08/06/14 – Dean Ahmad – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton 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.
And our next guest today is Dean Ahmad from the Minaret of Freedom.
That's minaret.org, the website of the Minaret of Freedom Institute, calling the faithful to freedom, advocating a free market Muslim perspective on economics, democracy, terrorism, and the Middle East conflict.
And Dean, you've also been pretty active over the years with the Libertarian Party, right?
Yes, I have.
All right, good deal.
Well, welcome back to the show.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
Good to talk to you again.
Always a pleasure.
Okay, great.
So, I guess, first of all, forgive me for asking such a broad question to start off, but certainly you're well-equipped to answer it.
What do you think that libertarians need to understand about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Well, I think that the most important thing for libertarians to understand is the context and the history of the conflict, to realize that what we're talking about is a region where Muslims, Jews, and Christians had lived side-by-side for a very long time, not without any problems, you understand.
I'm not trying to idealize it, but with great success, and where people had – there were many people who had property rights.
And I think that the most important thing for libertarians to understand about the area, Palestine, the area we call Palestine, which includes the occupied territories and Israel, consisted of mainly Muslims, but there was a very large – 10 to 30 percent Jewish minority, and a significant, maybe 10 percent Christian minority.
And many of these people had title to the land they lived on.
That land titles of the area that is called Israel were held by some majorities, about 93 percent of the privately held land was held by Muslim and Christian Palestinians.
And 97 percent was in the hands of Jews.
And that since the state of Israel was established as a homeland for – not for the native Jews who already had their homes in Palestine, but for European Jews who were trying to flee the pogroms in Russia and the anti-Semitism in France, and of course, later in the middle of the 20th century from the Nazis in Germany, that those people were being brought in and were trying to take over the land through what eventually, after the state of Israel was established, by means of confiscation.
Before then, they'd been purchasing or renting the land.
Some of those land purchases might be questioned as being from absentee landlords, but let's set that aside, because that's not the main problem.
The main problem is that through a variety of methods, the Israelis have taken land away from their actual owners, and given title to, in most cases, the Jewish National Fund or the Israeli state, and in some cases to private Jewish owners, and that this is totally opposed to libertarian principles.
All right, now, so that is important, but it's not the whole story either, because – well, or I don't know, maybe that is enough of the whole story for me to ask this.
It's not the whole story.
I get that.
Well, yeah, no.
I'm sorry.
Sometimes I don't know quite how to form my questions here, but, you know, the crux of what I'm trying to get to, I guess, or what's interesting to me that I wonder if you can help solve here, is whether you think that, you know, even with that being the case, is it possible that, you know, just the fait accompli, even with the Nakba and all the rest, that Israel could possibly – I mean, they've gotten political agreement from various Palestinian authorities over the time that they could really just go ahead and get away with being in Israel at least within 67 borders or maybe 48 borders, but that the real problem comes from the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and maybe the Golan Heights since 1967, or, you know, I wonder about what you think about all that one state, two state, and, you know, as bad as all the violations of property rights were back in 1948, it seems like, you know, maybe we could find a compromise and go forward from here, and there could, you know, be an Israel and a Palestine, but I don't know, what do you think about that?
Sure.
Well, if we're going to change our focus, we can look at the last maybe 20 or 30 years, and what we see is that ever since the Camp David Accords – That would have been in 79, right?
That's right.
Most Palestinians have been willing to accept Israel as a fait accompli, and set aside any questions we have about its moral or legal legitimacy, and to say that as a means of moving forward and trying to re-establish peace in the region, let's allow Israel to exist more or less in its 67 borders, and let the Palestinians have their own state in Gaza and the West Bank, and let's have an agreement that the minority populations in both of these states will be treated with a decent respect of human rights that are understood to be entitled to under international law.
This was the whole framework of the Camp David Accords, which proposed a direction for the solution of all but five of the toughest issues which were put off until later.
Because one of the toughest of those tough issues was never addressed, however, there was really no chance of a workable solution being produced.
That issue that I'm referring to is the question of the Palestinians' right of return.
It's one thing to say you're going to have an Israeli state, and you're going to have a Palestinian state, and they're going to be decent in the way they treat the minorities, and so on and so forth.
This is all great, but the question is, what about the people who were driven out of their land?
Are they allowed to come back?
Now, the Israelis have always steadfastly and uncompromisingly held to the view that any Jew, even if he was driven from Palestine 2,000 years ago, of course he wouldn't have been driven, his family would have driven out 2,000 years ago, should be allowed to return to Israel.
But they have not been willing to allow those Palestinians who were driven out 50 years ago, or 60 years ago, or 40 years ago, or 30 years ago to come back, or even some who have been driven out more recently from Jerusalem to come back.
But that right of return, certainly for those individuals who are still alive, and I would argue at least to some degree for their children, is something that's recognized in international law.
It's something that the Palestinians couldn't negotiate away, even if they wanted to, and they don't want to.
Yeah.
Well, you know, and that really gets to the absurdity of this whole question, when I, for example, am just Jewish enough where I would qualify for a Nazi camp or to make aliyah to Israel, otherwise I don't really have anything to do with Judaism and never have in my entire life.
But just technically speaking, I could get on the dole and all kinds of things over there, whereas you're actually from Palestine and you have no right to go back at all.
It seems to me like they had their fait accompli, and yet by mistreating and using and abusing and getting away with the occupation all this time, that now they've sort of called into question whether it's even possible at all to have, quote unquote, nice guy Israel that got away with what they got away with, but try to move forward in peace.
Now, I think more and more people are going all the way back and questioning why it is that I can live in Israel, Dean, but you cannot.
It's crazy.
Well, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, but I think that the most graphic representation of the problem was when the Israelis allowed a Jewish American who had never been to Israel and who had murdered a Hispanic person out here in Montgomery County in Maryland, they allowed him into Israel on the grounds that as a Jew, regardless of what he had...
All right, I'm sorry, we've got to go.
Dean Ahmad, we'll be right back, y'all.
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Oh man, thought that was an old picture of the Oklahoma City bombing, but no, that's from Gaza.
On my Twitter feed.
All right.
Talking with Dean Ahmad from the Minaret of Freedom.
Calling the faithful to freedom.
The Minaret Institute.
Minaret of Freedom Institute.
And so we're talking about the Israel-Palestine issue and all that.
And I wanted to be clear here real quick that I don't disavow Judaism any more than I disavow Anglicanism or whatever was from my father's side of the family or any of that.
I don't believe in any of that.
If I have a tribe at all, it's Anderson Mill neighborhood skater punks, something like that.
Otherwise, pretty much just me and my family is the way I look at it.
So I don't have any other real allegiances than that.
Other than to you guys, my audience who try to bring good guests to talk with you about stuff.
But anyway, I just want to be clear about that.
And it is insane, by the way, that I have any property right in Israel whatsoever.
And the Palestinians don't have the right of return.
And you were mentioned in this criminal, a murderer that they let in because, hey, he's Jewish.
So they let in an American into Israel.
These magical 2000 year old property rights even somehow applied to the scum of the earth as long as they're Jewish, even to murderers.
And so back to the fait accompli and the maybe blowing it thing.
I always thought that, you know, if Yitzhak Rabin, if we could go back in time and Yitzhak Rabin had lived and there was a two state thing and the international community helped all of the exiles and refugees settle at least in the West Bank and help develop the West Bank and they were allowed to keep their water resources, whatever, that that would be a raw deal, but that it would be more or less acceptable for going forward.
And the politicians in the PLO have said that in the past and that kind of thing, that they're willing to stoop that low and accept it because what are you going to do?
People want to live and go forward and all that.
But since the Israelis have insisted on, in fact, stealing all of the West Bank and keeping the Palestinians as occupied helots in the way that they are right now, bombing the crap out of them to death every once in a while, every couple of years, the way they do with these repeated caste led type punishments, collective atrocities, maskers, it seems like, nope, really, this is why Max Blumenthal and Philip Weiss and some of these other liberal American Jews have completely given up on Zionism at all.
They're saying that the current occupations is basically are basically part and parcel of the existence of Israel at all.
They insist that it's this way.
And this is why there can't be a Jewish state.
It must be a one state solution over there where everyone just has equal rights and leave all the theocracy and ethnic identity out of it, because even if they ever could have done it, quote unquote, right, as right as possible, they sure as hell haven't, Dean.
And that's the way I'm looking at it now.
Not again.
Not that I have a dog in the fight, but just looking at it from an American who's sort of stuck in this fight because my government is paying for one side to slaughter the other all day.
That's the way it seems to me is it's time for everyone to just drop the pretense of two states since those days are over.
Now, what do you think?
Well, I think an increasing number of people are coming to the same conclusion.
To me, the biggest change over the last couple of decades has not been in the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
The changes there have been kind of marginal.
The biggest change that I've seen has been in terms of the conversation or the discussion, the discourse about this issue within the United States.
And the most important thing you asked me earlier, what's the most important thing for libertarians to understand?
The most important thing for Americans to understand about what's going on, regardless of your political persuasion, about what's going on in the Middle East is that the dispute in Palestine is not at all a religious dispute.
The dispute is totally a land dispute.
There is no attempt by Jews to convert Muslims to Judaism, and there's no attempt by Muslims to force Jews into becoming Muslims.
It's got nothing to do with that.
The question is who has the right to that land, both in terms of property rights, as libertarians would be concerned, and in a more general sense of self-determination, as other people are concerned about.
If you're going to have a government, and of course, with libertarians, we can have interesting conversations about that question, but if you're going to have a government, it has to be with the consent of the governed.
And so you have this land where the people there have not been allowed to govern themselves for a very, very long time.
And the two-state solution offered, as you said, kind of an ad hoc, not the ideal solution, but look, here's a way you can have some self-determination.
We'll let the people in the 67 borders continue to be Israel and continue to govern themselves, you know, by a more or less democratic system, and we'll try to establish a more or less democratic system in the occupied territories.
But look what happened.
They allowed the people in the occupied territories, even though it continued to be occupied by the Israelis, but nonetheless, they allowed them to have an election and to elect their governors.
So who did they elect?
Well, that's partly because of an ill-conceived American attempt to intervene in the Indian elections.
Hamas won.
Even Hamas wasn't expecting the win.
They were hoping to be a plurality and therefore be entitled to set up a coalition government, but instead they won outright.
Well, okay, fine, they win.
Then what happened?
The FATF, with the encouragement of both Israel and the United States, tries to forcibly take over the government.
In the West Bank they have no problem doing so, but in Gaza they meet with violent resistance, and Hamas wins and maintains the government in Gaza.
Now you no longer have a unified government.
Now you've got a Fatah-appointed prime minister ruling the West Bank, and you have Gaza still being ruled by Hamas.
What's outrageous is that you still see in the United States, I just saw a camera advertisement this morning in the Washington Post, I couldn't believe their nerve, saying that the current problem started because Hamas, despite a democratic election, took over Gaza.
They're really forgetting that Hamas won the election?
And they even had a coalition, like you're saying, they didn't have to, but they agreed to have a coalition with Fatah until Elliott Abrams and Ehud Olmer and Hosni Mubarak funneled a bunch of guns to Fatah to kill Hamas with, to betray them with, only it blew up in their face of course, and only then did Hamas end up running the whole strip.
Yeah, so it's this kind of ignorance that has been the only reason that in the past the American public has sided with Israel.
But what I find now for the first time, if you look at what's happening in Gaza and the reaction in the United States, it's split about 50-50.
Now some people would be depressed by that, saying, you know, how can you have such a massive violation of common decency, let alone human rights, in these massacres, and still people are divided half and half.
Well, that's a big change from 20-30 years ago, when Israel could have done the same thing and had almost unanimous support from the American public.
Right.
Yeah, it seems like the internet has really made a difference too, and you look at the polls.
I mean, I know I speak for other Americans on this, and my own ignorance being brought up, not with a pro-Israel narrative specifically, but just with the common narrative about the situation, and that is that we Americans are on the side of the Israelis, and you don't need to know much more about it than that.
And certainly, they never explained that, well, back in the 1967 war was the beginning of the occupation of these particular territories, and this is what it's like for the people in those territories ever since then.
I know Americans used to not know that.
Now they do.
The younger and more online, the more they know about it, and their minds are changed.
They're not going along with that old narrative, because it doesn't hold up to scrutiny when you can really Google it and find out the details yourself.
Well, you're right about the influence of the online media, but I think there's another element, too, that should be acknowledged.
You know, you made the disclaimer that despite some Jewish background, you don't identify as such.
But the fact is, many young Jews in America who do identify as Jewish no longer feel that that identity requires them to support the Israeli state, let alone Israeli policies.
And what you're seeing is a dividing line between younger and older Jewish Americans, where this unquestioning support for Israel is pretty much being relegated to the older generation.
And younger people are becoming more and more willing to speak out, even on social media.
I think you mentioned Mondo Weiss.
Philip Weiss is a young Jewish American who has a website with a lot of good information about what's going on in the Middle East, stuff that you would have had a hard time finding being mentioned other than by a handful of Jews, you know, people like Izzy Stone and Noam Chomsky, maybe.
In previous generations, you mean?
In the previous generation, yeah.
Man, I'm so sorry that we're out of time.
I sure would like to continue this conversation with you, Dean.
Oh, any time.
I'd be glad to.
Let's try and catch up next week, then.
Okay.
Okay, great.
That's Dean Ahmad, everybody.
He's at Minaret.org.
That's the Minaret of Freedom Institute, calling the faithful to freedom, Islam and libertarianism there.
Minaret.org.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
That's it for the show.
See you tomorrow.
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