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 You've been took These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else except as a 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 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, introducing the great Ramzi Baroud from Palestine Chronicle, and he is the author of My Father Was a Freedom Fighter and also The Last Earth, a Palestinian story, which is a great collection of chronicles, of stories of individual Palestinian human beings, and what they're about and what their history is and all these things.
It's really great stuff.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me again, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
And did I mention that we republish 99% or something of what you write at antiwar.com.
In fact, the only reason I rejected the last one is just I hate the ICC and all that UN stuff, but I totally feel you on the war crimes though, so I'll give you a chance to talk all about that to make it up to you.
Absolutely, no worries.
Now, why would you put an Israeli in the dock at the ICC, Ramzi?
Well, because Israel has committed numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity.
These are two of the four major crimes that are the responsibility of the ICC to deal with.
In fact, if we would go even further, we'll say Israel also committed crimes against peace and the crimes of aggression and so on.
And yet it was never held accountable for all of those years, thanks to the blind and unconditional support of the United States government.
Yeah, you know, I heard a little something about that.
And certainly that is the case, that the U.S. supports them all the way.
And in fact, the Israelis, this was a statement from Netanyahu last week, I think, I read in the Israeli press, was about how, hey, listen, sometimes the whole world is against us and we have to stand up for what's right anyway.
And of course, he was talking about, now I forget whether it was seizing the Golan Heights or shooting Palestinian kids at the Gaza border, or which exactly it was, but it was something that was wrong.
It's the kind of thing where it ought to be cause for self-reflection.
It's not like the whole world's invading Israel because, oh, we all just wake up in the morning hating them so much or anything like that.
What the complaint is, it's the existence of the state of Israel at the expense of the people of Palestine, who are all still there, or many of them, not all of them, many of them are still there, essentially locked up.
In the case of Gaza, I know it's worse than, say, Hebron or something like that on the West Bank, but still in both cases, under Israeli sovereignty without representation of any kind.
Well, the world is against us is a very popular Israeli mantra that is infused quite heavily within Israel's social and political context.
So it's really, I think it's mostly beneficial in terms of local consumption in Israel, because it really does help cluster the support around the right wing and the ultra-nationalists in Israel to make them feel this sense of besiegement, this sense of, you know, that they are being attacked by everyone physically and intellectually and politically and legally and so forth.
And they need to solidify.
And that solidification happens through supporting right wing governance.
This is why Netanyahu kind of explodes this mantra quite often.
Really, I wouldn't think that there's a week that passes without this being infused somehow.
But also in terms of building all these walls and fences, I mean, what we don't realize is that there is actually, we talk about the apartheid wall, the Israeli so-called separation wall in the West Bank, but we rarely discuss the walls around Gaza that are building an underwater barrier, underground barrier, plus the existing wall and fence barriers and so forth and so on.
So there is this idea that we need to cage our enemy as well as caging ourselves.
And this is really wreaking havoc on the collective Israeli psyche that feels threatened and under attack.
No matter what they do, they always feel that they are being victimized.
So as you have lit then, I'm not sure if anti-war publishes him, but they should.
Very good Israeli scientist who writes about that collective ailment, that collective disease that's happening in the Israeli mind, that no matter what they do, they will always emerge feeling that they are actually the ones who who's being targeted.
And we've seen this in Gaza.
We see it every day in the West Bank and so forth.
Yeah.
Crying and shooting.
Right.
That's what they call it.
Yeah.
Poor, poor little me.
I'm put in this position.
I have no choice but to wax these civilians with my high powered rifle.
And that's what they are doing.
And the sad thing is that the international community is saying, but wait a minute, you killed nearly 300 Palestinians, unarmed Palestinians at the fence.
You know, the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel.
And you shot over 15,000.
Many of them are medics, journalists, children, women, workers, volunteers.
There is no legal justification for that.
You can you can bring the word security a thousand times in your in your press releases and your statements and your justification, but it doesn't justify what you're doing.
And the Israeli response is, you know, the typical response.
We have to protect ourselves.
We have to protect our borders.
We are a democratic, civilized country that is being attacked by those terrorists and hordes of Arabs and and so forth.
And at the very end, the world is against us and we have to do what we have to do to survive.
So, well, and now let's talk about that, because what that means, in effect, is that the promise of Palestinian independence one day, someday, really amounts to a hoax.
And it's pretty official when Netanyahu himself, when his ambassador, Ron Dermer, when his former ambassador, Michael Oren, all three just in the past couple of months have stated unequivocally that the era of the pretension of Oslo, essentially, that there will be an independent Palestinian state is over.
And that, you know, they're almost at the point now of de jure annexing major portions of the West Bank, which would, even according to the official story, make the possibility even of a two state solution completely moot.
And then, but so where does that leave us?
And, you know, someone emailed me about a statement I had made in my interview on the KPFK show in L.A. on Sunday about, and, you know, possibly it was over broad use of the term Zionist, but this is really the quibble right at the heart of it.
Is that so many American Zionists, whether Jewish or otherwise, they believe that, you know, having the state of Israel exist over there is perfectly compatible with justice.
If only things would be worked out exactly like this or that, and we'll have a two state solution, and two states for two people in this way or that way, or, you know, we'd like to someday.
It's all Arafat's fault.
We don't already, or whatever the story is.
When, and this is the point that you really drove home to me, was that there are plenty of kind of alternative realities where the Israelis very well could have made peace all this time, and yet we can only deal with this situation as it exists now.
And that is that after seizing the West Bank and Gaza, and Golan for that matter, in 67, that they've refused to back down from there.
And they've made clear their intention that they will not back down from there.
So the whole two state thing is moot, and that means that there can't really be an Israel at all without it being an apartheid state.
And that's, the thing is that people are still holding out for the dream, and they're not looking at the reality.
That even as according to the leadership, the essentially permanent Likud leadership of the government over there, this is the way things have to be.
For Israel to be Israel, the Palestinians must be subjugated indefinitely.
Absolutely.
There is, from a Zionist point of view, there is really no other way around it.
Yesterday I was writing an article for Al Jazeera about Zionism's perception of Palestinian nature and the destruction of nature as part of the colonial mindset, you know, destroying everything and rebuilding everything in the image of Zionism.
And I, once again, I read that letter by the founder of Israel, David Bingery, to his son Amos in October 1937.
The language in that letter, from the very ideology to the very self-perception of what Zionism is and what Israel intends to be 11 years before Israel was established, it is like taken from a Likud press conference.
It hasn't changed.
And you are essentially right that in order for Israel to exist in the way that Zionism wants it to exist, it would have to exist at the expense of Palestinians.
It would have to erase the Palestinians as a nation, as a people.
Their human rights will not matter.
Their language, their culture, their way of life, their most basic and fundamental freedoms will not matter.
And that's really the question that the Americans would have to ask themselves right now.
Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, yesterday said in a statement, she said Israel doesn't have to worry about the deal of the century, this nonsensical deal that Jared Kushner is coming up with.
You don't need to worry.
Everything is under control.
We wrote the whole thing to accommodate you.
But here's the problem.
If you are trying to accommodate this ultra-nationalist, semi-fascist, I would even say fascist, I don't want to get distracted from, you know, into a more radical discourse.
But this kind of mentality is being accommodated by Nikki Haley and Israel doesn't need to worry.
So what should Palestinians expect from the Americans at this point?
You know, nothing has changed as far as the U.S. is concerned.
The U.S. is pushing for whatever so-called peace agenda that accommodates Israel.
But in the process of doing so, they are actually allowing the conflict to perpetuate because Palestinians have no intentions of giving up.
They would have given up many, many years ago.
You know, there is one interesting thing.
I was reading this new book by Noor Massalha, a great Palestinian historian in the U.K. called Palestine, a 4,000-year history.
I strongly recommend this book.
It's just absolutely incredible, going back 4,000 years, tracing the history of Palestine and the Palestinian people.
And he says something really interesting in the introduction.
He says, note how in the Arabic language, when Palestinians say, I am going to go to Gaza or Hebron, they don't say I'm going to Gaza or Hebron.
They say I'm going to El Balad, the homeland.
I am going to the homeland.
No matter what Israel does, no matter how many checkpoints, no matter how many walls, no matter how the nature of politics changes, shifts this way or that, no matter who is in the White House, Trump, Obama, Clinton, whomever, at the end of the day, Palestinians will continue to perceive Palestine as their homeland.
And as long as that is the case, everything else, as far as we are concerned, is a waste of time because our perception doesn't change.
And the fact that we are now numbering almost an equal number to Jews between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, it also means Zionism, from a practical point of view, has failed.
Because the idea was, we take the land and ethnically cleanse the people, as they have done 70 years ago, and again in 1967.
And again, what Ilan Pape, Israel Professor Pape, refers to as the incremental genocide.
Despite all of these things, we're still there.
And we are actually numbering as many as the Jews who came to Palestine from Europe in 1947, 48, and so forth.
So as a result of this, for us, this is just a waste of time.
It is something that they convinced themselves that they figured out.
They figured out a formula that would allow Israel to dominate the Palestinians in a way that is consistent with the ideals of Zionism.
And we say to them, it's not going to work.
It never did.
It never will.
Until you accept the fact that we are equal in this land and allow us to be part of a project, a coexistence project, that brings us all together in one unified, single, democratic, secular state, in which we can establish this new sense of identity.
That's a fusion of the Arab and the Palestinian and the Israeli, the Muslim and the Christian and the Jew, all in one.
There is no other alternative.
So you like supporting anti-war radio hosts.
That makes sense.
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And thanks.
You know, what's interesting to me and is worth bringing up, too, because, you know, agreeing with you is easy.
But I'd like also really for this to help to convince other people and change some minds out there.
It's important, I think, to at least sometimes mention that Ehud Barak, who was the prime minister just two prime ministers ago.
It was him, then Sharon, then Netanyahu and Netanyahu since then.
Oh, no, I left out Olmert.
So three ago.
Point is, he was Netanyahu's defense minister in, I guess, the first or second Netanyahu prime ministership here the second time around very recently.
And so former PM and DM of Israel has said, hey, this is the choice.
Either we let these people go or we have to give up the pretense that we're a democracy.
Instead, then we're an apartheid state after that.
His words, just like Jimmy Carter or just like someone accusing Israel.
Here's their defense minister saying, look, this is the corner we've painted ourselves into.
We have to choose one or the other here.
And, you know, he I guess he was saying he can see why people don't want to let go of the West Bank and Gaza for whatever different reasons.
He's saying the other choice is unthinkable.
And yet here we are, six years later or what have you, still moving further down that path.
And again, with Netanyahu himself saying that he's going to start annexing outright these so-called settlements, these colonies on the West Bank.
And, you know, the idea, Scott, that that if Israel doesn't do this or that, it will become an apartheid state.
Israel has been an apartheid state from the very, very, very beginning.
You know, even before Israel was established officially in May 1948, for many years, there was the Israeli labor union called the Hester Drute.
The Hester Drute was this powerful labor union that worked with the British who were occupying Palestine since the early 20s.
And they made sure that no Arab gets a job in Haifa or Jaffa ports or elsewhere.
From the very beginning, the idea was based on Jews are superior to Arabs and the Arabs have to be kicked out and eventually kicked out of their own land.
So in 1947-8, when the ethnic cleansing of Palestine happened, I mentioned Ilan Pape.
You've got to read his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
I'm sure you already did, Scott, but your readers have to.
From that very early on, the idea was we are Jews, they are Arabs.
The laws would have to be in our favor.
Everything has to be for Arabs cannot own land.
Only Jews can.
That's been going on for 70 years.
I love Jimmy Carter.
I went to the Jimmy Carter Center in Georgia and met his staff just a few months ago.
But he was wrong.
The fact is Israel has already is already an apartheid state.
It was established on the premise of apartheid.
If we are going to talk about it from a technical and a legal point of view, fair enough.
Israel is now officially an apartheid state because last year they came up with this nation-state law that says only Jews matter, only their language, culture, and self-determination matters.
Arabs, their language, whatever, it's completely out of the picture.
Fine.
Fair enough.
But now it's officially apartheid and we have the walls and the checkpoints and everything else to prove it.
And along with the announcement that from the river to the sea, Israel will have a territorial monopoly on violence, period, which is what Netanyahu has said is clear as day in English.
That's right.
Who is an Israeli Jewish sniper shooting a Palestinian Arab child, woman, kid, young man, whatever?
So in every possible – no matter how much you twist it, it is still apartheid.
So is this what we want?
In other words, what Ehud Barak is saying is that we're almost out of pretense.
We were getting away with it by pretending that someday we're going to let there be an independent state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
But now that that pretense is falling apart, we can sort of no longer really for public relations reasons really even get away with calling it a democracy anymore, which is the real problem he's facing.
What Israel looks like to those who are still buying the pretense as it falls away.
Great.
That's absolutely correct.
So anyway, I'm sorry because I interrupted you.
You were going to say, though.
Do you remember?
No, no.
That's what essentially I'm saying is that we should have really confronted all of these discourses from the very beginning.
You know, what happened – we usually talk about what happened in 1967, the Israeli occupation of 1967.
As if everything that happened prior to 1967 has been through some sort of miraculous, magical process been completely forgotten.
But from the very, very beginning in 1947, 48, and this is not just historical, you know, discourse.
It's part of the reality.
I mean, those children who are standing at the border between or rather not the border.
There's no border at the fence between Gaza and Israel demanding their right of return.
What right of return?
Why is the right of return for Palestinian refugees who were ethnically cleansed from Palestine 70 years ago?
Why does it matter?
Are they just really just making trouble, coming with these nonsensical demands?
No, because the vast majority of Palestinians are refugees.
And most of those refugees trace their refugee, their original, you know, date of becoming refugees to 1948.
That issue was never resolved, not fairly or unfairly.
It was never addressed.
It was always pushed to later date.
The Israelis say there's nothing to talk about.
And the Americans say, OK, you know what, leave it to the final status negotiations.
That was in 1993.
No such negotiations took place.
Now, Jared Kushner has been traveling across the Middle East trying to convince Arabs, especially in Jordan and in Lebanon, telling them, listen, how about we call them something else?
Because you keep calling them refugees and that's creating a problem for Israel.
Right.
Let's read.
Let's rename them.
You know, let's rename the problem to something else.
And maybe it will just magically go away.
Jordan said no.
They are, you know, because Jordan has its own problems, too.
You know, Lebanon, Jordan, they are worried about their own demographics.
So there is this idea that, you know, they have to stay refugee because I don't want to mess up my own.
So poor Palestinians are caught in the middle between Arab demographic interests and priorities and Israel's complete disregard for international law.
So we remain.
I am a refugee.
The one who's talking to you over the phone right now is a refugee.
I have a refugee status with a refugee ID card.
If I go to any UNRWA feeding center, I will stand in line and they will give me an egg and a piece of bread because I'm a refugee legally.
And there are over five million people like me whose status has never been resolved because nobody wants to address it in a just and fair manner.
Well, and, you know, from an Israeli and Zionist point of view, it seems like for the long term health of the project, as defined by, you know, the so-called Israeli democracy and the 80-20 super majority, super duper majority Jewish population of so-called Israel proper, they might have been able to get away with that for the long term if they had not gone ahead and bitten off the rest in 67, as you say, because just like, as you say, for some reason, and it makes sense if only just as years go by kind of way, not in any real mathematical way, but it just seems as though, hey, they got away with 48, but it's 67 is what's unsustainable because in 48 they kicked all the people out.
And so that's worse.
But at the same time, they were gone, as the guy on the line can attest.
Right.
But then since 67, they took over the land, but they kept all the people.
So now they're living in totalitarianism.
And so, you know, I guess people expect people to live really bad in refugee camps in Jordan and Syria.
And so that doesn't get as much play.
But when there's no hope of any kind of representative government for the people of the West Bank and Gaza ever, that's what makes, as Ehud Barak would say, that's what makes the entire project unsustainable.
And if anything, that is what is going to cause a situation where the so-called Jewish state, as defined, has to give way to, as you're describing, rights for everyone who lives there.
And then it would be in that context is when the refugees would be most likely allowed to finally come home.
So they might have gotten away with it if it wasn't for the fact that they have taken so much more, that they've made the entire thing unsustainable.
I'm not saying that would be right.
I'm just saying it would make more sense from their own point of view.
And that's right.
And many, many liberal Zionists actually argued that many liberal Zionists were against the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, not because of any ethical or moral reasons, because they were OK with the immorality of 48.
They were OK with the immorality of how the state of Israel was established.
You know, Benny Morris, the original Israeli historian, wrote or was interviewed in Haaretz a few years ago where he he argued that, you know, listen, you can't make an omelet without breaking an egg.
OK, so we had to let a million Palestinian go, you know.
So and this is like one of the most progressive whatever per Israel standards at the time.
But but then then they ended up, you know, greed, power, U.S. support.
They ended up saying, you know what, let's expand the dream.
Let's take over the the entire ancient state of Israel, according to their perception.
They were hoping that Palestinians would run away.
But the demographics in the Arab world are extremely critical and sensitive.
And Palestinians did not leave.
Yes, they forced about 300000 Palestinians off their land in 1967.
But the population stayed and their numbers have grown now every single day.
Every single day.
You know, this is why I mentioned earlier the incremental genocide that Ilan Pappy refers to.
Every single day you have settlers throughout in the Hebron area, in the Nablus area, in Jerusalem, trying to kick Palestinians off their land.
We see this in the news all the time.
And a lot of for a lot of people, this doesn't make sense.
Why is this happening?
What are they hoping to achieve by taking over an apartment over here, a house over here, destroying few orchards here and there?
That's what they are trying to do.
They are hoping that eventually they will change the demographics in their favor.
But all the numbers are showing to the contrary, that the number of Palestinians in Palestine is actually recovering and growing.
And there is, in fact, according to the Electronic Intifada and other research Web sites, actually, there are actually already more Palestinians and Israelis in that area if you include Palestinians living in so-called Israel proper.
So so what do you do now?
You have to find an administration like the Trump administration.
You know, you have to find characters like Jared Kushner and Nikki Haley and others and Friedman who are willing to sign off on anything that Israel does.
But Israel, unlike and this is really important, Scott, unlike early Zionists, the current generation of Israeli Zionist leaders are not thinking very long term.
You know, in the back in the day, Shimon Peres or El Sharon, it's Haq Shamir.
And all the way back to Ben Gurion, they thought years and years in advance.
Netanyahu thinks about getting elected and reelected, forming a government.
OK, we need to form a government.
I need to show my my religious allies that I'm strong enough.
Let me go and kill a few Gazans.
Mission accomplished.
Now I am a strong Israeli.
I will get more support when I'm trying to form the coalition.
They are thinking in very incremental short term as opposed to long term.
They are not aware of the fact that the Zionist dream, so-called according to the old vision, has has already been destroyed.
There is absolutely no way you can achieve that.
So you have to subsist for eternity oppressing another nation, keeping them like like cattle at checkpoints, humiliating them, killing them, sniping at them in Gaza, starving them as in Gaza and denying them their identity, their rights, the right to even go.
You know, in the last Ramadan, in the last Friday, in the holy month of Ramadan, that Palestinians go to their holy places to worship because it's a particularly holy Friday.
Two children, two people, one is a 15 year old and one is 19 years old.
Kid were shot trying to get to Jerusalem to pray.
And this is the story.
It just keeps repeating itself.
And Israel just trying to hang on a little bit longer day after day after day.
But they know they know that that original mission, as terrible as it was, has been quashed by their own action, by their inability to come up with any vision for peace and coexistence and redeem the past.
Israel is not the only colonial country in the world.
We know that many colonial countries have come and went.
But you know what?
I just came back from Australia and New Zealand where I did a fantastic tour there.
And it's clear, especially in countries like New Zealand, that the old colonial system has has been, you know, removed.
And people are trying to find common ground, give respect to the natives, find a way to coexist.
There is a lot of examples of coexistence happening all over the world.
In Israel, they do not want to allow coexistence to ever take hold, which means that we have to be dealing with this human tragedy forever and ever.
And I don't think not only I don't think it's sustainable for the long term.
I don't think it's sustainable for the short term either, as Benny Morris himself has said that in a recent interview.
He said it will it will be a generation or two before the whole thing falls apart.
I may be repeating myself, but I like it.
It's the Thomas Jefferson quote about his own slaves and slavery in general as an institution.
He said, we have the wolf by the ears, but we can neither safely hold him nor let him go.
But the thing of it is, of course, is they're not wolves.
They're humans.
And it doesn't matter what the consequences are.
You have to let them go.
You have no right to hold them in the first place.
Too bad for you.
And that's the simple end of it.
It's as admitted by the leaders of the other side themselves in this that it's unsustainable.
As you just said, Benny Morris himself says, you know, I don't know how this is supposed to work.
He complains that they should have just finished the job and seized all of the West Bank and finished the Nakba way back then.
And it's just too bad that they didn't.
He's unapologetic about that.
For people not familiar, Benny Morris is one of the Israeli revisionist historians who admitted the extent of the Nakba of 48.
And he's just saying that Ben-Gurion should have just killed them all.
Or cleansed them all, forced them on a trail of tears all into the Jordan River somehow or something.
Yeah.
So anyway, I'm sorry.
I have to go.
I'm running so late.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show, Ramsey.
I know that does a lot of good and people have learned a lot from hearing you on here.
I hope so.
Thank you very much.
I really do appreciate it.
Okay, guys, that is the great Ramsey Baroud.
PalestineChronicle.com and RamseyBaroud.net are his websites.
His latest book is The Last Earth, a Palestinian story.
And then before that, my father was a freedom fighter.
And you can find him regularly at AntiWar.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
