10/25/13 – Mitchell Plitnick – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, good times.
Next up is Mitchell Plitnick.
He is the former director of the U.S. Office of B'Tselem, which I'm sure I'm pronouncing wrong, but anyway.
The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and was previously the Director of Education and Policy for Jewish Voice for Peace.
Welcome to the show.
Mitchell, how are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me on.
I meant to say, you're writing at Loeb Blog pretty often now.
Our good friend Jim Loeb, Washington Bureau Chief of Interpress Service at IPSnews.net, and his great blog, loebblog.com.
That's what I'm looking at right now.
Israelis, Saudis, just getting started in opposing U.S., Iran, and Beitan.
A very interesting article here, but I guess we really ought to start with your former association with Jewish Voice for Peace.
That's close enough.
I think you deserve a congratulations for making the ADL's top ten list of best groups on Israel-Palestine in America.
Yeah, the ADL list is, I mean, it's actually pretty scandalous.
What they do is they take, you know, if you look at the groups and you're familiar with all of them, you'll recognize that there are some groups who are, you know, the groups listed there are very ideologically different.
Some groups I would classify as groups that are really pursuing an agenda that has little to do with Palestinian freedom and could certainly be called anti-Israel just as a matter of course.
There's only a couple of those, but, you know, then most of the groups there are simply groups that are interested in peace.
Most of the groups there very clearly do not oppose things like a two-state solution or a Jewish state per se.
They're interested in ending the occupation, and that's something the ADL doesn't seem to like very much.
So it's very unfortunate that they continue to take this stance.
And what, on the other hand, what's kind of heartwarming is to see that this sort of vitriol is being less and less accepted in very mainstream Jewish and American circles.
Yeah, you know, it seemed to me, and I'm not familiar with all of those groups on there, but it certainly seemed like I didn't see a bunch of really mean anti-Semites anywhere.
It seems like Abe Foxman's problem is people making the argument that there are reasonable alternatives to what's happening right now.
That's the biggest threat to the status quo is an honest argument.
Well, I think it's partially that, and most of the groups that are on there, if not all of them, support the idea of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel to try and get at the change of policies.
I would say, you know, personally, I don't always agree with everything the BDS movement has to say and some of their ideology, but I've been sort of on the water path for 15 years now saying that Israel has no reason to end its occupation.
There needs to be pressure on Israel to give it an incentive to end the occupation, something that would cost Israel a lot.
It'll cost Israel a lot of resources.
It'll be a political, you know, just cyclone in Israel.
There's even this possibility that things like civil war, it's a big step for Israel to take, and if we want Israel to take it, the only way to do that is to make it something that is in their interest to do.
Right now, it isn't.
And why not?
Well, you know, Israel's no different than any other country.
You know, it doesn't do things because it's the nice thing to do, it's the right thing to do.
It does things because it's what works best for them.
And the occupation, it costs them almost nothing.
It's largely, the financial costs are largely borne by Europe and the United States and, to some extent, Saudi Arabia and some other Arab countries.
Right now, especially in the last few years, there's been very little violence as a result of it.
Comparatively speaking, compared to the early part of the century or some of the wars Israel's fought, etc., there isn't a whole lot of cost.
But the territory that Israel's occupying provides a good deal of resources to Israel, not the least of which is water.
The Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor, a large percentage of their water supply, which is, you know, a very scant resource in that region, it comes from the aquifer in the West Bank.
So that's just one of many benefits that Israel gets from the occupation.
It's also become integrated into Israel's economy.
There's a lot of companies and things like that doing business there.
There's cheaper housing for many people.
And there's the ideological part of it.
The West Bank is, in fact, the biblical Jewish homeland.
So it's not, you know, the stories in the Bible don't happen in Tel Aviv and Haifa.
They happen in Hebron.
They happen in Nablus.
They happen in Bethlehem.
So that's where the real history is.
So there's also the strong ideological component.
Ending the occupation is a difficult step, and Israel needs a reason to do it.
All right, well, I want to get back to that argument.
But what do you think could be done to make them go ahead and change their mind?
Well, you know, usually military occupations bear certain costs, whether it's, you know, costs in terms of violence, but mostly economic costs.
I mean, an occupying power is supposed to be financially responsible for the infrastructure and just the day-to-day care of the people under occupation.
Israel pays almost none of that.
Most of that funding now comes from Europe or the United States through various mechanisms, including funding the Palestinian Authority.
Where monies are not coming in is Gaza, and we see the result of that.
Certainly Israel is, you know, not bearing any economic costs there.
So there isn't that usual burden that an occupation carries.
Also, Israel's shielded from political consequences by the United States, and to some lesser extent by the international community at large.
Israel doesn't face boycotts.
It doesn't face international opprobrium.
People do a lot of business with Israel, despite the occupation.
We saw in South Africa when that country became finally scandalized, really not until the 1980s when boycotts and things like that happened.
Well, big businesses also didn't want to do business there.
It wasn't good for them because people would turn around and not buy their products.
So there needs to be a reason for things like this to change, and right now Israel just doesn't have one.
Well, so if you're in John Kerry's position, can you come up with anything, or just shrug and say, I guess the Palestinians are screwed?
It depends.
If I'm actually in John Kerry's position, then I have to worry about things that I, sitting here in my Maryland home, do not have to worry about.
The position that Kerry's in is that he has to take into account the idea that there's going to be political consequences domestically here in the United States to any actions taken to pressure Israel.
So it isn't that simple.
I think for the most part, most presidents, including, I mean, even George W. Bush, when Israel was first building its wall and part of its route was in a place that Bush did not like, he withheld some loan guarantees from Israel, and Israel changed the route of the wall.
So even, and even for him, I think, as someone who I think is as supportive of Israel's policies as any president has ever been, he didn't have a big stake in Israel's maintaining the occupation.
He just also didn't have a stake in trying to end it.
There's things the United States can do, pretty simple things.
They can condition the aid that we give to Israel annually on ending the occupation, for example, and that would probably have an enormous impact.
That would be something that would probably cause Israel to change its policies pretty quickly.
But there's a domestic price to pay for that.
So I think what Kerry's trying to do now is find the best deal he can get out of Israel and more or less say to the Palestinians, this is as good as you're going to get, you better take it.
I think that would be a disastrous outcome because I don't think the Palestinians will accept this sort of deal that seems, we don't know for sure, but seems to be on the table right now.
But I think that's about the best he's going to be able to do, at least at the moment.
Now, here's the thing.
You make a lot of good points about what Israel gets out of the occupation.
But it seems to me like that's all kind of short-term gain and it ignores the long-term, that it really does make them comparable, as you mentioned there, to South Africa.
And eventually, if they don't come up with something like a plausible Palestinian state, they're going to have to go ahead and call the West Bank part of just Israel.
And at that point, it's going to be a Jewish minority.
And at that point, American politics are going to have, they're going to change somewhat anyway.
And they're going to, don't you think that, I mean, there are a lot of people, it ain't my idea that this is a long-term threat to Israel.
That's what Ehud Barak says.
Yeah, Ehud Olmert said it, and on some level even Ariel Sharon said it.
I think that's true.
I think that in representative democracies, however, you're not inclined to think in the long term.
You know, nobody is, you don't have, I think you're saying, you don't have a Mubarak who is going to be in there for 30 years.
People look at the political realities that face them today and, you know, will face them maybe next year.
I don't think that any Israeli leader is going to look beyond that, and I think especially not now.
Israelis themselves, the Israeli people, who still support, on the whole, ending the occupation.
They still support a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza in the abstract, but it's not very important to them right now.
You know, the last Israeli election, it was hardly even an issue.
It was hardly even discussed by anyone except for the far right and people like Naftali Bennett.
So, you know, it is a representative democracy in that sense, and what politicians are worried about is their next elections.
Right.
Oh yeah, and we've got to talk about Benjamin Netanyahu and his position and his allies' position on the Iran talks.
That's the point of your article here, and a very important subject, the Saudis too, but first of all, what is Netanyahu doing about the prospect of a nuclear deal here?
Well, right now he's sweating.
He's very, very worried about where this is going, and I think that is apparent in how much he's turned up the volume a few years ago when there was a real, at least it seemed to him, a real possibility of a United States attack on Iran.
He was taking every opportunity he could to talk about Iran as an apocalyptic regime, even a suicidal regime, one that would be willing to see its own country destroyed in order to launch a nuclear weapon at Israel or the United States.
That didn't work, and he pulled back for a while.
Now that the talks are something that, at least at the outset, is looking potentially real, looks like something that could potentially lead to a U.S.-Iran deal, Netanyahu is again getting back to this country is, they're crazy, and they cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapons, and they desperately are wanting nuclear weapons.
He's repeating this over and over again, and many people believe him, despite the fact that U.S. and Israeli intelligence both agree that Iran abandoned the pursuit of nuclear weapons 10 years ago.
And even then, it isn't clear that they were actually trying to get a weapon, but more likely the capability of getting one.
But whether they were or not, the intelligence services all agree that they haven't been doing that for 10 years.
So he is trying to alarm people as much as he can, and he has occasionally gone back to threatening Israeli unilateral action, although I don't think that's realistic.
But he's doing anything he can to raise up the standards.
He's also putting out conditions that he knows Iran would never agree to, for example, completely halting all enrichment for goods, taking all of their currently enriched uranium and placing it in another country.
I mean, that sort of thing is what started this problem in the first place.
The United States was thwarting every outlet Iran had for what everyone knew at the time and agreed at the time was peaceful nuclear pursuits.
The United States would sanction any country that was helping them, and that taught Iran that relying on other countries is not a good idea.
They need to have their capabilities in-house.
So nothing ever knows that this is something that Iran would never accept, and that if the United States accepted this as a condition, it would destroy the talks.
So he's trying to do anything he can to avert a deal between the United States and Iran, because the implications of that deal are almost entirely negative for Israel.
Israel gets nothing good out of it.
Well, I don't know.
They lose an enemy that they don't want to lose.
Is that so bad?
Well, they don't actually lose an enemy.
Well, they take a big step down that path.
I mean, if there's a nuclear deal and that's the single biggest outstanding issue, and that's resolved, then it's all good from there.
At least that's a good start.
That's kind of where I think the global misconception comes in.
The nuclear issue is the most important one to the United States.
It's not the most important one to the Saudis or the Israelis.
What is important to them is Iran's regional influence.
And a deal between the United States and Iran could very well strengthen that regional influence.
The United States is not going to try to bring in too many outside issues into the nuclear deal.
All right, I'm sorry, we're out of time, Mitchell.
We've got to go.
Iran's regional support for various Shiite groups and different popular uprisings, et cetera, it's something that would not be part of this.
And that's what scares Israel and even more scares the Saudis.
Sorry, we've got to go.
Mitchell Plitnick, lowblog.com.
Thanks very much.
Appreciate it.
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