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All right, you guys, introducing Ali Abunimah.
He runs Electronic Intifada.net.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thank you.
It's nice to be back.
Happy to have you here.
So listen, last week, there was the big meeting in Bahrain over Jared Kushner's deal of the century to hook up the Palestinians with enough, I guess, Gulf oil money that they'll stop complaining about not having any freedom or independence at all.
How'd that work out?
Well, not very well, but I think we have to be very careful about even taking it seriously.
I don't think that even Jared Kushner and company think this is a serious plan.
I think they know it's a cynical hoax.
And the main purpose is just to say, well, we tried.
But those greedy, stubborn, irrational, crazy Palestinians just refused to go along with our very generous offer.
Yeah, I think that's the game they're playing.
You know, they managed to score a couple of days of headlines of a $50 billion investment for the Palestinians.
But even when you take their plan on its own terms and look closely at the small print, there's really nothing there.
OK, we'll start with that then.
Let's go through the plan a little bit and what it is that they're promising.
Right.
So what they're saying, as I said, the headline is $50 billion in investment.
That split between $25 billion that would supposedly go to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and the other half, which would be divided among Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.
And this money would be spread out over 10 years.
So even if all this money actually existed, which it doesn't, this is a completely unfunded plan, it would amount to $5 billion a year for 10 years, of which two and a half billion would go to the Palestinians.
Now, let's just break that down even further, because if we consider that, if we take what the World Bank says, I'm not a huge fan of the World Bank.
And the World Bank isn't like a pro-Palestinian organization, let's say.
We agree with that, right?
Of course.
Yeah, right.
So according to the World Bank, I mean, essentially, the World Bank is answerable to the United States, which does the majority of the funding always has.
Right, exactly.
Well, according to the World Bank's research, Israel's military restrictions on the Palestinian economy, so Israel's ban on letting Palestinians farm their own land, start businesses on their own land, do manufacturing, its restrictions on the movement of workers, on capital, on everything, reduces the Palestinian GDP by 34 percent a year.
So according to the World Bank, simply removing those military restrictions would be an immediate 34 percent boost to the Palestinian economy.
That would be worth more than this two and a half billion dollars that Jared Kushner is promising.
So that's just to put it in perspective.
The wealth destroying effects of Israeli military occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid are far greater than anything that is promised by Jared Kushner, if the promises were even real.
Right.
And this is something that it goes back to the question of the public relations stunt here.
There are a lot of different examples of this, I guess, going all the way back to 1948.
Especially, they talk about the year 2000, when they offered to give Arafat 99 percent of everything in the world he wanted, but he preferred to have war instead and not take it.
And boy, those Palestinians, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
And you know it's true, because it's such a great sounding cliche.
Essentially, it must be right.
But it seems like nobody's really buying that, because it's Jared Kushner who did it.
And the whole thing is, everybody's laughing at it.
And all the experts, including in Israeli papers, are saying essentially what you just said, which is, well, geez, all of the restrictions on their economies, what's making them poor in the first place?
They're not allowed to have a port?
They're not allowed to have an airport?
They're not allowed to, as you said, farm their own land or all of these things?
Why don't you try lifting that?
Yeah, to put this in perspective, if you're a Palestinian farmer on your own land in the Jordan Valley, Israel doesn't allow you to dig a well on your own land.
But not only that, Israel doesn't allow you to collect rainwater on your own land.
So Israel even claims to own the rain.
So if Palestinians set up cisterns to collect rainwater, because they're not allowed to dig wells, the Israeli army comes and destroys them.
So this is the level of totalitarian control that Israeli military occupation imposes on Palestinians.
And there's not one word about that in Kushner's plan.
Not one single word.
And then you have to take the fact that this plan, it's really concern trolling.
It claims that, oh, this is all about the well-being of the Palestinian people, the health of the Palestinian people.
There's a line in there about how a healthy economy requires a healthy population, and therefore his plan calls for all these investments in health care for Palestinians.
Well, let's look at the record here.
The first thing that Trump did when he came in, and Kushner did, this was at Kushner's instigation, was to cut all U.S. funding to UNRWA, the U.N. agency that cares for the very poorest and most vulnerable Palestinian refugees, including providing them with basic health care, and cut all U.S. funding to six hospitals in occupied East Jerusalem, which provide vital care for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
So that's the actual record of the Trump administration.
It's cutting health care to the very poorest Palestinians, again, rendered poor by the U.S.-supported Israeli military occupation.
Palestinians don't want charity.
They don't want U.S. aid.
They want to be free.
But as long as they're not free because of U.S.-backed Israeli military occupation, they need aid.
But what the U.S. is doing is to continue to support the occupation, to continue to support the oppression and dispossession of Palestinians, and to withdraw all support for Palestinians who are victims of that.
I wonder, do you know if they have the same PR firm that helps the Saudis push the lie about all of their humanitarian aid for the poor people of Yemen who are going hungry for some reason?
So it's the same kind of garbage, essentially.
Exactly.
No, it's completely the same kind of garbage.
They've become more sophisticated at turning all realities on its head.
So the Palestinians who are the dispossessed people under military occupation are the aggressors.
The Trump administration, which actually is doing everything it can to harm the Palestinians and to, you know, tilt things even more in Israel's favor by supporting settlements, by recognizing the illegal Israeli annexation of Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and so on, presents itself as the peacemaker and saying to the Palestinians, oh, you know, we're holding out our hand to you in peace.
And you stubborn Palestinians, we're just waiting patiently for you to come along.
It is just so cynical and Orwellian.
Everything is turned on its head.
And of course, you know, there's that Frank Luntz study from 2008, the Global Language Dictionary, where he's the expert with all the focus groups.
I'm sure you covered this at the time.
Absolutely.
Where they practiced all of this.
How do we get Americans to buy into this stuff?
And essentially the answer was we have to not just lie, but we have to turn everything entirely upside down just to confuse everything.
So yes, you're right.
It is kind of an apartheid system.
It's this Arab supremacy.
And they just won't let Jews live wherever they want in the West Bank.
Why are they so racist and prejudiced against the Jews?
And just turn it completely around.
No context at all about whose land we're even talking about in the first place and how they're coming about it.
This kind of thing, you know, truncate all the antecedents.
It's exactly the same rhetoric or rhetorical tricks that are used across American politics.
Whether you agree with a policy or not, they are able to turn reality on its head.
So, you know, it's the same type of language where you smash trade unions, you smash collective bargaining rights, and you call that right to work.
What it really means is right to be fired without recourse.
You know, if that's what it is, call it that.
Don't call it right to work because that's not what it is.
It's the same with a lot of the laws that are being passed to restrict abortion access and abortion rights in this country.
They get dressed up as laws supporting women's health.
And you end up with women being charged with manslaughter for having a miscarriage or potentially for that kind of thing happening.
So it's the same kind of trickery where you take something and you name it the exact opposite of what it is.
And I would argue that a lot of those techniques got perfected or refined in spinning the Palestinian issue.
Hey, it ain't a coincidence that this is the next example on the tip of both our tongues is the way they talk about Iran and all of Iran's threats and all of Iran's aggression and all of these things.
And of course, the Israel lobby and Israel's interests have everything to do with America's anti-Iran policy and specifically Trump's.
Absolutely.
A perfect example.
And in fact, there's a couple of great write ups at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting in the last couple of weeks about, you know, very specifically analyzing the New York Times language and other newspapers.
In fact, sometimes they'll go through all the media that was printed in a week somehow.
I don't know how they do it over there and count up how many times defense is called aggression and aggression is called defense, depending on who's playing which side.
And it's all so transparent if you're looking for it, but if you're not, it's extremely persuasive kind of propaganda, you know.
I don't know.
I hope that people are catching on.
I think it's getting harder to sell this stuff, at least to a significant segment of the population.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm just trying to be optimistic.
But I feel like with the Iraq war, so many more people bought it than are buying the Iran stuff.
Well, that's true.
Yeah.
And because Iraq was so bad that, you know, even now, God, I saw Max Boot say he profoundly regrets supporting the Iraq war.
It's full consensus now that, yeah, we should have never done that.
Just as much as it was full consensus that we had to back then.
And so that's a great warning.
Too bad it didn't keep us out of Libya, Syria or Yemen.
Although, you know what?
It did kind of sort of keep us out of Syria.
I mean, Obama backed al-Qaeda there for years, but he could have carpet bombed the place and put Jolani in power in Damascus.
And he was afraid to go that far.
And that was partially because of Iraq, too, you know.
Thank God.
Silver linings.
Now, talk about the Palestine papers for a minute.
Could you, the giant leak to Al Jazeera that really showed the willingness of the Palestinian side to, you know, their whatever, however you want to characterize it, their side of the story for dealing with the Israelis.
Because, of course, the narrative again is we keep offering them everything and they keep turning it down from the Israeli point of view.
You're talking about the Palestine papers from back from 2011.
Right.
Well, basically, this was a trove of Palestinian PLO documents relating to the peace negotiations that had taken place over the previous several years.
And it included what was really interesting about it is it included a lot of, you know, American and some Israeli documents, you know, that had been passed to the Palestinians or minutes of meetings between top Palestinian and U.S. officials, including at the time George Mitchell, the former senator who Obama appointed as mediator.
And a couple of things really stood out.
One is how far the Palestinian Authority went in offering pretty much the whole shop to the Israelis.
There's this standout phrase that Saeb Arakat, the top Palestinian negotiator used, we're offering Israel the biggest Yerushalayim in history, Yerushalayim being the Hebrew name for Jerusalem.
In other words, the Palestinian Authority was willing to concede to Israel most of the settlements it's illegally built in and around Jerusalem.
And yet the Israelis were absolutely stubborn.
No matter what the Palestinians offered, it wasn't enough.
The Israelis want everything.
The difference between now and then is that they don't hide it now.
Back then there was this sort of pretense of a peace process, and the Israelis would say that they're interested in a two-state solution.
Now they don't hide it.
The policy really isn't different.
And the other thing that was so notable was despite Obama's sort of, I don't know, marketing or image that he was sort of more even-handed and that George Mitchell had something up his sleeve.
Actually, there's this interesting parallel between George Mitchell as the mediator then and Robert Mueller as the Russiagate investigator more recently, which is that they were both portrayed in the media as these very wise, silent men who are very tight-lipped.
And at the end of the day, they're going to reveal everything.
And, of course, at the end, Mueller came up with absolutely nothing.
There was no Russiagate, no collusion.
The whole thing just went up in a puff of smoke.
But if you go back to George Mitchell, it was exactly the same in that for a year, the mainstream media narrative was, oh, you know, he's so tight-lipped.
This is because he's doing this serious work behind the scenes and, oh, he's going to be tough on the Israelis and he's going to be tough and no-nonsense.
And, of course, it all amounted to nothing.
But what the Palestine papers really revealed, because we had the minutes of the meetings between George Mitchell and top Palestinian officials, is that George Mitchell was simply parroting the Israeli line all along.
He was telling them, listen, you've got to go along with this or you're going to get nothing.
That's all he did.
He delivered the same message that the Palestinians always get.
There was no trick up his sleeve.
So, again, here we are now almost a decade later, and what we see is really the U.S. policy laid bare.
In some senses, it's more refreshing that instead of doing it in a closed room, as was done before, the Palestinians are told up front, basically, you're going to have to surrender.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Now, don't get me wrong.
It's not like it does the Palestinians any good or anything, but do you think I'm right about, well, like we're saying about the Iran war stuff is kind of falling flat.
This is kind of falling flat, too, right?
I mean, Jared Kushner is a joke.
Nobody takes him seriously, no matter what it is that he does.
I think that's right.
I think that just the total lack of credibility that this administration has generally on a whole range of issues, but particularly on this issue after, you know, again, its moves basically implementing whatever Israel wants on Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, et cetera, means that they come into this with zero credibility.
And no one in the so-called international community really took it seriously.
You know, even U.S. client states like Jordan and Egypt sent the very lowest level representation.
You know, they sent like deputy ministers or something like that.
But there is a bigger story here where I think they are more successful, which is that this is really about, again, it comes back to Iran.
A big purpose of this conference, especially holding it in Bahrain, just across the Persian Gulf from Iran, was it was supposed to bring together an official Israeli delegation with leaders from the Gulf states to really kind of celebrate the normalization of Israeli-Gulf ties as part of cementing the U.S.-led anti-Iran coalition in the region.
And the original plan was to have a top-level Israeli delegation headed by a senior Israeli minister and to have all those Gulf leaders there.
In fact, you did have a number of senior Gulf officials there.
That fell through because the PA, the Palestinian Authority, boycotted it, and therefore you couldn't really have an Israeli official delegation coming to this conference, which is supposedly about helping the Palestinians, and everyone is there except the Palestinians.
They still had Israeli representation.
They still had a lot of Gulf officials.
It was still an opportunity for a lot of normalization.
And what senior Gulf and Israeli officials have said repeatedly in the media is we're ready to come out in the open with our Gulf-Israel marriage in order to escalate the confrontation with Iran, but the Palestinian issue stands in the way.
So really, the reason these Gulf states support this Kushner initiative is, again, it's to try to get rid of, to sideline the Palestinian issue so that they can normalize relations.
And the Palestinians, even though they don't have a lot of power in this situation, managed to frustrate that.
Nonetheless, it was still another step in Gulf-Israel normalization.
Yeah, you know, so I'm glad you brought that up because I try to think about it in these terms.
I'm stuck in the news cycle, man, like a lot of people.
But there's this excellent book, I'm sure you've read, Treacherous Alliance by Trita Parsi, where the entire thing is essentially told from the point of view of the highest level strategists in America, Israel, and Iran.
And so all the news cycle stuff is way lower, kind of just noise.
And instead you have these grand strategies of who's balancing who and how, and for how long, until which point they're going to switch and stab them in the back and switch to the other guy, and this kind of thing.
And so even what you're talking about right now, right, it's reminiscent of in the early 90s with the end of the periphery doctrine.
And instead of allying with the periphery against the Arabs, it's allying with the Arabs against the periphery, essentially, which was Yitzhak Rabin's plan.
And really, I mean, you know a hell of a lot more about this than I do, but I know from reading Jeremy Hammond's book, Obstacle to Peace, about just what a fraud Rabin's two-state solution was even back then, but that it was essentially the same thing in a way, was try to put this thing to bed somehow, give the Palestinians enough to shut them up anyway, I guess, to take the controversy off the front burner so that they can move on within targeting the Iranians.
Oh, that's always been the case.
Every single peace plan has been a fraud.
It's never been about, they've never been based on international law or giving Palestinians their basic rights.
It's always about finding some formula to kick the can down the road or to buy the Palestinians off.
And that's what the Oslo Accords of 1993 were.
And that lasted a good 25 years for Israel because any time Israel came under pressure or Israel's European and American sponsors came under pressure over what Israel was doing, they could say, well, yeah, it's really bad what's going on, but we support the peace process.
So the peace process became this sort of endless excuse to do nothing while Israel was busy destroying Palestinian lives and homes and stealing more land and building settlements.
So that was the ruse.
That peace process is over.
It has no credibility.
And this is an effort to sort of replace it with something else that people can say, oh, look at this wonderful plan.
If only the Palestinians would come to the table, they could improve their lot.
But it's the same trick that has always been pulled.
Well, and the thing is this, too, right, we're talking about still the endless creeping annexation of what's left of the 22% of Palestine that the Palestinians were ever supposed to get.
And now they're openly talking about going ahead and annexing, officially annexing those settlements.
And I don't know how much of Area C or whatever, which Area C itself is 60% of the place, right?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the direction it's heading, clearly, is towards Israeli formal annexation of the West Bank.
Practical annexation is more or less complete.
And at that point, you know, it becomes clear that Israel's ambition or Israel's intention unambiguously is apartheid with no pretense of a two-state solution.
And at that point, we'll have to see how the world will react.
You know, I put zero faith in, you know, the human rights-loving EU governments to hold Israel accountable.
They're total hypocrites.
The U.S., of course, is a lost cause, although I think it's changing.
I think the discourse is changing at the grassroots, certainly changing within the Democratic Party.
And I think the global boycott, divestment, sanctions movement is sort of a key vehicle to change the narrative.
But, you know, it's still a rough road ahead.
Hang on just one sec for me.
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Hey, let me tell you something, man.
I have an idea and my friend Ramsey Baroud hates it.
I don't know if he's a friend of yours or not, maybe.
I'm sure you know who I'm talking about.
I do, a great author.
Yeah, yeah.
And he's a good friend of the show here too.
But so he didn't like my idea and I understand why.
But to me this seems like a great way to really change the whole kind of subject in a way that would be extraordinarily beneficial to the Palestinians.
And I know you're a one state guy already anyway.
But why not just accept the sad fact that the one state, you already have it.
The West Bank was annexed in 1967 along with the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.
Whether they call it this or that all this time is really kind of beside the point.
And instead of there should be one state with civil rights someday, some new organization, shouldn't the Palestinians all just declare that they are Israeli citizens and they want equal rights as Israeli citizens.
Simple as that.
And frame everything in that way.
And then it changes the whole kind of question.
If the premise is that, look, we've been annexed, face it.
Then that kind of would change everything.
And Ramzi is saying to me, well, the thing is, no, we need a whole new state that's based on equal rights for everyone and this and that.
And I understand that.
Hey, I'd like to have magic powers and make everything my way too.
But it seems like in the current circumstances, my way sounds kind of smart.
Now, what do you think?
Well, I think, you know, I see what you're saying.
But I think Ramzi has a point here.
I mean, I don't think you could get Palestinians to go along with saying we're Israeli citizens.
That involves accepting, you know, an identity which is fundamentally inimical to them and which negates their identity.
I think saying something like we are in a one state solution and we demand equal citizenship and restitution of all our rights, including our property and the construction of a state based on full civil equality Yes, I think that is that inevitably is where it's going to have to go.
And to say at the same time to Israelis and you will be citizens of this state under equality.
I think you could put it that way.
But I don't think you could get Palestinians to say we're all Israelis.
I know that's hard, but I mean.
So the point is.
But on the other hand, you're asking the Israelis to say, well, we're not Israelis anymore.
We're citizens of the new state that you guys say now.
No, because I think what is people's what is identity, right?
If being a slave owner is an identity, that's not an identity that you can save.
OK, and should not save.
If being an oppressor is your identity, you need to lose that identity.
But if speaking Hebrew is your identity, if being Jewish is your identity, if, you know, if a certain literature in a certain language is part of your identity, that's all great.
And no one's asking Israel to give up any of those things or asking Israelis to give up any of those things.
But what they are being demanded to give up is their role as rulers and oppressors.
Palestinians are not being asked to.
Palestinians do not wield power over Israelis.
So it's not at all the same thing.
And I think that as a civic state which recognizes and celebrates, you know, both languages and cultures and, you know, where people can write a history that is inclusive but also honest.
Those are all works that would have to be undertaken.
And I think, entirely possible, very difficult.
But what other way is there to go forward?
Yeah, I don't know.
It just seems like there are already...
How many, is there a good estimate for the fifth of the population of Israel that are Palestinian, Christians and Muslims?
Yeah, well, actually, if we're saying it's a one-state solution already or a one-state reality, then you have to look at the population of the whole of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza together.
And right now it's about 13 million.
And according to estimates published by the Israeli military a couple of years ago, Palestinians are already a majority by a narrow margin of about 300,000.
And how many of them are citizens of Israel?
How many of them are citizens of Israel?
About a million and a half.
So of the roughly 6.8 million Palestinians in historic Palestine, one and a half million are Israeli citizens.
And of course, I mean, it's a whole other show, right?
The fact that they're really second or third class citizens and are treated very unfairly, even not under occupation, but as citizens.
But I don't know, man, I could just see it where all the rest of the Palestinians say, we now, like them, are Palestinian citizens of Israel.
And hey, do it with a smirk and say, hey, guess what?
Looks like we're the bare majority now.
How do you like that?
Yeah, but that's a slightly different proposition.
Palestinian citizens of Israel still identify as Palestinians.
And their demand is for a state of all its citizens that gives full, you know, cultural...
Well, that's what I meant, essentially, was to claim the same status that they have for those under the outright occupation.
Sure, that I could see as a possibility.
So again, we're distinguishing a rights-based approach from sort of the cultural identification.
And also the fact that we're stuck in the 2010s in reality here and we got to do something, you know?
Sure, and I agree with you.
I think that Palestinians should have actually made that shift a decade ago, if not earlier.
But I think Israel is going to force it on us by, you know, going ahead and basically annexing the West Bank.
I think this shift has got to be coming soon.
Right.
Yeah, I think that's right.
But with the situation as it is anyway, it seems like the best time to call their bluff and take them all the way serious then.
I don't know.
And I know that politics in Israel are crazy.
Where this guy Lapid, who's, you know, supposedly the more liberal opposition to Netanyahu, he, in out of context, was accidentally misinterpreted to say that Israel is a country of all of its citizens.
Oh no, it's not.
And I'm sorry and I never meant to say that.
Please don't misunderstand.
Of course it's not.
Which is, if you heard that coming out of any other country, I don't know, for some reason this is perfectly acceptable from the Israelis.
And this is the so-called liberal running against Netanyahu here.
Exactly.
It's just nuts.
But ask Nancy Pelosi, she'll tell you Israel is a wonderful liberal democracy.
Right.
Yeah, they have freedom of religion there.
Right.
Which means if you're Jewish, you can lose your faith and you won't get kicked out of the country.
But it doesn't mean you can be an Arab Muslim.
Sorry.
Exactly.
So that's the discourse, the issue that we still, you know, the gap we still have to close in this country between the image Israel has and the reality.
All right.
So I'm sorry, one more thing here.
Can you tell me a little bit more about the Gulf states' role in all this?
Saudi, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, whoever.
Which all shakes are in on this?
And what exactly is their game?
As you said, you know, solidifying an alliance for war with Iran that they certainly can't wage without us.
So I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, the sort of leaders of the pack are Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
You know, obviously these are U.S. client states, but they have their own interests and perceptions and they really want confrontation with Iran.
And that's where the alliance with Israel is really rooted.
Bahrain is in that camp as well, but it's a much smaller player.
It's, you know, really tiny state.
But that's why they were hosting this.
That's their contribution.
Qatar is kind of in a category by itself in that it always tries to play both sides.
Qatar sent a representative to the Bahrain conference but kept a relatively low key.
At the same time, Qatar is, you know, providing financial support to Palestinians in Gaza and doing that in coordination with Israel.
So Qatar sort of sits on the fence and has been ostracized by the Saudi UAE club.
And Kuwait really stands apart from all this.
Kuwait has not gone along with the normalization with Israel at all and has taken a much more, you know, sort of pro-Palestinian stance.
So there are some interesting differences among the Gulf states, but really it's Saudi and the UAE are the ones spending tens of millions of dollars on pro-Israel, pro-war lobby shops in Washington to try and push for confrontation with Iran.
And they're able to do that, of course, because there are significant interests within the U.S. that want confrontation with Iran.
Yeah, there certainly are.
If those same lobbies spent the same money, you know, lobbying for, I don't know, U.S. war against Sweden or Spain, they probably wouldn't get the results.
I kind of wonder, what do they think they're going to do if America really did help them and launch a giant war and regime change the government in Iran?
What would they do then?
They need an enemy.
They need an enemy for a good reason, which is, well, they'll always have, you know, launching a war against Iran would be an unwinnable war.
What it would do, you know, that big fear, and I think this was a fear that was really heightened by some of the rhetoric of Donald Trump before he completely surrendered his foreign policy to the establishment, was talking about, you know, withdrawing the U.S. from around the world.
And that's very dangerous to them because they're totally dependent on the U.S. presence in the region propping up their regime.
So the more instability there is, the more U.S. warships you have, the more you need U.S. bases.
So for them, war isn't a one-time deal where, okay, you have a war with Iran and defeat Iran.
It's about creating and perpetuating instability and conflict that forces the U.S. to remain in the region.
That's their interest, is to prolong the U.S. presence in the region.
And, you know, if there was peace between all the countries in the region and Saudi Arabia and Iran were getting along just fine and, you know, the U.S. could draw down its presence as it did, you know, from Europe after the Berlin Wall came down.
There were, I don't know, 2 million U.S.
I don't remember the numbers, but huge numbers of U.S. troops in Europe that were mostly drawn down.
Now you have the war hawks and cold warriors pushing to increase U.S. troops in Europe in places like Poland as they try to push a new Cold War with Russia.
But peace is bad for business and peace is bad for these regimes that depend.
You know, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are never going to be able to defend themselves.
You know, they can't mount an army that can credibly defend themselves.
So they need the U.S. there to maintain these, you know, these monarchical regimes.
Yeah, and by defend themselves, you mean from their own populations because there's nobody else trying to hit them.
Sure.
There's no one else.
Yeah, exactly.
From their own populations, that's the main threat they face.
By the way, this book by Peter Baker that just came out about Obama, I think he's the Washington Post or New York Times correspondent.
I was reading it the other day, talking about how, you know, when the Arab Spring uprising started and when people rose up against Mubarak in Egypt, how, you know, Obama was basically hands off, let democracy take its course and all this stuff.
Of course, the U.S. eventually supported the military coup that, you know, that crushed the democratically elected government in Egypt.
But then when it came to Saudi Arabia, the book talked about how, you know, there were the uprisings in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, particularly amongst the oppressed Shia population in Saudi Arabia.
And the Saudis sent in tanks and just killed people.
And how it said that Obama made the conscious decision that, you know, that was letting democracy go too far.
He was going to remain silent and tacitly give the Saudis the green light to crush any uprising in Saudi Arabia.
Same thing in Bahrain, too.
Same thing in Bahrain.
But, you know, that book made the point that, yeah, Obama was like, yeah, right on.
Basically, we cannot allow democracy.
We allow an uprising in Egypt.
And in the end, they got a new military regime.
But we're never going to allow it in Saudi Arabia.
Yeah.
And by the way, you know, to your point about figuring out a way to keep us involved, our friend Phil Wise has these great quotes of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, both the grandfathers of neoconservatism, saying that, hey, whether it's China or whether it's Russia or whether it's Germany or whether it's anything, whatever we have to do to keep America engaged globally to prevent what they call isolationism and to keep essentially the American empire engaged somewhere, at least always, so that they remain available for use by Israel when it comes right down to it.
And they say it in the plainest language that that's what they're about.
And then I was going to say, too, because you mentioned how Trump used to talk like this during the campaign.
Hell, he still talks like this sometimes.
He said only a couple of months ago that, yeah, you know, the whole Middle East, we don't even need that oil.
We don't even care.
We don't really even have much interest.
Although, geez, I guess some people say, you know, Israel.
And you can't even tell how cynical and sarcastic he's being or not.
He sort of seems like he buys that.
Yeah, of course, Israel.
We have to stay there for Israel.
But other than that, I can't really come up with any more reasons why I care who rules Iraq anymore.
It's basically his point, and it's because of the high oil prices caused by Iraq War II that made all this shale and fracking and all that stuff economically viable, that ended up making America wholly independent from Middle Eastern oil supplies, other than some politically connected corporations have investments there, no question about that.
But our nation is in no way dependent on them.
And so, geez, kind of running out of things to...
Oh, I know, Iran's making nuclear weapons, have you heard?
Got to have something to fight about over there.
Exactly right.
Anyway, so it goes.
Alright, well, listen, I'll let you go.
I kept you over time.
Sorry about that.
But thank you very much for coming back on the show.
And listen, if there's really much to cover when the other half of the proposal comes out here, then I'd love to have you back to talk about that, too.
I definitely will be back.
There will be more to talk about, so let's do it.
Okay, great.
Thank you very much.
Thanks, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
Alright, you guys, that's Ali Abunimah.
He is at electronicintifada.net.
And they've got a great bunch of writers over there, too, man.
You're going to spend some time reading up.
Electronicintifada.net.
Alright, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
