07/19/14 – Max Blumenthal – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, July 20th, 2014, I'm Scott Horton, this is Anti-War Radio.
All right y'all, welcome to the show, it is Anti-War Radio, I'm your host Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA.
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On today's show, we'll be talking with Darja Mail, former unembedded reporter from the late lamented Iraq War, all about the new one.
But first, Max Blumenthal, author of Goliath, Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, and writer for Mondoweiss.net and electronicintifada.net.
Welcome back to the show, Max.
Good to be on with you again.
Very happy to have you here.
The latest article at Mondoweiss here is Israeli police ransacked Tariq Abdu Qadir's family home and arrest relatives in apparent revenge raid.
That's the young man that was beaten, and I hope we can get to that a little bit later in the interview, but I want to start with the big news.
As of this recording, Saturday afternoon, the 19th of July, Max, there's 341 killed, and 80% of them being civilians, somewhere around 79 or 80 of them children in the Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip.
One or two Israelis have been killed, and I guess about a dozen wounded, something like that.
And so in my Twitter feed, and in the president's statements, what I hear is basically the same kind of thing, and that is, it's always the same talking point, is, well, what would you do?
Okay, maybe you don't like what Israel's doing, but what would you do if the, you know, town next door was constantly raining rockets down on your head?
They have to do something because they're against these terrible terrorists.
Max, is that not right?
What's the deal?
Well, it's an appeal to our paranoia and racism when they ask, what would you do?
And we're immediately asked to put ourselves in the shoes of Jewish Israelis who are specially protected, specially privileged, and are the more powerful party, and are kind of like the suburbs in this situation.
And Gaza is what Obama calls a tough neighborhood.
He's actually used that kind of racist backlash language.
Why don't we put ourselves in the shoes of people in the Gaza Strip?
What would you do if you were warehoused as surplus humanity because you're of the wrong ethnicity?
What would you do if you were occupied by a foreign army that had stolen your family's land?
What would you do if you were surrounded with electrical fencing?
You couldn't leave, and your business wasn't allowed to export goods.
When I go on the radio in Alaska, I say, what would you do, fishermen?
Because I know there's lots of people who like to fish in Alaska.
If you couldn't fish more than three kilometers off your shorelines without a foreign army shelling you, what would you do if your skies were blanketed with drones and the most advanced attack fighters in the world bombing you without any anti-aircraft defenses?
Would you sit there passively?
And I ask Americans this, would you allow a foreign army to rampage through your streets?
Or would it be like Red Dawn?
Would it be like the Wolverines in George Milius's famous Cold War movie?
I would think that Americans wouldn't sit on their hands and that they would actually resist.
Americans like to be proud of their anti-colonial tradition while they should honor Gaza's self-defense against one of the most aggressive settler colonial projects in history and the only active settler colonial project in the world.
You know what I really think it is, the way that that talking point is even plausible at all, is that Americans are led to believe that Palestine is more or less the country next door, the territory next door or something.
So they picture it like Juarez shooting a bunch of rockets at El Paso, something like that.
But they don't think of it in the terms that you just described where this is like the Mexican army comes and occupies El Paso and enslaves all of the Americans there, takes all their best property, puts them in the worst ghetto of El Paso and take over the town and colonize it for themselves and keep them under martial law all the time.
Sorry to intervene, but that's actually what El Paso is doing to Juarez right now.
The Anti-Defamation League has produced these ridiculous ads.
Imagine if New Jersey was shelling you, as if New York is occupying New Jersey and Bruce Springsteen's coming through with his attack guitar and Bon Jovi is staging guerrilla assaults and a Trans Am.
I mean, it's like the most ridiculous propaganda and it just shows the bankruptcy of Zionist arguments right now in a one-sided slaughter.
The Washington Post actually commissioned a piece by their correspondent, Ruth Eglash, who is married to a government propagandist for the Israeli government and who has previously attacked my work before she was hired by the Washington Post.
She covered the 30 Israeli cows dying in a rocket strike.
I mean, they're so desperate to find Israeli casualties to write about and feel a stoke sympathy about because we clearly have more sympathy for the Israelis.
They're the quote-unquote white people like us in this conflict that they have to write about their cows since no Israelis are dying.
They're so protected that their skies are covered by an iron dome.
Has anyone ever asked Obama, why can't the Gaza Strip have an iron dome?
I mean, it's like this question exceeds the possibilities of American logic.
All right.
So the last time we spoke, it was about your article for the Electronic Intifada about how Netanyahu knew that the kidnapped boys were already dead and he played the Israeli people for two weeks and all at the same time, of course, whipping up, you know, sentiment against the occupied Palestinians in the West Bank and doing house raids on people who they knew weren't the ones they were after because they already knew who they were after and all of that.
And then so this is what has obviously led up to the war going on in Gaza now.
But so why drum up this whole crisis and attack Gaza this way, Max?
Yeah, I mean, we're going back into the middle of June when we talk about the missing teens and it seems like everyone's forgotten about it.
The two suspects, the Israeli intelligence services, have had their names since 24 hours after the kidnapping.
And they're in the West Bank, which is honeycombed with Palestinian collaborators, with Israeli intelligence agents.
They know every nook and cranny of the West Bank and somehow they can't catch these guys and don't even really seem to be looking.
And everyone's forgotten about it as they're carpet bombing the Gaza Strip.
I just find that highly unusual.
I don't have any answers for you.
I just find it unusual that the pretext for all of this was originally the kidnapping of three and killing of three Israeli teens.
And that remains unsolved.
And now they're attacking a place that had nothing to do with the kidnapping.
So it seems like this all was leading up to, this is all motivated, number one, by a desire to smash the infrastructure of Hamas and unravel the Palestinian unity government, which already was a result of a political weakness from Hamas just because of regional factors.
And there's an argument that Israel's strengthened Hamas politically once again and actually weakened Fatah and the Palestinian Authority through this attack.
But then the other reason, now that Hamas has unloaded some of its arsenal of fairly long range rockets, which have done minimal damage to Israeli infrastructure and civilian life, but have disrupted Israelis psychologically.
What has happened is Hamas has revealed Israel's vulnerability.
It's a psychological vulnerability.
It's something Palestinians understand, which is that Israelis exist in a settler colonial reality, just like the Algerian Pied Noir from France.
They feel very existentially threatened and they're a very vulnerable society.
Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister of Israel, said, we need to launch a ground invasion so our kids can have their summer vacation.
And that's really where this is coming from.
They have this fantasy that they can depress rocket fire in order to maintain this fantasy that they're a normal society that is almost existing in a kind of European reality, but in the heart of the Middle East.
And to get there, they have to exact massive casualties in the Gaza Strip and completely crush the Palestinian spirit for resistance, which I just don't think is possible at this point.
And so they're in a really doomed, they've enacted a really doomed strategy where they're telling their citizens, we will completely end all rocket fire at all costs.
They're not going to be able to do it.
And in the end, we could see over 1,000 casualties in the Gaza Strip, 1,000 killed.
There already have been thousands of people wounded.
Hospitals are overloaded.
Al Shifa Hospital, the main hospital in Gaza City, is 100% civilians.
And this is the product of the kind of lifestyle that Israelis want to live and their refusal to accept that Palestinians demand some level of dignity.
All right.
Now, lastly here, and very quickly, Max, I'm sorry, we're very short on time.
But at electronicintifada.net, there's an article here, expel Palestinians, populate Gaza with Jews, says Knesset Deputy Speaker Mashi Feiglin.
Can you tell me, as far as your best knowledge, could you place that on the Israeli political spectrum?
How far to the right is that position?
He's the deputy speaker of the Knesset.
How powerful of a guy is this really?
And what does that really mean for him to threaten that?
Is that a realistic danger that they would try that?
It's not going to happen.
But this is just an appeal to the right wing.
And it's, you know, whenever there's an attack on Gaza, I call it blood for votes.
Whoever can spew the most vitriolic anti-Arab rhetoric on Facebook or wherever else gets the hearts and minds of the Israeli youth who are just comprehensively overwhelmed with racism and this culture of militarization that they've been, unfortunately, raised on.
This is Moshe Feiglin, who's one of many deputy speakers of the Knesset.
He's not a powerful figure, but he's a popular figure.
And he has this record of extreme rhetoric, so much so that his Likud party actually filed legal action to keep him from getting elected in the last national elections.
This is the first time he's been elected.
And he is now really receiving a major platform.
He's a populist in Israeli society.
And this rhetoric is common.
Ayelet Shaked, who is one of the rising stars in the Jewish Home Party, a key party in the governing coalition, called for a genocide of Palestinians to prevent Palestinian mothers from giving birth to, in her words, little snakes.
Shimon Peres, the dove who Samantha Power loves to hug and praise and Susan Rice called a walking global treasure in one of the worst manglings of the English language, has called for acting with a heavy hand against Gaza.
Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas human animals, whereas his ambassador, Ron Dermer, is on CNN every day calling them human shields.
So I guess he's gone off message a little bit.
But this kind of dehumanizing rhetoric is increasingly common in Israeli society.
And my left-wing friends, this marginal group in Tel Aviv, in Jerusalem, who are staging anti-war rallies, say that they have never seen such organized right-wing street tactics to attack them, to even find their personal information through social media and hunt them down, and that they have had to go into a semi-underground mode.
So this is a frightening time in Israeli society.
And we'll see these trends intensify as long as the U.S. continues to arm and fund Israel.
Got that right.
And I'm sorry that we can't elaborate that point because we have to stop here.
We're all out of time.
But thank you so much for your time, Max, again.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks as always, Scott.
That's the great Max Blumenthal, everybody.
He's the author of Goliath, Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.
You can find him at mondoweiss.net and at electronicintifada.net.