07/15/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Sky here.
First, I want to take a second to thank all the show's listeners, sponsors, and supporters for helping make the show what it is.
I literally couldn't do it without you.
And now I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at Amazon.com, stop by ScottHorton.org first.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page.
That way, the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
It won't cost you an extra cent.
And it's not just books.
Amazon.com sells just about everything in the world, except cars, I think.
So whatever you need, they've got it.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page at ScottHorton.org or go to ScottHorton.org slash Amazon.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I will direct your attention now to news.antiwar.com.
That's where our first guest on the show today, Jason Ditz, writes.
Welcome back, Jason.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Really appreciate you joining us here.
Why don't you give us an update on all the bad news from Israel's war on the Palestinians?
Well, God, it's so depressing.
There was a ceasefire initiative by Egypt, which was supposed to take effect at 9 a.m.this morning, and it seemed to have some momentum behind it.
It's the first one since the latest, well, we're in day 8 of the newest Gaza war, and neither side seems to have gone along with the deal.
And, you know, Hamas said they wanted something more than just a brief truce.
They wanted some sort of settlement that would end in an actual ceasefire.
Israel's saying that they didn't trust Hamas to go along with it, and they're saying that Hamas was the one that violated it first after the 9 a.m.deadline.
But going into a cabinet vote this morning in Israel, which we don't know how the vote turned out, but there seemed to be quite a bit of opposition to a ceasefire under any terms among the Israeli cabinet.
Netanyahu was kind of pushing for the ceasefire, but Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon was opposed to it.
Neftali Bennett from Jewish Home was opposed to it.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was opposed to it, and it didn't seem to have that much support in the security cabinet.
You know, I'm confused about the way this played out.
Am I right that, I believe the way I read it reported was that the Egyptians came up with the offer.
They told the Israelis, hey, would you agree to this?
The Israelis said okay, and then they announced it on the news and said, okay Hamas, this is the deal.
This is the ceasefire that you have to agree to, kind of thing like that, rather than getting them on board first.
In other words, it was basically, it seemed to me, like it was set up really to fail, just to make Hamas look like they're the bad guys for refusing to abide by the ceasefire that everyone had agreed on when they had never really agreed on it, kind of thing.
Right, and it reflects the Egyptian junta's lack of relationship with Hamas.
I mean, older Egyptian governments, the Morsi government, even the Mubarak government had pretty constant contacts with Hamas, specifically for this reason, so that when these virtually annual flare-ups get going, they can negotiate ceasefires.
But the junta has cut off all contacts with Hamas.
They don't really have any ties like that.
There's some reports that maybe some of their spy agencies still have some contacts, but there's no real diplomatic channel open anymore, so it was sort of necessary for them to try to do it this way, and yeah, it didn't help.
The help matters any.
Well, yeah, and you know, Hamas, I guess, you know, they're just like the Israelis, they're at least a wannabe government, which gives them all the same kind of priorities and prerogatives, and the worst Israel is, well, you know, war is the health of the state, unless you really lose, right?
Then you're dead.
But other than that, it's good to have an enemy if you're a government.
That's exactly it, and Hamas' political leadership is absolutely playing this up as themselves standing up to Israel, which, if you look at it on paper, we're up to 192 Palestinians dead, no Israelis dead, very little damage on the Israeli side, even if maybe a couple dozen people wounded, but they're standing up to them, but they don't, they're not really accomplishing anything doing it, except getting a lot of Palestinians killed.
And on the Israeli side, it's the same deal.
It's, well, we're killing a bunch of people, it's not really changing the situation in Gaza, other than that there's a few more leveled houses than there used to be, but we're really standing up to those Palestinians.
Yeah.
Yeah, and you know, I believe it was Netanyahu's words where he said, well, I don't know who I'm quoting anymore.
It was one of these, you know, high-level Israeli ministers anyway, saying, well, we absolutely must destroy their rocket capability.
You know, like it's an advanced nuclear program or something, their rocket capability, which means there can be no roofs left standing in Gaza or something, right?
You can make one of these rockets in your garage is the whole point.
Right.
You could probably make one of these rockets in your backyard, unless you eliminate all metal from the Gaza Strip, there's going to be a way to produce these, what are basically chunks of plumbing pipe that they're just lobbing with some accelerants into Israeli territory.
Yeah, I mean, I guess what that really amounts to is it's just a blank check for further intervention until they feel like quitting.
Like you're saying, they're killing people, but to no real strategic end, but just until they feel like stopping, or I don't know if they're trying to drive the Hamas and Fatah government apart.
Is that working?
It's not clear that's working either.
And the thing is, for a lot of this, it seems like, especially on the far right in Israel, the war is kind of an end unto itself.
Just keeping this war going is popular among their constituents.
So they want to do it so long as they can without getting any sort of international censure on them from killing huge numbers of civilians, which in the past has provided a little bit of a check, but Hamas doesn't have near the ties it once did.
And all around the world, all this international censure is coming from governments, so unless they have good ties with the government in power whose civilians are getting killed, they largely don't care.
I mean, realistically, if Israel kills 192 Palestinians like they have now, there's some lip service among the Arab nations, but none of them like Hamas either, so they're not really outraged like they would have been in the past.
Egypt, which used to be Hamas's ally, isn't in the picture anymore.
Syria, which used to be Hamas's ally, isn't in the picture anymore.
There really isn't anybody left that's all that interested in stopping this.
What about Iran?
Do they even still support Hamas?
On paper, they do, though in practice, I think that virtually all of their ties were severed during the Syrian Civil War because Hamas was pretty quick to jump ship on the Assad government and start backing the rebels.
Well, so, I don't know, man.
I guess until the people on the hillside are done with their fireworks show, this thing is just going to keep rolling on.
It sort of looks that way.
I mean, at some point, Israel's got to just get sick of it and say, okay, well, we achieved our goal.
And that's really, you know, neither side has a real goal, but that's really what this is about, is both sides being able to politically say at some point, we showed them.
And, you know, in the 2008-2009 Israeli invasion of Gaza, it was a fairly popular endeavor in Israel, and Kadima ran pretty heavily on it, on the fact that they invaded Gaza in the 2009 election, although they still ended up in the opposition afterwards.
And in 2012, the same deal on Hamas's side.
A lot of Palestinians got killed, but Hamas spun the fact that they got a ceasefire in less than a week as proof that Israel was scared of them and that they had won.
Right.
All right.
Well, as you know, music means we got to stop right there.
We'll be right back with Jason Ditz from news.antiwar.com.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented LibertyStickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them, but still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
LibertyStickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz from news.antiwar.com.
And, you know, the last time we talked last week, Jason, I was saying, you know, it seems to me more like a fight between some guy and the prisoner he's kidnapped and is keeping in the basement rather than between two neighbors as it's so often portrayed in the media.
This fight between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank.
I saw a Twitter metaphor that I thought was a bit more apt, probably, you know, a bit easier to understand that attacking or, you know, criticizing the Palestinians for shooting rockets over the wall at the Israelis is like accusing a woman of punching her rapist, you know, as though somehow the fault could possibly be on the victim who is being preyed upon for daring to strike back in any sense whatsoever.
And yet, of course, as TV has it, anything that Israel does is always somehow magically by definition, retaliation and defense from the people that they are holding captive.
Well, that's that's true.
And what's what's incredible is this seems to extend to an individual level to some extent, even the reports on the torture and murder of the Palestinian team before this war started up.
We have confessions now from the three Israelis that did it.
And a lot of the media reports say it was a retaliation for the three Israeli teams that got killed as though this was somehow just another hit for tat move.
And you could sort of see in the way this is covered how those Israelis might have felt like, oh, we can just go out and murder a random Palestinian in East Jerusalem and no one will care.
I mean, as it turns out, it became an international incident.
But in a way, you sort of could see how they would imagine that everyone's just going to look the other way and call this retaliation like like everything else Israel does.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, you had entire mobs chanting death to the Arabs.
If you ever take it seriously, they look behind them.
Hey, where is everybody?
Oh, well.
And then they go on ahead, though, with their lynching.
Right.
And and not to not to put Hamas in a sympathetic light here either, because while you can sort of understand the desperation of the Palestinians and wanting to strike back, what Hamas is doing really isn't helping matters any.
It's just getting a lot of people killed, most of whom aren't Hamas members.
Despite all the talks of Israeli accuracy and the care and precision with which they conduct their attack, the U.N. figures said roughly 80 percent of the people that have been killed so far are civilians.
Yeah, it really is terrible.
And and, you know, most of the time it seems like the rocket attacks and and of course, Israel always just hit Hamas targets because they prefer to.
But most of the time, when you have the kind of random rockets coming over the wall various times, it's usually Islam Jihad or one of these other groups.
And Hamas always tries to go and clamp down on them and prevent them from giving the Israelis a PR win or whatever.
But I guess in this case, they think they're winning PR wise of piles of bodies.
And, you know, I don't know that Hamas or or whatever Palestinians, they have the right to defend themselves.
But you're right that what they're doing is certainly not smart, even if it is, you know, an act of desperation or whatever.
In fact, they're they're still giving the, you know, in a way they're giving credibility to this these kind of ridiculous slogans that, oh, the Israelis only target the bad guys.
Oops, killed a couple of hundred kids and and innocent people, too.
But we were only targeting the bad guys, whereas Hamas, who never hit anyone with these damn rockets, why they just fire indiscriminately towards civilians.
And so that makes them the far worse terrorists, you know, and so it's a great talking point that they help hand the Israelis and their partisans.
It really is.
And and it's hard to dispute that Hamas fires indiscriminately because their rockets are so primitive.
They don't really have any sort of guidance.
Right.
Yeah.
What are they going to do, target?
I mean, they can say, well, we took a shot at the Dimona nuclear reactor, but you're really just lobbing something in that general direction that you think will go that far and hoping it hit that.
I mean, the odds of actually hitting anything you're aiming at with those types of rockets are pretty remote.
Right now.
So what's the White House doing about this?
The White House is just making matters worse as usual.
When when the peace, the Egypt truce talks were sort of getting underway and Israel was set to have a Tuesday morning security cabinet meeting on whether or not to stop attacking Gaza, the White House came out with a statement praising Israel for acting in self-defense and saying how proportionate their response was to what Hamas is doing.
And really, again, because because the only thing that usually stops Israel in this in this sort of conflict is fear of international repercussions really gave them some more momentum behind not stopping the attacks.
That's terrible.
And then can you tell me a little bit about this controversy about whether Netanyahu once and for all disclaim the idea of a Palestinian state?
Because I guess some people are saying, no, he's just saying we couldn't do unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank the way we did from Gaza.
But I don't know if I read it that way.
What did you think?
Well, what he's saying, if he means what he said, would be that he's ruling out a Palestinian state ever.
I mean, he he flat out said there's no way we can have the West Bank not under our control because it'll just become 20 Gaza strips.
And whether he actually means to completely ditch the two state solution or not, I think is probably a matter of some dispute, because when these when these wars flare up, Israeli politicians just go insane with with the hawkish rhetoric.
And they say a lot of things that they realistically don't mean because they think they'll play well politically.
So I don't know that what he's saying was meant to rule out any two state solution in the future.
But but that is what he said.
Yeah, he's basically saying we have to control all these security zones, which means, you know, that that's the joke from the the accidentally recorded footage that leaked right where he's talking about how he screwed Bill Clinton.
Oh, yeah.
I told Bill Clinton, well, we just need these security zones.
And then I made this security zones take up the whole damn West Bank.
It belongs to us now.
The Americans are easily moved.
So so but that's what he's saying, right, is that, well, yeah, we just need these security zones.
But other than that, they can have their state.
Yeah.
Other than all the territory, they can have their state.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
They can all go swim in the Jordan River and not come back.
Maybe.
All right.
Thank you so much, Jason.
You're the best, dude.
Sure.
Thanks for having me.
Jason Ditz, everybody.
News dot anti war dot com for all the bad news.
He really is the best on this stuff.
News dot anti war dot com.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest accounts for the national interest dot 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 Council for the National Interest dot org.
Hey, I'll Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee.
Lots of it.
And you probably prefer taste good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee Company at Darren's Coffee dot com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world.
All specialty premium grade with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren's Coffee.
Order now at Darren's Coffee dot com.
Use promo code Scott and save two dollars.
Darren's Coffee dot com.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
And I'm so excited about Commodity Discs from Commodity Discs dot com.
They're one ounce silver pieces with a QR code engraved on the backside.
Scan the code with your phone and get the instant spot price.
Commodity Discs are paving the way forward for the alternative currency community in America and around the world.
The QR code Commodity Disc.
Technology is now finally made a real free market silver currency viable.
And anyone who donates a hundred dollars or more to the Scott Horton show at Scott Horton dot org slash donate gets one free.
That's Commodity Discs dot com.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow dot com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government generated bubbles pop, which is by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all the stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at WallStreetWindow dot com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.
WallStreetWindow dot com.