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 scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Kalman Barkin.
He's a friend of the show and regular guest now, an American who lived in Israel for a time and is an expert on Israeli politics.
And welcome back to the show, Kalman.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm doing all right.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing good.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
I want to know everything you know and think about Naftali Bennett, the new prime minister of Israel.
Please, sir.
All right, so Naftali Bennett is a pretty complex character.
His background is his family grew up as liberal American Jews in, I believe, New Jersey.
After the 67 war, they got, you know, spiritually awakened, as they say, moved to Israel, became pretty, you know, became right wing, got involved and became very Zionist.
They had previously been civil rights activists, the whole nine yards.
They come from, so when they made this transition, they sent him, he was quite young, they sent him to a more religious school as a child.
And that's where he kind of, he became religious and he in turn had an effect on his family as well and made them more religious.
He went, when he became of age, he did military service, like almost all Israelis.
And in the military, he joined like their special forces.
He was considered already then a leader in both the positive and negative senses.
He was considered to have leadership skills at the same time.
He was considered very independent in that he would, at times, show a little too much initiative for a, you know, structured military command.
He, that's, you know, that's kind of where he comes from.
He had become a little less, he'd become less religious during his military service.
When he left the military, he went into high tech, you know, made very decent money, but not like, he was involved in founding companies that had very successful exits, but he, you know, he went away with a few million dollars, but not exactly a billionaire.
And yeah, he made a lot of money in tech.
He got involved as part of Netanyahu's office when, when, when Ariel Sharon left Likud to found his own party after he moved to the center, Netanyahu was left with the remains of Likud.
He hired Naftali Bennett.
He had hired first Eyal Ceked, Naftali Bennett's current number two, and she had brought him Naftali Bennett as an office to sort of run his political office and rebuild the Likud.
Within a relatively short period of time, he managed to get into a fight with Netanyahu and especially Netanyahu's family, which played a pretty significant role in a lot of behind the scenes things, and got sort of kicked out of, you know, the bad blood with Netanyahu started then.
At this point, he starts various campaigns, famously together with Eyal Ceked, they found Israel Shalih, which is a very right wing, I guess, organization, campaign, I can't think of a good term for it.
It's an organization that exists for the sake of running campaigns.
And what they did was they would like call out various characters for being too left wing and not loyal enough to the state and to the Jewish people or whatever.
Basically their organization existed to raise money and use it to campaign against, to like viciously go after people for being on the left.
And eventually he was hired to run the messaging for the West Bank and the West Bank, all the West Bank settlements together, like all their mayors have a forum and they have like a, an organization, a regional organization that does a lot of political activism on behalf of the settlements.
And he was hired to lead their messaging.
Eventually he decides he's going back into national politics, meaning he'd have been in Taniahu's office, but he's going to enter in as a politician himself.
He teamed up with Eyal Ceked and another friend of his, a marketing guy, his name is Klokoft.
First the plan was to either join Le Code or make his own party and to sort of build his personal brand.
He started, you know, making, making viral videos and, you know, doing interviews on CNN and the type of thing, defending like propaganda on behalf of Israel.
Eventually he gets, the religious right party begins to fall apart and they reach out to him and ask him to sort of take over some elements in there, reach out to him and ask him to run for leadership of their party.
He runs, he wins.
He brings the party into, onto the stage and that's where he sort of becomes in politics as he's religious himself, but not overly religious, but he took over a very religious party.
Eventually this caused all kinds of schisms.
He left together with Eyal Ceked and they made their own right wing party, which was explicitly marketed as, as being less religious person, meaning being a mix of religious and non-religious, not being committed necessarily to the religious right, but, but being a home for the religious right as well.
During one of these rounds of elections, they actually didn't pass the bar and didn't make it into Knesset, but there was a repeat election, so they did fine.
That basically brings us to where we are.
In the, in the last, so then came the current election.
He, he joined, actually hold it right there before we get to the current one here.
Can you explain, go back to just that very last point about how I thought he got no seats at all.
His party got zero seats one election or two elections ago and now he's the prime minister.
That was a technicality or what happened there?
All right.
So in Israel, there isn't, there isn't a rule about like the, the prime minister isn't elected directly.
The prime minister is elected from within the Knesset.
So there's any member of Knesset can be prime minister in theory.
Usually it's the guy with either the biggest party or a close second, like Netanyahu became prime minister with 28 seats when Tzipi Livni got 29 seats, like, but typically it's, it's the guy with the biggest party.
What happened was there is there was a little bit, the right wing was slightly bigger than the left wing.
So even though the largest left wing party was one seat larger than the rightist, rightist white, white wing party, this, he became prime minister, but this is in 2009.
More typically, more typically it's, yeah, it's the, it's the leader of the biggest party in the wing that won.
You need, there's no such thing as making it into the Knesset with less than four seats.
They changed the law a few years back.
If you have less than four seats, you don't get in.
Now he has six seats.
So he's, he's, he didn't do that much better.
He had gotten a smidge under four seats that time.
And then maybe it's like 3.8 seats.
So in theory it is possible to get three, but basically you need to get four seats to make it into the Knesset.
And he got just under four seats and, and, and failed to pass.
And now he has six seats, so it's not, or no, he has seven seats, sorry, he has seven seats.
What happened is basically he went to the left wing and said, you guys have no chance without me.
If you allow me to be prime minister, then guess what?
You're back in power, which you haven't been forever.
So they were like, okay, whatever.
And by the left wing, that means the the labor party or people to the right of them?
It means everyone.
So this is what's so, so insane about the current government.
It means Naftali Bennett, who, as we've laid out, has, is a very bonafide right winger, includes Gidon Saar, which is also bonafide, hardcore right winger with a very long record to prove it.
That's 13 out of the 61 seats.
But then it includes Meritz, which is a genuine left wing party and includes the labor party, which is center left, includes yes, I did, which is down center.
And now for the first time, it actually includes a Muslim party.
Yeah.
Tell us about that and about the first time part to there.
So it's been very well established tradition.
You don't touch the the Arab parties with a ten foot pole.
What happened was in this in this past election, there's there's a saying in Israel, rock only there are certain things which only we could can be the first to do.
So when you when you think of.
Like only Nixon can go to China, right?
Yeah.
That type of thing.
So so Menachem Begin was the first one to to take to get rid of a settlement.
Like when he made that deal with Sadat and get back the Sinai Peninsula, he cleared out some ten thousand settlers.
Like that had never been done before and was on the left couldn't have gotten away with that.
But once once Menachem Begin did it, it became kind of OK.
So what happened here is Netanyahu came at the at the time of the election.
What happened was if you were if you were to discount the Arab parties in the last election, the right wing, including everybody on the right, was a significant majority.
However, Gidon Saar and Avigdor Lieberman made it 100 percent clear they are not going to form a coalition with Netanyahu under any circumstances at all.
So when you discount them and you count just Netanyahu, the the the ultra orthodox and the religious right, including Bennett and Smatrych and Ben-Gvir and that whole crowd, it was 59 seats.
So Netanyahu had a ticking clock because it was established in law before that Benny Gantz would take over as prime minister in September.
Now he knew that, so he made sure a new election would be called.
But if government has failed to be formed, then the old government continues as a caretaker.
And as such, Netanyahu would have been forced out of office by a political rival, which he had successfully pretty much destroyed.
But at the same time, on paper, he was still supposed to be prime minister.
So Netanyahu was really up against was really up against a hard deadline.
He had to form a government.
So he went out and reached out to this newer Arab party character by the name of the new party is called Rahm and his his name is Abbas.
This character named Abbas formed a new Arab party specifically on the on the platform of trying to get into the coalition.
And his thing was, we're Palestinian, we're not going to stop being Palestinian, but we're going to be willing to sort of sell our votes in exchange for really basic things like not destroying Bedouin villages and things like that.
And they had pretty strong support among primarily in the south of Israel proper, among like the Bedouin tribes, which are less nationalistic because they're nomadic.
And they're more they're more like, just, you know, how about you let us live our lives and leave us alone.
And so it was so two things sort of happened at the same time.
Netanyahu was really desperate.
And then this was sort of not representing as much a nationalist, Palestinian party, even though they absolutely identify as Palestinian.
It was a party that was built on like worrying about brick and mortar concerns of getting these Bedouin villages hooked up to water and not getting bulldozed.
And then Netanyahu was desperate to get them to reach 61.
So he went into talks with them and he was was willing, was getting ready to have them join his coalition.
In the meantime, what he did not expect was his right wing stood up to him for the first time.
His right wing, Bitzal Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and that crowd said, absolutely not, will never happen.
We are not going to make make any government with the Arab parties.
We're going to keep this tradition alive.
Because of that, it fell through.
It went to the last minute.
He pressured him.
He called all the rabbis.
He had everybody.
He used every pressure mechanism he has and it fell through.
They refused.
So.
So do I understand it right then that the willingness of Bennett to bring the Palestinians into his coalition and and the unwillingness of his other coalition partners to then throw him under the bus for that.
That's what made the difference and won him this this seat.
The prime ministership was.
I mean, yeah, it's to break this tradition that they've had this whole time to keep them on the outs.
Yes.
It's a majority of one seat and they brought in four Arab MKs.
So there's there's no yeah, the math doesn't work without it.
There's still I mean, it's it's having already very interesting repercussions.
Well, and also just on the on the first side, Netanyahu's partners refusal to go along and stick with the tradition and then the other side's willingness to break with it.
You know, it is a big historical shift.
And I guess.
You know, like you were saying about Begin and all that, maybe it makes it possible, you know, for the tradition to stay broken now and for them to.
I don't think that influence.
I don't think Bennett and Lapid could have had the political capacity to break that tradition until Netanyahu attempted unsuccessfully to break it himself.
It's already having very interesting repercussions.
OK, hang on just one second.
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OK, go ahead.
So so right now.
So one of the things one of the tricks that the Israelis do a lot is they have relatively sensible constitutional laws and then they pass emergency measures that like in theory everybody has equal rights.
But it's just this this state of emergency where, you know, we can we can I don't know like I can theory this freedom of gathering.
But there's a state of emergency order that a cop can declare any gathering of two or more people or three or more people in an illegal gathering and arrest you.
They have a lot of these laws which are officially temporary, but they've been extended every year or two years for, you know, 70 years at this point.
And then.
So one of these laws is is that in theory anyone can can get citizenship as a family member of a citizen or like in most countries in the world.
If your brother if you're you know, if your son or your your spouse or whoever is a citizen, you can apply for citizenship.
But they have a temporary order in place which which says which says you can't.
And obviously this is specifically for Palestinians because Jews are eligible under the law of return.
All right.
Speaker just because they're Jewish, they're eligible for citizenship.
So this is specifically a law targeted at Palestinians.
Anyway, it came time to extend it.
And now the coalition just doesn't have the votes to extend it because the the Arab and the genuine left refuse because it's an insane law.
And the right with the right, which is in the opposition, is is refusing to extend it to show to sort of fit into their narrative about Bennett sold out the sold out the right and really became a lefty.
And as of right now, they do not have the votes to pass it.
So it's going to be very interesting to see what happens.
And I suspect this is going to be a continuing theme, that all the consensus right wing priorities might not have the votes to pass.
So it could actually end up making a really big difference.
Yeah.
And now we need to say Bennett is so right wing, right wing.
That means what in terms of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip?
So his original his original campaign when he first ran was there's this major highway in Israel, which is just inside the Green Line, right next to the West Bank called Highway Six.
His first campaign was was going against the Netanyahu, who at the time was still talking regularly about the two state solution.
And he was saying how Netanyahu was going to bring the firing line up to the Highway Six.
Like his whole claim to fame was that he opposes the two state solution.
And he talks about an annexation of most of the territory and then some sort of jumbled supposed autonomy in the rest of in the rest of the area.
It's not not exactly not 100 percent clear what he wants to do.
But what's super clear is that he's very anti the two state solution and he's very anti giving citizenship to two of the Palestinians that are in the West Bank.
So some sort of apartheid.
But the exact flavor is unclear.
So man, this is so interesting.
And especially as you're saying, having this guy, you know, in this coalition, if he wants to stay prime minister, he's got to keep these groups happy.
And I think you told me before on the show that.
This is all, you know, in terms of the election, it's not about policy at all.
It's simply the who hates Netanyahu enough to compromise with others to join against him.
Yeah.
I mean, the only question was really very much focused on him personally.
And then so.
But as you're saying, we are seeing very interesting results coming from this coalition.
Like I said, it's all about not liking Bibi.
This coalition is from from Bennett, who, like I mentioned, and there's another guy in the coalition of Victor Lieberman, who famously he's famous for saying that he wants to bomb like the biggest dam in Cairo.
He was talking about bombing the dams of the Nile.
Yeah.
The Aswan Dam.
Yeah.
Aswan Dam.
Yeah.
And it was over because Mubarak didn't want to come to Jerusalem to kiss his ring or something like that.
That was the offense.
He's he's he like fits in the prototype of a mobster.
And then in the same government, you have solid bonafide lefties like which are basically the equivalent of of I don't know, probably to the left of AOC, even a few of them in the US, the Merits Party, which is just a solid left wing party.
And then you have these these Muslim parties as well.
So it's this coalition doesn't really have anything in common.
It's the entire wing.
It's the entire Israeli politics.
Well, does that mean that it's going to fall apart in no time and Netanyahu is going to be right back in the chair?
It's it's hard to tell.
It's an unprecedented situation as long as Netanyahu is the head of the opposition.
I don't know.
I mean, this this really is a truly unprecedented situation.
And now is Netanyahu a more legal jeopardy from his criminal cases?
It's hard to know for sure, but they do say that they expect the trial to move quicker now.
Now the judges are not going to they're going to be there.
They're not going to buy that.
He's busy as prime minister, so they need to delay it.
So it should move probably quicker.
All right, now, I want to ask you about this is something that you had brought up on the show the last time we talked and then you emailed me the translation from a guy named Bezalel Smatric, leader of Israel's Religious Zionist Party.
First of all, can you talk about him and how powerful he is?
I think I gather he's a former member of the Knesset, right?
Oh, no, no.
He is the guy responsible for sinking Netanyahu's attempt at a government because he refused to sit with the Arab parties.
Oh, he was that guy?
Yeah.
Bezalel Smatric, his name is.
Interesting.
And then so he knew good and well how bad this was going to hurt Netanyahu, but he was willing to let he was willing to see left wing parties and Arab parties come to power with Bennett anyway, despite himself.
Is that it?
Yeah.
He put out like these long, I was reading them, these like incredibly long messages to the public explaining how establishing a precedent that we're allowed to work with Arabs is the worst thing and it's going to cause permanent, irreversible damage.
And therefore, as much as I hate a left wing government, I'd swallow that before establishing this precedent.
And then now, how powerful is his party?
Because I don't know how many parties there are in Israel and I don't know how many parties or how powerful they are.
I guess Moretz is supposed to be really small and insignificant, but then he just said that they're part of the ruling coalition now, so things can change pretty quick.
But if I say Israel's religious Zionist party, that ranks where in terms of power and influence?
So it depends on the situation.
Right now they're in the opposition, so not a lot.
But in the past they've held, so they're usually not too powerful because they're so staunchly right wing.
Their positions in negotiations tend to be relatively weak because it's not like they can threaten to go to the left.
But typically they will get a couple of solid government agencies to control, depending on how many seats they have, and all kinds of money for all their pet projects.
All right.
So then you sent me this translation.
I have it here.
I'll just read this real quick.
It's not very long.
It's Smotrych in an interview, I gather, recently.
Do you know how recent it was?
I'm not sure.
I knew it existed and I searched for it.
I don't remember exactly when it's from.
Okay.
It was certainly in the last 10 years sometime or something at the most, right?
Yeah.
He only existed on the scene for about six, seven years.
Okay.
All right.
And obviously we talked about this in regards to the recent conflict between the Israeli state and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
He says the PA, that's the Palestinian Authority under Fatah in the West Bank.
He says the PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset on the international playing field in this game of the delegitimization.
Think about it for a second.
The PA is a liability and Hamas is an asset.
It's a terrorist organization.
Nobody will recognize it.
Nobody will give it status at the ICC and nobody will let them push resolutions at the UN.
And we essentially, we won't even need an American veto.
They'll, yeah, it's kind of jumbled up.
An American veto, we won't need one.
And I'm sure that given the current situation, given the current facts that the central playing field we're playing in here is international, their Abu Mazen, that is Abu Abbas, the head of Fatah, is costing us serious casualties.
And Hamas in such a situation would be an asset.
So and this is in answer to the real question that the reporter had asked him.
So I don't think we need to be afraid of that, which was Hamas taking over, as the question was phrased.
So there you go.
In this game of delegitimization, Hamas makes Israel look good, huh?
Yeah, I mean, that's that's his message.
And now how representative is that statement of the thinking of the Israeli security state, do you think?
I mean, I think it's quite representative because there's there's quite a bit of evidence that they they helped Hamas, you know, come to power in the first place by, you know, taking out all their enemies and and doing what they could to to sort of make Hamas come to power.
There's definitely a they definitely want Hamas to exist.
They've definitely like every time a politician talks about, you know, destroying Hamas, the response from the security state is always absolutely not.
We we we don't want them to to go away.
Some of them put it as whatever might come into place of Hamas might be worse, but some of them are absolutely like we we don't want the Palestinians being united under a single representation.
Yeah, you know, Netanyahu would say, I think, on numerous occasions, certainly a couple of times, at least, he said, look, Hamas is Al-Qaeda, is ISIS.
They're all the terrorists, you see.
Yeah, I remember when ISIS was in the news, Netanyahu was definitely playing up the obvious, you know, the Western fear of ISIS to be like, well, we're on the front lines fighting this homogenous glob of Islamic terror.
So, yeah, we're we're sort of your foot soldiers in the war against ISIS.
That was definitely the tactic he was trying to take, and he was repeatedly taking that position.
Yeah.
And then but by ISIS, he wasn't talking about, yeah, that's why we're back in Al-Qaeda in Syria.
He was just conflating them with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
That's why I'm bombing Gaza is to protect the American people from bin Laden nights.
Yeah, right.
What a scam.
Yeah, and Christian terrorists, Christian suicide bombers in the Intifada, who are basically ISIS.
Yeah.
Well, were there Christian suicide bombers in the Intifada?
There were a couple, yeah.
So was that their devotion to Mohammed then that made them do it, or it was something else?
Yeah, the majority of of the like a very significant percentage of of the suicide bombers and of attackers generally were not were not especially devout.
There's no correlation between how devoutly religious someone is and how likely they are to be to be involved in any of these conflicts.
Yeah, that's totally true.
And I got all the footnotes in the first book.
I left them out of the second one, but everybody, if you read Fulzer and it's all in there.
And look, it does make sense.
It's extremely cynical, but it's not that complicated.
Right.
And I especially like the way he frames it in this game of delegitimization, where people in other words, people are saying Israel is an apartheid state.
This is not right.
The way it's set up and this totalitarian state ruling over the Palestinians in this way.
And he's saying, oh, yeah, well, you're all a bunch of terrorists.
So which argument wins now?
And if they can frame it successfully, that the Palestinians are represented only by terrorist groups rather than anything like a civil government, then so much the better for Israel.
So Abu Mazen, who seems that's Abu Abbas, who seems like a reasonable guy from the point of view of American policy mandarins and somebody who maybe could be worked with or to the Europeans to instead we just show pictures of the Qasem brigades and their green masks all the time.
Then just think about how well that works.
They can't go to the U.N.
They can't go to the ICC.
They can't even go to Europe and have an official meeting with the foreign minister.
They'd be lucky to get his deputy secretary or undersecretary of something, you know.
And so, you know, they're much less of a threat, the scary terrorists than people who can be spun like Fatah could be spun as a potential state government in waiting, you know.
And one with the credibility to say to the U.N. that, look, recognize our independence and let us take our issues to court, which they have done.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that that quote obviously was meant for Israeli years, not for you and I, but that's the point he's making.
Yeah.
Thank you for the translation there.
And I think I need to edit that a little bit.
I can tell I tripped up a couple of times when I was reading it, but you've got different rules of grammar.
Yeah, I know it.
And I want it to stay like as exact as possible.
Oh, I got you.
Yeah.
Forward.
There you go.
So I did get that right then on the international playing field in this game of the delegitimization.
Think about for a second, the P.A. is a liability and Hamas is an asset.
Good stuff.
So you know what, Kalman, you also had sent me this thing about this new settlement that was going in that was recently announced that Amir Haas had written about in Haaretz.
And you said, I know these guys and I know all about this story.
So can you tell us about that?
Seem pretty important.
Yeah.
So the original founders.
So in for in 67, when when the when, you know, when the Six Day War happens, they they take the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and Sinai at the beginning, the the Israelis.
So there were a few areas that had been settled by Jews before the war.
Forty eight.
There was a little bit of territory that Jews lost in 48.
So there was the area of Gush Etzion and there was sort of a wide consensus to like rebuild that area, which which makes sense.
These were, you know, Jewish settlements that had been destroyed in the war, in the war 48.
But beyond that, most of the most of the of the Israeli public was not interested in settling that area because it was full of Palestinians.
And they a lot of them saw it as land that, you know, will find a solution and will probably go back to Jordan or it'll become its own state.
But obviously, the more the more religious.
So this is, you know, a stage in the coming of the Messiah and wanted to you wanted to to settle it.
And this organization opened called Gush Emunim and it was their their goal was to settle particularly the northern West Bank.
And they were going to do what it takes to get that to happen.
And they kept going again and again to this particular spot and attempting to set up shop over there.
Eventually there was a few a confluence of a few events that happened.
But eventually they ended up having enough people there and it wasn't convenient for the government to fight them.
So they gave in and allowed them to happen.
And that sort of broke the floodgates and set up.
And that's when the settlement started in mass.
So for them throughout the 70s and 80s, they were just building new settlements every week.
It slowed down a little bit in the 90s.
And then new settlements like new new towns basically stopped with the basically stopped in a little bit after Oslo in the mid mid to late 90s.
But so then these people what they started doing is they started founding their own settlements, not as the government would found the settlement as an official government action.
But they would come a bunch of people that just camp out on a mountain and some government agencies would work with them, but others wouldn't.
So basically there was enough international pressure that you wouldn't get an official Israeli government declaration of, hey, we're building a settlement in this place.
It would just be the water company and the military and whatever would connect this place to the grid that had already been settled by settlers illegally.
The situation went on for about 10, 15 years.
In 2005, there's the roadmap, or maybe it was in 2000, it was somewhere around that a couple of years before then.
The roadmap was established with with George Bush and Ariel Sharon, where they decided to not allow any new settlements.
They continued expanding existing settlements, but they didn't create any new settlements.
And this held pretty strong for about a decade.
Anyway, some of the original people that were involved in the late 60s, early 70s in starting the settlement movement decided that they are going to break this.
And they realized that the problem is they go up as two families and a trailer.
The government doesn't have a problem.
Like the international pressure is strong enough that the government doesn't want the headache and they just get rid of them.
But they figured if they get a large enough group to go and sort of have an established community and they do it in an opportune time, they'd be able to get away with it.
Anyway, they started this organization that would create communities that would be ready at a moment's notice, at an opportune moment, to go park on some hilltop and create a new settlement.
What they'd do is they'd go to the closest city, sort of rent a neighborhood, be established as a community, and then collect all kinds of money and be ready for a moment and do regular visits to the sites, do weekends, camping out at the site.
And this is how I got to know them.
I went to one of their campouts and I spent a weekend with them and sort of saw what they were all about.
And anyway, a few weeks ago, they triggered a move.
They had 30, 40, something like 40 families prepared for a spot and they jumped there and they set up shop.
And as of now, it's in limbo.
It's unclear whether or not they, you know, they picked a relatively sensitive moment where the government would be relatively weak and they set up shop.
Once they're an established city, it's going to be, not going to be very easy to move them.
And that's what they're banking on.
So for the next few weeks and months, it's worth keeping an eye on whether they manage to establish themselves, if the courts get involved, if the courts take a side, if the new Bennett government does something, if there's basically what happens here.
And this has a potential to really be a game changer because if they get established, it's quite likely they'll try again.
They have another six, seven, eight communities in the waiting with preselected sites waiting to pounce.
And is our new settlements going to start popping up again or not?
It really depends how this one goes down.
Yeah.
And now, did I read Haas right in this Haaretz story that you sent me the link to here that this is one of these that is kind of creates a new contiguous zone between other settlements that now, you know, further divides Palestinians from their own property and each other?
Yeah, the sites that they selected were selected for a reason.
So there are specifically strategic locations that they believe, mostly what they did is they took sites that were planned in the previous plans, in the 70s and the 90s, to be established as settlements before the government left that policy due to international pressure.
And they took sort of preselected sites and they decided they're going to do it themselves.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah, you're right.
It'll be really interesting to see how the new government tries to handle this or not.
And meaningful.
I mean, yeah, you could find them on Facebook.
They like exist.
They advertise themselves.
Hmm.
Eviatar is the name of the settlement.
Eviatar is the name of the settlement.
Nahala is the name of the organization that's behind this.
And Daniela Weiss is the head.
All right.
Okay.
Well, and you guys can read this article by Amir Haas in Haaretz.
It's for some reason not behind a paywall.
In just a month, illegal settler outpost sprouts up on Palestinian lands.
You can read all about that story there.
And thank you so much for coming on the show, man.
I always learn so much from you.
No problem.
All right, you guys.
That is Kalman Barkin.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
