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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, all in the line.
I got the great Jason Ditz.
He's our managing news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com, keeping track of essentially everything for you all day, every day for you there at news.antiwar.com.
Hey, man, how are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Hey, thanks for joining me on the show today, because I've been having fun laughing at Benjamin Netanyahu, and I was thinking you could give me a hand.
Sure, we can do that.
So tell me about Netanyahu.
You just say things that are true, and then I'll laugh, but don't worry, I'll leave my mic off so I don't ruin it.
Okay, well, the April election for Israel, Netanyahu ran on an extremely far right wing position.
He always runs right of where he tends to end up in his coalition.
But each election, it seems like he gets a little further to the right than he was the last time.
And this time he was he was teaming up with groups that had previously been practically banned for being terrorist organizations and the like.
His party had seemingly won the April election, but it's a representational system.
And as always, they had to come up with a majority government to actually form a government.
And they were given their usual deadline.
And it's not unusual for Israel to struggle with this and then form governments at the last minute with some surprise compromise at the end.
And everyone kind of figured that was where it was going again this time.
But for the first time in Israeli history, it didn't.
Netanyahu was unable to get his last coalition partner on board, which was Avigdor Lieberman, and he wasn't able to form a government at all.
So Israel dissolved parliament again just a month and a half after their last election.
And they've set another election for mid-September where they think new coalitions are going to come together.
Now, is it true what I read that, in fact, Netanyahu was afraid that the Blue and White Coalition or somebody else could try to form a government?
And so he very hastily disbanded parliament before they'd have a chance or the Knesset before they would have a chance?
Yeah, there was some talk of that.
I'm not sure how realistic it was that anybody had a chance of forming, getting to 61 seats in the last election.
But yeah, when Netanyahu finally gave up on the idea that he was going to be able to form a government by his deadline, which was about an hour and a half before the deadline was reached, he very quickly scrambled and started getting the votes together to dissolve parliament so that there wouldn't be any chance for the president to appoint somebody else to give it a try.
Right.
But it's going to last until September, so the Knesset just won't meet through the whole summer?
Is that it?
Right, right.
They're back in campaign season, effectively.
The Knesset is dissolved.
Once again, Netanyahu is kind of a caretaker prime minister pending an election, but he's also a caretaker prime minister that's running for election.
So that's going to kind of limit his ability to do a lot of things, including getting his legal immunity that he's been trying to push through in Israel so that he can't get charged for some of his fairly substantial crimes that he's accused of.
And also things like Trump's peace plan, which is supposed to be unveiled in late June.
Yeah, I had read that too.
So they won't be able to do that.
They'll have to put that off until September.
But now you're getting into the American election season.
And so now, oh, it was Phil Weiss's piece said he quoted three or four different analysts just reading the tea leaves and saying the deal's dead.
I mean, it was never going anywhere anyway, but at least they were going to try to make the Palestinians look bad for rejecting it or something.
Now they're not even going to get a chance to do that, I guess.
Right.
Right.
That was kind of always the plan, because U.S. officials were being pretty public about the fact that the peace deal was deliberately unfair bias in favor of Israel.
Some U.S. officials are arguing that this is because God wills it to be so.
But, yeah, it was something that Netanyahu could express token support for, knowing that the Palestinians would never go along with it, whatever it is.
And then he can say, see, it's not us that are unwilling to make peace with the Palestinians.
But because the election's on, he may not even be able to do that.
I mean, he's going to be facing people running to the right of him and running to the left of him.
And whatever he says on the Trump peace proposal, he's going to get attacked politically for it.
So for him, it's probably ideal for the U.S. not to make a proposal during election season.
And if they do, he's probably going to have to kind of dance around what his position is on it.
Hey, you guys, check out this cool new book.
It's called Keslan Runs.
It's by our friend Charles Featherstone.
I think you'll really like it.
It's a dystopia from the very near future.
And I won't tell you too much about it and spoil your fun, but I know you'll like it.
Keslan Runs.
That's such a long way to go for such a lousy PR stunt.
I mean, I guess as long as we're paying for it all, what do they care, right?
But I don't know.
I wonder...
That's really been Israel's peace process strategy for about a decade now, is that we're never going to make a deal.
We're just going to try to make it the Palestinians' fault that the deal wasn't made.
Yeah, certainly since at least 2000 in Camp David II there.
That's the narrative, you know.
Well, I guess we'll get back to the blue and white thing in a second, but I saw where Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu called him a leftist, which I thought was great.
Can you describe, if you could, a little bit for us the discrepancy between these two?
This is the former foreign minister.
Oh God, he was the defense minister there for a minute, wasn't he?
Yeah, he was both.
Thank God nothing ever came of that.
But anyways, for some reason Netanyahu couldn't seem to get Lieberman to join his coalition this time.
Why not?
Well, the problem was that the coalition's kind of split.
It's split between the religious right and the secular right.
Lieberman's fairly classic secular right wing Israeli politician, his party supported by a lot of ethnic Russians, sort of the Soviet diaspora that moved to Israel.
They're not particularly religious.
They really resent the ultra orthodox people not having to be drafted into the military and the like.
So his big platform was, well, we need to draft them too.
And the problem is that all the religious parties have already signed up for Netanyahu's side, and they're all on the our people can't get drafted side.
So, I mean, those groups can't coexist.
And Netanyahu's to the point now where he's, today, he explicitly said, Lieberman will not be part of a future government, no matter what the next election shows.
He's not going to have any coalitions with Lieberman in the future.
He even allowed the head of the Labor Party in Israel to film him saying Lieberman won't be part of a future coalition because he's thinking he might have a better shot of getting what's left of the Labor Party on board as kind of the outlier sort of left of center party in his next coalition.
It's funny that this guy, Avigdor Lieberman, who Martin Peretz from the old New Republic called him a fascist is how fascist he is.
I mean, if Martin Peretz calls you a fascist, dude, you're a fascist because that guy's a fascist.
That's the joke.
And this is a guy who threatened that maybe Israel should nuke the Aswan Dam in Egypt over the insult of Mubarak refusing to come to Israel, to come to Jerusalem, to bow on the bended knee there.
In other words, for public relations purposes, he kind of insulted them.
And of course has said that Palestinian terrorists, very broadly defined, I'm sure, should be beheaded.
With no sense of irony or humor or anything like that.
He wasn't talking about that.
He was saying we should cut all their heads off, just like ISIS.
I mean, that guy is a nut.
For a secular right-winger, he's a pretty right-wing man.
And then for Netanyahu to call him a leftist because he's not a religious guy, I guess that makes sense in a way, but I don't know if anybody around is buying that.
Yeah, he just needs justification for not letting him into the coalition or not even inviting him into the coalition when the next election comes along.
It just seems like everyone would scoff and laugh at that.
This guy might be a lot of things, but are you sure he's a left-winger?
Because I'm not sure.
Right.
And I was saying that when the election was finished and everyone was kind of anointing Netanyahu as the winner in that last vote that, you know, they have these groups kind of loosely listed as, oh, this is the left-wing parties and this is how many seats they got.
This is the right-wing and how many seats they got.
And it's like, yeah, but that right-wing coalition depends on Lieberman coexisting with all these religious parties, which is something he's never shown a willingness or an ability to do.
So this was always going to be a problem.
Now, somehow they had papered over it last time, huh?
But no longer?
Right.
They've had times where they sort of limited how much the religious parties had outside of, you know, they all have their own key interests within the Israeli government.
If you give the religious parties, leave them in charge of the chief rabbinate and give them some interior type positions where they can throw a bunch of money at their own communities, they're usually happy enough to go along with the left or right-wing government.
But the conscription issue is a big issue for them, too, because large chunks of the ultra-Orthodox go to religious schools to get out of the military.
And Lieberman's plan was to not let them do that anymore.
So, yeah, it's a pretty big fight.
Pretty high stakes in that one, for sure.
And so now what about Ayelet Shackad and Naftali Bennett?
They have a new shot for a comeback here, right?
Right.
Bennett didn't even really contest the last elections.
He sort of stepped aside and let Shalit run the new right.
And there was talk for a while that Shalit had been negotiating with Lieberman sort of behind the scenes of, like, well, after Netanyahu fails in a new elections call, that they might combine their parties and try to run together.
Because the polls showed they'd do fairly well as a combined group.
But with Netanyahu ruling out Lieberman as a part of his coalition, and that really being the only way Shaked's party would get in a coalition, that seems like it's sort of falling apart.
And now Bennett's apparently back in the mix.
He and Shaked are kind of trying to cobble together a new right-wing bloc that's also got some former Likud members in it to try to run a new list that might get enough seats or enough percentage to have seats in the next Knesset.
He's my partner there.
It was Will Grigg, the late, great Will Grigg.
But his book is coming out soon.
And we've got a lot of great writers there.
I hang out on the blog all day long.
And we have a lot of great podcasts as well.
Myself, Mance Rayder, Kyle Anzalone and his great foreign policy podcast.
Patrick McFarlane and Keith Knight holding it down as well.
Check out all that stuff if you like the Libertarian podcasts and writings.
Libertarianinstitute.org.
So, and now what about the Blue and White?
Because they just barely came in second place, right?
Oh, right.
It was effectively a tie.
They both had 35 seats.
But Blue and White didn't really have a way to get to 61 in a coalition because they had already ruled out letting any Arabs in.
Isn't that funny?
That's the tradition, I guess.
There's not a law.
But the deal is that even if your group could form a government and have the ruling government, and you could be the prime minister, if you have to ally with one of the Arab parties to do it, then forget it.
You'd rather not.
And go ahead and let the other guys win, if that's the cost.
That's just crazy, man.
It is.
And I mean, that was something that, you know, because of course, again, you have that when they show the results, they show the list of left wing parties, they show the list of right wing parties, and they show the Arab parties on the left wing side.
But you kind of have to discount them because the bigger left of center parties are never going to allow them into a coalition just because of how it would look publicly.
And Blue and White had to sort of disavow the Arab parties before the election, specifically because they thought it would cost them votes.
Some Netanyahu's allies were kind of insinuating, oh, if Blue and White wins, they're going to let some Arabs into the coalition.
And they felt the only way to avoid taking losses from that was to say, oh, that would never happen.
We would never do a thing like that.
Yeah, man, that is really something else.
And we're not talking about, obviously, we're not talking about Palestinians in the occupied territories.
We're talking about Israeli citizens, the Palestinian Christian and Muslim citizens of Israel.
Right.
I mean, the Palestinians in the occupied territories can't run for election and they can't vote.
Yeah, they have no political representation whatsoever.
Yeah, I mean, that is really just something.
If you take the comparison where if you just had an American political party say that no matter what we promise not to let the blacks in, even if it would be enough for us to win the election, to win the Senate, to win the presidency, whatever, that's our tradition.
We make sure to keep them disenfranchised as possible, as long as possible.
In fact, that has been the tradition in America in a lot of places.
But we've made great strides in overcoming that.
I think we're proud of that fact that we don't have white primaries anymore and we don't have poll taxes and all these things that they used to use to keep blacks from voting in that way.
So it's Israel's living up to the worst of America's past, I guess, is maybe a good way to put it.
Right.
And I don't think American political parties were ever really so supremely powerful over the political system that they could completely keep the wrong type out of politics.
Like if they decided, oh, you know, the Republicans are not going to let any blacks run this time or something like that.
I don't think the party leadership could even get that done if they wanted to.
And certainly now they couldn't.
Right.
And it would be an absurd thing to suggest.
But even in the worst days of Jim Crow, it would have been a very difficult thing to pull off completely nationwide.
Yeah.
And that was why they always had to resort to tricks like the white primaries and those kinds of things to try to get away with, you know, hemming around the edges as best they could.
That kind of thing.
But yeah, so that's the same thing that is, you know, just daily business.
That's how we do it.
That's how they talk about it in Israel all the time.
If you read the thing where I got that from, where I says the tradition was, that was a quote from the article, an article I was reading about this, where they talked about, they just kind of dismissed it out of hand.
They go, well, you know, of course, if they would just ally with the Arab groups, then they'd have the numbers and they could win.
But the tradition in Israel is that, no, you never ally with Arab groups.
They have to basically be part of the minority.
I don't know if people even let them join in minority coalitions, but that any other party would rather lose than to ally with them to get the majority in the parliament.
That is really something else.
Right.
And there have been some rare cases over the years where an Arab politician was running with a nominally Zionist political party and ended up getting into a coalition government that way.
You would every once in a while see talk of, oh, we're going to have an Arab be the deputy such and such of some ministry, and it'll be the first time ever.
But for the specifically Arab parties, which is overwhelmingly where the Arab vote goes, it's unheard of for them to be considered.
In fact, it's not only a tradition not to let them into the coalition government, it's a tradition to try to ban all their parties right before the election, too.
And the Israeli high court almost always throws those efforts out, but it happens every time.
And then, as you mentioned before, Netanyahu gets really right wing before these elections, too.
So he'll outright scaremonger and go, oh, no, all the blacks, I mean, the Arabs, they're voting in droves.
Right.
Again, if an American politician said that about a minority group, can you imagine?
I don't know, this day and age, it might get them some votes.
And that's a good point, too, because during the April election, which ultimately didn't matter anyway, the early reports were that Arabs were voting in droves.
And Netanyahu sent members of his campaign out to install surveillance cameras inside polling booths in Arab neighborhoods.
And then the number of Arabs voting plummeted later in the day because they were scared to vote with surveillance cameras on them.
And Netanyahu took credit for it.
It was like, yeah, it was my idea that we do this.
It's like it wasn't necessarily legal, but it also wasn't strictly illegal either.
I like that whole high five thing at the end, taking credit for it.
Yeah.
Hey, did you see how me and Jimmy, we suppressed the vote real good.
All right.
These guys.
All right.
Now, Gantz.
So he's still a parliamentarian.
He's got this blue and white thing.
But I guess I lost the plot there on the future of that blue and white coalition.
Are they going to be Likud's biggest competition in the upcoming election as well, you think?
It certainly looks like it.
And there was some question early on whether they would even stay together as a coalition, Gantz and Lapid.
But so far, it looks like they're staying together.
It looks like they're going to continue to run as a single list.
Likud has actually added the Kalanu party to their list now to try to bulk up their number of seats.
And early, early polling, which, of course, September 17th is the vote, so this is still a long time out, shows them still pretty well neck and neck, like one seat here or there, depending on who took the poll.
Yeah.
What do you think about the statements that this is a real kind of blow to Netanyahu's reputation and all of this kind of thing that maybe he might not even last?
Maybe the Likud guys will shuffle him out of the leadership position before the election even happens.
Well, it's certainly possible.
And I think a lot of the Likud, the younger Likud people were seeing Netanyahu increasingly as kind of an embarrassment.
I mean, a lot of his early effort to put together a coalition was on its face designed to get him legal immunity so that he wouldn't go to jail.
And it's like, well, you can't send a sitting prime minister to jail, so I better hurry up and get a coalition together so I'm still prime minister so they can't send me to jail is seemingly his top priority.
And a lot of the younger people in Likud are just seeing this as a very cynical thing for him to do.
They see him as not having any future.
And ultimately, that Likud is going to struggle to be a meaningful political force in the way it historically has been once Netanyahu is out of the picture.
Yeah, well, I sure hope that sentiment sticks.
I'm sick and tired of this guy myself.
And I think one of his great selling points is, I'm such good pals with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and all these people.
I'm an important man of the world.
I'm Woodrow Wilson on the global stage and all of this kind of stuff.
Whereas, frankly, his competition, they don't have that kind of stature.
They kind of have to start over from a little bit lower down on the scale.
At the same time, though, I think probably everybody who knows Netanyahu hates him.
And that could be spun the other way.
You know what I mean?
That, yeah, sure, Trump and Putin have tolerated Netanyahu so far, but how long do we expect that to last?
Well, and Trump loves Netanyahu and was, in the last couple days before the deadline, the form of government came up, Trump was issuing statements saying he sure hopes Netanyahu gets in again, which is kind of, I mean, for the US to meddle in another country's election like that is very, very common, but to do it in Israel is extremely unusual.
Historically, the US lets Israel elect whoever they want.
And historically, it really hasn't mattered who Israel's prime minister was, the US is going to be close with them.
But Netanyahu's behavior over his last few terms in office, maybe that's not so much the case anymore.
He's kind of built himself up as he's a friend of the Republicans, not so much Democrats.
He didn't like Obama.
The Democrats kind of aren't thrilled with him nowadays, to the point where, you know, he insinuates and Trump insinuates that the Democrats maybe aren't sufficiently pro-Israel anymore.
And for a long time, this just didn't matter.
I mean, Israel was a political non-starter in the United States.
Both major parties just assumed, oh, we'll be very close with Israel, whatever happens.
All right, well, thanks very much, Jason.
Really appreciate it.
Sure, thanks for having me.
All right, you guys, that's the great Jason Ditz.
He's news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
And you heard him there on Israeli politics?
This guy sits in Michigan.
He knows that much about all of this stuff.
Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, obviously Israel-Palestine, all of this stuff, all day long.
You need to catch up on whatever it is, you just go to news.antiwar.com.
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.
