8/8/17 Ramzy Baroud on the Palestinian response to the Jerusalem Attack

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All right, you guys, Scott Horton Show.
Introducing our friend Ramzi Baroud.
RamziBaroud.net and PalestineChronicle.com for his great writings.
We run it all at AntiWar.com.
And he's the author of the book, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, Gaza's Untold Story.
And that's what we were talking about last time, was the Gaza Strip a couple of weeks ago.
And now we have to catch up on doings over in the other part of occupied Palestine in the West Bank, on the West Bank, I guess.
The story behind the Jerusalem attack, how Trump and Netanyahu pushed Palestinians into a corner.
That one is at Counterpunch.
And I'm not certain if we ran that.
Oh yeah, no, we did run that at AntiWar.com too.
Sorry, I was traveling for a week there.
Power to the People, why Palestinian victory in Jerusalem is a pivotal moment.
That's the follow-up there.
Running both of those at AntiWar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show, Ramzi.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
All right, good deal.
Happy to have you here.
All right, so just real quick, everybody knows that former Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave a speech where he said, "'Come on, we gotta at least not lie "'to each other and ourselves."'We started the 67 War, took advantage of the situation."'It wasn't really a preemptive strike against Egypt."'We just called it that.' And, oh well, anyway, so that's the war where the Israelis invaded the West Bank and occupied the whole thing, took it from Jordan.
And they took all of Western Jerusalem and they've been working on the East.
And East Jerusalem is still nominally Palestinian territory and this is where the Al-Aqsa compound exists, which is at the center of our controversy.
Did I get that much right here, Ramzi, as a senator?
You got it all right.
Yes, that's okay.
All right, so fill us in here.
What all, it's not just the Al-Aqsa Mosque, it's the Dome of the Rock and this, that, the other thing.
Tell us about it.
First, I think what you said about the, what Menachem Begin's speech, where he admitted to the fact that, you know, this whole preemptive war in 1967 was a ruse.
In fact, it was, the whole war was based on a lie that Israel was embattled and it needed once more to move against the Arabs to defend itself.
It's the same lie they used in 1948 that, you know, the whole war just came about because they needed to defend the small Jewish communities and, you know, by accident, they ended up, you know, occupying historic Palestine.
And in 1967, the amount of territory that they actually managed to hold after the war, immediately after the war, was three times the size of Palestine because it included the Sinai Desert and the Juden Valley and the Golan Heights.
So you can't really go in such a coincidence.
You know, there was a book, I think, called The Accidental Empire, where an Israeli author argues that, you know, the whole thing happened by accident.
We needed to do what we needed to do and here we have this empire, but, you know.
You know what?
That's what happened to us Americans, too.
It's the most unfortunate thing sometimes.
That's precisely it, yes.
But you can't, really.
I mean, you can't talk about these massive military strategies and, you know, to prove to you that this was not accidental by any means, the day that they sealed the deal and occupied all of historic Palestine plus all of these Arab territories, they had a plan ready to be implemented called the Alone Plan.
And it basically meant that, okay, this is what we are going to do.
We are gonna slice up the West Bank.
Parts of it will become permanent parts of so-called Israel proper.
The rest, we don't need it, you know, and we are gonna build walls.
And it's precisely what's happening right now.
The Apartheid Wall, the so-called Separation Wall, actually does include the parts of the territories that Egal Alon, Israeli general, then planned in 1967 to make part of Israel permanently.
So we know that this is not no accident, that this whole thing has been calculated prior to the war and it remains part of the Israeli agenda 50 years later.
Benjamin Netanyahu in last June gave a speech in Jerusalem where he, it was, he used this triumphant language where he spoke about Jerusalem will never be part of any other entity.
But Israel is not only talking about West Jerusalem, he's talking about occupied Arab East Jerusalem that is recognized by the international community and, mind you, by the United States itself to be part of the Palestinian territory.
That too will always be part of Israel, he said.
But not just that, he also said that Haram Sharif, known as the Temple Mount in Israel, will always be part of Israel.
Now, this is particularly contentious.
Why?
Because Haram Sharif, the holy sanctuary, has been controlled by Palestinians and by Arabs and Muslims for, well, really for 1,000 years since the Crusaders came and went, and has been administered by what we call the Islamic Waqf, the Islamic administration for 500 years.
So when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, they went and they put the Star of David flags all over Muslim and Christian houses of worship.
But then eventually they reached an agreement with Jordan.
The agreement states that Haram Sharif is under the administration of Jordan.
It would be administered by Jordan and managed by the Islamic Waqf.
That is the status of Haram Sharif.
When the shootout happened between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers in Al-Aqsa on July 14th, the Israelis found this as an opportunity to change the status of Al-Aqsa permanently.
So what they did, they kicked the Muslim administrators out.
They shut down Al-Aqsa.
They built barricades, installed cameras, metal detectors everywhere.
According to recent reports, the Israelis stole massive amounts of manuscripts, Islamic manuscripts that goes back to hundreds, if not to over a thousand years.
And they are denying that they have stolen it.
That's another issue that is building up right now.
And they said, you know, it's over.
Islamic Waqf is out.
We are in charge now.
That's why there's been these massive protests.
Because if the status of Haram Sharif and Al-Aqsa Mosque change permanently, it is the last step that Israel needs to seal the fate of Jerusalem forever.
That's it, it's over.
So this is why Palestinians, Muslims, and Christians both mobilized, stood their ground for all of these days to prevent that change of the status quo.
Because for them, if the status quo changes, there is nothing to fight for in Jerusalem anymore.
Well, at the end of the day though, they've got gun control there, right?
I mean, the Palestinians are completely disarmed and therefore the IDF can do what they want with them if they choose to.
Oh, that's it.
Israel has the monopoly on the use of violence and guns and all of this.
Palestinians, of course, they don't.
When I said Palestinians stole, they were really, they were carrying flags and their prayer rugs and their Korans and their Bibles going inside fighting the soldiers.
That's, they were the symbols of their religion, but they fought in the- In other words, their weapon is, you can't just massacre all of us, cross your fingers and hope that's true.
That's right.
You know, you can't, at least not, you know, I mean, Israel does, you know, is in the habit of killing thousands of Palestinians.
I mean, 2000, really between 2008 and 2014, they killed 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
But the circumstances here are different.
They have absolutely no pretense.
Right there, they have a pretense that, well, you must have been near a Hamas guy or that kind of thing.
They can't pretend that here.
But not in Jerusalem.
They had these thousands of men and women, and in Arabic, we call them the Murabitun, these men and women.
They are organized.
They are grassroots organizations, community organizations, not affiliated with any political parties.
We call them the Murabitun, those who are steadfast.
And that's their job, to mobilize their community in defense of their holy shrine.
And they prevailed.
And this is why their victory, if you will, is particularly important, because it shows that no matter how the balance of power keeps changing and how vastly Israel is way ahead of any Palestinian ability to resist in terms of arms, the people's factor always makes the difference.
If you look back at history, wherever people get involved, the outcomes are not really as predictable as a gun battle, because we know at the end of any gun battle, when the Israeli army is facing few armed Palestinians, we know how that usually ends.
But when the people get involved, the outcomes are not predictable.
In this case, Palestinians claimed victory.
And I see victory quite consciously, because I don't, of course, mean victory that the nature of the relationship has fundamentally changed, but victory in the sense that they are still able to accept however symbolic change on the ground.
And if they can do that in Jerusalem, they can do that throughout the Palestinian territory.
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All right, so all along, though, people always refer to East Jerusalem as separate from the West Bank.
They say Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
Even though it's on the West Bank, it's part of it.
But so, I guess that reflects a reality that the population, the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem, they have a different legal status compared to the people of the rest of the occupied West Bank.
But more and more, it also symbolizes a real geographical division between the people of East Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied territory of the West Bank as well, right?
That's it, Scott.
I mean, the fact, and we do, as Palestinians, we do say East Jerusalem as well.
And I'll tell you why in a second.
But first, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, it was very, very clear that this particular entity is different.
It had not just territorial value and political value, but also religious and spiritual values.
So, it was very different.
They felt that they have, you know, that they have reached this spiritual fulfillment while Palestinians have been vanquished and they have lost their religious symbol.
So, that's one factor.
The other factor is that Israel annexed, illegally annexed, East Jerusalem in 1981.
It didn't annex the West Bank.
The West Bank hasn't been recognized to be part of Israel.
So, not de jure, right?
Exactly.
But East Jerusalem, according to Israel itself and no other country in the world, I don't know, maybe perhaps Costa Rica, but I'm not sure on that.
I know that there is a little island that recognize that.
But really, pretty much the only country in the world that says East Jerusalem is Israeli.
No one else recognizes that.
The United Nations doesn't recognize that.
So, 1981, they failed to make that a normality.
They failed to make East Jerusalem Israel.
And all the embassies are based in Tel Aviv and elsewhere.
Even the United States, the executive branch, the White House, refuses to move the Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
While the Congress, in the early 1990s, they said, nope, it's part of Israel now and we have to move the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem.
So, there is this conflict that has been going on for many, many years until Donald Trump comes in and he says, I agree with the Congress, we have to move the embassy, but they haven't.
They understand that if they do so, they are going to destabilize the situation further and is going to undermine whatever little plans that you have in the region.
It's going to be something beyond even Donald Trump's ability to just establish it as a new reality and send a few tweets and it's over, it will not be over anytime soon.
So, that's part of it.
There is another factor and that is, and this is really interesting what Israel is doing there, Scott.
They understand that in order for them to claim that place as Israeli, the number of Jews in Jerusalem would have to be significantly higher and the Palestinians have to be diminished in number.
So, they find every possible way to keep Palestinians out.
For example, they say, if you want to marry someone from the West Bank, no problem, but you lose your permanent residence in Jerusalem.
You want to travel, no problem, but you have to come after every number of years and register at the office of the mayor and all of this, otherwise you can't come back to Jerusalem.
So, they've created all of these obstacles so that the number of Arabs in Jerusalem keeps dwindling throughout the years and it has.
So, Arabs are now a minority.
But the other reason why they are a minority because Israel keeps redefining the boundaries, the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem.
Now, they are calling Jerusalem the greater Jerusalem and they keep bringing all of these new settlements and attaching them to Jerusalem and say it's part of Jerusalem now.
The more they do this, the more the number of Jews grow, the more the Arabs are isolated and are diminished in numbers.
About a week ago, Netanyahu added yet a new neighborhood to a settlement called Bitar Elite.
Bitar Elite is a settlement that is located south of Jerusalem to the east of Bethlehem.
It's been built on the West Bank, not on Jerusalem, historically.
It has 50,000 people there.
There are ultra-Orthodox extremists.
There are notorious settlers living there.
He has decided to add another neighborhood to Bitar Elite.
That neighborhood is located within what he calls greater Jerusalem.
And by doing so, they plan to include the entire Bitar Elite to be part of Jerusalem.
And you have another influx of 50,000 more Israeli Jews who would now become part of Jerusalem.
Again, the ratio then would continue to dwindle.
Now, right now you have about 900,000 people living in so-called greater Jerusalem.
About 200,000 of them are Arabs.
And that number keeps changing and changing every year.
So that's really the other main reason of why the reference is now to East Jerusalem as if it's an independent entity.
Sorry if I'm carrying on with this question, but it's really important to also note that a while back, Israel established what they call the Columbia Checkpoint.
Columbia Checkpoint is a military checkpoint between Jerusalem and the West Bank.
And with time, they changed the nature of that checkpoint to become as if it's a borderline, as if you are crossing to another country.
So when Palestinians are trying to get from the West Bank to Jerusalem, they go through the process as if they are traveling to Israel or to another country entirely.
With the years, this created this mental barrier that we perceive East Jerusalem as if it's something entirely different.
We fight for it as it's part of the Palestinian territory, but I think over a generation or two, it becomes obvious that there is something different about the status of Jerusalem.
This is why the fight for Jerusalem is particularly sensitive.
Yeah.
Well, and this is why you keep arguing, and more and more convincingly all the time, that the two-state solution is simply a mirage.
It's nothing but really, at least in effect, and maybe deliberately, nothing but a hoax to put off the only real answer, which is equal rights for everybody, since the Israelis already claim all the land between the river and the sea, and that already is the de facto state.
The annexation already really is complete all the way to the Jordan River.
So if the argument was only about equal rights for everybody within a single state, then, and of course, as you're saying, the special sovereignty over the holy sites and this kind of thing that they've had for hundreds of years or more, a thousand years, I guess you're saying, then all the controversy be gone, right?
It's only that the Israelis are doing this, continuing this policy at the expense of the Palestinians rather than living as neighbors.
You know, and if you look at, really, I think if you look at things from completely detached, practical ways, there is no emotional involvement in this.
You know, you don't have a stance on this issue.
And just really look at it in terms of the demographics, in terms of the territorial, you know, overlapping.
It's just, it would be bizarre to actually think of any possible, you know, mathematical equation that would allow us to confidently, you know, put lines between various parts of historic Palestine.
You mean like when they talk about land swaps, well, we'll do some land swaps within reason, you know, here and there, the green line, we'll kind of.
It's just going to be the most impossible endeavor you can do because you have a million and a half Palestinians living inside Israel.
You have half a million Israelis living in, actually more, because if you include East Jerusalem, you are looking here at maybe 700,000 or more Israeli Jews living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Israel wants to keep control of the Jordan Valley.
They say, no, no, no, no, Israel is too small.
And, you know, a missile coming from the Arabs, you know, it will take 20 minutes to get to Tel Aviv, we can't do this.
We have to keep control of the Jordan Valley.
We have to keep, you know, the Golan Heights and so forth.
So the Israelis are going to be everywhere, right?
Not just that, they can't live without, I mean, they take more than their fair share of water, but they also have control over the Palestinian aquifers in the West Bank.
So the Palestinians only get third of their water in the West Bank, while Israeli settlers and Israel itself gets more than two thirds of Palestinian aquifers.
This is that famous clip of Benjamin Netanyahu when he's bragging, that leaked video of him bragging how he got over on Bill Clinton.
He said, oh yeah, I'll tell you what, Bill Clinton, all I need is this Area C security zone.
He's mocking the president to this family.
Yeah, I told him, I just need this security zone.
We'll call it Area C, but then, ha ha, it turns out Area C is two thirds of the West Bank, and we get it all, and screw you.
And that's the part where they say, well, jeez, aren't you risking angering the Americans if you really treat them that shabbily?
And that's when he says, don't worry, America is easily moved.
It's absurd.
Yeah, yeah.
And that was what they were talking about when he said that, was how, oh yeah, yeah, Palestinian state, with just these small exceptions, and then the small exceptions are everything.
That's right.
And you raised a really important issue.
I completely forgot that, yeah, the West Bank is divided to Area A, B, and C.
Tiny little Area A, I think, what, 9%, is supposedly controlled by the Palestinian Authority, but the Israelis can come in and out whenever they please.
Area B, which is about 20 plus percent, is, again, supposedly controlled by both, really where the Palestinian Authority serves as a police officer for the Israelis, bring anybody, do anything we want you to do.
And then 60% plus of the West Bank is Area C, which is under the control of the Israeli army.
So this is the reality.
When they come and talk about true state solution, it's not only ridiculous, but it's also impractical.
And the other thing is like, okay, let's say for the sake of argument that there is an element of practicality, just to really play the devil's advocate, what has Israel done in the last 50 years to make that a possibility?
And when I say Israel, because Israel is the occupying power.
You know, when Palestinians get to criticize, oh, the Palestinian Authority television shows inciting videos, they need to stop inciting, because they keep singing about Palestine and they show the whole map of historic Palestine.
That's incitement.
That's what Palestinians need to do for peace.
Okay, fine.
We stop the videos that show Palestine as one entity.
But if all the keys are in Israeli hands, they have the tanks and the airplanes and the bulldozers and the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and the nuclear weapons, they control everything.
What have they done for the sake of peace over the course of 50 years?
So if those with all the keys have no intention to even think about more over the idea of a true state solution, what is left for Palestinians to talk about?
Well, and there's also the question of civil war within Israel.
If you had a government that was leftist enough in Tel Aviv to say, let's go ahead and do this now and pull the settlers out of there in any kind of reasonable way to reunite East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, for example, to tear down the wall and have enough contiguous space for a Palestinian state, how are they gonna get all the settlers out of there?
Especially a lot of these guys, unlike their Palestinian helots, they're armed to the teeth.
And I don't know what percentage of which ranks of the officer corps are hardcore settler types themselves, but I bet it's no small measure of them.
And you could even have a split inside the IDF over whether to enforce those orders if they got them.
That's right.
The demographics of the Israeli army has changed dramatically.
And again, they're not gonna be any more likely to just say, okay, fine, we give up.
You guys can all have equal rights and we'll start treating you fairly either when they don't have to for the same reason.
They have all the power.
That's right.
But here's the thing.
Look at any national liberation struggle throughout history.
It must have looked really ridiculous when Angolans took up arms and fought.
It must have looked bizarre when South Africans and the Zulu-speaking people united in their struggle against apartheid.
I mean, really, if you think of the odds of what are the odds of this happening, of Libyans fighting against the Italians and of Algerians fighting against the French, 2 million Algerians died in the rebellion that led to their liberation, eventually 2 million.
Any national liberation struggle, when it starts, it looks impossible.
But it has to be done because the other option is continuous enslavement.
And that's not an option at all.
It's not an option.
Fighting back is an option.
No matter how impossible it may seem, it's still an option.
But accepting degradation and perpetual imprisonment and a humiliation and no freedom and enslavement is not an option.
And it's just a human nature.
When people fight back, they don't always fight back with this kind of logical calculation.
Like, okay, if I fight back this way, eventually I'll, no, they don't.
It's just a human nature to stand up against injustice.
If someone tries to steal your car, Scott, you're gonna fight for your car, no matter what.
Even if it may seem like crazy because this guy is much bigger than you, have to, you know, it's your car, it's your rights, your property.
For us, it's the same thing.
Palestinians fight back because it's just built in.
It's an innate nature to fight back.
What is possible and what's not impossible?
Well, if we look back at the history of many rebellions and revolutions, really, we will, there's a valuable lesson for Palestinians.
You've got to mobilize, you've got to be united.
This is important.
For me, really, the intimidating element is not the power of the Israeli army because you saw the power of the Israeli army could not even install metal detectors in Al-Aqsa when 10, 20,000 people stood in their way.
I said, no, it's not gonna happen.
The power of the Israeli army is moot when it comes to people uniting with a clear strategy, a long-term strategy.
Our problem is the fact that still factions of our leadership is trying to find the balance between what is good for Palestinians and what's good for them, for themselves.
Right, well, and listen, for people who just don't understand what the big deal is or people ask me sometimes, it just seems weird that I'm on this side instead of that side in this one.
And start with the question of why so many, I think a majority of American Jews, I don't know if they necessarily agree with Ramsey about a one-state solution, but they certainly want a two-state one, and for real, in other words, to really grant independence to the people of Palestine instead of continuing the status quo.
What's wrong with them?
Nothing's wrong with them.
It's what's right with them.
This is unfair.
The whole thing is completely crazy.
And the fact that we're still talking about this when it's 2017 and this has gone on longer than the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe, the question answers itself.
Why in the world would the majority of American Jews be on the side of the Palestinians in this question?
I mean, if you want to boil it down that simple, certainly it's taken their side of the argument compared to the Likud party that rules Israel right now, that the people of Palestine deserve to be free.
Who could argue against that?
Yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, and what's funny is because people act like they're really befuddled by that.
Well, geez, shouldn't you be choosing your tribe?
Well, geez, I guess if this was the dark ages or something, but no, we're all universalists with our enlightenment principles.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, you see, that everybody is born with natural rights.
Like for example, to not have their property stolen, whether their car or their land or their holy sites.
Isn't that what we all think?
I mean, that's why we call it stealing, right?
It's right there in the 10 commandments.
That's right.
And you have like in Hebron in recent days, just as the situation was coming down a little bit in around Al-Aqsa and Jerusalem, in Hebron, you have these extremist settlers just moving in, swooping into a house and kicking the people who've been living there generation after generation out of it, and just going and living there, taking over their bedrooms and making tea in their kitchens.
And when the people protest, the soldiers come and start beating them up.
I mean, really, whether you're Jewish or Christian or Muslim or wherever you are from, when you just see a site like this, I mean, you can relate at a personal level.
You know, what would I feel if someone comes right now when I'm talking to you?
My neighbor, and kicks me out.
And I called the police and said, I was on the phone talking to this guy, and my neighbor comes and kicks me out and he takes over my house.
Well, how would you even like to be that guy?
I mean, I grew up knowing that I was on land that was once Comanche land, right?
Out in the woods in Northwest Austin, Texas, right?
So, but they were all gone.
They were all had been murdered 100 years before.
They were nowhere in sight, really.
There's no one to give it back to or anything.
And the house was new.
The house was built in 76, you know?
So, it's not exactly the same thing as like, literally pushing the guy out and moving in, as you're saying, making tea in his kitchen and that kind of thing.
Who could even live with themself behaving that way?
That's crazy.
And so you can imagine the anger of ordinary Palestinians you look at a video like this, and you see this old woman, you know, great grandmother of some whole bunch of kids who are at the street crying.
And she's begging them to go back to her house.
Now, maybe this is a woman who thought, okay, you know, the situation is a big mess, but at least I have seen real civil generations and they are well-educated and they are living in this beautiful house that I can die in peace.
And suddenly she's on the street and there is a soldier who's punching her and slapping her on the face.
You see Palestinians doing this.
I mean, Palestinians reach their breaking points because of these things that happens on a daily basis.
And the numerous checkpoints and near settlements in Hebron and Jerusalem and Gaza, that's their daily reality.
And when they are pushed to their breaking point, and God forbid, they carry a gun or a knife, the international media starts covering it, Palestinian terrorism.
But please, people, just put yourself in this situation.
And I'm not defending violence, but I am trying to place things within proper context.
You know, Americans vote against the British and they use violence.
Every Hollywood movie, you know, every action movie justifies the use of violence if someone is being treated unjustly and unfairly.
But somehow when it applies to Palestinians, we have to all be this caricature perception of Mahatma Gandhi just sitting and praying.
And it doesn't work that way.
That's not real life.
Yeah, or they just turn it around as to who's the aggressor and who's the defender so that the Palestinian is always the aggressor, even though they're the ones who are occupied.
You're just supposed to cognitive dissonance that right away.
And still, well, geez, it's a guy with a knife attacked a soldier.
Poor guy was just standing there.
If you see how they promote this on social media, I mean, like, my gosh, the same language, the same line over and over, the same talking point.
You know, how would you feel if someone tries to stab you with a knife?
Would you kill him?
And the answer is like, duh.
I mean, if my life is in danger, of course I would.
And then the argument is over.
Forget about all of this, colonization, imperialism, occupation, checkpoints, daily death, genocides, massacres, stealing homes, and all of that.
Or even just who is standing on whose front lawn, right?
Forget about all of it.
If you see it, you are sympathizing with the terrorists, but nobody wants to be sympathizing with terrorists.
That's it, that's the argument.
Yeah, well, I keep bringing this up just because I like it so much that scumbag Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, he did that famous opinion survey.
Maybe you remember the name of it, Ramsey.
It always escapes the tip of my tongue here.
But the most important part of it to me, or the most telling part of it to me, I guess, was where some pro-Israel organizations in America had adopted the talking point that, yeah, we're tearing down all these homes with bulldozers in East Jerusalem to take the property and everything, but you gotta understand that they're in violation of the zoning regulations.
And Frank Luntz said, no, no, no, you gotta stop saying that.
I don't know who told you that was a good talking point, but we tested it in our focus group, and Americans hate zoning laws.
And especially if you're telling them that you passed a zoning regulation in the last decade and you're applying it to this old lady's house that was clearly built in 1890 or whatever it is, that they're just not gonna like that.
They're gonna see through that and see the unfairness of that.
And so whatever you do, don't call it zoning.
Let's go back to calling the old lady a terrorist.
That's more believable.
That's more acceptable to an American than some busybody zoning board bulldozing somebody's house down.
That's actually, it's interesting.
I was just reading about this gentleman, and I was reading about him in the context of, he is the one who kind of inherited the legacy of Edward Bernays, the founder of the theory of propaganda in the United States in the 20s all the way until, you know, 60s and 70s.
You know, he's the first one to justify the first American military intervention in South America.
And it's Luntz, really, who kind of like took the mantle basically and continues to apply that kind of thinking of how you can manipulate words and manipulate people to get them to agree with you and to think exactly how you think.
And one of the- It's the Global Language Dictionary.
I found it here.
The 2009 Israel Project's Global Language Dictionary.
Oh, brilliant.
Wow, wow.
And I'm sorry, go ahead.
I did not know that.
No, but it just, one of his achievements is that he is the one who changed the term global warming to climate change.
Oh, that's funny.
Yeah, because he thought it has a risk of negative connotation.
And so since then, Fox News uses nothing but climate change.
I wonder if he's the guy that coined homicide attacks, too.
I wouldn't be surprised.
I mean, he has a long, long list.
Yeah, the other thing about this, I just remembered about this Global Language Dictionary was the part where he makes a direct comparison to Jim Crow.
And of course, just turning it on its head, I mean, he basically says in very frank language here, because the report is for the Israel Project.
It's advice to them, basically, of how to lie well.
So, this isn't an exact quote or anything, but he basically comes right out and advises that, listen, because Israel is in the wrong on all of this stuff, what you're gonna wanna do is lie.
See, and so what you're gonna have to do is just completely turn the truth on its head.
And you say things like, yeah, it's a horrible, despicable Jim Crow segregation type situation on the West Bank, where those evil Palestinians are just like the white supremacists of the Ku Klux Klan, who won't just let the poor Jews move and live where they want.
It's so unfair.
No other colonial power has ever went that far in manipulating the discourse as Israel has.
You know, if you look at how the Italians, for example, manipulated the discourse over Libya, they went as far as saying, listen, that there are all this currency from the Roman Empire and Libya, which means that we have roots here.
But really, it's minuscule.
It's a joke compared to the Israelis have turned things upside down.
They are the victims.
How can you, I can't figure it out, for 70 years have occupied and dispossessed and brutalized the people for this long, and yet majority of Americans are actually under the impression that in some strange way, the Israelis are the Palestinians and the Palestinians are the Israelis.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I always say, you know, the narrative that the Israelis are surrounded by threats always, you know, perpetually and forever threatening to push them into the sea and all of that, that really, and I think you may have been the one who educated me on this.
Was it you that explained that it was actually a Mossad agent in Egypt who had coined that phrase, yeah, we're gonna push the Jews into the sea?
It was somebody who was working for the Israelis all along and said that.
But then that actually, that entire frame actually really is apt for the Gazans and that they're the ones who are completely besieged and surrounded and being threatened with pushing to the sea all the time, not that they're allowed to go three miles offshore.
And right, and actually, sadly and oddly, many Gazans drowned in the sea trying to escape the siege in recent years, especially since the so-called Arab Spring, you know, they had entire boats capsized with Gazans in it.
I mean, if anybody was being pushed to the sea, it's the Palestinians or pushed to the sea.
In 1948, when the Israel occupied or the Zionist gang occupied historic Palestine, really, literally thousands of people just took these fishing boats and they're trying to escape Jaffa and Haifa and Akko, trying to get to Lebanon and elsewhere, escaping the militias, hundreds of people, entire families perished in the sea.
And yet, somehow, that sea, you know, statement applies to Israel somehow, but not to Palestinians.
I can't remember the last time I've heard of any Israeli who, you know, drowned in the sea running away from Palestinians, not one single person.
And yet, somehow, throughout the last 70 years, Palestinians are dying in the sea trying to run away.
Well, and so, like you're saying, that's what we have going for us here is honesty, the truth, and they have to keep lying these more and more unbelievable lies in order to try to justify the status quo, which just keeps getting worse.
So it seems like at some point, there's gonna be a breaking point for good or for ill, and hopefully it won't have to get worse before it gets better.
I hate it when people say it does have to.
It should never have to, but a decent respect for mankind, that's all that's required here.
That's right, and this is why they are terrified of the boycott movement, because it's not really about boycotting Israel.
I mean, we know that the U.S. government and the Congress in particular will always be able to supply them with, you know, millions more.
That's not the issue.
The boycott movement, the BDS movement, is allowing us to actually push the conversation everywhere, in university campuses, on television, media, all shapes and colors, and that's why they are very, very scared by this whole thing, and they are trying to criminalize BDS in the U.S.
They are pushing this law called S-720, which actually makes it criminal for you to support BDS, even if you are just an individual.
People could go to jail for 20 years.
I don't know if you've heard about this law.
My recent article this week is about this law.
It really jeopardizes the entire concept of American democracy.
If you choose not to buy Israeli hummus and you made that a statement, you could actually go to jail for it, and there's a fine up to a million dollars, and this is why, because they don't want the truth to come out.
They don't want people to talk about it.
Yeah, well, and you know, that's the kind of thing what I'm talking about, too, is their BS is getting more and more ham-handed and more and more extreme and, you know, relevatory.
Well, geez, why in the world would you want to outlaw speech in America?
Why would a foreign government and their lobby be pushing to ruin our First Amendment?
We kind of take that personally, and in the interest of what again?
Stopping me from boycotting who because they're doing what?
I mean, most people don't even know where Israel is, much less who's occupying who or the first thing about it over there.
They probably would tend to side with the Israelis since at least they're white and speak English on TV and stuff like that.
So, you know, more or less they seem more Westernized as portrayed in the media and all that.
So what's the problem?
You know, they're the ones raising the question as far as a whole new group of people know now.
Wow, I heard that the Israelis are trying to repeal the First Amendment.
What's that about?
Brand new conversation started.
Exactly.
So.
And that's what we, you know, that's what BDS aims for from the very beginning.
We, you know, instead of having this marginalized conversation where Netanyahu would take the center stage everywhere he goes, now the conversation is going to be about BDS.
And I think this is a historic opportunity for supporters of Palestine to engage Americans because we are in the same boat at this point.
If you as an American inquire for information about the boycott, the mere inquiry could be criminal according to the new law.
They're saying, well, we're going to omit this part before the vote.
But for the time being, that's what it is.
If you inquire about information, you could in fact be indicted for.
Yeah, and the question is still there.
Why did AIPAC send that legislation to the Hill?
And why did all these idiots rubber stamp it in the first place and sign on to it in the first place?
That's crazy.
Who do these people think they are?
Seriously.
And these are American citizens I'm talking about, but they're representing the interests of a foreign power where they're gonna literally outlaw not buying something or associating political speech with not buying something.
That's not even a nice try, pal.
That's just nothing but picking a fight with the likes of me.
So, I don't know.
And I think a lot of other people too who are just free speech people who don't know or care the first thing about Israel-Palestine, but who know that the First Amendment matters and always will, you know?
So, anyway, listen, let me ask you again then at the end here about the state of things as they stand with the al-Aqsa Mosque.
Is the protesters are still there?
They've already forced the Israelis to back down on the metal detectors, but what exactly is the current status quo and how does it different from the status status quo?
Yes, so we are back to square one now where basically Palestinians are allowed to pray at al-Aqsa, but the checkpoints are there and the Israelis would have to check their IDs.
And during certain times, they don't allow Palestinians between the age of 15, I believe, to the age of 45 from entering al-Aqsa and all of this.
And then the daily clashes and the arrests and the beatings and all this is back.
So, that's the status quo.
We are back there where we started.
Sadly, it's better than these other status, the new status quo that they were trying to establish, which is preventing Palestinians from going through without going to metal detectors and all of this.
So, the situation is still bad, but not as bad as it would have been if Israel did not remove all of these installations and metal detectors and all that.
You know, I read this thing by Yuri Avnery where he said, yeah, well, I guess lucky coincidence was, if I remember it right here, Ramzi, an Israeli murdered a guy in Jordan.
I don't know if it was a Palestinian that he murdered or not.
It was a Palestinian, yeah.
And then, so, the King of Jordan said, okay, well, I'll send this guy back in trade for you backing down on the metal detectors.
And so, that was enough to buy Netanyahu a little bit of face to save.
And that was it.
I don't think so, because if you read the, if you're following the Israeli media, there was a political crisis that developed in Israel as a result of this, where the right wing was accusing the Israeli intelligence, the sheen bait, of being coward.
And the sheen bait were the ones who were pushing to let's go back to the status quo.
This is a battle that we shouldn't be fighting right now, not the right time.
The right wing wanted to change the status quo, and Netanyahu got caught in the middle of this, and he opted to go with the sheen bait eventually.
This has been an entirely an Israeli fight.
Them kind of looking at the consequences of what the Palestinian protest continued.
Maybe the situation in Jordan was a little bit of a nudge, but I don't really think that it was central component of this argument at all.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I think, I didn't mean to mischaracterize it either.
I think he was saying that, basically, this just amounted to like a face-saving thing for maybe within the Israeli government, that he got to say, well, at least I got this guy back or something.
That would make sense, yeah.
But, yeah, well, so it sure is a difficult situation, and I can see why the Palestinians would be very concerned that if it comes down to it, the Israelis really could make a decision to just do another Nakba.
And in fact, that was an explicit threat from, I don't think it was just a member of the Knesset.
If I remember right, and again, I was kind of traveling, so I'm pleading half-ignorance about my recent facts here, but I think it was a member, wasn't it, of Netanyahu's government who said, not that there ever was a Nakba or any Palestinians ever lived in Israel or anything, or that there's such a thing as a Palestinian, but there will be a third Nakba if you don't knock it off, is what he said.
Oh, that's the reality they have to deal with, Scott.
Man.
All right, listen, thank you so much for coming back on the show and talking about all this important stuff with us, Ramzi.
Always, always a pleasure, Scott.
Thank you for having me and all the best with your book and everything you do.
Appreciate it, thanks a lot.
All right, take care.
All right, you guys, that's Ramzi Baroud.
He is at palestinechronicle.com and also at ramzibaroud.net.
The book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, and you can find all his stuff at original.antiwar.com slash ramzi-baroud.
So much great stuff there for you and Counterpunch and all over the place as well.
Oh yeah, and you know what?
If you look at the blog on antiwar.com, we blogged his recent video project that he did for Al Jazeera.
That's really good.
Historical interviews with Palestinian refugees and stuff, really good stuff.
And you'll just have to page down a couple of pages on the antiwar.com blog, but it's right there.
All right, thanks, you guys.scotthorton.org, libertarianinstitute.org, and twitter.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh yeah, and the book is coming out really soon, so get excited, starting right now.