I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Aaron, 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.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Daniel Larrison, formerly of the American Conservative Magazine.
He is now a contributing editor at Antiwar.com, I am so happy to say, and he's also been writing at ResponsibleStatecraft.org lately as well.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, my friend?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks very much, and yeah, it's great to be at Antiwar, and great to be back on the show talking to you.
Yeah, man, good times.
I'm very happy to have you at both, on there and here.
So listen, the reason I decided to have you on the show was because I wanted to hear your conservative take on Israel-Palestine, because of course, as you know, partisanship is virtually everything, and everyone knows that if you're a leftist, you side with the Palestinians, and if you're a conservative, then you side with the Israelis, or something, for some reason.
I'm not exactly sure of the correlation, honestly, but it is what it is, and so I know you feel a little bit differently about it, but I was just thinking maybe I'd give you a chance to explain.
Yeah, sure.
So I know that it can be kind of a tribal issue, where people on the right tend to default to supporting Israel, and I find that the reasons that they do so don't really make a lot of sense.
For one thing, they'll often say, this is our most important ally in the region, or this is one of our most important allies in the world, when in fact, they're not even a treaty ally.
The U.S. doesn't owe them anything, we're not obliged to defend them, they're not obliged to defend us, we have a security relationship with them that has been built up over the last 40, 50 years, but it's very difficult to see what it is that the U.S. gets out of that relationship, especially with all of the liabilities that come along with it.
And so the perspective that I've taken on this, that I've held for probably about the last 20, 25 years, is that the U.S.-Israel relationship is not really serving any vital interests of the United States, and in fact, it exposes us to a lot of resentment, a lot of hostility, and bogs us down in conflicts that we aren't really needed in, that don't serve any purpose for us.
And it also puts us on the side of an illegal occupier of other people's lands, which maybe in some extraordinary emergency situation, you could somehow justify as being an ugly necessity of foreign policy, but I don't really see what purposes serve by aligning ourselves with a government that steadily encroaches on and takes people's lands and continues to hold them in this state of statelessness and occupation now for more than 50 years.
And our continued backing of this government against the stateless people not only exposes us to retaliation in the form of terrorism, but it also implicates us into war crimes that government commits against innocent people.
As we're seeing again in the last 10 days in Gaza, we're being made complicit in the crimes that they carry out using the weapons that we provide to them.
And our government continues to give them cover at the UN.
And so I think in terms of our national reputation, our national interest, and our respect for international law, this relationship really doesn't make sense for us.
And that's why I've written many times that we need to downgrade that relationship.
We need to cut off the support we've been providing them.
And I approach it very much in terms of being a non-interventionist and thinking in terms of US foreign policy serving American interests.
And this is one area where that policy doesn't really serve anybody's interest except perhaps those of the pro-settler parties in Israel.
And then that's not what our foreign policy should be for.
Well, I mean, I don't want to oversimplify it, but I think that this is the honest point, right?
That in the much larger sense, the kind of zoomed all the way out sense from looking at the issue, the American right is siding with white sort of Westerners and our civilization against an alien civilization.
They're the other guys, the Arabs and the Muslims.
And they are, you know, trying to hurt our people.
And you're on the side of the East against the West.
Daniel, what that doesn't make sense.
Yeah, I mean, that certainly doesn't get framed that way.
It gets built up that way, especially after September 11th, there was a strong impulse to identify with Israel's conflict with the Palestinians and with their other neighbors and to sort of map our war on terror onto what they had already been doing.
And I think that's been a really terrible thing for our foreign policy.
It's warped our thinking about the whole region, about our relationship with predominantly Muslim countries.
And it's put us on this collision course with many different countries in the region for various reasons.
And so we talk about Israel as part of the West, but I mean, in some sense, yes, that may be true.
But in other respects, we have connections to Palestinians as well.
There are Christian inhabitants in Palestine whose ancestors have lived there for thousands of years and who belong to some of the most ancient Christian communities.
So if people want to play a game of identity politics, you can certainly, you can do that both ways.
I'm not particularly interested in that.
I don't think civilization is a particularly useful unit of analysis.
We should deal with states and peoples on a case-by-case basis in terms of what kind of relationship we can have with them.
And I think our guide in that ought to be trying to have good relations with as many nations and peoples as possible.
This is what Washington urged us to do in his farewell address.
He wanted us to have commerce and peace with as many nations as possible.
He warned us against passionate attachments to other countries and also inveterate antipathies.
And I fear with the Israel-Palestine issue, you see the worst of both of those, where you have Americans who are choosing to side with one or the other and becoming so attached to that cause that the American interest gets left out and gets forgotten.
And then because they've attached themselves so firmly to one side of the conflict, they then decide that they have to pit themselves against the other and try to help one side crush the other.
And in practice, that's meant arming the far more powerful party in the conflict to the teeth and giving them all of the support they could possibly want.
And I think that's put us in a position of siding with a very heavy-handed bully of a government that really doesn't reflect well on us.
And of course, in our own policies, we have behaved in similar ways as well.
And so I think if we want a foreign policy of peace and restraint, we have to move away from these kinds of policies that reinforce militarism and oppression and look for ways to have peaceful relations.
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So I have a friend of mine who is not a political guy, doesn't lean right or left, I don't think really in any real sense.
And asked me, well, what is going on with this Palestinian thing?
I mean, what I heard was these guys are launching rockets.
So now the Israelis have to defend themselves.
So I mean, is there more to it than that?
What's your answer?
Sure.
I mean, we have to look at the whole situation that led up to the start of the rocket attacks.
What provoked or what led to the decision to start launching those attacks was the raids on Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by Israeli security forces, where they were barging in and throwing stun grenades and using rubber coated steel bullets on peaceful worshippers.
Of course, that incensed a lot of people, understandably so.
And why were they making that raid on the mosque?
They were responding to large protests in support of the Palestinians who were about to be expelled from their homes in East Jerusalem.
And of course, East Jerusalem itself has been occupied illegally now for more than 50 years.
And you've had a steady campaign of what is essentially ethnic cleansing going on in the occupied territories as Israeli settlers seek to displace and dispossess Palestinians that are living there.
And so seeing all of this, of course, Hamas is trying to exploit it for its own purposes.
And so they start launching the rockets.
Israel predictably responds, and then predictably responds with overkill, as they have done in every other major operation, either in Gaza or in the West Bank or against Lebanon.
And that ends up leading to them committing a series of war crimes against the civilian population.
And that's where we are now.
Just in addressing the question of self-defense, of course, everyone agrees that there's a right to self-defense, but a right to self-defense does not extend to massacring whole families in their homes.
And unfortunately, that's what we see the Israeli government doing.
There was actually a really interesting article in Haaretz just this week by Amira Haas, who's their correspondent for the occupied territories.
And she's making the point that the Israeli government knows where everybody in Gaza lives.
They have all of this in their registry.
And so they know who it is they're bombing when they drop bombs in certain parts of the city.
And so when these families are being wiped out, this is not just an accident or a byproduct.
This is something that they know they're doing when they drop the bombs.
And I think that's where we need to focus our attention on the consequences of this escalation and the violations of international law that are taking place, with the blessing of our government.
That's the thing that we can actually have some control over.
There's very little that we can do to rein in a group that we have no influence with.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny, people want to believe so badly.
I've had two or three different people come to me on Twitter demanding that it be disproved or just asserting that it could not be disproved.
And can you believe the shame of the Associated Press sharing a building with Hamas?
And do you think that they would ever admit it?
And then so simply an Israeli claim with no evidence provided at all, in any way, that becomes the standard of truth.
And the burden is on the AP and everyone else in the world to somehow prove that Hamas wasn't in there.
And because they would lie, what do you think?
They would tell the truth.
And then so that's it.
And the entire burden of the scientific method is turned on its head, you know.
Yeah, so the attack on the building that housed the AP offices and the Al Jazeera offices was another example of this sort of egregious overkill and indiscriminate attack on a civilian target.
The the excuse that Hamas may have had some offices in that building, even if it were true, doesn't justify the massive destruction and disproportionate response that comes with destroying the entire building.
So even if.
The specific claim is, in fact, true, it doesn't justify what they did, and I think that there's been a misunderstanding about this, that, oh, if if there was even one Hamas office room that that justifies bringing down the whole building, that's not how these things are supposed to work.
Yeah.
And if anything, they use human shields, human shields.
But then it just goes without saying that it's OK to blast right through a human shield, even assuming that that's right.
And well, and of course, we would if the positions were reversed, we would not people wouldn't accept those sorts of arguments.
They would say that security forces have an obligation to protect innocent civilian life, even if there is someone who's trying to exploit the civilian population to their advantage.
You don't get.
You don't get a freebie, you don't get a license to ignore international law and human rights just because someone else is doing that.
Yeah.
And so and just to come back to the attack on the building, just I think a day before those offices were destroyed.
The Israeli government had been caught telling the press a lie about launching a ground invasion of Gaza.
And indeed, they were they were sort of boasting about it.
We used the press to set a trap.
And aren't we clever?
And then I think it was the very next day they ended up blowing up a building with international media in it.
And then we expect us to believe that they're the ones completely justified in what they're doing when they just told us the day before that they're perfectly happy to lie about their operations if they think it will give them an advantage.
Right.
So certainly you should, you know, in a fraught situation like this, you should always be wary about taking anything at face value.
But I think when a government that has every incentive to lie about something tells you something, you need to corroborate that in many other ways before you take what they say as the truth.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think that simply hasn't been done.
Right.
Isn't it really it's it's all just question begging and confirmation bias kind of thing.
I'm always reminded over and over, over these decades now, plural, I've been reminded of this rich guy in my cab in 2002 who said, of course, Iraq did 9-11 or else why would we be attacking them then?
You're telling me our government would, you know, lead me to believe that falsely in order to start a war against a country that didn't do it.
I mean, that's crazy.
How could a crazy ranting cab driver be right that the government would be so cynical to do something like that?
And it's sort of the same thing here where, OK, maybe they are bombing family homes and maybe they are bombing the press and maybe they are, you know, killing doctors and all these things.
But I mean, there's got to be a good reason for it or it's got to be an accident.
It's got to be just collateral damage, because otherwise, what are you saying, Daniel Harrison, that they're deliberately bombing civilian homes full of women and children, that our allies, the wonderful Israelis, are in fact war criminals, deliberate war criminals?
Is that what you're saying?
Well, I mean, yeah, this is what I'm saying.
It's what Amira Hassan is saying in her piece for Haaretz this week.
She was also on Democracy Now laying out the case for this.
They not only know who they're striking, they know that they're not actually getting any real significant military advantage by doing it.
They are choosing to drop powerful munitions in one of the most densely packed urban areas in the world.
And so they know going in that they're going to cause significant numbers of civilian casualties.
The other thing is that they define collateral damage, the damage that is supposedly permitted to them so broadly that what they perceive as collateral damage is what everyone else would rightly understand to be war crimes.
It's become a kind of game of definitions where they stretch things to the breaking point and try to make the civilians seem like legitimate targets or at least acceptable losses.
And anyone who takes international law seriously has to push back on that and then reject that.
That's not the kind of content that you can allow a client government to get away with.
And I'm pleased to see that there is some more significant resistance in Congress than there usually is, especially when it comes to Israel.
And there's actually going to be a resolution of disapproval introduced, I think, later today in the Senate.
And so there will at least be a vote on it.
We know that the vote isn't going to pass pretty much in advance.
But I can't recall the last time there was actually a serious effort to even stop an arms sale to Israel.
It must be.
Well, I can't recall one if there has been one in the last 20, 30 years.
So it's encouraging to see that there is much more awareness of what the Israelis are doing and there's much more resistance to it here in the U.S. than there used to be.
And I'm hopeful that that continues to build as we've seen opposition to other kinds of arms sales build over the last few years.
Right.
I've always said, Daniel, and I'm just reaffirmed in this belief all the time, and it seems to be from your writing and the way you say things, you're coming from pretty much the same premise as me, is that Americans just really don't understand this.
They don't know who's occupying who.
TV never explains it to them and they don't really have a fair shot at it.
But if they did understand, here's who's occupying who and how and for how long, that then they would be on the side of the Palestinians just because they're the victims, not because of their identity as Muslims or Christians or Arabs, but just because their identity as the underdogs who, you know, it's not like they were the ones who started the 67 war and then lost fair and square even at that.
Right.
This foreign countries did that.
They were only stuck in the middle this whole time.
Had never had a chance to even fight for themselves, much less lose for themselves.
Right.
Well, and even even losers in war are still supposed to retain certain basic rights, even if they had been among the belligerent, you don't get condemned to the permanent occupation of your territory for generations simply because you happen to be on the losing side of a conflict.
But unfortunately, that that is the position that Palestinians have been in now for more than 50 years.
So they and I think there is now growing recognition across the occupied territories and even within Israel among Palestinians there that they're the old divisions or the old factional divides among them are.
Are an impediment to realizing their self-determination and their freedom, and you're beginning to see a kind of solidarity across all of these territories where Palestinians are joining together to seek peaceful redress.
And then I think that's that's ultimately what's going to end up prevailing over time as the brutality of the occupation and the brutality of apartheid become so obvious even to Americans that it won't be tolerated in the future.
That's my hope anyway.
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Well, so I'm not sure if this is just semantics or maybe this is meaningful.
What do you think?
I saw a guy this morning say, no, you dummy.
It can't be apartheid because it's not apartheid.
It's a military occupation.
And those are totally different things.
So what really what is it about this military occupation that makes it apartheid, Daniel?
Well, it has to do with the way that everything is codified into the law that gives preferment and privileges to Israeli Jews at the expense of Palestinians, whether in the occupied territories or in Israel itself.
And you can see this in the case of the Sheikh Jarrah expulsions or attempted expulsions where you have Israeli settlers who lay claim to this property, even though the Palestinians who are living in these places have been there for generations.
The law defaults in favor of Israeli Jews simply by virtue of their status as Israeli Jews.
So it's the law is structured in such a way that it is always going to work against one group of people for the benefit of the other.
And so Palestinians are.
Not just in practice, but in terms of the law are treated as a lower class of not even citizens in the case of the territories, but as a.
A less protected group so that the law doesn't afford them the protections that it affords Israeli Jews, and so it's it is it is an apartheid system in some way, it's actually worse than the apartheid that was in South Africa.
I think it was.
I believe it was Desmond Tutu who said something to the effect of we didn't bomb the Bantustans.
Or the South African government didn't bomb the Bantustans during apartheid.
On top of the apartheid, Israel also engages in military actions.
And so in a way, it's a sort of an apartheid plus with even worse features than what we saw in South Africa.
Right.
And so here we are.
We're we're after the death of the ruse of the two state solution and the idea of independence for the Palestinians.
But we still don't have official annexation of the West Bank and the government of Israel just saying, OK, this is all literally we mean it now in law, Judea and Samaria and Israeli territory.
But we do have the prime minister saying, well, from the river to the sea, it will be one security force from an hours from now on.
He didn't say anything about Palestine will be free, but he did say essentially everything but the literal words.
It is one state.
And so it's still just de facto annexed and not de jure.
So they get to have it both ways.
Right.
Well, I think so.
I mean, that's that's the way that they can continue to pretend these normalization deals with the UAE and the others that, oh, we haven't annexed the territory.
So you don't have to worry about that.
And you can normalize with us because we haven't done this thing.
You oppose or at least you say or you oppose.
But they will still retain the control and still reserve the right to crush any resistance in that territory as they see fit.
And so, I mean, it is a one state reality and it has been for many decades now.
And that's just becoming harder and harder to deny.
The two state solution is it was a nice notion and it was it was maybe possible when it was first formulated.
But so many things have changed in terms of the expansion of the settlements and the entrenchment of Israeli control that you're not going to have two viable states living next to each other anymore.
It's going to have to be either one state that has equal protections for everyone or it's going to be increasingly ugly apartheid state with the characteristics we've already seen just enhanced more over time.
Yeah, you know.
I don't know.
It's funny, a guy said to me today.
On Twitter, not that that makes a difference, he says, I just don't know how this is ever going to happen, right?
The Israeli government is never going to give these people independence or equal rights, a one state solution, abolition of church and state, one man, one vote.
And never mind what your grandparents believed.
It's just not going to happen.
They're just they're going absolutely the other direction.
And essentially, unless it's America holding a gun to their head, which is never going to happen, they're never going to give this up.
And the Palestinians, I don't know what's supposed to happen to them, but eventually the facts on the ground will make them obsolete and they'll just be pushed into the Sinai Desert or the Jordan River or blasted off into space or something.
But who's trying to really actually do anything about this?
Who has the power to stop it?
Well, that's a good question.
But I mean, the answer is right now, no, but there really is no pressure being brought to bear, certainly not significant enough pressure to change what the Israeli government is doing.
I think probably longer term, either demographic realities or.
An internal change in the political culture in Israel may end up being what forces the issue and drives for some real change.
But I in the medium term, I would have to agree with sort of the pessimistic assessment that it doesn't look very good for the Palestinians in the near term.
Yeah, because they have really no international allies that are in any position to do anything about it.
Although with changing attitudes, even here in the U.S., that may not always be the case.
It certainly is the case now, but it doesn't it doesn't have to be maybe in 15, 20 years time or so, you know, that's another generation living under occupation.
Yeah, it's just incredible.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you again how much I appreciate you writing for us at Antiwar.com now, Daniel, we're so happy to have you there and you write such great stuff.
And also, I should mention, everybody, Daniel's website is called Unomia.
Am I pronouncing that right?
What does that mean?
I think you taught me this before, but I forget.
Unomia, it's a term from ancient Greece.
It means good order or the principle of good order.
Yeah.
Very nice.
Also, that's on Substack, DanielLarrison.substack.com.
OK, great.
Yeah.
DanielLarrison.substack and then again, Antiwar.com and ResponsibleStatecraft.org, the website of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft there.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show.
Great to talk to you again.
Thanks, Scott, I appreciate it.
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