All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Kalman Barkin.
He is a friend of the show, hangs out in the Reddit room, and I think is an Israeli-American, right?
No, actually, I grew up in the United States, but I did spend about two and a half years in Israel.
Oh, okay.
I thought you were from there.
And I still keep a really close eye on everything that goes on there.
Cool.
All right, so there's all kinds of turmoil going on in Israeli politics here, and I'm way behind on it because I'm sitting here trying to wrap up this stupid history book, so current events are going over my head.
But I did have a bit of a talk with Eric Garris and looked at some poll numbers and talked about a couple of the new parties being formed and the end of the Likud Blue and White coalition, all of these kinds of things are hitting.
But anyway, so I don't even really know where to begin.
How about Gantz?
Is it right that he's doomed?
His partnership with Netanyahu is already over, and now his party, Blue and White, is basically toast.
Is that correct?
Yeah, he's toast.
I mean, just as a politician, he basically committed the cardinal sin of looking weak, which is absolutely unacceptable in Israel.
And just looking weak in terms of giving in to Netanyahu on everything?
Sort of.
There's a mix of that, and then in his own party internally, not being able to control any of the factions, and just absolutely getting steamrolled from five different directions.
So at this point, he appears weak, and that's, in a country like Israel, that's the worst thing possible.
All right, so now at this point, they've called for new elections, which are taking place when?
I believe mid-March, late March.
And then, all right, so what can you tell us about Netanyahu and Likud right now?
Obviously, they're the center of all of this, and then the rise of these new parties and whatever all chaos you think is entertaining for us to know here.
So Netanyahu's been prime minister for, I believe, 14 years at this point.
Not consecutively, but he's been around for quite a while.
First rose to power in 1996, then lost to Ed Barak, took a short period of politics, came back, regained power, and has been there ever since.
He's currently under a fairly serious indictment that will probably end up with him doing some prison time.
I don't know exactly how much, but he'll probably be removed from office and do a little bit of prison time.
In the meantime, he's got a pretty hardcore group of support, which will go with him no matter what.
And then pretty much everybody else in the country doesn't like him, but they do not have a unified alternative to him.
So for the past four elections, this is going to be the fourth election in two years, but even the election before that, there'll be a different candidate popping up every time who isn't necessarily a good candidate.
It's just, he's the not Netanyahu candidate, and then he'll typically get a similar number of seats than Netanyahu, but since he's coming from the left, and Israel is an extremely right-wing country, they don't usually have a chance of actually forming a coalition.
So for example, the past time, Gantz, who was left by Israeli standards, but quite right on even by American standards, he got a very similar amount of seats to Netanyahu, but the only other parties he could form a coalition with were Labor.
What's special about this election, and an additional complication, even though the Israeli left for the most part refuses to make a coalition with the Arabs.
The Arabs, the Israeli citizen Palestinians are considered just, we let them vote because we can't get away with not, but there's no way we're going to give them any power because they're the Arabs.
But what's unique, so therefore the left can't really form a coalition because only the parties which are left enough to be willing to sit with the Arabs are never enough to create a coalition with the Arabs.
The center-left refuses to, so you got, for a guy like Gantz, he was center or center-left, he can coalition with the left, but he can't coalition with the Arabs, whereas someone on the left would be willing to coalition with the Arabs, but the center would be refusing to go with them.
And so if Gantz wanted to add the Arabs to the coalition so that he could get the prime ministership, he would lose other parts of the coalition who would not stand for it.
Yeah, it was actually, when he wanted to do it at this point, his own party, the more right wing factions in his own party threatened to splinter off and essentially sink his party if he dared, if he dared to coalesce with the Arabs.
And even to the point where if he dared, but they have a concept in Israel of a tacit coalition where they wouldn't actually be part of the government, they wouldn't be sworn in as ministers or anything like that, but they'd vote in favor of the government and against any no confidence measures, attempts to sink the government, and then in favor of the budget and the absolute beer necessities to keep the government going, but they wouldn't actually technically be part of the government, they wouldn't be ministers in exchange for whatever, for his support of various laws that are on legislative agenda for them.
Now, Gantz wanted to do even that, and that was like, no, that his party would refuse to even go along with that.
So not even sitting with the Arabs, but getting outside of coalition active support from them, they refused to allow it.
And that's really amazing because, I mean, what we're talking about is they're willing to forego power, right?
They could win if they would bring the Arabs into the coalition.
It's not like the Arabs would be the leading force in the coalition or anything, but they can't even abide bringing them in, even if it would mean that they and their guy get to take the chair.
And I was just, it's funny just like how, well, not funny, but you know what I mean.
It's odd that they would be so self-sacrificial in order to enforce this kind of segregation of power in that way.
I mean, if you take the analogy, if in Washington, D.C. we had a parliament and the blacks were allowed to have their caucus, but the liberals would never join with them, the white liberal Democrats would never join with the blacks, even if it meant that they could be the prime minister of America.
I mean, just to say it like that is absolutely insane, right?
To think that that could be the way our system would operate, at least in the last 60 years or whatever, right?
50 years.
It was de facto like that before in a lot of ways.
But I mean, just to transplant that situation onto our current one is just mind boggling, right?
You take a party who hasn't held power in like 12 years and they'll refuse, they'll remain in forever opposition because they're not willing to do it.
And now at this point you see like they're starting to write up a bill like, hey, we're never ever going to hold power again if we don't get over this.
But still, it goes pretty deep.
They've gone like 12 years without any power in large part because of this.
And now, so what are the politics?
They're just fighting about who's fixing the potholes and who's enforcing the lockdown?
Or do the Palestinians even matter at all in the real debates about which parties are running for what or ahead by how much?
So for the past four or five cycles, the election isn't even over issues.
It's over just do you like Netanyahu or do you hate Netanyahu, basically.
And then the 12, you know, anywhere between eight and 14 parties that are running at any given moment.
And, you know, I haven't checked the news there in like six hours, so there could be another two that came or went.
So each one will have their pet issue, but ultimately everybody knows that none of it's going to get done.
And what matters is just is Netanyahu going to continue in power or not?
And like Netanyahu's dream, which I think is I don't think he has a realistic chance of getting, is he wants to pass a law kind of like the U.S. and France, where a current president can't be convicted, can't be indicted only through like a political process.
Right.
Not that he's guilty of anything or anything.
Yeah, just the courts are, you know, charging him with bribery for no reason.
Right.
And this isn't his first rodeo either.
Back back in the 90s, he was under all kinds of charges for he was going on.
He was going like on official trips and he was getting double reimbursed.
But somehow he escaped that one.
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All right.
So now tell me coming about these new parties coming.
It's what the former mayor of Tel Aviv has this new party, the Israelis, that apparently is doing pretty good.
And then I guess I also heard that.
Was it Yisrael Betanu?
I'm not sure why we say some of these parties in English and some of them in Hebrew, the Hebrew version, whatever the Israel, our home party.
That's the party of Avigdor Lieberman, the far right secularist, I guess, Russian kind of based party there that they're doing really bad right now.
I don't know.
You keeping up with the polls?
Yeah.
So so so the big news, the big news, this election cycle, which I think is actually quite important, is there's a big fellow on the court named Gideon Sauer or Gideon Sauer, depending on how you want to pronounce it.
He is a longtime right winger, an ideological right winger, but he he kind of has respect for the institutions, whereas Netanyahu doesn't really.
And he tried priming Netanyahu and the Likud once a couple years back, and it didn't go very far.
But that's because the Likud is kind of like a lot of right wing right wing parties around the world, extremely, extremely loyal to its to its leaders, wherever they may be, kind of like you see now with the Republican base and Trump and you've seen in a lot of other countries, a lot of the Likud is incredibly.
I don't believe that a sitting leader has ever lost the primary in Likud in its entire 75 year history.
And there's only been four leaders to the party in its entire history.
So he had tried priming him unsuccessfully and he he so he left now and he created his own party.
So he's like he has legitimate right wing bona fides.
He's been there for decades and Likud and he's running on a platform of like of.
We can replace Netanyahu with someone on the right, we don't have to like just because you're on the right, it doesn't mean you have to support Netanyahu.
I'm very much to the right and I am an alternative to him.
And it's just this this guy is corrupt and he's and he's just destroying all the institutions just to try to protect his own skin.
And he's running on sort of that line.
And that's the New Hope Party.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's the New Hope Party or Tikvah Hadasha.
Probably they don't pronounce that in English because there's the sound, which is quite difficult to make in English.
Yeah.
So he's not that Yisrael Bettenu is very easy to pronounce either.
But anyway, I guess Yisrael Bettenu.
Yes, exactly.
How close was I to that?
Not very.
But yes, he's running on that.
On that line.
And while he's not doing as well as Netanyahu in the polls, like Netanyahu is in the high 20s and he's in the high teens.
But if you look at the other established right wing and center and center right and even somewhat center left parties, which really don't like Netanyahu, between them together, he's looking like he has quite a serious chance of winning at this point.
The only the only parties that that really like Netanyahu are Likud and then the ultra-Orthodox parties, the two ultra-Orthodox parties, the Agudas Yisrael and Shas, which whose leader also just came under indictment.
So for the second time, he has sat in prison for two years in the past, but he just came under indictment again.
And so that's that's really the only parties that support him.
Whereas Naftali Bennett of the, what's his party called now, Yemina, which means right word.
It's just that the name of his party is right.
And then Yair Lapid, who was was one of the big partners of Benny Gantz and the Blue and White Party.
He has a party called Yesh HaTid, or Is a Future.
And then and then Ron Holdayi, the current mayor of Tel Aviv, who is promising to retire from, like to give up, he's been mayor of Tel Aviv for like 27 years and quite an effective mayor.
Tel Aviv is a pretty decent place to live right now.
But he's he's promising to, you know, give up the mayorship as soon as he's elected to Knesset.
And he thinks he claims to be running for prime minister, but he doesn't really have the support for that.
But he'll probably join, but he's pretty solidly on the left and he like, but he'll probably join a sour coalition in exchange for some minister slot.
Oh, of something or other.
So between all these other center and right wing parties, there's there's a pretty good shot that they'll be able to elect, you know, Gideon Tsar or Naftali Bennett as an alternative right wing prime minister.
And this is really the first thing Bennett do really bad in the last election.
Yeah, he did terrible.
Basically, Netanyahu managed to, Netanyahu is very good at forming at narratives and the narrative he did in the last election was that if the Likud itself didn't get a very high number of seats, regardless of how any of the other right wing parties did, then Gantz would successfully make a coalition.
And so he was successful in getting a lot of right wing voters who aren't especially fond of him.
But they really didn't like the center left because, you know, there are the types of Republicans that think that anyone an inch to the left of their guy is a communist or whatever, or in their case is going to, I don't know, establish a Palestinian state or something.
Even though there's like there's no way that's happening.
So so he managed to use like a lot of fear to to get it together.
Speaking of which, if I could all of a sudden put the Labour Party and their coalition in power there, you're saying there would be no move on Palestine one way or the other?
And the Labour Party is gone.
It's probably, you know, disappear off the map this time.
And if not, it'll just be come alive.
But so the Labour Party, if Labour Labour is considered pretty solidly on the left, Labour would probably try to do something.
I don't know if even they'd be willing to go far enough to actually get a deal done.
Like if Meritz was in charge, then there'd definitely be something would get done.
But Meritz is like the fringe left.
Meritz is Meritz like is the only party that isn't, you know, pro ethno state per se.
Like they're not they talk of just a state for all the citizens, not a, quote, Jewish state, unquote.
Are they actually communist or they're just called communist because they believe in equal rights for Palestinians?
So there is a party in Israel called Hadash, which is legitimately communist.
And there are elements inside Meritz, which are, which I'd say communist or close to it.
But most of the party is like.
It's just like left, you know, I'd say regular left, like American American left.
Would be like a good analogy, like Tamar Zomberg, the head of the head of Meritz or the head keeps changing.
I can't keep track because there's elections, you know, every six months, roughly.
So Tamar Zomberg would probably be roughly, I don't know, Kamala Harris, maybe not, not not like AOC, but not like Hillary Clinton either.
Yeah.
I think Kamala Harris is a lot like Hillary Clinton, but I hear what you mean, though.
I mean, where Kamala Harris is located right now, not where she was five years ago.
Sure, sure.
All right.
And then so I get the idea that not just that.
I mean, I understand the importance of Netanyahu's character and all of this and the part, the role that he plays in the whole society as being essentially very distracting from important issues and things like that.
But I always kind of get the impression that whatever is happening to the Palestinians really is not even part of the political conversation in Israel at all.
The status quo is taken as a given, slowly increasing facts on the ground or whatever's going on on the other side of the wall over there.
Who cares?
Doesn't matter at all.
Might as well be happening in Mexico or something like that.
And and then they can debate everything else except that.
Is that really how it is?
Is that really how it is?
Well, it used to be a pretty big issue, like even when I was there not so long ago, it was discussed pretty regularly.
Like I remember when Bennett came onto the scene, his big deal was, so Netanyahu at the time was claiming, and I don't think anybody believed him on either side, that he was open to creating a Palestinian state as long as, you know, he had certain conditions, blah, blah, blah.
And Bennett was like, no, we will never create a Palestinian state ever, ever, ever.
And that was an issue that was absolutely discussed and was on the front page.
Over the past few elections, it's been almost like the primary issue is Netanyahu's corruption and everything else is just like slogans at most.
There hasn't really been serious, like when Yair Lavrov first came onto the scene, he's considered center left.
He showed up with like an idea of some sort of compromise that he wants to see in the conflict, you know, some sort of strong autonomy, pending a state and like that type of thing.
Now, would he have gotten it done or not?
It's hard to know.
And like, it's incredibly difficult to get done because the facts on the ground are quite well done.
It's incredibly difficult to picture until you've been in the area for a while.
And like, I spent enough time in the West Bank.
There's on every, surrounding every Palestinian city, almost every Palestinian city, with the exception of Jenin, because of actually Ariel Sharon, when they left the Gaza Strip, they also actually took out the settlements, the four settlements around the city of Jenin.
But pretty much every large Palestinian city, so Shechem, or as it's known in English, or in Arabic, in Hebrew it's known as Shechem, in English and Arabic, it's known as Nablus, and then Ramallah, and Jericho, and Hebron, and Tulkarem, pretty much all the large scale Palestinian cities are surrounded, they're mostly because they, you know, they're old, traditional cities, they were built in valleys, because that's where there's water access.
And it's a very mountainous area.
So you have like a Palestinian city in the valley, and then all of the mountains around it are settlements.
And almost all of them, like if you were to go to downtown in almost any large Palestinian city, and look up at the mountains around you, you'd see, you know, the white houses of these Israelis on every side.
And some of them are relatively small settlements that would be somewhat, you know, easy to get rid of, and given the right circumstances, the right deal.
But like, on the east side of East Jerusalem, you have Malaya Adumim, which is a giant city.
It's not going anywhere.
And then you have, next to Shechem, you have some 10,000 settlers, and Shechem is like, Nablus is like way off to the side.
And like any Palestinian state would be based on the Jenin-Nablus area.
And then like in between Jenin and Nablus, you have 10,000 families, 10,000 people and growing.
So 10,000 is kind of considered sort of like the upper limit, like in the disengagement from Gaza, roughly 10,000 people were relocated.
It's considered like dead museums, like the national tragedy of that.
Like that's the upper limit.
I don't think they can go really much past that.
But at this point, roughly 10% of Israeli Jews live across, live in the West Bank, between the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which are one, like East Jerusalem is basically they actually annex parts of the West Bank and join Jerusalem, and then the rest of them have the status quo.
So now, going like to the 1967 armistice line is absurd.
Like the facts on the ground are too far away for that.
Because like I said, roughly 10% of the Jewish population of Israel lives there.
And there's a lot of reasons for that.
One of them is, you know, because the government has had that goal for a long time to make sure that happens.
But another one is because Israel is a terribly constructed country from a legal standpoint.
The bureaucracy is just insane.
It takes something like 12 years from when an apartment is first planned until you get the keys and can actually move in.
But in the West Bank, because it's under military rule, they can actually build a somewhat, I shouldn't say reasonable pace, still takes like four years.
But like, if you want to buy a house and get in it while your family still looks like it looks now, then you got to go to the West Bank, just because the bureaucracy is so ridiculous everywhere else.
And that has led to a lot of the growth in the West Bank.
But there's so many like, even the spots over the past few years, since Ariel Sharon, and the early 2000s of the quote unquote roadmap, they haven't really built a lot of new settlements, which on its face looks like a good thing, but it's actually really not.
Because what ended up happening instead is the deal was they promised not to make any new settlements, and not to create any new neighborhoods which aren't really connected to the old ones.
And then every once in a while, and then also every time they wanted to approve like a big project, you know, 1200 houses or something like that, the Americans would get all angry.
So what ended up happening instead, is these tiny hilltops of 30 families ended up each turning into 150-200 families by building 10 buildings at a time throughout over a period of 20 years, to the point where the tiny settlements that nobody really cares about anymore are kind of a thing of the past.
Because I know of just a settlement where I had a friend, it was like 40 trailers, and it's in a very strategic spot, and it's really close to Ramallah, and it wouldn't be so easy to make a deal without it.
But eventually it just became 150 families living on a roof, and now just that one settlement is a big deal, living in proper houses.
And this story repeats itself over and over, and all of these tiny outposts are becoming neighborhoods.
And there's just 50, 60, 70 of these, besides for the large four or five big cities that everybody sees on the map right away when you're discussing it.
But every little outpost is suddenly, wow, that's now an actual neighborhood.
And this is sort of an unintended consequence of the Condoleezza Rice attempt, and Barack Obama attempt to clamp down on it, had the unintended consequence of turning the small outposts into Syria settlements.
In other words, they said, oh, we can't build a bunch of new small ones, so we'll just make the ones we already have bigger and bigger, and therefore irreversible.
There's that, and then also there's the numbers, when they announced that they're approving 150, 200, 300, like an entire new development project in Malaya Doumim.
Everyone's like, oh my God, Malaya Doumim is in a crucial location, and it's progress stopping and whatever.
And they're right to an extent, but the thing is Malaya Doumim was never going to move anyway.
It was going to be a problem, and it was going to stay there.
But instead, what ends up happening is they announced they're making five multifamily homes in Yatar, and you're like, okay, it's five family homes.
But if that happens once every year over a period of 20 years, then suddenly a little hill is now an actual well-established neighborhood.
And you do five, because of just the pressure, to a tremendous amount of, I'd say probably three or 4% of Israeli Jews refuse to live anywhere but the West Bank.
They're ideological about this.
This is their life's mission.
I knew somebody who had been in the Gaza Strip pre the disengagement in 2005, and they got removed.
They got relocated, and they were given funding.
This is the Ariel Sharon disengagement from the West Bank in 2005.
They were given funding for a house, but it couldn't be in the West Bank.
It had to be within Israel's proper borders.
But they went and they rented out the house they were given, and went to move to live in a trailer in the West Bank, because it was so important to them to live in the West Bank.
So there's always a tremendous amount of pressure for housing in the West Bank from the ideological crowd.
And when they pretty successfully, for a period of about a decade, managed to block off the growth in the cities, all the various organizations and diplomatic pressure, it ended up coming out in an even worse way in these little hills that became well-established neighborhoods.
Then there's another thing which people talk about, which I don't think they really understand the details of, is the unofficial settlements.
So that's an on and off thing that keeps changing.
Originally, everything in the late 70s, primarily a little bit in the late 70s, primarily in the late 80s and early 90s, settlements were being built by government decision in Israel.
The government would announce, we're making five new settlements in these places, we're going to steal some local land, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, etc.
Like the way normal things happen.
The government makes a decision, the Interior Ministry sets it up, the housing ministry sells the land to developers, and they get it like the way things work in most places.
But then once political pressure started to build up in the late 90s, they couldn't really get away with making government decisions, at least not too often, to create new settlements.
So what started happening is there had these NGOs, which would go find out where there's government-owned land, or whatever government-seized land, and they'd just park a few trailers there.
And then a lot of government agencies and quasi-government agencies, like there's government-owned corporations, which are designed to help out this type of thing.
And what they do is they connect them to water, they connect them to electricity, and they'd set up a settlement which would technically be illegal, but they had multiple government agencies helping them set it up.
And this went on for about 15 years.
And then the courts stopped playing ball, and the Americans started pressuring to stop it too.
And then in like, 05 or 08, the Israelis kind of stopped letting it happen until very recently, until during the Trump administration.
They've gone back to tacitly allowing it to happen in specific places with less direct help than they used to in the late 90s and early 2000s.
But that's when you hear about all the court cases, about where the court says to knock down houses, and the Israeli politicians all lose their minds, and they have big fights.
And then, I'm not sure if you saw, but a couple of years ago, there was a big debate over the, in Hebrew they call it chokha hasdara, the land-seizing law.
Mm-mm.
The what law?
The law to seize land.
Oh, uh, no.
The problem, right, a lot of these settlements weren't built by former, formal government dictator.
They were, from a legal perspective, they were built by some dude who had no legal standing to do it, right?
And then it turns out, a lot of the times, surprise, surprise, they belonged to private property.
They end up building it on some Palestinian dude who was kicked out in 67, but was living in a, what do you call it, a refugee camp in Jordan, and he has no access to it, but he still technically owns it.
And then he'll sue to get the settlers off his land, and the courts are generally sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and they'll say, well, you're setting on private property, the government must remove you, and that would be a huge political issue.
So they decided, when a city is formally built by the government, typically they'll say, they'll go through the process of stealing the land legally, the eminent domain, but if it's just built by a guy, then no eminent domain happens, so it still belongs to whoever it belongs to.
So they made like a law to retroactively eminent domain property that's on a settlement for the settlements that turned out to have been built on private property.
And this was a big issue.
I don't remember how it went down in the end.
I remember the courts were definitely considering knocking it down, and they were threatening to override the courts via constitutional amendment, which now is actually even a bigger issue right now, because they passed an ethnostate law a couple years ago, the nation state law, which is like an amendment to the constitution, and the courts are sending signals that they might decide that it's not, they might decide that their constitutional amendment is not constitutional, which is hilarious.
Yeah, that'd be good though.
I mean, explain that for us, if you could, the nation state law.
Sounds kind of innocuous, right?
Hey, it's a nation state, I don't know.
Yeah, so the nation state law says, so basically Israel doesn't really have a constitution.
They knew there were two Jews, three opinions, so Ben-Gurion realized that there wasn't really a chance to get a constitution made properly.
So he set up an interim constitution, one law, which is like, this is the Knesset, this is how the prime minister is elected, this is how the president is elected, just the basic structure.
And then the rest of the constitution was supposed to come soon, and it hasn't come yet.
But in the 90s, I believe it was, there was a fellow on the court by the name of Aaron Barak, who basically through judicial activism, basically created a constitution.
And he decided that certain laws have the standard, like there's a type of law, which he ruled that they have the standard of a constitution.
And not only that, he decided that, which had no legal basis, but it was good that he did it.
He decided that there's something called the intention of the legislature.
And he decided to read into this one law, there's this one law called the rights, the respect and freedoms of man, I don't think.
It was passed at 2am by when only half the Knesset was there, which was never understood to really be an important law.
But he went and read into that law, that this is essentially a constitution.
And while it isn't clear, there's a bunch of elucidated rights.
And he used that to strike down a bunch of laws later on.
And then in addition, they actually strike down, they created something called the reasonable test, where they'll strike down administrative rulings for being unreasonable.
The court decided that they don't agree with the decision, essentially.
So the court in Israel is incredibly powerful, which is kind of the only break on the system.
And so they decided they're going to create a new law, which is on par with the human rights law, which is what the whole sort of British style unwritten constitution is based off of.
And this law says that the country is ruled by two principles, not one.
So the old law was that the principle guiding the country is the freedom and respect of man, which means basically Western liberal values, as defined by the courts.
But then this one comes to say that this country is a country for the ethnicity of the Jews, and also is a democratic country.
And what they wanted to do is create that every time the court wants to look at a law and see if they can strike it down, they can't just look at, is this law representative of liberal democratic values, like property rights, or also all kinds of lefty values?
Or is it not?
Now they have to consider, is this law consistent with our goals to be a state for the Jews?
So the example that was brought up was this retroactive eminent domain law, where they'd say, yeah, it doesn't really work out with liberal Western values, but it works out with the value of, we're going to be a Jewish state.
So we need to settle the land with Jewishness, and all kinds of other projects that they want to do.
There has been an official government policy of, quote, Yehud HaGalil, which is make the North more Jewish for years now.
And that type of thing, the courts don't usually like, but the idea was to force the courts to consider right-wing values as the state's ethnicity and their value when they examine laws.
And the courts are really not happy with this.
So the courts are, before they do major decisions, they tend to write op-eds and see what the responses are.
Not them themselves, but other people in the legal community, former judges and prosecutors and that type.
And the legal theory that they're looking at now is, they just invented this legal theory where you can't change the basis of the system.
So they're like, yeah, the concept of the power to change the Constitution, but the Declaration of Independence must always be the basis.
And if you try messing with the Declaration of Independence, then the courts can strike down your constitutional amendments.
It doesn't say, the court was never given that power anywhere.
There's nothing that says that they have that power.
But if they decide they have that power, you know, you're going to tell them they don't.
And actually, this was missed because it happened right after the Knesset fell apart, like the current elections got kicked off.
The speaker of the Knesset actually sent a letter to the court saying, you guys have no authority to strike down constitutional amendments.
And if you do, we will ignore you.
So they're headed towards an internal, besides all of the political nonsense, they're headed towards a serious constitutional crisis where the courts and Knesset may just be at odds over whose power goes where and who has control of what.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
I mean, at least they're fighting over something so important as that atrocious nation state law, you know.
And if only maybe to force a conversation about what are we going to do about the millions and millions and millions of Palestinian captives that we hold prisoner kind of thing, something like that.
And there was a time where Ehud Barak, who had been the prime minister and then was Netanyahu's defense minister in the current, you know, it was, I guess, when he first came back to power in 09, but still he said, look, we can't keep this up or it'll be, you know, outright apartheid.
We kind of been getting away with it by talking about maybe there'll be a Palestinian state someday, but now we're just going to have it like this, but it's unsustainable.
You can't have, you know, it's too, the comparison to South Africa is too obvious and look what happened to them, he said.
And so I just wanted to like, what is the conversation about this?
Even Ariel Sharon in the last year, year and a half, two years of his life and rule said things along those lines.
Ariel Sharon, for those who aren't familiar, was an absolute bloodthirsty maniac for like most of his life.
He was known for, famously Ben-Gurion said about him that he doesn't want him in the military because he's seriously afraid that he'll show up and surround the prime minister's office with tanks one day.
The man was the most right-wing person on the planet.
And like, I think the court actually struck down, he was involved in the Sabrin Shatila massacre in the Israeli first Lebanon war.
That was his first, you know, first time he got kicked out of the military, but he was like the most right-wing person ever.
But then he turned around and did the disengagement from Gaza and the Northern West Bank, because nobody knows really what he was thinking.
The right-wing theory is because he was in legal trouble and he wanted to appease the legal system, which is generally considered on the left.
The left-wing theory is that he just figured out from Bush and other sources that you can't get away with this forever.
And he wanted to secure the long-term stability of the state by essentially cutting the Arabs off.
And there's another right-wing theory that he wanted to just be able to bomb Gaza a lot.
And he felt he wouldn't be able to do that if there were too many settlers within Gaza.
So he figured he'd take them all out so he could bomb them.
Well, I'll tell you what, I mean, Eric told me back in 2005, Eric Garris at antiwar.com was like, oh man, I'm against them pulling these settlers out of Gaza because they're human shields essentially.
They're there voluntarily.
I mean, they're taking, they're trying to take the place, but they're preventing the worst of what Israel can dish out on these poor people.
And boy, did that turn out to be right.
And now I'll start paraphrasing it while I page through my post-it notes, trying to find the quote.
Here it is.
Dov Weissglass, who worked for Sharon, said that the significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process.
When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem.
Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state with all that it entails has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.
And all this with a U.S. presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.
The disengagement is actually formaldehyde.
It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians, et cetera, et cetera.
It goes on like that.
Yeah.
And internally, because of the trauma, because Ariel Sharon was a thug.
And when he treated the Lebanese, he treated them like he was a thug.
And when he did the disengagement, he was quite thuggish towards the settlers that were being removed.
For like six to eight months, the entire country was in complete turmoil.
And there were people getting indefinitely detained.
He treated the settlers almost like he treated the Palestinians for his entire career.
And it was brutal.
And then 10,000 people got kicked out of their homes over a period of five days.
It scarred the country for a generation.
And the imagery is incredible.
And because of that, I think that also plays a big role in that until then, when Menachem Begin cleared out the Sinai Desert as part of the peace process, there were people that were angry about it.
The right wing was never happy about it.
But it didn't sear trauma into their bones.
Settlements were removed after that, and they were fine.
But after the trauma that was the disengagement in 2005, and the troops coming in with bulldozers and running over synagogues, or not synagogues, they didn't actually run over the synagogues, but they'd come in and you'd see thousands of troops kicking in the door to a synagogue and just dragging four-year-olds out.
The imagery there was extremely powerful.
And I think that plays a big role in Israelis being much less willing to give up even a relatively small amount of settlements for any future process, which I don't think that was his intention.
I think he was just brutal.
I was going to say, I wonder if that was part of it deliberately, that like, hey, let's make sure and be a real jerk about it, too.
Also, interestingly, the timing, he was going to do it even worse, but people told him to.
So on the Jewish calendar, Tisha B'Av, the 9th of Av, is the day of mourning for the temple.
You know, different people take it differently.
Some people are like, yeah, let's go rebuild the temple, and some people just take it as sort of the national day of mourning for everything the Jewish people have been through for the last few thousand years, the Holocaust and all the pogroms and everything like that.
It's kind of like the day of commemoration of all of that stuff, though in Israel today they have like a separate day for the Holocaust.
But that day is like the day of remembrance for everything they've been through.
And actually, the disengagement was like, he kicked everybody out of their homes like four days before that.
And he actually, his original date was to do it like on that day, which would have just, he would have just put himself like, he would have painted himself directly into the narrative of like, people that day talk about how like, Hitler and Bogdan Khamelinsky and, you know, the First Crusade, and all like the worst people towards Jews over the past 2000 years.
And he wanted to like come in and say, like, say, hey, I'm kicking you out of your house today.
He was an absolute brutal, like brutal person by nature.
And he ended up being talked off that ledge, but he did it like a week before.
So it's still like he seared it, he seared the trauma of disengaging.
And it was bad, like the suicide rates are still incredibly high among the people that were that were taken out of the Gaza Strip.
They, like some of them are just now, 16 years later, getting permanent housing.
Because, again, like I said, Israel's bureaucratic, incredibly terrible bureaucracy.
And what, for example, is just like one thing that happens, if you're constructing a home, and you're talking about a country that has thousands of years of history, if you're constructing anything, and you hit any sort of antiques at all, you just completely stop.
The site now belongs to the antiques department.
And they can take as long as they want.
They do not have to answer to anybody to do a full archaeological dig if that's what they want to do.
And they'll find like, okay, this was someone's house 400 years ago.
And they'll spend four seasons and you're building it just on hold for five years until the archaeology department got everything that they want.
So like, there's, there's people who are supposed to have houses, but unfortunately, like someone under the Ottoman Empire had a farm there.
So they had to wait like five years until the archaeology department got around to clearing the site.
There's, there's just, and then there's like eight different government offices you have to work with.
And it's just, these people were just brutalized.
And I mean, they signed up to be like, to live in places specifically for the sake of, you know, setting political messaging, but still, like the human tragedy side of it is very real.
And I think And all in the service of screwing the Palestinians worse.
So yeah, that's pretty bad.
Yeah, it's, it's rough.
And that's why I don't think anybody who talks about a two state solution at this point is either being disingenuous, like, like, no, I think it's, it's, he's absolutely being disingenuous.
I don't think there's, I don't think anybody really believes in it at this point.
But like, your American liberal writers, from from both, you know, the Jewish liberal writers, and just, you know, your general center left writers, when they talk about two state solution, they're either completely delusional or being disingenuous.
Like you, you can't spend any time understanding how Israel thinks, understanding the Israeli process, understanding that just 10%, like 10% of Israeli Jews live there, and nobody cares what anybody other than Israeli Jews think.
But it's not like, well, Israeli Palestinians support it.
Nobody cares, right?
They don't even let them be in a coalition of the left.
So you're talking, everybody has family there.
And any of the serious plans are talking about moving minimum 100,000 people in a country of seven or eight, a country of 8 million people.
Imagine the United States had to do something.
And, and we're talking 3-4% of the population have to get moved.
Imagine the entire state of Texas would get kicked out of their homes.
Or whatever, Dallas.
There's no way something like that is politically feasible in a country which is extremely right wing to begin with.
It's not, it's not, and then a country that doesn't know how to build houses, they can't get their act together and like build apartments for people that need apartments.
You can't kick the whole Dallas out of their house and tell them to live for the next 15 years in trailers in boiling, in boiling heat.
It's just, it's politically completely unfeasible.
And, and I mean, there are other solutions, but nobody's willing to talk about them because especially the international left is completely obsessed with the two state solution, which is probably the correct thing to do.
But it is literally impossible to accomplish.
Too late now for sure.
And it always was a ruse.
That's the real point.
Was it the peace process?
In fact, that's, that I had that Dov Weiss glass quote.
There's a great quote of Benny Morris, the famous historian who documented the Nakba and then justified it all in his, you know, very right wing order.
And he says, look, we have to keep up the pretense of a peace process.
Otherwise the Europeans, the Americans would just be breathing down our neck too bad about us.
But as long as we pretend that, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Someday, someday, someday that'll be good enough for them.
And that's the crisis of liberal American Zionism now is that it's hard for them to believe it.
And they would rather let the West bank go because they don't want the Palestinians.
You know, they're very chauvinist against the Palestinians, but they're afraid that they're going to lose their Jewish state.
If the Jewish state won't let the West bank with its Palestinians go and Gaza too, you know.
That's the center left argument in Israel all these years, like the labor party would get up and say, I don't care about the Palestinians.
You think I care about the Palestinians?
I just care about maintaining a demographic majority.
Why would I give a shit about Palestinians?
Yeah.
It's like, it's, it's, it's like the only party that's willing to say no, there are people here that are suffering.
And that itself is a problem is like merits, which is a hard left party by Israeli standards.
You don't like to, you don't see people get up and say, well, there are people too, and they shouldn't live under a military occupation per se.
In it of itself, that's not a good, that's not cool.
That like, isn't in the political mainstream as an argument.
So the idea that you're going to be able to go, well, yeah, it's not great for the, like these Israelis are actually going to have to make a concession here for the sake of not being occupiers anymore.
That's not like that.
You can get four seats and kind of said, on a good day.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, we're at an hour.
We better cut it.
I know you probably got a busy afternoon like I do.
Yeah.
But thanks very much for coming on the show and talking about all this stuff, man.
I learned a lot and more than I ever wanted to know about Israel, but we all got to know.
So that's part of the job.
I just thank you for like the, the, I'd say, you know, the, the oldest role and when you want to check whether, whether someone who talks about a lot of subjects, whether they know what they're talking about is, you know, you check the one subject that, you know, well, and I've, I don't know much about Afghanistan other than what I've learned from, from, from you and a few other, a few other sources, but I've heard you be very, very accurate about Israel.
So, you know, the parts that I was able to check, you did very well.
So.
Yeah, cool.
Well, I appreciate that.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that's Kalman Barkin and you can find them hanging out in the Reddit room.
Reddit.com slash r slash Scott Horton show for the regular donors.
