07/09/10 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio for Friday, June the something, I don't know, what, the 9th or something?
Yeah, it says the 9th on my piece of paper here.
I must have wrote that when I knew what day it was.
Today's guest, I think it'll just be our one guest today, is Jason Ditz.
He's the managing news editor at Antiwar.com.
Go to news.antiwar.com, and in fact, I'll go ahead and say there used to be a blank page there, but now there's not.
Now you'll find the links to all of the latest headlines from Jason's news summaries at news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Jason, how are you, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for joining us here.
Alright, so, big deal.
There's this tiny little country over there on the east end of the Mediterranean called Israel, and despite its size, it's apparently the biggest deal in the world, and their prime minister was in the imperial court in D.C. this week, and I think TV said that unlike last time, Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got along just great, and they're making real progress.
Well, I'm not sure what they're making progress on.
They certainly don't seem to have argued much while Netanyahu was here this time, and President Obama certainly didn't make any demands of him to change any policies this time.
So in other words, Benjamin Netanyahu is making progress in getting Barack Obama to back down from his prior demands, is that basically it?
Right.
And not only progress, he seems to have pretty much won the battle there.
It seems at this point that Barack Obama has backed down off of every even hypothetical demand that he's ever made on Israel, including things that other officials have broached the subject of them signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Now the administration says, no, they're not demanding that, and they're fine with Israel having an inherent right to having a large nuclear weapons arsenal, and there were no demands made about continuing the settlement freeze, which Netanyahu told the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday that the freeze has been a failure and suggested that it probably isn't going to be extended.
Well, and those are, would you say those are probably the two biggest demands?
I guess he hasn't really demanded anything about the easing of the Gaza blockade or anything about East Jerusalem.
Has he made any demands about East Jerusalem at all?
If he has, they haven't been recent demands.
The State Department called it unhelpful when they announced the expansions a few months ago, but they really haven't said much since then.
I don't know that he's ever made any specific demands on East Jerusalem.
Yeah, I kind of think not.
I think that's right.
Your memory's right there that they sort of said, well, geez, guys, you know, this whole East Jerusalem thing is making things more difficult, but that was basically it.
All right, now, so let me get back to the nukes here.
In fact, you have an article here at news.antiwar.com, if I can find it, which of course I can't.
I had it open here somewhere, but it was specifically addressing this point that Obama said Israel has a right to nuclear weapons, etc.
Can you elaborate on that story a little bit, because, you know, we were just talking with Grant Smith the other day all about strategic ambiguity, and there is no Israeli nuclear or anything.
Right, and it's incredible the extent to which President Obama, who supposedly for full nuclear disarmament worldwide, sort of kowtowed to the idea of Israel having this apparently exclusive right to having nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
And officials are going so far now as to calling the U.S. vote in favor of a nuclear-free Middle East a mistake, and they're saying that Israel can't be asked to give up their arsenal, which of course they've never acknowledged having officially, but isn't exactly a well-kept secret.
Yeah, I wonder about the congruity there.
I guess, you know, we're just talking about words and ideas, so they can be kind of contradictory.
You know, it's not like two physical objects trying to take up the same space or anything necessarily.
But on one hand, nuclear weapons, what nuclear weapons?
And on the other hand, they have the right to as many nuclear weapons as they want.
Shut up.
Well, I guess there's, let's see, what, like 6.2, 6.3 billion people in the world now.
What percentage of them don't already know for a fact that Israel has nuclear weapons?
Come on.
Yeah, I would guess it's a pretty small amount.
And the people that don't know probably are people that are living in deserts or on mountaintops and aren't even aware that there's an Israel.
Right.
I was just reading that New York Times piece about Yemen, where they ask the people, so how long have you lived in Yemen?
And they're like, what's Yemen?
I don't even know.
All right.
Well, so Israel has an inherent right to possess nuclear weapons.
And now, as you said, there have been people, I'm not sure if including the president himself, but members of his administration have come out and openly said they would like Israel to get rid of their nuclear weapons.
And in other times, not coming quite as outright about it, saying, well, we'd like to have a nuclear free Middle East and that kind of thing.
Now, they're just completely back down from that, too, huh?
It certainly seems to be the case.
The president never actually called for Israel to get rid of their nuclear weapons because he's never officially acknowledged them having them.
But he did say that he would like to see them sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty because he would like to see everybody sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.
And Israel reacted with outrage at that statement and condemned the NPP and that they would never sign it under any circumstances.
Now it seems like the administration's back off that as well, though.
Well, you know, I don't know.
I guess I need to go back and read that treaty.
But I can't think of what it binds the already nuclear weapon states from doing other than they promise not to sell their nuclear weapons to anybody else.
And of course, you know, they promise to someday disarm or whatever.
But that wouldn't apply to Israel any more than it applies to the U.S. and Russia.
Come on.
You know, all it would do really would be a promise to not sell nukes to South Africa again or whatever.
Right.
Well, it would also put them under some level of international oversight of the fact they even have nuclear weapons and how big their arsenal is and things like that.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, of course, the other thing is the settlement freeze.
And, you know, I guess I'll ask you to go ahead and just describe the situation in the West Bank just in general.
And then we'll talk when we come back from the break.
We're going to only have like a minute or two here.
But you know, I think a lot of Americans really don't know what is the West Bank.
Why is it called a bank?
What are we talking about here?
Well, West Bank was part of part of Jordan at one point that was invaded and occupied by Israel in 1967.
And since the occupation, they've been slowly expanding settlements for Jews only in parts of the area and declaring that those parts will be part of Israel from now on if they ever decide to return the rest of the occupied territories to some measure of independence or at least not under direct Israeli control.
You can sign up for the Liberty Radio Network email updates at updates dot LRN dot FM and join us on Facebook at Facebook dot LRN dot FM.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
I'm joined on the phone by Jason Ditz.
We're talking about the Israel-Palestine news this week.
Still hanging on the line with me there, Jason.
All right.
Now, OK, so the West Bank of the Jordan River, it's been occupied by the Israelis since 1978.
And here we are in or I'm sorry, 67 is what I meant to say.
And here we are in 2010.
And when they talk about a settlement freeze, they're talking about the Jewish Israeli colonists who basically are just trespassing on this occupied territory, illegally building neighborhoods in occupied territory.
Right.
And right.
And not just neighborhoods, but really entire small towns in some cases.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's true.
In fact, I heard years and years ago now.
I heard G. Gordon Liddy one time on the radio who he's, you know, hardcore for Israel.
And he was saying, let me tell you, there are settlements there in the West Bank that are the size of Scottsdale, Arizona, and they're not going anywhere ever.
And, you know, I'm pretty sure he was right about that.
Seemed right.
Well, so, OK, now what's this freeze?
You say in your article here, Netanyahu panned settlement freeze suggests no extension.
You're reviewing his CFR speech here.
And you say it is perhaps unsurprising that the settlement freeze never bore fruit because it never really happened.
Well, what was the settlement freeze and what didn't happen and what did?
Well, it was the official settlement freeze wasn't nearly as far reaching as what people were originally calling for, which was a full freeze on all construction activities in.
The occupied territories, eventually they decided to freeze for 10 months.
All new construction permits in just the West Bank, not including East Jerusalem, and that certain already approved projects could continue.
But even that they didn't really abide by because they were issuing new permits, perhaps not as often as they were before the freeze, but fairly regularly.
Yeah, and now on the East Jerusalem thing, they've been expanding and expanding.
It's sort of a never ending thing.
Just in fact, I guess Frank Luntz famously said, when you're justifying the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem to Americans, don't invoke zoning codes because Americans hate that.
And if you tell them that, hey, those Palestinians are in violation of the zoning codes because everybody knows their houses were built in the 30s and 40s before Israel came and stole any of that land, then that's not going to ring very nice in the ears of Americans.
You got to try to pretend that the the poor Israelis are being Jim Crowed by the Palestinians and they're only trying to have freedom of movement like every man wants.
Right.
And the settlements in the rest of the West Bank, a lot of them really are just built on more or less empty land.
I mean, some of them got built near Palestinian villages.
And as a result, the Palestinian villages have become virtually uninhabitable because the military doesn't let the people leave in any direction that might be too close to settlement.
But in East Jerusalem, we're talking about something else entirely.
I mean, this is a densely populated city.
And when they talk about building a new settlement in East Jerusalem, what they're really talking about is taking a lot of Arabs out of their homes and in some cases just expelling them from the city entirely and then building new houses or apartment complexes for ultra orthodox Israeli Jews.
Well, you know, I wonder there's got to be people in my audience who just think I'm a liar when I say that they're tearing down a neighborhood to build a park for Jews only in East Jerusalem or when I say that I'm reading a headline.
I swear to you, I'm reading a headline here.
They're tearing down an ancient or digging up an ancient Palestinian cemetery so that they can build a tolerance museum on top of it.
Tell them I'm not a liar.
Jason, is that really real?
That's real.
That was a court battle for a number of years.
The Museum of Tolerance that they wanted to build over the top of an old graveyard.
And then also they expelled a lot of people from their homes in East Jerusalem to build a tourist center.
Geez, I guess is they don't have irony in that part of the world or how does that work that they don't realize, hmm, it might look bad building a tolerance museum on top of a stolen cemetery.
Apparently that never enters into it.
Geez, I don't know.
Oh, and I just want to mention we said those were the two important things, the settlement and the nuclear weapons.
But there really was a third thing that came out of Netanyahu's visit, and that was he was expressing concern about the idea of the US withdrawing from Iraq.
Oh, yeah.
Please elaborate.
This was the chip on my shoulder all show long yesterday.
Go ahead and elaborate on that.
Oh, that was that was an incredible statement.
And apparently when Netanyahu was speaking to Secretary of Defense Gates, he was saying that he was extremely concerned and that having the 90 some thousand US troops leave Iraq would be a direct threat to Israel and it would mean war on their eastern fronts.
And exactly how this would result in a war isn't even implied in his statement, because Iraq, of course, doesn't even border Israel.
Israel's eastern neighbor, Jordan, with whom they're on semi-decent terms.
And the idea that Israel and Jordan are suddenly going to go to war because the United States isn't occupying Iraq seems just completely ridiculous.
But still, he put it out there.
And Secretary Gates apparently looking at providing Israel with some more military hardware to shore up their eastern defenses now.
Well, I guess if anybody wants to go ahead and see right through the lie to the money, there it was.
But let's go back to the lie a little bit more.
If the Israelis didn't get one more plane from the Americans, how in the world does anybody believe that the Maliki government could wage a war even if they wanted to invade Jordan and cross Jordan and try to hit Israel?
How could anybody believe that the Israeli Air Force alone couldn't just stop them all in the desert?
I mean, what are they going to do?
You know, catapult themselves over there?
Right.
And Iraq has a halfway large army, but it's not a particularly well-trained or equipped army.
And really, they don't even really control the Anbar province there.
Right.
It's struggling enough to occupy Iraq itself, let alone trying to occupy other countries.
Yeah.
Well, OK, so he just wants some airplanes.
Maybe he's got to deal with the guy at Lockheed for a nice kickback or something.
I guess it's all one degree or another of that fact I've heard.
I think it may be Noam Chomsky who says that in essence, Israel is just a military base for the American empire.
It's sort of it's not really a homeland for the Jews at all.
It's just a place where American taxpayers can spend money on Lockheed products and and have an excuse to do so.
That kind of thing.
Right.
Because a lot of the foreign aid that we're talking about going to Israel, Israel never actually sees the foreign aid itself.
The cash goes straight to military contractors and Israel just gets the hardware after the fact.
Yeah.
But, you know, I wonder when when he said that Iraq comment, was that to reporters or it was just reported later?
Like, you know, the DOD said, yeah, this is one of the things he told us or what?
My understanding was he he told that to Secretary Gates during their conference.
Yeah.
That's too bad.
I would have liked to hear a reporter ask him, hey, back when you were promoting war with Iraq in 2002 and 2003, was it your plan all along that America would have to stay forever to protect your country?
I doubt any any reporter that was allowed anywhere near him would have would have asked something like that anyway, though.
All right.
That's how you lose your access.
All right.
Well, hey, can you can you stay on the line here with us another 10 minute segment, Jason?
I got more questions.
All right, everybody.
It's Jason Ditz.
He's the news editor at Antiwar dot com.
That's news dot antiwar dot com.
We'll be right back after this.
Your analogy.
All right, welcome back to show it's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm on the line with Jason Ditz, we're talking about Israel and Palestine and America.
And now, Jason, this whole theory that someday the Israelis are going to work out a deal and come to the table and shake hands and give up the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and cease their occupations of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and allow for there to be created in those two areas, what's known as the Palestinian state.
At some point, even Netanyahu has said that that's what he favors.
I wonder what you think about this London Independent article.
I'm sure you've seen it.
The truth about Israel's land grab in the West Bank.
You know, what is this about, first of all?
And then, you know, how hard does this truth make the possibility of actually ever having a Palestinian state on the West Bank?
The article is about how, despite the fact that the settlements themselves really don't take up a huge amount of the West Bank, the settler councils have fenced off a good chunk, almost half of the West Bank for eventual use of settlement.
And a lot of it is actually privately owned Palestinian land that they've just fenced off.
And now that it's behind the fence, the Palestinians can't possibly get to it anymore.
Well, you often in your news articles there show a picture that I guess many people have seen, but it's not the kind of thing they show on TV or anything.
And it's sort of a step by step of Israeli occupation and expansion through the wars.
But particularly, I think the version that you use is just shows the West Bank.
It's kind of a color coded map of the West Bank and which areas are occupied by the settlers.
And yeah, I mean, it's saying here, well, and I recommend that to people that they go and look at that and see, because it's this is what they called in South Africa, the Bantu stands, right, where you had white minority rule and the black majority couldn't get it together because the whites kept them in these separate little enclaves where they couldn't travel freely between and etc.
They call them the Bantu stands.
And that's how they kept the people divided from being able to make their own state.
Right.
And that map shows territory that's under the control of the Palestinian authority compared to territory that's under the control of the Israeli military.
And it really is kind of a patchwork.
There is no contiguous area for this Palestinian state to be created in.
And that's why there are all these talks of land swaps, territory for territory, swaps in the in the West Bank to try to make something of a contiguous area to have a independent state.
Well, and, you know, the thing is, too, I guess back when Ariel Sharon got just closed down a few, I guess it was Sharon, it could have been Olmert, I think it was Sharon closed on just a few settlements, real small ones, and they had a damn near mutiny in the army.
Is there a lot of really right wing nationalists, religious and not in the Israeli army?
And they don't seem to they're the only ones who could possibly force the people of the colonists in the West Bank to get out.
And they don't seem to be too into it.
It almost seems like it's a fait accompli, like Chomsky says, establishing facts on the ground.
Right.
The the settlers really don't make up a very large portion of the overall Israeli population.
And even though they're not necessarily in the mainstream politically there, they have enormous power.
And well, as exemplified by the fact that Israel's coalition is so pro-settler, I mean, they have a lot of high ranking officials who are extremely pro-settlement, even though a lot of people in Israeli society really do support the idea of a Palestinian state just as a way of ending decades and decades of fighting.
Well, and, you know, that's the thing, too, that it's often remarked upon that there's a lot more free debate about Israel in Israel than there is in the United States.
And that's something that shouldn't be overlooked, is that there are a lot of people there who, just like you and I, are critical of American policy and saying, look, you know, this perpetual war, even if you don't care about the foreigners, it's destroying us.
War is the health of the state.
That's our slogan.
You know, there's people like that in Israel, too, who are saying, you know, we would have a lot better society if we weren't occupiers all the time.
Oh, absolutely.
And if you read, if you go to Haaretz or Ynet or the Jerusalem Post and read their comment sections and articles on settlements, you see a lot of fighting among Israelis who are extremely vehemently pro-settlement and a lot of them who think that this whole settlement nonsense is just hijacking Israeli independence to this small group of people who are calling it.
Yeah, well, that's certainly the case.
And, you know, the thing is, too, about the West Bank and you talk about all these settlements, is this giant security wall, they call it.
And, you know, of course, if you're occupying other people's land, they might try to suicide bomb you.
But it's almost like American level political discussion over there where never mind, you know, exactly where these settlers are, how they got there, whether they're there legitimately or not.
Hey, there's a threat.
So we have to build a wall.
And then they built this giant wall.
So you talk about, you know, there's no contiguous Palestinian territory to make a state out of.
There's a 20 foot wall they'd have to climb over just to get to their own field on the other side.
All right.
And, of course, they officially they call it a fence or at best a barrier of separation.
But what we're talking about is a several meter tall concrete wall, not a fence.
Yeah, I mean, it's huge.
I don't know exactly how tall it is, but it's it's taller than a vert ramp.
That's 12 feet.
So I think it's got to be at least 20.
Yeah, it's certainly in the ballpark of that.
And the the reality is when they built the fence or barrier or wall, there were a lot of court battles about where they could build it, because the military just said, you know, we're not even looking at what the settlers are claiming as territory.
We're just looking at what would be the most convenient defensive points.
And they were building this giant wall right through the middle of farmers fields and saying, OK, if you want to get to the other side of your field, you have to go through a checkpoint.
Four or five miles down the road, I mean.
It was built right over the top of a lot of people's houses or right through their backyards or through their field.
Yeah, well, so what about the politics again?
You know, Netanyahu, well, Barack Obama, he started out his presidency with this big Cairo speech and the whole look, this situation is untenable and we're going to do something about it and all this.
And then he does nothing but back down.
I wonder, did he come in naively thinking that he would just be able to do whatever he wants because he's the president and it's going to be easy?
And then when he realized it wasn't easy, he just gave up.
Or I still can't get over the fact that he even announced that he wanted to do any of this.
Why cause trouble if you're not going to actually go ahead and and go through it and say at reelection time, see, I did it, you know?
All right.
I think he really was that naive because in December of last year, he gave an interview to Time magazine specifically talking about the lack of progress.
And he said, boy, that was a lot harder than I expected.
So I think he really did think it was just going to be a matter of coming in and saying, let's get it done and then it would happen.
Yeah, what an idiot.
Oh, well, did you see in that article we got on antiwar.com today where he says to an Israeli news channel, well, I think people just don't trust me because my name is Hussein and that scares them or something in that article.
He says, you know, well, he talks about, you know, Rahm Emanuel is his is his chief of staff and that proves how pro-Israel he is.
And then he says that, look, it was my ties to the Jewish community that got me elected to the U.S. Senate in the first place.
That's where I came from.
I am a creature of the Israel lobby, he said in his own defense to the Israeli media.
Right.
And he's sort of fighting a battle on two fronts here.
On the one hand, if he wants to have any sort of credibility with the rest of the world, he can't completely back down on this idea of a Palestinian state.
Although at this point, it seems like he's all but completely backed down on it.
And even broaching the subject in Israel has made him hugely unpopular.
And you see rallies where there's an anti-Obama rally.
Check and mate.
Netanyahu wins again.
Thanks, Jason.
Jason Dix, everybody.
News.
Antiwar.com.