01/08/13 – Philip Weiss – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is the great Philip Weiss from the Mondo Weiss blog.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us.
Happy New Year and all those kinds of things.
I appreciate it.
Happy New Year to you, too.
So let's talk about this two-state solution.
It's already too late, right?
Is that what you think?
I think it's too late, yes.
Okay, now, for people who don't know about this, what does that even mean?
Sorry, I skipped ahead.
That's all right.
I think that there was a time when, you know, over the last 75, 100 years, where people thought that the best way to handle Israel and Palestine was to have one state for the Jews and one state for the Palestinians, to divide them on an ethnic basis, and so that they wouldn't fight, a lot like what happened in India and Pakistan.
But what's happened, since they never settled the question, never settled the borders, and there have been lots of fights, instead of being an equitable solution, what you have is that the current idea of a two-state solution leaves so little land to the Palestinians that they can't even have a state that would be a viable state, and the Israelis have just taken so much of the land.
So it would be like if you had Muslims and Hindus dividing the subcontinent of Asia, and, you know, the Pakistanis were down to one little province at the far north of, you know, near the Himalayas.
So partition would not have worked in India and Pakistan under those circumstances, and partition will not work at this point in Israel and Palestine, according to the lines that they've set up.
And that's because of the settlements, as they're called, the racial colonies on the West Bank.
It's part of a long tradition of Israel taking Palestinian land, yes, but the consensus that existed, there was consensus in the world that you could have, and the Palestinians, in our fact, went along with it, they will take a state on the 67 lines, where Israel had four-fifths of the land along the 67 lines.
But even that compromise that the Palestinians were willing to accept, you know, 25 years ago, they indicated that they would be willing to accept it 24 years ago, that has been destroyed by continuing Israeli colonies across those lines.
There are now 500,000 to 700,000 Israelis, the numbers vary, across those lines, living there, growing up there, having children there, burying their dead there.
They're not leaving.
Right, that's true, and I guess there have been some examples.
In the Gaza Strip in 2005, there were far fewer to deal with, but I think, I'm trying to remember where exactly it was on the West Bank, where the IDF had been ordered, I guess, by Ariel Sharon to tear down one settlement or another, and boy, oh boy, was it a big deal.
And some of these settlements are the size of small cities, I mean, not even that small of cities, medium-sized cities, here on the West Bank.
It is the kind of thing where the IDF, they would basically have to go to war to get the Jewish colonists out of the West Bank.
I think that what we're looking at is a civil war.
The settlers control a large part of the Israeli government.
They're all through the Israeli military, and they're part of the ruling bloc of the coalition that supports Netanyahu.
And when Netanyahu's coalition is formed again after the next elections, in two weeks, it can even be more settler-oriented.
And these settlers say, hey, we're never, they say things, there's never going to be a Palestinian state, we don't want, we want to annex most of the West Bank, and yeah, they're just continuing to take more land, and they've indicated that if there was ever a real effort to move Israel back to the 1967 lines, there'd be war.
Now, maybe that war's going to happen, I don't know.
I mean, it's a very dangerous situation over there, no question.
Well, it seems like annexation is, I mean, obviously, you know, it's not hard to see the idea, well, we'll just take it, we'll establish facts on the ground, and we'll call it the peace process for 35 years as we just take more and more and more until eventually the whole West Bank belongs to Israel, that kind of thing.
It makes sense.
But on the other hand, it also seems pretty obviously counterproductive, right, as even the defense minister, Ehud Barak, has said, which I know he's not exactly a Likudnik, but still it's a pretty obvious truth, right, that then they will be a minority if they outright annex the West Bank.
They will then outright be an apartheid state, a minority, an ethnic minority ruling the majority.
Well, it already is apartheid in the West Bank.
If you go in there, it's pure apartheid.
You see Israelis wearing, you know, in uniform, heavily armed, bossing around Palestinians who, you know, can't move, can't go to the sea a few miles away.
So it's an apartheid situation.
You have Israelis and Jews, Jewish Israelis, living in fancy houses right alongside Palestinian villages, and the Jews can vote for the government that controls the area, and the Palestinians can't.
That's worse than apartheid.
As to the point of whether Israel has destroyed itself, I think it has, although the settler bloc, if you've got a right-wing Israeli on here, the kind who's going to be playing a large part in the next government, they would say that, no, we're not going to have apartheid.
What we're going to do is we're going to annex a large portion of the West Bank from which we've pushed out the Palestinians already.
That's Area C, and we have a large Jewish majority of colonists in those areas.
That land will become Israel, and the Palestinians can have limited authority in parts of the West, sovereignty, excuse me, limited sovereignty.
It won't be a state, but they'll have limited sovereignty inside parts of the West Bank.
It's exactly like the Bantustan arrangement that the South Africans offered as this real great generosity to the blacks of South Africa, you know, I don't know, 30 years ago.
And look how that turned out.
So in other words, they don't care.
They're happy with the status quo, which is just martial law for Palestinians from now on.
Yes, they have had, well, it has been martial law in the West Bank essentially for, you know, the last 45 years since Israel won the 1967 war.
And so they've had their cake, and not only has it been a kind of martial law, but Israel has had its cake and eaten it in the sense that the Americans have never held them to account to international law.
So they've gotten away with it.
So why wouldn't they think they could continue to get away with it?
I have no idea.
Scott, do you think Chuck Hagel is going to change any of this?
No, of course not.
Okay.
I mean, look, just because Bill Kristol is hysterical about something doesn't mean he's right about anything, even from his own point of view, you know what I mean?
I mean, I don't know.
Do you think so?
To me, he's just Colin Powell.
When did Colin Powell ever stand up to anything?
Never.
Uh-huh.
Interesting.
He's just a – I mean, the way I see the Republicans is you have your – I mean, on foreign policy, you have your outright Israel firsters, and then you have your, you know, so-called Rockefeller Republican types, like Robert Gates, right?
And Hagel is a Robert Gates.
But so what?
I'm not impressed whatsoever by that.
That just means he's George H.W. Bush, who also was an insane killer, who also did nothing about what was going on in the West Bank, among the many other horrible things that he did.
You know what I mean?
What about – excuse me – what about the fact that I believe we won't have an Iran war because of this?
Obama's saying we're not going to go to war against Iran.
Well, I think – I agree with you, but I don't think it's – I think the cause and effect is different there.
My guess is that Obama has nominated Hagel to protect his right flank while he doesn't get in a war with Iran.
I like to believe, anyway – and really I'm just pretending I believe this because I like it so much – that he really does want to just settle the nuclear issue, make a deal where they can enrich up to 3.6 percent, but not 20, et cetera, et cetera, and additional protocol and whatever, and put that – the nuclear issue to rest and the threat of war with Iran to rest.
I don't know about that.
But at least if he's going to continue with the status quo of still not bombing Iran, at least it's nice to have a Republican protect his right flank on that kind of thing.
And what's his right flank?
Who's his right – who is his right flank?
Schumer?
Well, Netanyahu and the Congress.
Right.
I see.
Yeah.
I mean, because if it was up to the Congress, they would have declared war against Iran a long time ago, right?
The only – that's the real problem here is thank God we don't go by the Constitution anymore because they're worse than the presidents are.
Right, right.
Well, I mean, back to your point, I think what's going to be fascinating is that when Netanyahu's next coalition comes in, when he's – he's going to have in his government all these people who are pushing him radically right and are going to say it's time to annex the West Bank, Area C.
And when he does that, I think that Obama won't be able to oppose it personally here.
He'll say – he'll do his usual lip service against it.
But that the Europeans will go bonkers and Obama will tell the Europeans to go bonkers.
So we might have a major – I'm hoping that we're going to have a major confrontation between the West and the right-wing Israeli government in the next six months.
I don't know.
I mean, I see your logic there.
Well, first of all, tell the people a little bit about the Jewish Home Party and what Israeli politics look like now with the upcoming elections or a few months into the future here.
Well, the election is in two weeks, and it appears that not only – that the left wing, which all the American liberal Zionists are always hoping will cast out Netanyahu, that it won't succeed in doing that.
The left wing is more fragmented than ever, and the new force to emerge on the Israeli landscape is to the right of Netanyahu.
There's a guy named Naftali Bennett whose parents were born in the United States and who moved over there after the 1967 war.
He's a former software entrepreneur.
He's young.
He's attractive.
His wife cooks in a non-kosher restaurant.
He himself is Orthodox.
And he's a radical rightist.
You know, he says there should never be a Palestinian state, and he leads this Jewish Home Party.
And it looks like that's going to be a major part of Netanyahu's coalition, that the Jewish Home Party, which is a revival of an old party, that has never pulled that many seats in the Knesset, the parliament from which the ruling coalition is drawn, the Jewish Home Party could get, you know, 10 or 15 seats.
And so you have this major radical force on Netanyahu's right, forcing him to the right and pushing him to want to annex the West Bank.
So you're getting these – I mean, I always liken the situation over there to American slavery in the 1850s, when these compromises, historical compromises, that failed again and again were achieved.
The compromises were achieved, and then they were demolished, just ignored.
People continued to spread slavery.
They didn't – the compromises were just overridden by the hunger for more slaves.
And so in this case, the historic compromises have just been overridden by these people who want more land.
And just as in the 1850s it ended very badly, I think we're headed for some pretty awful confrontations over there.
And they want – the other thing these people who are annexing the West Bank want, they want more than anything, is violent confrontation with the Palestinians.
Because in a violent confrontation with Palestinians, the Israelis know just what to do.
They shoot Palestinians.
And they talk about the security threat that Palestinians represent.
And then they come crying to the West and say, look what these people do.
They rise up against us.
They're terrorists.
We have no choice but to attack them.
Well, I mean, and that's the thing, is they don't really risk losing the support of the West at all, right?
I mean, it seems to me if Netanyahu wanted to do an Andrew Jackson and just force march every Arab, Christian, or Muslim out of the West Bank or force it into Egypt and Jordan, across the river, let them drown in it, whatever.
Still, what's Barack Obama going to do about it?
Nothing.
He's not going to do anything about that.
What, he's going to not give them aid anymore?
He's going to not give them helicopters and F-16s anymore?
Please.
I guess that's where I – I mean, I'm just much more of a – well, you know I'm an East Coast liberal.
Did you know that, Scott?
Yeah, sure.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, I've read a lot of your old stuff nowadays.
Okay.
No, but I think that I'm just more of an East Coast liberal in that sense, in the sense that I have this kind of hopeful view that progress is being made, that Hegel represents progress, that there is slowly – these guys are developing some spine, and know that they won't be able to get away with that.
That's my hope, and certainly that Europe will go crazy.
I mean, look, this is not going to end happily.
I don't think this is – I mean, I pray for a peaceful solution.
God knows.
But I just don't see – when you have people who are as fascistic as some members of this government and as crazy and as racist as just almost every – I mean, racism is pervasive in that government, it's just not going to end well.
But I don't think that that dare that you just described, I don't think they'll get away with it.
I think that finally the West will say we've had enough.
Well, I sure would hope so, and I ain't trying to dare them to try it or anything like that.
I just – I don't see Obama having that much spine really on anything.
But then again, I mean, Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, they haven't dared try it yet, so I guess they are feeling that pressure, at least from Europe.
But, you know, you mentioned Area C. That would be C's and what's left, right?
But that's the quote, right, from that video of Benjamin Netanyahu talking about how he basically BS'd Bill Clinton and ran out the clock on Bill Clinton trying to pursue a solution to this problem back in the year 2000.
And he said, oh, the American people, they're easily moved.
It's absurd, he said.
Right.
In other words, he – and in fact what he was talking about was, oh, see, the secret is Area C means whatever I want it to mean.
It means all of the West Bank, if that's what I say.
And that's what I got Bill Clinton to fall for because of what a tool he is.
And he's just laughing and mocking us, but I'm just saying, geez, isn't he right?
I mean, come on.
Right.
Okay, so let's say you're right, Scott, which I'm – you know, I take your point.
Let's say you're right.
How does it end?
I mean, that's not a – you and I both know that that's not a stable – that does not create – if they take Area C and these people are in bantustans with limited sovereignty and continuing – that is not – Hillary Clinton, our favorite political leader, would say that's not sustainable.
The status quo is not sustainable.
Right.
Well, I agree with you.
I don't know what would happen.
I mean, this whole thing, as we were talking about a little while back, is it all just seems suicidal to me.
I try to put myself in the position of the political leaders in Israel, and what they think is smart I think is stupid in virtually every case.
I mean, I just don't know what in the hell they're thinking other than, well, I'm a big, tough guy and you have to do what I say, but it never works out, does it?
Right, and I think that to study this, to understand it, you really have to – you've got to be sitting up late at night reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or something.
I mean, they are behaving – this is out of history books.
The way that they're behaving is just so nuts.
It's assuring their destruction because they are going to end up with full-on apartheid, and the boycott, divestment, and sanction movement around the world is just going to continue to grow and grow and grow as more people say, screw these people.
This is disgusting what they're doing, and it's going to create more and more instability across the region.
And it will continue to create that instability.
Right, and blow back for Americans, too.
But now, okay, now this is sort of a minor point, but I'm just curious.
Can you illustrate the differences between the Jewish Home Group and the Yisrael Betanu, exactly what the translation is?
I'm not sure.
Israel, our home, I guess, is the party of the former foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and I guess I was to understand that they were right-wing nationalists but secularists, not really the religious right.
And I wonder how different is the Jewish Home Party from that?
You know, it's a little above my pay grade, that question.
No, really, I wish I knew in an expert way.
I don't.
I just know what I've read in the papers, and it's pretty much what you say, that this other group was more secular nationalist, and they have merged with Likud, which is Netanyahu's party, and meanwhile this more religious group has risen on the right.
I mean, it's just, the thing that's amazing about this is it really is degrees of radicalization and just extremism.
Right, because Kadima is what passes for the left now, right?
And that's Sharon's party.
Right, exactly.
And the thing about Kadima is that apparently, this is a party that used to have like 30 seats.
It had the biggest block in the Knesset, and it may dissolve in the next year or so.
There may be nothing left of it.
So we're really seeing a radicalization of that society.
When I was on the – actually, the most important thing I can tell you is the last time I was in Jerusalem, I went up to people on the street to ask them what they thought of Netanyahu, and if there was any way he was going to go.
And I met all these leftists, you know, quote-unquote leftists, who said that they liked Netanyahu.
He's a strong leader.
And they would repeatedly refer to two things.
They would say what the changes in the region, the Arab Spring makes – you know, I would say just what you were saying.
I said, Olmert says this is unsustainable, that your society is committing suicide, you're creating apartheid, that you have to have a two-state solution to save the Jewish state.
They said, yeah, I believe what Olmert says, but we just can't make peace with the Palestinians.
They're divided.
It's never going to happen.
We just have to live with the situation as it is.
And changes in the region, the Arab Spring, scare the bejesus out of me.
And so in that situation, you have these kind of secular liberals who are Jews living in a Jewish state, in ethnocracy, who are just terrified and therefore are giving power to this pretty radical right-wing guy, Netanyahu.
And it just, to me, it undermines – it just reminds us of what is wrong with Zionism.
When you set up a polity based on religious citizenship at some level, there's a higher form of citizenship if you're Jewish.
If you set that system up and there's racism throughout, you are just creating a machine that will get more and more extreme the more opposition it faces.
And you've gone from these kind of socialist Zionists that everyone found warm and fuzzy back in the 40s to these kind of radical right, fascistic, land-grabbing racists.
And it's just – it's horrifying to watch.
It sounds like Israel is sort of stuck in America 2002, right?
That's a good point.
Did you ever see that movie – I'm sure you did – the movie Defamation?
Yeah, I did.
I liked it.
Yeah, it's really good.
I highly recommend it to everybody out there.
And it basically just shows – well, like that.
Like America was in 2002, 2003, where everybody's afraid.
Everybody supports the right-wing nationalist.
And you're a traitor if you're not in on the consensus.
And everybody's scared to death for really no reason at all.
That's basically Israel all the time, right?
And so no wonder they make such bad decisions all the time.
Yeah, it's fear.
It's fear.
Fear just drives these people, and they're isolated.
And the more isolated they get, the more fearful they are.
And they just don't understand.
It ain't going to work.
I mean, one thing that's funny is you hear the liberals now saying, well, the only thing that we can save our coalition is if we got the Arabs to vote, the 20 percent of the population that's Palestinian.
We get them to vote, and then we can form a coalition.
Well, hey, if you want Palestinians to vote, vote to all the Palestinians.
And that way you could really overcome the right wing.
It's kind of like let's have democracy, folks.
Right.
Yeah, it's like they always say.
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.
Yeah, well, that's because America is always supporting every dictatorship because if they have democracies, they'll work against Israel instead of for it.
Right, right.
They're our only ally in the Middle East, whereas before we had no enemies in the Middle East at all.
Now we have nothing but enemies except business.
And, Scott, when did you figure that out?
I'm just curious.
Oh, I don't know.
Over the years at some point.
You know, Eric Margulies, his mother was a groundbreaking investigative journalist, the first female journalist to travel alone throughout the Middle East after World War II and report on all of these kinds of things.
And he likes to explain how everyone in the Middle East just loved Americans to death.
We were the ones who proved that you can kill the British and win and be free.
And so it didn't matter if we looked like the British or not over here mostly.
It was we were, you know, the light of liberty.
We don't need to go abroad seeking monsters to destroy.
We kill them with our silent example, that kind of thing.
They loved us until Harry Truman and until Israel and until we had to basically stab everyone else in the back.
Right, right.
I mean, and we promised, Roosevelt promised, we will consult you to the Saudis.
We will consult you before we do anything with Palestine.
They did not consult the Arab neighbors.
And look what's happened.
And the State Department said there's going to be endless war.
There's been endless war.
It's kind of simple.
All right, now one last thing here before I let you go, and I know you've got to go, but I wanted to ask you briefly here about the Hegel thing.
It seems so obvious, the controversy over Hegel, and it's so obvious it's all about Iran, and it's so obvious that it's all about what Israel wants America's policy to be as far as dealing with the Iranians.
And I wonder whether, especially now that Obama has gone ahead and nominated him, and he is a former senator, I mean, they've got to confirm him, right?
So I just wonder whether, you know, it seems like from Bill Kristol's point of view, it's not supposed to be that obvious that everything that he thinks is because he puts Israel first.
You know what I mean?
That's supposed to be only a terrible, bigoted accusation and not the obvious truth, but it seems like the neocons have just played their last card here.
They've made it so obvious, and I wonder whether you think, well, it's too much to hope for, right, that this is the neocons' last stand.
But isn't the lobby overplaying their hand here on Hegel and Iran right now?
Yeah, I think they are, but, see, that's where I'm a progressivist, and I thought you were, you know, this is where I, yeah, I think you're right.
Well, you know, I'm a hypocrite.
I think lots of contrary things all the time just trying to figure it out, you know.
I mean, it does seem like they— I'm an optimist is what I mean.
I agree with you.
I think they've overplayed their hand.
I think that that's what I want this to turn into.
I would love a Donnybrook about Israel.
There's nothing better for the American public than to see a Donnybrook about Israel, than to have Elliott Abrams going out and saying, this guy, decorated Vietnam War veteran, is an anti-Semite, which is what he believes.
Abrams believes that.
And then we have a discussion of what Hegel's actual attitudes are towards Jews and towards Israel, and we see that he's not an anti-Semite.
Maybe he's critical of Israel.
Well, that's not anti-Semitism.
And so I would like to have that conversation openly so Americans can say, hey, you know, you're not an anti-Semite if you don't like what Israel is doing, and darn it, I don't like it.
And I think that they have overplayed their hand.
I think they're going to lose, and I think that's why the Israel lobby, the big branches of it like AIPAC, are going to steer clear of this.
That's it.
If they can dig up stuff, I think with their right hand they're going to steer clear.
They don't want Hegel.
They're afraid of Hegel.
They want a military option on the table for Iran.
And so undercover I think a lot of these lobby organizations are going to be trying to dig as much stuff up as they can on Hegel, and if they could finally get something that would stick, then AIPAC would join in and say, we find this highly disturbing.
You know, we have to come out against him.
They want to destroy Hegel, but I think that they've been neutralized for the time being, the mainstream lobby.
And the neocons might just get hung out to dry on this.
Well, you know, Justice Armando thinks that the last straw for a lot of American support, maybe not the government and D.C., but, you know, among the American people, that the last straw is going to be the deportation of all these refugees, that it's such a Jim Crow type white supremacy thing going on there in Israel right now that, I mean, assuming that gets any attention on CNN whatsoever, that could really be problematic.
Like you said, you're an East Coast liberal.
This is not the kind of policy that you would support, I wouldn't guess.
Right, but that goes across the board with Israeli policies.
And the East Coast liberals say, oh, it's a great democracy.
Now who's the cynic?
Yeah, I know.
Well, you got me.
All right, Phil, you're the best.
Thanks so much for joining on the show.
Thanks a lot.
Happy New Year.
You too.
Everybody, that's the great Philip Weiss.
Mondoweiss.net is his great blog, and he's got Andy Robbins and Adam Horowitz, but another one and many other great writers there at Mondoweiss.net.
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