04/14/14 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show.
I had to make a phone call.
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Welcome back to the show, John Glazer, how are you doing?
I'm well, thanks for having me back.
Well, you're welcome.
Very happy to have you here.
Everybody knows John, he writes on the blog at Antiwar.com and also for the Huffington Post and the Washington Times.
You see that?
Left, right, and libertarian all wrapped up in one writing career there going on.
Perfect.
So, very happy to have you back on the show.
And you've written some things here for the Antiwar blog about the peace process going on over there in Israel-Palestine.
And a little bit of accidental honesty, or was it deliberate honesty from our Secretary of State on an issue, John?
Really?
Yeah, it's hard to tell whether it was accidental or whether it was deliberate.
But the fact is that John Kerry, when speaking before, I believe, the House committee, described why the peace talks fell apart this past week.
And what he said was that, contrary to what the media reported, and contrary to what was coming out of Israel, and contrary to what a lot of people in Congress were saying, it was not that the Palestinians decided to go sign a bunch of international treaties against the wishes of Israel, and therefore they did this deliberately to foil the whole peace talks thing.
Rather, it was the case that Israel did two things.
It, first of all, refused to fulfill its promise to release Palestinian prisoners, and then a couple days later, announced the construction of 700 new settlement units in East Jerusalem.
These two things happened prior to the PLO's announcement of its pursuit of 15 international treaties, and therefore this is precisely what collapsed the negotiations.
Notably, the Palestinians didn't say, I'm not going to negotiate anymore.
They just said, we're going to take this step.
This step being something that builds upon their achievement of getting a non-member observer status at the UN.
It just builds on their pursuit of statehood, because obviously what is clear from the past negotiations, and this round in particular, is that Israel is not interested in reaching a deal that will lead to a Palestinian state.
The whole purpose is to make that possibility impossible.
It was good that it was kind of an interesting thing that John Kerry said this in front of the House.
Of course, there are people in Israel and people here in the U.S. who jumped on him for it and said, we've heard this trope before, throwing Israel under the bus, blaming Israel first, and this kind of stuff.
And then John Kerry's office at the State Department said, no, no, no, we weren't trying to blame anyone.
We were just trying to be even-handed, describing what happened, and fluffing the feathers of the Israelis.
Well, the plagiarized Stephen Colbert, truth has a well-known anti-Israel bias.
That's right, yeah.
It apparently does.
But, you know, the truth is that these negotiations were doomed from the get-go.
And that's because, you know, the short reason is because Israel opposes a Palestinian state.
And, of course, that's the purpose of the negotiations, to build a state for Palestine and security for Israel.
But the long story is essentially that the Netanyahu government has added on a bunch of demands to their final status that they know are completely unacceptable to the PLO.
And, in fact, contrary to the U.S.'s own statements about what it supports and what it doesn't.
For example, instead of a broad agreement that the 1967 lines are generally what we're shooting for with minor and mutual adjustments and trades and, you know, land swaps and so forth.
Instead of that, Netanyahu's saying, no, no, no, 1967 lines are out.
They are not anything I want to have anything to do with.
In fact, what Israel has said is that their demands for security include perpetually occupying the Jordan Valley.
Now, Netanyahu asked for this to be Israeli occupation.
And then as a compromise, as you can call it that, John Kerry said, okay, we'll try to do maybe international occupation, you know, the UN forces and something like this.
But, of course, that situation just prolongs the occupation, which these negotiations are trying to stop.
This is what Palestine is involved in the negotiations to end.
The other thing that they, one other thing that they insisted upon, Israel insisted upon, was that the Palestinian side recognized Israel as the state for the Jews, the homeland of the Jewish people.
Now, the problem with that is it's a tweaking of a previous demand.
The previous demand was that Palestine recognized the legitimacy of Israel, right, which they did.
Palestine did it in 1988 and then again in 1993.
But now, since they acceded to that, you know, Netanyahu has to demand more in order to make it seem like the Palestinians are the ones being these intransigent, you know, rejectionist negotiators.
And so he said, no, no, no, recognize us as the homeland of the Jewish people.
You know, sort of twisting that knife a little more.
And, of course, this is unacceptable to the Palestinians.
However, all of that, what I just said, was not any reason why the latest talks fell apart.
Because the whole thing was so doomed that John Kerry said, all right, what we're going to do is do an interim agreement.
We're going to do these small little steps and then agree to a talk for another year because the deadline was coming up at the end of April.
And so this is what actually made the whole talk fall apart, these interim agreements, these small steps that both Israel and Palestine said they would agree to.
Israel didn't agree to them.
In fact, they passed a deadline on which they said they would do these things, and then they fell apart.
And, you know, this is the same story we hear every single time.
Israel is now trying to say it was Palestine.
And, of course, the whole world knows, anyone who cares to pay attention to facts, that Israel is the one that exploded these talks.
Yeah, well, same as always.
I mean, I even recognized when I was a little kid just from hearing it occasionally on the news the way they always talked about the peace process.
It never meant peace talks.
Yeah, they're having some peace talks.
They're going to go and sit down at a table and they're going to work out some peace talks.
It always meant we're going to goof around and pretend like we're ever going to have peace talks someday forever.
It's been like this since, you know, well, since 1967.
Yeah, I mean...
Framework, like you say, these interim deals.
Well, let's come up with a deal that says that we'll have some more meetings next year, okay?
We'll call it a framework deal.
It'll be a roadmap to a framework to a bunch of nonsense.
Right.
Essentially, the negotiations are sort of a way for Israel to continue to gradually annex the West Bank and fulfill its dreams of a greater Israel.
But under the backdrop of trying to negotiate and trying to, you know, settle this and give Palestine a state and all this stuff.
So it's just a way to sort of shift the debate.
If Israel is engaged in, quote-unquote, negotiations or, quote-unquote, peace talks, then the international community, and Washington in particular, has absolutely no right to criticize Israel for anything it's doing.
Right?
No policy of Israel can be criticized while negotiations are in process because, of course, negotiations are very delicate.
We want to be, you know, acceding to both sides and make it fair so that we can actually get something going.
But, of course, this is what Israel has done for decades.
Yes, we'll agree to negotiations.
Let's do it.
Let's talk.
Let's talk forever, in fact.
Let's talk for as long as possible because that way we can continue to steal Palestinian land in the form of demolishing homes that have been there for generations and putting in place, you know, Jewish-only settlements that the Israeli government subsidizes.
Continue to, you know, arrest and torture Palestinian children, which Israel does according to various UN and Human Rights Watch reports.
You know, continue to bomb and starve the people of Gaza.
You know, this is a process of gradual annexation, and everybody knows it.
That's what's weird about this.
You know, people talk about settlements that are unhelpful or even people say they're illegal.
Yeah, both of those things are true, but what do they mean?
What is their purpose?
Can anyone describe honestly that their purpose is for Israeli security?
No.
This is a colonial project.
It's to change the demographics of the entire West Bank so that eventually at some point down the road, everyone just has to shrug and go, well, Palestine was a thing of the past.
Now Israel is the only state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.
Well, and that's where, you know, the second half of the Nakba takes place, too, because at some point they're just going to have to force march all those people out of there, probably just straight into the Jordan River or something.
Well, yeah, as The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg has written, the right wing in Israel wants the land but not the people.
This is essentially, you know, this is the nuts and bolts of the problem Israel faces.
If it could and if it wouldn't get internationally condemned, it would just push everyone out of Palestine.
It would just, just like it did in 1948, just push everyone into Jordan, you know, forcibly exit everyone from the land and repopulate it with Israelis, and then that'll be done.
They can't do that because it's too drastic, but they do want that land.
So their middle-of-the-road process is what I just described, which is a gradual annexation, gradual ethnic cleansing, that will say, okay, some point down the road, it'll just be too impossible to extricate Jews and Israelis from West Bank, so we'll just have to deal with it.
Unfortunately, that is likely to succeed because of the power differential here, you know?
The U.S. backs Israel.
Who backs Palestine?
All right, nobody.
Well, actually, sometimes the U.S., but we'll train them up an army, but then they just get to use it for internal security purposes, that kind of thing.
Right.
All right, well, so yeah, your point's well taken about, and, you know, I wish, I mean, I guess I can sit here and pretend and play devil's advocate and follow up, but I think you're right, that it is perfectly obvious that they just keep moving the goalposts and moving the goalposts because the Israeli government, on this issue at least, they're just dishonest brokers.
They don't mean it when they say that they want peace.
They don't mean it when they say that they're willing to concede a damn thing in order to have peace.
They're occupying the West Bank.
What the hell do they need peace for?
They've got 35-foot-tall walls and nobody can cross, or however tall they are, 100-foot-tall.
You know, I wish you could play devil's advocate, but that's kind of my whole point, is that— I mean, there's really not a case to make from their point of view, not one that I could get all the way through without laughing.
Well, what I mean is it's just so obvious.
It's not reported this way and it's not talked about in this kind of language, but the settlements have no other purpose.
They don't have a security purpose.
They make Israel less secure.
They don't have any kind of purpose.
Even the prime minister calls the West Bank Judea and Samaria.
It's not the West Bank or the Jordan River.
That might be where some Palestinians live, but all that is is Israel East, buddy.
The Likud party charter describes Jewish settlement in both the West Bank and Gaza as the realization of Zionist values.
Yeah, well, you know, on their way to the Euphrates River.
All right, hold it right there, everybody.
It's John Glaser from Antiwar.com, The Washington Times, and The Huffington Post, Antiwar.com slash blog.
We'll be back right after this.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
All right, you guys.
So I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with John Glaser.
He's from Antiwar.com, The Huffington Post, and The Washington Times.
And we're talking about Israel-Palestine here.
And now, John, I saw a thing.
You were talking about this new condition that the Israelis would get to control the Jordan Valley forever.
And was it Mayor Dagan or one of these former Mossad heads who was talking recently about how completely ridiculous that is and how from the point of view strictly from an Israeli national security policy point of view, we don't need the Jordan Valley.
Who's going to invade?
Jordan?
Or Iraq?
Or Iran?
Yeah, right, like they could even get there in the first place.
And then, of course, Israel doesn't need to occupy the Jordan Valley to defend it at all.
That's where, you know, all them American-bought F-16 fighter bombers come in handy and troop transports and whatever else.
This whole thing, it is, I'm sorry, I'm beating a dead horse here, but might as well.
It's the kind of thing that sounds like maybe it's necessary, but no.
Dagan and Moshe, I can't pronounce any of these names, but Moshe Yalon, who's the defense minister, both of them have said that, look, this demand that Israel, you know, or somebody occupy the Jordan Valley in perpetuity, that doesn't offer any security to Israel at all.
They simply don't face anything like the kind of security environment that they faced pre-1967, where any of the Arab states around them could have invaded or even had pretenses to invade or anything like this.
These are all justifications that Israel is superimposing onto the current negotiations in order to continue an occupation that they are desperate to continue.
And it's not to, you know, ensure their security.
It's not to make sure that armies of Arabs from either Jordan or Egypt or anywhere else are going to, you know, come over the border into the West Bank or into Israel.
This is just simply not the justification.
Israel has military superiority over all of those states.
It's unique in the whole Middle East region for having nuclear weapons.
And none of that's going to happen.
So it's not a threat.
So the justification purely is, you know, dressed up as a security justification as such.
But it's not.
It's a justification to continue the occupation and make sure that the Israeli army and the Jews that are settled there do not leave the West Bank, because that is the realization of Zionist values.
You know, as I said before the break, the Likud party charter says that there should be no Palestinian Arab state to the west of the Jordan River.
And therefore the Jordan Valley is very important to maintain in Israeli control.
Well, you know, I kind of wonder sometimes whether I'm actually, in my own small way, accidentally helping to normalize the idea that eventually there's just going to be a big Trail of Tears march out of the West Bank, a second half of the Nakba type of a situation, because that sure doesn't ever seem to be the premise of anybody else's argument about this stuff.
I mean, you mentioned the Likud platform.
That still, they would, you know, could be argued as just sort of aspirational, you know, next year in Jerusalem kind of thing.
But, you know, when Ehud Olmert or Barack Obama talk about this, I'm sure you saw Barack Obama's interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, where this is some pretty tough talk.
And he's saying, listen, you're going to end up having to annex the West Bank, but that's going to be your poison pill.
I'm paraphrasing, you know, because you're going to end up being a demographic minority and then it'll be an outright apartheid state.
You know, you'll have your Jewish state, but you won't have your democracy anymore.
And that's what Ehud Olmert says as well.
The former prime minister, and I think he's still the defense minister in the Likud government, says that, you know, this is national suicide here, what we're doing.
We're biting off more than we can chew.
And so, but I guess, you know, the forced march is the only real explanation, other than complete and abject stupidity, that the plan would eventually be that, yeah, they're going to annex the West Bank all right, but they'll keep a Jewish majority by simply expelling all the Palestinian Christians and Muslims who already live there.
I think there's a couple things going on.
So first of all, it's true that there are some in the left wing in Israel that want negotiations on the basis of the 1967 borders and actually mean it when they say that eventually they would like to see a secure and Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel.
The problem is that the Likud party, one of the most right-wing hawkish groups in Israel, is in power and government right now.
And over the past couple of years, particularly under the Obama administration, there has been the rise of very smaller, not Likud, right-wing parties in Israel, you know, getting more seats in the Knesset and all this kind of stuff.
And they are very powerful politically.
They're the kind of powerful that, you know, in the U.S. when right-wing hawks and conservative talk radio and Fox News get on their soapboxes and scream that Obama's weak so you have to do something on Ukraine, and then Obama, no matter how reluctant he is, maybe he says something hawkish and da-da-da-da.
So this is the kind of pressure that both Netanyahu and the whole of Israeli government leadership faces, because if they sort of show weakness and recede from the dream of greater Israel, they'll be called out by this extreme right wing.
And so, you know, I think the extreme right wing, including Likud, is not looking forward about the consequences of an eventual, you know, expulsion program.
They're not looking at those kinds of consequences, partly because I think they're just extremely ideological.
And, you know, in addition to that sort of party analysis, I also think it's just, you know, bureaucratic and military inertia.
The occupation has been going on for decades now.
Israelis are settled with it.
They're okay with it.
This is part of the way they live.
This is their life.
This is sort of just a perennial fact of their existence in Israel that they have to have a massive standing army all around their borders in Palestine, conscription, all of this kind of stuff.
And so they, too, do not question the direction that that seems to be going in.
That's at least my speculation.
You know, there might be some voices, you know, maybe it's the case that a moderate or left wing government rises in Israel post-Netanyahu and they sort of are more in good faith negotiations.
And then there's a two-state solution.
But, you know, that would have to include incredible concessions of removing people that, you know, hundreds of thousands of people from the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
You know, incredible concessions of pulling back the military.
You know, all of this kind of stuff.
Incredible concessions of, you know, getting rid of the water resources and getting rid of the control of the water resource in the West Bank.
You know, this would be asking so much that even if that sort of leftist, moderate-style leader that we're hypothetically talking about did rise and push for this, he or she would get so attacked by the populace in Israel that I don't think it would be doable.
So, you know, in terms of what's going to happen and what this sort of logically plays out as, which is, of course, bad for Israel, bad for the United States, bad for Palestine, bad for everyone, I don't think there's just a lot of people thinking very rationally about it.
I think they're irrational.
That's the nature of Zionism, you know.
We inhabit this land no matter what, no matter who stands in our way, and it goes back to what's been said in the Bible.
So that's something you can't argue with, you know.
Zeus, Poseidon, God, Allah, Muhammad, Jesus, these are not things that are up for rational discussion.
And when people fervently believe it so much, they're not going to be punctured by logic that says, eventually you're going to have to come to a decision, and eventually this dream is going to die because there are actual people living there.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
There's so many liberal Zionists like Max Blumenthal and others now who are former liberal Zionists who aren't really Zionists at all anymore who say they want a one-state, that there has to be a one-state, multi-ethnic, you know, freedom of religion-based society there because the Zionist project is already so, it's moved so far to the right, as you say, the fact, you know, to paraphrase, the facts on the ground, such as they are, are basically irreversible.
So, but it's just, it's interesting to me that, oh yeah, as you mentioned earlier in the show, Yasser Arafat and, for that matter, the rest of the neighboring states, they all said, okay, fine, you conquered Palestine back in 1948, okay, but just go back to 1967 borders.
And so, where Allah and Jesus and all of this stuff about the Third Temple and this and that may be irreconcilable, the basic facts of the human beings who actually live in the Holy Land, it has been reconcilable this whole time.
It's just that the Israelis have continued to create these facts on the ground that have made it an irreconcilable situation.
I mean, if you look at how hard it was for Sharon to get the settlers out of the Gaza Strip, and that's much less important to the Bible-based kooks than Judea and Samaria are.
And so, you know, I think as you're saying, there's so many settlers there now, it would be such a project, it would basically be impossible even if Yitzhak Rabin came back to get it done.
But it didn't have to be this way.
They blew up their own country because they're mean-spirited and stupid.
Yeah, I mean, that's unfortunately how it looks.
I mean, I'm sympathetic to the one-state solution idea.
I am, because it seems like the least bad of a bunch of bad options in a certain sense.
Because I don't see a two-state solution working out, because of course it's going to play out along the dynamics that it has so far.
And, you know, it is a sort of facts-on-the-ground type of thing.
And I think a liberal Zionist like Max Blumenthal, who are very critical of Israel and the occupation and so forth, sort of need to come to grips and drink some bad cough medicine, and just say one-state solution is the most doable and the least bad option that we have.
Oh, well, to be clear, that's what he thinks.
That's his position, is that forget two states, it's got to be one.
Forget the Zionist project, it should just be Israel-ist-ine over there, or whatever that kind of thing.
The problem with that is that it has even less support internationally than the two-state solution.
Now, let me ask you this real quick.
We're already over time, but I've got to get you to answer this, because I screwed up and forgot to ask it over and over again.
Sure.
Which is that what difference is it really going to make for the Palestinians joining up all these international organizations?
Yeah, it's a symbolic move to try and build on their attainment of a non-observer member status at the UN.
They want to be able to put their toys in place so that one day they can seek a status as a state unilaterally.
And if they can be involved in all these international organizations and all these treaties, it makes it easier for them to do that.
And that's a sort of wild card that they'll pull out if Israel continues to be intransigent.
All right.
And I'm sorry, we've got to leave it there.
We're way over time here.
But thank you so much for your time, John.
Okay.
All right, everybody.
That's John Glazer from Antiwar.com, The Washington Times, and The Huffington Post.
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