09/17/15 – Ramzy Baroud – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
It's libertarian foreign policy, mostly.
Here on the Liberty Radio Network, live every weekday from noon to two eastern time, eleven to one Texas time.
Our next guest is our good friend Ramzi Baroud, writes oftentimes for antiwar.com.
He's got one there today called Israel's Unabashed Role in the Syrian Refugee Crisis.
Hey, thank you for coming back on the show.
Before we get to the refugee crisis and the Yarmouk camp and all this important stuff, I was hoping if you could please explain to me and to the audience the story of what is going on this week at the Al-Aqsa Mosque there in Jerusalem.
There have been what, I don't know, you call them skirmishes, I guess, Al Jazeera calls it, police and protesters and rioters and Israeli settlers and Palestinian protesters, and what in the world is going on.
Right, right.
Well, thanks for having me again.
What the media is telling us about what's happening in Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is one of several Muslim holy sites within a larger place called the Haram al-Sharif, which means the holy sanctuary or the noble sanctuary.
For a long time, various extremist Israeli Jewish groups have been trying to really, they want to topple the mosque.
They believe that there is a temple, the Solomon Temple that is supposedly built underneath the mosque, and in order for that temple to be resurrected again after thousands of years, the mosque would have to be demolished.
So that is really the mentality that governs the various extremist groups that are supposedly trying to visit the mosque with the help of hundreds of Israeli soldiers who are facilitating these supposed visits.
Naturally, Muslims at the mosque, the same way that whenever there is an event that targets Christian holy sites in Jerusalem by the same groups, Palestinians just, you know, go up in arms and they try to block the entrance to the mosque so that they protect it.
The result is you will have these clashes.
Last Sunday alone, over 100 Palestinians were wounded, and these clashes continued ever since.
Now, this is where I come in as a historian, and I don't just look at what the news is saying about the subject, but you look at the context behind it.
Last February, there were attempts at the Israeli Knesset, the Israeli parliament, that basically tried to push for a legislation that changes the status quo around the Al-Haram al-Sharif and Al-Aqsa mosque.
The status quo is that since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967, Muslims, like Christians, are allowed to control and to manage their holy sites.
So Muslims are supposedly managing the Al-Aqsa mosque.
The Jewish groups want to change that, saying, but we do have a stake in this because we believe that there is this temple under the mosque, and that temple would have to resurrect again, basically.
Now, you would think that these are just crazy ideas promoted by extremists.
Well, at this point in the Israeli government, there's a very strong constituency that is actually pushing for that exact thing, where they are digging right now underneath the mosque, as they have been for years, looking for evidence of that temple.
So now the issue has moved from being a mere religious, whether you want to call it fantasy or whatever, into actual policy.
And now that is being actively discussed in the Israeli parliament.
If a decision is passed so that the management of Al-Aqsa mosque goes to the Israeli government, I promise you there will be another uprising similar to the one that carries the name of the mosque, Al-Aqsa uprising in the year 2000.
And that's otherwise known as the Second Intifada, which started when Ariel Sharon went and did a political stunt there, right?
Exactly.
They call it the Temple Mount.
And now, so as it stands now, and I just don't know the history of the thing, but as you say, at least the belief on the part of the Israelis is that the Al-Aqsa mosque is built on what was, back in the day, the original site of Solomon's Temple, which I guess I had thought that that was the Islamic tradition too, that it was the same site.
But anyway, I don't know much about that religious stuff.
But I guess at this point I do know that most Israelis, I guess I thought, are, you know, basically they have the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall, they call it, of Solomon's Temple.
And am I right that as far as most of Israeli society goes, the status quo is fine?
It's, as you say, what's new is that the hardcore far right who want to rebuild the temple, the so-called Third Temple and all that, are now actually have a voice in power inside the state.
But it still is pretty much a right-wing fringe phenomenon and not necessarily, you know, what the larger Israeli society is going for there.
Am I right about that?
Right.
I would say yes and no.
Yes, in the sense that, indeed, most Israelis are still technically secular.
But that is changing.
The last 10 years in particular, I would say since Benjamin Netanyahu first arrived in power, if you remember, in 1996, there has been this kind of, you know, change towards the right, ultra-nationalist religious parties, you know, the introduction of the Shas party and a few others that kind of really reconfigured Israeli politics.
So the old secular Zionists of yesteryears, whose ambitions were colonial, but did not as much carry the religious signature as the current generation, that is kind of really dissipating, more or less.
And Israel is becoming increasingly religious, ultra-nationalist type of society.
So they are no longer on the fringe, per se.
And it's not like, oh, they just have few voices in power.
I would say the Benjamin Netanyahu government is their voice in power.
So they are the mainstream within the Israeli political establishment.
That's number one.
The other thing that I think is really quite bewildering, well, maybe not exactly bewildering, but I think it's rather interesting, is that the man who is leading this new push to redefine the status of Al-Aqsa Mosque, his name is Yehuda Glick.
Yehuda Glick is actually an American.
And he is so very well connected with the neoconservative, religious, evangelical type of environment here in the United States.
And he gets a lot of money and a lot of support that is allowing him to manage his little apparatus in Jerusalem, aimed at creating, you know, ethnically cleansing Muslims and Christians in the city.
Now, what's really interesting, according to Israeli national news, is that actually he's a secularist.
And you would never think that this man, who has the perfect profile of the extremist religious ballast, is actually a secularist.
Which tells you, if he is a secularist and he is using religion in that manner, you would know that there is some political conspiracy underlining this entire scheme.
Yeah, well, that's the American way, too, obviously, is to exploit people's faith for business purposes, for facts on the ground, if you want to call it that, manifest destiny or whatever.
Jesus says, this ranch land belongs to me now, or whatever it is.
And speaking of ranch land, there's a great article I would recommend to everyone.
It's kooky, crazy stuff, but very real.
It's by Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com called, Beware the Red Heifer.
And it's about how this is a loophole in Jewish tradition, that if there's a pure red heifer, then they can go ahead and rebuild the temple now, instead of waiting for the Savior or some kind of thing like that.
And again, what we're talking about is basically World War.
If the Al-Aqsa Mosque is truly torn down and the Israelis rebuild the Third Temple and start sacrificing animals and stuff, it's going to be... all hell is going to break loose at that point.
And these are the kind of kooks, it's a bunch of Texas ranchers that are putting their millions up to try to genetically engineer a red heifer, so that they can cheat God and force His hand.
But anyway, hey, they're Americans, they're exceptional.
I'm sorry, we've got to take this break.
We're over time.
We'll be right back in just a second with more Ramsey Brewer.
Hey, I'll check out the audio book of Lou Rockwell's Fascism vs.
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Fascism vs.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Talking Israel-Palestine with Ramsey Baroud.
His piece today at Antiwar.com, How Yarmouk Came About, Israel's Unabashed Role in the Syrian Refugee Crisis.
You know, I was thinking when I started reading this article, I love the way you begin the article, going back in history to the Nakba and all that.
And I was thinking, for some reason, of Edgar Allan Poe and the Telltale Heart, where there's some quote of, I don't know, Menachem Begin or somebody saying, well, you know, they'll grow old and forget, or something like that, and how, sorry, pal, your wish just is not coming true.
And the Palestinians are the heart buried under the floorboard there, driving the Israelis mad, and just won't go away.
And, you know, poor little Israel for that.
And, but so you just tell the story about, yeah, no, I mean, these people, the ones who haven't been killed, they're still here, well, they're still somewhere, and they want their land back.
And, you know, despite all the hardships that they're going through, as you described, they absolutely refuse to give up their identity or, you know, their plans to one day come home.
That's right, Scott.
And, you know, this is, this article was actually inspired by a book on which I'm working right now, called A People's History of Palestine, where I'm trying to reimagine the entirety of Palestinian history, but from the viewpoint of ordinary people.
I want to link all of history.
How is your MOOC related to 1948?
And how is 1948 related to what's going on in Gaza right now?
And the plight of Palestinians who are crossing the sea into Cyprus and Greece and Hungary?
All of these things are connected as far as the Palestinians are concerned.
As you said, for Israel, they would like the whole thing to go away.
But this is, for Palestinians, it's not just a matter of being stubborn.
It's not just a matter of, you know, submitting to defeat.
I've been told numerous times throughout my career, speaking publicly or via email, where people would say, you know, everybody gets defeated and they move on with their lives.
Why are you Palestinians so stubborn?
Just accept that you have been defeated and move on.
I wish it really was that simple.
Maybe a little bit of a few therapy sessions and we'll get over it.
But it's not that.
It's the fact that we are still, in fact, living the dreadful consequences of the past.
Those who are living in refugee camps across Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, even Iraq, who were victimized after the U.S. invasion of that country, many of them were slaughtered by both the militias and the U.S. Army.
They are very much the outcome of the tragedies that have befallen our people 67 years ago and even before.
So in order for us to address the present, we have got to discuss the past.
So really it's not a process of going back in history.
It's a process of really trying to understand why what is happening right now, whether it's Syria or in Gaza or elsewhere, is in fact taking place.
Right.
Okay, so now tell us, give us the real history of how the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria, which I assume is being exploded as we speak right now.
People are dying there.
Tell us how it came to be.
That's right.
In the article I took on the flight of the village of Ketia.
Ketia is a village that was somewhere between two branches of the river Jordan, and it existed in the south of a city called Safad, a major city in Israel until today called Safad.
And that's where Ketia comes from.
Its people are simple refugees, and I say simple in the sense that they just send it to their land.
They, you know, watched out for, you know, just needed to protect their very simple existence in that part of Palestine.
In 1948, particularly on May 19, 1948, a group of Zionist militias called the Haganah, the Haganah later on formed the Israeli army.
They came and they basically attacked the village along with many other villages in the area and kicked them out.
Some of them crossed the river Jordan into Jordan and into Syria.
If you could, if you look at the map, you will see that part of Palestine is kind of, you know, somewhat close to both northern Jordan and southern Syria.
So they ended up in that part of Syria and that part of Jordan.
Some of them did not leave.
They stayed.
They just really assumed that the whole thing is just going to, you know, go away and people will return to their land.
So they stayed for a few more months.
The Israeli army, then it became an Israeli army, came back and attacked them, tortured many of them.
Many of them disappeared, never to be seen again, and others went more across the river Jordan.
They ended up in this area near Yarmouk.
It wasn't called Yarmouk at the time.
There was a valley there called the Yarmouk Valley.
And the Yarmouk Valley is, these people lived as squatters.
They just stayed there.
Again, looking across the river, wanting to go back home.
Yarmouk actually was not established for another nine years after the Nakba.
People did not feel like the need to settle.
UN organizations, international organizations, the Quakers, for example, came to help them, food, tents, and that sort of thing, with the hope they will be repatriated back to their land.
That never happened.
Eventually, the Syrian government, in agreement with the United Nations, decided to establish a camp for them.
And they gave that camp the name Yarmouk because of the valley called the Yarmouk Valley.
And they lived in Yarmouk ever since, since 1957, like nearly half a million Palestinians living in Syria, mostly living in refugee camps.
What they did in Yarmouk, they thought, this is going to be the last space of earth on which we are going to stand before we go back to Palestine.
So they named their streets, their neighborhoods, their pharmacies, and their bakeries, and their everything.
They gave them the names of the villages and places in Palestine.
So as if Yarmouk became kind of a tiny little Palestine upon which they derived their sense of hope and meaning until they go back to their homeland.
That never really happened.
And until today, it didn't happen until the so-called Arab Spring and the civil war in Syria, where these poor refugees who wanted to stay completely out of it, this is not their conflict.
It doesn't matter what happens in Syria, it's not going to affect them directly or personally, and it's not going in any way to change their relationship to Palestine.
Unfortunately, they were not kept out of it.
And we have, you know, I've wrote about this and many others.
Please, allow the Palestinians to avoid this conflict.
We saw what happened to them in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Iraq, in Kuwait in the past.
We know the same thing is going to happen in Syria if they do not stay neutral and they are not spared the burden of this conflict.
That never happened.
And they got caught right in the middle of it.
Yarmouk, in particular, was hit the hardest.
Over 100 people starved to death.
Hundreds of people were killed.
Over 1,000 of its finest people have disappeared, never to be seen again.
And hundreds of thousands of the people in Yarmouk and around it lived.
And now only 12,000 people out of half a million who lived in Yarmouk are actually still there.
And they are trapped between the Syrian government and the Syrian opposition.
And that's their story.
All right.
So that is Ramzi Baroud.
Find him today at Antiwar.com.
The piece is called How Yarmouk Came About, Israel's Unabashed Role in the Syrian Refugee Crisis.
And share it around, man.
It's a really good one.
Thanks again, Ramzi.
Great to talk to you again.
Thanks, Scott.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
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