For Pacifica Radio, July 26th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com and author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You'll find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
And introducing our guest today, it's the great Sheldon Richman.
He is the author of the book Coming to Palestine and the brand new What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Sheldon?
Well, thanks for having me back.
And I'm doing fine.
Great.
Very happy to have you here.
And there's so much important stuff to talk about in regards to Israel and Palestine and what it all means to Americans as well.
And I guess the news is that the Netanyahu government backed off of official annexation of the West Bank when they couldn't quite get a green light from Donald Trump to do it.
But they might as well have gone ahead, because in terms of the political discussion in the United States about the end of the two-state solution or perhaps the two-state illusion, much has changed.
The game is up.
The illusion is over, even if the annexation didn't take place.
And a major indicator of that is that the important liberal Zionist writer, Peter Beinart, has written about, I don't know, a seven or eight thousand word essay for Jewish Currents explaining why he's giving up on liberal Zionism, or at least he's redefining Zionism to no longer mean majority Jewish dominated state in Israel at the expense of the Palestinians.
And he's called for a binational state and equal rights, the one state solution.
And this is, of course, caused a major uproar in political circles and of all different kinds.
And so I wonder, you know, first of all, whether you had read the New York Times version or whether you did go ahead and read the entire eight thousand word essay at Jewish Currents by Peter Beinart.
And what were your impressions of his, you know, I guess, eventual turn finally toward one state type solution for Palestine?
I did read the original and you can find it online.
So I did read it.
I liked, I enjoyed the article.
I think he made some very important points.
He's sort of been moving in this direction.
You know, he wrote a book, The Crisis of Zionism, which I think it was originally a longer essay, maybe at the New York Review of Books, I forget, or somewhere else.
So he's been moving this way.
And I think it's courageous of him.
It's brought him a huge amount of criticism for what it's worth.
Dershowitz, Alan Dershowitz, who is basically an Israel first, last and always, a guy called him a Nazi.
You can't make this stuff up.
He said that what Beinart was proposing was, of course, these are Dershowitz's words, the final solution for the Jews in Israel.
And that's how nasty it gets.
Just because a guy said, look, there's not going to be two states.
There's already one state.
It's an apartheid state.
So let's work to turn it into a liberal, however you want to define that word.
I prefer to define it very broadly in terms of individual liberty.
Anyway, turn it into a state where everybody there has the same rights.
It's hard to believe that you can get called a Nazi for saying that, but I don't put anything past Dershowitz.
I would take some issue with Beinart, but maybe that would seem like nitpicking.
I mean, what he did is extremely important.
It really has prompted a new round of the discussion.
There have been people, Jews and others, Israeli Jews and others, who have been calling for one democratic state.
I think that they use the ODS, one democratic state, abbreviation, I believe.
But I remember from a couple of years ago watching Gideon Levy, the columnist for Haaretz and others, Ilan Pape and others, calling for one democratic state, one just open liberal state where there's complete freedom, religious freedom and other sorts of freedom for everybody, which would also include a right of return for people who are driven from their homes.
So this is not a new idea.
What's big is that it's Beinart.
Beinart is known as a liberal Zionist.
These other people I mentioned maybe wouldn't qualify as Zionists at all.
And Beinart's Jewish, he's an observant Jew.
He has spent a lot of time in Israel, and I think he makes regular trips there.
So this is a good thing, despite some disagreements I have with him.
And he does want to reformulate Jewish identity.
One of the things he's trying to do in appealing to liberal Zionists is that it can be reformulated to remove separation as an important element and putting in its place equality.
And he tells people, and here's where I do take some issue with him.
He tells people that the earliest ideas about Zionism among Jews was not a political state, but was rather just a home, a place where distressed Jews could go for protection.
I think he's wrong about that.
I've done quite a bit of reading on history, and I wish he had said more about this.
But there was talk about a state very early on in the late 19th century.
But again, I won't nitpick him now over that issue.
Well, OK, so here's the thing about it.
Now, I think most Americans, many, many Americans just really have no idea what's even the controversy anyway, other than, I don't know, maybe some scary Muslim terrorists are picking on our friends or something like that.
But you wrote this book, Coming to Palestine, about how you were raised Zionist and then thought better of it once you learn more about the situation.
So what would you say to listeners who don't understand what's even at issue here?
Why wouldn't we always just side with our friends in Tel Aviv?
Well, you know, the funny thing is I gave up religion a few years before I gave up Israel, which, you know, that doesn't get you in trouble among middle class American Jews, which my background is.
I mean, I was born at the very end of the 1940s.
And so to give you an idea of my age, you can, you know, there are jokes about this, actually.
You can give up God, but don't you dare give up Israel and still be in the fold.
That's the point.
You don't get excommunicated for saying, I don't believe in God.
But if you say you're an anti-Zionist Jew, that's going to get you some.
They're going to say, well, that's a contradiction.
What are you talking about?
But the Jewish critics of Zionism were cognizant of the Palestinians and said there are people there, people who have been living there a long time, people who have the best claim to being the descendants of the ancient Israelites, because, you know, of course, those those people back then would have mixed with other peoples.
Palestine was a crossroads.
You had all kinds of people coming through, not always conquering armies, but traders and different populations moving through.
So there's a it's a big amalgamation of people.
So there are many people have pointed out, including David Ben-Gurion, who was the first prime minister of Israel in 1918, did a book along with a co-author who was a historian who became the second president of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.
When they said, you know, if you look at the names of towns and the names of streets, these Palestinian Arabs, they're our brethren.
They are descendants.
Now, they also they also thought they themselves were descendants, but they thought not everybody left over the years via the Romans or whatever.
And so we're related to these people.
Now, they dropped that when the Palestinian Arabs didn't take well to being expelled from their land.
Right.
The Jewish National Fund and others were buying up big tracts of land in the late 19th century, in the early 20th century, from absentee landlords who were living in, you know, Lebanon.
Then the new owners would come along and throw off the Palestinian farmers who are farmers who had been there for generations and generations, a thousand years and more.
Just threw them off because this was Jewish land.
This was being redeemed in the name of of the Jews.
By the way, these were secular Jews, Ben-Gurion and those types.
They weren't religious Jews.
The religious Jews, by and large, were not interested in setting up a state in Israel.
So this was not being motivated by God.
I think they they just put history in the place of God.
History chose us.
This is our land because history gave it to us way back in before the common era.
And so their critics said there are people living there.
This is not a land without a people.
So they were concerned about the Palestinians.
It wasn't only this is going to harm Jews, which they thought.
They thought it would harm Jews who were living well in the United States and other places, because you're you're saying, in effect, look, Jews don't belong in the countries they're now living in.
They're aliens.
They're parasites.
They really need to be in their own and they need to be in their own country.
And the Zionists were appealing to the the power centers in Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century and saying, look, we agree with you.
We are a problem in your in these societies.
These are not our societies.
So help us get the Palestine.
And, you know, the American reform founder, the great rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise said, how can you say that?
You realize what you're doing?
You are nourishing the anti-Semites by saying, yes, we agree.
So help us get the Palestine.
And Wise and others were saying, are you crazy?
First of all, it's not true.
Historically, they weren't aliens.
They weren't late comers to Europe.
They had been there because of converts.
I mean, Judaism was it was a very proselytizing religion.
And it's the end of the BCE point and the beginning of the Common Era for 400 years on either side of that line.
Many, many people converted to Judaism.
Kingdoms converted to Judaism and then spread, spread around.
And so those were early inhabitants of Western Europe, Eastern and Western Europe.
And so you can imagine how these rabbis, these reform rabbis were appalled that the that the Zionists were affirming the anti-Semites in one of their most basic positions, that Jews, you don't belong here.
And they said, OK, we agree.
Help us get the Palestine.
I think looking back, those were prophetic Jewish anti-Zionists.
They were they were right.
Yeah.
Now, so you have this recent article at Antiwar.com called Prophetic Anti-Zionist, where you cite Rabbi Wise and others and talk about how in, you know, the early part of the 20th century that, you know, what if instead of dedicating themselves to Zionism, they had dedicated themselves to real liberalism and taking the exact opposite take, you know, how things might have been different?
Well, and I was trying to answer the people and I hear this often who will say to me, look, the the those 19th century guys you're talking about, those rabbis and other anti-Zionist Jews who are both Orthodox and Reform, who did not approve of the movement to set up a state in Israel.
Don't forget that, like I said, it was a secular movement.
So the Orthodox objected, saying, who made you the Messiah, you atheist?
That's the kind of thing they'd say.
And the Reform gave the criticism I already talked about.
So people will say to me, OK, maybe that's the way it looked to them back in 1897 or 1900, but the Nazis were still 30 years, right, or more into the future.
So doesn't that show they were wrong?
Now, my answer to that is, and I concede the risk whenever you do counterfactual history, right, we can't be sure about these things, but we can make better and maybe worse guesses.
Maybe if the Reform had been listened to.
Then we would never maybe we wouldn't have seen Nazi Germany.
I mean, you don't know if if if the Jews of Europe and the Reformer under no illusions, they knew that the Russian Jews were having a very bad time, the Romanian Jews.
I mean, Wise always mentioned Romania, along with Russia, when he's talking about the distressed position of many European Jews.
But, you know, they said if if Jews the world over joined with other liberals and by that, I mean any advocate of equal rights and religious freedom and other kinds of freedom, if they if they helped them out, a worldwide movement, who knows?
But maybe there wouldn't have been Nazi Germany.
In fact, the easiest connection there is the pressure by the organized Zionist movement in America on Woodrow Wilson to get us into the war was one of the deciding factors that pushed America into it.
And as everybody already knows, no America, no Hitler, no Lenin, no World War Two, no nothing.
Yeah, that's a good that's a good point.
And yeah, should not be forgotten.
It seems, you know, it'll seem remote at first, but that's right, that you can make an excellent case that if the U.S. does not get into World War One, which was what shed ground to a stalemate.
Right.
There was very little movement.
Yet the trench warfare, hardly anybody was making much progress over years.
And yet the casualties were tremendous.
I mean, that's something I learned in junior high that was actually correct, that, you know, the Versailles Treaty and all of the resentment led to the German people's toleration of the rise of the Nazis.
The U.S. had not given new life, new energy, not to mention money and arms and men to the war effort, the allied effort.
There would have just been maybe a Vienna style 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars style settlement where basically every country was treated respectfully.
And, you know, you said, look, this is insanity.
Let's stop this.
We're all killing ourselves.
You might as well just commit suicide and try to kill each other.
Let's just kill ourselves.
Probably more efficient.
And then settle things, come up with some settlement.
Instead, with the U.S. enabling a complete destruction of Germany or a complete rout of Germany and Austria, which was already faded by then.
Now we were able to get a peace conference, unfortunately, in Paris run by the French and the British.
They didn't much really want to listen to even Wilson.
I'm not a fan of Wilson, but he had a slightly better position in his 14 points than the British and the French who wanted to carve up the Middle East for themselves.
Anyway, despite this business that we don't we don't seek any territory.
It was a big lie.
Right.
They just tried to human Wilson who said they expanded the British empire by a million square miles.
Yeah.
Wilson was saying, you know, we should we're not in this for territory.
None of us want territory.
And the British and the French are saying, yeah, right.
And so you get this very vindictive piece which branded Germany as the solely uniquely guilty nation.
If you don't humiliate Germany, then you've not sown the ground for Hitler and the resentment, which maybe didn't have to start being aimed at Jews.
But there was just a huge chip on the shoulders, right, of the of the German nation against the rest of the world.
And the Jews ended up being a convenient scapegoat.
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All right now.
And we've got to bring it back here to the current day again with the question of annexation.
And, you know, I'm interviewed quite a bit as the editorial director of antiwar dot com and that kind of thing.
And people ask me about Israel and Palestine.
And when they do, the question is always as broad as can be.
What is the deal with this whole Israel Palestine thing?
Anyway, they don't even know where to get.
And so it seems like the simple fact that needs to be reiterated here is that Israel already annexed the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and all of Jerusalem back in 1967.
And they've been slowly and steadily colonizing it ever since.
And they've been pretending since 1979 when I was three that there was going to be a two state solution.
And someday the Palestinians would have independence.
Instead, the Israelis have kept the land and the people.
They didn't expel them all, which not that that would have been OK, but I'm saying so now they have a situation, as you indicated earlier, which is outright apartheid.
Where virtually 50 percent of the population of Israel have no representation whatsoever in the government, have no civil rights, no civil liberties, live under military occupation of a foreign power.
And now the illusion that don't worry, we're going to work it out and there's going to be this peace process is going to end with independence.
Now that that's come to an end, now you have people of conscience like Peter Beinart and others who had been, you know, pinning all their hopes on that all this time are forced to recognize the fact that it's not going to be that way.
And importantly, Beinart says that his worry is not apartheid because he thinks that everybody agrees that that's untenable.
And he's afraid that, in fact, the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv or in Jerusalem, that they would prefer expulsion, that they'll put the Palestinians in boxcars before they settle on a permanent apartheid state.
They would they would agree that's untenable.
We'll just have to get rid of them all and get rid of the rest of them, I guess, would be the plan, or at least that's what Beinart is afraid of.
And I wonder whether you think that that is a real concern.
Apartheid is bad enough, but shipping them all off to Jordan or the Sinai would be even worse.
Well, I think it's certainly true that annexation took place a long time ago, not de jure because they didn't pay a law, but de facto, as Norman Finkelstein reminds us, under international law, if you occupy another country's land during a war, and it doesn't matter if it's a defensive war or an offensive war, according to international law.
If you occupy land, that is to be regarded as temporary.
In other words, you sit down and negotiate and the land goes back to the other side.
You're not allowed to move your population into the occupied land.
And so after 53 years, Finkelstein points out, we're entitled to say this is not occupied land anymore.
It's been annexed.
It's just not been annexed, you know, hasn't been written down and passed by the Knesset.
So the default is apartheid annexation.
If they annex it, then, of course, they're not talking about, even Netanyahu hasn't been talking about annexing all of the West Bank.
I think they've mentioned like 30 percent, but that would include the Jordan Valley.
Now, Finkelstein thinks that Netanyahu is concerned about optics, that he's a performance artist more than anything else, and that he didn't believe that, he doesn't believe that when they do, if they do a formal annexation, they won't annex the Jordan Valley.
For the very reason that if you look at the map after that annexation, that middle portion that's Palestinian that didn't get annexed is going to look an awful lot like apartheid.
And then he's not going to like that optic, not that he maybe wouldn't want to do the whole thing, but he is concerned about optics.
So if that's true, and that doesn't strike me as crazy, if that's true, then I have a hard time buying Beinart's concern that they're going to put people in cattle cars and move them.
I just I don't see that happening because I think the world outcry would be just so immense.
And Netanyahu couldn't be sure what the consequences would be.
But after all, look, he doesn't want to annex with with Trump being preoccupied with COVID-19 and other things as a reelection and all that stuff.
He he he broke his own deadline, the July 1st deadline for annexing what it was he was going to annex.
You know, when Beinart brings up the expulsion, I think he's talking eventually, you know, medium term to long term rather than something that might happen right now.
But hey, what if America was bogged down in a giant naval crisis with China?
Might they go ahead and take advantage?
Something like that.
It's not just America.
I know it doesn't ring true to me.
I mean, I don't have a crystal ball, but it seems to me it doesn't only hinge on America.
There are other countries, other people in the world that I just there's going to be video of putting people.
Come on.
On the other hand, though, holding holding half the population of the country in essential bondage is pretty bad, you know, camouflage that with Oslo so that parts of the West Bank are well.
But I mean, that's what we're talking about, though, is that that's over now.
I mean, Oslo is over.
I mean, I guess you're saying they'll still have Hebron and they'll just go.
Oh, no, but they still have the PA is still administering some of it.
So there's a bit of a camouflage there.
They can say, look, there are some of it is under Palestinian self-rule, which, of course, is misleading because they just subcontracted internal security to a corrupt, privileged elite of Palestinians.
Right.
Who are interested more in their own privileges than anything else.
And they could be very hard.
They haven't been they haven't subjected themselves to an election where there was a boss supposed to run for reelection in 2009.
It's a long time.
And there's no sign of that.
Well, now, real quick, let me ask you about this.
It's something that Beinart addresses, which is this fear.
It just people just believe that.
Come on.
If you have a wolf by the ears and you let him go, he's going to bite you.
If you just set all the Palestinians free and let them have the right of return from all the refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon and Syria and wherever they've been living all this time, then Jews would be outnumbered.
And then surely the Arabs would kill every last one of them who couldn't escape to New York first or something.
Right.
So what about that?
Yeah, well, I think this is one of the stronger parts of Beinart's article where he he dealt with those issues about how why the idea of a peaceful, mixed state and he hasn't really come up with a distinct plan, whether it will be a canton system or binational.
He doesn't he doesn't spell that out.
He leaves that open.
Why?
It wouldn't mean violence.
First of all, he points out that if when people have more of a voice, then they don't turn to violence.
What has driven people to violence in the West Bank, the Intifadas and other things, Gaza, is because they have zero voice.
And, you know, when they when they're quiet, they don't nobody pays any attention to them.
And then when they're not quiet, you know, when there's some disturbance or violence, which and I'm not defending killing innocent people ever.
But when that happens, then then then it's said, oh, see, there's nobody to talk to.
They only understand the language of violence.
So it's a it's a rigged game.
Another strong point that Beinart makes is he says one of the great tragedies of the 20th century was was the lessons drawn from the Holocaust.
Hitler's attempted Judeo side, because there is a segment of Jews and it's been dominant up till now, but I think it's changing, see everything through the Holocaust lens.
And so when they they look at the Palestinians, they see Nazis.
And Beinart shows that that is so destructive, so unjustified.
It's just absolutely ridiculous.
There have been Palestinians and there have been just other Arabs throughout the Arab world from very early on who were perfectly welcoming of Jews.
And would have would have helped to make a home in Palestine if it wasn't a political movement, taking people's land and set up a new state, which is then going to rule over the Palestinians.
This idea that there's some sort of ancient hatred is just wrong.
Historically, it's just wrong.
This does not go back to antiquity.
This is recent.
And a lot of it has to do with people getting kicked off their land.
Right.
You know, I always like to recommend this great documentary by Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen, two nice American liberal Jewish boys who went to Gaza.
It's called Killing Gaza.
And they went to Gaza and they interviewed all these people and none of them mention Allah at all other than like, you know, God help me or whatever.
It has.
And they never mentioned the Jewishness of the Israelis either.
It just has nothing to do it.
It's purely a secular thing.
They could be talking about any two cultures anywhere in the world.
Only in this case, it's these.
And so, you know, blaming religion is a poor excuse for all of this, of course.
Look, when the Arabs got to the got to Palestine during the Muslim conquest, the Jews of Palestine welcomed them because they were having a terrible time under the Christians.
And they said, you know what?
We have more in common with the with the Muslims.
They were welcoming of the Arabs and the Muslims way back then.
Historically, it was always the Christians versus the Jews and Muslims.
That's only changed since World War Two, really.
Right.
That's right.
You know, the Muslims consider the Jews, the people of the book.
And I'm not saying they agree on everything.
I'm not saying they were always nice to Jews.
But there were times when, like in Spain, more Spain, where Jews lived perfectly well, side by side with Muslims, actually Christians until they were expelled side by side with them.
Well, that's right.
I have to say to people, why were you know, it's almost like a riddle.
Why were Isabel Ferdinand and Isabella able to kick the Jews out of Spain?
Because the Muslims hadn't done it.
That's the that's the punchline.
Right.
Because they were perfectly they were welcome.
Now, things didn't always go well.
I agree.
Different administrations were different to the Jews.
But so I agree with Beinart that there's a huge potential now for people to get along, to live together and recognize each other's rights.
I mean, look, in the United States of America is the perfect example of that, where every kind of person in the whole world lives in peace and harmony together.
Ninety nine point nine percent of every circumstance.
And it's just fine.
Most people don't want to live their life violently.
It's not the way to live.
People want to do what you and I want to do.
You know, make a comfortable living, have good friends, raise our families.
So we've got to go with that.
Aren't you guys?
That is Sheldon Richman.
He's the author of the book Coming to Palestine.
And he's got a new piece at Antiwar dot com called Prophetic Anti Zionists.
Thanks so much for your time, Sheldon.
Appreciate it.
Anytime.
Thank you, Scott.
Aren't you guys?
And that is antiwar radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton from Antiwar dot com.
Wrote the book Fool's Air in Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And you find five thousand three hundred and something interviews at Scott Horton dot org and YouTube dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
I'm here from eight thirty to nine every Sunday morning here on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
