All right y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, appreciate y'all tuning in.
Our next guest on the show today is Josh Ruebner, he is the National Advocacy Director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a national coalition of more than 325 organizations working to change U.S. policy toward Israel-Palestine, to support human rights, international law and equality, and their website is endtheoccupation.org, and you can also find, well it looks like two or three pieces here, by Josh at the Huffington Post, that's huffingtonpost.com slash Josh Ruebner, R-U-E-B-N-E-R, and there's a dash between his two names there, but of course you can always go to antiwar.com slash radio later and find a link straight to it on the archive of this interview, which you'll want to pass around to all your friends anyway, I bet.
Welcome to the show Josh, how are you doing?
Good, thanks so much for having me.
Well I really appreciate you joining us.
Now I think Angela, my producer, mentioned that, I'm not sure if she was sure, but she mentioned that she thought that you were actually a conscientious objector, what they call an Israeli refuse-nick, is that right?
In a sense, I was born in the United States, my father was born in Israel, and because of that I received automatic Israeli citizenship upon my birth in this country, and as an act of protest I did burn the Israeli military deferment papers that I had in my possession.
So that's something.
It's something.
Well hey, I'm glad that they didn't try to really draft you, and maybe there will come a time where American citizens get drafted by the IDF.
So you know what, I actually was explaining to the audience on the show yesterday that the reason I'm not covering these Israeli-Palestinian peace talks is because, yeah right, let me know when they start tearing the wall down and moving the settlers out, otherwise this is all the same nonsense, it's pretended peace talks my whole life, I don't even care to cover it.
But then the reason that I thought it would be a good idea to interview you about it is because apparently you're looking at it the same way I am.
Your piece here at the Huffington Post is called Top Ten Reasons for Skepticism on Israeli-Palestinian Talks.
Not too impressed, huh?
No, not at all, and you really have to question the Obama administration's timing in wanting to resume these negotiations right now, when the Israeli government is continuing its colonization efforts of Palestinian land and committing human rights abuses against Palestinians on a daily basis.
I mean, just a few weeks ago there was a leaked video from 2001 of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bragging back in 2001 about how he stopped the former peace process back in the 1990s.
So it's really absurd, I think, for Palestinians to be arm-twisted to the negotiating table when they have to sit across the table from an Israeli Prime Minister who bragged about stopping the last peace process, it's just completely nonsensical.
Yeah, well, and this is also an Israeli Prime Minister who commissioned the Clean Breaks study by Wunzer and Perl that said this is how to completely remake the Middle East is we'll trash Oslo, we'll get America to get rid of Saddam Hussein for us, and we'll remake the Middle East, and Israel will be so much more powerful than all their neighbors from then on that no one will ever mess with us again, and he's also the same guy who at least once bragged that September 11th was great for Israel.
Yeah, and to make matters worse, on top of that, Israel's current Foreign Minister is himself a settler living in an illegal Israeli colony on expropriated Palestinian land who is often called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, so you put these two at the head of the negotiating team, and you've got to wonder what President Obama is thinking in terms of the prospects for peace coming out of these talks.
Well, and, you know, if it was Obama or anybody else, I wonder whether the United States Empire, the American Empire, has the ability to, I mean, what would obviously be necessary in this case would be to dictate terms to the Israelis that this is what you have to do now or no more welfare for you, that's it, we're cutting you off, unless you get out of the West Bank.
I mean, George Bush couldn't do that with a 90% approval rating.
And that's exactly what we've been arguing for the Obama administration and before that the Bush administration to do, is to use the leverage that the United States has over Israel to induce it and to force it to comply with international law, human rights standards, and UN resolutions.
And if you look back in history, there's this kind of mistaken notion that Israel can only be coddled into doing the right thing.
But if you look back at the history of U.S. presidents, the exact opposite is true, and I'm thinking specifically of the actions that President Eisenhower took after Israel invaded and conquered territory from Egypt in 1956.
He cut off all forms of U.S. assistance to Israel, because Israel refused to abide by UN Security Council resolutions saying that it should withdraw, and Israel was only able to keep up its intransigence for a few months before it withdrew to the international borders because of that U.S. pressure.
And if Obama were to do the same thing today, to cut off the anticipated $30 billion of weapons that are going to flow from the U.S. to Israel over the next decade, Israel would be coming to the table singing a much different tune.
Well, you know, there was a story not too long ago also about Ronald Reagan calling, I guess it was Menachem Begin, during air raids on Beirut.
And he said, stop this, this is a holocaust.
And I'm sorry if I have the prime minister wrong here, but the Israeli prime minister said, no, you don't tell me about what a holocaust is or whatever.
And Reagan said, well, fine, but still stop the bombing now.
And they stopped.
In like three minutes, the bombing raids were over.
And then Reagan said to whoever wrote this in his biography or whatever, maybe it was Donald Reagan or something, that, wow, I didn't know I could do that.
If I just tell the Israelis what to do, they actually do it.
If I actually make it a declarative statement like that, huh?
Yeah.
And it points to the underlying fact that Israel is incredibly dependent upon the United States, especially when it comes to weapons.
And the fact that the United States has this huge amount of leverage over Israel and fails to use it is part of this ongoing pattern of failed negotiations that we've seen in the past.
Well, OK.
So what about the question?
Because I want to get into a lot of these substantive points that you make in your piece at the Huffington Post here, Josh.
But first, I want to ask you whether just in the broader sense, if it isn't too late for this, that you look at a map of the West Bank, the amount of change, like just in quantity that would have to take place in order for there to be anything like a legitimate so-called state there seems to me quite a few bridges too far.
How many settlers live there, hundreds of thousands?
And then could the IDF, would the IDF force them out, even if Netanyahu issued the order?
That's a great question.
There are now over half a million Israeli settlers in the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem.
And if you look at some of the major settlements in the West Bank, some of the major settlement blocks like Gush Etzion, like Ariel, they look more like very well-established metropolitan cities than they do some tiny outpost on top of the hill.
It's very, very difficult to envision how these very permanent pieces of infrastructure that Israel's created on occupied Palestinian territory will ever be dismantled.
And without them being dismantled, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to see how a viable and contiguous Palestinian state could be composed of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
So that does leave open the question, has Israel's policies led to a point where the only feasible solution is some form of a binational or one-state solution where the territory of historic Palestine, what's now Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, is not divided and that Israelis and Palestinians live together on some kind of an equal footing as citizens of the same political structure?
I think Israel is definitely putting in place the policies that will make that latter option the only viable one.
Right, and then there will be mass deaths because especially the radical right in Israel, they're not going to tolerate Israel losing its Jewish majority character and control and a minority outright apartheid system can't last that long.
And you know, these are the words of Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak.
As we go out to this break here, I'll let you comment when we get back.
Sorry about that.
Heartbreak's built in here.
It's Josh Ruebner from the Huffington Post.
Listen to LRN.
FM on any phone, anytime, 760-569-7753.
That's 760-569-7753.
All right, y'all, I'm Scott.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Josh Ruebner from EndTheOccupation.org, the U.S. campaign to end the Israeli occupation.
And he writes at the Huffington Post, and you know, when I'm misparaphrasing people going out to break and all these things, I should try a little harder and get things right.
I am worried that there will be blood.
The paraphrase of Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak is that, jeez, we're in a situation where if we don't give up the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an independent Palestinian state, then we're going to have a single state, and sooner or later, they'll be the majority, and then what are we going to do?
And then that's the part where I worry about the blood.
So I wanted to make sure that I didn't mean to imply that those two said, yeah, then we'll have to kill them all or anything, because I don't think they did.
Although maybe Ehud Barak seems to like blood pretty good, so maybe, I don't know.
But I mean, what do you think, dude?
Are we at the point where it's too late to give up what they should have given up 20 years ago, 40?
I don't believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is negotiating in good faith, and I don't believe he's serious about dismantling all of the settlements, certainly, and not even most of the settlements, probably.
So it's very, very difficult to see how there is going to be a so-called two-state solution within this one-year time frame that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is aiming for.
Actually, in regards to something you mentioned before the break, there's an interesting development among some right-wing Israeli political circles right now in that they're saying, you know what?
The land is more important than the composition of the citizenship in the state.
In other words, there are some Israeli right-wingers who are now saying, let's annex the West Bank and East Jerusalem and extend citizenship to Palestinians living there.
So it's an interesting development that you have both progressive Palestinians and very right-wing Israelis now contemplating a different political solution to the conflict.
Well, but I mean, are they really, could they even, could you imagine them going as far as saying, well, okay, so it won't be a Jewish state anymore, that won't be the point, it'll still be a safe haven where Jews can come and there'll still be millions of Jews there, but it won't be a Jewish state anymore and they'll just adopt a constitution that refers to, you know, a bill of rights that refers to any person in the land like ours?
Well, I think a lot of the potential one-state or bi-national resolutions to the conflict that are envisioned are looking at some kind of guaranteed communal structures, both for Israeli Jews and for Palestinians, so that there would still be some kind of collective political entity, but there would be some shared powers between them.
So no, a one-state or bi-national solution doesn't necessarily cancel out any separate sense of national belonging, I don't think.
Well now, you know, people talk about, I've never traveled the world, I really don't know, I just interview as many experts as I can, but can you tell us about the difference between the way Arab, Muslim, and Christian citizens of Israel are treated now?
Because it's already sort of a pseudo-Jim Crow thing inside Israel, never mind the West Bank and Gaza, right?
It's very much a Jim Crow situation inside Israel, and what's important to understand and something that's overlooked is that Israel is, for all intents and purposes, already a bi-national state, and it's always been a bi-national state.
When it was created in 1948, most indigenous Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homes and not allowed to return, that's what today constitutes the Palestinian refugee issue.
Those who weren't ethnically cleansed from their homes remained within what's today Israel, and eventually achieved citizenship within Israel, and today comprise about 20% of the Israeli citizenry.
But even though they have rights that exist on paper, and yes they can vote, yes they can form political parties, yes they can have their own newspapers, there's a lot of discrimination against them, which is very analogous to the Jim Crow South, especially in terms of budget allocations not being adequately proportioned to Palestinian-Israeli communities, in terms of societal discrimination against them so that they're not allowed to live in particular places or go to particular schools, and then there's growing political repression against Palestinian citizens of Israel who are advocating for full civil and political equality.
For example, one person by the name of Amir Mahul, he's the leader of one of the most prominent Palestinian-Israeli civil rights groups called Etijah, and he was recently incarcerated without charge of trial, abducted from his home in the middle of the night by Israeli security forces, and subjected to torture, all in this kind of witch hunt against him and his organization, and he's a citizen of Israel.
So yes, Palestinians within Israel do face a lot of discrimination and a lot of abuse.
You know, it's funny, I remember Noam Chomsky remarking one time that when the first intifada broke out, that basically the spin in the American media was, geez, why did the Palestinians attack the Israelis like this, as though the occupation wasn't going on, as though the West Bank had invaded Israel, basically, with these suicide bombers, and that kind of thing, and it seems to me like, you know, if someone's not an avid consumer of news on this issue, and they basically are just a regular American going about their life, and they kind of hear a little bit here and there about Israel, or see it on TV, they might not even really understand that there are occupied territories that have been occupied for 40 years.
And you know, like, you mentioned how America treats the Palestinians as though, oh, well, you know, both sides have to make all these concessions and whatever, and come to the table and do all these things, as though they're equal partners, rather than occupier and occupier, and of course, a big part of the narrative is that, well, you, for example, if you want the Israelis to give up the West Bank to the Palestinians, what you're really saying is, you want to destroy Israel forever, at least that's the way the debate is set up here in the United States, it seems like in Israel a lot, too, where, you know, you're not allowed to actually have reality involved in the context of your discussion, it has to be, if you want them out of the West Bank, what you're really saying is that all the Jews should be drowned in the Mediterranean Sea.
I agree with you that that has been the traditional overarching discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in this country, but I do think, and that it's important to note this, that over the past few years, there has been, I think, a tremendous shift in the discourse in this country, and I think more and more people and more and more mainstream media outlets are starting to recognize the imbalanced nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that there is one side that's an occupier and one side that's occupied, and I think that more and more Palestinian voices are getting into the mainstream press in this country, which is a positive development that allows them to share their experiences living under Israeli military occupation with the American public, and then of course we can't discount the fact that, you know, the vast brutality of Israel's policies towards Palestinians and towards Lebanese as well.
Yeah, I've heard it said a few times that the Israelis can be pretty good at tactics in the short term, but they've got no strategic view whatsoever for the long term.
Talk about blowing it, you know, turning the American people against them, who they had, you know, as Netanyahu bragged, 80% it's absurd, he said, and then he threw it away, his predecessor.
All right, thank you very much, Josh, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Thanks so much for having me.
All right, everybody, that's Josh Rubner.
He is co-founder of Jews for Peace in Palestine and is part of the U.S. campaign to end the Israeli occupation, that's EndTheOccupation.org, and you can find him also at the Huffington Post.
I wish you would.
