07/25/13 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton.scotthorton.org is my website.
Keep all my interview archives there, more than 2,900 of them going back to 2003.
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Next up is the great Eric Margulies.ericmargulies.com is his website.
Spell it like Margolis.ericmargolis.com That's how most people mispronounce it.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, thank you.
Ready to roll.
Good deal.
You are the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And people can buy those books at Amazon or whatever website or whatever brick-and-mortar store in their town.
Isn't that correct?
That is correct.
They're getting harder to find now.
But they're certainly available online.
And they're available from my website, which as you very generously noted is ericmargolis.com.
Alright.
Very good.
So, let's talk about stupidity.
The Americans are going to solve the Palestine problem, I heard, or something.
Well, you know, this is something that we go through every year like hives or measles.
It's a scourge.
Every so often the U.S. launches a new Mideast peace initiative as it's hailed by the U.S. press and goes through all the motions of trying to bring the warring parties together, acting as a honest broker in the Middle East.
In fact, in my last column I wrote about this, and I call it Mideast Kabuki after the ritualized Japanese dancing drama because it's utterly meaningless.
It follows the same rules and procedures every time.
And what's described as a roadmap to peace usually ends up in the ditch.
Well, I actually kind of don't get it.
I mean, this is Charlie Brown on the football, but nobody is actually as dumb as Charlie Brown and keeps falling for the same thing over and over like that, right?
American public likes to be told that Washington is working on peace for the Middle East.
More important, America's cringing Arab allies, particularly the Saudis in the Gulf, North Africa, they need for their people to be kept relatively calm, to be told that the works afoot on peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis.
It's all a hokum, and everybody in the Middle East knows that this is a charade.
Well, you know, I don't know, I guess I'm just speaking for myself as kind of a younger me before I decided I really wanted to look into it and read about it and things like that.
But just going from my TV exposure kind of knowledge of the situation, I wondered, do you think that the American people even understand that there's Palestinian land, not just Israel itself, but that there's separate land that hasn't already been cleansed of Arabs, where the Arabs still live, but that is under occupation?
Do people even really get that, you think?
No, they don't, because the whole question of occupied land, whether it's on the West Bank or whether it's on the Syria's Golan Heights, has been cleverly rebranded, not as occupied land, but as disputed territory.
And American people are confused, they really don't know any, Americans can't find anything by, you know, they're very weak in geography, and we Americans are even weaker in history, and nobody really knows what's going on there.
And the only people who think they know, who are what we call Christian Zionists, fundamentalist Christians who get all their news from Bible stations, they think they know what's going on there, but they really don't either.
So we have a very confused area, and anybody who tries to set the records straight is quickly slapped down.
All right, well, you know, give us the minute and a half version of it then.
What is the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, 67 borders, this, that, whatever, that people are fighting over?
Because there are a lot of people listening who, they probably have never, you know, they watch 60 Minutes and they don't learn a damn thing.
No, that's right.
The issue is this, that when Israel was created by U.N. vote in 1948, most of the British ruled mandate state of Palestine, at least half was given over to a Jewish state.
As a result of the fighting in the First Arab-Israeli War, the Jewish state expanded its control to almost 70-odd percent of the West Bank.
The remaining portion was ruled by Jordan under an agreement with the Western powers, and eventually became what's now a Palestinian mini-state.
But it's still occupied by Israeli forces.
In the 67 war, Israel was able to take over the entire West Bank and the Golan Heights from Syria, which it still controls today.
And Israel says, well, you know, we'll talk about maybe some kind of Palestinian, don't use the state word, some kind of Palestinian homeland within that area.
But we've got to hold on to most of it to guarantee our security.
Israel's opponents, the Arabs, say baloney that Israel is never going to give up the West Bank.
It wants the territory, it wants the water in the area.
And that all it does is agree to talk about talking.
And as one of the Palestinian leaders put it so pithily, he said they're talking about sharing a pizza pie while they're eating it, and that's exactly what's happening.
Right, and at this point we're left with nothing but crust while they pretend that, oh, yeah, we're going to be just, you know what, if you just let Jonathan Pollard out of prison, why, we'll actually have some talks.
Well, Israel's been adamant in refusing to stop building settlements which are totally illegal, totally against international law, have been condemned by the U.N., but every time the U.N. Security Council tries to stop it, the U.S. vetoes the action.
The General Assembly has called for an end to this building of settlements.
What it is really is slow motion ethnic cleansing.
The Israelis are trying to squeeze the Palestinians out of this little rump state, where they may eventually agree to setting up Bantu stands, which is what South Africa did during the apartheid era, where designated sort of little mini-states that were run by black leaders inside to act as holding tanks for unwanted blacks in the population.
And this is the same thing that's going on now.
So the Israelis are frantically building settlements.
And even when the United States tells Israel to stop, cease and desist, and the Israelis give the Americans the bird.
Well, now, I saw this thing on C-SPAN yesterday.
It was Jimmy Carter and a couple of guys, I don't know, and they were talking about, well, jeez, you know, here's some reasons to be hopeful.
And that guy Carter, he after all made some important deals, you know, peace between Egypt and Israel, at least, back then.
And he was saying, you know, yeah, no, there's all kinds of good ideas, like maybe the Israelis could keep some settlements right around East Jerusalem, but in trade they would have to give up property between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which would create this corridor of Palestinian land where they could travel back and forth.
And it just seemed to me like, man, they're going to build a railroad and ship all the people in the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.
Maybe I'm way too cynical about this, but anyway, never mind me.
Jimmy Carter seems to think there's some hope here.
Eric, what the hell?
Well, I have great admiration for President Carter.
He's certainly the most honest president we've ever had.
And I admire his good intentions, but I think he's being far too optimistic.
Remember, it's Jimmy Carter who said last week, too, that the United States is no longer a functioning democracy.
Terrifying words coming from a former president.
Well, you know, Carter is right in the sense that there are all kinds of possible solutions to the problem, to creating what must have a Palestinian state, a small contiguous one that's not chopped up by Jewish settlements or Jewish-only roads, but a viable little mini-state, which, of course, will become an Israeli protectorate anyway, but at least something that they can call their own.
I call it my law, Margolis's 243rd law, is that every people on earth has the inalienable right to misrule themselves and not to be ruled by foreigners.
So the pieces are there, territorial swaps, etc.
In 2002, the Arab League and the Saudis put forth a police peace plan, which is the most comprehensive plan ever advanced, which is everything that the Israelis used to pray for.
It was a terrific plan.
It would have worked if followed.
The Israelis would have to go back to the 1967 borders with certain adjustments for their settlements.
The entire Muslim world would recognize Israel.
57 countries would give Israel full recognition and access to their markets, integrating Israel into the Muslim world.
And there would be some token compensation for the Palestinian refugees and also, underline, for Jewish refugees who fled the Middle East in the 1950s.
So it was a good plan, but the Israelis just rejected it out of hand.
And that is the settlement plan that will eventually come into being if the Israelis ever agree to a peace settlement Palestinian state.
But they show no sign of doing so.
Yeah.
Well, which brings us back to where we started, which is why even bother with this Kabuki thing in the whole first place?
You know, I think if I remember the anecdote right, anyway, after September 11th, when Bush had a 90% approval rating and more political capital for his greatest failure ever, of course, the greatest failure of any president ever.
But anyway, he had more political capital than any president ever since, you know, Truman finished up World War II or something.
And Colin Powell said to him, man, now's our chance.
We can do this Israel-Palestine thing, and it'll really help us.
Let's do it.
And Tom DeLay, the, I think, majority whip at the time, maybe majority leader in the House, but not speaker, came and told Bush, I'll turn every Christian Zionist in America against you.
Don't even think about it.
And Bush said, OK, forget it.
And I think he was actually, you know, kind of agreeing with Powell, and they were going to do it.
He had said some things about how, you know, I really don't approve of these new settlements, Mr. Schroen, and some stuff like that.
But boy, did he shut up quick.
And if George W. Bush can't do it, and Obama obviously hasn't meant it, you know, he's threatened no consequence whatsoever for Israel not doing, as they're told, this entire time, now five years into his presidency.
What's the point?
I mean, couldn't he make health care even worse or something instead?
Why is he even doing this?
Because there's a bureaucracy in Washington devoted to Middle East affairs, because we have to please our Middle East clients, our satraps in Saudi Arabia and other places.
And because even in Washington, people are getting nervous.
They feel, you know, the whole Muslim world feels that America is out to destroy Islam, has become an enemy of Islam.
And in spite of Obama's pretty speeches, there's more and more mounting evidence of this every day.
So they're trying to do something.
And also in the background is the thought that the U.S. wants to keep control of any Palestinian state that does emerge.
Right now, no president wants to risk his political capital to fight against the ardent partisans of Israel and the media and the press and Congress on this issue.
Nobody really has the strength.
No American president has shown the strength to do this since Dwight Eisenhower.
So it's not really trying to please any domestic constituency.
It's just trying to relieve a little bit of the pressure from the Arab allies of the empire.
That's right.
There is no domestic constituency for creating a Palestinian state or justice for the Palestinians.
Well, there's a small one among some liberal Democrats.
But by and large, no.
And the media is very anti-Palestinian.
And so there's no real support for any kind of Palestinian, certainly not in Congress.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so I'm sure you're aware of this, as reported by Max Blumenthal at Mondoweiss the other day.
General Mattis, the former commander of CENTCOM, that's Petraeus' old job, Zinni's old job there, commander of everything between the Mediterranean and India, right, or even China.
He says, if Kerry fails, Secretary of State John Kerry fails, Israel will be an apartheid state.
And that didn't work out too well the last time.
And he also says that his, I forget, he paid a military security price.
Eric, I think that is the nicest way of saying America's Israel policy got my soldiers killed, this general said.
And I believe he was even given an opportunity to back down and refuse to.
Well, sometimes we show brave officers who are not just desk generals.
Look at General Dempsey, the chief of staff, where McCain is threatening him he won't get another term in the joint chiefs because he's warning about the dangers of U.S. military intervention in Syria.
I mean, that is really shameful.
Yeah.
But I mean, it's really something, though, for him.
I guess Petraeus was still on the job when he accidentally said that America's Israel policy and Israel's Palestine policy is really bad for America's security interests in the region.
He had to back down and crawl on his belly before Max Boot, of all people.
But Mattis is retired now, so I guess he's feeling a little bit ornery.
But that's pretty much the consensus among the military professionals who kind of, by inculcation, even as powerful as they are, really don't care about any other country but ours.
Well, yeah.
But, you know, politics uber alice in the States and America's Middle Eastern policy since the 50s has been contradictory and damaging to itself.
A prominent Jewish thinker back in the 50s, I remember, wrote a book called What Price Israel?in which he warned that the entire Muslim world was going to be turned against the United States unless they met some kind of fair arrangement with the Israelis.
And that didn't happen, and it's not going to happen.
So we have the same policy.
But what's so painful to me as being a long-time Middle East watcher is that Kerry is pretending to carry on negotiations between Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas, and the United States is on his broker, and the United States is not on his broker by any means.
And the PLO, today's PLO, is a sock puppet for the Americans and the Israelis.
We pay them all their money.
We finance them.
We train and arm their security forces.
Mahmoud Abbas is scorned across the Arab world as a puppet.
And the Israelis know they're pretty much in charge of America's Middle East policy.
So what kind of negotiations are these?
They're not.
The real Palestinian representatives, democratically elected, are Hamas, who are jailed up in Gaza, where the Israelis are trying to kind of squeeze them there by restricting food and materials imports.
The real, the authentic Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, was probably murdered to clear the way for the amenable Mr. Mahmoud Abbas.
Right.
Yeah, and then people shouldn't forget that it was Connolese Rice and Ehud Olmer who cooked up this whole election of 2006 that put Hamas in power anyway.
And the Israelis withheld all of the PLO's tax revenue from the borders.
And so they couldn't buy up their votes and provide their services and all that, like in a good democracy and all.
And then they weren't even happy with coalition government.
They wouldn't even let Hamas take power in the West Bank at all.
And then they had a power-sharing deal in Gaza until, like in David Rose's piece in Vanity Fair, the Gaza bombshell, Elliot Abrams and the Mossad and Hosni Mubarak worked together, the dictatorship in Egypt worked together to funnel all these guns into Gaza.
That's why the siege is there, to keep guns out, right?
No, they funneled guns in so that the Fatah side could beat Hamas with them.
And, of course, Hamas won and got the guns.
And after that didn't have to be in a coalition at all.
And now they've been in control of the Gaza Strip completely since then, well, other than the fact that Israel controls it entirely from the outside.
And our newest Middle East SOB, General El-Sisi in Egypt, is now busy putting the stranglehold back on Gaza and working closely with the Israelis, who, of course, are overjoyed by the overthrow of the Morsi government in Egypt.
You know, I had missed that night.
My understanding was that the Muslim Brotherhood had barely lifted the restrictions at all.
There was, I guess, some trade and some medical travel, but that was pretty much all they were ever getting, even under the Brotherhood government, right?
That's correct.
The Muslim Brotherhood acted timidly.
Their problem, from abroad, they were accused of trying to set up a dictatorship.
In fact, it was just the opposite.
They were scared of their own shadow.
They were much too timid.
And they opened up partly the passageways into Gaza, but not 100 percent, because they were scared of angering the United States.
So, but now that's history.
The military, the Mubarak forces, are back in charge.
Mubarak without, the Mubarakists without Mubarak are back running Egypt.
Thank you for U.S. help and Saudi help.
And Palestinians are stuck back in the squeeze again.
Hey, did you see the public relations about that today?
Or maybe it was from yesterday about, oh, well, now the White House is going to back off their sale of all the F-16s that they were going to go ahead and deliver to the Brotherhood.
But now that there's been this coup that we apparently really disapprove of, we're going to hold back these F-16s for, watch, I bet six weeks or more maybe.
That's right, and there are only four of them.
Not very long, but meanwhile, the Bakhshish, the money, is going to keep flowing from Washington to Egypt, and particularly it goes right in the pockets of Egypt's generals.
Yeah, you know, it was what, an article or two ago you reminded us that the American government has a complete stranglehold on Egypt's food supply.
They don't get American wheat, they don't eat.
Simple as that.
And so whoever's their government, even if there was a real-ass revolution and the entire power structure was torn down and the people of Egypt went this or that way, they still would have to turn right around and get on their knees because the Nile River isn't going to feed all those people.
Egypt, to put it cruelly, is a beggar nation.
It must rely on imported food.
Its gold reserves are now down to $16 billion.
The economy's collapsing.
If somebody doesn't give alms to Egypt, the Egyptians will starve.
There will be a revolution.
The Russians used to provide a lot of wheat aid.
Now the only people who can conceivably help Egypt are, well, the Chinese, the United States, and of course the Saudis have stepped in now with $12 billion of foreign aid to celebrate the overthrow of the democratically elected Morsi government.
Well, you know, wherever they and their money go, their culture goes too, right?
That's where the Taliban came from, was the Saudi-backed madrasas in Pakistan in the 80s, right?
So what is this going to mean for the future of Egypt?
It's going to mean probably more military dictatorship.
But what will happen is that the generals there and the Mubarak establishment, the secret police, the judges, the media, will bring in a civilian government such as that little sock puppet one they have now, and they'll bring in more civilians.
Mohamed ElBaradei, long known as America's man on the Nile, will rise to more prominence, I would think.
So the U.S., the way we like to run things in the Middle East and our democracies in the Middle East is to have the military in charge, but to have a nice veneer of civilian government.
We had the same thing in Turkey that we were very happy with for decades.
But that's what's going to happen in Egypt.
And after a while, people are going to forget about Egypt and look at something else, and the generals and the bureaucrats and the secret policemen will continue running Egypt.
And again, well, maybe not again, for the first time, what does America even care?
I mean, we've got access to the Suez Canal no matter who rules Egypt, right?
Because we've got bigger guns and they're going to let us through there.
So it's really just all about Israel, right?
Not entirely.
Yeah, it's about Israel.
Israel has put tremendous pressure on the U.S. through its partisans in Congress to make sure that Egypt stays leashed and doesn't have adequate weapons to fight a war against Israel.
It has to obey because otherwise it'll starve.
But the other reason, of course, is Egypt is very strategic.
One out of every three Arabs is an Egyptian.
And Egypt is the heart of the Arab world culturally, historically.
So it's very strategic for the U.S.
It's the hinge between North Africa and black Africa and the Middle East.
Egypt has a big army that's not any good at defending Egypt from foreign attackers, but it can be used to crush rebellions in other parts of the Arab world.
So Egypt is a linchpin to America's domination of the Arab world.
And that was the point of what I wrote about in my book American Raj, How America Rules the Middle East.
Yeah, there you go.
You know, I actually have that buried in a pile of two reads, and I'm so ashamed that I haven't read that book yet.
I swear I'm going to get to it, Eric.
Good.
I hope you enjoy it.
Well, the situation keeps changing.
So read it soon, otherwise who knows what's going to happen next.
Well, I'll keep in mind the context, but yeah.
Okay.
I'm the worst, man.
Can you believe that, everybody?
I haven't read American Raj.
I'm shocked.
All right, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show as always, Eric.
I'm going to read that thing, but for the next time we talk, you watch.
Always a pleasure.
You'll be quizzed.
Okay, good.
Bye.
And check that table of contents.
Remind yourself what you wrote there.
All right, everybody.
That's Eric Margulies.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks very much for tuning in and tolerating my mess here today.
I appreciate it.
We'll be back here tomorrow.scotthorton.org, listen, and noagendastream.com.
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