9/19/18 Jeremy R. Hammond on the US as Obstacle to Peace in Palestine

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All right, you guys, introducing Jeremy R. Hammond from Foreign Policy Journal.
That's foreignpolicyjournal.com.
And he's the author of a few books, Ron Paul versus Paul Krugman.
Guess who wins that one?
Yeah.
And Obstacle to Peace, the U.S. role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And I think you can guess who wins that one, too.
And he has a new e-book out that's free, actually.
Just sign up for his weekly newsletter.
You get the free e-book on the Israel-Palestine conflict called The Israel-Palestine Conflict, a Collection of Essays.
And they're really good ones, including this one that we ran at the Libertarian Institute just last week.
The U.S. funding cut for UNRWA illuminates Trump's deal of the century, which was, well, among the best takes on all that activity.
And maybe we'll end up talking about that at the end of this interview.
But anyways, welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Jeremy?
Good.
Glad to be on.
It's an honor.
Very good.
Happy to talk to you again.
And listen, so let me start off by telling you just what a great job you did on this thing.
It's such an important book, as you have Noam Chomsky and others saying in the endorsements here.
And, you know, talk about a meticulous researcher.
He knows one when he sees one.
And this is really the book I've been waiting for a long time to read.
And I finally, I quit my turkey habit.
I mean, I quit my Twitter habit, Cold Turkey.
And so now I have time to read books again, and it's great.
And I finally had a chance to get in this thing.
And in fact, it taught me all the things that I knew it was going to.
All the stuff that I really wanted to understand about the UN resolution surrounding the creation of Israel and that early history.
And as the subtitle has it here, the U.S. role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And it's just really something else.
I learned a million things.
I started learning things, you know, just a few pages into the thing, I'd already learned, you know, a dozen things.
So it's just a great work, and I really hope everyone will look at it, and I really congratulate you for it.
It's really something else.
Thank you.
All right.
So to start with here, I want to get back to the rise of Hamas.
I want to start with, you know, basically the overall story really has to do with the legality of all of this.
And how Israel gets away with what it gets away with, and the U.S. role there, which is everything.
So I want to talk about, you know, first of all, I want to talk about the UN Security Council resolutions that are involved here.
Even though I'm not a big fan of the UN, it is the law that mostly America has foisted on the world, and yet we exempt ourselves and our friends.
So it is the standard, the international law here.
And I think you even did a whole separate book, right, about kind of debunking the myth that the UN authorized the creation of the Israeli state back in 1948.
Yeah, I have a pretty popular article on Foreign Policy Journal called The Myth of the UN Creation of Israel.
Okay, so a little monograph or some kind of thing, right?
It's just an essay that I had written and published in Foreign Policy Journal.
And that's also included in the free e-book.
It's one of the essays that's in the free e-book that people can go to JeremyRHammond.com and sign up to get my newsletter and get that free e-book.
It's also one of those essays.
And so, I mean, there's this kind of myth that Israel was established through some kind of legitimate political process, and that's just completely false.
And so what that is basically – the truth that's kind of underlying that myth is that in 1947, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181, which was the famous or infamous partition plan resolution, which called for the creation of a Jewish – separate Jewish and Arab states as a resolution to the problem that had been largely created by British policy during the mandate period.
Under the League of Nations mandate for Palestine.
And Britain was trying to extract itself from this conflict situation that it had helped create.
Like you, I'm also not a big fan of the UN.
The UN is largely also responsible for this conflict, and Resolution 181 is part of the problem.
So first of all, General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding on member states.
Security Council resolutions are.
They're two separate chambers of the United Nations.
So in that sense, the General Assembly had no authority to partition Palestine.
And all that resolution did was to adopt a plan that had been come up by a UN special committee on Palestine, UNSCOP, which in fact actually was explicit in acknowledging that the goal of the mandate to help the Zionists facilitate the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was contrary to the Arabs' right to self-determination.
So they were – they acknowledged that right in their report.
And the partition plan was a reflection of that same racist, colonialist attitude that Western powers had toward the Arab Palestinians.
And it was totally inequitable.
And we can get into that in a moment.
But just to get back to the legality of it, so all it was is a – it recommended that the plan be taken up under consideration by the Security Council.
So it was – that's where it went and that's where it died.
The US representative in the Security Council pointed out that the UN has no authority to partition Palestine against the will of the majority of its inhabitants and that the only way that that could be done was through force.
And the UN had no authority to use force to – in international relations that way.
So there's just no truth to this idea that the UN created Israel.
And Israel's own founding document, the unilateral declaration of Israel's existence from May 14, 1948, does cite Resolution 181 as though it conferred some kind of legal authority for that declaration.
But it did not.
It neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority for the Zionists – to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration.
Which again, they were effectively declaring sovereignty over territory they didn't even control in which there was a majority Arab population who owned most of the land.
The partition plan, by the end of – even by the end of the mandate, the amount of land that the Jews had managed to acquire was less than seven percent of the territory of Palestine.
Arabs owned more land than every single district in Palestine, including Jaffa, which included the main Jewish population center of Tel Aviv.
The partition plan called for a Jewish state to be constituted out of 55 percent of the land in Palestine, including some of the most fertile land.
And it was totally inequitable.
It was really a fundamental – premised on a fundamental rejection of the right of the Arab inhabitants to self-determination, as was the mandate.
The mandate – the purpose of the mandate was to deny self-determination to the people of Palestine unless and until the Jews, through mass immigration, managed to acquire a majority.
That was the original intent of the mandate.
The mandate was drafted by organized Zionists, and the British government has acknowledged in their document – if you read the Peel Commission report, for example, they talk right in there about how the purpose of the mandate – the mandate was crafted predominantly in favor of the Jews and without regard for the rights of the Arabs.
So the fundamental root cause of the conflict is this rejection of Palestinian self-determination.
And that really manifested ultimately in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine during the 1948 war.
More than 700,000 Arabs were expelled or fled from their homes, never allowed to return.
And there's another founding myth and foundational myth of Israel is that that war was started by the Arabs who just launched a genocidal war of aggression against Israel to wipe it off the map.
But the truth is that the Arab states didn't invade Israel.
They couldn't have because Israel didn't exist.
It wasn't a legally defined state.
It had no legally defined borders.
There was only the unilateral declaration declaring its existence, which had no legal foundation or authority for that.
I mean I could declare that I own your property.
It doesn't make me the rightful legal owner of it.
And what happened was by the time the Arab states actually managed to muster a military response after that unilateral declaration in May 1948, by that time, 300,000 Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed from their homes.
So in most – I like to put it this way.
Forget what you think you know about the Israel-Palestine conflict because I think what most people think they know about it is based in myths and legends and falsehoods and lies and propaganda.
And I think if we just – we need to start with a firm foundation of what actually happened historically and what the historical truth is and what the real root causes of this conflict are.
And from that point, once we kind of understand the root causes, then it's easier to kind of understand why it persists today and what can be done then in order to try to move forward toward a just resolution.
All right.
Now, I don't think you really go into too much detail in the book about Truman's recognition of the state of Israel then on behalf of the United States.
But you do talk about the manner in which the United Nations then turned around and recognized this state.
Not that they had authorized the creation of it, as you talked about, but that then they recognized it and admitted them to the UN almost immediately and, as you put it in the book, illegally.
Yes, because there are certain requirements for states to become a member of the United Nations.
And Israel just didn't meet those requirements even though the United Nations admitted it as a member.
And one of the fundamental issues in that respect was the refugee issue because, again, Israel was established not through any kind of political process, a legitimate political process, but through the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab population from their homes.
And so that's the origin of the refugee crisis that exists today.
And the UN General Assembly passed a resolution, Resolution 194, in the wake of the ethnic cleansing, acknowledging, recognizing the internationally recognized right of refugees of war to return to their homes.
Once belligerency has stopped, they have a right to return to their homes and their property.
Israel refused to allow the refugees to return, in fact, made it impossible for refugees to return by systematically wiping hundreds of villages off the map where Arab villages used to be.
They were wiped off the map.
And it was, what, 750,000 people that were forced out of their homes?
Approximately, yeah.
And now, so, and this is something I think you and I are both right around the same age, born in the 70s, but, you know, back, well, even, I don't know, I guess the way I was taught it in school and on TV and what have you, but certainly for people, I've learned this, for people older than us, that they were taught very explicitly that no one lived there.
And imagine that, the eastern shore of the Mediterranean had yet to be settled in the year 1948, and so when all these refugees from Europe came in the aftermath of World War II, they just said, oh, how convenient for us, you know, we'll take a desert and make it bloom, and isn't that nice?
In fact, Eric Margulies, my friend and the great reporter, has talked about how his mom was this intrepid reporter, back, right after World War II, who, you know, had the run of the Middle East and had done all this stuff, and one of the things that she did was she reported on all these refugees, these 750,000 people who were, you know, kicked out of their homes and living in tents and whatever, and she was threatened, and he was threatened, he was a little boy, and they threatened to kill him.
It was, I guess, Jewish Defense League types and whatever.
This was the biggest deal in the world, that she was letting this secret out, because it was a big deal to try to pretend that this was a land without people.
There is no Nakba, right?
Even though, by the time you've written this book, you can spend the whole time citing Israeli revisionist historians about how all of this took place, very mainstream ones, admitting far after the fact what really happened here.
But is that your understanding as well, that it was really a major point for them to pretend that these people didn't even exist in the first place?
Yeah, that was part of Zionist propaganda very early on, well prior to the existence of Israel.
It is interesting, I forget which, I think it was the Shaw Commission report, I forget which British report it was, actually pointed out how this was a very common talking point of Zionist propaganda in the 30s or maybe it was the 20s.
Of how they were claiming that they had populated this unpopulated land, and it was of course completely false.
The Arabs were always a majority.
There was a small population of indigenous Jewish inhabitants, certainly.
But most of the population, the Jewish population growth in Palestine during the Mandate Period was immigration.
Whereas most of the growth of the Arab population, contrary to another hoax that's out there, that this idea that the Arabs migrated to Palestine because the Jews had gone there and populated this empty land and made the desert bloom.
And so all the Arabs wanted in on the economic prosperity, and so there was this mass wave of – I mean this is complete nonsense.
This is just a hoax.
Joan Peters wrote a book from time immemorial claiming this.
It's just nonsense.
You can go back and census data, it's just not even – again, there's all these myths and you read it all the time if you're on Twitter or wherever and people are saying these things.
It's just nonsense.
Well, in fact I think Sheldon Richman taught me recently that Norman Finkelstein got his PhD and his thesis was based on debunking that book and showing how she had just lied about every little piece of her statistics and so-called data points.
None of her footnotes said what she said they said and this kind of thing.
Exactly.
His first big work on that in the 80s.
Yeah, you can go and look up – I just recently debunked another.
There was another hoax that came out recently.
Ilan Jernow wrote a book called What Justice Demands.
I think it's called America in the Israel-Palestine Conflict or something.
It's just another hoax along similar lines, just full of lies and deceptions and misinformation including this kind of claim.
The Arabs were the majority.
They owned most of – again, owned more land even by the end of the mandate than Jews in every single district.
In fact, even in the territory where the UN had kind of suggested that the Jewish state should be established, even within that territory, Arabs owned more land.
And when the Bedouin population was included, they were the majority.
They had a numerical majority even within the proposed Jewish state.
I mean the whole concept was totally racist and colonialist and inequitable.
And this is the fundamental root cause of the problem.
I'm getting plenty of quotes from the founders of Israel saying that this is what we have to do.
This population is here, so we have to transfer them and all these things.
Yeah.
All beyond question.
David Dan-Gurion, that was his favored solution to the problem of the Arab population was what he called compulsory transfer.
Which was a term he was borrowing from the British in the Peel Commission Report of 1937.
They were the first to propose that the land be partitioned into separate states and that the solution to the problem of the Arab inhabitants already living there was compulsory transfer.
Which would mean – that was two ways.
They were also talking about forcibly expelling Jews from the Arab state.
But there were a small, relatively small number of Jews living in the territory for the proposed Arab state.
Whereas there were huge numbers of Arabs living in the proposed territory of the Jewish state.
So they were really talking about ethnic cleansing.
And this was what David Dan-Gurion described as his favored solution to the problem of the Arab population was compulsory transfer.
Which is exactly what ended up happening.
That's exactly how Israel came into being.
And like you mentioned, you can read Israeli historians, Benny Morris.
In an interview once acknowledged that without the expulsion of 700,000 Arabs, the state of Israel couldn't have come into existence.
All right.
Now – oh, go ahead.
Well, I was just going to come back to that point about the UN admission.
So there was this kind of expectation.
One of the criteria for admission to the UN is respect for international law and respect for the principles of the UN Charter.
And Israel was blatantly violating both by refusing to allow these refugees to return to their homes.
This was acknowledged in Resolution 194.
And despite Israel's adamance about rejecting the right of Arabs to return to their homes, for the UN to admit Israel as a state while that was happening was just itself a fundamental rejection of the principles of the UN Charter.
And that's why I say in the book and I make the argument from that and other points that Israel's admission to the UN was actually illegal.
That resolution itself was in violation of the principles of the UN Charter.
Well, and their borders remain undefined to this day, right?
To this day.
Yeah.
I mean everyone calls it a border fence.
It's not a border fence.
It's an armistice line.
And it's never – there is no border between Israel and Palestine.
Which under the criteria for statehood in the Montevideo Convention, that's one of the criteria for statehood under international law is that it has to have legally defined borders and Israel has none.
All right.
Now, so we're skipping ahead in the narrative here because we're skipping ahead in the international law rulings.
I think it's at least for the sake of argument one could argue here and I mean the book is basically centered around the two-state solution as being the international law and what America is doing to help Israel avoid that.
And so this really goes to the question of the occupation since 1967.
So one could argue that hypothetically all morality aside that when you kick 650,000 people out of their homes and create this I think 80-20 super majority, super duper majority even of Jews over Palestinian, Arabs, Muslims and Christians that at least that is sustainable in the brutal sense of it.
But it's the occupation since 1967 where half the people that they kicked out of their homes before, they've now taken possession of.
They've now occupied the land and so there are now it's basically a 50-50 split of the population with other than that 20% of Israeli citizens that are Israeli Arab who are second class citizens at best anyway.
But excluding them, the super duper majority then of the Palestinian Arabs are under occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and that's the current controversy.
The current controversy is not over what they got away with in 48.
The question is whether they're ever going to go back to those 48 borders or those 67 borders, which is more or less the same thing, right?
Or whether they're going to continue holding the Palestinians under occupation the way they are.
And so that brings us to, I mean you can disagree with the way I characterize that or whatever you have to say about that too, but brings us to the question of UN Resolution 242, which was passed with obviously the US voting yes after the 1967 war there to order the Israelis basically to withdraw from these territories.
I don't know if that includes Sinai, but yeah, I guess it does, right?
I mean the Golan Heights and then the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
And so this is the international law that the story of your book basically centers around the flouting of this resolution, the kind of bastardizing of it and reinterpretation of it to help Israel get away with murder here, right?
Yeah, and this is I think a very important thing that a lot of people get wrong.
In fact, I would say most commentators get wrong, even people who are very supportive of Palestinian rights.
There's this habit of conflating the goal of the peace process with the two-state solution.
And this is just a fundamental mistake.
The goal of the peace process has always been to block implementation of the two-state solution.
So Israel and the US might talk about a two-state solution, but that's different fundamentally from the two-state solution that's actually grounded in the applicability of international law.
So Resolution 242, again, there's this Zionist propaganda myth that that resolution did not call for Israel to fully withdraw from the occupied territories.
That it could get away with just withdrawing from some of the territories and that other part of the territory that it was occupying was open for negotiation of who would ultimately end up controlling that territory.
Let me make sure I understand this right because, hey, we're Americans.
We understand that Bill Clinton's lawyerly way of speaking and getting around these kinds of things.
But so the resolution says that they have to withdraw from territories and the Israelis say, aha, if they meant all of them, then they would have said the territories.
And since it just says territories, that means we get to pick and choose which ones we withdraw from and when.
And that's the loophole they're climbing through.
Yeah, which is on its face absurd because if you think about it, if you're going to argue that, well, it doesn't say all of the territories, therefore we must understand it to read some of the territories.
Right.
In other words, even if there was a the there, they could continue with the same line of argument as long as they're BSing anyway.
Yeah.
And so, I mean, fundamentally, it's just in terms of English grammar, the absence of the article has absolutely no effect on the meaning of the clause insofar as the extent of withdrawal called for.
Now, wait a minute.
Did the U.S. say, OK, if you say so, Israel, we'll take the the out and make sure to do it your way.
So you'll have this loophole or was the intent of the Americans?
Do you know what their intent was and was it did they mean it to have the same difference?
No, we absolutely know what the intent of the U.S. was and we know in the intent of we know that the will of the U.N. Security Council as a whole was after the 67 war.
The U.S. had been working with the Russians in the General Assembly on a couple of different draft resolutions regarding the need for territorial withdrawal.
Withdrawal of Israeli forces from from occupied territory, rather.
And they were explicit.
I mean, the actual wording of those draft resolutions included language like withdrawal to the armistice lines, which is synonymous with the sometimes you hear it called the 1949 armistice lines.
Sometimes it's called the 1967 lines.
Sometimes it's called the Green Line because that's the color they drew it on the map.
Those are all all the same thing.
And U.S., of course, was supportive of that in principle.
The resolution 242 right in the preambular section states that, you know, it emphasizes the principle that it's inadmissible to acquire territory by war.
Well, that's that principle of international law is completely incompatible with their absurd Israeli interpretation of this resolution.
During the during the meeting records and you can go look up the meeting records of the U.N. Security Council prior to and up to the vote.
And one of the things that Zionists seem to like to do in the propaganda is say, well, you know, the guy Lord Carradine, the British guy who was responsible for chiefly drafting this resolution.
And I forget that his American counterpart.
But, you know, they quote quotations from them years later, basically repeating this Zionist propaganda interpretation of Resolution 242 saying, oh, yeah, well, we left that out on purpose because, you know, we thought it wasn't Israel should not return to the 1967 lines.
The relevant the relevant documentary record is the record leading up to it and until the vote and that documentary record at the U.N., you can go through and read it.
And the U.N. was unanimous that the meaning of the resolution was that Israel had to withdraw to the pre June 5th, 1967 lines.
And what about when?
Did it say now?
Immediately.
Or or because the way they interpret it, the other side of it is that, well, only after they're done capitulating to our ever lengthening list of demands that we'll never acknowledge.
Yeah, this again, this comes down to an absurd interpretation that that the idea that the Palestinians would have to negotiate with the occupying power over how much of their own territory, you know, they can keep for their state of their own.
I mean, it's absurd.
It's totally incompatible with the principles of the U.N. Charter and international law.
So, I mean, they don't in the U.N. Resolution 242, they don't use the word immediately.
But it's clear that I mean that that this was what international law required, that there was no legitimate reason for Israel to to remain as occupying power.
Although, you know, of course, Israel argued that this was legitimate because it was engaged in, you know, immediately after the 1967 war, it began its settlement regime, you know, which is that's what the occupation regime is all about.
It's it continues to settle illegally, you know, in violation of again, in violation of international law, create established settlements in occupied territories.
And so 242 is important to understand that it, you know, there's the kind of design of the popular Zionist interpretation of it.
And then there's the reality of what it actually means in terms of international law and the expressed will of the U.N. Security Council at the time.
And so this is really important because that's fundamental to understand in order to understand the peace process and the goal of the peace process.
Because, again, you know, there's this confusion about, you know, this idea that the U.S. has been aiming for, you know, the two state solution.
No, it's in fact, the peace process, the two state solution is premised on the idea that, you know, international law applies to the situation.
The whole peace process is premised on the idea that international law doesn't apply.
Instead, you know, the occupied people have to negotiate, negotiate with their occupier, you know, over over their own land and over their own rights.
And the whole purpose of the peace process is essentially to get the Palestinians to capitulate to Israel's demands.
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It's America saying – it's the USA saying to the United Nations, you stay out of it because we will handle it.
We are the referee.
We are the third party overseeing the negotiations here.
And as long as we are, then don't worry Israel.
You don't have to do what they say.
Exactly.
And this is the whole – this is a foundational premise of the peace process.
But then if the Americans ever backed off, like say, I don't know, any of these guys had any spine whatsoever and they went ahead and went back to it, then the Israelis have a great fallback position here, which is that the resolutions never said what they say they say anyway.
Right?
And so it's – that's kind of their backup stance if America ever leaves them high and dry is they still insist that 242 doesn't say that they have to withdraw or it does, but it says only from where they want and on their own time.
Yeah, and it would settle that if the question was referred to the International Court of Justice.
And there's no doubt about how that would result and what the outcome of that would be if that was to happen.
The Palestinian Authority could do that.
The Palestinian Authority – well, since 2012, Palestine has been recognized by the UN as a state, which has given it access to international institutions like the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court, the ICC.
The PA has been hesitant and hasn't really moved toward doing those things, which would be enormously beneficial for the Palestinians because they have international law on their side.
It's as simple as that.
And so this is also important to understand the role of the PA because the Palestinian Authority was established under the Oslo Accords.
The Oslo – when we talk about the peace process, we're talking about the Oslo peace process.
And the purpose of the PA under the Oslo Accords was essentially to serve as Israel's collaborator in enforcing its occupation regime.
This is the function that the PA has served and continues to serve today.
So it's easier to understand why the PA has been so reluctant to move toward taking action.
Let's have that question put before the ICJ.
Let's resolve that.
What was the intent and meaning of 242?
That could be easily resolved.
And so the PA has essentially served this role of collaborator in itself.
That's another obstacle to peace that needs to be overcome, is that dysfunction of the PA.
Fatah, the main party that controls the PA, Mahmoud Abbas is the leader of the party and the president of the Palestinian Authority.
By the way, illegitimate president.
His term expired in 2009.
But he's served his function well for Israel and the U.S.
I mean, he sometimes gets out of line and they have to kind of lecture him and punish him or whatever.
But he's, for the most part, served as a faithful collaborator, including – you hear about the Hamas coup in Gaza and how Hamas came to power in Gaza.
Wait, wait, wait.
Stop.
Go back for a second.
How did – what was the role of the Egypt deal in the Camp David deal in 1979?
How did that help?
Because before Abbas – we've got time, I think – before Abbas, it was Yasser Arafat, of course.
And so now obviously the Palestinians weren't allowed at Camp David.
But it was, what, the King of Jordan negotiating on their behalf, selling them out on their behalf?
Or what was the beginnings of all of that then?
Yeah.
Well, the U.S. was mediating between Egypt and Israel.
Israel had been in control of the Sinai Peninsula.
And so Egypt wanted to kind of come to an agreement to get its territory back, and that's ultimately what happened.
But yeah, so the situation with the Palestinians was part of that process.
And so they were kind of trying to – they were taking the initiative to basically come up with a plan to resolve the situation with the Palestinians, even though the Palestinians weren't involved in the negotiation process.
In fact, Israel refused to allow any Palestinian representatives from the PLO to participate.
So here is the Israel and the U.S. and Egypt and Jordan getting together to talk about the future and the fate of the Palestinians without the Palestinians really having any say in it.
And that was kind of the origin.
That's where the idea first came up with that Israel would need to have some kind of collaborator regime in the occupied territories to essentially enforce its occupation on its behalf because trying to sustain the military occupation on its own was proving difficult and inexpensive and politically untenable in the long term.
And so that was the whole idea was that they were going to have a new Palestinian leadership, and ultimately that did happen in 1995 with the Second Oslo Agreement, which established the Palestinian Authority.
And now you have this great quote from Natan Sharansky, noted democracy promoter, saying – and I think approvingly – I'm not exactly sure of the context.
I think you probably know better – that the purpose of Oslo is to create, quote, a strong Palestinian dictatorship in the occupied territories to keep the Palestinians under control.
Precisely.
Yeah.
I think he was actually writing that critically, at least to an extent, but very honestly, very candidly.
And that was – I think it was Sharansky also who described the role of the PA as Israel's enforcer, quote-unquote, Israel's enforcer.
And that is the role of the PA, and that's also another thing that's really – So he was actually being candid and cynical about that and was supporting a true peace deal at the time when he was saying that?
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that he was supporting – Or he was on the side of – I don't know enough about that, but I think he was being critical that – I think he recognized that the Oslo Accords, the way they were framed and the function that the PA was to serve under it was not conducive toward any kind of peace agreement or any kind of just peace, like a permanent just peace.
So it's interesting, right, because I think if you ask people about Yasser Arafat, they would think of him as some terrorist leader from some state called Palestine that's always attacking Israel or something like this.
But here, he's Quisling.
He's the leader of the Vichy government in occupied Palestine.
That's the closest analogy, right?
Yeah, essentially.
He had been turned into an Israeli subcontractor.
Yeah, that was essentially what happened.
The PA is basically a sub-body of the PLO.
The PLO is its parent organization, and that's kind of what happened.
I mean he essentially sold out, and the entire political leadership essentially of the Palestinians essentially accepted this role.
And they have relative – compared to the average Palestinian, they have a relatively cushy lifestyle compared to – they have their political privileges and things.
And so what are they going to do to – they're not going to want to do something that's going to threaten their own status in their own society.
So they come to serve this dysfunction in this role.
All right.
Now – so can you explain a little bit about how areas A, B, and C came about in the West Bank?
Yeah, this was also part of the Oslo Accords where there's kind of this idea you hear a lot, this myth that – well, the Palestinians have – what's the phrase they say?
They never miss an opportunity.
They miss an opportunity.
And so it's this idea that they've been offered a state so many times, and they've always just rejected it just because they hate Jews so much.
This is kind of the talking point of the propaganda.
And the reality is that in every single one of these so-called offers that have been made, the amount of concessions that Israel has made have been negative, less than zero.
And every single concession that has ever been demanded or made during any of these negotiations has always been on the side of the Palestinians in terms of what each party has a right to under international law.
But, of course, the peace process is not framed that way.
The peace process is framed in terms of what Israel wants.
So in terms of what Israel wants, sure, it's made concessions.
But you read in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the U.S. mainstream media, they say things like Israel has ceded land.
Well, no, it hasn't.
It's not Israel's land to cede.
It might have withdrawn from certain territories.
So this is what it was in basically the ABC areas of the West Bank.
It was Israel dividing up the West Bank into certain areas.
There was one area where it would have both administrative and security jurisdiction, and that would be like where the settlements mainly were being constructed.
Another area of the West Bank would be, I think it was the PLO or the PA would have administrative jurisdiction, but Israel would still retain security control.
And then there would be certain smaller areas where the PA would essentially have both.
And so it was – the whole goal of that was for Israel to be able to continue its settlement project and to further entrench its occupation.
The goal was not to end the occupation.
The goal was to further entrench it and to sustain that as the status quo.
Well, it's funny.
It's sort of like, yeah, Yitzhak Rabin, he was going to get us out of Vietnam, and that's why they killed him kind of thing, where if he got shot, then it must have been because he was the greatest hero ever and the result of his policy was going to be perfect.
And then now look what happened instead kind of narrative, right?
Yeah, it's just another part of the state mythology.
But it was – Netanyahu did incite a right-wing coup to shoot him and kill him because they just want the whole West Bank outright, to annex it outright.
And to them, ceding Area A, failing to one day ethnically cleanse Hebron and Bethlehem and whatever's left there of the Palestinian population centers on the West Bank is treachery.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I think if there is to be progress toward a just peace, the first obstacle that needs to be overcome is the U.S.
Because without U.S. support for Israel's crimes against the Palestinians, they could not continue.
It's just that simple.
That is the predominant reason why they are able to continue.
And another obstacle obviously is Israel itself and its policies.
But that's something that can only be changed by first affecting the U.S. role.
And then the third major obstacle is, as I mentioned, the PA.
And that's another huge obstacle that they have an opportunity – in fact, Trump has kind of opened up a door and created an opportunity for the Palestinians to move forward in terms of taking the matter to the ICJ and the ICC.
Because the Obama administration was much more on board with the way things were done up to that point, which was essentially Obama understood that he has to maintain some semblance of credibility for the peace process.
Because the peace process is precisely what allows the status quo of occupation to continue.
And he was very intent on sustaining the status quo situation.
And so he understood that for that to happen, the peace process has to have some kind of credibility.
And that's something that Donald Trump simply does not understand.
And so he's taken steps that, on the face of it, are very harmful to the Palestinians, such as recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, even though East Jerusalem is under international law, occupied Palestinian territory.
And moving the embassy there, even though there's a UN resolution that forbade member states from moving their embassies to Jerusalem precisely because it's so prejudicial to Palestinians' rights.
The cutting funding for UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency, which is the agency of the UN that helps the refugees and works with refugees, runs schools and clinics and things in the Palestinian territories.
All these steps that he's taken are so blatantly prejudicial against the Palestinians in support of Israel's goals that there's no chance for negotiations to be restarted under the peace process.
There's just no chance for that.
And that presents an opportunity, because Obama was very clever about always making it seem, at least kind of like creating this perception that the Palestinians were at least partly to blame for the absence of negotiations.
That perception became increasingly difficult for the Obama administration to sustain as he neared the end of his second term, and that's exactly why the U.S. abstained on the resolution that came up before the UN Security Council right at the end of Obama's term, rather than vetoing it like he did in 2011, when a very similar resolution came up condemning Israel for its settlement regime.
The Netanyahu government is kind of somewhat like Trump, seems to have just been oblivious to this political need to sustain the credibility of the peace process, and Netanyahu has done all he can to help show that that process is not credible, that it's a farce.
Which is actually really in the long run, that's a good thing for the Palestinians, because it opens up the door for them.
It makes it politically feasible for them to actually pursue things, to go to the UN.
When the Palestinian leadership was trying to go to the UN to get recognition of statehood, the U.S. of course opposed that and called that unilateral move, rejection of diplomacy and unilateral actions.
So for the Palestinians to act multilaterally and to do diplomacy would mean that they have to come back to negotiate with an Israeli leader who had openly declared his enmity for the peace process, and basically it's this far right wing Netanyahu who has made his intent clear about what his designs are for taking over more territory that belongs to Palestinians.
So I think there's actually an opportunity under the Trump administration for progress to be made, but it has to be recognized and the opportunity has to be seized.
So I think that's why it's so important to understand, number one, the origins of the conflict and why this conflict exists and why it persists today.
And then two, understanding this big difference between the two-state solution and the goal of the peace process.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I certainly see what you're saying about America and Israel's cover being blown in a sense by Trump overreaching here.
But then assuming that the Palestinians go for it the way you say, it'll be a major test of what difference does it make if the global world empire, the enforcer of all these international laws, says they don't apply, they don't really apply.
So I guess they could get a better, more specific resolution someday than 242 out of – in the form of a court ruling, an international court ruling, something like that.
But what do you think would happen then?
Well, I think we saw a glimpse of what could happen when Tzipi Livni, who was the – at the time under – I forget what year this was, but she had traveled to the UK.
I think she was the foreign minister at the time, the Israeli foreign minister, and she traveled to the UK and was arrested for war crimes.
This was after Operation Cast Lead 2000 – this must have been 2009 because it was right after Operation Cast Lead I think, which was December 27, 2008 until January 18, 2009, 22-day full-scale military assault on the Gaza Strip.
She was arrested and then the British government intervened with the courts and ordered her to be released and of course decried that this even happened and how could this happen?
It's such an offense against the rule of law, which it wasn't.
I mean she is a war criminal.
There's no question.
But what I'm trying to say is that I think that that could be an indication of what could happen.
If the Palestinians did pursue legal remedy through the ICJ and ICC, yeah, sure, Israel might not be a member party to the ICC, but if Israeli war criminals tried to leave Israel, they're going to be arrested.
And they could be put on trial for war crimes in that situation.
And I think that's really what needs to happen.
I think there needs to be that kind of accountability and pressure on the Israeli government.
And that's exactly why – I mean John Bolton years ago said that – now he's this advisor for the Trump administration, but he had said for the Palestinians to pursue legal remedy through the ICC would be like putting a gun to Israel's head and America's too.
Well, he had good reason for saying that because, again, international law is completely on the Palestinian side in all of this.
So I should say rather the Palestinians have international law on their side.
And so that's what the US is afraid of when it comes to the ICC and when it comes to the Palestinians pursuing that course of action.
So I think that's a possibility and I think that's a very realistic possibility if we could get to the point where the Palestinian leadership would actually vigorously pursue that course of action.
All right.
Now back to the history lesson here.
So let's talk about the year 2000.
You know that slogan, the Arabs never miss – the Palestinians here – never miss an opportunity to miss opportunity.
That comes from, I think originally, I forget who said it, but it was the accusation about the negotiations in the year 2000 where, sorry you can't see it, but trust us, it was the most wonderful offer in the whole world.
And Arafat turned it down even though he could have had a state and it would have been great, but he turned it down because he'd rather fight and make money off fighting because he's greedy and evil and bad.
And I remember that was the narrative at the time.
That's more or less still the narrative to this day.
And yet you seem to have a different take in your book here.
Yeah, Camp David, this idea that the Palestinians were given this generous offer is nonsense.
Again, every single concession expected, demanded during that negotiation was expected of the Palestinians in terms of what each party has a right to as opposed to what Israel wants.
And in the whole – you hear this, Israel offered to give up 95 percent of the West Bank.
Well, OK, but why not 100 percent?
I mean what do the Palestinians have a right to?
Well, they have a right to 100 percent of the West Bank.
It's Palestinian territory under international law.
So in other words, Israel – even if we accept that 95 percent.
So Israel was – in other words, Israel was demanding that the Palestinians cede five percent of their territory.
OK, that's not an Israeli concession.
That's a Palestinian concession.
And it wasn't 95 percent.
I mean at best it was 93 percent or somewhere along those lines.
It's like when a federal department cuts their budget.
Well, we're slowing the rate of projected growth next year a little bit.
But yes, of course it's still an increase.
Of course, yeah, exactly.
It's not a cut at all.
And the idea was that the Palestinians would have to accept limited sovereignty within certain areas of the West Bank and Israel would control highways.
Israel's settlement regime would still exist and continue and Israel would control Jewish-only highways that cut across the West Bank and divide it into these little enclaves where Palestinians would have really no freedom of movement and checkpoints.
It's just like it is today.
And the whole Jordan River Valley.
The whole Jordan River Valley would be under Israeli security control.
Israel would control the airspace, the borders.
I mean you're talking about an open-air prison, not a state.
Same as Gaza is right now.
Gaza is being called the largest open-air prison in the world.
And what did the 2000 deal say about East Jerusalem?
I don't recall the specifics.
Israel – I don't know if they – putting me on the spot here.
I don't recall whether they had put that off or whether it was something that Israel was just demanding that the Palestinians recognize East Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
But what happened at Camp David was essentially no progress in that respect.
But then at Taba shortly after, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators actually sat down together and actually made progress in that area and actually came to an agreement that yeah, East Jerusalem could be the capital of a future Palestinian state.
But as soon as George W. Bush came in and Netanyahu came into power in Israel, that was over and done with.
So that limited progress that they had made at Taba was just gone.
It was kind of back to the pre-Camp David type of situation where it was just these demands being made that the Palestinians must accept that Jerusalem would be the undivided capital of Israel.
And of course the U.S. has maintained that, well, that's a subject for negotiations.
Well, it's not really.
I mean, yeah, sure, Israel wants to retain East Jerusalem.
But what is it under – just like the West Bank, just like Gaza, under international law, East Jerusalem is occupied territory.
So why didn't the Palestinians need to negotiate about that?
I mean they're just being forced to negotiate away their rights, and that's the whole purpose of the peace process is to essentially to force them to surrender their rights, their right of return.
I mean the demand that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state, not just recognize Israel.
The PLO recognized Israel in 1988, but when it also accepted the two-state solution and Resolution 242 as a basis for the final solution.
But this idea that the Palestinians have to negotiate with their occupier over their rights, so the demand for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state specifically, what does that mean?
It's a euphemism.
So what it really essentially means is that they must accede that the unilateral declaration of Israel's existence in 1948 and the ethnic cleansing by which the state actually came into being were legitimate.
That's what it means for the Palestinians to accept Israel as a Jewish state.
And that the non-Jewish citizens of Israel must be recognized by them as being second-class citizens of this future foreign country, supposedly.
Precisely, precisely.
And John Kerry gave a speech at the end of the Obama administration's term in which he explicitly said it has long been the U.S. position that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Not just recognize Israel, but as a Jewish state.
In other words, the right of return is off the table.
Going back to Camp David 2000 again real quick here, I took notes here that you have these great sources that you refer to.
Dr. Ron Pundak, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Akram Haniyeh, I don't know how to pronounce that right, and Ehud Barak himself talking about it.
You want to elaborate on what it was that they had said about – my note here is that Ehud Barak himself bragged about it.
That he was basically getting away with this PR coup of saying, look at how generous the Israeli offer was and succeeded in making the Palestinian side look intransigent.
That that was basically the mission itself, I guess.
Yeah, I just pulled up the quote.
So Barak told – I think he was speaking to the Knesset, the Israeli – I could be wrong about that.
But he declared after the Camp David negotiations, I did not give away a thing.
I made clear, and I am proud of it, that in exchange for an end to the conflict and giving up the right of return, 80 percent of the settlers under Israeli sovereignty, recognitions of the security needs of Israel, which is another euphemism.
And Israel's affinity to the holy places, we will be ready for painful defined concessions that lead to a Palestinian state.
That was Camp David in Ehud Barak's own words.
Yeah.
Now, so here's the thing, too, is this whole book is a couple of degrees shy of being a critique of the New York Times role in covering and opinioning about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Yes.
And, of course, you can't really overstate the importance of their reporting on this issue about what all these things mean.
And you're so methodical in the way you take some of their stuff apart and the changing of their language and which parts of their – where they used to previously say allegedly and then when they drop it the next time around and these kinds of things.
You do a really great job of showing.
And so that really is kind of the background noise to this whole story that all along the New York Times is lying about who's who and who's occupying who and who's brutalizing who and who's scaring who and who's doing what to who.
How many people are killed on which side and when and what the law says and what the American negotiations are about.
They get it wrong every time and quite deliberately.
Systematically and deliberately.
Yeah.
Thank you for bringing that up.
Such an important point.
Yeah, I do focus a lot on the role of the US media as well as the US government.
And I put particular emphasis on the New York Times as America's newspaper of record and probably the most important newspaper in the world and their role because the way I look at it, I kind of identify – I mean the thesis of the book is in the title.
The US is this obstacle to peace.
So if we're going to overcome that obstacle, how can that happen?
I think fundamentally the reason that that Israel – US policy continues the way it is where it's – US policy is to support Israel's crimes against the Palestinians to put it simply.
So what needs to happen for that to change?
Well, I think enough Americans, if they knew what was really happening and if they understood the true nature of the conflict, they wouldn't lend their consent to this policy.
And so that's where the role of the media comes in because the media serves – as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explained in their book Manufacturing Consent in describing the role of the mainstream media and the corporate media in the US as manufacturing consent for government policies.
And that's what the New York Times does and the rest of the mainstream media.
They manufacture consent for the US policy of supporting Israel's crimes against the Palestinians.
And so that's why I went to great lengths to expose and carefully document the New York Times' just systematic deception about the conflict.
Just to give one example for your listeners, during – in the prior to – well, the US government claimed that the Operation Cast Lead, which I already mentioned was a result of Hamas incessantly firing rockets at Israel and that Hamas violated a ceasefire that was in place.
Totally false.
It was Israel uncontroversially – uncontroversially Israel that violated the ceasefire.
The New York Times reported Israel – well, Israel had violated the ceasefire repeatedly but it effectively ended it on November 4th, the very day of the election that Obama became president.
In 2008, Israel invaded Gaza, killed six Hamas members, four or six.
I don't recall exactly.
And from that point on, the ceasefire was effectively ended.
And New York Times reported that violation the day it happened.
Isabel Kirshner reported on it the day it happened.
And within weeks that there had even been a ceasefire was completely wiped from the record.
When you read New York Times articles during Operation Cast Lead, it's as though there was no ceasefire.
The narrative just became Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in self-defense after years of incessant rocket fire.
The fact that there had even been a ceasefire, much less that Israel had been the one to violate it, was just completely wiped from the record.
And if you're the average Joe who doesn't know the story at all, you would think that Gaza is the country next door that's basically attacking them and invading them.
And the New York Times never – or not never, but never in context did they explain that, well, these people are kind of locked in here and they're under Israeli control in every way.
And so it's not the country next door attacking them.
That's why we always talk about two states in the future tense is because these are conquered, occupied people.
Yeah, and even when the mainstream media did acknowledge the blockade of Gaza, of course they don't relay the fact that that's illegal.
I mean the policy, Israel's blockade policy is illegal.
It's a violation of international law.
It's a policy of collectively punishing the entire civilian population of Gaza for the crime of having Hamas as their governing authority.
That's explicit.
Israeli officials were explicit that that was the purpose of the blockade.
Of course the media never relayed that information.
And we know that.
I mean we know that from Israeli officials.
We know that from the U.S. State Department.
There was a cable from the embassy in Tel Aviv to Condoleezza Rice at the time who was secretary of state stating that, well, Israeli officials are telling us that the purpose of the blockade is to keep – essentially to keep Gaza on the verge of a total humanitarian crisis without quite pushing it over the edge.
This was the purpose of the blockade.
Of course the media never explains that.
You never – again, like you said, never put that whole operation into context of this is the blockade.
And The Washington Post wrote about this in my book.
They did mention – they did talk about in one commentary about the blockade.
But of course they blamed the Palestinians for it and that the lesson for the Palestinians from Israel's punishment of them is that they should just give in to Israel's demands and then all their suffering could end.
This is the attitude in the mainstream media.
Yeah, constantly.
And always in such high tones as though they have the monopoly on defining what's reasonable about all of this too.
And it really is amazing.
And of course you talk about this.
It sounds like the kind of thing that a liar might accuse them of or something.
But you have family members.
I think the NYT Jerusalem bureau chief, his son joins the IDF and then his replacement, she has family in the IDF as well or in the Israeli government somewhere.
Yeah, no.
Her husband – well, that's Isabel Kirshner again, the same reporter who had reported on Israel's November 4th violation of the ceasefire.
Her husband worked for an Israeli – his business was Israeli propaganda.
He worked for a PR agency.
I think her son was also in the IDF.
Ethan Bronner is the other reporter you're thinking of whose son was in the IDF.
And think about that.
And these were the two leading reporters in the New York Times.
Well, what's the opposite of that?
Like you take a couple of guys from Gaza City, another from Hebron and you ask them to do it.
How do you think the reaction to that would be?
Yeah.
This bias explains why you saw headlines during Operation Cast Lead like Israeli soldiers vow to – Israel vows to soldier on in Gaza.
It's as though the New York Times was just ripping off headlines from IDF propaganda.
I mean – and there was another example I just want to cite as long as we're talking about Ethan Bronner.
The way that the New York Times consistently reports the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing, which is – the term means catastrophe.
For our listeners who don't know, al-Nakba is the catastrophe, which refers to – as the New York Times explains it, refers to the Palestinians' catastrophe refers to the creation of Israel.
Well, no, it refers to the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab population in order for Israel to be created.
Kind of an important distinction there where one conveys the idea that – well, the Palestinians, they just hate Jews and can't stand to see Jews exercising their right to self-determination.
Whereas, well, no, they're upset that their own right to self-determination was rejected.
Self-determination on my land, on the other side of the fence where you got me pinned in.
Yeah, you're right, and you know what?
So that's the whole kind of – it's the unsaid thing, and I don't feel like neither of us need a disclaimer, but it's interesting to talk about anyway.
How, you know, last night, in fact, I saw an interview of Roger Waters from Pink Floyd, who is a pro-Palestine activist, pro-Palestinian activist, being interviewed by Dan Rather.
And it came up that Dan Rather goes, hey, they call you an anti-Semite all the time, you know, you want to talk about that?
And, of course, his answer was, well, jeez, I'm just sticking up for the Palestinians.
And you get the idea at this point.
It should be so obvious to people, especially when they're attacking Roger Waters, who we all know his whole story.
He did a whole album about it that we all heard a hundred times about how his dad died fighting Nazis in World War II.
That's who he is.
He's Roger Waters, the guy from the wall, everybody.
And so, you know what?
He's probably not animated by Nazism.
It's not his thing, man.
And if you listen to what he says, he's like, well, I'm as caring as I can possibly be.
And so, in order to do that as good as I can, I try to look for the people who need caring the most.
You know, this kind of thing.
He's pretty sincere.
And you can tell at this point that this cry of anti-Semitism is just the last refuge of a scoundrel.
I mean, what's going on here is one nation state is occupying and completely disenfranchising a population the size of their own.
Right?
I mean, it's basically a 50-50 split population-wise.
Only, what, 45% of one side have no representation in the government, no political power whatsoever, no civil rights or political rights whatsoever.
And so, how do you got to be an anti-Semite to notice that and to criticize that?
And yet, you know what?
At the same time, not at the same time as though it's a counter-argument to that, but just alongside of that, is the fact that a lot of people might hear something like this.
First, they hear their whole life that no one would ever criticize Israel if it wasn't because they hate Jews.
And then they notice they hardly ever hear any criticism of Israel at all.
And so then, if they do hear someone who's pretty adamant about what's going on in Israel-Palestine, like yourself or myself, they go, Well, it must, it sounds like it fits right with what they've been told.
Boy, these guys really have it in for the Israelis for some reason or something like that.
So, I don't know.
What is your reason then, Jeremy?
Because I presume that you're not some kind of bigot because I know better than that by a lot.
So, what then?
Yeah, I get the charge leveled at me pretty frequently.
You know, you look at my book, the introduction was written by Richard A. Falk, who was the former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories.
He's Jewish.
I'm sorry, that's the foreword was written by Richard Falk.
It's got an introduction written by Gene Epstein, a former Barron's editor, who's also Jewish.
And in fact, he wrote his introduction specifically because he did it specifically in a way that this was his idea.
He wanted to kind of prepare readers' minds for what was coming and to hit that charge off, to preempt that charge of anti-Semitism.
And say, look, we need to be honest with ourselves here.
And I, as a Jew, can say this, that Israel has behaved badly and we need to really recognize and be honest with ourselves about what the real situation is here.
Why do I write about this issue?
There's this kind of thing like, well, you focus so much on Israel and Palestine, how come you're not writing about the tragedy someplace else?
Well, you know, I have limited resources and time and I can only do so much.
So why, you know, this is a legitimate question.
Why have I chosen this?
Well, that kind of gets into my story, which, you know, I'll try to give it briefly.
But I just, I started getting into political writing after 9-11.
And I just was not satisfied with the answer that, you know, I asked the question.
I was naive enough.
I was probably better educated than most, you know, in terms of staying up to date with current events and stuff.
But I was naive enough to ask myself, you know, why would someone do this?
Why would people do this?
And I really wanted to know that.
And I was unsatisfied with the answer that, well, it's because they hate our freedom.
So that's when I really began, you know, intently researching and studying foreign policy and writing about it.
And that just naturally led to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
And so I started really putting a lot of time and energy into learning about that.
It was just kind of a natural evolution.
I was also, you know, a little bit of my background.
I was raised in a Christian family, you know, brought up around Zionists.
You know, people who believe that the U.S. must support Israel no matter what.
They believe that Israel's establishment in 1948 was a fulfillment of prophecy.
You know, I have that background.
I came from that environment.
And so I'm just kind of naturally interested in the subject because of that Christian background.
Which also means that you can really testify to the goodness of the people who disagree with you on this.
And help you to estimate what it is that they think they know about it and what it is that they're missing, too, in all fairness, right?
Right, yeah.
Yeah, and there's a lot of sense I brought it up.
I think that's another huge influence that is kind of underestimated and not really properly appreciated.
You know, a lot of people focus on the influence of the Israel lobby in Washington.
And my take on that is that that's exaggerated because it isn't required to explain, like, Congress's stance.
The Congress people's stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
It doesn't require AIPAC money to explain a Congress person voting the way they do, for example, to support Operation Cast Lead when it was happening.
When Congress people are themselves ideologically Zionists.
So you don't need – it's not required to explain the nature of Congress people's positions on this issue.
And the influence of Christian Zionism in the country is, I think, far more profound than the Israel lobby.
As important as that is, I'm not trying to downplay it.
I'm just saying I feel that it's kind of overemphasized and exaggerated, which I think can be harmful because it kind of makes it seem like, well, there's this outside – the state of Israel and this outside influence is kind of controlling foreign policy.
But I think it's more an internal thing.
I think it's a domestic, cultural, ideological thing that exists in the United States itself.
It's not this external influence, and I think that's important to understand.
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Well, in your experience, I guess I think, and I think Grant Smith's polls showed this, too, that most people, and I assume the same Christians that you're talking about, but I don't know exactly how the polls broke that down, if they tried at all.
But anyway, most Americans don't understand the truth of what's going on here at all.
That's why you had to write this giant book to explain it.
Because, you know, so, you know, I wonder about those same people that you're talking about, the Christian Zionists especially, where it is, the politics really are very deeply mixed up in their religious beliefs about the future end times and all this kind of thing.
Whether they really understand just how unfair the Israeli persecution of the Palestinians is.
If this is the kind of thing that, you know, are you sure that this is what Jesus wants?
In other words, you know what I mean?
I wonder if you think that, because in other words, well, look, all the time they don't ever show on TV, here's a map.
Even, you know, I was flipping through the channels on The Daily Show, and Trevor Noah was, he did show finally a map of here's Israel and here's the West Bank and Gaza highlighted a different color.
But then he talks about them as though they're separate countries at war.
Right?
And then flip a coin and on the other side of it, they'll just show it like it's one country.
And then you don't know where these Palestinians are, hovering on a base in the air or what, you know?
Yeah.
But they never break it down.
They never explain it.
In fact, they explained it once on MSNBC in December 2016, when Obama abstained at the UN resolution.
And so MSNBC explained what was going on.
That was their one chance to take the Palestinian side, or not even, just take the truth side for a minute.
But it just echoed in the vastness of the silence on any other event like that in the history of cable news television.
Where, hey, look, everybody, here's basically where the Jews' only roads are.
And here are these little Bantu stands in the occupied territory here.
That never happens, ever, except that one time.
Yeah.
Even if you watch PBS NewsHour, I watch PBS NewsHour, they just assume you already know what you need to know about it, at least.
You know, they never go into it.
Yeah, it reminds me of an example I was trying to get to earlier.
I was bringing up the Nakba and Anthon Bronner, and the point I was going to get to there was just another example of that.
You know, of the media's role in just deceiving people and not educating them about this was, you know, how the New York Times consistently reported on what the Nakba was.
And in saying, well, the refugee problem was a result of a war, you know, started by the Arabs in 1948.
And there was actually somebody who wrote in to the New York Times to ask, well, how come you don't explain that, you know, by that time, 300,000 Arabs had already been expelled from the territory that became Israel before the Arab armies entered the picture?
How is that not relevant?
How come you don't explain that?
And the public editor actually replied to that letter.
And the explanation was, well, there just isn't enough space.
Yeah, they can bring it up to misrepresent it, but that's all, though.
So, in my book, I actually took the exact number of words that Anthon Bronner had written that paragraph in, and I rewrote it using the exact same number of words to explain the same thing that he was saying about the origin of the refugee crisis, but acknowledging that it wasn't just an unfortunate consequence of a war started by the Arabs.
No, but by that time, 300,000 Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed.
Exact same number of words.
And then getting to the point you made about public opinion, you know, I think there's certain kinds of people.
There are those people out there who just they just worship Israel, and they have this faith in Israel, this worship of the state.
And no matter what the facts are, that that's just going to be their position and their attitude about it.
And they just couldn't care less about the Palestinians' human rights.
Yeah, there are those people.
I think you were kind of hinting at this.
I think most people – this is my belief, and I believe this very strongly or I wouldn't have written this book.
I believe that most people, if they understood what was really going on, they would not be supportive of what's happening.
They would not be OK with the United States government that claims to represent them supporting these crimes against these people who just have suffered for so long under such an oppressive occupation regime.
They lost their homes.
They lost their homeland.
And now they're living under an occupation regime that is so oppressive, and they have no freedom.
In Gaza, I mean, people are – the malnutrition, people – the poverty, the unemployment, this is all a consequence of this occupation regime.
And just as a human being, I would love to see other human beings realize their potential.
And the Palestinians are such an amazing people in terms of their resilience.
And just the way they – it's really staggering what they're able to accomplish.
There was a World Bank report, I think it was, that I read about the effect of the blockade on Gaza.
And they were talking in there about how the Palestinians in Gaza were actually managing to rebuild even though Israel was blocking construction materials and stuff from entering the strip.
But just to their own ingenuity and amazing resourcefulness.
And so I think most people, if they really understood the nature of the conflict, I don't think that they would be supportive of what's happening to the Palestinians, of what Israel and the U.S. government are doing to the Palestinians.
And that's really what I wrote my book for is – because I believe that if people understand, I think we can affect a paradigm shift in which it becomes no longer politically tenable for the U.S. to sustain this policy.
And I think that once that begins to shift, we'll start seeing progress toward a resolution.
And I should make another final point you brought up.
I guess you didn't bring it up, but you kind of hinted at it.
The way you kind of described that there's a territory of Israel and there's a 50-50 split West Bank and Gaza Strip.
And there's a lot – there's a big movement right now for a single state solution.
So I'd like to kind of just state my position on that.
Let me mention one thing real quick just about the question of American support and whether dissent has to do with anti-Semitism, whether anti-Semitism has anything to do with this.
And I just wanted to point out that you're talking about North American critics like yourself and myself too.
But going back to the Palestinians on this, there's this great new movie – I'm sure you've seen it – by Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen called Killing Gaza about the 2014 war.
And it's just interviews of Palestinians.
They walked around the Gaza Strip and put a camera in somebody's face and said, hey man, so what do you think about what's going on here?
It was that kind of thing.
And nobody said anything about Jew this at all, Jew this or that or the Jews or those Jews or anything like that.
It was simply the Israelis or the IDF and then everything that they said – nothing that they said was about like Allah says I must destroy the Zionist thing.
It was all just about, hey, this is my property.
They sounded just like any American would sound.
This is my property.
You're trespassing and I will resist you because – right?
You could have translated it into any language in the world.
And so without stating it, that's not even the point.
They don't talk about that at all.
That's not what the movie is about.
It just shows you how there's no Islamic fundamentalism and there's no anti-Semitism really kind of involved in their equation at all.
That's not what's going on here.
It's simply a matter of the people in the prison – it's like Attica.
Rockefellers on the outside and the rioters on the inside.
That's all.
The mandate era.
Zionists like to point to Arab violence against Jews that occurred during the mandate era.
There was 1920, 1921, 1929.
There were various outbreaks of violence against Jews.
Apologists of Israeli policies like to argue that, well, that just shows the Arabs just hated Jews and just inherent anti-Semitism.
And the British government had investigations into each one of those things.
And they state right in their reports at the time that there is no inherent anti-Semitism in the country.
And Arabs are acting out out of frustration because they're – essentially because their self-determination is being denied.
The British promise of independence was not fulfilled.
Instead, they're living under this British occupation regime that's essentially assisting and facilitating the Zionist project to reconstitute Palestine into a Jewish state.
I mean, the Arabs knew what was going on.
They weren't stupid.
They recognized it.
And that's exactly why there's this frustration that outbroke in these violent outbreaks.
And so just to emphasize that point, I mean, you're right.
I mean it's not about – Palestinians just hate Jews.
It's not about that at all.
It's about their rights are being denied.
And it's not even that they just do.
It's that they don't.
Right?
That's not even it at all.
That's even better.
Well, even Hamas leaders have said that we don't hate Jews.
We just want our – we just want to be able to exercise our rights in our own land.
And Israel – you always hear Hamas rejects – wants to wipe Israel off the map.
Well, there is a bit of truth to that.
I mean Hamas would like to see Israel eliminated but not like through physical violence.
They want to see the Palestinians exercise their right of return, which would mean the end of the Jewish state.
There's no question.
I mean it wouldn't exist as a Jewish state if the Palestinians were able to return to their homeland like they have a right to do.
So it's in that sense that Hamas would like to see Israel eliminated.
But is that wrong?
In Hamas, since at least 2005, has had a position of accepting a Palestinian state alongside Israel along the 1967 lines.
In other words, they abandoned that position.
They changed that position from they want to.
Yeah.
From what they'd like to see to what their doctrine was has changed.
Yeah.
I mean well over a decade ago, Hamas changed that.
I mean I saw one of their guys on the Charlie Rose show on PBS saying, we will recognize 67 borders if you will let us have them.
Shake on it.
Let's do this.
Right.
Right.
And that's been consistent.
Hamas' position.
All right now, and I'm sorry.
Do you remember where you were when I interrupted you?
Oh, I was going to say something about the one state solution.
I think that's important.
Yeah, yeah.
Go ahead, please.
So I just kind of want to, you know.
And you've got a great segue there, right?
Because you're talking about the right of return and that would, you know, destroy the Jewish state such as it is.
I guess the question is whether if the Israelis won't let there be a two state solution, where the Palestinians could at least have their measly 22% of what's left of Palestine, then they're going to end up losing the whole thing.
Because I don't think they want to share, right?
They don't.
That's kind of what we're talking about here.
Yeah, and I think it was this kind of idea that, you know, the single democratic state rather than the two state solution is the ideal outcome.
And I agree that a single democratic state would be the more ideal solution.
The question is how do we get there?
And I think it's a fundamental mistake, a strategic mistake for one state supporters to reject the two state solution because I don't see any other feasible way to get to a single state other than through the two state solution.
And part of the problem is, again, the fundamental misunderstanding about what the two state solution is.
And unfortunately, many, most, I would say, almost all, I would say, Palestinian supporters get that wrong.
And that's one thing that I really want to try to emphasize.
Well, clearly, it does not include the right of return, then.
It includes settling for the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem.
Is that right?
Well, you know, under international law, the borders, I mean, the 67 lines are not a border.
It's an armistice line.
And so it's basically the UN resolution 242 said, well, this is the situation as it exists today.
This is the reality.
And called for Israel to withdraw to the June 5th lines.
That doesn't mean that Israel legitimately controlled the territory up to the June 5th, 1967 lines.
Because, again, during the 1948 war, the Jewish community owned legally, well, technically legally, in a sense, 7% of the territory.
And I say that because most of that land was acquired by purchasing it from absentee landlords.
And just so what happened was the Zionists, you know, exploited feudalistic Ottoman land laws to expropriate land from what were really its rightful homesteaders and landowners.
Which was, you know, these Arab peasants, these poor Arab peasants who were living on and working the land.
And they were expelled from it in many occasions when the Jews purchased it.
The Jewish settlements in Palestine, the colonies, you know, they had a policy of buying land in perpetuity for the Jews.
Never allowing Jews to sell any land back to Arabs and also not allowing any Arab employment on the land that they purchased.
And so, you know, anyhow, to get back to the present, you know, there's this idea that this one state can happen.
And I don't really see any way to get to it without first going to the two-state solution.
Which isn't necessarily to say that, OK, Israel's establishment up to the 67 lines, Israel's territorial control up to the 67 lines is legitimate.
And that everything that happened for Israel to be created is legitimate.
That's not what the two-state solution, that's not what Resolution 242 is saying.
It's just saying that was a situation in 1967 that certainly at a minimum Israel must withdraw to those lines.
And then, of course, you know, it did call for negotiations, you know, it said obviously there need to be some kind of process for a border to be established.
And that would be a step.
But then there's the issue of the right of return.
And under international law, I mean, this is one thing that people get wrong.
I think they think that if the two-state solution was to be realized, if that was to be implemented, it would mean the loss of the right of return.
And it doesn't mean that.
And I think this is really important to understand.
Because the Palestinians would then, if we were able to achieve that two-state solution, which essentially think of it this way.
Implementing the two-state solution just means ending the occupation.
That's what it means.
So if we can end the occupation, then the Palestinians would have more political leverage to be able to then pursue a remedy for the refugee situation.
And pursue remedy by, you know, working toward recognition of their right to return to their homeland.
And I don't see them being able to.
That's just not going to happen unless they actually, you know, unless the two-state solution is first implemented.
So I don't see the two-state solution as necessarily the end game here.
I do support it because I think that that's the path forward toward.
And toward what I agree is the better solution ultimately.
The more just solution is for Jews and Arabs lived peacefully together during the mandate period.
Until the Zionists came along and, you know, came to steal the Arabs' land from them.
They could live peacefully as neighbors again.
Like you just made the point very nicely about how, you know, it's not this inherent anti-Semitism from Palestinians.
Don't just hate Jews.
I think it's possible for these people to get along together as they once did.
In fact, during the, you know, prior to the mandate, Palestine was actually a refuge for Jews because the few Jews who lived there.
Because, I mean, especially compared to like Europe where anti-Semitism really was rampant.
Jews living in Palestine had it pretty well off compared to Jews in Europe in terms of that.
And so that's just one point I just want to make and emphasize is that I don't see.
Maybe somebody has another outline of how the one state solution could be realized without going through the two state solution.
I don't see.
I haven't seen it.
So that's one point I really want to emphasize.
I think in your book you talk about how at one of these points it was Bill Clinton's point of view.
That, look, if you let them have the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and let them be prosperous and independent.
In under obviously some kind of restricted way, but not in this completely ridiculous way.
Then, and you let, you know, Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Syria and wherever else come home to a rich, prosperous, free Gaza Strip or West Bank.
Then, you know, maybe they'll settle for that.
And it seemed like that actually made a lot of sense.
Not that I'm saying it's fair because obviously it's not fair.
But if you take 48 as a fait accompli just for how long ago it was or something.
You know, that seems to make sense and be sustainable as opposed to the current situation.
Yeah, I mean that's, I think it's an excellent point.
That reminds me of, again, that the book, I've just written an e-book pretty recently, early this year.
Debunking the hoax I was talking about by Alain Gernot.
And one of the arguments he makes in that book is that, you know, during the 1970s, right after the, you know, Israel began its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.
Well, what happened to the economy of the West Bank?
Well, it did so well and GDP went up and, you know, it was just booming.
And so he uses this as an argument to say, well, look, you know, Israel's occupation was good for the Palestinians.
They benefited from it.
So I cite a World Bank report that looked at the same time period to show how, well, no, that was just because of Palestinians.
Again, they're so resourceful that they were able to grow their economy, not because of the occupation, but in spite of it.
And the World Bank was very clear about that and being very clear about how the occupation was limiting the economic growth.
And really making it, you know, and making the growth that did occur unsustainable, you know, by controlling the borders, not allowing exports to Jordan, controlling, you know, controlling what gets into the territories, what gets out of the territories.
Restrictions on what the Palestinians can and cannot do, you know, in the territories.
And so, yeah, if the Palestinians were allowed to reach their full potential and have some kind of economy where there was economic growth and economic prosperity.
A lot of the refugees, I'm sure, would be perfectly happy to resettle within those territories rather than, you know, going back to what is now Israel.
No question about it.
You know, again, the Resolution 194 didn't only mention the right of return.
It also talked about compensation for lost property and, you know, damages.
That's another solution.
That should happen anyways, regardless of whatever else happens.
But, you know, yeah, I think that's a good point to make.
It's not that these five million refugees that exist today would just all go flooding back to Israel.
That's not necessarily what would happen.
I think a lot of them would end up just living happily in the West Bank, in Gaza.
Because, you know, if there was an economy there and they could prosper there, why not?
So, you know, it's interesting because every week up until very recently, we used to run – not every single week, but pretty much – the articles of Yuri Avnery, the great Israeli peace activist who recently died at age 94 or something.
He was a former Knesset member, fought in the 1948 war and, you know, more or less was a two-state guy ever since then.
And he basically always knew better than every dumb and wrong thing the Israeli state has done this whole time, right up until three weeks ago.
And so, you know, his articles are really something.
So, there's this whole, like, kind of, you know, I picture Doc Brown from Back to the Future 2 where he's got like two parallel dimensions.
One where Biff Tannen isn't the president, you know.
And anyway, so there's this Israel as a good sport, good winner after 48 that tried to do their best to make peace with their neighbors and friends with the Palestinians who they defeated, but give them their – what's left, that 22 percent and let them have independence and this and that.
And all the wars they could have stayed out of and all the things and whatever.
There really is an alternative history right there in Yuri Avnery's Told You So's, right?
And yet, so as Ramsey Baroud – I brought that up to Ramsey Baroud, too, about like, well, you know, what about settling for 22 percent, something like that, you know.
And his thing is, yeah, but see, what happened instead is the reality.
And so, what happened instead is the reality of Zionism.
That the project of ever being fair and cutting the Palestinians loose to have their own thing and whatever, that was never in the cards.
This has been the Likud doctrine all along, more or less.
And they're going to – nobody knows exactly how it's supposed to shake out, but hell or high water, that West Bank is going to belong to them and the Palestinians are going to somehow no longer be a problem at some point.
And they're just buying their time until, what, America gets in a war with China, so they can do it while nobody's looking or something, or something.
And that – I don't know, he didn't say all that part, but just the part about conquering all of Palestine, one way or the other, hell or high water, that that is the reality.
That's the aim.
I'm sorry?
Yeah, I'm saying that's the aim.
That's correct, yeah.
And they'll never settle for anything less.
Yeah.
All right, now, go ahead.
I agree with that.
I mean, I think that's correct.
That's the position of Netanyahu and his Likud party.
It's just – that's their vision.
And so they just want to – I mean it works in their favor if the status quo can be maintained for as long as possible.
That's what the peace process was all about.
And now Donald Trump is essentially trying to force a solution down the Palestinians' throats by – he's trying to take Jerusalem off the table, which he can do whatever he wants.
He's not going to take it off the table because it still remains under international law occupied Palestinian territory.
I mean it still remains under UN resolution security councils that the U.S.'s embassy shouldn't even be there.
I mean that violates the UN Charter because that security council resolution is binding on the U.S. as a party to the UN Charter.
And under the U.S. Constitution, the UN Charter is the supreme law of the land.
It's an international treaty.
I mean all treaties signed are the supreme law of the land.
And so he's violating the constitution as well by doing that.
And he's just trying to – he's trying to take the – that's the whole purpose of cutting funding to the UN RWA is to essentially – he's trying to – it's – what he's trying to do is to force that UN agency to change the definition of refugees so that 90 percent of the refugees are no longer refugees.
And therefore we'll never have any possibility of being able to actually get any compensation or be able to return to their homeland.
That's his aim.
So he's trying to twist the UN's arm to deny the Palestinians their internationally recognized right to return to their homeland.
So it's just this strong arming trying to force this solution down their throats.
So of course I'm sure Netanyahu is loving this.
But I think in the long run, I don't think it's going to work the way Trump probably intends.
I don't think – I can tell you the Palestinians aren't going to surrender to that.
I mean they're just too resilient and they've been struggling this long for their rights and they're not going to just give up now because of Donald Trump.
So I think there is an opportunity for the world to move forward toward a just peace right now actually as a consequence of what's happened under Trump.
And I just hope that the opportunity is recognized.
But I've enjoyed this discussion and it's been an honor to speak with you and swap knowledge and have this talk.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so there you go.
We'll leave everybody hanging and wanting more.
So they'll have to read the book because there's great write-ups there about Kasled and all about the so-called disengagement from the Gaza Strip by Ariel Sharon and all of the Obama BS.
And it's really great.
It's Obstacle to Peace, the US role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And I should mention the book's website is www.obstacletopeace.com.
You can pick up my book there.
Of course it's available on Amazon.
But you can buy it directly from me.
You can cut out the middleman and it helps me out.
And you have a whole other – I see now on Amazon that you've got a half a dozen books here all about this, right?
Yeah, I do have a few on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Another one is The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination which focuses on the mandate era.
And then there's that one I did called Exposing a Zionist Hoax, How Ilan Journals, What Justice Demand Deceives Readers About the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
It's my most recent e-book.
It's available as a Kindle or a PDF download.
And then I actually have a new package on obstacletopeace.com.
You can get all my books for kind of one low price because by cutting out the middleman I can pass back some savings to my customers.
And plus I can send signed copies.
If you buy it directly from me exclusively, I can send signed copies as well.
And then I mentioned my other websites real quick.
Again, I mentioned at the beginning Foreign Policy Journal.
So ForeignPolicyJournal.com and also JeremyRHammond.com.
Go ahead and go there.
Sign up for my newsletter.
You can get that free e-book featuring some of my better essays on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
So go ahead and sign up for my newsletter and stay updated with my work.
All right.
Right on.
Well, thanks very much for coming back on the show, Jeremy.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
JeremyRHammond.
Again, ForeignPolicyJournal.com.
All right, 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.