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 feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line.
I've got Ramzi Baroud from Palestine Chronicle.
And of course, his latest book is These Chains Will Be Broken, Palestinian stories of struggle and defiance in Israeli prisons.
And we republish almost all of what he writes at antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Ramzi?
I'm doing great, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
So the bad news is we're wrapping up another generation of the occupation of the people of Palestine.
And not too much has changed for the better in the last little bit here.
But I thought I'd give you a chance to plead your people's case.
Let the Americans, as many of them listen to this show anyway, know what it is that's going on there.
What's the injustice all about and what can be done about it?
If it's okay, could we start and oh, by the way, let me say here, first of all, there are really great pieces we're going to talk about here in a minute moving past apartheid.
One state is not ideal justice, but it is just and possible.
And this great one about the history of the first intifada that broke out in the late 80s when the people rose and long live the dead peace process.
It's all one big topic.
But could we start real quick?
I was interviewed recently by some guys and they said, you know, I really don't know much about Israel-Palestine other than the Palestinians are real bad guys and they never cooperate and they no peace partner and just can't, you know.
But other than that, I don't know much about it.
And I just thought, you know, I mean, I'm not picking on this guy, but I'm just saying that's, you know, pretty typical and representative of what the American people think about this.
Don't know much about it.
But what I do know is it's all the Palestinians fault if there is such a thing.
So what would be maybe you're just a couple of minute, you know, short version of the history of, you know, post-World War II, who's occupying who over there and why should anybody in Texas care?
Absolutely.
Well, I mean, the history of this is not just the history of what actually has taken place, but it's also the history of the misinformation and the bias that accompanied the situation that would let someone, an intelligent, you know, an intellectual person somewhere assume that the victim is actually the aggressor.
And it is this thing that we have been trying to unpack and to deal with as Palestinians all of our lives because of this amount of misinformation.
And of course, there are reasons behind it, and we can talk about it later.
The story of Palestine began in the late 19th century when the Zionist movement began kind of thinking about creating a home for the Jewish people.
And that very idea of a home for the Jewish people, now, two things to keep in mind.
Number one, that was 50 years before the Holocaust has taken place or even more.
Right.
So why would at that point in history, somewhere in Europe, would the Jews as a political entity under the budding movement, Zionist movement of Herzl, why would they come with this notion that we need to get the Jews the heck out of Europe and give them a home somewhere else?
That is actually grounded in anti-Semitism.
And you would say, well, the Jews felt that way because they were victims of anti-Semitism.
Why did Europe help them?
Why did Britain promise them in 1917 to actually give them that Jewish homeland?
And the reason behind that is because the Europeans themselves at the time were also quite anti-Semitic and they wanted to deal with what they called the Jewish question.
Let's get them out, let's dump them somewhere and so forth.
Well, that dumping in that somewhere happened in a place that had absolutely nothing to do with the situation.
It was Palestine.
And Palestine was chosen because of its historic and spiritual significance on one hand, but also its strategic location.
It is the center of the so-called ancient world between Africa, Asia and Europe.
It's kind of the gate to civilizations.
And that was really essential for the British because they also wanted to implant a Zionist state there and to be able to control that region from that particular headquarters.
So Israel becomes the headquarters of Western colonialism in the region.
And they eventually got what they wanted in 1948, but they got it at the expense of my grandparents and a million Palestinians who were basically taken out and completely just ethnically cleansed from Palestine, which was accompanied with the destruction of almost the entirety of Palestine.
Over 480 towns and villages were just eradicated and people were just pushed out.
Now, that was the original sin when Palestinians became refugees in 1948.
When we Palestinians insist on what we call, what the international community called the right of return for Palestinian refugees, we are not being overly sentimental.
We're not being silly.
We're not being unrealistic.
We are actually fully grasping the nature of this conflict.
And we are saying we have to address the issue of refugees in order for us to have any sense of justice to this issue that reeks with injustice from the very, very beginning.
Everything that happened since 1948 until today, all the wars, the war of 1967 where Israel occupied the rest of historic Palestine, the intifadas, the popular uprisings of Palestinians that took place in 1987 and the year 2000, the wars on Gaza that were led by Israel against this tiny little region in southern Palestine to crush the resistance there, everything else was a consequence of that original situation that was never addressed in 1948.
Currently, Israel is an apartheid state, meaning that after they got rid of most of the population, like myself, over 5 million Palestinians are actually living outside Palestine and most of us are descendant of refugees and we can't go back.
Who can go back to Israel?
You know, air quotes, going back, are Jews who want to claim some kind of a nationality in Israel.
They can go back anywhere in the world as long as they are able to prove that they have Jewish lineage through their mother blood.
I mean, as bizarre as this may appear or sound, it really is true.
While Palestinians who were born and raised in Palestine, like myself, are not allowed to go back.
And currently, Palestinians are fighting for a semblance of justice in that land.
They are living behind walls, they are fenced off in various parts of the West Bank, they are living under siege in Gaza and so forth.
And the struggle continues because none of the Palestinian demands for justice, for freedom were met and none of international resolutions that passed by the United Nations to address the injustices have ever been respected.
Sadly, the United States is the biggest supporter of Israel.
If you took American money, political support and validation, and defense of Israel at every turn, including the massive military budget that we give Israel every year, Israel would have eventually crumbled under international pressure.
They would have, you know, finally given Palestinians at least some of their rights.
The U.S. is making that impossible.
Things got a lot worse during the Trump administration, where basically the U.S. accepted Israel's illegal definition of everything in Palestine, including the illegality of the Jewish settlements that are built on whatever small parts of Palestine that are still inhabited and controlled by the Palestinians.
So this is the reality of it.
And this is why someone in Texas should really care about this situation, because it's his tax money, it's her tax money that is going there to sustain Israeli military occupation and apartheid.
Yeah.
Well, there's not much confusion where those M-16s and F-16s come from.
They all have made in the USA written all over them, figuratively at least.
And no, no.
You know, when we were when we were I was a child when the first Palestinian uprising, we call it the Intifada, when it broke out in 1987.
I didn't know really much aside from the fact that the U.S. was an evil country that is supporting this other evil country that's doing these terrible things to us in the refugee camps.
But what I do remember is I used to collect empty bullet shells and empty gas canisters that they used to lob.
The Israeli army used to lob at our school when we were children.
And every single one of them said made in Pennsylvania.
I had no idea what a Pennsylvania was.
But I remember that it said made in Pennsylvania, USA.
So there was this idea, I mean, these bullets that are killing our classmates, that are, you know, that, you know, this gas that we inhale and we cry every day on our way to the, you know, either to the school or back, had some connection to this USA.
And what have we ever done to the USA to deserve this kind of treatment?
Now, with time, the sophistication of the weapons have increased to the point that in the 2014 war on Gaza, thanks to President Barack Obama, Israel was running out of munition and the president had this executive order to ensure that Israel remains, you know, the reserve of weapons remains sustained and under control.
So he ordered this massive shipment of munition to Israel so that it's not, that it's not forced to end the war before it meets its strategic goals.
So this relationship, this really sinister relationship of ensuring that Israel has the military capabilities of subduing Palestinians has been going on for decades now.
And there doesn't really seem to be an end in sight.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
I don't know if you and I have ever discussed this aspect of it, but this really is important, right?
This military industrial complex racket, just the way it is built into so much of virtually all of America's foreign policies, that even though two or three billion here or there is kind of chump change in the scheme of things to, you know, I don't know, three and a half, four billion dollars a year spent almost entirely on American military equipment, that's pretty meaningful to the American companies, the vested special interests who are on the receiving end of those checks, even though it's of course all at the expense of the rest of the country.
And of course, Israeli military industries are extremely advanced and intertwined with the Americans, you know, from top to bottom.
And so that's a whole part of keeping the racket going where it wouldn't matter if they were occupying Palestinians or Chinese or anybody else, you know what I mean?
Of course.
It's something even more complex than this relationship between American military suppliers and the Israeli government.
You know, traditionally Israel has received about 3.1 billion dollars of U.S. aid.
That's pretty much the average since 1967.
They received a lot of money before that.
But that's when really it became kind of, you know, kind of part of our foreign policy agenda.
You know, Israel has to be the largest foreign aid receiver anywhere in the world, more than, you know, a whole bunch of countries combined.
But there was a rule that this money, which is mostly going towards armaments and military supplies purchases, you know, the weapons would have to be bought from the United States.
So this way Israel receives a lot of money, but American companies are kept happy as well because they are manufacturing a lot of weapons for Israel.
Things have changed in recent years.
Now, the amount of money is significantly higher, almost a billion dollar extra over the original three, three billions.
And there are lots of, you know, kind of amounts that are quite not, you know, quite often not added to the larger number that are sold under, you know, other things like, you know, mutual corporation, defense developments, this and this and that, that involves American companies and Israel.
Now Israel is also exporting weapons to the U.S., specific kind of weapons that are used for what they call, you know, security.
You know, American airports now, you know, use Israeli technologies.
Israeli technology is being used for surveillance, you know, throughout the United States and also at the U.S.-Mexico border.
And an Israeli company was one of the main companies that were accepted, their bid was accepted to build the Trump wall around, you know, separating the U.S. from Mexico.
So things have changed.
And now Israel is number seven worldwide of, you know, being a weapons exporter.
So those who imported weapons and used them against children are now exporting weapons to many, many countries around the world.
And by the way, politically, that is complicating the lives of Palestinians as well.
I was in Africa, you know, just a couple of months before the, you know, the pandemic started and it was very sad going to these countries and seeing Israeli weapons, Israeli technology being, you know, dispatched and used by, you know, African dictators in Kenya and in other parts of Africa.
And it was really quite disheartening because these countries have traditionally been on the side of the Palestinians, but now they are either becoming quiet or actually taking Israeli sides and voting in favor of Israel at the United Nations, like the Cameroon, for example, because of the massive Israeli weapons that are being shipped to Cameroon.
So this is not about, just about Israel receiving American weapons.
Now Israel has developed its own technology based on the American funds and are selling, you know, weapons throughout the world.
In the latest conflict between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, 55 percent of all weapons were Israeli that were used by Azerbaijan.
So this should give an idea that we, you know, you basically created a monster here.
This is not about a small nation that is so beleaguered against these crazy Arabs and they were, you know, trying to defend itself.
We are talking about creating a monster and the monster is lashing out and it's present everywhere in the world at the moment.
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Hey, guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military-industrial complex and the power elite after World War II, during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jack Kennedy.
It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's road to world empire.
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All right, I want to go back to something you said about the dishonesty surrounding the narrative of even the creation of Israel back then, you know, before and after World War II.
But, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with the war correspondent, Eric Margulies, you know, long time.
He's covered 14 wars, something like that.
His mother was an investigative reporter back after World War II, and I guess was the first female reporter to go alone throughout, you know, the Arab lands, interviewing all the sheiks and whatever.
And she reported on the existence of these people called the Palestinians who've been purged from their land and, you know, what's left of them are, you know, in these, huddled in these terrible refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza and this and that.
And how they threatened to murder her and they threatened to murder young Eric, who was a boy at the time, because that was a huge cover up.
There were no such thing as Palestinians.
This was a land without people for a people without land.
Imagine that.
We were in a Sunday school our whole lives about how, yeah, the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean there, or, you know, the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea there, it's been settled for thousands of years.
As you said, it's the crossroads of three continents.
But somehow the place was just completely abandoned after World War II.
And so it wasn't that lucky for the Israeli Jews to come.
And the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing campaign of the Palestinians from their land, I don't know how it was in Europe, but in the United States, it was a massive cover up and a crazy conspiracy theory and was, you know, completely dismissed.
I'm not sure at what point they even finally admitted that, OK, yeah, there were Palestinians there.
But, you know, and I'm sure they played down the numbers when they finally did admit it.
But and, you know, I'm not really sure, Ramsey, with, you know, honestly, and I it's such PC times now, I hate to even bring these subjects up because everybody gets so antsy or whatever.
But obviously, there's a huge amount of racism involved in this.
And I wonder whether the American people would have cared, really.
But apparently, you know, the the measurement was, yeah, we better hush this up.
We better try to, you know, forbid discussion of these Palestinians and what's happened to them, because it would be enough to cause a problem, you know.
You know, there is a there is a lot of awareness and growing awareness of the Palestinians, not just that they exist.
Thankfully, we managed to achieve that.
But after the existence, we had to be dehumanized.
And I think the effect is the same.
And I'll talk about this in a second.
But first, I want to say, yes, there is a lot of growing awareness.
But because you have this massive edifice of of of propaganda, whether through newspapers, you know, textbooks, academic thinking, of course, television, popular culture and so forth, to the point that even that awareness, people are so scared to go against the current.
I mean, simple examples would be during the wars on Gaza.
You would have, you know, celebrities, well-known singers and artists who would, you know, use God forbid the hashtag free Gaza or hashtag free Palestine.
And the nature of the attack, the nature of the decided propaganda, calling them all sorts of names.
If they are Jews, they become self-hating Jews.
If they are not Jews, they are immediately branded and labeled as anti-Semitic to the point that a lot of people are afraid to even show their support and their solidarity with Palestine and the Palestinians.
But back to the issue of dehumanization, you see, if whether you you exist, whether you don't exist or you exist, but dehumanized, the outcome is essentially the same.
So they couldn't really cover us up for too long.
They had to eventually come to terms with the fact that we do exist.
And that kind of pretty much happened in the 60s and 70s.
And the reason that this happened, there was a massive amount of suffering happening in Palestinian refugee camps around the world.
Some Palestinians, especially within the socialist movement, took radical choices or made radical choices, sometimes taking Israeli hostages, you know, here and there and so forth.
The idea behind that logic was we wanted to just impose Palestine on the news headlines.
People need to actually realize that we exist.
We have refugee camps and there are millions of people and they are just perishing in these refugee camps.
But that's really when the idea, OK, well, we can't hide them anymore.
They do exist, but they are terrorists.
And this idea of the Palestinian terrorists, the Palestinian bad guy, as that gentleman that you quoted earlier in this chat, really kind of became the go to option after Palestinians, you know, were no longer a secret.
And as a result, now we are fighting for our image.
We are fighting against this dehumanization that dismisses entirely.
You see, especially after 9-11, when this idea of, you know, the mindless, brutal terrorists that has no regards for anything or doesn't respect the sanctity of human lives, he doesn't deserve to exist and can be wiped out anywhere at any time.
Israel really appreciated that narrative very much and pushed us, all of us Palestinians, including even our Christian population as well.
And we do have a massive Christian population.
They pushed us into this new brand.
We are the terrorists and Israel is fighting a war on terror.
Israel is part of the American led global war on terror.
And that became the go to narrative.
But ultimately, it's the same.
We are dehumanized either way, whether we've been, as Golda Meir, the former Israeli prime minister in the 70s said, Palestinians don't exist, or whether we exist as really bad guys who don't deserve any respect, any rights, any justice and freedom.
Ultimately, it's exactly the same outcome.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so talk to me about this one state, two state thing.
I thought they had a deal back, what, 30 years ago, shake hands on the White House lawn.
We're going to have a two state solution here at the end of our peace process.
Ramzi?
Well, this is kind of a nice segue between between the two topics, because a group of Palestinians led by Mahmoud Abbas, the current Palestinian president, or rather the president of the Palestinian Authority, has decided to kind of, you know, if you can't if you can't beat them, join them, basically, that was the idea.
We can't defeat Israel.
We can't defeat American support for Israel and so forth.
So let's kind of join that kind of, you know, that camp in the Middle East.
We become one of the so-called moderates.
The moderates are, you know, anybody who agrees with U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is a moderate.
Automatically, you could be a completely brutal dictator with no respect for democracy or human rights.
It doesn't matter.
You just need to agree to what Washington says you are a moderate.
Mahmoud Abbas became a moderate, and the idea was we can't get everything we are asking for.
We can't go back in history.
Let's just accept some basic elements, you know, maybe some autonomy in, you know, small parts of historic Palestine.
And eventually we will call it a state.
Well, they've been played really well.
I mean, for many years, for, you know, the whole charade started in the early 1990s, and now it's 2020, almost the end of the year, nearly four decades.
We've been kind of going through the same motion of trying to find a negotiated solution.
Now, if you listen to this in the news, it sounds really good.
What's the problem with negotiated solution?
What is your alternative?
Violence?
Killing?
Of course, this is not going to work.
So naturally, a new narrative was built in the media in which, and of course, the language of this narrative was created by Washington itself, was catered to entirely by American foreign policy calculations that basically created this new lexicon of the peace process, the land for peace, negotiated solution, painful compromises for peace, and so forth and so on.
And the result of this is that you have now a Palestinian, but of course, 40 years after all of this, we still got nothing.
Not only we don't have anything to show for 40 years of so-called negotiations, we've actually lost a lot more.
The illegal Jewish settlements in the West Banks have tripled in size.
The population of Israelis who come and take over Palestinian lands and live in the West Bank permanently have tripled in the last 40 years.
The city of Jerusalem that was at least Israel accepted at one point, not that it's occupied or at least half of it is Jerusalem, eventually they accepted that it is contested.
Now it's not even contested anymore, it's the undivided eternal capital of Israel.
And now an American embassy has been moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to confirm this fact in violations of international law.
So 40 years after all of this, we have nothing to show for, we lost pretty much everything.
And our Palestinian leadership that is, by the way, not democratically elected, is still hanging on the hope that maybe Biden is going to take us back to that old language so that we can sustain the status quo a lot longer.
And the question is, why are Palestinians doing this?
Why are they shooting themselves in the foot?
They know they are not going to get anything out of this.
Why would they do it now when Israel is more right-wing than ever?
Well, that's the sad fact, they are getting paid, and handsomely so.
The Palestinian Authority, which only represents a small class of Palestinians, does not speak on behalf of the vast majority of people in Palestine, have been receiving a lot of money from the US and what they call the donor countries, which include Japan, the European Union, the Saudis and so forth and so on.
So that money has been paid in exchange for their silence.
Now, the ordinary Palestinian is suffering.
Israel is more apartheid than ever.
The military occupation is more entrenched than ever, and so forth.
Now, we can sustain this charade a little bit longer, but for what purpose?
Why can't we just face the fact?
The fact is, there is a piece of land that exists between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.
We all know that.
And most of us are actually living there, but we are not living there as equals.
We are not living there as equals.
We are living in an apartheid, racist state.
And we need to change that.
We don't want, as Malcolm X at one point used to say, we don't want segregation from the white man.
We want separation from the white man.
That was during the height of the civil rights movements.
Eventually, it was understood that any peaceful solution to the racial divides and conflicts in this country is not separation, but rather an integration between societies, and when people are treated equal.
The exact same scenario was repeated in South Africa, when the apartheid regime collapsed, and finally people, at least from a political point of view, are treated as equal citizens.
This is what Palestinians, this is what we should have in Palestine.
And this is what the Palestinian people are increasingly fighting for.
39% of all Palestinians believe that the one-state solution is a must, and over 60% of all Palestinians believe that the two-state solution is dead.
So now there is a whole new thinking, a whole new awareness.
We can either chase after the two-state mirage and the peace process that we know did not get us anything, or we can start exploring new language, new thinking, in order for us to coexist in one new reality.
Now, I did mention in the article that this is not a perfect justice, because for a perfect justice to be achieved, we have to go back in time.
You know, my grandparents and my parents and millions of my people who died in exile, died in refugee camps, lost everything, died without their dignity, without their human rights.
How do I rectify that?
How do I go back in time and rectify that?
Justice cannot, there's no just solution to what has happened, has befallen our nation for over 70 years.
There's no illusions about this.
But just because there is no just, perfect justice, it doesn't mean that we need to carry on endlessly in exploring unjust means, because we don't want to face the fact.
The fact is, there can never be a semblance of justice without people existing as equals in that land.
All right.
Now, so this is really the hang-up, and what a great public relations invention this two-state solution is.
But your point is that it is impossible to have a two-state solution now.
I guess, you know, you could say, you could draw the line at some point, but geez, even if you look at the advancements that, two major advancements of the Israeli side of this that have happened in the Trump years, where they moved the embassy to Jerusalem, which is really putting an American stamp on Jerusalem, the entire unified city as being an Israeli city and precluding the idea that it could then be a capital for a Palestinian state.
And then also recognizing the quote-unquote legality of the settlements.
I mean, that's pretty much game over.
I don't know if Joe Biden will reverse that, but I pretty much doubt it.
He was the worst Zionist in D.C. until Donald Trump got there.
But I mean, if people look at the popular maps of how, you know, divided up the West Bank is now, it's clear that just in turn, you know, in a scientific manner, he won the argument that it is quite literally too late for a two-state solution.
In fact, even I've heard it mentioned about the essential civil war that would break out within Israel if they really tried to remove those settlers from the West Bank to let the Palestinians have it.
It's just too much already.
It's already done.
So then where does that leave us?
That means now, since that's not one of the choices, the choice is either the status quo, which is apartheid akin to Alabama in, say, 1941, or South Africa in the 1970s and 80s, or this one-state solution that you're talking about.
But as I know you know, since everything is always told from the Israelis' point of view in the United States, the common conception would be back to all Palestinians are terrorists.
And if we tear down those gates and tear down those fences and tear down those walls, you're saying we should just let Hamas and their Qasem Brigade or whatever it's called just run wild inside Israel and every Palestinian will get to go and try to demand his grandmother's house back and it'll be bedlam and chaos and the poor Israelis will be besieged by Arab violence and there won't be integration, just, you know, another worst war and Israel will be destroyed.
And so, you know, I heard him talk about this a couple of weeks ago where what Ilhan Omar, I think, or Rashida Tlaib had said on Twitter, of course, something about from the river to the sea, all of Palestine will be free.
And someone said, that's anti-Semitic because everybody knows that if everyone between the river and the sea is free, then that will mean the destruction of the chauvinist Israeli Jewish state.
And so what you're asking is not just equal rights for me to please, but to take away everything that they have.
Ramzi, what about that?
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, Israel has pushed itself into an impossible situation and it's all of its own doing.
So let's, if we try to think about this, you know, I often present this argument from a Palestinian point of view.
If we want to think about this from an Israeli viewpoint, that you want this, you know, you want to achieve a degree of racial purity.
You want to have a Jewish state that serve as a safe haven for Jews all over the world.
Let's say that this is the argument.
Why would you take over the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem and incorporate millions more of Palestinians into this Jewish state?
And once you have them there, they become a problem because you feel like it's messing up my demographics.
So you call them a demographic bomb.
Okay.
But isn't you that actually made the decision in June 1967 to include this so-called bomb into your Jewish majority population?
And now once you do it, you have created a new problem for yourself.
And now you have to go through the arduous mission of ethnically cleansing these people and stealing their land and destroying their olive groves and so forth.
But you know what?
Forget about this.
Let's move a little bit to the so-called peace process.
Again, from an Israeli point of view, you wanted to seal the deal.
You know, Israel has not, has no defined borders.
Israel has never defined what are the borders of Israel.
Like any Israeli, what are the borders of your country?
They don't exist.
The reason is because Israel has from the very beginning been an expansionist state.
They just wanted to see how far they can go.
And at one point they did take over all of Sinai and they took the Jordan Valley and they, you know, took, and now they still have massive amount of land that they have taken from the Syrians, you know, the Syrian Golan Heights, which by the way, have been accepted by the U.S. to be legitimate Israeli territories.
They are still in occupational parts of Lebanon called the Shibha Farms and so forth.
So you are expanding your boundaries, you are including, you know, large portions of Arab populations, whether Palestinians or non-Palestinians, and you are complaining about a demographic bond.
Now, in the peace process, they said, you know what?
Let's give Palestinians, you know, a piece of land and call it Palestine.
And these would be the borders of Palestine, you know, bent to stands, you know, similar to South Africa, that are connected via corridors and bypass roads and that sort of thing.
And when Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister at the time, you know, was willing to concede that, which was by far less than what Palestinians could have possibly wanted as a just solution, an Israeli came and assassinated their own prime minister.
And since then, the country has been going through this process of, you know, moving further and further to the right, to the point that the Israeli political right has been redefined, Scott, so many times.
Suddenly, you know, Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, who was the defense minister, you know, who used to be seen as ultra right, now they are right center.
Because there are new groups of Israelis that is even further right to these guys.
Only a small portion of Israelis are defined as liberal and left.
So right now you have this massive right wing constituency that has no intentions of removing their settlements whatsoever.
They don't even have the patience to even talk about a Palestinian state.
They don't want to hear of it.
But then on the other hand, they have no solution of their own.
Aside from the fact that the Palestinians are a burden and they have to leave.
So basically, you have paved the road for what former President Jimmy Carter called in his book, peace or Palestine, peace or apartheid.
You created a situation that there is not even a possibility of any degree of peace and justice.
And you created this only possible scenario of a perpetual apartheid.
Now, how can Israel maintain this perpetual apartheid?
So some people would say, well, apartheid is not sustainable.
Sadly, it is kind of sustainable, maybe not forever, but for long periods of time.
I mean, South Africa did, you know, South African apartheid regime did manage to, you know, sustain apartheid for decades.
And prior to that, hundreds of years of British Dutch colonialism.
It's not totally impossible.
But in the longer you have to sustain this is, is depends on the nature of the propaganda.
And this is why the propaganda war and the cultural war is now at its greatest degrees, unprecedented in history of this conflict, is the nature of the propaganda underway.
Palestinians would have to be dehumanized beyond belief.
Even the likes of Mahmoud Abbas and the so-called moderates would have to be dehumanized.
Because if Palestinians are given a platform, a voice, any sympathy anywhere in the world, it means that Israel would have to contend with the fact that it's failing to provide a paradigm for peace.
Now, Israel did something very, very clever, normalizing with the Arabs.
The normalization that is underway between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, and potentially Saudi Arabia in coming months is a masterful stroke in the sense that it will allow Israel to sell itself as a peacemaker, saying, listen, I am talking to the Arabs.
I don't have a problem with the Arabs.
I'm making billions of dollars of deals with the Arabs.
The Palestinians are the obstacles.
They don't want to sit and talk with us unconditionally.
Therefore, it is their fault.
And the media is going to nod and repeat time and time again that Palestinians are an obstacle to peace and Israel is doing everything in its power to reach out to the Arabs.
But again, that is going to win you some time, but it's not going to be enough to sustain it forever.
So this is the choice that Israel has made at this moment.
It's a choice of perpetual apartheid and there is no way around it.
I hear you.
I mean, I'm really sympathetic to this argument.
Before the interview, I was, you know, thinking about how to frame this.
You know, there's a it's their problem.
They're the ones who made it this way.
And I'm sorry for bringing this up again.
I'm sure I've mentioned this to you before, but it's such an apt parallel to me.
From the notes on the state of Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson said about the slaves that we have the wolf by the ears and we can neither safely hold him nor let him go.
And then.
But the problem with that is it's not a wolf.
It's a human man.
He got no right.
You have to let go.
And if he bites you on the face, it's your damn fault for taking a hold of his ears in the first place.
So tough luck.
That's kind of how I feel about it.
But still, though, back to like the meat of the question.
If there was some Israeli clerk who said, no, we can't go on like this and we have to integrate, we have to make a one state Israel, a Stein or whatever you want to call it now and have equal rights for all citizens between the river and the sea.
You know, it wouldn't be easy, right?
It would be a real problem.
And there would be there is right now at least some reason.
I'm sure it's hysterical, far beyond reason.
But there's some reason for Israeli Jews to be afraid of what would happen when these people, in fact, do come for their grandma's old house.
Absolutely.
But but but let me let me just.
Oh, and I guess the rub is then that's why they absolutely refuse, right, because they're terrified that that they would have to give up so much of what they've taken.
Absolutely.
But let's let's think about it in a kind of like a more, you know, rational way based on historical experiences.
If there is a one state solution and there has to be, there's no other way it has to be.
It will only happen based on a very intricate and clear understanding.
And it's going to be based on, you know, on international law.
By the way, I interviewed perhaps the greatest expert on international law in the world today regarding Palestine and Israel, Professor Richard Falk, who was the UN envoy to the Middle East as a human rights coordinator and, you know, for about seven years.
And I asked him, you know, pointedly, I said, does one state solution, does the one state solution violate international law?
He said, no.
The two state or the one state, you see, he said, as long as it doesn't negate the spirit of the law, of international law, it doesn't violate it.
So as far as that is concerned, one state solution can be completely streamlined within international boundaries, within the boundaries of international law, which means that the UN and other international institutions can can be part of that process.
It would be a transition.
It's not going to like, OK, open the borders, you know, let the settler hordes, you know, from the West Bank go to, you know, and to Gaza and let the Gazans come running, you know, with their torches and forks.
It doesn't work that way.
And it never has worked that way.
I mean, this is exactly the same argument they've made in other parts of the world, especially in South Africa, when the assumption was the blacks are going to run amok and they are going to start burning homes.
It was a very peaceful transition.
Nothing happened.
And it leads to why should it be the onus?
Why should the onus be on the occupied and the oppressed to assure the oppressor and the occupier regarding their own security?
Only because it's their only chance, not because it's fair.
Right.
But but there is also another dimension to this.
Once you have a democratic elections in Palestine, Israel, this new state, you know, new alliance is will be formed.
It would be, you know, it's it would be shocking to see how politics and politicians kind of find a way to to actually survive that situation.
I mean, just look at Israel right now.
We already have an actual example, the joint list.
What is the joint list?
The joint list is a coalition between various Arab parties, some from the left, others from the center, right, that have unified in the last few elections in Israel in order for them to play an important role in forming a government coalition.
They actually endorsed Benny Gantz, who ran against Israeli right wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not because they have anything in common with Gantz.
You see, Gantz has been promoting a war on Gaza and Gantz have been saying terrible things about the Palestinians.
But from a political point of view, they figured that Netanyahu is the worst case scenario.
And it's much better to actually side with Gantz for now.
Maybe in the in the future they will split from from the government coalition.
They will, you know, join a different coalition, more liberal socialist Israeli Jewish coalition and so forth.
And but sadly, Gantz refused to ally with them.
And he rather to go back to the to the election, to the elections, to the voting booth in order for them, for him to avoid allying with the Palestinian Arabs.
But the fact is, they are all Palestinians.
They are the same people as me.
They were just not for whatever historical circumstance, were not ethnically cleansed from Palestine in 1948.
And they have representation in the Israeli government, in the Israeli parliament, the so-called Knesset.
You see.
So if that is functioning, you know, they are actually trying to be part of mainstream Israeli society.
It's just that Israeli society is refusing to let them in for 70 years.
We haven't seen this massive violence from the Arab communities of Nazareth and Haifa and Umm al-Fahm and so forth.
They are part of a functioning, well, as much of a functioning democratic society as possible.
They're second class citizens, but not fifth class occupied like the people in the West Bank and Gaza.
Exactly.
If that is, if that can potentially work for them, why shouldn't work for the rest of us in the West Bank and Gaza?
Sounds right to me.
You got my vote, Mr. President.
And speaking of which, speaking of which, the second worst Zionist in the history of Washington, D.C. is coming back.
He's going to be the president in a few weeks, Joe Biden.
And he's bringing a bunch of people with him who are, as far as I can tell, bad on everything.
And I see you wrote a piece here.
I'm sorry.
I didn't get a chance to look at it yet.
It's called The King's Man.
Blinken's appointment reassures Israel that little will change under Biden.
So what's the bad news here going forward now, Ramzi?
Well, the bad news, well, first, the good news.
The good news is that we don't have to struggle trying to figure out this administration the same way we struggled figuring out the Obama administration and its relationship with Israel.
You know, believe it or not, years after Obama was elected and I went back to the Middle East and, you know, a lot of people just did not get the memo and, you know, that Obama has been the biggest supporter of financial support and military backer of Israel than any other president in history.
And they were still saying Obama was a great guy and he did so much for Palestine.
You know, so a lot of people kind of bought this, this, you know, propaganda that Obama was different and so forth.
Luckily, not so many in the Middle East, even, you know, the mainstream media and, you know, funded by rich Gulf countries are still not really conveying this illusion that Biden is going to be different and we are going to just, you know, give him the chance and wait for a few months and see what's going to happen.
There is no transition.
There's no waiting period.
People are really more or less aware that things will remain the same in Washington.
Now, the thing that is really interesting to me, that is interesting to me the most is the fact that there is consensus right now between Israeli politicians and American politicians within this new administration that says, listen, we can't have a repeat to what happened during the Obama administration in terms of the public spats and the public fights.
If we disagree, fine, but it can only be done in private.
So the media cannot know about it.
There will be no leaks and so forth, which kind of sad in a sense, really.
I mean, well, I mean, in every sense it is sad.
You know, it's a foreign policy issue.
There has to be, you know, if there is indeed a conflict, the conflict has to be made well known to the public so that the public can engage with these issues.
But no, from now on we are told and open, and this is what I quoted in my article based on interviews conducted by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, that if there's a disagreement, you, Scott, myself, no one else is going to even know about it.
But that said, there will be no disagreement because we know Tony Blinken, he's a good friend of Israel.
In fact, he was the only American foreign policy, you know, official during the Obama administration that actually Israel liked.
They hated everybody else, right?
They were, you know, just pro-Obama and they did not like them, but they liked Blinken.
So whenever there was an issue that needed to be smoothed out, Blinken was the man that was sent to sort it out, and he did.
And now this man is going to be the secretary of state of the United States, and one of his top foreign policy agenda is to make things right with Israel again.
So there's really not much to expect in terms of, you know, good news from the U.S. regarding Palestine and Israel.
That's a heck of a note to have to miss John Kerry, I'll tell you what.
That's true.
Absolutely.
You know, I remember John Kerry telling Mahmoud Abbas a while back, a few years ago, he said, I think in the first year of when Trump was elected, he told him, he told an Israeli Palestinian official to convey this message to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, Obama, Trump is not going to last for long.
Even if he finishes his first term, he's not going to be a second termer.
And he was right.
Let Abbas be patient.
You know, the Democrats will restore the presidency and everything is going to be OK.
We're going to go back to business as usual.
And we are, you know, so tell him, be strong, he said.
That's the exact term.
Be strong.
And that's the promise.
This is what, you know, John Kerry has actually promised.
We have Tony Blinken and Mr. Biden, who repeatedly has avowed his love for Zionism and so forth.
Which raised the question, what could they possibly have against John Kerry?
That he dared pretend to go through the motions a little bit for a few months back in, what, 2015 or something?
Or no, I guess it would have been earlier, 2013 or something.
Right.
And he did.
And, you know, I don't know.
I felt like maybe John Kerry had an element of sincerity about him.
I mean, yeah, as you know, what seems doubtful when you say it that way, you know.
Yeah.
I'm extremely cynical about U.S. foreign policy.
Sometimes you just want to hang on any hope, however shady and nonconvincing.
But I felt like maybe in the statement he made, because it was a secret meeting that took place in London, it was later revealed and leaked to Israeli and Palestinian media.
You know, I thought maybe he was sincere.
Maybe he really feels that something good could come out of it.
But he absolutely abhorred Netanyahu and the way that he conducted his relationship to the U.S.
Because you see, there's been this long argument, longstanding argument, not just in U.S. foreign policy, but also within the intellectual community regarding U.S. foreign policy regarding Palestine and Israel.
Who controls whom?
You know, is it Israel that controls U.S. foreign policy, you know, using its pro-Israel lobby in Washington, D.C., especially AIPAC and such?
Or does the U.S. actually control its own foreign policy, and it's using Israel as a client regime, like Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Pakistan or whatever?
You know, what is the situation here?
And I think some of these foreign policy officials, like John Kerry, must have been up to some rude awakening when he went to Washington, D.C. and he dealt with the Israelis, and he realized, wait a minute.
They're not really behaving as if we are the great empire that's controlling the world.
They're actually, they think their agenda trumps our agenda.
And I really think that this is the main reason of disagreements between specific U.S. officials.
Right.
Like, it's personal.
Right.
Yeah, I think that's right.
You know, there's the anecdote of when Bill Clinton first met with Netanyahu when he was sworn in to be prime minister the first time in 1996, and that when the meeting was over, Bill Clinton said to his staff, whoever it was, who the F does this guy think he is?
Oh my God.
Like, do you know what just happened in there?
Who's the superpower and who's the client state?
And you know, it's not often you hear me quote Bill Clinton approvingly, but I could just see how, I mean, what must have happened in there, right?
Netanyahu going, look, Bill, here are your marching orders.
You know?
Exactly.
He would have been pretty far out of line for Clinton to react that badly against it, you know?
Right.
And you would think that Kerry would have got that when Netanyahu came and brought both chambers of Congress against the wishes of the most beloved popular president of the United States, Barack Obama, and made his case against Iran to a cheering congressional crowd in which that stood in defiance of their own elected president.
I mean, if you come from outer space at that particular moment, you just landed from Mars and you went to the congressional chambers and you saw Netanyahu giving a speech in eloquent American English to this massive crowds of elected American representatives, you would have thought that indeed it was Netanyahu who was the president of the United States, you know, not Obama.
So I think it should really, I mean, the answer to that question, there's no dilemma anymore.
We know who is at least in charge of making American foreign policy in the Middle East, specifically in Palestine.
I think that question should have been resolved in people's minds by now.
Yeah.
Well, I know it ain't the American people, you know?
All right.
Well, listen, thank you so much for coming back on the show, Ramzi.
It's always great to talk to you.
I hope people will read your books.
My father was a freedom fighter, Gaza's untold story.
And of course, the latest is these chains will be broken and find all his great articles also at antiwar.com.
Thanks very much again.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
Take care.
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.
