09/23/09 – Philip Weiss – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome back to the show Phillip Weiss, author of the Mondo Weiss blog.
How you doing, Phil?
Welcome back to the show.
Thanks, man.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
Now, well, you're welcome and thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Lots of interesting stuff to talk about.
I think the most shocking thing, I saw that you noted this on your blog at MondoWeiss.com, that Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor in the Jimmy Carter administration, and, you know, basically the Henry Kissinger of the Democratic Party, I guess you could call him, establishment wise man sort of guy, as they characterize him up there in Imperial City.
And he has said that the U.S. ought to warn the Israelis that if they try to bomb Iran by flying over Iraq, that our guys will shoot them down.
We're not playing anymore.
Wow.
Talk about, I couldn't believe I read that.
What do you say about that?
Well, I guess I'm not surprised that Brzezinski has that feeling, that attitude.
It's certainly a little more out there than he's been before.
I mean, it's consistent with his view of the whole situation, that this is crazy to be, you know, warmongering with the Iranian regime over this.
I think what's remarkable, though, is it shows up on CNN and, or actually it was at the Daily Beast and then on ABC's blog.
So this sort of stuff is getting attention now where before it was completely marginalized and people are taking the neocons on.
That's good.
The neocons and the interventionists, they're in the Obama administration too.
And finally they're getting some stick from people who are, you know, have their head on their shoulders.
There's kind of been a longstanding dispute going on between Brzezinski and the neocons.
Am I right about that?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, Brzezinski can't stand these people.
And like so many other realists, he was right about the Iraq war.
And they were wrong about it.
And, you know, he said this is a terrible thing to do.
And he's also said repeatedly that Israel-Palestine is central to any understanding of what's going on over there.
You can't deal with the Arab world or the Muslim world in the Middle East without dealing with the American implication on one side of that conflict, Israel's side.
Isn't it strange that, I mean, the way you phrase it, it's funny.
It's, you know, yeah, this is getting a lot of attention.
It got on ABC's blog.
And it's like, wait a minute, we're talking about Zbigniew Brzezinski, the most famous, credentialed, you know, Council on Foreign Relations president kind of guy in all of D.C.
And we ought to be glad that he got mentioned on a blog at abcnews.com for saying this?
Yeah, well, I mean, but consider that, you know, when Brzezinski's name was even associated with Obama during the campaign last year, Obama had to say, oh no, you know, we just, I met with him once and talked to him.
So that is the influence of the Israel lobby in democratic politics.
Let's leave aside the Republicans for a second.
That's the Israel lobby.
You cannot say negative things about the Israeli occupation.
You can't say negative things about the Gaza war.
You can't say anything negative about Israel's behavior and maintain a political life in Washington.
That's what it's about.
And so the fact that he's being mentioned here in a neutral context saying, hey, this is what he says, you know, in a very strong statement, obviously, you know, let's shoot these planes down if they come near Iraq.
You know, that's the end of the special relationship.
He's saying let's end this special relationship with Israel.
And it's because of those kinds of statements that he was completely marginalized last year and Jimmy Carter wasn't allowed to speak at the Democratic convention.
So, you know, we got a long ways to go yet.
It really is amazing.
You know, I didn't grow up in that corridor of power between New York and D.C. and all that stuff.
I'm not that plugged into that kind of thing.
But, you know, I'm kind of looking at bits and pieces and trying to make as much sense of it as I can.
And there was something that we ran on the Anti-War blog a few weeks back that was a big Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter, James Baker, and who was the fourth guy?
I'm forgetting.
Another establishment guy.
And they did like this 20-minute video about enough is enough.
It is time for a two-state peace in Palestine thing.
You know what I'm talking about?
Yeah.
The Landrum bowling thing.
Yeah, it was a documentary that was done online.
Yeah, it was great.
And, I mean, these are the guys who, you know, I thought when I was younger, this is the definition of the American establishment.
I mean, James Baker and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and, you know, of course Brzezinski at least was, I don't know if you know the guy's day-to-day, but was very close to the Rockefellers, a very powerful group of people in the American establishment.
Yeah.
James Baker III, for crying out loud.
We're talking about what I thought were the people who ruled the world.
And yet they're doing YouTubes on the antiwar.com blog because they can't get on TV.
So what does that mean?
Well, it means there's a whole new mood on campus.
It means the neoconservatives took over.
It means from a sociology standpoint the old WASP establishment went out the window and a new meritocratic Jewish establishment came in.
I was a beneficiary of that as a young Jew.
But if you look at the money and the democratic political process, you know, most of it's from, you know, or most of it, yeah, according to the Washington Post, is from Jews.
And that's fine except that, you know, Jewish identity right now is built around support for Israel.
And so you have this kind of support for Israel as an establishment credo that no one can take on.
And when someone does take it on, like Brzezinski, he's called an anti-Semite.
Or Jimmy Carter is called an anti-Semite.
And so, you know, it's just the mood.
It's what the mood is of the establishment right now.
I think it's changing.
I think that the realists are coming in.
I think that Jewish identity is being, you know, even Jewish Americans now have rebelled against this stuff over Gaza.
There's been some rebellion on that.
Although all the major leadership Jewish organizations are, you know, right there with supporting apartheid and blockading Gaza and blowing it to bits.
But, you know, there are some positive changes.
And Obama, I mean, here Obama's administration, there's a lot of people who supported the Iraq War in that administration.
It's full of those people.
And you've got to know that he never supported that war.
He doesn't like the fact that they did that.
And he's determined that we're not going to get into a mess in Iran.
I think that he's sent pretty strong signals on that.
So there have been some real positive signs.
It's really strange because I guess I'm confused why, I mean, it makes perfect sense what you're saying, that the Democratic Party is extremely dependent upon Jewish money.
But we're talking about liberal Jews.
Why does the Democratic Party feel like it has to act like Paul Wolfowitz wants in order to satisfy liberal Jews in America?
That doesn't make any sense to me.
I thought that 2005 was four years ago and that the neoconservatives and everything that they think and do and say is completely discredited, right?
It is discredited, but let's take that apart a little.
First of all, consider that there was wide Democratic support for the Iraq war.
You had a lot of liberal internationalists who were supporting the Iraq war.
They were part of the base on that.
I mean, not the base, but they were part of George Bush's coalition.
I mean, Hillary Clinton voted for that war.
That's why she's not president right now.
If she had voted against that war, she'd be president.
There wouldn't have been room on the left for Obama to come up on her left flank and defeat her a year ago.
So the first part is that their Democratic Party was compromised by this, too, and a lot of Democrats supported it.
Second point, the liberal Jews did not support the Iraq war.
No, they didn't support the Iraq war.
And my mother points this out to me all the time.
The neocons, you know, we were against the Iraq.
I was against the Iraq war.
But what the liberal Jews have never done is they have not accepted the degree to which support for Israel and letting Israel do whatever it wants is implicated in all these policies.
So it's not the neocons policy they're following.
It's the Likud Party's policy.
Yeah, it is the Likud Party.
And right now, look at where we are on this.
What are we asking from Israel right now?
We want a settlement freeze.
And we're not even getting that from Netanyahu.
And who is upset about it in this country?
Who?
You know, you and I are upset.
We don't have a lot of political power.
There are not Democrats raging against the settlements.
There should be Democrats out there saying, take down those settlements.
They are destroying the American image in the Middle East.
And, in fact, if anything, it seems like Netanyahu's position in the prime ministership would be a catalyst for that, that they could say, look, it's Netanyahu.
Netanyahu ain't Israel, and it ain't Netanyahu's way or the highway kind of thing.
It should be easier to break from a kook like him.
It is.
And that is one of the positive developments that we can point to here.
We now have J Street, which is an alternative to AIPAC, which is on the Jewish center left and is trying to give congressmen who have opposed the Gaza war, Israel's slaughter in January, the congressmen who oppose that, J Street is trying to give them political cover.
The congressmen who say, we've got to put pressure on the Netanyahu government, J Street is trying to give them political cover, too.
So there is a movement within the Jewish community to at least take on the Israeli government mildly.
And we'll see what happens with that.
But, you know, so long as, you know, it's sort of like the Cubans, the Cuban lobby in Florida.
The Jews care more about Israel than anybody else in America.
And they're going to get engaged on this question.
And to take, you know, you've got to make other people care about the question.
And other people are only going to care about the question from one time to another.
And so it's really important, just as the Cuba lobby is being changed by demographics and younger Cubans coming along who give a hoot about, you know, Castro and Batista and all that.
You know, now there are younger Jews coming along who say, what?
It's a, you know, Arabs get fired from railroad jobs in Israel because they're not trustworthy.
You just killed 300 children in Gaza and said it was because they were firing rockets at us.
Younger Jews aren't going to buy this stuff.
So there are demographic changes happening within that community that are good.
Indeed.
Well, so let's talk a little bit about that Operation Cast Lead, it was called, right?
Yes, it was.
And is that like a fishing reference, I guess?
That's funny.
I believe that Cast Lead is actually a reference to the Hanukkah festival.
That's over my head.
Traditional Jewish stuff I don't know about.
Yes.
Well, they take their names from various Jewish references.
And this one refers to an aspect of the Hanukkah festival.
And so, yeah, that was the Gaza operation that went from December 27th, I believe, to January 20th or so, right before the inauguration, January 19th, maybe.
And that killed, you know, hundreds of civilians in Gaza.
The Gazans couldn't even flee the operation.
They couldn't, you know, they were blockaded on three sides.
And the Egyptians won't open that border.
So, you know, it was a turkey shoot.
And 13 Israelis died, several of them killed by, you know, friendly fire, whereas 1,400 Palestinians were killed.
Well, now, when that was going on, I guess in January, toward the end of the thing, this happens very occasionally, at least, you know, wherever I've ever lived.
CNN International gets piped in instead of the regular headline news, usually only when something really important has happened or something immediate breaking, because the local, you know, the American CNN reporters, they just, they don't know anything.
They're not capable of covering it.
So they'll turn it over to the CNN International.
And they have a real pretty blonde lady, but she actually knows what she's talking about.
You can tell she's a real journalist and asks real questions and stuff like that.
And I saw on CNN International, they were just playing kind of, as they're talking and interviewing people about it and what have you, they have the footage going on in like, you know, three-quarter screen size or whatever.
And there we can see, plain as day, white phosphorus bombs being used against, as you said, you know, like fish in a barrel, this turkey shoot.
People have penned in, and they're shooting white phosphorus at them live, worldwide, on CNN, not just on Al Jazeera, right, on CNN.
Right.
And that was denied at the time, or there was unconfirmed at the time.
Well, the Goldstone Commission has just come out a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, a 520, 75-page report saying, led by a judge from South Africa who has investigated human rights crimes in South Africa and Bosnia.
A Jew himself has come out and said, these were violations of humanitarian, international humanitarian law, and they dropped white phosphorus right near schools.
They did it right near the UN.
So, yeah, the kids that I saw when I was in Gaza, kids who were scarred for life by, you know, and some of them haven't even been treated for these wounds that they've gotten from white phosphorus.
That was, you know, likely a war crime, and where's the investigation of it?
The Human Rights Council of the UN has taken this report, and it's recommended that they go to the International Criminal Court on these charges for an investigation.
And what is the United States going to do?
Are they going to block that?
Hell, yeah, they are.
Yeah, that'll be the day, I'll tell you what.
Well, tell me about your trip.
I'd forgotten.
You went to the Middle East.
You saw Obama's Cairo speech in Cairo.
Yeah, I did.
And you went on a tour of Gaza.
The people in the audience almost never get to hear someone tell, what is the Gaza Strip?
Where is it?
What's it like there?
Who are these people?
What is their circumstance?
I mean, literally, we could be talking about Turkmenistan or something, as far as the average American is concerned, Phil.
Yeah, I mean, I think the, yeah, you're looking at a strip of land that's half the size of the county I'm sitting in right now in New York, Putnam County.
You know, it's around, Gaza is around 150 square miles.
So it's a tiny strip of land bordered by the Mediterranean Sea, Israel, and Egypt.
And there are one and a half million Palestinians living there, most of them refugees from the 1948 war that created Israel.
So Israel was created by a U.N. partition.
There was supposed to be an Arab state 62 years ago.
You know, six decades passed, and there's a Jewish state, but there's no Arab state.
And that's the source of this problem here.
And these people were promised a state 60 years ago.
They never had one.
You know, you say Turkmenistan.
Well, there are a lot of Muslim states that have been formed since then, Kosovo, Tajikistan, you know, Pakistan.
You know, there are places where people have gotten a state.
They never got their state.
And so these are refugees living essentially under occupation there, blockaded by Israel on three sides.
And, you know, you're going into one of the poorest areas in the world, incredible malnutrition.
Yes, there's an Islamic movement there, and there are terrorists in that, you know, Hamas has sworn by violent resistance as a way to fight the blockade.
Let's remember that Israel was blockaded on one port, just one side, one corner, in 1967, and it launched the Six-Day War and attacked two Arab countries and subsequently, you know, engaged Jordan.
But that was because of a blockade.
And here you have the Gazans who have been blockaded for years.
You know, they don't let posture surfboards in.
And this report that just came out to the Human Rights Council, the UN, says these people are being persecuted.
And that's what I witnessed when I was there.
I saw persecution.
I saw people whose way of life is being sort of destroyed in any way possible.
So it's just disgraceful.
And it's just about, you know, lust for territory on the part of the Israelis.
And they want these people, you know, who knows what they want.
They want them just to... they have them in a ghetto there.
They have them in a ghetto.
Well, and, you know, so it all ties together, right?
You have a media shutout in America.
You have a humanitarian crisis that basically the rest of the world can see right in front of their eyes every day.
And you talked about how people, if they don't have, if they don't see a personal direct tie somehow to the question, it's just like, you know, most people don't care about Cuba, right?
Just like you said, it's not their issue.
But the thing is, and this is something we've talked about before, and this is something that I think, you know, is the most important way to get people to understand that this is important to them, is that Osama bin Laden, since 1996, has cited Israel's war crimes as his reason that he's declaring, as one of his main reasons for declaring war on the United States of America.
And also, Terry McDermott, the LA Times reporter, in his book, Perfect Soldiers, the biography of the lead hijackers, the pilots, said that Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Sheib and those guys would sit around at their Hamburg apartment and talk about what Israel did today and why they need to go kill Americans for that.
That was before they decided to go to Afghanistan and hook up with Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Three thousand Americans died as revenge for what Israel does, because America, in general, you know, collectively, basically in people's opinion, has to take responsibility for what Israel does to people in Lebanon and in the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza.
And people have got to understand that, or we're going to keep having American civilians killed en masse like that.
Yeah.
Now, obviously, I think Osama bin Laden has other motivation as well, but he has cited that repeatedly, as you say, and lately has said Americans should read Jimmy Carter's book, should read Walton Mearsheimer's book.
Isn't that amazing?
Yeah, it is.
It's great.
It's amazing.
I mean, here you have a mass murderer, but that's his motivation.
In some large part, that is his motivation.
And the thing is that George Mischel knows this.
Barack Obama knows this.
And the question is, to what degree can they bring this American interest in getting out of this mess and ceasing to be on the part of the oppressor in Israel and Palestine?
To what extent can they actually bring that forward as a policy?
And, you know, there are some hopeful signs.
There are signs that, I mean, I think Obama really cares about this, or he wouldn't have given him the Cairo speech, in which he promised that he was going to work for justice in Israel and Palestine and end the oppression of the Palestinians.
I mean, he spoke of occupation and he spoke of humiliation in that speech.
Very powerful words to the Arab world.
And George Mischel was saying 10 years ago, stop this.
Dismantle the settlements.
And now they won't even freeze the settlements.
So I think we're headed toward some type of collision on this in terms of American policy and Israeli policy.
And I have some faith that there will be an American effort to pressure the Israelis, that the day of a blank check is over.
I mean, you know, I grasp at straws.
That's the character of, you know, being an optimist and working on an issue as closely as I do this one.
But there was a Hollywood agent, Gavin Pallone, who was on MSNBC just yesterday or so saying, hey, there's apartheid over there and we can't be giving Israelis a blank check.
This is one of the first times I've heard a Hollywood person say this.
It's an obvious truth that if it's not apartheid, I think it's apartheid.
I've seen it, it's apartheid.
You know, call it Jim Crow, call it segregation.
Whatever you want to call it, it's affliction, and it's on a racial basis, and it's causing resentment throughout that world.
And, you know, we've got to stop writing the check for these, underwriting anything these people want to do.
Well, I'd like to actually add in here too, Phil, because I know how people are, and they try to take things to mean whatever they want them to mean.
And the fact of the matter is here is I'm not justifying anything that those people did.
I'm not giving them excuses.
I'm simply explaining it.
It's simply the objective reality truth.
Anyone can go to the PBS NewsHour website and read The Declaration of War by bin Laden from 1996.
It's all about the quantum masker.
They can go read it for themselves, and that doesn't say that he's justified or anything like that at all.
It just says this is the motivation of the people that we're dealing with.
As long as we pretend that this isn't part of it, that we're not dealing with consequences for certain actions, then we're going to keep suffering those consequences.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I absolutely agree with you.
And, I mean, I think that's what Obama's motivated by is that this is in the American interest.
If we don't resolve this, and he made a promise to those people, and that was interpreted as a promise in Cairo.
And if he doesn't follow through on that, I think that there really are going to be, you know, it's just going to be, who was it?
Who was it?
I think Jordan's king said recently that there's going to be another war around here within a year and a half if something isn't done.
Well, and you know, one thing here, and I'm sorry, we're almost out of time, but see what you know about this, because I don't know much, but I read Bob Dreyfuss talking about General Dayton's army.
There's an American general that's built an army for a Palestinian state over there in the West Bank, and these guys have got to have a mission, or then what?
Yeah, right, that's a good point.
It's sort of like they started building this thing in preparation for, yeah, about the time we're done training them, it'll be time to have a Palestinian state.
Well, if there's no Palestinian state, then what are you going to have except a new armed wing of Fatah at war?
Right, right, great point, great point.
And then, you know, Hamas and Fatah at each other's throats, and you know, it's a nasty situation.
Well, and you know, as far as the Israeli insistence that they don't have to deal with Hamas because Hamas are terrorists and whatever, don't you think that the Israeli government and the American government, you know, collectively or whatever, have to take some responsibility for the fact that Hamas holds the power in Gaza right now, that this is all the fault of their stupid election, and they tried to cause that civil war between Fatah and Hamas when they were working out a coalition, and then the civil war, just Fatah lost and Hamas got even more power.
I mean, this is nothing but George Bush and Condoleezza Rice's fault.
It seems grossly unfair to say, oh, well, we don't have to make any concession whatsoever on Gaza ever, as long as Hamas is the power in that land.
Well, I mean, the other part of that is, look what we just did in Iraq.
What did the Democrats say again and again in the Congress?
They said you have to deal with the Sunnis who are out of power now and doing suicide bombing in Iraq.
They have to be part of the government coalition.
They're a minority, but they have to be included.
And they were terrorists, but we worked with them to form a government.
We bought them off.
We negotiated with them.
That's right.
And so the same holds for, you know, here's another political territorial dispute, and one side has been treated as terrorists for 60 years.
And, you know, what resources have they had?
They have been fighting resistance.
They've been doing it in really ugly ways at times.
But no one is dealing with them as people who have a territorial claim here.
All right.
Well, this thing is going to be a long time before it's settled.
I hope I can keep having you back to talk about it, Phil.
Thanks, Scott.
I appreciate it, man.
I appreciate your time on the show today.
Everybody, that's Philip Weiss.
The website is Mondoweiss.net.