06/23/15 – Jerome Slater – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
All right, first guest today is Jerome Slater, and oh, I got his bio at the bottom of the page here.
He is a professor emeritus of political science and now a university research scholar at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and he's got his own website at jeromeslater.com, and here he is at Mondoweiss, Obfuscating the Truth, the UN report on war crimes in Operation Protective Edge, and I'm sorry I asked you such a general question to get us started off here about, you know, what you thought was the most important thing in there, but I suppose the most important thing is the adding of detail on the various war crimes, although the Commission fudges a bit and calls them maybe war crimes, but clearly they consider them to be war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas, and they have the report contains great detail on a number of specific incidents and cases.
That's the most important.
It's also controversial because it attempts to be very balanced, and I'm going to put balanced in quotes, in juxtaposing the actions of Hamas with those of Israel, when it is clear that Israel's attacks on civilians were far more extensive than were those of Hamas.
Yeah, now that's interesting, of course, the way they have to, I guess, try to spin it that, well, look, we're looking at both sides and then the language for both sides ends up pretty much the same, and it's true that Hamas rockets killed at least one Israeli child, I know, and they are, you know, kind of firing blind over the wall, but is the UN basically saying that to fire such a primitive, unguidable rocket toward where there could be civilians amounts to an attack on civilians, a war crime, just because they don't have laser-guided drone Hellfire missiles to target IDF headquarters with, or that kind of thing?
Well, yes, because they even hedge on that, because they say in a number of places that they're really not quite sure that Hamas was attacking civilians, although it did hit some civilians, that it might have also been attacking Israeli military targets, which were very close to the civilians that were hit.
So they're even providing a kind of, I don't know if excuse is the right word, but an explanation for Hamas's attack on civilians, which may have been only a consequence of their not having accurate enough weapons, or maybe accurate enough intelligence to hit military targets, which they may have been aiming for.
So they're using a lot of qualified language.
Well, and it does make sense, and I'm not testifying to any fact here or anything, but it sounds plausible enough to me that Hamas would have their own version of a price tag, that, hey, you know what, all we have is these rockets, we are going to shoot them toward we think they're where there might be civilian apartment buildings and try to terrorize the population, turn them against the government policy.
That's a tactic in war.
And Hamas will send, in the past, they'll send a suicide bomber to a pizzeria.
So why the hell wouldn't they do that?
I mean, they're Hamas for Christ's sake.
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly.
In fact, they even, spokesmen several times have admitted that they're going to respond in turn to what Israel does, which is to attack civilian targets.
So yes, I mean, as you say, they have a history of attacking civilian targets anyway.
Yeah.
Not at all, but I want to add that there are two differences between what Hamas did and what Israel did.
First of all, the Hamas attacks were far less extensive, if only because they didn't have the weapons.
I think the estimate of the general estimate is something like 1,400 civilians were killed by the Israeli attack in Gaza, and something like seven or eight were killed in the in the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, or numbers of that order.
Because the other thing is that Israel is occupying Palestinian territories, and it has quite a repressive occupation.
In addition to occupying it, it occupies it repressively and often violently.
So Hamas can be seen, they certainly see it that way themselves, as trying to liberate the Palestinian territories, principally Gaza in their case, but also the West Bank, from the Israeli occupation.
What the Israelis are trying to do is to maintain the occupation.
There's really no doubt about that.
Alright, I'm sorry we got to take this break, Jerome.
We'll be right back on the other side of this break with Jerome Slater, writing at Mondoweiss.net today about the new UN report on Operation Protective Edge, so-called.
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Alright guys, welcome back.
We were interrupted by the break, but before that we're talking with Jerome Slater, writing here at Mondoweiss, obfuscating the truth, the UN report on war crimes in Operation Protective Edge, and we're talking about the false equivalence of Hamas.
Now, maybe the moral equivalence is the same, but in terms of who's occupying who and who's arming who, you know, there is no comparison.
I mean, this is basically like Dick Cheney on a canned hunt of a wild animal who can't get outside the chain-link fence.
This is in Israel's fence.
We even saw, just anecdotally the other day, the Israelis acquitted themselves of bombing the boys on the beach to death, just to kind of put an exclamation point behind the fact that they are completely penned in.
They don't even control their own coasts, the people of the Gaza Strip.
On TV news in America, they act like Gaza or Palestine in general, same for the West Bank, is the country next door, rather than basically an Israeli-run prison by the sea, where every once in a while they bomb their trustees, which seems like, you know, a much more apt way to describe the situation, where Hamas, for whatever reason, isn't doing exactly what they want, and so they bomb the people of Gaza in the name of bombing Hamas.
That sound about right?
Just about.
And now, so does this report talk about how this thing started, and what led to the beginning of the war?
Good question, and my frank answer is, I don't remember off the top of my head how much they went into it.
They go a little bit into the context.
Yes, they did a little bit, but that wasn't the main purpose of the report.
Well, as you talk about it, the answer is yes.
Yeah, well, I mean, you talk about it, they accept the premise that this was defense, so maybe they didn't do a very good job of bombing in defense, but they were defending themselves, which is actually contrary to the real truth of how the war started, of course, where Israel was bombing the Gaza Strip in the name of the three kidnapped guys who the Israeli government already knew for two weeks had already been killed, while they were pretending to search for them, and, you know, targeting every member of Hamas on the West Bank.
They also started bombing them on the Gaza Strip, I believe it was on the 6th, and then the first rocket attack in response came on the 7th, if I got my dates right.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think it also, you also have to emphasize, as I did earlier, the larger context, and the larger context is that Israel has occupied the Palestinian territory since 1967 and has sought to repress all forms of resistance, not just terrorism, by the way, but also nonviolent resistance is repressed by Israel, often violently, and so when you engage in that kind of behavior, there's going to be resistance, and it's, of course, very unfortunate, to say the least, when that resistance takes the form of terrorism, but one also has to remember that Israeli terrorism has been far more extensive than Hamas terrorism.
That is to say, where terrorism is defined, as it commonly is, as intentionally attacking non-combatants or civilian targets, and those targets are not limited to civilians or people as such, but also to their economy, their social structure, and so on, and Israel has been doing that for many years, and that naturally engenders resistance.
Well, and how much of a game-changer do you think it is now that the Prime Minister Netanyahu has said there's never going to be a two-state solution, all the land from the river to the sea belongs to me?
Now that the pretense is over, does that really change anything, or they'll just continue with their facts on the ground?
Yeah, no, it doesn't change anything much.
I mean, it gets out into the open what everybody who's been paying any attention at all has known for years, that Israel has no intention of giving up, or at least Israel, when it's led by the right wing, as it is now, has no intention of withdrawing.
But other than that, I don't think anything much is going to change.
The widely accepted assessment, and one that I hold, is that it's unrealistic in the extreme to expect change from Israel, coming from within Israel, change from Israeli policies, which is generated from Israel itself.
It's going to take a lot of outside pressure.
The state that has the most capabilities for such pressure is obviously the United States, but the only thing that would work would be making American economic and military and political support of Israel conditional upon them agreeing to a negotiated and fair two-state settlement.
But the United States is not about to put that kind of pressure on Israel.
No political party has any incentive to do so.
The downside politically is far greater than what you might gain, and so it's not going to happen.
Frankly, I'm very pessimistic.
I don't see any solution to this, at least not in the foreseeable future.
Yeah.
Well, and you sure do get it right there about the politics, not necessarily what's good for the national interest of the country and the 300 million of us, but the squeaky wheel gets the grease up there, and the squeaky wheel is the Israeli government and their lobby.
And that's what really counts on this issue.
There is no real organized opposition to them.
Well, it's not only the lobby.
That puts it, I think, a little bit too narrowly.
If by lobby you mean, you know, specific interest groups.
It's also that the American people as a whole, poll after poll, year after year, shows that they are far more critical of the Palestinians than of Israel.
And so there isn't any political gain to be made by taking on Israeli policies.
Yeah.
Well, and that's just because on TV they never really explain who's occupying who.
Again, they always kind of refer to the Palestinians as neighbors without really defining what they mean.
Even in the midst of talking about a someday two-state solution, they still never say, like you said, Well, you see, they've been occupied since 1967.
Those words never come out of the mouth of a TV news anchor, ever, ever.
Not in 30 years has anybody ever talked like that on there.
Maybe Pat Buchanan once on MSNBC.
But other than that, Americans just don't know.
They don't show them a map.
They just don't tell them the truth.
Yeah, and it's not a matter of opinion that there's been an occupation since 1967.
It's a brute fact.
So you would think that this would be, at least sometimes, mentioned, if not emphasized, as an explanation for why you have Palestinian terrorism or any other form of resistance.
Yeah.
Yep.
Nope.
They'll just never give that context.
And I think it's because it's a safe bet that the American people like to believe, at least, that we side with the underdog and the little guy and the occupied against the dictatorship.
And so who wants to be under the martial law of a foreign government for 50 years?
That doesn't sound fair.
We might side with the Palestinians if we knew what was going on there, I think.
In fact, the truth of the Gaza Strip is just like the narrative about Israel, surrounded by enemies, helpless and desperate to not get pushed into the sea and constantly under siege and all this.
It's not really true about Israel.
They're surrounded by weak and friendly neighbors, mostly.
But it's the people of Gaza who are living that narrative.
I would add, let me just modify what you just said, or at least state my opinion.
It was a significant degree of truth that in the early years of the conflict, it was surrounded by powerful Arab states, which posed a threat to the independence and maybe even the existence of Israel.
But that hasn't been true, or it's becoming less and less true as Israel becomes more and more powerful, as more and more of the Arab states have individually reached a peace agreement with Israel, like Egypt and Jordan, or when the Arab League as a whole has unanimously said they will support a two-state settlement.
So Israel is far more powerful than its neighbors, many of whom are falling apart, as we know.
And the Arab states as a whole and individually have repeatedly said we want to reach an agreement that's fair to the Palestinians.
And what's fair to the Palestinians is defined to mean a separate independent Palestinian state, not the destruction of Israel itself.
Right.
And, well, I guess we're almost out of time.
I guess I could mention, we could mention that Hamas has even agreed to recognize Israel if they would live to their end, live up to their end of the ceasefire and lift the siege.
And the PLO and PLA, whatever, has offered to recognize, or I guess has recognized Israel even since 1988, right?
Right.
Yeah, I'm not sure that Hamas has officially said that it will officially recognize Israel, but they've sent all kinds of signals for many years that at least de facto, they are ready to agree to a two-state solution.
Well, I saw one of their ministers say on Charlie Rose one time that, yeah, we would recognize within 67 borders.
Let's shake hands.
Yeah, maybe so.
You may be right.
And now I'm not saying they're going to necessarily live by what they said on Charlie Rose or whatever, but that was why they started moving the goalposts and saying, yeah, but you have to say it's a Jewish state and all this kind of, you know, changing the, altering the deal and pray I don't alter it any further kind of thing.
I'm sorry, I'm keeping you over just a minute here, Jerome, but if I could ask you about this one part of the report that you highlight here in the article about what may amount to war crimes, where the Israelis are, they're doing things, as the UN characterizes it, that are resulting in large amounts of civilians being killed, and then they keep doing those things, and so perhaps these events are designed to do these things on purpose?
Is that about as close as they get to saying that the Israeli government was deliberately targeting civilians in the actual report?
Well, they have this, it's obvious that they deliberately targeted the civilian infrastructure of Gaza.
There isn't any question about that, and obviously the people who wrote this report know that, too, but they don't want, for political reasons or a lack of courage, frankly, to state that this not only is the policy of the Israeli government, it has been the policy of the Israeli government in the past.
So they dance around with all kinds of indirect language saying that it suggests the possibility that this may have had the tacit encouragement of the Israeli government.
So that's just plain nonsense, and I think that they know it's nonsense.
You know, as you sort of suggested yourself earlier, no one wants to state the un- well, not no one, but the official bobbies don't want to state the unvarnished truth about what has been going on.
So they feel the need to provide balance, even if the imbalance is far greater than any balance, and they don't really want to come out and say it's the policy of the Israeli government, it's the Israeli way of war in the past to punish civilians in the hope that it will deter resistance to their own policies.
That's- never mind, I won't add to that.
All right.
Yeah, I'll let you go with that.
Thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate talking with you today.
Thank you.
All right, so that is Jerome Slater.
He writes at jeromeslater.com.
Here he is at mondoweiss.net with this piece, Obfuscating the Truth, the UN report on war crimes in Operation Protective Edge, and he is a research scholar now at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and we'll be right back.
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