06/30/15 – Robert Naiman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys.
Welcome back.
I'm sorry.
I meant to try to figure out a way to bring this up in the draw of the interview because I forgot earlier in the show, and now I'm just going to have to step all over Robert Naiman's interview with it because I just have to mention this because it's so great.
Former Bush officials teaching course on Iraq war decision-making.
Wolfowitz and Libby, right?
Other than Pearl, like, those are the two worst ones.
And they do admit that oops, Iran benefited.
I don't think they quite say oops.
Anyway, that's hilarious.
I forgot.
Did they say what college?
Is it going to be at Harvard or something?
How we did pretty good.
It's going to be called.
Anyway, hilarious.
On the line, I got Robert Naiman.
I assume he thinks that's hilarious, too.
He's from Just Foreign Policy.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Robert?
Good to be with you.
Listen, you got an article here at Common Dreams, and it's in the viewpoint section today at antiwar.com for everyone to go and look at.
It's in the highlights at the top of the page.
Freedom Fotila 3 exposes the anti-democratic extremism of the Israeli center.
And we can get to that.
We got plenty of time.
But first of all, what's a freedom flotilla?
The freedom flotilla is an international project of a group of peace and human rights advocates from around the world, particularly Europe, who've been sailing towards Gaza to protest the Israeli-led blockade of Gaza, the fact that people in Gaza aren't allowed to use their seaports, they're not allowed to export, they're not allowed to have normal travel and commerce.
And this has been going on for several years.
The latest iteration has just been happening this week, Freedom Flotilla 3.
All right.
And so what's the news?
Well, the news is that the flotilla was stopped.
What I wrote about in my piece was, you know, what was illustrated in terms of the reaction of the official Israeli political sector.
One of the participants in the flotilla was Barak Ratas, who's a member of the Israeli parliament.
Other participants included a Spanish member of the European parliament, the former president of Tunisia, other parliamentarians.
The rhetoric coming out of the Israeli government, the official Israeli government circles, was hysterical.
And I wanted to point out an example in my piece with this guy, Yair Lapid, former Israeli finance minister, leader of the Yashatid party, who's routinely described in U.S. press as centrist, and his political party is described as centrist.
He said the participants in this flotilla, he's quoted in the Jerusalem Post as saying, these people are nothing but a gang of terror supporters whom Israel should deal with as it would deal with trying to disperse a violent protest.
This, I think, exposes the character of these people who would like to be perceived, particularly in the West, as, you know, we're just Europeans, we're a democracy like you.
When their occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem is challenged by a nonviolent protest, they get hysterical.
They try to crush that protest and that opposition by any means that they can.
I think this is important for people in the West who are either supporting or passive about these policies to understand what it is that the United States government is supporting in terms of Israeli policies.
Yeah, now, it's funny because what you say about them being so hysterical, like the panic in it.
I remember back in 2010 when the Mavi Mamara was seized and the Israeli reaction going on and Max Blumenthal was there, I guess doing the research for his book Goliath at the time, and he filmed a big rally and, you know, I assume, I'm pretty sure he had the permission of the parents to film this five-year-old boy explaining what was going on here, and it was all about, you know, the IDF heroes protecting the Israelis from invasion, and the way the five-year-old explains it, they were coming to invade with sticks to kill us all and throw us all in the ocean.
But our heroes defeated them and this kind of thing, and it was perfect because you would absolutely have to be five years old to believe that this is what's going on, and yet the entire crowd, that's their narrative.
That's where he got it from, and that's what they're saying, is like, oh my God, a gigantic terrorist flotilla of Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda stick-wheeling madmen came to kill us for being Jewish, and that's basically the best they got.
They have to stick with that, you know, just stay scared because we cannot have a reasonable discussion about what might be the problem here because they'll lose it because what they're doing is wrong.
And, you know, we should always remind ourselves that this dynamic is not limited to Israel.
It also includes, importantly for us, the supporters of the Israeli government in the United States, supporters of the Netanyahu government in the United States.
We just saw an example, you know, the fast-track bill that just passed Congress had language inserted by Maryland Senator Ben Cardin at the behest of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee that says it has to be a U.S. negotiating objective and a trade negotiation with Europe.
The U.S. must oppose these negotiations with Europe, European trade sanctions against trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
They lie about this.
It's kind of a similar dynamic to say, oh, my God, you know, these horrible, horrible BDS people are against Israel, hate Israel, and are trying to boycott Israel.
But you actually read the text of the bill, what it's about is Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
And so what they're doing is saying Israel equals Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
If you're against Israeli settlements in the West Bank, you're against Israel.
It's in the text of their bill.
So it's really a similar dynamic.
It's exactly the same.
We refuse to discuss, you know, what we're actually doing, the actual policies that we're implementing, why we're doing this.
So we just have to throw up this scare fly.
Everybody's against us because they're, you know, the world hates us.
We're anti-Semites.
Anybody who criticizes us, that's because they're anti-Semites who hate the Jews, and so on and so forth.
They have to do hysteria because they're afraid of a rational discussion about the real things that are actually happening.
And unfortunately, you know, we laugh, and it is laughable, and yet we're talking about something that's far from being marginal.
I mean, this is Congress just approved it.
Ben Garten, you know, who would like people to think he's a liberal internationalist, brought this to the bill and insisted that there could be no change to the tax.
You know, AIPAC will not permit us to change this tax a little bit before putting this in our bill.
So that's exactly what is going on, and that's why it's so important to educate, engage, alert the American people that this is what's being done by Israel over there.
Our government, our tax dollars, our power is being, our national power is being used to support these policies, and there is an increasing movement of resistance against this around the world, including the United States.
I'm sorry, Robert, I've got to stop you here.
Let's take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Robert Naaman from Just Foreign Policy, and this one is at Common Dreams and Antiwar.com today.
We'll be right back.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm talking with Robert Naaman about the attempt of some very professional and legitimate and elected people to float some boats and break the Gaza blockade and how they've been denounced as the terrorist scum of the earth by the Israeli center, not even the right-wing extremists, but the reasonable ones over there, and how the reason why is because the truth is what's going on in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, well, gee, it's just unfair.
And if we had a frank discussion about it, things would have to change.
And so instead, it's apparently at least in the past has proven to be more effective to just scream, you know, everybody in the world is an anti-Semite and they're against us just for being us, rather than admitting, which it seems kind of silly.
It's not like anybody in Israel doesn't know that they're occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, right?
It's a pretty big elephant in the room there to try to ignore.
But anyway, that's where the discussion is stuck.
And that's why these guys are getting on these boats, men and women, are getting on these boats and trying to break the blockade and just to bring some humanitarian supplies and a little bit of light to the situation, Robert, right?
Yes, and are shedding light, I think, in the sense that the, you know, unfortunately, the normal state of affairs is that there's almost no Western press coverage of Gaza, for example.
But right now, there is in significant measure because this fertility is happening.
So it's an indication that this is something that a group of people in the West care about and the Western media should pay attention to it.
Yeah, definitely.
Well, so now, how many times have you ever been to the Gaza Strip?
You've been there before, right?
I have been twice, many years ago.
But since then, I've participated in many Gaza-aimed efforts in which I didn't actually reach Gaza.
So, for example, I was part of the 2011 flotilla where we weren't allowed to leave Greece, and I was part of the Gaza Freedom March where we tried to go from Cairo and were blocked.
So I've both had the experience of actually being there and also the experience of being prevented from going.
All right, well, so assuming we've got the attention of some people who just don't know anything about it except the name of it because you just told them it's called Gaza, what's the big deal anyway?
Well, the big deal is that, first of all, if there is any diplomatic resolution of the conflict, that means the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza being an independent Palestinian state.
That is what the Israeli government and its supporters are trying to prevent.
Also, we have 1.8 million human beings living in intolerable conditions of not having a normal life where they can't travel to study, they can't export, they can't import normally, they can't travel for medical care normally, they can't travel to be with family normally.
And these policies could not stand if it were not for the cooperation of the United States government in these policies.
And that's why it's so crucial, first of all, for Americans to know that this is happening.
And secondly, to support efforts to challenge these policies that are causing completely unnecessary human suffering just to serve the political agenda of people that are trying to make the occupation permanent.
And now I'm sure you come across this all the time.
I think it's – I certainly wouldn't say I was raised by this by my family, but I think just TV.
We just hear maybe characters on TV shows say this from time to time, whatever.
It's just kind of a common theme in America is that, well, you know, over there in the Middle East, they've been fighting for thousands of years over that kind of thing, and it's all just a big unresolvable religious mess which warrants my inattention because nobody's right or they're both right or some kind of problem, and so who cares about it?
What's wrong with that point of view?
So first of all, the first thing that Americans have to understand is that this is not some over-there thing.
You know, some people in the U.S. would say, oh, that's a big mess, kind of like this crisis.
We shouldn't get involved.
The problem is we are involved.
We're involved, you know, up to our eyeballs.
The U.S. government is involved.
If you pay taxes in the United States, you're involved because the U.S. government is involved.
The U.S. government gives $5 billion in military aid to Israel every year.
But perhaps even more importantly, the United States government provides diplomatic and political cover to the Israeli government by vetoing resolutions at the U.N. Security Council, by opposing international diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict.
So we are involved.
If you personally, you know, close your eyes and close your ears, that doesn't mean that you're not involved because the U.S. government is using our power to support these policies.
This conflict has not been going on for thousands of years.
It's been going on since the late 19th century when the modern political Zionism, which was an innovation in world Jewish affairs at the time, decided to colonize Palestine.
The creation of Israel was in 1948.
The occupation of the West Bank Gaza in East Jerusalem started in 1967.
So these are not ancient problems.
And while there's no dispute that, you know, Jews have a different religion than Muslims, and of course not all Palestinians are Muslims, some Palestinians are Christians, this is not a dispute about religious belief.
This is a dispute about territory and about the freedom of the people who live on the territory.
And when the Israeli army withdraws from the West Bank, this conflict is over.
And this is what the fight is about.
It's about the presence of Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and the presence of Israeli settlers in the West Bank who are the excuse for the presence of the Israeli soldiers.
When they leave, this conflict ends.
Now, a year ago, didn't the Israelis agree to lift the siege in some specific areas as terms of the ceasefire when they finally ended the slaughter?
That agreement was never fully implemented.
Since the blockade was first imposed, it has varied.
I mentioned before how the blockade was eased when the Morsi government was elected in Egypt and then intensified when that government was overthrown in a military coup.
The blockade was also eased after the Israeli attack on the Mazi Marmara brought greater international pressure to bear, including U.S. pressure on the blockade.
But it's never been lifted, and whenever it's eased, it's still at the whim of the Israeli and Egyptian authorities.
It will be announced like, okay, now they're opening the Rafah crossing and people can go out.
Then later they close it again.
So this is an unsustainable situation.
It's a violation of the human rights of 1.8 million people not to have the normal expectation that they can participate in travel and commerce, education, get medical care, like anybody else in the world would expect to be able to do.
Yeah, again, and I'm sorry to even kind of bother you with that.
I mean it's a ridiculous trope.
That's how I even described it in my note to remind me to say that or to ask you about that.
It is kind of a ridiculous thing, but I think it's pretty much what passes for conventional wisdom over there.
And then, of course, your answer is perfectly right that this isn't thousands of years old.
This is going on right now, and you can count the series of major events that have led us to this over the past few decades.
And as you said, the solutions are right in front of us too, mostly for the Israelis to stop doing what they're doing to these poor people.
Simple as that.
And so, yeah, anyway, I just like the way you say it, man.
I think it appeals to people because you're obviously so fair and honest about it and just saying the way it is in a way that gets it across well.
So thanks very much for coming back on the show, Robert.
Good to be with you.
Appreciate it.
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