Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax 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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, 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, you guys, introducing the great Ramzi Baroud, regular writer for Antiwar.com.
And his own website is RamziBaroud.net and also the Palestine Chronicle.
And he's the author of these two important books, The Last Earth, a Palestinian story.
And before that, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, Gaza's Untold Story.
Welcome back to the show, my friend, how are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks for having me again.
You know what?
I'm so happy to talk to you.
Right now, there's so much going on.
Let's start with your recent article here last week, I guess.
The essence of being Palestinian, what the Great March of Return is really about.
All right.
So first of all, the surface sketch, what is the Great March of Return?
Well, the Great March of Return is this protracted popular protest or a series of protests, rather, that started last year on March 30th, 2018.
And they started with the specific purpose of they coincided with Land Day.
It's a day that Palestinians hold dear because 13 people inside Israel, today's Israel, 13 Palestinians were killed in the early 70s.
And as a result, Palestinians have been kind of commemorating that day.
And the fact that Gazans in particular have commemorated that day and, you know, for the last year, basically, it's just their way of trying to show that there is, despite all the divides between Palestinians and by divides, I mean not just ideological and political, but also geographical divides, Israeli walls, checkpoints, they are still one nation and they are still united.
And they are still united around specific causes and nothing would happen to change or alter that in any way.
So basically, they have protested every single day since March 30th last year.
The protests take a specific, you know, they are far more popular on Friday, which is the holy day for Muslims and it's the day off for Gazans.
And during these protests, you know, over 300 Palestinians have been killed, over 15,000 have been injured, several thousands of them are permanently maimed.
And yet, despite all of this, the protests are still committed to the principles of why they were, they took place in the first place and that is non-violent popular mobilization at the border or rather at the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel.
All right, so much here.
So I guess, I mean, right to the heart of it is the Israelis are giving these refugees in Gaza, this population, nothing to settle for.
So they're saying, listen, I want to come home to my grandmother's house that she was kicked out of that belongs to me that I can see from over the wall or that I know that you planted a tree where it used to be, but it's still my property.
And the Israelis are not responding that, look, at least we gave you an independent Palestinian state where you can profit and thrive and have a life and, you know, be okay.
Instead, no, they're still just locked in prison.
And so, you know, why not ask for everything?
Absolutely.
I mean, it's really as far as the Palestinians are concerned, they have been scammed.
I mean, this is a scam that goes on for many, many years.
All that the protesters are asking, they're asking for one immediate and urgent demand and that's ending the 12-year Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip that has caused much damage, much loss in human lives, much suffering, much pain and so forth.
But they are also asking for the right of return to their original homes in Palestine, as you said.
Nearly a million Palestinians were expelled from Palestine in 1947-48.
And the vast majority of Palestinians who exist in Palestine itself, in the occupied territories, but people like me anywhere in the world, the vast majority of us are descendants of those refugees.
And our right of return has never been settled, neither by any moral code nor by international law whatsoever.
By the way, I'm sorry to interrupt, but at the end of what you're saying, could you talk about a little bit of the numbers?
Because, of course, we know there's huge refugee populations in Jordan, Syria, the U.S., etc.
Right.
So the original number of refugees that were expelled from Palestine were anywhere between 750,000 to 850,000.
Their descendants, however, are now numbering by over 5 million people.
And the vast majority of them are refugees.
And many of those refugees are still living in refugee camps.
Like, for example, you have nearly 400,000 Palestinian refugees registered at the United Nations Refugees Agency, UNRWA, as refugees living in Lebanon.
A larger number living in Jordan.
I'm sorry, what was the first location you said?
In Lebanon, in refugee camps in Lebanon.
About 10 refugee camps, I believe, in Lebanon are still populated by Palestinian refugees who have this incredibly precarious status, legal status, where they can't go anywhere.
They are basically stuck in this political, legal limbo.
They can't go, they can't work, they are denied jobs.
76 jobs, for example, they are denied to hold these jobs in Lebanon.
Similar suffering, but in varied degrees, are registered in Jordan as well.
In Syria, it's an interesting story, because Syrian Palestinian refugees in Syria – and sorry if we are diverting too much here, but it's rather central to the story.
No, we're not.
No, we're not at all diverting.
Go ahead.
So, Syrian refugee, Palestinian refugees in Syria were treated fairly better.
And here we are not talking about international standards.
We are talking about comparative standards.
So, they are not treated as badly as those in Lebanon.
They received free education and they received better treatment and they had the chance to hold jobs and so forth.
And yet, after this current war in Syria, the nearly 400,000, 500,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria found themselves on the run.
80% of them are now refugees for the third time or the fourth and some instances for the fifth time, some of the people that I interviewed for my books and my articles.
And so here, this is like a real-life example of how the issue of refugees is not a sentimental issue.
Back to Gaza, they tried to make this demand of the right of return for Palestinian refugees to be ludicrous.
Like, you come after 70 years, you don't even have the political power to break the Israeli siege on Gaza.
And here you demand for the return of refugees.
But really, when you think about it, it's very much a pressing issue.
It's very much a relevant issue.
It's not a sentimental issue.
And if you don't believe me, look at the Palestinian refugees in Syria, who were fairly, you know, well off compared to others.
And yet, here they are once more in, you know, seeking refuge elsewhere.
Many of them are in Jordan.
Many of them are in Lebanon.
Some of them are in Europe.
And the same situation happened in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003.
Palestinian refugees were on the run again.
So these are very, very pressing issues.
And the demands of the protesters should, in fact, be taken serious and discussed by the international community, not as a humanitarian crisis, but rather as a political issue as well.
And, you know, I mean, this is the thing, too.
This is no diversion at all.
This is right to the heart of it, too, whether we're talking about you living in the United States of America, just as much right to return to your family's property, or whether we're talking about people who, another example, are the Palestinian refugees in Kuwait who were then expelled when Yasser Arafat made the bad political decision to side with Saddam in Iraq War I, at least rhetorically.
He didn't do anything.
But in doing so, that angered the Kuwaitis.
And so then a couple of hundred thousand, I think, Palestinians were— I actually just emailed you a link to a writer of mine at the Libertarian Institute who's just done incredible work on Syria.
His name is William Van Wagenen, and he wrote this thing, a short history of the destruction of the Yarmouk camp in Syria, where, first of all, it's not like—you know, there's a quote.
I'm sure you know it better than me.
There's a quote of one of the former Israeli prime ministers saying, they will forget as time goes on, and this kind of thing.
In other words, as though the Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk, for example, would eventually just become Syrians, and that would just become part of the history of Syria, and they'd just be Syrians and get over it now and whatever.
Well, they never really were assimilated.
They've been stuck in this Yarmouk refugee camp all this time, and then what good would assimilation get them when the CIA is backing the al-Qaeda suicide bomber types against Assad and reducing the entire country to the ground?
You know, it wouldn't have done—they wouldn't have been any better off had they been full-fledged citizens.
But anyway, the real point being is that they're still refugees.
The sons and grandsons and great-grandsons and great-great-grandsons here are essentially rights-less or mostly rights-less, stateless people stuck in other people's countries with no way out.
Exactly, Scott.
I mean, if you want to truly address the issue of refugees and rehabilitate refugees, then you have to look at the root cause of why they became refugees in the first place and address this issue.
You know, for 70 years they've been beating around the bushes, and there's been every attempt at forcing the refugees to forget that they are refugees.
For example, Mr. Kushner, Jared Kushner, a few months ago when he went on this tour in the Middle East, later on we discovered through leaked information to Al Jazeera and The Guardian and others that he was trying to get the Jordanian king, King Abdullah, to basically accept the Palestinian refugees, take responsibility of the Palestinian refugees, take that responsibility away from the United Nations and redefine their status so they are no longer refugees.
So basically kind of like trying to wish the problem away as opposed to actually addressing the problem.
And in exchange for that, Kushner offered King Abdullah billions of dollars.
Take the money.
It's yours.
You don't even need to spend them on refugees.
Just please change their status so the number of refugees drops by 2 million, so we'll have 2 million people to worry about.
It doesn't matter what happens to them, to their status, to their human rights, to their sense of identity, to their legal rights.
None of this matters at all as long as we just don't talk about them as refugees anymore.
Yeah, man.
Pardon me just one second.
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You know what?
All right, so I want to get into this.
We're going to get back to the specifics of the march in just a moment here and whatever else you want to talk about.
We've got some time.
I hope you do.
One thing that—and this just came up the other day.
In fact, two days ago, I gave a speech and I was talking with a guy, and he told me he was a geographer, I guess.
Is there a separate name for that profession when you're one?
Anyway, and he was talking about way back years ago, and I guess probably the late 90s, how his friend at work showed him a map of this is what the Palestinians are supposed to settle for, essentially.divided up by all these settlements and all this stuff.
He's a cartographer or something.
Some kind of fancy name like that.
Ramsey?
I don't know, man.
Anyway, and he said that he essentially just couldn't believe it.
His friend was showing him this map, and he just couldn't believe that essentially the story the map was telling was that the Palestinians were the victims and the Israelis were the aggressors here.
And that if it comes to somebody occupying somebody else or one group of people treating another group unfairly, geez, it's pretty hard to interpret this map any other way.
And so he rejected the validity of the map.
And this is the story he's telling me.
And then he asked me, so what was my problem?
How come it took me so long?
And he finally had wised up since then.
I don't know what clued him in.
I forgot.
But he was asking me, what's the real explanation for how he could be just possessed of so much dissonance that he would just refuse to accept the reality he was being shown in his own medium, you know?
And I was kind of struggling.
But then again, I think the answer is obvious.
And it sucks because a bunch of PC whiners have really worn this out and used it to death, but it's still a real thing.
And that is racial prejudice.
That essentially the leadership cast of the Israeli Jews are European Ashkenazi Jews, and they're whiter.
And to the American majority, kind of makes sense that they're sort of an extension of us, part of Western society and civilization.
Fort Apache out there, an Injun country.
And everybody on the other side, they're browner.
They don't speak English nearly as much.
They wear different hats, as George Carlin says, different hats is everything, man.
You know, look at wherever people are killing each other en masse.
Different hats are involved.
And so that's really what it comes down to for the average person is that, well, just like in partisanship in American politics, you pick your side.
And so I guess the reason I'm better on this is I have a prejudice against that kind of thinking because for me, I'm a libertarian, so everything is about the individual right of property ownership.
And so on that measure, a John Lockean, Thomas Jeffersonian measure, then Jewish this and Palestinian, Christian or Muslim, that doesn't mean anything.
It's simply a matter of who homesteaded the land and who took it and who's got the right and who doesn't.
All that stuff is easy.
It doesn't have anything to do with race or religion at all in an abstract sense of individual rights.
But for other people who don't really have that kind of grounding or their philosophy, I hate to say it, but I think that's really the answer.
And you know what this guy said to me when I said that to him?
He goes, you know what, you're pretty much right.
I think that's really it is I didn't want to think that my side were the ones who were on the wrong side.
And this is something that goes back in history a long time ago, Scott.
I fully agree with you.
I think the racial prejudice is a major component of it.
And just to further demonstrate that, look at Israeli society itself.
I mean, many people are voting against Netanyahu because they are Sephardim.
They are Eastern Jews.
And they understand that there's a great deal of racism within their own Jewish society based on the issue of color.
Look what's happening to African, like Jews from African descent and the massive issue of racism that's happening in that country.
So, of course, that's a great deal of that answers the question in a great way.
But I also think that there are other issues that are cultural as well.
And I think there is something personal about all of this.
If you were to believe of one thing your entire life, your entire intellect is based on believing in certain things, whether in God or a certain political ideology.
And then you discover all of a sudden that not only you were wrong in some aspects of that belief, you were entirely wrong.
Not just you're entirely wrong, you have the entire thing reversed.
So Palestinians are actually not the aggressors, they are the victims.
Palestinians, actually many Americans think that Palestinians are occupying Israeli land, believe it or not, according to a poll by the Zoogby International.
When you actually think that, wait a minute, these are the dispossessed, the disinherited, these are the people who have lost everything.
They are the ancient people of that land.
You have the entire thing reversed.
Zionists are not religious Jews, they are atheists.
The whole thing is a scam from the very, very beginning.
Palestinians are not threatening Israeli lives.
How many Israelis were killed during the time, the Great March of Return in the last year where 300 Palestinians were killed and 15,778 Palestinians were wounded?
How many Israelis at that border, in that particular clash, were killed or even wounded?
Zero.
Zero.
Yet when you watch the news, you get the exact wrong impression.
Israeli leaders, Israeli officials, Israeli ministers, Israeli spokespersons all over American television say, we are doing what any civilized country would do.
We are defending our border.
The hordes are trying to destroy the Jewish state.
And people, uh-huh, uh-huh, and then they just shake their heads as if it makes perfect sense, but it makes zero sense.
You see, and when someone comes and exposes all of this, believe me, not a lot of people have the intellectual integrity to come and say, my goodness, haven't I been wrong on this?
Okay, from now on, I will revisit my entire belief system.
A lot of people, because of, you know, issues of egos, because of the fear that if you abandon this particular belief, what other belief system that you have had wrong and embraced wrong your entire life?
So it's scary.
And I know I met many of these people throughout my career speaking in person, and, you know, and they are afraid.
They are afraid that they are the, and then they try to find compromises sometimes as their way of trying to bridge the gap between the new facts that they are learning and their belief system that they have embraced all of their lives.
It takes a long time, and I think it takes particular kind of intellectual courage to really take responsibility for yourself and for our world and just to really call things the way they are.
You know what?
Greenwald and them have been doing the tour of the media, talking about, you know, how they were right all along about Russiagate, which is great, and which they were.
And one of the things Greenwald is saying is, because they are asking him, but you are some kind of progressive or something, so how could you take this position?
What could possibly possess you to get this right?
The burden is on him to explain what explains this weirdness of him that he was outside of the thing.
And he was saying, look, this isn't really a partisan or ideological question.
It's an empirical question, right?
And that's the same thing here.
Or whether you like brown people better or white people better or any kind of silly thing like that.
This is an empirical matter.
Who's occupying who?
Who kicked who out of whose homes?
Who are living terrible lives, deprived lives in refugee camps here, there, and the other place?
And who's living it up on land that they stole?
This is not a matter of whose side you're on.
You could be from Timbuktu or from, you know, from, I don't know, Upper Mongolia and not be able to think of a partisan interest to take a side anywhere and still say, well, look, you know, this army is occupying this civilian population.
You know, oh, and they're colonizing it too.
They're moving settlers in and stealing all the property.
And so this brings us now to the current Israeli politics here.
And I don't know exactly whether this is true or not, but Netanyahu is saying if he's reelected, which I think we all assume he probably will be, here in just the coming days, that there will never be a Palestinian state.
He's reiterated that.
And he's said he's going to go ahead and annex some, at least, begin annexing officially the settlements, the so-called settlements, the colonies on the West Bank, just as he's gotten away with now on the Golan Heights.
And I think he will.
I think most likely he will get elected unless there is like this massive surprise at the end.
But I think he will carry through with this.
I mean, this could be dismissed as like, well, you know, just elections hogwash and who keeps track afterwards.
But if we understand what's happening in the larger political context, the fact that the U.S. has actually recognized Jerusalem, all of it as Israel's capital, contrary to international law, the fact that they just acknowledged a couple of weeks ago, the de facto reality imposed by Israel on the annexation of the Golan Heights, the Syrian-occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory, the fact that you have voices throughout Israel right now demanding the annexation of the entirety of the West Bank, and the fact that the Israeli society as a whole, really more or less kind of moved to the right-wing arena.
And now the whole ideology of Israel is being redefined.
Well, so we have to keep in mind that Israeli society is changing as a whole in terms of its political ideology.
The fact that Avigdor Lieberman, for example, when he first entered into the mainstream political arena, we used to say, my goodness, Israel is changing.
Look at this man.
He is a whole new breed of right-wing politics.
He is an ultra-nationalist.
He's an ultra-right.
And yet, new characters arrived to the scene that pushed him further to the center or, you know, to kind of like, as if he's a traditional right-wing conservative, despite the fact that Avigdor Lieberman hasn't changed.
But what has changed is the entire paradigm in which Israel is measured.
So you have Lapid, and you have Elad Shakid, and you have Bennett and others who are so insanely extremist.
I mean, someone like Shakid, for example, where she regularly calls for the killing of Palestinian children and their mothers, you know, the mothers of the little snakes, she calls them.
And she is the minister of justice in Israel.
And that is completely mainstream Israeli politics.
So when you have this reality, and this is the new Israel, and the fact that the Trump administration would support Israel in any way at this point, so why wouldn't Netanyahu annex most settlements, at least settlements that are located within the Israeli so-called separation wall, actually the apartheid wall, because most of it is built on Palestinian land anyway.
Why wouldn't he do that?
From a political point of view, it makes perfect sense that this is the right opportunity because nobody is going to say no to him, and he will become even more and more popular within this insanely right-wing society.
And the Palestinians cannot really do much about it as far as their leadership is concerned.
Yeah, there was a quote where Netanyahu was asked, well, geez, what do you think the Americans will say?
And he says, well, we'll see how they react, or we'll see how he reacts about Trump, something like that, along those lines.
So, and now this is the big deal.
And this is, you know, kind of where we started here about the one state or two or this or that.
If there ever was going to be a two-state solution, those days have passed.
And I think we're agreed that certainly since the death of Rabin, and I agree with Jeremy Hammond in his great book, Obstacle to Peace, that, you know, even Rabin's version of a two-state solution was itself amounted essentially to a hoax or something that, you know, shouldn't have been stood for either.
But so now we're in a situation where if Netanyahu, we can certainly take it to the bank when he says there will always just be one security force from the river to the sea in the land of Israel and this kind of thing.
It's certain that they're never going to give up the West Bank.
Oh, just Area C, which is two-thirds of it, as he laughed about how he got over on Bill Clinton on that secretly recorded tape where he said, you know, American support is absurd because of how easily moved it is.
Yeah, I told Bill Clinton, well, we just have to hold on to Area C.
It's two-thirds of the West Bank, sucker.
But anyway, so that much is true.
But then so, you know, more and more people are coming up against the reality.
This is among people who understand who's occupying who and what's going on here at all, that it is, quote unquote, at least too late for a two-state solution.
There will never be an independent Palestine.
The Israeli government just won't let them have their own security force.
Full stop, as Netanyahu says.
And also all the land's already been colonized, all those hilltops where Israeli Jews are, you know, civilians are protected by the Israeli military and all that.
They're never going back on that.
So it seems like, as you convinced me a long time ago, now is really the time for all the Palestinian factions to agree that they want Israeli citizenship.
They want one man, one vote, and like Martin Luther King, Brown versus Board of Education, and no taxation, no security force without representation.
Thomas Paine said so.
And this is what we're doing is just—and then go for the full—we want the vote.
And that's it, right?
Frame it in American civil rights terms.
And, you know, of course, I mean, this is precisely what's going to happen.
We were moving towards that moment for a long time.
If you look back at history, not historiography, not the way that we were fabricating history, but really what was happening on the ground, in reality we were moving in that direction.
Every day we were moving with that direction.
Every Israeli wall, every new Israeli checkpoint, every new Israeli military plan, settlement, colony, wall, whatever you want to call it, everything was moving towards that direction, that Israel was not about to concede anything to the Palestinians whatsoever.
Now, that's where history and reality contradict or clashes with media fabrications, because while that is happening, never stopped happening, not for a second, not for a minute, while that's happening we are talking about something strangely different.
We are meeting in Madrid and Oslo and Paris and Rome and New York and Camp David, and we were talking about, you know, yes, things are happening.
There are new signs that show that peace is possible and the two-state solution is a step closer.
And these countries that are recognizing Palestine, sadly, belatedly, now are also helping the Palestinian leadership contribute to this illusion.
I'm not saying that it's wrong for them to recognize Palestine.
No, I like that validation.
It really means that everything that Israel and the U.S. have done to twist the arm of the international community is failing.
And the international community is saying, no, we don't agree with that.
We still stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
But as a political solution, it's not feasible anymore.
It wasn't feasible 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
Why should it be feasible now?
But, you know, what really saddens me is the fact that we are allowing Netanyahu to determine the fact that the two-state solution will not happen.
If we are making him take the steps first and force us into a situation where say, see, we told you, nothing, no such thing as two-state solutions.
Let's change the entire strategy on the entire Palestinian strategy.
And let's call for equality and an equal vote in one unified, single, secular state.
Now, I know that this is what's going to happen.
This is what you know, the new momentum is going to head towards that direction.
But why didn't we wake up to this reality earlier instead of wasting all of these years?
It's because of that two-state hoax.
Yeah, that Oslo hoax.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Now, listen, if I can just make a recommendation, just because this is how it works on my ear here.
I think even the way you said it is too complicated from a strictly make your point point of view.
And this is exactly what we're talking about anyway, essentially, is we want Israeli citizenship, not a single state.
The state is already there.
They've already annexed the West Bank.
They annexed the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967.
Whether they call it that or not, it has been the land of Israel, the country, the state of Israel all this time, just with nearly half the population in total subjugation.
And so that, I think, is really the key to making it very concrete and making it very simple and easy for any even brand new person to the subject to understand.
They want Israeli citizenship because they are subjects of the state of Israel.
Let me clarify that.
That's not exactly the way that we see it within the one-state camp, which is gaining a great deal of momentum.
We understand that two things would have to happen in order for one states to become a reality.
Number one, Zionism as a concept that gives ascendancy to Jews over everybody else does not work.
This is an archaic concept, comes from fascist eras.
We are all equal, Jews, Arabs, Christian, Muslims.
We are all equal, and we need to be treated equally.
It means that the Zionist project will have to be completely removed.
And we understand that no matter what the reality is, Zionism is still strong in Israel, and it's not going to be easy to defeat it.
And that's going to be the nature of our struggle.
On the Palestinian front, the Palestinian authority, the Palestinian leadership that has really been entirely predicated on the concept of the two-state solutions itself would have to be altered, if not at all removed from the scene.
So we are, yes, we have a simple clarity regarding the future, that there can never be justice in that piece of land unless we're all treated equal according to a new social contract and a new political paradigm in which we are all equal, we are all treated equal, we are all responsible and accountable under the law.
But for that to happen, you have major obstacles that would have to be overcome.
And I am not undermining these obstacles, but I'm also not saying that it's impossible.
It happened.
It happened in many parts of the world.
It happened in South Africa in the recent past, and it will happen in Palestine.
But we have to be so very clear on what we want to achieve.for $5 a month, and you will get access to my private Reddit group.
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I absolutely agree with everything you just said.
And I still think that the way I said it still stands as far as how to approach it.
That essentially, you know, you could call white supremacy in Mississippi a form of Zionism or whatever for argument's sake.
And then the we want equal rights and equal citizenship in Missouri.
It doesn't really necessarily argue that point.
It argues around that point.
Right.
We want our equal rights.
It's sort of so it's sort of not saying necessarily it's not.
It's sort of arguing around the question of whether about Zionism itself and whether Israeli Jews have the right to be there.
You're not saying they don't.
You never did say they don't.
You said they didn't have the right to steal property and live in somebody else's house and this kind of thing and that the Palestinians have just as much rights as they do.
And so that's why it seems to me by phrasing it as Brown versus Board of Education separate is inherently unequal.
And we want the right to vote and we want full Israeli citizenship because that is the state that exists now.
It essentially bypasses all those old arguments.
And it just makes it a simple matter of equal treatment because it sounds like when you say in a one state or where it sounds like now we've got to change the name and everything.
And maybe the Jews will have to leave and which you're not saying.
But the idea is kind of raised.
Right.
Whereas if you just say, look, we just want Israeli citizenship because essentially we are Israelis.
We just don't have citizenship.
Then that makes it so simple for the average Joe, you know, and it's perfectly technically right, I think.
But it's actually not that simple because we are not demanding Israeli citizenships.
I know, but that's what I'm saying you should do.
Well, first things first, pal.
I mean, don't get me wrong.
I'm all in favor.
We could do a whole show about that.
We've done them in the past and that's a hugely important point.
But I'm just saying for people who essentially have no civil rights whatsoever in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, you know, we shall overcome in stages.
This would be a pretty big one.
This is really essential part of the conversation.
And I really think that.
And look, I'm just some white guy from Austin.
What the hell do I know?
But still.
No, not at all.
In fact, you know, great deal.
And really, you're very impressive in terms of the research that you do and the nature of the questions.
But, you know, one thing we have to keep in mind that Palestinians, even though they don't have a state on the ground, have a refined sense of nationhood and a refined sense of identity.
And I think for a lot of people, even if they see it as impractical to come and say there will never be a Palestinian state.
This is not and this is going to be as hard for them, if not even harder than for Israelis to come and say, listen, you are not going to dominate the political sphere anymore and you have to treat everybody like equal.
It's actually going to be quite harder for Palestinians to accept the fact that their dream of a Palestine and a Palestinian sense of nationhood has disappeared.
So I think I think it would be I think that the premise that we agreed on and that is of equal, you know, equal rights and an equal state that still stands.
But the formulation of how that comes about, it is something that that I think will take perhaps a generation to actually work it out.
And I think that there are many ventures out there and I'm involved in some of them in which we are trying to kind of get the foundation, the intellectual foundation and the political foundation of this new idea.
We are trying to figure it out and we are being very, very careful with the kind of wording we use.
Yeah.
All right.
So now back to the the poor Gazans, because, you know, I don't know.
I think we've maybe talked about this before.
I read it.
The 972 Mag, which are, you know, leftist pro-peace Israeli Jews.
They one time had a essay.
I think it was a former soldier, IDF soldier who wrote that, you know, a good way to understand it would be that the West Bank is sort of a minimum security prison, whereas the Gaza Strip is a maximum security prison.
And maybe one that's kind of had a riot and the guards have always drawn to the outside, but it's still a prison.
And so, you know, this is something that they sure as hell don't show on TV.
And I don't know if I even really give you a chance very often to talk about just what is life like for the average guy and gal in the Gaza Strip right now, because it's something that I think if Americans really had a fair chance to judge the facts here, they might choose the side of right.
Well, how about this?
I have a sister who work who lives in Gaza.
She's a doctor.
And I can give you kind of like some idea about what her life is like.
For 12 years, she wasn't allowed to leave.
This is a doctor and an accomplished one who hasn't been allowed by Israel, never been granted the permission to leave anywhere for a conference or for a vacation, of course, or to see family members at all.
She hasn't seen any of her brothers who are living.
Most of them are living about an hour away in the West Bank to see them for the last 12 years.
So her nephews and nieces were children.
Now they are graduates from university.
Some are married with children and she hasn't seen any of them.
Psychologically, the pressure is just incredible.
You feel you are trapped.
You can't go anywhere.
You can't do anything.
Your life is at this state of arrested development and you're stuck.
But also her children.
Most of them graduated from universities.
And if they are lucky, one of them managed to actually escape Gaza.
She went to South Africa.
She got married to a Palestinian gentleman there.
And her mom, of course, she had to say goodbye at the Egypt-Gaza border, knowing that she's not going to see her for years and years and years.
And you don't know if ever.
And now, I'm sorry, can you clarify real quick about why this is an escape and not just she moved?
Because if you are allowed to leave, it's almost impossible to come back.
And allowed to leave by who?
You know, so there is an office that kind of basically a liaison office between Egypt and the Gaza government.
Egypt has been really more or less kind of part of the siege on Gaza.
We don't speak about it sometimes because maybe it complicates the issue.
Sometimes it's whatever.
I'm just being pressed for time.
But yeah.
But wait, so I mean, it's implicit what you're saying here, but I want to go ahead and say it explicitly.
They're not allowed to travel through Israeli quote unquote borders there.
Exactly what you mean by that.
They have no legit seaport or airport.
They cannot travel to the outside world except through Egypt.
Is that what you're saying?
Exactly.
Except through Egypt and Egypt coordinates with the Israelis, with the Palestinian Authority and makes life extremely difficult.
So you could have people going for treatment, cancer treatment.
And I've seen them.
I was there a few years ago at the border trying to get to Gaza myself.
And you see this huge camp of people.
Many of them are very ill cancer patients lying on the hard floor in their jackets, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks to eat, to be allowed to get back to Gaza.
That's why when you leave Gaza, you would be out of your mind to come back unless whatever mission you went out for is achieved.
So if you are going there to do your degree, don't come.
Don't even try to come back for four or five, six years, because if you do, you might never be allowed to go and finish.
And a lot of people, a lot of students have their future completely destroyed because they made the terrible mistake of coming back.
So and, you know, my sister is able to purchase things.
She has, you know, because she is a doctor and she gets paid.
But a lot of people can't.
You have the poverty rate in Gaza is over 50 percent.
An employment rate in Gaza is almost 60 percent.
So you have a situation there where people are literally a lot of people are homeless because they lost their homes in the Israeli wars, 2008, 9, 12 and 14.
And these homes were never rebuilt again.
Because Israel did not does not allow enough cement to enter the Gaza Strip.
Even the fishermen in Gaza just yesterday, there was a fisherman who were killed by an Israeli military boat for trying to get to an area in which they were allowed to fish.
Forty thousand Palestinian fishermen work in the sea, but they are almost in a constant state of Israeli war because because of the fact that you have Israeli boats.
I actually the first day I was in Gaza in 2012, I opened the window to my hotel and it was right on the beach.
And you see this this Israeli military navy basically lining up the horizon.
And you have all these poor fishermen all gathered in tiny little ponds here and there trying to catch something.
You feel like this is not someone going to fish.
That's a state of war.
And there are so many other manifestations that there's just not enough time to communicate.
It's essentially it's one of those places quite literally, but it almost really makes drives the whole point home.
It's one of those places featured in the Save the Children ads where the poor, desperate poverty is.
There's just no way out for these people because they're living essentially as refugees.
And there and this is withdrawal of the Israeli settlers there in 2005.
Ironically, they were serving in a way as shields for the Palestinians as long as they were there trespassing.
But now that they're out of the way, the place has turned essentially into a prison.
I mean, they talk about the Gaza Strip like it's a border.
It's the border of Israel.
But if it's the border of Israel, then what do you call it on the other side?
Then is that Palestine or not?
It's not.
Or it is, you know, de facto, but certainly not de jure.
So what the hell?
You know, it's got to be both ways always.
Right.
And that takes us back to the very, very first point that you raised, Scott.
The march of return, the march of return, then it's those people who feel entrapped, denied, denied any and not just their freedom.
But they feel like this psychologically they are breaking down.
And then they decide in one specific day to march to the fence, separating them from Israel and and just sit there.
And they have been sitting there for the last year.
Sometimes the protests are only a few thousand, sometimes like last March 30th when they commemorated the first anniversary of the march.
It was it was near several hundred thousands of people at the border.
And we are not leaving until this nightmare ends.
You know, so it's kind of people reclaiming their identity, reclaiming their power, reclaiming their political initiative.
We're not docile in all of this.
We are not hapless victim.
We can stand and still take a stance despite, you know, all these years trying to break us down and push us to the margins of victimhood.
You know, so I this is why I think that the march of return is not just a normal protest.
There's something extremely sentimental about it.
And psychologically, it really is helping Gaza cope by pushing the people back into into the equation that we we factor.
We are something.
And, you know, and you need to pay attention to us.
You know, I guess I've lived a pretty charm life because I don't know.
I've known some people who've lived some really hard times, but I can't think of any time I've ever met someone whose spirit was just broken.
I don't know what that really looks like.
But I know that the Israeli strategy is to make the Palestinians essentially just give up and shut up.
And yet that keeps not happening.
And if you think of that in terms of, you know, an actual police slash military strategy, you know, sort of like in Vietnam.
At some point, we'll drop enough bombs on the north that they'll stop backing the south.
No, it's just not true.
You'll you'll drop those bombs.
All right.
But they're not going to give in.
And the same kind of thing here.
And it's just on one level, it seems silly to think that the Palestinians are just going to what?
Roll over, give in like a, you know, a beagle in a cage, you know, or something like.
And and they don't.
And what would we do?
Any American town, like any American listening to this, whatever town you're from, the people, your town.
And even if you really disrespect the people in your town, I think they'd really give in and roll over and let a foreign army come and kick all y'all right out of your land and take it all at once.
And that you just sit there and take that.
I'm a Texan and I speak for all Texans, even ones who just moved here yesterday.
That as long as they bought their land or rented it peacefully, we wouldn't stand for that for one second.
And we'd all share rifles with each other to make sure, too, that we could drive them out effectively.
No question about that.
It's silly to even bring it up.
Who could ever take Texas from the Texans or Colorado from the people from Colorado?
Coloradoans?
No.
Is that what they call them?
Coloradoans?
Let's pretend that this is the case.
Yeah, I mean, so I guess they can take it, but they certainly couldn't make us give up.
You know, that's what I'm trying to say.
And yeah, and that's important.
I'm glad you say about the spirit there of these people.
And you know what?
Let's get back to those casualties because we've got medics shot with big red crosses or red crescents, I guess, on their shirts or this kind of thing.
We've had reporters targeted and we've had, you know, it seems like they're specifically targeting young people with wounds to the legs to cripple them for life, which I guess is better than getting your head blown off.
But still, it's pretty sadistic when you look at it that way.
Right.
I mean, just the idea.
I think there was an article about this in The New York Times.
But why is Israel trying to create a generation of crippled in Gaza?
And I think I think the reason is because really, if you look at the numbers, I mean, over 15,000 wounded, but thousands of them are maimed permanently.
And also, let's keep in mind the fact that that Gaza's hospitals are horrible.
I mean, they are in horrific conditions.
You know, they were barely functioning before any of this happened.
So imagine now.
But there is something.
The Washington Post has an article about it that I was critical of.
And I think the article was published in Antiwar.com in which they kind of basically found a couple of Palestinians who lost their legs.
And they had them say, I don't know really how proper the quotes were taken.
But one of them was said something like, what is this?
You know, what what did we lose our legs for?
For nothing.
The march of return achieved nothing.
And I kind of doubt the integrity, really, of the of the interviewees.
I mean, the the interviewers, because, you know, Gazans don't speak this way.
I mean, you lost your leg anyway.
So why should you declare that it was for nothing?
Usually people in when they go through this kind of horrific situations, they try to find a narrative that that, you know, gives them a sense of meaning and value to their sacrifice.
But but say, for example, that they indeed have done that.
I think this is what Israel wants to achieve.
They want thousands of maimed people in the streets of Gaza where people say, how did you lose your leg?
In what war?
Oh, I lost it in the march of return.
And look at us.
We achieved nothing.
That's the idea.
But the fact is, if you look at the pictures from the march of return, check out Palestine Chronicle dot com.
We usually have regular photos coming from there.
We have a reporter there every single day.
And if you look at the pictures, you will find that many of the protesters are on crutches.
Many of them have no legs.
So they get.
And some of the people I interviewed, there was a gentleman who got shot three times, lost a leg.
And eventually he was killed by the Israelis.
But every time he would get discharged from the hospital, he would take a taxi and he would go back to the border.
So this is not a nation that's going to be giving up any time soon.
And you know what?
Even if some poor wounded guy muttered something about, oh, geez, I kind of wish I hadn't gone that day or whatever.
That's still you can tell your point still stands that they're setting an agenda with this narrative.
They're setting a narrative here that this is how the Palestinians feel.
They all regret that they ever tried to stand up for themselves.
And at least if that doesn't convince the Palestinians, it's at least supposed to convince us that they don't mind so much.
I remember Chomsky saying and this was when I was too young and not paying near enough attention way back then.
But I remember Chomsky characterizing the reaction to the first Intifada, which was, huh?
Just total surprise.
Why would these what do they have to complain about?
I thought everything was totally hunky dory over there.
And no one no one had really told that side of the story at all.
If there was anything for the Palestinians to rebel about, I thought that they were all perfectly happy and let them eat cake and stuff.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And it doesn't surprise me, I guess this mindset still there.
You know, I don't think that all Israelis are this, you know, kind of have this kind of wicked mindset that, you know, that they know that what they are doing to the Palestinians is quite evil and violates international law and all of this.
But we are going to do it anyway and pretend that we're not doing it.
I think there are many Israelis and, you know, those those who kind of wake up at one point and the you know, and I have I do have several Israeli friends who kind of been on that Zionist camp at one point in the past.
You always get that thing where we really it's like it's like you are living in a whole new, different dimension.
It's like you see the Palestinians, but they are invisible to you.
You don't see their pain.
You don't see their suffering.
You don't you don't you you don't think of yourself as an evil doer of any kind.
And that's what Zionism has done to the Israeli mindset.
It's just this idea that you are too superior to even bother understand what what your actions may may may cause, what kind of damage, what kind of harm to people.
And then when they look back, it's like, but how could we not have seen it?
It was right there in front of us.
But it's like subconsciously we're hiding it like you don't want to see it.
And they are going to carry on with this illusion for as far for as long as it takes.
But I tell you this, Scott, this is not a sustainable political, social, cultural project.
There is not one single historical evidence to suggest that this kind of racism, apartheid, perpetual war, you know, political dysfunction can carry on for eternity.
There's going to be a point where there's going to be a breaking point and things will change.
I think you're right.
And, you know, I know from my own experience in all of my learnings about politics, domestic and foreign and all over the place, I put this one off to last just because it seems so complicated and so full of opinions.
And what all am I going to read to finally figure this out and this kind of thing and what have you?
And then I guess luckily by circumstance at the dawn of Iraq War II and the terror war, I was reading a lot of antiwar.com and had a lot, you know, access to a lot of great takes on Israel-Palestine from there.
So I didn't ever, you know, I guess I had the most vague kind of bias toward the Israelis that any average American media consumer would have.
But it was certainly, it was sort of like reading up about corruption in the medical industry, which I know is huge, right?
The FDA and big pharma and all this stuff.
I know it's a giant thing, but I just postponed looking into that topic because it was such a big thing and it was kind of off topic for me for a minute.
That kind of, I looked at Israel-Palestine the same way.
I put it off, put it off.
And I think that's one of the biggest propaganda myths of all, is that this is really too complicated for you to bother with, dude.
You know, everybody claims God's on their side and it's all of this big mess and it's all far away.
And if you don't already really have a side that you have a reason to pick, then you don't really have a reason to know too much at all.
And they're never going to explain here's the map on TV in a simple way for you to understand.
You'd have to really start reading about it and stuff.
And so it's sort of, it demands that extra commitment to study that the average person kind of, and it actually doesn't, but it seems like it does.
That's the narrative is this isn't really for you.
This is really for people who have a bone to pick in it or are real experts, you know, like banking.
Oh, it's all a very complicated mystery.
You don't need to look into how this works, you know.
So that, I think that helps to cover a lot.
But then again, the opposite of that is once people start to learn about it.
So, hey, you know what, that, that common narrative wasn't so true after all, which shouldn't be that surprising really, should it?
Right.
Yeah.
Anyway, I'm just ranting and raving all over your interview, but it's just because I agree with you so much.
That's great.
Hey, listen, you do such great work.
And I'm always excited when I see a new Ramzi Baroud article in my email box and have the opportunity to run you at Antiwar.com and interview you on the show all about it.
And really appreciate your perspective a lot, Ramzi.
Take it easy, dude.
Thank you.
Thank you for all the work that you guys do at Antiwar as well.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's Ramzi Baroud, The Last Earth, a Palestinian story.
And before that, my father was a freedom fighter.
Gaza's untold story.
Check out Ramzi Baroud at Antiwar.com and of course at PalestineChronicle.com and RamziBaroud.net.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, Antiwar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
