Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name, been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, I got Phyllis Bennis on the line here.
She directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and is the author of Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror, a primer.
She wrote this article originally for Other Words, and we've got it reprinted at Antiwar.com.
In fact, it's the spotlight today on Antiwar.com.
Foreign aid that costs an arm and a leg, literally.
Welcome back to the show, Phyllis.
How are you doing?
Good.
Great to be with you.
Good.
I'm so happy to talk to you about Palestine today.
I already knew this, but I read the numbers in your article and I got mad all over again.
I just almost can't believe it.
Can you explain to the people, first of all, what the Great March of Return is and is about and things like this?
Sure.
The Great March of Return is a weekly protest in the Gaza Strip that started a little over a year ago.
It started on March 30th of last year, of 2018, and it was designed to do two things.
One was for ordinary Palestinians.
There's two million Palestinians who live under the Israeli siege.
It's like a kind of occupation, a little different than the kind of occupation they have in the West Bank.
But it's complete Israeli control of the Gaza Strip.
Soldiers surround the Strip.
The Israelis have built a fence surrounding it.
The entrances and exits are controlled by Israel, with some collaboration from Egypt.
And Israel controls everything about it.
Who goes in and comes out, who can get out when they might need medical care, for instance.
It's a total siege that's been underway now for a decade.
And that was part of it, was to protest the siege.
The other part of it was to say, we have the right to go home.
Our homes were taken from us.
We were expelled from what were then our homes in 1947 and 1948, when Israel was first created.
And 80% of the population of Gaza, which is not only 2 million people crammed into a really tiny strip of land, but it's a really young population.
Half of it is under 25.
So it's a really young population.
And 80% of the population are refugees.
They're people whose homes were taken from them and their descendants.
So the Great March of Return, an overwhelmingly nonviolent mobilization of thousands of Palestinians, that started a little over a year ago.
When it was first announced, the immediate Israeli response was, if you do that, we will not accept it and you will be met by gunfire at the border of Gaza.
And sure enough, Israel began deploying sharpshooters from the very first day, the very first March, 58 people were killed.
It was just a horrific reality.
And since that time, there's been over 7,000.
7,000 people, Scott.
Almost all of them young people, mostly men, a few women.
But some of them are kids.
They're kids 12, 13 years old, all the way up through mid-20s.
That's the demographic we're talking about.
And of those 7,000 people who have been shot by Israeli snipers, 120 of them have already, well 220 or so have been killed.
Another 120 or so have had arms or mostly legs amputated because the damage to their bones was so severe that the doctors could not save their legs.
And in a place like Gaza, being disabled in that way is a really horrific reality.
There's no roads that are paved.
So wheelchairs are going through sand.
There's not wheelchairs available for everybody.
And there's certainly, while there's some basic prosthesis for some people, there's nothing close to the kind of fancy, very modern, technically advanced prosthesis that we now take for granted here in this country.
So it's really a sentence of being the rest of your life isolated from the community.
We've just learned from a new UN report that over the next two years, 1,700 more overwhelmingly young men are going to face the amputation of their legs, a few arms but mostly legs again, because they were shot with bullets that exploded and shattered the bone.
And the kind of surgery that's required, sometimes they can save the leg, but it requires a very advanced kind of surgery with not just techniques but equipment that the Gaza hospitals aren't close to being able to provide.
The hospitals in Gaza have been shelled by Israeli wars in 2008 and 2009, again in 2012, and the most extreme level in 2014 in a 55-day war that left 2,200 Palestinians killed and a vast amount of the infrastructure of the strip, houses, schools, markets, hospitals, shattered from the bombings.
Much of it has never been rebuilt.
And not surprisingly, the doctors are unable to do the kind of surgery that's needed.
And what the UN has recognized is that there's no money to rebuild the hospitals now, and they've determined that of the people who have been shot, 1,700 of them over the next two years are going to face such serious threat of infection leading to potential death that the only option will be to amputate their legs.
So it's almost 2,000 people that we're talking about from just the people shot by Israeli snipers at these weekly protests.
It's a shocking, shocking reality.
Man, I'll tell you, and what's funny too is, or not funny but worth remarking upon or something, I guess, is that they could just put up enough razor wire, not to justify pinning the Gazans in or what have you, but I'm just saying, they could use beanbag shotguns.
There are less lethal ways of keeping a mass of civilians from crossing.
It's not a border, is it, but from crossing that line.
There is a fence, we should be clear.
The Gaza Strip is not just divided by a line.
There's a huge fence.
We hear a lot more about the West Bank fence than we do about the Gaza Strip.
But the Gaza Strip is completely enclosed.
When the Israeli soldiers and settlers pulled out in 2005, we hear about that a lot, that Gaza's not occupied anymore.
The soldiers and the settlers pulled out.
Well, the settlers were pulled out.
There were about 5,000 of them.
But the soldiers didn't go home.
They were just redeployed from the streets of Gaza City to the edge of the Gaza Strip, what Israelis sometimes call a border but usually don't because they want to control that land anyway.
So the Gazans are still surrounded.
These protests were going on on the Gaza side of the border.
They weren't at the fence.
Most of them are shot from hundreds of yards away.
Well, and they make it sound, though, like if they could get to the fence, they could get right through it, and then the next thing you know, they'd be setting off a suicide bomb in Tel Aviv.
Yeah, they do say that.
And what has happened has been that a few young people who did not abide by the overwhelming nonviolent discipline of the protests sent across the fence these small homemade kites with a lit rag connected that set a few small fires in Gaza.
That's it.
That's the level of violence that we're talking about here.
Now, under international law, it's illegal to use lethal force against protesters, against civilians, against anyone unless the soldier or the police officer firing the lethal shots is in imminent danger of being killed.
Nobody's even claiming that.
They said we're protecting our fence.
You don't get to do that.
You don't get to kill children, and children have been targeted along with journalists have been targeted, medics have been targeted.
You don't get to kill people because you're protecting a fence.
It just doesn't work that way.
And if it were any other government other than the Israeli government which has the full backing and protection of our own government in the United Nations, etc., those government officials would be held accountable.
Hang on just one second.
So you're constantly buying things from Amazon.com.
Well, that makes sense.
They bring it right to your house.
So what you do, though, is click through from the link in the right-hand margin at ScottHorton.org and I'll get a little bit of a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
Won't cost you a thing.
Nice little way to help support the show.
Again, that's right there in the margin at ScottHorton.org.
All right, so I have this recent Phil Giroldi article, Israel's War Criminals in Their Own Words, where he talks about a transcript of an Israeli radio broadcast from April 21st, and Craig Murray has, condemned by their own words, has the translation here.
And it's an Israeli brigadier general named Zvika Fogel, and he's responding to reports of the killing by soldiers of an unarmed 14-year-old boy.
And he explained in some detail why his soldiers are absolutely doing the right thing, as Giroldi says here.
And then, so he says, in response to the first question, should the IDF rethink the use of snipers, he says, any person who gets close to the fence, anyone who could be a future threat to the border of the state of Israel and its residents, should bear price for that violation.
If this child or anyone else gets close to the fence in order to hide an explosive device, or check if there are any dead zones there are, or to cut the fence so that someone could infiltrate the territory of the state of Israel to kill us, the interviewer says, then the punishment is death?
And Brigadier General Fogel says his punishment is death.
Punishment is death.
I know that quote.
It's a horrifying one, and it's not the first time, and it's not inconsistent.
There was a famous episode about two years ago when the Israeli minister of justice, of all things, retweeted or reposted a Facebook page which was talking about the need for killing Palestinian women before they could bear more little snakes.
And it sounded so much like, in our own country's history, the way early soldiers and others talked about the native people of this land.
There was a famous statement from an Indian killing general who said, kill them all, nits make lice.
Because one of his own soldiers, this was at the Sand Creek Massacre, right before they went in following the orders to shoot to kill everyone in these sleeping camps, and one soldier stood up and said, children too, and the answer was, children too, nits make lice.
It was an absolutely extraordinary moment.
And I think that this is the parallel that we're seeing in Israel, that the view of Palestinians by Israeli officials, by Israeli soldiers, and increasingly by Israeli voters who have just voted in the most right-wing cabinet ever in a very right-wing history in Israel, see the Palestinians as having no value as human beings.
They are to be removed by any means necessary.
Lesson one in social psychology class is that attitude follows behavior.
So of course they're animals, or else why are we slaughtering them like animals?
If they're human beings, then killing them and stealing their stuff is wrong.
So we can't even entertain that possibility, because look at what we're in the middle of doing.
Right.
No, that's exactly right.
You know, in the article that I wrote that you mentioned, Scott, I started it with the story of a close friend of mine who is a double amputee.
He had both an arm and a leg having to be amputated after a medical crisis.
And he had 10 years since the crisis began where he kept thinking he could save his leg and save his arm.
And then it became clear that they were never going to work.
He was always going to have just a useless appendage.
And eventually he made a choice with his doctors.
They chose to do the amputation knowing that he would have access to the most advanced, most developed kind of prosthesis for both his arm and his leg.
He has one for walking and one for running.
His hand is like a miracle of electronic gizmos.
The kids all call him either Rocket Man or Bionic Man.
But the kids in Gaza have no such choice.
They will face amputation because the alternative is death.
And they will not have access to this kind of advanced technology.
They will be essentially without a leg or, at best, a very primitive kind of prosthesis, perhaps a wheelchair.
There are so many young people in Gaza now that they've created two sports leagues for wheelchair basketball and soccer games played by amputees.
It's like a TV show or some kind of crazy movie or something, right?
You can have a whole generation of people limping around without legs, walking around without arms, and everybody's going to know you weren't in a tractor accident.
The Americans paid the Israelis to shoot your arm off is how you got that way.
And that's a very important point.
The Americans paid the Israelis.
We pay the Israeli military, direct to the military, $3.8 billion of our tax money every year.
No questions asked.
They can use it for whatever they want.
The first bill aimed at protecting Palestinian children has now been introduced in the Congress, led by Representative Betty McCollum from Minnesota.
But it's the first time, and it's a far long ways off before it will be brought to a vote, but it's the first time that any resolution has been brought to our Congress aimed at protecting children from being the victims of the military attacks, the military, in the case of this bill, it's the military court system.
Israel's the only country in the world that has a juvenile military court system that gives soldiers the right to arrest, interrogate, question, imprison, take children as young as 12 away from their parents, out of their own town, into Israel proper, out of the West Bank.
It's a huge set of violations of the International Covenant for the Rights of the Child against all kinds of international law.
And yet our money is part of what funds the Israeli military that does this.
So our obligation is very, very clear in the need to stand up against this kind of attack.
We also have to recognize this is, again, not the first time that there's been this kind of policy.
Yitzhak Rabin, who was a prime minister of Israel who was ultimately assassinated by a right-wing Israeli settler, he was known as the sort of peacenik because he was part of the set of Israeli officials who were involved in negotiations with the Palestinians in the period before and after the Oslo agreement.
But the reality was when he was defense minister in the first couple of years of the Palestinian uprising, that was 1988-89, he gave orders to his soldiers to break their bones, break the bones of children who were throwing stones.
And indeed, everywhere you went, I was spending a lot of time in the occupied West Bank at that time, and you would always go to the local hospital to get the news of what was happening.
And in every hospital there were wards filled with young boys between maybe 10 and 14, 15 years old, sometimes a bit older, who had broken arms, who had their arms in a cast because soldiers had held them and beaten them with their rifles until they broke the bones.
And they were not rogue soldiers who were off on a tear.
They were following orders.
So this kind of order, shoot to kill in some cases, shoot to maim in other cases, shoot to maim, this is a consistent pattern of the Israeli military response to Palestinian protests.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny because the narrative is so biased the other way that it sounds like maybe you're not right or something, but then you're saying, no, I was there and saw this with my own eyes.
And I won't read it to you, but I want to just point out that in that same quote of that general talking about, yes, killing kids, he goes on to elaborate about what it's like when you try to blow a child's arm off, but sometimes the bullet goes a little higher, if you know what I mean.
The picture's not a pretty picture.
He goes on to elaborate about what it's like to blow a child apart with a high-powered rifle.
But hey, business is business, guys.
And you can read that, it's Israel's War Criminals in Their Own Words by Phil Zaraldi The UNS Review, UNS.com, has that quote.
It's just unreal.
It's unreal except for the fact that the most real part of it is the billions of dollars that we send to that military every year.
The U.S. has a law, it's known as the Leahy Law, named for the senator who championed it, that says explicitly that any, it doesn't say any military force, but any specific unit of a military force that is known to carry out a pattern and practice of violations of international law or violations of human rights should have no access to U.S. military funding.
That requirement is simply put aside in the case of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces.
And their money goes year in and year out.
Every ten years there's a memorandum of understanding that's signed.
The last time it was negotiated was by the Obama administration.
And it raised it from $32 billion a year to $38 billion over the ten years.
From $32 billion over ten years.
And that's the memorandum that the Trump administration is now implementing.
Every year, $3.8 billion.
That's a lot of money going to that military force.
And for a country that everyone would agree doesn't need it.
Well, that's true.
It's also Israel is the 20, well, depending on whether you believe the CIA or the IMF, Israel is either the 23rd or the 26th wealthiest country in the world.
So why we're sending them any money is the big question.
Out of almost 200, yeah.
Well, and you know what's interesting, in David Wormser's paper, A Clean Break, for Netanyahu back in 96, about how we need to get rid of Saddam and remake the Middle East and all that, part of that, they also argue, we need to break our dependence from the United States.
You know, speaking from the Israeli point of view, that we need to be able to be a sustainable project on our own here without this kind of thing.
So it's hard to break from free subsidy, but it's in Israel's own interest to do so.
And that was endorsed by Netanyahu, at least publicly at the time.
I don't think he really meant it.
No, I'm not sure any of them meant that part of it.
What they did mean was the more substantive part of that report, which really was aimed at consolidating Israel's role as the dominant, both military and security power in the region, the regional hegemon, if you will.
That was really what that paper aimed to strategize about.
And it's come to fruition to a large degree.
Yeah.
Here's how to weaken Iran.
We'll get rid of Saddam.
Brilliant strategy, these guys.
Yeah, how's that working for you?
Hey, so you know what?
Let's talk a little bit more about what you said about arresting these kids, because it's more like abducting them out of their beds in the middle of the night, which I have to remark about this.
I don't want to draw like an inapt analogy or comparison or something, but this is just a fact that when I was growing up and they taught us in public school about the evils of Soviet communism and of German Nazism, the hallmark of the totalitarian state was that they come for you in the middle of the night.
And this is what the Israelis do to children, as you say, as young as 12 years old.
And, you know, I talked with Todd Pierce, who's a former JAG, I forget which branch now, Army JAG, who he wrote this really long thing explaining and analyzing how this is not martial law.
This is war law.
This is occupation by a foreign government.
It's a whole other level of military lawlessness beyond martial law.
No, that's absolutely right, and I think if we look at the strategy, it's not about, of course children are going to be more traumatized by being arrested, that sort of thing.
It's a method designed to increase trauma.
When the UNICEF report on this Israeli system of military juvenile justice, that's what they call it, military juvenile justice, the only country in the world that has such a system, it's shocking to read it, to recognize it, because what we're looking at in what UNICEF documents is that there's a deliberate effort.
For example, if there are two kids who are throwing stones in the West Bank, one of them is an Israeli settler kid, the other is a Palestinian kid, and they're both 12 years old.
So they're both throwing stones.
Not a good thing to do.
It can be dangerous.
Stones can even kill people if it's done right, although probably not by a kid.
So this is a bad thing.
If the Israeli kid is seen by soldiers or police, dealing with them is basically on the same kind of rules that we have here for arresting children.
It's not always followed, we should be very clear, but there is a sense of how it's supposed to work.
It's supposed to be all in the interest of the child, understanding that this is a child, not a hardened criminal.
So if a child is arrested at all, the parents have to be accompanying them, they can't be questioned without a lawyer and a parent, there's all kinds of restrictions.
And the Israeli kid, appropriately, is treated exactly the same as that.
If the Palestinian kid is seen throwing stones, in many cases the soldiers will not arrest that kid right then.
They will come back to the home at 2 o'clock in the morning once they figure out where the kid lived.
They'll come back so that the whole family is traumatized.
And one of the lessons that children take away is, my parents can't protect me.
What does that do to the social fabric of the family and of the village, of the community?
It destroys it.
It's designed that way.
So the kid is then put in a jeep, taken off without telling the parents where they're being taken.
The parents are not allowed to go.
They're taken from the West Bank inside Israel to some kind of a military encampment where they're held under arrest.
They're interrogated.
Most of them report being roughed up at the least.
Some are beaten.
And they're certainly not treated like children.
They're often interrogated in Hebrew, which almost none of them speak.
And on occasion, for older children, they're sometimes forced to sign a confession in Hebrew where they can't even read it.
So it's a horrific reality.
And it, of course, goes against all understanding of what it means to be a child.
And the Israelis clearly know that issue because their own children are protected, are treated in a very different way.
It's the classic example of the violation not only of the International Covenant for the Rights of the Child, it's also a clear example of violations of the International Covenant against the Crime of Apartheid.
Because what it reflects is the difference, having two different legal systems for the same territory, for two different groups of people that are determined on the basis of race, ethnicity, language, etc., which is exactly what happens when children face the possibility of arrest in the West Bank.
Can I add that the whole thing is completely stupid, too?
I mean, obviously the point is to break the spirit of these people that one day, what, they're just going to give up and lay down on their bellies and say, fine, walk all over us, throw us in the Jordan River, kill our kids, we don't care anymore.
Which is completely, it hasn't worked this whole time, Phyllis, I don't think.
I can't imagine a bunch of, well, I don't know, Austinites might, but a bunch of Texans wouldn't put up with that.
We would pull out our rifles and we would shoot and shoot and shoot.
Which, by the way, the Palestinians don't have any rifles, and that's why they live like slaves.
Well, I'm not sure that an armed uprising of Palestinians would get them very far right now, so I'm very grateful that that's not their agenda.
Well, if they'd had rifles in the first place, they wouldn't all be living in the Gaza Strip in West Bank, but anyway.
Well, OK, we can disagree on that.
The point is, Palestinians have made their own determination that at this point in history, nonviolent mobilization is their best bet, and that's what they're carrying out.
And it's in response to those nonviolent mobilizations that we are seeing this extraordinary level of violence in return, including the constant deployment weekly of sharpshooters on the Gaza border killing children.
All right.
Now, hey, do you have any more time?
You've got to go.
I've got to go.
Oh, man, I was going to ask you about Jared's new deal of the century.
Another time.
But I guess I'll have to wait until next time.
Thanks for doing the show, though.
I really appreciate talking to you again, Phyllis.
Good to talk to you.
OK, guys, that's Phyllis Bennis sticking up for the Palestinians, as usual, for an aid that costs an arm and a leg, literally.
It's the spotlight today on Antiwar.com.
She's at the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
She wrote the book Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror.
And she wrote this article for Other Words.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
