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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Website's ScottHorton.org.
And of course, you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slashScottHortonShow.
Our second guest on the show today is Joe Loria.
He reports on the United Nations for The Wall Street Journal, although I think we'll go ahead and disclaim that he speaks for himself when he's talking here.
Thank you very much for joining us on the show again.
Joe, how are you?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thank you.
Thank you for the disclaimer.
Yeah, I wouldn't want you to get in any trouble or anything.
You do straight news for The Wall Street Journal, and it's very important stuff.
First of all, can I ask you to address the targeted assassination of this Hamas leader, Jabri, I think, in the Gaza Strip this morning?
Yeah, what's most troubling is it doesn't seem like an isolated incident.
The IDF is saying this is part of a larger operation.
You have to recall four years ago, just after the American election in 2008 and just before an Israeli election, that we saw Operation Cast Lead.
So there's some suspicion that with an Israeli election coming up in January, just after this election, that we could be seeing an escalation maybe on the same scale.
And that would be extremely troubling for the main reason is that the Israelis in their so-called pillar of defense, which is what they're calling the operation, think, again, that they could uproot terrorism.
I think we've seen 60 years of that failed policy.
Only negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians will be able to solve this issue, not another military operation by the Israelis that will lead to countless civilian deaths and probably more terrorism.
We're dealing with military thinking on both sides, and this clearly is a failure of this policy.
How many people have been killed in the most recent incursion in the past, what, week?
I don't have a figure on that.
I think it's a couple of dozen.
I don't really know, but it's not on the scale, certainly.
Cast Lead, but it's only the beginning.
Right.
Now, when you say that, you know, it's this failed policy, this obviously failed policy of rooting out terrorism, is that really what they're doing?
Is that your impression, or that's just what they say?
Is it more, it seems like it's just punishment because they know they can't root out anything.
What are they going to do?
Evaporate every member of Hamas right out of the Gaza Strip?
Well, if there's clear thinking on the Israeli side, then you realize that it's not going to root out terrorism.
That's what they say publicly.
I don't really know whether some people in the Israeli establishment really believe that, if it's alluded to.
This time, we'll end the Hamas threat once and for all.
But you're right, it's certainly punishment seems to be a motive in this.
And I think the election again.
If you recall, as I said four years ago, Lieberman was running against Tiffany Libby and other candidates, and they wanted to show that they were tougher.
And Olmert, of course, wanted to show that he was tougher than Netanyahu, and nobody's probably tougher than Netanyahu.
So they launched that attack.
And I think Netanyahu faced again with re-election in January, wants to show that he's protecting the Israeli people.
There's been quite a lot of rockets fired recently from Gaza into Israel, and many of the million Israelis currently have taken shelter.
There have been injuries.
So there has been, you could say, provocation from the Hamas side.
Of course, in this whole dispute going back to 1945, even earlier, going all the way back under the British mandate, when did this start?
This is how he fired the first shot.
Obviously, I think Netanyahu is trying to show he's tough, and that he can protect the Israeli people.
This is the way he's been, not to get into this subject, because it's a whole other show, but this is the way he's been scaring the Israeli people about Iran's nuclear program and comparing Ahmadinejad to Hitler and the Holocaust, and it's clearly a way to frighten the Israelis that these men can protect them.
So I think on a smaller scale we're seeing that in Gaza.
Well, by the way, before we get back to the United Nations and Palestine's attempt to get recognition there and all that, do you know enough about Israeli politics to comment on the, I guess I'm interested in the response or the backlash or lack thereof or whatever in Israel to the merger of the Likud party with the party of the foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, which I think is called Yisrael Bettenu or whatever, a right-wing nationalist secularist party that's to the right of Likud.
And I guess I was hoping that that had backfired and made Netanyahu look worse to the people of Israel, but I was wondering if you know.
Well, we will know in January when they vote.
If they win the election, this merged party, then clearly the Israeli people are with them.
If they lose, then they're not.
Clearly anybody on the left is left in Israel.
There aren't many because it's a dwindling force in Israeli politics.
It hasn't been for some time now.
They're going to be extremely alarmed by this alliance.
I mean, if you could, you just said that Lieberman's party is to the right of Likud.
It's pretty hard for him to be to the right of Likud, but he is smart.
And even this morning Lieberman made a statement that Abbas should be overthrown if this vote that we're about to talk about goes ahead in the General Assembly and Palestinians do get observer state status, non-member observer state status in the U.N.
So that is a more formidable right-wing force right now.
Obviously Netanyahu had to make this merger.
He thought in order to win this election.
And as I said, there's no flexibility from Lieberman's party on settlements.
It's a settlement party, essentially.
So this will drag Netanyahu even further to the right on the settlement issue.
And you might even see the hand of Lieberman now that he's been fortified by this merger and this attack, these attacks that are beginning in Gaza as well.
Well, you know, what do you make of the theory that a lot of Netanyahu's hype about Iran over the last couple of years was just to shut everybody up about the West Bank and the Gaza Strip?
Could have had that effect.
I don't think that that necessarily was his main motive.
I don't know how he thinks about that.
But it seems that he legitimately has tried to stir up extraordinary fears about annihilation and existential threats to Israel, which, as you know, have been countered by very powerful people in Israel, including Shimon Peres, president of the country and former and current Assad chief, and various generals who say, some of them said explicitly, including Peres, that Iran is not a natural threat to Israel.
So whether Netanyahu really believes that or whether that's pure politics, whether, as you suggested, it was done to distract from the Palestinian issue is speculation.
But I don't think that he needs to.
I don't see any flexibility on the Israeli side in terms of stopping settlements, which is the conditions that Palestinians are given to re-enter to talks.
They're not in any way keen to do that.
And I think now with Lieberman's party in the government, there's even less chance that there was much support of those settlements stopping, and therefore of talks resuming.
All right.
Now, so on this move in the United Nations to gain a higher level of status, is it full-fledged nation-state status, just like everybody else that they're going after there?
And then, actually, before that, could you answer, is it Hamas, or is it the Palestinian Authority, which is separate from Hamas, the old PLO?
They're the ones doing this, correct?
Yes, yes.
Hamas does not agree with this move.
They think it's pointless.
They don't see any reason to go to the U.S.
So, yes, this is purely a Palestinian Authority move.
And they tried, as you remember, last September at the General Assembly, Hamas made a big speech of huge attention and applause in the General Assembly, and he waved a piece of paper in the air saying that this was his application for full U.N. membership that he was giving to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, which he did after he left the podium.
Now, for full membership in the United Nations, you need a recommendation from the Security Council to the General Assembly.
So the Security Council has to approve it.
And when they do, it's been more or less rubber-stamped in the General Assembly.
The problem for the Palestinians is, of course, the United States has a veto on the Security Council, and the United States clearly threatened to veto this resolution for full membership.
It also turned out that with a lot of lobbying by the U.S., it looked like the Palestinians would not even have gotten the nine votes necessary to trigger a U.S. veto.
So if it only got eight votes, the U.S. would not have to veto because they would not have passed.
Now, at the time, Abbas said that he gave the Security Council two weeks to do this, and then he would go to the General Assembly to do what he's doing now.
It's not clear why he never went to the General Assembly then.
It's clear that in the last month or so, according to diplomats at the U.N., that he delayed this until after the elections in the United States, not to cause any problems to Obama.
But if that was his mode of then, he wouldn't have made that speech last September, September 2011, in the General Assembly, if he thought to look at Obama then.
But he certainly delayed it now.
So what we have now is a completely different situation than the Security Council, and that would be a full member state of the United Nations with all the rights of member states.
That ain't going to happen.
So plan B is to go to the General Assembly and ask for non-member observer state status.
This is something that the Vatican has at the U.N.
It's something Switzerland had for a long time until they actually became members of the U.N. about 10 years ago.
It gives a lot of rights to the Palestinians getting this status.
Number one, they can join, and most importantly, they can join various U.N. agencies and treaties, including the International Criminal Court, which would give them the power to go to the court and charge Israelis even for the Kessler attacks, because any of the treaty calls for a retroactive back to 2002, because Kessler happened four years ago.
They can join the Law of the Sea Treaty, which would give them legal rights over their territorial waters.
It would challenge the blockade in the International Court of Justice.
Of course, if the International Court of Justice ruled in their favor, Israel would most likely ignore it, as they did when the ICJ ruled that the fence, the fence or the wall that separates Palestinian territories from Israeli settlements in Israel was illegal, and Israel just ignored that.
But it does give them more legal rights.
The International Civil Aviation Organization could be joined, which would give them, again, legal rights over their airspace.
Does that mean that Israeli F-16s would stop patrolling the skies over the West Bank?
No, but they could challenge them legally.
I think the criminal court is the one that really upsets the Israelis, because even though the ICC has not shown a propensity to go against Western governments to investigate, let's say, U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan that have killed civilians, Afghanistan is a member of the ICC.
They can bring a charge against a non-member of the U.S. if alleged crime takes place on their territory or on the territory of any ICC member.
The head of the prosecutor, the former prosecutor of the ICC, told me and a few other journalists that he was looking into that.
Of course, it never happened.
So these are all maybe symbolic, but they do have legal weight.
It gives leverage to the Palestinians in the negotiations.
If they ever start again with Israel, which Abbas said he would try to start the next day, the next day after this vote, which is coming on November 29th, which is a significant day because that is the 65th anniversary of the 1947 resolution passed by the General Assembly that created Israel and that partitioned the old British mandate in Palestine, which, as you know, the Palestinians rejected at the time.
But in 1988, on November 15th, which was the date they were looking at, which is tomorrow, perhaps having this vote, but they're doing it on the 29th, was the day in 1988 in which the Palestinians declared their independence.
And at that moment, they accepted the partition resolution that they had rejected in 1947.
And about the same day, on November 16th, 1988, 100 countries recognized Palestine as a sovereign state.
Since then, 32 other countries have recognized Palestine as a sovereign state.
This is very key.
Many of those countries have exchanged ambassadors with Palestine.
They have embassies in their capitals.
Palestinians, rather, have embassies in their capitals.
They have embassies in Ramallah.
And that is a very key point because if 132 countries say that Palestine legally is already a state and they're basing that on the 1933 Montevideo Convention, which lays out the parameters for a territory being a legal state, that calls simply for a population living on a territory with authority and to enter relations with other governments.
Palestine has all three of those.
In 1915, the first Secretary General, Tigre Lee, wrote a memo saying that universal recognition was not required to be considered a state.
And also there have been, let's say, Pakistan and India became states and U.N. members without their borders being finally defined because Kashmir is still in dispute.
So Palestine is a state according to 132 countries.
Unfortunately, among those 132 countries, there's not Israel in the United States.
They obviously do not recognize Palestinian statehood.
And therefore, we've got the political problem we've got.
But for the Israelis and the Americans to say and the American press, which trumpets and parodies this view that Israel is not a state, I'm sorry, that Palestine is not a state and that they want to go to the U.N. to become a state is false.
They are in the view of 132 countries already a state.
They simply were looking for membership or now non-member status.
They are a state for 132 countries.
That's a very multilateral position.
If they vote on the 29th of November, that will be a very multilateral act.
At least 93 votes are needed in the General Assembly.
And they will get that, as I said, because 132 countries are already a state.
And Palestine will get this new status.
And their statehood, which, according to those countries, will be bolstered by this move.
The only argument to the contrary that I'm hearing, Joe, is, hey, this is unilateral.
You're not supposed to do that.
You're not supposed to do anything unless you plan it with Netanyahu first or something like that.
But I haven't heard an argument in substance as to why it is that the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip don't deserve to be independent after all these years.
I mean, are they still going to claim that, well, you know, the next war could be launched from the West Bank or whatever was their excuse back in 1968 for staying?
Yes.
I mean, one of the things the Israelis would want in a final status negotiation is to station Israeli troops on Palestinian territory, the state of Palestine, which Israel would recognize, inside Palestine on the river Jordan, so that arms, terrorists, whatever, could not enter from Jordan into Palestine.
That's something, obviously, Palestinians do not want.
They don't want foreign troops on their territory.
They feel now, along with those 133 countries I've recognized, that there are already foreign troops on their territory.
They see the occupation of a Soviet state by Israel.
So Israel would want to keep forces on Palestinian territory.
That is a huge problem along with East Jerusalem, of course, and the return of the refugees.
These are all the major issues that would have to be settled in a negotiation.
But you're right.
They say it's a unilateral discussion because they are going on their own to the UN rather than coming to Israel to negotiate this issue.
But as I've said, this is a done deal already.
It's 133 countries that are already recognized by the state.
This is simply the UN passing a resolution acknowledging that and then giving them further status and legal rights inside the UN system.
That's what really upsets the Israelis and the Americans, is the legal rights that they have.
But it's a supreme act of multilateral behavior to have a resolution passed in the General Assembly that should garner upwards of 130 votes, so maybe it's at least more than 100 votes they're going to get.
That's multilateralism by definition.
It's a whole many countries coming together and expressing this view and giving legal status.
So that argument doesn't wash by the Israelis at all.
So then, now they know that the Americans are going to go to bat for the Israelis and prevent this thing from going through ultimately, so in a way it's just a PR stunt or like a card to play in future negotiations.
We'll drop this argument for now if you'll only do this or that kind of thing.
Is that right?
Well, the Americans cannot block this one.
This is just in the General Assembly.
They don't have a veto in the General Assembly.
Gotcha.
So this is a done deal.
If they go ahead with the vote.
Now in the article I wrote in the Wall Street Journal, I pointed out in 1989, a year after the Declaration of Independence was passed, they went to the General Assembly for the exact same reason that they planned to do on November 29th this month, and that is to get this non-member observer state status.
And according to Francis Boyle, who you may or may not know, may have had on the show, I don't know, he is an American international law professor at University of Illinois in Champaign, and he is a, and was then, an advisor to Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians, still to the Palestinians today.
He was there in the General Assembly hall, and he told me, and I quote him in the Wall Street Journal article, saying that Thomas Pickering, who was the U.S. ambassador at the time, made a speech from the podium, essentially saying that he would bring down the whole U.N. system if the Palestinians went ahead with this vote.
And how would the U.S. do that?
Well, James Baker, the Secretary of State then, and the U.S. administration now, are saying the same thing, which is that any agency that Palestinians or a Palestine state would join in the U.N. would be defunded.
We already see this happen.
UNESCO has already run ahead of the game and allowed Palestine to join as a member state last year, and the United States Congress cut off funding to UNESCO.
Now, you understand the Obama administration has been trying to resume that by putting in riders and bills and whatnot, but the Congress is not allowing that to happen.
They don't want funding for UNESCO to go on.
So presumably if they, the ICC, the U.S., did not do anything about it, they would have gone to members.
But the Law of the Sea, the United Nations Organization, and other agencies that they may join, WHO, whatever, could face defunding by the United States.
The U.S. cannot by law not pay their U.N. dues, although we saw Ronald Reagan withhold them for years illegally.
The United States didn't pay their dues for years under the Reagan administration.
I don't think the Obama administration would want to do that, and the Congress might indeed call for that if the Palestinians get this vote and become a reserve state.
The U.S. should not pay its dues.
So in the face of that threat, the Palestinians backed down last time in 1989.
And there's a fear and there's a possibility that the Palestinians could back down again.
They should have called James Baker's bluff right then, because defunding UNESCO is one thing.
Defunding the entire General Assembly, that's suicide for the entire U.N.
That means that the Security Council loses all its authority too, right?
Right.
Well, Republican governments don't give much of a damn about Security Council.
They use it as a fig leaf.
We saw that clearly in 2003 with Bush.
Right, but they need that fig leaf, don't they?
Well, he didn't get it and he invaded Iraq anyway in 2003.
Oh, that's true.
Democrats are generally more sincere about the U.N. and really trying to get multilateral action, but we've seen, you know, administrations doing what they want, whatever the U.N. says.
That's a very deep seat of view in conservative circles in the United States.
The U.N. is a bunch of rubbish and what the hell do we need it for?
And we can get a resolution in time.
I mean, John Bolton, at least, went on the right track and said that.
We can get the U.N. to go along with us.
If not, we're going to do what we want anyway.
We're the most powerful country in the world.
Who are they that's going to stop us?
So, you know, that could be.
Now, we could see maybe some compromise by the Israelis to prevent the vote.
Maybe this is a card being played by the Palestinians that they will resume talks a week before this vote or a few days before the vote by saying that they would temporarily cease settlements, stop settlements.
But I find it hard to believe that Lieberman is involved in this government right now, with his party in control, part of the government party right now.
So it's going to be very interesting to see on the 29th of November whether they go ahead with this vote.
If it does, it will win.
We'll get the new status and see how the U.S. and Israel react to that.
Well, it's interesting.
What you said earlier was, I think you said that Avigdor Lieberman was saying that if the Palestinian Authority goes forward with this thing at the U.N., then they ought to overthrow Hamas.
He said that this morning.
That's from the Financial Times.
I just saw that before I got on the air.
Well, and what does that even mean other than occupy, you know, fully invade and occupy the Gaza Strip again?
Because you can't get, what, a decapitation strike.
They killed one guy this morning, but they can't just overthrow Hamas from the air.
No.
They sent ground troops last time and that's led.
Would it lead to that?
We don't know exactly the full parameters of the operation defense pillar, as I call it, which really are.
How are they going to overthrow Abbas?
Are they going to occupy Ramallah?
I don't think so.
Right.
To what degree is Abbas even independent from the Israelis?
And wasn't it the Americans and the Israelis that picked him in the first place?
Well, he was safe with them, I guess, to some degree, because he's clearly on board for a two-state solution.
He's renounced violence.
He wants to recognize Israel as the final deal.
But he has enormous pressures behind him, not from Palestinians and Arabs all over the region, all over the world.
And he's often been seen as weak, obviously, and caves in.
And, again, those feelings arose when he didn't follow through on his threat last September to go to Jerusalem within two weeks if the Security Council didn't give him full membership.
So, again, he's been dawdling here, but this time, I mean, if he doesn't do this on the 29th of November, maybe he won't have to be overthrown.
He'll lose a lot of support, obviously, get nominated as well.
But I think in order to bolster his own standing with Palestinians and Arabs across the region, he needs to have this vote, unless he really gets some kind of major concessions from the Israelis before.
Well, with or without this vote, do you see a path to, in any near term, to see the lifting of the siege of the Gaza Strip?
It sort of seems like it's just an accepted fact of life, at least in American politics, that, oh, yeah, that's just how Gaza is now.
It's just a prison.
No, I don't see any path.
I see Israel granting some destruction on Gaza.
Maybe there'll be some period of calm, and then we'll see militants once again, probably firing rockets.
I don't see the blockade remaining.
Reconstruction material is hard to get.
Where is food and other things?
I mean, originally the Palestinians, the Israelis were going to let tater chips into Gaza, and the Israelis changed that.
I mean, this is the kind of ridiculousness of the punishment, as you pointed out, that we see in Gaza.
There's just a logic there.
The outside world maybe can't really understand the conflict that's gone on for these many years, with leaders on both sides that are very determined to win, and they're willing to use violence.
Obviously the Israelis have far more firepower to get their objectives.
And I think that this vote will be very historic.
It will point out if the borders in the West are allowed to go into history, which is crucial to the conflict and the argument about what happened.
But there are Israeli historians who say on the left that if you look at the map of Palestine in 1920, if you look at the fences of the British Isles, there was about 80 to 90 percent Arabs living in Palestine, 10 percent Jews, and that continued to change until you got the situation at the time of 1937, when there was still a majority of Palestinians, but it had gone down to something like 60 to 40, and now we're seeing more and more territory gobbled up by Israel, but there's still a majority of Arabs in form of Palestine mandate.
This is the reason why Israel will not annex the West Bank, because if they did, it became part of Israel, greater Israel.
What do you do with all these Arabs?
You can't give them a vote, because they'll vote out a Jewish government, and it will become an Arab-Palestinian state, presumably, hopefully, protecting minority rights of the Jews living there.
But that's not going to happen.
That's why there's been going on and on about a Jewish state.
So if you don't allow the Palestinians to vote, there will be a legal apartheid, which obviously would be very bad for Israel's image in the world, and that's not going to happen either.
So that's why we have the status quo of little by little gobbling up more and more territory.
If you look at the map right now of the West Bank, it looks like somebody put ink on the wall.
These settlements are not contiguous.
It's shrinking more and more of Palestinian territory, and it's a slow, creeping takeover without legal annexation, although there is an Israeli right-wing party that wants to annex the settlement zone.
So Joe, if I understand you right, I think what you're telling me is that the term apartheid is so politically incorrect that the fact of permanent military martial law occupation forever is actually preferable in political terms, that if they just annex the West Bank and started treating everybody in the West Bank the way they treat the Arab Israelis now, the non-Jewish Arab Israelis now, then they would be officially an apartheid state, and that would be worse PR-wise than what they do every day as they have for 40 years now.
That's correct.
Because what they do now is they can justify that there's still terrorism and they need to have an occupation there to protect the settlements, but more importantly to keep Palestinians from coming from the West Bank into Israel proper to come back to terror.
And, of course, these rockets from Gaza gives them the justification, they feel, to go on with military actions against the Gaza Strip, as we've seen happening now.
So, yes, it would be worse for them, no question.
A lot of Americans, American Jews, would not be able to support that.
Even though, of course, it's apartheid right now.
The people of the West Bank are Israelis, they're just occupied helots with, you know, fourth class citizen status or something, but they sure are subjects of the Israeli government, aren't they?
Yeah, but it's not a legal apartheid in the sense of them not having the right to vote even if they are for citizenship, they're living in the country.
Right.
That would be, see, that's the thing they want to avoid, and they have avoided.
The first time that I really got my attention drawn to this subject, because it always just seemed too complicated to me, someone will, you know, I'll figure it out someday or something, but I'm putting it off, but it was in 1998 or something, I think, that Hillary Clinton, the first lady, in no official position, said that, well, of course, everybody agrees that someday there will be a Palestinian state.
And the entire media went, oh, my God, Hillary Clinton uttered the term Palestinian state.
Did she have authorization to say that?
What does that mean?
This is the biggest deal in the world.
You're not supposed to say Palestinian state, not for another dozen years or something.
And I remember thinking, wow, that sure seems a pretty heavy-handed response to the uttering of a term.
Well, what the hell, you know?
That was kind of what got me interested in this topic in the first place, was, and Hillary Clinton, of course, is the model of centrism and establishmentarianism.
She sure didn't mean to get out of line.
She wasn't trying to be controversial and stir up trouble.
It was an accident, a faux pas.
Yeah, but look where we've come from now.
We've had Netanyahu utter those words, and George Bush did it before that.
So she was ahead of her game there, and also there were a hundred countries that already had recognized a Palestinian state, so it was in existence.
She was talking about Israel and the U.S. recognizing a Palestinian state.
And that's still the aim.
Netanyahu says he still wants, little by little, more and more, the West Bank is gobbled up by these settlements, a continuation of really the policy of driving Palestinians off their land.
I mean, many of them did run away because they were afraid that the Israeli army would attack the villages.
Many others were told by our general at the time, our army that was joining the fight in 1947 to leave the country, when we'll defeat Israel, then come back.
Of course, they didn't.
I mean, not coming back.
There's an unfortunate saying that a lot of Israelis believe that this Israel was a country without a people for a people without a country.
And that's not true.
Many, many Palestinians living in Israel whose villages are gone and who will probably never be able to come back again.
And even if Israel recognizes a Palestinian state at some point, it won't allow Palestinians to come back and live there.
Not in huge numbers, anyway.
There's no path or any solution to this situation.
Status quo serves Israel.
This low-intensity war in which, you know, there have been many fewer deaths from Palestinian terrorism in Israel.
One has to say that that fence, that barrier that they built, that the ICJ said was illegal, probably has had an effect on preventing Palestinians from entering.
But the suffering of the vast majority of the Palestinian people who are not terrorists is a huge price for those people to pay.
But there has been a reduction in terrorism.
But there's been an increase in the settlements.
So I think the status quo is good for Netanyahu, good for Israel.
There's U.S. backing.
But this vote really was just poking the eye to Israel and the U.S. that the U.N. will be saying, look, there's 130 of us here at least that have been saying for years that Al-Sant is a state.
And we're going to say it openly in the U.N. now.
We're going to let them join all these organizations and treaties like they're a state.
The only thing is they can't introduce resolutions.
They can't vote in the General Assembly.
I mean, so there are going to be restrictions on what Palestinians can do with the U.N., but it is a major upgrade.
The Palestinians and their supporters feel it's high time that they did this and put pressure on the Israelis.
And this is going to be an enormously interesting and historic moment in this long conflict on November 29th.
All right, well, we'll definitely be keeping our eyes on The Wall Street Journal.
And I hope when this does happen, maybe a few days after, when we know the first kind of responses to it, then maybe we can have you back to talk about what's going on.
Yeah, just to end, the Israelis say they will not give tax revenues that they collect for Palestine.
That's $100 million a month.
And the U.S. has threatened to cut off $500 million in aid.
Yeah, that's how they got Hamas elected in the first place was cutting off all the tax revenues to Yasser Arafat, so he couldn't buy up all the votes he needed.
They did that for a while, and then the pressure came on Israel, and they released the taxes.
So they haven't done this before yet, and they're threatening to do it again.
And the Palestinians have to find money from the Gulf, from Europe, who knows, the Chinese.
I mean, somebody, they're going to have to find this money.
All right, well, thank you very much for your time on the show and all your great reporting, Jim.
Appreciate it.
Good to talk to you.
All the best.
Yep, you too.
All right, everybody, that is U.N.
Joe, Joe Lauria from The Wall Street Journal.
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