All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And our next guest on the show is Max Blumenthal.
And, uh, he keeps the blog at maxblumenthal.com.
He's an award-winning journalist and bestselling author.
His articles and video documentaries have appeared in the New York times, the LA times, the daily beast, the nation, the Huffington post salon.com, Al Jazeera, and many other publications is a writing fellow for the nation Institute and his book, Republican Gomorrah inside the movement that shattered the party as a New York times and LA times bestseller.
And for those of you in the chaos audience, those clips of that lunatic, John Hagee leader of millions somehow from the cornerstone church there in San Antonio that I played yesterday were from Max Blumenthal's work, which you can find at the Huffington post and on YouTube.
Welcome back to the show, Max.
How are you?
I'm pretty good.
Great to be on.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us.
And, uh, you know, this, uh, there's a few different things I wanted to ask you about, but this latest entry on your blog, it's a piece that was originally published at electronic Intifada.
The Carmel wildfire is burning.
All illusions in Israel is a most engaging, uh, thing.
Um, uh, a piece here, uh, you apparently visited an Israeli and a Palestinian village on the edge of this, uh, massive forest fire in Israel.
So I was just wondering if you could get into this story and I'll try to come up with questions as we go through, but, uh, it's an excellent piece.
I highly recommend, uh, everybody look it up.
It's at max Blumenthal.com.
Uh, so go ahead.
Well, um, I don't know how much this, uh, the Carmel wildfires been covered in the States, but it's a massive, this is a massive fire, probably the worst fire that's ever hit Israel.
Um, and, uh, when the fire began, I think on the first day it felled a tree that landed on a bus carrying, um, prison cadets, um, who are, uh, going to be prison wardens or jailers.
And it killed 40 of them.
I mean, this is a society in Israel that has a high per capita of, uh, of people who work in the prison industry.
It has a huge percentage of people in jail.
Um, and it's a small society.
So this, uh, you know, this, this affected is really deeply and the fire started bearing down on Haifa, which is the third largest city in Israel.
And, uh, it revealed one of the most, uh, I think it was, it revealed so many things about Israel.
First of all, it revealed that the country had invested so heavily in buying F 35, but it had no firefighting airplanes.
So these tough guys, Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman had to get down on, bend a knee and beg Turkey, the government of Turkey for assistance.
And they had to beg their patrons in the West for assistance.
They even had firefighting crews from the Palestinian authority, um, given special access to Israel, um, to fight the fire with them because they just didn't have the means to take care of their citizens because they'd invested so much in the occupation and offensive military capacity.
Um, so this was incredibly revealing about, um, you know, what Israel has become, which is essentially a military base and how it's just, it's leadership is given up on its citizens.
So there's an enormous outrage in Israel right now by average citizens, including people who are right wing at their government.
Um, they don't want to ask the deeper questions though.
Um, and a deeper questions actually are to some degree forbidden because Israelis are not allowed to learn about them in their public school system.
What I'm talking about is what the Palestinians referred to as the knock bar, the catastrophe of 1948.
Uh, when up to 750,000 Palestinians were, uh, forcibly expelled from their homes and their villages and sent to refugee camps and spirited across the border, um, in accordance with, uh, the wishes of, uh, leading Zionists going back to the, uh, Theodore Herzl who proposed transfer in his diaries or the first, uh, Jewish national fund president, you know, Joseph White or David Ben-Gurion, um, they needed to make room, uh, for the Jewish and democratic state and with all those Palestinians there, they could have only had a democratic state.
Um, so they needed to, uh, establish a Jewish majority through force.
What they did after destroying, uh, over 400, maybe as many as 600 Palestinian villages, they brought in the Jewish national fund, uh, which was responsible for, uh, buying a lot of the land from absentee landlords, from offendees, um, behind the backs of the Palestinians who worked on it prior to 1948 and the Jewish national fund planted thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of pine trees on top of these destroyed villages, including around the Mount Carmel area, which burned these pine trees are not native to the environment of, um, the Eastern Mediterranean, which is hot and dry, and this is an unprecedented, um, dry season.
So they burn like tinder, um, the trees that the JNF, the Jewish national fund is planted around Jerusalem, just basically die and, uh, have to be replanted constantly, but around Mount Carmel, um, where they attempted to replicate a European environment, um, to do what they call, um, what the JNF calls conquering the wilderness or redeeming the land, um, which was actually greenwashing the Nakba, um, this, this, this caused a complete disaster because it turned out that a kid who was smoking a nargila, a water pipe had, um, had sparked the entire fire and that the, that this massive area went up like tinder because these trees, which were non-native were planted to conceal, uh, the, the, the sins of the foundation of Israel.
So in June, I visited a village, one of the villages that had burned, it's called Ein Hod and it is a, uh, a Bohemian artists commune.
It's incredibly bucolic.
There's a bed and breakfast there.
There's a nice airy bar.
Uh, they, where they make their own beer.
There's a museum of Dadaist art.
It was founded by a Dadaist artist named Marcel Janko, who's from Romania in 1953.
But actually, and then this village was, was evacuated during the fire, but this wasn't the first time the village was evacuated.
It was also evacuated in 1948, um, when its original Palestinian inhabitants were forced out.
Now, most of those Palestinians, um, after fighting long and hard and being one of the last villages to hold out, um, against the Zionist militias were sent to Janine refugee camp.
They were sent to Jordan.
They were sent as far away as Iraq, but one family held out and stayed five kilometers down the road and formed their own town.
They named it Ein Hod after the original name of the town that they had lived in.
And they watched as, um, these Jewish foreigners who'd come over from Europe, moved into their homes and took their belongings.
And as laws were passed, like the absentee property law of 1950 to present the palace, to prevent the Palestinians from coming back.
So what you have now is an ethically cleansed artist colony.
Uh, and five kilometers down the road, the original inhabitants live there and have their own village, which it was unrecognized for 40 years.
The state of Israel refused to provide it with electricity, refused to provide it with water or trash service, but they held out finally won recognition in 2005.
So I went and visited both of these towns in June and I, uh, I went on a guided tour in Ein Hod, um, the Jewish town and the tour guide was speaking in Hebrew, um, and she, and I asked her about what happened in 1948, because I noticed that she was telling the visitors, the people she was taking on the tour, that they were looking at third generation homes when actually these homes dated back hundreds of years.
They've just had been occupied by, um, Jewish Zionists for three generations.
And she told me there are no facts, there are only narratives in this conflict.
And she maintained that they kept good relations with the people down the road.
But when I went down the road, I met, um, one of the leaders of the village popular committee and the Palestinian Ein Hod, who was just furious about what had happened, still was keeping tabs on all of the towns in the area that had been ethnically cleansed, um, and told me that one of the most insulting things was that they had turned the mosque that his family had worshiped at for hundreds of years into a bar called Bonanza.
Amazing.
So, uh, well, I'm sorry to interrupt you here.
This is the story that the fire revealed.
Right.
All right.
Now hold it right there.
Uh, everybody we'll be right back with Max Blumenthal.
Uh, we're talking about the Mount Carmel fire, this one in Israel.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Max Blumenthal.
He's the author of Republican Gomorrah, like Bill Hicks said, anybody that far to the right.
He was talking about Jesse Helms.
Anyone that far to the right is hiding a deep, dark secret, man.
I think you'll find that that is the case.
All right.
Now we're talking about this extraordinary article.
It really is an important piece.
Uh, I should remember to forward this on, uh, to Matt Barganier, uh, our editor at antiwar.com.
The Carmel wildfire is burning all illusions in Israel.
And it really is Max, isn't it?
A case of you reap what you sow in the most literal sense.
It, I gotta tell you, it reminds me though, when you're talking about that little, um, uh, kind of utopian, uh, artist colony there, uh, on the, on the ashes of, uh, a former Palestinian village, it sounds like Boulder, Colorado or something, right?
Everybody, everybody's just as happy as can be.
And nevermind the Palestinians who the American Indians who used to live there.
It's our history.
It's American history.
You're telling me going on over there in Israel.
No, it, it, it, it, it does remind me of that.
And, uh, if you read, bury my heart at wounded knee, the book by D Brown, which is the first book to tell history from the native American side that was popular with an American audience.
He talks about these great celebrations, um, at auditoriums in Denver, that the, uh, settlers of the West who were building the first great Western city would have when there was a massacre of the native Americans, like the sand Creek massacre, where babies were, uh, were cut out of their mother's stomach.
Um, by general Chivington.
So, I mean, this is what I'm doing.
This is what we're doing.
I mean, this is not, I mean, I wouldn't consider what's happening to the Palestinians to be the same kind of genocide, but it's, it's an ongoing, um, attempt to destroy them and dispossess them, destroy them as a people.
It's happening.
The native Americans have been forced on reservations.
What's happening to the Palestinians is ongoing and we can actually intercede and try to stop it.
And I like to think if I was a journalist in the United States in the 1860s, or even in the 1890s, I would be out West covering, um, their dispossession.
So that's what I'm doing.
And you know, this is inside Israel.
We're not talking about the West bank or Gaza, right?
This is inside Israel.
These are Palestinian citizens of Israel, and this is the Jewish national fund.
Well, you know, I'm, I was raised Jewish.
I'm Jewish.
When you, when you grow up Jewish, you, you, you basically, almost every Jew, um, donates a tree to Israel through the Jewish national fund.
And you donate it in the name of a relative who is deceased.
I had this dog, this stray dog that I took in when I was 10 years old that I really loved and he was run over by a car and I donated a tree to the Jewish national fund in his name.
Little did I know that that tree was going to be planted in the service of ethnic cleansing and the concealment of history.
Um, and then what the Jewish national fund is doing right now is so appalling.
Uh, they're trying to, what they call green, the naked desert inside Israel.
They're trying to plant a forest in the desert, planting a million trees on top of some of the 40 unrecognized Bedouin villages, which contain the residents of a people who, which contain people who've lived there for over a hundred years, well before the Zionists ever settled the land.
And I witnessed with my own eyes, the village of Alar Aqib, um, where people, people, Bedouins lived there who served in the Israeli army.
I watched this village get raised to the ground, completely leveled by Israeli bulldozers in order to make way for God TV forest.
What is God TV forest?
It's such an unusual name for a forest.
As weird as it already is that they're building woods in the desert.
God TV is this extreme right wing evangelical end times network.
I think it's the third largest evangelical broadcasting network in the world.
And they've partnered with the Jewish national fund, um, to, to build this forest, to plant 1 million trees in the desert on top of villages that will, that, that are being destroyed right before our very eyes.
And God TV makes no secret about why they're doing it.
They're doing it to promote the second coming of Christ.
So Israel has partnered with antisemites to destroy the indigenous people and dispossess them who've lived there for over a hundred years, who are basically the native Americans of Palestine.
And they're doing it right before our eyes.
Um, and so there has to be something that we can do about it.
The least we can do is document this and tell people about it.
Well, and on the antisemite note, these people, mostly they think that they're Israel's best friends, right?
I mean, even if they want Jesus to come back and offer to convert them one final time or whatever kind of madness, um, it's, they don't, it's not like they're Klansmen or whatever, right?
It's a different flavor of a nationalist Christianity.
No, I mean, you listen to pastor John Hagee, who traveled to Israel, uh, last year, um, actually earlier this year to oppose, uh, Obama's, uh, what, what turned out to be Obama's empty, uh, pledge to, uh, to guarantee a settlement freeze.
Um, and so Hagee brought his followers out there to do a rally with Netanyahu and Netanyahu said, Israel welcomes you and the Jewish people love you, you know, because, because, um, the government of Israel always claims to speak on behalf of the Jewish people as if they have the authority to do so.
This is the same pastor Hagee who said, um, you know, and I posted this video on my blog that went, um, the antichrist when he returns will be half Jewish as Adolf Hitler was.
These are literal antisemites and Israel's alliance and partnership with these evangelicals to carry out their dastardly project of cop of colonization, uh, reveals just the sad trajectory of the state of Israel.
They've always had to ally themselves with other pariah states, other extremists and other people who have a sorted agenda, like the apartheid government of South Africa, like the military junta of Guatemala that was involved in its own campaign to ethnically cleanse and massacre the Mayans.
Um, like the, uh, like the, uh, Clint does of South America that were engaged in wholesale torture and disappearance of dissidents.
Um, and, and, and so now they're partnering with people who hate Jews.
They don't hate Jews in the same way, as you said, that the Klan does.
They just believe that eventually Jews will burn in an everlasting lake of fire when Jesus comes back.
Right.
Wish you well.
Uh, yeah, yeah.
Very, very strange.
And, uh, you know, that whole cornerstone church, uh, thing is just a, it's, uh, almost a miracle that such a thing exists in this world, but, uh, there you have it.
And for those in the chaos audience, I'll actually, uh, at the break, I'll play you that clip of Max asking pastor Hagee, uh, Hey, aren't you the same guy that said the Jews deserve the Holocaust and all this, and, uh, and a couple of more crazy rants by that guy.
Um, so that you can feel where he's coming from.
This is before McCain had accepted his endorsement.
So, I mean, this is out there that, that he, he said that the Pope is the devil too, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's an anti-Catholic bigot.
I mean, he's just a good old fashioned deep fried bigot.
But people want his money.
Right.
Well, you know, I think, uh, Jim Loeb told me the story.
I forget who it was that critically asked Irving Crystal back in the early 1980s, when Irving Crystal was helping to arrange money to buy Jerry Falwell, a jumbo jet.
And he said, someone asked him, are you sure that this is a good idea?
Partnering up with somebody who would have Jesus come back and create a nuclear war or whatever, and kill us all.
And Irving Crystal said, well, it's their theology, but it's our Israel.
Um, but it seems like a pretty risky policy to me.
And of course it also ends up empowering the Christian right in ways that are completely detrimental to what most Jews believe in, in terms of our life here in America.
Yeah.
Um, it allows the Christian right to whitewash their anti-Semitism and their agenda in the United States, of course, is to destroy the separation of church and state, uh, and or, and, and force, uh, Jewish kids to go to public school to sing Christmas songs and to basically, uh, worship Christ against their will and be, uh, feel like second-class citizens.
And, you know, it, it, it, it shows, um, I think that the Jewish establishment has prioritized Israel, um, as the main facet of Jewish identity far more than they've prioritized the actual faith of Judaism and protecting Jewish people in the United States.
Um, and that, you know, that's incredibly sad that they're not willing to, uh, to establish a red line and say that we won't work with this anti-Semitic faction within the religious right.
Um, well, now, can I ask you real quick?
Um, it seems to me, and you can agree or disagree with this, but it seems to me like basically the whole world would shrug and accept the 1967 borders.
The fact of the existence of Israel and the people that you've written about here who were displaced in 1948, notwithstanding Israel is what it is.
But is it possible, do you think, from your experience over there in Israel, uh, for the people of Israel to finally demand that the occupations, uh, and the settlements in the West Bank and the, the siege of Gaza end and that the Palestinians would be allowed to have a state?
Just tour the West Bank and take a look around and you'll see how impossible it is, um, to withdraw these settlements and go talk to Israelis.
And these people are heavily indoctrinated, so I don't think their minds can be changed, but perhaps their behavior can.
That is the question, right?
Whether the IDF can remove those settlers without everything falling completely apart, and I guess you're saying the answer is no.
I mean, when the IDF is filled with settlers, the deputy chief of staff, Yair Naveh, is a religious settler himself.
You have to question whether the will is there, whether the government and the government's controlled by settlers.
And you look at the polls of Israeli attitudes, uh, it just doesn't seem that a solution will come from within.
Pressure just has to be brought from the outside to bring an end to this nightmare.
And so far, I mean, we see Obama capitulating on taxes, capitulating the Republicans left and right.
The will, the United States government isn't going to be, isn't going to be a fair broker.
So it's really up to us.
That's why I've embraced the BDS movement, the boycott, um, because it's a nonviolent tool that citizens all over the world can use to apply pressure on Israel and on companies involved in the occupation and on people involved in the occupation to change their behavior, because we know we can't change their minds.
Right on.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks very much for all your great journalism and your time on the show today, Max.
I do really appreciate it.
Yeah.
Thanks for giving me the time.
All right, everybody.
That is Max Blumenthal.
He's written for every important newspaper in the world, just about.
He's a fellow at the Nation Institute and he's the author of Republican Gomorrah Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party.
