Matthew Hoh, a Marine veteran and former State Department official, discusses his recent activism on Palestinian rights issues; the common myths recited to Americans to keep them from learning the truth about Israeli apartheid; the new generation of Palestinian and American non-violent activist leaders; and why Gaza is shaping up to be one of history’s greatest human catastrophes.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Hey, Al Scott here.
If you've got a band, a business, a cause, or campaign, and you need stickers to help promote, check out thebumpersticker.com at thebumpersticker.com.
They digitally print with solvent ink, so you get the photo quality results of digital with the strength and durability of old style screen printing.
I'm sure glad I sold thebumpersticker.com to Rick back when he's made a hell of a great company out of it, and there are thousands of satisfied customers who agree with me too.
Let thebumpersticker.com help you get the word out.
That's thebumpersticker.com at thebumpersticker.com.
All right, y'all, Scott Horton Show, full archives at scotthorton.org, 4,400 and something interviews there, going back to 2003 for you, scotthorton.org, and all the latest stuff goes up at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow first.
You can follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow, and I'm going to record one of those Q&As today.
If you guys want to follow the Q&A show, that's all at scotthorton.org slash show, different feed, and just send me your questions on Twitter, hashtag SHSQA, or just email me scott at scotthorton.org, and I save them up and then do five or ten at a time kind of a thing, so ask me your foreign policy questions, and I'll try to straighten you out.
That's all at scotthorton.org slash show, and yeah, check out my Patreon.
All right, it's Matthew Ho.
Remember last week?
I interviewed him.
We talked all about all kinds of things, but this time, we're going to talk about Palestine.
You probably remember that back in 2009, he tried to stop Obama from doing the bogus troop surge that was guaranteed to not work in the summer of 2009.
He came out in public, and of course, Obama ignored him and escalated and lost anyway, and of course, he served in the Marine Corps in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and then was a State Department official by the time he quit and tried to stop the war in Afghanistan in 2009.
Okay, so now he's a different kinds of anti-war activist, and including, and I hadn't really realized this, Matt, how long has it been the case that you're an activist on behalf of the people of Palestine now as well?
Not very long an active activist.
I mean, certainly, I had my revelations and my understanding about what was happening with Palestine and Israel a while back.
I mean, my understanding that what Israel was doing with the occupation of Palestine has been going on for a long time.
I went to a predominantly, not predominantly, but I went to a college that had a lot of Jewish kids.
A lot of my friends in college were Jewish, and I was under this myth.
I have read Herman Wokes' The Hope, and I had this myth in me that what the experience of Israel after the war, after World War II and the foundation of Israel, this great establishment of this promised land and this occupation of this empty, barren land and this building up into this reclaimed paradise and all this mythology that we got from Herman Woke, and we got from, oh, who wrote The Exodus?
Uris.
Yeah, yeah, the young Uris, right, yeah, exactly.
My friends who were Jewish in college in the 90s were like, no, that's not true.
It's absolutely not true.
And so I had an understanding that what we were told about Israel and everything was just not the case.
And then later in life, reading, you know, becoming better informed about it, but being an actual activist or working for the Palestinian people, really not until this year, Scott, not until actually, and I would say not until I went there have I been what you would say committed to the cause and certainly haven't done anything for the people until I've been there.
And it's kind of like most things, Scott, you know, you can have the experience, you can read about it, you can understand it, you can think you have the feel for it.
You can know the statistics, you can know the details, you can watch the documentaries, you can read the books, you can understand that the Israeli military builds roads through farmer's fields, you can understand how the settlements operate, you can understand how the Palestinian people are segregated, how the apartheid system works, how the suffering that they're kept under.
But until you're actually there, until you're actually with them and you feel it, you have that visceral reaction.
It's the same as you can, the way I describe it is until you actually see child abuse or to actually see like animal abuse, right?
You don't really know what it is.
And it's the same way here in the sense that until you actually see how people are suffering, until you actually feel the occupation, until you actually are talking with people every day whose children are being taken from their homes in the middle of the night, do you actually have a real feel for what that suffering is like?
And then do you actually say, holy cow, you know, I can't just say in my op-eds that what Israel is doing is wrong.
I can't just, when I'm lecturing about what's wrong with American foreign policy, put as an aside, also we need to stop giving billions of dollars to Israel, you know, as I was doing.
So over the last bunch of years, as I would talk about American foreign policy, I would say that, you know, American foreign policy towards Israel was wrong, that the Israeli occupation of Palestine was wrong, but I wasn't doing anything more than that.
And then had this opportunity this past year, several months ago, a few months ago, to go on a delegation with Veterans for Peace to Palestine to stand with, be in solidarity with the popular resistance in Palestine.
And yeah, it was an incredible experience, very in line with experiences I've had this past year or two as well, because as Veterans for Peace, we send delegations around the world to work with various opposition groups, various resistance groups.
So this is my third such delegation.
I have been on delegations in previous months to Okinawa.
I have been with the Okinawan resistance, as well as I have been in October this year, I have been to Standing Rock and have been out with the Native American, with the Sioux resistance out at Standing Rock, have been arrested out there with the Sioux Native Americans.
And so the parallels, you know, between these various resistance movements, with between these movements that are resisting, you know, colonialism, that are resisting occupation in one form or another, was really quite striking.
But to get back to your question about how long I've been active, involved with working for the Palestinian people, yeah, not very long.
Something of course, I wish I'd come to earlier, but something I was grateful to have been able to see personally recently.
And so now, you know, once the people take you in like that, you feel dedicated towards it.
That's all to say, in terms of my personal work, and I think you would agree as well, Scott, I think with your personal work, too, my main fight, I think will always be against, you know, the US government, which I think is what your fight will always be as well too.
I still feel like that's our biggest struggle will be against the US war machine.
Yeah, well, that's the one that we're at least sort of pseudo responsible for.
I mean, they act in our name, not like we really consent in the first place.
But it's also the one that we're closest to, you know, yeah, yeah, presumably have, you know, can speak for and all that.
So I want to get back to this thing about, you know, your previous understanding.
And I like the anecdote to about how it was your Jewish friends in school who disabused you of all this mythology about Israel.
Yeah, that's, I think, probably, you know, fairly typical.
You know, you're Americans, I guess, especially non Jews are supposed to assume that all Jews put Israel first, for good or for ill, right?
If you're, if you're against Israel, then I guess you're supposed to think that and if you're for Israel, you're supposed to think that but in fact, most American Jews, well, at least like a good third of them don't even care about Israel one way or the other at all.
And then the super majority of the rest want the Israeli government and the occupation in Palestine in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in East Jerusalem to end and for the Palestinians to be treated fairly, because after all, they're civil rights liberals, they're American liberals, and they'd have to be for Jim Crow in the south if they're going to be for the occupation in the West Bank.
And so when it comes to the cognitive dissonance, they choose principle over, you know, supposed tribal loyalty or whatever kind of thing, because isn't that what you would expect from Americans?
Yeah, it's only the very richest people become very right wing.
You know what I mean?
And then that's where that's where it changes, right, then you have the very richest Jews in America who are in politics anyway, who support very right wing policies inside the Democratic and Republican parties and this kind of thing.
But that's hardly the case with, you know, quote, unquote, American Judaism or the American Jewish community or anything like that.
That's Sheldon Adelson and his peers, quite a different subject.
But so I guess the thing is, though, is I want to get back to the myth that you were just disabused of here.
And first of all, if you want, I think it's important to go back to 48 and the land without people myth.
But then secondly, and I think this is the real important thing.
Just judging by my own, you know, previous misunderstanding when I was, I guess, much younger now, but still, I think my my previous misunderstanding is basically the average Americans misunderstanding or lack of when it comes to just who is occupying who and what is the West Bank?
Is that the country next door or or you know what?
I mean, people just it's never really clear.
How can how can the Palestinians be invading with their terrorist forces all the time and be negotiating for a state of their own at the same time, too?
It sounds kind of contradictory, but nobody on TV ever explains.
So maybe you can't hear.
Yeah, you know, I mean, it is.
It's it's it's it's it's never laid out.
And then the other thing on television, of course, is you very rarely ever see.
Palestinians speaking on their behalf, it's rare and we've seen this, we've seen when organizations do studies on this, you see that the representation on television for Palestinians is incredibly low.
It's the same as for our anti-war folks or our peace, our peace people, whenever we're launching strikes into whatever country we're launching strikes into, you know, the numbers are, you know, 85, 90, 95 percent of the people who are on CNN and MSNBC and Fox and whatever are, you know, on the boards of defense corporations.
Right.
And we get Phyllis Bennis or we get somebody else, you know, on at midnight with Chris Hayes.
And that's who we get.
That's all we get.
You know, I mean, so it's the same type of thing for the Palestinians.
You know, the Israeli side gets a host of people who are speaking on behalf of the Israeli government, Israeli military, explaining why it was necessary to, you know, kill 2000 Gazans because they fired off three Katyusha rockets and no backstory about why those rockets were fired.
No backstory about, you know, how two and a half million people have been basically besieged in Gaza for 50 years.
You know, if I was kept in, you know, basically an open air prison like Gaza is for 50 years by an outside power, by a different people, I'd probably fire off a couple of rockets as well.
Let alone the fact that the Israelis shoot in the Gaza all the time themselves, which is something we never hear about.
But yeah, I mean, you do you have this this notion, you have this one of the myths that we alluded to is this thing that no one lived there before, which is which is preposterous, which is just which is just nonsense.
And and it's such a invalid claim.
And it's so easy to that's such an easy one to debunk because we have the census records from the Ottoman Empire and then from the British.
And we know that in 1880 or so, when when the Zionist movement, when when when the movement to resettle European Jews from Europe, that this this establishment of a Jewish homeland in in Palestine and in the area around Jerusalem really began, that about 800,000 people were living in that area and predominantly Arab.
They were all Arab and predominantly Muslim and some Christian.
And about one percent of them were Jewish or so.
And we have the census records.
But there's this myth that nobody was living there, you know, and you still hear this.
It's a talking point that comes from the Israeli government still.
It's a talking point that comes from American congressmen.
You know, it's a talking point that AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the big political action committee that gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to congressmen.
There's kind of alternative spin on it, too, which is OK, well, there may have been people, but there was never a nation of Palestine before.
It's a made up nation, unlike Israel, of course, which was obviously made up more recently than Palestine.
But anyway, why who said that that was ever even the question?
As you're saying, they lived there.
They owned homes there.
They still have deeds.
They show them every year on Nakba Day.
They show their house keys and their land deeds.
So who cares if they were ruled by the Ottomans or the British or the Martians?
The fact is, they're still human beings with individual property rights.
Or are we all Eastern barbarians now?
I thought this was the West where we believe that individual human beings have the right to own property.
No.
Oh, it's I mean, yeah, exactly.
That that's that that's the that's the that's the argument.
That's the way their reason that the reasoning will work is that.
And again, and then as you take apart one argument or we present one one set of facts, they throw up another one and they'll say, well, we say with this argument, there never was a Palestine or they'll say that it's amazing.
You talk to some Israelis or defenders of Israel who say the word Palestine never existed before 1967.
And you say, what are you crazy?
It's in your Torah.
It's in the Hebrew Bible.
I mean, it's Palestine was the word that Greeks and the Romans used for that.
I mean, like that was the province, you know, I mean, things will be said that are so historically inaccurate and in fact and not factual.
Well, I mean, even never even mind ancient history.
That was what the Brits called it from the time that they took it over from to the time they gave it up.
That's for sure.
Yeah, that's exactly the men and women who founded Israel, the men and women who were the founders of the state of Israel, the what when they had their British passports, that the passports called them Palestinians.
You know, if you were born in Jerusalem or in that area under the British, your passport was labeled.
You're a Palestinian.
But these people then became Israelis.
But somehow this is just this type of understanding, this knowledge, these facts are just wiped away because that's inconvenient.
To what is occurring now and again, there's an ability to.
But again, Scott, we're dealing with people who are willing to look away from what is occurring.
I mean, we're talking about one of the things I heard before going over there was that the Palestinians are being used as a weapons laboratory for the Israelis.
And you think, OK, that's a bit much.
That's really a bit much.
And then when you get there and you take part in the actions, you take part in the demonstrations, take part in the various civil disobedience and nonviolent actions.
And then you see the conduct of the border police and the Israeli army, you see the weapons you're using, you have the effects of the various gas they're using.
And you realize and you think you talk to the resistance, you talk to the popular resistance, you realize it's true.
You realize that they are constantly testing new forms of weapons.
And then you talk to people in academia, you talk to people who are involved in research and you realize the weapons market for Israel is incredible.
You realize it's true.
You know, see, you are dealing with people who are using an occupied, besieged, enclosed population as a weapons laboratory to export weapons to foreign markets, basically.
So why would they why do we expect them, Scott, to actually adhere to historical facts?
You know, I mean, it's silly on us to be sitting here having this conversation because this is a type of people we're dealing with.
It's the same type of thing as why will we expect that those who are running Jim Crow South, the Jim Crow South, to have adhered to any types of morals or standards or historical facts or even rational standards of argument?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, the problem, this is something that we always face with all the wars and everything, too, is we have to debunk it on its real terms and on the fake excuses that they use, too.
You know, so, yeah, and that's exactly and that's the case for everything.
I mean, we can go back.
I mean, you and I have known each other for what, since 2009 now, right?
I mean, and like we always have these conversations.
We're banging our head against the wall and talking like rational people.
And but what we're talking about are policymakers and decision makers who are not making rational decisions and slaughtering millions of people or, you know, in the case of Palestine, except for when they go into Gaza, you know, and they slaughter people, you know, causing mass suffering, you know, as they're doing in terms of their occupation.
But yeah, I mean, so it is it's something that we have to deal with.
But there are ways to deal with that.
You know, there are ways.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think probably the average Joe can recognize that, like, well, they sure make a lot bigger deal out of it when the government that they're targeting kills innocent people than when they do or when somebody on their side does.
I mean, it gets pretty glaring, the hypocrisy like, oh, whoops.
Yeah, we did sort of kind of kill 300 civilians in Mosul a couple of weeks ago.
But then, oh, my God, 70 people were killed by a guy that we're using that as an excuse to target him so we can kill even more people.
That kind of thing.
It's a bit blatant, I guess, is my point that I think even regular people, you know, become and, you know, people who aren't necessarily political, but who just sort of get drive by hit by the news that they kind of even see how kind of cynical that is.
But I think with Israel, because it's not America, because it is a separate country, you wouldn't guess that the news is that slanted in their favor.
And I think part of the problem is, is when you tell people about the degree of oppression and the lawlessness really of the Israeli occupation and the colonization, especially of the West Bank, that it's basically unbelievable to regular Americans who are hearing it for the first time because they're hearing it for the first time.
And you're not saying, yeah, it's sometimes a little bit bad.
You're saying, no, really, the IDF boogeyman, these soldiers come and kidnap children out of their beds in the night, just like the Soviet NKVD, just like the German Gestapo.
That was how Americans were raised to believe this is the definition of a totalitarian state where the men in black masks come and get you in the night.
And they do this to children.
They torture children.
They treat the Palestinians so unfairly that if the TV news people in America ever told the truth to the American people, their heads would explode.
They wouldn't believe it.
They'd say that the Iranians must have taken over our media.
Yeah, I mean, there's a reason why the United States and only it's only the United States and only one or two other nations in the world support Israel and the United Nations.
I mean, I think in the last vote in the U.N., it was just Rwanda, I think, was the only other nation that supported Israel.
You know, I mean, it's because the rest of the world is knowledgeable, understands what the Israelis are doing.
That this is I mean, the United Nations has declared that the Israeli government is an apartheid regime.
I mean, and under international law.
Apartheid is, you know, below, you know, it is below genocide.
I mean, like you can't get much worse than in terms of rankings of bad things that governments do.
Apartheid is there's not much worse than it.
I mean, after you the next step from apartheid is genocide.
I mean, and that's what you're looking at.
That that's and to your point, I think a lot of it with Americans is it is starting to change because of YouTube, because of Facebook, because of Twitter.
More people are having access.
But what you also see there, Scott, though, too, I think is what happens is is you as an American, you can go visit Israel, you can go visit Bethlehem, say, and you can take a tour and you can never see this massive apartheid wall, this massive segregation wall that has been there for 10 years or 12 years or however long it's been there for, you know, that has destroyed lives, basically just ripped apart the Palestinian economy, ripped apart families, ripped apart the culture, ripped apart the whole society.
You know, there's this massive segregation.
While you can visit Bethlehem, go to the birthplace of Christ, go to the milk grotto, go to all these fabulous, wonderful, you know, religious sites in Bethlehem and Manger Square.
You can get a latte at the Starbucks or whatever there as well.
Get back on the bus and never see one inkling that you are in an apartheid state.
You have no idea.
You have no idea that you're driving on a road that Palestinians can't go on.
You have I mean, because it's all managed.
It's all done in a way that the American Christian tourists can come in and out and not see any of this, even though it's taking place just literally.
A stone's throw from where all of these wonderful, you know, meaningful holy sites are located.
And I think that's part of the problem as well.
There is a complicit.
The American churches, the American Christian churches have been complicit in it for so long that I think that has been part of the problem, too.
I don't just blame the American media, which is certainly to blame and certainly the American Congress, which has taken so much money from AIPAC.
I mean, if you look at the amount of money saved that a guy like Eliot Engel, who is the ranking Democratic member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has taken from AIPAC.
I mean, he has taken, I think, over half a million dollars from AIPAC, you know, as well as most other members of Congress have taken tens of thousands of dollars.
You mean so there's a lot, but also, too, I believe the complicity of the American Christian churches in this is is is has a lot to do with what we're talking about, about why Americans are not more outraged, not more upset, not more aggrieved at the apartheid, at the segregation, at the suffering, at the at the well-documented and well-understood human rights abuses that are going on there.
I mean, it is absolutely criminal what is occurring there.
You drink coffee, I drink coffee, just about everyone drinks coffee, so why bother with anything but the best?
Darren's Coffee is roasted at his new shop in Claremont, Indiana, and coming soon, you can order on Amazon and support the show by using Scott Horton's affiliate link.
Darren's Coffee dot com, because everyone deserves to drink great coffee.
All right, so now tell us more about this, then you're you went to the West Bank, you got off the tour and this is what keeps happening inside the American Jewish community, too, is these kids go on their birthright tours and then I guess they escape from the bus and they go look around on their own.
Oh, my God, you wouldn't believe what I saw when I looked around the corner from this stage managed thing that we're on and they come back and and start talking with each other about what a problem they have.
But so and we broke off the tour.
You were there, you were wearing Hebron and where else?
Well, we were so with the Veterans for Peace delegation and we had a really great group, you know, a bunch of the guys who were with, including Ray McGovern, who's a guest of yours a lot.
I thought I saw him in the picture there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ray was there and several others who have been there a number of times.
And then we had a couple other folks.
We had a friend of ours from Code Pink was there, a friend of our Miko Pallad, who whose father was the second in command of the Israeli army during the 1967 war, who then became a major peace activist in Israel.
And Miko's book is called The General Sun, which is an excellent, excellent book if anyone is looking for an introduction into a better understanding of Israel.
And Miko is an excellent speaker on the topic of Israel and Palestine.
But Miko is with us as well.
And so we had a lot of really great contacts in Palestine and a lot of connections with the popular resistance.
So we spent we were we were located in the old city in Jerusalem and East Jerusalem.
But then we were in we were in Hebron.
We were in Naba Sala.
We were in Berlin.
And these are all towns that in villages that have been very central in the resistance movements, in a nonviolent resistance movements over the last dozen, 15 years since the segregation wall has been put in place.
Now, talk more about that, please, because I hear this pretty often that, oh, yeah, you know, then Palestinians and their terrorism.
How come they don't just be like Gandhi, be like MLK, go ahead and take a blow to the head like a real man is supposed to just sit there and take it?
Because I don't know, I guess that is an effective strategy for protest a lot of times.
But the myth, obviously, that I'm getting here, getting to here is that the Palestinians don't do this and there never has been a Palestinian Gandhi or or even anyone who would have followed one if there was one.
Yeah.
And it is a myth because there there there are.
And the nonviolent movement in Palestine is really quite large and really quite strong.
And the Israelis are scared to death of it.
And one of the things that the Israelis use quite well, as any authoritarian state would, is a detention system, a detention program of, you know, unspecified, undetailed charges.
So you can they can detain people for no reason, no charge, hold them for six months and then if they want, keep them for another six months and just keep rolling that over and over again.
And in fact, I'm sure you saw seventeen hundred Palestinian prisoners went on hunger strike yesterday because they're being tortured basically in Israeli prisons.
And if you talk to anyone who comes out of those prisons, they are tortured and they are beaten and the conditions are terrible.
And some of those prisoners who are on hunger strike.
Yeah, some of them did commit some acts of violence.
Very few of them.
Some of them were involved in nonviolent resistance activities.
But the vast majority of those who are on hunger strike have no charges filed against them.
They're just held.
And many of these who are being held have been detained based upon the confessions, confessions that are done in Hebrew by children.
So I know I'm going off topic, but just to get back to this, this thing we discussed a bit earlier about about the detention of children is what the Israelis do.
And this is not a rare circumstance.
Every village we went to, we went to a bunch of villages.
This is the main fear of the Palestinian villagers because it happens all the time.
It happens a couple of times a week and you see it in their faces.
You see it in the faces of moms and dads throughout Palestine.
And you talk to them.
The Israelis come into their homes.
And they take their boys, 12, 13, sometimes 11 years old, from their homes in the middle of nights out of their beds, they take them away for a night, maybe two nights, maybe three nights.
They put them in a chair.
They scream at them over and over again.
Until the boys sign a document, a document in Hebrew that they can't read.
God knows what it says.
And until the boys finger somebody in the community say, yes, this man is in the resistance, that woman is in the resistance, et cetera, et cetera.
And that's what the Israelis do.
That's what that's the government.
That's the military.
Our government gives three billion dollars a year to.
That's the government.
That's the military that nearly every member of our Congress rushes to support.
Right.
That's that's who we declare is this beacon of of freedom and democracy in the Middle East.
That's what they're doing to the Palestinians.
You just see on the face of it.
This has nothing to do with defending themselves from any terrorist.
Anything.
They're trying to break the population, even though that's stupid.
Right.
You do this to somebody's son.
You make two enemies, at least for life.
In the history of Palestine, when have the Arab Muslims and Christians ever just laid down on their belly and said, OK, we worship you Israelis.
Go ahead and have your way with us.
Torture our sons.
We love it.
Now we love big brother.
Go ahead.
That can't happen.
That will never happen.
And yet that clearly is a strategy, just like reading about SEAL Team Six in Afghanistan.
Well, the reason we disfigure their corpses like this is to send them a message that they better give up.
Yeah, well, and then what happens?
The insurgency triples in size.
Give me a break.
Exactly.
We you know, I'd see it.
So they have the border police.
The border police are the ones that deal with the disturbances, the demonstrations, the villages a lot.
And from what I understand, the border police, like the army and some of the police forces, they have a lot of conscripts because when you're 18, everyone goes into the military.
Everyone goes into the security forces.
And you see this, this notion, another myth, Scott, this notion that the Israeli defense force is this vaunted, superior, you know, the best high quality, legionnaire style you know, military that is just so exemplary.
And oh, my gosh.
No, no.
It's an absolute joke.
What I saw was a bunch of when we were up close with them, we dealt with them.
And there was a bunch of scared, confused 18 and 19 year old kids, you know, who have received basic recruit training, less training than our kids receive, were not very well prepared, had abhorrent weapons handling practices.
I mean, we're in clear violations of all kinds of norms that would would just shock.
If there are any former military or law enforcement folks who are listening to this, we would absolutely be shocked at the standards and the norms displayed by the Israeli military and Israeli security forces.
Absolutely bare minimum training that I could see was provided to those young men and women.
But they're 18 and 19 years old.
The captains are 22 years old.
I mean, this is a security for security services is built around conscripts because that's all they can get.
And it's destined to collapse.
It's not sustainable.
I mean, that's the one thing I will take away.
And I will say about what's happening there.
It's not sustainable.
This is a morally bankrupt occupation that is that cannot sustain itself.
And it's it feels like it's a race against time there for the Israelis to try and try and squeeze the Palestinians out, to try and push them out.
They're getting more desperate.
You know, they're trying to do things that will force more of the Palestinians out.
How can we win before we lose, basically, is what I kind of got the feel from what I saw in terms of their actions towards the Palestinian people.
What can we do to force more of them out so that when we are spent, when we are totally done, at least we're still here and they're gone.
But they don't have an answer to that.
Right.
I mean, what could they do other than another forced march?
And how many million Palestinians live on the West Bank?
Six million or something.
Six million.
Six million.
And so you can't do another knock and say, all right, you guys are just going to have to swim to Jordan, pal.
Yeah, what they do is so what you do is you attack the children, you take their, you know, right.
You make it you take you make it so that people are scared to death for their children.
So maybe it maybe it's unlivable.
Maybe you're so scared of it.
You can't take it anymore.
And you move.
Right.
You make it I mean, you go through all the villages.
They're not even allowed to move, are they?
Well, that's a kind of contradiction to where they're supposed to go, just go die in the Sinai Desert or something.
Exactly.
Well, or if they want it, if they want to cross to Egypt and Jordan and go away and never come back or Syria, the Israelis will let them do that.
You know, I mean, will Jordan even let them?
I mean, there's not even a bridge across the river there anyway.
But right.
That's right.
But if they can get across, the Israelis are going to let them.
Right.
I mean, like that's not the Israelis concern.
Right.
I think it was the water.
Don't give them any water.
I mean, you saw this over and over again, too.
I mean, that's the water and not even talk about Gaza.
Gaza is a whole other situation.
I'm talking only about the West Bank.
Right.
Gaza is a whole other situation.
Gaza is two and a half million people who are dying in an open air prison under air, sea and land blockade.
The World Bank, the United Nations, I believe maybe multiple organizations have ruled, have clearly stated that in a few years, Gaza will be uninhabitable, that people will literally be dying.
It will just be you cannot we don't we will not be able to live there for lack of water because of communicable disease, because of all kinds of reasons.
But in the West Bank itself, the West Bank, they're just not receiving the water.
The Israelis are taking the water out of the aquifer, giving it to the settlements.
The settlements are receiving anywhere from six to eight times the amount of water that the Palestinian cities and villages are living.
You can and not only that.
So not only the Palestinians not getting the water, that's their water, right?
They've been living there.
I mean, you're talking to Palestinians whose families have been living there for hundreds of years.
Meanwhile, these settlements that that were built after the Israeli military came in and occupied that land in these settlements were built 20, 30 years ago or however long ago at this point.
So now the Palestinians have all these black water tanks on top of their houses.
The Israeli soldiers will come by.
And they will shoot holes into the water tanks, and you can see this, the Palestinians will show you where the bullet holes are, they've had a patch.
I mean, so you have this as well, right?
The other thing they do is, you know, the house demolitions, the house demolitions go on, you know, on and on.
And so people live under and you can have a house demolition order in your house for who knows what reason.
I mean, for all kinds of Byzantine, weird rules and regulation that the Israelis have come up with, your house could be demolished.
And then what do you do?
Where do you go?
The other thing, too, with the houses are you're not allowed, you have to get a permit.
And if your family expands, you know, how do you build that second floor?
So as you're going through all the villages and all these, you know, these towns, you see all these houses with an incomplete second level.
The second level has not been built.
It has not been finished.
You know, and if they start to try and build it themselves, the Israelis will come along and demolish it.
And then, of course, give the Palestinians the bill for the demolition.
I mean, so it's just making it unlivable.
And of course, the constant harassment by the military, the constant.
It was the other way around.
What if the Israelis had lost the war of 1967 and the Palestinians had pushed them into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and treated them exactly this way?
I don't know.
I mean, how much money would the Palestinians have to give to the American Congress?
Yeah, you know, I mean, it just depends on how much Congress had given them first, I guess.
But yeah, you know, because people look at the end of the day, what this comes down to really is that at least the ones they show us on TV, the Israelis look more like Americans.
They show us the Ashkenazi Jews and they go, look, see, they're just like you.
They're white and they're civilized and they speak English and they're Ford Apache out there holding back the Muslim hordes and this and that.
And that's the way that they portray the whole thing.
And so Americans go, well, look, these Palestinians, they're brown.
I can't understand a word they're saying.
They're Muslims like those 9-11 hijackers.
And so what else do I need to know?
Yeah.
And they act like us, too.
It's interesting because you go into, you know, we're in Jerusalem, you go into East Jerusalem and it's like you're in a Middle Eastern Arab place and everyone is also to we look different.
I'm, you know, I mean, I'm a tall white guy, you know, everything else walking around and gawking at things.
And, you know, and I've got my veterans for peace, you know, free Palestine shirt on.
So, you know, people like me, you know, but but, you know, you're through.
But it's that Arab hospitality, that Arab graciousness.
You know, people are friendly.
You go to West Jerusalem.
Yeah, it's like I'm back in the States.
No one looks at you.
No one cares about you.
You know, I mean, so they're like us.
They talk like us.
You know, the Israelis, they look like us.
They they look European.
They look American.
They act American.
They, you know, you know, yeah.
So they're similar.
So, yeah, we naturally gravitate towards them.
Yeah.
So, no, there is that.
And it just seems like if the Palestinians were doing to them what has been happening with this occupation, there's just no question about what an outrage this would be.
I mean, this is the second coming of the Warsaw Ghetto all over again in the context of the Gaza Strip is how it would be talked about.
America would invade and destroy Palestine and liberate the Israeli Jews if the if the tables were turned here.
There's no question about that.
I mean, yeah, I think so.
But let's not forget, we always didn't have that feel towards the Jewish people.
I mean, you know, prior to the Second World War, we meaning the U.S.
State, the U.S.
Government, the U.S.
State, and we didn't give a rat's ass about them.
I mean, we turned away shiploads of them.
We couldn't care less.
I mean, so like this notion that we've always been a protector of them, we always cared for them.
Yeah, I mean, and certainly it's interesting, too.
You know, it's interesting because.
I was just actually had a run in with members of the Jewish Defense League not too long ago, and they are very they're like Jewish skinheads.
It's a very interesting group and and elements of that organization have been labeled a terrorist group.
They're very it, but they're clinging on to this white nationalism.
And, you know, I said to one of the guys, I'm like, look, man, I'm telling you what, like you don't get more like I'm at the top of the white nationalist chain, you know, like and I'm telling you what.
My fellow white nationalists will drop you as a Jew first chance they get.
I don't know why you're clinging on to us, you know, and it's something, you know, it's interesting.
Because this notion that we're somehow the protectors of Israel, when there's always been when prior to World War Two, we didn't do anything to protect the Jewish population in Europe.
Right.
And there's always been a strain of anti-Semitism in the U.S.
And certainly Ku Klux Klan and everything else has a massive element of anti-Semitism in it.
And, you know, there's always been anti-Semitism in American politics.
And, yeah, so it's just interesting that we have now this fervor to protect Israel and we have this notion that we're going to let them do whatever they want to the Palestinians to the extent of basically perpetuating these massive human rights crimes against them based upon our own supposed morality and sense of protection for the Jewish people, which historically is nonexistent.
It's really quite a sham.
Yeah.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say the one should keep at least some of your savings and precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
If this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
I mean, I'll give the American people a little bit more credit than that, because I think a big part of the result of World War Two was, you know, because the Soviets never got any of the credit for fighting the Nazis.
It was us that beat them.
Everybody knows that.
And so since it was the Americans who finally put an end to the Holocaust and stopped the Nazi regime, I think that, you know, Americans were proud of that.
And I think that that really did help to diminish anti-Semitism in America to tremendous degrees, you know, in in politics, in life and generally.
I mean, honestly, I never heard the word Jew used despairingly, really disparagingly against somebody until I was at least in junior high or high school.
I mean, people just and I'm from Texas and around basically almost all Protestants and people just didn't talk like that.
You know, people are not.
So, I mean, there's a point there, though, where it would make perfect sense then, you know, if Americans are getting better and better about bigotry and they're not so anti-Jewish anymore, then it would make perfect sense for America to have a friendly relationship with friendly good old Israel over there.
But as you're saying, that's not the dynamic that we're talking about.
That's the one that Americans believe in that.
Well, yeah, they're just over there minding their own business, just like us.
When neither things are true, we're helping them get away with blue bloody murder.
And that's the thing of it.
And there's no point in ignoring.
And it's worth bringing up, I think, that Mohammed Atta felt that way.
And Mohammed Atta blamed the United States of America for what Israel was doing in that case to the Lebanese in 1996.
And that was why he went and joined Al Qaeda.
But that's absolutely right in the first place.
Yeah.
And, you know, I mean, one of the things, too, being with regard to Israel, doesn't discriminate if you're a Palestinian Muslim or Palestinian Christian.
They treat the Palestinian Christians just as badly as they treat the Palestinian Muslims.
So it really is not a religious thing in that sense.
And, you know, a lot of times, too, I'm a big supporter of the boycott, divestment and sanctions.
You know, this BDS, which is a nonviolent movement to force Israel, you know, in the same manner that boycott, divestment and sanctions was used against South Africa in the same way that boycotts were used in the American South.
Same notion.
And much of the attacks against that movement and the people in that movement has been that it's been anti-Semitic.
And I would, you know, make the same argument that, you know, I mean, it's no more anti-Semitic than the, you know, the boycott movement of the American South was anti-Christian, you know, or the boycott movement of South Africa was anti-white.
I mean, this is not an anti I mean, to say that you are against the policies of Israel is no more is not anti-Semitic.
It's that you are for human rights, that this is not a religious issue.
This is an issue of a government that is pursuing a policy of land theft against another people.
I mean, that's what it basically comes down to.
I mean, if anyone is looking at this in the religious concept, how you could read through the Torah, read through the Hebrew Bible and everything and find justification for what the supposed Jewish state of Israel and I say supposed because it certainly isn't adhering to those concepts of mercy and justice is doing to the Palestinian people.
You know, you know, I don't know how you get to that point.
So the notion that somehow if you are against the policies of Israel, that you are anti-Semitic is just a gross, silly, desperate characterization.
You know, it goes back to the same type of arguments that we were talking about early on this conversation, Scott, that people are using because because defend what Israel is doing to the Palestinians is defenseless.
So you have to make stuff up because it's completely defenseless.
There's I mean, the things that we took part in, the things that we saw, the things that the Israelis did, it's the same.
I mean, and what affected us.
I mean, one of the things I do want to address is for those of us, because a couple other guys here with me on this delegation were veterans who have been in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And so what we saw the Israeli army doing was very similar to what we were doing, what we did in Iraq or Afghanistan.
I mean, they were they were serving as occupiers.
They were performing the same tasks, doing the same duties.
They were foreigners in someone else's country, in someone else's land.
They were going into other people's homes.
They were stopping other people on their streets.
And that was very hard for us.
That was very difficult for us to see in a lot of ways.
It helped us in a lot of ways.
It was as we got through that process of dealing with that and seeing that.
But to be on the other side of the rifle like that, to be on the other side of the wall like that, to be with the occupied rather than being the occupier, was a hard process for us.
But yeah, I mean, to also to be on the other side, to be on those who are aggrieved, to be with those who are on the side of that injustice, to have that perspective is something that was very valuable to us.
And, you know, something that you can't ever leave behind.
I can see how that would make an impression on you, watching them doing your job, your old job and seeing yourself in it only from the point of view of the occupied this time.
That could yeah, I can see that being pretty tough for you guys, actually, depending on how well adjusted you already were to the idea of who was occupying who and either of those wars.
Yeah, you're very, very sympathetic to them.
And you could see in some in some cases, yeah, you're very sympathetic to them because because a lot of Israeli soldiers were in a position where they could you could they didn't want to be there or they didn't know or they didn't understand what was happening.
Or this certainly was not what they were told.
I mean, they were they went to an all Israeli school.
They had probably never met a Palestinian before in their lives.
They were told they were all barbarians and savages.
They were told you are now going to go to, say, Hebron and you are going to protect us from these people.
And they get there.
And this is what I'm doing.
Holding these six and seven year old girls at Rifle Point while we search their mother.
And, you know, she went to go buy apples.
This is what I'm doing.
This is how I'm you know, I mean, and this is what we do every day.
And then we're never going to go in their home.
We're going to flip their bed upside down and go through their stuff and just harass them and make their lives miserable.
This is what we're doing, you know, and meanwhile, you know, but there's also others within the forces that enjoy it.
And one of the things as I've when I've lectured at a couple of universities now and I make this point.
When a couple of the units that the Israelis have are very aggressive and you see this in the border police and they do take volunteers into some of their units.
And I saw this watching their border police because the border police.
So what happens when you have these demonstrations and the nonviolent resistance in Palestine is very good.
Right.
And they do their nonviolent work and they do their demonstration.
But then what invariably happens is the border police and the army comes out.
The settlers come out.
There's a confrontation.
And then the Israeli army fires off tear gas.
They do something in everything.
I saw the Israeli security forces fire first.
And then what happens is the 13, 14, 15 year old Palestinian boys start throwing rocks because that's what the 13, 14 and 15 year old boys are going to do, you know.
And so but then rather than being the professional, competent, responsible, mature security forces that they can be, the Israelis continue the conflict.
They can chase them.
They go after them.
And I would watch the security forces, the border police come in and out of villages all day long.
Causing this conflict rather than just leaving them alone, rather than just letting it be, rather than just ignoring it, they would keep antagonizing these Palestinian teenagers.
And what I would say to when I when I talk to some college kids about this, I've asked them their ages.
So a lot of times the college kids will say, I'm 21, I'm 22.
And I say, well, you know what?
Guess what?
You guys are already out of the military.
You guys are already done.
Right.
Because you're too old.
You've been in it.
You've been out of it.
And then I say to the other kids and so far, you know, almost all the kids I talked to in college are white.
Right, because that's how American society is.
Right.
Or at least, you know, I mean, that's at least around me here in North Carolina, at least the universities by me, North Carolina, NC State, UNC, Duke.
Right.
And and I say to the ones who are 18 and 19 and 20 who would be in service, I say, OK, guys and gals, I say, all right, of you.
Who here wants to be in units whose specific job are to keep the brown and black people separate from the white people?
And they all say, no, I don't want to do that.
I want nothing to do with something like that.
Right.
To their credit.
And I say, well, OK, OK, that's great.
I say we'll find other jobs for you.
We'll get you in supply.
We'll get you in logistics.
You can work on computers.
You can work on a helicopter, all kinds of stuff.
You don't have to do that kind of work.
But do you know people have you ever been to a high school with with people who would do something like that, who would be happy to do that job, would be happy to keep the brown and black people away from the white people?
Oh, yeah.
I know I know guys who would who would do that.
And that's what you get.
That's what you get into the border police.
I mean, so you do, you also have this element in Israeli society that is happy to do that work.
And that's what you see.
And you would have that here, too.
I mean, you would have that here in a heartbeat.
You could recruit people into a paramilitary force like the Israeli border police.
Especially this year.
I'll tell you what, man.
Right.
You know, exactly.
Yeah.
So I mean, also, you know, there's I want to mention real quick here and I'm sorry I'm out of time.
I got all these other interviews scheduled today.
But I just want to mention real quick, because I think, you know, rightly, a big part of this interview has been about the discrepancy between the reality and the narrative.
And I just wanted to point out a couple of things along those lines.
The first is a documentary called Defamation, and that's about how the Israeli state propagandizes the Israeli population into such a state of paranoia.
It's for people who are old enough to remember.
Now, it's like America in 2002 in Israel all the time.
And people are regular.
People are told that every non Jew in the world lives only for the chance to kill every Jew that they could ever get their hands on.
And that this is an immediate danger that Hitler's, you know, SS is still out there.
And it's it's, you know, Holocaust Day every day.
And this level of paranoia and incitement on the Israeli side of the line really helps explain a lot about how the IDF sees these people that they're they they have to have part of their brain knows that they're the occupier.
They're the conqueror.
But the other half of their brain is taught that this is self-defense.
And I'm only stealing these people's land, because if I didn't, they would be killing me.
And whenever they're too dangerous to be kept alive or to be kept nearby and this kind of propaganda.
And then this other thing that's so important, too, is and you can read about it as well.
But just reading the document is just mind blowing.
It's by Frank Luntz, that big fat hypocrite, freak Republican pollster from Fox News.
Everybody knows who I'm talking about, right?
Frank Luntz.
He did this thing in 2009, the Israel Project's 2009 Global Language Dictionary.
And what this is, is this says, if you're in Israel, a pro-Israel lobbyist, this is how to lie to stupid, gullible Americans.
This is how to turn the truth exactly upside down on every single issue.
So, yes, it is a Jim Crow situation over there.
The horrible, racist Muslim Palestinians won't just let the Jews live wherever they want.
Why not?
Why are they such racist?
Why are they creating a situation like the Jim Crow South?
And how long should America continue to back the Palestinians as they do this to the poor Israelis?
And they just turn every exact truth 180 degrees on its head and they admit it in there.
They go, look, the last thing in the world you want to do is be straight with people here.
So what you want to do is you want to lie.
And it just says that.
And that's the whole thing.
That's the only reason the American people support Israel is because they don't know the first thing about it.
If they knew what the Israelis, that the Israelis were the ones who were occupying the Palestinians, that the Palestinians were basically locked in this prison in this manner, were treated the way that you're describing here today, they wouldn't stand for it.
I know that they wouldn't stand for it.
The fact is, they're just completely lied to.
They think that the Israelis are the underdogs.
The Israelis are like in the Gaza Strip, besieged and surrounded and threatened with annihilation.
But it's just not true.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
No, it's, you know, words, you know, you get to be at a loss for words when talking about this, because it is so abhorrent.
I mean, and crime is the word that keeps coming back and they're being punished.
We would ride the buses with the Palestinians and they'd have to go through checkpoints all the time and get off.
And you're with these young women, these young Palestinian women who are going to college and they're being, you know, you talk to them and they're being punished.
You know, that's what they would say.
I feel I feel like every day, twice a day, I get searched and I'm being punished just because I'm going to my chemistry classes, just because I'm going to my, you know, I mean, and that's that's really simple because they're born to parents of the wrong religion and the wrong race, you know, in the wrong ethnicity, in the wrong town, in the wrong village.
And that's the simplest thing that they have to deal with is just going through the checkpoints, which can take an hour or two hours each day.
And the humiliation of that, that's the simplest form of punishment.
I mean, that that's the easiest thing that they have to go through, let alone all the other.
I mean, the loss of the homes, the violence, I mean, everything else, all the physical abuses, the the murders that the Israeli military and security forces get away with, you know, I mean, the economic deprivations.
I mean, on and on and on the lack of water.
I mean, like it just goes on and on.
The list goes on and on.
And at the West Bank, what the people in Gaza are suffering and dying from is I mean, I think, Scott, when we look back, because I think your show, unfortunately, is going to go on.
Good God, you're what you're 40, I think.
So unfortunately, you've got like 40 or 50 more years of doing this show, man.
Unfortunately, I think you've got it.
Unfortunately, I think this show has been going for a long time.
But, you know, when you and I are talking about this a bunch of years from now, I I'm really afraid that, you know, we're going to talk about what happened to the people in Gaza as one of the greatest catastrophes of modern history, because I think I think, as I said earlier, it's not sustainable for the Israel in the West Bank.
They will run out of time.
And I think that it will collapse not tomorrow or anytime soon, but I don't think they could sustain it.
And it will collapse as it did in South Africa, you know, but Gaza, I think the people of Gaza will run out of time before.
Before the political situation in Israel collapses, and I think that will be one of the great catastrophes that we witness is is is the thousands and thousands of people who will die because of that.
Because of the the human catastrophe that will occur from that.
And it sure looks like nothing's changing anytime soon.
If anything, everything is just going to get worse.
I mean, Donald Trump, I think, probably still doesn't even understand what the West Bank and Gaza Strip are, doesn't know anything about the war of 48 or the war of 67 or the war of anything that makes anything the way it is, who's occupying who or anything.
He's just putty in the hands of his advisers, which, you know, I know that Mattis knows better.
But then I also know that Mattis knows better than to really make a fuss about it, too.
So, no.
All right.
Listen, I'm sorry.
I got to go.
But thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about this.
It's such an important thing.
And nobody knows near enough about it.
It's really important that you shed light on it the way you are.
Everybody, please go check out Matthew's great article at Mondoweiss.net.
A U.S. veteran reflects on protesting alongside Palestinian human rights activists in Hebron.
And it's a really good one.
And I really appreciate your time again on the show, Matt.
Hey, thanks, Scott.
I really appreciate it.
All right, great, Matthew Ho.
And that's the Scott Horton Show.
Scott Horton dot org slash interviews 4000 and something going back to 2003.
They're signed up for the podcast feed.
The questions and answers are all at Scott Horton dot org slash show.
And let's see, interviews get posted first at the Libertarian Institute.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Ask me your questions there.
S.H.S. hashtag S.H.S.Q.A.
And I'll get to those for you.
Thanks.
