10/06/14 – Thomas Harrington – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
All right.
So one of my newest sponsors, as you know, is Thomas Harrington, author of the book Live in La Vida Baroca, American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies.
If you go to scotthorton.org slash books, or in fact, if you just go to scotthorton.org, you'll see it right there on the right side of the page, and a hot link to Amazon where you can buy it.
And very happy to welcome Thomas back to the show.
How are you doing?
Great.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing real good.
So listen, I was explaining to the people at the top of the show here about how you really cover a lot of different subjects and essays in this great book, and all the perspective of incorporating Spanish history and a perspective from Spain on the American empire and all that.
That's great.
But one of the other things that's really great about this book is there are quite a few really good essays about the situation in Israel and Palestine and the American role, of course, in making it what it is.
And so I guess to start off, I was reading a thing.
I'm not certain.
I'm fairly certain this was a quote from Netanyahu's UN speech, actually, but I didn't see it.
I was reading it, so I might be confused on the exact origin.
But it was very recently where he was saying, oh, yeah, no, we're going to make peace with the Palestinians at some point and let them have their second state at some point.
I'm very roughly paraphrasing here.
But he said, but it's not because they have the right to any of this land or anything.
All of, he's certainly talking about the West Bank, all that is Israel.
It belongs to us.
But we're considering maybe letting them have some of it if it'll shut them up for a while kind of an attitude.
And I was just thinking that, I guess I was a little bit surprised that they're that frank about it when I thought the policy was to pretend that someday they're actually going to work this out.
Whereas, you know, right there, that's basically an admission that the Palestinians can just go to hell.
The Likud, the right wing nationalist parties and coalition in power there in Israel, they're just not ever going to let the people of Palestine have independence ever.
Is that the way you read that, too?
I do read it.
And I think what's interesting is in the last few years, we've seen a gradual increase in the frankness about this.
I don't know if you saw that Richard Cohen's book has come out to the Washington Post.
And he's quite frank about the idea that there was ethnic cleansing, apparently.
I haven't read it all fully.
I've seen parts of it.
And this was necessary to do.
It's also a position that is held by Benny Morris, one of the new Israeli historians, who was one of the people that first talked about what had not been talked about.
That was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
And he's finally come around to the position of, yep, we had to do it.
It needed to be done.
And so I think there's an increasing idea that we're not going to keep up the pretenses any longer, that the world is about force.
We have the force.
And it's really a matter of exercising that.
After all, they have the unquestioned support of the United States.
And I take it even further.
When you're on a college campus, you begin to see these in terms of the idea battles on campus.
And there is a greater and greater clarity about the fact that the idea is to simply not allow other points of view on campus, at least ones that go outside the officially prescribed parameters of the discourse.
So yeah, I think the idea of having to keep up the pretext is going away.
And they're just saying, yep, this is what we're going to do because we have to do it.
Yeah.
Well, except here's the thing, though.
Even people like Corporal Goldberg over the Atlantic say, this is stupid and suicidal.
You know, I mean, I'm talking about people who are Zionists or, you know, nationalists, you know, right wing Zionists who are saying, hey, listen, the priority is keeping a Jewish supermajority and keeping a democracy.
And we can't do that if we, you know, outright or at least de facto own the West Bank so bad that it might as well where everybody accepts it as de jure.
It's no longer occupied territory.
It has been annexed at some point here, even if they don't call it that.
Maybe we're already way past that point now.
But it's in other words, it's coming to the point of view where the perception is that this is an occupied territory.
It's just part of Israel.
And then that way, it's right around 50 50.
Maybe the Jews are actually even in a minority now.
If we're going to count all the Palestinians, as the leverage pointed out recently, count all the Palestinians in the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as all the Christian and Arab Israeli citizens, they're actually the majority now already making.
And then the theory goes, I mean, I don't know how long it's supposed to take, but that that at some point is not tenable when this the place may be Jim Crow and everything.
But when the oppressed are the outright majority at that point, then it becomes a situation where just for political correctness reasons or whatever, like South Africa, it has to come apart because the rest of the world just won't accept it.
So I mean, is is Jeffrey Goldberg wrong to worry?
Question.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Is Jeffrey Goldberg wrong to worry?
I mean, is the answer to be worried?
But of course, his worry is misplaced in the sense that the thing he should be worried about is the original architecture of a state that wants to be Jewish.
I mean, we've heard it so many times over the years that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, Israel is a Jewish and democratic state, that we often stop, don't stop and ask ourselves what those words mean.
And when we begin to deconstruct what it means, it's an absurdity.
How can you be democratic when you have one group that is inscribed in the in the laws of the state advantages that other people don't have?
You know, I work on Spanish nationalism and there was a strain of Basque nationalism that used to talk about blood types and how if we're going to have a real Basque nation, we need to have people with this certain blood type, which was prominent among Basques, and we need to have purity of Basque names as one of the markers of what we're going to do in the nation.
Well, rightly, that was laughed out of left field.
That was seen as completely inappropriate for anyone in a country that seeks to be democratic to be talking in that way.
And that went by the boards, you know, the last people talking that way went by the boards in the 80s.
But that's in effect what we have in Israel.
We have an entrenched set of privileges to the group of people possessing, call it a cultural or even biological markers in some ways.
I'm reading a great book that, in fact, I'd even encourage you to have the author on.
Her name is Ofra Lith Yeshua, or Yeshua Lith.
It's the case for a secular New Jerusalem.
And she's the daughter, actually granddaughter of Israeli pioneer settlers.
And she came to the realization over the years, very painfully, that it was the underlying architecture, the privileged one group of people over the other, that makes the whole thing untenable.
So, yeah, Jeffrey Goldberg should be worried.
But the flaw is in the design and not in the fact that other people are there.
I mean, this was inevitable in one way or another.
Right.
Well, no, I mean, and that makes sense to me.
And I encourage everybody, Max Blumenthal is going to be on the show later in the week.
I encourage people to go watch his speech at the kind of makeshift tribunal, their war crimes tribunal that they had, the Russell Tribunal it's called, where he closes by saying, you got to understand this is part and parcel of Zionism.
You know, you can't have Zionism without this mess.
And that's why we have this mess.
And so, you know, you got to understand it in that context.
And yet, and I don't have a dog in the fight, you know, I really don't care other than it's the US government's fault overall, which is what I care about.
But it seems to me like if the Israelis were trying to be cool, then they could have peace.
They could have withdrawn from the occupied territories in 1969 and said, OK, guys, you can have your independent state, but we're going to have, you know, whatever.
They could have done it in 88 after Arafat recognized them, or they could have done it after the leaders of Hamas had promised to recognize.
Oh, hell, now we got to go out to this break, Thomas.
So this is the question on the other side of the break.
Couldn't they, if Rabin hadn't been shot, couldn't they have worked this out somehow?
That kind of overall question versus the premise that Zionism itself just mandates this sort of outcome.
One moment.
We'll be right back with Thomas Harrington, author of Livin' La Vida Baroca, professor at Trinity College.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
Gals too.
All y'all.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Thomas Harrington.
He's the author of this great book, Livin' La Vida Baroca, American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies.
There's sort of a pseudo-conflict of interest because, yeah, he's advertising on the show.
Isn't that great?
I love the book and I'm happy to tell you about it anyway.
I'd have him on an interview about it anyway.
It's all good.
I'll take your bribe anyway.
I like your transparency, Scott, but I like your show.
Yeah, anything but the whole truth is a damn lie if you ask me, so I've got to say it.
All right, now, so listen.
Here's what my question is, is that if Rabin hadn't been shot and say he had somehow negotiated away control over East Jerusalem and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and had tried to have a good faith effort at working with the Palestinian Authority to set up the kind of government that they could live peacefully next door to, et cetera, whatever, in a reasonable way, not in a lacunate kind of an Ariel Sharon sort of way, could that have ever worked?
I mean, I guess maybe the fact he got a bullet in the head from a right-wing settler, Zionist kook is sort of proof, you know, kind of undoes the argument itself, but it just seemed to me always like the right-wing nationalists there are putting the nation in a position that is untenable unnecessarily and that, in fact, if they would just give the Palestinians independence, then as cruel as it is, as unenlightened as it is to have the 80-20 Jewish democracy and all of that that they have, it's still better than occupation forever.
And so maybe at least it would last a little longer.
I don't know.
You know, I think it's interesting because it gets into the history of Zionism, which I'm not an academic expert, but there's a divided core in Zionism.
The revision of Zionism, which came of age, so to speak, with Begin, really had a vision of the whole land of Palestine and that there was a need to have it.
The labor side of things, the liberal Zionists, if you will, that were predominant for the first 20 years or maybe 30 years of Israel's history, that's a more ambiguous question, and that's where I remit to experts greater than mine, but there seems to be two schools of thought on that.
Were these people ever interested in coexistence, or were they just interested in a sort of much more polite way of maintaining Jewish majorities and Jewish control over the land?
I think what we do know, though, is that after the assassination of Rabin, the right has generally just taken on more and more pieces of the terrain of power in Israel, and such that there seems to be very little left.
Even the two-state solution at this point seems to be, you know, something that has very little relevance any longer.
As I say, there's the Arab League plan out there, which no one seems to even talk about.
If peace really were the object, that would seem to be a place to start, but that doesn't even get mentioned.
It doesn't even get responded to by the Israeli government.
Right.
Yeah, well, I mean, from their spin, anything proposed by Arab Anything would be completely ridiculous and illegitimate and a non-starter no matter what.
It would have to come from them in the first place, and, jeez, they just can't find anyone to negotiate with.
There's no partner.
But the dynamic is, to me, what is depressing is there seems to be no obvious endgame.
Once you dehumanize mentally and rhetorically and culturally people with whom you're trying to work out a problem, you really destroy the ability to do so.
And you can see this same mentality spreading in the United States.
I think one of the most depressing things I've seen in the course of my lifetime is the idea that you have enemies, but enemies should be talked to.
Now we have enemies that are unspeakable, that are evil, that are beyond the pale, and therefore we can't even begin to talk with them.
This wasn't always the case.
I mean, we had a nuclear-armed Soviet Union that we talked to.
We made sense out of, or at least we tried.
We didn't give up being what we were, but we tried to understand them.
And this sort of cultural autism, as they call it, seems to be spreading everywhere, and that's very frightening to me.
And it seems to have one of its prime points of emphasis there in Israel-Palestine.
We have to make these people evil.
And instead of saying, we're all evil, everyone is part evil, part good, we have different points of view, but let's work it out.
In fact, you can see it on the left-right divide in this country.
Trying to get some people from the left to listen to your program, or to listen to read antiwar.com is a lot of work.
Those are those people, and I don't need to read them.
When in fact, there's a lot in common when you start talking about it, and start putting ideas down side by side.
Yeah, especially when it's the left-wing slogan that it's the 99% versus the 1%.
Well, this country's not 1% right-wing and or libertarian, right?
But I agree with them about the 99% thing.
In fact, I'd be more specific.
I'd say it's more like 99.9, and that kind of thing.
So yeah, I mean, I always try to be very ecumenical.
Most of my guests are liberals, obviously, because liberals are the only ones who are good on foreign policy, for the most part, and really right about it, other than David Stockman and Doug Bandow and a few others.
So you've got to look to the left if you want expertise on this stuff, because people on the right, and even libertarians, just don't seem to care all that much, most of them.
I don't know.
I find there's a lot of good libertarian voices, too, that have made me look at the history of American foreign policy in very different ways.
For example, the idea that I have come across through you guys, if you will, Woodrow Wilson's role in creating many of the problems of the American empire.
Franklin Roosevelt, you look at him through a different focus.
That doesn't mean I take away everything that's admirable about him, but it's made me rethink how we've really acted over time.
I think it's very healthy to do that, without losing some of the core convictions that you have.
Right.
It's just a matter of priorities.
I still believe, and maybe this is silly, but I still believe that maybe even a supermajority of Americans really do want to be free, and would even tolerate their neighbors being free too, if that was the price they had to pay, if only they had it put before them in such a way where they could choose it.
You know what I mean?
I think you're raising an interesting point, one that interests me a lot.
I really wonder whether we educate for freedom in this country anymore.
I think there's a theorist of education, Henry Giroux, who's also a cultural critic who's quite excellent, who talks again and again about how we have internalized authoritarian ways of looking at the world over the last several decades, and that the neoliberal model has made us commodify people, and that parents now educate their children in order to make them cogs in the machine, and accepting the idea that there's always someone more powerful that you'll have to pay fealty to.
That wasn't the way I was raised, and I dare say a lot of people growing up in the 70s and 80s, as I did, were not always thinking about, hey, who's the strong man that I have to please?
And now I see a lot of Americans basically assume that there's always some concentrated power that you have to suck up to in a certain way.
And so it gets into interesting questions about, can you educate for freedom?
And I think, frankly, the left has fallen down on that, and I think the right has fallen down on it, in the sense that both have their centers of power that they want respected before anything, and then there can be freedom around the margins.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, like you were mentioning with campus speech earlier, wherever there's a possibility for factions to clamp down on each other, like on campuses, boy, they'll do it.
I mean, there doesn't seem to be any restraint whatsoever.
It's not just Israel and Palestine, but there's 10,000 speech codes across this country right now.
And one of the most fascinating things is that I was in graduate school back when the whole PC began as a left-wing phenomenon, and I objected to it then, and there weren't a lot of people on the left objecting to it.
And now what's fascinating is it's crossed the political spectrum, and it's now the right that is taking advantage of the ability to silence people through good taste or offensiveness, and they're taking it to a whole new level.
So we have taboo subjects on the left, taboo subjects on the right, and we have young people avid to learn who nonetheless have been socialized in this idea that there's always someone you have to worry about offending, when in fact, if you really look at education, it should be about opening the mind, if anything, daring on the side of being free.
And it really troubles me that we seem to not have that idea any longer.
All right.
Well, we're working on it.
I appreciate your time on the show again, Thomas.
Okay, Scott.
Thanks a lot.
Been very good.
That's Thomas Harrington, everybody.
He's a professor at Trinity College, and he's the author of Livin' La Vida Baroca, American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxy.
Find it in the margin there at scowhorton.org.
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Oh, John Kerry's Mideast Peace Talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
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