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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We 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, on the line, I've got Ramzi Baroud from PalestineChronicle.com.
And of course, we regularly reprint what he writes at Antiwar.com as well.
And he's the author of the book, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, and also The Last Earth, A Palestinian Story.
And his most recent piece we have here at Antiwar.com is called Palestinians Face Torture in Israeli Administrative Detention.
Welcome back to the show, Ramzi.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thank you.
And thanks for having me again.
Very happy to have you here.
Now, listen, sorry about this.
But I think it's important that we do this from time to time because there are new listeners all the time.
And I think we all know what people don't know mostly about this.
So is it all right if we just start out with me asking, isn't Palestine, the terrorist country next door to Israel, that's constantly invading them and trying to extort land out of them?
And why won't the Palestinians leave Israel alone?
All right.
So this is kind of like the exact opposite of what is actually happening.
Palestine is a country that existed prior to the existence of Israel in 1948.
Before 1948, there was no such thing as Israel.
But there was a Palestinian homeland that belonged to the Palestinian people.
And it goes back to literally thousands of years.
In 1948, Israel came and they were not an Israeli.
There was not an Israeli government or an Israeli army.
They were mostly Zionist militias that came from mostly from Eastern Europe and other parts of the world and ethnically cleansed the Palestinian people, destroyed nearly 500,000 villages and pushed the vast majority of the population outside of Palestine.
Many of those people, millions of them, are now actually living in refugee camps throughout the Middle East region.
And that's really kind of the start of this whole thing.
Palestinians demanding the restoration of their homeland, demanding the return of their refugees back to that homeland, demanding their rights and their freedom and so forth.
And Israel has been ensuring that the status quo, that of military occupation, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, carries on, as has in fact been the case for the last 70 years.
All right.
Now, so what's the big deal then about 1967?
What difference was made on the ground there for the Palestinians?
So Israel did not occupy all of Palestine in 1948.
In 1948, they occupied 78 percent of that historic piece of land that we call Palestine.
22 percent of it remained outside Israeli control.
And they were administered by neighboring countries, including Jordan and Egypt.
In 1967, Israel came and pretty much kind of sealed the deal.
They took over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and they took over the Gaza Strip.
And with that action, they controlled 100 percent of all of historic Palestine.
Now, when they did so, whether in 1948 or in 1967, they ethnically cleansed a lot of people.
But many Palestinians also remained.
So as a result, you ended up having millions of Palestinians also living in today's Israel, either as militarily occupied Palestinians living under siege in Gaza or under military occupation in the West Bank, or as third or fourth class citizens living in Israel itself.
So they are Israeli citizens, but they do not enjoy the same rights and privileges as the Jewish citizens of the state of Israel.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
So you're constantly buying things from Amazon.com.
Well, that makes sense.
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Won't cost you a thing.
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Again, that's right there in the margin at ScottHorton.org.
Announcing the latest book to be published by the Libertarian Institute, Coming to Palestine, by our heroic executive editor, Sheldon Richman.
In Coming to Palestine, Richman tells the truth about the creation of Israel, the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, and the Israelis' continued oppression of the Palestinians since that time.
He also tells the stories of anti-Zionist Orthodox and Reform Jews who opposed the creation of Israel, and those who fight for the Palestinians' freedom today.
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All right, now, to focus on the West Bank and East Jerusalem for a minute here.
I think probably the common conception, because it's my misconception as a youth, is essentially that the West Bank, that's Palestine, and they're constantly attacking Israel and trying to make the Israelis give up Israeli land to them.
That's the way, even, I forgot exactly who coined this or what, but I don't think it was necessarily meant this way in the first place.
But the phrase, land for peace, ends up making it sound like the Palestinians are the aggressors and are trying to extort land out of the Israelis.
They'll only get peace when they give up some of their land.
But then, the deal is, it's kind of confusing, I think, for a lot of people, because they hear about the possibility of a two-state solution some day, which, okay, so then, what is the status of this place?
Oh, I see, this is the thing that they never really say outright, certainly not on TV.
They're under military occupation.
It's not the country next door.
They've already been conquered and annexed by Israel, but they're under military authority with no representation, no civil or, you know, never mind civil liberties, individual liberties in terms of personal life or economy or anything like that.
They also have no civil rights in terms of participation in the government that rules over them whatsoever.
That's right, Scott.
I think the degree of confusion is measured mostly based on the degree of Israeli influence on the narrative.
Here, we call it propaganda.
In Israel, they call it Hasbara.
Hasbara is a form of propaganda that is launched by the Israeli government, and it's very, very powerful and effective here in the United States because of the power of the pro-Israel Zionist lobby operating, whether in Washington, D.C. or throughout the country.
And one of the main achievements of that lobby is not just being able to confuse the facts, but to kind of mix up the facts to the point that people think that the victim is the aggressor and the occupied is the occupier.
And this is something I have lived in the United States now for 25 years, and it's something that I still run to.
I mean, in fact, it's still so powerful, this notion that Palestinians are outsiders in their own homeland and the natives of Palestine are actually the foreigners who came and they are trying to push the natives who are actually the Israeli colonizers coming from Eastern Europe.
And it's so very important, and I'm so glad that you asked that particular question, because indeed it is confusing when it's seen in that way, especially that you don't get kind of a Palestinian point of view.
I mean, how often do you see a well-spoken Palestinian on CNN or Fox News or any of our mainstream media representing a Palestinian point of view that challenges this kind of Hasbro?
Almost never.
Almost never, really.
I mean, I can't remember the last time CNN asked me personally to come on, but in fact, you know, it gets even sadder than that.
Even Senate hearings or congressional hearings related to Palestine, when they want to get a sympathetic point of view for Palestinians, they actually ask an Israeli who is sympathetic to Palestinians to come and speak on behalf of the Palestinians.
So we are almost entirely marginalized from this story.
We're not part of it.
Even though the story has affected us and completely subjugated our people and ethnically cleansed millions of them, we are the last to actually have a say over this story.
So you can imagine why this confusion would be there.
Now, Israel occupied the rest of Palestine.
Not Palestine.
Palestine was occupied in 1948.
Our beautiful major cities that go back in history thousands of years, like Haifa, Jaffa, Akko, and so forth, they were taken not in 1967.
They were conquered in 1948.
In 1967, the remaining bits of Palestine were taken over.
But then at that time, when we Palestinians and our supporters demanded that we fix the problem from its very origins, we were told this is unrealistic.
Quit talking about Haifa and Jaffa and Akko.
Quit talking about Jerusalem.
Quit talking about that, you know, the 80% of Palestine that was taken.
Let's just be realistic and pragmatic, and let's negotiate over these little bits that were taken over in 1967.
Some Palestinians accepted that.
Plus the negotiations that you've seen in the news and that no longer exist, of course, and the Oslo agreements and all.
And a lot of Palestinians refused that.
They said you can't talk about solving the so-called conflict without looking at what actually happened, the original sin of 1948, you see.
So that has been a major point of contention among Palestinians themselves.
Do we compromise on the whole thing and just argue over the little bits, or do we discuss the entire thing and try to resolve the conflict from its very origins?
But with time, with time, terminologies began changing.
Nobody was talking about Palestine, the historic Palestine, and everyone started talking about the West Bank.
And not just that.
Even the West Bank itself was divided to sections and regions and areas and divided by checkpoints.
And then we were told, no, no, no, forget about the areas that are now being used for the Jewish settlements.
This is, you know, forget about this.
Let's just talk about the areas that are remaining.
So at the very end, we start talking about about 8 percent of historic Palestine, which is not only outrageous, but it's also contrary to international law.
International law does not recognize that the problem, according to 1967, international law sees the problem as the one that occurred in 1948.
So this is where the confusion is, and this is where why the West Bank has with time been seen as Palestine and historic Palestine has been basically marginalized and removed from the conversation altogether, to the point that if you as a Palestinian intellectual go to speak in mainstream media or in polite company about Palestine prior to 1967, you are seen as an extremist.
And I've been called that many times myself.
You're a radical.
You are an extremist.
You are calling for the destruction of the Jewish state.
So demanding the right of return to your of your own people, the refugees back to their homeland is seen as a call for genocide.
And that's, again, where the Zionist propaganda, the Israeli propaganda is so powerful.
Because because a lot of people actually do believe this sort of rubbish.
And then here you are, the one who should should be the source of information.
You are constantly on the defensive, trying to prove that you are not demanding genocide or you're not calling for the destruction of any state and so forth.
Well, let me let me ask you this.
If you took the best interpretation of Yitzhak Rabin's effort to do the Oslo two state solution in the 1990s, if he had not been assassinated by a Netanyahu supporter and instead had been able to implement that.
And again, let's say the best interpretation of that, like real independence for the West Bank and East Jerusalem, if not West.
And and that kind of deal back then before the settlements.
Well, when the settlements were as big as they were then instead of as big as they are now.
And then if they had allowed the right of return for the Palestinian refugees, if not to what they call Israel proper, former Palestine, but at least to come back to a free and independent and prosperous West Bank.
Might that have been good enough then?
There are no evidence that Yitzhak Rabin actually spoke about a Palestinian state.
That was not really in the discussion.
It was not included in the discussion.
What Rabin was talking about, what was he was hoping to achieve, is a degree of autonomy in which Palestinians govern, you know, an unarmed, demilitarized region.
And, you know, according to some kind of an autonomy that is happening under the auspices and the agreement and the acceptance.
In other words, what we call the status quo now is essentially all he was really going for, was we'll have the PA take responsibility for our tyranny.
That's that's brilliantly it because.
So, in other words, even though a Jewish extremist ended up killing Rabin for this and the killing was because of Hebron in particular, because they thought that he was going to give parts of Al-Khalil, which is known as Hebron, back to Palestinians.
And they thought that this is, you know, completely contrary to the Bible.
And it was a very religious sentiment that killed Rabin, not because Rabin was giving Palestinians their rights and restoring their refugees and that sort of thing.
So it was an internal kind of Israeli matter that ended up costing Rabin his life.
But as far as the politics of Rabin himself, he really was ultimately aiming at providing Palestinians with whatever they have right now.
You know, a semblance of an authority, a semblance of an autonomy in tiny little regions that are surrounded by the Israeli military, by the Israeli army, by illegal Jewish colonies and so forth and so on.
So Rabin ended up having what he wanted to have in the first place.
Yeah, well, so speaking of which, let's talk about this latest piece of yours.
Palestinians face torture in Israeli administrative detention.
And you tell the story here of Heba Ahmed al-Labadi.
Who's that?
So Heba al-Labadi is a Jordanian Palestinian.
She is a Palestinian girl who is also a Jordanian national, and that is quite common in the West Bank.
She was coming along with her mom to a wedding in the city of Nablus in the West Bank.
The Israeli army grabs her right at the border.
They have no accusations against her aside from the fact that she visited South Lebanon.
If you visit South Lebanon, and that includes you, Scott, and me and everybody else, South Lebanon is, you know, the activists who work there in various organizations and groups.
Many of them are part of Hezbollah because Hezbollah has a great deal of control over that part.
It seems that she met with a journalist from Hezbollah.
That's really the accusation over coffee or really the circumstances are not clear.
According to Israeli thinking, this means that she is in cahoot of Hezbollah and she is part of some sort of a terrorist network.
They tortured her for weeks and they could not find any reasonable information.
So they did not want to release her.
So they ended up holding her according to what they call administrative detention.
Basically, administrative detention is the idea that if they really have no evidence against you whatsoever, they have the legal right, according to the Israeli law, to hold you and torture you even, because even though torture at one point, it was legal in Israel for many years, until the late 90s when the Israeli Supreme Court said, no, it's not legal anymore.
A couple of years later, the Israeli government pushed them to change that ruling into, yes, torture is legal under some circumstances.
Well, when it comes to Palestinians, almost every circumstance is the right circumstance.
So torture is now widespread and it's being used in numerous and quite often very creative ways.
And I detail that in my forthcoming book in November about the prisoners.
So Hiba is being held under this law now for five months.
She is on a hunger strike.
She has been on a hunger strike for almost three weeks.
She has lost a third of her weight.
She is subjected to all sorts of mistreatment.
She is not allowed to shower unless she is being watched by male soldiers.
I mean, imagine that.
So as a result, she hasn't even showered since she's been detained.
And this is, sadly, it's Hiba's story, but it's also the story of hundreds of Palestinians who are right now being held in administrative detention.
Now, let me just mention something important.
There are over 5,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
They call them, you know, the term, security prisoners, as in people who were involved in various acts of resistance.
The decision is not made by an Israeli civil court, but by the Israeli military court that is operating under Israeli occupation in the West Bank.
500 of those prisoners are held under administrative detention.
They usually tend to be academics, activists, social media activists, poets, artists, and so forth.
People who are seen to be inciting, mobilizing, organizing people, but they haven't really done anything that can be seen as a security threat to the state of Israel, but they are still troublemakers nonetheless.
So social media, for example, a single post on Facebook could land you in a six-month administrative detention in an Israeli jail that could be renewed indefinitely, sometimes renewed to a period of years.
So this is what Hiba is experiencing.
And I wrote an article about Hiba, but also in a way to highlight the plight of the hundreds of administrative detainees in Israeli prisons.
It sounds like a communist totalitarian police state, or I guess a fascist one, depending on which side of the political spectrum you're on, and hate the other side more.
And this is the power of Hasbara, Scott, is that when you have that kind of fascist state, but you present yourself to the world as the most civilized, the most democratic state in the Middle East, and therefore you win the appraise of the media.
And I remember it was actually John McCain, the late John McCain, once he was on the John Stewart Show a long time ago, and he came and he was railing against Guantanamo, saying we need to close it because this is not good for our image and for our laws and all of that.
And I was like, this is really interesting, John McCain is saying that.
And then he said, and then John Stewart says, so what is your, like, is this possible under these circumstances?
And John McCain says, well, Israel makes it possible.
Israel does not torture.
Israel does not mistreat prisoners.
Yet Israel is able to stop Palestinian terrorism.
And everybody was clapping and happy.
And you could imagine how enraged I was that this is the power of the Zionist propaganda.
The amount of torture that Israel uses against Palestinian prisoners, I don't think Guantanamo has ever.
In fact, one of the torture tactics that they used in Abu Ghraib in Iraq during the American invasion in 2003 is a very famous form of torture known as the Palestinian chair.
I was just about to interrupt you to say that.
Thank you.
Hey, that didn't mean that, yeah, we borrowed this from the Palestinians.
This is what the Israelis use on the Palestinians.
Exactly.
And it wasn't just borrowed.
It was introduced with Israeli experts who went to Abu Ghraib to teach their American counterparts how to perfect the use of this Palestinian chair.
So basically the Palestinian chair is a chair that is uneven.
It has uneven legs.
And therefore it can never be in a particular, you know, in a perfect position.
You are tied to the chair, your legs, your hands, your whole body just wrapped around in this massive rope.
And you could be sitting on that chair literally for days.
In other words, it's a stress position.
It's a stress position of the people that I have introduced, that I have interviewed who experienced the Palestinian chair.
Well, we don't call it the Palestinian chair.
We have a different name for it.
The Israeli chair, is that it?
We call it the shabah, which is the ghost position.
That's the term we have for it.
And so basically not one single one of them did not leave with a permanent back injury.
For anybody listening who thinks, hey, no touch torture doesn't sound so bad to me, why don't you take a heavy book, even a light book, and hold it out to the side and see how long you can do that.
Now imagine being forced to do that, where you have no choice for days on end.
And that's the simplest one, right?
That's the kind of stress position your first grade teacher might have used on you.
But yeah, that sure is torture all right.
That's right.
No question about that.
Many of the torture tactics are these kind of creative forms of tortures that are kind of like a middle ground between punching you in the face a thousand times.
It's an enhanced interrogation is all.
Yeah, yeah.
That's what it is.
So this is what's happening.
This is what Palestinians are experiencing at this moment.
And just to clarify again, now you're talking not about people being arrested by the IDF and taken before a military court, which is all run in Hebrew and being sentenced under the military courts, criminal penalties.
You're talking about a whole other level of no court at all, no star chamber even, straight to prison in secret.
Absolutely.
I am talking about a student taking part of a protest, a teacher teaching a kind of history that Israelis don't like, a woman activist who's trying to mobilize her community to do something for the community.
And that kind of activity does not please the Israeli military.
They don't like to see this kind of people.
But they don't have any particular evidence.
They can't say, oh, they tried to stab someone.
They threw rocks at the Israeli army.
There's no evidence.
There are no photos.
There's nothing.
You're just a troublemaker.
You are the kind of person that they don't want you on the street because of your ideas.
You could be a radio station host, an intellectual who's trying to introduce new ideas to the community.
You will find yourself taken in the middle of the night and placed under administrative detention for anywhere between six months to three years continuously.
And I think after a certain point, I think after three years, then they are obligated to take you to a military court or release you.
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And thanks.
So back to what we were talking about in terms of the broader view of what's going on here.
You understand then why this is all necessary.
It's to somehow keep these people down.
And for some reason, Ramzi, you all won't just break and lay down.
So instead, it's just the permanent jackboot on your neck.
Right.
So the military occupation becomes the status quo.
The settlements become an industry, a thriving industry where they make a lot of money making products, selling them in European and American markets, and billions of American dollars that are going to be invested in the safety and the security of the illegal settlers and the safety of the Israeli army and the bullets that kill all these Palestinians and so forth.
And of course, the Palestinians have no other option but to resist.
And when I say resist, I'm talking about the form of resistance, of cultural resistance, not just guns and bullets, but people refusing to be subdued, refusing to relent and stop demanding their rights.
And that's what they have done one generation after the other for over 70 years.
And the Israelis don't like that, of course.
But the Israelis have normalized the occupation to the point that even that doesn't matter to them anymore.
They see themselves at the Sparta, this militant state that has to have a sense of threat.
In fact, if you look at the Israeli election campaign in September, the messages that were sent by both Gantz and Netanyahu is be very afraid.
They are coming to get us.
You have to vote for me, otherwise you are unsafe.
Your children are unsafe.
They are pushing that message of fear to the point that the Israelis who have the snipers and the nuclear bombs and everything you can possibly imagine, they are the ones who are actually very terrified.
While the Palestinians who are occupied and marginalized and subjugated do not have as much fear as their Israeli occupier, which in some sense doesn't make any sense.
But that's what happens when you keep selling this message of fear to your people over the course of 70 years.
And of course, there is that easy answer of how about we treat our Palestinian neighbors as human beings.
Maybe we need to look into their legitimate concerns.
Maybe this whole ethnic cleansing wasn't a good idea in the first place.
Maybe we need to take responsibility for it.
Maybe they shouldn't be refugees after all these years.
Maybe we need to find a way to coexist in one place and to share the resources and to vote like equals and to be treated and respected as equals.
Of course, it hasn't really dawned on the mindset of the majority of Israelis at this point.
And this is what we as Palestinians are fighting for.
Well, and on that note, and to wrap up here, the headline at Mondoweiss today is 71 more Gaza protesters injured, 33 by live fire.
And this is the Friday protest, the March of Return.
It says right there return in the title.
And yet again, in the Hasbara, in the American media, this is essentially termed as an invasion of a bunch of foreigners trying to destroy Israel.
And when it's presented in the American media, I mean, when you have Israeli army spokespersons coming on mainstream media saying, you know, there is no civilized country in the world, no democratic country in the world would allow, you know, hordes coming to cross their borders.
So there's this kind of complete misrepresentation that Palestinians who have been driven out of their land and trying to get back to their lands are seen as the foreign hordes who are trying to come and disturb the lives of the peaceful, democratic Israel.
You know, well, it's actually the other way around.
It's the Israeli hordes who push the Palestinians out.
And those Palestinians are demanding their right of return, as they have done for like a year and a half now.
Every Friday, thousands of Palestinians go to the fence, separating besieged Gaza from Israel, demanding an end to the Israeli siege and end to the killing and end to the blockade and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
And every Friday you have a toll.
Sometimes, quite often, it's a death toll.
Now we have over 300 dead and well over 10,000 wounded in the last year and a half.
And that is going to continue.
It's going to carry on.
And sadly, now it's becoming some kind of a routine that is not even capturing the headlines anymore.
It is just a thing that happens.
You know, and Israel has a great deal of control over that narrative as well.
So even if it's reported in the media, it's reported as Palestinians trying to cross the fence.
And, you know, Americans, you know, this idea of someone is trying to cross my fence and come to my backyard, you know, I think it bothers anybody and everybody if you don't understand it within context.
You know, so that's the issue.
That's what's happening in Gaza.
And it's part and parcel of the resistance throughout, you know, the West Bank and the rest of Palestine.
I wonder what that would be like to have a whole, you know, few towns, few million people and have, it's a small community there, as big as it is, and as many people as it is jam-packed there together in that small area in the Gaza Strip.
And to just have a generation where you have, I guess, hundreds and hundreds of young men without legs.
And to have a whole generation like that where everybody, everywhere you go there's guys, they don't have wheelchairs, I guess.
They're probably banned, I presume, but, you know, still crutches everywhere.
And just, what must that be like to live in a prison?
And is this still the case, Ramzi, demographic-wise, that literally the majority of Gazans are minors?
They're actually not minors.
They are the majority.
People under 18?
And a growing majority as well.
So these are all people who are very, very responsible for somebody voting for Hamas back in 2006, you know.
That's an excellent point, Scott.
It's rarely used, but that's absolutely the case.
Because you are looking at an event that happened, you know, the last elections held in Palestine was 13 years ago.
And when you think of, you know, these kids who are 15, 16, 17, up to 20, who are constantly getting shot and killed and maimed, you know, the oldest of them was seven years old when the elections happened.
But that's, yeah, that's absolutely correct that they are being, you know, and I'm not saying that anybody should be victimized by voting for the wrong party under any circumstance.
No, of course not.
It's just a whole other level of absurdity to the whole thing.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Anyway, listen, I know you're in a hurry and got to go, but thank you so much for coming back on the show and talking about this stuff with us again, Ramzi.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you, Scott, and keep up the good work.
All right, you guys, that's Ramzi Baroud.
He is at original.antiwar.com slash Ramzi dash Baroud.
And of course at palestinechronicle.com Ramzi Baroud dot net.
And read his book, The Last Earth, A Palestinian Story.
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.
