10/08/15 – Allison Deger – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, all, Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee, lots of it.
And you probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darin's Coffee, a company at DarinsCoffee.com.
Darin Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darin's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darin gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade, with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
DarinsCoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and you get free shipping.
DarinsCoffee.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest today is Allison Degger.
She is assistant editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Welcome to the show.
Allison, how are you doing?
Good.
A bit busy.
Yeah, must be.
And I'm sorry, I meant to ask you off the air.
Did I pronounce your last name right there?
You did, yeah.
Okay, good deal.
So, yeah, let's start with the latest here.
Clashes break out across the West Bank after Netanyahu declares, quote, all-out war.
I guess just catch us up on the latest news, the last week worth of skirmishes and casualties, if you could, and then maybe we'll get to a little bit bigger context.
Sure.
For the last week, the tinderbox has sort of ignited.
We have seen unprecedented levels of clashes over the past decade.
And a lot of commentators are using language, questioning if something like a third intifada, the Arabic term for an uprising, has started, although very cautiously, because there isn't any kind of formal leadership.
The Palestinian leaders haven't moved in that direction.
And we are seeing, you know, despite heavy, heavy numbers of injuries and arrests, a real crackdown in Jerusalem, but there is a bit of restraint in the West Bank.
So over the last week, things really kicked off after a settler couple was attacked by a Palestinian in a drive-by shooting.
And for the Palestinians, it was seen as a revenge attack for a brutal killing, a burning alive of a Palestinian family about a month before.
And so the narrative that people are experiencing is sort of vigilante citizen attacks against one another, but that at the same time, the Israeli army, and you referenced Netanyahu's statement made last Sunday to the Security Council, is exercising broad, sweeping strokes, almost tantamount to an incursion, but without formally stating so.
And they're cracking down on demonstrations.
In the past week alone, there have been 1,553 Palestinians wounded from Israeli security forces in demonstrations across the West Bank and Jerusalem, around 100 from live fire.
And daily, we are seeing Palestinians moving to take violent, generally stabbing attacks against Israeli civilians.
And what we're noticing is that these are not from organized militant groups or armed factions of political parties.
These are young people around the age of 18, 19, 20, who make statements to their families and on Facebook in a very short time, like two weeks before, that they're motivated by the cycle of violence that's already in place.
So the Palestinians see this as this escalation as faulted by Israel's militarized response that's been so heavy-handed, that's inciting people.
I mean, really, they're saying that, you know, their actions are deterrent and are not incitement.
But of course, as they are ramping up steps, it has yielded increased violence.
Yeah, well, on the Palestinian side there, I mean, obviously, they have the right to resist occupation.
There's no question there.
But it's just so stupid for how wrong it is to attack innocent civilians on the side of the road.
I read one of these where I think the guy stabbed an IDF soldier first, and then he just turned on whoever happened to be around, stabbed a 60-year-old lady, something like this.
I mean, first of all, individuals are individuals, and she's got the right to not be stabbed kind of thing.
But second of all, you know, it completely undermines the actual truth of the situation about who's David and who's Goliath in this thing.
When Palestinians are attacking innocent civilians instead of the IDF, it completely takes all the focus off of the IDF attacking civilians in the West Bank where they are the occupying power.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, the Israeli line so far has been discussing this as an uptick of violence and that there's no systemic issues at play except for, you know, the Palestinian terror on their citizens.
But at the same time, we still have Israeli citizens, you know, engaging in vigilante attacks against Palestinians and they're treated much differently in these instances, and this is something that's really angering Palestinians.
So, for example, today there was three attacks, unfortunately, by Palestinians on Israelis and one of the Palestinian attackers was shot on scene.
In another instance that was partly caught on video earlier this week, Yaron was seen running in front of Damascus Gate, which is in East Jerusalem, after stabbing an Israeli and throngs of settlers were chanting, shoot him, shoot him, and Israeli police sent him down.
And the thinking was, for Palestinians, this is an assassination.
When our citizens engage in crimes, they are killed before a trial.
And when Israeli civilians do the same thing, they get the benefit of a court system and legal protection.
And so you really see that lack of rights playing out in the field when these person acts are committed, where Palestinians are just not afforded the same assurance to life as Israeli citizens.
Well, and yeah, when it comes to soldiers and settlers, they hardly ever even face a courtroom, much less some re-execution.
Yeah, settlers' acts of violence have, I think it's around a 1.9% conviction rate.
And according to the Israeli Human Rights Group, DHG, the issue is just failure at every step of the way.
It's not as though they're entering a courtroom and the judge is just scoffing them off, but that while there is a very intense monitoring system intact in the West Bank to look at the behavior of the Palestinians, there really is none in place in the West Bank.
And the same thing for settlers.
So when an act happens, basic policing just isn't there.
Sometimes investigators don't even go to the crime scene.
They don't interview witnesses and victims.
And so, you know, it's an abysmal rate.
And it's been constant for a decade.
So it's like 1.9% conviction rate for settler attacks on Palestinians for the past 10 years.
No change.
There's been attempts in Knesset to bolster up those efforts.
There was one police unit that did.
It's terribly underfunded.
And right now, as you know, Knesset has a strong lobby representing the settler wing inside of the government, and they really push to keep funding down to look into those crimes.
And I would really urge people to go to mondoweiss.net and find this video of the 18-year-old here.
It's as egregious as any police shooting we've been talking about here in the United States, where the guy is, you know, at least 15, 20 feet away, 50 feet away from anyone.
I don't know if his hands are up, but he certainly is not attacking anyone.
I don't think he has anything in his hands.
He's sort of just standing there, and the cops just waste him.
They didn't feel like trying to cuff him, so they just killed him instead kind of thing.
And, you know, it's as bad as Walter Scott being executed on the front page of the New York Times or any of the rest of these, except, oh, it's a Palestinian, so apparently their lives matter even less than American blacks, something like that.
I'm not exactly sure how they rank on the totem pole there.
For Palestinians, they're looking at, when they look at these cases, you know, while they do acknowledge he was committing a criminal act, the way that they're perceiving it is, if you commit a criminal act or not, you're still open for such an extrajudicial killing.
You know, at the beginning of the month, 18-year-old Hediyeh Heshamon from Hebron was crossing a checkpoint into this really controlled area of the city.
In fact, I'm sorry, Allison.
I'm terrible at watching the clock here.
Let's hold this and let you tell this very important story on the other side of this break here.
It's Allison Degger, everyone, from Mondoweiss.net, very important website, Mondoweiss.net.
Hey, Al Scott here for Samurai Tech Academy at MasterSamuraiTech.com.
Modern appliance repair requires true technicians who can troubleshoot their high-tech electronics.
If you're young and looking to make some real money or you've been at it a while and just need to keep your skills up to date, Samurai Tech Academy teaches it all.
And they'll also show you the business, how to own and run your own.
Take a free sample course to see how easily you can learn appliance repair from MasterSamuraiTech.com.
Use coupon code ScottHorton for 10% off any course or set of courses at MasterSamuraiTech.com.
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.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Allison Degger from Mondoweiss.net, the great Phil Weiss and friends over there, Mondoweiss.net.
She's assistant editor there.
You're writing from the West Bank, is that right?
The position's based in Jerusalem, but I report from all over, and mostly my beat is the West Bank.
Yeah, okay, right on.
All right, and so I'm sorry we were interrupted by the break and my bad timing here, but you were going to tell the story of the 18-year-old young woman who was executed at the checkpoint earlier.
Was it late last month, or when was it again?
September 22nd, Hadil Hashomon, 18 years old, got up early, went across the checkpoint that divides the city of Hebron between Israeli and Palestinian control.
This is an agreement from the Hebron Protocols, part of this era of making security arrangements and negotiating deals between the Israelis and Palestinians to move towards the Palestinian state.
And while the state did not happen, these arrangements did stay intact, and so she crossed into this area where it is home to around, I think, 500 settlers or so and thousands of Palestinians, but the whole area is like a ghost town.
Palestinians are not allowed to enter their homes from the main street by law.
They have to walk around through back alleys and enter from the side.
It's a very tense environment, and so she went into this zone because she often visited low-income families, and she was going that morning to do just that, and when she was in the crossing, soldiers began yelling at her in Hebrew, a language she did not understand.
Another Palestinian who spoke Hebrew attempted to intervene.
She stepped back.
There was a metal barricade between her and the soldiers, and she was fired upon around seven times and then left to bleed out on the ground before any medical intervention.
Ultimately, she was transferred to an Israeli hospital, but she had died before she reached the facility, and her family is saying that the Israeli army planted a weapon on the scene.
The Israeli army claimed that she had a knife and was using that to threaten soldiers, and so they acted under threat to life.
However, there's a series of 27 photographs, I believe, taken by a Brazilian activist who had left the country, who had stood there for 25 minutes before the incident and during the incident, and he was about eight meters from her.
He saw no knife in the area around her.
There was no knife in any of the photographs, and so in this killing, Palestinians feel like they're seeing kind of the ultimate cruelty of the occupation, an innocent young woman off to, you know, have a kind heart, you know, on a kind-hearted venture, and just gunned down and left to be killed.
And after she was died and while she was being loaded up into the ambulance, the Israeli army allowed her settlers to come and move in a bias of a loose black covering over her clothing, a modesty covering to expose her clothes underneath and photograph her dead body.
So...
Out there in public as she laid on the street?
Yeah, while they were loading her into the ambulance, they took selfies with her body.
They took selfies with her, wow.
Now, and I want to go back to the part about they let her bleed out.
It took her about 45 minutes, or it took them about 45 minutes to even get her in the ambulance, right?
And I read that one of the Israeli settlers that was standing there was an EMT, and they're all just standing there gawking at her, and wow, then they even Abu Ghraib-style took pictures of themselves posing with her corpse.
What fun.
Father told me that was like another death that she experienced.
Her father, incidentally, is the director of a hospital in Hebron, and so he's very, very aware of the status of her medical condition from the time that she was first shot until the time that she arrived at the Israeli hospital.
He told me he spoke on the phone with the Israeli surgeon that attempted to treat her.
That surgeon called him to offer condolences, and the family was, of course, heartbroken that there was no chance for her to survive, holding her and denying her medical treatment for such time.
Absolute barbarism.
And, you know, as James North said on the show back then a couple weeks ago, what was she even doing at a checkpoint?
What checkpoint?
Oh, she has no rights at all, no human rights at all.
She lives at the pleasure of the Israeli military that occupies her homeland, period.
That's it.
Imagine Texans or other Americans listening to this show, if you really had checkpoints all the time between this neighborhood and that neighborhood just to travel around your own damn county where you were born, of a foreign army that it's up to them to allow you to go here or there, and they might kill you if they feel like it, or your sister.
I mean, that area is generally described as, let's say, the most tense city, the most tense section of the most tense city in the most tense district or area of this part of the world, you know, of this region.
It's a very...
Visitors will note it does have an ominous feel when you walk in there.
You can almost, like, reach your hand out into the air and just grab a hold of it because it's thick.
You know, it's quite an atmosphere.
But to bring it up to speed with what it has to do with today is that Palestinians are looking at her death as somebody like Fadi Abun who did attack Israelis as very similar, that their rights weren't...that they didn't have rights.
And so we can say that this is sort of the undermining motivating factor that's going on.
People are fed up of after 10 years without any kind of progress to the political program that's in place that they don't have a path to either statehood or some other formulation that guarantees them more protections.
And ultimately, that's what it's about for the Palestinians.
This is a peaking of frustration that they don't have rights.
Yeah.
Well, now, and can you explain this about the new...
Is it a new law or a new regulation that approves sniper fire against stone throwers?
And by stone throwers, they mostly mean miners.
Right.
This is the new law that they'll just kill you for throwing a rock at a soldier or a tank?
So right now...
Okay, so what you're speaking of is the new policy in Jerusalem where 22-caliber shots can be fired at those that are throwing stones and that those that do not pose direct threat to life to police or soldiers.
So it's a pretty relaxed policy.
And then there's a couple other minor but really heavy-handed measures that were passed along with it.
So they specifically say...
You're saying they specifically say even if it's not a threat.
So we're not talking about they're dropping boulders on their heads and really risking lives.
There's small boys throwing small rocks.
That's good enough to shoot them with 22 rifles.
Yes.
I mean, the wording of the announcement from the government said, you know, paraphrasing, but it was explicit that in instances where there is not threat to life to the soldier or the police, they are legally allowed to use these weapons against stone throwers.
And I'm sorry I interrupted you there.
I can't help it sometimes.
Go ahead, please.
Oh, no, no, no problem.
And so some of the other regulations included if one was over 18, they could get a minimum sentence of four years.
The prime minister announced that he was seeking legislation to make a maximum sentence of 20 years.
So 20 years for 19-year-old stone throwing.
And then for youth, for minors under 18, increased fines for their parents would be administered.
But it's important to remember that more or less the policy is already in place in the West Bank, right?
Because in the West Bank, Palestinians are ruled under military code, right?
So in Jerusalem, Palestinians have a Jerusalem ID.
There's 350,000 of them.
They're not citizens of any state.
If they want to travel internationally, they generally get a laissez-passer, or there's an agreement with Jordan where they can get a passport.
But they're not Israeli citizens.
But since the 1980s, when Israel annexed Jerusalem unilaterally, they see Israel, or excuse me, they see East Jerusalem and all of Jerusalem as under Israeli jurisdiction.
So that means that the laws that are applied there are the laws that you would apply for citizens.
So a big takeaway that wasn't really discussed is that in a sweeping gesture, these .22 caliber bullets are now allowed to be used.
Netanyahu is basically saying, I'm going to pass a law that allows people who pay taxes to a city, who vote in a city, who we say we govern under the laws as if they are citizens, we're going to treat them just like people that are under military occupation.
It's a real downgrading of the rights of East Jerusalem Palestinians.
It's a militarization of the eastern part of the city.
All right, now, we're already a little bit over time, but could you say one thing real quick about what exactly is going on with the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and do you think that the Israelis are really making a move to consolidate control over it and exclude Muslims from it or something like that?
It seems like that's what the Palestinians fear.
The Palestinian Authority is suggesting that the ultimate goal is to make some kind of sharing agreement, like the Ibrahimi Mosque or what Israelis would call the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and so to give split use of the facility.
So maybe that means on certain days one religious group uses it, on certain days another religious group uses it, or you just take a line, draw a line down the middle, and you divide up use of it.
And any changes to that area is very, very, very sensitive.
I mean, not just the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
We're talking regional issues, and Jordan, who is ministers over the Muslim religious site, from an old agreement, they're discussing recalling their ambassador over this.
I mean, it takes it out of Israel-Palestine to something larger.
Now, for the Palestinians, they would point to the fact that there's around 12,000 Israeli settlers who visit the Haram al-Sharif, a compound that houses the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, every year.
And they say 10 years ago, you know, the number was like in the hundreds.
And so from their perspective, the status quo has already been changed so that there is a sharing of that space.
So they feel it's already happened and that it will keep happening and that it will keep being limited.
The mosque, and even today, Jamal Zarqa, who is a member of Knesset with the Joint Arab List, the third largest party in Israel, a member of Knesset, he was denied access to Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Closed for Muslims, closed for members of Knesset, who, you know, out in these parts, there's generally an allowance for members of Knesset to have access to these kinds of places, even if they're closed to the general public.
So they're saying it's already changed and it will change more.
Israel is saying, quite interestingly, announcing that we have changed the status quo is an incitement of violence.
Right, but they're not addressing charges of allowing more settlers onto the compound.
Religious Jews are not allowed to pray as part of this old agreement.
And it does happen, and it does happen with Israeli police protection.
So that's a violation of the agreement.
The last time I attended a press conference, the Israeli government was brought up.
They said, please stop it from happening.
But every journalist out there has seen it happen, you know, time and again.
They're really not enforcing any of that.
And this is also the focal point of all of these tensions that are happening right now.
I mean, if you look at the clashes across the West Bank in Jerusalem, actually most of them are in Jerusalem, and that's where most of this is going down.
And Al-Aqsa is at the center of all of it.
All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Alison.
Great to talk to you.
Thank you for having me.
All right, y'all, that is Alison Degger.
She is assistant editor at Mondoweiss, reporting from East Jerusalem there, mondoweiss.net.
And this one is the latest, I believe.
Clashes break out across West Bank after Netanyahu declares an all-out war.
And we'll be right back in just a minute.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new e-book by longtime future freedom author Scott McPherson, Freedom and Security, the Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
This is the definitive principled case in favor of gun rights and against gun control.
America is exceptional.
Here the people come first, and we refuse to allow the state a monopoly on firearms.
Our liberty depends on it.
Get Scott McPherson's Freedom and Security, the Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms on Kindle at Amazon.com today.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at ScottHorton.org or TheWarState.com.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the social network and community-based publishing platform for the liberty-minded.
Liberty.me combines the best of social media technology all in one place and features classes, discussions, guides, events, publishing, podcasts, and so much more.
And Jeffrey Tucker and I are starting a new monthly show at Liberty.me, Eye on the Empire.
It's just $4 a month if you use promo code Scott when you sign up.
And hey, once you do, add me as a friend on there at ScottHorton.
Liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.