08/17/11 – Jeremy Sapienza – The Scott Horton Show

All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is Jeremy Sapienza, Senior Editor at AntiWar.com.
Welcome back to the show Jeremy, how you doing?
Hey, pretty good Scott.
Good.
Hey listen, so I wanted to talk with you a little bit about what's going on in Israel and well in Palestine and the United Nations.
I'm not sure when in September but sometime coming up next month there's supposed to be a vote in the UN General Assembly.
I guess they're calling it quits on the peace process so-called with the Israelis and they're going to go ahead and unilaterally or I guess with the UN General Assembly declare Palestinian statehood and I wonder if you think that's going to work or and if so what will be the repercussions, that kind of thing.
Well, they'll definitely get recognition probably from the majority of the countries in the world.
Many of those countries have already recognized Palestinian statehood or the legitimacy of a Palestinian state or some variation on the rainbow of recognition.
What that will mean on the ground, probably not much.
Israel is not going to go, oh okay, why didn't you just say so and then leave the Palestinians, you know, to live their lives in peace.
So, honestly I don't know.
The other problem is that Palestinians aren't necessarily behind this because, well not all Palestinians, and they don't necessarily consider the PLO or the Palestinian Authority to represent them or their interests.
In the state that will be declared independent is really what some activists call just a collection of bantu stands like in South Africa.
Places that have, where Palestinians control just like tiny little towns, effectively just like they do now, possibly connected by little roads, but they'll probably have to go through many checkpoints to pass the Jewish settlements which will remain, of course.
So, in my opinion, nothing will change.
Well, and I wonder whether they can even get it through.
Did I read right that the UN Security Council has to approve the resolution before it goes to the General Assembly?
Oh, see, you know more than I do.
That's probably, that's likely, and in which case the U.S. will just kill it before it's born.
Yeah, well, and the whole time the American-Israel lobby will say, why does Obama hate Israel so much?
Right, right.
As Obama bends more and more backwards, they have some kind of reverse glasses on where they see him as like the liberator of Palestinians or something.
He does their bidding every time, so I don't know what their problem is.
Well, it makes for, you know, a great argument when the only place that he can move is between where he's already at and further to the right on all these issues, you know?
Right, well, as with almost every other issue, yeah.
Yeah.
All right, now, so, I mean, I wonder what's even the good of the symbolism there?
It just makes it more atrocious that the occupation continues if it's a so-called state that they're occupying?
It gives Palestinians a bit of a rhetorical boost, just like the recognitions in general.
It gives them more legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the world.
Like last year, I wrote a bit about, I remember, I can't remember which country was first recognized in Latin America.
Maybe it was Uruguay?
No, no.
No, it was Brazil.
Brazil recognized the Palestinian Authority as, you know, recognized an independent Palestine, or again, some variation of that.
And then Argentina followed soon thereafter, and Uruguay, and then I figured that Bolivia and Venezuela wouldn't be far behind.
In fact, I was shocked that they hadn't already been on that bandwagon, Chavez being as he is, and Morales just being a lackey of Chavez.
But I predicted that this will sort of be a domino effect where countries all around the world will see it more and more acceptable to recognize Palestine either, again, as a state or a legitimate entity.
So, it certainly helps to have the entire world on your side.
What they're going to do about it is a whole other story.
Well, I wonder how it plays in Tel Aviv, too.
Does this strengthen Netanyahu's position, or does it really put him on the defensive as it ought to?
Oh, well, you could argue it would do both.
Isn't he always strongest when he's on the defensive?
You always have to have an enemy to fight.
You've always got to have Turks at your gates.
That's what's always empowered extremist Israeli politicians.
Well, really, any politician in the world is being able to point at some external enemy, or really, in this case, an internal enemy, and attack.
Well, you know, something that's always fascinated me about this story is that they're going to have a peace process that goes on for 20 years, and nobody ever stops calling it a peace process.
Well, it was always a scam.
It was always a scam.
Palestinians had no power, and Israel had all the power.
And backing of the superpowers of the world, there's just no way in hell that that peace process was ever going to be in good faith.
Israel still owns everything.
That's all there is to it.
So it's really cynical of the Israelis.
They go, oh, there's no partner.
Well, anytime there is a partner, you undermine them.
Anytime somebody, even Hamas, offered a truce and stuck to it, even as Israel continually violated it.
Only when they finally fought back did Israel say, after holding their bullets for so long, did Israel say, see, we have no partner for peace.
Everybody is crazy and wants to kill us.
They want to throw us all into the sea.
Well, hell, they created Hamas in order to undermine the PLO in the first place.
Yes, well, and it worked, I guess, in a way.
But it worked brilliantly in every way.
It undermined the PLO, and it gave Israel a really crazy enemy.
So instead of just secularist Arab nationalist opposition, they now had a totally religious whack job opposition that didn't care whether it lived or died as long as it could kill some Jews.
But it turned out that even they moderated with time.
Even they valued, do, in fact, to turn a cliche on its head, value life over death, because they have offered many times, again, a truce, and to not recognize as legitimate, but to just live in peace with an entity that they may not want to be there, but they recognize that it's practical to do so.
Right.
Well, quickly, a couple of footnotes.
People can read about Israel creating Hamas in UPI and the Wall Street Journal, a couple of good footnotes for you there.
Yeah, just Google it, yeah.
But yeah, you know, Hamas even had a guy go on the Charlie Rose show on PBS and said, yeah, 67 borders, man.
We already said a million times, and we'll say it again.
67 borders, sure.
You know, they're not saying back to 48 borders, you know.
Right.
Well, I mean, borders never really existed, but yeah, I mean, they didn't want, really, they don't want any borders.
They want, I mean, I don't know, Hamas probably has a more extreme view, but I think in general, Palestinians want the right of return, which is each individual to have the right to return back to his land.
This is an issue primarily of property rights and of, really, of individual dignity.
This is not, this is Palestinian land, some amorphous blob that is vaguely understood to be owned by a certain type of person.
No, this piece of land is owned by this person.
This piece of land is owned by this person.
When Israel was created, it threw out hundreds of thousands of native Arabs, and these people now crowd into Gaza and the West Bank and live in Jordan and Syria and Lebanon and a few other places, and all they want is the right to go back to the land from which they hail and possibly claim the very piece of land that they or their parents or grandparents left.
We're not even talking about ancestors.
We're talking about, you know, several decades ago.
All right, well, hold it right there.
We're going to take this break.
We'll be back about that right of return right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jeremy Sapienza, Senior Editor at AntiWar.com about the peace process.
Huh, such as it is over there in Israel and Palestine.
And when we left off, Jeremy, you were talking about the right of return, and I guess I probably don't understand, but I guess I had thought that the leadership of Hamas basically had given that up, that when they say 67 borders, they mean if you give us just the Gaza Strip and whatever, they work out with the PLA about the West Bank and whatever, but if you recognize our independence as a state, then, you know, forget about us wanting to come back to where we were before 67.
Yeah, true.
No, I wasn't saying that wasn't true.
Now, that's definitely true.
You're just talking about what's right.
That's their practical solution to just end all the, well, to really just end the fighting.
People want a normal life.
They don't want to struggle forever.
So if it takes just recognizing these borders, which are not just, but it's a practical move on Hamas's part.
And, you know, it should add that we don't really expect things like that from Hamas.
They're crazy.
And yet even they said that they would be willing to accept that.
And Israel rejects it because, you know, of course, it's a trick by dastardly Arabs.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing, you know, most people think of Hamas just means some kid blowing himself up.
They don't know anything else about him.
And the most substantive discussion of this with an American politician I could think of on TV was John McCain on what Swiss television or something like that during the Davos summit back in 2007 or whatever he goes.
Now, come on, they got elected.
We've got to recognize them and talk to them.
I mean, but you don't even hear that deep of a discussion, never mind the point of view in the American media about it.
Hamas is just simply terrorists.
That's it.
Nothing more to know about them.
That's right.
That's very useful for certain people.
All right.
Now, part of the news that's been that we've been following at antiwar.com over the last couple of weeks, well, last couple of decades, whatever, same difference.
The expansion, the endless expansion of the settlements in the West Bank, can you describe for people who maybe don't know too much about the situation there about the West Bank of the Jordan River and the occupation there?
And that's a lot to cover.
But quickly, essentially, there are about some half a million Israeli Jews that live on Palestinian land, not purchased, just invaded, taken over.
And Palestinians don't like it, obviously.
The Israeli army occupies essentially the entire West Bank to ensure freedom of access and safety for, again, Israeli Jews only.
And Palestinians have to organize their lives around the very comfy, suburban lives that Israelis have created in their, you know, among their hardscrabble villages.
That just lays bare the propaganda.
I mean, I really think that people who don't take a particular interest in foreign policy and they just sort of, you know, the news is on in the background at their house, sometimes kind of view of the world, would probably are under the understanding that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, if they know those names, that's all just part of Israel.
Whatever the problem is with the Palestinians there, it's like Frank Luntz says, those Palestinians are like the whites in the Jim Crow South who just won't let the Jews live where they want.
Right, even if it's right on their head.
This is occupied territory.
It's not just, you know, one other region of Israel, but that's the way it's portrayed.
It's not.
It's literally a complete, utter takeover and a colonization.
It's not even like we're doing in Afghanistan, where we run the place.
They run the place and they are colonizing it purposely.
They are purposely populating it with Jews so that Palestinians will leave.
I'm sure there are elements, I'm sure, within Israel that would absolutely round up and slaughter every Palestinian if they could.
But that's credibly politically incorrect, especially if you need aid from all over the world, which they do.
And they certainly need to be able to travel and trade.
So Israelis are not just going to up and kill every Arab in sight.
No.
They're going to create conditions that make it incredibly and increasingly difficult for Arabs to remain in the land that Jews consider to be theirs because God gave it to them or just because they're Jewish nationalists and want it.
And after all, don't the Arabs have 22 other countries in the world?
Right.
I mean, we hear that actually pretty often, right?
Why can't they just go live there?
Right.
Well, because it's not their country.
It's not where they're from.
And, you know, earlier you brought up the Bantustans, the term lifted from South African apartheid, where they were just, I guess, I don't know if it was walls or fences or what exactly, but just divide all the different segments of black society there so that they could never come together as any political force, that kind of thing.
The same sort of thing.
Well, not only that, the Bantustans were locally governed.
You know, that was the big thing is that they created these Bantustans and the blacks could govern themselves, just like in a Palestinian state will allow the Palestinians to govern themselves.
Of course, they won't have military.
They won't have control over water.
They won't have, they almost certainly won't have any whatever mineral rights there may be.
And no right to unite together.
Right.
No, definitely not dangerous.
Israel has a right to protect itself.
Well, in the settlements is how they do this in the West Bank, right?
They go, well, we'll put a couple of condos on top of that hill over there, and then the feds will have to build a highway.
The Israeli government will have to build a highway with a wall next to it and patrol it with the IDF forces.
And this is how they cut the Palestinians off from their property.
Right.
And interestingly, there are some, most of the settlers are not fanatics.
They're just Israelis fed up with high prices and a difficult life, life crushed into Israel's city and want cheap housing, cheap, spacious housing on the lovely hill in the West Bank and or Judea and Samaria as Israelis would call it.
And you do have some true believers who want to get rid of the Arabs and spread Jewish settlements all over and eventually outpopulate the Arabs.
But Israel dismantles those settlements.
They're illegal.
They're unplanned.
You're not allowed to haphazardly create settlements.
You have to stick to the plan.
And it is a plan.
And for Israel to say, oh, we don't mean to do this.
We just, you know, we have these settlements and they naturally expand.
No, this is a plan by Israel, a nationalist plan to populate the West Bank Jews.
However, you've got to be part of the state's plan.
You can't just go about doing it on your own accord.
And that's why they're always knocking down these so-called illegal outposts.
Well, I have to question why they don't just round them all up and force march them into Jordan or slaughter them, as you said before.
What's stopping them?
I mean, how can the outrage of generations of this be any less than the world's outrage when they force them all into Jordan?
And then what's Europe going to do about it?
What's America going to do about it?
Nothing.
You know, I mean, I'm not sure.
I don't know.
The only thing is that I can think that actually most Israelis do not want to do such a thing.
I think that it's a small segment of Israeli society that would even do it.
Well, I guess I'm wondering why Netanyahu and Ehud Barak do it, you know?
Yeah, I think on some level they recognize humanity of these people, but there are certain segments like the nutbag foreign minister Lieberman, who probably would jump at the chance to get rid of all the Arabs.
What are they doing in the way of the Jewish state, even though he's from Belarus or whatever?
Yeah.
Hey, was it scandalous anywhere but antiwar.com that Congress up and went to Israel for their August vacation this year?
Yeah.
I feel like we've covered this year after year after year.
I mean, there's always senators taking little Bible vacations in Israel.
But this was particularly shocking, I think, to a lot of people, including people who normally don't criticize Israel at all.
And actually, I think this wasn't even a criticism of Israel on our part, but some 80-something senators or almost 90 senators, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson Jr., went to Israel in the middle of all this economic crap that we're dealing with.
They went on a junket.
Right.
And promised that no budget cut will ever affect Israel, no matter how many grandmas get their plugs pulled.
All right.
Thanks.
That's Jeremy Sapienza, senior editor at antiwar.com.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks, man.