All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Noam Shizoff.
He is an independent journalist and editor, and he's worked for the Tel Aviv local paper Ha'ir for Ynet and as deputy editor for Marie Daily News.
His work is published in Haaretz, Yediyeth Arnoth, The Nation, and other publications.
He has the Promised Land blog at 927mag.com.
He lives in Tel Aviv.
This headline is absolutely just shocking to me, but I'll just leave it as a teaser for the audience and make sure they pay close attention for the rest of the interview, cut the power to Gaza this summer.
Wow.
That seems like something important, but before we get to that, I would like to ask you, Noam, all about your piece about the deal made between the Kadima party and the Likud led by prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
This is, I believe the way you put it, he's got the biggest majority since the founding of Israel, an unprecedented, super duper majority in the Knesset.
Now backing Benjamin Netanyahu, which means he can do whatever he wants.
And what does he want?
Welcome to the show, Noam.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
What does this really mean that Benjamin Netanyahu now has 96 Knesset members out of how many, 120 something, right?
Yeah, he has 96 members, 94, I think, members behind him.
It's actually out of 120.
So it's more than any majority you can imagine.
It's in the U S or something.
But it's actually not the largest coalition ever, but other coalitions were more balanced.
Like they had two competing powers who were cooperating together.
That's possible in the Israeli system.
But this one has like one sole person behind it.
He's calling all the shots and that's Netanyahu.
So I think that there is a reason to say that this is the leader of this coalition in many ways is the strongest prime minister that we had since David Ben-Gurion, the founding father of the state.
And now the Kadima party itself was basically a spinoff from the Likud and the best I know is very overly simplified that it was a fight between Sharon and Netanyahu over whether to pull the last of the settlers out of the Gaza Strip or not back in 2005, but that otherwise the Kadima party is the same thing as Likud anyway.
So having them as the opposition was like having them as part of the government as it was.
Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
It's not the appropriate metaphor, but maybe you can imagine two two flanks of the Republican Party joining hands in one coalition and that that would be it.
Because Kadima is a party that's split out of the Likud and in many ways, the policies of Kadima are the extension of the policies of the Likud.
Some people in Kadima were known to be a bit more supportive of the idea of the two state solution of the continuing the peace process.
But in essence, it's not a proper liberal or dovish party in any way.
It's a it's a party that basically want to maintain the status quo in the West Bank.
Well, and that's the thing is the status quo at this point is so extensive in terms of Israeli settlements in the West Bank that it would be how big of a project, perhaps an impossible project to get all those settlers out.
Would the IDF even do it if the IDF is made up of half settlers at this point?
A lot of people are asking this question, whether it's possible to to even think of an idea of separating Israelis and Palestinians into two sovereign states.
But I must say that I think it's even too early for that, because right now we're not seeing any political capital or any political will in changing the situation.
So before we speak of solutions, before we speak of whether we want to pull the settlers out or whether we want to create one unified state or any other alternative you can come up with, you're going to have the political leadership wanting to change the situation.
And it's not the situation, it's not what's going on in Israel.
You've got a supermajority that's committed to the status quo, and you've got an American administration that's basically supportive of this position from its own political calculations.
So I don't see the situation changing a lot.
So it's even too early to speculate on whether we can pull off those settlers.
Right.
So in essence, what this really means is there's just no pressure whatsoever.
If even having Kadima out of the government counted as pressure, there's just basically no incentive for Netanyahu to do anything other than maybe continue to slowly expand.
Exactly.
There's no internal pressure and there's no external pressure.
The administration has tried to put some pressure on the first year after the 2008 elections, but then it changed policy completely.
So there's no external pressure on Netanyahu and there's no internal pressure.
So I don't see a lot changing in the coming years.
Yeah, but there's got to be I don't know what percentage of Israeli citizens are for this.
I mean, I know how politics can be different parties and coalitions and whatever.
There's a lot of people maybe that don't participate at all, whatever.
So the government doesn't necessarily have to reflect what the people think very much at all, even in a democracy.
You know, it seems like to me I live in America, so it's pretty clear that that's about how it works around here anyway.
But are people upset about this or is this basically they they have this kind of consensus in the government because they do have this kind of consensus among the population as well?
I think that Israelis have separated themselves from the question of the occupation.
And it's ironic because the relatively quiet situation of the last few years, when we didn't have the sort of intensive fighting that we saw in the last decade, both in the West Bank or in Gaza or in Lebanon, has allowed Israelis to to separate themselves emotionally and politically from the West Bank in many ways.
And we saw there was massive, massive demonstrations last summer against the government.
But these were on social issue, demand for social reform and nothing to do with the West Bank.
So I think the Israeli public, it's not that it's for the occupation or against the occupation, but many in the Israeli public have separated and separated themselves from this issue altogether.
Like Afghanistan to Americans.
I guess so.
And that's our West Bank.
The tragedy of the tragedy of our existence right now is that people only care when there are casualties.
And that's something that's very hard for me to accept.
You know, I don't want I don't want this society to wake up just when the terror attacks takes place.
You want you want people to understand what's so wrong about the situation right now without having a violent uprising in their face.
Well, and now I guess, you know, I asked Noam Chomsky one time on the show.
So what is the deal anyway?
I mean, what's the game plan here?
Low level warfare against the Palestinians forever or what?
And the way he answered it was, well, it's all about what they call establishing facts on the ground, which means they'll never or at least they'll wait till the very last minute before they really do another Nakba, another mass expulsion and just force march everybody to Jordan like the Trail of Tears or something.
But they'll just keep expanding the settlements and expanding them and expanding them, sometimes a little bit slower, but never will they stop.
And eventually there just will be no more room for Palestinians anywhere.
They're all just be surrounded by concrete walls until they just starve or throw their hands up and leave.
I don't know if there is a master plan.
That's the thing you see.
I think that a lot of the politics in Israel, there are there are certain elements which are messianistic and nationalistic and they might have a master plan.
But a lot of the politics is very short term.
Well, and by the way, I'm probably paraphrasing him too simply.
But yeah, well, I'm saying that a lot of politics is short term right now in Israel.
It's about what you do this year and next year and the year after.
And on the short term level, I see no desire of Israelis to end the occupation.
And I got to tell you, it's not exactly what you asked, but I got to tell you that the occupation is not an exclusively Israeli project.
It's an American Israeli project.
And the American administration is providing the arms and the financing and the political back and backing the diplomatic shield to Israel's action.
So until we see a real will, both in Washington and in Jerusalem to change direction, I don't think I don't see the trends on the ground changing.
Well, that sounds like a pretty frank and honest assessment to me, a pretty accurate one.
And with that, we'll have to leave it because we're already over time.
But I thank you so much for your time on the show today.
No, thanks for having me.
And one last note.
The name of the site is 972Mag.com.
I always say 927, don't I?
Yeah, that's 972Mag.com.
But thanks for having me.
Yeah, sorry about that.
I'll get it right eventually.
All right.
Thanks.
Everybody, that's Noam Shizoff at 972Mag.com.
