For Pacifica Radio, May 23rd, 2021.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com and author of the new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,500 of them now, going back to 2003, at ScottHorton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
All right, we've got a great guest this week.
It's my friend, Jeremy R. Hammond, investigative journalist and author and including of this incredibly important book from 2016, Obstacle to Peace, The U.S. Rule in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Welcome to the show, Jeremy.
How are you?
Doing well.
Thanks for having me on your show.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show here today.
So the main thing I want to discuss with you is all those opportunities the Palestinians allegedly had to have an independent Palestinian state that they just blew because they just hate offers of having state power for some reason.
But your book starts off this way and it's so important for the current context and you are one of, if not the very best on it in the whole world.
So could you please tell the story for people to understand the Israeli role in the facilitation of the rise of the right-wing religious group Hamas in the Gaza Strip?
Sure.
Yeah.
So Hamas was actually, its parent organization was actually founded in Israel.
I mean, it was licensed in Israel.
And so Hamas kind of grew out of that.
Israel initially tacitly supported Hamas, if not directly supported Hamas, due to it being opposed to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO.
Because the problem at the time was that the PLO was moving away from violent resistance to participation in the political process.
And I'm sorry, at the time means when?
Well, Hamas was late 80s, 88 approximately.
88 was when the Palestine Liberation Organization issued its declaration of independence, actually.
And shortly thereafter, you know, Yasser Arafat had renounced terrorism.
It declared acceptance of the two-state solution, which entailed, you know, accepting UN resolution, Security Council Resolution 242 as a basis for negotiations and as a basis for settlement.
And you're saying that was the problem?
This was the problem for Israel, yes.
Because, of course, Israel didn't want—Israel opposed the two-state solution.
Israel was—Israel, along with its superpower benefactor, the United States, stood in opposition to implementation of the two-state solution.
And so this posed a problem.
So the PLO was—its moves towards moderation and participation in political process posed a problem.
Because, of course, Israel essentially required Palestinian violence and terrorism in order to—as a pretext, as a justification for its oppressive policies and its takeover of additional land in the West Bank and in Gaza, which had been occupying since 1967.
And so Hamas was at least tolerated and somewhat tacitly supported, if not directly supported, as a counter to the PLO early on.
And so that's some important kind of context for understanding.
And then, of course, even later, once Israel was actively opposing Hamas, it would behave in such a way as to ensure that Hamas would not moderate its behavior.
So, for example, Sheikh Yassin was assassinated.
The leader of Hamas was assassinated in, I think it was 2004, maybe it was 2003.
I forget the year exactly.
2004, yes.
It was incidentally right before the assassination.
Sheikh Yassin had declared his—he had moved, he had taken a leap toward favoring the two-state solution and saying that he would accept a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines, along the—which are the same synonymous.
You hear the term green line, 1967 line, the 1948 armistice lines.
These all refer to the same thing.
And so that had moved Hamas closer toward the international community's consensus in favor of a two-state solution.
But every time Hamas would take steps to kind of—towards moderation, away from violent resistance, away from terrorism, and closer to—in taking steps, again, just participating in political processes, participating in elections, Israel would act in such ways as to prevent that evolution of Hamas and to, you know, and to provoke violent responses, either from Hamas or from other groups such as Islamic Jihad.
So, for example, in 2005, we all—you know, there's the whole Hasbara, the whole propaganda narrative that, oh, look at what happened when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip and all it got in return was all this rocket fire.
It was actually—what triggered that bout of violence was Israel had killed some members of Islamic Jihad in the West Bank.
And so the brethren in Gaza fired rockets at Israel.
And so that was actually what triggered that round of violence a week after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from Gaza.
And settlers as well were removed.
And so, you know, I mean, you can see, as you're referring to there with the divide and conquer strategy to, you know, prevent peace, essentially, like, oh, no, look, a bunch of terrorists that you can't possibly expect us to negotiate with them, which makes for a perfect talking point, right?
And Hamas is guilty, although I don't know how long it has been, but they certainly are guilty of using suicide bombers in the past, which is the kind of thing that, you know, scars them as absolutely illegitimate men for anyone to talk to ever again, if that's the way our side wants to frame it, right?
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
And same thing, you know, in their, you know, their founding document of Hamas, they do describe wanting to eliminate, you know, to get rid of Jews from the river to the sea, this kind of thing, to expel them from their land.
But later on, in 2006, Hamas was winning municipal elections.
In 2007, they won legislative elections.
And they had put out a manifesto.
It was essentially, you know, updating kind of their approach, which made no mention of anything like this.
It was very much more moderate, very much more acceptance and acceptance of, again, taking steps toward a two-state solution, accepting a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines with a 10-year truce with Israel.
And this has been the Hamas position consistently since Sheikh Yassin was assassinated.
And, you know, they've repeatedly come out and said that this is what they're seeking.
They're seeking a 10-year long-term truce with Israel, with a withdrawal to the 1967 lines in recognition of Palestinian state.
Right.
And I've seen with my own eyes, one of the leaders, I don't think it was the main leader, but it was one of the very highest level leaders of Hamas, interviewed on The Charlie Rose Show on PBS, you know, a little more than 10 years ago, somewhere around there.
And he was saying to Charlie Rose, look, we're beaten.
We know that.
But we insist on keeping the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
And if you'll let us have the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, then yes, we will recognize Israel.
No, we won't recognize Israel first.
But we absolutely will sign a deal that has recognition of Israel in it.
And so that's hardly Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
That's something else there.
Yeah, precisely.
In a very sensible position.
This was a threat the same way that the PLO's evolution, again, away from violent resistance toward participation in a political process, acceptance of Resolution 242 as a basis for a peaceful settlement, the same way that that was a threat for Israel.
Hamas' evolution in the same direction was a threat to Israel.
And so Israel was acting in ways to provoke the assassination of the Hamas leader itself.
Even people within the Israeli political establishment, particularly members of the defense and security establishments, criticized that assassination, specifically on those grounds that Hamas was moving toward moderation, and this is just going to provoke the more extremists, and it's going to empower the more radicalized groups.
And so it was obvious what the consequences of that would be.
And so that this speaks to the intent of the assassination, that that was the purpose.
I mean, it wasn't as though it wasn't foreseeable.
And that was just some kind of unintended consequence.
Israel can't have a peace partner.
Israel doesn't want to have a peace partner.
It needs to be able to say, as you mentioned earlier, no, well, look, we don't have a peace partner.
There's nobody that we can negotiate with who's reasonable.
And that is how they maintain their occupation regime.
And they justify their, of course, the oppression, the brutal nature of the occupation.
The pretext for that is, you know, terrorism and violence on the part of Palestinians and rejection, supposedly, of as you brought up in the beginning of offers, supposedly of the state of their own.
Let's get right back to that in just a second.
But you made a previous allusion there to the election of 2006 and seven and then the laying of the siege as the response to that.
And I just wanted to point out this tweet from Barbara Slavin from Thursday morning.
She says, let's always remember how the George W.
Bush administration supported Israel, meaning the Israeli policy of supported Israel as it deposed Arafat and how Condi Rice insisted on democratic elections in 2006, then promptly rejected the Hamas win.
And so I wanted to add to that, or maybe I can do it in the form of a question if you know about this.
But I remember from the time not only had they deposed Arafat, but because the Israelis have a monopoly on collecting all of the Palestinian authorities taxes on the West Bank, they had total control over that and refused to give that revenue to Fatah, right, in order for them to, in the more cynical sense, just use patronage and buy up votes, but also pay people salaries, right, public workers and whatever that they're in charge of.
And so that really undermined them as the incumbent party and helped to switch the, you know, move the spirit of the thing toward Hamas that led to Gaza falling directly into their hands, which then just happens to go along perfectly with the Israeli narrative that terrorists, terrorists, terrorists, and how could we ever deal with them?
When the narrative right before that was, how can we expect Israel to negotiate with somebody who wasn't elected?
And then they went, oh, Hamas got elected.
Well, how do we expect Israel to negotiate with terrorists?
Yeah, precisely.
And so the way that that's described in U.S. media and in the U.S. media, and of course, Israel's narrative is that there was a coup, a Hamas coup in Gaza.
And that's how Hamas took over the Gaza Strip is that it implemented this coup against the Palestinian Authority.
That's precisely the opposite of what really happened.
What really happened was that the U.S. and Israel were actually supporting Abbas and the Fatah party against Hamas, of course, after Condoleezza Rice had called for democratic elections so that Israel could have this, you know, elected authority to engage with as a peace partner after calling for, you know, these democratic elections.
And then they were doing everything in their power to try to ensure that Abbas, you know, that the Fatah party would win and Hamas would lose those elections, including, including arming Abbas's security forces and things like this.
And, and it was, so what it was is actually a Fatah attempted a coup after the elections and after Hamas won the legislative elections and gained control over the legislature.
Fatah essentially tried to implement a coup, tried to take over.
Abbas tried to, you know, declared for himself these, these authorities to do things that he had no power to do, such as, you know, such as replacing Ismail Haniyeh, the, the prime minister that was put into power, which he had no authority to do.
And he was, you know, threatening to do all of these moves, calling for reelections.
He had no authority to do that.
And so it ended up with violence between the two parties.
And Hamas essentially stopped the coup from happening.
And that's why Hamas remains in power, remained in power legitimately in Gaza.
Whereas Abbas continued to rule in the West Bank illegitimately.
In fact, his term ended in 2009.
So he's been ruling there without any kind of electoral mandate whatsoever, ever since.
And there's been no reconciliation today between the two parties.
And so this was an outcome that was a direct consequence of, you know, the U.S. interfering after calling for democratic elections and then not liking the result of supporting Fatah to attempt a coup that failed, which is what the Vanity Fair article described accurately.
And what a narrative, too.
Just like in Egypt, the wrong guys win and America supports a military coup against them.
In this case, it failed, but resulted in a policy that America doesn't mind anyway.
The Americans apparently haven't minded this whole time.
Do you remember this?
John McCain was interviewed right after the Hamas victory and said, look, we've got to deal with Hamas.
They won the election.
We said they have to stand for election.
They won an election and we can talk to them.
It'll be fine.
And then somebody told him, shut up, John McCain.
Don't you say that.
The narrative is they're terrorists.
We don't have to talk to them.
And then later that week, a couple of days later, he said, oh, yeah, what I meant to say was I never said that.
We should definitely not talk to Hamas.
Well, another point that people really need to understand here is the role of the PA itself.
Maybe you should talk about that for a minute.
So the Palestinian Authority was established.
It was created under the Oslo process in the early 90s.
Oslo one, 93.
And then there was the I think it was the Y River Memorandum, if I'm not mistaken, and then Oslo two in 95.
So that process created the PA.
The PA is a child organization under the PLO.
But the whole purpose of the PA, it goes back to the Camp David Accords in 1978, where they were anticipating, you know, the the what they wanted to have with Israel in the U.S. essentially wanted was to have to put into place a government in the occupied territories that was willing to do Israel's bidding and would serve as Israel's enforcer.
And it's essentially its collaborator in enforcing its occupation regime because Israel didn't want to have its forces in essentially performing that function within the occupied territories because it was very expensive and costly and obviously risky for their soldiers and all of this.
And so if they could just get collaborators within the Palestinian government to do that, to perform that service for them, then that was an ideal situation.
Right.
This is what they were aiming at all the way back at Camp David.
And of course, this is what happened, you know, in the early 90s with the Oslo Accords.
Essentially, that's what they did.
They established the PA to serve this this role as Israel's collaborator regime.
And so that and also to serve as a public relations piece to that.
This is how people remain under the false impression that Palestine already is a second state.
It already is an independent nation next door that's constantly attacking Israel rather than occupied territory that was lost, not even by the people who live there, but by the foreign powers of Egypt and Jordan back 54 years ago.
And that these are just subject people firing over their reservation wall rather than across an international border.
But if that's true, then what's the PA?
Isn't Hamas the government of the Gaza Strip?
Isn't Mahmoud Abbas the president or the leader of the government of the West Bank?
It sounds like an independent country to me, sort of, kind of, as long as somebody is coming at this without really having the background.
Then they can easily be made to believe.
And I'm sorry, I got to add this.
The narrative this week during the attack is, well, what if the Mexicans were firing rockets over the Rio Grande or into San Diego?
And then what would we do?
Nothing.
And in that case, you see, the Mexicans means the sovereign national government of Mexico and its army, right?
The Mexicans attacking us doesn't mean some Mexicans attacking us.
It means the Mexicans.
And then they do the same thing with the Palestinians.
Perfect slide of hand.
What would you do?
Here, the Palestinians are firing rockets.
It sounds like it's the nation state next door that's attacking Israel.
And all they're doing is defending themselves from invasion or an attempted one.
Right.
The real question would be, what if Mexico was occupying the United States under a brutal military dictatorship?
How would the Americans react?
That's the real situation.
But, you know, speaking in terms of, you know, this this illusion that you just described of how, you know, like this, as though there's already kind of this independent state with the P.A. as its as its government.
You know, the Palestinian Authority actually doesn't control very much territory, even within the West Bank.
Well, talk more about that, because that really is the crux of the issue, isn't it?
Yeah.
So Israel maintains, you know, jurisdiction, security, you know, what it describes as jurisdiction illegitimately, of course, illegally.
But it maintains control over most of the West Bank.
And so it's divided up the West Bank.
It's it's it's illegally constructed, all these settlements throughout the West Bank.
And then it maintains, you know, where where the the Palestinian areas of control are kind of like this, these little areas that are not contiguous.
And they have very little control even within those areas.
But, you know, they've got all their settlements are connected with these highways, you know, Jewish only highways.
And the Palestinians, anytime they want to travel anywhere and move anywhere, they have to go through all these checkpoints.
And and it's just this horrendous occupation regime.
You know, in Gaza, Israel controls still, even though they were true in 2005, they're still occupying power because they control the airspace, they control the territorial waters and they control the borders, along with Egypt.
And Egypt is complicit in the illegal blockade of Gaza, which continues to this day.
And so this idea that, you know, the PA is kind of like in charge and has jurisdiction in the West Bank is not true at all.
Israel is has got jurisdiction in in most of the West Bank as well.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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OK, and now so let's go back.
I saw someone on I'm not sure if it was Alan Dershowitz.
I think it was Alan Dershowitz was being quoted saying, listen, the Palestinians were offered a state in 48, in 67, in 88.
And I'm leaving out a couple.
I'm sure 2000 was one of them.
But I think he mentioned even a couple more than that.
And we always hear this.
I'm sorry, I forget the cliche off the top of my head about how the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Thank you.
Exactly.
You know, we tried to offer Yasser Arafat total power and he told us to go to hell.
Yeah, yeah.
The best example of how that's false is let's go back to the very first of those supposed instances where the Palestinians were supposedly offered a state of their own and unreasonably turned it down, which was the so-called partition plan.
UN General Assembly Resolution 181.
So first of all, you know, if you look at the Israeli Declaration of, as they call it, Declaration of Independence, which was a unilateral declaration of statehood.
They cite in there as the legal authority for that declaration, Resolution 181.
So it's really important for people to understand that UN Resolution 181 neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any kind of legal authority to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration of May 18th, 1948.
What 181 was, was a recommendation that there be partition, that Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
That was recommended that the Security Council take up that issue, which it did, and that's where it died.
It was never implemented for the simple reason that the UN had no recognized that it had no authority to force a partition of Palestine against the will of the majority of its inhabitants.
And so that brings us to the question of, oh, well, why did they reject partition?
How come they didn't accept their state then?
The thing is, as well, if you look at, number one, population and secondly, land ownership in Palestine, Palestinians, if you included the Bedouin population, were a majority, even within the proposed Jewish state.
If you exclude the Bedouin population, they were a minority.
But if you include the Bedouins, then they were a majority.
Arabs owned more land in every single district in Palestine, including Jaffa, which included Tel Aviv, which was the main population center, a Jewish population center in Palestine.
And what the proposal called for was essentially taking land from Arabs and giving it to Jews for their own state so that the majority of land, 55% of the land approximately, would go to the Jews for their Jewish state.
And the Arabs were left with approximately 45% with Jerusalem as an international zone.
And so it was completely inequitable.
It was a violation of, essentially what they were doing is rejecting the Palestinians' right to self-determination.
In fact, if you go back to the committee that came up with the partition plan, the UNSCOP, the UN Special Committee on Palestine, is the body that came up with the partition plan and made the majority recommendation was for the partition.
There was a minority part of that committee that rejected it on the grounds that it was a violation of Palestinians' rights.
But they said right in there, if you look at the document that was created from UNSCOP, they said right in there that the idea of partition is really counter to the concept of self-determination.
And so it was recognized when they created that plan that it was contrary to the UN Charter.
The UN Charter explicitly states that all peoples have a right to self-determination.
And yet the UNSCOP plan that came up with it was eventually adopted as the partition recommendation, explicitly acknowledged that that recommendation was counter to the right to self-determination.
And so that plan, for the Arabs to have accepted that, they would have had to accept that they were surrendering their own rights.
So obviously, they were right to reject that plan.
It was completely inequitable.
It was a violation of their rights.
And the idea that that was some kind of reasonable proposition is completely ludicrous.
And then, so what about, can you quickly do 67 and 88?
That's an important, both of those obviously very important years.
You already referred to Arafat was willing to recognize, did recognize Israel in 88.
And of course, the 67 war, famously the year 2000 was another supposed opportunity.
Oh, and you know, I think it was Dershowitz, and I think he cited something in the Bush years too, 2007, something like that.
Is it really right that the Palestinians had a deal that had to have been good enough for them to accept or not?
No, absolutely not.
I mean, in every single one of those cases, whether you're talking about UN resolution 242, which Israel rejects, the plain meaning of resolution 242, which called on Israel to withdraw completely to where it held, the positions it held before June 5th, 1967, which Israel has always refused to honor that resolution.
It has maintained its military occupation.
In every single case, all of the, you know, we've talked about concessions, in every single concession, in every one of those so-called offers was demanded on behalf of the Palestinians.
Israel offered no concessions to the Palestinians.
So they talk about, oh, well, Israel was offered, you know, this claim, Israel was offered 95% of the land at Camp David, which is false.
But let's just assume that that was true, that they were offered 95% of, you know, Gaza and the West Bank as their own state.
Well, why should it, why should the Palestinians be giving, be willing to surrender 5% of their land?
That's not a concession from Israel.
And that's 5% of the 22% that's left.
That's what we're talking about.
5% of the 22% left over after the 1948 war.
Correct.
And isn't it important to write the revelations and what were called the Palestine Papers by Al Jazeera, what, 10 years ago now, that showed that the PA was willing to bend over backwards and do anything the Israelis said.
Yes.
And it still wasn't good enough.
Still not good enough.
Yeah.
Which, you know, Jerusalem is obviously a big, big issue in the conflict.
You know, they were willing to essentially bend over on the issue of Jerusalem at that time.
But, you know, that goes to, speaks to what's happening there today, where essentially Israel has got this policy of slow ethnic cleansing happening in this, you know, the protests that were happening, which led to the Israeli security forces, you know, attacking people within the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount.
This relates to the expulsions that continue to happen that are illegal under international law, where Palestinians are being expelled from their homes.
You know, throughout the West Bank, Palestinians are expelled.
Their homes are bulldozed.
Settlements continue to expand in violation of international law.
The wall that has been built there, the separation wall, is a violation of international law.
The International Court of Justice in 2004 looked at that issue specifically, and they ruled that the wall and all of the settlements are illegal.
It's completely uncontroversial that this is the case.
Every inch of the West Bank and Gaza, including East Jerusalem, is occupied Palestinian territory under international law.
And Israel rejects Resolution 242 as a basis for the settlement.
In one sense, it accepts it, but it accepts it according to its own interpretation, which is a misinterpretation, because you often hear that, oh, well, Resolution 242, it doesn't call on Israel forces to withdraw, which is complete nonsense.
If you look at the preamble to that resolution, it states explicitly that the acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible.
And so the entire resolution has to be understood within the context of that point of international law.
And it is a quibble right between the French translation and the English one, isn't it?
Not necessarily.
What the Israelis claim is that because there is no definite article, the English version, before territory is occupied, that therefore it didn't mean all of the territory is occupied.
But I mean, just in the plain English meaning of the plain language, the absence of the article doesn't...
It's still just an excuse, but yeah.
All of the, we need to understand it to mean some of the, which is nonsense.
It's completely illogical.
Yeah, the French version does have the definite article, though, which is completely...
So there you have it.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry, we're all out of time.
But everybody, again, that is Jeremy R. Hammond, and he is the author of this great book, Obstacle to Peace, The U.S. Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
And it has a great introduction by Gene Epstein as well.
And thank you very much for your time on the show, Jeremy.
I really appreciate it.
You bet.
I appreciate it as well.
Thank you for having me.
And I'm sorry we're so short on time, everybody, but I got a whole mess of interviews on this very recent crisis at ScottHorton.org in the archives for you there.
And that has been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, editorial director at Antiwar.com, author of the book Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
Find my full interview archive at ScottHorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And I'm here every Sunday from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
