All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide around the world at ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio, and I'm happy to welcome Daniel Lubon back to the show.
He is a correspondent for Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.net, and he also writes at The Faster Times and at Jim Loeb, IPS, Washington Bureau Chief, his blog, loeblog.com, and you can also find much of it reprinted, maybe all of it, reprinted at our blog at antiwar.com slash blog.
Welcome back to the show.
Daniel, how are you?
I'm good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me back.
Okay.
So here's the thing.
I keep getting emails that say something like this.
Hey, you're always talking about Israel-Palestine with these experts, but everybody, you know, the baseline is too high and I can't reach it.
I don't understand what you guys are referring to when you know everybody by name and all the different geographical designations and what have you, and could you please give me a kind of Israel 101 and just sort of give us the basic history sometime on the show?
And so I was wondering if maybe we could start out this interview with just a little bit of that.
Nothing too in-depth, but just enough to kind of get people up to speed so that they know what it is everybody is always arguing about so much for the newly interested, I guess.
I think it might be simplest just to start off after World War II, where you have the UN partition plan.
I mean, of course, you can go back to the foundation of Zionism and the immigration of European Jews to Palestine in the early 20th century, but it might be simplest just to start off with the UN partition plan, which was designed to split up the territory of Palestine into two states, a Jewish state of Israel and an Arab state of Palestine, which was actually rejected by the Arab parties, the Palestinians, which is frequently invoked by many of the more right-wing defenders of Israel to show that the Arabs never wanted peace and so on and so forth.
But regardless of the real particulars of how the conflict started, in 1948, you have the first Arab-Israeli war, in which many of Israel's Arab neighbors invade, Israel fights them off, ends up with, I believe, 78% of the territory of Palestine, which was much more than the original UN partition plan called for.
During the war, there's large-scale uprooting of people from their homes, the creation of a large refugee population among the Palestinians.
I think there's still a scholarly dispute about the extent to which this was sort of a top-down imposed policy of ethnic cleansing, and the extent to which it was the result of more individual decisions on the ground, but I don't think there, you know, ever since scholarly work by people like Denny Morris, there can't be any doubt that there was large violent uprooting, particularly of Palestinians from their homes during the war, and as a result, the Palestinian refugee population is created, which has persisted to this day.
I mean, I'm not sure how much you want me to go in-depth on all the history.
Well, you know, maybe just touch on, well, let's talk about the 1967 war, for example.
And then, I guess, you know, people ought to pull out a map and just, you know, get the basics about where the Jordan River is, and where Jordan is, and Egypt and Lebanon up there to the north, and what the Little Gaza Strip looks like, at least in a shape from the bird's-eye view, and kind of get an idea of who the neighbors are, Syria, and so forth.
And then, so what happened in the 1967 war?
Well, the 1967 war began with an Israeli attack, what they would say was a preemptive attack, although there's some dispute about, you know, about the extent to which there actually was any pending attack from the Arab neighbors.
But the 1967 war pits Israel against Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and it's a smashing success, at least on a military level, for the Israelis.
They conquer the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, they get the Golan Heights from Syria, and they get the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, who had been in charge of them until then.
The result of this being that what we now know as the Israeli occupation begins in 1967, and Israel finds itself ruling over a large population of Palestinians that were not previously part of the country.
Subsequently, in the 70s, you have the start of the Arab-Israeli peace processes, particularly under Nixon, Ford, and Carter, which culminate in the Camp David Accords, where Israel ultimately gives the Sinai back to Egypt and establishes peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, but still does not give back either the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or the Golan Heights.
And that is basically the geopolitical situation, at least, that has persisted to this day.
In the 80s, I mean, there's so many things that happen that it's difficult to know exactly what to touch on.
Well, there's the invasion of Lebanon.
Yeah, there's the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
They're going after Yasser Arafat up there, right?
Right, right.
Yeah, going after Arafat.
Later in the 80s, there's the start of the First Intifada, which is primarily nonviolent resistance to occupation, although it's not exclusively nonviolent.
By the way, let me stop you there, and I'm sorry to ask you such general questions and kind of put you on the spot for so much material in a short time like that, Daniel, but let me try to make it a little more specific here.
Noam Chomsky, I remember, once remarked that when the Intifada broke out, as far as the American people were concerned, they just couldn't understand why the Palestinians would invade Israel and blow people up like that and whatever, and because they just had really no idea of even the most basic sketch of the history, as you just pointed out.
I think to this day, I was complaining to another guest on the show yesterday that you can watch CNN and you can watch a 10 or 15 minute discussion about Israel, and there's really no mention of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
There's really no explanation for the American people as to why a Palestinian would ever throw a rock or do anything.
Would you agree with that?
Do you think it's really that opaque in the way it's presented to the American people?
Because I guess I don't know anymore.
I've been reading antiwar.com every day for a decade or something.
Right, well, yeah, I guess I'm in the same position where I've been following the conflict closely enough that it's hard to know exactly what's trickling down to the general public.
I mean, I certainly remember when I was growing up and first became aware of the conflict primarily in the 90s, you know, in the wake of the Oslo peace process, and leading up to the start of the second intifada, I mean, I really had very little sense of what was going on, what the conflict was about.
And my exposure to it was primarily just that, you know, every so often you would read in the paper about some Palestinian suicide bomber blowing himself up.
And I suppose on that level, I would say Chomsky's right.
I mean, I think Americans often tend to view the conflict exclusively through the prism of terrorism, without much understanding of the sort of the larger political conflict and, you know, the occupation itself.
I'm, you know, I'm hopeful that that's slowly starting to change, but it's hard to tell exactly how much it's penetrating the real mainstream media discourse.
Well, I know for years and years, it's been that whenever Israel does anything, it's a reprisal for something or a reaction to something or a preemption of something.
And whenever the Palestinians do something, it's always them starting it.
And again, I mean, you really could, if you were just kind of the average Joe, worked all day and didn't really pay attention that much, wasn't your issue, not really your interest.
I mean, you might really think that the Palestinians occupy part of Israel.
Right, right.
I mean, it's yeah, definitely the discourse, I think, really fails to reflect that throughout the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israelis have been the stronger party, the more powerful party, and that the body count among the Palestinians has always been much higher than the body count among the Israelis as a result of the conflict.
I mean, I can get back to just tracing out the very broad history, but I don't know if you want to talk more on this point.
Yeah, no, go ahead.
Say whatever you like.
Sure.
Well, I mean, I was going to say, I mean, the first intifada in the 80s is what begins the process, which ultimately leads to the Madrid Peace Conference, as George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, exert more pressure than most presidents have previously been willing to do on the Israelis.
It ultimately leads up to the Oslo Accords, where Yitzhak Ravine, the Israeli Prime Minister and Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, meet and begin a process that ideally was supposed to lead towards a two-state solution.
The two-state solution, just to get down to the very basics, in almost every formulation, simply revolves around the return of the territories that Israel captured in the 1967 war to turn them into the foundation for a Palestinian state.
So that would involve East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and then the Gaza Strip, which is the small strip of land on the border of Israel and Egypt.
But anyway, so the Oslo peace process goes on until roughly 2001.
Yitzhak Ravine, the Prime Minister who first moved to instate the process, is assassinated by a right-wing Israeli extremist shortly after signing the Accords.
And the Oslo process culminates in Camp David under Bill Clinton, which involves negotiations between the government of Ehud Barak, the Israeli Prime Minister, and Arafat.
What exactly happened in Camp David remains hotly disputed among people from various sides of the conflict.
Now, this is the one where Arafat was offered the golden deal, and that SOB just wouldn't accept it.
And it's all his fault.
And so if it's the Palestinians or the victims, it's still he's the one to blame.
That's what everyone knows in the common narrative, right?
Right.
So that's certainly the narrative that has become most popular.
Yeah, that's the narrative that Ehud Barak makes a very generous offer of a Palestinian state to Arafat, who chooses to reject it and instead to start the second intifada, which is the second wave, this time much more violent, of resistance against occupation.
So that conventional view has been challenged by a number of people.
Most notably by Robert Malley, who was one of Clinton's negotiators at Camp David, and has written a couple articles with Hussein Agha, in which he attacks that conventional view of Camp David and says that really, Barak and Clinton kind of bungled the process, and that was probably more to blame or as much to blame for the collapse of the talks as any unwillingness on Arafat's part.
Clayton Swisher's book, which I think is called The Truth About Camp David, gets into this much more so.
Whose book is that?
Clayton Swisher, who I believe is a writer for The Nation, although I'm not positive.
But regardless of what happened in the wake of Camp David, basically the peace process collapses, you have a much more hardline government which comes to power under Ariel Sharon, who promptly makes a very provocative visit to the Temple Mount, which is where many of the most holy sites, both for Jews and Muslims, are, and this visit was widely interpreted as a signal to the Palestinians that Israel is never going to relinquish control of these sites.
And shortly thereafter, the Second Intifada breaks out, featuring, as stated, which is significantly more violent than the First Intifada.
And to many people, the peace process has never really recovered since Camp David.
Right afterwards, Clayton, of course, is replaced by George W. Bush, who showed very little interest in any kind of Israeli-Palestinian peace deal for the large majority of his time in office.
And it's safe to say that there haven't been any really serious breakthroughs since then.
All right.
Now, if there is a breakthrough at all, you can characterize that however you like.
But if there is a breakthrough, it may be that it's beginning to become within the bounds of political correctness to say, hey, Israel's a nation-state, and so is America, and our interests aren't necessarily always the same, and this occupation of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza is, because after all, Gaza is still basically occupied, where it counts, in terms of blockade and everything else.
You know, maybe people can have an honest discussion about this, actually, even near the halls of power, without being smeared out of existence.
Is it even the case, perhaps, Daniel, that Barack Obama really means to do something about East Jerusalem, maybe about the settlements in the West Bank that obviously are preventing the establishment of any contiguous state there for the Palestinians?
Well, there's little question to me that he wants to do something about it.
I mean, I think his anti-settlement stance is genuine, his support for the two-state solution is genuine.
I believe that a lot of people in his administration, people like James Jones, his National Security Advisor, take very seriously the idea that the continued Israeli-Palestinian conflict is harming U.S. interests.
So I wouldn't question his intentions, it's just a question of how much he'll actually be able to operationalize them and execute anything as a result.
I mean, the record of his first year hasn't been terribly promising so far.
You know, the real centerpiece of his policy was calling for a full settlement freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem from the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister.
And Netanyahu basically told him to go jump off a bridge.
I mean, he dragged his feet and refused to offer a settlement freeze for a long time until Obama was basically forced to give in.
After that, he offered a partial, temporary settlement freeze in the West Bank for I believe eight or ten months.
But you know, no one who really caused the conflict would interpret that as anything more than a token gesture.
So as a result, Obama really hasn't had that much to show for his first year of attempts to instate an Israeli-Palestinian peace.
And I think it's still an open question how much he will actually be able to do anything.
Well, what about the American establishment in general?
You have a new piece here about the Center for a New American Security, which you look at at least the Wall Street Journal version of who pays their bills.
It's the old establishment, people who probably, you know, somebody like me could guess see the world a lot like, say, James Baker, for example.
What do they say?
Well, I think that is one of the new developments we've seen in the last couple years, and perhaps one of the more promising ones, if you're hoping to see a peace deal in the near future.
Which is, I think there has been something of a convergence between many of the traditional left-wing critics of the Israeli occupation and some of the realists, foreign policy realists, most famously people like John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt, also people at high levels of the military.
I mean, there's been a lot of talk in the last few weeks about various statements that David Petraeus, who's now the head of CENTCOM, made, first allegedly in a piece in foreign policy where he asked for Israel and Palestine to be put under the mandate of CENTCOM because he felt that they were too important in terms of their effects on the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and throughout the rest of the region, and then later in testimony to the Senate where he basically said that the perpetuation of the conflict creates an environment unfavorable to U.S. interests.
So I think you've seen a growing concern about the effects of the conflict among people like Petraeus or James Jones, and a growing willingness to speak out about that.
And so that's why I come to- Well, in fact, even Obama, before we get to that's why, I want to hear the that's why, but even Obama in his nuclear thingamajig there on TV last week said that this was a vital national security interest of the United States, which that was probably brand new for an American president, say, at least in a long time, right?
Right.
I mean, I can't, I don't have in front of me the record of the evolution of the language among presidents, but it was certainly a very striking, coming when it did, it was a very striking statement intended to back up and reinforce the message that people were taking from the Petraeus view.
And so I believe that's why the new Center for New American Security report, which came out, that's why I found it notable and wrote about it.
I mean, it's been pointed out by other people like Helena Cobham, who's a very knowledgeable commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, wrote on her blog that she really doesn't think this report is very noteworthy.
All of its prescriptions are pretty vague, perhaps unrealistic, and she just doesn't think it's a big deal.
I can certainly accept a lot of her criticisms.
For me, what was important about this report is not so much what it says, because perhaps a lot of what it says is fairly vague and not terribly groundbreaking, but what was more important was who was saying it, because as you noted, the Center for New American Security, CNAS, is in many ways a very establishmentary and think tank.
I mean, it's made its name particularly for being some of the main proponents of counterinsurgency tactics, COIN.
So in that way...
Yeah, this is Petraeus's cheering section, really.
Tom Ricks quit the Washington Post to go be his PR flack over there, right?
Well, yeah.
So I mean, they have people like Tom Ricks, who wrote this very, very admiring account, The Gamble, of the surge in Iraq.
Andrew Exum, who I think is a smart guy, and in many ways, I have respect for him, but he is very much a proponent of COIN warfare, and he runs the blog Abu Mukulama, which is kind of the meeting place for COIN enthusiasts.
And they feature a number of other people who are very much involved in this shift or this movement towards COIN in ways that I personally, and many people at Antiwar, have been fairly suspicious of.
But so I suppose the other thing to say about them is I've found them to be fairly risk averse as an organization, in that they generally are fairly loathe to CNAS, that is, are fairly loathe to take very strident stance to say the war in Iraq is wrong, the war in Afghanistan is wrong, or anything along those lines, although there are people among their fellowship who have spoken out against the wars.
Well, after all, I mean, even the Baker Commission that had a former associate justices of the Supreme Court on it and so forth, it would have had us out of Iraq by spring of 08, supposedly.
Isn't it the case that General Dayton, U.S. Army General Dayton, has trained up an entire army to be Mahmoud Abbas's PLO, PLA army there in the sovereign state that would be the West Bank?
And what are they going to do with this army?
And who better of a peace partner than Abu Abbas, or Abu Mazen, or however they call his name there, or the Israelis?
I mean, I'm sorry to ask you to read Netanyahu's mind, but why not cut a deal with this guy, especially when America just trained him up an army?
Yeah, well, I mean, the Dayton forces are a very interesting case in point.
I mean, I think Dayton himself has said that, you know, I'm training these guys because they think that they're going to be the security forces of a new Palestinian state.
And if a state does not come into being in the near future, it's going to be a bad thing.
I mean, what are these guys going to do?
I think regarding Netanyahu, I mean, he very nominally endorsed the idea of a two-state solution in a speech a few months ago.
But I mean, even that, he claimed a lot of credit for endorsing a two-state solution.
But if you look at what he actually said, it's far from clear to me that he endorsed it in any really viable form.
I mean, most notably, he showed no willingness to concede East Jerusalem, and of course, there's continued settlement activity in East Jerusalem, and there's simply no way you can have a viable two-state solution without East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state.
So for me, I mean, it might be that for someone who is strongly in favor of reaching a peace deal, they would simply, you know, jump at the chance to reach a deal with Abbas.
I'm still just not convinced that Netanyahu has any desire for that.
I think he wants to talk a good game about being willing to make peace while basically dragging out the occupation as long as possible.
But it's worth saying that, you know, Abbas is not necessarily, you know, the ideal partner for peace anyway, at least not on his own, in that it's safe to say that he has fairly little legitimacy left among many Palestinians.
He is in control of the West Bank, is not in control of Gaza, and so it seems likely that any real peace deal will have to include Hamas in Gaza, which so far, I mean, so far the Obama administration hasn't been willing to incorporate them into the process in any meaningful way.
Yeah.
And meanwhile, it's all America's fault that Gaza is ruled by Hamas in the first place.
But anyway.
Right.
Well, that's another foreign policy triumph for Elliott Abrams, the national security guy in the Middle East.
Absolutely.
Well, and they even, there was a thing in Vanity Fair about how they tried to do a coup against Hamas, and all it ended up doing was giving them a bunch more weapons.
But anyway.
So let me ask you this.
You say Netanyahu just wants to drag it out as long as possible.
And, you know, it seemed to me like that's what the whole game has been all along, is in fact, you even hear American politicians, they'll say, we got to get we got to resolve these issues so that we can have a peace process like nobody even ever talks about an end where there's really going to be a state.
It doesn't seem like most of it.
It's like the process itself is the end.
But really, you know, it's obviously the means.
But what is the end?
I guess is my question.
Are they just trying to drag it out until one day they can get away with pushing all the Palestinians out of the West Bank and into Jordan, out of Gaza, into Egypt and just take the land?
Or they're going, Netanyahu knows good and well, he's got to give up the West Bank at some point, but he's just putting it off or what is the deal there, you think?
Well, I mean, it's hard it's hard for me to read the minds of what's going on with a lot of people.
But I mean, I think there probably is a divide.
I think there are prominent people in the Israeli establishment.
I mean, people like Barack, the former prime minister, Omar Livni, who take seriously these warnings about a demographic threat.
I mean, warnings, which I find somewhat problematic in a lot of ways.
But the notion that if Israel does not end the occupation, eventually the Jewish population will be a minority and it will have to choose between being a Jewish or a democratic state.
So I think there are some people in the establishment who are worried about that and would genuinely like to see a two state solution, even if the way they choose to go about it often seems very inadequate.
For someone like Netanyahu, I have a hard time really getting into his head, but I think a lot of these hardliners, the logic is probably something like what you said, that roughly speaking, if you just perpetuate the occupation long enough, eventually the Palestinians will give up.
They'll realize they're a defeated people, as one prominent Israeli general put it.
And eventually they'll just leave and they'll give up hopes for establishing a state.
And to me, that seems like the underlying logic surrounding a lot of what the Israeli hardliners have been pushing in recent years.
Well, it kind of brings up the question of whether the two state thing is just a pipe dream anyway.
I mean, it's just PR for the same process of eventually just taking it.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a consensus among a lot of people that the two state solution is really on its last legs, if it is still viable.
And that if it is still possible to have one, it would have to be very soon.
I mean, if you just look at the maps of the expanding settlement activity in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, I mean, it's starting to become clear that without very major changes and very major uprooting of a lot of the settlements, there simply couldn't be any kind of viable state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Well, what about just a one state solution?
You know, I kind of, you know, maybe it's because I'm a Jeffersonian or something from the New World, but it seems to me pretty objectionable that everybody's got to have an ethnic state, you know, Kurdistan here and Shiite Arab stand there and this, that, the other thing.
How come you can't just have a minimal government in the Holy Land whose job it is to protect everybody's individual rights?
And then what's to fight over?
Right.
Then you have everybody be an equal citizen, like, I don't know, the American South or what we're trying to do.
Right.
Right.
That's really, if you look at, for instance, Olmert, the former prime minister's comments from a few years ago, he indicated that in the absence of a peace deal, that's probably what would happen.
I mean, he says, if we don't end the occupation now, they'll just run a one man, one vote campaign against us.
And I think there's a sense, you know, everyone is aware that that would be an enormously appealing and powerful message if the Palestinians were simply to say, let's have one person, one vote democracy, just like in America, particularly to Americans.
I mean, going back to the issue of what Americans do and don't know about the conflict, I mean, I don't think many Americans are really aware of just the simple political disenfranchisement that's a part of the occupation.
And if they were told that the notion of Jewish democracy, in some sense, requires that the non-Jewish population either be kept at manageable levels or else disenfranchised entirely, it's not clear whether they would really stand for it.
So I think we're seeing, I mean, there are all sorts of problems in getting to a one-state solution, too, just like the two-state solution, and there's real questions about, you know, the protection of both populations in the transition to it.
But I mean, I think if we don't see real progress on a two-state solution very soon, that's probably where the political movement is headed.
And that might end up being the ultimate status quo.
I'm interested in the politics of all this in Washington, D.C.
It seems like at least when Republicans are in power, then politics is supposed to stop at the water's edge, and everybody rallies around the president in foreign policy, because he's the king on foreign policy.
And yet, with Obama, I guess partly because there's just so much propaganda about him being one of the others that somehow became the leader of America or something, and maybe just because he's a Democrat, apparently it's okay for half of Washington, D.C. to denounce him whenever he puts, as we already discussed, minimal pressure, which he ended up already backing down from anyway, on Netanyahu to stop the settlements or relinquish any part of East Jerusalem or even move towards these things, really.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think that is the effect that the Israel lobby has on our politics, which has, you know, been increasingly discussed in recent years.
I mean, it's very bizarre.
I mean, one could expect that if Obama made an aggressive push towards a peace deal that Republicans who disagreed with it would denounce him, but it's very interesting to see the number of Democrats, members of his own party, who are willing to denounce him whenever he takes any kind of aggressive action towards Israel.
And similarly with Iran, I mean, if you look at what AIPAC and other Israel lobby groups have been pushing hardest over the last couple of years, it's an aggressive line against Iran, particularly harsher sanctions legislation.
So, I mean, it was very interesting to see earlier this year, both houses of Congress passed by overwhelming majorities this harsh sanctions legislation against Iran's petroleum sector.
We had the very odd sight of a Democratic-controlled Congress, perhaps a Freudian, passing legislation that a Democratic administration made fairly clear that it didn't like over his objections.
I mean, for all that, I think that the power of AIPAC and these other groups is starting to decline.
He would still have to be very foolish to underestimate it, because they still have a pretty solid hold over the Congress.
Yeah, you know, it's funny to me that if you go back and read George Washington's farewell address and he talks about all the problems that come with foreign entanglements and people's loyalties getting crosswise and what have you, it's just, it sounds like he's talking exactly about the situation with the Israel lobby in Washington, D.C., you know, it's just perfect.
Yeah, I certainly, it's important always to keep in mind that, you know, in some ways the Israel lobby is just like other lobbies, but more so.
I mean, it manifests many of the same patterns that, you know, permeate our politics.
Oh yeah, well, the British got us into two world wars, you know, poor little Belgian babies with their hands cut off, you know?
Yeah, I think it's really hard to, there's just been so much caricaturing of the position of those who sort of call attention to the problems resulting from the Israel lobby that it's been very difficult to have an honest discussion.
I mean, you know, Meir Shimer and Walt, when their book came out, they were immediately accused by their critics of saying that a secret Jewish cabal controls the world and that, you know, all Jewish Americans have dual loyalty and so on, you know, things that appeared nowhere in the book.
But I think, yeah, people are starting, even people who didn't like, for instance, the Meir Shimer and Walt book when it came out have basically come around to this fairly commonsensical position that even if the Israel lobby, you know, it may be no different from other lobbies in its form of organization, but it still has a fairly pernicious effect on our politics and our policies in the Middle East.
So I think in that sense, you can say that the conversation has shifted a lot, even in the last five years or so.
Yeah.
Well, and another thing, too, is that as we discussed with Isaac Luria on the show yesterday, the Israel lobby tends to be run, obviously, these the biggest organized groups are run by the people who have the most money and people who have the most money tend to be right wingers.
And so even though the vast majority of American Jews are liberals and, for example, in this recent dust up, at least personal dust up, if not policy dust up with Netanyahu, 73 percent of them, according to a poll that was published or reported about in Haaretz, I forgot who originally did the poll, but 73 percent sided with Obama against Netanyahu, but not AIPAC and not the neoconservatives.
Right.
And I think, Isaac, you know, I think, of course, who works for J Street, which is the new political organization that's been found to represent the views of more liberal Jews regarding Middle East policy.
I think they represent a pretty positive step forward in countering this right wing stranglehold and their claim to speak for the Jewish community.
I mean, I know a lot of people have been a little disappointed with J Street, that it's You know, they've been afraid to really stick their neck out too much, and I think a lot of those criticisms are valid, but I nonetheless think that ultimately this is going to prove to be a very positive step in countering the stranglehold of groups like AIPAC.
And I think really just mobilizing the liberal mainstream of the Jewish community is going to have very far reaching effects on the ability of the Israel lobby to enforce these kind of right wing policies.
Well, as long as I'm keeping you here, what about the future of Netanyahu and the three Likuds, as, I don't know what his name is called, it's Kadima, Likud, and Yisrael Betanu, this is the coalition, but they're all just Likud or even to the right of Likud, because Kadima is just Sharon's split from Likud, and he was the founder, right?
Or one of the major players in it?
Well, yeah, Kadima is the party that Sharon founded when he left Likud.
I mean, the funny thing now is actually, Kadima is not part of the government, they're theoretically the opposition party, and Labor, under Barack, has joined the Netanyahu coalition.
I mean, the general hypothesis that was going around was that, like a lot of people, is just obsessed with the Iranian threat, and he wants to be defense minister when Israel confronts Iran, he was pretty much willing to put up with whatever Netanyahu might do in order to get that opportunity.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about the current coalition in Israel, because on the one hand, there's certainly a lot of nasty characters involved in it, Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, and people like that, but on the other hand, it might be beneficial just to have the government revealed for what it is.
In some ways, it's more harmful when you have people who are, to all indications, fairly nice liberals who then enforce these hardline policies, but when you have the face of your government be people like Netanyahu and Lieberman, then it becomes very hard to disguise what you're doing.
I think there's, you know, getting into the Israeli coalition politics is not really my expertise, so I can't really say how long I think the current coalition will last.
I mean, a lot of Netanyahu supporters have been calling on him to sort of swap out Kadima for Yisrael Bteinu, to move from basically a far-right coalition to a center-right coalition.
I personally have no idea whether there are any plans for that underway, but if you're Netanyahu, that might be more beneficial purely from a pragmatic political standpoint.
Now did I understand you right when you said that it's Ehud Barak, the former prime minister is now the defense minister from the Labor Party.
He wanted to join this coalition because he wanted that spot in case of war with Iran, is that what you said?
Yeah, I mean, that's the hypothesis that's been going around as to why he was so intent on joining Netanyahu's coalition.
I don't have any first-hand knowledge of it, but I think, by all accounts, Barak is fairly fixated on the supposed Iranian threat.
You know, it's interesting, because when I go trying to think back on my footnotes of the different Israeli politicians and high-level people who have said that the Iranian threat is really kind of overblown and we need to hold our horses, he's one of them.
There's Mayor Dagan and Zippy Livni have both said things like that, the former head of Mossad and the head of Kadima now, I guess.
But here Barak and Haaretz from just this week, Iran poses no immediate existential threat to Israel.
He says the only way out of the stalemate, he told Israeli Radio on Monday, the only way out of the current stalemate with Iran is a bold Israeli move, adding that he felt Iran did not pose an immediate existential threat to Israel.
So, what do you make of that?
He wants to be there to try to stop the war, maybe?
Or because he really wants to have one, but just not yet?
Or what's going on?
Or maybe this means it starts next week, because he's saying it's not going to.
Right.
I mean, it's a little hard to parse it all, but that's certainly, those comments are in line with things he said a few weeks ago, where he said, basically, whatever Iran's problems, they're not meshugganah, they're not crazy.
So, in other words, even if they got a nuclear weapon, they wouldn't be crazy enough to use it, and a certain suicide.
So, that is actually a contrast with what a lot of the right-wingers have been saying.
I mean, Netanyahu last year gave an interview where he said that the leadership of Iran is a messianic apocalyptic cult, and therefore can't be trusted with nuclear weapons.
So, it's a little hard for me to say exactly what Barack's statement would imply in terms of policy.
I mean, I think part of what might be going on there is that the Israelis, after a long time in which they've been hyping the existential threat from Iran and saying that if Iran gets nuclear weapons, Israel will be wiped off the map, and so on, now they're facing a situation in which it's looking more and more likely that the US and the rest of the world is not going to stand for military action to prevent them from getting nuclear weapons.
So, now, in many ways, a lot of the alarmism could come back to bite them, just if they've managed to successfully convince a large portion of Israelis that life as they know it will end once Iran gets the bomb.
So, I think that might be why you start to see people like Barack walking back some of the more alarmist statements that have been made about Iranian intentions, because they want to say, you know, even if they do get the bomb, life as we know it is not going to be over, don't emigrate, stay here, and so on.
Yeah, it's funny, too, because there's also been leaks about the Israelis measuring – I'm sorry I have all these Iran subject tabs here, and I can't find the one I'm looking for, but it's Israeli political and military leaders strongly considering taking the chance of starting the war without asking Obama, and just going ahead.
Yeah, well, and it's always hard to say how much of this is just playing politics.
I mean, what a lot of people have said, which I think is probably true, and what you hinted at before, is that if they really were planning a surprise military attack against Iran, they wouldn't be talking about it and hyping it in the media.
You know, if you look at what happened before the, let's say the 2007 Israeli attack on Syria, there was total silence in the media, and you never heard anything about it.
So, in some ways, the more they talk about how military action is on the table, you might say the less likely it is that it will actually take place.
Yeah, well, I hope that that's true.
But then again, we're all placing bets on what Benjamin Netanyahu's rational decision-making process leads him to conclude, right?
Right, which is always a risky endeavor, to be sure.
Sure seems like it.
All right, well, the Richard Perle of Israel, he's in charge over there.
Hey, listen, I really appreciate all your time on the show, and all the great stuff that you said.
I learned a lot, and I hope everybody else did too, and I really appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks for having me on the show, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
Everybody, that's Daniel Lubon.
He is a correspondent for IPS and writes at the Faster Times and at Jim Loeb's blog, Loeblog, and also at antiwar.com slash blog.
