05/08/14 – Scott McConnell – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And if you take a look at the front page of Antiwar.com today, you'll see this piece by Scott McConnell in the American Conservative Magazine after Kerry's failure.
And I know you're asking, which failure, Scott Horton?
Well, Scott McConnell is on the line to tell us which one he's referring to.
Welcome back to the show, Scott.
How are you doing?
Thank you.
I'm doing well, thanks.
Very good.
Very good.
Happy to hear it.
Thank you very much for coming on the show.
And, of course, I'm just screwing around here.
The failure in question, the most recent major one.
Well, I don't know the most recent because Ukraine's an ongoing thing.
But you're talking about the collapse of the peace talks in Palestine.
John Kerry, I think I supported John Kerry's efforts on this.
I didn't think much would come of them.
But I mean, John Kerry is, I think, an awful in Ukraine and has acted like a neoconservative.
But in the Mideast, he's acted like a standard American diplomat who thinks that the best chance for peace and self-determination and as close as you can get to justice in Israel-Palestine is a two-state solution.
And he invested a great deal of time and effort and energy and was willing to quite publicly call out Israeli leaders and really tried to push Israel to allow a Palestinian state on the West Bank.
And he came up against that the Israelis kept building settlements and the Israelis kept building side issues.
And finally, he and his negotiating team, which included a lot of kind of Israel lobby type negotiators.
I mean, figures like Martin Indyk, who had been involved in the peace process for many, many years, and had always been interpreted as being very pro-Israel and described in some instances as Israel's lawyers.
But they are people who, to some extent, believe in a two-state solution, believe it's better for Israel, obviously better for the Palestinians, and better for the United States.
And they just couldn't get it done because Israel wouldn't budge.
I mean, Israel has a government now which openly wants, you know, all of Palestine and just wants to either disperse the Palestinians or put them at the baddest stands or just wants nothing, you know, doesn't even conceive of any scenario in which they should have any justice or self-determination.
And I think Kerry came to realize that.
So it's like a big process that started in the early 90s with the Oslo process kind of ends with a whimper, but I think it's pretty clearly over now.
Well, and when you say that, what you mean by that, the Oslo process, that means the negotiations toward having negotiations toward eventual two-state solution.
That's what they've been working on since the early 90s, and that is, this was the last try for that.
In other words, Annapolis and Camp David and etc., etc., going back.
Now it's basically widely recognized that we're not going to even try that anymore.
That's over.
This was it, and now it's falling apart.
Well, the Americans aren't going to try it anymore, and it's kind of acknowledged.
The American perception was that as long as they made Israel feel secure, then Israel would feel secure enough to make confessions.
So the United States was always very, very nice to Israel and always offering it, well, if you do this, we'll give you more weapons, we'll give you more money, we'll give you this, that, and the other thing.
And I wonder if that basic perception of the psychological dynamic between Israel and the United States is incorrect.
The other possibility, which I think may happen, and I kind of alluded to at the end of the piece, is that Europe will take a bigger role, but instead of sort of giving Israel more carrots, they may bit by bit by bit be willing to use sticks.
I mean, Israel has a much closer economic relationship with Europe than the United States, because it's nearer.
Thousands of Israelis go to vacation to Europe all the time.
So, I mean, Europe can just start making that sort of thing, you want to keep holding the West Bank all right, every time an Israeli comes here, we won't give him a visa, we'll ask him to ask under oath and in official form whether he served in the occupying forces on the West Bank, and maybe start denying visas, or maybe start putting in trade restrictions on products which come from the West Bank and things like that, and just begin to make Israel feel it's not getting a free ride anymore with the occupation.
I mean, and you know, beginning a sanctions regime.
And that might make a difference.
And maybe the Europeans have the gumption to do that.
I mean, it's clearly the United States does not.
I mean, I think Obama and Kerry clearly understood what the right thing to do was, but they didn't have the, you know, the political clout to do it, they would have to face down entirely the Israel lobby in the United States, and which includes, you know, a major part of the fundraising apparatus of the Democratic Party, and Obama wasn't willing to basically blow up his, his presidency and his party for to do that.
Well, yeah, you know, you mentioned how hard Kerry worked on this, and I gotta say, you know, I've supported it too, out of all of his policies, I guess I support the negotiations with Iran, as well.
And, and really, in both sense, in both cases, I've been impressed by how hard he's worked to get it done.
Although, as Phil Zaroli reported in the American Conservative, in fact, that really, the deal with Iran was already worked out, secretly in a moment, and Kerry's kind of window dressing there.
But on this one, though, I totally agree with you.
Sorry for that diversion and tangent.
On this one, though, it does seem like he's taken this very seriously.
And in fact, I've sort of thought, why?
It doesn't seem to make sense why he would try so hard, because it seems like he must have been as aware, as you and I that the Netanyahu government and his coalition, which includes many ministers to the right of Netanyahu, that they never meant to give up the West Bank, even if they ever did give up the West Bank as a Palestinian state, it wouldn't really be a state by any other definition of the term that anyone else in the world recognizes, it would still just be, you know, occupation, maybe a little bit lighter.
I don't know if even occupation light.
So what, what was the point?
Was Kerry actually naive?
Or was he just trying to demonstrate that?
Okay, one last good faith attempt, kind of a thing?
Or what do you think?
Well, I think he may have been willing, wanting to, I mean, the Netanyahu for a number of years has said that he favored a Palestinian state.
And he didn't.
I mean, he said that to American audiences, he said different things to Israeli audiences, and different things in Hebrew than in English.
But there was a sense of maybe Kerry felt that you put enough pressure on, you can, you know, make him take it to his word and figuring that Netanyahu maybe feels ambivalently, maybe Netanyahu fears bad relations with the United States, or maybe Netanyahu's coalition would collapse.
Ultimately, I don't think Kerry had a lot of support from Barack Obama on this.
I mean, I don't think Obama wanted to have, I think Obama cares more about a deal with Iran a deal with Iran than having a major confrontation with Israel.
And it's quite possibly that, you know, politics being the art of the possible that you can't do both.
That, you know, you, we can, we can have a negotiation, which eliminates the possibility of war with Iran.
And just say, and tell the Israelis, all right, you've made your choice, you've made your bed, now lie in it.
That's essentially what Obama said.
It is in his trip to Israel last year, I mean, he tried to me talk to Israeli students, and he made the case that it was in their interest that the Palestinians have self determination that that wasn't their interest that they not become an apartheid state.
But he also said, like, it's up to you, you know, meaning, we America aren't going to force you to do what's in your interest.
And so that means that, you know, Kerry could use words, but there was no question that America was going to cut off aid to Israel or begin to, you know, support United Nations resolutions against Israel and things like that.
We know Andrew Coburn reported in Harper's that he had sources that said a lot of this was personal between Obama and Kerry, that, you know, everybody recognizes you're saying that America would have to really push hard to make Israel to make Israel do something to get them to do it, threatened to withhold aid or something severe like that.
And that Obama was certainly not willing to go that far.
If even if it would work, if john Kerry was going to get all the credit and go down in history as the guy that worked the deal and not him.
And I sounded plausible enough to me when you talk about sure, sure, sure.
I mean, I Andrew has, Coburn has sources in Washington.
And that sounds possible.
I mean, that politicians have big egos.
That's funny.
And you know, it's also it's the reverse, isn't it of the policy of 2009, where he started off saying, Hey, let's work out a deal Islamic Republic of Iran.
Happy New Year.
Come on, let's, let's work it out.
And then he ended up basically sabotaging his own outreach to Iran on their nuclear program, in exchange for a real settlement freeze.
And, and, and we're gonna, you know, get back to work on talks on a two state solution.
And then of course, they didn't freeze anything.
And he had just scotched his whole Iran negotiations, his early Iran negotiations for now.
Yeah, well, the Iranians didn't, I have to admit, didn't make it easy with with their election crackdown on the parties of the forces, which may well have won the election.
I mean, it's hard to know.
So it was, it was hard.
It's hard to get everything lined up in a row.
Obama was clearly opening up to Iran, but Iran was, you know, not in a position, then to, to say yes, in a way that Obama could get a settlement.
Well, as Ray McGovern reminds us, the Israeli Mossad was dressing up as CIA and hiring Jandala to murder generals and officers inside Iran in October 2009, right in the midst of make it or break it on the top.
No, there's been a lot of state sponsored terrorism sponsored by, sponsored by Israel.
And, you know, and previously by the United States and Iran.
I'm sorry, we're going to have to stop right there, but we'll pick it up on that point.
On the other side of this break with Scott McConnell from the American conservative magazine, the American conservative.com.
After Kerry's failure is the latest.
Hey, I'll sky here.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton show.
I'm at scotthorton.org and APS radio news.com.
Talking with Scott McConnell from the American conservative magazine.
He's a founding editor there.
A former neoconservative, I think he would have me say.
Now running around with the paleos here.
The American conservative.com after Kerry's failure.
And I'm sorry I had to interrupt you there with that hard break, Scott.
But and we were kind of off topic anyway.
But where we left off was Iran and Jandala.
And and I think you were making sort of a general statement about Israel, the United States and and other states using terrorist groups in order to ruin negotiations, kind of as a general principle of how business is done.
Yeah, I want to get I mean, one point I'll make in the piece, which I want to reemphasize is this is the first time I think that American diplomats, even speaking off the record, have explicitly blamed Israel for the breakdown of negotiations.
I mean, this is a marked departure from what happened in 2000 and also in 2008 and the various other ones.
And so it's a it's a it's a turning of a chapter, which is which I think will be, you know, will be remembered.
I mean, I mean, it's for for people to speak to a dovish Israeli journalist and say, basically, the Israelis, you know, ruin this negotiation by continuing to appropriate land and build settlements is I think it's a significant thing that happened.
Right.
You link in your article to this piece in Ynet inside the talks failure, U.S. officials open up.
And I guess this is sort of behind Kerry's poof statement where he was kind of going through the chronology explaining what was going on.
And I think the proof came right after he listed the announcement of was it 14000 new settlements?
Yeah, I mean, here's like it's like the nitty gritty can get kind of boring, but there's a go ahead.
You know, the quotes are are fairly significant.
This is this is an American diplomat unnamed talking about Abbas.
He said Abbas agreed to a demilitarized state, a demilitarized state, the Palestinian leader.
He agreed to a border outlined so 80 percent of the settlers could continue living in Israeli territory.
He agreed for Israel to keep the security sensitive areas for five years on the Jordan Valley.
And then the United States would take over.
He accepted the fact that in the Israeli perception, the Palestinians would never be trustworthy.
He also agreed that Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, i.e., occupied Jerusalem, would remain under Israeli sovereignty.
And he agreed that the return of Palestinians to Israel would depend on Israeli willingness.
Israel won't be flooded with refugees, he promised.
I mean, this is the most accommodating Palestinian leader that the Israelis are are ever going to have and are ever going to be dealing with.
And I mean, he's paid a great price in in terms of his own popularity for his readiness to deal with Israel and to try to meet Israeli concerns.
And basically, the American diplomats are saying that Israel will not take yes for an answer.
And it's never been so explicit.
And I probably could have hyped the novelty of that in the in the article more.
But it's it's really there.
And I think it's very significant.
Well, now, of course, it was just a convenient talking point for the Israelis to say, and I guess their partisans to say, oh, well, now here the PLA wants to cozy up to Hamas and go ahead and create that coalition government after all.
And and so that was why the negotiations broke down.
And I guess, you know, like you're saying now the truth was obvious enough that that that was that spin wasn't going to really, you know, become the official narrative at this point.
And yet it did seem pretty convenient.
I wonder why.
What was the point of that?
Was there a specific point of them announcing that when they announced it?
Because it just made them look bad, gave Netanyahu one more half truth to spout, you know?
Oh, that would be that would be beyond me.
But if if the Palestinian or Palestinian authority did not have a deal with Hamas, Israel, Israelis could say, well, what's the point of having a deal with a Palestinian authority when they don't represent all Palestinians?
I mean, they're the ones that engineered the election that led to Hamas coming to power in the first place.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, Hamas is it's part of Palestinian society.
I think there are a lot of elements.
I mean, the the overall dynamic is that the Palestinians want to have better lives, and that includes Hamas, too.
And Hamas is somewhat divided, but they're perfectly willing to take to take a two state solution, too.
I mean, if you kind of go deep enough into their rhetoric, you know, they may sort of want to hide their readiness to make confessions with kind of bluster.
But they're you know, they they are accepting of a two state solution.
Also, Hamas did think this is kind of like embedded by Israeli Secret Service during the first intifada.
It's like they were worried about a secular liberation movement that was getting gaining more and more Palestinian friends in the West.
So the Israelis really started giving money and stuff to to Palestinian radical Muslims and the idea that this would this would divide the Palestinians and make it make it make them less presentable.
Right.
Yeah.
If Hamas didn't exist, they'd have to invent them.
Oh, yeah.
Well, they did.
And then, you know, as Ray McGovern likes to point out, when they kill when they betrayed Yassin and finally assassinate him, that was what led to the Fallujah uprising in the Iraq occupation.
Then the American clampdown on Fallujah was, you know, knocked down a whole chain of dominoes and somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million people killed in the civil war that followed.
That was a huge thing.
And a lot of that, you know, tinderbox was lit by the assassination of Yassin, the guy that they had hired to build Hamas for them in the first place.
Lord have mercy.
Ray is right.
All right.
Well, so what now?
I mean, you got you still have how many million people live in the West Bank in East Jerusalem?
Um, I think there's about four and a half and then another, what, 750,000 in Gaza.
I mean, there's about an equal number of Palestinian and Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews in the whole territory.
I mean, so I don't know what will happen now.
I mean, I can concoct an optimistic scenario that Europe will begin to stay to Israel.
Look, you can have a peaceful settlement and perhaps Israel can become part of the EU.
Perhaps Palestine can become part of the EU.
You can divide the territory, the water resources in somewhat fair way that makes sense.
Or you can be increasingly isolated from Western Europe and just, you know, go off in your South Africa direction.
And the United States has not been willing to say that.
And maybe France, Britain, Germany will.
But that's the most optimistic scenario I can come up with, that some combination of European diplomacy and BDS will pressure Israel.
But you can come up with lots of more pessimistic and bloodier scenarios as well.
Well, so what about a secular, binational state where it's not a Jewish state, but it's a democracy and, you know, all of that, you know, Western-style democracy?
That's how it's supposed to work, right?
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know how you get there.
In South Africa, there were actually elements of commonality between the white apartheid rulers and the blacks, indigenous blacks, that don't quite exist.
I mean, the Israelis don't have that mindset.
I mean, they don't even have the beginnings of it.
So, and also their military position is, you know, probably more dominant.
I don't see how you get there.
I don't think that's a bad outcome.
I'm not, you know, completely committed to that there has to be a Jewish state in Palestine.
It seems to be not a terrible thing necessarily, but not a necessary thing either.
But I don't know how you get to a binational democratic state.
I mean, these are, generally speaking, when you have different ethnicities who are in great, deep civil war type of conflict with one another, the outcome is dividing the states, not unifying them.
I mean, that seems to be the general historical pattern.
Right.
All right.
Well, I guess, like you're saying, there's the European governments and then there's the BDS movement.
And the Americans have basically abandoned under Obama's leadership, progressive minority leadership has basically abandoned really the American policy of seeking a two state solution now, since he wasn't willing to back carry up on this.
And so it's a brave new world now.
Yep, it's a brave new world.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Scott.
I sure appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
I enjoyed it as always, Scott.
Bye bye.
All right, everybody.
That's Scott McConnell.
He's a founding editor over there at the American Conservative Magazine, theamericanconservative.com.
The article is The American...
No, it's not.
That's the thing.
Yeah.
After Carey's failure.
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Oh, John Carey'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.
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