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.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Hey, guys, on the line, I've got the great Grant Smith.
He's the founder and the director of the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP.org.
And we run everything he writes at antiwar.com, of course.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, man?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you here.
We've got so many things to talk about.
First of all, you wrote a bunch of books, Big Israel and Divert about the Israelis stealing weapons-grade uranium from America.
And before that, I forgot them all, but a whole bunch of them, and they're all about the Israel lobby and Israeli agents in the United States getting away with things.
And now you are publishing, the Institute for Research, Middle Eastern Policy, IRMEP.org is publishing a new book by a man named Walter L. Hickson called Architects of Repression, How Israel and its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of U.S. Middle East Policy.
Wow.
What a title.
What about Walter Hickson?
Yeah.
So Walter Hickson is a historian, distinguished professor at the University of Akron up until recently, who's been published by all sorts of mainstream academic publishers.
And he's written his second book now about the Israel lobby, which will be broadly available in paperback, audio book, and Kindle next week on the 7th.
In fact, I think you can already get the audio book right now.
But anyway, this book, I mean, it could be called Case Closed, Israel and its U.S. Lobby have been the main obstacles to peace since 1948, because that's essentially what it proves through just a damning series of, again, mainstream, hardcore, archival, historian research, full citations, and just an incredibly damning indictment of what's been going on.
Great.
I can't wait to read it.
Yeah.
So check it out.
I need it to be a science fiction episode in my life where I can stop time for like, I don't know, a summer and catch up on all the books I got to read.
What am I going to do?
Anyway, I can't wait.
I mean, this looks amazing.
Yeah.
I mean, if you just want to, I know, Scott, that, you know, you've got a lot of free time.
So if you want to listen to the audio book version, I can send you a free code.
Oh, that's even worse.
No.
I mean, I have no time whatsoever.
I can read three times faster than I can listen to anything.
Okay.
Well, it's, you know, it's one of those things, anyone who really likes this sort of book can definitely drop us an email at info at IRMEP.org and we're happy to send you a free audio book code if you want to review it on Amazon and Audible.
Awesome.
That sounds like a deal.
We've got 50 sitting here, unused, 50 of them sitting right here.
All right.
So when they go to IRMEP.org, then what do they click?
There's nothing on IRMEP.
We haven't launched it yet, but drop, drop an email to info at IRMEP.org.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I should have been listening better.
I was reading the book instead of listening.
Don't read the book.
Listen to the book.
So yeah, drop us an email and we can send you a free code to listen to the audio book and review it.
I just flip open to John Hagee attributed Rabin's death to his quote, fanatical pursuit of peace.
That sounds about right.
It's kind of like, yeah, everything about this, oh, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity type garbage is really psychological projection.
And Hickson just rips this stuff apart.
I mean, he's been just immersed in just about every American Israel Public Affairs Committee issue of their Near East report since it started coming out.
And he just rips to shreds every single assertion versus what was actually happening at the time.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, we got to talk more business before we get to your article here, and that is the upcoming conference, the 2021 virtual edition of the Israel LobbyCon annual series and U.S. support for Israeli apartheid.
Tell me all about it and how people can participate.
Yeah.
So we're announcing speakers and speaker lineups next week.
And if people want to check out and register for that free Israel LobbyCon, it's at www.israelapartheidcon.org.
And it's all about these ongoing damning pieces of evidence coming out of the U.N., coming out of observers on the ground, and now the new B'Tselem report about just the quest for separateness and how much the Israel lobby is fighting that tooth and nail.
And we've got an incredible lineup of speakers who will be talking about that in two sessions.
And it's also focusing for the first time, you know, Scott, normally we do this at the National Press Club right before the meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
But this year we're doing it right before and right after the convening of J Street, the liberal Israel lobby group.
Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah.
So we'll have some keen analysts looking at what they're saying and doing in their conference.
Most of the session one that we're doing right before their conference will be looking at the Israel lobby and apartheid question.
And then after the J Street conference, we're doing another Saturday session starting at 11 a.m. talking about J Street and the Biden administration.
So it's a really interesting wraparound that we're doing, obviously enabled by technology.
We're bringing in some speakers.
We could never quite bring in from overseas and remote parts of the country like Texas and California.
So it should be a really interesting conference this year.
We're treating it with the serenity of a conference.
It's not going to be one of these things where you see a bunch of people sitting, you know, sitting on a couch with terrible audio and video if we can help it.
It's going to have the same sort of crisp, focused pace along with Q&A.
So I'm looking forward to it.
I think it's going to be a great conference.
Yeah.
And you know what?
Next year in D.C. we'll get it done again.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
2022, we still have a huge thing.
The 2022 conference, you can check out that conference at Israel LobbyCon with Roger Waters and Gideon Levy and just a host of incredible speakers.
We managed to reschedule that twice.
But National Press Club.
I love that Gideon Levy.
I got to start reading him more often again.
You know, he's amazing in person where you can talk to him, interact with him.
His speech was just incredible that, what, a few years ago I saw him.
You know, all these speakers make themselves available and you can't replicate that on Zoom.
You know, we're really looking forward to getting back to our natural habitat, which is the National Press Club.
So yeah, check out Israel LobbyCon.org slash 2022-conference or just go to Israel LobbyCon.
After you check out IsraelApartheidCon.org, which is this year's.
Yeah.
Coming up this month.
This month.
Oh, yes.
It's already April, isn't it?
Goodness.
Yes, sir.
And this is the 17th and the 24th.
Correct.
Nice.
So registration is open and then gobs of speaker information coming out next week.
All right.
Cool.
Well, listen, Grant, I mean, that sounds absolutely great, dude.
And I've been to these in person before and they're just excellent.
And definitely we'll be covering this at Antiwar.com and at the Institute and everything else.
And then, like you say, in fact, you know what, I'll have you back next week to talk about who all is speaking because I know it's going to be an impressive list.
Yeah, I'd appreciate that.
The bios of these people are a mile long and I think it's really important to understand what they're bringing to the table.
I mean, at this day and age, anyone can do a Zoom convocation.
But again, we put the same amount of time and effort into choosing the speakers and working out with them what they're talking about.
So it should be awesome.
Yeah.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
If you want a real education in history and economics, you should check out Tom Woods's 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's 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.
And now let's get to the heart of the segue of the thing from the subject of the conference to your new piece running at Antiwar.com from March the 30th here.
Cut aid over Israeli apartheid.
Say Americans.
So how about the word apartheid is an emotional trigger for some people.
And they either say, oh, my God, Israel is got an apartheid situation going on over there.
Or they say something maybe like, how dare you say that?
Or maybe they're confused and would just ask, what do you mean by that exactly, Grant Smith?
Yeah.
Well, you know, apartheid is just an Afrikaans word meaning separateness or the state of being apart, literally aparthood.
So that's what it means.
It means that you're putting together a systemic separation based on some distinguishing characteristic between the peoples over whom you're ruling.
And of course, you know, the word is pertaining to South Africa.
The word is supposed to, you know, be thought of in that term originally.
But now it's increasingly been brought up to refer to what the Israeli government has done to the Palestinians living within the confines of the states and also the territories it controls in the West Bank.
I would add East Jerusalem, Gaza.
And you know, this issue keeps coming up.
The U.N. Economic and Social Commission for West Africa came out with a report in 2017 clearly stating that the situation on the ground was apartheid.
And so, you know, they managed to pressure the U.N. Secretary General to pull that report, to say that this unit of the U.N. wasn't authorized to do that report.
And, you know, Richard Falk and some of the other people like the executive secretary who wrote the report, Rima Calaf, you know, she resigned.
So there's been this growing awareness of the situation that it is, in fact, a systematic imposition of separation.
But Israel and its U.S. lobby simply don't want to deal with that.
OK, so I'm interested in what you think of this piece in the Jerusalem Post here.
I'm not sure if you saw this, but I would bet that you did, that the Biden administration published their 2020 country reports on human rights practices.
And even though they treat Trump's moving the embassy and recognizing all of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, in other words, not the capital of an independent Palestine ever.
And their annexation of the Golan Heights that they did refer to.
It's interesting the way they do this.
They kept in place a description change made to the report by former President Trump in which he replaced the phrase Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories with Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
But within the report, the Biden administration reintroduced the word occupied to describe Israel's capture of territory during the 1967 Six-Day War.
But I wonder if that is just essentially public relations against the notion of apartheid that.
In fact, you know, the people on the West Bank are not the subjects of Israel.
It might be apartheid if they were.
But in fact, no, they're just occupied, presumably temporarily.
And you know, under their own, this Palestinian Authority pseudo government kind of thing.
And then so that way they get to split the difference and devolve the responsibility away.
Is that what's going on with that?
That's the J Street angle, right?
Is focus on the two state solution that'll never come.
But just to obfuscate the fact that it's already one state that they annexed de facto or de jure or however you want to call it, all of the West Bank back in 67 and certainly in the last years have made that clear that they're never giving it up.
Yeah.
So the Jerusalem Post and some other Israeli newspapers that parsed carefully through the State Department, you know, report card did note that the word occupation crept back in.
But, you know, I think the analogy of the ratchet where if the Trump made a horrible, you know, completely, I would say illegitimate proclamation that the Israelis do, in fact, get to have sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights and this and that, that you just can't ratchet that back.
So that would have been meaningful if the Biden administration in their so-called human rights and scorecard report had said, yeah, actually, the Golan Heights, much as we have disputes with Syria, is actually Syrian territory.
So we're going to say occupied Golan Heights and as well as occupied West Bank, blah, blah, blah.
That would have been, you know, turning the ratchet back.
But they didn't do that.
So I would tend to side with you that returning to some mild rebuke by calling the West Bank occupied is really just PR.
If the Trump administration had, I might add, against American public opinion and against the public opinion of the world, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank or pieces of the West Bank that the Israelis had designated their own territory, I'm pretty sure Biden and Tony Blinken would have taken that word out.
Because again, U.S. foreign policy and, you know, the the proclamations like this are a one way ratchet.
They never go back.
Yeah, well, that's, you know, a great paraphrase of Robert Higgs there.
And how that works, the ratchet effect there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I love that analogy.
And now.
So the B'Tselem report in the context in which they phrase it, they're saying then that the two state solution is moot.
It is one state.
And that's what makes it apartheid the way it's set up now.
Is that correct then?
That's that's correct.
I mean, the B'Tselem report is something everybody should read.
It's not that long.
It's called a regime.
Well, no, it's called this is apartheid, a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
And they go through case by case why there are separate rights, no matter where the Israeli regime is operating within its own territory or within occupied territories, that it's created this system of apartness.
And depending where you live and work, you get different permits, different social benefits, different rights to vote.
You know, that's if you're lucky enough to be in East Jerusalem.
But if you're in the West Bank, you're just basically a subject.
You've got different systems of military control, exercising authority over your life.
If you're in the Gaza Strip, you know, even though they withdrew, you've still got the Israelis surrounding the place and you get to live under a life of absolute control.
So, you know, B'Tselem is basically boiling down sort of region by region all of the rights and separateness of Palestinians versus Israelis by religion in terms of immigration, in terms of freedom of movement, in terms of who's deciding what can happen and, you know, the takeover, the constant encroachment and seizure of land, et cetera, et cetera.
And it's just boiling all of that down and saying this fits the definition of apartheid.
And there is, you know, again, the J Street and others who say, oh, no, there can be two states, blah, blah, blah.
They don't go this far because they don't want to confront the reality that if it ever really was a bona fide attempt to resolve the situation, it certainly isn't now.
And so this B'Tselem report is extremely critical in saying, let's not pretend anymore.
This is apartheid.
It extends far beyond, you know, just what Israel is doing in the occupied territories.
It's also present within the country.
And then I know that your expertise is about the Israel lobby, you know, and the Israel affinity groups here in the United States.
But in your understanding of Israeli politics, is there anybody other than B'Tselem, there's, you know, a couple of kind of leftist groups now that Yuri Avnery is dead.
Is there anybody apart from the editorial page over at Haaretz and this one big peace group who actually, you know, care about this issue at all or push for the idea that, you know, as Ehud Barak said years ago, the former prime minister and defense minister, that, hey, we're looking at apartheid.
We need to let the West Bank go or we're not going to be able to have Israel at all.
I mean, is anybody else saying that right now?
You know, unfortunately, no significant population.
I mean, there are good guys all over the place who recognize what's going on.
Yeah, I mean, I'm in factions, but of course, yes, individuals are good on.
Yeah.
No, I mean, if you look at polls of Israelis, there seems to be majority support for separation.
It depends on how you phrase it.
But, you know, when they came out with their basic law, that Israel was a nation state of the Jewish people in that past, you know, there was broad support for that.
So, you know, I don't think anyone's fielding polls saying, do you support apartheid?
I think what they are doing is fielding polls saying, do you approve of this sort of separation?
And that enjoys overwhelming support.
So I don't think it is a big concern.
And again, there are groups that are under constant attack for their foreign funding and for their sort of resistance to bending a knee toward the Israeli government.
And B'Tselem is one of them.
And some people at Haaretz are, you know, frankly, looking at the situation.
Others aren't.
But they're a small group, tiny group.
Hmm.
All right.
Well, it's just it's such a paradox that it's such an untenable situation.
And yet it seems so tenable somehow still.
Well, I think it's tenable because kind of the gist of the article and, you know, I guess, you know, depending on when we did the poll, obviously we did this poll as kind of a tie in to the conference.
But, you know, looking at U.S. support for Israel from the standpoint of, you know, your average American who hears that there's this group in Israel that's now condemning what's going on on the ground is as being apartheid.
To me, it was kind of surprising that a third of Americans are OK with that.
And you know, the question specifically was, should Israel be the leading aid recipient of the U.S. given this situation documented by an Israeli rights group?
And 33 percent of Americans said, yeah, that's fine.
So I don't think it would take a great deal more to bump that up.
And again, I focus on the Israel lobby because it's been working really hard to quash this growing awareness of what Israel is doing and has been doing.
They have to quash this.
They do not want this to be widely debated.
And so that's I think that's kind of the value of doing the first and only survey of Americans who are basically subsidizing all of this.
Yeah.
About.
By the way, don't bury the lead, because in fact, the plurality sort of significant five percent more said that actually, no, we should cut them off if that's the way they're going to do business, right?
That is true.
And that's pretty good.
You know.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not going to say that I was hoping for more because what I was hoping for was to get a snapshot of what's going on right now.
And so that I think the fact that people tie the two issues together and are saying, yeah, things like that should have consequences.
Yeah.
I think that's interesting.
But, you know, that's the value of doing polling in a platform, again, that beats Gallup, hands down, Google surveys, expensive, but worth it to see what people think.
I mean, it's I think it's it's interesting that 38.1 percent of plurality say that.
But you would think that it might be more if people kind of even tied that back to, you know, South Africa or discrimination that's happening in the U.S. and other things like that.
So I don't know.
We'll see.
You know, I think this is a poll that could be done in future years.
We also typically run a series asking what Americans think about Israel's position as the U.S. recipient of foreign aid since it's gotten the lion's share since 1948.
And these things do change over time.
And I think the lobby is going to have to work over time.
And we mentioned some of the pushback from APAC, the ADL and some other organizations every time this allegation comes up, whether it was, you know, Jimmy Carter raising it with his 2006 book, Palestine, Peace, Not Apartheid, or John Kerry in 2014, or the squad and some other dams when they were pushing back against annexation in the summer of 2020.
I mean, every time the words aid and apartheid come up, there's the Israel lobby.
So that's, of course, of everlasting fascination to us.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, great work, as always.
Tell us again about the book and the conference now, Grant.
So the book, the book is Architects of Repression.
It's by Walter Hickson.
It's coming out next week.
And people can go to Middle East Books and More to buy the book.
They can go to a little book website called Amazon.com and get the book.
And they can also get it in audible and e-book formats.
And again, if anyone wants to review the audio book and submit comments about whether they liked it, didn't like it or whatever, we've got 50 free audio book giveaways that we can give to people who want to be reviewers and listen to it for free.
Pretty long book.
It's over 12 hours.
Got a lot of content.
Send an email to info at IRMEP.org and we'll send you a free link to listen to the book.
So we're excited about this book.
Case closed.
I mean, it really has been Israel and its lobby that's thwarted peace since 1948.
This book presents that damning case.
And then IsraelApartheidCon.org.
Check that out.
We've got the conference coming up on the 17th and 24th.
Free tickets are available there.
So register and come and listen to the incredible lineup of speakers we're announcing next week.
All right.
That's great.
And that's IsraelApartheidCon.org.
And I'll have you back on next week to talk all about that again, too.
Hey, I appreciate it, Scott.
All right.
Good times.
Thanks very much, Grant.
Thank you.
Talk soon.
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.
