09/03/14 – Ramzy Baroud – The Scott Horton Show

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, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
We're on Liberty Radio Network and scotthorton.org.
Follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest on the show today is Ramzi Baroud, and he's the editor of Palestine Chronicle at palestinechronicle.com.
We often feature what he writes at antiwar.com, at original.antiwar.com slash Ramzi dash Baroud, and also sometimes on the blog as well.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Ramzi?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, very happy to have you back on the show here.
And so, well, there's a whole hell of a lot to talk about, that's for sure.
I guess I was the first thing I'd like to say to introduce the topic, I guess, to get you started.
I've been seeing on Twitter, I've been following more and more Gazans on Twitter because of the last war against them.
Anyway, and so I've seen kind of firsthand these just kind of enormous, very joyous statements of celebration over the slightest lifting of the seas.
Now they can go from three miles all the way to six miles off their coast without getting exploded to death in order to fish.
And they're so thrilled.
And I just thought, you know, in a pity kind of way, how sad and pathetic it is that this is what the people of the Gaza Strip are reduced to is having to celebrate the slightest relaxation of the terms of their collective prison sentence that they're all sort of life prison sentence.
They're all serving there.
And in some cases, death sentence they're serving.
So anyway, I was just hoping that, you know, you could talk to us a little bit about, you know, now that the ceasefire is holding, what do we know of the aftermath of, you know, what Israel has just done to the people of the Gaza Strip?
We'll do that.
But first, let me let me just even so very briefly just explain why Gazans celebrated.
I mean, this is this is their own decision, you know, to go to the streets and the hundreds of thousands and to celebrate while still, you know, the economy, there's no well, there's no economy in Gaza.
I mean, at this point, we're looking at 40,000 homes that were either completely destroyed or partly damaged.
Seventy five UN schools that have been blown up, many hospitals, numerous mosques and churches and and so forth and so on.
So you're looking and this is a place, I mean, it's important that we remember that Gaza did not start or did not go into this war in any kind of, you know, shape of an economically sustainable shape to begin with.
The UN a few months ago came up with this report saying that Gaza will not be inhabitable by the year 2020 and its water will not be drinkable, you know, a couple of years before that, in fact.
So they already, you know, kind of went into this war in a completely devastated state of economy and everything.
But the reason that they've celebrated is it requires that we kind of really understand the psyche of the people in Gaza.
And, you know, my last book, I'm not trying to really plug it in here, but really just trying to understand, you know, the spirit of the people of Gaza, which is, you know, to understand Gaza.
It's different from understanding any other part of Palestine or the Middle East, because it's basically a small, tiny stretch of land that is surrounded mostly by Israel, but also blocked by Egypt and by the Israeli navy at the Mediterranean Sea.
So it's completely locked and it has been living this kind of successive state of siege way before Hamas was even incepted in the Gaza Strip.
And this kind of perpetual suffering starting 1948 when Israel was established, 200,000 refugees found themselves in Gaza, competing for the meager resources and the tiny little, you know, land with the original inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.
A lot of tension rose then.
Somehow they managed to survive together.
They were under successive wars, 1948, 1956, 1967, and so forth and so on.
Yet not one single time in their history of these tormented people did they actually manage to hold the Israeli army at bay.
Because we are talking about kind of ragtag militias, you know, young kids from refugee camps, you know, making their own weapons, fighting the Israeli tanks, shooting at Israel.
And it's been a joke.
It's been an absolute joke, the way that they have been fighting.
Yet somehow they persisted.
You know, they would not accept defeat, even though any military strategist would look there and look, the fourth strongest army in the world fighting these poor refugees who are lost in this desperate state of economy and state of affairs.
And what are you guys fighting about?
I mean, it's ridiculous.
Why can't you just submit?
And maybe after declaring your defeat, you will be rewarded with something.
You would be able to survive or feed your kids.
Why are you still thinking that you have the chance of winning?
And imagine, after all of this, they actually managed to mature as people training in refugee tunnels underground.
And they are able to cost the Israeli army 64 soldiers, 600 wounded soldiers, destroying tanks, shooting down drones, to the extent that the Israeli army could not go beyond half a kilometer in the entire Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu's plans militarily were a complete disaster.
Even the Israeli public, the majority of them saying, we lost, Gaza won.
And imagine this in the minds of this fourth, fifth generation of Gazans who are so used to defeat, so used to humiliation.
The Israelis come in, occupy, destroy, kill, rape, imprison, capture, does whatever, and then they would go back declaring victory.
Yet for the first time in their history, that did not happen.
That's what they were celebrating, not the ceasefire, not anything else.
Right.
So it's not just a measure of their desperation and the fact that they got a few concessions as the terms of the ceasefire, but that they can feel proud that they're, you know, I guess if you can call Hamas and their armed wing defense forces, that they basically held tough and kept the Israelis from doing much worse.
We are talking about, you know, as you said, a world power versus an occupied territory.
So it's not like it's any kind of, you know, level playing field or equal fight here.
But I could see what you mean, that that feels like a real victory compared to what they were suffering.
Exactly.
Yeah, that's really something else.
And then, okay, so in a couple minutes before the break, if you can please, sir, just try to break down a few of the numbers for us, casualties, amount of damage and infrastructure and that kind of thing.
2,143 Palestinians were killed, including 600 children.
The vast majority, about 85 to 90 percent of whom are civilians.
11,500 plus were wounded.
Many hospitals, of course, were targeted and destroyed.
Schools, yet despite all of this, they are still going to change the way that the schools operate and they will try to accommodate all the students.
Hundreds of the students will not be going back to school because they were killed during the war.
20,000 homes were completely destroyed, an equal number that was damaged as well, and it cannot be inhabited.
And of course, the economy right now has lost many billions of dollars that would require basically a thousand truck of aid and cement on a daily basis for the next 10 years in order for Gaza to be rebuilt.
Yeah, it's incredible.
You know, I mentioned this on the show yesterday, if people will just put into their favorite brand of search engine, aerial view Gaza destruction.
That's one of the features of this brave new era of drone wars is that we have drone footage now flying over Gaza, which will be enough in one instant to put the lie to any Israeli claim of using precision strikes on only Hamas targets and all the ridiculous things that they claim as they slaughter these people by the hundreds and thousands over there.
Now, I'm sorry we have to stop and take this break, but we're talking with Ramzi Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle.com, and we'll have more about this entire mess when we get back.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Talking about the war against the Gazans here with Ramzi Baroud.
Fearing political Islam, Why Arabs Betrayed Gaza is his latest piece at antiwar.com.
There's a lot more than that.
Here's a couple of headlines just for fun here on this topic.
Israel confiscates nearly a thousand acres of Palestinian land in the West Bank in the aftermath.
I guess that's nothing compared to what they just did to the people of Gaza, right?
So by dialectic rules, no big deal.
And then here, Israel alarmed.
This is the fun one.
Israel alarmed by al-Qaeda presence on the Syria border after they have worked all this time since 1996 to get the United States to regime change Bashar al-Assad in favor of chaos and madness.
Now they're surprised that they've got al-Nusra suicide bomber coups and the kidnapping peacekeepers in the Golan Heights.
But anyway, so I'm sorry, when we were interrupted by the commercial break there, Ramzi, we were talking about the aftermath of the war in the Gaza Strip, the amount of casualties and that kind of thing.
Six hundred children killed in this latest thing.
And you talked about the people of Gaza's feelings of pride that they were able to withstand that assault basically as strongly as they were able to.
And they did win some concessions in the ceasefire.
But so what do you think is the future now?
Because there's really it seems like the Israeli policy and the American policy is always going to be, well, Hamas equals ISIS.
And so we can't do with them that kind of crap.
And yet there doesn't seem to be any political opposition to Hamas in the Gaza Strip that can replace them anytime soon either.
So I wonder what you think is going to happen from here.
Is this the current status quo from here on out or something big is going to move or what?
Well, I think they have reached a conclusion.
The various parties involved in this, Israel and the Saudis and others, they've reached a conclusion that Hamas is not at its weakest.
That was the argument.
In fact, they went after Gaza thinking this is the most opportune time to get rid of Hamas forever because, you know, supposedly it's the last leg on which the Muslim Brotherhood stands.
If we get rid of Hamas, the whole Muslim Brotherhood phenomenon is gone and done with.
And to their surprise, Hamas emerged much stronger and much more kind of validated within Palestinian political landscape, but also around the Middle East.
So the plan really kind of fired back like you would never believe it.
Now, Netanyahu is really caught in this situation where, hmm, so if I can't use Gaza as my, you know, field for experimentation with our new weapons supplied by the U.S. or new political ideas to, you know, kind of push my ratings up because, you know, they love to go to Gaza and say we are targeting terrorism and suddenly we become heroes among their constituents back in Israel.
That is no longer an easy option because he knows if he's going to go back to Gaza at any moment and fire one single rocket, one single missile, the war is going to start all over again.
And if he could not deal with Gaza over the course of 51 days, he can't possibly be able to contain Gaza anymore.
So what do you do?
On one hand, he knows that the Gaza chapter is not closed.
On the other, he's not going to be poking into Gaza anytime soon.
That's why, back to that headline you just read, the thousand dunams, the thousand dunams that he or acres that he is confiscating, you know, just like that, or privately owned land.
In the West Bank, it's his message to the very, very angry Israelis who are saying, you humiliated us.
You went to this war to get rid of Hamas and to create quiet for us in the southern border.
And you came back with nothing.
But now there's going to be a thousand legal case against possible war criminals in the Israeli army.
So what have you done?
So he is fighting at three different fronts right now.
Number one, he's creating this thing where he's trying to appease the settlers and to distract from the actual defeat that just happened in Gaza.
Now the tension is the Americans are not happy about it.
Why create this situation, Netanyahu?
We really did not need it in the first place.
The Europeans are not happy.
And now Netanyahu is hoping he is going to be once more seen as the defender of the settlers in the West Bank.
And perhaps that is going to help him gain one or two points of the 60 points that he lost in the 51 day Gaza war.
Number two, he is back to Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, this kind of Vichy kind of government that is just basically doing exactly what Abbas wants them to do.
Oh, you talk to Hamas, you're not a peace partner.
Here's your ultimatum, Abbas.
Abbas is an 80 year old man who has no control over nothing.
Another way to create this unnecessary fight in order for him to create distraction.
And number three, and that's even more interesting, is his statement.
He said a couple of days ago, he said, I could have went to war against Hamas and Gaza, not just for 50 days, but for 500 days.
The reason I didn't, and I had to agree to the ceasefire, because ISIS was on my border.
Okay, just really try to imagine that logic.
How many Israelis did ISIS kill or hurt?
How many times did ISIS try to infiltrate into the Israeli borders or target any Israeli interest in Palestine, in Israel or anywhere around the world?
No, zero.
Now he's trying to create this menace that I am too being a victim of of ISIS and to divert attention and play on the fear element that the ISIS is just going randomly and chopping heads.
Again, once more hoping to create similarities between Hamas and ISIS and to present Israel as the victimized state and explain why he pulled out or he had to end the Gaza war because he could not possibly achieve his military goal.
This is very standard Netanyahu.
I mean, we are so familiar with Netanyahu.
He's been around for about 18 years, really, more or less.
So we know the kind of tricks he's capable of pulling at any time.
And that's just really typical Netanyahu's behavior.
Well, and then so, but what's Hamas to do?
I mean, there are a lot, this is one of the goals of the war, stated goals of the war was to break the alliance somehow.
Not that they ever really explained how this was supposed to work, I guess, but the alliance, the new coalition government between Hamas and Fatah, but it remains a coalition government for now, right?
It does.
And I, you know, this is surprised even cynical like myself.
I really thought this is going to be at Hamas.
It's absolute strength right now.
Why would they want to continue with this pathetic national unity deal with Mahmoud Abbas who has nothing to offer?
But you know what?
When the war was over a group of militants representing the various Palestinian factions, including the faction that belongs to Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah party, they went to the site of a massacre in a neighborhood called Shejaya where the entire neighborhood was destroyed and hundreds of people were killed.
And they stood on the ruins and they made a statement, a joint statement by all Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Fatah, where they insist that the Palestinian national unity is a must and no one, not Netanyahu or anyone else, will be able to defeat that initiative.
And really, if that initiative did not fail, despite the attempted 51-day war and all sorts of pressures, and yet the unity holds, it really does give a good and positive sign that perhaps this unity this time around is meant to hold.
And then now, I guess, I mean, maybe it's, I don't know.
I don't have any faith that the Obama administration is going to send Kerry back to try again or any of that.
It seems like, if anything, I don't know, I don't mean to be too definitive in my statement about it.
Seems like to me that the war against Gaza was sort of Netanyahu's exclamation point on there never will be two states, not even the kind of rump state he's described in the past.
So forget about it.
But so where does that leave the future of their negotiations?
I mean, they just go try to join more UN agencies until at some point they become treated like a state by enough of the other countries in the world that they somehow can try to declare independence or what do they do?
This is the aim of various Palestinian factions, including socialist movements and including Hamas.
They basically tell Mahmoud Abbas, listen, dude, you've been doing this for a long time.
You've aged while you are doing this and you got nothing but embarrassment, defeat after defeat.
And the West Bank is really like a Swiss cheese right now.
It's just full of holes and Israeli settlements and bypass roads and all of that.
If Israel did not give you anything when it could have done something, would it give you something when they have the most right wing government coalition in their history?
It's just not going to happen now.
So turn your back onto Israel, go to the ICC, go to various UN organizations and let's just sort this out.
Let's go back to the international community.
And Hamas has actually been much more active in wanting to go to the international community than Abbas has.
Abbas is hesitating for one simple reason.
He needs American money in order for him to sustain his Palestinian authority.
Without American aid and European aid and Saudi aid, Abbas would not be able to politically justify his existence anymore.
So he's delaying, he's playing games.
But it seems to me that after the Gaza war, he understands that time has passed on that sort of behavior and delays and that most likely he will end up going to the ICC.
And then, Netanyahu would once more declare, I have no partner in peace, thus I will go and build more settlements and so on.
But, Ramzi, isn't it the case that right before the war, and this was really what caused the war, the war was Netanyahu's reaction to this coalition deal where Hamas had signed on to, they were kind of dropping the position that you just described in favor of Abbas and saying, OK, fine, we'll do it your way, even after the talks had already blown up.
And now that you're saying after the war, forget it.
Forget it.
There can possibly be no talks at this point, because Netanyahu understands that there is so much anger and frustration in Israel.
The Israelis just don't want a two-state solution.
They just don't want it.
Across the board, aside from the remaining leftists, if you would even call them leftists, Israelis have divorced that idea.
Practically, it can't happen either, because Jewish settlements are scattered throughout the West Bank, taking over Jerusalem completely.
There can be no way you can draw a line anymore and create a two-state scenario.
But on the other hand, they are not prepared for a one-state either.
So the options that are left to them, either permanent occupation and the occupation being the status quo, and by the way, this is not just a hypothesis, Netanyahu himself spoke about it.
He said, I am prepared to offer you economic peace, meaning maintaining the occupation and actually maybe benefiting from it, and giving the Palestinians a few bites here and there, so they are happy.
Palestinian elites are benefiting financially, and the Israelis can actually sustain the occupation and make it thrive to a degree.
That's Netanyahu's offer.
Nobody is talking about two states, one state.
All of this, as far as Israel is concerned, is just over and done with.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, Hamas on one hand is saying, listen, nothing but resistance would work with these guys.
We've tried it in Gaza.
We promise you this is how it's going to work.
And Abbas is saying, no, that form of resistance is not going to work for us.
But he is failing to actually take any meaningful political moves in order for him to actually present Palestinians with an alternative.
And I think if you continue to do this, eventually there is going to be no taker among Palestinians that would believe in Mahmoud Abbas or his Palestinian authority.
All right.
Well, we're already over time.
But thank you so much for your time.
It's great to talk to you again, Ramzi.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
You take care.
All right, Shaul.
That's Ramzi Baroud.
He is the editor of Palestine Chronicle, and his latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter.
You can find it at Amazon.com, Gaza's Untold Stories.
And you can find his archive at Antiwar.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 his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at WallStreetWindow.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.com.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here.
Are you a libertarian and or a peacenik?
Live in North America?
If you want, you can hire me to come and give a speech to your group.
I'm good on the terror war and intervention, civil liberty stuff, blaming Woodrow Wilson for everything bad in the world, Iran, central banking, political realignment, and, well, you know, everything.
I can teach markets to liberals and peace to the right.
Just watch me.
Check out ScottHorton.org slash speeches for some examples and email me, Scott at ScottHorton.org, for more information.
See you there.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Edited by libertarian purist Sheldon Richman, The Future of Freedom brings you the best of our movement.
Featuring articles by Richman, Jacob Hornberger, James Bovard, and many more, The Future of Freedom stands for peace and liberty and against our criminal world empire and Leviathan State.
Subscribe today.
It's just $25 per year for the back pocket size print edition, $15 per year to read it online.
That's The Future of Freedom at FFF.org slash subscribe.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee, lots of it, and you probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee, company at Darren'sCoffee.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'sCoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and save $2.
Darren'sCoffee.com.