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.
We can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Kalman Barkin.
He's a friend of the show and an Israeli American, and you do live here in the United States now, right?
I do.
Yeah.
Welcome back to the show.
So I grew up in the United States, I'm American, lived in Israel for a couple of years, and now I'm back here.
I see.
Okay.
Thanks for getting that right for me, because I got it wrong.
So appreciate that.
All right.
Now, so here's the deal.
I know that there were elections in Israel, and I saw some reports very early on about Netanyahu has this many seats in his coalition, this and that, but I have not been studying the background of all the new players.
The only thing I think I know is that Naftali Bennett is back after getting creamed the last time, and something about a big Baruch Goldberg fan is now part of the coalition, something like that.
Otherwise, I don't know anything about what's going on with the Israeli election.
So you tell me everything that you know, and then I bet you I'll come up with some follow-up questions.
All right.
So we may have mentioned this before, but it's probably worth giving a little background on exactly how the system works over there.
They have a parliamentary system, kind of like most countries, but what's kind of different about their country is there's no districts.
So you'd vote for just a party, and then there's proportional representation based on what percentage of the votes the party got.
So you'd go in and you'd vote Likud, or you'd vote Labour, or whatever, and then they plug all the votes into an algorithm that gets divided mostly proportionally, but a little bit of cheating in favor of the larger parties, and that's how it works.
They get, what do you call it, they get the percentage of the votes.
And then to become prime minister, you need to get a majority of Knesset to, you need to get a majority in the Knesset and a vote to, a vote of confidence in your government.
So typically the way that works is you'd make a coalition, you'd get 61 of the 120 members of Knesset to support you, you form a coalition, and you've got, you know, and then in exchange you'd give them cabinet positions, you'd give them funding for their pet projects, you'd give them all those types of things, typical coalition politics, western coalition politics.
Because of their interesting system where it's proportional representation, you end up having a lot, a lot, a lot of parties, and this really, really complicates things.
Like in this past election, so I can check, I believe there are 13 parties, let me check real quick, yeah, 13 parties made up the Knesset out of 120 seats.
And then it doesn't all line up right left, there's all kinds of sectarian things and all kinds of other things at play, so you can't tell cleanly who won the election after each election.
So this past election, right now, over the past two and a half years now, Israel's been in an extended, just complete political dead end with no end in sight.
Basically what happened is Netanyahu, the politics right now doesn't even go around right or left, it goes on whether you like or don't like Netanyahu.
And then right left is also an element, obviously, and then a few other sectarian concerns.
So election night, the exit polls there are generally pretty accurate, and it looked like the parties that support Netanyahu had a slight majority, 61 seats, which would be a nightmare, but he would be able to form a coalition, but only with every single person who supports him, and he'd be stuck with every whim of every member of the coalition.
But at the end it turned out his supporters only got 59 seats.
So we don't really see a way out right now.
Oh, so in other words, he still doesn't have his 61 seats as of right now?
As of now he still does not have his 61 seats.
So I read a thing that said that there was a competing coalition that was within range of it as well.
And I guess the frame of the article I read was that Netanyahu can do it, but only if he allies with these complete fascists, as they've been called by the Israeli Supreme Court, which banned them from power once upon a time.
But then there was another competing faction that they said could come to power, but they would have to ally with the Arab list, which they're not willing to do.
But there's this new guy, Abbas, not Mahmoud Abbas, a different Abbas, and he's a major player in all this now, and I don't know how he fits in.
You tell me.
Yeah.
So a few things on a player.
There's this new player, Mansour Abbas, he's sort of, he's an Arab party, he broke off with the main Arab party, and he's very religious and very, like a big part of his thing was the Arab parties need to stop talking about the Palestinians, we need to talk about things that matter to us, such as his hardcore version of Islam, and he ran on sort of getting funding for Israeli, Palestinian Arabs, but at the same time also on hating gays and preserving what he calls traditional Islamic values.
So he's considered a potential partner by some in the Israeli right, because I guess he's running on just giving money to Arab Israelis, which they don't have a problem with, and also on his social stuff that he's running on, they definitely don't have a problem with.
But others in the, but at the end of the day, he is a Palestinian, and he's made that pretty clear, so others in the right are refusing to do it.
So like, I was watching, immediately after the election results came in and it appeared that they didn't get 61, some in the, some like high up in Likud were talking about what they call support from the outside, which means you're not technically part of the coalition, you don't get any positions in the coalition, but you get a bunch of policy, the coalition will give you policy considerations, and in exchange you'll just not vote against the coalition when it comes, so instead of getting 61 to 49, when they'd come for the vote, they'd get 59 to 57, because your four members of Knesset just wouldn't show up to the vote, allowing them to get a majority coalition without actually being a majority of the Knesset.
So that was the idea, but at the end, it was pretty quickly shot down, like Netanyahu wants to do this, but it was shot down by the more right-wing members of his coalition, which like you mentioned earlier, include some pretty unsavory characters.
So like you were talking earlier about a character named, a character who is a big fan of Barak Goldstein.
Barak Goldstein, for those who don't know, was the terrorist in, about 25 years ago, I don't remember exactly.
Yeah, 94.
94, okay, so 26 years ago.
He went into the, there's a site in Israel which is a holy site for both Jews, there's multiple sites, but this site is a holy site for both Jews and Arabs, and generally at the time, they used to mostly pray in different rooms, but not completely, just like different times, and they overlap.
Basically you had a room which was serving as both a mosque and a synagogue, and he just came in with an assault rifle and just massacred however many people he could.
So this guy who just got elected to Knesset is a big picture of this person in his living room.
And this is Itamar Ben-Gavir, how do you say that correctly?
Itamar Ben-Gavir.
Close enough.
And then, so is he going to be a big player now?
If Netanyahu does form a coalition, it's definitely based on his vote.
Yeah.
Not only that, so you mentioned also how they were banned in the past.
So the original party was banned by both the Israeli government and the United States government recognized it as a terrorist organization, and then I think a bunch of European governments too.
Then they sort of reformed it, the same people just made a new party, and then the party itself wasn't banned.
They're careful not to say certain things, but it's the same people.
However, their candidates are usually banned.
But this Itamar Ben-Gavir is a lawyer.
Usually they put up a guy named Mikhael Ben-Ari, or Boroch Marzl.
These guys, they kept putting up different people and they all got banned.
Finally, they put up a lawyer who's smart not to say exactly what he thinks and to only say the right words, and he hasn't been banned personally.
But every other candidate they put up so far hasn't been banned until this point.
Their election slogan was Ben-Gavir, the most right-wing there is.
Hey y'all, let me tell you about the Libertarian Institute's latest book, What Social Animals Owe to Each Other, by our executive editor, the great Sheldon Richman.
For decades, Richman has been explaining libertarianism to the left from the left.
He makes a strong case that any honest liberal, progressive, or leftist actually should be libertarians, since in fact it is freedom itself that provides what y'all want.
Richman argues the case for liberty and peace, the human spirit and social cooperation, for true liberalism, libertarianism, against the corrupt forces of statism, corporatism, and violence.
What Social Animals Owe to Each Other, by Sheldon Richman.
Now available at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
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.
The War State, by Mike Swanson.
Find it in the right-hand margin at scotthorton.org.
And you know, so there's a quote here from James Zogby, Imman do Weiss, they're quoting him, and he was threatened by Kahane's Jewish Defense League back in the 1970s.
And the way he framed it was, imagine if Donald Trump had brokered a formal agreement with the Ku Klux Klan, or neo-Nazis, in exchange for their electoral support.
That's the equivalent of what Netanyahu is doing again.
It's more than that.
It's more than that, because another quirk in the Israeli system is if you get less than 3.25% of the vote, your party doesn't go into Knesset at all.
So even though you get just like three and a half seats, and you should get three seats, you don't get any.
They have like a minimum threshold.
And for a while it looked like the party that Itamar Ben-Gvir is in may not crack the threshold.
And Netanyahu was going around to areas which could lean either to that party or to Bennett and telling them no vote for that party.
So he was essentially campaigning to get this guy in.
It turns out he's not the only unsavory character in that list.
Surprise.
There's this guy named Avi Moes.
He's very right wing on Israeli-Palestinian issues.
But his main claim to fame is he's running on not normalizing gays.
He's running on making people not accept gays.
That's his thing.
The same list.
And then there's all kinds of other right-wingers in the party.
Those are the two more extreme characters in that list.
Is it right that what made them fascist in the eyes of the Supreme Court of Israel back then, the Kahane's party, was that they were for finishing the ethnic and sectarian cleansing of the West Bank?
Or it was more about domestic fascist policies that they had in mind for Israel that had them banned?
It was about the ethnic cleansing.
Kahane wrote a book called They Must Go, which is just, yeah.
I gave a speech earlier this week for any of those college kids who heard that speech.
They're at the University of Montana, and I was talking about the first al-Qaeda attack in the country, or kind of proto-al-Qaeda.
It was Egyptian-Islamic jihad that killed Rabbi Kahane in New York in 1990.
And that was the beginning of it.
Yeah, this was pretty soon after he got banned from the Knesset.
He went back to the United States to campaign.
He had his new plan of how he was going to take over the Israeli government.
And he was going here basically to raise funds and raise converts.
And yeah, and they took him out in New York.
And then, so now his, I guess, kind of followers here, or his successors, is that their outright avowed policy is let's take the West Bank and let's push all the Palestinians into the Sinai or into the Jordan River?
So they don't really have a formal organization because their formal organization was listed as a terrorist group.
Then they made a new one and it was again listed as a terrorist group.
But they do have some organized, they have a school where they all hang out.
And most of his students still push that.
Ben-Gurion himself, like I said, is a lawyer and he's a very intelligent guy.
And he's guarded.
So it's kind of hard to know exactly exactly what his official position is.
But like the other people that this party has put forward have definitely said that straight out.
Ben-Gurion generally dodges the question.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so long live King Bibi, huh?
Is that the way it goes?
So actually a really interesting thing right now is remember Bibi made that deal with what's his name?
Gantz.
Yes.
That after a certain amount of time, they'd rotate, he'd become prime minister.
And he called this election to prevent that from happening.
But now that it looks like nothing is going, like there's a good chance that nothing will be solved and it'll go for another round.
If it goes for another round, so it's still considered the same government continuing.
And if it goes for another round and then it doesn't reach immediate conclusion after the fifth round too, then Gantz actually becomes prime minister because it's still a continuation of the same government unless a new one is founded.
So by law, if they don't found a new government by November, then Gantz, who will probably not be in Knesset at that point, will become prime minister.
Well, but if he's not even in the Knesset anymore by then, then something else will change and it'll be someone else by then.
Or Netanyahu again, right?
Or not?
I don't know.
I didn't think it would get to this point, but at this point it's a deadlock where nobody can do anything.
So if nobody can do anything, then inertia kind of continues.
But I don't know.
There's talk now about maybe all of the Arab parties agreeing not to not to oppose a center-left government, which I mean, they say center-left, but I mean the people that don't like BB government, this includes all kinds of right-wing characters, but not the hardest of the right.
I think even Bennett is being calculated in some of these calculations.
And then there's talk of possibly trying to get the ultra-sectarian orthodox parties to flip sides because their allegiance does lie with the right, but they're more up for sale, like they care less about it.
They care more about the sectarian religious stuff.
It's talking about maybe trying to get them to flip sides.
And then on the reverse, there's the Netanyahu crowd is talking about poaching a few seats from Gideon Saar's fell.
Gideon Saar didn't really succeed.
He only brought six seats.
He was supposed to be an alternative to Netanyahu.
So there's talk about maybe he can poach a few members from there.
But right now they're in complete deadlock and the way things look now, they're headed for a fifth election.
So five elections in a row, just because the country's in complete political deadlock.
They can't get anything done.
And I mean, who cares about that?
It's all about the Palestinians and what position they're in after this.
And I guess the idea is that anyone new is going to be weaker in international standing than Netanyahu, at least in terms of his personal influence inside the United States, which goes a long way, I think.
Maybe, I think.
But then, so am I right then that if Gantz or anybody else, good old bombing back to the Stone Age Gantz or any of these other people, if they become prime minister, whoever it is, then the question of Israel-Palestine is back on the table for, well, are they going to have a policy?
Netanyahu's policy has been not too slow motion, facts on the ground and just keep going and never outright officially annex the West Bank, but also de facto annex the hell out of the whole thing.
But so, I mean, isn't that the real point here, even if that's not part of the discussion in the public debate over whether you like Netanyahu or not, that's what's at stake for the people of Palestine, people of the world, is a chance to start over with some kind of new thing here.
It's kind of hard to know because Netanyahu's a very, very talented politician.
He's very good at playing both sides.
He's very good at talking about one thing and doing the opposite.
He's just really, really good at, you know, I mean, we're working on the peace program, but it's, you know, it's been 25 years and we haven't really figured anything out yet, but we'll get there.
His public facing and private facing is like, I don't build new settlements, but I build new neighborhoods to hold settlements, aka new settlements.
So he's very good at not stepping over lines and knowing exactly how far he can push in every direction.
It's likely whoever his successor is will not be as talented, but his successor might just be, you know, pulling a china shop right wing guy who just doesn't care.
And yeah, it'll damage Israel on an international level.
Maybe in the long term, we'll turn things around, but in the short term could be very damaging.
But it's really hard to know because we don't know who his potential successor is, and we don't know what Israel looks like with a different prime minister because he's been prime minister for like, he first became prime minister in 1996.
You know, it's been lost after a few years, and then he's been prime minister ever since 2009, I think, uninterrupted.
It's been a very clean break, hasn't it?
Yeah.
Well, all right, man.
This is more than I ever wanted to know, but I know I need to know.
So I appreciate you filling me in here, and I'm going to try to keep reading.
Now that the book is done, I signed back up for Phil Weiss' morning email.
So I'm trying to get back into the swing of things with keeping up with this garbage.
I can send you the list of all the parties and kind of where they stand.
Oh, that'd be great.
Yeah, I'd love to take a look at that.
That'd be great.
All right.
Well, thank you again, Kalman.
I really appreciate it a lot.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that's Kalman Barkin.
He's a friend of the show, and he knows his stuff.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
