08/06/15 – Daoud Kuttab – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
We're a little bit over time with Con Holland in there.
You'll want to check the archives later at scotthorton.org.
Up next is Dawoud Kattab.
I hope.
Something like that.
Award-winning Palestinian journalist and former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, here writing for Al Jazeera.
Welcome to the show.
How are you, sir?
Thank you very much.
How are you?
I'm doing good, and I'm very sorry about mispronouncing your name.
I'm sure I did.
Could you help me out one time, please?
Kattab.
Kattab.
Okay.
It's Arabic for authors or writers.
My great-grandparents were scribes who wrote cases for people who didn't know how to read and write.
So we got that name.
Cool.
Very cool.
All right.
And I just wrote it phonetically so that maybe I'll be able to get it right at the break.
Okay.
So anyway, thank you very much for joining us on the show today.
A very important article that you've written here for aljazeera.com, why Israel is suddenly owning up to its terrorism.
And I was actually even talking with a Syrian friend of mine who was saying, oh, you got to give the Israelis credit.
At least they're calling it terrorism, you know.
But you seem to think there's an ulterior motive there.
Oh, I'm sorry, it.
Meaning, I assume it's understood, but I shouldn't.
There was a so-called price tag attack where Israeli settlers firebombed with gasoline a house full of Palestinian civilians on the West Bank last week, where an 18-month-old baby boy was burned to death, and the rest of his family horribly burned as well and all hospitalized.
And that was what the Israeli government, surprisingly to some people, called terrorism.
So why is it that they have decided to go ahead and do so?
Well, there are two theories.
And I'll tell you the two theories, and I'll tell you which I believe in.
One theory is that the Israelis are worried that because there's no progress in the peace process that this attack on this family and the gruesome death of this baby child will bring about a new wave of violence.
And so they're trying to prevent it by basically making a very strong statement.
And the head of the Israeli security visited Mahmoud Abbas late at night, and they're trying to calm the situation down.
That's one theory, which I don't subscribe to.
I subscribe to a second theory, which has to do with the International Criminal Court.
You know, since April, the state of Palestine, recognized by the UN as a non-member state, has received full status in the International Criminal Court, which means that they can sue Israel or Israeli officers for crimes of war.
Now, crimes of war require two things.
Require that a case is very clear violation of international humanitarian law.
And the second requirement is that the governing powers or the security powers in that area have done little to really investigate the case and hold people accountable.
So if the Palestinians are going to sue the Israelis for a war crime against this particular event, the Israelis have a very weak case, and the Palestinians have a strong case for two reasons.
Because it has to do with a clearly identifiable violation of international law, and secondly, because the Israelis have a record of not doing anything about settlement activities.
So I think the Palestinians therefore want to actually take on the entire settlement enterprise, and not just the individual act against this family.
So I think my argument is by taking on a very strong stand, and by calling it Jewish terrorism, and by making a very strong, powerful position, Netanyahu gives the impression that the Israelis are taking this case seriously, that they're investigated seriously, and they'll hold people accountable seriously.
And therefore, that would cut off the potential of the International Criminal Court sending an investigation into Israel's crimes of war.
So that's my theory, that they basically cut their losses so that they are not held accountable for the settlements as a whole, which is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
And they basically figured that they would make this case, the case where they can show that they are serious about investigating it.
Right.
A modified, limited hangout, as Richard Nixon might call it.
Not exactly just a leak, but a sacrificial prosecution there, kind of thing.
I see what you mean.
Although, I mean, they're not, are they really cutting off the ICC, or they're just giving the ICC an excuse to not proceed?
They're giving them an out.
They, no, they, of course, they've never, just like the US, Israel is not a member of the ICC.
But that doesn't mean that they're not held accountable by the Rome Statues, which many countries in the world have signed, and Israel would be blamed for it.
What they're trying to do is convince the investigator.
You see, there is a, ICC has a prosecuting investigator that, if required, they can come and investigate.
And again, if they make that decision to investigate Israeli crimes of war, even if they don't succeed, or even if they, you know, make a superficial attempt, it would be so bad for the Israelis and so good for the boycott, the divestment, and sanctions process that it would increase the delegitimization of Israel.
So the Israelis are concerned about this.
They consider the boycott attempt one of their biggest dangers in the coming years, because the international community is slowly understanding that Israel is an occupying colonial power, and that is not responding to international requests for the two-state solution for the end of occupation.
Right.
Well, you know, I wonder if their PR stunt here might backfire in the sense that it just kind of highlights how little attention they've paid to prosecuting these price tag attacks in the past, right?
Absolutely.
The UN has said 2,100 acts of violence have been committed by the settlers, including destroying property, destroying mosques, destroying churches, attacking innocent civilian Palestinians that have not been prosecuted, that have not been questioned.
And so, yes, if people are willing to dig just a little bit to find out how many cases have been prosecuted, they'll realize that the Israelis have done nothing about putting an end to this hooliganism.
And in fact, the entire settlement process, as I said earlier, is illegal by international law by putting them in occupied territories.
They're violating the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states clearly that an occupying power is not allowed to bring its own civilian population to the occupied areas.
So they exist in settlements because the Israeli army protects them and doesn't really follow up on their hooliganism and their acts of violence against the local population.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think some Americans might wonder, well, come on, some settler criminals go and do some vigilantism and murder some kid in the middle of the night.
Why is that the Israeli government's fault?
But I think you just explained why.
Yeah, I mean, exactly.
The Palestinians are only allowed to control a very small part of the West Bank.
It's what we call Areas A.
But Areas B and C, which constitute more than two thirds of the West Bank territories, are under direct Israeli security control.
And Palestinians are not allowed to.
The Palestinian police are only allowed in the very populated cities of the West Bank, but nothing else.
Yeah.
And in fact, people might remember from the famous video of Netanyahu in 2000 bragging about how he screwed Bill Clinton.
He says, yeah.
So what I did was I said, well, we just need Area C.
They can have A and B.
How about that?
And Bill said, yeah.
And then it turns out we made Area C two thirds of the entire West Bank.
Ha ha.
And then the settler says, yeah, but maybe that'll make the Americans angry.
And that's when he says, nah, America is a thing that is easily moved.
Eighty percent of their people support us.
It's absurd.
And he said that, and it applies today.
You see what he's doing on the Iran deal, the way that so many Republican, even Democrats are lining up with him, including people like that you'd expect to really stand for the peace of the region.
I mean, we all want peace in the region, including you think that the Israelis would want peace.
They're actually going for war instead of supporting a peace agreement that gives everybody what they need, which is to put the Iranian nuclear civilian development under close control.
While the Israeli nuclear bomb is not even being watched, there is nobody supervising it.
Hold it right there, dude.
We got it.
We got to take this break.
It's Daoud Kutab.
Maybe yes.
Kutab.
Yeah.
All right.
And he's right here at Al Jazeera dot com.
Why Israel's suddenly owning up to its terrorism.
We'll be right back.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Daoud Kutab.
He wrote this piece for Al Jazeera.
Why Israel is suddenly owning up to its terrorism.
And I know after all these years of this, guys, that it's kind of naive of me, but I still, I guess, have to believe that if the American people knew the truth about this, that or the other imperial project, they'd be against it.
But mostly they're deceived.
And so that's my excuse for them.
And it's also the reason I'm doing this show is so people have access to what's actually true around here.
And what's actually true around here is that the Israeli military is slowly but surely stealing the West Bank of the Jordan River, what the Israeli right calls Judea and Sumeria for a bunch of religious kooks who are, I guess you could say, slowly but surely colonizing the entire place.
And they can't force march all of the Palestinians out of the West Bank at this point for political correctness reasons, just drown them in the Jordan River or something like that.
So instead, they just create facts on the ground, which is just more and more and more apartments, more and more seizure of farmland, more and more torching of orchards, more and more terrorist attacks against children in order to just drive the Palestinians mad and into smaller and smaller areas.
And then whenever the Palestinians dare to fight back, they say, look, terrorism, you know, just like the British in South Africa or something.
And it's the exact same thing that's going on.
And it's been going on for longer in the West Bank.
It's been going on for longer than the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe.
This is not it's not an age old problem, meaning, oh, it's so old that nobody can do anything about it or tell who's right or who's wrong.
But it's old enough that it's absolute, you know, horrible sin and crime.
But but something very obviously can be done about it really would be as simple as Jeb Bush telling the Israelis, get out of the West Bank or I'm kicking you off welfare.
And that would be the end of that.
It's not their territory.
It's no more legit than if, you know, Canada invaded and tried to occupy North Dakota.
And so, you know, people need to, I don't know, snap to that reality was a price tag attack, Daoud.
Well, this is another interesting kind of development that this poor family that was their home with torch had done nothing to the settlers, to the illegal settlers living by them.
What happened is that the in a different settlement, the Israelis had taken over a private land of a Palestinian and build a house on it.
And this Palestinian for years has been fighting in the Israeli court system.
And finally, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that it's his private land and you should give him the land back.
And so because the Israeli army forced by their own courts to give back the land of this man, the settlers, in order to embarrass Netanyahu and his own government, which is full of settlers, attack a Palestinian.
They have nothing to do with what, you know, the decision of the court.
But they call it a price tag.
And they say that there is a price for every decision that's made against settlers, whether it's by the Palestinians or by the Israelis.
They take out revenge.
They actually wrote in Hebrew revenge.
And they put the star, the Jewish star on the home that they built.
And it's like saying, you take anything against us, we will take revenge.
Ironically, the same day that they destroyed this illegal house built on this man's private land, they approved 800 units in other settlements.
So the Israelis themselves, the Israeli government approved more illegal settlements in different parts of the West Bank.
Yet these lunatic, radical settlers were not happy the fact that the army had to obey their own Supreme Court's decision to give back a small plot of land to a Palestinian.
And how many hundreds of thousands of settlers are there now in the West Bank?
Well, the estimate is about 500,000, which is huge.
And if you look at what happened in the Oslo Accords, which happened in 1994, the actual number has been doubled.
Instead of the peace agreement that earned Rabin in Paris and Arafat a Nobel Peace Prize that was supposed to usher in a peace settlement, it actually made it much more difficult to create the two-state solution because the Israelis have been building and moving Jewish settlers into the Palestinian occupied territory.
So that makes it much more difficult to create some kind of peace agreement that is built on the idea of separation.
You know, in between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, there's only two solutions that are possible.
Either we share the power or we share the land.
Either we have one state, which everybody has equal rights in, or we split the country into two states.
And it seems the Israelis want both.
They want the land, but they also don't want to give the power away.
So that's why we call it apartheid, because they are trying to control the West Bank, even though they're a minority, illegal settlers.
And the settlers have all the civilian rights to travel, to get subsidized water and electricity and housing support.
Yet the Palestinians, who are the majority whose land has been taken, don't have these rights.
All right.
Now, there's something interesting that you said earlier about Israel not being a member of the ICC.
And I personally am against the ICC, even though, boy, am I for trials for American war criminals.
I would hate to see any of them tried without the Bill of Rights.
And I think it puts the responsibility on the American people to hold them to account instead of some so-called world community or whatever.
But as you were saying earlier, that it kind of doesn't matter that Israel hasn't signed up to the ICC.
If the case went to the ICC and they even had a real investigation, looked into actual real prosecutions, that is huge, just in terms of public relations, not because it's fooling anyone, but just because it's bringing the basic facts to people's attention.
Also, if there is a judgment against the military officers or the political army leaders who made the orders to commit crimes of war, and all settlements are crimes of war, then the ICC can actually make a statement saying, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Minister of Defense, all these people are guilty of war crimes.
If they set foot in any country that is signed to the ICC, they can arrest them.
Right.
So it would cause the Israeli officials, political and military officials, hardship, and they would be stuck and will not be able to travel unless they want to take a chance of being arrested and taken to this court.
So even if they didn't sign to it, if they are held to have committed or even the suspicion of committing a war crime, so alleged war criminal would have to be taken to the Hague and tried.
And that's what they're afraid of.
All right.
Now, there's one more thing here, and I'm sorry, we're almost out of time.
But there's this headline at antiwar.com.
Israel expands detention without charges to citizens citing Jewish terror.
And I wondered if you thought that that was just a cynical move to that.
Now they're going to be able to detain Palestinian Israeli citizens without charges is what they're really doing.
I wouldn't call it cynical, but I look at it in a different way.
I look at it in terms of being lazy.
In other words, the Israeli army, which has so many, you know, has done so much to get confessions out of Palestinians and find ways to put them away for years is using now administrative detention, which means an arrest without charge, without trial against Jewish so-called terrorists.
But instead of actually finding who committed these crimes, they're putting them in jail without a charge.
And therefore, they're not going to to charge them with this crime and put them away for many years.
They put them away for six months.
They probably treat them well.
And then six months later, they're gone and they are not held accountable.
So in a way, it is a restriction of their movement.
But in another way, it's a clever way of not having to actually convict them.
And therefore, there will be a much bigger internal fight in Israel if you convict Israeli Jews of committing these crimes.
Yeah.
Wow.
Isn't that something?
Well, and do you think, though, that they'll be able to use it against Palestinian Israeli citizens now and hold them for even longer periods of time on without even trumped up charges, but just grab people and hold them?
The administrative detention has been used against the Palestinians for years and in Israel, Palestinian Israeli citizens, Israeli Israel, Palestinian Israel.
I don't know.
I suppose they can.
Yes.
I mean, there's no no legal reason that they cannot use them.
It seemed to me that was what they really meant.
They just were using this one price tag attack as the excuse to change the law.
But maybe I'm too.
I think they are under pressure to to do something.
And I think they found this to be the least, I mean, least troublesome thing.
Put them away, keep them in their nice way.
And then six months later, they're gone home.
Right.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry.
I kept you over time a little bit here.
I'll let you go.
But I really appreciate you coming on the show.
My pleasure.
Anything.
OK, that is Daoud Kutab, and he is writing for Al Jazeera dot com.
Why Israel is suddenly owning up to its terrorists.
Former professor of journalism at Princeton.
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