10/29/15 – Philip Weiss – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And on the line, I got Phil Weiss from the Mondoweiss blog.
Hey, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Phil?
Great.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show today.
No problem.
Everybody, Phil Weiss, he keeps Mondoweiss.net.
He's got a great stable of writers over there.
The title is The War of Ideas in the Middle East.
And so it's news and politics focused, obviously, on Israel-Palestine and the Israel lobby in the United States as well, and all this kind of stuff.
I do hope you'll sign up for their morning e-mail and just keep track of what's going on at Mondoweiss.
It's really great stuff, man.
It really is.
I absolutely rely on you.
Thank you.
And so now this one goes back.
I got quite a few articles here.
I want to go over as many of them as I can.
But I want to start a couple of weeks ago with this one here, October 18th.
Goldberg, that is Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, says the root of the conflict is the Palestinians' anti-Jewish narrative.
So first of all, for those not familiar, could you catch us up?
Who is Jeffrey Goldberg and why is he important?
Jeffrey Goldberg is the most important journalist for the Israel lobby in the United States.
He is a very successful and witty writer and media figure.
He found anti-Semitism to be so strong in the United States that he moved to Israel in the 1980s and joined their army and ultimately came back here because he found that society a little too provincial, I think, and closed.
And he wanted to have a big career, which he's having here.
But he acts as Israel's mouthpiece in this country.
He just always stands up for Israel.
And this thing is an article that's horse manure.
It says that the root cause of the conflict is that Palestinians don't accept the ancient connection of Jews to the land of Israel, the biblical connection.
That's why they'll never accept Jews' connection.
Well, you have people living under occupation.
That's the problem.
People living under military occupation have no rights.
Five million people.
That is a problem.
Yeah.
Well, a couple of things there.
First of all, and obviously we're going to talk about the occupation, but just in religious terms, Muslims know that it was the Jews who first, obviously didn't invent, but identified the one God that they believe in, too, the very same God of Abraham and Moses.
And they respect Jesus as a prophet, if not the Savior.
And they're another break off of Judaism, just like Christianity is.
And who in the world would deny that?
Find me the most bin Ladenite lunatic imam on this planet to deny the history of the invention of monotheism.
And that's their story, too.
Right.
But, I mean, Scott, that is a very rational and intellectual assertion on your part.
I accept it.
But there is some concern that this conflict has this religious component and some of the hatred is infused with religion on both sides.
Oh, sure.
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't deny that.
I'm just saying Jeffrey Goldberg's premise here is just it doesn't even stand up on the face of it.
It doesn't seem like to me.
If Muslims believe in Islam, then they believe in the same God that the Jews believe in.
Yeah.
And, I mean, let's just be clear here.
The father of Zionism was Theodor Herzl.
And when he was trying to start a Jewish state 100 years ago, long before the Jewish state was actually started, 50 years before, he always promised everybody from the czar to the pope to the sultan, we will internationalize Jerusalem.
We will not control Jerusalem and the holy places.
That's a recipe for endless war.
And FDR recognized that in the 1940s when they were saying they wanted a Jewish state that would control Jerusalem.
He was saying, you're trying to start a jihad.
So of course it's going to – you can't have Israel having sovereignty over the old city of Jerusalem.
It's just not fair.
It's not going to work out.
And, by the way, it didn't work out that well when Jordan had sovereignty over it.
So I think it has to be internationalized.
Well, and so – and this gets back to the actual conflict on the ground here, which never mind the actual Jewishness of the Jewish Israelis there, the humanity of them and the state that they have created there is, never mind being a fait accompli, it's actually already been recognized as legitimate within the 67 borders by the Palestinian authority and even by Hamas.
Is that not correct?
Absolutely.
I mean, consider, here are these Palestinians who 67 years ago they were promised a state.
And within a year the Israelis, they got their state and the Palestinians have been waiting seven, eight decades, no state.
And then 35 years ago or 30 years ago the Palestinians said, okay, we give up our revolutionary struggle.
We're not going to try to remove Israel from the map.
We are going to accept Israel's existence on nearly four-fifths of the land.
And we will take a state on the fragment that's left over.
And Israel, rather than pocketing that generous offer in 1988, has continued to colonize the land.
Israel has destroyed the two-state solution, and that is what we are seeing now in all the violence.
We are seeing a young generation that has no rights and is subject to settler violence, and they are responding in this impulsive and violent and awful manner, but they have no rights.
All right.
Now, so I have a hard time taking anything Jeffrey Goldberg says seriously or even honestly from his point of view kind of thing.
However, this is a very familiar trope.
I guess it doesn't really matter whether Goldberg himself believes his own B.S. on this, but it seems like this is really the widespread belief in Israel.
They hate us because we're free.
They hate us because we're Jews.
They hate us because we're good.
And never mind the occupation at all.
It is the anti-Semitism that is born into everyone who is not a Semite, and never mind the fact that they are Semites.
Right.
And it's sort of like, you know, how do conflicts end?
Conflicts end with political solutions, and there's got to be a political solution of this one that addresses Palestinian concerns.
And it's not that they're trying to extirpate Jews from the land of Israel or Palestine.
I mean, they are—Muslims will point out that they lived, as you observed, they lived for thousands of—well, for over 1,000 years with Jews largely peaceably throughout the Middle East.
Now, in some of those cases, Jews were second-class citizens.
Yes.
Or they had a different status in Muslim societies.
But they had—actually, they did better in those societies, Jews, by and large, than they did in Christian societies at the same time.
They protected the Jews from the Christians during those times.
I have a sense that that's the case.
Yeah, I haven't done the— Yeah, like during the Crusades and during, you know, the Inquisition in Spain, when all the Jews were getting kicked out of Spain, where'd they go?
They fled to the Middle East.
Right.
To be safe.
Right, right, right, right.
I mean, look, history has been unsafe for a lot of peoples, including Jews.
My people have had a long history of persecution, but they've also had a lot of success, Jews.
And you can't just look at everything in terms of your victimization, which is what Jeffrey Goldberg does, one of the most powerful.
He's a guy who sits down with Netanyahu—I mean, with Netanyahu and with Obama.
He has more access than just about any journalist I know because he can address the American Jewish organizations, the Israel lobby.
That gives him a lot of power.
And this is an era of Jewish power.
And I think that part of what is—part of the responsibility that we have, Americans and Jews, is to recognize this and to get over some of this claim that is the basis of Zionism, that the West is unsafe to Jews.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's a whole other topic.
In fact, let's take this break here.
You and I can't hear it, but we should be able to hear the music playing.
Cool.
We'll go out to this break, and then that's a good point to get back to on the other side of this break.
It's the great Philip Weiss, y'all, from Mondoweiss.net.
Don't you get sick of the Israel lobby trying to get us into more wars in the Middle East or always abusing Palestinians with your tax dollars?
It once seemed like the lobby would always have full-spectrum dominance on the foreign policy discussion in D.C., but those days are over.
The Council for the National Interest is the America lobby, standing up and pushing back against the Israel lobby's undue influence on Capitol Hill.
Go show some support at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the great libertarian social network.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I'm talking with Phil Weiss from mondoweiss.net, mondoweiss.net, a bunch of great writers there, including Phil, of course.
Thanks, man.
Yeah, well, no, you deserve it.
So anyway, the thing is we're talking about reality and perception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And then right there at the break you were saying something about how the Israeli government would have diaspora Jews believe that they're not safe in the West and that they've got to come to Israel.
Yeah, I mean, that's actually one of the things that Netanyahu says all the time, is that the West is not safe.
He went to the French Jews and said, move to Israel.
So this is the Zionist ideology, and it's completely out of whack with, you know, modern Jewish experience in the United States.
And, you know, I don't want to go to a parochial on you here, but this is a Jewish problem.
And part of it involves the fact when I first went to Israel, I was 50.
I didn't get inoculated with Zionism until – never got it, the inoculation.
I only went over there after the Iraq War because I knew that it was part of the American problem.
But my Jewish friend over there, a friend of my family, said, you know, we who moved to Israel are made aliyah.
That means we went higher.
And you live in the diaspora, and we call that yored, which is lower.
So they assign a higher spiritual place inside the Jewish community to people who move to Israel.
And that kind of – it's a very dangerous form of thinking, and I think it actually is something that a lot of American Jews unconsciously subscribe to.
Oh, they're over there.
They're on the front line.
We can't question them, and they're spiritually superior to us.
In fact, they're living in a fascistic society that's completely racist, and where they're shooting down Palestinian kids who have no rights because these kids are flipping out and pulling guns – I mean, pulling knives.
Well, yeah, and let's get back to that in just a second.
But even on the point of, you know, Americans, whether – I guess, you know, your focus always is on, you know, the American Jewish establishment.
Down here in Texas, there's a lot of, you know, cornerstone church types who are just Zionists and who vote Republican as hell, and for that reason, probably above very many.
But if they love Israel so much, they ought to get in touch with reality a little bit and look at just how destructive this thing is.
Because it seems like, you know, either the whole thing is just going to come apart under the world being unwilling to tolerate minority rule under martial law like this forever, or they're going to go full fascism, rename the place Judea, and kill every last Palestinian or drive them into the Jordan River or something like that.
Some kind of, you know, complete calamity that would completely destroy what they think of as the Israel they're trying to protect.
And if they think that, oh, we have to support them because we love them so much, they're crazy.
They need to – if they love them so much, they need to tell them to knock it off.
This is murder-suicide here.
Right.
Take away the keys to the car.
I mean, look, I do think we're facing a crisis at last and inevitably, which is that this society that they have – that Israeli Jews have created is completely inconsistent with Western values.
And American Jews are finally waking up to this because some of the good people in Israel are reaching out and saying, please help save us.
And save us on whatever terms some of them are saying.
We don't care how you help save us.
Give everybody – gosh, give everybody the right to vote.
Can you imagine that?
Can you imagine that American Jews who have led so many important movements for – or been part of so many important movements for freedom and civil rights in the United States, they, by and large, their organizations are supporting a society in which half the people on a racial basis cannot vote for the government that controls their lives.
It's Jim Crow and worse.
And American Jewish organizations have signed off on it.
And now the crisis is happening.
The awakening is taking place because that society is really going down the tube right now.
And you know what?
Man, that's such a great way to frame it, too.
Voting rights, civil rights, the right to participate in representative government.
That is – no offense or whatever – but that is always, it seems to me, a kind of higher principle than liberty to liberals.
And so, okay, good.
That is the best way, really, to appeal to them.
That on their very civil right, the right to participate in the government kind of a basis.
Never mind – because if you complain about Palestinian property rights, they go, ew, property rights, wealth.
We're talking about people having their land stolen from them, right?
But no, well, you can't really own land or whatever.
But if you appeal to them on voting rights, I think now you're talking.
You know, hey, what about segregated buses and segregated roads and all this kind of thing?
These are – now you're speaking the language of the civil rights liberals.
Right, right.
Jewish or otherwise.
Yeah, and it's going to take a long time to break in on the American consciousness.
It will take a real long time.
I mean, last summer, Jewish settlers, illegal Jewish settlers in the West Bank burned a Palestinian family to death in an arson attack.
Completely innocent family in a small village.
Three members of the family were killed.
And all the liberal Zionist organizations in the United States said, oh, this is a – there must be – they have gone too far, the settlers.
There must be accountability.
There's been no accountability.
The defense minister said, we know who did it.
They haven't charged anybody.
So there's been complete impunity for this attack, this gruesome attack.
Worse than – similar to like the Philadelphia, Mississippi attack during the civil rights era here.
No accountability.
And the Jewish – the liberal Zionist Jewish organizations have let the case drop because they can't – it just goes so much against their dream that Israel is this fair society.
It's not.
It's worse than Jim Crow.
It's worse than apartheid.
And three people are burned to death in the most grisly manner, and there is zero accountability.
And that's why the Palestinians on the West Bank, the young Palestinians are so desperate and so afraid and have seen generation after generation – they were told they would get a state.
They've not gotten any rights at all, and yet they're pulling knives.
It's terrible.
It's awful.
I think it's horrible what they're doing, and yet it's an inevitable result of this oppression.
All right, so talk about – it seems like beyond the horrible attack on this family and other recent incidents, it was really – and there have been quite a few.
I couldn't really name them all off the top of my head because there's too many, but the one that was – that really had a lot of photographs, that really made the news, was the soldier with the, what, 7-year-old boy or 10-year-old boy or something in the headlock and fighting – and the women fighting him off and protecting the little boy, this kind of thing.
But what really, apparently, best I can tell, really set this off was the change of status of who's allowed to do what at the so-called Temple Mount or the Dome of the Rock or the Al-Aqsa Mosque or whatever all you call that place.
And so can you explain what changed and why it is that that, in particular, is such a big deal to the Palestinians?
Because apparently it has provoked a leaderless kind of knife intifada here.
Yes.
I think that – I mean, if you're not a religious person, and I'm not a religious person in a conventional sense, it's hard to make all this out.
But, you know, this site in the Old City of Jerusalem is revered by Muslims, and it's revered by Jews, but the Muslims have a mosque and the Dome of the Rock on this plateau in the Old City, and it's always been a Muslim place of worship.
And now Jews are trying to go up – they say this is where the temple, the ancient temple was that was destroyed in the second century AD, and the earlier one was destroyed a couple hundred years before that, and they want to go up there and pray, too.
They're not allowed to pray up there, Jews.
And yet there have been indications in the last few months that the status is changing.
And when Palestinians hear that the status of a Muslim place is changing, they think of Hebron, where they used to have sole control of the Ibrahimi Mosque, and suddenly the place was divided, and Jews were allowed to worship there all the time in Hebron, and Hebron was colonized by Jews, and Muslims – Palestinians were forced out of their houses.
A similar apprehension has arisen among Muslims in Jerusalem and around that their most holy place in that part of the world, the third most holy Muslim site in the world, is because it's under Jewish control, the rules are going to be changed.
And Netanyahu took a long time to say, no, no, no, we're not changing the rules.
He did so.
He did not come out and shut down this talk, because members of his own government want to change the rules.
There are right-wing religious members of his government that want more Jewish access to the Al-Aqsa compound, the Temple Mount, that plateau.
And they are agitating for more Jewish access, and some of them – there's even – his minister of agriculture has even been on a video showing the removal of the Dome of the Rock to make way for the rebuilding of a third temple.
So there are religious crazies, obviously, on both sides of this issue generally, but on this case you have one society that is controlling the space politically, geographically.
That's Israel, and some of their leading government figures are agitating for a change in status, and Muslims are freaking out about it.
Well, pretty simple explanation, if you ask me.
I'm sorry we're out of time for this interview.
Oh, sorry if I rambled.
No, no, no, not at all.
It's just that I've got to go and we've got to go.
Great.
But it's always great to talk to you.
I hope that I can get you back on the show.
And thank you for keeping all your great writers, Adam and Charlotte and everybody.
They're just great and really appreciate you, Phil.
Thanks, Matt.
Okay, talk to you soon.
All right, see you.
All right, you guys, that was the great Phil Weiss.
He's at Mondoweiss.net, the war of ideas in the Middle East.
And that's it for today's show.
Thanks.
See you.
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