Hey y'all, so here's the thing, I'm giving a speech to the Tarrant County Libertarian Party on April the 28th, that's Saturday, April the 28th, from 2 to 4, Central Time, up there in Fort Worth, so if you're anywhere near the 200 square miles of concrete known as Dallas-Fort Worth, head on out there, and I'll see you, it'll be cool.
I'll sell you a book.
Oh, you can find out all about it at eventbrite.com.
Oh, and I guess I'll write up a blog entry too at the Libertarian Institute and at scotthorton.org.
Sorry I'm late, I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had, you've been took, you've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, and he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world, then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, y'all, introducing the great Ramzi Baroud.
He is a regular writer at, of course, Palestine Chronicle, his own site, and is an author.
His latest is The Last Earth, a Palestinian story.
And we run virtually everything he writes, I think, at antiwar.com as well.
The latest article is called Why Israel Feels Threatened by Popular Resistance in Palestine.
Welcome back to the show, Ramzi.
How are you?
I'm doing great, and thank you for having me, Scott.
All right.
Well, very happy to have you here.
And lots of important stuff to talk about in the news in the Gaza Strip, obviously.
So can we talk about your book a little bit?
I hope to read it someday and really give you a decent interview about it, but I'd like to give you an opportunity to talk about it.
I know you're doing a book tour right now to help promote it, so you can mention those towns coming up on your tour and whatever you can to promote the book here, if you want.
Oh, absolutely.
Thanks for the opportunity, and would love for you to read it and share your feedback.
I still have My Father Was a Freedom Fighter right behind me here on the shelf.
I haven't even gotten to it yet.
I'm so sorry.
I got such a pile.
I can't believe it.
Oh, it's all right.
Actually, let's start with the last one and then go to the previous one.
It works that way, too.
So yeah, I have been starting April 20th, I've been on a global book tour and starting in the US and Canada, then conducted a tour in 15 cities in the UK, 15 locations in the UK and about 11 cities, then, of course, to Scotland, four cities there, and to the Netherlands and to Austria, just came back a couple of days ago, and will be heading to Australia and New Zealand in May.
In the meantime, I have a few local events in Seattle, Washington, and Spokane, and will end the tour, at least the English leg of the tour, in South Africa in July.
So it's been really exciting, not just touring with the book, but kind of connecting with people and understanding the nature of the discussion within the solidarity movement and trying to help maybe just push for, I don't want to be cocky enough to say an alternative reading to what's happening in Palestine, but at least to reimagine the conflict in Palestine independent from the Zionist narrative and putting more focus on the refugees, who are really the core of this struggle, as has been the case for the last 70 years.
All right.
So now, first of all, just business, repeat again the upcoming dates, and then people can find out about that at ramsaybaroud.net, is that correct?
That's correct, yes.
On Thursday, I have a book signing at the Elliott Bay Bookshop in Seattle, downtown Seattle, and that's going to be on Thursday, which is the 19th of this month.
Then on the 25th, I'm giving a talk at Ecollege in Spokane, in Washington State, and more information can be found on my Facebook or my website, ramsaybaroud.net.
Great.
Okay.
And now, so on the thing about the narrative, I saw a clip, a video of you going around on Twitter or Facebook, where you were explaining that that was the kind of thing that we always talk about the Gazans, even everybody who takes the Palestinian side.
We talk about them in the context of what the Israelis are doing to them every day, which, hey, by the way, is extremely important, of course.
And I guess I didn't say in the introduction, but you yourself are a refugee, right?
And from the Gaza Strip, right?
That's correct.
Yes.
Yeah.
Oh, wait.
But so just to finish real quick.
But so then you were talking about, instead of that for a second, let's give a chance for the people of Gaza to just, or the Palestinians at West Bank too and wherever, give them a chance to just be themselves and tell their own stories from their own point of view without it having to be always about the Israelis, whether a pro or con type Zionist narrative.
So I think that's really important.
So, you know, I'd like you to talk about the book in any way, tell us some of the stories out of there or whatever it is you like to elaborate on that.
Well, that's right.
I mean, the idea is here, you know, I've been in the States for about 24 years, live Gaza directly to here.
And one thing that always struck me is that the definition of the Palestinian, the representation of the Palestinian is always kind of caught within the prism of the Zionist narrative.
If you are pro-Israel, then you see the world from a Zionist point of view and you completely neglect and negate the very existence of the Palestinian people.
As Newt Gingrich once said, the Palestinians are invented people.
So there's, there's one major ethical problem here.
And on the other hand, if you are pro-Palestine, you kind of really see Palestinians as this kind of perpetual victim that we don't really exist between the narrative of being a, being a terrorist or being a victim.
While in reality, this is entirely contradicting reality.
In reality, we exist in this vast space between perpetual victimhood and perpetual terror.
And this is the idea behind the book is I thought, what if, and just for the record, this is something that I built on my PhD thesis that I finished at the University of Exeter in the UK in 2015 on people's history of Palestine.
I wanted to imagine a scenario in which the Palestinian story can be independent from all of this, from all these representations and from all of these depictions and reductionist thinking.
What if we give the mic and the stage and the platform to ordinary people in Gaza, in the West Bank, in, in Australia, in, in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria and Iraq and elsewhere all over the world, really, and tell them, tell your story in an organic way that is independent from all of these representations or misrepresentations we have of you.
The outcome was really quite exciting that it even took me by surprise that ordinary people don't necessarily find themselves obligated intellectually to see themselves as part of the one state versus two states.
Should we use violence or nonviolence?
They don't find themselves obligated to deal with these notions at all.
These are people who have been fighting, resisting, standing, persisting, living, loving, hating.
They are themselves and they can only see themselves interacting with their immediate circumstances.
They are beholden to their past and they are determined to change their collective future, but they do it in such a way that does not fit our perspective as historians and intellectuals and journalists and human rights workers and activists.
That's what I really found to be quite interesting.
And in my opinion, this is so very important, not out of pity that this narrative hasn't really been granted the chance and the platform to be articulated in a proper way, but really, if you think about it, if it were not for these people, 70 years after the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947-48, the issue would have been forgotten completely, entirely.
Yet it hasn't.
It's still there.
It's really, it's the power of these people that allowed, and the power of their narrative and their collective resistance that allows the struggle to carry on as long as it did.
As far as Israel is concerned, this issue should have been sorted out a long time ago and forgotten, that there are no Palestinian people, there's no Palestinian struggle, there are no Palestinian rights or land or refugees, none of this would have been relevant.
What made this issue an issue that we are discussing 70 years, three, four generations later?
It's certainly not our leadership, because we don't have a savvy or wise or responsible leadership, certainly not the Arab world, corrupt Arab leaders with their own agendas.
So what allowed this issue to be an issue if it's the popular struggle of the Palestinian people?
And yet their story is the one that is least told.
And that doesn't make sense, even from an intellectual point of view.
See?
Yeah, I mean, I hate to say it, but it just comes down, well, I don't want to say racism necessarily as much as just prejudice, right, that, you know, the Arabs are darker, and, you know, fewer of them speak English, I guess, at least, you know, in media, and the leadership cast of the Israelis, at least, are, although not the majority of the Israeli Jewish population, but a good 40% of them or something, and the more well-to-do and more powerful tend to be the European Ashkenazi Jews, who are whiter, and on TV, look more, quote, American to people.
And of course, you know, there's just more people who are interested in telling Israel's side of the story in this country than there are Palestinians, by a long shot, and have a hell of a lot more access to the media to tell their side of the story.
If you tell the Palestinian side of the story to somebody, once they realize that, wait, the Israelis have been occupying these people this whole time, where, when it's always made to sound like the Palestinians at the gates are trying to invade and conquer Israel, when the story gets told the other way around, people are really shocked, and they tend to, I think, side with the Palestinians, or certainly, you know, back off the idea that, yeah, America must defend Israel no matter what against the onslaught of the Arab Eastern hordes, you know, coming their way all the time, that, you know, that narrative obviously doesn't hold any water, but once somebody's broken from it, they really react against it, because of how false it really is, you know?
Right, but I also think that we as Palestinians made a horrendous mistake as well, because, you know, we arrived into this discussion that you are talking about quite late.
I mean, the Zionist intellectuals have been part of the, you know, intellectual culture and political culture in the West for a long time.
You know, they began really kind of leaving a mark mid-late 19th century, when they enshrined this idea that Palestine was a land without people, and thus, you know, the Jewish people were a people without land, and it was what they referred to as a marriage between this land and this people, and completely overlooked that there was a Palestinian people at all.
Really, not until 1948, Scott, that they discovered, like, oops, there is a Palestinian people there, but we can't really call them Palestinians or people, so let's call them the refugee problem.
So, we were the refugee problems, and we were Arabs, just around.
It's not that we don't take pride in being Arabs, but the idea is when you kind of make the identity all, you know, like there are hundreds of, you know, hundreds of millions of Arabs all over the world, therefore we are just part of this massive body of people that you call Arabs, we're not unique in any way.
And then we had the new, you know, depiction of the 60s and 70s, with the rise of Palestinian militancy, when we became the Palestinian terrorists.
This is why there's so many Americans, when you tell them, I am from Palestine, they have no idea what you're talking about, and they keep telling me, Pakistan?
I would say, no, no, Palestine, Pakistan, and then you tell them Palestinian, and then they immediately understand, but they understand it in a negative connotation.
The Palestinian terrorists, the militant, the angry protester who's burning flags.
So for a century, really, the Palestinian, as a member of a larger group and an identity called the Palestinian people, didn't really exist.
And this is why I'm saying as Palestinians we made a mistake, because we kind of almost accepted, you know, our fate, that this is the presentation they have for us, and therefore we have to be on the defensive all the time, constantly trying to prove that we are not terrorists, that we are an actual people, that we have an actual unique culture, that we have food, that we have this.
But we have done so for such a long time, you know, the politics of negation, if you will, to the point that at the end we never really presented ourselves in a comfortable way.
You know, this is us.
We existed before Zionism.
Jericho has been around for 11,000 years.
It's the oldest city on earth.
It's Palestinian.
The Palestinian national movement goes back to the 17th and 18th century, when the leader of Akko, in Arabic Akka, fought against the Ottomans and pushed them out to Damascus.
We haven't, we are not a yield.
We are not an outcome of Zionism.
We were not created in 1948 when Israel decided to bestow upon us our Nakba, our catastrophe.
We've existed before Zionism, and we will exist after Zionism.
And this is why I feel like there's this need for new history, to kind of really reclaim the narrative altogether and to present ourselves entirely independent from this kind of misrepresentation that allowed us to live on the margins of history for a hundred years.
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It's the coolest kind of currency I've ever heard of.
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Well, and really, right at the end of the age of empires, right with the end of World War II and the rise of the United Nations and all this, the new order was sovereign states for everybody, and neo-imperialism, of course, or neo-neo-imperialism by the Americans to enforce it all.
But right as time is running out on the French in Indochina and the British in Palestine and in India and all of this, a brand new European colony is created in Palestine.
The idea, I mean, it's pretty understandable, you know, for the time, for the way people thought back then, that, you know, as you said, even if in 48 they realize, oh, there are some Arabs there, so what?
I mean, yeah, there were some Apache that used to live around here, too, till we got rid of them.
And that was basically the idea.
Nobody cared.
I don't think they would have cared.
They knew.
I don't know if they knew.
Right.
Right, yet they are still there, you know, 70 years later, there are still Palestinian people and there are tens of thousands now waving their flags at the Gaza border, demanding their right of return.
And you know, the news see this as, you know, there are clashes in Gaza, they tell you.
Snipers, hundreds of snipers shooting children and women and men, you know, and killing dozens and wounding thousands.
And they tell you that there are clashes.
But the way I see it is far more encompassing than the issue Palestinians are protesting.
I see it as something far more powerful and profound than this.
The way I see it is that Palestinians, 70 years after their Nakba, their catastrophe, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and despite of what Israeli historian Ilan Pape refers to as the incremental genocide in Gaza, you still have a generation, a young generation of people who were born or politically matured after the Israeli siege on Gaza over 10, 11 years ago.
Still there, stubborn enough, resilient enough, strong enough to stand with their flags and wave it in the face of Israeli snipers, knowing that their fate could be injury or death.
This kind of degree of determination.
This is what I started the conversation talking about.
That's what makes the Palestinian people who they are.
That's what makes them unique.
This absolute undefeatable spirit of this nation, and really, I mean, as intellectuals and academics and historians, we try to avoid sentimental language because we are scared that you can't verify, you can't cite what does that actually mean.
But really, there's no other explanation but that.
The spirit of this nation, children standing there dying and getting wounded because they believe in their right to be free and for their human rights and their right to return to their homes and villages.
There's no other explanation but that.
Yeah, well, and you know, I mean, we've talked about this before, and who knows, it's just a counterfactual.
But it seems to me that, and I agree with you, that at least by now it's too late.
But from the Israeli point of view, I think if they had treated the Palestinians as fairly as possible after the Nakba, go ahead and have as prosperous as possible of an independent state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and in the Gaza Strip, and try to be friends and get along, that enough time passes and people get along better.
And if there's less to fight about, people would rather live their lives and go home at night to their families and stuff, you know.
And I think things could have probably been all right.
But then you look at the current situation, where the people of the West Bank live under Israeli totalitarianism, military totalitarianism, and the people of the Gaza Strip are basically in a giant concentration camp, with Hamas serving as the trustees of the prison on behalf of the Israelis.
Although maybe that's just my point of view on, I don't know exactly, right?
But you know, you're constantly always scolding the leadership of the Palestinians, both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
But what can these people do about it?
You talk about in your articles, for one example, Abu Mazen, Abu Abbas, his term has been up for what, a decade or something?
There's just nobody to replace him?
The Palestinians?
Why can't they get their act together?
What's the deal, Ramzi?
Well, right, because that's a major issue that we are struggling with.
And the reason we are struggling with is not because of the lack of initiative, or why can't the Palestinians do this and that?
To turn popular mobilization into organization, into organizing actual political platforms under a kind of regime in which on one hand you have the Israeli army, and on the other hand you have the Palestinian leadership that is living with an Israeli political mandate, and without the Israeli political mandate, the Palestinian Authority would not exist a single day.
Without the security coordination, the Palestinian Authority is providing Israel with security by creating a buffer between them and the resisting Palestinians.
And on the other hand, the Israelis, despite of all the apparent disagreements between Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, despite of the apparent disagreements, they are agreeing on one thing.
They don't want to see Palestinians rebelling.
They don't want to see an intifada.
They don't want to see an uprising, because an uprising would threaten both the occupation, but also the status of the Palestinian leadership that is enjoying the perks and the money that's coming from various parts of the world.
So this is for the first time in many years that you have a generation of Palestinians who is not only struggling against a single oppression, but dual oppressions.
The PA and the Israeli army and the armed Jewish settlers.
And that's why it's not an easy prospect here.
The region is a big mess right now.
In the old days, at least independent Palestinian intellectuals, politicians, can actually survive, can work in various Arab platforms, can organize and mobilize and create organizations and push for change.
None of this is available at the moment.
The Arab world is in an influx.
There are wars and proxy wars happening all over the place, and the Palestinians are overlooked.
So our challenge is if we are to meet, for example, as Palestinian politicians or intellectuals to organize a new vision, you really don't have a safe space anymore.
So this is what we are struggling.
It's like people rebelling from prison.
That's literally what's happening.
Gaza is an open-air prison.
People are rebelling.
You know, a woman organization in Gaza announced that April 20th, next Friday, will be that women will take the leadership of the march, of the rally, where tens of thousands of people are organizing at the Gaza border.
Women will take charge.
Now, when you think about it, you know, where are the feminist movements all over the world embracing the efforts of Gaza women?
Many of them will be shot.
I tell you that in advance.
Where is the outrage?
There will be very little, if any at all.
So I feel like we are surrounded.
We are besieged by the lack of solidarity, meaningful solidarity, coming from around the world, and besieged by our own, the failing leadership of the Palestinian people, and of course by the Israeli army and their snipers.
So it's not an easy question to be addressed with, you know, why aren't the Palestinians doing something about it?
They are actually doing a lot about it, but they are fighting against many walls and many obstacles.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it really is something to see when, and it ain't on TV, but, you know, looking at Twitter, I mean, it is reported in, I guess, Israeli media, but it was all going around the day before the shooting started that, yep, the Israelis are deploying snipers, and their plan is to start murdering Palestinians when the protest shows up tomorrow, and then that's exactly what happened.
And then, of course, the videos leak now of the guy apparently filming through his, you know, assistant sniper scope, whatever they call that, you know, the spotter, through his scope of just, you know, shooting an innocent, unarmed Palestinian protester in the head and killing him and laughing about it and cheering him on and all this kind of thing.
And like you're saying about the solidarity, where is everybody on this?
I mean, this is huge.
And, you know, I don't know, there are some people trying their best to do a lot of great work, but I guess they feel like this is just, you know, the immovable object, that the Israelis are just going to commit war crimes, and the Democrats and Republicans are going to continue to cover for them.
And then so, you know, what else can be done at this point is, I think, you know, that's what happens.
People stop worrying about things that they know they can't control.
And they feel like maybe they could just go find something else to protest, like Trump's ties to the Russians or something.
That's right.
It's like this kind of convenient type of obvious protest.
But in reality, I think the most urgent form of protest is the one that we find when we find a situation that is so overwhelming and we feel individually incapable of doing anything about it.
But collectively, we can, of course we can.
This is how we created the kind of momentum of solidarity that allowed, that helped the resistance in South Africa to eventually overthrow the apartheid regime.
This is not, you know, we constantly use the South Africa example, but in reality, you know, all revolutions and all change in society happened at a time it appeared hopeless.
I mean, we speak about apartheid in South Africa that lasted for 50 years, but we rarely address colonialism in South Africa that lasted for hundreds of years.
I can imagine that at any point during these hundreds of years, people must have thought it's hopeless.
It's pointless.
What can you do?
That's the way things are.
But eventually, Nelson Mandela left prison and eventually apartheid was defeated and eventually society was allowed to slowly, we're not saying that the situation has fundamentally been altered, but to slowly begin a process of change.
If it was possible in South Africa, it should be possible in Palestine.
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Well, and so here in this case, I mean, we have unarmed protests.
They tried to spin and say, oh no, here's a guy with a rifle, but that was somebody on a different day, far away, or some fake footage.
At least it was far away.
I don't know if it was another day, but it had nothing to do with these people's protests here.
And now, how many people have been shot so far in these protests, you know?
Or killed in these protests?
About 33 killed and about 2,500 wounded.
And you know, I don't know how much of this, honestly, I don't watch the Lair News Hour or whatever.
I guess I should.
I don't know how much of this is on TV.
There's some coverage of it on Twitter, but it seems like it's hard to sustain for more than, you know, the first couple of days.
As you say, there's, this is going on, this is continuing on until Nakba Day, which is, what's the date of that again?
That would be May 15th.
Oh, May 15th.
So this is still going to go on for another month with these protests.
And so I guess we'll see what happens between now and then.
It must be terrifying for the, you know, obviously the most effective thing for the people of Gaza would be for all of them to go and do a big peaceful protest thing if they can.
But then that's asking a hell of a lot of people when they know that the IDF is perfectly willing to blow their heads off just for showing up.
You know, the Israelis have clearly made their point when it comes to that.
But then, you know, I mean, and that's the thing, right?
Like I think I saw on Twitter, Greenwald or somebody was quoting Thomas Friedman saying that if the Palestinians did just this, if they did a big unarmed protest to the Gaza fence border saying they want the right of return, at that point, that would be the day of reckoning for the Israelis, that they would have to deal with this problem in a constructive way.
And then, of course, nah, it's the same old so far.
But I don't know.
I mean, I think you're right about the South Africa example.
And then, of course, you know, people always invoke only the nonviolent aspects of Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggle in America, although there was a lot of, you know, justified violent resistance as well.
But of course, Gandhi in India and all this kind of thing, this is what it's got to be, right?
It's a Hollywood movie for people that like, oh, when we get everybody, you know, little heartstrings pulled or some kind of thing to finally see the Palestinian side of the story here and get people to ask, well, what are they doing locked in here anyway?
And what does it mean that it's a concentration camp?
They're not allowed to leave.
They're not allowed to sail.
They're not allowed to fly.
They don't have passports.
They don't have a state.
And they don't have free, you know, anarcho-anything either, right?
They're locked in a prison here.
And what do they do other than get born with the wrong religion?
I mean, it's crazy.
I don't know.
Anyway, I'm rambling now.
But the point is that, I don't know, let me ask you then, is there a breakthrough coming?
Is this it?
Maybe?
Well, you know, I don't know.
I mean, this is not, it will not be an easy answer.
What I think we need right now, and I think that's precisely what Palestinians in Gaza did and I'm, in fact, there was an article I wrote for Al Jazeera a few days ago called something like, why is Israel scared of Palestinian popular resistance?
It's because it is, it's the reason that Israel killed so many protesters on the first day, 15 people on the first day, and wounded 773 with live ammunition.
Why?
The reason is they don't want this to become a habit.
They don't want to have to deal with popular mobilization at this level.
It's first of all, it's a nightmare for the Israeli PR machine, but also it's the kind of war that they can't win in the long run.
I don't believe in Thomas Friedman's, you know, this armchair intellectualism.
I believe that if this is the beginning of redefining the nature of Palestinian resistance in which the core struggle is not the factions, but the people, then I think we are definitely on the right track.
Hey, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just thought of, you know, Egypt in 2011, what happened was on CNN, they basically had to kind of shrug and go, well, I guess it's unanimous.
Every single man, woman, and child in Egypt of all factions want the military dictatorship to go.
And it's kind of hard to deny that America is this dictator's best friend, and this is kind of all our fault.
And it just, I mean, there was nothing they could do about it.
That was the scene from Cairo, was all factions, right, left, town, country, north, south, and cops and Muslim Brotherhood and everybody came together and said, let's do this thing.
And they won temporarily, but still it was a huge, it was the change in the narrative.
That's what I'm trying to chime in on what you're saying, where people all of a sudden realize that actually, well, who cares what Mubarak wants?
Apparently the people of Egypt want something different.
Precisely, but what people don't know about what's happening in Gaza, and this is back to the very, very original point that we started with, that Palestinians are neither a victim nor a terrorist.
There is something in between.
And that is what's happening in between right now.
The fact that there's been this debate going on within Gaza civil society, within Gaza organizations in which women protested, our position position is not just aiding men as they protest and organize.
We need to be in the leadership and they prevailed.
And that's why Friday is designated as the women leading the protest on Friday.
You know what?
They're just going to spin that though and say, Oh, look at the men hiding behind the women and using them as shields and this kind of cynical thing.
And they could and they will.
And for us, it actually doesn't matter because this is ultimately, ultimately about our society becoming enlivened and becoming healthy again and coming to terms with its own agony and its own collective collective pain.
But it's also its collective responsibility.
We want to see the gunmen.
I'm not protesting any form of resistance here, but, but, but this can't just be about guns and bullets.
It also has to be about society reanimating itself.
As France Fannin once put it, resistance is the recreation of man.
It was Jean-Paul Sartre who once argued the, the, the, the recreation of, of, of men creating himself and women recreating herself as well.
That's what resistance is about.
We need to be part of that.
We can't just sit there, Hamas, but Netanyahu, one state, two states, violence, nonviolence, Gaza, war, this and that.
We need to see the Palestinian people rediscovering their collective power as a nation and, and, and that could become and will become the, a part of how the new strategy is animated when people ask me whenever I travel, what do you think is the solution?
I would say it's not my business.
I can offer you, I can offer you ideas, but the solution has to come from the Gaza border.
It has to come from the 6,500 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails right now.
And when they collectively decide what the solution and what the strategy is, my responsibility as an intellectual to support them in their efforts.
This is what we are desperate for.
And so we don't really, I don't necessarily just see the Gaza protest as the right of return.
And this is about land day and about this and that.
It's about something much more bigger.
It's about Palestinian society, rediscovering, reanimating, recreating itself.
And that is the first step towards healthy strategies and healthy solutions and an actual collective vision.
That's what we need.
Hey, Ramzi.
It seems to me like, okay, so the Israelis are in this panic because the right of return, you're saying these different solutions that are up for debate by the actual people involved on the ground there.
What they're demanding is the right of return.
We want to move back into our grandmother's house.
And of course, we're talking about millions of people and the Israelis are absolutely terrified of this.
And it would stop at apparently nothing to prevent it, except going ahead and lifting the siege and letting Gaza be as prosperous as possible.
Because after all, they don't seem to really want to colonize the Gaza Strip the way that they want to colonize the West Bank, right?
So I guess I just don't understand, well, I don't want to be too naive sounding, but it just seems to me like there's plenty for the Israelis to work with in negotiating more of a peaceful relationship and a cooperative relationship with the Hamas regime or whatever you call it there in Gaza.
The elected government.
Yes, of course.
I mean, this is kind of the rational, kind of rational thinking, you know, like, okay, you have to see there's the flaw in my argument, right?
Well, no, it's not a flaw at all.
It's completely, you know, it's not plausible, but it's rational to expect that.
But this is not a rational situation because Israel wants to maintain the status quo.
The status quo is so essential.
Israel's strategy is now, let's keep the situation as is, as long as possible.
You say, okay, but what is their ultimate goal?
Their ultimate goal is to finalize their strategy regarding the illegal settlements in the West Bank to complete the wall and to annex most of the West Bank where the settlements are located and the water sources.
And then Palestinians can deal with the outcomes.
Now this is not a conspiracy, nor it's my theory.
It is something that's being debated regularly in the Israeli Knesset, in the Israeli parliament, you know, annexing the West Bank, annexing the settlements, annexing areas that really matters to Israel strategically and let the Palestinians live in Bantu stands and find a way out of this, this kind of puzzle of road system in the West Bank.
And they can exist under apartheid.
It doesn't really matter to us.
So in order for this status quo to be maintained, the Palestinians need to be demonized regularly.
And Israel has to be presented as a victim.
You have this Taliban, Al Qaeda-like leaders of Gaza, Hamas leaders of Gaza, bearded angry men with weapons.
You know, they look exactly like the people in Afghanistan, and therefore it's all the same as far as American audiences are concerned.
And they keep lobbing all these rockets, homemade rockets at Israel, a civilized, democratic, Western-like state that is fighting for democracy and for survival amongst the hordes of Arabs and Muslims.
I mean, this is the most beautiful propaganda campaign you can possibly conjure up.
Why let it go and create a situation in which there is a possibility for a peaceful coexistence?
And then Israel will be held accountable to international law and to its responsibilities under United Nations resolutions regarding the land and the water and the sharing and the people and the right of return and all of this?
Why create this nightmare scenario for Israel?
So this is why I'm saying what you are proposing is very rational, but it's not plausible from an Israeli point of view at all.
Right.
Yeah.
We can't start treating them like human beings and recognizing their rights at all, because what a cascade of consequences could flow from that.
Exactly.
We have to start respecting their rights.
My God.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate the work that you do and the time that you share with us on the show as always, Ramzi.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
All the best.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Ramzi Baroud.
RamziBaroud.net and Palestine Chronicle and AlJazeera.net, oh, .com now.
They finally got that URL, didn't they?
And then you can read them at Antiwar.com.
We reprint all this stuff at Antiwar.com.
The latest here is, Why Israel Feels Threatened by Popular Resistance in Palestine.
And okay, you guys, you know me, ScottHorton.org.
And yeah, the feed is fixed.
It should be fine.
Do the RSS thing there, YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
We post all the interviews there, too.
Antiwar.com for the things I want you to read.
LibertarianInstitute.org for more things I want you to read.
And oh, FoolsErrand.us for my book.
Buy my book.
It's really good.
FoolsErrand.
A Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
It's at FoolsErrand.us.
And yes, the audio book is now available, too.
Check that out.
And follow me on Twitter, at ScottHortonShow.
Okay, thanks.
Hey, I want to add on a special thanks to the heroic Ron Paul, the greatest American hero ever, in my estimation, for interviewing me on his show, The Liberty Report, with the great Dan McAdams, as well.
It's really great.
They interviewed me on Monday, and it ran on today, Wednesday.
I don't know what day you guys are hearing this, but it ran on Wednesday.
You can find it on YouTube.com, and I'll blog it and all that.
We talked about Syria and Afghanistan and other things, libertarianism.
So thanks, Ron.
You're great.
