04/30/13 – Phyllis Bennis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is scothorton.org.
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And sorry, Phyllis, for leaving you on hold there.
Phyllis Bennis is next up on the show.
She's a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
She's the author of Challenging Empire.
How People, Governments, and the U.N. Defy U.S. Power.
And she's got this piece at Al Jazeera, Challenging Einstein Carries New Diplomacy in the Middle East.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Great to be with you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
A very important piece here.
I really hope people will go and take a look at it again at aljazeera.com, Challenging Einstein.
And it's about our new Secretary of State.
Actually, aljazeera.net, sorry.
Oh, it's actually both now.
The fraudulent Al Jazeera at .com has finally surrendered the domain name, apparently.
Oh my God, okay.
So yeah, it's either way, I believe.
Same address.
There you go.
But yeah, you're right.
There was a fake Al Jazeera for a long, long time there at .com.
All right.
Now, so this is about our new Secretary of State, John Kerry, and his newly taking up the cudgels of the peace process there in Palestine.
And basically, you're asking me to not expect too much.
So I guess I'll ask you, why are they even bothering with this?
Why do they keep making an issue out of Israel-Palestine ever since day one of the Obama administration?
They have made such a big issue out of this, and then refuse to do anything about it at all.
Phyllis, I don't understand.
Well, it is a very big issue.
The real question is your second one.
Why haven't they done anything about it?
We keep hearing about, oh my God, Obama is pressuring Israel.
Oh my God, he's throwing Israel under a bus.
Well, there was no bus.
There was no pressure.
Right.
No.
The real question for Kerry is, what's he thinking?
He's somebody who knows this issue well, you know, from his 28 years, whatever it was, on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chairing it for the last God knows how long.
He knows this stuff.
He knows that the Arab Peace Initiative, which is his latest thing, this is what's new.
He says, well, we're going to go back to the Arab Peace Initiative from 2002.
Well, that's kind of interesting.
That talks about what the part you'll hear from Kerry, the part you'll hear from the U.S., is normalizing relations between Israel and all the Arab states.
That means trade, diplomatic relations, everything.
And declaring once and for all an end to the conflict, meaning once this is decided, nobody gets to come back and say, well, there's this other issue we didn't resolve.
So that's all good.
The problem for Israel and the problem, therefore, for the United States is that it says that all that only happens once Israel has fully withdrawn, fully, the word is full withdrawal, from all the territories it occupied in 1967, meaning all of the West Bank, all of Gaza and all of Arab East Jerusalem.
So all those 600,000 or so settlers, they have to, what, either leave or become Palestinian citizens, because if we're going to have two states, which is, once again, the U.S. line, it's always said as one word, two-state solution with swaps, two-state solution with swaps.
Which means a two-state solution, which everybody agrees isn't really possible anymore, given what's happened with the settlements, but we'll have, quote, swaps.
So in other words, they're saying, let's do the Saudi peace plan, where you guys abide by your side of the Saudi peace plan, but our side completely changes into we get to do whatever we want.
Yeah, we're going to kinker with the Saudi peace plan, and we're going to say that the Arab states have to give Israel everything the original Saudi peace plan called for, meaning normalization, but we're going to just tweak it just a little bit.
We're not really changing anything, but we're just tweaking a little bit.
So we'll put on this issue of, quote, swaps, and we'll say that both sides have to agree, which means both sides have a veto.
So the Palestinians don't have to agree to it, and the Israelis don't have to agree to it, and there's no reason the Israelis should, because we go back to the pressure, the bus.
There is no bus.
There is no pressure.
There's no reason in the world that Israel should say, oh, well, I guess the U.S. is more serious this time around.
I guess we better think about doing something to end the settlements, at least freeze the settlement.
No, no reason in the world they should do that.
The other part of the Kerry announcement was that there was going to be this four-country summit.
Well, that's always good.
You know, summits put pressure on, the press all go, and then they want a story.
So there's all kinds of pressure that comes from a summit.
But what a surprise.
You know, you may have noticed, Scott, you heard that about two weeks ago, the same time that Kerry started talking about the Arab Peace Initiative, he was talking about this four-party summit.
But you know what?
We haven't heard anything about it since then, because guess what?
The Israelis said, oh, no, we don't think so.
We're not going to any summit with all these Arabs.
And that's the end of that.
So we haven't heard any more about it.
So the big question we come back to, and I don't know the answer, is what are they thinking?
What's their deal?
You know, why do they think that just putting it all back on the agenda is somehow going to change the scenario without changing anything about what the U.S. is willing or not willing to do to pressure its key ally?
So as long as we're continuing to pay that $30 billion agreement that we have with Israel, to pay them for straight military aid, and Obama has now said that he's going to raise that for the next 10 years, beyond $30 billion, he wants to get it up to something like $37 billion.
As long as they're doing that and nobody's touching it, as long as they're continuing to support Israel in the United Nations and make sure that Israel is never held accountable for any potential violations of international law, any war crimes, anything, why should the Israelis change?
You know, the request can come as often as we like.
Please stop building settlements.
Answer?
No.
Pretty please stop building settlements?
No.
And then they stop asking.
You know, when we'll start seeing a different answer, this is the old Einstein theory.
You know, Einstein's theory of the definition of insanity was to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.
What will challenge the Einstein theory, what will make it a different question, is when the U.S. says, please stop building settlements, the Israelis say no, and the U.S. answer then is okay, you're an independent country, you can do what you want, but you know that $30 billion we're paying you in military aid?
You can kiss that goodbye.
And you know the $37 billion or so that we're going to be promising you for the next 10 years?
We're not doing that.
And you know how we always protect you at the U.N. so you're never really held accountable for anything you might do?
Nope, we're not doing that anymore either.
That's what pressure begins to look like.
That's when we might see a different response, because we might have been doing something different.
So far, we're not seeing it.
I can certainly agree that if you were president, then we would see some real changes in Israeli policy.
If I was president, we'd have some serious problems, let's not even go there.
But you know, M.J., and I'm just, this is just in the realm of fantasy and counterfactual or whatever, I don't know, but M.J. Rosenberg said that he believed, and he had sources in Israel telling him this, that in 2009, even short of those kind of threats, that really just with the stature of George Mitchell and the bigness of the Cairo speech and all that, without threatening to withhold anything or really do anything, that they really were making Israel look and feel like they were looking bad and better do what they were told, and that Netanyahu was prepared to capitulate, and then Obama back down first, Obama blinked first.
There's no question Obama blinked first.
But I'm not so convinced that Netanyahu or anybody else in Israel thought it was going to be any different in early 2009.
I mean, I love M.J., and he has good sources, and he's a good analyst, but I'm not sure he's right on this one.
I think there may have been...
In other words, they weren't even close to giving in.
You're saying...
I don't think so.
Because I don't think there was ever a moment when they were pushed to do so.
You know, the problem with Senator Mitchell, Senator Mitchell's appointment, which as you remember, was just the first day after Obama took office, right after his inauguration.
And that seemed to bode really well for taking seriously a new Israeli-Palestinian agreement of some sort.
Here's a guy who's known for being very independent.
He's old enough.
He was, at the time, I think 76 or 77.
This was the end of his career.
He wasn't looking for, you know, what was going to be his next job and who could he not afford to piss off or something.
He could afford to be completely independent.
He was known from his work on the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.
He was known for being independent and tough.
And he also had said, very importantly, that in the Irish context, if you're serious about diplomacy, everybody has to be at the table.
You can't withhold the right to participate from anybody because you think they're a terrorist or whatever.
And he said very clearly, it's not because you have to like everybody there.
You just have to be clear that if everybody's not at the table, the supporters of the ones who are excluded are not going to feel any obligation to abide by whatever agreement you reach.
So it's not going to work.
It's a matter of pragmatism.
So we all thought, well, that sounds good.
Maybe he'll apply that to the Israel-Palestine issue.
He was never allowed to do so.
He was never given the authority, just as Hillary Clinton, in her work as Secretary of State, wasn't given the authority, whether she would have done it is a different issue.
It wasn't part of her brief.
Whether Kerry is going to be able to hold onto this after this next month or so, I think is a big question.
I think it's a very big question.
But without a clear willingness to bring pressure to bear on Israel, there's simply no reason why the Israelis should change their position.
Right.
And by the way, you pointed out that $30 billion thing.
That's the appropriation, or at least the promised appropriation for 10 years out, where the Constitution forbids the Congress from financing our own military for more than two years at a time.
We can go ahead and make promises to Israel's military 10 years out for $30 billion worth of planes and bombs.
That's a very important point, Scott.
And I think it's not only the question of the unconstitutionality of it, but it's also a question of money.
$30 billion is not jump change.
And what's incredible right now is that the pro-Israel lobbies led by AIPAC are actually on a campaign in the Congress to get members of Congress, both the House and the Senate, to agree that they will not allow the requirements of the sequester that imposes cuts of about 5% on everything across the board, the entire federal budget.
But they're claiming that while Head Start programs are being cut, and cancer care is being cut, and food aid for the elderly is being cut, that aid to the Israeli military should be sacrificed and should not be cut at all.
And what's astonishing is the chutzpah of these people in Congress, who are looking to do it.
They've actually introduced a resolution that would allow them to do just that, to exempt aid to Israel from the cuts that are being imposed across the board on all the rest of us.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, the thing of it is, too, that, and I know I can speak for the American people in general on this, unless they've decided to take a particular interest in trying to read something and sort out who's who at least a little bit, they don't know anything about the permanent occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, the siege of Gaza.
They don't.
TV will never, ever, ever tell it.
Not even a character in a TV drama will ever explain it.
Ever.
Well, you know, I would say, though, Scott, and maybe it's the hopeless optimism in me, God knows where it comes from, working on this issue, I shouldn't have any.
But I would say that the discourse in this country, including the press, has indeed changed dramatically over the last decade.
It isn't anywhere near what it needs to be to counteract the decades before of absolute false propaganda, but it is very different than it used to be.
You know, you have mainstream articles being written by mainstream journalists in mainstream papers.
The Washington Post, arguably the most pro-Israel of the major national dailies, there's a reporter on their team named Walter Pincus, good reporter, but, you know, sort of old-school, inside-the-box investigator who does the left-office federal budget, that kind of stuff.
He's written, like, five pieces over the last year, challenging the very notion of military aid to Israel.
And what's fascinating about it is, this guy doesn't fall.
It's a matter of course.
He's not getting fired.
He's not getting fired.
There's to be a reporter who's at it, complaining about it, but it's taken as a normal part of discourse now.
That's huge.
You know, we see it in the lack of ability of aides, which still have a huge amount of money to throw around and threaten members of Congress that, if they don't toe the line on Israel, they face the possibility of a very well-funded opponent next round.
But they don't, if they ever did it, bring to the table the votes of American Jews.
You know, you saw that in the elections in 2008 and 2012, when all the time leading up to the elections, you had this scenario where all the pro-Israel forces operating in the Jewish community, and those in the Christian Zionist community as well, were saying, don't vote for Barack Obama.
He's not good enough on Israel to talk on terrorism.
He's not good for Israel.
He's not good for Israel.
He's not good for Israel.
But what a surprise, at the end of the day, in 2008, 78% of American Jewish voters voted for Barack Hussein Obama.
It was slightly less in 2012, but very much the same, very close to the same proportion.
So, you know, the ability to come with the money, that's still, unfortunately, way too important in our society.
But being able to come to the table with money and votes gives you a lot more clout.
They can't do that anymore.
That's huge.
That's absolutely huge.
All right.
And I know you need to go, and we're just starting to have some phone trouble again with this thing.
So we'll have to leave it here.
But thank you so much for the great interview.
It's great to talk to you again, Phyllis.
Thank you, Scott.
It's always a pleasure.
Appreciate it.
All right.
That's Phyllis Bennis.
She's at aljazeera.com here with Challenging Einstein, Cary's new diplomacy in the Middle East.
And yes, scare quotes around new there.
Challenging Einstein.
Phyllis Bennis, of course, at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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