For Pacifica Radio, May 16th, 2021.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm editorial director of antiwar.com and author of the new book Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,500 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, now introducing Max Blumenthal.
He runs The Grey Zone, the great investigative journalism website, and he also wrote the books Goliath and the 51 Day War, and he produced, with Dan Cohen, an incredible documentary about the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2014, called Killing Gaza, an extremely important movie.
And welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Max?
Doing well.
Thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
And listen, I actually did a lot of interviews today with Ramsey Baroud and Phil Bweiss and Alan McLeod on different aspects of the same controversy of what's going on right now in the violence in Israel-Palestine, but I really wanted to save the heavy lifting for you, my friend, because I know that you have so much to say about this, and especially the way that you frame it, it really is for people to understand, to change their minds.
And in fact, I guess I wanted to start, if it's okay with you, I wanted to ask you, if you formerly were Zionist, were you kind of raised to believe in Zionism?
And at some point you made a change, were you kind of agnostic on the idea, or at what point did you decide you were interested in this and that you were so outraged about this?
I remember talking to you 10 years ago while you were riding Goliath in Israel, and you were just beside yourself with the situation there at the time then.
And so maybe that'll help people understand, if they could understand, what would lead you to come to such a crisis of conscience over this, that you have been such an activist on the issue for all this time now?
Well, I doubt many of your listeners in 2021 will disagree with much of what I'm saying.
I mean, my critique of Israel that I put forward in Goliath as a country under permanent right-wing control, growing more and more extreme by the year, thanks to the indoctrination of its youth through the most dominant institution in Israeli life, the Israeli army, has been completely confirmed by events since then.
I almost feel as though I went soft in the book.
And so looking back, I see my trajectory ideologically.
My relationship with Zionism is very similar to a lot of progressive-minded Jews growing up in the U.S., and I think I've added an additional layer in the past few years in just thinking about different modes of resistance and what works and how the situation can change and how it can't, that may separate me from maybe the mainstream of progressive Jews right now.
But I mean, Jewish progressives in the U.S. have moved so close to where I was 10 years ago, and this was completely expected.
So I'm 43.
My generation of Jews in the U.S. was aware or politically conscious enough to kind of know what was happening when the first Intifada began, which was stone-throwing against Yitzhak Rabin's broken-bones policy of crushing the arms of 13-year-old Palestinian boys with rocks.
We talked about that in Hebrew school, and you could even see in my Hebrew school, which was officially Zionist, there was anguish about what was taking place, and everyone was for a two-state solution.
I remember in high school, people crying.
You know, I went to a private high school in Washington.
A lot of Jewish American students whose parents were in the Washington scene, crying in the hallways when the Oslo Accords was signed.
And sort of liberal Zionism was the de facto mentality of the culture I was raised in.
But Zionism in my family was not really an issue.
My nuclear family was agnostic.
It was considered sort of like a foreign issue.
We were consumed in domestic politics.
I, however, was able to go on the birthright Israel trip, like right at the dawn of the second Intifada, which was much bloodier and more gruesome than the first one, obviously.
This was in 2000, and it was before 9-11.
And Birthright Israel is a free trip for Jewish Americans age, at the time it was like age 18 to 25.
They might have expanded it.
And millions, I mean a large proportion, I would say a majority of Jewish youth have been on this trip.
It's a free trip.
They just wine and dine you, take you all over.
What is Israel?
I mean, we did go into the occupied Golan Heights as well.
And their goal first is to build a lifelong bond between you and Israel.
The second goal is to prevent assimilation, to prevent you from marrying a Gentile and having non-Jewish children.
So it's also like a big sex vacation.
They're really pushing you to have sex with other Jews.
And then the third goal is Zionism.
Zionism was really tertiary.
So I came away still just wanting to be more of a liberal Zionist and feeling more connected to Israel because now I had Israeli friends.
I got to talk to the young soldiers and hear their experience.
And then the second Intifada got horrendous and the Jenin refugee camp, the most poorest, obliterated, ethnically cleansed people in the West Bank had their homes just wiped away by bulldozers, escorted by tanks.
Children were mowed down.
One of the bulldozer drivers, they called him Kurt Ebert.
There was an article in an Israeli paper, Yediot Aronot, about him bragging about how he built a football stadium in the middle of the refugee camp with his bulldozer and that he spent three days just mowing down homes with a bottle of whiskey and he was naked inside his bulldozer, covered with nothing but an Israeli flag.
And that when he came home, he was the hero.
I mean, this was the kind of golem that I finally recognized in Israel, governed at the time by Ariel Sharon, who Joe Biden fondly recalled at his funeral as the bulldozer.
And I started, you know, asking the hard questions about Zionism.
Why do they have to do this?
And recognizing that there was an ideology or philosophy at the core of Israel that necessitated the warehousing of Palestinians and their treatment as surplus humanity.
I started raising questions on a sort of a group email chat with some of the other people on the Birthright trip, including some of the rabbis who had been present and one of them who was the rabbi of basically an ultra-orthodox cult called the Lubavitchers or Chabad at my university where I went to school, University of Pennsylvania.
He chimed in and started defending the Israeli bulldozing and destruction of the Palestinian education ministry on the grounds that they teach hate.
So we had to blow up the education ministry.
And that was really kind of a breaking point for me, breaking point from what my sort of artificial community was supposed to be.
And then, you know, you flash forward to 2006, the destruction of southern Lebanon, the destruction of Beirut.
I have many Lebanese friends whose property and homes were damaged or destroyed in bombing and, you know, kept getting more and more personal.
Then the first really major disproportionate assault on the Gaza Strip, Operation Cast Lead, named for a toy that I played with in Hebrew school, and they were bombing Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip that had multiple families in them.
And for the first time I saw, for the first time the world saw the sheer ruthlessness of Israel, that it was willing to exterminate entire families simply because they were associated with the wrong political faction, Hamas.
And this continued again.
Operation Pillar of Cloud, 2011-2012.
Then by that time I had decided to embark on this journalistic journey where I would expose the Israel that Americans didn't know, using my Jewish-American privilege, to go in and show what Netanyahu's Israel was really like, because I sensed that Israel had entered its sort of transitional point in 2009 with the return of Netanyahu to the prime minister's office, the full right-wing Knesset, the rise of Avigdor Lieberman, this Russian-Israeli or Moldovan-Israeli proto-fascist figure who wanted to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Just a transition into permanent right-wing rule, the sort of illusion of liberal Zionism had exploded.
The contradiction of a Jewish and democratic state could no longer be reconciled.
And what I did is painted this portrait in my book, Goliath, of what it was like being inside the heart of this extremist beast, living in Jerusalem, being all over the land and what it was like.
And then I was able to actually go to the Gaza Strip in 2014, when Israel enacted its most savage assault on the Gaza Strip, Operation Protective Edge, in which 551 children were killed, something like 100,000 homes and structures destroyed.
And I saw what it was like as the war was taking place.
I was, you know, under the bombing, I was able to go into some of the buildings that were destroyed.
I was visiting friends in some of the buildings that were destroyed in this latest round of attacks on the Gaza Strip.
And so it becomes increasingly personal, but also very clear.
And you hear from people in the Gaza Strip a different, I would say, you are immersed in a very different perspective than you are among West Bank or Jerusalem Palestinians.
And it's the perspective of resistance, of armed resistance.
They're still fighting.
There are no settlers living among them.
They push the settlers out.
They're proud of their resistance.
They are proud to even sacrifice in war in order to liberate themselves.
And they feel like they're the last true, you know, the last true vestige of the Palestinian national struggle.
Whereas in the West Bank, you have Mahmoud Abbas and the PA funded by the United States collaborating with Israel.
Israel's their tax collector.
They arrest Palestinians on behalf of Israel.
The Gaza Strip is still considered, people there consider themselves free.
And we see in the period between 2014 and this latest round that the resistance in Gaza has actually improved its capacity.
And the Israeli defense chiefs, the military intelligence apparatus is getting very frustrated right now.
Yeah.
All right.
So that's a good place to pause for a second.
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It's Max Blumenthal from the Gray Zone Project here, and we're talking about what's going on with Israel-Palestine, and again the background, his books, Goliath and the 51-Day War, and as he's also just referring to there, the documentary that he made called Killing Gaza with Dan Cohen, who I interviewed a week ago about the beginnings of all of this, you know, current crisis breaking out here, which is just incredible to see because you don't ever get to see the firsthand version of what's going on here and how they feel about it from the point of view of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip.
They're just completely blacked out and then here they all are and notable in that, and I don't think this was clever editing by you guys, it was clear that essentially no one ever said anything like the caricature that, you know, by Allah I will jihad against you or any kind of thing like that, and no one also either said those Jews, etc, etc.
Everything was about you see this dirt?
This is my dirt and it belongs to me and I'll always fight for it.
In other words, you could put those words in the mouth of any grown man anywhere in the world.
They just said the exact same thing.
No, I mean people didn't know we were Jewish.
They thought, you know, they're just Americans and they would have said anti-semitic things if they had felt that way, but that's not the discourse or the language that you hear in the Gaza Strip.
It's just the straight-up language of resistance and what people say again and again is we will, we're struggling for our rights.
They're always using, those who can speak English, I always heard them say that they understand that they have rights under international law.
They know what those laws, the international law.
It's not the rules-based order that Tony Blinken and Joe Biden makes up.
It's the right, first of all, under the Geneva Convention to resist, but it's also the right to not be occupied, the freedom of movement, right to have a country, government, the right to be able to protect yourself and your children.
Those kinds of things are what they are struggling for and all of this business about, you know, anti-semitism is just like something that's far in the background where it's present in the sense that they cannot differentiate between the Jews of the world and Israel because the only time they encounter Jews, it's from a tank or an F-15 jet or a soldier themselves who are bearing the symbol of my faith community.
And so I always say if Israel wants to reduce anti-semitism or if Zionists want to reduce anti-semitism, they could take that Star of David off the Israeli flag and off these weapons of mass death and child extermination and just simply reserve it for religion that has millions of adherents who are either non or anti-Zionist, including most ultra-Orthodox Jews, but they refuse to do that.
I mean, they made the Israeli flag look like the Talit, which is the prayer cloth that we wear in the synagogue.
They put two blue stripes on it with a Jewish star in the middle to make it seem as close to a religious cloth as possible.
And then that flag comes to symbolize apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and massacres.
So that's the unfortunate situation.
And for the youth who've grown up in the Gaza Strip since 2007 when the siege began and they were not allowed out, they don't have the chance to meet.
They can hardly meet anyone from the outside world except through social media.
Whereas you talk to older guys, they've actually gone into Israel and worked as laborers, sold fish from the Gaza Strip in fish markets inside what is now Israel.
And they even had some friendly relationships with Jewish Israelis.
So they have a different mentality than the youth who've grown up under siege and see Israel just as this cold death machine that surveils them with drones at all times.
That's another aspect of life in the Gaza Strip that I think people might not understand is there's this AURAL.
I'm spelling it A-U-R-A-L, ambience of doom and surveillance because there are always drones in the air.
Maybe if you live in the hood in the U.S., you live in the inner city, you'll see helicopters flying overhead with spotlights every once in a while.
That's especially during times of military escalation.
It's always there.
So it's like these flying lawnmowers are over your head.
And I remember people in the Gaza Strip, young people that I would hang out with, say that, you know, if I don't hear my girlfriend's voice with a drone behind it, something is unusual and it freaks me out.
This is the most heavily surveilled patch of Earth on the planet and you can't expect them to love their occupiers.
Just imagine that drone there all the time.
What would you want to do to it?
I mean, how would you not want to fire something at it?
What would Americans do in that situation?
I mean, they never put themselves in the shoes of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, but this is why people in Jerusalem also support armed resistance from the Gaza Strip.
It's why people in East Jerusalem cheered when they saw the rockets, the incoming rockets from the Gaza Strip to Jerusalem, because they may not have drones there, but there are settlers there always watching them, always harassing them, police always harassing them.
There's just no, there are just so few moments of respite or peace and the only moments you get are inside these little cantons or bantustans in the West Bank and, you know, you can be in Ramallah, for example.
They call it the five-star occupation.
Not that the Gazans are allowed to travel there, right?
Well, no, and of course, if you're in the Gaza Strip, your family is likely from what is now considered Israel and you cannot go there because you're not Jewish and you're a demographic threat.
You might reproduce and then offset the Jewish majority, so you can't go there.
You got to stay in your little ghetto, but everybody's living in separate ghettos.
Even if there aren't walls surrounding them, there's a city in the northern West Bank called Qalqilya, completely surrounded on all sides by walls, but there are other times where it's hard to get from Ramallah to Nablus because there'll be settlers on the roads just attacking cars at random times and people know, so they're like, okay, I'm stuck in Ramallah tonight.
You're always just stuck.
There's almost no freedom of movement.
And then when you want to leave, when I would want to leave Ramallah to go to Jerusalem, just me as like a white American Jewish guy, I'd have to go through, I wouldn't want to go through the Qalandia checkpoint, which is the huge, this is just a major checkpoint, where I'd always have to give my ID and everything and they'd run my numbers and I wouldn't like having my numbers in the system because if I left at the airport, then they might know that I'd been in the West Bank and suspect something that I might not be able to travel back to Israel.
So I went through the Hizmet checkpoint, which is a little more lightly traveled and I would get taken out of the van with all the Palestinian men.
They would still take me out.
It would always be a female soldier because the female soldiers want to show that they're tough to their male colleagues.
They would pat me down, check my passport.
They wouldn't run it through the system.
And so that's why I did it.
But just imagine, you just want to leave your town and go, you know, imagine every time you go to TGI Fridays or Applebee's or whatever, you have to get patted down and show ID.
It's just non-stop and people just get fed up with it and they finally see someone hitting back from the Gaza Strip and they cheered.
They cheered for it.
They cheered for the resistance because no one else is there to protect them.
Not the EU, not the US that sends them.
They say, I remember a guy standing in the rubble of his home in the Gaza Strip.
His home had been bombed by 2,000-pound missiles.
There was nothing there but a ceiling fan, a melted ceiling fan dangling from his ceiling.
And he said to me, the US, you're from America.
Let me tell you something, you give us balloons and little sandwiches in one hand and in the other you give our occupiers nuclear parts and artillery.
That's what you do.
That's the reality of it.
And you know, it is true that innocent Israeli civilians have been killed by these Hamas rockets in the past few days, which is condemnable, of course.
And yet at the same time, they are the ones legally who have the right to resist, the occupied, not the occupiers.
And something we talked about with some of the other guests on the show about the propaganda here is that especially during violent conflict, all of a sudden the Israelis get to have it both ways.
And now it's the Palestinians are attacking us in a way that makes it sound like they're talking about a Palestinian state, an independent country next door to them that is attacking them.
How would you feel if the Mexicans were firing rockets across the border into Texas?
You wouldn't do anything about that, even though that's not a direct analogy at all.
It's much more like an American prison in, you know, Attica, right?
A riot against Governor Rockefeller, not a foreign state attacking at all, but they get to have it both ways.
In fact, this was the famous tweet by Gal Gadot.
The Wonder Woman actress got to say, oh, my crocodile tears for the sad situation between us and our neighbors.
Oh, so you're saying that the Palestinians should have independence then?
Is that what you're saying, Wonder Woman, or not?
Yeah, I mean, I live in a semi-detached house.
So I have a neighbor on the other side of the wall.
And like when I want to go to her house, I have to knock on the door and ask permission.
But Israel's in the neighbor's house and the neighbor's on their knees.
So these phony analogies are always designed to paper over and obscure occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, which is how this began.
And this began with protests in Jerusalem against ethnic cleansing in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
But, you know, on the issue of civilian casualties from rockets being fired by the factions in the Gaza Strip, they always say, the leadership of Hamas has always said, well, if you would allow us to have advanced targeting systems, we would target your military installations.
But these are homemade rockets.
It's all we've got.
And in the 2014 conflict, when Israel assaulted the Gaza Strip and killed 551 children and women out of 1,400 casualties, the Palestinian resistance factions killed about 60 Jewish Israelis and about 50 of them, more than 50 of them, were soldiers invading the Gaza Strip.
So they took measures to target specifically military assets, including when the Al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas, the armed wing of Hamas, actually invaded Israeli territory through tunnels at Nahalaz and they attacked a military base.
They could have gone and attacked the kibbutz there and killed a bunch of civilians, but they went for the military base, killed soldiers, took a Tavor rifle off one of the soldiers and scrambled back into Gaza.
They're proud of attacking military.
They're proud of fighting soldiers face to face.
And that's where they have the advantage.
Just as Hezbollah demonstrated its advantage in 2006, facing down the Israeli infantry and sending them packing, sending them in full retreat.
Israel doesn't want to fight face to face.
It doesn't want its special forces going in, doesn't even want its tanks and heavy machinery going in.
It wants to extract a price on the civilian population and demoralize them under the delusional fantasy that they will turn on their leadership, which is also like the point of US sanctions.
And this is why we've seen the Israelis begin this assault on Gaza by bringing down major civilian residential towers with no military value.
They brought down the Shurukh Tower, which is like 12 or 13 stories high.
It's where the much of the media works in the Gaza Strip.
So when I was in Gaza in 2018, I swear it looks like a miniature World Trade Center.
You watch this, even got the cell phone tower on the top as it comes down at the last part of it comes down.
It looks just like whichever North or South Tower.
I forget only smaller, but it's really hard to not remind me of that.
When you show me that footage, man, it's pretty, it's just blatant.
That's the point.
And that is the point.
It's this that they're doing.
They're doing it for the same reason that Al Qaeda attacked the Twin Towers.
It is a symbolic target that is designed to humiliate the enemy.
And an Israeli general actually said this in 2015 that it's like bringing down the Twin Towers.
They bring down, they ended the 2014 assault in Gaza in August by bringing down four major residential and towers and a shopping center.
And they're doing it again.
These are places that I've been.
I've been inside them.
They're not military installations.
It's where the media is.
I would do like live media hits in the Shurukh Tower in 2018 when I was there last.
I hung out with friends in other towers.
It's where the middle class lives and like the more educated what's left of the sort of educated elite of Gaza.
They're attacking them precisely because they do not support Hamas.
And so they're trying to provoke this kind of conflict because there's nothing they can do to remove the resistance from Gaza.
They're not going to march to Gaza City.
It would be like Stalingrad for the Israeli army.
This is all they can do and they need to satiate the blood lust of the Israeli population, which we've seen on graphic display for the past 48 hours as bands of Jewish Israeli youth have rioted in mixed Arab Jewish cities attacking anyone who they consider Palestinian.
Yeah, breaking store windows.
And I mean, yeah, boy quit with the historical parallels guys.
You're you know, I see from one point of view how it's productive public relations for the look at what a menace we are to their enemies.
But what about everybody else who's watching to what this looks like going around breaking store windows and knocking down Towers?
Yeah, and it's it's the impunity where they don't care.
You know Israel you think of them investing so much in what they call Hasbara or propaganda explaining Israel's position to the world Benjamin Netanyahu kind of rose as a master of explaining Israel's position to the Americans using every kind of manipulation tactic in the book, but now it's just gotten to a point where they don't even feel compelled to explain themselves.
They're guaranteed 4 billion a year.
They've seen it one Democratic administration come and another go and they still remain in total control without any anything to deter them.
And so this young generation grows up in that environment.
They don't care if people see them on social media enjoying a night of broken glass 15 minutes south of Tel Aviv.
What difference does it make?
What price are they going to pay?
Is Germany going to suddenly or the German government going to say this recalls the darkest historical echoes and we are going to stop punishing Palestinians for the crimes that we committed against Jews in Europe and you know, we see who the fascists are here.
No, they're not going to do that.
They're going to continue sending dolphin class submarines to Israel as part of their Holocaust reparations submarines that are retrofitted to fire nuclear missiles at Iran.
That's what they're going to do.
German ships are used extensively by Israel to enforce the siege of Gaza.
Cruiser class ships are used to terrorize Palestinian fishermen.
They all come as part of Holocaust reparations.
So this the the impunity guarantees the fascism that's on display and it's another reason going back to the actually I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Stop right there.
Max.
Yeah.
All right, and I'm sorry for the KPFK audience.
We're all out of time here, but we're going to go for another half an hour recording and so you'll be able to find the full episode at Scott Horton org.
It should be up by the time you hear this on Sunday morning in LA.
It's the great Max Blumenthal author of Goliath in the 51 Day War co-producer of the documentary killing Gaza and he runs the gray zone project at the grayzone.com and that's it for anti-war radio for this morning.
I'm your host Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
Hey, I'll check it out the Libertarian Institute.
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All right, go ahead, bud.
Well going back to the theme that I've been emphasizing the impunity that Israel receives intensifies the support among Palestinians for armed resistance because they don't actually inside Palestine have any hope that because Americans are able to understand better their situation or that, you know, there's this some members of the squad in Congress who are taking a more sympathetic position to Palestinians or one of them happens to be Palestinian or Human Rights Watch finally recognizes Israel is guilty of apartheid.
They don't see that changing their situation in any material way and I I agree with them.
We do not live in a democracy as far as foreign policy is concerned and particularly when it comes to Israel Palestine, which is almost treated by administrations Republican and Democrat as a domestic issue.
I don't see any real hope of a major policy shift inside the United States.
I think US citizens can offset some of the damage they can make it more difficult for the US to provide all of those you know, military loans to Israel.
They can embarrass Israel and US supporters of Israel in the media, but on the ground, it doesn't change anything.
What is consistently changed the situation on the ground is armed resistance and it doesn't mean that I'm celebrating it because it has taken some gruesome forms.
The second Intifada in which Palestinians were pushed to violence, it began actually much like the first Intifada reacting against Ariel Sharon's provocation at the Al Aqsa Mosque, which is deliberately designed to inflame Palestinian sentiment and in October 2000, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry, Israeli military fired 1 million bullets at Palestinians.
There's actually an Israeli documentary called A Million Bullets in October about how the second Intifada was incited and the goal was to push them to violence.
You had a generation of youth growing up whose homes had been demolished as Israel began to bring in this bulldozing collective punishment policy and those youth whose parents were killed or whose homes were destroyed, they made up the core of the suicide bombers, those who were willing to commit suicide bombings.
But that violent resistance of Palestinians necessitated a shift in overall Israeli strategic deterrence, especially vis-a-vis the Gaza Strip, where resistance was most intense and it is why there was a pullout or withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
So people in the Gaza Strip, they say, well, we actually got them to pull out.
There are no settlers among us.
They couldn't keep the settlers here.
It's just strategically, militarily impossible to keep defending them.
So why should we stop this?
What if negotiations gotten the Palestinians and the West Bank?
150,000-200,000 settlements, the separation wall, they have no means of deterring it, no means of defending themselves.
So it continues and between that period when the Al-Qassam Brigades were basically along with the Al-Aqsa Brigades of Fatah and PFLP were sort of the face of Palestinian resistance and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the four major factions, when they were just, at best, they had light weapons, at best, they had rifles.
Between then and now, there's been just major, major improvements that have caused a shift in the strategy from attacking Israeli civilians to confronting the military directly.
And what we've seen in the latest round is confidence in the resistance factions in Gaza to actually issue an ultimatum to Israel, not about the Gaza Strip.
It was not about ending the siege of Gaza.
It was not about changing conditions.
There was about Jerusalem.
As the evictions were about to take place in Sheikh Jarrah, in East Jerusalem, the chief of staff of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the major resistance faction in Gaza, Mohamed Daif, who has survived five assassination attempts and is probably paralyzed and missing an eye, whose entire family has been killed by Israel.
He stated that if you go ahead with the evictions, we will make you pay a heavy price.
And that is precisely what they have done.
They have deterred Israel from abusing Palestinians outside the Gaza Strip.
This is an unprecedented strategy and it speaks to the capacity that these factions have gained, inarguably because of the support they've received from Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, the main allies of Palestine that have refused to go away or normalize like the phony colonial cutouts in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Yeah.
Well, Max, I'll tell you what, it's 5.40 Texas time on Thursday as we're recording this and the wife just texted me that the IDF has sent ground forces now and invaded Gaza.
Well, I don't know if the Israeli army has sent ground forces in.
They've announced that ground troops are attacking.
So what I assume this means, what I assume this means is they're bringing artillery, the howitzers, the mortars, tanks, and they're simply just firing randomly into the Gaza Strip and we're hearing that there's been a huge wave of casualties in the last two or three hours inside the Gaza Strip.
In our film, Killing Gaza, me and Dan Cohen included a scene which was actually an Israeli news report of a mostly female howitzer division, not a division.
They were like a platoon and the women were just sitting on the frontier of Gaza on the other side, just randomly firing mortar shells and howitzers in and they didn't know where they were firing and they were just told to keep firing from dusk till dawn.
And so that's probably what's happening.
And as I said before, the attack on Gaza is partly designed to satiate the bloodlust and rage of the Israeli public, which is taking more rockets than they've ever taken before.
The Iron Dome system that Israel invested so heavily in has completely failed.
Okay, but now let me ask you this man, and we'll get back to that in just a second.
You know, so I get it that Americans, if Ben Shapiro tells all his Facebook fans that this all started when Hamas started firing rockets, they don't know any better.
But the Israelis, like wasn't it on TV?
Didn't they know that?
Well, yeah, we're kicking a bunch of Palestinians out of their homes.
Some settlers are kicking some Palestinians out of their homes in East Jerusalem.
And you know, there's we got this riot between these very far-right Jewish groups who are not representative of the entire population.
I don't think who are chanting death to Arabs and all of this stuff and and attacks on people at the Al-Aqsa mosque.
Like even if you're a Jewish Israeli and you're on that side, you still know that this was the lead up to what happened here.
Just like, you know, there's always the lead up that the Americans don't really get to hear about, but that, you know, people paying close attention can see.
So, but they know that, right?
That, well, look, screw them, right?
We're kicking them out of their homes, but we are kicking them out of their homes, right?
Yeah, from their point of view, right?
Or not?
Well, this is how the assault in 2014 began.
It began in Jerusalem, not in Gaza.
There had been settler attacks on Palestinians.
Netanyahu is feeding into it in order to extract some political benefit.
And is this the one where, is this the time where there were a couple Israeli Jews who had been kidnapped and killed, but the Israeli government pretended to keep looking for him for two weeks, even though they already knew that they had been killed just to...
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
And so they covered up the fact that they knew where the kids were in order to stoke the mobs and the violence.
And a very, I think it was 16, a 16-year-old Palestinian kid named Mohammed Abu Hader, whose family I got to know pretty well, was kidnapped sitting in front of his house by settlers, settler youth.
They poured gasoline down his throat and set him on fire, smashed his head open with a hammer.
And that really set off what took place next, which was Palestinians retaliating from Gaza, sending a rocket to Jerusalem as a message that we will defend our people.
And the reaction from Palestinians in Jerusalem was the same.
Finally, someone is defending us.
Now, when Israel initiates evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, it has to think, do we want to do this?
We previously thought Palestinians were defenseless in Jerusalem.
I personally have watched the evictions take place in Sheikh Jarrah.
They've been going on since 2002.
Palestinians are taken out of their home in the middle of the day.
Their furniture is taken out by heavily armed police, and the settlers are literally moved in 15 minutes later.
Settlers who consider Palestinians to be lower than animals.
In one case, settlers moved into half of a Palestinian's home and began terrorizing them inside their own home.
So there have been huge protests against this with hundreds of Israelis, Jewish Israelis being involved alongside Palestinians, dedicating years of their lives to try and fight these evictions.
And nothing has changed.
Nothing.
The Jerusalem municipality is fully behind this project.
They're moving Palestinians out because they leased their homes before Israel even existed and claiming that these Jewish families had titles dating back to the 19th century.
It's just absolutely absurd.
Oh, and that's the rule now.
We're going back to status quo of who owned what back then because I think that there will be a lot of Palestinians happy to hear that.
Exactly.
I mean, yeah.
Why can't, you know, the New York Times Jerusalem Bureau, which is a stolen Palestinian home in the Katamon neighborhood in South Jerusalem or West Jerusalem.
Why can't that family go back, the Carmi family, go back and kick out the New York Times?
No, because Israel's law of, you know, absentee property law only works one way.
So what can Palestinians do?
The one thing they can do that has actually caused Israel to think twice and the Jerusalem municipality, which now contains deputy mayors who became sort of famous figures, by removing Palestinians from their home, like R.E. King, they finally made them think twice by firing rockets, by fighting back.
And, you know, the reason that Ben Shapiro and people like that think Palestinians have no right to defend themselves is because I think they're not Jewish and they're not white and these people are just simply racist.
I mean, that's just what it comes down to.
MAGA, you know, they want to make America great.
They believe in America first.
But every time Israel starts carpet bombings on Palestinians, they become Israel first, Israel firsters.
And it just brings out the whole hypocrisy of the conservative sort of corporate conservative movement in the U.S.
You got that right.
The very first people to rail against moral relativism will be the first ones to accuse you of moral equivalence.
Well, yeah, wait, which is it?
There's an objective standard of morality or there isn't?
I thought that.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
I guess that was anti-Semitic of me to think that.
Yeah, I guess not.
Hey, listen.
So I guess you're saying that you think that essentially the IDF won't go, you know, in large numbers of foot soldiers into Gaza just because they can't, for public relations purposes, on their side, they can't take the casualties.
So they'll just stay at the outside and just shell them?
All I know is right now, I don't believe they've entered.
When they did enter in 2014, it was a near disaster.
They lost something like 40 soldiers, a number of officers in this region east of Gaza City called Shujaieh, which is heavily fortified, very well defended, lots of tunnels.
And soldiers were almost captured.
One actually was taken, but he was already dead.
Armored vehicles were blown up.
It was a disaster for the Israelis and they went into full retreat.
This was, you know, I think like July 12th or July 14th.
They went in so confidently that they actually were using surplus armor that they got from the U.S., that the U.S. had used in Vietnam, that just was very poorly protected.
And in the end, they wound up going into full retreat and then launching a major artillery and air attack on the civilian population, massacring scores and scores of people just to get the soldiers out to provide them with cover to leave.
So with that in mind, they will be reluctant to go in in the same fashion.
They have no chance of fulfilling the ultimate goal that Ariel Sharon used to campaign on, which was marching to Gaza City and just completely taking over.
But I can't say for sure that they won't do it because there's enormous political pressure on Netanyahu right now, and it's especially coming from the mayors and the sort of municipal authorities in the south of Israel.
These are very right-wing, more right-wing than Netanyahu, right-wing people with, you know, populations that are taking rockets right now.
The oil facilities in Ashkelon, which is a southern Israeli city, were hit by a rocket.
And this is, you know, caused huge fires and it was something that that city hadn't seen before.
So they're demanding Netanyahu do something.
They want blood.
And so far, you know, attacking the civilian towers hasn't deterred any of the factions in Gaza from fighting back.
All right.
So now in the last few minutes here, I want to talk with you about what you said at the beginning about modes of resistance and, you know, what people are trying to do about this other than Hamas and Islamic Jihad firing rockets off here.
I noticed, I'm sure you may have seen or at least saw that there was such a thing as this interview of Norman Finkelstein, the American Jewish anti-Zionist activist, or I don't know, anti-occupation activist anyway, by Katie Halper.
And I sensed even, he's been very hardcore for the two-state solution and not the one-state solution for a very long time, but I sensed a softening there in the sense he seemed to think that really it is too late for that, but then to him the conclusion was not that this would happen immediately in time, but just the immediate conclusion.
The next step is, well, they're going to have to go from an apartheid state to separation of church and state and citizenship for all because they're just not going, they had to have the ruse that one day there's going to be a two-state solution.
One day they'll have independence.
So the status quo is okay for now, but without that ruse to cover that, as Finkelstein put it, they could have got away with it.
They could have got away with 48 if they had just been willing to let the Palestinians have 22%.
Now that they won't let the Palestinians have the last 22%, they're not going to be able to have a Jewish state at all and the end of apartheid and equality between the people there is coming sooner or later now because they were so selfish the way he phrased it, that they wouldn't just settle for more than their fair share.
Well, I've been saying that since I really started engaging publicly on this issue, that there was never going to be a two-state solution.
There was a one-state reality and it's an apartheid reality and, you know, it's either going to remain an apartheid reality or there will be some kind of binational state where people are enjoying equality.
The root of the conflict, and I really don't even think of it as a conflict.
It's just a crisis.
It's a political crisis.
The root of it is the denial of rights to Palestinians because they are not Jewish and under Zionism only those who are declared Jewish by the Israeli rabbinate receive full rights.
That's why you see in Lod, the city of Lod, which is 15 minutes east of Tel Aviv.
It used to be known as Lida and this was the site of the worst ethnic cleansing of 1948.
The Lida Ramleh Death March enacted by Yigal Alon and Yitzhak Rabin, two of the founding fathers of Israel, sent 150,000 Palestinians packing, massacred thousands, sent them mostly to the Ramallah area in the West Bank.
There are still many Palestinians there and they staged an uprising that forced Netanyahu to declare emergency law and bring in hundreds and hundreds of militarized police and we saw large segments of the Jewish population there actually evacuate.
They left the town.
So this isn't just about people living under de facto, under official occupation.
It's about Palestinian citizens of Israel living under de facto occupation, denied rights.
And you know, that's the only way out of this.
The idiots of the Beltway Blob really, they actually believed like these kind of people like Dennis Ross and Tony Blinken and Daniel Kertzner and these characters that in, you know, the Winep crowd of the think tanks, they really believed with the Abraham Accords, when Israel normalized relations with the colonial cutouts of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and you know, all the good warm, the warm ties that Netanyahu's enjoying with Mohammed bin Salman, that they could put the Palestinian question aside.
They actually thought that they could just go around Palestinians.
I think Dennis Ross wrote an essay for the CF, the Council on Foreign Relations journal about how the, what Biden should do is just totally disengage from Israel-Palestine.
But here he is again, having to face the same issue that keeps coming up and it's the crisis of Zionism that millions of people who actually comprise a majority between the river and the sea are denied rights.
So the problem has to be addressed there and there's this other trend that I keep coming back to, which I think may be decisive at some point, is the improvement of the military capacity of movements, factions, and states in the region that are willing to still resist Israel, whether it's Hezbollah, Iran, or the factions in the Gaza Strip.
And then finally, I think, you know, before we even talk about a binational state, which seems to me like very distant, but a distant reality, but a reality nonetheless, is the rise of a multipolar world order where countries like China are enjoying more and more political power on the world stage.
And if we look at what the Chinese foreign ministry has been saying in the past few days, it's very interesting.
China's foreign ministry spokesman, Lijian Zhao, tweeted a video of Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, refusing to say that Palestinians have a right of self-defense and calling him a hypocrite.
That is astounding.
China has never done anything like that in the past.
And China is trying to get through a resolution at the UN to actually denounce what Israel is doing.
And who is blocking it?
Of course, it's the U.S. So this is another reason why the U.S. is so worried about the rise of China.
Because these are colonized people.
These are people who know what it's like to be colonized and oppressed, who don't have an Israel lobby in their country.
Right.
Hey, I want to say here real quick, people can find that on Twitter real easily.
Just type in Ned Price.
And in fact, Sam, if you could please add that to the show notes for people to find for this episode as well.
It's absolutely amazing.
In fact, there's two different ones, two days in a row, where the reporters tried to nail the State Department spokesman, just hemming and hawing all over the place.
24 hours later, he comes back and completely fails again.
He couldn't find anyone to write him the right line to use to somehow weasel out of this.
And so he can only hem and haw when he's asked whether Palestinian kiddos got the right to still be alive or not.
Yeah, this is Saeed Arikat, who is a reporter from Al-Quds Daily and Matt Lee from AP.
They're kind of like the dynamic duo in there at the State Department.
And they just, like Ned Price is like this, like punching bag for them.
It's just, he has no way of responding coherently.
But when it comes to Palestine, he really like he's just such a Ned, like he has real Ned energy.
No offense to anyone named Ned, but his answer is just absolutely hilarious.
Because we hear constantly from Tony Blinken about the rules-based order.
But the rules are nowhere to find.
We don't know where the rules are, unless he's just being a mob boss who says, we set the rules, we make the rules.
Israel and Saudi Arabia and our allies in Colombia and us, we exist in a state of legal exception.
And what these reporters were saying is, you know, isn't there another set of rules that's actually been ratified by countries?
It's international law and it actually affirms the right of occupied people to defend themselves.
And they really lifted the mask on the rules-based order with that exchange.
In fact, it was just a week ago or something, they announced that the Biden government is sticking with the Trump policy of recognizing Morocco's sovereignty over this massive stolen piece, stolen piece of Western Sahara there.
Because why?
Because Morocco is going to get along with Israel now.
And so here's your liberal rules-based international order under the baby blue flag of the United Nations and all of this public relations.
And yet in practice, it never holds up at all and just do whatever they want.
Yep, or Sudan.
Here, pay us 300 million dollars for, pay us 300 million dollars and get off and normalize with Israel and we'll let you off the State Department list of terrorist organizations.
It's just that easy.
I mean, it just shows how politicized the whole war on terror was.
Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister of Israel, said that Syria could have avoided the whole proxy war that was imposed on it for the last 10 years if it had just normalized with Israel and given us the Golan Heights.
So there you go.
Oh, did he really say that?
That's great.
He did.
He said it in an interview with RT Arabic.
How long ago was that?
I think was fairly recently.
I will send it to you when we get off the phone.
That is great, Max.
I'll tell you what, I know that at one point his government was talking with Assad and Condoleezza Rice intervened and stopped them.
And so we don't want you to negotiate right now and that I think at the time at least the leaks were that Assad, because after all they stole the Golan Heights back a long time ago.
It's not like they were giving it back to Syria anytime soon or any international authority was going to make them.
And Assad was apparently willing to even accept that in exchange for normalization.
And in that case, the Americans intervened and prevented them from making peace.
Yeah, absolutely.
That happened again and again with Syria and it really was the neocons in the Bush administration taking a more Likudnik position than the Israelis.
Yeah, isn't that amazing?
At the time.
And now look where the situation is.
You have the government in Damascus just fully aligned with Iran and Hezbollah, more aligned than ever before.
Of course, more dependent on them.
I mean literally dependent on them.
Yeah.
Same for the Houthis who were pals with the Iranians and now they're friends.
In fact, I like to point out, I'm pretty sure I got the date right on this.
It wasn't until the summer of 2018 that the Ayatollah finally invited the head Houthi to come to Tehran and recognize them as the real government, the official government of Yemen, when they'd seize the capital city at the end of 2014, beginning in 2015.
And it was years into the conflict before Iran even recognized them as the legitimate government of the country.
So again, with the self-fulfilling prophecy there, but yeah.
Right.
And by the way, you know what?
Let me ask you one more thing on that subject.
AIPAC put out a tweet yesterday, or was it Christians United for Israel?
No, it was AIPAC, said it's Iran behind this.
Everybody knows that it's Iranian funded.
Hamas is launching these rockets.
And the last I had heard, the Iranians had stopped backing Hamas because they were mad that Hamas sided with the jihadists and the CIA in Syria.
But I know that's kind of probably outdated information.
But I wondered if you had an update on that, of whether it's true that Hamas even fund or is even funded by Iran at this point at all.
AIPAC is correct.
I hate to say that.
Yeah.
I would rather say, you know, the foreign agents at AIPAC are correct, but they're not registered as such.
But they should be.
Just so that no one thinks that I'm, you know, supportive of AIPAC, I just said that.
But AIPAC is correct on that count.
During the early stages of the Arab Spring, as the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in Egypt, Khalid Mishal made the ill-fated decision to move Hamas's kind of politburo from Damascus in Syria to Doha in Qatar.
And Doha basically became like the base of operations for Hamas at that time, the base of foreign operations.
The Qataris rewrote Hamas's charter.
They were supplying them with loads of money for kind of like civilian assistance.
And the movement was sort of slowly being domesticated.
And they believed that, you know, there would be this government right next door in Egypt that would bring Gaza into sort of an economic renaissance.
And even as, you know, the government of Mohamed Morsi was still trying to maintain some kind of preventing the tunnel economy, things were better in the Gaza Strip in the years of 2011, 2012, than they ever really, than they had been in a long time.
But it was at politically stupid mistake.
Qatar has to answer to the U.S. They have the Al Udeid air base in Qatar.
And the government of Morsi, of course, fell to this hardline, effectively pro-Israel military junta that subsisted off of the aid money that came through the Camp David Accords.
So that was the end of that.
Mishal takes a backseat.
The organization has a rapprochement with Iran.
Iran begins supporting not just the al-Qassam brigades through the IRGC.
I mean, this is an important project of Qasem Soleimani, who allegedly even visited the Gaza Strip towards the end of the Arab Spring as the region started sort of kind of returning to where it was before.
And they supported the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is taking sort of a, not a leading role in Gaza, but a more important role.
They have, they're responsible for many rocket launches.
And they also have Kornet anti-tank missiles.
Now they've staged operations against Israeli tanks and infantry on the frontiers of Gaza.
And the PFLP, which traditionally was funded by the Soviet Union before its collapse and was the Marxist-Leninist wing of the Palestinian resistance, they are now supported by Iran as well.
And so if you look at, you know, go on social media, look at some of the pro-IRGC principalistic accounts in Iran, they're very proud of what they're witnessing right now.
They're taking, effectively taking credit for it and saying, we did this.
Mohamed Morandi, who's a professor at Tehran University, just tweeted a Newsweek cover of Qasem Soleimani, which said, it was Newsweek from like 2014.
It had Soleimani's face and it said, you know, he used to fight the U.S., now he's taking out ISIS.
And Morandi quote tweeted the image and said, now he's taking out Netanyahu.
So even though, what he's saying is that even though Soleimani is dead, his legacy is the improvement of the resistance in Gaza.
However, where I think AIPAC is wrong is that the factions in Gaza determine their own strategy.
Iran isn't telling them what to do.
It's not telling them when to fight.
That's not what's taking place.
It's just giving them the capacity and, you know, many of their weapons are still homemade, but there's also training and know-how.
They've also received training in Syria.
But yeah, that period of kind of Hamas trying to integrate itself more with the Sunni Arab Spring Islamists is over.
And now, by the way, when you mentioned that they rewrote their charter there, did they revise any of the most controversial stuff about Israel in there or they left that?
Yeah, well, that was the point was to make them more acceptable on the world stage.
So they took out all the conspiratorial stuff about the Rothschilds.
And, you know, the Hamas charter did contain anti-Semitic passages and that was removed.
And did they keep the new charter now?
Yeah, I mean, honestly, like if you talk to anyone in Gaza about the charter, it's just like laughed at.
Party platforms never really mean anything anyway.
Yeah, so exactly.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I'll let you go, man.
I know it's getting even later there in the East than it is here, but I should appreciate your time on the show here.
No, thanks for having me.
And sadly, I think this is going to continue for a while.
So I'm around.
All right.
Well, good.
We'll talk again.
Thanks very much, Max.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That's Max Blumenthal.
He's at thegrayzone.com.
The Monster is his book, Goliath.
You got to read that thing.
It's crazy, man.
And the 51 Day War.
And check out the documentary Killing Gaza.
Costs three bucks on the internet.
It's really worth your time to see.
An hour of your time.
I promise you it's enlightening.
Killing Gaza by Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen 3000.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
APSradio.com.
Antiwar.com.
Scott Horton.org and Libertarian Institute.org.
