07/01/13 – Philip Weiss – The Scott Horton Show

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Our first guest today is Philip Weiss from the great Mondo Weiss blog.
There's a lot of other great writers there besides Phil, who you ought to read too, but he's the Mondo one.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing really great.
Appreciate you joining us again today.
Don't worry.
So John Kerry.
Yes.
Yeah, John Kerry.
And he's been over there in Israel saying, hey, guys, let's have some peace talks.
And I wonder, best you can tell, how far you think he's getting.
Well, I guess I find it amusing because he's spending a lot of energy on this.
It is really remarkable that our Secretary of State has now gone over there I think five times and really has nothing to show for it.
They haven't even sat down with each other, Netanyahu and Abbas.
So whatever Abbas's legitimacy, because his electoral mandate ran out quite a while ago, he obviously represents some strong segment of Palestinian opinion in the West Bank anyway.
Whatever his legitimacy, he's not even sitting down with Netanyahu.
And our Secretary of State is running back and forth to the Middle East to prepare these people for negotiations, to get them even to sit down.
And now they actually sat down together three years ago.
Nothing came of that.
And so I think nothing will come of this.
Secretary is very positive about it, but he's got religion on it, and there's nothing to show for it.
And I find it, frankly, a little humiliating.
Well, you know, I don't understand.
What's even the point?
I mean, they could just sit around.
Obviously, we've got to deal with Israel on some level all day, every day.
So why not just sit around threatening Iran for another four years or whatever?
Why even do this?
And Obama has done this since, what, his second day in power?
Pretend he's going to do something about Palestine and then not.
So he makes the lobby hate him, and he makes everybody who cares about the Palestinians hate him too.
Right.
I mean, I think there's been some functional element to Obama's mistakes here or misdirections, inasmuch as there has not been an attack on Iran.
I mean, that is a good thing.
And I don't think Obama wants any sort of military action against Iran.
And because of the strength of the lobby, that means throwing them a lot of bones.
So the flip side of that has been doing actually nothing to stop Israeli colonization of the West Bank.
So I think that he's sort of sacrificed the Palestinians for the sake of trying to keep the United States out of another military engagement.
That's interesting.
You know, people say that this is why Netanyahu is always screaming about Iran.
It's just to distract from Palestine.
Oh, yeah.
And I wouldn't say – it's hard to say that we're not being manipulated here.
I mean, we are openly being manipulated inasmuch as our Secretary of State is running over there five times.
But I take your point that nothing the United States has said.
I was in Cairo when Obama said the settlements must end in 2009, four years ago.
And all that's happened is that the settlements have continued.
And there are always these kind of little symbolic freezes.
There's apparently a symbolic freeze going on right now.
Well, in spite of that symbolic freeze, we see hundreds of more settlement units have been approved.
And they're moving to scrape another Bedouin village off the map.
They're trying to – they're signaling that they're going to move more and more Palestinians out of, quote-unquote, Jewish areas into cities in the occupied territories.
It just never ends.
The colonization never ends.
And some form of ethnic cleansing never ends.
Well, and, yeah, one of these new settlements is supposed to – maybe it already has – is supposed to, in effect, cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, where you'd have to go through a checkpoint now.
You wouldn't be able to just – or maybe you already had a checkpoint.
But now you'd have to go all the way, the extra long way around the settlement to get there.
Maybe you can't get there at all.
I don't know.
Yeah, well, there's a crucial piece of land between East Jerusalem and a large Israeli settlement.
All these settlements are illegal, completely illegal under international law.
You're not allowed to move, transfer civilian population into occupied territory.
And so there's this crucial piece of land between East Jerusalem, which was supposed to be the Palestinian capital, that Israel has indicated it's going to build settlements on called E1.
It's just another provocation.
The United States has said, well, this is not a good idea.
But there's never any enforcement.
There's never any enforcement.
And the New York Times today, which even the New York Times is sick of Kerry's shuttle diplomacy.
It says, what is there to show for this?
But even the New York Times, it can't ever suggest that there should be consequences for Israel's thumbing its nose at the international community and crushing the Palestinians.
Yeah.
And now, I mean, really it comes down – and everybody in D.C. knows this, right?
That the only way to actually make the settlements, to make the Likud party, the government there, put a halt on the settlements, if not get rid of them, roll them back, would be to threaten their aid.
Listen, I said and I meant it, stop with the settlements.
I want to freeze or you don't get your $3 billion and your F-22s, pal.
I mean it, right?
Because without a real threat, what's Netanyahu going to do except just do a football stiff arm and just keep on running?
Look, I mean, if you and I know, I mean, this is just common sense.
It's common sense to anybody that they're just – they've just been getting away from it with this behavior forever.
And there are never any consequences.
I mean even Jake Tapper of CNN had the temerity to say to Jay Carney at the White House earlier this year, there's never any consequences.
And I think the good thing about all this process is that it is so ludicrous that it's beginning to become known to the average American.
They're beginning to have an inkling.
And so that holds the prospect – the possibility, not the prospect, but the possibility that Americans will begin to say, I don't like giving these people money.
They're just kind of destroying our reputation across the Middle East, and they're stomping all over Palestinian human rights.
So let's cut off the aid.
And this campaign that we see – there are various campaigns in the United States, billboard campaigns and such to end U.S. military aid.
And I think that is really going to be a likelihood in the next five or six years that that will become a political initiative.
How much traction it gets against the lobby, we'll have to see.
But there have got to be consequences.
Well, I'm convinced – and maybe I'm wrong about this.
I like to try to be optimistic, at least today I do.
I'm convinced that the American people are so bad on Israel because they don't understand the issue whatsoever.
And that if anyone ever really explained to them about the occupation, the permanent occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem since 1967, under basically foreign martial law and the way the people are living there, that it's not just a question of whether the Arabs are allowing Israel to exist and trying to drown all the Jews in the Mediterranean Sea or whatever, but it's a question of the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
I think if they knew the truth about that, then they would be on the side of the Palestinians.
But what they're led to believe by TV through a bunch of just basically glittering generalities and whatever is that sort of like, well, the whole world, they just hate us because we're Americans and we're so great, and so we've got to use fire to keep them at bay.
Apparently the same thing holds true for Israel.
They never did anything to anybody, but everybody just hates them, I guess, because they're Jewish or whatever everybody's problem is.
And so, yeah, the whole world is against them.
It's not because what they're doing is wrong.
It's because of who they are and who everyone else in the world is, a bunch of barbarians at the gates, I guess, and whatever.
And so I think that's what the American people think about Israel, and that if they knew that the reason that the whole world disagrees with you on this is because they know the first thing about it and you don't, and here's the first thing about it, I think that they would change their mind, because there's just no real rationalization for the permanent occupation of Palestine, other than Palestinians aren't human, we can do what we want with them.
And nobody's going to go for that.
No one can say that out loud like they mean it.
No, I agree, but what we're dealing with are these kind of fundamental discourse questions that – I mean, if you go back to the 1930s or 1920s, you find someone, a leading Palestinian intellectual named George Antonius saying, a very forceful and eloquent advocate for the Palestinian cause saying, all I need to do is get the facts before the world's court, and everyone will agree that this is an inhuman situation.
He was dealing at that time with the Zionist immigration to Palestine, some of it refugees from the Holocaust, the impending Holocaust, a problem that the world and Europe needed to address, no question.
But what he was dealing with was the supplanting of an indigenous population by a European population chiefly, and that never got to the world court.
And so the Nakba, which in 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes, or some of them fled, but they certainly weren't allowed to return to their homes, the Nakba was never brought to the attention of the West or people here.
And so again and again, there have been these very unequal, unjust conditions for Palestinians brought about by a form of colonialism, I think a religious form of colonialism.
These conditions have never been explained to people in the West, and there's a reason for that, because Zionism is such a sort of part of the American establishment now, or has been, and Zionists get to tell the story.
And I guess that's my hope, is that that is going to change, partly because it changes in Jewish life, but also because of this mockery of American power that we're seeing in this pathetic shuttle diplomacy.
Yeah.
Well now, there's the thing too, you have a note of it on your blog about Bill Clinton warning, and it's so funny, if we're talking about any other place in the world, this would just sound like it's the KKK talking or something, right?
But instead, it's perfectly acceptable for Bill Clinton to say, you know, the Israelis really got to worry about the population bomb, there's just more and more brown people around them all the time.
Basically, you know, honestly, between the lines, reflecting the fact that this basically is a European colonialist white supremacy issue, as much as it is a Judaism versus Islam issue or anything like that.
Yeah, I mean, I think the explicit quote there was Clinton saying there are too many Palestinians, or you know, there's just Palestinians having a lot of babies, too many babies.
And can you imagine him saying that in Arkansas, when he was an aspiring politician, or aspiring to the – maybe he could get away with it in Arkansas, I don't know, but in some districts.
But, you know, or saying that about black people in the United States, he couldn't get away with that anywhere.
And he would be run out of – you're just not allowed to make that type of racist argument.
Well, it's perfectly acceptable in 2013, especially if your wife aspires to national office, to make that type of statement about Palestinians.
And it's racism.
And this kind of stuff is just, you know, deep in our national discourse and in our media.
So that when a liberal Zionist says, you know, there are too many Palestinians, or we're hoping the refugees die out.
You know, these are just disturbing, ugly statements that just pass for legitimate liberal discourse.
Well, now – and so, I mean, the fact of the matter is that the government of Israel insists on, no matter what, maintaining, obviously, Jewish majority power in the government, no matter what happens.
But they're not willing to give up the West Bank.
At some point, they'll have colonized enough of it that it really will be undeniably just part of Israel, conquered and taken.
And really, the Palestinian population of the West Bank at that point will have to be – at some point, will have to be declared Arab Israelis, just like the other Arab Israelis, right?
And then at that point, it's outright a minority-run apartheid dictatorship.
And then the clock is ticking on that, because even at that point, even whatever president of the United States is going to be in a really bad spot when it's just outright, you know, not close, but outright apartheid like South Africa in the 80s.
I think that – I mean, from my perspective, we've already passed that point.
What you're describing, of course, is when that perception is fully upon the world's consciousness.
And that, as you're right to say, has not yet happened.
But what we are looking at now, inside the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, is the transformation of this from a movement for Palestinian statehood to one of a movement for equal rights.
Just what happened in the Jim Crow South, just what happened in South Africa.
You're here – these are integrated populations now.
As you observe, there are Israelis all over the West Bank.
There are, according to one of Netanyahu's leading coalition members, there are 650,000 Jews east of the old green line.
And that means that you will never leave the West Bank, this guy says.
Okay.
And many in the Israeli power structure says we're never leaving the West Bank.
And if you've been in the West Bank, you observe these industrial parks and swimming pools and hilltop villages and suburbs of Tel Aviv, as they describe themselves, in Judea and Samaria, not the occupied territories.
They're never leaving.
So let's have a discussion of how fair it is for someone in a fancy house to have voting rights while the villager whose land he's taken, who's right next to him, has no right to vote over the government that controls his life.
That is worse than apartheid or is apartheid.
And that's what would precipitate a struggle for equal rights.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm not really in a position to judge, but it does seem like one state solution is more viable.
I mean, of course, I'd prefer a no state solution.
But, you know, it's kind of ironical that, you know, it seems like the Israelis would have to admit that if their government existed just to protect the rights of Israeli citizens and make sure that they have a fair court system to sue each other in and fair trials for their accused in criminal cases and prevent invasion by Egypt and whatever, then who cares whether it's a majority Jewish or majority Palestinian vote or whatever, right?
Exactly, exactly.
I mean, you know, the Israel lobby and the Jews who support Israel over here, they live as minorities in this country and seem to like it.
I like it.
It's a good political constitution.
Why shouldn't that work?
If that has worked so well for us, why shouldn't we try to support that in Israel?
Why shouldn't we want minority, majority, whatever sectarian or religious differences there are, why shouldn't all people have an equal calling on the government?
A government should be the state of its citizens.
And that is what is so appalling about, for me, as a liberal left American Jew confronting this place that exists, quote, unquote, in my name.
I want no part of it when it creates these obnoxious legal distinctions.
So I think that awareness is going to develop.
But you brought up – the first point you made was there in what you just asked me was about security.
What is best for people's security?
Well, again, I return to our State Department saying in 1948 you established the state.
There will never be no end of war and bloodshed in this region.
And, golly, what have we seen?
We've seen one war after another.
We've seen collateral damage to the United States again and again and again, including the killing of Rachel Corey in 2003, including the killing of Robert Kennedy in 1968.
That was part of the damage that occurred from the establishment of Israel.
And what – I'm not trying to undo Israel.
What I'm trying to do is reform it.
It exists.
I think that we have to reform it.
We have to make it what it says it is, a democracy.
And what that does seem to be right now is creating one political entity between the river and the sea in which everyone has equal rights.
Well, and, you know, I think you're right that – there's a certain way of looking at it.
The establishment, the recognition of the State of Israel as nothing but trouble, destined to be nothing but trouble this whole time kind of a thing.
It sure would have made sense to me to give all the Jewish refugees the best part of Germany.
It seems like they'd earned it kind of a thing rather than sending them all to Arab lands.
But on the other hand, you know, people want peace and people want to get along.
It seems to me – and I don't mean politicians.
I mean people.
It seems to me like there's really a long history of bad decisions made, mean decisions made that didn't have to be at all.
And, you know, like take the Nakba, okay?
Most people, even like the Saudi peace plan, right, is to go back to 67 lines.
And I guess there's a thing about the right of return in there and whatever.
But the Arab states – and I don't know if this just counts for the ones in the Americans' pockets, or I think this goes pretty much for the people of the Arab world.
They would accept Israel under 67 lines.
Even Hamas has said on the Charlie Rose show they would accept Israel under 67 lines just in the occupation.
And so, you know what I mean?
It's been a long time since they stole that land from the people who live there.
And maybe they can all have the right of return.
But I'm just saying I think there's room for compromise in there if there was any goodwill whatsoever.
It's just like if, you know, you can – with foreign policy, you can always take it to the neighborhood level.
If somebody moved in the neighborhood, kicked somebody out of their house and took it over, that would be a horrible thing.
But after three or four years, if he's still just lording it over everyone and beating everybody up and threatening everybody and pointing guns at their head all the time, that's a real problem.
He could be having barbecues and inviting people over and trying to make nice, even though he didn't really have the right to steal that house in the first place.
He's got to live there for the long term, right?
So that's the thing to me.
It just seems like – it's just like in America.
We don't have to be run – have our government run by the world's worst human beings, but we do.
We have them, and they do what they do.
Right, but I mean just on the neighborhood question, the reason they get to defy their neighbors is because they've got Uncle Sam to take care of them.
And if they didn't have Uncle Sam, they would make peace with their neighbors in a second.
And if they had a greater sense of respect and equity with their neighbors, they would have grabbed that Arab Peace Initiative back in 2002.
I just don't think that peace initiative, which was, yes, a great gesture of acceptance of Israel, that depended on Israel returning the 67 lines, and it's just not going to happen.
So you're dealing with a surprising degree of acceptance since 1988 from the Palestinians and then the Arab world, and they have not missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, the Israelis.
Right.
Yeah, I forget what it's called now, but M.J. Rosenberg did a great article one time a few years back now where he recounts every argument that the peaceniks ever had with the warmongers on Israel policy from, I guess, the 50s or something.
And every single time, he just shows it, and it's so well done.
He just shows how every single time the peaceniks were right and the hawks were wrong, and look at the trouble they caused with the stupid, horrible decision that they made.
And he just goes point for point with 20 examples or something.
It's just great.
Yeah, M.J. is pretty great.
I mean, it's every war and every botched negotiation.
Every time they could have had a deal with the Syrians and blew it and whatever, whatever, and there's a lot of them.
Right, and then you just got to wonder who's in the driver's seat there, and how come there are never any consequences from the United States of extremists being in the driver's seat?
Well, what do you think of the sort of chompsky-eyed position that it's America that's in the driver's seat and Israel's really just a big military base and we've got to keep everything destabilized over there so we can sell planes and whatever.
I guess I don't buy it.
I think that if, you know, we're losing a lot of arms sales we could be making to Iran.
You know, three billion of sales of military aid to Israel, yeah, it helps American corporations.
But I guess I don't see, I believe there's an American interest here, and that interest is not in having sort of endless strife in the Arab world and hatred of the United States from the Arab world.
I don't buy the chompsky position.
I think that the State Department, supporting an American imperial interest, don't establish this state, and Truman bowed to a domestic lobby in that respect.
And I think we still bow to a domestic lobby because we think it's just one little part of the world, and okay, they get that.
But it's actually affecting us across the world.
And I don't think it's helped oil.
I mean, look at, would we have greater access to oil for the military-industrial complex if we were not saddled with Israel?
I think the answer is yes.
Right.
Well, you know, they can't even serve as an actual, quote-unquote, ally at all.
I mean, it's like the louder they proclaim they're our number one bestest friend in the whole world, the more obvious it is that every bit of dirty work our government needs done, we've got to do ourselves or hire somebody else to do it for us.
We can't hire them to do it for us because it would, as though there was any legitimacy to any of these policies, but that would be the worst public relations of all, to actually have the Israelis say attack Saddam for us or try to prop up Mubarak for us or whatever.
We've got to do everything for them, and we've got to beg them to please stay out of every conflict that we're in, like in Syria right now, for example.
And so what the hell kind of allied best friend is that?
They're not even a good satellite.
We're a good satellite of theirs, maybe.
Right.
No, I agree with you about that.
I think that's the – it just – it doesn't – the relationship does not serve us.
And although I'm against all these wars, those were presumably launched by – with some idea of an American interest by the imperial president, and Israel didn't help us much in those imperial wars.
Right.
Yeah, of course, I'm against them all too.
I didn't mean to imply like, come on, Israel, get to work killing people for us, because that's not my position.
I just want to point out the irony of what great allies of ours they supposedly are, and they never fight by our guy's side.
Right.
Right.
They can't.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, well, so what's the end of this?
I mean, he's already come home.
John Kerry, are they going to keep on with the charade for another few months or another few years still?
I think it'll go on another few months.
I think that even the liberal Zionists are saying 2013 is a make-or-break year.
So I sort of feel like after this year and failure, which is inevitable, there's going to be some degree of reckoning, and that'll be a good thing.
And what you're going to find is that more and more people in the mainstream are going to be saying, hey, gosh, it's a modern age.
Do we really need a Jewish state?
Can't they just, you know, have a state of all its citizens?
That is that your beginning can be.
I mean, people in my community have been saying that a long time.
You're going to hear more and more voices in the mainstream saying that.
All right.
Hey, thanks a lot for your time, Phil.
It's always great to talk to you.
Thank you, Scott.
It's a pleasure.
I really do appreciate it.
Talk to you soon.
All right.
Everybody, that is the great Philip Weiss.
And he's got a whole stable of great writers over there covering Middle East issues, especially Israel, obviously, but a lot of other Israel issues for you.
They're at Mondoweiss.net.
And follow him on Twitter, too, at Mondoweiss, Adam Horowitz, and a bunch of other great writers there.
Hey, all.
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Hey, all.
Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Aren't you sick of the neocons in the Israel lobby pretending as though they've earned some kind of monopoly on foreign policy wisdom in Washington, D.C.?
These peanut clowns who've never been right about anything?
Well, the Council for the National Interest is pushing back, putting America first, and telling the lobby to go take a hike.
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