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.
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 on the line.
I have again, the great Ramsey Baroud.
He is editor of the Palestine Chronicle, and he wrote My Father Was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth and These Chains Will Be Broken.
And he is a regular contributor at Antiwar.com.
I am so proud to boast and brag.
Welcome back to the show, Ramsey.
How are you, sir?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Great to have you here again.
You write so much great stuff.
I can't interview you about it all, but I do want to talk about this extremely important one.
And there was a kind of partner article that went with it, too, from not too far back.
From Tentura to Nakab, and I'm sure I'm saying both of those wrong, sorry.
From Tentura to Nakab, Israel's long hidden truths are finally revealed.
So first of all, how do you say those places?
And what's so important that we're learning now, sir?
Well, Tentura is a Palestinian village that no longer exists, but it existed prior to the existence of Israel.
And Tentura was one of those villages that, like most Palestinian towns and villages, naturally resisted the Zionist onslaught in 1947, 1948, which eventually ethnically cleansed the Palestinian people from their historic homeland of thousands of years.
Tentura was one of these places that was kind of omitted from history books.
You know, like, for example, the Dariusin Massacre, which was duly reported perhaps because of the presence of international observers or monitors.
At the time, Palestinians, of course, knew what happened in Tentura, that hundreds of people were lined up and killed by the villages.
Old mosques were killed in their homes, were stuffed into barrels and shot inside the barrels.
In fact, one of the terms I used in the article is the blood in the barrels.
One of the Israeli soldiers at the time, who is now admitting to being part of that mass killings, spoke in horror, you know, that his guilt carried on for all these years.
And he says, you know, I remember the blood in the barrels.
So they killed them in the most savage and, you know, creative ways, if you will.
And then they denied that this massacre had existed.
Of course, in our collective memory, as Palestinians, we knew what Tentura was and we knew what happened there.
Yeah.
You guys knew this all along.
This is a big secret from The New York Times or something, but not from you and your family and your people.
Right.
And we've discussed this in the past, is the fact how our, not only our collective memory as people, but our historians, our intellectuals, our human rights activists, none of their opinions matters.
As long as Israel doesn't admit to anything, it means it never existed.
Let me stop you here for just a second to emphasize to people, because, you know, we all need reminding of this from time to time of just how new the Internet is.
All communication about current events have always come from movie tone news.
Here's what's going on.
And there's one side of the story and that's it, that you ever hear.
And, you know, even up until our current era, it was rather Jennings and Brokaw for the first 10 years of the Internet still with a major competition.
Now we have this situation where everybody has an opinion and a Twitter, you know.
But back then, you know, if something wasn't covered completely by the mainstream, if NBC News and The New York Times didn't report it, as you're saying, it just didn't happen at all.
And I'll just bring up this one quick anecdote to help illustrate this.
And then I promise I'll be quiet and give you the floor back here.
My friend Eric Margulies, we've talked about this before.
His mother was one of these characters, this kind of Lois Lane character who went around the Middle East by herself, interviewing all the sultans and emirs and potentates and whatever after World War II and, you know, had done all this stuff.
And then she reported on the poor Palestinian refugees in the West Bank.
The story was at the time that this was a land without people for a people without land.
And so the Nakba itself, the entire thing was a secret.
There were no 750,000 people run off of their land now living in, you know, hovels on the side of a dirt path somewhere in the West Bank.
There was none of this.
And when Eric Margulies' mother, I'm sorry, I forget her name, but when she reported this, they threatened to kill her and they threatened to kill baby Eric.
I guess the predecessor of the Jewish Defense League in the United States said, lady, we'll cut your throat, essentially for even daring to say that there was such a thing as a Palestinian over there at all.
So now I think people maybe are a little bit less surprised to understand how secret this one particular or these two or three particular massacres were.
The Daria scene, that story got out at some point, but that was supposed to be just that one or something, maybe.
But so, so just, you know, anyway, I'm sorry for taking so long to say that, but people got to understand that it is possible for them to get away with completely covering up something as huge as this when we're talking about the late 1940s here.
You know, it's interesting that you mentioned the Internet and its role in revealing much of this compared to the past, because this story, of course, did not start with this.
In fact, the whole reason of why this story has been provoked is the or brought back to the fore is the documentary called Tantura that just was recently released by Alan, Alan Schwartz, I believe is his name or Schwarz, where he basically interviewed the survivors of of those who committed the murder.
And but this story is not the first time Tantura is in the news.
In 1998, an Israeli student, I think if I remember the name is Teddy Katz, I think is his name, 1998 Haifa University.
Right.
That's what it says here.
I have your article in front of me here.
So, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
And he came, came up with, you know, he did his research for his master's degree on Tantura interviewing the survivors of the Palestinians, not not the murderers, not the Israeli troops that killed the Palestinians.
And and he was he became the laughingstock of academia in Israel.
They said he's phony.
You know, he was his research was rejected and he was sued in Israel by the the Israeli soldiers.
At the time, he was taken to court for defamation of characters and and, you know, all sorts of things.
In fact, one thing that I learned only recently, I mean, I knew that Ilan Pappy was involved in revealing some of that stories in Israeli mainstream academia.
But what I didn't know that the reason he was driven out of Israel is because of how his he was attacked.
His character was basically destroyed.
He was told that he was he was a liar.
He didn't know anything about history.
And eventually he ended up leaving Israel and going to the University of Exeter.
And I'm revealing this not because, you know, it's a secret.
And for me, he actually wrote it on social media.
And the man feels vindicated 24 years after that particular event.
Now, the soldiers themselves say this is precisely what happened and the kind of details and the horror that these details reveal is even beyond what we've had expected at the time.
So so this story tells us so much.
Number one, really like like when when this debate started in Israel, didn't the New York Times have enough resources and enough, you know, people on the ground that they could have actually investigated and interviewed Palestinians?
Why it never dawned on U.S. mainstream media to actually take on that story as opposed to leaving, you know, a young student being completely destroyed and tarnished in Israel and his career to be ruined, you know, and and and without anybody intervening.
And not just that, how about the the hundreds of other massacres that have been carried out against Palestinians throughout the years?
And the minute time that we start discussing them openly, Israel has carried and continues to carry genocide against the Palestinians.
Why don't we have the courage to say it out loud, even though the Israelis are now themselves saying it?
Why can't we?
Why don't we have the courage to have that kind of moral responsibility?
Because you know that, you know, the mass graves of those Palestinians who were killed are actually now a parking lot in a very popular Israeli beach in the south.
And, you know, at least dig out the remains of their bodies and have them being buried in a in a in a respectable way, you know, in Palestinian tradition and culture and religions.
And look, speaking of speaking of The New York Times here, I mean, this Haaretz is The New York Times of Israel here.
This is not Palestinian media.
Not that that would be a mark against it, but just this is against interest here in the broader sense.
The headline at Haaretz reads, there's a mass Palestinian grave at a popular Israeli beach.
Veterans confess.
That's the story in Haaretz.
People can read it right now.
If you get stuck behind the paywall, just put it in archive.
Just take the original link and put it in archive.is and you can read whatever you want there, folks.
Now, so isn't it important and meaningful, Ramsey, that you have the likes of Benny Morris, who is a hawk, right?
I don't know if he's Likud, but he essentially says that, man, the real problem is we didn't finish the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Would have been so much better if we had.
However, here's the story of how we did it.
And it's absolutely horrifying and horrible.
And against interest, doesn't make much sense for a Zionist to do that unless he just has that historian's ethic that, well, the truth is the truth and history is history.
So let's write it down.
But other than that, you know, I'm not I'm not sure what's even worse, Scott.
Someone who denies something to have happened in the first place, even though they know it has happened and someone else to actually say it has happened.
And yes, it was completely fine and justified that it has happened.
And much more of this should have also have happened.
I mean, it's just from a moral point of view, I don't even know like what is worse, to be entirely honest.
And, you know, the only comparison I can think of, and that's just honest, it's Holocaust deniers, right?
You have some people say the Holocaust never happened.
You have some people say it never happened, but it should have and we wish it had been bigger.
You know, it did, but they didn't quite finish the job.
That's exactly what we're talking about here.
I can't think of another argument.
That's a parallel, frankly.
Absolutely.
You know, and it's also one thing to discuss, to discuss the morality of history, our take on history.
I know this is a big deal in America at the moment.
You know, how do we you know, how do we deal with history that that was terrible of racism, slavery and horrible things that have happened against minorities, people of color, poor whites, you know, various communities throughout the country for hundreds of years?
How do we how do we understand it according to today's context?
But it's a whole different thing when that history is repeated with as gory details as as as as the past.
It's happening in Gaza as we speak.
And this is why the other place that we've mentioned in the article, the Nakab, you know, the or the Nakab, as they call it, the the the Palestine's desert in the in the south, where this Bedouin community has been really it's like it's not even the kind of, you know, ethnic cleansing that happens over the course of a month or a year.
It's a process that has been in the making for 74 years now.
You know, they have been targeted for 74 years in 1951 to 1953.
They have been pushed out in large numbers.
The and according to an Israeli military stratagem led by very well-known Israeli government official just pushed out of their land.
The land is taken and developed for Jewish purposes only.
While these poor Bedouins who lived there and and can only relate to this place as their homes for, you know, you know, since time immemorial been just pushed out entirely.
But that struggle continues until today.
The tiny little minority of Bedouins who are still living there, they are still being pushed out, their villages being destroyed, their water resources being destroyed.
You know, whatever they try to do to reclaim, even when they put schools out, you know, makeshift schools really more or less, it's confiscated, is destroyed, it's bulldozed.
There's a particular village called Araqib.
Araqib has been serving as the symbol of not only of Israeli colonialism and Zionist colonialism, but of Palestinian resistance.
It has been destroyed and rebuilt over 150 times.
I can't keep up with the number because it happens every two or three weeks.
They destroy it, the people go and rebuild it.
And they rebuild it knowing that this rebuilding is going to only last for a couple of weeks and the Israelis will come again and destroy it again and so forth and so on.
And these are not activists.
These are ordinary people.
You know, the village there with families, children, you know, they live every single day.
So it's not like, oh, it's just a principled stance that Palestinian activists do by rebuilding the village, just the people who have been living there, that tribe that has been living there for hundreds of years.
So so in other words, Tantoura is repeated.
It's repeated in Gaza.
Tantoura is repeated in the West Bank, in Nakav, and it's everywhere.
And now we know and now we know yet somehow we still haven't really done anything meaningful to bring this tragedy to an end.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, y'all, the audio book of my book Enough Already, Timed and the War on Terrorism, is finally done.
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Right, man, I'll tell you what, you know, as we've talked about for years on this show, I'm just absolutely convinced that American support for Israel, by and large, I mean popular support for Israel, which is, you know, the numbers do shift and they are shifting more in the Palestinians' favor, I believe.
But I think the reason that they are the way they are is basically based on the simple confusion about the matter.
And people think, look, if they're up against Palestinians and that means they're from Palestine, right?
So that's the country next door and it's full of Muslim terrorists and they're always attacking poor little Israel, trying to extort land from them, you know, land for peace.
Why should we have to give you land that belongs to us in exchange for peace, you crazy terrorist extortionist?
And then, but it's funny because they do always talk about maybe having a two state solution someday and something about an occupation.
Maybe it's they're talking about the Palestinians are occupying the poor Israelis.
Boy, if you look at a map of the region, it kind of looks like somebody took a big bite out of Israel.
When you look at the West Bank there and TV will just never set people straight about who's occupying who and how that big bite out of Israel is actually all that's left.
And even that's deceiving about it's left because it's completely conquered and occupied by the Israelis since 1967, nine years before I was born, far longer than the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe.
The Palestinians were already beat.
They were beat way back in 48 and then especially in 67.
And that's what people just don't understand because then, you know, like you talked about the crimes of America's past, but this is ongoing up to the current day.
So that's the metaphor, right?
It was like if we're talking about the Navajo out in Arizona, this would be like if we're still constantly the Anglos picking on the Navajo instead of building them a skate park and saying, well, sorry about killing almost all of you and whatever that instead we just build a wall around them and we starve them and blockade them and constantly drop bombs on their heads and fly drones and, you know, treat them as an enemy state to this day kind of a thing is the analogy here.
You know, Ben Shapiro and the right wingers always say, oh, what if the rockets were flying in from Mexico?
That analogy is not apt.
What if the rockets were flying from over the wall of a giant Navajo concentration camp we built in Arizona would be the apt analogy.
And then in that case, you understand who's the aggressor and who's the helpless, if not innocent victim here, right?
That's right, of course.
And but there is a silver lining in all of this.
You know, I stumbled by by accident.
Really, I was doing some research about the American public opinion as far as Palestine and Israel is concerned for an article that I would be producing soon for anti-war and others.
And it says that actually last year in May in particular, the Gallup research opinion poll says that the support for Palestinians was still, you know, support for Israel is is quite large and present among Americans.
But support for Palestinians has reached unprecedented, unprecedented high levels in May.
And it's the first time in history it reaches these numbers.
So something we are doing something right, obviously.
And we know it's not mainstream media.
We know it's not corporate media.
We are doing something right, I think, with the help of social media and numerous alternative platforms and channels and people speaking honestly about things.
They are naming names and they are speaking the right language.
I mean, that that report by Amnesty International really.
I mean, I talk about that.
What report is that you?
Right, so so Amnesty International came up a couple of weeks ago or so with this incredible report in which they said Israel is an apartheid state, not just in the West Bank and Gaza and in Jerusalem, all of Israel, all of that region, historic Palestine.
Not only that, Israel is also an apartheid state as far as the treatment of Palestinians living in diaspora.
That includes me and my family.
We are also included in that classification.
Now, this is shocking, not that Amnesty doesn't do good work, but Amnesty has always historically been quite careful in the kind of language that they have used regarding Palestine and Israel.
And, you know, my personal analysis is that Amnesty is a liberal platform and they have, you know, support in the mainstream.
And therefore they try not to appear too radical in their description and their language.
But this report is not the most important report.
What actually started this whole thing is Israel's own Beth Salem human rights group called Beth Salem.
They come up with this last year where they said Israel is an apartheid state from the river to the sea.
Human Rights Watch a few months later come and reaffirm that and declare Israel to be an apartheid racist regime.
And as of late, Amnesty International follows suit.
And we know that there is a very serious conversation at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
We are anticipating a similar language where the UN Human Rights Council will also dub Israel as an apartheid state.
And once that becomes mainstream thinking and it is rapidly becoming mainstream thinking, I don't know how Israel can actually weasel its way out of this without absolutely fundamental and real changes on the ground.
So finally, we are beginning to see a shift not only within the stances of these groups, but within public opinion as well in the United States and elsewhere.
Right.
I mean, and part of it, too, is because, you know, Likud, if you put yourself in the position of a Zionist concerned very much with Israel's long term national interest, Likud are the absolute worst you could possibly have.
They should have let the West Bank and Gaza Strip go a long time ago back when they promised to in either 79 or at least in the 1990s.
And instead, what's happened is that their right wing nationalist governments have put them in this position that from the point of view of most American Jews who are liberals and kind of civil rights, MLK sort of tradition liberals from the previous generation, that they look at it like this is a major threat to the Zionist dream.
How are you supposed to have a Jewish democracy with an 80-20 super duper majority if you integrate all these millions of Palestinians and then you have to have this crazy South African apartheid style thing where Alabama is a white state, even though half the population is black.
You just can't.
How are you going to get away with that?
And so you have that's where I think that there's a big shift that really matters, right, is among liberal American Zionists that you're going to ruin everything with this stupid policy.
And by the way, I wanted to squeeze this in here, too, is that, you know, you you mentioned the phrase river to the sea.
And I know that among American Zionists, Jewish and Christian and otherwise, that this phrase has come to mean genocide against Israeli Jews that see when they call it Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.
They mean it won't be Israel anymore.
It'll be Palestine.
And then that just means by definition that all the Jews will be killed and all of this kind of thing.
But I just wanted to point out that Benjamin Netanyahu said the exact same thing, that it is one state.
He said, quote, In order to assure our existence, we need to have military and security control over all of the territory west of the Jordan, end quote.
So in other words, Likud says it is one state that is itself, whether you use the A word or not, that is official annexation of the West Bank and the declaration that there will never be an independent Palestinian state.
And therefore, what are you going to do?
B'Tselem, HRW or Amnesty or anybody else for that matter, as long as words have meaning, then the game is up.
The two state solution ruse is over.
And this is, in fact, an apartheid state.
What else are you going to argue about it?
You know, that's why I think in fact, that's I think one of the main reasons of why this kind of new language is being introduced.
And by the way, I think the language itself is indicative that in order for us to bring justice to to the to to the Palestinians, then we have to talk about one state.
Because really, even though Amnesty, it's not really there are human rights groups, it's not their position to offer any any political solutions.
But but the fact is that they are they are saying basically there is no difference between a Palestinian living in Gaza under siege and war, the Palestinian living in occupied West Bank, Palestinian living in Jerusalem or a Palestinian living in Haifa or Yafa or Akko or a Palestinian living in Jordan, for example, in a refugee camp or in Lebanon.
And whatever is happening to them, whatever bad things happening to these guys is happening collectively.
And therefore, the solution has to be collective and justice has to be collective.
Well, I mean, think about it rationally.
Can two state solutions really resolve any of these issues?
So so it's also important to point that that this kind of wholesome approach to the problem of apartheid, racism, occupation and all of these things is is seems to now finally point to the fact that a solution can only happen if all of these issues are addressed at the same time.
And that can only happen with equal existence, a system in which everyone coexist as equals in a democratic state.
So that's another encouraging part of the conversation.
Right, and look, I mean, all of that can only happen based on the truth, based you know, you can't just have a bunch of mythologies going in if you're really going to reconcile these things.
And the fact that, you know, I guess essentially the Israelis are being forced to recognize and admit to the history of the Nakba in a way that you guys have remembered all along could be a real step toward that.
I mean, you've got to presume the good faith of the average Israeli that, man, I didn't know we massacred that many people back then or something, you know, kind of thing.
There's got to be a sentiment like that on the Israeli side.
I don't know.
I guess there ain't much of a left there.
Max Blumenthal told me that Israeli political spectrum goes from Dick Cheney to Hitler, you know, or whatever, to Rabbi Kahane or whoever, you know, all the way to the right.
But that Cheney is the left.
I mean, there is no labor really anywhere.
The left is like the left half of Likud or whatever.
You know what I mean?
Kadima, where these guys who are all right wing nationalists, the only difference is some of them are more religious than others and others are more secular.
Others are more Russian dominated or, you know, this kind of thing.
But as far as their politics, doesn't seem like there's too many people to work with on the Israeli side, really.
You know, no, no partner for peace over there, Ramzi.
Yeah, exactly.
But but here's the thing.
Israel has managed to control this ridiculous system of lies and deception based on several pillars.
One of these pillars has been controlling the narrative on Palestine and Israel and punishing anybody who challenges that narrative and calling him all sorts of names, including, sadly, anti-Semitic or even if he's Jewish, a self-hating Jew.
But that is just no longer possible.
They are losing control of the main mechanism of control that they have had for all of these years.
And now they are no longer in a position that they that they can keep the genie in the bottle.
I mean, if Amnesty, I remember when we you know, when I started the Palestine Chronicle back in the day, we're talking about over 20 years ago, several articles, you know, that we published during the second intifada, we are talking about 2000 to 2005 of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian intellectuals and activists attacking Amnesty International for creating for creating, you know, kind of an unequal set of responsibilities on Palestinians and Israelis.
They're saying that you have to be holding Israel account.
This language is too fluffy and too it gives Israel the opportunity to to find its way out.
You have to commit to calling Israel what it is.
So, you know, jump 20 years later and here we are in a situation where Amnesty is finally doing that.
So it means that within these 20 years of struggle, of us trying to control our side of the narrative and the Israelis trying to keep things as status quo as possible, they have lost and we have won.
And when we say Amnesty International, we are talking about hundreds of organizations all across the world.
We just we are pointing at the major ones here.
Right.
So so with this defeat, how can Israel with with with the Israelis themselves taking responsibilities for their crimes, like in Tantura, how can they possibly reverse this?
How can they possibly go back in time and try to fix that control of the narrative once more?
So now Israel is being exposed day after day and the world is seeing Israel exactly for what it is.
Well, let's see how far they can can play this game.
Let's see how far they can maintain this occupation and sustain this apartheid before the tipping point happens, before the critical mass is achieved.
And I really do think because, you know, as you know, Scott, we are doing this day in and day out for decades now.
And we know that, you know, there's something fundamentally that has changed.
So it really is the matter of time.
We just keep pushing forward until until Palestine achieved that coveted moment of freedom.
Yeah, well, that day is coming.
It's sooner or later.
I sure hope sooner.
But, you know, they say that arc of the universe bends toward justice.
And again, this will always be my thesis on this.
The truth has a severe anti-Zionist bias here.
If you care, if anybody cares about universal principles of individual human rights and dignity, then this cannot stand.
Not for much longer.
So best of luck to you, buddy.
That's right.
Thank you very much, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is the great Ramzi Baroud.
From Tantura to Nakab, Israel's long hidden truths are finally revealed is his latest for Antiwar.com.
And of course, check him out at Palestine Chronicle.
And his latest book is These Chains Will Be Broken.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
