All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
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.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Ramzi Baroud.
He is, of course, the editor of Palestine Chronicle, and we run him regularly.
He's a regular columnist, actually, at antiwar.com, and I'm not sure how to pronounce the lady's name, so I'm not going to tell you the name of his new article until after he says it.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Ramzi?
I'm doing great.
Thank you for having me again, Scott.
I'm so happy to have you here.
What's the lady's name again here, M-U-N-A?
My co-author in the article is Romana Rubio, who is the managing editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
Oh, gotcha.
Okay, Muna.
Now, here's the thing.
There's so much going on, of course.
I had Phil Weiss to talk about American politics revolving all of these questions.
I'm going to have Alan MacLeod on to talk about all of the propaganda in the news headlines, and later on, I'm going to have Max Blumenthal rant for about an hour about the entire overall situation here, but I'm really happy that your article is about the more narrow point is really how all of this conflict started, is the fight over this neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in, I'm probably saying that wrong too, in East Jerusalem here, and that's what your new article is about, so very happy to have you to talk about that.
Now, talk about this great article, The Untold Story of Sheikh Jarrah.
We'll be running it Monday on Antiwar.com.
Well, The Untold Story of Sheikh Jarrah, Scott, is the story, essentially the story of Palestine.
The way that our understanding or the common understanding and misunderstanding of Palestine and Israel is that we always think of the issue in quite a segmented way.
We think of Gaza, for example, around specific terminologies concerning Hamas, rockets, terrorism, Israel's right to protect itself, the security of Israeli citizens, and so forth.
We don't think of Gaza, again, common mainstream understanding, as a place in which millions of refugees who have been ethnically cleansed from their land in Palestine in previous wars are living a dismal existence, miserable existence, where they can't leave, they can't go to hospitals, they have no access to clean water, to electricity, and so forth and so on.
And both issues are linked, in fact, that's why they are protesting, that's why they are angry.
Wouldn't you be, if you are caught in this situation?
The mainstream media doesn't want to link what's happening to Gaza, in Gaza, with the history of Gaza and the history of Palestine.
The same way they perceive what's happening in Sheikh Jarrah to be almost like an entirely independent news discourse, compared to what's happening in Gaza.
Of course, for Palestinians, they don't see it that way, they are the same people.
If someone comes and invades the United States, God forbid, and torments people in Florida, and humiliate people in Seattle, and attack people in New York, well, the people of Florida, New York, and Washington State are going to be perceiving that threat to be the same threat to their very existence as a nation, to their dignity as a nation.
By the way, and us Texans would go and fight for them, too.
Exactly.
Now, imagine this scenario, where you in Texas go to fight for your brethren in these other places, and someone in Europe coming and barking at you, saying, hey, stay out of this fight, it's not your fight, you are an aggressor.
And you would say, but they are my brothers and sisters, how can you say that?
Well, this is what we are having to deal with in Palestine at the moment, is that when people stand in solidarity with each other, and they find their communal solidarity, and they find their common cause, they are being told that they are instigating violence.
But who has instigated this violence?
When did this violence start?
Why is it that violence is usually marked the second that a Palestinian homemade rocket is fired at Israel?
Why does it start, and it's registered in mainstream consciousness to be that moment?
Why can't we perceive violence as the moment that Israel attacked Sheikh Jarrah, and decided to ethnically cleanse dozens of families and their children from their own ancestral homes, and expose them to this kind of extremist violence that has been taking place for weeks, involving extremist Jewish settlers, the Israeli police, the Israeli army, and even elected members of the Israeli parliament?
Isn't that an instigation?
Isn't that the beginning of this timeline?
But it's the same issue, Scott, over and over again, where the timeline usually starts when Palestinians respond.
Yeah, I've got to say here, I have to say, the only place to me where your argument here breaks down, it's only in your own favor though, is that we could be just as well talking about parts of Florida, right?
I never even mind separate states in our union, but we're talking about a land the size of Williamson County and Travis County, where I live, right?
We're talking about people on the south side of Austin are being persecuted, and people on the north side of Round Rock are going to fight, right?
Talk about brothers and sisters, right?
This is all Central Texas, even.
What we call Central Texas is 300 miles around, or 200, or something, right?
It's not even about even people in Texas fighting for people in Washington or Florida.
It's about fighting for people who live 60 miles down the road, not even.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Only I was trying to highlight the element of nationhood, but if you think about it in terms of physical proximity.
I got you, but I just want to say it's even more personal than that, right?
It's even closer than that.
Absolutely.
But if you, and especially if you also think about in terms of physical proximity, I mean, if you look at the news, it tells you Israel versus Gaza.
Gaza is not versus anybody.
Gaza is a tiny little stretch of land that you can take your car from Rafah all the way in the south to Beit Hanoun all the way in the east.
These are the two furthest points from each other in Gaza in about 20 minutes.
That's Gaza.
It's a tiny little strip of land.
And this land has been under siege for 15 years and has been under Israeli military occupation for 50, for 55, 56 years.
So this land is already not just segmented, but oppressed, isolated, impoverished, one of the poorest parts, spots on earth.
And you know, you would think, well, why are they throwing rockets?
But here's the problem.
For 15 years, I've been on your show for many years, Scott.
I have been, and along with hundreds of Palestinian speakers, intellectuals, historians, political activists, screaming, yelling, pleading to the world, please look at Gaza.
An explosion is happening.
They are human beings.
You cannot subject them to this kind of humiliation and want and poverty and expect them to be silent about it.
There's going to be a breaking point.
I think personally I've used the word the breaking point like hundreds of times throughout my writing about Gaza.
And this is the breaking point.
And nobody listened to us.
Nobody listened to us.
And now you reach that breaking point.
You reach the breaking point.
And then the media acts so stupid and so foolish and it's like, but why are they throwing rockets on Gaza?
I mean, doesn't Israel have the right to defend itself like any other state?
And then they kind of enter into this childish arguments that, of course, Israel, any country in the world has the right to defend itself, but you don't have the right to defend yourself if you are the aggressor.
We can talk about the conceptual element of self-defense when you seize your aggression.
You can't be an apartheid state recognized by Human Rights Watch, mind you, recognized by the United Nations report of 2017, mind you, recognized by Israel's own rights group B'Tselem, mind you, and yet you are an apartheid regime.
You are a regime that is being investigated for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
You are a regime in an active state of military occupation.
You are a state that is imposing sieges and building walls around Palestinian communities and stealing and robbing their land and sending your gangs of extremists to steal yet more homes and more land.
And then you come and act at Fox News and CNN in this complete and utter bewilderment.
But why do they hate us?
Why are they firing rockets at us?
Really?
I mean, do you think that even with all the mainstream media propaganda, people are that stupid?
You know, there is going to be a point where Palestinians would have to fight back.
It's only human nature for them to fight back.
The issue should not be about them fighting back.
The issue is, should be, why are they fighting back in the first place?
Yeah.
I mean, look, here's the thing, and I know that you know this, and this has been one of our perennial discussions too, is that people just don't know.
And people all over my Twitter feed in the last few days are saying to me, what do I need to read about this?
I don't know anything about it.
Who's who?
Who's doing what?
And, you know, the default is that the Israelis, at least the ruling cast of the Israelis are European Jews, and so they're whiter and somehow represent the West.
And on the other side is the barbarian hordes of Muslim orcs who are trying to push them into the sea.
Heard that one a million times.
And so how could you be siding with the other side?
That doesn't make any sense.
Or geez, what am I missing?
But in other words, they're completely ignorant and then therefore extremely susceptible to what you were saying before about, oh, now Palestine is a sovereign independent nation next door that is attacking Israel rather than the already conquered for 54, 55 years long after the 67 war territory occupied and ruled by the Israelis.
And it's the perfect test for, I don't know if you saw the lady that plays Wonder Woman saying, oh, it's so tragic.
The fight between us and our neighbors, like what a lie smuggled into that pretend sanctimony.
Wonder Woman is an Israeli lady, I mean, and she served in the IDF.
Yeah.
Right.
And it says, but oh, look at my crocodile tears while I regret that it's come to this between us and them over there, you know, in the foreign sovereign nation of Palestine, which geez, I don't know, every Israeli in my timeline is telling me there's no such thing as Palestine.
There never was.
So I don't know how that could be.
But I guess it's fun to have it both ways if you can.
Of course.
But but I want I am I'm more optimistic this time.
I know that that media, you know, just just being able to balance out the lies and and deceit of the media is not enough to liberate countries.
But I also understand that Israel cannot continue doing what it's doing to the Palestinians if there is greater awareness that's happening around the world.
And this awareness is absolutely increasing in exponentially.
I mean, just today, you know, I woke up early this morning and there's this flood of email of WhatsApp messages coming to me from all over the world, three from Africa, several from South America, from Asia.
People protesting.
They are saying put this on the Palestine Chronicle, publish this.
This is my speech at the at the event in Nairobi.
This happened in Cape Town and so forth and so on.
This is important.
I know that Americans are subjugated and rather subjected to an enormous amount of lies and deceit.
And that's different from people around the world.
This is why there is greater awareness that's happening worldwide.
But we are still struggling with an American with the American audience simply because of the massive amount of propaganda that is happening here.
And the fear among people to speak out.
Just before we I came on your show, Scott, I was checking out the the the American media headlines on Google News, just the depiction and the framing of the issue.
And the top one comes from CBS and it says religious fighting in Israel continues.
I mean, can you imagine after 70 years and more of the colonial Zionist occupation of Palestine, the ethnic cleansing and all the thousands upon thousands of reports from the United Nations and other international organizations framing this the proper way that this is colonialism, that this is ethnic cleansing, that this is apartheid, that this is war crime.
This is the zinth of American media know-how.
They decided after over 70 years to frame this as religious fighting.
And then you talk to ordinary Americans and they say, well, it's a religious conflict.
It's been taking place for thousands of years.
And sometimes we wonder, where did that come from?
How did anybody in his right mind reach this strange conclusion?
Well, look at CBS.
It tells you it's a religious war.
This is the sad reality.
We can't count on mainstream media.
We have to continue to support our own alternative media.
So people are asking, what do I read?
Yeah, go to Electronic Intifada, go to AntityWar.com, go to Palestine Chronicle, go to the Palestine Monitor.
There are numerous sources of news and we are doing such a darn good job.
I have two correspondents in Gaza feeding us with lines every two, three minutes from the Strip.
I don't think Washington Post has that kind of access.
You know, so these are the kind of media channels that we need to listen to and support and formulate the accurate opinion that this is not a religious war.
It's a war of liberation on the part of Palestinians and it's a war for apartheid and colonialism on the part of Israel.
You'll learn so much and highly value this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation.
And last but not least is the great Ron Paul.
The Scott Horton Show interviews, 2004 through 2019, interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money, taxes, the police state and more.
So how do you like that?
Pretty good, right?
You can find them all at LibertarianInstitute.org slash books.
Scott Horton Show interviews, 2004 through 2019.
And thanks.
All right.
Now listen here.
We have five minutes left and I want to give you a chance to really talk about, to zoom in here as you do in your article about who is zooming who in this neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
As you say, it's part of the entire thing and inseparable from it.
And yet at the same time, it's really the precipitating event that has led to the current crisis.
And so can you tell us who is who and what's going on there?
So I want people to think of Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood as as a microcosm of Palestine.
Sheikh Jarrah at this point is Palestine.
And the neighbor and the Palestinians there are the are the Palestinian people and the Jewish extremists who are trying to ethnically cleanse them and remove them from their homes and steal their homes from them.
They represent Israel at this point.
It's really the story in a nutshell.
In 1970, Israel passed a law that basically legalized robbery.
It says that any Israeli anywhere can come and claim a Palestinian home by proving that their Jewish ancestors at one point in the past may have owned this home.
Now this is just another one of these laws.
It's not the only law.
In 1950, they also passed a law called the absentee law.
It basically means this.
I come and I cleanse you from your neighborhood.
I steal your house and I fire at you and at your family and you run away and you don't come back because you don't want to be killed.
Then I come and say, well, you're absent and your house is empty.
Therefore, legally, I have the right to take it called the absentee law.
It is these laws that allows these extremists to go to actually go to court.
I mean, when they go to Palestinian homes, they don't just go and say, Palestinians leave.
No, no, no.
They actually go to their very own courts and say, I want this house because they want to build a settlement, an illegal Jewish settlement in the Palestinian area.
And then they forge documents, they come up with most irrational legal arguments, and then the court says, OK, fine, the house is yours.
So a week later, a month later, they send the police, the army and the settlers.
They come with all their furniture and their families, and then they knock at the Palestinian house and say, get out.
But it's my home.
My great, great, great father bought it from the Ottomans 150 years ago.
It doesn't matter.
We have a court order.
Get out.
And that's how hundreds of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem have lost their homes.
And this is the exact tactic they are using in Sheikh Jarrah.
Man, you know, I read this piece.
Enough is enough.
Ramzi, I read this.
We will not allow this to happen.
And we are not going to leave our homes.
And that's how the whole solidarity started with Sheikh Hashtag Sheikh Sheikh Jarrah and the solidarity that eventually reached all of Palestine that we are witnessing right now.
You know, I saw this clip, the one of the guys saying, hey, if I didn't steal your house, somebody else would.
So what difference does it make?
Who, as I I'm not this sophisticated, but people identified his accent as Brooklyn.
But anyways, I read this article, I guess.
Oh, I know what it was.
It was at Mondoweiss.net.
I forgot who wrote it, but it had a real deep dive on this Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood here.
And he talked about how this family had moved into the this New York Jewish family had moved into half of this Palestinian family's house and just say and claimed half the house.
And then they couldn't kick him out.
And they just put up some wallboard and then just said, that's it.
They're squatting in half the house while they're living in it.
Like one day while they're at work, his came is still half of their house.
And then that is then it's been like that for years.
And that was why she knew that guy's name.
But Jacob, what you're doing is wrong.
And they're on a first name basis because he already stole her half her house, I think in 2009 or something.
And now they're stealing the rest of it.
You can't make this stuff up, man.
You could.
Here is the thing that I'm not sure if you know about this, Scott.
But as of yesterday, this woman in the video, her name is Muna Al-Kurd.
This woman in the video was actually removed from the entire neighborhood and kicked out with her son and her daughter by the Israeli police yesterday.
And it's caught on video on camera of her screaming and yelling that this is Beit Shili.
This is my home, she says in Hebrew to the Israeli soldiers.
This is my home.
But they kicked her out anyway.
The whole thing's crazy.
Anybody can just go on Twitter and just type in Sheik Jarrah under videos and you just see all these, all this footage.
And then so tell us too, if you can.
Can you give us a, you know, you don't have to get all every single blow by blow, but give us kind of a understanding and explain what the hell happened at the attack at the Dome of the Rock or the Al-Aqsa Mosque there the other day.
Right.
Of course.
So the settlers are now trying to take advantage of the situation.
Now, I don't want to complicate the issue even more, but we know that Israeli politics right now is going through a very strange transition.
Netanyahu is desperate, the Israeli prime minister.
He wants to stay in power for as long as possible, yet he's being taken to court for several cases of corruption.
As a result, he needs his right wing constituency.
I think much of what the Israelis are doing right now has been the result of Netanyahu's desperation by trying to manufacture a crisis initially in Sheikh Jarrah and eventually in East Jerusalem and elsewhere.
The crisis is done for the purpose of forcing Israelis to accept that we cannot go to another elections.
We have to form an emergency government.
This is something that the Israeli president himself can push for.
And if an emergency government is formed, Netanyahu will remain a prime minister and therefore will avoid being tried in court at the moment.
So the attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque, the attack on the holy shrines in Jerusalem, the attack on Sheikh Jarrah was really all Netanyahu's own, these are all thugs that are working very closely with the Likud party and the allies of the Likud party, the ruling party in Israel.
There are two main Jewish gangs that are operating and now their operation has reached beyond Al-Aqsa Mosque and beyond East Jerusalem, throughout Israel itself.
Two main gangs, one is called La Hava and one is called La Familia.
And what's interesting about these gangs is that it really takes us back.
La Familia?
Really?
Absolutely.
And what is interesting about these gangs is that it's like they are taking Israel back to its origins.
Because before the Israeli army itself was formulated, it was actually a merger of several gangs that operated in Israel at that point, they became militias and the militias became the army.
It's like they are descending back to that origins of Israel and they are breaking down into militias.
And much of that violence is actually happening by these pro-Netanyahu, right-wing, ultra-nationalist, extremist militias that are wreaking havoc all over Palestine at the moment.
Yeah, I saw on Twitter today, they were saying in all these so-called mixed cities where there's just roving gangs, people rioting and beating up Arabs or whatever, I guess as they call them, Arab Israelis or Palestinian citizens of Israel and people terrified.
So I don't know, God, man, I'm sorry.
Do you have to go?
I'm late for my next guy, but I could bump him a little bit.
I know that you're short on time, but also you sound like you want to talk about this stuff some more and I sure want to hear it.
You know, just one thing I would like to add, and I'm really, I am a positive guy.
I mean, despite of all of this, I try to always find a positive spin to things.
But there's one thing that I would really like to say, and I think it should not escape us.
For many years, we have been talking about Palestinian unity.
We are asked, why aren't Palestinians united?
Why are Palestinians divided politically?
Why, when will Hamas and Fatah get together and they sort out their problems and so forth and so on?
And the argument that I've always made, and I always maintain despite of all the pressure to think otherwise, is that in actuality, Palestinians are united.
Because the unity that matters during these times of upheaval and national liberation struggles is the unity of the people, not the political elites.
And I always maintain that despite of the walls, despite of the apartheid walls, despite of the military checkpoints, despite of the siege, and despite of everything that Israel has done to fragment Palestinians, initially geographically, but also politically, despite of all of this, Palestinians, whether they are living in Israel or in Gaza, the West Bank, in Jerusalem, or in diaspora, they are essentially the same people and they understand themselves to be the same nation.
And then they will always behave as such.
I think what is happening right now, Scott, is indicative of that.
You know, we haven't really seen anything like this.
I don't want to exaggerate and say in the entirety of the so-called conflict between Palestine and Israel, but I would even venture out and say it's really getting quite close to that.
Seeing Palestinians in Gaza chanting for their brethren inside Israel, who are chanting for their brethren in Jerusalem, seeing West Bank cities with thousands of people, Muslims and Christians, rising in solidarity with everybody else.
We haven't seen this, and I think there will be consequences to this, because now my argument is let's redefine the concept of unity.
Let's not make unity around few corrupt politicians.
Let's make unity about the people themselves.
So one thing that Netanyahu has done so foolishly in order for him to sustain his position in power just for a few more months, he actually managed to unify or at least allow the Palestinian people to display their national unity in a way that is unprecedented in history and will have absolutely incredible consequences in the future.
Now I can't even tell who is a Palestinian from Gaza when I see Palestinian intellectuals, spokespersons in the media, activists.
When I see scenes of the struggle that's happening, I can't even tell what is Haifa, what is Gaza.
You have to kind of judge by the background sometimes to guess what city is playing.
Just to give you kind of a better understanding of this, you look at the screen, let's say of Al Jazeera channel or Al Mayadeen channel, airing news about what's happening in Palestine, and you see these silos of screens, of boxes that are airing the event's life.
And you see on the top, you see Gaza, Gaza now, Jerusalem now, Ramallah now, Haifa now, Lidda now, Tel Aviv now.
And you see all these Palestinians rising, either protesting, resisting, or being beaten up by police and so forth.
And I'm thinking to myself, this has never happened.
This has never happened.
This combination of videos of all Palestinians fighting and resisting together, it is unprecedented in our history.
And this is what Netanyahu has done foolishly, thinking that he was doing himself a favor, trying to steal a few more houses in Jerusalem, and he sparked what potentially could be one of the most memorable Palestinian revolutions of all times.
Yeah.
Well, and you know what, too?
This is part of the discussion I had with Phil Weiss, is about the Human Rights Watch report and not just that, but articles in Foreign Affairs and official statements by the Carnegie Endowment.
And more and more people are saying essentially what you've been saying all along, that we can't really pretend there's a two-state solution coming anymore.
And we can't pretend that we can keep going on like this.
Something's got to give.
And then, so even Peter Beinart was allowed to write in the New York Times today that the Israeli Jews ought to let all the Palestinians come home from wherever in the world they are, whichever refugee camps they've been languishing in for generations in Syria or Jordan or whether they're Americans now or wherever they are, that they ought to all have the right of return, just the same as he said, look how bad we want to come back to our homeland.
Well, same thing for them, too.
How could we possibly deny it?
So I don't know if something's really going to give, but I agree with you that there is real cause for hopefulness, if not optimism or some kind of way of phrasing it, you know, that makes sense.
I think that things really are changed.
They can't really get away with framing it the way they had before.
Absolutely.
And, you know, I keep saying this is the last point, but I promise you, this is the last point.
The only thing that Netanyahu has done that was absolutely foolish was redefining Israel's relationship with the United States.
That has been a bipartisan relationship, winning the support of both parties and therefore allowing Americans, you know, Americans did not have to choose.
Israel was the love affair of all American politicians.
But by aligning with the Republican Party, making Israel a political issue in America, a polarized issue in America, it allowed so many people, including celebrities at this point, to think of it also from a political point of view.
Now many people are associating Netanyahu, Israel, with Trump, extremism, the Republican Party, and as a result, they are speaking out without fear.
I mean, back in the day when I first came to this country, the mere mentioning of the word resistance or free Palestine, it would end your career.
It would end your career.
Now I am just astonished as I see all these people, famous celebrities, not, you know, people who used to be famous, no, people who are active in the industry, people, sports people, footballers and such, hashtagging Palestine, free Palestine, retweeting each other and getting away with it.
It's absolutely incredible.
The same situation is happening in Europe, where you have also people who are on the top in their fields, whatever, whether being sports or, you know, actors and actresses and so forth, also speaking out and speaking out like Mark Ruffalo, for example.
OK, we know that Mark Ruffalo, top Hollywood celebrity, has been quite sympathetic to the Palestinian people, but to actually read the tweet in which he, two days ago, calling for sanctions on Israel, similar to the sanctions on apartheid South Africa, I mean, that was beyond anything we've ever seen, you know, and people retweeting it in their hundreds of thousands.
I mean, so we are really reaching a point where indeed I think that the nature of the conversation is changing on Israel.
We need to continue this momentum and we cannot allow Israel to frame this to be the matter of Hamas versus Israel.
It's not Hamas.
In fact, it's not really about Hamas anyway, because some of the people who are fighting, many of them are affiliated with various socialist groups, nationalist groups, you know, independent groups.
So this whole Hamas versus Israel, no, this is about Palestine, occupied Palestine versus the Israeli occupation.
Of course, Hamas had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the people in this neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem or with the attack at the Al-Aqsa Mosque or any of these other things whatsoever.
So that's just an absolute fact, not a matter of spin one way or the other at all.
All right.
Listen, I know you got to go and I do, too.
I'm so late for my next guy.
But thank you so much for coming on the show, Ramzi.
And thanks so much for writing for us at Antiwar.com, too.
Thank you very much, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That is Ramzi Baroud.
And listen, I was totally neglectful at the beginning of this interview and I didn't mention his books.
And check it out.
He's got a brand new one coming out in November.
Our Vision of Liberation, Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out by him and Ilan Pape.
And then here is his last one is These Chains Will Be Broken, Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons.
And before that, The Last Earth, a Palestinian story.
My father was a freedom fighter, Gaza's untold story and more.
And he is the editor of Palestine Chronicle.
And again, he's right there in the right hand margin at Antiwar.com.
