All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm joined on the phone now by Philip Weiss.
He keeps the great blog Mondoweiss, the war of ideas in the Middle East at mondoweiss.net.
Welcome to the show.
Phil, how are you doing, man?
Great, man.
And yourself?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining me today.
Not a problem.
So all the big headlines are, well, I'll go with McClatchy because forget the Washington Post.
McClatchy newspaper says U.S. drops push for Israeli freeze on settlement construction.
What U.S. push for an Israeli freeze on settlement construction?
How can they drop something that they never had?
Phil, how does that work?
It's like the stewardess saying, welcome to Chicago when she's on the same plane as you.
Doesn't make any sense.
That's funny.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think they've just sort of thrown in the towel and admitted it now for all to see.
Isn't that?
That's the best part about it, you know, is that we can just all see how ridiculous the whole thing is.
Well, and so what was the narrative anyway?
They were trying to pretend the Obama team, right, that they were trying to get the Israeli government to do something, weren't they?
Yeah.
I mean, in Cairo's speech of a year and a half ago now, Obama said directly the settlements must end.
Here's an American president and the Arab world or whatever you want to call it.
The Muslim world, Egypt, Cairo, you know, the people I talked to that day in Cairo, they took him seriously.
They thought that Obama meant it, that he wanted to end the Israeli expansion across what they call Eretz Israel in Israel.
And he failed.
They gave up on it.
He tried for a while.
He got humiliated by Netanyahu.
Netanyahu turned to all his friends over here, the American Jewish community, basically refused to line up on Obama's side on this.
They sided by and large.
The leadership, all the American Jewish leadership to speak of, you know, came out for the settlers.
So I mean, J Street certainly might have tried, but generally Obama got no political cover for this position within the Democratic Party, within the American Jewish community.
And so he's dropped it.
He's forgotten about it.
And Netanyahu's claim of 10 years ago, before he was prime minister, after he was prime minister the first time, but 10 years ago, he said in casual comments that were recorded, America is something that can be easily moved.
And for an Israeli prime minister, that is true.
America is something that can be easily moved.
The good thing about this is that in order to get a quote unquote settlement freeze, whatever the heck that was, I mean, they've got 500, half a million, half a million Israelis are in the occupied territories, building their homes, living in their homes.
They're not going anywhere.
But this is just a freeze on further expansion, which Israel is thumbing its nose at the Americans over in any case.
But in order to get the latest extension of the freeze by a couple of, three months, the United States was going to turn over war planes, increase military aid, do all this stuff that even sort of middle of the road columnists were saying is embarrassing and humiliating to the United States.
So the good part of this is that there has been a sort of the beginnings of a conversation about an American interest that is somewhat at odds with Israel's.
And that's been encouraging.
And the kind of humiliations of the American relationship with Israel, I don't think they're coming to an end by any means.
I mean, they just continue.
But, you know, maybe there's going to be more of a discussion about it, because here is something that happened before our eyes in which the United States was repeatedly humiliated.
Our president made a declaration in Cairo, the settlements must end and has done been able to do nothing about it.
Well, what's the matter with him anyway?
It seems like he blew all his political capital on a bunch of stuff nobody wanted.
Like even the Democrats were almost in majority opposed to the health care thing.
The American people in general were.
And I remember reading on your blog where Obama was being threatened by Democrats that if you don't back down on Israel, we won't support you on your health care thing.
And we're in this giant catastrophe.
All it does is, you know, it's not like it's free health care for poor people or anything like that.
All it does is force everybody to buy insurance at gunpoint and at the threat of massive penalties and whatever.
And he blew his entire political capital on getting that favor done for the big insurance companies.
And he's got nothing left for anything else.
Yeah.
I mean, his only mandate really, Phil, when it was to undo the Bush legacy, it wasn't to go and do a Pelosi agenda for remaking America.
It was just trying to undo the 21st century so far.
That's what the people wanted him to do.
And also, when you speak about spending political capital, if you've been elected by, what was it, 53 percent of the American people or more, you know, that's not spending political capital when they tell you that they want to not to have adventurous wars overseas.
That's what they want.
That's that's your that's your your mandate.
And that makes you richer.
Yeah.
You think it make him richer.
Right.
There's no expenditure.
I mean, I don't understand why he didn't go to the American people on this.
Well, I know why.
But because the political capital that was at stake was not sort of our normal political capital.
It was the support of the right wing Jewish community.
And that's what was at stake here.
And he knew that he couldn't sacrifice it, even inside the Democratic Party, because the American Jewish community, which is so important in Democratic Party politics in funding the presidential elections, is just right wing on these issues.
You think he ever really meant in the first place that Cairo speech?
Because it always occurred to me that he was being really honest in his AIPAC speech where he said, hey, whatever you guys want, including a unified Israeli Jerusalem forever, which was further than any American presidential candidate at least had ever mandated or said should be the case.
Right.
I mean, I thought now there's the real Barack Obama right there.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
I guess I'm more hopeful about Obama and that I think that he did spend time in Chicago with Rashid Khalidi, a leading Palestinian American scholar.
And he gets the issue.
He knows that you're never going to have peace in this region if you allow continued Israeli expansion, let alone control of Jerusalem.
They did retract that statement, you know, a day or two after he pandered to AIPAC and made the statement.
I guess I just think I think that he really understood as his military advisers were telling him that you got to attack this problem, Palestinian oppression.
Well, George Mitchell had the reputation, right?
He the gravitas or whatever.
Talk about political capital.
Right.
I'm George Mitchell in here.
I'm going to get things done.
And then he got nothing done.
Right.
What happened to him?
Is he still on the job?
I think he still is on the job, but I think he sort of got sandbagged by, you know, more hardline Israel lobbyists.
I mean, Dennis Ross is all over this thing.
And, you know, he's he was last before he came into the Obama administration.
He was chairman of the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem, which, you know, is concerned with the future of the Jewish people in Israel and people choose not intermarry in the United States.
I mean, this guy is not a fair broker.
And I think he's all over this process.
So I don't I think I just have a sense that Mitchell has not had been able to use the tools.
None of these people have been able to use the tools that they that should be used in international negotiation.
And those include freezing somebody, telling someone to get lost.
You know, here's a guy, Netanyahu, who's prime minister of a country of what, six million people.
They occupy another five or six.
But a country of six million people, when do we give back a country that size the time of day when they're defying our wishes?
And that's why everything is just, you know, screwy here.
Yeah.
Well, and that's certainly a big part of what we need to discuss when we come back from this break, is the power of the Israel lobby in the United States.
I mean, just the way you put it, six million versus three hundred ten million seems like their power balance is out of balance.
It's Phil Weiss from the Mondo Weiss blog.
Mondo Weiss dot net.
We'll be right back.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Philip Weiss.
He keeps the blog Mondo Weiss.
He's got a stable of great writers over there that contribute as well.
Including a guy named Adam Horowitz, who I don't think is the beastie boy.
We're talking about America's relationship with Israel and Israel's relationship with the occupied millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
And now I saw this thing today and I just thought, you know, I can't think of a good way to change it around because of the religious ties in the state and whatever here.
I was going to flip it around and make it about whites and blacks in America to see how outrageous it sounds, Phil.
But anyway, people can use their imagination.
The headline is from the independent dot co dot UK.
Israeli moderates outraged as rabbis target non-Jews.
Over 40 prominent Israeli rabbis, some of them public servants, yesterday targeted the country's million plus Arab minority.
These are not occupying the West Bank and Gaza.
These are Israeli citizens with a religious edict warning their congregations not to rent property to non-Jews.
And I was just thinking, man, if that happened in America, what would the if that happened to blacks or Puerto Ricans or anybody else in America, Mexicans at the hands of Lou Dobb in the right wing, what would the American Jews say about that?
It would be unbelievable.
It would be an unbelievable reaction.
And they would be the leaders of the movement.
They would stop it in its tracks.
They would.
And you know, the thing is that Jews did play such an important role in the civil rights struggle in the United States.
Where are the congregations in America condemning this right now?
I mean, there have been some condemnations, but what the failure is, the American Jewish failure is the failure to recognize that this is absolutely representative of a current in that society and perhaps the main current of that society, which is racism towards the Palestinian minority, let alone the people who are completely oppressed in the occupied territories.
And American Jews have signed off on this by and large because, you know, this is the the great liberation struggle of American Jewry or of Jewry.
And meanwhile, you know, we're doing great in the United States because of minority freedom that we have helped to ensure.
And we're helping to rubbish that freedom in Israel and Palestine.
It's a complete outrage.
And there is no condemnation befitting, you know, how outrageous it is.
It's just it's so repulsive.
And it's just I don't know, you get these wake up calls all the time around this issue.
And meanwhile, you know, I have family members who are angry about me for even talking about it.
And these are, you know, people who would, you know, shed tears over Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, the martyrs of the civil rights struggle, two of whom were Jewish in Philadelphia, Mississippi, that famous case in the early 60s.
You know, where where is the where is the liberal American Jewish community on this?
They're just AWOL.
They just are completely AWOL.
And that's why a lot of young Jews are really just questioning what happened to our community when it it, you know, lifted the goblet of Zionism and and and drank deep.
Yeah, well, and even Zionism kind of started out as sort of a hippie utopian socialist kind of thing, not that I'm for socialism, but it sort of meant, well, it seems like Israel now is just run by right wing nationalists, mean old sons of bitches, man.
Yeah, I think you're right.
That's that's a great analysis.
I mean, look, any movement of the sort of kind of cultural breadth of Zionism.
I mean, you look at communism.
It had it looked good on paper in some ways.
There were very idealistic people who were called toward communism at a time of tremendous inequity.
And, you know, probably, you know, and I mean, I'm half a socialist, as you know.
But but it didn't work out that well in the former Soviet Union now, did it?
And now we're seeing how Zionism is working out.
And it's just what you're saying.
It's not those idealistic components and even those idealistic components, if you look at them more critically, they were part of a, you know, a pretty racist, in many ways, regime, you know, that ethnically cleansed the land, that didn't let people come back to their homes on the basis of religion and race.
So, you know, for all the kumbaya feeling, I mean, those those kibbutzes, you know, that Noam Chomsky and others went to over to work in, they didn't let Palestinians join.
You know, it's just like, can you imagine, you know, farms in the south that wouldn't hire blacks?
I mean, that would be outrageous.
Right.
Some hippie commune.
Yeah, it's not that exclusive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, OK, so now here's the thing.
I mean, especially the way we're talking about it, like, I don't know, maybe it's hypocritical as Americans because it's hadn't been that long and there's still a lot of racism in our society and whatever.
But it seems to me like Israel isn't even a Western society, like it really fits in with the Arab societies as sort of this kind of old world, never heard of John Locke yet kind of a place.
And so if that's how they are, then why are they even our ally at all?
They don't help us strategically.
And and how can it be, as you put it before the the break there, that a country with six million people can somehow I think it's your premise, you know, get this American empire to carry out policies in its favor against our own interests.
And and it seems, you know, at least from here, as though they're they are virtually undefeated in the ring, too.
Yeah, they're pretty undefeated.
I mean, how does it work?
How could it possibly be that way?
You know, the satellite gets to tell the empire what to do.
You know, to me, it's all the problem is that all this analysis, this political analysis ends with a big why.
And, you know, the problem with you're asking the right question is what I'm saying.
And and even these columnists I mentioned earlier who were baffled and angry about the craven American offer to the Israelis to just please free settlements for another three months.
Those columnists would say, why is America on bended knee here?
They know why we're on bended knee.
And this gets back to the issue of Jewish identity, because, you know, my people, the people I am most proud of in life.
I mean, I grew up among I mean, now, you know, I'm fairly assimilated, but I grew up in a very culturally circumscribed Jewish environment.
I'm I'm I will always be proud of Jewish achievement and Jewish values, but my people are very empowered in the United States and they believe in Zionism by and large.
And Dershowitz has said it's our sacred mission to protect Israel.
And Netanyahu comes over and Orrin come over here and say you have to support Israel through thick and thin.
And American Jews have been obedient to those or those calls.
And, you know, not only have they been obedient, but they have real influence in American foreign policy.
And so until you deal with this knotted issue of is it all Jews?
No, it's not.
Look at Adam Horowitz.
Look at Phil Weiss.
Look at the polls.
Yeah, right.
I mean, the polls say that most American Jews are for the peace and against the Likud and that kind of thing.
Yeah, but the problem with that is that even in the I mean, the Jewish community remains remains fairly liberal.
But when you test them on questions of giving up the West Bank, they're not really that liberal about it or giving dividing Jerusalem.
They're not that liberal.
And so even J Street, which is, you know, this liberal, this alternative to AIPAC and the Israel lobby, which tried to say, hey, let's end these settlements.
They couldn't really make any headway on that because they couldn't get strong Jewish support.
So I think my community is pretty backward on these issues.
It's just really backward and it's empowered and it enjoys immunity from the press scrutiny.
And until the press scrutiny begins, the politicians won't go near it.
And so we're in this kind of bind and Americans are slowly, slowly waking up.
That is happening.
I mean, just yesterday, a friend mentioned if you look at Obama's when Obama came into office, he did this thing on what should I change in foreign policy?
He did this ask, you know, when it was all Kumbaya, we just won.
We're so excited, you know, ask the voters, what do you want from me in foreign policy?
Overwhelmingly, people said, change Israel, Palestine.
Paul.
So Americans are waking up.
The General Jones, former NSC advisor, General Petraeus, you know, these guys have said, hey, change that, change this policy.
You look in the WikiLeaks cables, you see people saying all over the Middle East, hey, they're recruiting terrorists based on our role in the injustices of Palestine.
So.
Well, and here's the thing we talk about the Israel lobby.
I mean, I think, you know, even if you say in majority, American Jews are bad on these issues, if you really test them in general, they are liberals, as you say, and tend to be for peace.
If they had good leadership, they probably go for it.
But even then, Jews are only like two percent of the population of America.
So it's a real case of the economics of democracy in it, where the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Most Americans don't give a crap about Palestine at all.
And so the ones who do care about it are the people who are for Benjamin Netanyahu.
You got it.
And they get what they want.
I agree with you.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we're out of time.
I really appreciate your time on the show.
I hope we can do it again soon.
That's Phil Weiss, Mondoweiss.net.
