For Pacifica Radio, August 30th, 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 editorial director of Anti-War.com and the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Alan MacLeod from FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and check out this great piece.
In a recent spotlight on Anti-War.com a couple of days ago, media show little interest in Israeli bombing of Gaza.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Alan?
Yeah, it's good to be with you.
I got to tell you, I haven't read about this anywhere except in your report and the very few foreign stories linked from Anti-War.com.
I don't think I saw anything in the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal at all.
Wait a minute.
I should check that.
But I don't think I did.
And I've been reading them.
Well, I'm not surprised if you're a connoisseur of media.
You probably haven't seen it because, frankly, it's not really being reported in the Western press very much.
This is a subject which really should be getting a lot more coverage, mostly because there are tons of journalists in the Middle East, in Israel itself.
This is being reported in Israel, in Palestine.
Also because our tax dollars, if we are in Western Europe or the U.S., are pretty much going towards this sort of thing because, of course, Western countries, especially the U.S., gives Israel billions of dollars worth of aid, usually military aid, every year.
And yet this is completely off the radar for people.
And I think the reason is because of who is the perpetrator and who is the victim here.
Yeah.
Well, as always, and I will say that I'm looking at the Wall Street Journal right now and double checking here.
There are stories about the Israelis hitting Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, which is a whole other story and a possible portent of real escalation there.
But really, I'm looking and I have been reading this and there's plenty about the UAE deal, which of course is at the expense of the Palestinians.
But I don't see anything here about Gaza.
Control F Gaza.
There's nothing.
So tell us.
What happened?
A terror balloon was sent over the fence, huh?
Terror balloons.
Yeah.
I mean, that is indeed the Israeli justification for this, what, three weeks of bombing now that there are balloons coming over the border from Gaza to Israel.
But I think just like inception, sometimes it's good to take another step back, you know, and we have to see the conflict in the wider, in the wider context.
And that is that one country, Israel, has invaded and occupied the other, Palestine, since the 1960s and hasn't left.
And so really, I think that's the key context in any of this conflict.
And not only that, there's this huge asymmetry between bottle rockets or balloons that are with fire on them going into Israel and F-35 jets pounding heavily concentrated, heavily, highly dense areas of civilian populations like in Gaza.
And something that you said just before, you said Israel was bombing Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.
That's also a very common way in which the media does, if they do report on Israeli aggression, they do frame it as Israel targeting either Hezbollah or targeting Hamas.
It's never about targeting Palestine or hitting civilians.
It's always about specifically those terrorist groups.
Well, and in fact, I mean, the thing is, too, though, is collateral damage is one thing, not to like adopt their euphemism to discount it or whatever.
It should always be mentioned that civilians are killed.
But in fact, the Israelis have a doctrine.
I don't know if they're engaging in it this week deliberately or not, but they certainly have deliberately used what's called the Da'iya doctrine, which is named after a neighborhood in Lebanon is where they came up with it, which was deliberately kill civilians to terrorize them for political purposes, hoping that they, which this is always stupid and never works and always, of course, backfires, that they will then the people will blame Hamas or Hezbollah for getting them into this mess.
And so, you know, they just leveled entire neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip in 2014, for example, just absolutely ruthlessly, you know, not collateral damage at all, but deliberately targeting civilians in their homes.
You know, just right now, I'm writing an article today about a subject that just on this, actually, this week, it's been reported in the Israeli media that the IDF has been planting IEDs in Palestine, in a village quite near the West Bank city of Nablus.
And Haaretz says that Israeli sources, IDF sources have said that, yes, we have been planting these in civilian areas.
And the reason is that they want a deterrent against any sort of Palestinian action against them.
And what was found near these IEDs, it was actually found by a seven year old boy who thankfully wasn't injured, although his relative was.
They were found quite close to Hebrew only signs that have been put up, warning of the dangers of these bombs that have been placed there.
And as I said, the IDF, IDF soldiers did tell Haaretz that they did do this.
And yet Haaretz themselves went on this long talk about how, oh, this is probably a Palestinian false flag.
It was absolutely incredible.
But it's just another example of these sorts of egregious policies that the Israeli government and the Israeli military are prosecuting all over the region, but very rarely get talked about outside of alternative media.
Yeah.
I mean, and, you know, here's the thing, too, and I'm absolutely not blaming you.
It's just the the frame of the whole situation.
It's almost unavoidable where you have the first sentence of your piece as Israel is bombing Palestine again.
And it just makes it sound like it's a foreign country.
The country next door, instead of Israel, is bombing the part of itself that it doesn't like full of people that it hates and is persecuting, you know, as though the governor of Mississippi was bombing the, you know, blacker counties, you know, something like that.
That's what's going on here.
This is this area, as you said, has already been not just occupied, but annexed Gaza and the West Bank are part of Israel.
And so there is no Palestine.
They already conquered Palestine.
And so because if you don't know this story and you hear it framed like that, it sounds like Palestine is a country on the other side of the river and that they're attacking these poor Israelis and the Israelis have to defend themselves from the attacks from the Palestinians who sound like they're a foreign nation.
We know they're a conquered subject peoples.
And I know you clarified that in your very opening statement.
But it's just the way we talk about it to the ignorant.
It sounds like it.
It doesn't sound like Israel already controls this territory.
And of course, you know, any mention of Hamas or the Palestinian Authority of any kind makes it seem like, yeah, they have a government to write.
These are independent states with their own governments, a terrorist Hamas government and a Palestinian Authority, when in fact these are essentially trustees in Israeli prisons who help run the prisons for the Israelis and keep the people in line for them more than anything else.
But what they're not is independent governments at all.
You know, there's incredible ignorance about the entire region across the West, frankly.
My supervisor at Glasgow University did some polling with focus groups, and he showed that actually when when he asked which country was occupying which, the majority of people thought it was actually Palestine that was occupying Israel.
And you know, where does that come from?
That can only come from how we talk about it in popular culture, how we're never given any context about what happened in 1948 or 1967 or how, you know, one state is essentially being sort of transplanted onto another.
This is just kind of gone out the window.
And so people just see, you know, people throwing rocks, people being terrorists, Israelis defending themselves.
And that's pretty much the standard narrative and pretty much all of our corporate mainstream media.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
I brought this up to a couple of my Palestinian friends that I interviewed from time to time, and they hate this.
But to me, it seems like the only option, the only I mean, and it's making a best of a bad situation, right?
It's like you have been kidnapped.
You and your family are locked in some freak's basement.
You are in a you are already compromised.
There's no not compromising.
Right.
You've already lost.
So now what?
And then so my answer is, all of them should just start calling themselves Israelis and demand full citizenship.
I am a citizen of Israel should be on all of their signs, right?
Like I am a man at the garbage protests back in 60s.
I am an Israeli citizen.
Give my representative a seat in the Knesset.
And then that's it.
And that's how you do it is turn just like the black civil rights movement of the 60s saying we want to be recognized as full fledged Americans.
We are citizens of this country and we want our rights as citizens of this country.
The fact is, and it sucks, Israel finished stealing what was left of Palestine back in 1967.
All this crap about one state, two state and will they annex or not is only obfuscation.
Of course, you know, I said that's a Ramsey Baroud and Ali Abunimah and a couple of these other guys and they just want to strangle me.
You know, I want a whole new state with a whole new definition of citizenship and a whole great thing.
But I say you got to start somewhere.
And and if that was the frame of it, then that would also kind of argue pass a sale and help educating people to see that, oh, they are already under the control of the Israelis.
Right now, they don't sound like they're foreigners from across the river, from a different country.
Now you understand that they are already occupied and they just want the same rights as the rest of the subjects of the same government have.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm just some white boy from Texas.
What do I know?
One of the problems with that, obviously, is that Israel is especially Netanyahu's being very clear about this.
They're trying to establish a Jewish state for like a not Jewish only, but certainly Jewish supremacist.
And I don't think they'll ever.
I mean, I don't know how you'd get them to accept that, because, of course, Palestinians and Arabs outnumber the Jews there.
And so that would cause a huge crisis of population and crisis of legitimacy for the entire projects of Israel, wouldn't it?
If Palestinians outnumbered Jews, because suddenly they'd be having very different policies if those people got into power.
Right.
Well, you know, and I should have read Ali Abunimah's book by now, but I've talked with him about this and I've read articles by him and whatever.
And I believe him.
I think he makes a great case that the Jews of Israel would not be in danger.
In fact, the whole phrase, push all the Jews into the sea, that actually was made up by an Israeli Mossad agent who was posing as an Egyptian terrorist or something like that way back in the 50s.
The phrase itself was a false flag attack.
There was never any motive of the Palestinian people to kill and or cleanse or get rid of the Jews.
They just want their rights thereto and give us one state and equal representation and equal civil rights.
And that will have to be good enough for you, right, is the argument.
Yeah.
I mean, I think ultimately the conflict will not be resolved until the United States, which is the world's hegemon, by far the biggest power in the world, really the only country that can exert its dominance on other regions of the planet until they start withdrawing their support for annexation or crimes.
This conflict is going to continue, unfortunately.
And so the people of the Middle East will suffer for what's going on in Washington, D.C.
If that does happen, then I think pretty much all bets are off the table.
One state could be viable.
Two states could be viable.
But ultimately, I think things have got to change in Washington, D.C. before they're going to change in the Middle East.
Yeah, I'm afraid that's right.
And things are only, of course, getting worse.
Look at us.
We're in the middle of a presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the two most Zionist Republicans and Democrats probably ever since Harry Truman anyway.
You know, more so than George W. Bush.
I mean, George W. Bush at least had Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice trying to get him to do something, a little bit of a Annapolis something or other.
Tell Sharon to please slow down the new construction a little something.
But with Trump, blank check.
And then versus Joe Biden, who's trying to outflank Trump on the right on all matters of foreign policy, including Israel-Palestine.
Yeah, I mean, there definitely are some differences between Trump and Biden, but when it comes to Israel, there really aren't too many.
I mean, Branko Marchetic famously called Biden Israel's man in Washington, didn't he?
So that's kind of like the feeling among people, the politicians in Jerusalem towards what's going on in Washington.
Either way, they're going to win because they've got two strong allies vying for president.
And that's one reason why there was such a kind of mini hysteria about Bernie Sanders potentially getting the nomination.
It's not like his his views were particularly out there.
They were right in the mainstream of not only American, but certainly world public opinion on what to do with this crisis.
He was proposing very sort of moderate things, but that was treated as if it was, you know, some guy from Mars who was going to destroy their entire country.
And that's because, yeah, they they fear any sort of change in Washington, because I think they know ultimately that their power lies in their strong allegiance to the United States.
Yep.
And you know what?
I got to say, that is just not one of the narratives of the last year's presidential politics at all.
But you're right.
And I always thought that that was a huge part of it, too.
I guess, you know, if you read Phil Weiss and those guys, then you'll catch on.
But otherwise, the media would never tell you that the Israelis in their lobby in America have decided that they are terrified of Bernie Sanders and hate Bernie Sanders guts because essentially he is an old enough school type of a leftist that he is really just a straight up equal rights for everybody kind of guy.
And so even though he used to live in Israel and has all of, you know, all of his past of supporting Israel in every way, just on a personal level, couldn't really abide what's happened to the Palestinians.
And plus, he had all these young people who were comparing this to Jim Crow and saying that, you know, something's got to be done right now or comparing it to South Africa and pushing him on that.
And then think of the credibility, right?
All the hope.
You know, I mean, I was no Sanders fan, but I thought, boy, if he was in there, that would be the single best thing about him is that he could push Netanyahu around.
No problem.
What are you going to do?
Call him an anti-Semite?
And you know what I mean?
He could have just he could have run roughshod over Netanyahu.
That's why they worked so hard to prevent him from getting anywhere near there.
You know, there really is a danger to Jews around the world is there has been a rise in anti-Semitic attacks.
But generally they come from like, you know, white nationalist types.
But unfortunately, the government of Israel doesn't see those sorts of people as a threat.
In fact, they're very often quite relatively close allies with those sorts of people.
Instead, they see these sorts of like peace activists, either sort of libertarian or on the left as their big, their big worry there.
They're losing the young people, they often say, you know.
The idea is basically that public opinion is turning against them as, you know, Internet and social media has has kind of punctured a hole in the sort of mainstream narrative of what's going on in that area of the world.
And that seems to be their real, their real worry.
Not the fact that Jewish people in the United States or other countries are being killed in bombings or stabbings, but the fact that public opinion is turning away from some of the more radical foreign policy decisions of Israel.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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And you know, for the complaint about, well, you know, the alleged threat or the fear of the danger of tearing down the wall and giving Palestinians full citizenship and all of that, they had their chance.
They've had 50 years to, they've had 75 years to set the Palestinians free.
And you know, they conspired with the King of Jordan to screw them out of the West Bank in the first place in 48, which was directly in violation of the deal that each side gets a state, of course.
And then, as you were saying, occupied the whole place since 1967.
You know, the last 22% has been under their control.
But ever since 79, when I was three, they promised in that Camp David deal that they would work out a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
And they've been jerking their chain this whole time.
And then now they're sad that 50% of their population aren't Jews?
Well, give them independence then.
But they won't.
So, you know, tough situation you find yourselves in there, guys.
Yeah.
I mean, ultimately, I think a two-state solution could work.
One state solution, a bit tricky as well.
But yeah, ultimately, the reality is, is that this is the real solution that's going on right now.
You know, this is basically what Israel wants, which is to take over all the habitable and good quality land that Palestine has.
And the rest of the population can just be sort of herded into these Bantu stands, these like poor villages, and maybe the international community can let them have some aid and stuff.
But then they just don't have to deal with them and they're trapped in there.
And Israel has the widest possible amount of land that it has.
And so ultimately, that appears to be the solution that the Israeli government wants.
And that's neither one state or two states, really.
It's just the reality of what's on the ground right now.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Establishing facts on the ground in super slow motion.
Just hold on to it.
Someday those Palestinians will disappear.
Someday they'll, you know, the opportune moment will arise, they could be pushed into the Jordan River, into the Sinai Desert, or some kind of thing.
But just keep buying your time and just keep expanding those settlements and just keep increasing the size of Area C for security reasons and whatever you got to do to make it, you know, more and more Israeli territory.
Because why rush if that's going to cause a real problem?
You know, go ahead and keep doing exactly what they're doing.
It's worked so far.
And they haven't gotten the Europeans or the Americans to turn against them yet.
Not close.
In fact, let me ask you about that.
Is anybody care in Europe about the bombing of Gaza this week?
Any of the European governments saying anything about it or anything?
Oh, I haven't heard this.
There tends to be quite a kind of wide opinion in Europe on Israel.
I think a lot of the left parties are pretty critical.
And certainly in countries like Scotland and Ireland, there's very strong support of Palestinian human rights.
But in other countries, and certainly in the, how would you say, the more influential countries, the more influential governments in Europe, they tend to be pretty much on board with what the Americans are proposing.
Even if they might rhetorically not particularly like it, they're not going to rock the boat by opposing it.
That tends to be what goes on, frankly.
And I'm sorry, because I meant to ask you this first.
It's on the list.
That's the first question.
Do you know how many people have been killed in this latest series of strikes?
I do not know.
There haven't been any estimates or anything?
They just say, well, there's some bombs going off, but they don't.
Yeah, I haven't seen.
I mean, as I said, I'm really, how would you say, I'm kind of relying on the Western reporting of this.
And because there's so little of it, it's kind of hard to find out these sorts of facts.
Yeah.
I guess I really need to take the time to go and look at, you know, some of these other like, all RRB and maybe even Middle East Eye and some places like that.
See if they have something.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, I'm certain that something like B'Tselem or the human rights groups might put out a report later on.
But generally with those sorts of things, they tend to be ignored by the big media outlets that could signal boost them and get these sorts of figures into the public imagination.
And now, so you were saying that they did bomb a power plant there.
So that's a major civilian target.
And I think you probably assume the worst as far as electrical service being cut off to those poor people, as far as that goes, at least temporarily, you know?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, Oxfam has been warning about a terrible epidemic that could be coming.
You know, the COVID-19 has already hit Gaza and Israel has shut off electricity towards Gaza.
So the people there have only got electricity for, I think, four hours a day.
And they also have far less water than they need.
And so Oxfam said that they're really forced to choose between drinking, bathing and cleanliness.
And that during a pandemic is just a recipe for disaster.
People's access to clean water has dropped from 80 litres a day to 20 litres a day.
And so, yeah, people are forced to choose between cooking food or basic hygiene.
And that is, you know, really an unconscionable way to live, frankly.
That's completely crazy.
Tell me, you know, people just ask yourself, what if this was what America was doing in Iraq?
What if George W. Bush had started moving white American Christians to take over Baghdad and claim it as part of little America and steal all the drinking water from the local people and this kind of thing?
That would be the absolute, I mean, what I just said is the most bananas, ridiculous thing in the world that could, would never happen.
As bad as that war was, it wasn't like that, you know?
This is just completely crazy.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
So the opposite of my point of view is delineated in the Israel Project's recommendations from 2009, or I thought it was 2008, the Global Language Dictionary, right?
Is that what you got here?
Yeah.
That's right.
I'm so glad that you brought this up.
Everyone, if you have never read this, you've got to look up the Israel Project's Global Language Dictionary is what it's called, and it's Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, did a bunch of work, you know, with a bunch of focus groups testing out different narratives, and then this is an instruction manual for pro-Israel lobbyists for how to lie to people and fool them and deceive them into thinking that what Israel's doing is justified.
And it's actually hilarious.
You will laugh while you read it.
It's just great.
And then you explain in the article here that the way that the media in America covers this sure seems like it's straight out of that manual, huh?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, the manual has things like, you know, words that work, words that don't work, and, you know, clear lists of tactics to use, and one of them is, quote, clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas.
And I find that with the limited coverage of what the Israeli bombing of Gaza has been getting, that has been going on.
It's always Israeli jets hit Hamas targets.
Even in the same article there, it'll say that the jets were responding to terrorism and were hitting Hamas targets.
You know, they might casually mention that a UN-run school had also been hit.
I mean, is that supposed to be a Hamas target?
I don't know.
Another one is, yeah, always say that Israel is responding to attacks, not that they are the aggressor.
And then, yeah, focus groups have shown that that really helps them, helps them look like a much more sympathetic country to Western audiences rather than one that is involved in any sort of aggression against others.
Yeah.
And that's what's going on in the media right now.
So it does seem like, you know, if Israeli spokespeople were writing a lot of these articles, they wouldn't look all that different.
Certainly not the first couple of paragraphs anyway.
Right.
And people, you've got to read that thing because I'm just sitting here reminiscing.
The part where, one of my favorite parts is where they say, well, you know, a lot of the times when Israelis bulldoze Palestinian property, not necessarily as a punishment for, you know, reprisals and collective punishment stuff, but just to take the land, to confiscate it, to build a new different house there or, you know, that kind of thing, that one of the excuses that they had often used was that these Palestinians have been violating all of the zoning ordinances and they have no right to run a business out of their apartment in this part of Jerusalem or whatever it was.
And then, so Frank Luntz tested that with the focus group.
And then he writes in the language dictionary thing, don't say that Americans hate zoning so much.
They hate being told what to do with their property.
They can't stand the idea.
This is going to be your excuse that these people who've lived here, you know, that this building that was built in the 1890s doesn't pass the code of the country that has invaded and occupied and taken over the land since then, that they're going to then zone it into illegitimacy.
Don't say that.
Boy, not to Texans, especially, you know, and just, I just love that kind of thing because it's just so cynical.
They're like, well, geez, you know, we went through, we tried all of our different excuses and these are the ones that work best.
In fact, there's even places in there where they say like, listen, you can't tell them the truth because that'll cause problems.
You got to turn it upside down.
You have to be really clear that it's the Palestinians who are enforcing apartheid on the Israelis.
How come the poor Israeli Jews aren't allowed to just live wherever they want on the West Bank?
And it's because it's an ethnic Palestinian supremacist regime and just, you got to love it.
And you know what?
They got their money's worth from him.
Oh yeah.
For sure.
I mean, the thing about the zoning is that, you know, it is technically true that these things don't have permits, but I would ask people to think, you know, how easy would it be for a Palestinian to get a permit to build a new business somewhere in Israel or the West Bank just now?
I think that would be pretty difficult to get the permission to do that.
Right.
Right.
It'd be out of the question.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show and this great piece and your will to bring this important story to people's attention, especially in the face of such neglect by everybody else.
So really appreciate it.
Alan.
Yeah.
Well, thanks for having me on.
All right, you guys.
That is Alan McLeod from FAIR.
That's Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
The piece is called Media Show Little Interest in Israeli Bombing of Gaza.
All right, Sean, that has been the show for today.
I'm Scott Horton, again, from antiwar.com and author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org or youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And I'm here every Sunday from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
