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Our first guest today is Steven Zunis.
He is a foreign policy in focus columnist and senior analyst and professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.
He's the author, along with Jacob Mundy, of Western Sahara, War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution.
Welcome back to the show, Steven.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
Great to be on again.
Happy Labor Day.
Yeah, you too.
Very happy to have you here.
Appreciate you joining us, especially on a barbecue day like today.
To remind me, I want to ask you about the Western Sahara and the latest breaking in Mali toward the end of this thing.
But first, I want to start with your piece here, a couple of pieces.
Firstly, at foreignpolicyandfocus, www.fpif.org, U.S. shares responsibility for Rachel Corey's death.
Now, for those not familiar with Rachel Corey and her murder at the hands of the IDF, please tell the story and then get to your point about George Bush and his deal with Ariel Sharon that made it all possible.
Well, basically, Rachel Corey was one of a number of young volunteers from around the world.
She was a student at Evergreen State College up in Washington State.
She was 23 years old.
And they were a group of people as part of the International Solidarity Movement, which is one of a number of groups, including Christian Peacemaker teams and others, who engage in what they call third-party nonviolent intervention, the belief that having a foreign national in the conflict zone would discourage violence where violence has been going on.
Now, with the increase in repression and violence in the Israeli-occupied territories 10 or 12 years ago, there was a proposal at the United Nations for bringing in peacekeeping forces.
But, of course, the United States said it would veto that sort of thing.
So there's a proposal simply to send in unarmed monitors who at least keep track of what was going on and report to the United Nations and the like.
And the United States vetoed that as well.
And so, as a result, there seemed to be a special need for NGOs, for non-governmental organizations, to try to fill that gap since the UN was not able to do it themselves.
And so Rachel Corey was among a number who came down to the Gaza Strip, where Israel had reoccupied some of the areas of the Gaza Strip that were supposed to be under the administration of the Palestine Authority.
Now, the United States is the guarantor of the Oslo Agreement and subsequent treaties which required Israel to withdraw from certain segments of the occupied territories.
And indeed, there was a UN Security Council resolution of 1435 which specifically called on Israel to go back to its designated areas, which it had reconquered in 2002.
But the United States blocked the UN from enforcing this resolution.
So one of the things that Israel was doing in some of these reconquered territories was bulldozing homes.
I mean, they were bulldozing homes by the hundred that were near the Egyptian border.
The Israelis claimed that terrorists were digging tunnels underneath the border that were coming out inside these houses as a way of smuggling arms.
And there were a handful of cases of that, but what Israel was doing was literally bulldozing every home in the entire area, regardless of any evidence that that particular house was involved in this sort of activity.
And there was this Palestinian pharmacist whose home was about to be bulldozed, and Rachel Corey and others were standing in front of it to try to prevent it from being destroyed.
And she had a bright orange fluorescent jacket.
She had actually been engaged in conversation with the bulldozer driver, trying to convince him not to destroy this family's home.
And according to both Palestinian and international eyewitnesses, he just put on the accelerator and mowed her right over, then backed over her again, killing her.
And there was an Israeli inquiry by the military that basically absolved the soldier of any responsibility.
So Rachel Corey's family filed a civil suit in a civilian court in Israel.
And the verdict finally came down just two weeks ago, and the court ended up upholding the military investigation, which according to Amnesty International and other observers, in fact even the U.S. ambassador, acknowledged that it was not transparent or fair or thorough or anything else.
Unfortunately, the U.S. State Department, when asked about the verdict just last week, said that while they could understand the disappointment of Rachel Corey's family, that they would not express any disappointment or anything themselves.
Again, even though Amnesty and virtually every other observer saw it as a real travesty of justice.
And it seemed particularly galling that the Obama administration, one of the first responsibilities of the State Department is to defend and protect the lives of Americans overseas.
And again, for them to back down on a case of murder like this was particularly disappointing.
Just in terms of what I was mentioning at the beginning, that Rachel Corey would not have been murdered, would not have even had to have been at that place in Gaza at that time, were it not for the Bush administration blocking the U.N. from bringing in its own unarmed monitors and blocking the U.N. from enforcing its resolution that would have kept Israeli troops out of that area.
Yeah, well, I want to stick to the point about the government's responsibility to stick up for American citizens overseas.
Of course, the entire policy as it concerns the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip is just, you know, we could spend all day on the corruption there.
But when, well, first of all, they've just betrayed this girl, simple as that.
As you point out, they say, oh, yeah, the investigation was a sham investigation.
She never even got anything like a real investigation here.
And then they turn right around and decline to even really complain about it to the Israelis.
So what does that tell you?
And then secondly, what does it tell the Israelis?
Other than you have a blank check to murder American citizens, you know, if you feel like it.
Which they then turn around and did to Furkan Dogan on the Mavi Mamar.
Shot him point blank in the head after he was already laying prone on the ground.
Yes, and the United States was the only country in the United Nations Human Rights Council to vote against a censure investigation of this Israeli attack on the high seas.
Indeed, I think it's no coincidence that Rachel Corey was murdered less than a week after the United States vetoed another UN Security Council resolution criticizing Israel from killing three UN workers in three separate incidents, including a British national in the Gaza Strip who was helping to rebuild some Palestinian homes that had been destroyed in a previous Israeli attack.
Yeah, well, so what's Ariel Sharon to think other than.
All right, I got a license to kill granted to me by the world empire.
Very, very much so.
And unfortunately, this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.
You remember those three American nuns and the lay worker who were murdered by the junta in El Salvador.
And just weeks later, Jimmy Carter increased military aid to that government.
And Ben Lender, who was an engineer who was working on this micro-dam project in Nicaragua, murdered by the Contras, only to have the US government increase its aid to the Contras.
So unfortunately, this has happened before.
But Israel, I think in particular, seems to be able to get away with things that I mean, can you imagine if Iran or some other country had ended up killing an American citizen under similar circumstances?
Right.
All right.
Well, now here's the thing.
I've got a little bit of a syndication gig going on with UC Riverside.
And oftentimes your interviews, in fact, I think get kind of compiled into the best of that then plays on on 88.3 FM KUCR in Riverside, California.
And there's a question now as to whether you, me or somebody else could get in real trouble if they were to air my interview of you on this University of California radio system.
Not that anyone would confuse you, Stephen Zunis, of being any kind of bigot in the world.
Just that the state of California seems to want to define bigotry as any criticism of Israel whatsoever.
Is that right?
Yes, this is rather remarkable.
On Tuesday, the California State Assembly, with a big bipartisan majority, in fact, was a voice vote, but there was something like 66 out of the 80 members signed on as co-sponsors.
Passed a resolution that ostensibly was coming out in opposition of anti-Semitic activities on public university campuses and specifically called on the administrations of these campuses to suppress these so-called anti-Semitic activities.
On the one hand, the resolution was non-binding.
But it really sent a pretty chilling signal, particularly since the definition of anti-Semitism did not just include obvious cases like painting a swastika outside a Hillel office or something awful like that.
But even things like advocating a boycott or divestment of sanctions in opposition to the Israeli occupation in the West Bank.
Or acknowledging that Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.
Or acknowledging that the Israeli armed forces have engaged in crimes against humanity.
Now these are empirically demonstrative facts.
Israeli historians using Israeli archives have come up with considerable evidence that there was a calculated policy of ethnic cleansing in several major regions of Palestine during the 1947-1949 period.
And anybody with eyes to see can see that they have a policy just like that in the West Bank right now.
It's called, get the hell out, we're taking this land from you.
Colonists and taking over homes, etc.
And similarly, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others have documented war crimes, including crimes against humanity, by Israeli forces.
As they have lesser but still very real violations by Hamas, Hezbollah and others.
Here's the thing, if you even acknowledge that, according to this resolution, you are engaged in an anti-Semitic activity which they say should be banned on college campuses.
Which is just ridiculous.
Historically in other countries there has been hard left anti-Semitism.
My wife is Jewish and she's from the Soviet Union.
And they might as well have been Nazis.
There's nothing liberal and civil rightsy about their left wing form of government.
But here in America, the left, broadly speaking, anybody from Al Gore over, and I choose him as a centrist, anybody from the president over, by definition, civil rights and equality for all races and ethnic categories and whatever, and everybody is to be treated as an equal and judged by the content of their character, not the color of their this, that or anything else.
That is just absolutely part and parcel of liberalism and progressivism in the United States.
In other words, it's just about impossible to conceive of anybody but an actual right wing radical skinhead neo-Nazi criticizing Israel, but what they really mean is the Jews.
Because liberals who criticize Israel, you never hear them slip and say the Jews, because they don't mean that, they're talking about Israel.
Right wing, nationalist, Likudist, Republican Party, government of Israel.
Right, exactly.
I acknowledge that there are some incidents where there are some people in the name of Palestinian solidarity or whatever do, on rare occasions, cross that line to what I consider anti-Semitism.
But it's certainly not representative of the vast majority of the movement.
I mean, I was involved in the divestment movement regarding apartheid South Africa.
And within that movement, you had some communists and some pretty hardcore people who took positions I didn't like and were rather extreme.
But again, that didn't delegitimize the movement as a whole.
But what they're doing is they're trying to lump anybody who criticizes Israeli government policies as being an anti-Semite, even Jewish groups, for example.
And others who support Israel's right to exist.
I mean, to acknowledge that there is ethnic cleansing or war crimes doesn't mean that you are necessarily even anti-Israel.
Just like you can say, hey, the United States is engaged in ethnic cleansing against the Indian population.
The United States is engaged in war crimes.
That doesn't make you anti-American.
So, you know, this is the...
Hey, for that matter, all the Arab state governments have said they'd recognize the 48 borders.
Exactly.
And so this is very much about stifling free speech.
And even though, again, it's a non-binding resolution, it is pretty scary in terms of its implications.
Especially when you think of the history of the public universities in California being at the forefront on human rights issues, whether it be opposition to the Vietnam War, opposition to investment in apartheid in South Africa, you know, opposition to U.S. intervention in Central America.
I mean, the campaigns against the Israeli occupation at these universities are very much part of this progressive tradition.
So this is not, to me, this is not just about Israel and Palestine.
This is about something much bigger.
This is about suppressing this proud tradition of human rights activism.
Well, don't let my last name fool you.
I'm an absolute racist against the English because I was very happy to see in the news that there are some Englishmen who are under investigation for war crimes that they committed against human beings in Iraq.
And so I guess that makes me a bigot against white folks that I think that the law ought to apply to them and they ought to not be able to get away with injustice.
Does that sound right?
Yeah, exactly.
Now, what's interesting is that, you know, one positive thing about this that's come out is that there has been quite a bit of backlash.
And, you know, it's already, and the number of the Democrats who supported this are now saying, and at least in one case we actually talked to the state representative, whom I know personally and I trust, I believe him, though I'm dubious about some of the others, they said that this is the last week of the California legislature is notoriously dysfunctional on a whole number of levels and they're working 18-hour days and these resolutions are coming up, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And they claim that it was misrepresented to them that they thought it was only about genuine anti-Semitism, you know, neo-Nazi type stuff, and that it was sort of the Republican sponsor, a right-wing representative from Fresno, did a kind of bait-and-switch on them.
And so they're starting to distance themselves.
They say in January they're going to introduce a resolution confirming the right of free speech.
But to me that's not enough.
I mean, essentially they're concerned about the provision that said the university should suppress these activities, and the University of California has gone on record rejecting this resolution on the grounds that it is calling on it to suppress free speech activities.
But my concern is that this is basically saying, oh, you can be, you have a First Amendment right to be anti-Semitic if you want to be.
Which, you know, strictly speaking, yes, you do.
But for me, my big problem is that they will still remain on record saying that legitimate criticisms of Israeli government policies are anti-Semitic.
Until they change that, I think we're in real trouble here.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this is the one saving grace, really, is that it's much more like the movie Brazil than the book 1984, right?
There's enough absurdity to it.
It proves that they'll never be able to completely enslave us all because the police state just doesn't know what the hell it's talking about at any given point in time about anything.
You know, they don't know what they're doing.
It's completely ridiculous.
All right, well, shrug.
All right, now, can you give me just like two minutes on the latest for Mali where the American war in Libya has led to at least beginnings of what seemed like a civil war there?
Yes, things continue to go from bad to worse.
The Islamic extremists that were able to take advantage of all the weapons that were floating around in Libya as a result of the U.S.
-backed war taken over the northern part of the country, they're so incompetent they're not able to even provide the most basic needs to the population.
They're begging the Malian government to send them some administrators who can help them run things because they can't do it themselves.
But one of the more interesting pieces that's come down the pike recently is that as part of the U.S. effort to further militarize the Halyan region and West Africa in general, the United States provided the Malian government with close to 80 land cruisers as well as the sophisticated satellite communications technology.
And guess who has all those now?
Al-Qaeda.
Yeah, well, that makes sense.
Why not?
You know, we saw the headline this morning, I'm sure you saw in Haaretz, Al-Qaeda threatens Hezbollah for backing Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Whose side do you think America's on in that one, Stephen?
I mean, dang, man, there comes a point where the silliness of it ought to discredit it.
But no, okay, go ahead.
You know what?
If Israel dislikes Hezbollah, then we ought to take Al-Qaeda's side against Hezbollah, even if Al-Qaeda's the one that hates us.
It's striking how simplistic the thinking is.
I mean, the world is very complex, especially North Africa and the Middle East.
And this idea of imposing people with very simplistic ideas, who have this false dichotomy and these Manichean views of the world, sending all these weapons into this area, and thinking they're somehow going to make us more secure, or the region more stable and peaceful, is ridiculous beyond belief.
Yeah, that's the one thing they can guarantee is just further chaos, right?
I don't know, maybe you could have, but very few of us, I think.
I mean, you're already an expert on the region.
Very few of us could have specifically predicted that the fall of Gaddafi would lead to a civil war in Mali.
But many thousands of us could have predicted that it would lead to a civil war somewhere else, that it was going to lead to some kind of chaos, that those shoulder-fired rockets are going to end up somewhere, those mortar rounds are going to be homemade landmines under somebody's truck sooner or later, and here we are, it didn't take long, sooner was right around the corner.
Exactly.
All right, well, here we go, and on we go.
Thanks very much, Stephen, appreciate it.
My pleasure, anytime.
Everybody, we'll be right back after this with the other Scott Horton.
That was Stephen Zunes from, let me get his bio just right, Foreign Policy and Focus, fpif.org, Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.
We'll be right back with the other Scott Horton right after this.
