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 the great Philip Weiss from mondoweiss.net, and check this out.
He's got this really important piece from, I don't know, a couple weeks ago.
Hope you'll take a look at it.
It's called Israel is Considerably Weakened as BDS Finds a Home in the Democratic Party.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing wonderful.
I got a mild case of the germ, but I'm hanging in there just fine.
Cool.
Hang in there.
Yeah.
But so listen, I just think your journalism is so important, and especially on this topic, the crack up in the Democratic Party over Israel.
And this has been a long time coming, and it's on now.
If for no other reason, it's kind of in the lead here, right, that Rashida Tlaib, one of the new members of the squad here, the more leftist Democrats, she's Palestinian.
And instead of being quiet about it, like some Palestinian politicians I know, she decides to stick up for her people.
Well, and the simple truth, which also has a severe pro-Palestinian slant.
And now, so things are really changing inside the Democratic Party.
And as you say in the article here, her presence in the Congress is one thing.
And then another couple of things going on here recently was the recent attack on Gaza and also the fall of Benjamin Netanyahu.
So you have all these different tides and forces and opinions, you know, crashing together inside the Democratic Party.
So tell us, Phil, what's it look like to you?
I guess obviously we're in a period of great transition and there's a lot of flux.
And I'm always going to be saying that Israel's weakened because I want to believe it.
But I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Israel just does not have the same power in the United States that it had a few years ago.
And Benjamin Netanyahu would agree with me.
You know, Benjamin Netanyahu is saying this every day.
Netanyahu said recently, just lately, Netanyahu said, hey, the United States wants to have no surprises from us on foreign policy.
Well, hey, that's my policy.
I'd love to surprise them.
I'd love to tell them what we're doing.
I'd love to shock them.
And now Biden is getting his wish and we're not going to surprise them.
And that's a true fact.
I think that Bennett, as the new prime minister of Israel, is going to do nothing to upset Biden.
And Biden, you know, mutual, you know, hostage exchange, Biden will do nothing to upset Bennett.
And what that means is that there is going to be a much more moderate Israeli government policy.
They're going to accept the Iran deal going through, and they're going to try to tone down some of the settlement activity so that there is not a reaction from the Democratic Party and the left side of the Democratic Party.
I think Biden is saying to these screwballs over there in Israel, look, I got Rashida Tlaib and this squad breathing down my neck, these progressive Democrats.
They don't like Israel.
I love Israel, but, you know, you're just going to, you do more of this settlement activity.
You put up these outposts, you demolish homes in East Jerusalem.
These people are going crazy in the United States.
You're losing the Democratic Party and there's nothing I can do about it.
And I think that is ultimately the dynamic that is occurring now.
And, you know, it's late, but it couldn't be too soon from my standpoint that finally there's a voice for Palestine inside the Democratic Party.
And that really is the news here.
And obviously, you know, Scott, you and I have talked about this news a lot over the last year and a half, but it really is in there now.
And there's it's got traction and it's a wonderful thing.
And the Israel lobby is looking over its shoulder.
And so is Israel.
Yeah.
Well, so listen, 20 years ago, Steve Rosen, the head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, told Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker magazine, hey, Jeffrey, you see this napkin by I think you said by noon tomorrow, I could have 77 senators signatures on this napkin.
In other words, they absolutely rule America's upper house and the rest of Congress, for that matter, is the implication.
And so then what's really changed since then?
I think it's gone from 77 to probably 43, you know, senators.
They can still get that napkin signed, but it's a lot fewer.
And the you know, a lot of things have changed.
But a couple of the factors are the Israel lobby is beginning to splinter a little bit.
The AIPAC, when it got the 77 signatures, could say, hey, we represent the Jewish community.
We represent the campaign war chest for a lot of you politicians.
You you alienate, you know, you make us happy.
You keep the campaign contributions flowing.
And now AIPAC is a very atherosclerotic organization run by people who are completely out of touch.
J Street is sort of replacing AIPAC as the Israel lobby in the Democratic Party.
It wants to, you know, continue support, continue military support for Israel.
And it's sort of at odds with AIPAC in some ways.
And then you have the left wing of the Jewish community, some of which is part of the Israel lobby beginning to differ with J Street.
So I think that diversity within the Jewish community is important.
And you know, the fall of Netanyahu, I mean, whatever Netanyahu was powerful in the United States.
Netanyahu could defy the American president because he had the lobby on his side.
But he also had, you know, great political gifts.
The guy is an incredible, I think, a bully, but a great, very effective statesman for a right wing Israel position.
And now he's gone.
And you've got this coalition that's far weaker politically and that doesn't have anyone with Netanyahu's sort of sheer determination and authoritarian abilities.
Yeah.
Now, so stick on that point for a minute here, right?
Because now that Netanyahu is gone, at least for now, I don't know how long this coalition can hold together.
But it seems like it's a pretty diverse coalition.
People only have one thing in common.
They hate Netanyahu, which is good enough.
It actually got rid of the guy after 16 years or something.
And, you know, I don't often sympathize with Barack Obama, but can you imagine becoming the president of the United States and then right at the same time the Israelis put Netanyahu in there?
Oh, man.
This is going to suck.
Right.
It's like inviting that guy you hate to your party or whatever or something, you know, just.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Screw him.
But here's my thing.
So this guy, Bennett, he's not as connected as Netanyahu.
He doesn't have that sheer determination and power that Netanyahu has wielded.
But on the other hand, he's a new fresh face.
And even though he's to the right of Netanyahu, he's got a better smile than Netanyahu.
I don't know.
And I saw I forgot if it was by you or somebody else over at Mondoweiss wrote that like this could be a real problem because you have a lot of Democrats going, oh, we really like the new guy now that he's not the old guy.
And that makes us feel better.
And we can pretend he's a click to the left in Netanyahu if we want to.
And as you said, he's kind of already agreed not to make too many waves for Biden.
So maybe they'll be able to run with that.
And so do you think in the end that'll help them or overall, the fact of his weakness relative to Netanyahu is what really counts, you know, up front?
Well, let's put it this way.
Let's say that you and I had been given the portfolio of improving Israel's image in the United States.
You know, like it or not, you and I had ended up with that portfolio.
We would have said years ago, get rid of this Netanyahu guy.
He's pitting the Democrats against the Republicans.
He's in it for himself.
He's trying to embarrass the president.
Get rid of, you know, Americans don't like him or Democrats don't like him.
Republicans love him.
Democrats.
We want to keep this a bipartisan issue.
I think if we've been given that portfolio and a lot of people actually do have that portfolio, they're very happy with Bennett coming in.
There are a lot of things that liberal Zionists or mid middle, you know, centrist Zionists can sell about a Bennett government.
Honestly, they can sell.
They can say that Bennett is a pragmatic guy who is not going to want to rile up the Democratic Party.
He's not going to do provocative things.
He's already shown that's the case.
Yes, he's a right winger, but he's aligned with Yair Lapid, who's a centrist and is a television personality, extremely user friendly.
He's the foreign minister.
Liberal Zionists love Yair Lapid, even though he's a centrist who has right wing policies.
And what's more, Bennett has a historic government that includes an Arab party.
He's got three votes from Ra'am, the UAL, the United Arab List.
And that's historic.
And that's something that liberal Zionists get to celebrate.
Hey, this is a real, actual, diverse government with merits and labor, left wing Zionists and these Palestinians for the first time in a government and a non-token fact or somewhat token but not stooge fashion.
And I think that that is really something they can try to sell.
The problem, I think, for them is that even if Bennett performs perfectly for Biden and keeps this thing quiet, I don't want any provocations, Biden's saying, I've got other things to do.
You can't do to me what you did to Obama.
And I will pay you back by trying to strengthen your government, by having you come to the White House, kissing your butt, you know, being really nice to you, praising you, praising Israel, getting the Democrats back in your- that's how I'll repay you.
Even if they proceed on that basis, which is obviously what they're going to do.
They're going to work together behind the scenes to figure out how to get this Jerusalem evictions of Palestinians.
Take that off the take that off the front burner.
We do not need scenes of being Palestinians being thrown out of their homes.
That is what Biden is saying to the Biden administration.
And Bennett is saying, we hear you.
OK, so they're not going to do some of these provocative things and everyone's going to go back to a happy relationship.
I don't think it's going to work.
I don't think it's going to work.
And the simple issue is that these people, going back to your first question, have lost discursive power.
They do know they can no longer set the agenda.
You have an American left where Black Lives Matter is a significant factor in the discourse.
You have the squad in the Congress, these sort of left-leaning progressive Congress people, some of whom come out of Black Lives Matter, Cori Bush in Missouri, who are very attuned to Palestinian rights.
And the Palestinians are in the American discourse in a way they have never been.
And, you know, just because you're not evicting them from East Jerusalem, there's apartheid.
And they are not going to, you know, they're going to demand a similar response to apartheid this time to what the world did the last time there was apartheid.
And so I think the underlying conditions here are so horrifying and are war crimes.
And the ICC, the International Criminal Court, is investigating them as such.
These underlying conditions are such that nothing these guys can do to sort of quiet things down is going to work in the end.
There's an international movement to address apartheid, and they can point every day to abuses against Palestinian human rights, inhumane acts that caused Human Rights Watch, among other groups, to say this is apartheid.
It's all there for you.
Might change a friend's mind.
Enough already.
It's time to end the war on terrorism at EnoughAlreadyBook.net.
Sure.
And that's really the thing, right?
The establishing facts on the ground.
They established so many facts on the ground that they made the fantasy of the two state solution null and void.
And, you know, I said Netanyahu has declared one state between the river and the sea.
And someone on Twitter said, no, that's what the Palestinians say when they talk about destroying Israel.
And I said, no, here's the quote of Benjamin Netanyahu saying there will always be one state from the Jordan River and everything west of the Jordan River is how he phrases it.
But that's it.
It is a one state solution now.
And so, yes, I guess some people are happy to keep it this way.
Just not the Palestinians.
And they're about half the population.
Yeah.
And I mean, to your point, first of all, I mean, that is why Human Rights Watch finally said there's apartheid, because everyone knows there's been apartheid there for many years.
But Human Rights Watch said in February, you guys have given up any pretense of seeking a two state solution and therefore you've crossed a threshold.
It's you know, so long as you are maintaining apartheid and actually looking for a two state solution, we're going to give you a pass.
They're not looking for it, but you're no longer even looking for one.
And so we're not giving you a pass anymore.
And I want to just raise one thing that I heard on an Israel policy forum call the last day or so.
That's an Israel lobby group in the United States.
You know, they were talking about where should the Biden administration put the consulate for Palestinians, which Trump had closed, that was in Jerusalem.
And they were saying Israel doesn't want that consulate for Palestinians to be reopened in Jerusalem because Jerusalem is sovereign Israeli territory.
We would like them to put it in Abu Dis, outside of Jerusalem.
It's still part of Jerusalem, but it's pretty far outside.
And it's where people think a Palestinian state would be.
Here are these people talking about the lands that belong to Palestinians and exiling their capital to far outside Jerusalem.
It's just routine insults to Palestinians that the Israel lobby carries on all the time.
It's sort of like saying, oh, you want to have your embassy in New York?
We'll let you have it in Westchester County.
You know, and this type of abuse and insult, and they don't even think of it.
They just think this is reasonable on Israel's part.
I think these conditions are monstrous.
And that's ultimately the portfolio that Naftali Bennett has and that is growing more and more obvious to the world.
And Biden can't do anything to sort of slow that progress inside the Democratic Party, where young people are demanding change.
All right.
Now, so under Obama, the deal was we will go along with you guys on Iran as long as you'll back off on the settlements and all that.
We'll work on a two state solution in Palestine.
And then they switched it and said, OK, we'll shut up about the settlements if you guys shut up about Iran.
And then they didn't shut up about it.
But Obama did go ahead and do the Iran deal over Netanyahu's authority.
But the Palestinians definitely got the short end of that.
And so you mentioned how Biden is working on his his group are working on the nuclear deal now.
And I mean, I just hope that they made kind of a handshake deal with Zarif that, listen, we're going to sign the deal in like eight weeks.
But between now and then, we have to pretend to be really belligerent and tough and all of this kind of stuff.
But I don't think it's I'm hoping that's the case.
Yeah.
I mean, reading the coverage at Antiwar dot com by Jason Ditz and Dave DeCamp there, it seems like they really don't want to sign the deal, that they think that Trump's new sanctions have given them such leverage over Iran that why get back in the nuclear deal now when it makes the Israelis so mad?
And after all, they're not making nukes anyway.
So what difference does it make?
That's interesting.
I have to read that piece.
That's a great tip.
Was that your question?
No.
I mean.
Yeah.
Oh, I don't know.
I guess I just so I wonder what you didn't really have a question today.
Even like, you know, what do you think about Biden in that same situation?
It's basically Obama's same administration and they're they're dumb, but they're not that dumb.
So they know the same thing that you and I have been talking about, that the two state solution is over and they're just going to try to coast and let this be somebody else's problem later.
Or do you have, you know, any reason to believe the Biden administration is actually going to try?
I mean, obviously, they're not going to force a one state solution.
What do you think they're going to do?
Anything?
They won't.
They won't do anything to push a two state solution.
They said Blinken has said it's off the table right now.
It's not going to happen.
Pushing it is going to achieve nothing.
We saw what John Kerry did when he made an urgent effort to push it.
Nothing came of it.
It was strictly an embarrassment, a waste of good energy.
Blinken is not going to make that mistake.
And I think the other interesting thing that you brought up here and I thought your analysis of, you know, trading settlements for Iran is pretty funny and accurate.
And I think that they they are going to get the Iran deal.
I think that is going to happen.
Everyone in Israel thinks it's going to happen.
And the Israeli press and establishment, they think it's a done deal.
And they're not going to get the settlement.
You know, they're they're they're going to demand quiet on the settlements.
But I think that one of the fascinating issues here are elements of this drama is that Biden thinks he's a much better politician than Barack Obama.
And I agree with him.
I think Biden is, if anything, you know, a veteran politician.
And I think that Biden is trying to show how it should be done.
I mean, he's doing it the way he thinks it should be done.
But there's a little bit of rivalry with Obama going on.
And as LeHav Harkov, the Jerusalem Post said, pointed out, Obama made a quote unquote mistake early on in his presidency.
And he met with these Jewish leaders and he said, look, there's never been daylight between the United States and Israel.
There's going to be daylight now because I disapprove of the settlement policy.
And as I said, in Cairo, in, you know, nine, a few months into my my most important, my first foreign policy, big foreign policy, foreign trip and statement, you know.
And he said this to the Israel lobby at the White House, there's going to be daylight.
And I think that it was a political disaster for him because the Israel lobby said daylight.
No, there's not going to be daylight between the United States and Israel.
That's our job.
That ain't going to happen.
And Netanyahu said, oh, he wants daylight.
Yeah, I'm going to give him daylight.
And so Obama started embarrassing, excuse me, Netanyahu started embarrassing Obama and the Israel lobby went along with Netanyahu.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, his own party, Obama's own party, went along with Netanyahu in embarrassing Obama.
And, you know, Obama had to step down on backward on the settlements thing, backpedal furiously and veto an anti-settlements resolution at the UN.
So I think what Biden has done, Harkov says, is he said there is going to be no daylight.
You love no daylight between the United States and Israel.
There'll be no daylight.
I like that policy.
No daylight.
And that means no surprises, no embarrassment.
I don't embarrass you.
You don't embarrass me.
But guess what?
And this is where I think the private jaw boning is going on to Bennett.
You don't take a step on these settlements.
And I think that the evacuation of Eviatar, this outpost settlement in the West Bank, which happened is going to happen, I believe it was supposed to happen, is supposed to happen today.
These religious nuts.
It's a compromise.
It's not going to satisfy Palestinians who live in the villages that that settlement is stolen land from.
But they are getting they're trying to remove that hotspot, these 50 families or whatever from the deep in the West Bank.
Bennett is doing that and he's doing it for Joe Biden.
And so I think I forget now exactly what the question is, but I think we are going to see some sort of piecemeal actions on settlements that will make the American government happy, but won't make the Palestinians happy.
Yeah.
And even that, I guess, is, you know, probably in great measure due to the pressure inside the Democratic Party in the Congress now.
But doesn't sound like they're going to get much more than that.
No, I yeah, I think there I think there is a lot of pressure on the Democratic Party.
I mean, I think that's the big imponderable here, because I think that Biden is able to say as our Democratic Party leaders, look, you guys, you are playing with fire.
You are running an apartheid state.
And we've got a Democratic Party where there's been a revolution over racial issues in this country in the last, you know, two years.
This is hot stuff.
This is you think it swept away a lot of centrist Democrats.
You think it's not going to affect foreign policy?
Screw that.
Of course it will.
But, you know, young people working social media over Black Lives Matter and MeToo, those have been extremely important political forces inside the Democratic Party and the larger, you know, politics of the United States.
You think it's not going to have an effect on Israel?
Guys, you better wake up fast.
Yeah.
I sound like we found the good part of it.
I mean, a lot of it, a lot of it goes so far.
But at the same time, I mean, how do you exclude the Palestinians when bottom line is the message is justice for all those who didn't get any this whole time?
Pretty sure they fit into that category.
Yeah.
I think that, you know, they definitely have been told to wait in line again and again and again now for, well, 100 years.
So, you know.
Yeah.
Seriously.
And so this is the thing of it, too.
You know, I gave a speech in Pittsburgh to the Libertarian Party there, like right during the bombing a few weeks back.
And the biggest response, which is not really surprising, I think it's probably what I would have predicted, I guess.
But it came true, was that the response I got from everybody was, well, I never really knew that.
You know, I always just kind of took the Israeli side because that's what you're supposed to do or whatever.
But now that I understand who's occupying who, well, that ain't fair.
And that's basically the sum of it.
Just like we've talked about all this time.
If people knew the truth about what was what over there, they'd be on the right side.
Forget woke this and that.
I mean, it's just simple right and wrong, you know?
Yeah.
And what?
Wait, why did the penny drop for these folks?
Because of your speech or?
Yeah.
They just never heard anybody explain it.
And the way I explained it was like, all right, so first this happened and then this happened and then the next thing.
And so you could see why they're pissed off.
And then they were like, yeah.
And then once you get to the part about how the Israeli Mossad deliberately helped to aid and facilitate the rise of Hamas so they could divide and rule the Palestinians.
Once people know that that's true because you can tell them with a straight face, you can read it in The New York Times and The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and UPI and Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel, too.
You know, it's just that's just true.
And once people know that that's true, then they go, well, I don't like being manipulated and lied to, you know, and and the three point eight, you know, the billions we send them.
I mean, I think the Gaza war is a good demonstration of what what why what we're doing when we give them arms, you know, we're allowing them to kill Palestinian civilians, slaughter them again and again as an answer to their constitutional question, which is we don't want to give them rights in a Jewish state bombing family homes, wiping out entire families.
And the good news is, is that I think that even, you know, these, quote unquote, Christian evangelicals that everyone is always talking about supporting Israel, obviously of, you know, a broad swath of America and very diverse and includes a lot of young people who are saying, no, I don't like this policy.
So that, too, can change.
Yep.
And, you know, yes, social media is a huge part of this, too.
And that's why they're working so hard to censor it.
And for all the right wingers complaining about being censored rightfully, they were experimenting on the Palestinians first.
And that's who's getting kicked off of Facebook and shut down at universities.
And, you know, the are the biggest recipients of censorship, especially online in the first place.
And and for these kind of obvious reasons, and I'm not exactly sure, I guess I didn't really see any polls this time, but I know in 2014, for the first time ever, the American people sided with the Palestinians when Netanyahu was bombing Gaza.
And the only reason for that, plain and simple, Facebook and Twitter, we don't have to rely on rather Jennings and Brokaw to tell us what the Israeli foreign minister wants us to think.
We have pictures of Gazans saying, look what they did to us.
Does that seem right to you?
And then the answer is no, doesn't seem right to me at all.
Wow.
Yeah, I like it.
I like that analysis.
I mean, it was that it was unavoidable at the time, so it should be unforgettable now that you know what?
Like, this is the big deal.
Hashtag Gaza under attack.
It does make the difference, you know?
And by the way, at that speech, a hysterical Zionist lady in the front row got up and started screaming that not on the Palestinians count anyone under the age of 30 as a child, which was some talking point she heard somewhere.
It is supposed to repeat and essentially had a panic attack and got up and left and then later got on Twitter and accused me of threatening her and all of this stuff, which anybody can see the video.
My big threat was I rolled my eyes away from her.
But that's so.
But yeah, it was the cognitive dissonance, right?
Like if if I thought a little bit better about how to handle a heckler, that would have been the joke was this is what happens, right?
You tell somebody the truth who's invested in the other narrative here.
They will have a nervous breakdown.
Look at this.
What?
Everybody look at the lady having a nervous breakdown.
Right.
Because somebody told a simple truth about who's killing who over there.
Right.
You know, Palestinian children and, you know, 67 this last time and you know, they were this time.
They were all pictured on the front.
A lot of them were pictured on the front page of The New York Times, a historic breakthrough.
Right.
And obviously that's being driven by, you know, young people, woke people, social media, whatever, you know.
By the way, so speaking of time, so we'll leave it at this.
I won't keep you all afternoon here.
But the New York Times and The Washington Post, I know you guys keep a special close eye on The New York Times, their editorial page making any movement on this.
I you know, I think that they are aware that, look, there are huge forces at The New York Times.
What Barry Weiss, who left The New York Times, a Zionist propagandist called a woke mob at The New York Times.
So there's obviously a left wing, young left movement inside The New York Times as there is at all media institutions that demanding progress on certain narratives.
And I think that's definitely true of Palestine.
I haven't looked at it closely, but what I sense is that Patrick Kingsley, the new Jerusalem bureau chief, is actually interested in the occupation.
His predecessor, Jody Rudoran, was not, or one of his predecessors, she was a few years ago.
I mean, I remember saying to Rudoran, your job is to convey to the American public that the two state solution is dead because we're here, Jody.
It's dead.
We see it's dead.
Israel killed the two state solution.
She chose not to do bring that news.
And I think that now we are seeing The New York Times bureau chief take that job more seriously to convey to the Americans what anyone sees that this has been a terrible charade, the two state solution.
The charade is complete.
In the musical chairs of Israel and Palestine, Jewish supremacists are sitting in almost every chair.
So I think, oh, but I think The New York Times is reflecting that more.
They continue to have Zionist hacks like Bret Stephens with thick skins who are going to, you know, espouse these tired narratives.
But I think we're going to see some progress.
That's my prediction.
All right.
Well, if you're looking for it, it's at Mondoweiss.net every day.
It's The Grateful Weiss and his incredible stock of great writers over there covering all aspects of the Israel-Palestine conflict and politics in the U.S. and in Israel, all about it and all the rest of it.
Mondoweiss.net.
Thank you so much, my friend.
Hey, thanks, Scott.
It's a great pleasure, as always.
Talk to you soon.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, www.antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
