?
If you do one state, and it's what?
And, of course, what I would say would have to be a liberal state, meaning free, where there's no religious test for anything and nobody's discriminated against by the government on the basis of religion, ethnicity, or anything else, race.
Very soon, the Jews will be outnumbered by non-Jews, mainly Arabs who are Muslims, of course, with a smaller group of them Christians.
I think it's about 50-50 now, if you count all the people in Israel and the territories.
And the Arabs have a higher birth rate, so they would outnumber them.
Now, what is the Israeli public going to say about that?
So, in other words, how politically feasible is that?
I don't have an answer to that.
I'm just pointing out the problems.
You could continue the way things are, but that's intolerable, and how long are Palestinians going to put up with that?
They have zero rights in the West Bank, and they have less than zero rights in the Gaza Strip.
I mean, it's terrible.
Your life is controlled in the West Bank.
Checkpoints, searches, detentions without charge, no trial.
People are going to put up with that?
I don't know what's going to happen.
That's why it's so frustrating, because I don't want to see violence on any side.
I don't want to see any innocent people killed.
And those of us who care about this have tears in our eyes when we think about it, because how is this going to come to some peaceful resolution where justice prevails and peace?
I wish I could tell you, but I can't.
Well, you know, my idea, which some Palestinian friends of mine have told me they hate, is that they ought to demand Israeli citizenship.
They ought to be Palestinian citizens of Israel, just like the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the ones you referred to there that hadn't been cleansed, and just say, look, you did already annex the West Bank.
Who's kidding who here?
And we just want the full right to vote and the full benefits of even the second-class citizenship that the Palestinian citizens of Israel have now would be an improvement, and it would be a right to vote in the Knesset.
And so that would be a good start, if you ask me, but they don't want that.
They want a new single-state solution, which is understandable, of course, but seems less achievable in terms of getting their work done in the nearer term.
Right, but as far as political feasibility goes, again, that would make it cease to be a Jewish state.
So what are the Jewish Israelis going to say about that?
I'm just going to say from the Palestinian point of view, it makes their case stronger, and the Israeli case weaker.
I heard a statistic today that 50% of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and I'm talking about the territories now, are under the poverty level.
Fifteen percent of Jewish Israelis are under the poverty level.
There is unequal access to resources, to education, all of which government controls.
I mean, I wish government was controlling it, but there's land.
There's not the same access whatsoever.
The Arabs are badly discriminated against.
And to a lesser extent, the Israeli, the non-European Jews who came to Israel, I mean, they came from Iraq and they come from Arab lands and also the ones that originated in Spain.
They were badly discriminated against.
So bigotry has lots of different directions that it goes.
But the Arabs, yeah, the Arabs in Israel are not treated equally or fairly by the state.
So again, it suffers the same sort of political problems now.
I'm not talking about moral problems, but political problems if they were to go that route.
I mean, so I'm back to my frustration and pessimism.
I try to be an optimist about all things, and it's very hard to muster optimism in this case.
Well, you know, Sheldon, I think your book is a great contribution to the current discussion, and it is to the current controversy over this issue.
And Donald Trump and the more left-wing Democrats on the other side have really helped to turn this into a political football for the first time really in a very long time.
And so I think your book could be a very important contribution to that whole kind of discussion as it is being exposed to more daylight now.
So great work.
Congratulations again on it.
Thanks.
That's Sheldon Richman, executive editor of the Libertarian Institute.
The book is Coming to Palestine.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, Sheldon, that is Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at ScottHorton.org.
See you next week.
See you next week.
