Welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our first guest today is Philip Weiss, author of the Mondo Weiss blog at philipweiss.org.
He's the author of American Taboo, A Murder in the Peace Corps, and has written for the New York Observer, The Nation, The American Conservative, The National Review, Washington Monthly, New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Harper's, Jewish World Review, and other places.
He's got a new article that I think was the spotlight on antiwar.com yesterday, Looking Into the Lobby in the American Conservative magazine.
Welcome to the show, Philip.
Hey, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
How are you?
I'm pretty good.
Well, I'm really glad to have you on here.
Thank you.
I've been a fan of your blog for a while now, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to finally speak with you.
Great.
You're of great value to me in that you're one of the only people, there are very few, I guess, relatively speaking, in American media who are willing to use what George Carlin calls simple, honest, direct language to discuss the very touchy issue of the influence of the Israeli government and the American Israel lobby in determining American foreign policy, and the origins of the neoconservative movement, and all of these kinds of things.
Great.
Thank you.
Well, sure.
You're welcome.
Actually, I'm not sure exactly how to discuss some of these kinds of things myself.
I'm a little bit Jewish.
My mom's mom was a Russian Jew, and so that makes me Jewish technically, I guess, even though I wasn't raised that way.
But I guess I like to think that I'm at least Jewish enough that it's okay for me to talk about the Israel lobby without being called anti-Semite and Smyrna and whatever.
I think if my mom's mom wasn't Jewish, I would be probably a lot more hesitant to even talk about the Israel lobby or even the policies of the government of Israel the way that I do on this show.
I sort of feel like I need that protection sort of thing.
That's fascinating.
Yeah.
I see what you're...
I mean, part of it is that Jews have historically been oppressed and have been persecuted.
I mean, many people on the face of this planet have been persecuted.
Jews are one of them.
But that history of persecution makes people very hesitant to even describe Jews as being empowered.
Right.
And see, the thing is, Jews are a very small minority of the population in America, and that's the age-old canard, right, is the undue amount of influence by this small group of people.
And that's the other thing, too, is the definition of people as groups, where it's somehow kind of...
You know, you and I are supposed to have this magic telepathy or whatever, where we agree on things even though we don't know each other.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Well, I mean, the thing is that, you know, if you read...
I'm Jewish, too, you know, and that, I think, is an important element of what I write about, because I identify as a Jew.
I'm very...
I'm intermarried, but I think of things from a very Jewish perspective.
I grew up in a very strong Jewish household.
And if you read the history of Zionism and the history of Israel, you see that American Jewish support was essential to Israel.
And in those same books, one of the things that they say over and over again, the supporters of Israel, we need to use Jewish influence, pressure, and money to ensure the security of the State of Israel.
Those are their words.
And when anyone who's critical of Israel uses those same words, you know, you're an anti-Semite and you want to exterminate Jews, or serve...
And that's not the case for me, anyway.
I'm not an anti-Semite.
I think Jewish power is a great thing, it's part of the diversity of this society.
But with respect to Israel, it's problematic.
Well, and the lack of honesty in the debate, I think, and this is something that you write about on your blog often, you have a new one there about Chris Matthews, and how it's impossible for this guy to just outright speak in English about the subject.
Yeah.
I mean, I love Matthews.
Matthews is a great journalist who knows politics better than anyone, and on this issue, he just is always tongue-tied about the fact that Jews play an important part in the political process, which, you know, pro-Israel Jews are doing right now on this Iran stuff.
Is it in our interest to let, you know, Israel go off and bomb Iran right now?
What's it going to do to the price of oil?
What's it going to do to peace in the Middle East?
To our soldiers in Iraq.
To our soldiers in Iraq, right.
And you know, Israel has been in a cycle of violence with its Arab neighbors since, you know, before Israel, since the 1920s, when Arabs opposed Jewish immigration in Palestine.
What's the cycle of violence that they chose, at some level, to participate in?
Do Americans have to also choose to be in that cycle of violence?
I think that is really the central, you know, kind of issue for me here.
Sure.
And having the actual choice, I mean, if this is even supposedly a democracy and all that, to have, say for example, the Iraq War, which most Americans probably still can't really put their finger on what that war was about, but the vast majority of them have no idea really about the neoconservative influence and the centrality of Israel to their foreign policy.
Absolutely.
And you know, the thing is that this is the one way in which the left has tended to serve the neoconservatives, by protecting them from that conversation, by saying, it's all about oil.
You know, it may well be about oil for Dick Cheney and for Rumsfeld.
I'm not completely sure.
I mean, those guys are black boxes.
But for the neoconservatives, Israel was central to their thinking, has always been central to their thinking, and surely played a role in their plans for this war.
Even saying that one reason we're going to war is because Saddam Hussein has been funding terrorism, Palestinian terrorists going into pizza parlors in Tel Aviv.
Wait, that's not my cycle of violence.
And that's a confusion and a conflation that the neocons have made again and again of Israel's interest with the United States.
Well, and you know, in this whole war on terrorism, from my point of view, and I guess I could be wrong, but it seems like the interests of Israel and America are in fact exactly opposite, that it's American support for Israel, that, well, I don't know, you know, Osama bin Laden always ranted about, I guess he talked about Palestine too, but mostly talked about the bases in Saudi Arabia, but in the book Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott, the LA Times reporter, about the hijackers themselves, as they sat in Germany fuming, what they were fuming about was American support for the Israeli occupation.
Wow, Scott, I did not know that.
And I will go get that book, because that has been a central point for me, is how, what is the pool of fury that the terrorists have been able to draw on against the United States?
And it stems from the fact that Israel is occupying portions of Palestine.
That's what's fueling a lot of this rage.
You know, some of it also is just this whole clash of civilizations.
How much of that is a bill of goods that we've been sold in order to side with Israel?
And one of the things that I try to do in my blog, and that I think that other progressive Jews do, is to try to distinguish between being really pro-Zionist or ultra-Zionist, and being able to criticize Israel, a country that has some real human rights issues in the way it treats its minorities.
And you know, even a Scottish-descended redneck from Alabama ought to be able to discuss Israel critically without being smeared personally.
Absolutely, especially when American blood and treasure is being expended, you know, in part because of protecting Israel's security.
I think that's where, you know, I really think that the taboo is being broken.
You know, you're breaking it, I'm breaking it, Chris Matthews might not be breaking it, but he will be for long.
I really am hopeful here, because the issue is too central to our politics to be ignored continually.
And I think there is some positive movement there.
Well, you know, my friend Angela, who helps produce this show, she was raised, she's a Jew, and she was raised in New York City, and completely surrounded by the libertarian movement and the neoconservative movement, and all the different magazines and all these things.
And so she is so well-versed in this history, and she talks about how the libertarians and the neoconservatives are kind of cousins.
And in some ways, they shared some ideological principles and things like that, but for the most part diverged over war, particularly, and other issues.
In both cases, what you have are sort of different social classes of Catholics and Jews.
In both cases, sort of rebelling against the WASP establishment, of course.
The libertarian movement is founded all by Catholics and Jews, and the neoconservative movement as well.
That's fascinating.
I don't know.
I didn't know that about libertarians.
I haven't really studied that movement, although what you're saying rings true.
It's certainly true of the neoconservatives that there was a lot of class resentment in their rise.
But they also, you know, in terms of their politics, they were almost all Democrats, and then as soon as the Democratic Party suggested that it wasn't going to have a strong military, Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, the grandfathers of this movement, they went Republican.
Why?
Because they said, back in the 70s, a strong American military is needed to protect Israel.
They were open about that then, because they just worked at little magazines.
Little did they know their sons would actually be in government positions.
And now, that's one of the problems with the neocons, is that the things that they could be honest about when they were working at little magazines, they're not being honest about when they actually are in government.
And that's really been confusing to the Scots-Irish, you know, defendant in Alabama, or the black defendant, or the Jewish, you know, whoever.
Our journalism has not served us here.
It hasn't openly discussed this kind of stuff.
Well, and you know, the punishment for stepping out of line, if you're the kind of person who has power, I mean, you know, freedom is another word for nothing left to lose and all that.
Right.
What are you going to do to me?
I work for antiwar.com for a couple of hundred bucks a week, you know what I mean?
Right.
But when somebody like John Mearsheimer comes out, who's, I guess, was, maybe still is considered the dean of the realist foreign policy school at the University of Chicago there, and they've basically called this guy a Nazi and almost destroyed his career.
Maybe they did.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't think they can destroy John's career.
But it's interesting what you're saying, because, you know, here's a guy who, you know, and this is one of the things I report on my blog, he was on the New York Times op-ed page a dozen times more than that over the last 15 years.
He supported the Gulf War in 91, which lefties like I, like me, were against.
Well, you know, suddenly he decides that the Israel lobby is central to this.
He has not been on the op-ed, and he opposed the Iraq War.
He hasn't been on the Times op-ed page for, you know, five years more.
And so this guy has been, has hit the third rail.
And why did he hit the third rail?
Because he opposed the Iraq War, and because he raised the question of the Israel lobby's influence.
So here's, the New York Times can't deal with that.
That, this really suggests how screwed up our discourse is.
And, you know, you'd have in, you know, places like the Washington Post, right?
You would see Colin Powell say, yeah, they set up a separate government over there, talking about the neocon vice-presidential cabal there, and that kind of thing.
So you get little bits and pieces of this all the time, but you never get, you know, all right, here's what happened.
You have to go to James Bamford's book or something for that.
Yeah.
You know, but Scott, I do think that the knowledge of this is becoming so, you know, there is a lot of knowledge about this out there.
The internet is serving us.
When you look at this stuff that we write or talk about, you know, we're not crazy.
We're trying to understand why our country made this huge disaster.
And I think that knowledge is leaking out.
And this summer, a guy named Steve Snagoski is publishing a book called The Transparent Cabal about the neoconservatives that expands this understanding.
I think it's leaking out there, and it's just, I'm an optimist.
I think it's going to break out, and it's not going to break out with persecution of Jews.
I think it's going to break out in terms of a discussion of whether America's interests and Israel's interests are identical, and of course they're not identical.
Well, and you know, it's funny because, I mean, I don't know exactly the numbers on this one, but presumably most American Jews care a lot about Israel, but it was, last I saw, 70-something percent of American Jews are opposed to the policy in Iraq and the policy in Gaza and the West Bank as well.
I think those numbers are accurate, but it's a little more complicated because, and I'm very engaged with the Jewish community on this question, Jews in America tend to be very conservative about Israel.
So 60 percent of them, roughly, are for not dividing Jerusalem.
You know, here's this ancient city, home to three great religions, that the UN, when it divided Palestine and created the state of Israel 60 years ago, the UN said, Jerusalem must belong to everyone, it's an open city.
No, now it's controlled by Israel and the Jews.
Well, most American Jews support that, and that is a basic conservatism on the part of American Jews that I'm very engaged with.
Although, yes, you know, we are a very liberal community by and large.
On some of these issues, there's a conservative streak, and that's why Obama has supported, you know, we're not going to divide Jerusalem.
You know, I was surprised to hear him say that.
I expected him to go along with all the imaginary scenarios of Iran's nuclear weapons and that kind of thing.
But I was kind of taken aback to hear him say that.
That's not official American policy, is it?
Yeah, even Bush seems to be to the left of Obama there, as Bush is to the left on Israeli colonization of the West Bank.
I think official American policy is that we want to see some, you know, a capital in East Jerusalem for the new Palestinian state, but there's a lot of vagueness in that.
And you know, here is where I have spoken openly about Jewish money in the political process, and Cy Hirsch of The New Yorker has also done that.
It does take some bravery to speak of, but it's just too important to an understanding of our politics not to see that, certainly in the Democratic Party, certainly for Hillary Clinton, the war chest tended to be very successful Jews.
And now that Obama is trying to win that group over or get more money from that group, he is, I think, piping some very hawkish lines.
I mean, him becoming a hawk, obviously he's playing to the center of the country, but part of it, too, involved appealing to that hawkish part of the Jewish community, where he can get a lot of money.
Well, and of course, the richer the donor, the more right-wing they're going to be anyway.
Yeah, that's funny.
I guess it's true, you know, and maybe we could change our politics a little, make a little more money, huh?
Yeah, it would seem like a little more peace, we'd all get rich, and then I guess we'd all become a bunch of right-wing war mongers and start the whole thing all over again.
I don't know.
That's great.
Now, help us understand the divisions in Israeli politics a little bit between those who want to just basically settle the West Bank and take the whole thing over and continue keeping the blockade against Hamas and the Gaza Strip and low-level warfare forever, versus those who actually want to do...
There was this whole land for peace thing back in the 1990s, I heard of once.
What happened to that?
Well, Scott, I have to say first, I don't know Israeli society very well.
I've been there once only.
I plan to go back this summer.
And in fact, when I was there...
But I'll tell you this, not knowing that society and its politics very well, I have certain, you know, distant perspective on it.
But one thing I noticed is when I went to the West Bank and visited a settlement, the guy who was carrying an M-16 at the guard house as I drove up with this cab into this, you know, remote hill area in northern West Bank, he had an American accent.
And there's a lot of sort of right-wing Jews from America who have helped to push this colonization movement.
Not to say that it's not a homegrown product in Israel, but it's gained support from zealots around the world.
And there is obviously a lot of zealotry in that society, and it's called on zealots.
And obviously, it's called on zealots in Arab society, and there are a lot of zealots in that society.
Is there a place for moderation in those societies?
Apparently, yes.
I mean, polls show that, you know, 60 percent of Israelis support a land-for-peace initiative, and apparently 60 percent of Palestinians, or two-thirds of Palestinians, share that view.
So the interesting development for me here is when I was at the AIPAC convention conference this year in June, the leading Israel lobby, American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, when people got up, questioners got up and said, we have a biblical right to this land.
It must never be given back.
You know, the Bible is our deed.
I heard people from AIPAC say to these questioners, that language is inappropriate to this conference.
What that reflects is the understanding that this is really a last shot for Israel.
If Olmert believes that Israel will become an apartheid society if it fails to get rid of the West Bank now, they don't want the West Bank, because there are so many Palestinians there.
They don't want to be governing Palestinians.
They want to be governing Jews.
They want to be a Jewish state.
And so realists in the Zionist community see this as sort of the land-for-peace option as really the Hail Mary.
It may be that desperate, given how many colonies now exist in that land.
But this is their way of preserving the Jewish state.
If they fail to create a Palestinian state now, it means that Israel is really going to be governing, as it has for 40 years, 3.5 million Palestinians.
And they're not very good at doing that.
And they have an apartheid structure already.
So it's really a grim picture.
And I think that there are a lot of smart and realistic Jews who want to change that.
Zionists, I would say.
I'm not sure how I feel about what the best outcome is.
Well, it seems like they tried the clean break, and that didn't really work out, right?
Yeah, well, the clean break, of course, was the neoconservative answer and Netanyahu's answer.
And now, you know, Netanyahu wants to get back in.
And that would be, you know, essentially, as I understand it, would end up meaning expelling Palestinians or, you know, hoping they move to Jordan.
So, you know, the problem with a lot of this thinking is that it belongs to the 19th century, it belongs to the era of colonialism, of the white man's burden, and, you know, it's dressed out in Holocaust righteousness, and God knows, you know, the Holocaust did create a strong moral imperative to do something for Jews, but Palestinians and Arabs have always said, why are we suffering for a European horror?
Why is Islam responsible for something that the Christian world, you know, fostered?
Right, well, and that is the thing, is because it goes back to the end of the old colonial era, anyway, before the new colonial era, and the idea basically was, well, there are a bunch of brown people, we'll just put it there and screw them.
Right, right, yeah.
I mean, just like they'd been red Indians in Massachusetts or something, I mean, that was the idea, right?
That's right.
Is we can make a colony wherever we want.
We're Europeans.
Yeah, we can get away with doing that to the red Indians 200 years ago, but, you know, history doesn't move forward, so.
One of the things that you mentioned there, in terms of Bush being to the left of Obama on the settler movement, I don't remember exactly when this was, but I guess it was early in the Bush administration, when he was trying to do one thing or another, maybe you can refresh my memory, about taking a stand against expanded settlements in the West Bank, and Tom DeLay came to the White House and said, oh no, you don't, and he was representing, of course, not necessarily AIPAC itself, but representing the Christian Zionists, the Christians United for Israel, Tom Hagee, and the Kooks, who were trying to force Jesus' hand to make him come back and end the world faster.
And Bush backed down, that's the point.
I didn't know more about that than I do, I've read about that.
You know, obviously, Christian Zionists are an important political force in American life.
How important, I don't know, I mean, I know how Jews feel about Israel, and how one issue it is to them, single issue it is to them, I question whether Christian Zionists would lay it down the way that the Jewish ones would.
But even if that's the case, it represents a tremendous transformation of American Jewish political life, where my people used to be for desegregating the South, for a lot of liberal social justice issues, and now they're teamed up with the right-wing evangelicals.
Yeah, the Jesse Helmses of the world.
Yeah, yeah.
And that means that they would have sold out a lot of their social concerns, Jews are very pro-stem cell research and pro-abortion rights in general by like 90%, they would have sold out those issues in order to make common cause over this neo-colonialist state.
You know, Jim Loeb tells the story about Irving Kristol being asked, hey man, are you sure you really want to team up with Falwell and these guys?
I guess they were buying Falwell a plane so they could go coast to coast.
And they said, man, you really want to team up with people who ultimately want Jesus to come back and kill everybody who won't convert?
I mean, what are you doing?
And he said, well, it's their theology, it's our Israel.
Interesting, interesting.
Loeb is great.
I mean, I see him as a, he's a real ally for me here.
He's, you know, he's so, he's been such a great critic of the neocons.
I've never heard that story.
That's a great story.
Yeah.
I mean, and it seems like though, you know, well, and this is Irving Kristol, so we wouldn't expect him to learn anything from his mistakes or anything like that, but, you know, it seems like there's unintended consequences to things like that.
It seems like you're talking about selling out on issues that are tangential, but we'll have to push those to the back burner because first things first now in our alliance with these kooks with their theology.
Right.
Well, you know, the thing that's also revealing about that is, is just what's central, which is, you know, what have you become when you become an ultra Zionist?
You know, you're supporting militarism, you're supporting this disdain for people of different color skin, you know, you're supporting apartheid, you're supporting denial of human rights raids on how, you know, just collective punishment targeted as, you know, the whole bill of goods is just, I think that for me was the central, what my efforts have come out of as a visit to Hebron and the West Bank and led by Jews from Israel.
And one of them of whom ran away from an exhibit we were seeing, he just said, I, all I wanted to do was vomit.
And I said to myself, if this is why, how, if, if supporting this colony, which we observed, which were they, they were throwing rocks at Arab girls trying to go to school, you know, and this is Jewish sacred land.
I said, if, if being Jewish means supporting this state and saying right or wrong, you know, I'm with them, I would hand in my Jew card, you know?
And I don't want to, and that's part of what my blog is about is fighting for a different definition of Jewishness, but that's the way it ends up, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, I don't know what I am, but I'm not, I can't support that kind of thing.
Well, I think part of the problem too, in the larger sense, when, you know, like when we're discussing the media's unwillingness to discuss these things is most Americans have absolutely no idea what it's like to be a Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza.
We just do not get that coverage at all.
Absolutely.
I mean, what you just said, throwing rocks at school girls and stuff like that, that's exactly the kind of stories that I grew up with, learning what was very wrong with the South.
Absolutely.
Absolutely, man.
I mean, that is really what you've got at, I think is probably one of the most important issues here, which is that, you know, Americans have been engaged morally on so many important struggles and mainly, I guess, the South, you know, desegregating the South, then South Africa.
And we got engaged because we got these vivid pictures.
Well, every day in occupied Palestine, there are these kind of horrors that are not reported here.
And if they were, American public opinion would change.
And if our press were halfway as honest as the Israeli press is, Israel has a wonderful press.
I mean, or a certain newspaper, I mean, it's just amazing what a light, you know, these people have been, moral light they've been in.
You know, if our press even reported half of what the Israeli press reported, I think American public opinion would really change.
You know, our press has done our leaders a great disservice here, because, you know, the Arab world sees this.
I've been, you know, I was in Israel during the Lebanon war, and at my hotel, they had Al Jazeera on.
It was a Christian Arab hotel.
And the Israelis had just killed, you know, like 36 kids with this bomb in southern Lebanon.
And, you know, all morning, it was on Al Jazeera, on the television, over and over and over again.
Now, you can say that's manipulating people, or you can say, no, that is just reporting a horror and, you know, pounding it in.
But that's the kind of images we got from the South, you know, during the 60s.
Right.
Yeah, and, you know, yeah, the media blackout is really, it's the worst part about it.
And it's funny to think that, you know, like you're saying, in this tiny little country over there, that's what, the size of New Jersey or something.
They have all this media that, where you can actually read what's going on in the world over there.
And yet, here in America, land of 300 million people, land of the First Amendment, this kind of thing is just basically unheard of in public.
How exactly does that work, anyway?
Do you know?
Yes, I think I do know, because, you know, this is about my generation of Jews, and we are very successful in the media.
We may not dominate the media, we're a large component of the media.
And by and large, and they're guys that I know, they're my friends, they're my peers.
I grew up, I mean, I'm a New York elitist.
I grew up with this crowd.
And these people are very uncomfortable with this stuff, even if they're liberals.
They know neoconservatives, they know right-wingers on Israel.
In our community, we know a lot of these people.
And you can either make the choice, as I have, to, you know what, maybe I'm not going to be friends with certain neocons.
Maybe I can't, maybe I'm going to make things uncomfortable when I go home.
My mother and I disagree about this.
We've had it out.
We continue to have it out.
You can make that choice of creating real social disruption within your own community, as I have, and as I'm sure Jim Loeb has, as Henry Siegman has, as many other Jews have.
But we tend to be isolated.
By and large, you know, there's a go-along, get-along thing within the Jewish community, and they just don't want to know about it.
They grew up with Exodus and the understanding that Israel was just this wonderful thing, that we're sort of a glory to Jewish civilization, and they just don't want to hear.
You know, it just is too troubling to them to contemplate that all this might be true.
And so what that means is that these people, many of whom have real media power, are just kind of sitting on their hands when someone like Jimmy Carter is smeared as an anti-Semite, or John Mearsheimer is smeared as an anti-Semite, or when I can't get work to write about my point of view, they think that's fine.
And so there's this just kind of, not that they're Zionists, some of them are Zionists, but it's just this kind of passivity, and it is a reflection of Jewish-American culture in that respect.
What you see is that even someone like Chris Matthews, who's not Jewish, defers to these sensitivities, as he calls them, and feels that he doesn't know that much about it.
Well, Americans ought to learn about this.
All Americans should learn about this.
Sure.
Well, and Matthews, of course, does know all about this.
He was one of the guys who actually did talk about the neoconservatives in specific before the war.
You're right.
You're right.
Well, he knew in far between, but he said enough that we knew he knew what was going on.
Yeah.
And, Scott, he mentioned the Israel thing then, too, right?
The Israel agenda, I think.
Yeah.
He asked, I think it was Richard Perle that he said, you know, to what degree is this clean break?
Or maybe that was actually even Tim Russert that asked Perle about the clean break, now that I think about it.
Really?
Well, so tell me about the future of the Israel lobby here.
I know there's this new thing called J Street.
As someone who thinks that America should have no entangling alliances with anybody and that Israel ought to be on their own as much as Mozambique or any other country that's not in America's interest, is J Street headed toward a non-interventionist future at all?
Or maybe one that, I guess, just leans a little bit more liberal than AIPAC, or what's the deal with that?
You know, I don't know.
I mean, I think J Street's a very hopeful sign.
I'm very pleased that it exists, because what I guess I've indicated throughout this conversation is that I think Jewry itself, American Jewry, which has so much power in American society, it needs to reform.
It needs to open up.
So J Street is a sign of that.
I was somewhat dismayed that J Street didn't really criticize Obama when he called for an undivided Jerusalem.
So there are some ways in which I think J Street is not exercising enough independence.
What I've called for, and I think will happen, it's just inevitable, is that within the Jewish community there will be a great debate, a soul-searching, about why we protected these neoconservatives.
Why we didn't dime them out, as you and I are diming them out right now.
Why we didn't dime out their agenda at the start of this.
And the Jewish community will have to come to terms with it.
I think, I'm an optimist, and I think that the American South, the desegregation movement, is a great example, and it's an inevitable example, that the sort of call of human freedom is just the loudest call here, and that Americans will before long begin to see Arabs as human beings.
And it's just inevitable.
But I think part of that will be reforms within the Jewish community, of which J Street is an important symptom.
Well that's good, yeah, I guess I always believed in that whole free market of ideas and that kind of thing.
The more open the debate, the better.
So are you optimistic?
Well on this particular thing, whether there will be more debate on this issue, yeah, I think it's looking up, the fact that Joe Klein was smeared as an anti-Semite in the pages of commentary, and everybody just laughed at that, I mean, how can you call Joe Klein an anti-Semite?
Wow, that's great.
That doesn't make any sense at all.
I mean, so I think the accusation is beginning to fall a little flatter, and I hope that more and more people will partake in the debate.
That's great.
It is unfortunate though, and I've noticed this on your blog too, it's hard to have a debate about this without attracting a bunch of neo-Nazis swine, I mean, what are you going to do?
I know, and you know, the thing is that it's upsetting to me that I do that, that I do attract that, you know, or that David Duke is putting me on his site, linking me on his site, and at the same time I think, you know what, this man has no power over me, I don't feel threatened by anti-Semites in America, I have to say what I believe is true.
And I think that right now, you know, you have to look at every period of history where we are right now, you know?
Right.
Well, that's really good of you, man, that's actually courage to find.
And you know, speaking of where we are right now, the Israelis are trying to hold talks with the Syrians about making peace and giving up the Golan Heights, and during all this drum beating for war with Iran and all that, it sort of seems like at least some parts of power in Israel are trying to work things out over there.
Right, and I agree, and part of it is also understanding how much is Israel locked in a kind of a regional power struggle with Iran.
How much of this is just mow-mowing each other, that, you know, they're the two regional superpowers, Iran and Israel, of course they're going to be opposed to one another, that's the way it works, it's like the Soviet Union and the United States.
And um...
It's not about nukes, we know that!
I mean, that's really, you know, the thing to me is that, I'm really curious about this really.
I can't...
I mean, I understand, as you're saying, two major regional powers, but it seems like Israel ought to be able to deal with Iran as a regional power, seeing as everybody knows they're not making nuclear weapons.
What really is the big deal?
Well, you know, it's interesting that at the, remember when, right at the same time that they took our hostages in, what, 79?
Well I was three, and I remember well though, yeah, go ahead.
Okay.
At that same time, Iran was calling Israel a tumor that had to be cut out of the Middle East, in its public statement.
And the United States, of course, hated Iran because they'd taken our hostages, and Israel at the same time was telling the United States, no, no, no, no, no, don't alienate Iran.
So the rhetoric was at one level, and at that time Israel was playing footsie with Iran because it was opposed to Iraq.
You know, there's just this counter, the rhetoric is at one level, and at the other are these real kind of regional battles for power and influence.
And Iran has obviously been hugely empowered by our destruction of Iraq.
And Israel isn't like that.
I mean, it's hard for me to read all this.
I don't quite understand it, but I think that it's important for Americans to look at what is our best interest.
You know, where's the price of oil?
Where are our soldiers right now?
Who's going to get hurt if they, you know, go ahead and bomb Iran?
I mean, as you pointed out, look at all the American soldiers who are vulnerable to Iranian attack.
Well, I guess I like to think, and I know there have been a couple of examples of this, I like to think that, well, as you're saying, that the real policy actually is a much more peaceful one.
I know that it was leaked, I believe this wasn't really a public statement, but it came out that the foreign minister, Zippy Livni, or however you say her name, said that, oh, we, you know, Iran doesn't have nukes and they're not making nukes, but even if they did have nukes, we could live with that anyway.
Really?
Interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was in Haaretz.
Fascinating.
And you know, Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek has said, we can live with a nuclear Iran.
John Mearsheimer said, we can live with a nuclear Iran.
Why aren't we hearing from these people on television?
I don't know that I agree with them, but, because I don't understand nuclear policy especially, but I would, God knows I'd like to hear from those voices right now, rather than someone who says we have to dash that society to bits.
I mean, look, Israel got its nukes in the 60s, that created enormous instability.
Some say the 67 war began because Israel wanted to become a nuclear nation.
And, you know, Noam Chomsky's answer on all this is, hey, denuclearize the whole region.
And I guess that's where I am on this one.
Why can't we wind down the rhetoric and get, you know, if Israel really wants to make progress here, why don't they get rid of some of their nukes?
Sounds reasonable, but I guess you can't be a regional hegemon with no nukes.
That's true.
That's a good point.
Right.
All right.
Well, hey, listen, I really appreciate all that you do and the honesty that you bring to this debate.
It's a debate without much honesty most of the time, so I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Hey, thank you.
And, you know, annawar.com, I love it, man.
Oh, great.
Well, thank you.
Okay.
I'll pass that on to the boys, too.
Okay, great.
All right, everybody, that's Philip Weiss.
He's the author of American Taboo, A Murder in the Peace Corps.
He's written for the New York Observer, The Nation, The American Conservative.
His blog is Mondoweiss, that's philipweiss.org, one L in philipweiss.org, and the new one in The American Conservative is called Looking Into the Lobby.
You can find that if you just click more viewpoints on the front page of annawar.com.
