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.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Hey guys, check it out.
I got Phil Weiss on the line.
He runs mondoweiss.net and he runs a lot of important articles by himself and a lot of other great writers there too.
And you know, Phil, now that the book is done, I've re-signed up for your morning email.
I had to put it aside.
I just couldn't spend that much time every morning reading Israel stuff.
Just couldn't do it.
But now I've re-signed up and now you've got me all raring to go to learn all about Israeli politics and all of this stuff again.
Well, congratulations to you on getting a book out.
Oh, thank you.
Appreciate that.
Cool, man.
Appreciate that.
I've been getting my nose in that.
I enjoy it.
I've got a lot of great writers there like Richard Perle and David Wormser and you know, you've got a good theme in there on the neocons and we're definitely going to be covering it.
So I look forward to that.
Cool, man.
I look forward to that too and I do hope you like it, the rest of it too and all that.
So listen, let's talk about what's going on.
Oh, did I say welcome to the show, my friend?
How are you?
Yeah, you too.
I'm fine.
I'm fine.
And yourself?
Do you have any power down there?
No, I'm never hanging in there.
I deduce that it's because I'm pretty near a couple of big hotels that maybe I'm on their same little grid or whatever and I never did get cut here.
So we're doing okay.
Really?
Wow.
Unlike a lot of people, man.
It's pretty bad in a lot of places.
I'm right across town from you, right?
I mean, there's people that have been out 40 hours, I've heard.
Yeah.
I mean, within, yeah, a single digit miles from here for sure, you know, one, two miles, three miles from here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In many directions.
Yeah.
My wife has been, you know, texting with all her friends and they're all without power and most of them without water too.
You know, all of them.
So yeah, it's, boy, there's going to be some Republicans hanging at the end of this thing.
Their days are over, at least for a while.
I mean, it's a pretty conservative state, but the individual men at the top of the Republican party and I think both state houses and the governor and all them, their gooses are cooked.
I mean, the Democrats are so weak though, right?
I mean.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know what's his name.
Beto is making a big splash and he's actually apparently helping people, you know, volunteering and doing stuff during this, but he's the same guy who said he's going to come and take everybody's rifle away.
So he ain't going to make it.
They're going to have to get somebody better than him.
I don't know.
Mm-hmm.
Well, so what is it, but is it a, is there any ideological component to the, I mean, I've seen the whole business about alternative energy, but.
Oh yeah.
No, I mean, it's all a big crony corrupt system.
Remember Enron and all the rolling blackouts in California at the end of the nineties where it's all these traders just, you know, it's a big rip off and it's, it's what the Republicans call free market economics, but it's more like a fascist cartel type system.
Not exactly fascist, like iron, you know, clad, but it's very crony capitalist type of a system.
And so they get away with bloody murder until they don't.
And then people freeze to death in their homes and you got people without power for four days in a row and stuff like this.
It's just absolutely unacceptable.
So there's going to be some kind of riot.
I don't know what kind, but it's going to be ugly.
Okay.
So just not to be a jerk, but you know, cause I live on a mountainside and mountain top here in Eastern mountain, not a very high one, but you know, people are used to power outages up here as sort of the, you know, it happens four days, long time, but they accept a certain amount of power outages.
That's not the case down there in the culture.
I don't, you know, no, I mean, well look, I've lived here my whole life, except a couple of years out in LA, which no exception.
Um, and you know, since 76, this is the worst winter storm that's hit Texas this entire time.
They say since the 1930s or something, you know, so like 90 years, this is the worst winter storm to hit Texas.
And so, you know, not only were the power companies not expecting it, but nobody was expecting it.
So people just don't usually prepare for, you know, having to go, you know, weeks at a time without resupplying because everything is, you know, at a, um, at a phone call or a tweet away or a, a text message away and your groceries arrive.
You know what I mean?
So, um, people are not used to having to live like they live on a mountainside and a lot of them I think were caught by surprise, you know, what was predicted as to your storm?
Well, they just said, it's going to snow like crazy, but I don't think they said expect for there to be no power for a week, um, we're just looking forward to it, you know, slide down the side of the hill and have some fun in the snow.
I mean, for me, again, I've lived here my whole life, so this is something that almost never happens.
If it snows here and accumulates, it's usually like, you know, an inch and a half or two inches on the front lawn and you get to like crunch around in a little bit and say wee, but that happens like once every nine years or something.
You know what I mean?
Once every 10 years, you get a little bit of snow enough to slide down the golf course.
That's like once every 10 or 15 years.
So for us, like, Hey, all right.
And then, oops, people are freezing in their homes.
And you know what to like, some people will have frozen to death in this thing that we'll find out later, you know, in the, in the weeks to come, you know, right, right, that's going to be really ugly, man.
And you're right.
It is, it is part of the ideology of conservative crony capitalism.
You know, it is, that is a big part of it.
Not that turning it over to somebody else would necessarily be better, but just that's the way that they have, the way they have set it up is clearly unreliable, you know?
Interesting.
Interesting.
Huh.
All right.
So how's the book going?
The book's going great.
That's great.
Sold a couple thousand of them already, and I'm not sure how many I should sell, but once I got to take care of all the donors and everybody on my thank you page, I'm so far behind on sending books out.
I've already sent hundreds out to previous donors, but I got hundreds and hundreds more to send out.
And then at some point here, I got to get to kind of a friend actually compiled a great list of mailing addresses for kind of middle-ranked newspapers and AM radio shows and PR agents for influential, talented people around and try to just give them all free copies as much as we can.
And all the peace groups too.
Like, I really want it to be not just kind of a libertarian book.
I want it to really get out there to people, you know?
Yeah.
It's got a lot of hooks in there to all that community.
I mean, and I don't know, it's an eloquent, I should think you're pushing on an open door in terms of, you know, just radio stations and small newspapers is this what they believe, you know?
Right.
That's, I think, too.
And, you know, that's kind of what the book is about, too, is that everybody already is anti-war.
It's just a matter of prioritization and all that.
But you guys, you know what you call a super duper majority of the American people and including veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars who won them over.
So yeah.
Yeah.
You know what?
Let's just whip them all into shape real quick.
And we've got 200 million people ready to force the issue, right?
You know?
I don't know.
That should be overwhelming force if there ever was one.
Yes, you'd think.
That's the goal.
Yes.
That's the goal.
And, you know, it's just like, it's, you know, based on the same ethic that you put your site together on, which is that you give the people the truth and give them at least a chance to do the right thing or choose the right way.
And most of them will.
And I think that that's right.
You know, most people, once you give them a chance to understand this stuff and they understand what's fair and what's not, then they side on the side of right.
I was actually just interviewing Nathan J. Robinson, who I see you wrote an article about here about him getting banned from the Guardian for telling the truth about this.
And then I gave him a chance to talk about the Palestinians and what they're going through and all that a little bit there too.
You know, based on the idea, as you and I've discussed many times before, most people don't understand this stuff at all.
But if you tell them straight who's occupying who wants, they go, oh, well, that ain't right.
It's pretty simple.
Two plus two equals four kind of stuff, right?
If you believe in the Declaration of Independence that everybody's born free, well, then Palestinians ain't free.
Something's wrong.
Got to fix it.
Simple as that, right?
Well, well, I do hammer the American propaganda media on this.media, as even Ben Rhodes is calling it now.
But can we really give the American people a break on not knowing about this?
Help me.
How much of a break can you give anybody on not understanding what the what the facts are?
And actually, I think that a lot of American people, the public opinion in the United States has shifted on this question, and they are pro-Palestinian and the Israeli brand.
I mean, this is the hopeful side of me.
The Israeli brand is a it's tanking and it's Tylenol, you know, with the when when it was poison.
I mean, I just think who can be for that country right now?
I mean, but yeah, no, I think that I think that well, back to the first part of how ignorant they are.
I think I've told you before that.
I kind of project my younger ignorant self.
You know, my not that I was any kind of Zionist or whatever.
I didn't really understand the situation at all.
But just the way I the way they portrayed it was the Palestinian Arabs are attacking our friends, the Israelis.
And so, of course, we're on the Israeli side, but that's basically all you need to know kind of thing.
But once anybody explains that, no, no, no.
See, back in 67, the Palestinians lost and they've been conquered and occupied and subjugated ever since then.
They're not the country next door.
They're the country that's already been subsumed.
And yet they are completely oppressed.
Then you go, oh, well, then that makes sense then.
No wonder they're always, you know, throwing rocks and stuff, you know what I mean?
That's what I might do if I was locked in an open prison as well.
You know, you might.
Yeah.
You might do that.
Yeah.
I mean, I really think that people don't know.
And I think that they have no real reason to prefer the Israelis because they're wider and more European ish or whatever.
I mean, the fact is they're treating the Palestinians totally unfairly.
And once you understand that, then, yeah, I think most people, as you said, more and more Americans, the more they learn this, the better they are on it.
Simple as that.
You know, the truth is the antidote to the policy.
And I mean, inside the Democratic Party, if you look at their base, the numbers are overwhelming for among actual voters for reducing aid to Israel over its human rights violations, including its unending settler enterprise, which the settler enterprise isn't much different from the original enterprise.
So, you know, who's who's who's fooling who here?
So what's B'Tselem?
B'Tselem is a leading, yeah, it's a leading Israeli human rights organization.
It comes from a biblical phrase meaning God made human being in his own image.
I think that's what it is, so that every human being is godly in the view of this Israeli human rights organization.
And in January it said that Israel maintains an apartheid regime of Jewish supremacy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Every part of Israel, including the happy Tel Aviv and all the great bars and people playing ball games on the beach.
And now for especially young people who just don't know of this history, went to government school or something like that.
What does apartheid mean, Phil?
Well, as I understand it, apartheid is a it comes from an Afrikaner's word that for apartness.
And it's something that the South African government established in the 40s or maybe even earlier, where it was going to separate the white population from the black and colored populations there and have different sets of rules, laws for the whites from the blacks and coloreds, because the country was ultimately dedicated to white supremacy and to whites doing best, and therefore they should have different rules.
And this is now a crime in international law, apartheid.
Everyone recognizes it.
And I think basically it's just any system that has different rules for one group on a racial or ethnic basis or even religious basis from another group now that those rules are sometimes formally codified and sometimes they're not in Israel.
They're codified.
It's just a national law that says that if you're Jewish, you have a superior right to land and other rights stemming from the state.
So they're practicing apartheid over there.
And now, so America used to have that, except they abolished it in the 50s and 60s, right?
And it's de facto in some places still, I'm not going to lie about that, but.
Yeah, yeah.
No, they, yeah, America has had a long struggle with this question, which is one reason why Americans are particularly good audience to turn against American support for, you know, codified legal apartheid, where the difference between the Palestinians and the Jews in Israel and occupied Palestine is, is grotesque.
I mean, water rights, freedom of movement, land rights, including those citizens of Israel who are Palestinian, who can vote, even they are, they are second and third class citizens inside quote unquote Israel proper.
But it was, I should say that it was a bombshell when B'Tselem, which is this Israeli human rights organization said this.
I mean, we could have been talking about- I was going to ask, that was going to be my question.
How significant was this for, because I know they're, they've been really good on all these things for a very long time, right?
And all their reports on the abuse of Palestinian children and all of these things.
And so is this just par for the course, or I think you're saying this was a bombshell, huh?
I think it was a bombshell.
I mean, I think that in fairness, as I, as I wrote, you know, you look at Jimmy Carter, you know, taking hits for saying this in 2006.
I said it in 2006.
I got fired by Jared Kushner not long after, after going to occupy Palestine.
Jimmy Carter put it in the title of a book and he got run out of the Democratic Party for saying it.
But there have been a series of people saying this and human rights organizations saying this and finding this over the years since around 2005 or so.
And what is different now I think is that it's become more of a drumbeat and that more and more, quote unquote, official mainstream organizations are saying this, including Israeli ones.
Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization, said it last July and B'Tselem said it in January.
Now, Palestinian groups have been telling this for us, us this forever.
But I think the drumbeat is increasing.
And what is remarkable is the degree to which the American media and the liberal Zionist organizations that support Israel have been ignoring this report.
And they've been ignoring it for a simple reason, because they know if they support it or even mention it, it leads to one thing.
What happened in South Africa?
Boycott, divestment, sanctions.
That's what you do when a country is practicing apartheid.
You boycott it.
You lead an international divestment campaign.
And they don't want that to happen to Israel.
You have all these liberal Zionist organizations that bewail the occupation and the what's being done to Palestinians at some level and at the other.
They say, keep those three point eight billion dollars flowing to from the United States to Israel every year.
And if you make a joke about it, you're fired from The Guardian or from the New York Observer.
Yeah.
Or Nathan.
Yes.
Nathan Robinson.
And that's great.
You had him on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's a good guy.
I like him.
Hey, I'll check it out.
The Libertarian Institute, that's me and my friends, have published three great books this year.
First is No Quarter, the ravings of William Norman Grigg.
He was the best one of us.
Now he's gone.
But this great collection is a truly fitting legacy for his fight for freedom.
I know you'll love it.
Then there's Coming to Palestine by the great Sheldon Richman.
It's a collection of 40 important essays he's written over the years about the truth behind the Israel Palestine conflict.
You'll learn so much and highly value this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation.
And last but not least is the great Ron Paul.
The Scott Horton Show interviews 2004 through 2019 interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money, taxes, the police state and more.
So how do you like that?
Pretty good, right?
Find them all at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
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And now, so this is a great segue and we're going to switch back to Israeli politics here in a minute.
But Arkansas's anti BDS law violates the First Amendment says court, Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
According to your writer, Michael Aria here at Mondoweiss.net.
And this cuts right to the heart of it here.
And you know what?
Let me go ahead and share this because I have it right here on my feed quote.
In recent years, we have promoted laws in most US states, most US states, which determined that strong action is to be taken against whoever tries to boycott Israel.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister.
So they are on a move to to well, he says strong action must be taken.
What are these laws and what did the court decide here?
Well there are around 28.
This is how, as you point out, the Israeli government has pushed these initiatives.
And I have to I'm looking it up as we talk.
But there was one case in which we have this legislator actually consulting with the Israeli consul officer in the hearing room as this legislator is explaining why anti BDS law is an American, a good good as American as cherry pie and an Israeli official is there telling her to do it.
These laws say that in 28 states, variants of them say, if you support boycotting Israel, then we are going to punish you in terms of state contracts and that kind of thing.
And that's what the Arkansas court struck down.
Now, I as I gather, as I understand, they left an opening.
Unfortunately, it was two to one ruling and it wasn't as emphatic as we would like.
But they said, hey, boycotting is a free speech, right?
You can't punish people for exercising their free speech in the United States.
And it's widely anticipated that this is going to be the case in in in all, if not or many, if not all of the 28 states, including New York, that have adopted this kind of really McCarthyist, McCarthyite legislation that doesn't allow Americans to speak out against Israel.
It's really incredible.
In other words, if there wasn't the First Amendment, the government of Israel would have outlawed boycotting Israel in the United States, or at least de facto from any business of any import where their boycott makes a difference.
As long as and because, you know, contract that's can be defined very broadly, right?
One of the lawsuits was it was like a special education teacher, right, who was on a contract to a school.
And it could be defined.
I mean, my imagination isn't broad enough to know what all counts for.
You are hereby persecuted by your own state for being disloyal to a foreign country.
What?
Right, right.
This is completely crazy.
Yeah, it's crazy.
And the case I highlighted was one where a Georgia state legislator who pushed the law there said that the Israeli consulate, quote, asked me, unquote, to introduce an amendment to the law that made it more improve the law.
So she's introducing an amendment at the behest of the Israeli consulate in Georgia.
I don't get it.
And I don't think Americans are going to enjoy this type of interference in our politics.
But, you know, unfortunately, this is not yet been fully politicized and we need it to be more politicized when it is politicized.
Americans will get to come down on the commonsensical side of the issue.
Well, and there's a real learning opportunity here, too, where, you know, the woke left, I think, and there's a lot of different categories and categories themselves are make-believe concepts.
But there are parts of the left who are kind of pro-censorship of other people's differing opinions, but who are nominally good on Palestinian issues.
And so maybe they can take this kind of censorship of pro-Palestinians as a lesson that it really sucks to be censored and to have people censored.
And maybe we can find a better way to proceed.
And then maybe people on the right who are sick and tired of being bossed around and told what they're allowed to say all the time might get the idea that, geez, don't we sound like stupid hypocrites?
I don't know if you saw this, but this Green, the Congresswoman everybody hates or whatever in the Republican Party there, was attacking Ilan Omar as an anti-Semite.
And it reminded me of something a friend, Carl Hicks, had said, that basically the Republican position is there's no such thing as racism at all unless you're opposed to the Israelis bombing somebody, in which case you're a vicious anti-Semite.
You know, like that is such a stupid position for the right to take.
How can they take it?
How can they go around accusing people of being racist just for criticizing Israel, a foreign country, which, by the way, as you were saying, has in law racism and, you know, ethnic religious supremacy over conquered people as their official doctrine in power?
It's not.
Yeah, I mean, I I think there's a lot of ideological crossover on this one and that, you know, that that kind of coalition will be essential to overturning this ultimately and presumably would be part of, you know, the legal judicial context for this, that you'd have some conservative judges saying, hey, screw this, you know.
All right.
Now, Benjamin Netanyahu, who will rid me of this meddlesome prime minister?
I think my prediction is he's going down in March.
I always predict that and I'm always wrong.
So you can take my prediction to Vegas.
He's up for reelection in March.
It's the fourth election in three years.
The reason they're having four elections in three years is that the opposition to Netanyahu could have gotten him out if they would only build a government governing coalition with Arabs.
But they refuse to have Arabs in the governing coalition.
It's got to be all Jewish parties.
So the center and left, which was going to oust Netanyahu, has a racist policy against Palestinians participating.
And that's why Netanyahu continues to be prime minister.
I just want to establish that first.
That being said.
Wait a minute.
Let me stop you for a second.
Just make sure I understand that this is just to kind of recapitulate, make sure everybody's on the same page here.
You're saying that the losing coalitions continue to lose just because not that there's a law against this, but because they refuse to allow the Israeli Arabs.
These are people not in occupied territories, but Palestinian citizens of Israel.
They refuse to let them, although they do have some representation in the Knesset into their joining into joining their ruling coalition.
And if they did, they could push Netanyahu right out.
But they continue to lose because they cannot let anyone who's not Jewish into their alliance.
Essentially, yes.
They you have a parliamentary democracy.
There are 120 seats in the parliament and 15 of them are Palestinians.
And they are those are 15 seats that that want to be against Netanyahu.
And if you have, you know, 46 seats of Jewish seats that want to get rid of Netanyahu, and you add that to the 15, you got your majority right there.
They won't do it.
So this is in other words, this is like Nancy Pelosi saying, if I have to get the black caucus votes to be house speaker, forget it.
That's right.
That's right.
It is very much like that.
It's very much like 1964, Mississippi, when they said, we will not see these black we you know, we're not using black votes at the Democratic nominating convention in Atlantic City for Lyndon Johnson.
We're sending our segregated party up to the nominating convention.
And they, the Mississippi Democratic Party was boycotted because of that.
It created huge crisis.
And ultimately, the Mississippi Democratic Party got integrated in the 1960s to some degree.
And so this is something the United States has been through.
They're doing it in Israel, and they're calling themselves liberal Zionists when they do it.
So go figure.
I don't know.
And I'm sorry that I stopped you on that point, because you were going on.
But I just want to make sure that we're clear on that and what that means.
Yeah, it's important point.
Now, I should say that I think Netanyahu is going to get knocked off this time because there are enough right wingers in the opposition that he will, they will be able to take him out.
And so you've got people who defected from his own party.
People are sick of Netanyahu in Israel.
I think that the, you know, people just being tired of Netanyahu, that is starting to creep up on him.
And it's just, you know, he's been in 11, 12 years.
They're just, they're sick of him.
And so I feel like these, and you know, he's under indictment for corruption charges.
He's in trial for that.
And you have right wingers who have left his own party who want to take him out.
They're going to have to make a very broad coalition across the center and left with Jewish parties.
Again, we don't want anything to do with Palestinian voters, but they will make a broad coalition and I think they will be able to take Netanyahu out.
Yeah.
I see here you have this article, Israeli Jewish leftists, although you got some scare or ironic quotes around leftists there.
Israeli Jewish leftists will vote for far right Saar to oust Netanyahu.
So who is Gideon Saar?
Gideon Saar is to the right of Netanyahu, was a former sort of cabinet official with Netanyahu, a Likudnik, you know, Netanyahu's party and more supportive of settlements and opposed, even more opposed than Netanyahu to a Palestinian state.
And he finally had, he's very presentable.
I should add that he's soft spoken.
He looks like a professor.
Uh, I think his wife's a TV personality and, you know, he's very user friendly, I think.
So he is sort of the lead opposition now to Netanyahu on the, on the right.
And, uh, he's gonna, he, he potentially could join up with center, uh, and even left wing Jewish parties cause they don't, they're not ideological there.
I mean, if you're Jewish, they're, they're all for you.
There's really, it's, it's all flavors of the same, uh, ice cream, you know, uh, if, if you're a Jewish nationalist, then you can sort of get along with another Jewish nationalist because if you're a Jewish nationalist, you believe in apartheid in a system where Jews get more than other people and it's worked out for you pretty well over there so far.
But, okay.
So, I mean, forgive me if these discussions we're having seem so unfairly, unnecessarily disconnected from each other.
I'm sure it's not your fault.
It's just the situation.
But on one hand, you have this very prominent human rights group saying that we face a real crisis here.
Now that we're no longer pretending that one day we'll ever let the West bank go and be a Palestinian state.
Now we got this apartheid thing and we can't really be a liberal democracy and an apartheid state at the same time and something's got to give and what are we going to do?
But then there's this whole conversation in Israeli politics about don't you hate Netanyahu and maybe we should get someone more right wing than him and, and no Arabs allowed in our coalition and it sounds like it's not even really a controversy in terms of electoral politics of this situation with the Palestinians on the West bank and Gaza.
All that is just, whatever, man.
Facts on the ground.
Come back and argue about it with me next year, the year after that and the year after that.
Right?
Am I wrong about that?
Yeah.
But Scott, the ultimate question is why is the United States allowing that contradiction to go on like that?
You know, here you have even Israeli partners who are saying this is apartheid and the American government and the American democratic party, which is supposedly progressive and liberal is backing them to the hill and refusing to hear this.
You have good progressive candidates in the United States on the democratic side who are anti-racist and a lot of ways who say we are Israel's partner and I want a two state solution and no, you can't call it apartheid and no, you can't boycott it.
That's anti-Semitic.
So that's where the power lies here in the American community, in the American political community.
And I believe the American Jewish community, which is the heart of the Israel lobby.
And until that community begins to splinter, you will not have a re any questioning of the Israeli system.
And the politicians there can go on practicing apartheid and saying we are, you know, the the only democracy in the Middle East.
Getting away with it.
They get away with it because we let them get away with it.
So who's Joe Biden and what's he got to do with all this, do you think?
Well, Joe Biden is the guy who called Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday on the telephone after holding out for, you know, three weeks.
Yeah.
Wow.
Almost a month.
So Biden made his point.
Biden made his little point that he could defy Netanyahu.
And then the press just came down on him.
The Israeli press.
It was a scandal in Israel that Biden was not calling Netanyahu.
So he finally collapsed and called Netanyahu.
Well, now, was that a real strong like on a scale of one to 10?
How strong of a diplomatic statement was that by the new president?
I liked it.
I wish it had gone on longer.
I wish it had gone on forever.
I think it was a point.
But, you know, the problem is that Netanyahu has rubbed it in Biden's face so much that it just seemed like a tit for tat.
You know, Biden went over to Israel and I think 2010 and Netanyahu announced new settlements or 2011.
He announced them just as Biden was coming into town.
It was a major insult.
Biden swallowed it.
Biden, I think, hates this guy Netanyahu.
He's been humiliated by Netanyahu again and again.
So send him a little signal like, hey, buddy, you're not on my call list and anything I can do to help you get defeated in March, I'll do it.
I mean, remember the last three elections, Netanyahu has been able to run with a giant poster in Tel Aviv of him embracing or shaking hands with the American president.
That's what he could sell.
I am friends with the American president.
He's not getting that poster this time around.
So maybe that'll make a difference in Israeli politics.
Like I said, it all springs from America.
And here's this tiny little, you know, etiquette lapse, a tiny little insult by Biden.
Maybe it'll make a difference.
Yeah.
Well, I think it sounds like you're saying, though, it does not pretend any real change here.
I think it's, if anything, it's personal, but it's not policy.
Yeah, sadly, sadly.
I think that, sadly, yeah.
I mean, I think that a lot of people in the Biden administration hate what Israel's doing, as much as I do, frankly.
But their hands are tied.
They are still, the Israel lobby is still the, you know, the most important factor in foreign policy making in that arena, in democratic politics, let alone Republican politics.
And so Biden is going to do nothing to defy the Israel lobby.
And so it's, it's, you know, he's going to look for and he doesn't have the political capital to spend.
I mean, God knows, we hope he gets back into the Iran deal and look at all the flack he's getting from people in his own party on that, you know, who are performing for the Israel lobby.
You know, a perfectly good deal that advanced world peace and limited suffering in a modern society of 85 million people, Iran, stopped demonizing Iran.
And the deal got trashed by the United States and Biden's having trouble getting back into it.
I know.
And it was his own men.
These are the Obama guys who actually got in the deal.
I read that it was even Sullivan, who, as far as I can tell, is the most dangerous one out of all of them, who was, you know, Hillary's right-hand man there.
Yes.
That he was one of the ones who helped really break the ice and get the talk, the secret talks going in Oman at the start of the thing.
So this is their own thing that they did.
They had good reasons for doing it, as you say.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
But, Scott, reflect on this.
Obama wasn't able to push that deal until his second term, you know, and pretty late in his second term.
So he did it late in his term.
And here Biden is in his first term of what presumably he hopes is two terms.
And he's already he's in the same position as Obama is taking on the Israel lobby at a time when he's trying to develop political capital.
And obviously he he regards it as an urgent matter to get into that deal, or I should hope he does.
Certainly people on his team do.
But how much capital will they spend on this when you have, you know, people inside the Democratic Party saying don't do this?
Yeah.
I mean, my bet is still on they've got to figure out a way to do this.
Let both sides save face.
Yes.
Climb down.
I agree.
You're stupid.
I mean, if they let this thing go to hell again over the Israelis insistence at this point, I mean, boy, and talk about weakness at the very beginning of Biden's presidency, that that's how he's going to start out is letting the aberration, supposedly Donald Trump, who actually it was Obama that was the aberration that he made this deal at all.
But it was in their framing.
It was this raving kook Trump that canceled the deal.
Why not just restore it the same way they just turn right around and overturn the designation of the Houthis as terrorists?
That was just something Mike Pompeo decided.
So what's legitimate about that?
Nothing.
Screw him.
Right.
Right.
Right.
So right.
Yeah, they can totally do it.
And then as you're saying, just like in 2015, nobody's confused about who's objecting to this.
There's only one group objecting to this.
Yeah, it's the Israelis and their lobby in the United States.
Yeah.
Although, I mean, as your book points out, you know, Syria is going to be a giant test of this, too.
Right now, very trying to withdraw forces from Syria.
And look what happened to him.
You know, so, yeah, I don't think Biden's going to pull out of Syria at all.
I think there's basically no pressure.
I mean, you know what?
I mean, that could change.
Right.
The the the activists who are focused so intensely on Yemen now, we might all just switch and really say enough is enough and get out of Syria next and make that the big push.
And but other than that, there's no faction of power anywhere in America that's saying get out now.
Yes.
And they all admit that they're not there to fight ISIS.
They're there to fight Iran or at least to prevent Iran from growing too big in strength now that they came to help rescue Assad after we sick the Bin Laden terrorists on them back in the Obama era.
Right.
I love some of the quotes you have in your book on that one.
Isn't that amazing?
And I mean, yeah, the nakedness of the agenda on like Michael Oren's part, you know.
Right.
Oh, yeah, that's my favorite.
It's completely.
By the way, anyone listening, just type in Oren, O-R-E-N, Oren Sunis.
And there it is, comes right up on YouTube and you just laugh your ass off.
It's unbelievable.
Crazy.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
If you want a real education in history and economics, you should check out Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn't teach you in school, but should have.
Follow through from the link in the margin at scottwharton.org for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
Look here, you and I both know that what you need is some Libertarian Institute things like shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and stickers to put on the back of your truck and to give to your friends, too, that say Libertarian Institute on them so that everyone will know the origins of your oppositional defiant disorder and where they can listen to all the best podcasts.
So here's what you do.
Go to LibertasBella.com and look at all the great Libertarian Institute stuff they've got going there.
Find the ad in the right hand margin at LibertarianInstitute.org.
LibertasBella.com.
I guess I won't keep it too long here, but I wanted to give you just a quick chance to talk about this article that you wrote about Issa Amro.
I'm probably saying that wrong.
Can you tell me just who that is and why people ought to read your great article about it?
Well, I should say that article's a little bit old now, but Issa Amro was a human rights activist in Hebron, Apartheid Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, who was charged with various trumped up charges like insulting an Israeli soldier over the last few years.
Here he is.
This guy is a nonviolent activist.
He works with liberal human Zionist groups in the United States, even, and he was being charged by the Israeli military with these trumped up charges.
Now, I think the Israeli military saw that we were part of an international campaign, or in writing about this, I was part of an international campaign on his behalf to drop the charges, drop the charges.
And even these liberal Zionists, to their credit, stood up for Issa and said, hey, drop the charges, and Israel has punted on it.
So that's another case.
What this demonstrates is that when American liberal Zionists come out against Israel, that has an effect.
And if the mainstream Jewish organizations, not just the liberal Zionist ones, came out against Israel, there's the ballgame, I believe.
Now, they support Israel again and again and again, but that's where the power lies on changing Israeli policy, I believe.
Yeah.
And now, so that's an important article.
It's called Pressure Mounts on State Department.
If NAV only deserves support, why not Issa Amro?
That's a good one.
Oh, right.
I forgot I wrote that.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
It's just a few days ago there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But no, so that reminded me of the thing that I forgot to switch gears back to what we were talking about just a second ago with the Biden thing.
How significant is it that, if I have it right, that he's already announced that, yes, we're keeping the embassy in Jerusalem, and yes, we are not overturning Donald Trump's recognition of Israel's so-called annexation of the, I guess, actual de jure annexation of the Golan Heights?
And there was one other one, too, I forget.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
I think that it's significant.
It's sad.
You know, Biden is just collapsing on these questions.
He's not wanting to take Israel on on these questions, and it just shows that he doesn't have political capital for this issue.
He's going to throw Palestinians under the bus, and he's not going to do anything on the occupation.
I think that he will oppose some settlements.
He might put his foot down on a couple of settlements, but when it, excuse me, when it comes to actual real action against Israeli expansion in the West Bank, he's not going to be doing much.
And the Israelis know that, and the whole thing about Netanyahu's right-wing opposition is part of the thing they're saying is, hey, we're going to work with the Americans.
We're not creating a Palestinian state, but there's a new sheriff in town, Joe Biden.
We're going to, we don't want to alienate him.
He's always loved Israel, and we're going to work with him.
So I think there's going to be an accommodationist front on both sides.
We'll see in months to come, weeks.
And that means Palestinian human rights are thrown under the bus, and there's no progress toward a quote-unquote Palestinian state, whatever that means.
Yeah, it doesn't mean a damn thing, and it hasn't been so long.
Yes.
Oh man.
You know, a lot of us were raised on Pink Floyd, you know, to one degree or another, and what Roger Waters has done for this movement of bringing recognition to the plight of Palestinians is absolutely heroic.
But man, he's almost as old as my dad or something.
You know, we need somebody that famous and that important, who's quite a bit younger, to make a big deal about this in a way that is just not happening.
I mean, there's, you know, let a million Mondewises bloom, but we need some damned superstars to take this up like it really matters, to let people know that this matters.
I mean, I can't imagine who that might be, but somebody's got to have the courage to say this stuff.
I agree with you.
I agree with you.
And I think there have been some inklings from younger superstars, and Roger is youthful at heart and has got an incredible energy, you know, but I think it also speaks to the fact that look what Roger has sacrificed.
Right.
This guy has shown incredible courage.
He's shown what political courage is all about.
It's obviously hurt his career in countless ways for him to be doing this, and he's never backed down at all.
And that's fantastic and just is such a model to other people with fame and celebrity who are in a position to, you know, punch above their weight.
All right.
Well, well, yeah.
Thanks a million, man.
I sure appreciate you coming on the show.
It's great to talk to you again, Phil.
And I got to tell you, I really appreciate, and I know a lot of people really appreciate the work that you and your colleagues are doing over there.
Thanks, man.
Yeah.
And I'm halfway through the book and you'll hear from me.
Okay, great.
I can't wait.
Okay.
All right.
See you, Scott.
Good luck with the weather.
Okay.
Yeah.
We'll be good.
See you.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Phil Weiss.
He's over there at mondoweiss.net.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
