Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - Bad Hasbara 69: Stone Cold Liars, with Rashid Khalidi

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

Matt and Daniel are joined by Palestinian-American historian and author Rashid Khalidi to discuss the fall of Assad in Syria, the United States' major parties' views on Palestine, and whether Bill Clinton needs a lozenge.Please donate to Mercy Corps: https://www.mercycorps.org/Buy Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627798556/thehundredyearswaronpalestine/Buy Refaat Alareer's If I Must Die: https://orbooks.com/catalog/if-i-must-die/Subscribe to the Patreon https://www.patreon.com/badhasbaraSubscribe/listen to Bad Hasbara wherever you get  your podcasts.Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/5RDvo87OzNLA78UH82MI55Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-hasbara-the-worlds-most-moral-podcast/id1721813926Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Mashwama bitch, a ribbon polka toast. We invented the terry tomato and weighs USB drives and the iron d'o. Israeli salad, oozy, stents, and jopas orange rose. Micro chips is us. iPhone cameras us. Taco salads us. Polaramos us. Olive garden us.

White foster us. Zabrahamas. As far as us. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Bad Hasbara. Still the world's most moral podcast. That's right. And we are here still being the most moral host. My name is Matt Lieb.

And mine's Daniel Matze. And we're so excited for all of you to join us here today for another fantastic episode of a show that we never wanted to exist. Matt, do you know what today kind of is, sort of? What is today? I mean, especially... Why is this day? Different than all other days. Well, I don't know exactly what day

this episode will come out, but a couple of days from the day we're recording, this week at least. This is our anniversary. Oh, my God. And we met? Not of me first coming on the show, but of us two meeting. It was December 12th last year. Oh, you remember the date? Oh, I remember. remember it very well. Now, our first kiss? I mean, you know, intellectually. I mean, we slept together for months before we ever kissed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, pariscially online. Because you

were, you had that Julia Roberts, pretty woman thing going on, no kisses. No kiss. You were very strict about that. You were afraid of the intimacy. You wanted my body, but you didn't want my soul. He took me shopping and people were rude. Yeah. It's, uh, it's easy for me to remember the date that I met you, because it's also the night that I met my girlfriend. I met you guys at the same event. It's crazy. What a life-changing Hanukkah party, though. That was a life-changing trip to Los Angeles. Yeah. See, that's thing. City of Dreams. You go to Los Angeles? Exactly. Now, I, I filtered her out of there. Now she's here

in New York, and you're still there. What do I have to do, Matt, to get you to leave that wife and kid of yours? Oh, man. I'm trying. I feel like Whitney Houston and saving all my love for you. Is that what that song's about? It is, yeah. I never knew that. What's Jolene, Jolene's about just like having a really good friend, right? Jolene is about pleading, no, you mean the Dolly Parton version, not Beyonce's version? Yeah, it's about pleading with another woman not to steal your man even though she could because she's prettier and more attractive and has all the stuff, but basically saying

to her, Jolene, please don't do it even just because you can, like he's all I have. I feel like that's how I feel about Husson Piker, except for not man, it's guests. right please please don't steal Hassan Hassan Hassan Hassan Hassan I'm begging with you please don't steal my heart gas

saving on my love for you starts with a few precious moments as all that we share you've got your family and they need you there okay that's anyway but yeah that's beautiful it's beautiful it's been a year dude I mean very quickly after that I was I was guesting and then you were coming

you went to L.A we recorded our first episode together and then we kept the recording and now you're here forever. You're mine. Change my life. Change your life. And you can change our lives by subscribing to this podcast on your various apps and giving us five stars in

review. You can also change our lives by subscribing on YouTube. Please, I'm bad at YouTube. I keep forgetting people to subscribe and like and share and comment and thumbs up and notifications bell, all this stuff. You keep forgetting people to subscribe. You keep forgetting words in this

in that sentence too. Why can't you just let me talk the way I talk. Why can I just be me? I'm just me. I'm just me pointing it out. I just that's true. I got to let you be you by letting you point it out. I don't speak great. Not the smartest words guy, right? You want a smart words guy? Go get Nomschomsky. But you're funny. I try. I certainly do. And today's episode is brought to you by our sponsor, not really a sponsor. but someone we are shouting out, Mercy Corps. For more than three decades, Mercy Corps has worked in the West Bank and Gaza

meeting critical humanitarian needs. Our programs have supported Palestinian communities by helping communities cope with crises, supporting marginalized and vulnerable youth and increasing economic opportunities. Please donate to them at mercycord.org. That's M-E-R-C-Y-C-O-R-C-O-R-P. S.org.

And yeah, give them money before you consider joining this Patreon because they need it more than we do. But if you should happen to want extra episodes of this podcast, please go to patreon.com slash bad hesbarah and subscribe now. You get all these episodes early. Plus you get about one bonus episode

a weekish, sometimes not. Not last week. But, you know, maybe this week. Who knows? It's holidays. So please, pagerund.com slash baddestbarra. Daniel, we have a very special spin today. What is the spin? Yeah, today I'm not spinning no records. Just got a couple of books. Okay.

Spinning around on the old vinyl player of the mind. Well, first of all, this one right here. Oh. For all the Joe Biden's watching, you might recognize that if I turn it upside down. There it is. There it is. Now you can read it. The Hundred Years War on Congress.

Palestine by the estimable Columbia professor Rashid Khaledi, who I have a feeling we'll be hearing from very shortly. Yeah, wonderful to pick this book up again. I was reading the conclusion this morning in the bathtub, and we have questions for the so decadent in the bathtub. Yeah. Bubble bath and books. Yeah.

What else do you got? Western, Western progressive lying in the bathroom. Bath reading about oppressed people's. It's a real good look. And then we got this book, which it's really worth highlighting, especially today. Yes. Because the book comes out today that we're recording. When we're recording, which is December 10th.

This is Rafat Alarir's Book of Poetry, If I Must Die. Exactly. And I attended a really moving, powerful event here in New York City last week. Professor Khaledie was there. Norman Finkelstein was there. Another Finkelstein was there. Morrow Finkelstein was there. Recently fired

Professor Katie Helper was there. Deborah Winger, two-time Academy Award nominee was there. This is just, so this is a book of poetry and prose. And of course it includes his by now world famous poem, if I must die,

which it turns out he wrote back in 2011. Oh, I didn't even know that. Yeah. I thought he wrote, wrote it in the months before his assassination as some kind of omen, but I guess it was more of a long-term omen. I mean, he knew the dangers of being him there. And here he just, this is a chapter called an introduction to poetry, which was given by, given as part of a, it's an excerpt from a lecture he gave to students in advanced English poetry at the Islamic University in Gaza. And I'll just read

the first four quick paragraphs here, because I think it sums up the spirit of this book. And why anyone listening to this podcast who gives a shit or more than a shit about this topic and about liberation and about ending the occupation of Palestine and freeing all the people there should be picking up this book and helping it surge up to charge as it's been at one point it was in the top 50 I think a couple of days ago and that was before it even came out all right so he says we all know Fadwa Tukon the Palestinian poet and please don't introduce her as Ibrahim Tukhan's sister. Let's talk about Fadwa Tukana's, Fadwa Tukhan. I'm ashamed to say, I don't know who Fadwatuckin has, so I'm going to, that's going to send me down a rabbit hole. But he says,

we always fall into this trap of saying, she was arrested for just writing poetry. We do this a lot, even us believers in literature. Why would Israel arrest somebody or put someone under house arrest? She only wrote a poem. So we contradict ourselves sometimes. We believe in the power of literature changing lives as a means of resistance, a means of fighting back. And then at the end of the day, we say, oh, she just wrote a poem. We shouldn't be saying that. Moshe Dayaan and Israeli general said that, quote, the poems of Fadwa Tukhan were like facing 20 enemy fighters. Wow. She didn't throw stones. She didn't shoot at the invading Israeli jeeps. She just wrote poetry. And I'm falling for that again. I said she just wrote poetry. So, um,

Yeah, with that in mind, if I Must Die is out today from O.R. Books and I'm delighted to have a copy. And you should get one too. We're going to have a link in the description of the show in the both podcast app and also on YouTube. So please, everyone, buy it right now. And, you know, if you're watching this on social media, which you should be, because we're going to put it out there before we put it out on the podcast. feed please you will see a link right under this tweet and or instagram thing so click on it buy it now help uh you know help get this to number one if we can do it then uh we should uh we should celebrate it but cole and alan durshowitz is christmas stocking that's right that's right uh so please once again if i must die uh poetry and prose by refat elearier um recently martyred in Gaza. Shout out to Barry Weiss

murderous snitcher shit. I'm from Snitches get Kinnishes. That's right. So yes, now we get into finally introducing our guests. We have an amazing guest this week.

We just plugged his incredible best-selling book, A Hundred Years War on Palestine, something that both Daniel and I have read cover to cover multiple times and we are so excited to have him here right now

ladies and gentlemen and everyone else please welcome to the show Rashid Khaled Thank you. Thanks for that intro. Oh no problem. Thank you so much for coming on Bad Hezbarra, the world's most moral podcast. Probably the least serious piece

of media you're likely to do in the next in the previous or following year. I did one less serious one. oh did you do uh well like hot ones that's the one where you eat hot same america hot ones no no no yeah you're like the less said the better the less said the better exactly um well thank you so much for uh for coming on the show uh like i said we have both read hundred years more um on palestine a few different times and um to start out i i want to say that we have, you've sold a lot of books since the October 7th, I believe. And you recently

sold a book to somebody who I think should have maybe read the book. I don't know, about a year ago. This is Joe Biden when he was in Nantucket. He left a bookstore and he seems to have your book here. What do you think about the fact that? that Joe Biden is reading 100 years war on Palestine. Well, we know that Joe Biden bought the book, or at least was carrying the book. Given the book, we do not know that Joe Biden read the book or can read the book. I have no answer to that question. That's a good point. We don't actually know if he knows he's holding a book.

Well, we don't know that he can read because he doesn't seem to have, he seems to have some difficulty even with a teleprompter. We would have to see the ice cream still. stains on the pages of the preface to know for sure it's the only way to know um what what did you uh what did you feel about this when you saw this because i mean i'll just tell you my own personal feelings um was watching this uh and not knowing whether or not i was seeing um a staged PR event um you know hey when he leaves this store what should he be reading what if he's reading a hundred years war in palisine um or if this was you know just given to him by

you know, a, a bookseller with a sort of a dark sense of humor. Yeah. And I just kind of thought like, this seems a little late to be learning about this, buddy. The best take on it, I think, was a, some wise guy on some social medium said, he said, this is what really happened. First aid to second aid. You want to see me blow up the internet? Second age, how are you going to do that?

First date, just watch. First state, sir, you dropped the book. Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, it did seem very much like it was, you know, sort of a publicity stunt. But it's a strange one, too, because, you know, at this point, he's already, you know, he'd already dropped out of the race. The Democrats had already lost the presidential election.

And it just seemed like a slap in the face. There was part of me that was like this could also just be an incredibly, I don't know, it just all seemed very callous to me. The rhetoric of the administration is as harsh and as hostile and is dehumanizing towards Palestinians and Arabs as it has ever been. None of it's changed. The man either is not there or is still directing this. hostility. Their reaction to what's happened in Lebanon, reaction to what's happened in Syria,

the reaction to what is still ongoing in Gaza with their active participation, it shows that there's been no change. So whatever it meant that he was carrying the book upside down, leaving a bookstore in Newtucket, it has absolutely no valence, as far as I'm concerned. If they stop slaughtering people in Gaza, if they stop actively giving pretext for Israel expanding its occupation of part of Syria. Yeah. And if they would stop letting Israel bomb the living hell out of parts of South Lebanon, even though there's a supposed ceasefire, I would say, well, maybe there's a change.

There's no change. I joke that these people are war criminals, include the president and everybody who works with them. And they're responsible for genocide. With the upside down. Nothing has changed. I joked that he pulled the historically informed reversed tarot card, which is a very confounding and difficult position to read.

You know, if you pull historically informed, you might learn something, but if it's upside down, it could be going the opposite direction. I wanted to ask you, because what came to mind from me is this is not the first time someone in this political lineage dynasty has had some kind of passing, at least more than passing familiarity with your work. You and Obama knew each other in Chicago, from what I hear, yes? and much has been made of, you know, that Obama understood the perspective you were putting forth and understood the historical accuracy and validity and urgency of that perspective. And then he gets into power and becomes a much more mealy-mouthed version of himself where his nuance is all calculated to obfuscate and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and the truth of things rather than to illuminate so I'm wondering which offends you more Joe Biden playing smart or Obama playing dumb you know um I think Obama may have been one of the better informed individuals who took the office of president yeah and I don't say that because of anything he

may or may not have learned about them at least. I say that because I think he's a smart, worldly person compared to, you know, a Harry Truman or a Lyndon Johnson who'd barely been outside the United States and didn't know very much about the world. He knew a great deal about the world and knows a great deal about the world. But, you know, when a blood-stained general or some miserable senator puts the robes of the emperor on, they become the emperor. Yeah.

And you become a different person. You enter the presidency and you have a military industrial complex, which owns maybe a third of the Senate and a quarter of the House of Representatives by their campaign contributions. You are dealing with a foreign policy establishment, which far right to far left believes in intervention and war and so on. And you don't change those things just because you are you. You put the robes on and you are the emperor running the world. And I mean, that was very clear from the moment his ambitions became apparent as a parent. a politician, local politician in Illinois, at which time we were still living there. By the time he became a senator, we were in New York, and we were hardly in touch with it. So, I mean,

it's very clear that you want to advance in the United States. You do not become an advocate in American politics in that era, the first part of the 21st century. You do not advocate for Palestinian rights, and you do not say the United States should stop intervening everywhere always. He did campaign against the Iraq war because Americans are not stupid. They understand and the American wars, especially the ones that cost the lives of American soldiers, are not worth the candle. And he was right in that. And Trump is no, is just as smart.

He understands that Americans don't want to fight Middle Eastern wars. So that, that's something else. But Palestine, third row of American politics. Right. And he understood that. And he, whatever he knows, I don't know what he knows. But I know he knows a lot more than a lot of people who held the office of president. But that in five cents won't get you.

coffee no and it's and when i see him as ex-president now without yeah like the only the only incentives bearing on him are legacy and keeping the brand and the corporation and the empire in power now and his statement on october seventh for instance was among maybe the most offensive that i'd seen out of anyone just a complete and total falsification yeah of what happened from the numb from the scale to the context to the erasure of the occupation and and and and the effectiveness of his smarmy college professor uh affect um into the bargain and i was just like oof it would be tough for me if i'd ever known the guy to be a genuine person to i mean historically american presidents have taken two courses some of them like clinton for example want to stay

machers. They want to stay, you know, power brokers. And that's clearly the case with the Obamas. They want to stay on good terms of their rich friends. They want to continue to make money. They want to still be powers in the Democratic Party and in the country. There are other people like Jimmy Carter who renounce that. Very few, by the way. Or they go back to the farm. A couple of them did that. But, you know, they have clearly chosen a path of ease and of comfort. And the power, they obviously have a lot of power, they and the Clintons, in that miserable machine that is the Democratic Party ruling elite. I guess what I find kind of hard to understand is how, you know, Biden or Democrats in general seem to be okay with sacrificing their own political power for a like sort of, in benefit of a, you know, the greater U.S. imperialist project like Biden being in power it's a team sport Matt it's a team

I know but that's a strange it's a strange one because just on a human level as someone who's not obviously in Washington doesn't understand the ins and outs of whatever the hell goes on on the hill I look at it and I go like people these all seem like slimy ambitious people and part of ambition I assume is self-interest and it seems like you know I mean Obama is a great example of someone, he's not president anymore. He is not, he doesn't have to worry about being elected or, you know, getting A-PAC money against him. It's strange to me that, you know, that more people don't take the Jimmy Carter path, that they don't, you know, start speaking out just on a purely self-interested and almost, you know, on a level of spite because we all know

the Israelis hate Obama. But look at, look at the difference between Carter's influence, which is nil on the American political establishment. Sure. And the influence of the Clintons and the Obama's. They have stuck to the party line. They haven't deviated. And they retain influence.

And that's, you know, the donors are not to the, it's not to his personal, it's not his personal wealth, though that is affected by book sales and other things. Sure. It's the wealth of the party. The big donors are the big donors. The party raised, we found out $4 billion between the two candidates. Democrats must have raised half of that. That did not come from nickel and dime small donors.

No, I promise you. So the money, the rule of money in politics is a big thing. If you want to be a player, if you want to be a, they want to be powers in this system. And it's also access. I mean, Norman Finkelstein has long called Obama a stupefying narcissist. And the narcissism, the getting off on being around other pretty people, celebrities in particular. And having people give a shit what is Spotify playlist and Amazon read list says that the self-regard and the industries around just the reputational industries and all of that. It's also money.

I mean, look at the amount of money these people make from their book sales. he and michel she just came up with you know money is money is fine but you do certain things that cost you with a certain public and you're not going to make the same kind of money and that's that might that might indeed be a consideration i don't know i mean i'm not in touch with them i don't know what's in their heads but that would be certainly watching their political performance it's perfectly clear that they're unwilling to break with a consensus around israel they're unwilling to break with the interventionist consensus even though it was clear from his position when he ran for president first, that he understood the dislike of a majority of Americans for

interventionism brought. Right. Yeah, I guess what I would ask you about, you know, with regards to Obama is I can imagine, obviously, watching someone you know, who you know knows better as they're, you know, gaining more and more political power, more and more deciding to not advocate for, you know, the rights of Palestinians. I mean, that's, of course, disappointing, but I'm sure, you know, there's part of you, puts it into a lens of like, yeah, you know, this is, Palestinians are always the ones who are

going to be thrown under the bus for whatever, you know, particular other political capital he wants to expend. That's just the way the Schwarma gets made. That's the way the Schwarmie gets made, right? But after the schnitzel, if you prefer. By the way, it's not lost on us that a Palestinian guest came on and used the Yiddish first. The Yiddish terms, Maher, we appreciate that.

I don't know when you guys were born. I was born in New York three quarters of a century ago. Oh, so you're basically Jewish. I mean, I feel like all of New York. Culturally in some respects. Right, yeah. But, you know, I think it's the disappointment factors got to be even more increased after the fact when he's no longer president, when you're like, I know you know better. And now the only incentive you have to continue throwing Palestinians under the bus during an actual genocide, during, you know,

know, one of the, there's got to be the most death brought upon the Palestinian since the creation of the state of Israel. It is. By a long shot. By a long shot. And to have him still being someone who is going to carry Israel's water for them, I mean, what is, what is that, how does that feel? And what does that make you think? Like, how optimistic are you about?

I was not disappointed when he was elected or when he served as president because I had very low expectations. Right. I'm not terribly disappointed because my expectations have not increased just because they left office. The audacity of no hope. You know, what do you say to people who can't say something about one of the worst moral issues of our generation in terms of American participation and involvement and complicity? If they cannot find, if anyone, any political figure or any public figure cannot find the courage to say something about that, then they're dead to me, all of them. Because they don't see what any young person with a smartphone has seen for 14 months. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's worse than saying nothing. They speak up and they. Well, for the people who have said some of the things that some of these politicians have said, it's far, far worse. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of Clinton, we brought up his scumbaggery. I have a clip that I want to play for us, that something he recently said at, I don't know,

some events where they let people like Clinton speak. Was this the Dearborn speech? Oh, no, this was after. This is so, you know, the... The Dearborn speech was as doozy. Yeah, the greatest advertisements for Trump. anybody ever made. I know.

I know. This is after that. And, you know, he's clearly still learned nothing, but, you know, now there's no election for him. But as his wife said, these students, they don't know history. Yeah, yeah. Well, he repeated sort of that in the same thing here. And I'll place them for you now.

When I tell the young people, for example, who are understandably super sympathetic with the Palestinians, well, they've been killed, a lot of those Palestinians have, and all they know is it's got a lot more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis. And I tell them what Arafat walked away from. Were you clearing your throat for him? Or, because he also does it to me. I'm just like, please. All right, sorry, here we go. like, can't believe it. I said, oh, yeah, he walked away. We need to get him and RFK Jr.

together to do a, you know, like a Michael McDonald, James Ingram duet, you know, Yama will be there. Play the clip. Instate, with the capital in East Jerusalem, 96% of the West Bank, 4% of Israel, to make up for the 4%

that the settler was occupied. that were beyond the borders in the 60-seller war. And they can't even imagine that happened. And I tell them the first and most famous victim of an attempt to give the Palestinians a state was Prime Minister Rabin, whom I, I think, loved as much I ever loved another man. And so Rabin, he dies, and then Shimon Peres is defeated in the election and where the rest of it is history.

But you walk away from these once-in-a-lifetime peace opportunities and you can't complain 25 years later when they, the doors weren't all still open, and all the possibilities weren't still there. Yeah, the rest of it is history. The rest of it is revisionist history. Yeah. Not surprising he was speaking at a forum run by the New York Times, the greatest vendor of Hasbara west of the Atlanta. Being interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin.

So tell us, what's wrong with that picture, Professor Khalid? What's wrong with that picture? Let's start with Rabin's last speech to the Knesset. We are offering the Palestinians less than the state. So anybody who says state is a stone, cold liar. Rabin went farther than any Israeli prime minister, recognized the PLO, recognized the Palestinians who are people, and agreed to deal with the PLO. So he went very far.

That's why they killed him. Yeah. He was willing to make some territorial concessions? And it's an order to create an independent, sovereign, contiguous Palestinian state? No, he said he wasn't. So what is Clinton talking about? He said, we will retain security control over the Jordan River. What does that mean?

That means they continue to control Palestine, all of it. Israel is the only sovereign power. Israel controls entry, exit, population register, which means you can register your baby or you can't. You can get the West Bank, whatever. All of those things were to be maintained. Occupation continues, in other words. In an occupation light, okay?

Now, you want to set up that Bantustan or that Indian reservation or whatever you want to call it. Right. Up and call it a state and you're a stone cold liar. He said less than a state. So whatever Clinton is talking about is within an envelope controlled by Israel. It is not a Palestinian state. It is not independent.

It is not sovereign. It's not self-determination. It's determination by Israel of what minor concessions or major concessions, Israel is willing to make. And that's what Clinton and the United States always were willing to do. Whatever the Israeli ceiling was, the United States would come just below it. Right. And one of the things you talked about. Sorry, and that's Clinton and that's, uh,

George H. George W. before him. Right. And that's American president's after him. In terms of your book, you talk about Clinton also, I mean, I look at this clip, and it's just another way of saying Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The great Abba-Eban line. Yeah. And it's, I think, even more offensive because of what you,

described in your book as the way that Clinton dragged this out to a point at which he was not even capable of making any kind of deal. Like, it was something that was destined to fail by how he dragged it out. Explain that to our audience. The Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993. They're supposed to have ended by 1999. That's during Clinton's two terms of office. Yes. The agreements are null and void as of 1999. So-called final status issues were supposed to have been decided on by 1999, i.e. statehood sovereignty, Jerusalem refugees, water borders, all the things we at Madrid and in the Washington

negotiations were not allowed to talk about. We're supposed to have been settled after Oslo. They were never settled. A year after, more than a year after, the Oslo Accords were supposed to have ended. in the last few months of his presidency, as I say, he wasn't a lame duck. He was a dead duck in a situation where Barack, the prime minister he brought to Camp David, Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, had already lost his majority in the Knesset. And when Alaphat was already discredited among his people,

because they realized that they were not going to get a state. They were going to get an intensification of occupation and expansion of settlement, which is what happened in the seven years between 1993 and 2000. It's not like nothing happened. A lot happened. Checkpoints happened, closing happened, separation happened. Baruch Goldstein happened. 100,000 Palestinians lost their jobs in Israel, happened, et cetera, et cetera. The Palestinian GDP per capita went down.

The Palestinians realized that they were sold a bill of goods at Oslo. And so he brings Arafat forces Arafat to come. Arafat says, I don't want to come. He drags him to Camp David in a situation where he had lost his legitimacy, Barack had lost his legitimacy. And Arafat had to lose. Of course it failed. It had to fail. It was destined to it.

It was overdetermined. The only decent book on it is by a man named Clayton Swisher, who wrote a devastating account of what really happened, much better than the self-serving accounts of every other one of the participants, including Dennis Ross, who wrote by far the worst account, though there are many Israeli and American accounts that are almost as bad, and almost as deceitful and self-serving as what Clinton said. What do you make of Shloma Venomis account? Because on the one hand, I've heard him say some very condescending, patronizing things that echo the idea that, you know, Arafat walked away from the deal of a lifetime. On the other hand, in a Democracy Now appearance opposite Norman Finkelstein, he said if I was Palestinian, I wouldn't have signed Camp David either. You know, I've known Shloma since he was a graduate student at Oxford. And, you know, what he knows about Palestinian and Arab history

and what I know about Spanish history, you can put in a fimbled. So I would all do, he's a fine Spanish historian. That's what he was studying at Oxford. That's what he did his speech. on, his defil on, you know, he's wrong. What can I say? Yeah. And he was foreign minister, so he knows something. He's no, and he's no fool. I'm not, I'm not saying any bad about him as a, as a person or intellectual, but I would not take his version of that myself. Yeah. Yeah. And in terms of like self-serving, I mean, just that clip. And I see this, you know, repeated when it comes

to Bill Clinton, the amount of self-serving revisionist history. when it comes to the so-called peace process is like it's it's hard to watch also because you find that there's just so few public figures of you know status to refute any of it so it just becomes the history and you know you and a handful of other people are kind of the only people out there actually talking about narrative. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The only honest one of the lot was Aaron David Miller,

who said, you know, we weren't honest brokers. We were lawyers for Israel. Right. That's all you need to know. You know, the United States and Israel are in the same corner conspiring against the Palestinians and pretending to be honest brokers. To me, this is why I wrote a book called Brokers of Deceit,

because that's what they were. Perfect. The psychopathy lies also in the way he concludes it. It's just his moral logic is unfathomable where he says, look, if you walk away from a once-and-a-lifetime deal, you're doomed. Not that you're doomed. You don't get to complain 25 years later, which is to say the Holocaust could happen to you and you wouldn't get to complain. Sorry, you fucked up. Even if it was true, even if the premise was true, and it's not that they walked away from some sort.

sweetheart deal that was going to lead to a situation that would have fundamentally changed the facts on the ground that have created this situation. But even if that was true, what monstrous moral logic that then, well, 25 years ago, your... Sons are responsible for the sins of the fathers unto the end's generation. That's what he's talking about. Yeah, it's... Yeah, exactly. It's, it's, it's so callous in nature because you're just like, this is, you know, he starts off that conversation with like, You know, you talk to kids these days, and they talk about, like, all the dead Palestinians. I mean, why would we pay attention to 40 or 30 times as many Palestinians, 50 times?

Why would we even mention that? I had a deal, and they didn't take it. That's the importance. Right, exactly. Me, me. Yeah, you know what actually died, this deal I had. It's, it's, you know, it's, you know, it is, it is. And you can't help but, like, see people who are, I don't know, I mean,

in this political system is not mentally sound. Like, I can't, I can't look at him and not think, like, okay, so you're a psychopath then. I think you need all, you know all you need to know about where he's really coming from. Right. When you listen or you read, I have never seen it. I don't think I've seen it. I have actually seen a clip, a video clip, of the talk he gave to an Arab audience in Dearborn.

Oh, yeah. as a as a as a as a as a representative of the harris campaign oh yeah we played it on this show yeah you played it and where he says they were here first before the Islamic conquest you more on the entire population didn't change when a few Arabs conquered Palestine in the seventh century most of the people were aramaic speaking Christians they stayed they eventually became arabized and Muslim you don't know your history and your your basis for your policy and your outlook is the Well, thank you for letting us know that you don't believe in the world or history. You believe in the Bible.

That's right. But you try and tell me that's a basis for the United States government's policy or your policy or how Arabs should respond to Vice President Harris? Well, I think he helped win Michigan for Trump with that speech. Rashi, he ain't never loved a man the way he loved Yitzhak. Yeah, yeah. It's the most he's ever allowed himself to love a man. I'll leave that. I'll leave that. Yeah. And he also, I think, conveniently leaves out who exactly killed Yitzhak Rabin.

And why? And, you know. The people who are in power now, and I'd say the intellectual and spiritual and political trend, the kahanists, the settlers who killed Rabin, because we went in their view too far. Yeah, which is crazy. Are in power today. Yeah. And you look at, you know, what they thought was too far. And it was not Palestinian sovereignty. It was like, oh, you get to put a name on your Bantustan.

You get to name it and will recognize the flag of your Bantustan. It's just completely absurd. And to see that they are the ones in power and in charge of executing this war, quote unquote, this genocide is, it's insane. And it only makes me feel. pessimistic. Can I ask you, how have you been feeling, I think, in this, you know, last year? Obviously, that's a big question, but, you know, public opinion has changed. It does seem like now more so than ever, there is an appetite among, especially younger people, to learn about

what this whole Israel-Palestine thing is, which I see is a good thing, and I wonder, yeah, how do you feel about public opinion changing? Does it matter? Do you think it can affect change? I mean, about that I feel very positive, and I feel positive about it partly because I'm a historian, and they don't expect public opinion to affect the bought-and-sold politicians who make decisions. I understand that that's going to be a long process. And I understand that it's taken a very long time to end Jim Crow. It took a very long time to end the Vietnam War. It took a very long time to end the Iraq War. It took a very long time to end support for apartheid. And that it requires campaigns over very many years. So public opinion changing is a great thing. But unlike I think some

younger people who expected that the wave of support that they were at the top of, for ending the war and opposing American weapons sales to Israel and so on did not lead to any change whatsoever. They were deeply discouraged. I see it in a longer, you know, perspective because I'm older than them and because I'm also a historian. How did I feel generally? I have felt depressed ever since the war began because having followed this for just a little bit, I could tell what was coming in some respects. I could tell that there would be horrific, horrific, horrific suffering in Gaza and later on, as we've seen in Lebanon. So it's terribly depressing. I have family everywhere. I know, fortunately, all of them are safe,

but you know, you wake up every morning and you go to bed every night worrying about this. And so even as I was encouraged by the fact that public opinion really has changed significantly over the last five or ten years, but especially over the last 14 months, I knew. that it would not end the suffering yeah you wrote in the conclusion of the hundred years war on palestine that among the sort of three most promising uh streams of you know or pressure points in terms of what activists can be pushing on the most promising is trying to raise awareness about inequality the fundamental unequal nature of the situation and it does seem that for the first as opposed to, you know, Israeli aggression or flare-ups of atrocities leading people to be like,

well, we really need a two-state solution or land for peace or these kinds of triage remedies. There does seem to have been some kind of hopefully no going back sea change in terms of how people actually look at the essence of the situation. It's not a stretch to tell people anymore that it's. These are the consequences of settler colonial policies that we're dealing with a society that can't, unless it changes its fundamental nature and uproots its core ideology, make conditions any better. Did you see that coming? Sort of, yes. I was surprised by the rapidity with which it took place. And I think the war actually accelerated, but it was coming anyway.

College campuses have been voting for divestment from companies that support the Israeli occupation for six, seven, five years. Columbia voted for divestment in 2000, Barnard and 2000, Brown in 2000, Michigan in 2000. Yale voted for it yesterday, two days ago. We're speaking on the 10th, and he was the 7th or the 8th, whatever. And so that change has been coming, and I could see it coming. But what you're talking about is a change in discourse that goes beyond. simply a shift to people seeing the Palestinian narrative for the first time. Areas have been opened up and root issues are being examined for the first time in a way

that terrifies supporters of Israel. They have had complete monopoly over the discursive field since Woodrow Wilson, since the Balfour Declaration in the United States and in the West. Nobody challenged them or nobody effectively challenged them at any level, public opinion, universities, students, intellectuals, politics, anywhere, the media, anywhere. There was no challenge. It was a univocal, monotonous, monotone, Israel, Israel, Israel. Land without people, people without land, yada, yada, yada, yada. Denizert, Bloom, only democracy.

Whatever nonsense Hussboro was being churned out, was swallowed, hook, line, and sinker by everybody. Now, what has changed is that in academia, you can't say these things anymore. You can't say their leaders told them to leave in 1948. You can't say that. It's completely, it's not respectable. People have contempt for you. Israeli historians have contempt for you. Mainstream Israeli historians,

Israeli politicians saying we're going to do a second neckvah, meaning we did it once, we can do it again. Not only did it happen, but we're going to make it happen again. We were genocidal or ethnic cleansers then. We're going to be ethnic cleansers again. We're going to finish the job. I mean, you can deny it. So discursively, everything has changed, but only on certain levels.

The framing, the perspective of the mainstream media and the politicians hasn't changed one bit. Any nonsense produced by any Israeli spokesperson is taken as the gospel truth by every American politician, with many exceptions now, beginning to be. And almost the entirety of the mainstream legacy media, the corporate media is perspective, it's framing, it's shifted slightly, but not very much. much. So on the level of public opinion, on the level of intellectual and academic and student and young people, opinion and discourse, everything has changed. The other side is beleaguered. They actually have nothing to say. That's why they're calling everybody who opens their mouth

and anti-Semite. That's right. Because they have no argument. How do you justify this number of people killed? Well, I just saw Rabbi Jaffe wrote, this is the lowest competent to civilian ratio in modern warfare. All right, but you're talking about 30, 40, 50,000 civilians. Yeah. You're talking about more tonnage on Gaza in 14 months than on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg, Dresden, and London in a six-year war.

Yeah. And you still can say, nobody, nobody can believe that unless they live in a little Zionist constructed bubble where reality cannot penetrate. And that bubble is smaller and smaller and smaller in terms of people it still has the influence that it used to have with the mainstream media with the politicians and with the elites but it doesn't have credence with ordinary people anymore and certainly not with smart educated young people yeah yeah and that that partly

spawned the title of this podcast because we're in a new era where just the old slick abba evan erudite sounding smart sounding you know pained chin stroking um you know know, so what can you? Shooting and crying. Shooting and crying. Hasbara just doesn't fly anymore. And I, I wonder if... We'll never forgive them for making us kill. Kill and killed. I mean, she was, she was even better than I got to say. No, absolutely. They had some geniuses. Yeah, she was the Yogi Berra of his real prime minister. Amazing. I actually once heard her to speak and I have to say the woman was a charismatic, which you wouldn't think looking at some of her pictures. And B, enormously articulate and very shrewd in how to address an American audience.

She was obviously grown up in Milwaukee. Right, because she's American. She was born in Ukraine. Of course. Of course. She grew up in Milwaukee. Yes. Yeah, it is, you know, in terms of the discourse changing, I find it to be obviously something I am optimistic about.

And yet Now with the You know, election of Trump It does It concerns me that We're going to see this kind of discourse Being relegated to like, oh, this is just some Left-wing liberal

You know, kind of put into this category of just like woke whining and whatnot And, you know, obviously a lot of people before the election had like different opinions about like, you know, whether or not Trump would be worse for Palestine. Some people thought like, oh, no, he'll be better because, you know, you can't do any worse than this. And others said like, use your imagination. Things can always get worse. And what are your thoughts on it? Do you think his, you know, acceleration of this is going to be bad or

is there a silver lining somewhere? Do you see any silver lining in the sort of chaotic nature of his ideological worldview and the fact that he's surrounded by such an incoherent? That's what I would start actually. I mean, the thing about this man is that he's utterly unpredictable

because he has no fixed points of reference. Right. Neither in terms of knowledge nor principle nor ideology. He will say, do anything that he thinks is to his advantage, his material advantage, it's political, as personal, whatever. Sure.

And he's shown that again and again. He was pro-abortion, he's anti-abody. He'll say anything. He has no principles whatsoever. No moral compass and no, there's no fixed points. I mean, he's a rich man who doesn't want taxes. We know that. That's a deep belief.

Okay, there are a few things like that. But Medicare, Medicaid, he might not do what people think because he might, he has it, he has very, sharp political instincts everybody misunderestimates don't yeah the man is a smart politician a very smart politician and he knows that the public probably wants medicare they may not make want medicaid but he won't let him touch medicare and social security that's half of his voting base for right no fool so these lunatic budget chopping tax cutting right wing republican corporate

hacks who try and force him to do that might actually find he won't do it so man has no principles no fixed points except the kinds of points that and doesn't know anything about the world at all he knows a little bit of the world of business and nothing about the world in the middle east it's a cipher to him he has one instinct which is rooted in his political shrewdness he knows that americans don't like intervention and he knows that americans have have an extremely negative reaction to american military interventions in the middle east and he has made it very clear repeatedly, unequivocally, that he wants some of these wars to end

before he takes office on the 20th. I think that's actually had an effect in terms of bringing about a Lebanese ceasefire. And I hope and I pray in bringing about a ceasefire in Gaza. Even if it's temporary, it'll be better than the continuation of this slaughter, this ongoing daily grind of 30, 50, 70 people massacre day in, day out.

And I'm not saying that makes me happy, Trump is in office. But it's something that Biden didn't do, wouldn't do, couldn't do, didn't want to do, whatever it is, didn't. Right. Doesn't matter. Wood could. And this guy, for reasons that have nothing to do with Palestinian suffering. I don't think he knows who the Palestinians are cares. Yeah. He knows he really is Palestinian as a slur recently. He doesn't know what it is other than a racial slur. And he and he and he beyond that also is non-interventionist. Look what he said about Syria. Same kind of thing. Now, I'm not saying that he's not going to be swayed by people like Rubio and other other neocon hawk lunatics

anti-Iranian anti-Russian anti-Chinese he will be swayed by them yeah he'll be swayed by the last person who speaks to him swayed or bamboozled or covertly undermined whatever they have to do and and he has this love of chaos around him pitting people off you know playing people off against one another which is almost guarantees that he's going to have all kinds a cacophony of on policy voices around him. So only God knows where he's going to go. If I were the almighty, I'm not a big believer, but if I were the almighty, I wouldn't be sure what the guy's made.

Even God is just like, I don't know what this guy's up to, but I'm voting for him. Even God's voting for the mystery box. So I don't know. I mean, I really don't know. I didn't think that Biden deserved anybody's votes. I don't think that Harris deserved anybody's votes. I would never have voted for Trump in a million years. but there you are.

You have a choice between poison and diving into the deep blue sea. Right, yeah. Choose your... Thanks about the political system. Yeah. God bless America. Let me say one more thing. Please.

It is the corrupt, unrepresentative leadership of the Democratic Party that is responsible for this problem. Yeah. At least the Republican Party faithfully represents its base, its base is beliefs as far as as Israel is concerned. Yeah. It is composed of a lot of right-wing scientists and a lot of evangelical Christians who believe that Israel can do no wrong. Yes.

And the leadership of the party, whatever they may think in the Republican, but whatever they may believe or know, follows that because it is electorally convenient for them. And it's one of the things that helps them to win elections. The party leadership actually is responsive to their base. We have a bunch of corrupt oligarchs in the Democratic Party who are completely divorced from the base of their party on most things, actually. They're corporate. They're rich. They live in gaited communities. They have no connection to the overwhelming majority people who vote for the party. But on this issue, intervention in the Middle East and on this issue, support for Israel, they are completely out of touch, completely out of step with overwhelming majorities of Democratic voters. And they don't give a damn. They step all over them on this as on every other issue where their corporate interests or their other interests are concerned. And they deserve to lose because they spit on their supporters.

They don't care what they think about this and many other issues. Whereas to their credit, Republican leaders are responding in this respect, at least, to their base. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I don't think I've heard it put that succinctly, but I think that 100% sums up exactly my feelings about this. You know, you watch the polls that were coming out about how many Democratic voters wanted to ceasefire. How many called it a genocide? How many are? Overwhelming majorities. Overwhelming question. Over one. Yes. At the very least, it's like, you know, credit or credit is due to the

psychopathic Republican Party, they are responding to their, you know, sizable psychopathic base of people who are, you know, like you said, right-wing Zionists and or Zionist, Christian Zionist, evangelical. Those are their voters. What I'm hoping is that they've inherited some new voters who actually believed in the acronym MAGA and what it claims to stand for, and will, at a certain point, once the thrill of victory wears off, hear Trump, cowtowing to Miriam Adelson and saying, I'll make Israel great again. And if he says that enough times, I'm hoping that the new constituency, the populist constituency, that actually are genuinely looking to their own. economic self-interest and maybe due to latent anti-semitism or just or just or or just anti-entervate i don't care why are scratching their their heads a little bit like why is this jewish state halfway across the country getting this blind loyalty from our dear leader what the fuck is going on

i'm hoping i'm hoping people turn on them to their credit um republican a large part of the republican base and admittedly also the left wing of the democratic parties you know base are anti-interventionist you can call them isolationist if you want sure they're more in tune with the view the correct views of the founders and the framers you know go and read washington's farewell address going read john adams speech to the house of representatives in 1821 these guys had their heads screwed on right we do not go abroad in search of monsters to slay and we don't spend money abroad in ways that are not going to help the united states and And many Democratic voters on the left, and I would say a large proportion, maybe a majority of Republicans, believe those things.

And those are true American values. You know, the term isolationism is a way to denigrate people who don't believe in full-spectrum dominance by the United States of everywhere all over the globe. Yeah, it's like calling a woman a prude for not wanting to sleep with you. Yeah, right, exactly. Or a cat lady for not wanting to be your boyfriend. It's misogynist. Don't call people isolationist. My foreign policy is cat lady.

I just want to be in bed with my cat. Why do I have to go out in search of other monsters to select? Well, speaking of spending money on things. Yes. We have to take a quick commercial break. So please, everybody, stick around. We'll be right back. And we're back.

Welcome. Bad Hats Barra, World's Most Moral Podcast. We're here with Rashid, Holiday, and just so excited. This has been a great first hour, and we have so many more questions. We'd love to keep you up for a day. I'd love to, you know, just get you and my wife would approve. Yeah, well, your wife can come. We'd love to detain you administratively.

Yeah, you know. You're triggering me, guys. I'm sorry. No, we didn't mean to trigger. That was a terrible joke. I don't even know where that came from. I thought it was pretty. I mean, I walk onto the Columbia campus and I'm triggered.

I feel like I'm going through Calendia. Yeah. Electronic, whatever. Yeah. Daniel. Yeah. So this is our first episode since Syria changed the world, since everything collapsed there. And this is not a Syria podcast.

And you are not known as a, Syria scholar, but you are a scholar of the region and everything affects the Palestine question. And so I just wanted to pick your brain a little bit about this situation. And just to sort of set the table, I don't know if I have one specific question, but like, it's a, this is like, of all the various jigsaw puzzle pieces in the region, this is one of the trickiest to find a clean fit. for me as i'm observing it first of all i know in some ways the least about it um there's a lot of differing opinions about this event yeah i'm i'm aware of my own biases in a very acute way it partly that i'm my brother is a journalist for a you know a venerable anti-imperialist

independent rag the gray zone whose beat is to focus on the the the consequences of U.S. and NATO and Western meddling in this region, hence their reporting on Syria is focusing on the CIA dirty war and the ways in which the plight of the Syrian people has been exacerbated by the very Western powers who are claiming to champion. At the same time, I'm seeing a lot of, first of all, just spontaneous and very sincere jubilation on the part of, Syrians, whether there or in the West, a sense of deep relief, a kind of bewildered, I mean, literally people coming out of prison dungeons, wiping their eyes and seeing the sun for the first time. It's very emotionally striking. It's very compelling. Then my anti-imperialist side goes well, but this also happened and didn't this also happen in Baghdad and Libya? And aren't I seeing them looting, looting banks? And what's this I'm seeing about possibly public

executions in the town square and I don't know what's real and people are but there's what I am seeing is a concerted request or an emphatic demand from people to let Syrians have their moment and don't impose your smarty pants Western anti-imperialist condescending patronizing oh but you'll be sorry because it's going to backfire and now look Israel's attacking and so on and so forth and it makes me want to just pause for a second and breathe which is a good thing to do if you're too online following politics and he we have you so that's just to sort of put on the table what's what's up for me as I watch all of this looking for a way to look at it that is holistic that is empathetic that is holistic and that is that is rational and that's

also correct what's the right way of looking at it professor hallity we don't have time for me to give you a really full answer to this so I'm going to try and make five points very quickly sure the fact that you know that it's five I love well these are the things I've been thinking about it they're probably more and this is the worst regime in the Middle East that just collapsed I mean anybody who's sorry for the fall of Bichita asset has no human empathy I have friends that this regime killed I had a friend who spent 12 years in a dungeon lost all his teeth came out an old man oh my good their dungeons and he was one of the lucky ones. They've slaughtered. We don't know how many tens of thousands of people in

their prisons. And we're going back earlier than the start. Oh, this was in the 80s that this guy went in. They picked them up in 82. He got out in the 90s. So I think anybody who cries salt tears for the Assad regime has no heart. What we've seen in terms not only of people leaving prisons, millions and millions of people able to go home. from Turkey and Syria, sorry, Turkey and Lebanon and Jordan. Millions, millions. They displaced almost half the population of Syria this region. So they're monsters. They were monsters.

That's the first thing. And nobody should cry salt tears for the asset region. The second thing is what you mentioned about foreign meddling is true. Like every Arab revolution that started off in the 2010s, 2011s. um against autocratic awful dictatorial police state regimes um there was immediately external intervention uh in syria and there has been from the beginning of the revolution and before the revolution through every phase since 2011 right up to the present um i mean the people who have made the biggest advances are in one case turkish clients clients of the turkish nation state

in another case supported by and smiled upon by the turkish state so the so-called syrian national army turkish completely turkish controlled and hey at the hairaeer sham the folks headed by former mr jolani now we know his name is ahmed is sharra the turks smiled upon them so that's that's only one and the katris are also involved and everybody in his brother-in-law is involved. Israel is now intervened. The Americans are intervening with the Kurds, through the Kurds and Eastern Syria, the YPG. And that's been part of the course for the past 13 years. So that's going to be a problem. And Israel is now invading, intervening, bombing, affecting the situation in ways that can only be negative. Wiping out the Syrian military. Well, they just sank the

Syrian Navy and they've destroyed, I think, most of the Syrian Air Force. And they've taken out Syrian air defenses. Happy liberation. According to people who are unfriendly to the regime in the opposition, this is the worst bombardment of Syria ever. I would say it's probably the worst bombardment of Syria since the 1973 war. So that's going to be, if not a problem, if not the biggest problem, a problem. And it will, it will interfere massively with the reconstruction of a Syrian government, if one can be reconstructed. because the country doesn't remain fragmented as it has been for most of the past 11 years. So that's the second thing.

The third thing is the effect on Palestine. Some people are saying, this is terrible for the Palestinians. They've lost their only ally. Well, I don't think the Assad regime was an ally of the Palestinians. I was in Beirut when the Syrian army came in, intervened against the PLO in 1976. when it helped the Lebanese forces to capture and slaughter the population of that isata, when many Palestinians were kidnapped and killed by the Syrian regime. A friend of the Palestinians, excuse me?

I mean, with friends like this, you don't need enemies. And that leads me to something that some other people have said, that this has led to the collapse of the so-called axis of resistance. Well, there was an axis. who created the access and what purpose was it created for. It was essentially created by Iran as a deterrent to protect the Iranian regime and the Iranian nation state for Iranian national, to protect Iranian national interests.

That was what their alliance with Syria was for. That was what their support of Hezbollah was for. That was what their support of Hamas was for. And that's why they support Ansar al-Mah, the so-called Houthis in Yemen. Each of those actors had a degree of independence. They weren't Syrian clones or controlled. Sorry, Iranian cloners were controlled by Iran, but Iran supported them and massively supported them at a huge cost.

$30 billion that Iranian people would love to have had back were loaned to Syria. They'll never see that money. They did it for the interest of the regime and the interest of Iran. They've created deterrence to protect Iran against American hostility and hostility of regimes in the Middle East. And that had no, in my view, no connection to a Palestinian national interest. It may have served some Palestinian factions. It may have helped in this way or that way for this or that Palestinian interest.

But it wasn't designed this so-called access of resistance to liberate Palestine or to help the Lebanese liberate the bits of South Lebanon that Israel controls along the Mount Hermann frontier with Lebanon. It was intended to protect Iran. And it disappeared and Iran is more vulnerable. and that may or be a good or bad thing. It has nothing to do with the Palestinians, in my view, my personal view. I honestly don't never believe that there was such a thing as an access of resistance. There was an access of protection for Iran.

And it served that purpose until Israel showed it was infinitely stronger than a lot of fools believed that it was by doing what they've done in Gaza, by doing what they've done in Lebanon, by doing what they are currently doing in Syria. And by doing what they did to Iranian air defenses, they completely wiped them out. They destroyed Iran's capability to produce ballistic missiles for at least a year. According to the head of the British General Staff, who was speaking to the Royal United Services Institute three days ago. And he said, 100 F-35s, 100 planes, most of them F-35s, American planes, fifth generation, firing missiles 100 miles off of their target, completely destroyed Iran's air defenses. modern Russian supplied air defenses, mind you, and its missile production capacity for a long period.

Well, it showed Israel is much stronger than anybody thought it was. It showed that Iran was a bit of a paper tiger, and they showed in south Lebanon that Hezbollah was a bit of a paper tiger. And they've shown in Palestine. Now, that doesn't mean people aren't resisting and won't resist in the Gaza Strip. The Israelis admitted 16 soldiers killed three tanks, destroyed three days ago in the Gaza's Four soldiers killed in South Lebanon. Occupation will breed resistance, whether Iran exists as a superpower or not, with or without Iran, that's going to happen.

Occupation breeds resistance, inevitably, necessarily, historically, always everywhere. I mean, this is not rocket science. People don't want to see it, don't want to believe it, they don't want to say it's occupation. Fine, live in your little bubble of irreality, but that's reality. And so I personally, in terms of Palestinian interests, the Palestinian Seam weak. But they weren't strong because of Iran. If they were strong at all, it was because they stay steadfast on their land. It's because they resist nonviolently and violently.

And it's because they will not tolerate occupation in the long run. They won't. So that's my next point. My last point is that it's easier to bring a regime down than it is to create a viable, sustainable system, democratic especially we've seen that in libya we've seen that in yemen we've seen that in iraq we've seen that in the sudan uh every country that's that's experienced a revolution including even tunisia where the process has been more peaceful and less bloody you still don't have a democratic outcome um so the syrian people have every reason to be

jubilant that the dictator is gone and the prisons are open and that millions of people Millions. There's a million Syrians in Lebanon. There's millions in Turkey, three, four, we don't even know how many. And a million trapped up against the border in Idlib and the border regions of Syria. And I'm not quite sure how many in Jordan, half a million, maybe more. Well, all those people can go home now. They're going to go home to a chaotic country with a collapsed economy and with Israel attacking from the south and the Turkish pawns attacking from those. north. God helped them. But everybody I know, Syrians, Palestinians from Syria, every single person I know is jubilant. I have people who have not been able to go home for 11 years. Friends, you're going to begrudge them because of some supposed anti-imperialist sentiment?

I mean, the struggle for Syria has been going on since World War II and it will continue. It's a it's a cockpit for the rivalries of every single actor in the Middle East, international actors and regional actors. And it will continue to be. And I wish them stability and democratic, sustainable regime. They may or may not get that. And if they don't, it'll be partly because of internecine problems within Syria and largely, maybe mainly, because of external intervention. Yeah. I find myself, I'm sorry, go ahead. What were you going to say, Daniel? great answer. Yeah, that's a lot on your plate there and you just ate it up.

I've been thinking about this stuff for a little while. Right. Yeah. Before the regime collapsed. Yeah. And I've been thinking about it for at least two hours and I have lots of thoughts. But, you know, I do find myself kind of similar to what Daniel was saying is like, you know, in general. And I think this is true of, you know, a portion of our listeners as well, needing to put

things into the kind of neat prism of anti-U.S. imperialism. And in so doing, end up, you know, hearing you're talking about Iran as being, you know, this accesses of resistance, really being just about keeping Iran, you know, safe and not so much about the Palestinians. And, you know, hearing that and just kind of, you know, feeling a bit of a slump in my, in my soul, where I just go, yeah, you know, and of course it's true, you know, this is a self-interested regime as most regimes are. All regimes are. Yeah. Or they disappear very quickly.

Right, exactly. And so, you know, more and more as this year has gone on and we've been doing this podcast, it's obviously, you know, we're doing it in order to. counter the Hezbar that's coming out. We're also doing it in order to make sure people know they're not crazy. The things they're seeing with their eyes are real. But also, you know, it's trying to see some light at the end of the tunnel here. And as this, you know, as year has gone on, it's harder and harder to see that light because you, you know, you see nothing but a bunch of self-interested parties, all kind of like, I don't know, feasting on the flesh

of the Palestinian resistance. And so, yeah, so I just wonder, like, you know, if there's no one, if there's no one coming from without to save the Palestinians, what is there? What is the, what is the axis of resistance that needs to be built in order to stop this? The only answer I have is to convince every Jewish person that I know, but also non-Jewish people, but every American Jew that I know in the United States to start being anti-apartheid and start looking at this for what it is. You put your finger on one thing, which is without external support, none of this happens. Israel doesn't bomb. Israel doesn't get a cover of the United Nations, Israel, without this support from this country,

which is dependent on the hospital. and dependent on people whose brains have been washed. Right. Decades and generations of propaganda. Lies. And that's part of it. The other part of it has to come in the Middle East, first from the Palestinians.

And if you go back over the history of the Palestinian National Movement, there are people who said, we have to depend on ourselves, first and foremost. And there have been people who said, no, no, no, we have to depend on Arab countries or outside support. And obviously both are essential. But the people who depend on an outside support, I think we're entirely, we're wrong. You think Abd al-Assad's going to save you?

You think that another Saladin's going to come along? You are wrong. Saddam Hussein? Are you kidding? Yeah. Seriously? The Iranians? I mean, what world are you living in?

I mean, this is one of my critiques of the Hamas leadership, military leadership in Gaza. They sincerely believe that these countries would trample and actors, Hezbollah and so on, would just, abandon their own self-interest and do what Hamas's military leadership wanted and launch a big war. I mean, seriously? I mean, what world are you living in? I'm not saying this is true of the entire Hamas leadership, especially the ones outside who knew perfectly well that that was, I think, that that wasn't going to happen. Right. But that's been true over a very long period of time for many Palestinian leaders. They assumed other people would do their job for them. No. Now, that doesn't mean that it's not incumbent on the Palestinians to appeal over the head.

of self-interested and sometimes hostile regimes to public opinion. But that depends on democratization in the Arab world. The greatest barrier regionally to support for the Palestinian people is regimes that are unrepresentative of their people who are supportive of the Palestinians. Every time they're allowed to express themselves, that's very clear. And these autocratic, repressive police states

are designed to prevent that public expression and to align them in a craven manner with Washington and what Washington wants, which is not to leave Israel all along. The asset regime did nothing across the ceasefire line ever from the time that Kissinger negotiated a disengagement agreement in the in the Golan Heights in 1974. That's how many years? 50 years? 50 years of peace on the Ghos. I mean, what kind of anti-imperialism exists? exactly are we talking about when it's a regime that does exactly what the United States and Israel wants in terms of never launching a single attack across the disengagement lines that Kissinger drew up in 1974.

I mean, ladies and gentlemen, somebody tell me how anti-imperialist and how pro-Palestation that is. I see them getting credit, the Assad regime getting credit for the like, well, they could have in any time sold out the Palestinians by becoming aligned with some. Saudi Arabia and whatnot. And personally, I don't know enough about the, you know, interregional issue to dispute that. What do you say to that? Like, hey, they could have at any time become Jordan, and they decided not to.

Well, they have, it's a dictatorship, but there's deep, deep, deep public opinion in Syria, I should say, which is supportive of the Palestinians. They have the same problem with the Jordanian king. They have the same problem that every Arab government has. Their public opinion is much more hostile to Israel and much more hostile to the United States and its interference in the region than these regimes dare to be. Some of them align themselves as did Syria with Iran, as does the Iraqi government to a certain extent. And some don't.

But the Saudis had excellent relations with Habz al-Assad in the last, sorry, Bashar al-Assad in the last couple of years. The Saudis are now have excellent relations with Iran. So, you know, these things are, these supposedly immutable facts are not really immutable. And sometimes they're not even facts. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so speaking of appealing to public opinion in foreign regimes, I want to turn back to the Palestine struggle itself and ask you about something that's, you know, maybe a little touchy. But you've, this was the first year that I started here.

the term normalization and sometimes it would come at me if i was doing an instagram live which is how i got people to start listening to what the hell i was saying uh just talking into my phone and i would speak with um a certain degree of human empathy or compassion or or speak about an israeli friend of mine or speak about israelis in a way that other than um other than a negative way. Other than a negative and not only negative, but a kind of denialist way, which is to say I wouldn't put the term, I wouldn't

put the name Israel in air quotes, in scare quotes. I wouldn't call it the crumbling Zionist settler colony, which sometimes I do just for kicks, but I don't rigidly or dogmatically use that kind of language. People would say, you're normalizing this regime, which we're trying to tear down. And then I, and then, you know, and then I would see

Palestinians accusing each other of normalizing by doing conversations with anti-apartheid Israelis or so on and so forth. Groups like combatants for peace, all this kind of stuff. You said from the same conclusion to your book, and you read it rated this in a Haaret's interview of all places, very recently, which I want to ask you about what the reception's been to that. But you said the following,

a forgotten but essential element of the Palestinian political agenda is work inside Israel. specifically convincing Israelis that there is an alternative to the ongoing oppression of the Palestinians. Neither the Algerians nor the Vietnamese people short-sightedly denied themselves the opportunity to convince public opinion in the home country of their oppressor of the justice of their cause, efforts that contributed measurably to their victory, nor should the Palestinians. So I guess two questions for you. Number one, do you get where critics of normalization are coming from?

Do they have a valid concern or critique in good faith? And number two, this is just kind of coming from me. Isn't there kind of a big difference, one you point to elsewhere, between, say, the Algerians trying to appeal to the French people in the home country versus Palestinians trying to appeal to Israel? There is no home, as you point out elsewhere, there is no home country on some other continent that the colonists can return to. you're trying to appeal to your oppressor directly.

It would be like the A and C trying to do outreach to white Afrikaners who were deeply invested, did that. Okay, so tell me. Of course they did. Of course they did. So did the IRA. I mean, so did the Irish nationalists. I mean, of course there are differences.

Every settler colony is different and every colonial situation is different. Israel is not like South Africa or like, not like Ireland, even though Ireland and Algeria were settler colonies. South Africa was a settler. colony but they're different um as you say no home country there's no metropole israel is not an extension of the sovereignty and the population of a colonial power they didn't there weren't british subjects who were sent to palestine as an extension of the sovereignty of the king of england which is what settlers in virginia and settlers in ulster were they were an extension

of the sovereignty and the population of the mother country intended to intended to encroach on and expelled the indigenous population and establish the sovereignty and control of the mother country Zionism is a separate national project which has a settler colonial you know nature but which has its own national existence before before they decided to colonize Palestine they were meeting in Basel trying to figure out where to go so you know and it's a set it's a settler colonial project but it is also a national project and there's no mother country right so it's different in that among many other respects. But you can make, you can make some comparisons that I think are valid. It's not just Vietnam and not just Algeria, which are the two cases I cited in the

book. I would also cite South Africa and Ireland. The Irish worked in the United States, which they understood had influence on Britain, and in Britain during their War of Independence in 1990 to 1921, and again during the troubles in Northern Ireland. They raised all their money in the United States, all their money. And they had widespread support in Britain and in and in, uh, and in the United States. I mean, there's a police station on their 24th street here, which had a wall above the parking lot, which had pictures of Bobby Sands and the hunger strikers. The cops put that up. New York City policemen, anti-terrorist New York City policemen supported the provisional IRA that was blowing up places in Belfast and in London. Back when policemen were cool.

well there you go i'm not talking i didn't say i didn't say that you said that um i do believe that it's different and that you have to you're talking about settlers or you're talking about the israeli population right but the same thing is true of people in ulster and the same thing is true in in south africa uh you're not going to eliminate them you're not going to expel them they have no place else to go they're staying there they've been there in the case of ireland for four or five hundred years in the case of israel they've been there some of them for 100, 150 years, 80 years, whatever it may, three, four generations. They're not going anywhere.

A few may leave, the tech bros may leave, but most Israelis are going to stay. And so you have to figure out how you're going to live with them. And that has to color how you deal with them. Now, does that mean dealing with the institutions of the state or those supported by the state? No, I support BDS in that respect. I won't deal with Israeli universities. They're complicit in war crimes. I won't deal with any agency of the Israeli state.

will I publish a book in Israel if it's not published by a state yeah because I can reach Israelis speak to Haaretz yeah because it's not controlled by the state and how was that some of the main critics of the Israeli state including its colonial policies

and that was an extensive interview how a arts did with you at the end of last month has that been received by Israelis by Palestinians what kind of feedback have you gotten I have gotten no negative feedback from Palestinians I'm sure there's a lot of muttering somewhere but I haven't heard it I assume there might be muttering, I don't know.

I mean, I have a lot of revolutionary nephews and nieces and my son and his, you know, buddies in the family. And, you know, they didn't, even they haven't said anything. And if they don't, that's sort of a barometer for me, the younger generation of militants. Yeah. In my family. And the reaction from Israel was uniformly positive from a very large number of people, some of whom, of course, I knew. I mean, I have many students who teach in Israel. I have many Israeli graduates, I saw some Israeli graduate students now even.

I'm, you know, I've retired, so I have fewer and fewer. But the reaction was over, and I'm, of course, many of my Palestinian friends in Israel responded. But so did a very large number of Israelis, entirely positive. I assume there are negative, I didn't read the comments. I'm sure the comments were typically, when I look at how arts, the comments are typically by too peridiv on both sides. But you know, anybody who lives in social media and lives in those comment, things really shouldn't get alive.

get a life seriously go swimming touch grass take your grandchildren to lunch you know a pet your dog eat a hard eat a soft boiled egg you know anything but something the normal people do toxic nonsense yeah well i have to say a few months ago when the when the owner of or was the editor some big wig at haritz came out and called the owner chucking yeah called the hamas fighters or or and they called them freedom fighters. Not that he condoned what they did, but he called them freedom fighters. And the Israeli government was making noise

and passing laws. It sounded like they might try to shut Haaret's down. The cynic in me was like, fucking do it. Shut that thing down. Let's tear down this facade of a liberal democracy. But I lived to be glad that they didn't just so that your interview could be published because it was excellent.

And again, that's where my mind goes to a kind of almost exceptional. acceleration is like let's just let's just get on with it already i mean let's think two steps beyond okay we have now the most extensive ethnic cleansing since 98 you know ongoing as we speak in gaza the northern strip has been emptied they may try and go all the way down to the natsarine corridor they may establish settlements they're going to establish a permanent military occupation or what they think will be permanent military occupation right um we don't know how many people were killed because there are thousands under the rubble and we may not know for you know

whole whole family trees have been wiped out yeah so it's going to be really hard to reconstruct how many people are killed because there's nobody to tell you this was my family they're all dead I have a student who lost 30 members of her family I've been on podium with poets in the last two well we did there was a the rite idea thing that one of you attended down in New York is Daniel I think done at our books there was another event at Columbia yesterday. And both of the people who spoke had multiple family members who have been killed. But they're at least they're alive. There are some family lines that are utterly wiped out. Families don't exist. And Palestinian family line is like

dozens and dozens and dozens of people. I mean, I had dozens and dozens of cousins. Everybody has done. When that happens, you're talking about enormous loss. And so we won't know, but it is the highest, largest number of Palestinians killed ever. In 1948, 15,000 people were killed. And we're getting to the point where it's a higher proportion of the population of Gaza than those 15,000 were of the Arab population of Palestine at the time. So it's not only numerically higher, it might soon be proportionally higher. So in the face of that, people are naturally a little bit hostile to Israel, and especially the younger ones amongst us, people who are much, much younger than me and even younger than maybe you guys, are going to feel radical. and angry and understandably so. Especially during here when Israelis are being so loudly and publicly unpleasant in the world in a way.

Yeah. Well, not only unpleasant. I mean, look what they're doing in Syria. Oh, my God. Yeah. On top of Lebanon, on top of Gaza, on top of the West Bank. But sooner or later, we have to figure out how we live with these people. And you never win without winning over a part of the opponent, whatever it may be.

In the case of Vietnam, it was easier. Their opponent was off in the United States. And they appealed directly to American public opinion successfully. The Algerians had that convenience. Now, they had Algerian, Cornwall, French settlers who fought with the FLN or worked with the FLN. They won over part of a very tiny, tiny fraction, obviously. But they went over huge segments of French public opinion. And that's why they won.

You think they were winning in Kabul and in the mountains? they weren't winning they weren't winning the french army could have gone on definitely a french public opinion hadn't turned against the war u.s army could have gone on indefinitely in vietnam and or in iraq if american public opinion hadn't turned against the war and the vietnamese to their credit understood that the ira understood that the the a nc understood that the plo dimly understood it but not as much as they should and we don't have a palestin national movement right now we have fragments of one and that's that's the problem we have to reestablish a consensus around strategic objectives Palestinians, not me. I'm old,

I'm finished. Our regeneration has failed and we're done. I'm talking about a younger generation, of people who are savvy about the West, of people who have lived in Palestine, of people who speak both Arabic and English. And you know, like Golda and like Abbaim and like all of these people, they were of the metropole and they were of the Zionist movement and of the Ashub and of Palestine. So they were embedded in their community in Palestine, and they were embedded in the West. And we are about to have a generation like that that can both speak English to Americans, understanding American constitutional and political and ethnic and whatever considerations, and speak in Arabic at home in Palestine. We're about to be there. Some of them

can speak Hebrew, too. Yeah, I was just with one of the students. I said, you come from Turkkenam. How come you speak such good Hebrew? So I studied it. I want to know. when they'd speak when they'd talk about me at the checkpoint what they're saying no your enemy yeah yeah yeah for sure just just now before I came to do this one one of my students he was in my class this semester and we just had a little meeting they wanted me to sign my books and they wanted to just say goodbye and that she's she's talking about how she learned Hebrew and there's lots of Palestinians like that obviously all the Palestinians inside Israel are the are going to be the vanguard of this of course because they are Hebrae-sized in their culture and their knowledge.

I mean, you know, every time you talk to one of them, a fraction of what they say is in Hebrew, the machoom this, and I don't know what that in Hebrew. Yeah. And they're talking Arabic to you. And many of them are embedded in a web of personal relationships with Jewish, Israelis. Especially people in some sectors in the legal sector, in the medical sector, and areas.

You know, anything to do with defense and science, they tend to be kept out right but a lot of high-tech people are allowed in and certainly the medical sector and pharmaceuticals and nursing and so on huge arab involvement in the israeli health system can the uh what is it two million or two or three million uh Israeli Arabs Palestinians Palestinians Palestinians citizens of Israel as well yes is yeah right but that uh excuse me when we were when we were six years old in Hebrew school we were taught to They call them Israeli Arabs. I went on birthright, and I was told that they call themselves Israeli Arabs. I mean, many of them think of themselves as Israelis. They're Palestinians, and they also think of themselves as Palestinians. Right.

There's no contradiction. You can be a Shriner and a feminist and a Democrat and a vegan. I mean, blow our identities are. People have all sorts of identities out there. But in terms of, you know, this. making a cohesive Palestinian national movement it seems like

you know one of the big voices that needs to step up so to speak would be those you know Palestinians within 48 and is that something that you see

as possible plausible is that something where people are actively working for i mean it's hard for them because of the specific insidious kinds of repression that they're subject right when they express their palestine identity in any any public form on social media people are called up before their deans in universities uh people that work are called up and and not by their bosses by the shabakh by the general security services yeah the shin bet um so it's very very hard to express yourself political

politically as a Palestinian, or even sometimes culturally, inside Israel. So you have 2 million people deprived of a whole bunch of rights. But, you know, the leading sectors of that community, some of the politicians and lawyers, the academics, some of the business people and so on, are active thinkers in this direction. And you see that, a few of them are outside and some of them are inside. I mean, somebody like Azim Mshara is a leading Palestinian. intellectual.

He's in Qatar. He left. He was a member of Knesset for a while. And he used to teach at Birzid for many, many years. And there are many people like that. Many, many people like that. It's hard to maintain that kind of public presence inside Israel. The only ones who seem to be able to do it, if they can stand it, are the lawyers.

Because they're fighting every day for Palestinian rights. And, you know, so far the Israeli legal system is highly partial, highly biased. But it's, to some extent, a refuge from the extreme religious, ultra, ultra-nationalist trend. It's one of the last bastions. I'm no advocate of Israeli democracy or the Israeli judiciary. I consider them implicit in everything that happens. The Supreme Court has issued some of the most disgraceful opinions in history. But a lot of Arab legal people are able to fight within that system.

And they crack down on everybody, but they seem to be surviving. Whereas a lot of other people are just, you know, are beaten down. Yeah. In academia and in other places, it just can't take it anymore. And that's the objective, you know, get people to leave. It's always been, you know, when I once was not allowed in, this is way back when, 30, more than 30 years ago. And I took intervention of a U.S. Consul General, a wonderful guy in this.

Tel Aviv consulate to get me in. They said, you can only have one month. You have to go to the, you have to go to the Ministry of Interior over in West Jerusalem. So I go to the Ministry of Interior. It's a division of population control. And they're not talking about birth control. They're talking about getting rid of Arabs. Yeah.

And they dealt with me. And that's what it's all about. It's diminishing the number of Arabs, increasing the, it's a demographic war. Yeah. They say it now openly about Gaza. But that's what the whole project always was. Right. We will spirit the penniless population across the frontiers discreetly.

That was the father of modern political science. That was in the privacy of his diary. Right. But, I mean, we see that also is not something that is even possible, though, because, I mean, there's no world in which the, you know, population of, you know, both Gaza and the West Bank are just going to be free of Arabs. I don't think there's a world in which, you know... Not in the 21st century.

In the 16th or 17th or 18th, it might have been possible. That's what Tony Judd said. Yeah. He said they missed the boat. If they tried this earlier, they might have gotten away with it. Right. And so I guess it just leads to, you know,

like two outcomes to me that seem, you know, an optimistic one and then one that's incredibly pessimistic. One that is pessimistic is. Is this continuing, you know, a need for demographic control in which you start, you know, creating what is essentially, you know, a Nazi regime that does do mass murder and genocide and in numbers that, you know. They can't exterminate them all. Right. I mean, that's a terribly pessimistic thing to say, implying that they can exterminate a lot of us. But they're doing, they're damnedist in Gaza.

I mean, the things they're doing in Gaza, when they come out, will make some atrocities of the 20th century, Paul, by comparison. Yeah. And so I guess my, and so my more optimistic view is that this is just completely unsustainable and that they have no choice but to live together eventually. And it's just, you know, it's just a question of it. They have made it more unsustainable by reoccupying Gaza. Right. And by occupying a strip along the Lebanese border, and by occupying more Syrian territory. They've just created three worlds of trouble for themselves. Yeah. By their decision. Yeah.

No, killing people is one thing, but occupying territory and preventing people returning is another thing. Yeah. So, yeah. Let's hope that, as Princess Lear said to Darth Vader, the more they've tightened their grip, the more star systems will slip through their fingers. That's right. Yeah. And, you know, the more extreme they become and the more they carry on, I mean, the more

to show the world what the terminal endpoint of messianic Zionism is, the less sustainable it would be. I think we've gone, we've, we've, you've stayed with us on this ride for a really good, generous long time. Thank you so much for. Yeah, thank you for coming on. The book, once again, 100 years war on Palestine. We have it. here. This is, it's a great book, please. If you haven't gotten it, you should be getting it immediately. Rashid, Hality, thank you. I don't know what inspired you to come on our show. Possessed you. Yeah, what possessed you? A few friends. Oh, that's nice. Friends who actually said, yeah, yeah, go on that. I get a lot of requests to do things, and I run them by.

my trusted my brain trust all right well shout out to your brain trust uh thank you for coming on and your brain trust and your trusty brain yes uh and thank you everyone out there for listening uh please join the patreon patreon patreon patreon dot com slash bad hasbara uh email us with your questions comments and concerns bad has barra at gmail dot com all right everyone thanks again so much for listening and uh daniel From the river to the sea. Get yourself some Khalidhi D and some poetry. Hey. Thank you, guys.

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