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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 their 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, it's our good friend, my partner at the Libertarian Institute, the great Sheldon Richman.
And every Friday he writes, TGIF, the goal is freedom.
And this one is called Trump turns to Gaza as Middle East deal of the century collapses.
Well, that didn't take long.
Welcome back to the show, Sheldon.
Thank you.
Nice to be back.
Yeah, I think there's a classic case of what they call dead on arrival.
Absolutely, man.
So, remind us from last week, what was the deal of the century?
And just how did it die?
Well, it never was formally introduced, but we were getting indications, including from an interview with Al-Quds newspaper, which is a Palestinian newspaper, with Jared Kushner about the ideas they were floating to, oh, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and the dictator of Egypt, and I guess the king of Jordan, and I guess the head of the United Arab Emirates, a deal, a grand deal to bring peace to Palestine, and I guess the larger Middle East.
The idea being the Saudis basically deliver the Palestinians to the US and the Israelis by promising them a huge amount of outside investment for infrastructure and jobs, in other words, economic development, in return for them forgetting their aspirations about being totally free of the Israeli state, having an independent sovereign state of their own on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
What was in it for the Saudis was firming up the alliance that's certainly emerged now and is quite open, involving the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, with some other Arab states involved, an alliance against Iran.
So, everybody seems to get something out of this wonderful deal.
Oh, except for the Palestinians.
Oh, they're going to get some money.
They were going to be bought off, in other words.
Well, that was going nowhere.
The Palestinian Authority wouldn't even receive Jared Kushner and his team when they came to visit.
So, it's not going anywhere.
So, it's basically dead, and people were saying immediately that it was dead.
So now, according to Washington Post and other reports, the idea is to take everybody's mind off that by turning to the dire situation in the Gaza Strip.
And of course, as your listeners are well aware, things have been very bad there for a very long time.
It's a captive, open-air prison.
It's been called a concentration camp, because even though the Israeli military pulled out in 2005, along with the dismantlement of some settlements that were there that Israeli Jews were living in, it didn't liberate or really withdraw from Gaza.
It just moved the guards outside the prison walls.
It's still a prison, so people can move around inside without Israeli soldiers patrolling the streets.
But nobody gets in or out, and nothing, I mean goods and services pretty much, don't get in and out without Israel's permission.
It controls the two borders that it has with Gaza.
One is like a 50-kilometer border running basically north and south, and then there's a border at the top.
But then you have the Mediterranean, which is patrolled by the Israeli navy on to the west.
And then there's a smaller border with Egypt, which Egypt polices.
But of course, Egypt has been basically on the U.S. payroll and an ally of Israel since 1978, when Jimmy Carter got begging and Sadat together to shake hands and to have a big celebration about peace coming.
But it was all a big scam, really.
It was a way of just co-opting the Egyptians, getting them to do some of the dirty work.
And they were getting a huge amount of money every year, not as much as Israel gets, but maybe a billion or something.
Israel gets more than three billion.
So Gaza's been in really bad shape.
They had elections that were pushed on them by the U.S., and certainly promoted in 2006.
But the U.S. favored party didn't win.
Hamas won.
And so ever since, the Israelis have stepped up the punishment of Gaza, not just the Israelis, but the European Union and U.S. with sanctions.
There was an attempted coup that the U.S. backed by the Palestinian Authority, Fatah basically, the Arafat group that's in the West Bank.
That failed.
So Hamas then clamped down and now runs.
I'm no fan of Hamas.
I'm not a fan of its administration or its regime.
But they've been basically running things to the extent things are run in Gaza ever since.
But in return for all that, Israel put down this really formal blockade by sea and by land and by air.
Really, like I said, no one gets in or out without Israel's permission, and very little gets in or out in the way of exports or imports, including needed stuff, medicine and trivial stuff, chocolate and potato chips.
But they can't even get the materials and equipment to repair sewage facilities and water facilities.
Drinking water is polluted.
Fishing, they can only fish within a certain distance.
But of course, those waters are polluted because of what I just said.
And so fish are not really edible.
And it's just a horrible, horrible situation.
And then, as if to punctuate this every few years, Israel finds some reason to bomb Gaza and then also send in ground troops where they fire, I mean, very, very heavy firepower on residential areas.
And so they always end up killing a lot of civilians and children and a lot of the population there.
It's almost 2 million people, most of whom are under 18.
But they claim they're killing Hamas, but they don't intend to kill noncombatants.
But under international law, if you don't discriminate and just fire on residential areas, that's the same.
And this is international law now.
And according to even Israel's international law experts, this is the case.
They say this.
It's no different from targeting civilians.
In other words, you can't claim, well, that wasn't my objective.
If an end is, or a result is inevitable and foreseeable, and if you fire into neighborhoods with really, I mean, I'm talking about big artillery, big heavy guns, you can't say, oh, we didn't mean to kill civilians.
And of course, we know they've hit schools, they've hit UN schools that were being used as shelters.
They've done this from the air.
I mean, terrible, terrible, terrible.
The worst people will say is, well, the force has been disproportionate, which is a pretty sorry euphemism for massacre.
So that's what's going on.
So now it looks like the Trump strategy is to distract everybody from the real core issues and say, look, there's such a dire situation in Gaza, and it is dire, that let's forget everything but getting some money in there and getting some development aid.
I guess that's what they're talking about.
But there's more going on, because we're getting other indications that they're talking to Egypt about developing facilities in the Sinai, which is just south of that border with Egypt, for some sort of, I don't know, Freeport, where goods can come in, and infrastructure facilities where Gazans can go to work.
And it looks like it's shaping up this way.
Pay Egypt to get, you know, give them a lot of money so that they can take some of the burden of Gaza off of Israel.
It's bad PR for Israel.
Every time they go into one of these wars against Gaza, they get a lot of bad PR in their reports out of the UN and human rights organizations showing what atrocities they are.
Why not just sort of shift some of this burden to Egypt?
And maybe even the Gazans not only will work there, maybe they'll end up living there and leave Gaza.
So that's what seems to be shaping up.
And I think we need to keep an eye on that because it's another scam.
Yeah.
And now, yeah, that's the thing, too, is they desperately need to let up on that siege.
But you know what?
You think anybody's going to buy that it's really good enough?
I mean, I guess it's true.
It'll take some of the pressure off.
But at the same time, it just draws that much more attention to the situation as it is.
You know, and boy, they start letting Palestinians travel and give speeches and stuff.
Holy crap.
That could get out of hand.
Well, I think you have to look at their choices.
And Israel, I think, will find this attractive.
I mean, look at the choices it has.
So you're right.
A lot of people will identify.
We're already identifying it as a scam.
But they don't have a lot of choices.
If they keep up, the status quo, you know, just is building, builds up more and more anti-Israel sentiment.
And as we know from lots of studies, Israeli Jews, especially younger Israeli Jews, are now beginning to think, what tie do I have to Israel?
Look at the terrible stuff going on there.
American, yeah, American Jews.
How can I claim to be a liberal or a progressive when so quote, my state is doing stuff like this?
I mean, this is becoming more libertarian or conservative or any kind of human with principle at all.
The handwriting is all over the wall in neon letters.
Now we've seen the stories about the birthright trips where, you know, Israel or a Jewish American organization send young American Jews to Israel to get them to understand that, no, they should be loving Israel.
And what are they doing?
Some of them are peeling off without authorization and going into the West Bank to talk to people because they're asking tough questions and they don't get answers from their tour guides.
They say things like, why do you take us to see the occupation?
And they're told, shut up.
We're in charge of this tour.
And you know what?
A group of them then went away on their own and talked to people and were met by others who could then guide them through.
And they were, when they let their views be known, their intentions be known, you know, they were told, oh, you're going to get killed.
It's so dangerous.
Don't go in there.
Guess what?
It wasn't dangerous.
They were welcomed.
And people were very happy to hear, to see that these young people wanted to hear what was really going on and not the sanitized tour that they take you on.
So this is just, the cracks are getting larger and larger.
So let me mention here real quick, the Philip Weiss article, we're running it on antiwar.com, I guess yesterday, and we're running it at the Libertarian Institute as well.
It's called Hasbara is dead.
And it's just about how, at this point, the pro-Israel propaganda is only for the people who already believe it.
At this point, there's no real effort, or it's nothing but a failed effort to convince the people, I mean, other than the very marginal, but to convince most of the people who are willing to look at it with their own eyes.
It's ringing more and more hollow.
And so time in that way is not on their side.
And they've got to be really worried because if they lose America, they got a real problem, because it's a source of a lot of money, and not a lot of money from the taxpayer, but also just a lot of money and moral support from these very prominent organizations, APAC, and the Anti-Defamation League, and these various groups, which still have political clout and can marshal money and votes against candidates in primaries.
It doesn't always work.
It didn't work in New York State.
So they've got to be worried.
The older generation is dying off, and the younger generation in America now is coming up and doesn't have that attachment.
Not only do they not have that attachment because it's a more secular society.
Jewish intermarriage, I think, is around 50 percent.
It's just not the same kind of tribal feeling.
But in addition to that, they're seeing all this bad coverage of what the Israelis do to the Palestinians.
And they're going to learn sooner or later if they're not already learning it.
This is not new.
This is not since the last couple of years.
It's not even since 1967 when Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza.
It goes back before the foundation of the state.
It goes back to early 20th century when people were kicked off, Arabs and Palestinians were kicked off their land, when Jewish organizations bought land.
And a lot of those purchases were dubious because they were purchased from absentee feudal landlords from the old Ottoman administration.
In other words, the deeds were held not by people who had worked the land in sort of the John Locke fashion, but by big landowners who got grants from because they were buddies with the Sultan or the administration of that day in the Ottoman times.
So later, even after 1917, when it was before that too, you would have Jewish benefactors going to whoever the owner of record was, which may be some Turk living in Turkey who hadn't even maybe never even been there or moved a long time ago or living in Lebanon or something, buying huge amounts of land, farm land, you know, some of the great land, some of the best land, and then turning it over to Jewish settlers who were coming from Europe.
And what they did was kick the Arabs, the Palestinians off the land.
They were redeeming.
That's the word they used.
They were redeeming the land, cleansing the land.
It was Jewish land in their view.
And so they then dispossessed the Arab peasants, the Palestinian peasants, who in Lockean terms should have been recognized as the owners, right?
The Lockean principle is the soil is to the tiller.
The tiller of the soil is the owner, not the guy that gets it from the king or the sultan or whoever's the boss man in the political system.
They kicked the people off and wouldn't employ them.
And it was all given away by Herzl in the very beginning.
And Herzl writes in his diary, because this doesn't get made public for a while, but he writes, you know, what we're going to do is, and these are his words, we're going to spirit the penniless population, that means the Palestinians, across the border, secure them employment.
This was the great humanitarian gesture, right?
We'll secure them employment across the border, but deny them employment in Palestine, because it was supposed to be free of non-Jews.
That's the plan from the beginning.
And the young American Jews and others in Europe are going to learn this if they don't already know it, because the information is there.
It's not from fringe websites or, you know, quote, revisionist historians who are suspicious.
It's from Jewish Israeli historians who in the 1980s, late 80s, the government documents, archives were opened up after all those years.
And it was made, the access was made to scholars.
And the book started pouring out in the late 80s about this.
Benny Morris, Tom Segev, you get Avi Shlaim, a little bit later, you get Ilan Pape, all heavily documented works using the government archives and using diaries by the founders of the state, letters, memoirs, biography, some of the stuff openly published, some of the diaries that were only later disclosed.
It was all there in the plan.
It wasn't an accident.
It wasn't, you know, the fog of war or wartime necessity.
It was a plan to rid Palestine of Arabs, of non-Jews.
And the idea was, we'll take what we can get.
So when the UN recommended partition in 1947, giving Jews who own less than 7% of Palestine, even if you accept all those sales as legitimate, only less than 7%, divided the land.
It was a recommendation, by the way.
It wasn't on an act of the UN.
UN had no power to divide somebody else's land.
But it recommended partition.
And the Jews were going to get 56%, even though they were only a third of the population of Palestine.
They were getting 56% of Palestine, some of the best, most arable land, including the urban areas.
And within that 56%, Jews only owned 11% of the land.
So it's not even a huge, still not a huge percentage.
And they have 53% of the population in that Jewish partition.
So they're barely a majority.
Now, they on record say, they're kind of cagey with the language, but they say, okay, we'll accept this partition because they already knew the Palestinians in the Arab world were going to reject it.
They weren't even consulted.
They didn't recognize the legitimacy of the UN's even entertaining the idea of partition.
And so they didn't participate in it.
And the UN had no right to do it.
So they didn't participate.
And so the Ben-Gurion and the soon to be the leaders of the soon to be state, Israel, said, well, let's kind of pretend we'll accept it because we know the Palestinians won't and the Arabs won't.
And then we won't ever regard these as the borders.
And they said that openly, at least to themselves, they said it.
We have the documents.
We will not regard the partition as the borders.
That will be left, as Ben-Gurion put it, that will be left to the military.
And of course, the war that occurred after Israel declared independence, that spread the Jewish area from 56% of Palestine to 78% of Palestine.
In other words, Palestine minus the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which is what we're arguing about today.
My point is that American Jews who already aren't too crazy about Israel are going to get the full picture and they're going to be even less crazy about it.
Yeah.
And what a great tangent.
I didn't want to stop you, man, with all that to say, yeah, that American Jews are picking up on this history now and they've had it.
And you know what?
I mean, you look at what's going on at mondoweiss.net or as I keep mentioning every time we're on this subject, this new documentary by Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen, two young American liberal former Zionists who now know better.
Killing Gaza.
Three bucks on Vimeo, guys.
Killing Gaza.
It's just an incredible thing.
And you know, I'm reminded of a Mike Wallace interview with Rabbi Kahane, who was, his party was banned as fascist by the Israeli Supreme Court.
And he was actually assassinated in Al-Qaeda's first attack on American soil in 1990 in New York City.
But he was interviewed by Mike Wallace and Mike Wallace was asking him about, you know, his stated goal to seize the entire West Bank and, you know, cleanse it, as they say, of all the Palestinians who live there.
And then onward to Baghdad, I guess.
I don't know, whatever.
And, and Kahane says, hey, listen, I don't believe in all this Thomas Jefferson stuff about rights and ownership and all this and that.
That's you.
I believe in my tribe only.
And it's us versus our enemies.
And I don't care who they are.
Men, women, children, whatever.
All their property are belong to us.
And that's it.
And I just appreciated his brevity and honesty that your whole thing about the Declaration of Independence and self evident truth that everybody has the natural right to own themselves and their property and all that.
Yeah, no, I don't buy that.
Not if they're in my way.
Well, right.
And, you know, of course, the story, I mean, what an effect happened, which, by the way, his what was banned for being fascist by the Israeli Supreme Court back 40 years ago is now the Likud policy from the river to the sea.
Well, that's right.
And, and Israelis, well, pre Israelis, for example, the terrorist group that ran the Ergun, their flag or their symbol showed Israel from the Mediterranean through the area that today is Jordan and all the way up to the Watani River in Lebanon, an area that Israel once occupied, but finally got kicked out by Hezbollah, which is one reason they don't like Hezbollah.
So the the goals were very expansive.
And so they weren't going to be satisfied, of course, with the partition.
But what an effect happened, and this is long before the Holocaust, the Holocaust can't be the reason.
Europeans came to Palestine, and in effect said, look, you know what?
2000 years ago, people we claim we were related to, or at least have some spiritual connection with lived here.
So all you Arabs get the hell out of here.
We're back.
Now that's laughable.
I mean, that's laughable.
But it worked.
And the Zionist movement has been extremely successful.
Now it doesn't mean it's going to continue being successful, but look what it has accomplished.
The big reason the Ben-Gurion was willing to take the partition, even though they were completely dissatisfied with the way it was done, was it meant they had the legitimacy as a state.
It was the UN, even by their recommendation, putting its stamp of legitimacy, saying, yes, Israel can be a state under this partition plan.
It never got voted on by the Security Council because the day after that, Israel declared its independence.
Well, not that, sorry, not after that.
It took a little longer.
The British had to get out.
The British were getting out in the first part of 1948.
So there was a little, there were a few months there.
But then once they got out, the independence was declared.
So it never got passed by the Security Council, but that didn't have the power anyway.
The UN doesn't have the power to create states by dividing up territory.
And Palestine was a defined thing.
For a long time, the Israelis like to say there are no Palestinians.
Golda Meir famously said, the old grandmother, the kindly grandmother, who was the prime minister after the Six-Day War, after the 1967 war, she said, you know, it's not as if there's Palestinians.
And by the way, Newt Gingrich still says the same thing today.
It's not like there's Palestinians.
It's not like there are people.
That's nonsense.
Palestine was a definable place as far back as the Roman times.
A bunch of Poles and Russians and Lithuanians are definitely Israelis, though, and Moroccans and Algerians and Iraqis for that matter.
I've been watching some really good stuff on YouTube.
There are very good documentaries on YouTube.
If you search, you'll find these things.
I mean, here's the part of the crime and how cruel this all is.
I mean, it's bad enough if a whole bunch of people get killed, or if 750,000 or 800,000 people get driven from homes that they and their families have lived in for 1,500 years or something like that.
That's terrible.
That's, you know, it's bad.
I mean, it's Nazi-like, not in the sense of setting up death camps, but in the sense of, and it's czar-like, driving people out of their homes.
And of course, massacres were committed along the way, which are very well documented.
So it was ethnic cleansing.
But there's one thing that makes it even worse, which I think doesn't get as much attention.
It was like a cultural genocide.
Palestine was a beautiful place, you know, given its day and the, you know, economic development in the whole world and technology.
It was a vibrant place with markets, with industry, with art, orchestras, writers, newspapers, many newspapers, universities, agriculture.
The Jaffa Orange had been world famous since like 1865.
I just came to realize.
We were told it was a people, a land without a people.
I grew up being told by my parents and they didn't know better.
So they weren't lying.
They were simply conveying lies.
There was a land without a people for a people without a land.
Nonsense.
There were lots of people there.
The Jews, even by 1917, were only like 10% of the population.
Very well developed.
And so even when people acknowledge, okay, there were people living there, the same folks who grudgingly say that would then say, yeah, but they were savages.
You know, you can find this in, I hate to say it, Ayn Rand, you know, Ayn Rand and this whole objectivist view has been where savages meet Western advanced people.
You know, you can roll over the savages.
They weren't savages.
This was a beautiful area.
You can find film and pictures of what life was like in the old city of Jerusalem and Jaffa and Haifa and other places.
They had, I mean, it was a lively place, artistically speaking, culturally speaking, scientifically speaking, economically, in every respect.
That got wiped out.
Stanley Cohen was on the show.
He wrote an article and of course he's, I don't know, of course, but he's a liberal Jewish civil rights lawyer from New York city.
And he says, this is genocide.
He's like, you know, I'm not telling you my opinion.
I'm telling you that's the law.
And I said, come on, genocide means the Holocaust.
And he says, no, it does not either.
Genocide means destroying a nation.
And in this case, they killed a lot of people.
They continue to kill a lot of people and inflict massive violence.
But what they did in 48 was they destroyed a nation.
Just what you're saying.
And now, as this documentary pointed out that I was watching, most Palestinians today were born after 1948.
So they don't even know.
They maybe have seen pictures or their parents told them, but it's not the same.
They didn't live it.
They never experienced it.
And here's the thing.
I mean, we're individualists and properly so, but that can be applied in wrong ways.
Because a group of people, while they're all individuals with their own aspirations, et cetera, is in a way more, the group is more than the sum of its parts because there is culture.
Right.
And that's not a claim.
That's not a collectivist claim that that group has the right to, has the authority to violate the rights of those people.
You're not saying that you're just saying there's such a thing as society.
I'm not even talking about rights now.
Right.
There's, there's, there's something collective there.
And I'm just thinking like a libertarian because the libertarian hears that and their antenna goes up.
Like you're about to justify violating my rights, but that's definitely not your point.
A society is not just a collection of individuals because they have ongoing, regular contact and that generates what we call positive externalities in economics.
So that's culture.
That's what you mean by culture and by society too.
It's not just a group of atoms who occasionally touch and trade.
It's much more than that.
It's language.
It's everything else.
So you can destroy that without really destroying the people themselves.
I mean, you can drive them out of their, where they've been living and scatter them.
And so you haven't really killed them.
We can say, you know, you haven't killed, maybe you could imagine a hypothetical where you haven't killed any single individual, but you still destroyed something.
And that gets overlooked.
I mean, hey, living in the Yarmouk refugee camp is hardly good old Palestine or living in Gaza when your family's from Jaffa.
Right.
And that's, that's maybe a bigger crime.
I mean, it's all big and I don't want to rank them.
It's an important point to make though.
Yeah.
We usually don't grasp that.
It takes, you know, Palestinians have to remind us and show us the pictures.
I mean, I didn't know this, I don't know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
You know, I started from individual rights and thought, yeah, the Palestinians have individual rights.
How dare somebody throw them off the land.
But it's so much more than that.
That's the thing I want to drive home here.
It's much even bigger than just an individual Palestinian saying, you know, being told, get out of here, even though you and your family have been here for a thousand years and more, you have to go live somewhere else or go or we're going to kill you.
I mean, that's horrible.
But it's even more than that, because they were a people.
And I mean that in the sort of best libertarian sense, we shouldn't shrink from that.
You know, sociology, you know, there were good early classical liberals who were sociologists.
I know sociology, that subject makes some libertarians cringe because they think, oh, it's a denial of the individual.
It did not deny the individual, but an individual is more than just, in a way, more than himself.
I mean, he grows up in a milieu, a cultural milieu.
And so that matters.
You can think about it as you grow older and you can decide, I don't like this culture, I'm going to move.
So the individual is kind of in charge in that sense.
But that doesn't mean there is no larger thing called the culture.
And that has been destroyed.
I mean, some people are valiantly trying to hold on to it, but those people are getting old.
They're dying.
And it's not the same with their kids or their grandkids.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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Well, and you know, this is the thing about, while I'm always talking about Killing Gaza, that's documentary, where you just get to see Palestinian after Palestinian after Palestinian saying, listen, this is what they've done to us, and this is why we fight.
So how do you like that?
And you get the idea, just like you're saying.
It's not just, oh, this happened to this guy, and this happened to this guy.
But in interview after interview after interview after interview, you get the idea of just the scale of what's really taken place.
And of course, the context of that is the war of 24, well, the canned hunt slaughter of 2014, the 51-day war then.
But overall, same difference anyway.
Gaza's Gaza.
Right.
And so this sheds, I think, once you think of all this and appreciate this, it sheds light on what's going on today, and what's been going on since 67.
And that war, when Israel got those additional territories, which it always wanted, and really doesn't want to give up.
Because as I think I pointed this out last week, and it was in last week's article, the burden of proof has been on the Palestinians, actually from the beginning, but certainly after the 67 war.
In other words, you show us, the Israelis say, and America has been backing them up, you show us that you're worthy, that you care about us, you care about our security.
Only then, when we're convinced, will we think about what we might give up to make some sort of coexistence possible.
That's outrageous, given the context I've already spelled out.
I was going to ask you about, you actually give a lot of attention in your article to the Palestine papers that were linked to Al Jazeera a few years ago.
Talk about that.
That's important.
That's amazing.
That didn't get the attention it should have because the Arab Spring started around that time.
Because they were disclosed in 2011.
And that's when the Tunisia thing happened.
And then you get Egypt, Tahrir Square, and then you get the rest of it.
And so it really overshadowed this.
But this was extremely important.
This was the largest leak of inside documents, maps, memos, transcripts of negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority, which got set up under the Oslo Accord from the 90s, and the US.
The US was a party to this.
First, it spanned about 10 years, from 1999, so beginning in the Clinton years, to 2010.
So Bush and some of Obama's time.
Very enlightening.
And one of the things it shows that's astounding, that it stunned people in Palestine and the rest of the Arab world, is that the Palestinian Authority, and again, I forget what year Arafat died, but Abbas, I guess, is now the president of it.
And they're giving away the store.
Israel's story has always been, we don't have a partner for peace.
So how can we negotiate?
We don't have a partner.
And then the Palestinians are always regarded as rejecting generous offers and being intransigent.
And as Abba Ibn put it many years ago, who was a foreign minister for Israel, the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
One of those little charming phrases that sticks with people.
Oh yeah, those Palestinians, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace.
Well, these 1600 documents, we're talking about like 15,000 pages, shows how obsequious the Palestinians were.
I don't know really what motivates them.
I think Abbas and his administration are pretty corrupt.
They like the deal they had going with Israel.
They're getting a ton of money from the West to police their own people against the Israel, to keep them from bothering the Israelis too much.
So I think there was a lot of corruption there.
They were living well in Ramallah and in the West Bank.
But anyway, they were making offers like you wouldn't believe.
They were saying, just to take East Jerusalem as an example, East Jerusalem is now in Israeli hands.
It was supposed to be an international city under the UN recommendation, no sovereignty from either an Arab state or a Jewish state.
But it's now held.
And their position has been, at least when they came to adopt the two-state solution, that East Jerusalem would be the capital of Palestine, West Jerusalem could be the capital of Israel.
Here is Saeb Araket, who's the lead negotiator for the Palestinians, saying to the Israelis, Tzvi Livni, who was the foreign minister at the time, look, here's what we'll offer on East Jerusalem.
You can have sovereignty over the Jewish and Armenian area.
That's Christian area, of course, Armenia.
And we'll get the rest of it.
In other words, they're willing to divide East Jerusalem.
That's a big step.
And I'm not saying these were good concessions, but they're concessions.
A lot of the Palestinians thought it was a sellout.
On the big area called the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif, where the big mosque is, the third holiest site in, I guess, in Islam, but also the Western Wall, which is something related to the ancient Jewish temple.
Rather than claiming sovereignty over that, the Palestinians said that should be administered by a multi-party commission, committee.
So in other words, they were giving up sovereignty over that.
They said to the Israelis, you can keep all the Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, I think maybe except one.
And then on the West Bank, they said, for the West Bank, which is really part of, East Jerusalem is really part of the West Bank, but it's talked about separately.
On the West Bank, they said, you can keep basically, oh, it's like 60% of the settlements.
And we just want a little land swap, because that's like 2% of the West Bank.
The settlements are concentrated, if you just look at the territory that they take up, not the land in between, which is often just undeveloped.
But anyway, some equivalent land swap.
So they were giving up major stuff.
They even said, look, if you want to call yourself the Jewish state, call yourself the Jewish state.
I mean, they weren't even holding Israel on that point.
Israel turned it down.
Livni said the map was, while physically acceptable, physically possible, could be done, wasn't politically possible.
But she actually thanked the Palestinians, saying, you know, thanks for this constructive offer, but it's not politically, we can't sell it politically in Israel, so forget about it.
Unbelievable stuff that was never publicized until this leak occurred.
And these have been authenticated, these documents.
At first, the Palestinian Authority, because they look bad, said, oh, these are not real.
Well, they don't say that anymore.
Pretty soon, they weren't saying it.
Instead, they launched an investigation to who did the leak, which tells you they were real.
So amazing revelations.
I talk about it in the piece, and I link to further stuff on it.
I'm pretty sure I interviewed one of the journalists involved in that when it came out, too, going back.
Well, Ali Abunimah, who runs the electronic Intifada, which has a very good website for keeping up, was one of the people that went through those documents with Al Jazeera, and Al Jazeera shared them with The Guardian, so that's where they were posted.
And you can find online on YouTube, if you go to Al Jazeera's channel, four installments of the TV specials they were doing each night.
They rolled this out in fours, in four pieces.
So each night, they did an hour special with a panel that Abunimah was participating on.
So it was really very interesting.
All right, you guys, that's the great Sheldon Richman.
The article is TGIF, the goal is freedom.
Trump turns to Gaza as Middle East deal of the century collapses.
Thanks, Sheldon.
My pleasure, Scott.
Talk to you again soon.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
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