04/12/13 – M.J. Rosenberg – The Scott Horton Show

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For Pacifica Radio, April 12, 2013.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Friday from 6.30 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
And you can find my whole interview archive, more than 2,700 interviews now, going back 10 years to today, April 12, 2003, at ScottHorton.org.
You can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slashScottHortonShow.
And our guest tonight is the great M.J. Rosenberg, now writing for The Washington Spectator.
Welcome to the show, M.J. How are you doing?
Okay, how are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Alright, so now, looks like it's the same piece here that ran at the Huffington Post, where people can also read you, I think, here, right?
No Chance of Peace with Netanyahu, Time for Obama to Push Back.
Is that the same piece?
That's the same piece, yep.
Alright, now, so we got really, you know, like 20 minutes, so I really want to give you a chance to tell this history.
Because this is very important, if people want to rewind back to the unipolar moment at the end of the Cold War, and the ultimate power of America under the George H.W. Bush administration.
And James Baker III, who, face it, is one of the most powerful Sith Lord rulers of the American Empire of all, right?
He's a lawyer for Standard Oil in New Jersey, right?
Yeah, and he helped them steal the 2000 election.
He was a lawyer.
Yeah, I mean, this is a guy who could have you killed if he wanted, kind of a guy, right?
Yeah, right, so let's be nice to him.
Yeah, yeah, well, or at least, you know, I think the context is important, especially for the young who maybe didn't get to live through, you know, this period of time, I understand.
I remember the Gulf War pretty well.
I was about 14 or 15 in 9th grade, right around then.
But I never heard of Yitzhak Shamir.
I didn't know anything about America's relationship with Israel, for example.
So I learned a lot just reading this thing myself.
So here's the story, basically, is that once the, you know, at the very end of Ronald Reagan's term, one of the very last things that Reagan did, and actually it was the doing of his Secretary, then Secretary of State, George Shultz, was recognize the PLO.
It was the first time that the United States agreed to basically in any way, shape, or form to deal with the PLO, which was kind of amazing, because basically it was against the law.
The AIPAC had written legislation that banned any contacts with the PLO, and somehow Shultz either ignored it or got them.
As I've often said, if you fight them, they'll cave, and especially when it's Republicans, because they're scared of Republicans.
So he recognized the PLO, and the feeling of the Bush administration almost from day one was that it wanted to get some progress on the Israel-Palestinian front.
One of my strong beliefs is that the Republicans tend, the presidential Republicans tend to be better on this issue, with the exception of George W. Bush, though he's no worse than Democrats.
But Republicans in general tend to be better because of their pro-business orientation.
They're not, you know, they don't get lots of money from the AIPAC crowd.
They get all their money from business.
And business, say what you want about business, lots of these guys like the idea of getting, if not peace, no war, so they can, you know, sell things everywhere.
And that certainly means in the Middle East and maintaining the stability of the oil supply and all that.
So the way, so Bush's, the first George Bush's approach was, well, let's just get, let's take on a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians so that there isn't another war, another war there.
And all will be great for the extension of, you know, U.S. interests in that part of the world, or what they consider to be U.S. interests, without being, you know, tied down with this endless, with this onerous alliance with Israel, which makes the whole rest of the Middle East hate us.
So Bush and his secretary of state, Baker, you know, are trying to get the Israeli prime minister, who is a, he's the second Likud prime minister.
The first one was, was Malcolm Bacon, and the second one was Yitzhak Trumir, who succeeded him, to try to get him to agree to allow indirect negotiations, like that the United States will talk to the Palestinians, or at least some Palestinians.
And then Israel could join these indirect negotiations, and we'd get some progress, and maybe it would ultimately lead to an end to the occupation.
Note, James Baker does not like Israel.
There's just no question about that.
In fact, he very famously said, I mean, he might be kind of anti-Semitic based on this statement.
He famously said once, and was heard by a congressman named Jack Kemp, who was in the room, he said, F the Jews, they didn't vote for us anyway.
So he's not, you know, he's not a nice guy.
Nonetheless, he wanted Israeli-Palestinian peace for whatever reason, and he's pushing the Israelis and making all these, but he keeps having to accommodate Shamir, who keeps coming up with ways for not negotiating.
He says, okay, well, we don't want you and not us.
We can't talk to PLO.
No talking to PLO.
We can't talk to anyone who's in any way connected with Yasser Arafat.
We can't talk to anybody who has any connections to the PLO.
We can't talk to anybody who we suspect might have under-the-cover connections with the PLO.
And we can't talk to any Palestinians from Jerusalem, because that would imply that Jerusalem is part of Palestine.
So they have all these things that they want to be accommodated on, and basically the Bush administration agreed to it because they were really eager to get these negotiations started.
So Congress, Democratic Congress in those days, was getting kind of worried because they don't like to see Israel getting pushed around by the United States, especially in a direction toward peace.
So they call a hearing, and they ask James Baker to come up to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
I was in the room.
I was a staffer.
They ask him to come up to the House Foreign Affairs Committee to explain his policies.
And he comes in, and he's Secretary of State, so it's a big deal, and everybody says nice things.
Then he says, someone asks him, well, are you going to stop picking on Israel and stop giving Israel such a hard time?
Are you ready for a restart with Shamir, because you've been giving them a hard time?
And Baker says, yeah, I am ready for a restart with Shamir.
In fact, that's what I intended to tell you.
But then I read this on the way over, and he reads aloud from this cable, which said that Israel had another stipulation, which was that any negotiations that take place can only be about autonomy for Palestinians under Israeli control.
They cannot be for what the administration wanted, which they would discuss everything with the goal of a final status agreement that would end the occupation and set up a Palestinian state and the usual.
Shamir said that's not what we want to negotiate over.
We only want to negotiate toward autonomy, and by which we mean let the Palestinians be in charge of schools, sanitation systems, garbage, and all that kind of stuff.
But we're going to be in charge of everything.
And at the end of the day, if they're good, they'll get this thing called autonomy, which means in charge of municipal services, and we get to keep everything.
So this is the thing that was so shocking.
I've never been so shocked.
He goes and he says, so I realize you cannot deal with these people.
This is impossible.
No president can negotiate under these conditions.
So I have a message for the Israelis.
We're not going to call you.
You call us.
We're out of this business.
When you're serious about peace, get in touch.
And then he very dramatically says, President Bush's phone number is 120-456-1414.
Until then, we're done.
Well, the room exploded.
I mean, the House Foreign Affairs Committee is dominated by people who are, like, really crazy pro-Israel, because nobody else really wants to be on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
You can't deliver for your district, so you get lots and lots of the Jewish members who go on there, and everybody who goes on there basically has to get AIPAC's approval.
I'm talking about the Democrats again.
Especially in those days, Republicans didn't matter.
They matter very little now on this issue, in fact, with all the Democrats.
So these Democrats started screaming and going crazy and everything, but the session ended.
Actually, I've got to say, it was really amazing, because they called him really terrible names.
It was totally disrespectful, just what you'd kind of expect, because everybody wanted to posture against Baker for daring to say that.
Anyway, so they froze out.
They froze out Shamir completely.
And then what they did behind the scenes, and there's plenty of documentation on this, is they decided to get rid of him.
Not like they do in Latin America or Iran or other places where they've done this.
They did it using the election process, and what they did was they took a number of actions that would weaken Shamir with the Israeli public, and Bush then, in 1992, flat out was saying, you know, he said, you know, they kept sending messages they don't like this Israeli government, and then George Bush himself said on camera that he was sick and tired of having the Israeli lobbyists running all over Capitol Hill trying to outflank him.
He said, I'm just one lonely guy, and there are thousands of these lobbyists up there.
So, I mean, nobody ever did anything like this before, and the Israelis got scared, the Israeli population, and they elected as prime minister, they dumped Shamir, and they put in Rabin to indicate how much he was the candidate of Bush.
The day he was elected, he was invited to go to Kennebunkport, Maine, which is the private home of Bush, which nobody ever gets invited to.
And so he's standing there, you know, next to the President of the United States within hours of being elected.
It was basically, Rabin is our boy, and then Rabin went ahead and, you know, with the breakthrough of Oslo and all that, and Shamir went.
Shamir later said, he said he was really sorry that he didn't get re-elected because his whole plan on this autonomy was to stretch out negotiations for 10 years, and then by then we'd have 500,000 settlers on the West Bank, and we wouldn't have to worry about anything.
Well, there are almost 500,000 settlers now, so he got what he wanted.
Now, the reason I tell this whole story is because now Netanyahu, who was Shamir's protege and fair-haired boy, and in those days he was fair-haired and handsome, he was America's favorite Israeli, because he looked like a movie star.
He was their U.N. ambassador, I think.
Well, now he's the prime minister, and he's taken a page out of Shamir's book, and his administration told Kerry, who's over there doing some peacemaking, just like Baker did, though probably not nearly as courageously, they just told Baker that they are not interested in final status talks.
They don't think that the main issue is borders.
They don't think the main issue is the occupation.
They think there are more important issues, like the Palestinians recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, and blah, blah, blah, which, of course, I mean, it's great, because basically Netanyahu was just saying, we're not interested in peace at all, ever, ever, ever, because if it's not about borders, if it's not about who controls the land, well, what in God's name is it about?
Of course that's what it's about.
It's been about that since 1948.
So now you have Netanyahu just flat out saying, you know, I'll do the same thing as my old buddy Shamir did.
I'll just prolong the negotiations forever.
And I think the difference is, not to jump to the end of the story before I know it, but the difference is that Barack Obama is not nearly as gutsy as George H.W. Bush was on this stuff, and John Kerry is not going to be James Baker.
But who knows, I could be surprised.
But that was my story of this week.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, Netanyahu, too, he has his own experience to go back on, too, because when he was prime minister the first time, after Rabin got his bullet, which was the solution to that problem for the settler movement, Netanyahu, he's already had experience in strong-arming the Americans, and I think probably if you compare Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, Barack Obama's no Bill Clinton, either.
Although I wouldn't give Clinton the stature that Bush Sr. had.
Bill Clinton never went any further than the Israelis wanted him to go.
Pardon me?
Bill Clinton never went any further than the Israelis ever wanted him to go, either.
Yeah, no, no, yeah, I wouldn't say that he did.
He was a bit more self-confident in whatever it was he was doing than Obama, who just seems a lot easier to push around no matter what.
Yeah, but the thing about that, you know, Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton did kind of, you know, he did some good things, like he went to Gaza.
He spoke at the parliament in Gaza.
I mean, it's inconceivable to think of a president doing that.
And he never was as nauseating in his language about Israel as this president is.
You know, I have this kind of like a theory about Obama.
I mean, it's like a wish almost.
He goes to Israel, and all he does is mal-Israeli propaganda.
He does what I call Hebrew school propaganda.
Very unsophisticated.
Israel is the biblical home, and Abraham is the father, and all this stuff.
And it's almost like he's saying, this is what the lobby makes me do.
This is who owns this country's foreign policy.
Clinton was a much more subtle friend of the lobby.
He gave them everything they wanted, but he didn't make it so blatant like Obama.
I can't really figure Obama out, except one thing I am willing to guess.
He doesn't give a damn about Israel or the Palestinians.
What he cares about is going the path of least resistance that will keep money flowing to the Democratic Party.
Yeah, I mean, I'm a bit puzzled by Obama even trying to make a big deal out of this thing at all.
I mean, the Clinton path is mostly to just put it all off until the end of your second term and then fail.
That's mostly what George W. Bush did, too.
Right after the lobby faced him and Colin Powell down right after September 11th, they went ahead and went for the Clinton policy, which is just ignore it.
Right.
I don't know why.
I would have thought that after Obama made that embarrassing trip to Israel, he'd just say, okay, I can just cross Israel off the list of things he has to do.
But he's really scared that they're going to attack Iran.
So he's sort of like appeasing them, like a child.
He's really trying to make sure they don't hit his sister again.
He's just giving them lots of brownies to eat and just keeping busy for a while.
He keeps, you know, so he's always, well, of course, all he would have to do is, this is just crazy about Republicans and Democrats, all he would have to do with Iran is do exactly what George W. Bush did at the end of his term, which was saying, if you do it, you're doing it alone, we don't have your back.
He did that, got away with it, and there was no attack during his term.
Obama feels that he has to, you know, just do everything they want, as if they could attack without us, which they can't.
Obama seems not to understand, in general, in his dealings with anyone adversarial in any way, who holds the cards and who doesn't.
He only seems to think that the other side holds the cards.
But in dealings between the United States and Israel, the United States holds the cards.
We have a superpower.
It's our money.
I mean, $3 billion in aid a year.
Why does he think he has to appease them when all he has to say is, you will not attack Iran on my watch?
That's all.
Let me ask you about the history of George Bush Sr.'s unelection in 1992.
Because, I guess as you said, well, as Baker said, the lobby and their acolytes aren't really, at least back then, aren't really Republicans anyway, so what difference does it make?
But then again, I've heard the claim made, too, that the lobby mobilized hardcore against Bush Sr.and for Bill Clinton in order to unseat Bush Sr., in the same way that they handle the House of Representatives.
Don't cross the lobby or they will cross you, no matter who you are.
And I wonder whether you think that was a big part of Bill Clinton's victory back in 1992.
I don't think it had anything to play with.
One, just as an indication of how that message wasn't even really sent out, the Jewish vote for Clinton was overwhelming.
It was much higher than it was for Obama.
It was around 80, not much.
I mean, Obama got like 75 percent and 70 percent, and Bill Clinton got almost 80 percent.
The money from Jews went to Clinton and not to Bush.
But this was all about every blink shows.
One, Jews are Democrats, and the Jewish money is Democratic money.
And the economy was falling apart under Bush.
Don't you remember?
We probably don't, because, as you said, you were really young.
But the thing is, everyone thought that Bush was going to win easily, but he never bothered with the economy.
All he did was foreign policy, and the economy got worse and worse and worse.
And by 1992, we're in a recession.
I think AIPAC wants everyone to think that any time there's any possibility to ascribe it to their power, they claim credit for it.
But I just don't see it.
Yeah, at the same time, they say, M.J. Rosenberg, you're an anti-Semite for saying that AIPAC has any power.
How dare you?
I know.
They do more than say that.
They go around getting people fired and everything else.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, they are the world's worst people.
I mean, I don't know if you saw this latest business of Alan Dershowitz trying to stop President Carter from speaking at Yeshiva University, because he's an anti-Semite, and he did the same thing with President Carter speaking at Brandeis University.
These are both Jewish schools.
What happened in both cases is that Dershowitz totally failed, and the students showed up, and the president got evicted.
But nonetheless, the Jewish community has these enforcers like AIPAC.
Well, Dershowitz is such a clown.
I mean, God, he must really believe his own BS to take on a former president and lose like that.
I mean, what is he doing?
I know.
But, you know, it's so funny.
The president of Yeshiva University, and that's an Orthodox school, whereas Brandeis is just Jewish-sponsored and not religious.
But the president of Yeshiva University said, well, yeah, we're having Dershowitz, but you always have to understand we see our first obligation as a university to defend Israel.
I mean, like, what?
So only this Israel First crowd, or extreme right-wingers of the general kind, don't feel honored when presidents show up at their school.
I mean, you're Americans, for God's sake.
He's a president.
It doesn't matter who the president is.
You can pick at him if you want.
It's a big deal.
The president's coming.
I mean, it's not like he's Nixon and had to resign in disgrace or anything.
I mean, he did get, you know, pretty well trounced by Ronald Reagan, but that was mostly over Volcker's interest rates, right?
Yeah, that's right.
That's true.
I think, though, the—well, you know, I think that Alan Dershowitz and his ilk, including AIPAC, will never forgive Carter for achieving that Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.
They think that that was a disaster, which it might have been for Egypt.
I don't know.
I don't know for—but actually, I don't think it was a disaster for anybody in the sense that as a result of that peace treaty, it was a disaster for the Palestinians because it was a separate peace without them being involved at all.
But for Israel, thousands and thousands of Israelis have not died in wars since— not a single Israeli, in fact.
Not a single Israeli has died in a war with Egypt or even been shot at in anger since that peace treaty that Jimmy Carter delivered at Camp David when five years before, in 1973, 3,000 Israelis were killed when Egypt attacked.
And there would have been more wars since.
I won't even mention the number of Egyptians who were saved, but they're not the ones who were denouncing Carter.
So you have this really upside-down world where Jimmy Carter, I think you can say— I would say was the most pro-Israel president the United States ever had in the sense that he saved thousands of Israeli lives.
But these right-wingers don't like that.
I think people like Alan Dershowitz like their Jews to be martyrs.
In other words, they like to talk about the Holocaust.
They like to talk about Arabs killing Jews.
They like to always raise money on that basis.
But when you have a guy like Jimmy Carter who actually saves people's lives and saves the lives of young Jews, you know, soldiers, who have mothers and sisters and kids and wives and all that, that doesn't grab them.
I think it's obscene to call Jimmy Carter an enemy of Israel.
I mean, it really is.
These people are really—they live in a bizarre world.
Well, listen, I understand that, and I understand that Alan Dershowitz is a total kook.
I mean, who knows what he really believes at all.
But you've got to enlighten me here a little bit.
You have to help me out, because there must be some kind of counterfactual as to what would be better if they did not have the peace treaty with Egypt, from Israel's point of view, better.
As you said, the people, the victims of Mubarak in Egypt have suffered greatly, but that's not the question we're dealing with here.
What could he possibly be thinking?
MJ, help.
Alan Dershowitz said that the treaty was made, was effected in spite of Carter, not because of him.
Now, I guess he assumes that none of us remember, you know, that time when Jimmy Carter not only brought, you know, first he brought them to the United States, he brought them to Camp David, he wouldn't let anyone leave until, you know, Begin and Sadat, until they ironed out the peace treaty.
And then when the guys, when these two leaders went home and there were snags, he got on a plane and went to both places and negotiated himself.
But he says, oh, his anti-Israel fervor was an obstacle.
You know, it's—you know, they always find something.
You're right, but when you said we don't know what Alan Dershowitz really thinks, yeah, I know.
I've been told that I should never mention Alan Dershowitz because he just loves being talked about.
He's this guy, he just, you know, everything with— when he hears, okay, a president's going to speak somewhere, so, okay, let's just call him anti-Semite and I can get some ink.
He's just a sicko.
Well, I'm here to tell you, fake Alan Dershowitz is the funniest guy on Twitter.
Yeah, right, except he sounds just like real Alan Dershowitz.
Yeah, exactly.
It's terrible.
I mean, but, you know, I wish Alan Dershowitz was our whole problem, but, you know, there is this lobby, there is AIPAC, which this administration just totally kisses up to around the clock, has infinitely more influence than Alan Dershowitz could have in a million years, and holds the same kind of views, and so do our Democrats in Congress.
I mean, you know, it's like, you know, we have this— Alan Grayson is probably the most progressive, or one of the most progressive Democrats down in Florida.
He said, and you can find it in Max Blumenthal's piece online, he says he gets all this information about the Middle East from AIPAC.
He calls the president of AIPAC, he said, and he named him, and he tells me what I'm supposed to be for.
You can be a progressive and still say things like that, you know, and talk that way, and be that way.
I mean, the fact of the matter is, liberals and conservatives and right— I mean, Democrats and Republicans, they are all the same on this.
I mean, it's really awful.
I'm not saying the left is the same as the right, but if it wasn't for liberals and progressives who supported Netanyahu and supported the AIPAC line, the whole thing would just collapse.
I mean, after all, Ted Cruz in a million years can't change anything in the Middle East, but, you know, Barney Frank can, that kind of thing.
Right.
Well, it's like you said about how Obama in 2009, he almost won, but then he backed off.
Yes.
That really—it doesn't take much pressure, again, when you're talking about a superpower and its satellite.
The American people, the American progressives, if they were good on this, could have their way and make a change for things.
They could force the president's hand, and he could force the Israelis' hand without much pressure at all, but nobody's got the will in the right direction to make it happen after all this time.
Change is only going to come when something bad really happens.
And then, you know, at some point at this rate, the way things are going, the Israelis are going to beg the United States to solve this problem and let the Palestinians have their state and all that, because, you know, it was always al-Qaeda, not al-Qaeda so much as, like, marxist terrorists out there, crazy terrorists, not people like the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, both of which just have no interest in global revolution.
They just want what's theirs.
I mean, Israel really has— at this point in time, it could liquidate this whole situation if it chose to, but it wants it all.
That's the whole thing.
It wants it all, and it has the United States standing behind them and saying, yes, you can have it all.
It's crazy.
Everybody, that's M.J. Rosenberg from The Washington Spectator.
That's WashingtonSpectator.org, and of course you can also read him at TheHuffingtonPost.com as well.
Thanks very much.
And follow him on Twitter.
M.J., the name J. Rosenberg.
M.J. Rosenberg.
J. Rosenberg on Twitter.
All right, thanks very much again.
Great to talk to you.
Same here.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all.
That's anti-war radio for this evening.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
You can find my full interview archive at ScottHorton.org, and you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at SlashTheScottHortonShow.
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