03/05/13 – M.J. Rosenberg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is M.J. Rosenberg.
He hates when I say this, but it's true, and it's important.
He used to work for AIPAC, the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, a long time ago.
And now he's a peace activist, and he keeps the website mjrosenberg.com.
Like Homer Simpson, his middle name is actually J.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I didn't think of that.
Yeah, that was actually, I think it was the George Carlin episode of The Simpsons.
I think it was.
That's what the J stands for.
Have we already talked about this?
We may have had this conversation.
I'm sorry, I'm kind of stuck.
I don't think we have.
All right.
Well, anyway, mjrosenberg.com.
So, you know what, before I ask you all about the AIPAC conference, can I first ask you what you can tell us about the status of Benjamin Netanyahu's negotiations and attempt to form a government after the recent elections in Israel?
Well, you know, the whole election turned out to be a disaster for him.
I mean, you know, he called elections when he didn't have to, thinking that he's so beloved that he's going to landslide.
Instead, he did really bad.
And he's having a terrible time putting a coalition together.
In fact, you have to go to the Prime Minister, to the President of the country, Shimon Peres, and you ask him for time to put your coalition together, and Netanyahu just had to ask for an extension.
The problem he's got is that both a far-right party and a centrist party, which came in number two and three after Netanyahu's Likud party, have joined together and said that neither one of them will go into a coalition if the religious fanatic parties are in it.
And Netanyahu has always depended on the religious lunatics to create his coalition, so he's being put in a position where he has to choose, does he want to form a coalition without the ultra-orthodox, which could lead to, maybe, peace moves.
These more centrist governments might be more willing to yield to pressure from the U.S. or whatever.
And he has to consider whether he wants that kind of government, or whether he's going to somehow cobble something together where his friends with the beards are the key people that count.
They're best for him, because they're ultra-nationalists and they'll let him do whatever he wants, as long as he gives all these concessions and money to all these religious organizations.
But his other alternative is to form a coalition without them, but those people are totally opposed to giving any money to these religious fanatics.
And in either case, he's right on the edge.
It's very hard for him to put a coalition together.
And the worst thing as a result of him not being able to do it quickly, as he expected, is that Obama, who's supposed to be going there next month, won't go to Israel if Bibi's coalition is not in place.
So this trip that he's desperate to have, this visit, this homage for the President of the United States, might not happen on top of everything else.
So Bibi's not happy.
Not good times for him.
Now, if he did form the coalition with the so-called more moderate parties, the TV star guy and his new group, you're saying that that wouldn't necessarily exclude the religious types.
They might be okay with that as long as he continues to pay them all their welfare.
But if he makes a coalition with them, that might well turn off the moderates and exclude them from the coalition.
Yeah, and the moderates are only – that's a relative term.
The moderates aren't really moderates.
I mean, like the one group headed by Michael Bennett is a fanatically right-wing group.
It just doesn't want the Orthodox or anything.
So it's sort of like – Secular nationalist.
It's like the difference between the Klan and the Aryan Nation in a way, right?
It's sort of.
I mean, it's really – we're dealing with – I mean, the real moderates don't have any – they don't have any say in this government.
Though I have to say the television guy, Yair Lapid, who's the up-and-coming person, he seems to be kind of an empty suit because every profile of him mentions mainly his profile.
Like how handsome he is.
I always think that's a bad sign when we even start off by saying how handsome the guy is, and then it describes his politics, and no one knows what his politics are.
He's just the most – he's a television star.
He's totally telegenic.
So he's Ronald Reagan without any kind of ideology, which might be okay compared to being an ideological zealot.
Well, he's something new in Israeli politics.
So in a way, Yair Lapid in his Yesh Atid party is a hopeful sign.
Actually, the most hopeful thing about the Israeli election is that the Israelis don't seem to like Netanyahu.
So let's forget for a minute that they might have voted against Netanyahu because they're to the right of Netanyahu and some to the left of Netanyahu, but he's not quite as beloved in Israel as he thought he was.
He did an amazing thing right before the election, right before, two days before.
He announced that he – I think this is his third term, I think.
He announced that he'd be running for his third or fourth term after this victory.
It's kind of inconceivable in an American context.
It's like, you know, do whatever.
Even Franklin Roosevelt never admitted he was running for a third term until the summer of 1940 because it's, like, so presumptuous.
Right.
Also, he's had the election – You know what, MJ, actually that reminds me of Richard Nixon, right, because Nixon actually did have his guys talking about repealing the 22nd Amendment so he could run for a third term right before Watergate got really bad.
I know.
Talk about chutzpah.
That's what it does to you.
You tempt the gods with that kind of stuff.
Netanyahu is not in a good position.
The person who's in a good position vis-à-vis Israel right now is President Obama.
He can pretty much do what he wants.
Unfortunately, I don't think he wants to do anything.
But with Netanyahu, it's really so odd.
With Netanyahu doing badly in the election, with Obama doing great in the election, winning a second term by almost landslide numbers, he doesn't have to kiss up to the Israelis anymore.
Instead, he immediately announces he's going over there.
What's that all about?
I'm really asking that because I don't know what it's all about.
There's no indication he's going over there to bring a plan with him and to do what he could do, which is to say to Israel, here's the plan.
It guarantees your security and it guarantees security for the Palestinians, and this is what works for the United States.
Implement it.
He's not doing that.
He's going over there to pander so he can raise more money for the 2014 election.
You know what I don't understand about this guy, Obama?
Everybody talks about his fans, talk about, oh, he's playing three-dimensional chess and he's so smart and all this crap.
But what kind of president takes office immediately taking on the Israeli right over the settlements in the West Bank, but then refusing to back it up, refusing to really do anything about it, digging himself this giant pit that then he's got to dig himself out of for four years begging and scraping so he can be re-elected again.
And then, you know, if you're going to do that, if you're going to try and fail to solve the Israeli-Palestine thing, you do like George W. and you do like Bill Clinton, you wait until the very end and you pass it off to the next guy.
But, I mean, talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
If you became president, MJ, and you decided you were going to take on Netanyahu and the Likud over the settlements in the West Bank, you would have to have some kind of plan of action to make sure that you won the fight, right?
Or else, why pick it?
Well, it's crazy because, you know, he really was winning that fight.
You know, that began with Joe Biden going over there and announcing, you know, we want a settlements freeze and the Israelis, and spitting in his face by announcing around 20 settlements the day he was there.
And Obama says he's digging in and he dug in for like a week or two.
And my sources, and actually any Israeli will tell you, the Israelis were ready to capitulate.
They were scared stiff about this.
They were, and the left in Israel was ecstatic because they finally had a president who was on their side.
And he cut the, one, he lifted the fears of the government, so the government, you know, by just dropping the thing, and he cut the ground out from under the left.
You have to understand, in Israel, the left, and there still is a left.
I mean, the left there, their main argument is always the same thing.
If we continue on this course, we lose the United States.
We can't, Barack Obama's not going to support us if we keep spitting in his face.
And so what Obama does is he gives up.
And the left and the right is able to say to the left, you see, we can do whatever we want.
And then, yes, I mean, Joe Biden, you've got to read Peter Beinart, the writer who has an article in Daily Beast today about how Joe Biden's speech at AIPAC, he gave the keynote speech, that he spoke in pitch-perfect AIPAC.
And Beinart goes over the words he uses, and in every single instance, he's just using AIPAC phrases that are designed to send a message to them, I am yours.
I mean, it's like sometimes these guys get up and they're a little bit artless, or, you know, they don't know quite how to just say it right.
Well, Biden, according to Beinart, who knows this stuff, nobody has ever talked to them in the language they wanted to hear, including my favorite thing that he said.
He denounced the Palestinians' unilateral effort to go to the United Nations and seek recognition.
And as Beinart points out, or as anybody would point out, by definition, when you go to the UN, it is not unilateral, considering the UN is by definition multilateral.
But every phrase.
The other thing about this conference, it's fascinating.
The two most important speeches were Biden and the defense minister, Ahud Barak.
Ahud Barak is a hawk.
I mean, you know, we know what Ahud Barak is.
But he's, you know, by Israeli standards, he's not that hawkish.
So even though he gave all the hawkish stuff about Iran, and, you know, all that warmongering about Iran, every so often he talked about peace and, like, diplomacy and, like, not having a war and maybe having peace someday with the Palestinians.
Everything he said that was—and this is—oh, same applies to Biden, exact same formula I'm using here.
When either one of them said something that sounded bellicose and crazy, the audience would go nuts screaming.
All references to peace, even ultimate peace.
Even the kind of stuff that your average minister says about anything or rabbi says about anything, like, someday we hope everybody lives together, that's just dead silence.
So we're really talking about an organization that is, in my opinion, well to the right of a right-wing Israeli government.
It's nuts.
And they all live on Long Island.
It's, like, crazy.
Well, you know, I don't know about all living on Long Island, but— They live in a few other places, too.
They live in Beverly Hills and— Well, now, so, I mean, that gets right to the point, really, which is, you know, in your view, and I guess this is not really a quantifiable thing as much as just an opinion, but is AIPAC—are they agents of a foreign power or are they just right-wing Americans?
You know, mostly Jewish, obviously, who have an interest.
I mean, if—I'm trying to think of a parallel between, you know, I don't know, the Irish lobby or any other—I guess the English lobby we always just called the Council on Foreign Relations, right?
Right.
They're totally different.
First of all, the Irish—I mean, there really is no Irish or English lobby.
You know, traditionally, you know, we're kind of like pro-IRA or anti-IRA.
I mean, there's no—there are Irish members of Congress, you know, people like Ted Kennedy, and who always, you know—but it's an interesting thing.
The Irish political power in America, unlike Capitol Hill, where it matters, it was all these Irish politicians led by Ted Kennedy who were always pushing peace.
It's really—it's totally different.
Well, they were the Occupied, not the Occupiers, right?
Yes, right.
It was totally different.
So they were kind of like—they were the ones who, you know, who supported Clinton when Clinton, you know, pushed the Good Friday Agreement and all those things.
So it's sort of like the opposite.
It's sort of like as if the Irish lobby was here lobbying for then-Ian Paisley.
I mean, it's like a whole different kind of thing.
But the thing about foreign governments, with the exception of Israel, are represented by two institutions.
One is the embassy, obviously, and the other is they hire lobbyists.
They hire law firms or lobby companies that represent them.
Every country does that except Israel.
The difference is that if you're a registrar, as the Brits have lobbyists and the Pakistanis have lobbyists and the Germans have lobbyists, you have a lobby that is registered with the government, with the Department of Justice, under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
It's entirely legal to do all the representation you want of every single policy that is of the government you're representing.
But everything you do has to be reported to the Department of Justice, and you're not allowed to be involved in American politics at all.
There's no such thing as giving money.
There's no PACs.
None of that stuff can be done.
In fact, every piece of paper you send up to the Capitol Hill, if you're representing, say, the Japanese government as its lobbyists, you send copies to the Department of Justice.
That's just the way it works.
What the Israelis did back in the 50s was they said, well, this isn't going to work.
Our whole thing is going to be trying to influence the American government through Congress.
So let's set up an American organization that wouldn't have to register because it would just be Americans who work for Israel.
And that's the secret of AIPAC.
It's nominally an American organization.
All the members are Americans.
They're Americans.
But it's an American organization that's working for the interests of Israel.
Is it then a flat?
It's a mixture, though, of foreign lobby and something else, which might even be worse.
I often quote the fact that Yitzhak Rabin couldn't stand AIPAC.
There was a big article about it in 1992.
He becomes prime minister and immediately tells them, get out, get out of our politics.
Why?
Because he thought they would never support his efforts to get peace with the Palestinians.
Right.
Well, I mean, in fact, it's Americans who are the leading donors to the Likud Party, right?
Exactly.
That is a transnational elite that rule both halves of the policy.
So who is the tail and who is the dog?
Yitzhak Rabin, as prime minister, told Tom Dine, who was then the head of AIPAC, to fire Steve Rosen, the creep who was eventually indicted for espionage.
AIPAC said no.
So it's all like, I mean, they're kind of like a weird hybrid.
Yes, they are.
Look, their loyalty is to Israel.
No question about that.
But it's more of a loyalty to Likud, Israel, Netanyahu.
If Israel ever elected a peace government, AIPAC wouldn't support it.
The thing is, institutions have their own imperatives.
And I work at AIPAC, as you said.
Man, the salaries are great.
The benefits are great.
Every time they have a battle with, like, an American president, they raise more and more money, which they spend on their half-a-million-dollar salaries for their executive director, and their top lobbyists make, you know, $250,000.
I mean, we're talking about, and when you're there, I never had a job like this.
While you're working, you can expense-account your lunch, even when you don't take anybody out to lunch.
I mean, it's a big racket.
So it's like, you know, so it really wants to perpetuate.
It's got an eight-story building in Capitol Hill.
Most lobbies, even the NRA is in the Chamber of Commerce.
They're the only other ones I know that have their own buildings.
I mean, and their building overlooks the Capitol.
It's just eight stories of lobbyists.
So it's a combination of a disloyal lobby that represents a foreign government and just a bunch of opportunists.
In my opinion, if they cared about the survival of Israel, they'd support peace.
I mean, they'd see a movie like The Gatekeepers and hear what these former heads of the Shin Bet say, that Israel will not survive without peace with the Palestinians.
They don't support that.
They support endless war because with war, there's more money.
You know, it's easier for them to raise money.
Yeah, you know, and Americans are the same way.
They just don't want to listen.
I just saw a clip this morning of Michael Shoyer, the former head of the CIA Bin Laden unit, that gave Bill Clinton ten chances to kill him before 9-11.
And he's sitting here explaining to the Fox News guy, they hate us for what we do.
In fact, the question was about the first World Trade Center bombing.
And Shoyer is saying, yes, Virginia, America had a foreign policy before 1993.
And it's what caused this war against us.
We started it, basically.
But people, they just don't want to hear it.
And the same thing here, like you're saying about these guys from Shin Bet.
I haven't seen the movie, but I've read a couple of articles about it.
Let me know when it's on the Pirate Bay.
But it's the same thing as Ehud Barak, the current defense minister, has also said that, hey, we're facing an apartheid situation.
We're going to have to choose real quickly between Jewish state and democracy.
Well, if that's the one thing that people in Israel can agree on, that that's what they want is a Jewish state and a democracy, then they have to give up the West Bank.
It's as simple as that.
It's the most basic arithmetic.
That's all there is to it.
So it's like some kind of pathology to deny that, that they think they can just keep going on, colonizing the West Bank, because apartheid isn't going to last long.
When they have to outright annex the West Bank, then apartheid's going to last, what, three weeks or something?
And then that's it.
This is the stupidest thing in the world.
And I owe it to the American president to say it.
You know, I worked for AIPAC 20-some years ago.
But the fact is, I remember they always worried that the day an American president gets up and says, This is what you have to do.
You have to end the occupation.
You have to end the occupation, because that's what we want you to do.
And says it makes clear that this is the United States speaking.
They then capitulate.
They're a total dependency of the United States.
They wouldn't last a month without the United States.
I mean, it's so amazing that the United States, which throws its power around all over the world, and has been doing so pretty much since around 1898, is so terrified of this one country.
Yeah.
Well, and like you're saying, they were about to give in to Obama, and then he blinked first.
That's just a tragedy.
It is.
It's an absolute tragedy.
And the other thing, the thing is, and this is deemed pro-Israel, you know.
People like Chuck Schumer, who doesn't give a damn about Israel.
He only cares about raising money from people who don't care about Israel.
If he gave a damn about Israel, he would support policies that would end the occupation and allow this Jewish state that he says he believes in.
It would be a mostly Jewish state within the 67 lines.
It would survive.
It survived before 67.
And after all, the irony is, what has the occupation done for Israel anyway?
It was much better off before it had any of those territories.
Right.
It just made some settler kooks happy.
Exactly.
What's that worth?
And they talk about that the territories make them secure.
In 67, they had no territory.
They were just tiny little Israel.
And they won a war against Egypt and Syria and Jordan.
In six days, it lost 600 people.
In 1973, they had all the territories they have now, plus they had the entire Sinai Peninsula separating it from Israel, which was four times the size of Israel itself.
With all those territories, they were attacked.
The war lasted for three weeks, and they lost 3,000 soldiers.
So the whole thing about the occupation being about security is just pure garbage.
It's not.
It's just imperialism.
I mean, they love lording it over the Palestinians, and it's about the domination of these religious fanatics, and it's about crazy nationalism.
You know, these right-wing Israelis have turned Judaism from an ethical religion to worshiping rocks.
Oh, we have to keep this wall.
Oh, we have to keep this because Abraham might have lived here.
I mean, where does this even come from?
This isn't Judaism.
And the other thing is, and I know there are people who might be listening out there and say, oh, well, what about the right-wing?
What about the fundamentalists?
They're the ones who matter, the Christian right.
They don't matter.
They're irrelevant.
They don't give money.
Our politics is not about a bunch of millions and millions of Christian fundamentalists who might love Israel in their hearts.
It's about who gives the money.
And the people who give the money are the people who are directed by AIPAC, and they're not Christian fundamentalists.
I mean, so that's really important.
The other thing is about our whole rotten system we have here.
It is not about Jewish votes.
The Jewish vote is overwhelmingly Democratic.
Only 5%, according to the American Jewish Committee poll, vote with an eye on Israel.
They all vote overwhelmingly on domestic issues because Jews are liberal.
But this isn't about Jewish votes.
It's about a few hundred people with money.
That's it.
Well, it just so happens that the richer you get, the more right-wing you get.
Yeah, exactly.
On everything, right?
Apparently on everything.
That's true.
You never hear of somebody who was once poor.
I don't know.
I guess you hear people like George Soros and types like that, I suppose.
But then he doesn't do anything on this issue either because he's scared to.
Kind of amazing to me that George Soros is scared to touch this issue.
Well, and this is one thing that's notable about American Jews is there's even a saying that goes something to the effect of they earn money like Republicans or like white Republicans, but they vote like Puerto Ricans.
Exactly.
Because they put actual religious-based principle first, and that's rooting for the underdog kind of thing counts, you know?
Big time.
And they voted overwhelmingly.
Look, the fact of the matter is, if the Jews were the only people who would have voted, we would have had Democratic presidents in every single election since 1928.
And the thing is, they say that Jews were becoming more conservative.
They voted overwhelmingly for Obama twice.
After all, his middle name is Hussein.
He's a black guy.
If you ever were going to turn against someone because you didn't trust them on Israel, you would.
But they didn't because he's the more liberal of the two.
The other thing the polls show is that the Jews who are most uncomfortable with Obama think he's too conservative.
Because Jews tend to be, you know, when you break down their issues, they're for single payer, they're for all these kinds of quasi-socialist things that Jews have always liked.
The AIPAC misrepresents Jews.
It is a faction within the Jewish community.
It's a faction that's very wealthy.
Yeah, it's really the same dynamic of whether Jews are anybody else in this society, where the worse you are on economics, the better you are on foreign policy, I've found.
I'm a libertarian talking there.
Yeah, I know.
That's okay.
That's true.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your time as always, and I appreciate your Twitter feed and your interest.
You know, I keep up with you all the time, M.J., and I learn a lot.
Thank you, Scott.
And call me anytime.
I'm always here for you.
Okay, great.
I will do that.
And tell people to follow me on Twitter.
I will do that.
Hey, everybody, follow him on Twitter.
Wait, I have it right here.
It's M.J. Rosenberg, spelled out like Homer J. Simpson.
M.J. Rosenberg on Twitter.
Thanks very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
Okay, Scott.
Bye-bye.
All right, and also check out his website.
His blog is mjrosenberg.com as well.
That's the Future Freedom Foundation's new and improved site at fff.org.
Hey, everybody, Scott Horton here.
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