I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Hey guys, on the line, I've got the great Philip Weiss from mondoweiss.net.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Phil?
Great, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
I'm so happy to talk to you.
And I'm so grateful to you for this wonderful review that you wrote of my new book at Mondo Weiss, and especially on chapter three, which was one of my favorites too.
Yeah.
Sorry, it took me a little while on that, but I think it's an incredible record you created there.
It was a revelation to me.
I think that was the shock, and I don't know if I conveyed this, how much of it was a revelation to me.
I lived through it, and yet to have it summarized in such a fashion really captured the enormity of what went down and the lies and conspiracy theories that so many people, all these intelligent people accepted.
So thank you.
The thanks go to you.
Cool.
Well, thanks very much for that.
And of course, I'm just borrowing so heavily from Karen Katowski and Robert Dreyfus and Jason Vest and Seymour Hersh and James Bamford and all of these people who wrote so much.
I'm sorry, because I just thought of three more names and then I spaced them out.
There's so many people who did the work, and just to Raimondo for that matter.
This was the value of antiwar.com back then.
Everybody thought that this was James Baker's war, that this was Houston's war or something like that, the Republicans.
And Raimondo was like, uh-uh, oh, Jim Loeb, I was going to say, the brilliant Jim Loeb, of course.
Yes, brilliant Jim Loeb.
Yes.
I first interviewed Jim Loeb in 2004, and I'm like, okay, well, I'm looking at the AEI.
Does Ralph Reed count as a neocon?
No, no, not him.
He's friends with him.
But no.
See, it's like this, son.
And so Jim Loeb just set me straight on who was who and what it all meant.
I think maybe 03, certainly by 04, but I think even in 2003 was when I first interviewed him and got, you know.
So Pat Robertson runs around with these guys, but he's just their useful idiot.
I get it.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
And he was always honest.
That was the great thing about Jim.
He's still honest.
Oh, yes.
He's the best.
What I'm not acknowledging is that the storytelling is great in your book.
And that is, you know, all these people could have done all that work.
Great.
They informed you.
You tell the story extremely well in a captivating fashion.
So that is more important than anything, in my view, telling the story right.
Killer.
Well, thanks very much, man.
I appreciate that so much.
Dessert.
Completely dessert.
And listen, we're recording this on Thursday the 13th.
So you can find that at Mondoweiss.net.
Even if you're in the future, looking back, you'll find the archives there.
And it's the spotlight today on Antiwar.com for some reason having to do with a conflict of interest, I'm sure.
Now listen, here's the deal.
I'm going to interview Max Blumenthal later today, and I'm going to give him a solid hour to tell everybody exactly what the hell is going on over there with the current state of things.
First of all, I want to ask you a narrower set of questions revolving around American liberal Jewish Zionism and the new HRW report that came out.
Finally, the Human Rights Watch has said that Israel is in a state of apartheid there.
The two-state solution is effectively canceled.
The ruse is over.
It is one state.
The West Bank and Gaza have been annexed.
And I think as you describe it in your piece here very well, they don't go back to the Nakba.
They don't talk about 67.
They're not trying to get into the right of return of refugees living in Syria right now, or I'm not sure if they get into it.
They do.
Oh, they do.
They do talk about refugees in Syria, Jordan.
But they're talking about what is going on now, rather than devolving into like kind of a broader argument that they might, you know, go down those rabbit trails.
They're saying this is the state of the situation.
It's completely untenable.
So just go from there.
Tell us, take us through the HRW report and what it was they're trying to explain here.
Please, sir.
Well, I think that what you captured at the start of this explanation is what's going on.
And that is that at last you have this leading establishment organization, the leading human rights group in the world, acknowledging that it's one state, acknowledging that the two-state solution is over.
And that is happening all around us now in the establishment is that this fiction of the two-state solution, which sustained the world and sustained leaders in the world for the last 30 years, is crumpling under its own weight.
It's such a farce.
And that's what we're seeing in the violence in Palestine.
What we're seeing in Israel right now is that Oslo failed.
It was just a mask for greater Jewish expansion, Judaization of lands, what Max is going to talk about with you later.
And the left and realists have been able to identify this problem for the last 15 years, have said, hey, this is a charade.
How fair is it to Palestinians what's going on?
Why is the world maintaining this fiction?
And we kept waiting for the mainstream to catch up.
And John Kerry, to his credit, said some four or five years ago, the two-state solution is coming to an end unless you do something.
And nothing was done.
It only got worse under Trump, of course.
And finally, the chickens are coming home to roost in the mainstream.
So the Human Rights Watch report is one of several blows from the mainstream, from establishment organizations against this paradigm.
And they are trying to turn the battleship, that famous metaphor of the aircraft carrier that takes miles to turn around, they're trying to take the established, the world consensus on, well, there's an obvious answer how to end the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
It's two states for two people, a Palestinian state right alongside a Jewish state.
They are trying to take this completely stale, outmoded, you know, a snare and a delusion.
They're trying to remove that from establishment opinion.
And the great thing is that you see these establishmentarians who are finally coming out for democracy and equal rights.
And that's certainly true of the Human Rights Watch report.
It's true of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace a week before.
It's true of B'Tselem.
As I said, it's true of the International Criminal Court.
And I think, I have to believe that this was concerted, that at some level these establishmentarians got together and said, hey, we're sick of holding the bag for Israel as it just steals more Palestinian land.
We got to strike some blows against this.
And so that's its significance.
It's a huge event.
And it's already affecting opinion.
You see, for instance, Peter Beiner, who courageously, a former Zionist, has come out for one state with equal rights.
Today in the New York Times, he's saying Palestinians have a right to return to their homes or deserve to return to their homes.
He wouldn't have said that, I don't think, if Human Rights Watch hadn't said, hey, guess what?
These refugees were expelled from their homes.
They have a right under international law to return to their homes.
So I think that it's amazing how the discourse is shifting on this and how Israel's own behavior right now is supplying the exclamation mark to it.
Because Israel has no answer to the central constitutional question of its existence, which is, how can you be a Jewish state when more than half the people under your governance are not Jewish?
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Hey, guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
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Well, this is going to be another discussion we're going to have later with Alan McLeod, too, about the media and the way they handle this.
But so often, especially when there's violent conflict, clashes, as they put it, going on, they just cast all of a sudden, as Wonder Woman did on Twitter the other day, all of a sudden, Palestine is the country next door.
They're not occupied, ruled people whose land has already been annexed for 54 years.
They're the neighbors.
And so they're attacking, like it's a contest between sovereign states.
So they get to have their cake and eat it, too, all the time.
Yes.
Although I think that that contradiction is, that absurd, that falsehood, that fiction is coming to an end because they realize when they attack the country next door, quote unquote, their own people rise up against them.
And that's what's happening in this occasion.
We're seeing Palestinian citizens of Israel who are, you know, protesting in some cases, you know, who are protesting on behalf of their fellow Palestinians who are under Israeli occupation.
And the big thing that may stop Israel this time from murdering thousands of Palestinians in Gaza is that they know that if they start murdering, if they start massacring as they have in previous years, there's going to be an uprising inside Israel from their own citizens.
And so the falsehood that these are two separate entities, occupied Palestine, which is a country of its own governed by Palestinians, and the Jewish state next door is being, that fiction is being destroyed, ripped apart, I mean, I think it's a good thing by Israel's own Palestinian citizens who are a very large majority, close to 20, 25 percent.
Right.
OK.
And now to reiterate here, the hugeness, if you could, or if I understand it right, I'm not sure the hugeness.
It seems kind of important, right, that as you said, you have Human Rights Watch, B'Tselem, which is the Human Rights Watch of Israel, essentially their largest human rights group and most important human rights group there.
But along with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here in the United States and even Foreign Affairs, I think you quoted, ran an article about, man, this is coming to a head here.
This is kind of untenable.
And then, but and Peter Beinart writing, as you said, what he would have never written before and what they would have never published before, probably on the op-ed page of the New York Times there.
So but now so talk to us a little bit about J Street, because they had a recent conference and J Street, they're the liberal Zionist organization that's clinging like a dying man to the two state solution.
And I guess, isn't that right, that that's essentially their position is we got to get back to that, even though, yes, everyone we just listed here is already saying it's too late for that.
It can't happen now.
So now we have to figure out a way to provide equal rights for all parties here.
Yes, I think that J Street and the other liberal Zionist organizations are really in the middle now.
And it's a which side are you on moment in history?
Which side are you on is that, hey, there's only two paths here.
That has been there's no for years we thought there was a middle path.
That middle path was a two state solution.
You get your cake and eat it, too.
You get to be a Jewish state.
You get to have 78 percent of the land.
You get to dominate your Palestinian minority.
You get to have Jewish sign higher rights to Hebrew and all the rest, all the other discrimination that would never be tolerated in the United States.
You get to do that.
And Palestinians get their own state and everything works out fine.
Well, that whole sort of middle ground, that middle path of compromise, the sort of Kansas, Nebraska or Missouri compromise in American history where, you know, we had a two state solution where, you know, you can have your slaves.
Just don't go north of this line and we'll be free above this line.
That was a perfectly good compromise, Abraham Lincoln said until 1854.
And then they wanted more.
The slave states wanted more and they wanted Kansas, Nebraska.
OK, so that destroyed that middle path.
And we know what followed in the United States.
I think this two state solution is a similar thing.
It was the middle path.
Everyone thought there's a way to have everyone have their cake and eat it, have let the Jewish state have their cake and eat it, too.
And it's over.
So you get to choose one or the other.
You get to choose equal rights for everyone or apartheid.
But it's one state either way.
And liberal Zionists are in the middle and they are going to have to choose.
And I think what it's a terrifying time for them, because obviously we're talking about lobby organizations that are about access in Washington.
And the right wing Israel groups still have the pro-Israel groups still have access even more than J Street, AIPAC, Conference of Presidents, American Jewish Committee.
They have Biden's ear.
That's why he's saying Israel has a right to defend itself.
And meanwhile, J Street is building its, you know, building its constituency on the liberal side of the Democratic Party.
It's got most of the Democratic Party in its camp.
And it's trying to hang on there and trying to say things that are going to make the left happy, like we're for conditioning aid to Israel and some, you know, you can't use American aid to shoot, detain Palestinian children.
OK, we'll go that far.
But they are, as to the larger question of what the future holds, they are holding on to this fiction that there can be two states.
And they're saying, oh, it's creeping occupation and deepening and creeping annexation, deepening occupation.
We've got to reverse that.
There's 700,000 settlers across the line.
Israel has long ago made this choice.
And J Street is sort of juggling this and trying to preserve this fiction.
And the world has moved on.
So I don't know how important it is, except that it shows that the Israel lobby itself is starting to crack at the edges.
And that's always been J Street's role, cracking the Israel lobby at its edges.
But I think bigger things are now afoot, that the establishment itself is turning against the Israel lobby.
And that is the great news, that Walt and Mearsheimer were unable to bring about.
They tried.
They struck a really important blow 15 years ago with their paper on the Israel lobby and their book on the Israel lobby.
They said, this is against the American interest.
And now you see, and they were called anti-Semites for saying it, now you see a lot of establishment organizations are coming out in the same way.
So J Street, I don't know, in the broader scheme of things, how important they are in what is going on.
But I think they're going to have to choose to.
Yeah.
Well, and it is a generational thing, right?
Like you see with Andrew Yang in New York City, he's running for mayor there.
And he says, oh, well, you know, all the party people are telling me that I better be as Zionist as possible here.
So let me put out a tweet like that.
And then he gets this major backlash and he has no idea.
Which by the way, I'm sorry, I think it was the New York Times or somebody.
Everybody can Google the footnote.
You're lazy selves.
I don't remember things anymore like I used to.
His own campaign guy, his number one handler guy, called him an empty vessel and meant it nicely somehow or something in context like, yeah, the thing is with Andrew Yang, he's an empty vessel.
So here he's going, oh, Zionists, fill me.
And then he's getting major backlash from people on the streets.
And how dare you?
And he's going, what?
I thought I said what I was supposed to say.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, it's great.
I mean, I'm glad you picked up that moment.
I mean, I think that's huge.
I think it's that finally these politicians who are filleting the donkey, who are the famous Saturday Night Live skit, who are doing anything the lobby wants and they're thinking that's the royal road to political office in America, and it has been, are realizing it's going to cost them.
And we saw it with Ed Markey, whose Senate race last year, you know, he was this progressive hero and he has issued statements that are reflexively pro-Israel.
His own former staff are mutinying over this.
So I think that this is a way in which the woke left is playing a really important role in the Democratic Party.
They are asserting themselves.
They are saying you cannot be against, you know, white nationalism or not, you know, in the United States and be for Jewish nationalism in Palestine.
It's a complete contradiction.
And I think it's great that these guys are finally facing some real headwinds in the Democratic Party.
Yeah, totally agree.
And you know what?
And I've seen this on Twitter.
I'll go ahead and address it.
Some people are just reacting so hard against the woke stuff and its excesses right now.
I saw this, you know, with pretty predictable, I guess, but Mike Cernovich, the prominent kind of new rightist, said, well, if Ilan Omar's on the side of the Palestinians, then I guess I'm with the Israelis, which, of course, he just said Joe Biden and say, well, if they're on the side of the Israeli, if he's on the side of the Israelis, I guess I must be with the Palestinians.
I don't know if that's if all you're doing is reacting against one side or the other.
But right.
You know, there are so many people on the conservative right who have felt this way about Israel all along.
In fact, it's just Raimondo pointed out, Regnery, the conservative publishing house, published at what cost Palestine or what cost Israel and and quite a few books back then.
Yeah, fantastic.
And highlighting the plight of the refugees, right.
If you want if you want an American discourse of the refugees and the human, the virtual genocide that took place, certainly ethnic cleansing that took place in the 1940s, late 40s.
You look at the conservative press in America.
They were highlighting this now.
You know, people who say anti-Semite, it's not anti-Semite.
They were, you know, they were Arabist, whatever it was, they were internationalists.
And they were saying this is really against an American interest.
And they were right.
And and so I think that there is a real conjunction of interest on on this question.
And politically, it's a powerful coalition.
And you know, at least before World War Two, and I think after World War Two in some places, certainly before World War Two, American and I know there are all different branches of Orthodox Judaism, and I don't know what they all are, but the most prominent of them and to renounce Zionism.
And so this is going to be nothing but trouble.
And we're against it.
And then I guess the story goes, anyway, after World War Two, everybody said, well, OK, I guess we better now.
But they had real reasons for being against Zionism, including including the accusation that they foresaw just some bright men.
They foresaw that, you know, in the future, American Jews are going to be accused of having dual loyalty to this foreign state when we're not Israelis, we're Americans.
And in fact, I saw that echoed today by someone was tweeting out Newsmax saying, you American Jewish Democrats, how do you feel about Biden refusing to stand by your home country?
Right, when he is standing by Israel, first of all, but secondly, what's how is Israel your home country, Phil, is it right?
No, and, you know, the Jonathan Pollard case illuminates that, too, where he was welcomed home when he finally got out of jail.
Netanyahu went to the airport, he said, and Pollard said, this is what American Jews should be doing.
And that's part of, you know, Zionism, whether they are stealing, you know, state secrets to give to Israel, Zionism may not be that bad, but Zionism certainly calls on American Jews to be loyal to Israel.
They say that they use words like loyalty.
Well, what does that mean?
Ultimately, it means supporting a state that's doing ethnic cleansing.
And so, yeah, Zionism is rife with contradictions and deep problems.
And, you know, it's finally beginning to I think it's beginning to fall apart.
And I would say that, you know, you mentioned the opposition of the anti-Zionist Jews in the 40s.
After the Holocaust, they did have good reason.
People Jews did have good reasons to be sympathetic to Zionism.
But I think, you know, in the long run, it's it's it we really should consult what George Marshall said, the former secretary of state, you set up a Jewish state on Arab lands, you are going to create problems and you're doing it at the behest of America.
Do you?
America is going to inherit the world.
It's going to go on for decades.
And there were people in the State Department who said that.
I think they're right.
I think that you took a region that was fairly quiescent and obviously that had a lot of sources.
But and it's become a nightmare for America, for from American national security perspective, whatever that is.
I'm not justifying drone attacks or assassination or invasion.
I just feel like big cause of that problem is that we have supported the Jewish state to the hilt.
And frankly, the abuses of the Axis powers during that war discredited this kind of colonialism for all time.
It was like this was the last gasp of the old boy doing things when it was led by the United States.
And I'm against the U.N. and all this stuff anyway, because I think it's a prescription for just worse conflict.
But the idea was, or at least the premise they sold was, that America's outlawing invasion and colonization and redrawing borders through force.
We're going to negotiate from now on or else we'll attack you was the story essentially.
Right.
And in the case of Israel, it's like, OK, well, we're just going to pretend these people are just sand n-words and towel heads and camel jockeys.
And somehow they don't really count when they do count, you know, that was just pretend that was just a way of looking at it.
But it didn't hold up to the reality, as you said, there are millions of Palestinians who still exist and something's got to be done about the refugee camps where they live in perpetuity here.
You know, come on.
Yeah.
Although, Scott, I mean, just to be clear, your book documents imperial folly that and racism that's across the Middle East by the United States.
Nonetheless, I think this is a this is one of the ultimate sources of that is our support for this Jewish state and complete disregard, dehumanization of Palestinians in refugee camps, in an open air prison in Gaza, in cantons and Bantu stands denied any rights in the West Bank and in second class citizenship inside of Israel.
So, yeah, this is it.
And finally, I think the establishment is reckoning with this.
Yeah.
And listen, guys, I'll just leave you with one thing here.
Danny Sherson told me about talking with tribal elders in the Kandahar province.
And they would say, oh, yeah, if you love us so much, how come you support the Israelis merciless persecution of Palestinians all the time?
That's who we are.
We're the guys that support Israel in the world.
Everybody knows that.
And where it counts, too.
But not that pacifying Kandahar was going to work anyway.
But you know what I mean?
And I'm sorry I'm so late, but I just want to tell the audience that, listen, you got to read Mondoweiss.net.
It's not just Phil Weiss and his excellent articles about, you know, all of the politics of this stuff.
But he has such a great stable of writers over there.
And if you signed up for the morning email list, you get a great taste of this stuff all the time.
You get very caught up on what this all means and to who and why and what's being done about it and everything.
It's Mondoweiss.net.
And thank you again so much, Phil.
Hey, I appreciate it.
And carry on the great work and great luck with the book.
It's a really important book.
And I know it's going to have a long tail, as we say, there's going to be an audience for this for many years because it's a history.
It's a scholarly history in the end.
Well, thank you, man.
Appreciate that a lot.
OK.
Talk to you soon.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
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