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I'm Scott Horton.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
Welcome back to it.
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All right, time to welcome Max Blumenthal back to the show.
He writes at maxblumenthal.com and at mondoweiss.net.
Why is it .net instead of .com?
Anyway, welcome back to the show, Max.
How the hell are you?
I'm pretty good.
Good to be on.
Good.
I'm happy to have you here.
You are the author of a book called Republican Gomorrah, which I really like the title of that.
I'm sorry I never did get a chance to read it yet, but I wanted to plug that for you.
A special friend of ours told me that you have a brand new book coming out about Israel.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I sort of informally announced it, and maybe this will be the formal announcement, but I've been covering Israel-Palestine for about four or five years, and this book will really bring all my reporting and analysis and research together and paint a portrait of what ...
It really focuses on what Israeli society has been like since 2009 when Operation Cash Lead, the brutal assault on the Gaza Strip, commenced at the same time that Israel held national elections and elected its most right-wing authoritarian government in history.
This book really tracks my journey inside Israeli society and inside occupied Palestine.
It's coming out on Nation Books, the publisher of Republican Gomorrah.
It's called Goliath, Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, and it comes out in August.
Wow.
Oh, good.
Next month, huh?
Hey, put me on the list for ...
Sorry.
Sorry.
It comes out in October.
Oh, no.
The old date was August.
Oh, okay.
But you are definitely on my list, and we're going to do a show in October, and you're going to be one of the first shows I've done because you're one of the few radio hosts or people in the media in general who's regularly hosted me since I've really shifted into covering this topic, which is like a third rail in the U.S.
All the people from MSNBC and NPR who used to have me on all the time have disappeared, and you're one of the few people who really has the courage to talk about this in an honest way.
So I definitely ...
You're going to be one of the first shows I want to do.
Right on.
I definitely read the thing cover to cover and try to give it the best treatment I can, and I've been a fan of your journalism since at least the Hagee video, but I don't think that that's where it started.
I think I've been reading things that you've been doing before that, but that's the thing where ...
That's such a great video.
I'm sorry.
I can't even talk about it.
I'm laughing my ass off.
If anybody's never seen that, please just type in Max Blumenthal and Hagee and go take a look at that.
I forget now the exact title of it.
It's right on the tip of my brain.
That was an experience I'll never forget.
The first time I did a video on Christian Zionists at the Washington Israel Summit of Pastor John Hagee's Christians United for Israel, it was like being on acid without the LSD, just talking to these people about the apocalypse.
Rapture Ready.
That's the title.
Yeah.
Rapture Ready.
It's on YouTube, and you'll see me talking to dozens of people who are praying for the apocalypse and what they call the cleansing of the earth.
Crazy.
Good times.
That's the source of their support for Israel.
Israel's really reaching out to some great Christian American allies, these people who want the Jews to burn in an everlasting lake of fire.
Absolutely not anti-Semitic.
Yeah, no, they're the Israelis' best friends in the whole world, or at least they're the Israeli lobby's best friends in the whole world.
And I've been able to determine that they've been created by AIPAC.
They have had operational assistance from AIPAC since the beginning, Christians United for Israel.
And at their last conference, I think it was their 2011 conference, they had four AIPAC staffers speak on stage.
So this is, you know, the relationship is getting much more open between the Israel lobby and open evangelical anti-Semites who are Rapture Ready.
And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the middle is falling out, and the left is falling away.
And a lot of young Jews are really questioning the U.S.
-Israel special relationship, along with people like the U.S. CENTCOM chief, James Mattis, who just retired on June 1st.
And I just reported from Mondo, I said, James Mattis at the Aspen Security Conference.
I mean, if you want to see, you know, the imperial, the directors of American empire being interviewed by journalists, major Washington journalists, who are probably paid by the Aspen Institute to appear, I mean, just you want to see the cozy relationship between the military and the media.
Watch these videos of last weekend's Aspen Security Forum, held by the Aspen Institute, which happens to be sponsored by Academy, which is the third incarnation of Blackwater.
They've changed their name three times.
So James Mattis, the CENTCOM chief, actually appeared at this conference and was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer.
Wolf Blitzer starts out the interview by asking the crowd to give Mattis a round of applause.
So this isn't really a real interview, it's sort of a PR moment.
But Mattis cares about U.S. empire, and he cares about U.S. interests.
That doesn't mean that he, you know, is a humanitarian, doesn't mean he cares about that he has any compunction about killing Afghan civilians or anything like that.
But he's asked about the peace process, and he's asked about Secretary of State John Kerry's effort to bring the Palestinian Authority and Israel together to make the deal.
And he says openly, first of all, that Israel is drifting to apartheid because of the settlement movement and that it will be an apartheid state and be eventually dissolved if it's not able to cut a deal with the Palestinian Authority and become normalized, normalized relations with the Arab world.
And he says that his troops have paid a price because of the U.S. special relationship with Israel and because the U.S. is seen as biased in Israel's favor and an unfair broker in the U.S., in the Israel-Palestine peace process.
You know, he's speaking purely as an imperialist from a realist point of view.
But he's making these very frank statements because he doesn't care anymore.
He's retired.
And when his predecessor, David Petraeus, made these remarks, he basically had to walk them back because he was still CENTCOM chief and he had ambitions to possibly run for president all before Paula Broadwell stepped onto the scene.
But, you know, it's not just crazy left-wing Jews like me, and it's not just Palestinian solidarity activists who are talking about Israeli apartheid.
It's the former commander of the entire U.S. armed forces, and this is a big problem for the Israel lobby.
Well, you know, I wonder, it's only the next day, right?
This was just yesterday, correct?
Yeah, this was yesterday.
I reported it under Weiss because I've been watching this conference and, you know, like Keith Alexander from the NSA appeared there and was interviewed by Pete Williams from NBC in a totally non-adversarial context.
And I just kind of happened onto these comments by Mattis and I thought they were incredible.
So I reported them at Mondeweiss and they've been ignored.
No other media outlet, and I would think at least some of the smaller Jewish online outlets would pick them up, like the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, for example, where you would expect commentary, the neocon rag to really get out.
I was going to say, someone sent it to commentary.
I sent it to them.
I tweeted it at all the usual neocon suspects and I said, where's the outrage?
And I think they've made a calculated decision to just ignore this and the media is suppressing it.
So that, to me, is almost as incredible as what Mattis said.
Right.
Or Petraeus having to walk it back when he said the same thing.
And here's the other thing, too, is that, well, obviously, you know, I mean, come on.
This is the story of our era and going all the way back quite a few decades now to America, the dishonest broker on the Israel-Palestine issue and the consequences for the American people and for the American empire.
I mean, this is a common theme that's been running around for before I was born.
Yeah, yeah.
And it continues, you know, two decades of talking about talking and talking about process in order to provide Israel cover so it can build more settlement and deepen apartheid.
And that's really the point of the peace process, peace process.
I really recommend a book, by the way, before I say it, before I offer my thoughts about the peace process by Rashid Khalidi, Rashid Khalidi, who was a former negotiator for the PLO.
He's now a professor at Columbia and his book is called Brokers of Deceit.
And he really outlines how the peace process was distorted in favor, was warped in favor of Israel by the Americans and mainly by two or three figures who include Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk.
And these people in the 80s, I wrote a profile maybe two years ago of Dennis Ross, who is in the Obama administration at the time.
And during the 80s, a lot of the people in the Reagan administration and then in the first Bush administration who who handled Israel-Palestine and who handled the Middle East were called Arabists and they generally came out of the State Department.
They spoke Arabic.
They came from Gentile backgrounds, often were accused by neocons and pro-Israel elements of anti-Semitism, but they were because they were seen as a little bit too sympathetic to the Arab world.
And these people had a realist attitude on the Middle East.
And they were, you know, Brent Scowcroft was sort of sympathetic to their perspective.
And what Indyk and Ross set out to do was replace them as the peace process became a reality.
And so they set up something called the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which was to be an alternative to all of that, all of the mainstream think tanks in Washington that hosted positions for Arabists.
And it was connected to AIPAC, supported entirely by pro-Israel money by wealthy pro-Israel donors.
And so Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, who co-founded this, basically created positions for themselves.
Then when Clinton ran for president against Bush, one who started the peace process and who had people like Scowcroft and Jim Baker, who was very close to the Saudis negotiating for him.
And, you know, I disagree with their agenda in Madrid, which is the first site of talks between Israel and the PLO.
But you can see that there was much more fair.
Bush put pressure on Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli prime minister, to stop building settlements to bring him to the table.
This is Netanyahu's boss and mentor, a real right winger, a greater Israel fanatic.
Bush threatened to pull loans on settlements.
And Clinton attacks Bush one, comes in with with Ross and Indyk as his negotiators, and that's when Oslo is signed.
Arafat is the head of the PLO, the Palestinian Authority is created.
And Ross and Indyk came out of Winnep, really start designing the peace process and shaping the facts from the ground and creating the groundwork for the current crisis.
And this is this has been and for the status quo that's been in place for the last 20 years.
And now, you know, Ross is retired and he's getting all kinds of awards in Israel.
I was in Israel at Hebrew University for a debate during the election.
Early this year, late last year, and I saw a huge poster of Ross, he'd been presented with an award at Hebrew University for service to Israel and the Jewish people.
He's doing all kinds of paid talks at synagogues and at pro-Israel organizations.
So, I mean, it's obvious what Ross intended to accomplish because he's being rewarded for it.
He intended to slant the peace process in favor of Israel.
And since the peace process has begun, literally hundreds of thousands of new settlers have been moved into the West Bank.
Not one single established settlement unit has been removed since the peace process begun.
And by now, it's actually geographically impossible to create a Palestinian state.
And I mentioned another figure, Martin Indyk, who is the under, sort of the underling of Dennis Ross, very close to him politically and ideologically.
Barack Obama is going to, probably in the next few days, through Secretary of State Kerry, appoint Indyk to be the manager of this next round of peace process talks they hope to hold.
And so that really shows you where things are at.
They're still stuck in neutral and, you know, nothing new is happening except that last week, Israel authorized 1000 more new settlement units.
Well, now there's this this footage that came out, I guess, what, three, four years ago now.
It wasn't secretly recorded, but I guess they were just kind of ignoring the video camera in the room or maybe they accidentally recorded this part.
They tried to turn the camera off, but it was still running or something.
But anyway, there's Benjamin Netanyahu back in, I guess, 99 or maybe 2001 or something like that.
And he's explaining to his family that he's visiting about how he screwed Bill Clinton, basically, and how he said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll deal, we'll deal, we'll deal.
And that really what it came down to, the biggest loophole of all was the security zone, Area C.
Well, we have to have these security zones.
They got the Americans to concede that maybe it was Ross who got the Americans to concede that.
And then but the security zones means the West Bank.
So there you go.
No, exactly.
I mean, that's really the key, I think, if you want to sum up the Israeli perspective on the U.S.
-led peace process, just watch that one minute, one and a half minute clip of Benjamin Netanyahu sitting with an Israeli family, telling them that America is a thing you can easily move, you can move easily.
And he means that, you know, the Israel lobby is going to, you can lean on the Israel lobby to make sure that there's no political pressure ever put on him.
He brags about how he, and this is all in Hebrew in a video he didn't know was being recorded, about how he'd marginalized the U.S.
He says, they asked me before the election if I'd honor the Oslo Accords.
And he said he would.
I said, he said, I would, but I was going to interpret the Accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the 67 borders.
In other words, he was going to consistently move negotiations away from the green line to allow Israel to keep more and more major settlement blocks.
And he said, how did we do it?
He basically set up these arbitrary military zones in the West Bank that he said he needed for security and defined them as security zones.
And by the end of negotiations, he had defined the entire Jordan Valley, which is this, you know, huge swath of land in the West Bank where all of the arable land is, basically all the farmland where Israel has put all of its farms illegally.
He had defined all of that as a military zone and the U.S. had accepted his argument.
So there you go.
That's what happened to the Oslo Accords.
And this is in 2001.
These remarks came out in 2010 and they're still trying to deal with this guy as if he's serious about a two state solution.
It's an absolute joke.
Yeah, that's what he said in there.
It's absurd.
I don't know what's the Hebrew word for absurd.
But he said it's absurd how easy it is to move America.
You can call it mesh got in Hebrew or, you know, my family, we prefer the English.
We would say he's a misogynist.
Man, that's something else.
And no, I mean, it's what is what are Obama and Kerry thinking?
I mean, really, are they even aware of who they're dealing with?
Yeah, I wonder why they even bother with this.
I mean, Obama's been doing this, you know, big promises about Palestine and then accomplishing nothing since he came into power.
Why doesn't he just act like Bill Clinton and save it till the last year and then fail miserably and then be regarded as a hero anyway?
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a rhetorical question and you have to look at how Kerry managed to start start at least attempting to reignite negotiations.
And it all started with meetings he held with AIPAC to get their approval.
AIPAC supports this probably supports getting a boss who is the unelected, unpopular U.S. and Western supported U.S. and Western installed sort of ruler in the West Bank, getting him to the table with Netanyahu to keep these talks going just precisely because of what Netanyahu said, because if Israel can be seen as trying to negotiate, it can continue to build settlements and it can escape from the scenario that James Mathis, the outgoing CENTCOM chief, laid out where they're exposed as an apartheid state, which is ruling millions of people without giving them any rights.
So the peace process is absolutely essential for Israel's deterrence strategy, both strategically and politically, and for Israel's image.
And that's why AIPAC blessed Kerry's trip.
It's why the Israel lobby supported Obama when he ran for re-election.
And then you have groups like J-Street, like liberal Zionist groups that claim to be pro peace.
If there's no peace process, these groups, which are raising lots of money, millions of dollars, will have to fold.
So they're putting a lot of momentum behind it and supporting it.
They basically, you know, you have people like Jeremy Ben-Ami, whose entire career is on supporting a peace process that exists in name only and is basically a charade.
And he doesn't want his career to end.
Yeah.
Well, now, so in your book, again, it's called Goliath, Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, coming out this fall.
Do you come to a conclusion?
I mean, don't spoil the whole book for me or anything.
I'm not trying to get you to blow the lead here.
But it seems like are there no realists inside the Netanyahu government, like you're saying, where it's just a mathematical thing?
You keep owning the West Bank forever.
At some point, the Israeli Jews will be outright numerically in the minority.
And at that point, it'll be an outright apartheid state.
And at that point, the clock is just ticking until the whole thing has to fall apart like South Africa did.
It's bad enough like this.
It's going to be too much worse if it's majority Muslim and Christian Arabs being dominated by the Israeli minority.
And so but is it just that they're really stupid, they're really short sighted and narrow minded, or is their plan that they're going to force march all the Palestinians across the river or just into it in order, you know, at some point to solve the problem that way?
Or what do you think that there's any kind of even medium term plan for how this is supposed to work?
Because I can't help but think that since everyone in the whole world, including General Mattis, knows that the course they're on now is national suicide, that, jeez, they they must not want that and have some other plan in mind.
Yeah, that's that's that's the key question.
And the answer is no.
Israel has no strategy.
It has no long term strategy.
If you watch the movie The Gatekeepers, which is nominated for an Oscar, and it's, you know, interviews with former chiefs of the Shin Bet, Israel's General Security Service.
That's what they keep saying over and over is, you know, we have no strategy for ending the occupation.
But they do have tactics.
And, you know, and any settler colonial state like Israel has no strategy.
It's just trying to buy time through bombing, through building walls, through arbitrary military zones, to manipulating foreign governments.
And this is what it's come to.
Benjamin Netanyahu's closest advisor has been Moshe Yaa'alon, who is now the defense minister.
And at the Herzliya Security Conference, where all of the securitocrats from Israel and the neocons gather every year in a coastal city in Israel in 2011, Yaa'alon said, you know, we can't keep believing in these pie in the sky dreams of peace.
At some point, we have to admit that there isn't going to be peace.
But what we can do is manage the conflict so that, you know, we keep war and killing at a low ebb, at least on our side.
So basically, basically their strategy is to try to maintain a one way peace or what Netanyahu calls the big quiet.
And everything we see Israel doing is part of that strategy.
So you have, you know, the separation wall, the whole goal of the separation was, you know, so people and people in Palestine will remain occupied.
Their national movement will be fragmented.
Their communities will be literally fragmented.
But people in Tel Aviv will exist as though they live in Europe and they'll be at the beach facing Europe.
And, you know, even though, you know, a few kilometers away are, you know, refugee camps.
And that's that's that's why Netanyahu keeps getting elected, because that strategy has largely succeeded and the U.S. has pumped billions of dollars into supporting that status quo.
But at the same time, things have gotten so comfortable in Israel.
The status quo has gotten so uncomfortable that you've seen a young generation grow up who thinks, what do we need a peace process for?
What do we need two states for?
We have all these settlements.
Let's keep them.
Like people like Nathalie Bennett, who's a young, high tech millionaire who's been a leader of the Israeli settlement movement, doesn't speak like a fanatic, is now the economics minister in Netanyahu's government.
And Nathalie Bennett has threatened to potentially quit Netanyahu's coalition, which would completely destabilize Netanyahu's government if he enters into final status negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.
Nathalie Bennett has a plan of his own, and it's totally different than two states.
It's a plan for open apartheid in which Israel annexes Area C, which is 60 percent of the West Bank, which has already been put under their control thanks to the Oslo Accords, thanks to Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk and Clinton and every other U.S. government.
But to officially put that in Israeli hands, which is where all the settlements are, all the Palestinians living in Area C will get some form of P-level Israeli citizenship.
In other words, they'll have limited rights and they think that the demographics will work so that they can still keep sort of a Jewish ethnocracy.
Then you have Area A and B, which are the main Palestinian population clusters, and those people will be given Jordanian citizenship.
They won't be transferred to Jordan.
They'll just be officially living in these ghettoized Bantustans and they will not ever be given citizenship in a Palestinian state.
So what Naftali Bennett and the younger generation in the Likud party, young figures who have been taking over every Likud leadership position, making Netanyahu look like a moderate one, is to just take what Netanyahu and every other Israeli government have been doing kind of beneath the radar with U.S. consent while conducting this empty peace process and just put an end to the farce of the peace process and do it in the open.
And Netanyahu is resisting and the Israeli establishment is resisting this because that would bring Mattis' warning into the open.
It would be open apartheid and Israel could no longer deny what I've been saying for the last five years, which is that it already is an apartheid state.
That would be undeniable.
All right.
We got to leave it right there.
Pretty good timing.
Thanks, Max.
I really appreciate it.
Yeah.
Thanks again, Scott.
Everybody.
That's the great Max Blumenthal.
He writes at Max Blumenthal dot com.
Probably still at the Huffington Post.
I don't know.
Here he is at Mondoweiss dot net.
This one is if Kerry fails, Israel will be an apartheid state.
Hey, all.
Scott Warren here for the Council for the National Interest at Council for the National Interest dot org.
Are 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 have never been right about anything.
Well, the Council for the National Interest is pushing back, putting America first, telling the lobby to go take a hike.
The empire is bad enough without the neocons making it all about the interests of a foreign state.
Help see and I promote peace.
Visit their site at Council for the National Interest dot org and click donate under about us at the top of the page.
That's Council for the National Interest dot org.
Everybody.
Scott Horton here.
Everything.
Maybe your group should hire me to give a speech.
Well, maybe you should.
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