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 Nathan J. Robinson, and he is the Editor-in-Chief of Current Affairs, which is, I think, a relatively new publication from the last year or maybe two.
Five years.
This is five years now.
Oh, is it five?
Okay, well, what do I know?
Yeah.
I could have just asked.
Yeah.
Time is going by quickly.
Yeah.
And you are the Editor-in-Chief, right?
Yes.
That's true.
Great.
Okay, so welcome to the show.
Nice to meet you.
Oh, nice to meet you, Scott.
Great.
I've read some things by you in the past.
They were interesting.
I forget off the top of my head what all, but I know you from around the Twitter a little bit and I've read some articles, and so this is obviously a very important subject here.
How the media cracks down on critics of Israel.
But I thought actually I would start with, I think probably the audience might be interested to know, because when people are on the left, that can mean a lot of things and there's so many different divisions and sects on the left, especially once you get to the left of the liberals.
And so I was wondering, not that we're going to argue about economics today or anything like that, but just I was wondering if you could describe to the audience where on the spectrum you categorize yourself and your magazine.
Sure.
Well, I consider myself a democratic socialist.
We're basically aligned with Bernie, right?
Basically Bernie Sanders politics is the politics of Current Affairs magazine, with some variations.
We're critical of Bernie Sanders sometimes because we're an independent magazine, but we call ourselves a socialist magazine.
We advocate for universal healthcare.
We advocate for the Green New Deal.
We are sort of, we're not a Marxist magazine.
We're not a sort of, which I think some of our comrades on the left define themselves as.
We're kind of independent socialist magazine, but we do consider ourselves relatively socialist.
I also like to call myself a libertarian socialist to distinguish myself from authoritarian regimes who have called themselves socialist.
Libertarian socialism being a great tradition on the left of caring a lot about civil liberties and freedom of thought and freedom of speech, along with economic security and along with increasing the power of workers relative to owners and such.
I got you.
All right.
Very good.
And very interesting.
All right.
So this is such a big deal, I think.
I'm not sure how big of a deal it has been made out of it by others, but this is a pretty kind of a landmark sort of a thing that happened here.
An important writer, editor in chief of your own important publication here, also a writer for the Guardian.
This, you know, obviously one of the most important newspapers in Britain.
And you got canned over a tweet, over a sarcastic tweet about American aid to Israel.
Is that right?
Yes.
I, yes, I was a columnist for the Guardian US and I was terminated and it was made clear to me that the reason that I was terminated is because I sent a tweet.
The tweet, well, it was a two part tweet and it was, as you say, sarcastic and it's in the context of the COVID relief bill.
And at the same time that Congress was passing in December $600 in relief for each American, they were also giving Israel a new pile of military aid.
And the joke that I made, because Twitter, you make jokes on Twitter, was, you know, did you know it's the law that every time Congress passes any new spending, it has to include some weapons for Israel.
And then I, you know, my second part of the tweet says, well, not really the law, but it's just such custom that it might as well be the law.
And the point that I'm trying to make here is that US politicians have long been, and they say this openly, this is not some conspiracy on my part, is that US politicians say essentially we have a firm commitment to making sure that Israel has a military advantage over all other powers in the Middle East.
And so funneling them weapons is as high or higher of a priority than helping taxpayers during a pandemic.
Yeah.
And, you know, which is not that unique of an observation because of how true it is, right?
I mean, this has been going on for a very long time and it's not really in dispute, is it?
Yes.
No.
I mean, Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US military aid since 1945.
So it is true.
But when I tweeted this, I got an email very quickly from the editor in chief of The Guardian, who I'd only met once, who said, essentially, this is anti-Semitism.
You're singling out the only Jewish state.
You need to talk about foreign aid to other countries.
You aren't putting this in context.
You're suggesting essentially his point is that by saying that I am saying that Jews control the government because I'm saying Israel, which is a Jewish state, is crafting US law.
And I mean, I think that's nonsense, right?
Because I think all I'm pointing out is that the United States gives a lot of weapons aid to Israel.
But The Guardian is very sensitive to anti-Semitism accusations and immediately stopped publishing me.
I deleted the tweet and I apologized to the editor because I could tell from his tone that my job was on the line.
And they stopped publishing my columns.
And then a month later, after I've been trying to get in touch with my editor and trying to go, you know, what's going on here, my editor said that they had had a meeting with the editor-in-chief and that the editor-in-chief had decided to discontinue me entirely as a columnist.
Yeah.
And now, so what's the big deal anyway, right?
As you point out in your article, it wasn't you that singled out Israel.
It was this actual appropriations bill that singled out Israel.
So was there any kind of rational argument back and forth here or just, hey, buddy, I don't like you anymore now because of this and there's nothing you can do about it?
Essentially, essentially the second one, essentially, when my editor called and said the editor decided to discontinue the column, I said, well, can I can I talk to them?
Can I can we work this out somehow?
You know, can I understand what the what the guidance is for what the Guardian's columnists can and cannot say about Israel on Twitter?
And I was told essentially there's no point talking to him.
He's made up his mind.
You're gone.
You're out.
It's over.
And I've been writing for the Guardian for four years.
I've been a columnist not for not for quite that long because that was a promotion that I got to full columnist.
And I've never had a single critique of my work by the I mean, you know, they do line editing, but nobody's ever said before.
They've never any performance issues, never any suggestions that they would discontinue my column for any other reason.
So it was very, very surprising to find out just how fast you could be out for tweeting the wrong thing about Israel.
So this is not just, you know, that I have an oversensitive editor.
This is a problem that everyone in media faces.
And if anyone tweets, you know, the wrong thing, there's an invisible line.
And you don't find out what that line is until you cross it.
And then you are quickly told that you have crossed it and then you are out.
And it can really seriously damage your career.
The only reason that I was able to speak openly about this and write openly about this is that I am the editor of Current Affairs, which is my own independent platform that is not beholden to advertisers or donors or to anyone other than our readers.
But if I was looking for another newspaper column, first, it'd be very hard to get one now that I've been called anti-Semitic.
And second, you know, it would be very, very hard because I would have to constrain myself.
I wouldn't be able to tell people.
I wouldn't be able to have written publicly what I said.
The article that I did, I could only write and I could only tell people the truth because I wasn't looking for another job.
Yeah.
You know, let me ask you this.
In my experience, someone who actually is an anti-Semite is always very happy to explain why you should be too.
And I've never met someone who hates Jews, who kind of covers it up all the time with sophisticated language and pretends like that's not really what he's about.
I've seen plenty of critics of Israel smeared as anti-Semites, but I don't think I've ever seen like a real anti-Semite who pretends that he's not one.
You know, like they're essentially accusing you of being here.
I mean, I think anti-Semitism is a very, I mean, it's a serious scourge.
It's a serious problem.
And it caused the worst crime of the 20th century, right?
Just the hideousness of the Holocaust.
So I understand why people are on guard about anti-Semitism.
I understand why people want to be really careful about anti-Semitism.
But I think what we need to do is make sure that being on guard about anti-Semitism does not de facto exempt the state of Israel because it is a Jewish state from being scrutinized.
In fact, you know, Israel, it says, you know, why are you singling us out for scrutiny?
But in fact, the opposite is true.
Israel is in fact using these kinds of arguments to be uniquely immunized from the kind of scrutiny that could be given to another country.
Because when that scrutiny is applied to Israel, it is considered to be a form of bigotry.
That is very, very dangerous.
And it's dangerous because, you know, I am a supporter of Palestinian rights.
It is because the state of Israel often engages in illegal and atrocious acts that need to be mentioned and need to be discussed.
And U.S. military aid to Israel goes to further human rights abuses.
And that's really the larger story here, right?
You know, sure, you can publish Current Affairs and you can write whatever you want about the Palestinians and some people will be able to read it.
But by making sure you can't write that kind of thing in The Guardian, that means that for most people in the neighborhood, they don't have access to those kinds of arguments.
The argument about, hey, Palestinians' lives are important and these people deserve protecting and are being treated unfairly.
It is by definition a fringe view that fringe people believe because the mainstream will just refuse to allow you to make those kind of arguments from their platform.
And they'll call you a racist if you try to.
That's pretty effective.
Yeah.
It's been extremely effective at shutting down criticism.
It is the case.
I mean, The Guardian publishes some critical material about Israel.
And in fact, this is part of why getting fired from The Guardian in particular is so insidious because it is not a right-wing newspaper.
It is a liberal left newspaper that presents itself as a supporter of Palestinian rights.
But what is very, very clear is that they carefully police what their writers say to make sure that they don't go out of whatever is the editorially approved boundary line for what can and cannot be said on this issue.
And that means that people need to think about what they're not hearing.
They need to think about the fact that every writer seeing me fired knows that their job is under threat and that tweets, you know, not just tweets, but pieces of writing that they would have submitted that they're not going to submit, all of the many things that would have been said that aren't going to be said because writers know that if they wade into this issue, it's just too high risk for them career-wise.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I started out in pirate radio and I work for antiwar.com and I do have a major radio show now, but it's on KPFK in Los Angeles, the Pacifica network there.
And they're pretty radical left and, you know, a nonprofit and kind of protected and insulated.
So they're allowed to have, you know, they can have a guy like me and others on there who can talk about these issues.
And they've been pretty, they've been open.
I've never had a problem covering Israel-Palestine issues there at all.
But I know it's not even worth trying to get on the local right-wing AM in my town.
And I'm a libertarian.
I'm plenty gold money enough for them in a way I could get on there.
But the first time I talk about the Palestinians, I'm going to be out of a job.
So I don't even try.
No, it's true.
I mean, this is why independent media platforms are so, so important, right?
And really, genuinely independent platforms that are not beholden to advertisers.
And that's, we've built Current Affairs over the course of five years.
And you know, it's interesting, you mentioned we are quite new, but luckily, because we're five years on now, we've built up some security and stability.
We've built up an independent readership and that supports us.
And that gives us the ability to speak freely.
And without these kinds of independent institutions, you know, this was a real insight for me, a personal revelation.
I mean, I talk about the corporate media all the time, but to then cross the line and find out really how it works was really kind of eye-opening for me, because it's sort of, it was like, oh, all this stuff I've been writing about in the abstract, here it is.
This is how it goes.
And again, you know, I think it's relevant here that you're not just some guy who wrote a few pieces for The Guardian before, right?
You've already achieved a level of stature above that, being the editor of your own publication in that sense, and being, as you said, promoted to regular columnist up there or whatever exactly the title was.
So you know, it wasn't like you were one of a thousand.
You were one of a much smaller number, higher up in rank there at The Guardian to be just thrown right overboard.
And again, go back to, over a silly tweet, don't you know you can't give a COVID relief check to grandma if you don't pay $500 billion or $500 million to the Israelis to waste on weapons at the same time?
I kind of thought that was funny.
Yeah.
That's a good tweet, man.
That's a solid tweet, Nathan.
You should be proud of that tweet.
And I deleted it.
In fact, I was told that my main crime was that I explained the joke afterwards, which was an offense to comedy, but I felt like I had to because I knew that some people would interpret this in the worst possible way.
And of course the editor goes, there's no actual law that says that.
Like, well, you know, on Twitter sometimes you're sarcastic.
I don't know if you've heard of sarcasm, but it wasn't about the sarcasm, right?
It was about the subject matter.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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And you know, and back to the antisemitism too, because it is true that there are passionate defenders of Israel who presumably honestly mistake all criticism for antisemitism and maybe your writer is one of those and he just got terribly offended and had to go cry for a minute and get himself together and have a glass of cold water before he could even, you know, censor you.
But you know, probably not, right?
Probably more like, hey, don't talk about the politics that I don't want to hear is much more like it.
He didn't mistake a good civil rights Bernie Sanders leftist like you for a racist white supremacist or whatever kind of thing, right?
Come on.
Yeah.
It's hard to think that he could really believe that his columnist, again, who he'd published for years, you know, had revealed some sort of deep inner hatred for the Jewish people.
It is very implausible.
I think what is more plausible is that he got a bunch of emails from people calling me an antisemite and didn't want, uh, any kind of PR problem on his hand.
So it didn't matter whether it was true or not.
The fact that defenders of Israel made the argument and, and, and applied the label was enough to cost me my job, which means that there is a very strong incentive to imply apply that label to anyone whose criticisms are uncomfortable or threatening to us military aid to Israel.
And what a great incentive for the Twitter and telephone and email mob that went after him over you to do this again to the next guy to boy, we got rid of that Robinson in one shot.
That was easy.
It's, it's, it's showed that it is effective to weaponize accusations of antisemitism.
It has also cheapened the word antisemitism as I say, I think antisemitism is responsible for the worst, obviously the worst crime of the 20th century.
It has a very, very long history of just some of the ugliest violence that human beings have ever perpetrated.
And so when you devalue that word by applying it to anything and applying it to people who are just criticizing the policy of a government that is a brutalizing people, um, you make it much, much harder to root out antisemitism because you make it so that it's a, it's a, it's a crying wolf situation, right?
Which is that there are wolves in the world, but if you use the word wolf so much that it becomes meaningless, then when actual deadly wolves show up, we won't have the language to talk about it because people will have destroyed the terms that we need to talk about something that is truly horrific.
Right.
I think that's absolutely right now.
So tell us a little bit about the Palestinians cause what is there for you to object to anyway?
Everybody knows that Israel's just a nice guy, our best friend and keeping the radical Islams at bay for us and all this stuff.
Right.
So what's the problem?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's important to understand the basics of the Israel Palestine conflict, right?
Which is there is a, there is a conflict.
The reason, one of the reasons there is a conflict is because in 1948, um, there was a project, the project was called Zionism to build a Jewish state in a territory that had a lot of, uh, that had a Jewish minority at the time and an Arab majority.
And the project of building the state of Israel as a Jewish state required, um, expulsion of a lot of Palestinians.
This is why they're still, uh, this is the whole demand for the quote right of return, right?
The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the land that they were expelled from in 1948.
Um, and so what has essentially happened over the course of a, of, of decades is as the state of Israel has been built up into a powerful state that operates in the interest of, you know, openly, this is not conspiratorial that Oprah, it's a, it, it declares itself a Jewish state, not an, not a hybrid Jewish Arab state.
It, uh, and that requires the suppression of democracy, right?
Because it means that Palestinians are, don't have the right to rule in the territory that was historic Palestine.
Um, and so what has happened over time is Palestinians have been pushed into smaller and smaller enclaves, deprived of more and more of the right of self-government.
You can look at the sort of map of the disappearing territory that is Palestine as there have been increasing Israeli settlements.
Um, and what, what is going on right now is an effort by Israel to sort of essentially that for a while there was a peace process, a discussion about the two state solution.
Let's give the Palestinians a state here.
Let's give Israel a state here that the, that discussion has kind of gone away because Israel has de facto achieved complete control.
There's kind of an almost one state reality because there's Israel and then there's Israeli occupied Palestinian territory and a blockaded strip called the Gaza strip.
Um, and so what that means, right?
What that means ultimately is that, um, Palestinians really have very, very little autonomy.
The Israeli human rights organization, B'Tselem in January just released a report finally, you know, declaring that this is essentially an apartheid state.
It has Palestinians live in what is similar to South African Bantustans, right?
Little, little enclaves that are barely connected to each other, right?
There are roadblocks between them and this situation is getting worse and worse and worse and worse.
The Trump administration made it worse and unless the Biden administration is pressured heavily to pressure Israel, right, by for example, conditioning military aid on this or that or the other, um, this is going to get worse for Palestinian people.
And um, that's why it's so important to talk about military aid.
That's why it's so important to be able to have a frank and open discussion as we are in a situation where the two state solution has, has really, really eroded and Israel sees no reason to make concessions because they're not under any pressure because no one feels like they can criticize them.
Um, so, so that's kind of underlying it all why this is important.
Right.
Um, and you know, I think one of the greatest proofs of, you know, just the basic frame of what you said is how many American and for that matter, Israeli Jews agree with you that this is wrong.
It's not supposed to be like this at all.
Now what incentive in the world do they have to object unless there's something to object to?
Yeah.
I, that's absolutely true.
Right.
Is that, um, a lot, a lot of, of, in fact, a lot of Jews around the world, a lot of American Jews object to what Israel does and object to, especially the part where Israel does it in the name of Jewish interests, right.
In the name of, because they say, well, not in, not in my name.
Right.
And, and, and object to criticism of Israel being called antisemitism because as Jews, they don't identify with the actions that the state of Israel is taking and they don't like that Israel is trying to claim to be the legitimate representative of, of the Jewish people.
Um, which is not something that many Jewish people have, have granted it or would grant it.
Um, and, and that's, and that's very important to the discussion is the number of, and in fact, I think probably the harshest critics of the Israeli government are, are, are Jewish critics like Noam Chomsky, like Norman Finkelstein, um, like Ilan Pape, you know, there's a rich tradition of, uh, of, of, of Jews looking at the state of state of Israel as saying this, this does not represent our understanding of what a Jewish identity means.
And it is offensive and insulting that, uh, that, that an oppressive state is operating and, and claiming it speaks for me.
Yeah.
Um, there's also the subject of their military capability in relation to their neighboring states and including their nuclear weapons, as you mentioned in the article, would you like to discuss that a bit?
Yeah.
Well, you know, Israel, it's funny, Israel has always formally, uh, denied, I don't know if they deny or they won't comment on being a nuclear armed power.
Um, occasionally they accidentally admit it.
Right.
Uh, uh, I think Netanyahu said something like, you know, Israel is nuclear armed state.
I mean, you know, uh, you know, cause the official position is we don't, we don't admit that we have nuclear weapons.
Um, but we know, I mean, every international observer of, uh, nuclear weapons, uh, has concluded that Israel is in fact a nuclear power.
In fact, uh, Israel is, uh, certainly the most technologically, uh, superior military in the Middle East.
Um, by some measures, uh, superior technologically to even, even the United States, Israel, uh, invests very heavily, um, in its military superiority, right?
So when we offer military aid, we are trying to help Israel maintain what is called, uh, in US policy, it's quote qualitative military advantage over other neighboring states.
This is, this is, this is a United States commitment is to making sure Israel has the most powerful military in the Middle East because they are ally, they further our interests, right?
So, um, we are talking about assisting a country that is already extremely powerful and that that power is used to make sure that Israel has no reason to make concessions to the Palestinians.
I mean, people talk about Palestinian rocket attacks, but this is like homemade munitions, right?
This is, I mean, we're talking about such a disproportionate level of force.
Like the Palestinians fight back with like, they set kites on fire and send them over the border, right?
That's, that's, that's the power or they, or they throw a rock, right?
That's, that's what Palestine, it's like the, it's dark ages stuff, right?
Compared to the most technologically advanced, one of the most technological advanced armies in the world.
Um, so that's, we really got to understand when we talk about the Israel Palestine conflict, the massively disproportionate military force on one side.
Yeah.
Now I got to tell you just from my own previous understanding, and I'm going to put this in the form of a question to you, but the way I always understood it before he understood it was these Palestinians, they're the country next door and they're constantly trying to invade and attack and send terrorists against Israel in order to try to extort land out of them.
And peace for peace even means that if you give us some of your land, Israel, then we'll stop sending terrorists to attack you all the time.
And that was the way no one ever explained that to me, like in a very like deliberate explicit lie like that.
But that was essentially my impression until I was 22 or whatever, and actually learned the first thing about it.
Right.
So I wonder if that's your experience too, that that's basically what most people think here is that even if they do just have kites, what right do they have?
They're defending themselves.
They're attacking the poor Israelis, right?
People, people need to everyone has to.
You can't understand this conflict without understanding how it arose.
Right.
So if you see like Palestinians sending kites and rockets and Israel coming back and bombing a village, you might think, ah, look, there's violence from one side, violence from the other side.
What you have to do is understand why there is a conflict.
And the reason there is a conflict is because historically, the area that is now the state of Israel was an Arab majority territory.
And in 1948, 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from from the land.
And since and and since then have been confined to smaller and smaller territories that are being settled by Israel.
That is the context.
And Palestinians are demanding land.
They are demanding land that historically they would have been able to settle on and cannot.
Right.
They when when the great march of return in 2018 at the at the border, the Gaza at the border wall, when the Palestinians approached the border wall and tried to breach the border wall, Israel killed hundreds of Palestinian demonstrators that tried to cross shot thousands more and said, well, Palestinians are trying to breach the border.
But why was the why was the march called the Great March of Return?
It was called the Great March of Return because these are Palestinian refugees and the descendants of refugees who are trying to get access to the homeland that they were deprived of.
So the context of this conflict matters.
The fact is that there is a reason the power to understand what the Palestinian grievance is and the history that it arises from.
Without understanding that history, you don't understand the conflict, which is why it's so so.
And David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, said he I mean, you could look at his quotes and he said, essentially, the Arabs fight us because we are taking their land.
And he said, if I was an Arab, I would not make peace with Israel because essentially the Zionist project was let's build it.
We're building a Jewish homeland and building a Jewish homeland means getting rid of the people who are already here.
So that's why they're upset.
And that's that's not me saying that's David Ben-Gurion saying that.
So without understanding that the whole conflict looks confusing and it doesn't it's not clear why people are doing what they're doing.
All right.
Well, I think that's why it's so important that you're doing what you're doing.
And especially now that you're free of the Guardian, you can continue to write all about this and publish other great writers all about this at Current Affairs and let people know why it's so important, because I agree with you that it is.
Well, thank you so much, Scott.
I really appreciate you having having me on and letting me go into this, as I say, like independent broadcasters are just just so, so important, given given what the corporate media is like.
Yeah.
Well, we'll see how long it lasts before, you know, the Atlantic Council gets to decide which podcasts are allowed to go out and what have you.
They already called anti-war dot com the Russians back a few years ago.
So it won't be long.
I don't guess.
Oh, we're all Russian spies now.
Yes.
Always.
I've been told that I'm on Putin's payroll, which if I am, the check must have gotten lost in the mail.
Seriously.
I'm 44 and still renting here.
So I don't know.
Yeah.
Isn't it funny when people say you're in the pay of foreign interests and you're like, where's my money?
Yeah.
Well, and of course, you know, especially for anti-war dot com, I can't get more transparent than this.
We've been around for twenty five years.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Right.
About everything the whole time, by the way.
I remember you during the Iraq war during 2003.
I mean, you know, you know, you're great work.
Yeah.
Great, man.
All right.
Great to meet you, Nathan.
Appreciate it.
So nice to meet you, Scott.
Thanks very much.
All right.
You guys.
That is Nathan J. Robinson.
He is the editor in chief of Current Affairs and that's Current Affairs dot org.
Media cracks down on critics of Israel.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, anti-war dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
