All right, y'all, welcome back, Santel War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Philip Weiss.
He keeps the blog Mondoweiss.net.
And Adam Horowitz and a couple other people right there, too.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
Great, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Glad to have you here.
Yes, yes.
Good to be here.
All right, so let's start with the latest Gaza flotilla attempt to break the siege there.
Yeah.
Why don't you fill us in and update us on what the heck's going on over there?
Okay.
In great secrecy, two days ago, two boats set out from Turkey, a Canadian and a French boat, for Gaza to break the siege, the latest flotilla aimed at breaking the siege.
You may recall that last June, I think it was, the Israelis kept a very large flotilla even from leaving Greece and Turkey, Greece, anyway.
And this time, these boats set out in secrecy.
They were around 50 or 60 miles off the coast of Gaza when the Israeli warships surrounded them this morning.
Actually, I guess in the afternoon, Israeli time.
And they are being, they've been seized, the ships.
And they are bringing the passengers into Ashdod.
They've arrested them.
So the Gaza flotilla has again been intercepted.
All they were carrying was messages of love and support to the people of Gaza who've been blockaded for four years.
And hopefully this will draw even more attention to this inhuman, cruel, illegal, collective punishment of one and a half million people who are in an outdoor prison.
Yeah.
Well, that's what it's doing right now.
Why don't you tell us about this four years of siege?
What's the four years of siege, Phil?
Well, after Hamas took over the government of Gaza in 2007, Israel said that Hamas is a terrorist organization, and it declared a blockade.
And it shut down all sort of entry and exit from Gaza, subject to control.
One of Gaza's borders is on, it shares with Egypt.
And the Egyptians have so far complied with this blockade, by and large, although the famous tunnel network goes from Gaza into Egypt at the Rafah border.
But what you have here is a form of collective punishment because Hamas, or organizations related to Hamas, have fired rockets at civilians in southern Israel.
So because Hamas has been classified as a terrorist group, and Israel's gotten away with this form of, really, in the end, a form of state terrorism, when you combine it with the constant Israeli attacks on Gaza, drone attacks, rocket attacks, and of course, cast lead in 2008-2009, which killed 1,400 Palestinians in three weeks, more than Gaddafi had killed in actions that caused the world to rise up against Gaddafi.
Israeli killed 1,400 Gazans, and many of them, most of them were civilians.
There were nearly 400 children.
This massacre did not merit the response that Gaddafi got when he threatened massacres in Benghazi.
Yeah, of course not.
That's called the double standard.
Yes, yes, sorry, sorry, you're putting the right headlines on it.
All right, now, I don't know if we need to go over the entire run-up to the Operation Cast Lead there, but part of that story, I believe, Phil, was that the Hamas government and the Israelis had agreed to a ceasefire, and part of the Israeli side of the agreement was that they would lift the siege, and they never would abide by that part of the agreement, even though Hamas was abiding by theirs, and then the whole crisis leading up to the full-scale bombardment there in December was that, the way I remember it anyway, correct me if I go off the story here, as Bill Hicks would say, but there were a couple of guys who were not Hamas members who fired some rockets at Israel over the fence, and Hamas immediately grabbed these guys.
I forget if they killed them or threw them in prison, but they attempted to immediately enforce their monopoly on violence there, and yet the Ehud Olmert government used that one rocket attack as an excuse to say Hamas isn't abiding by the ceasefire.
I mean, obviously, they're supposed to prevent that kind of thing from ever happening, but clearly it wasn't them that was behind it in the first place, and then they used that to say, oh, Hamas just won't abide by this ceasefire, and then they started doing strikes into Gaza, and then the retaliation started going back and forth leading up to the full invasion of the Operation Cast Lead.
Do I have that about right?
Pretty much, although I think that the more important action was in November, when Israel killed a bunch of Hamas fighters in an attack that had not been preceded by rocket attacks, and then rocket attacks did follow.
I mean, there was a little bit of tit-for-tat.
The issue, though, is whether the Israeli response in Cast Lead was in any way proportionate.
It made any effort to discriminate between civilians and combatants.
It did not.
Well, do I at least have it right that the Israelis had never abided by their half of the ceasefire in the first place, when they were supposed to lift the siege as part of the ceasefire?
Yeah, they've never done anything.
They never did anything to lift the siege, absolutely.
They've never done anything to lift the siege, and they're now coming under.
The great thing about this flotilla is that we're going to see increasing international pressure to lift the siege on these people.
Every reason that's been given for it, including Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldiers being held prisoner by Hamas, Shalit is free now, and they continue to bombard Gazans at will.
It's cruel, and the great thing the flotilla has achieved is to bring international attention to this.
You know, there's something else, Scott, I wanted to bring up that I think is right up your alley.
I don't know if you followed this intellectual property business at the UN.
No.
Okay.
Okay.
This is exciting.
You know, because the Palestinians have dared to ask for statehood in the UN, and greatly isolating the United States.
It was a great move by Palestine in that the United States stands alone in trying to support Israel right now, and we've become more and more isolated through this support, and it's been exposed.
But part of it, and now the Palestinians have dared to ask for membership in UNESCO, which they've gotten with this vote last week.
Well, you know, what will follow from the UNESCO membership, which the United States has opposed, is that the Palestinians will seek membership in the World Intellectual Property Organization.
And the United States has said, we're going to oppose its membership in the World Intellectual Property Organization, and we're going to withdraw funding from UNESCO, and withdraw funding from any other agency.
So we will withdraw funding from the World Intellectual Property Organization, and we will get out of, basically, intellectual property enforcement.
And what this means is that we are leaving our own corporations incredibly vulnerable to intellectual property infringements around the world.
And these corporations are really upset about this.
And yesterday, at the State Department, a reporter challenging the State Department on this question.
The reporters have been all over the State Department, over this UNESCO business, saying this is a complete diplomatic failure.
The United States is isolating itself from world opinion.
We look ridiculous.
All we're doing is not trying to – we're responding to Israel again and again.
And now we are actually endangering, quote unquote, national security, according to some of these reporters, because we are going to back out of these kind of international property conventions.
Well, I kind of actually like that silver lining in this.
Oh, right.
That's right.
Anthony Gregory finally convinced me that intellectual property is fascism, really.
It's not a natural right.
It's only a civil right.
It can only be enforced by a criminal monopoly state, and should cease to exist.
And I know that's a minority view.
I knew you'd love it.
I knew you'd love it.
I should have anticipated – yes, yeah, no, I know you come by this opinion.
It's a hard-earned, you know, and I guess I come at it from more of a corporatist, liberal standpoint.
But, you know, in the end, it does expose this alliance, this special – Right.
Who is America willing to take Israel's side over big business in America?
That's a pretty big one right there.
Right.
Hold it right there.
It's Philip Weiss.
The blog is Mondoweiss.net.
You got to bookmark it.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Philip Weiss.
He keeps the blog Mondoweiss.net with Adam Horowitz and a couple other guest bloggers from time to time as well.
And we're talking about the siege on the Gaza Strip and the latest flotilla to be – I guess – have they been boarded by the Israeli Navy or – Yeah, yeah.
They were boarded.
The boats, they were seized this morning.
I mean, we don't have absolute – we don't know exactly where they are between the waters and the port of Ashdod, but they are on their way to Ashdod, according to the organizers.
The two boats have been seized, and the 25 passengers are headed for prison is the word.
Now, but none of them have been shot four times point blank in the head by the IDF at this point?
Not that we know.
Apparently not.
No.
Apparently there have been no injuries, but that – reports do not indicate that.
But who knows?
You know, who knows?
I'm just kind of being sarcastic.
I mean – No, I mean – That's an important question.
Scott, it's a great question.
I mean, look, this is – you're referring to the fact that in the end of May 2010, Israel boarded the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish boat, and killed nine people, including an American citizen, unarmed.
Yeah, who was already wounded and laying on the ground when they executed him with four bullets to the skull.
Yes, yes.
And apparently he'd been photographing – this is a 19-year-old kid who'd been photographing the assault on the Mavi Marmara.
So they didn't like that.
So – Well, all right.
So now here's the thing, too, and I think people need to know this whenever the Gaza siege is mentioned at all, and that is that – I forget the guy's name.
You may remember, but it was a right-hand man, Smithers type of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who said that the purpose of the blockade was not to keep weapons out of the hands of Hamas.
It was to put the people of the Gaza Strip on a diet.
And it was in the WikiLeaks, heroically liberated from the government by the American hero Bradley Manning and uploaded to WikiLeaks.org, the State Department cables, where they say – basically confirming that, saying that the policy is to keep them hungry but not starving.
Yes, that's right.
That was in WikiLeaks.
I agree with you.
The heroic Bradley Manning did liberate that information.
Look, this siege is just – it has so many purposes that have nothing to do with national security.
It has a Zionist purpose, which is to break up the Palestinian people between the West Bank and Gaza.
They can't travel, but you have this – we constantly hear that Israel would support a Palestinian state.
Well, these people can't even travel between Gaza and the West Bank.
So they're trying to divide the Palestinian people.
They're trying to radicalize the Palestinian people in Gaza.
They're trying to make life so unbearable to Palestinians that the educated leave.
They're trying to smash that society in something like the way that we smashed Iraq when we occupied Iraq.
They've totally – most of these people are refugees to start with who are in Gaza.
They're refugees of the 1948 war or the 1967 war, but they're refugees.
And they have a right to return to their homes, and Israel is making sure that they live in misery and that maybe they'll even leave.
They do not want a viable Palestinian state on their borders.
And so – and one other thing about that, when Weissglass said that, Dov Weissglass, the thing you're – the statement you're quoting about putting them in formaldehyde, the other part of it was that we're going to continue our colonization of the West Bank, of the biblical lands in the West Bank, and one way we're going to do this is to take the attention off it by sequestering Hamas in Gaza.
Really?
He said that in the same statement.
We're cracking down on Gaza so people will look at Gaza and not the expansion of the settlements in the West Bank.
Well, he didn't say that explicitly, but that was always the policy.
That was the policy of Sharon when they got out of Gaza, was that we will solidify our colonization project of the West Bank by getting out of Gaza.
And really they took the last of the Jewish human shields out of Gaza so that they could clamp down and turn the whole place into a giant prison by the sea.
And you know, one of the great Israeli refuseniks, Yonatan Shapira, once a pilot, refused to carry out orders to bomb – I believe, I might be getting this a little bit wrong, but I know that he absolutely confronted his superior officer and said, if we were going after terrorists inside a Jewish city, an Israeli city with a lot of Jews in it, would we follow these same methods?
And the superior said, absolutely not.
We would protect, do our utmost to protect civilian life.
And he said, I'm not doing this then.
If we're pursuing a different policy inside a Palestinian area than we would pursue following the same criminals inside a Jewish area, it's racism.
And that's the heart of it.
Well, you know, in Justin Raimondo's article today, it's about Israel and Iran, and he's got a link to Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons, and the link is to Martin Van Krevel, I think that's who it is, saying that, oh yeah, we can nuke all the capitals of Europe and if we ever go down, we're not going down alone, I promise you that.
Wow.
But then the other part of his statement is that, yes, of course, the policy is to eventually sooner or later, expel all the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza and take them for us.
And anything between now and then that looks like it's not that is just smokescreen, basically.
Yeah.
I mean, I think, you know, what both these pieces get at, and I have to ask you about how significant this undercurrent is in American life, how much, I want to ask you how much awareness this is of the craziness of these policies inside American life.
I mean, I have my view of it.
I wonder what yours is.
But both of these pieces that you cited get at the craziness of these leaders.
These people are, they have factions in their government that absolutely want to expel Palestinians.
They have factions in their government that want to have a kind of an Armageddon with Iran.
Who knows what would happen if they attack Iran?
And yes, there are factions in Israeli government and certainly in all through Israeli society that has contempt for any sort of criticism, and that might include a violent response to criticism.
Look, this is a society where a prime minister was assassinated 15 years ago by a right winger for trying to make concessions to the Palestinians.
There are extreme elements in this society that are not on the fringe, but they are in the mainstream of Israeli society.
Yeah, well, I mean, you look at the foreign minister, Martin Peretz at the New Republic calls him a neo-fascist.
And here I always thought Martin Peretz was a neo-fascist.
So if this guy's a neo-fascist to Martin Peretz, I think that, you know, that's one of those where, wow, even Martin Peretz thinks so kind of a thing.
And this guy has said before, and I believe the offense was Mubarak didn't want to come to Tel Aviv to kiss his ring in Israel.
And so he said, well, maybe we'll just bomb the Aswan Dam and flood Cairo.
How do you like that?
Right.
Right.
Right.
Extremists.
Extremists.
And this is a guy who wasn't even born there.
He's an immigrant to this country under their right of return, a law of return, under which Jews from anywhere can move into a country where they had expelled Palestinians.
So people who were expelled and can't return to their homes have to watch as the society is governed by people who were born in Moldova and came here under this idea of a...
Yeah, or Brooklyn.
Yeah.
But, Scott, how widespread is the awareness of Israel's policies in the United States right now?
Do you think?
Oh, I think it's minimal at best.
I think, you know, if anybody knows anything about Israel, it's they're on the front lines of our war on terror and not much more than that.
You know, maybe Jesus is going to come back soon or something might be wrapped up in it a little bit.
Wow.
Wow.
I don't know.
I just don't know about it at all.
And certainly the only organized force in American politics concerned with Israel is the Israel lobby.
I mean, there's nobody who's organized to say, hey, you know, why should all their decisions determine our reality?
You know?
And, you know, here's another link from Armando's article today is he says Israel's just albatross around our neck.
You click on that and it's Osama bin Laden's interview with John Miller from ABC News.
And when they finally get to actual substance, the first thing he says is America pays the Israelis to kill Palestinians all day.
You don't care about them.
And so we're going to kill you.
Bin Laden, 1998.
And John Miller says, oh, yeah, you and what army?
And then what?
Like a month later, there are two embassies are blown up in in Kenya and Tanzania.
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, this is something Americans just have no knowledge of.
The media never talk about the about the blowback on this policy.
I mean, don't we have a right to know what the cost is?
I would say so.
Well, listen, one way to really get your head around these issues, despite all the censorship in American media, is Mondoweiss.net.
I'm urging you all to go and check it out on a regular basis.
Thank you so much for your time on the show today, Phil.
OK.
Talk to you, man.
Philip Weiss, everybody.
Mondoweiss.net.
