All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and as promised, our next guest is Robert Perry.
He is an American investigative journalist.
He's won the Polk Award for national reporting.
It was back in 1984 for breaking the Iran-Contra story, uncovering Oliver North's involvement in it, and he's a master investigative journalist, particularly on the corruption of the Republicans going back to the Carter years, at least, maybe Gerald Ford years.
He's the author of the book Lost History, Contra's Cocaine, the Press, and Project Truth, and Secrecy and Privilege, Rise of the Bush Dynasty, From Watergate to Iraq.
Welcome to the show.
Bob, how are you doing?
Pretty good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
I appreciate you joining us here on the show today, and I'd like to congratulate you on the brand spanking new site there at ConsortiumNews.com.
It looks great.
Well, thanks.
I guess we've been sort of slow in modernizing because we're not focused on the techie side.
We're more focused on the content side.
But finally, I had my arm twisted enough to agree that we should make it look like more of a modern website than we did, a little less homemade.
So, again, without a lot of money, but we did put together, I think, a much sharper looking website, but still focused on the content, not the bells and whistles.
Sure, yeah, yeah, of course.
But you're right.
I mean, it's just, well, it's more pleasing to the eye.
You come, it's nice and clean and a nice black print on white background and good wide margins.
And it's nice.
Looks good.
Web 2.0 of 2011.
You're here.
All right.
So everyone go check out ConsortiumNews.com.
Support ConsortiumNews.com.
Why not?
Cheering Netanyahu's intransigence.
Maybe we could just start with the reaction, the back and forth.
Well, I don't know.
I guess we got to start with the substance of what Barack Obama actually said a little bit here.
And then the reaction and the back and forth with the political parties in D.C. and, of course, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and all this.
It's a huge tempest in the teapot from this end.
I don't know.
What do you think?
Well, I wish it were just teapot.
I think there's real danger here because the way Congress reacted in terms of having this sort of competition between Republicans and Democrats to out cheer one another for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, they've created this impression among hardliners in Israel that they really don't have to make serious concessions for peace, that they can take a very hard line, and then maybe take even a harder line.
There's almost like nothing they feel that they would do that the U.S. Congress would object to.
Now, see, that might be confusing to people in the audience, though, because we've been subjected to a week full of Benjamin, I mean, Barack Obama laid down the gauntlet, took the side of the Palestinians against the Israelis, and is going to force the Israelis back to the 67 lines and poor Israelis.
Well, that obviously isn't what happened.
What happened is that, first of all, President Obama has been very much supportive of Israel, as he repeated again, in his speech to AIPAC, if you saw that over the weekend.
But he did say, which is something that was actually not that controversial, really, or shouldn't have been, because it's been a position held by both former U.S. Presidents and even Israeli Prime Ministers in the past, including Netanyahu in the past, that the negotiations for a boundary between the Palestinian state and the Israeli state should use the 1967 borders as a starting point with land swaps.
While it was often talked about in private negotiations, it has been public in different ways.
President Bush said things that were similar.
Netanyahu and Secretary of State Clinton had a joint statement that went along these same lines.
That part was sort of a tempest in a teapot, but it was, in a sense, that Netanyahu reacted very angrily to President Obama stating something that had been fairly much established policy.
And he made that an issue, and the Republicans trying to peel off as many Jewish American voters as possible also made that an issue, and basically attacked Obama for, quote, throwing Israel under the bus.
So you had that kind of reaction to the President of the United States essentially reiterating what had been long-standing policy, that even the Israelis had agreed to.
What it really showed was how Netanyahu could use the political divisions in the United States to his advantage, and pushing things actually farther away from any hope of having serious peace talks.
Well, going back to Obama's original speech, I mean, I was hoping you could break down some of the details of the way he framed it, because it seemed to me, in fact, we ran at antiwar.com a piece that ran immediately in Haaretz saying, Obama just handed Netanyahu everything.
He says in here, oh yeah, 67 borders, all right, like you say, reiterating the long-standing American policy.
But he built in 100 different, the burden is on the Palestinians to do everything first, and then the only mandate to the Israelis is that maybe someday they show up at a peace conference or something, but not that anything actually happened.
I mean, that was the way I read it.
Right, I would agree that basically President Obama was taking a fairly pro-Israeli side on this, but even this rather small point that Netanyahu disagreed with was then blown up into a major confrontation, which set the stage for this bizarre performance a couple days ago, in which Netanyahu was invited to speak to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, and you had both Democrats and Republicans bouncing up and down every time he spoke a few words to give him a standing ovation, something that not even American presidents get when they do a State of the Union address, when there's, I think, too much of that bouncing up and down in those cases, too.
But this was like the two sides competing to show that, no, I'm more pro-Israeli than you are.
Well, speaking of throwing at buses, Harry Reid betrayed Obama right off the bat, the majority leader in the Senate.
Well, I think that's, you know, there's obviously a point where the Congress is so afraid of offending the hardline Israeli supporters that it is essentially giving a carte blanche to people like Netanyahu.
And things could get much worse.
The point I was trying to make was, and I try to make in this article you're referring to at consortiumnews.com, is the fact that there are already plans afoot among the hardline Likudniks, people in Netanyahu's own party, to move very aggressively against the Palestinians if they seek, as they're expected to, U.N. recognition of their own state.
They're expected to go to the U.N. in September and have the General Assembly recognize a Palestinian state.
Now, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, Danny Danan, who is, you know, one of his, he's in, he's part of Netanyahu's ruling coalition.
He's a Likudnik.
He has proposed, he did this on the op-ed page of the New York Times.
You can go back last week and look at it.
He said if this happens, Israel should annex the entire West Bank and essentially settle it, make the Palestinian towns essentially mini-Gazas, you know, essentially sort of wall them off and leave the Palestinians with no means of support in these enclaves, while Israel would take control of everything else.
So what that suggests is that you would have a very dangerous situation, um, dangerous for not just for the Palestinians, but I think for Israel and certainly for its image around the world.
All right, well, we'll have to hold it right there, everybody.
We're talking with Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com, the brand new and improved, reopened under the same management, ConsortiumNews.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Bob Perry from ConsortiumNews.com.
The piece is cheering Netanyahu's intransigence and he was just talking about this op-ed that was published in the New York Times on the 18th, Making the Land of Israel Whole.
It's by Danny Danon, who is a member of the Likudnik group, and a deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset.
And it says, well, they basically leave out, let's force march all the Palestinians, uh, you know, off of the West Bank, across the Jordan River, maybe just into it and says, well, but still let's just annex all of the West Bank.
And you know what I wonder when I look at, um, you know, Obama's, uh, uh, highfalutin rhetoric to, to the contrary and his actions, uh, coinciding, I wonder if he's just trying to a wink, nod agreement between the Americans and the Israelis that the Israelis are going to get all of what they call, uh, Samaria and, uh, the Palestinians be damned.
And we'll sit here and, and say, oh yeah, 67 borders and two state solution, this, that, and the other thing from now until eternity.
And, and, uh, well, or from now until it's too late, you know?
Well, I think what Danon is also proposing is, uh, is quite simple.
He's proposing that well, I think what Danon is also proposing is, uh, is quite sinister in that he's, what he's saying is that, that the Palestinians on the West Bank could not be citizens.
They would be confined to these unannexed, uh, unannexed, uh, communities or towns.
Um, that, this sounds awfully much like apartheid.
And I know that's a sensitive point.
Any defenders of Israel don't like to have what Israel is doing to the Palestinians compared to what the white supremacists did to the blacks in South Africa.
But, uh, this plan really moves it in, without any question, into that direction.
Well, and you're just really paraphrasing, uh, Ehud Barak, the former prime minister, the current defense minister of Israel, when you say that.
Right.
There's no question.
This, this is, and when, when president, uh, when former president Carter, uh, included that in the, in the, in the title of one of his books, uh, you know, whether it go to peace or apartheid, um, there was outrage among, uh, defenders of Israel, but it was a warning, you know, and what is so sad here is that many of the, I think the greatest friends of Israel, people that care about Israel, um, are being dismissed and rejected and denounced as anti-Israel or anti-Semitic when they are simply, uh, providing advice that was well taken.
You had the other case where the same fellow, Danan, held a hearing at the Knesset earlier this year where the, uh, Jewish American group J Street was summoned, was summoned to Israel, uh, and then, and, and, and subjected to kind of a McCarthyistic hearing where it was accused of being, uh, anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian because it had, had objected to, uh, the Israeli expansion of settlements.
Um, so you have, and what Danan made clear in this was that, that American Jews are not going to be allowed to dissent, that they must line up behind whatever Israel does, whatever the government of Israel does, they must, uh, just say, yes, sir, and that's their function, that's their role.
And it was quite, you know, for some, for some, uh, Jewish Americans, it was highly offensive that the Likud party is now insisting on that kind of regimented support for its policies.
Well, you know, it's puzzling to me, uh, well, first of all, before I get to the puzzling part, uh, which is, I'll go ahead and say now, so I don't forget it, what I thought was official Likud policy that land swaps and give up the West Bank because it is, it is what it is, that pretty much everybody agreed with that longstanding American and even Likud policy, I thought it was, but, um, what about my, uh, wild assertion that there's sort of a, uh, a wink, nod agreement between the Americans and the Israelis to just let this all continue until, uh, eventually maybe, uh, the, the Palestinians are simply forced out of the West Bank, off of the West Bank?
Well, I don't really see particular evidence for that, at least not at the, at the, at the White House level.
Um, I mean, certainly you could look at what happened in Congress this week and suggest that there is that sort of do whatever you want, uh, carte blanche, uh, message that's being sent to Netanyahu, but I do think that at the executive branch level, and this is not just the Obama administration, in many ways it was, um, it was, it also involved previous, some number of previous administrations, uh, there has been this desire to, to have the Israelis reach some kind of accord, as difficult as that might be, with the Palestinians and make the best of it.
Um, so I, so I don't think there's, it's necessarily what the U.S. would like, but President Obama, what he was shown this week was how vulnerable he is to, uh, to any accusation that he's anti-Israel.
Uh, and I think you have, you have also this, the history, this, you know, there was a point, and I've done a lot of work on this, and I did a story over the, uh, or end of last week, about how the, how President Carter, when he was denounced by, and much, the, the first Likud Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, when Begin was angry with Carter for, uh, pushing Begin into the Sinai, uh, give back from, at the Camp David Accord, the, the peace deal with Egypt, uh, Begin was so angry at Carter for that, and so suspicious that Carter would try to force Likud into a, into accepting a Palestinian state if he got a second term.
Begin threw his lot in with the Republicans, with the, with the Reagan campaign, and, and did everything he possibly could to see, to, to make sure Jimmy Carter didn't get that second term.
So you have this history there of, of that, that Israel feels it can pull strings inside the United States, uh, in ways that will intimidate, uh, politicians, including presidents, uh, and, and a special fear is that, that in a second term, when a president is deemed not as susceptible to the, for the political pressures of re-election, that he might actually be more aggressive with Israel in trying to force it to make, uh, a peace deal with the Palestinians.
And this has been Likud policy, really, since the beginning, since the, since it emerged in the 1970s.
Whatever they say, whatever the rhetoric is, um, they, Likud has always found excuses to make sure the peace talks don't go anywhere.
And sometimes, of course, the Palestinians have made mistakes, too, or, or misjudgments, or, or they've been pig-headed at times.
But, but, but, but every time there's a chance for, for some kind of deal, Likud comes up with some reason not to do it.
And one of the new ones that Netanyahu threw in, which he repeated in before the Congress, was that the Palestinians must not just accept Israel's right to exist.
The Palestinians must say that Israel is a Jewish state.
And the Palestinians have said that, first of all, since they have 20 percent of their population, of Israel's population is Arab, that the Palestinians don't want to do it.
But, but, but secondly, they say, it's not our business, it's not the business of any outsider to define somebody else's state.
Israel can do that for itself.
They don't need the Palestinians to do it any more than they would need the Americans or anyone else to do it.
But, but here's something that, that it has a very emotional appeal.
It is sort of, in a sense, kind of pointless, but it's something that Netanyahu has made a precondition.
Right, well, and it takes as its premise a total lie, which is that the problem here is that the Palestinians won't recognize the state of Israel, when the problem is the Israelis won't recognize the state of Palestine.
It's not a dispute whether Israel has a state or not.
It's the Palestinians who are living under permanent occupation.
Right.
And they just turn the, they just turn the whole argument into this, like, fantasy land where we all have to start out debunking the Sarah Palin position before we even begin, you know?
Right.
And it's, but it's worked very effectively for Likud.
And I think you're right when you say that, and I think it's true that Likud has always had this policy of, of settling, of taking over, essentially annexing the West Bank or as much of it as possible.
And it's not just security concerns.
And I've sympathized, I spent time in Israel, especially in the early 90s, and I, I'm sympathetic to, to their legitimate security concerns.
However, the, having some of these settlements where they are has nothing to do with security.
These are settlements that actually would, would in many ways make Israel less secure in terms of its boundaries, because they, they reach out into the West Bank.
This is not a matter of, in a sense, widening certain narrow parts.
So you have this, you have a lot of the settlements around Jerusalem, for instance.
So, so there's a lot, this is not really true, what the Israelis are claiming.
They're, Likud has never wanted to sort of be upfront, at least with Americans, about what its real goal is.
And that is to take back what Likud considers the biblical lands of Israel, Judea and Samaria.
And, and essentially, to make sure that the, that the Palestinians aren't there anymore.
Or if they are there, they're there only in very small numbers.
So they can be used as laborers and some kind of second class citizens, but not as full participants in the society.
And then that, and that's been the dilemma.
How do you get rid of the Palestinians and take back the land?
And that's why I think Danan's op-ed was so important in the New York Times.
He kind of lays it out.
Right, yeah, he does.
Again, that's called Making the Land of Israel Whole.
And that's Bob Perry.
His latest piece is at ConsortiumNews.com, cheering Netanyahu's intransigence.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Bob.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
