All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Ramzi Baroud from palestinechronicle.com, and of course, author of the books My Father Was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth, a Palestinian Story.
His brand new one just out last month is called These Chains Will Be Broken, Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons.
Welcome back to the show.
Ramzi, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing really good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show again here today.
So I just ordered the book.
It's on its way.
But can you tell us a little bit about it before we get into the rest of the regular subject matter of today's show?
Absolutely.
The book is a continuation, Scott, of my work of the last, I would say, 10, 12 years where I have been putting a lot of focus on kind of allowing readers to rediscover the Palestinian narrative from a Palestinian point of view, which is something you would think it should be kind of a given, but it's not.
This is not how the Palestinian viewpoint is conveyed to the world.
Palestinian voices are hardly heard or quite muffled in the media.
And even in alternative progressive media, we don't get the chance to actually tell the story the way we see it from our viewpoint.
So I've kind of been really trying to deal with various issues, that of the Nakba, you know, the destruction of Palestine in 1948 from Palestinian point of view, and so forth and so on.
Now, this time, I felt that the story of prisoners is a very, very tough story to tell, because on one hand, Israel managed to convey that, you know, prisoners are terrorists, and therefore they deserve no respect, no sympathy, no rights, and so forth.
And even those who defend Palestinian rights try to steer clear from this issue altogether, because they find it very difficult to communicate.
So I thought, okay, how do I do this?
Do I do this patronizing kind of academic style, where I go and tell the story of the prisoners on my own, or do I actually get the prisoners to tell their own story?
And that's precisely what we did.
We have 20 interviews with 10 female and 10 male prisoners, freed prisoners.
Some of them are actually interviewed inside prison through, you know, smuggled cell phones.
So we, you know, there was a degree of risk involved there.
Those who we could not reach in prison, we interviewed their mothers, their wives, their dads and so forth.
So what we actually ended up with is something that hasn't been done before in terms of getting the story of the prisoners.
And it's not told around these kind of predictable lines of, you know, trying to prove that they are terrorists or they are freedom fighters.
We're not dealing with that.
We are allowing them to take complete charge of the way they want to tell their story.
So some of these stories end up being love stories, friendships, family.
You know, some of them are quite depressed and you can expect that.
One interview or a series of interviews were conducted with a prisoner who has been in prison for 25 years.
And the interview was conducted with the help of his sister who communicated with him in prison.
And he's quite depressed.
And we felt this is really kind of off-putting, you know, this is not the message that we would hope to communicate, but it's his message.
It's his story.
Therefore, we conveyed it the way that he saw it, even though maybe as editors, we felt that it's inconsistent with the line we wanted to communicate and so forth.
So we ended up with something that actually surprised us, the very people who put the book together.
And we are hoping that this could challenge not only our view of prisoners and the way we tell their story, but kind of allows us to kind of delve into so many other taboo subjects and talk about it and let the people who are affected by it convey it to the rest of the world.
Great.
Well, so I can't ask you too much more about it because I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but can you tell us about the reception it's got so far?
Well, the book is really more or less officially out, was three, four days ago, and OK, you know, I was confused about that because I thought it wasn't coming out until this month.
But then on Amazon, it says December 20th or something.
Right.
Amazon kind of messed things up a bit, but the book is now officially out and can be ordered, whether via Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Clarity Press, the publisher that published the book in Atlanta in the US, but also a press release, an official press release will be out about the book.
And I will be touring with the book soon.
But more importantly, the press release is going to have the numbers of Palestinian prisoners and contact information of Palestinian prisoners that I would like to speak directly to the media and to go and do their own speaking engagements and so forth, trying to cut the middleman as much as possible.
Great.
OK, well, and of course, you're at Palestine Chronicle dot com.
People want to find out more about that.
And the book is again on sale now.
These chains will be broken by Ramzi Baroud.
And right.
And another source, Scott, if we can also go to my personal website, that's Ramzi Baroud dot net, Ramzi with a Y.
There's tons more information about the book there as well.
OK, great.
Ramzi Baroud dot net.
And we'll link to all that in the show notes to there.
Thank you.
OK, great.
So you're a regular writer for Antiwar dot com, or we regularly run your essays that you publish all over the place, I guess is a better way to put it.
But and of course, the reason why is because you're picking up the slack of so many others who just turn away, get bored or never pay attention in the first place to this most important story, the endless, indefinite Israeli siege of the Palestinians on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, for that matter.
But so I wanted to catch up with you about some pretty big news lately as far as settlement expansions and also what's going on at the Friday protests in Gaza.
And then I see that you have here some articles from last few weeks touching on all of this stuff.
So I don't know if you wanted to start in one occupied territory or the other there, Ramzi.
You want to talk about your great article about Area C there on the West Bank?
We could talk about this if you wish.
Yes.
All right.
So what is Area C?
Let's start with that.
Well, the short answer is that Area C is created to confuse the rest of the world regarding what is actually happening.
Let's look at the terminology.
Prior to the Oslo Peace Accords, supposedly, of course, between parentheses, the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, we only spoke about Israel and occupied Palestine or the occupied territories.
There was nothing else.
It wasn't confusing at all.
We knew where the occupied Palestinian land is, and we would protest, you know, settlement expansion and so forth and so on.
And the international community was very clear regarding its role and responsibility towards the occupied Palestinian people.
Oslo kind of saw this illusion that there has been a solution or at least a solution is in the making.
And in the process of doing so, the lexicon, the discourse, the vocabulary began changing.
So the West Bank, for example, according to Oslo, was divided to three areas or three zones.
Area A, and of course, I'm talking here in theory, Scott, Area A is under Palestinian authority control, and that's about 17, 18 percent of the total size of the occupied West Bank.
Area B, which is slightly larger, is under, again, in theory, Israeli and Palestinian control.
Area C, which is the largest of the three chunks, about 60 percent, is under total Israeli control.
Right now, in practice, none of this happened.
Area C is entirely under Israeli control.
Area B is entirely under Israeli control.
And Area A, which is 17, 18 percent of the West Bank, Israel goes in and out as it pleases.
It arrests, it murders, it assassinates, whatever.
Right.
So in reality, the occupied territories haven't changed their practical status.
They are still occupied territories and they are still recognized by international law as occupied territories.
But we are forced, for technical reasons, to use these terminologies as Area A, B and C.
Now, Area C, the one under total Israeli control, that's where the settlement expansion is happening.
That's where most of the apartheid wall or the separation wall is being built.
That's most of the land confiscation, the destruction of the ancient olive groves, the confiscation of farms, the slow genocide that Israeli Professor Ilan Pappe keeps talking about.
That's where most of these things are happening.
So that is Area C.
And it's as problematic as the rest of the areas.
But those Palestinians living in Area C suffers the most, obviously.
OK, so I wanted to point out real quick here, and people can look this up from, I believe it was back in 2010, a video leaked of Benjamin Netanyahu speaking with some Israeli settlers in their living room and talking about how he kind of had gotten away with this maneuver against Bill Clinton.
And it's in regards to Area C where he says they redefined which parts of the occupied territories counted as a military site, which is, I think, the same.
You know, this is the analogous term here.
So he was saying essentially, oh, yeah, sure, we'll go along with what you guys are doing.
But meanwhile, they essentially redefined the terms to such a degree that it meant essentially de facto annexation of two thirds of the entire territory.
That's that's exactly.
And I've seen that video when it came out, sadly, very little attention.
And this is the same video where he says, oh, the Americans, 80 percent of them support us.
It's absurd.
Yeah.
He mocks the Americans for letting him get away with this stuff.
Absolutely.
And but now, sadly, we have an administration that that recognizes the illegality of the Israeli settlements of the Jewish settlements as if they are legitimate, defying international law of the last 70 plus years.
So ultimately, sadly, Netanyahu has won that deceptive narrative of his that he can, you know, communicated in that leaked video ended up being the mainstream narrative of Israel that is now publicly communicated to the rest of the world.
And very little is being done about it.
Well, and the headline was, oh, here it is.
Oh, I had it here where he was saying they have every right to annex the entire Jordan Valley at this point.
And then they also announced two thousand more settlements or, you know, apartments, I guess, if they're expanding in units.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, not two thousand more entire settlements.
That would be something else.
But anyway, it is essentially.
As you've been arguing all along, you know, since I've known you that they did already annex the West Bank, essentially it already is Israeli territory under their rule and that some future independence for the West Bank under a Palestinian state is nothing, has been nothing but a ruse this whole time, a peace process while they take it all away.
And it seems pretty undeniable now.
But then the question is, though, and I guess we've been up against this all along, too, is at the point where it becomes essentially, you know, or in fact, de jure annexation, then that puts them in an even worse bind in a way.
Right.
The the as Bill Kristol said, what's wrong with the status quo where they're getting away with everything, with with essentially no consequences?
If they make too radical of a change, they might have to face, you know, more pressure to, I don't know, give Palestinians the right to vote or something crazy like that.
That's right.
You know, just just a side note, the U.S. support of Israel throughout all of this, I mean, you know, you mentioned the Jordan Valley, but earlier they also Trump signed the document that recognizes Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights as legitimate.
And Pompeo later on said that the West Bank are legitimate and so forth.
So basically they rendered everything regarding international law pertaining to the occupied territories, whether Palestinian or Syrian or others, to be entirely moot.
And Israel has the right to do what Israel wishes to do.
But by doing so, they completely rendered international law irrelevant, too.
You know, I, you know, I recently wrote about the ICC, the International Criminal Court, that now will be kind of looking into, you know, to see if it has the mandate to investigate Israel's crimes or any crimes committed in the occupied territories for that matter since, I don't know, 2006, I believe, or something like that.
But then the question is, you know, what is the point if whatever the international law says is being, you know, pushed aside by Washington?
And they say, listen, we have the military power, the political clout, the financial means that we can make it work for Israel regardless of what international law says.
So the word international law, as far as Israel is concerned, is a joke.
Nobody takes it serious in Israel.
We are talking about it as Palestinians because, honestly, we don't have an alternative.
And we are still kind of hoping for this awakening that will happen at one point in the future.
And regarding equal citizenships and all of that, you know, another side note, Scott, I hate to put you on the spot, but for years and years, we have been saying certain things that someone like me has been accused of being too radical, too pessimist, too this, too that.
And then with time, you are proven to be right in everything we've said to the point that you kind of hate to say I told you so.
But we've told you so.
We have been saying it for years, as you said earlier.
Now we are saying the only possible way out of this, the only way we can actually do something positive out of this mess is to have a one state, equal citizenship, equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis, for Arabs, Jews, for Muslims and Christians and so forth.
That's the only way out of it.
There can be no other political concoction that could produce a minimal amount of justice.
But this and it falls short from our national expectations as Palestinians.
We wanted a state of our own.
We wanted to restore that, you know, the biblical term Palestine back.
We wanted our sense of identity and sacrifices to be recognized and and so forth and so on.
But that's not going to happen in the way that at least in the way that our ancestors and our various freedom fighting movements envisaged in the 50s and 60s and 70s.
It's not going to happen that way.
It's clearly it would not happen.
So the only solution is a one state solution.
Now, this is our our you know, this is how the tendency now in Palestine.
Israel doesn't care about these things.
Israel doesn't feel that it's obligated neither morally nor legally to come up with a solution because Israel is imposing its own vision and its own solution.
And according to the Israeli solution, Palestinian rights and aspirations and culture and all of this do not matter in the least.
What matters is Israel to get the maximum amount of territories and to impose its political will and maintain that status quo for as long as possible.
And with the help of the United States and other European countries, you know, that is going to happen like, you know, just yesterday, Scott, Italy, which has traditionally been far more amiable and pro-Palestine than other other European countries.
Now they are proposing a law, and I think it will pass in the parliament, that equates anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and and is going to make BDS, the boycott movement against Israel, will make it illegal in Italy and so forth.
So now the West is all kind of still after all of this, after all of this, they are still, you know, formulating this very strong front for Israel, regardless of everything that Israel has done in the last 70 years.
So we have very little hope that neither Europe nor the United States is going to make any difference at the end of the day.
It's the resistance of the people that will that continue to challenge Israel, what's happening in Gaza, what's happening in the West Bank and the dynamics of the region itself.
You see?
Yeah, well, you know, you have this other article from a few weeks back, I guess, a couple of months back about the upcoming flotilla.
They're going to try to break the Gaza siege again.
And you've written time and again about all the peaceful protest movements in the West Bank.
And of course, there's the protests at the fence, you know, still ongoing.
They're correct at the after the Friday prayers, they go out there to the to the Gaza fence to get sniped at by the IDF.
And, you know, today's MLK Day, coincidentally, so I want to have that same argument with you again.
All of my Palestinian friends hate this, which is not too many.
But I talked with Ali Abunimah about this, and he also was like, no, you didn't like it either.
But all this one state solution stuff, to me, it just seems like if you want to go from like, you know, kind of an ironic sort of asymmetrical political kind of, you know, end run, that the thing to do would be to say, it is one state, the state of Israel.
And you can worry about the name change later if you want, fine by me.
But it seems like instead of saying, let's start with a whole new constitution, a whole new state with equal rights for everyone kind of thing, that maybe you could all just demand the 15th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act and just, you know, frame it all in the in the terms of the black civil rights struggle in America for simple equal treatment under the law, just like it's supposed to be like that.
And then if you want to name it Israel-Estein later when everybody has equal rights, great.
But it seems like that's the best way to jam their narrative is to essentially, you know, concede defeat.
They did annex, as you put it, I think many times, they annexed the West Bank in 1967.
There's no point in pretending it ain't Judea and Samaria under the control of the Israelis.
It is their state from the river to the sea.
But who's they?
And now it's time to define they much more broadly to include all the Palestinians to that kind of deal.
And I can see why if you're a Palestinian, that sounds horrible, but maybe good enough.
No, no, I'll tell you why it won't work, because we, you know, I was I was thinking when you were formulating the question, I was thinking that I'm going to tell you this.
You know, at one point in South Africa, there was only one country and it was the South African apartheid regime.
So why isn't that black people simply did not you know, why did they demand the erasure, complete erasure of of apartheid government and formulating a whole new government based on a whole new set of priorities that represents the majority of blacks and so forth?
And the demolishing of all the Bantustans and all this, you know, so-called homelands and so forth and bring it all one in one.
You know how complicated South.
You know, I was just in South Africa a few months ago.
And, you know, wherever we would pass in the car going from one province to the other, you know, friends would point over there, Ramzi.
That was the homeland or the Bantustan of this tribe.
And that's the Bantustan.
At one point, they had like six, seven foreign ministers in South Africa.
I was really astonished with all this, you know, the complexity of the South African scenario and where it is now.
I will not allege or claim in any way that everything is good and dandy in South Africa, but they have one government, one parliament, one foreign minister, one constitution and so forth.
So if the South Africans have done it, I don't see why the Palestinians shouldn't do it.
But even more interesting and more relevant to this is that we already have an example of where we can prove that for Palestinians to demand supposedly equal rights within an Israeli constitution, within an Israeli state is problematic.
And that example is Palestinian Arabs who are living in so-called Israel proper since 1948.
These are the Palestinians, unlike my grandparents and my parents, were not ethnically cleansed.
The minority Palestinian population that remained in Israel, Muslims and Christians until this day.
And after the end of the emergency laws in the 50s, they were slowly granted Israeli citizenship.
But what happened to them?
How is their plight any different?
They are still treated as second, third and fourth class citizens.
They are still denied so many opportunities.
They can't even buy land because the land is all owned by the the Jewish National Fund that only sell land to Jews.
Yeah, but we are still.
But exactly what we're talking about is making them that exact same population, changing them from one fifth to half the population now.
But here's the thing.
Their plight is actually worsening.
They are worsening after the passing of the the nation state law, their status after all of these years, civil rights struggle for 70 years nonstop.
They are in a far worse political and cultural and societal conditions than they were were 70 years ago.
So here we are going to embrace the very failed model that did not work with a portion of our population.
So why don't we challenge that entirely and demand a whole different political setup instead of falling of that trap that we have felt in all these years ago?
OK, but you got to admit that it would be an entirely different situation, first of all, just because time keeps moving forward.
And but it would be entirely different because we'd be talking about not one fifth of the citizens being treated as third class citizens like this.
But you'd now be talking about the Israelis begrudgingly forced to admit the citizenship of the Palestinians.
Now it's half the population are being treated as third class citizens in a way where right now it's much easier to frame it that the Palestinians are all these enemy aliens from some foreign country somewhere.
Instead, this would be more like just admitting half of the citizens.
Yes, they're citizens, but no, they still can't vote because we just won't let them.
And that kind of thing.
That's a different dynamic than oppressing one fifth of the population of the citizenry inside so-called Israel proper and then just freezing out all the occupied.
I don't get me wrong.
This is a horrible half measure.
I'm not saying it's perfect or anything, but it seems like it might be a good bit of kung fu to change the situation.
You know what I mean?
You know, this this may work in theory, but it wouldn't work in practice because you are dealing with an enemy that is always a step ahead of you.
You know, they say that the reason that computer hackers are really good at what they do is that no matter what kind of software defenses that you develop, they are always a step ahead of you.
So you are chasing after them, not the other way around in Palestine, in Israel, in Israel's proper.
They have these laws.
For example, if you are a Palestinian.
OK, so if you're a Palestinian in the occupied territories, you have no rights.
You are occupied.
You have a precarious ID card.
That means nothing.
And a passport that makes no sense.
If you are a Palestinian Arab living in Israel proper, so-called of 1948, you have an Israeli passport and you can travel.
But there are certain regulations to ensure that the population remains suppressed and and minimize as much as possible.
So, for example, if you travel and you stay out of the country for a certain number of years, you could actually lose your right and residence in Israel.
This is far more accentuated in Jerusalem to ensure that the population, which used to be the majority of the people of Jerusalem, the majority used to be Palestinians when Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967.
Now they are a shrinking minority because of these laws.
So you are dealing with an enemy that is constantly plotting ways to keep you suppressed, keeping your numbers at minimum, keeping you divided.
So even if we under some circumstances said, you know what, let's just all be Israeli.
First of all, Israel would never allow this to happen because they know that they have been fighting a demographic war.
That's the term they refer to Palestinians as a demographic bomb.
Can you imagine with Israel being the strong, powerful country with nuclear arms that it is today would actually allow for a political formulation that would bring millions of Palestinians this demographic bomb and puts it in the Israeli parliament in the Knesset, even under the current constitution in Israel?
This would never happen.
But even if they do, they will always find ways to keep Palestinians divided, minimized in their effects and their numbers.
But so then where are we at?
I mean, obviously we all agree what we want to see is the kind of reformation you saw in South Africa where it went from apartheid to no longer apartheid.
But so how do we get from here to there?
What is it you want to see happen?
Well, the same thing that happened in every national movement anywhere in the world, everything that happened when black people were told that they cannot drive on the front of the bus or drink from water fountains, Scott, people fight, people resist, people organize, people mobilize, people seek international, regional and solidarity, and then they push back.
And that's what we are doing.
And that's what we need to continue doing.
Just because it seems implausible at the moment, it doesn't mean it's impossible.
You can't.
You can't.
Because if we don't and if we just accept the status quo and say, well, what can we do?
Israel is a powerful country, you know, but at the end of the day, nothing would have ever changed in the world if that was the case.
Colonization in its traditional form would have carried on until today.
The slaves would have been slaves and black people would be in the back of the bus.
But it's people resisting, people fighting back and organizing, and that's what we should be doing.
And that's why international solidarity is essential for us.
This boat that will be going to Gaza, I don't think the Israelis would allow them anyway.
And I keep telling them that when I talk to them, you know that the Israelis are going to intercept you right in international waters and they are going to haul your boat to Haifa or Jaffa, right?
It makes no difference.
But what it does, it's constantly trying to send the message to Israel that the world is watching.
There is an international solidarity movement.
They are willing to take risks.
The fact that international law is being hijacked or being subverted by American pressure doesn't mean that the rest of the world doesn't care about Palestine and the Palestinians.
And regarding the dynamics of the region, we rarely talk about it, but it's so very important.
You know, Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister of Israel who was imprisoned for corruption charges, wrote an article, I think it was in the Jerusalem Post a few days ago, actually two days ago, where he said to Israeli leaders, stay out of this whole Iran situation.
We can't deal with the consequences if the whole thing, you know, if we end up paying the price for it.
Now they are afraid.
There are serious fears that Israel as a military power that used to control and shape the region like they are cutting a cake, it doesn't work anymore.
Any little mistake in South Lebanon, Hezbollah will fight back.
Any little mistake regarding Iran, Iran will stand up for itself.
The military dynamics have changed so fundamentally.
But because Israeli propaganda and the talk about how the U.S. can blow up the whole region in Israel's behalf and so forth, kind of is selling this illusion that we are still living in the 50s and 60s.
But the region has fundamentally changed in terms of military power.
Even Gaza, Israel is still unable, Israel is able to besiege Gaza, but Israel is unable to use its military prowess and its military power to create or to yield political outcomes that suits its interests in Gaza.
Imagine besieged, impoverished, hungry Gaza that has no communication with the outside world.
They can't even get gasoline or cement to Gaza.
But it's actually able to present some sort of resistance that actually affects the Israeli military equation.
Now, this is changing and will continue to change 10 years from now, 20 years from now.
Israel is no longer, will no longer be that kind of power that is able to commit murders and get away with it.
And that's really, I think, I think that's a very important part of the equation that we rarely discuss as if Palestine is located in some random space.
But you have to look at the region and the dynamics of the region as well to understand or to at least try to predict what the future may be like.
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All right.
Now you have this really important article of why or how Western media allows Israel to get away with murder in Gaza.
And I think it's fair to assume that most people just hear the mainstream media, i.e.
Israel's side of the story on this.
They don't really know about maybe about the siege of Gaza at all.
So you referred there to the misery of these people, essentially captive in the Gaza Strip.
Who are they?
Why are they in the Gaza Strip?
And what's so bad about it?
Well, the vast majority of Gazans right now, Gaza is about two million people.
That's actually officially that the Palestinian census says two million people living in Gaza in an area that is about, what, 365 square kilometers.
I don't know how much that is in miles, but much smaller.
It's the most one of the most crowded and impoverished places in the world.
And it doesn't need to be this way because many Gazans are well educated and they are capable of looking out after themselves.
But they have been placed under an Israeli siege for at least 12 years.
The Israeli siege followed Palestinian general elections in which the Hamas movement won the election.
Israel, which has already created this massive narrative that Hamas is not a political party and, you know, deserving of dialogue, a bunch of crazy mullahs, terrorists who are, you know, just blowing things up left and right.
And we are not only we don't want to talk to them or dialogue with them, but we want to keep them under siege because that's what you do with the terrorists.
Well, in the meantime, they kept two million people under siege as well.
So the unemployment rate in Gaza is over half of the population unemployed.
People are dying as a result of lack of medicine, especially cancer patients.
Thousands of people are denied the right to go to hospitals to get treated, whether in Jerusalem, in the West Bank, in Israel.
And the situation is getting much worse.
Over 99 percent of Gaza's water is polluted.
The United Nations decided that 2020 is the year where officially Gaza will become an inhabitable.
So Gaza right now, as we speak, is not suitable for human habitation.
And all of this because Gazans, like the rest of Palestinians, voted for a movement for Hamas, for a political movement that that Israel doesn't like.
As far as Israel is concerned, militarily, Gaza is important.
It's important for Gaza to remain under siege because it always gives this illusion that Israel is being threatened.
And Israel has thrived for 70 years on the idea that it's a victim.
It's a victim in a tiny, small, tiny little country that is placed among hordes of Muslims and Arabs.
And it's always a victim.
And those darn Gazans are there victimizing Israel day and night by firing these homemade rockets.
And Israel is defending itself.
And Israel has the right to defend itself and so forth and so on.
So Gaza does serve a purpose within the Israeli propaganda.
Without Gaza, it would be tough for Israel to present itself as a victim and it's under attack.
So they need to keep Gaza under attack.
And they also want to send a message to the rest of the Palestinians in the West Bank.
If you pick up arms, if you dare resist, if you dare fight us, this is what's going to happen to you.
This is your fate.
So you need to remain quiet and suppressed in order for you not to suffer this horrific fate that is being suffered by Gazans at the moment.
You know, I have one of my children is 13 years old.
He was born a few months after the Gaza siege.
And now he has a mustache.
He was asking me yesterday, should I shave my mustache or not?
And I'm thinking to myself, my goodness, my son was born more or less when the siege started.
We never expected that the world is going to allow this, you know, this horrific situation to carry on all of these years.
And my son is now 13 years old and people are still sitting there for 12, 13 years in Gaza, waiting for salvation, waiting for someone to come and say enough is enough.
You need to let these people go.
You need to let them live their lives.
You need to allow them to travel, to get education, to get health care, to get to rebuild their houses that were destroyed in successive Israeli wars that took place in 2008 and nine, 2012, 2014 and so forth.
Yet nothing has happened.
The only thing that's happening right now, as far as international solidarity is concerned, activists, you know, taking boats, going there with medicine and food, getting intercepted by Israel and hauled to some Israeli port somewhere.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny you talk about the image of Israel besieged by the hordes and all that.
None of that can withstand even a cursory glance at a map and the slightest bit of knowledge.
You just go around the semicircle there.
You have loyal, friendly ally, Egypt, loyal, friendly ally, Jordan, Hezbollah in the north.
I mean, Syria and Hezbollah, who pose no offensive threat whatsoever.
But I guess Hezbollah can keep them out of Lebanon.
I don't know if Assad could even keep them out of Syria at this point.
But certainly there are no hordes anywhere to be found, not in any of those places.
There's nobody coming.
The whole thing is ruse.
But what's funny about it, though, is is that if you just zoom in the exact same kind of scenario, the way the Israelis paint it is true about the people of Gaza.
But the besiegers are the Israelis.
And there it's just like you picture from the bird's eye view there on the map or whatever.
Israel is this tiny little strip of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.
Just zoom in.
And when you get to Gaza, you're an even tinier little strip of land on the eastern Mediterranean there.
Then all of a sudden the BS story becomes the truth, only it's all the other way around.
And it's this poor population stuck there.
And we would be remiss, wouldn't we, if we didn't mention about how the Israeli Mossad and their political leaders decided quite deliberately in the 80s to assist the rise of Hamas as a right wing religious alternative to the PLO to split the Palestinians.
And I actually just finished rereading Devil's Game by Robert Dreyfus, where all of chapter eight is about it.
But of course, there's a Charles Higgins in The Wall Street Journal and Richard Sale at UPI and Jeremy R.
Hammond in his great book, Obstacle to Peace, writes all about this.
I'm sure you have more.
But that's the real story of Hamas is they were a Mossad plot to divide and conquer the Palestinians from the get go, of course.
You know, I did actually write about this extensively in my books as well.
And I lived in Gaza when Hamas was created.
And I remember the clashes between Hamas and the various Palestinian national factions of the Islamic University and so forth.
And I don't want to go into this into details.
I just want to say that there is a lot of misinformation regarding this issue.
There is one thing that if if a government or some authority is using you to manipulate political conflicts or you allowing yourself to be used in that way, I actually think that the growth of Hamas and I clashed with the fantastic Noam Chomsky over this myself, is that it's not so simple that the Mossad created Hamas.
They didn't create Hamas, but they did, in fact, when Hamas wanted to start at the time it was called Al-Jamiya Al-Islamiya, which means the Muslim Council or something like that.
Whenever they wanted to hold events to get permits from the Israeli military, because you can't do anything without a permit from the Israeli military, they were allowed.
When others wanted to do so, they were disallowed.
So they kind of gave them room to maneuver and to create a base and to organize.
But it wasn't because it was Hamas involved in some sort of a Mossad plot.
And as a historian, I feel like I have to be really honest about these things, regardless of how I feel about these movements personally.
The clash happened during the first Intifada in 1987.
I think 80 days later, Hamas felt the pressure that all of these movements are rising in support of the Palestinian uprising and Hamas was staying out.
And they had these kind of extensive meetings in which they've decided that they are going to shift the nature of their struggle from education and cultural events to political struggle.
And that was the formulation of Hamas as a political movement.
Prior to the Intifada, Hamas did not exist as a political movement, it only existed in other forms.
And I think that's where the Israelis began realizing it was a big mistake that they allowed Hamas to build the base because they thought the Palestinians will never rise.
Everything is going to remain as it is.
What we are achieving here is creating conflict among Palestinians, and that's going to carry on forever.
Well, that didn't.
And Hamas eventually ended up being far more stubborn and strong in terms of resistance than the other political movements.
And if you look at actually at the situation right now, it's Hamas that is fighting in Gaza while Fatah, which used to represent the largest Palestinian political movements, are the ones who are coordinating, you know, do what they call the security coordinations with Israel in the West Bank.
So times have changed.
And yes, I agree with the idea that the Mossad was involved in in playing some sort of a political game.
But that's entirely different than with Hamas itself being a Mossad creation.
Well, yeah, I might have overstated it, but that what you just said is entirely consistent with all three of the authors, four of the authors I just mentioned there and what they wrote about it.
But as you're saying, everybody is in a Israeli cage here when they put their thumb on the scale against the Reds and for the right wingers, it means everything.
And Dreyfuss writes about how Yassin was busted with a house full of rifles and he did one year in jail and then was let out again.
He might as well be an informant.
It doesn't matter whether he has signed on the dotted line with them or not.
You know, all of this is under their control.
And so when they lean toward the religious side for a while, create the space for them, as you say, that amounts to the whole thing is a controlled experiment in their lab.
You know, that's why the players aren't really free.
They're making their choices within such narrow constrictions.
You know what I mean?
I wanted to bring this point earlier.
Speaking of experiments, when I was talking about the usefulness of Gaza, the usefulness of Israeli siege on Gaza, you know, after every Israeli attack on Gaza, like the one that happened in November, there are always these massive Israeli military expos, whether in Israel itself or massive displays that they present in armed expos around the region, sometimes Dubai and around the world.
And what they usually explain and the videos that they show, they show the destructiveness of their weapons against Gaza.
So Gaza is now the alive experiment that has actually generated Israel hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in arms sales, because without Gaza, Israel has no place to experiment with these weapons.
So that's what usually happens.
So, yes, not just a political experiment, Scott, but a military experiment as well.
Like, what was his name?
A friend of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon Gissen, who said that he, you know, talked about how they are experimenting with the amount of food that Palestinians are allowed to eat in Gaza by putting Palestinians on a diet, he said, you know, and just to keep them kind of like neither dead nor alive somewhere in the middle.
I mean, the amount of experimentation that Israel is doing on the Palestinians is just really, really appalling.
And the thing is, they are not even bashful talking about it.
They talk about it openly.
It's just we don't report about it in mainstream media.
If it were not for your radio program and alternative radio and news media, you wouldn't even hear a Palestinian voice anywhere being uttered in the United States or anywhere in the West.
But that's what it is.
You know, and they openly they are not scared or not worried about the consequences of their words.
They are very open about them, but they know that they have very good friends who would always protect them no matter what.
Yeah.
You know, I bet you probably remember when Thomas Friedman, who for some reason is the celebrated public intellectual, wrote in The New York Times that, you know, what the Palestinians should do is they should just all march unarmed toward the border and say, we want rights and stuff like that.
And then at that point, the Israelis will be so shamed they'll have to do something, which I don't know what it was that got to his conscience that month or whatever it was.
But anyway, that's what they did.
And then they all just got their legs blown off, if not, you know, their hearts blown out.
So but is that still going on?
It's been more than a year, the protests at the fence.
I'm glad you brought this up.
Yeah.
Please talk about that.
As of late, so the protests have been going on since March 2018.
Really, the idea, the idea was beautiful behind it.
There's been a lot of discussion among Palestinians that, you know, we need to introduce.
Yes, we have been using popular struggle.
We have been using, you know, I don't like the word nonviolent because it kind of puts a value judgment on Palestinians.
And I don't like that.
I believe that people have the right to resist injustice in whichever way that actually eventually could eradicate injustice.
Hey, that's morally right.
But that's also the law that people have the right to defend themselves.
Go ahead.
Exactly, exactly.
But, you know, we Palestinians are the exception when it comes to these things.
So but so here we are.
You know, let's try to find new ways of expressing our, you know, you know, sending a clear message to the rest of the world that here we are in our tens of thousands seeking your solidarity.
Look at us.
Try to understand our story.
Solidify with us and so forth and so on.
And this is a demand that many have been making.
And even I remember Edward Said, you know, on Al Jazeera being critical that why Palestinians don't go and surround the Jewish settlements and hold hands and wait until the settlements are emptied of the colonialists.
And and it's not like they are not aware of what is actually happening on the ground as much as the sometimes I feel like there is a slight lack of awareness of how far Israel is willing to go to suppress Palestinians, even the most nonviolent forms of resistance.
So Israel treated these kids as if they are an invading army.
They placed hundreds of snipers at the borders and they sniped at them day and night, you see.
So every Friday, two people killed, 16 people killed.
When the U.S. in the day that the U.S. transferred its embassy to from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I think like 62 Palestinians were killed in one day within a few hours, thousands wounded.
So Israel treated them, men, women, children, treated them as if they are enemy combatants.
But because Palestinians are very stubborn, especially Gazans, I mean, I am from Gaza and I can tell you we are extremely stubborn people.
You know, anybody else would have said, whoa, wait a minute.
This is insane.
You know, we are there without weapons.
We are barbecuing and we are reading books and we are dancing and doing poetry.
But they are shooting at us as if we are an army.
Let's stop.
Let's just go back and rethink this thing.
But they didn't.
They carried on regardless of the sacrifices week after week after week until Israel began treating them even more like enemy combatants.
The bodies continue to pile up.
You have over 11,000, not, you know, there's like over 30,000 wounded, but 11,000 who are maimed, like disabled for life as a result of this.
Over 350 killed and so forth.
So there has been a decision by the committee behind the March of Return where they've decided that they are going to make this a monthly event as opposed to a weekly event so that they would minimize the casualties as much as possible, but also don't want to feel like their efforts have been defeated.
Yeah.
So this is a new decision.
And at this point, I think it's going to only be done on a monthly basis for, you know, as long as they decide.
Well, you know, it's important to talk about in this article here about the media spin when they even bother talking about it at all.
And it's really all important, isn't it?
The double talk about the border here.
Sometimes it's a border, sometimes it's not.
If it's a border, then that means that this is a country and these people have the right to be out from under this siege, don't they?
But then all of a sudden, it's not a border anymore.
Now it is this kind of weird quasi-occupied territory and all of this kind of thing again.
But when Israel's defending itself from attacks across that border, all of a sudden, it sure is a foreign country then, the Gaza Strip, isn't it?
Right.
And Israel did.
I mean, here's the strange thing.
The international community, the United Nations says, no, no, no, no.
Gaza is still an occupied territory, regardless of what you Israelis decide to call it.
It's still part of the occupied territories.
In 2005 or 2006, I can't remember exactly, Israel declared Gaza an enemy territory, therefore treating it as if it's a foreign country, but placing that supposed foreign country under absolute hermetic siege, you see.
And so they are treating it as a foreign country, but without giving that supposed country the freedom or the rights to go anywhere or to do anything.
And we, you know, and this also kind of highlights the importance of language.
We can fall into the trap without even realizing that we are.
I have used the term the Gaza border for years until one of my editors said, Ramzi, you know, by saying border, you are recognizing the Israeli definition of Gaza as if, you know, an enemy territory.
And if it's an independent place, you have to be careful in that language.
And I since then, I have devised, you know, what every time I refer to Gaza, I refer to it as or to the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel.
The fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel is the best possible wording I could come up with without giving the impression to the reader that this is an independent territory because it's not.
And the fact that I have I fell into that trap myself for years just shows you how important language is, because one make one little mistake gives Israel so much leverage to argue in international institutions that we are dealing here with an, you know, a sovereign place.
And therefore we have the right to defend ourselves.
I mean, on the other hand, you were calling it that and defining it that way, sort of in defiance of the occupation, sort of insisting that it should be a border.
At that point or previously, right or not?
Well, I mean, I mean, it's like it's different.
You are using a certain word and you have a certain perception of that word in your head.
But you don't know in the wrong context.
It could be flipped and could mean something else.
That's all about the ear of the beholder there.
Exactly.
The Jerusalem Post comment says even Palestinian writer Ramzi Baroud refers to it as a border.
And I was like, oh, my gosh, what have I done?
You know, that sort of thing.
So you have to be extra cautious with this kind of terminology because you know that Israel is an expert in kind of I mean, you know what they did with the United Nations Resolution 242, right, when there was in the French, the original French part of it, where they said Israel needs to evacuate the occupied territories.
In the English translation of the French resolution under American pressure, they removed the article that so it ended up Israel needs to evacuate occupied territories.
And for the last 50 plus years, Israel has been arguing that under international law, it's not obligated to leave all the occupied territories, but some of them because the article that has been removed.
You see, so it's extremely complicated and we have to be very, very cautious of how we treat these subjects.
Well, and it's extremely cynical and transparent and ridiculous at the same time.
Of course it is.
Yeah.
But that's why I'm not a lawyer.
All right, listen, I won't take up any more of your time today, but I am so appreciative.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show to talk about this stuff with us, Ramzi.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you very much, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's Ramzi Baroud.
RamziBaroud.net and PalestineChronicle.com.
The Last Earth and My Father Was a Freedom Fighter are his previous books, but the brand new one is called These Chains Will Be Broken, Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons.
Brand new out.
And check them out at Antiwar.com.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
