For Pacifica Radio, February 2nd, 2020.
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 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.
All right, introducing our guest today, it's Sheldon Richman, contributing editor at Antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Sheldon?
I'm doing fine, and always happy to be back.
And happy to have you here.
And of course, you're the author of the new book published last year, Coming to Palestine, which we talked about before on the show, about your changing understanding of the situation in Israel and Palestine.
And you have two articles that you've written this week about the second part, the political part of Trump's so-called deal of the century.
One is called Trump Lays an Egg, the Israel-Palestine Vision.
And the other is called Trump Would Make Palestinian Subjugation Permanent.
And both of these are available in your archive at Antiwar.com for people to look at.
So let's talk about it.
You want to take it from the top here, what you think are the most important aspects of this so-called deal that people need to understand?
Sure.
You know, in a way, it's all anticlimactic.
First of all, a bunch of this had already come out, was it last year, Jared Kushner had given interviews.
So we knew a good deal about it already.
And also, it's not very different from what American presidents have been proposing for a long time, especially like Bill Clinton's proposal at Camp David in 2000.
So in one sense, it's not new.
What seems to be so egregious about this with Trump is there's no guise of, you know, negotiation.
America has dropped the pretend role, the play acting as broker or facilitator of negotiations.
Honest broker, the term is often used.
He's now just dictating.
It's a diktat.
He's not calling it the deal of the century now.
If you actually look at the document, you can download the PDF online.
It's a vision, capital V, vision for a better life for Palestinians and Israelis.
Peace to prosperity, it's called.
So really what it is, it's about a $50 billion bribe to the Palestinians to give up any political aspirations of freedom, individual freedom, or even the freedom to get together and form your own political entity.
Because Trump and Jared Kushner and others say this is a two state solution.
It's not a Palestinian state in any real sense.
It's been compared to the old South African Bantustans.
It's an archipelago.
You can find the maps online.
An archipelago of Palestinian towns, what not, connected by roads or bridges.
But Israel has complete control over it.
So even though internal security is allotted to Palestinian authorities, which is also what happens on the part of the West Bank under the Oslo agreements that go back 20 years, more than 20 years, I guess.
So while there's some internal self-rule in the name of internal security, Israel controls everything external, airspace, border crossings, even the electromagnetic spectrum for the whole territory, actually for the whole area of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
And Israel reserves the right under this to step in inside this so-called state, sovereign state of Palestine.
Anytime it doesn't believe the Palestinians aren't living up to their obligations regarding the security of Israel.
So it's all about the security of Israel.
And if you look at the maps closely, they issued these two things called conceptual maps.
One is actually the same map, but emphases are different.
So one's supposed to be Israel and one's the state of Palestine.
But if you look at the Palestinian areas that are in the West Bank, this isn't true of Gaza Strip, which would be part of this new alleged state.
But if you look at the parts of the West Bank, which would be part of the new Palestine, if you look at the West Bank, you see a bunch of red dots, 15 red dots.
And if you look at the Israeli map and go to the legend to see what those dots are, and they're numbered one to 15.
If you go there, you'll see a list, one to 15 with names.
These things are called Israeli conclave communities.
And so it shows one to 15, but that doesn't mean they're 15.
There's only 15 of them.
That's a lot, but it doesn't mean they're only 15.
Because if you look right under that list of names on the map, it says, this list is not conclusive.
In other words, this is not all.
So the question is, what are these Israeli conclave communities that are scattered throughout what's supposed to be the sovereign state of Palestine?
If you go to the PDF, which I did and do a search on the phrase, Israeli conclave communities, you don't get anything.
The term is not in the document.
So I don't even know what they are.
They're not the settlements.
They're not the pre-existing settlements.
No, the settlements are going to be part of Israel, not part of Palestine.
They don't tell you what they are.
The settlements are going to be annexed to Israel.
In fact, Netanyahu already said he's going to go ahead with that.
And Trump has already announced that that's perfectly fine with him.
And the Jordan Valley too, right?
And the Jordan Valley too.
But, right, that's going to be part of Israel, which means Palestine will have no access to the Jordan River or the Dead Sea.
It'll have no access to any water, because Israel also controls all the water anyway.
So this is considered the state, the sovereign state of Palestine.
It's the joke of the century, the cruel hoax of the century.
You know, for, I guess, a year or two, we've been talking about this because they've been sort of leaking about it all along and that kind of thing.
And it was clear that, as you said, the Palestinians didn't help negotiate this thing whatsoever.
It's a diktat to them and that kind of deal.
And so I think we had talked about, and there is sort of a consensus among the opponents here, that this thing is mostly made to be rejected.
It's just another PR stunt to say, see, the Palestinians, in fact, Jared Kushner said something almost exactly along these lines, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Wow.
What a great little cliche.
It must be true or something.
And that this would be another way of demonstrating how, no matter how generous we are to the Palestinians, they always refuse to accept it.
However, as true as that may be, that's distracting from the real point that it's setting that narrative so that they can complete their land grabs.
They've already established these settlements, they've already taken over the Jordan Valley, but now they're going to consolidate these gains officially and declare these areas a part of Israel proper.
And then, I think, as you said, under the security agreements and so forth, essentially all of Area C becomes incorporated under Israeli control.
And maybe, and then some, because as soon as they say that the new Palestinian so-called government isn't doing a good enough job, they can come right in anyway.
Yeah, well, they set out criteria.
My article today, the one you mentioned, discusses Section 7 on security, and there's an associated appendix, Appendix 2, with three sections, A, B, and C. And B, I believe, versus maybe C, sets out criteria that the Palestinians are obligated or expected to fulfill, to satisfy, in terms of security, including counterterrorism and all that stuff.
And Israel will be doing the report card, each, however, periodically.
And if they declare failure, then they can go in.
Now, prior to all this beginning, the diktat gives the Palestinians four years to decide whether they want to go into this.
And also, I guess, there's supposed to be some negotiations on some details, I guess, some slight room for negotiation, not on the big plan, but on some, maybe some minor aspects of this.
But they're given four years.
So the question is, okay, what if four years elapse and the Palestinians just say, we're not interested in this?
Clearly, according to Trump, Netanyahu would then have complete license to annex everything, all of it, Gaza, and all of the West Bank.
And then the question is, what will they do with the Palestinians that will be on their hands?
Because there are several million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
And so what would they do?
Will they kick them out?
I think they'd have a hard time doing that internationally.
I think that just wouldn't be politics.
So they're not going to give them full rights, including the right to vote and everything else, because Netanyahu or whoever his successor is, isn't going to do that.
So what do you do if you can't transfer and you can't make them full citizens?
In other words, you can't have just a free country from the sea to the river.
What do you do?
You just, I guess, take the Bill Kristol option, which is, hey, what's wrong with the status quo?
Apartheid works just well, fine for me here in Washington, DC.
Why can't we stick with it?
Yeah, they're just essentially making the territories or the settlements, colonies that they've created in the West Bank, more permanent, legally speaking, and I guess at the stage for, you know, taking the rest.
But essentially, they already annexed it all back in 1967.
This is just, you know, essentially changing the letter of the law to describe the situation in a way.
Yeah, it goes, it goes fully from de facto to de jure, even though we have a 2004 International Court of Justice decision.
Nearly unanimous, I think there was one American judge who didn't even call his disagreement a dissent, which declared that the occupation, the settlements, and the wall—because they have this wall snaking through the West Bank—the occupation and the settlements and the wall in the West Bank, and also the occupation of Gaza Strip, are illegal because under international law and UN rules, you can't gain territory by war.
You can't gain and keep it.
If you happen to gain it in a war, you give it back at the end of the war.
I mean, those are the rules as they're set out.
And you're certainly not allowed to transfer your population into the territory or move any of the indigenous population out.
Israel's done all of that.
It stumped its nose at international law and everybody else in the world who has condemned this as illegal.
Trump says, no, it's fine.
It's not illegal as far as we're concerned.
He's like the pharaoh in the movie The Ten Commandments, and so it is written and so it is done.
He decrees it's not illegal, so it's not illegal.
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And now the Palestinian reaction to this.
I hadn't read about Hamas, but I saw where Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, such as it is, said, yeah, right.
Completely.
No, no.
A thousand times.
No, I guess was the quote.
Yeah.
I'm no fan of Abbas, of course, but, uh, plenty of, uh, Palestinians aren't, there's no way he could go for this.
Uh, the Palestinians, I think would then, uh, you know, run him out of town on a rail.
He's not popular already, which is why he's not stood for election.
He hasn't held an election.
I think it was supposed to hold in 2009.
Uh, so he's not exactly a small D Democrat, but no, he, he wouldn't.
And he wouldn't talk to Kushner while this was being talked about.
Of course they were condemned for that, but they understood what was happening.
So he wasn't going to give it the facade of, oh, the, all the parties are being consulted.
He wasn't going to play that game.
Uh, the funny thing is under the terms of this, uh, this plan, this vision, I should call it this vision, Hamas is supposed to be disbanded.
All these groups like Hamas are supposed to be disbanded.
If anything, this is going to bring those groups together with Fatah, you know, with the PLO, which constitutes the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank, it'll drive them together.
And then of course, Israel will then use that Netanyahu and the others will use that as evidence that, uh, see, we don't have a partner for peace.
So nobody can blame us for cracking down.
We live in a tough neighborhood.
You Americans don't.
So shut up.
You know, that's going to be their attitude and Trump will be applauding.
Sheldon Richman with his crystal ball describing next week or one after that.
Um, listen, and you know, Jason Ditz has a piece at antiwar.com about how the IDF started, you know, gearing up and they're ready for massive riots and violent reaction, which they presume.
And I think there's a very good likelihood that they're right.
And once they annex the Jordan Valley outright and to whatever degree, I'm not sure exactly what degree they're going to go ahead and claim full sovereignty over all the settlements there that they expect some level of intifada, which they're prepared already to crack down on.
And then they'll say, you see what savage terrorists these are.
And you speak that crazy Arabic and you can't understand a word of it.
Trust me.
They're saying that they hate Jews just for being Jewish and that they'll never stop until they're all drown in the sea.
Yeah, that's right.
It's funny that somebody takes your land and then someone else says, Oh, I know why you hate that person who took your land because of his religion.
Yeah.
A little Occam's razor would help here.
Yeah.
Well, and so let's talk about that in a little bit more specificity here.
It's the great Sheldon Richman from antiwar.com author of coming to Palestine.
And you talk about in your latest piece here about the presumption of Palestinian guilt that underlies the way the entire thing is drawn out here.
We're talking about the formerly the deal of the century.
Now the vision for the future, whatever it was vision for what was it a vision for a better life for Israelis and Palestinians and Israelis.
All right.
So, so talk about that.
I mean, this is really, you would get the impression.
And honestly, I can speak for myself, at least as a little kid, as a victim of sort of the TV portrayal of this situation that you would think that the Israelis were always there and the Arab Muslim terrorists have invaded and conquered the West bank of Israel, whatever that is.
And that the poor Israelis are being extorted out of this land and they're being so generous.
And yet the ruthless Palestinian barbarians will just never let up.
Yeah.
And I stress this because this is a very important, it's the premise of the, of the, of this vision.
It's Trump's premise.
It's Netanyahu's and all, almost all Israelis premise that the Israelis are the aggrieved party in this fight that goes back 70 years.
It actually goes back a little bit longer than that, a little over a hundred years.
It's not ancient, but a hundred years, let's say.
And that the aggressor are quote, the Arabs.
They don't like to call them Palestinians because they say, well, there's no Palestine.
There was no country Palestine.
So the Arabs.
And then, so not only is that the story they tell, that the Arabs are the aggressors and the Israelis or the previous two years before there was an Israel, the Zionist organization was the victims.
It goes, it's even worse than that because in their version of things, the Palestinians are not quite human.
They're not worthy of any level of trust.
So even if we give them some kind of hope, like I already explained, if they're given an area with some internal home rule, they still have to be watched over extremely closely by the Israelis because they haven't proven that they're trustworthy or worthy of any kind of freedom or dignity.
So they got to be watched so closely and given criteria, which is what this thing does.
And then if they fall short, we then, we the Israelis step in and as they put it, maximize our security footprint, they say.
That story is completely wrong.
Like you say, it's not that Israel was there and then the Arab horde descended from what, Saudi Arabia and took over the place.
That's not what happened.
People have been living in Palestine from, you know, time immemorial, from before the birth of Jesus, before the common era.
And those people have been there continuously.
The idea that the Hebrews were exiled, that's all been smashed many times over, but most recently by Shlomo Sand in his excellent book, The Invention of the Jewish People.
And so people have been there continuously and mixed with other people because Palestine has always been a crossroads historically, right?
Lots of different groups come through, sometimes conquering armies, sometimes just merchants.
People came through there in ancient times and the middle ages.
So people have been there continuously, even if they've converted from Judaism to Christianity and then later to Islam.
Those people have been there continuously.
So Israel is the result of a movement that begins in the late 19th century, really, with Theodor Herzl, and then through a lot of political maneuvering through World War I and the Balfour Declaration, and then through 1948 with a 1947 recommendation by the UN General Assembly that Palestine be partitioned, which it had no right to do.
You can't partition somebody's land.
The state of Israel declared itself a state.
I mean, with Ben-Gurion and the other founding fathers, they simply declared themselves a state on 57% of Palestine, even though they only had about a third of the population of Palestine.
But even the map is, if you don't know anything about it, you just look at it, it's kind of misleading.
The West Bank looks like someone has taken a chunk out of this country, when in fact, that's what's left of the country that's been conquered by the Israelis.
Right.
And that's important because in the late, what is it, the early 80s, the Palestinians made this huge concession, and they never get any kind of credit for it.
They said, look, I mean, this is when Arafat was still leading the PLO.
He said, look, okay, in a way they cried uncle.
They said, we'll take the 22% that is the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
That's the 22% of what Palestine looked like, you know, pre-Israel, 1948.
And the Israelis said, too little, too late, pal.
They had already taken the West Bank.
They're never going to give it back then.
Well, that's right.
The Israelis were already occupying it because of their war in 67.
But they said, look, take the 70, you got it.
Take the 77, 78%.
You got it.
We'll take the 22.
Now under the vision, Trump's vision, they're bragging that Israel will now get 70% of the occupied territories.
Well, that's 70% of 22%, which is like 15% of their original home, homeland.
Well, I'm not good at math, but I trust you on that.
But so before we run out of time, we got to talk about the future here, because I think you illustrated it pretty well there earlier, but it bears repeating that there's still millions of Palestinians here.
And if you exclude the right of return for Palestinians living in refugee camps all over the Middle East for, I don't know, argument's sake, but you just take the population of the Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem and all of that, you're talking about almost, and if you include the non-Jewish citizens of Israel as well, the Palestinian Muslims and Christians, you're talking about half the population.
And with this kind of full level of annexation that we're talking about here, this is going to lead right to an apartheid state.
In fact, I'm sure you saw this piece at Mondoweiss where he has this great roundup of a substantial number of very prominent liberal Zionists saying that this is terrible, this Trumpian Netanyahuian policy is wrong.
We want a real two-state solution.
We want to cast these Palestinians out so that we don't have to be an apartheid state ruling over them and can keep the Jewish democracy.
And so that's the way they're reacting to it, is that, you know, apartheid, they don't want to give equal rights to the Palestinians.
They're afraid that this will essentially force them to eventually.
Right.
Lots of people warned about that.
Even Ben-Gurion, who, you know, was tended to be more pragmatic than some of the other zealots, was worried after the 1967 war and said that this is not a stable long-term solution to anything because you're right, you're going to end up with this problem.
What do you do?
And the Israelis are not exactly sensitive to world opinion, but they're also not totally oblivious to it, at least some prominent Israelis.
And I don't think they want the whole world saying that they're administering, you know, an apartheid state.
You know, things like BDS could really catch on and start to roll downhill big time if Israel doesn't show any interest in that subject.
But you're right, there are five million Palestinians in the two territories, Gaza and the West Bank, and then there's several hundred thousand in East Jerusalem.
That gets separated out from the West Bank, although of course it's adjacent.
There's a few hundred thousand, I don't know quite that number.
So if you put that together with the Israelis inside, sorry, the Palestinians inside Israel, you get, I think, more than seven million, and there are only six and a half million Jews in Israel.
So they would not be the majority.
And that's an army report, an Israeli army report on the population.
Some of those numbers are disputed, but it's at least very close.
And I think the Palestinians have a higher birth rate.
And that's even still excluding the refugees in other countries, right?
In Jordan and Syria.
They're about seven million in the Palestinian diaspora.
That's right.
But of course, they get no right of return or compensation under Trump's vision, which will surprise no one, I'm sure.
So it's not a stable situation.
I don't really know what's going through the minds of people like Netanyahu or Gantz, who doesn't seem much different on this, or, you know, any of the leading center to right politicians.
How is this possibly sustainable?
I think they just think we can tough it out, but I don't think they can.
Well, you know, and for people in the audience who are just really skeptical of this, or hearing this kind of point of view for the first time, it's no less than Ehud Olmert, the previous prime minister, and Ehud Barak, who in Netanyahu's government was the first defense minister and had previously been the prime minister himself, have both used this word, apartheid.
And we are painting ourselves into a corner here that we can't get out of.
And it's a real problem.
And that's from their own point of view.
That's not external criticism.
That's Barack and Olmert saying that.
Well, right.
And others, too, who weren't quite at the heights of being prime minister, also use that word.
And that article you're referring to from Wanda Weiss, I believe, showed that word being used several times.
So their concern is not the Palestinians.
Their concern is that, obviously, their concern is that this is going to be detrimental to themselves.
Right.
I mean, look, after South Africa, the word apartheid, well, I guess apartheid always had a bad, bad name.
But with South Africa, and the end of apartheid there, you know, does anybody really want to be in the position of ruling over an apartheid state?
I don't think so.
So it is a problem that the Israelis feel they have to work out somehow.
The question is, they don't really care about the Palestinians.
I don't think the general public in Israel cares about the Palestinians.
I think they think they don't like Arabs.
They wish they were gone.
They're just stuck with them one way or another, and they can't transfer them, to use Herzl's old word about how to get rid of them.
So they have, they got a problem on their hands.
But of course, so do the Palestinians.
I mean, the Palestinians inside Israel have been living without full rights.
They're at least third class, at most third class citizens for over 70 years.
And the ones in the territories for 50, what is it, two years, or 53 years, have zero rights.
And in Gaza Strip, of course, they have less than zero rights, because that's just a prison, open air prison.
Yeah.
Well, and speaking of further cleansing, how about that tunnel between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank?
I could see, there's your forced march right there.
If they can't push them all into the Jordan River, push them all to the Gaza Strip.
It's the West Bank that the Israelis want.
They don't care about Gaza as much, except for the gas offshore, but they can steal that.
Right.
The Trump vision envisions a tunnel.
This is, I guess, to preserve the facade of that it's one Palestinian state between the West Bank areas that would be part of Palestine and the Gaza Strip.
Of course, Gaza already has two million.
It's way overcrowded.
It's uninhabitable.
Most of the drinking water is not really drinkable.
Yeah, this presumes the lifting of the siege and tens of billions of dollars in aid and all this stuff, which is never going to come true anyway.
Yeah.
And there's something on the map.
If you look south of Gaza, there's some kind of high tech center that says, who knows what stuff is.
Yeah.
Right.
And he claims he's going to raise the money from Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Who knows?
I mean, look, it's not going to go anywhere.
Except for providing cover for further annexation, right?
I mean, that's the thing.
Yeah.
Except for as a cover.
Yeah.
It's meant to be turned down.
No self-respecting Palestinian could accept it.
First of all, Netanyahu is demanding—I don't know if this language is in the vision or not—that the Palestinians acknowledge Israel as the state, the nation state of the Jewish people, even though 20 percent of the population are Christians or Muslims or, you know, don't believe in God at all.
Right.
And there's no other nation in the world that requires anything comparable to that in terms of recognition by anybody else, especially their conquered victims.
So they want the Palestinians to, you know, without any help even, rub their own noses in the, you know, in the dirt and smile about it.
And then Israel, you know, will be satisfied temporarily, the Israeli politicians and I think much of the Israeli public.
Unfortunately, I can't make a big separation between the government and the public because I don't think the public is much different from, you know, Gantz, Netanyahu and some of the others.
The same.
You know, liberal types who would want a more humane approach.
But I don't think they're—they numbered.
They're in great numbers.
And that is Sheldon Richman, regular contributor to Antiwar.com, author of the book Coming to Palestine.
Thanks very much for your time, Sheldon.
Anytime, Scott.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, and that is Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
