Judging Freedom - Alastair Crooke: Israel/US Fatal Mistakes

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

Alastair Crooke: Israel/US Fatal MistakesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, February 19, 2024. Alistair Crook joins us. Apologies for the late start. Technical gremlins seem to be visiting us from time to time. Alistair, it's a pleasure. Welcome here. As we come on air, there is some relatively breaking news in Israel about which you recently informed me, that the Israeli cabinet has voted unanimously that it will not accept any two-state solution. That's significant that it's unanimous because there are moderate members in the cabinet, and a recent poll shows that 71% of the Israeli public favor the IDF attacking Lebanon, Hezbollah,

or not. What do you make of these two breaking developments? Well, for me, they were not unexpected. I think people have underrated the sense in which, you know, Israel sees itself very much cornered. It's a sort of sees itself as a redoubt, the last redoubt for where Jews can be safe. And they see that the only way to keep this, only way to keep it, is through deterrence. And they have to create a deterrence. They don't have any sort of depth, if you like, strategic depth, so they need to keep deterrence. I'm only saying how this appears, I think, to a majority of

Israelis, that they have to have a state in which Israelis are, if you like, free from anxiety about their security, that they can go anywhere in the land of Israel. And just as important, that the states that surround them still learn to fear Israel and not to interfere with Israel, because it has this ability to use overwhelming violence in reaction and won't hesitate to do it. And this is a deterrence that they believe they need in order to survive in the Middle East as a redoubt, or as one person put it, as a sort of eschatological garrison, a last redoubt against, you know, Armageddon and

everything that the biblical predictions have suggested for them. Is a vote like this corrupt? By which I mean, you know, a vote in the American Congress against the two-state solution would be radically influenced by the Israeli lobby, the military-industrial complex, the various forces, the American intelligence community, the various forces that has a vice grip on the Congress. Is a vote in the Israeli cabinet, particularly a unanimous one, credible and intellectually honest, or is it subject to the same forces and pressures that I've just articulated for the U.S. Congress? No, it's a serious vote because it also reflects public opinion. 75 percent, three-quarters of Israelis would agree with that vote, would accept it. Things have changed since the 7th of

October, and Israel has moved strongly towards the right and towards a reassertion of deterrence, both a domestic deterrence on the ground to create security, and, if you like, a restoration of the sense that they are feared by other states. And both of them were collapsed on the 7th of October. And so this, I think, reflects a genuine book. But it reflects something else, because people are too ready just to ignore it and to say, oh, well, you know, this may not be very serious. This is politicking.

I think it's not politicking. I think that actually they are very serious about the ideas that they have to restore deterrence. They have to restore deterrence in Gaza by showing that, you know, low intensity conflict will be met by overwhelming military force, the bombing of Gaza, the destruction of the whole cities there. And at the external, it needs to be shown that Israel has not defeated, that it is full of deterrent power. So I think people need to start taking it seriously, because actually, the real problem is that Israel does not have any solution, any alternative, and it is compelled to take these sort of actions. It feels absolutely compelled to take them, and if you like, it feels checkmated into having to take them because they do not see any solution. And by solution, I mean two-state solution is off the

table as far as they're concerned. So what solution is there except to try and restore some form of deterrence, both internally and externally. They are cornered, and this is why the situation in the Middle East is so dangerous and why it's possible that Israel will actually take action. And it seems to be prepared. I put in a report I've written. I mean, we can see, in fact, you know, that there are four Israeli divisions in the north of Israel on the border of Lebanon, as opposed to the usual one. And where have they come from? They've come from Gaza. In fact, Gaza is actually really quite depleted of Israeli

military forces. I think there's one division, but they can't move them because they're stuck in Khan Yunus mostly. And so actually they are running out of solutions and so feel compelled to act in this way. So I think we should take it quite seriously, this vote. Is there a near unanimity or at least overwhelming majority in favor of the slaughter, the rampant slaughter of innocents and ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza? Yes, there is. And, you know, I think it was 46% of Israelis in a recent poll,

something like 91% approved of what was happening in Gaza. 46% didn't approve because they felt it hadn't gone far enough. So that's what, I mean, yes, there is. I mean, we're talking about something much more primal, much more emotional, much more far away from strategic rationality. We're talking about people, if you like, a bloodlust that that has come up. And these things are when they consume people, they consume them with a deep passion. You have a piece out over the weekend entitled, The Resistance as a Plan for Israel. Who or what is the resistance?

Yes, that's an important question because people are not quite sure what it means. It's a group of militia and, if you like, informal movements that are not part of a state per se, like Hezbollah, like the Hashad al-Shaabi, which is the Iraqi resistance groups, like the Houthis in Yemen, like other groups that support the, if you like, the Palestinian cause. And in fact, there's a sort of symmetry. They do not see any way that Palestine can exist. And this was the point. They don't see any way.

They see no other solutions except that Israel has to be psychologically deterred. It has to have its consciousness, its psyche seared by some form of defeat until it feels defeated, until it feels, if you like, exhausted, that it finally is prepared to give up the idea of Zionism, the idea that there are special rights and a very special position of Jews in the Middle East and either live like everyone else, every other inhabitant of the Middle East, but no more special rights, no more exceptionalism, no more overwhelming military violence in order to preside over the Middle East.

So on that side, too, there is a sense. Now, the nation states stand back from this resistance movement. The resistance movement coordinates amongst itself. It has a control room that moves locations. So they're coordinating. You see images of them. They're all together, and they're all thanking each other and talking to each other.

So it is quite a large movement, but it keeps apart from the nation-state structures, whether it's Syria or whether it is in Lebanon, and acts simply as an informal actor in the region. But there's no doubt that the nation states, many of them also support it. And there's no doubt there is massive, very strong feeling in the Middle East and in the Islamic world as a whole in support of what they're doing. The Houthis have become sort of a mythical force of anti-colonialism, anti-Israeli, because they see this as a colonial.

The settlements are a form of a sort of settler colonialism, and this is how they see the aim of the settlements was from 73 after the 73 war when Israel took back the Sinai the determination of Israel said no more of the occupied territories would be ever relinquished and so they started the process of settler colonialism in the West Bank in order to prevent a Palestinian state ever coming into being. And largely, it seems they've been successful. But the resistance groups see this, understand that. And that's why they say only when they talk about a defeat, when they're not talking about the death of the Israelis, but that they have to psychologically be defeated, they have to be exhausted,

and they have to be prepared to live in the Middle East without Zionism as the principles on which the state is built. Now, whether that happens or not is going to be the trial of strength that is currently taking place in the region. On the one hand, Israel backed entirely by the United States wholeheartedly and Europe and Britain particularly. And on the other hand, you have the resistance movements that are slowly increasing it, the pressure. And the key point, really, for your listeners is, you know, America also is in checkmate, because it doesn't have any good solutions to this problem. Its old solutions are gone. The old solutions of overwhelming air power, of bombing like we saw in Iraq, because the techniques of defense have changed. important, strategically significant, deep underground, 70 meters underground.

And they have developed and spent a lot of research and money on drones, on fast missiles. That's their air force. You know, the West no longer has total air dominance as it used to. And we've seen the change taking place in Iraq, where the whole methodology of war has changed dramatically. The old war, the desert storms of Iraq, over, you know, tanks thundering through the desert in a cloud of dust and smashing Saddam's tanks out of the way.

You couldn't do it today. It's impossible. With surveillance, satellites, drones, all of this technique, you can't move mass tanks, mass forces. So we're into a new form of technological war. in the post-war idea of overwhelming force and tanks and armaments and surface equipment, and they're not adjusting to this change that takes place. When you talk about a swarm of drones now in Ukraine, for example, it's a swarm of drones, many, many, maybe 100, 200, which communicate with one another, which through AI, and are ordering each other and keeping in their structure by AI themselves without external influence. And then at the right moment, they identify the target, and then they delegate certain of these drones to attack it. And so a mass of tanks are just finished like that.

I mean, there's no artillery, there's no enemy tanks involved. The drones think about it and organize it and come, and the killer drones are sent off from the swarm and destroyed. Whether it is Abrams or Challenger or Merkova, tanks, doesn't matter. So we're in a new warfare. When you mentioned the resistance, I'm going to put up some maps in a minute, because as we speak, we're actually just finished speaking, but a few minutes ago he finished speaking.

A lawyer representing the Palestinian Authority speaking before the International Court of Justice in The Hague. talk, but we're going to run a short clip in which he puts up five maps showing what the resistance believes the Jewish people, the Israelis, have done to Palestine. It's very, very interesting because you hear his words and you can see it depicted graphically. And the final map is one being held by Prime Minister Netanyahu shortly before this very famous picture, shortly before October 7th. So, Chris, let's run that clip. Allow me now to show you five maps. The first one is historic Palestine. This is the territory over which the Palestinian people أولاً هو فلسطين المتحدث. هذا هو المنطقة التي يجب أن يتمكن الناس من استعمال حقائقهم لتدريبهم.

في مجال ذلك، اتمنى للجمهور الجنسي أن يتحرر فلسطين ويكتشف أفضل أمورنا كما يظهر في الماكسة الثانية. مع المعارضة التي تتبعها ، أكثر من ثلاثة من أمريكا تم إغلاقها بشكل سهل ومدفع من إسرائيل. وثلاثة أربع من فلسطين أصبحت إسرائيل كما يظهر في المعارضة الثالثة. هذا كان بداية المعارضة. التحديد ، التحرك This was the start of the Nakba, the disposition, the displacement and replacement of our people, the denial of rights and discrimination that continues to this very day. In 1967, Israel then occupied the remainder of Palestine,

and from the first day of its occupation, started colonizing and annexing the land ومن يوم الأول لتقوم بمقاومتها بدأت في التقنية والتقنية المدينة بأهمية تجعل مقاومتها مستقبلة. تركنا مع مجموعة المتواجدين المتواجدين. محاولة إدخال نظامنا كما يظهر في ماب 4. إسرائيل أرادت جيوغرافيا فلسطين ولكن ليس ديموغرافيا لذا استمرت تجهيزنا الناس من أجل المنزل والمدينة

هناك الماك الخامس كانت تصويراً من أمام إسرائيل للأمم المتحدة في السبتمبر الأخير وقال هذا هو المدينة المتحدة الجديدة. هذا لا يوجد لا يوجد فلسطين على هذا المسار. فقط اسرائيل. مجموعة من كل المنطقة من الجردان الى المدينة المدينة.

هذا يظهر لك ما هو المستمرات المستمرات في This shows you what the prolonged, continuous Israeli occupation of Palestine is intended to accomplish. The complete disappearance of Palestine and the destruction of the Palestinian people. The complete disappearance of Palestine and the destruction of the Palestinian people. Is this the view that the resistance and the people in the streets have? Is this history generally accepted by them? Yes, completely. This is what I talk about when I talk about settler colonialism. This has been going on, as he said, for the years. It had a sort of a great uptick after the 73 war. And it is about the assimilation of land by demography and by physical means, and also then borrowing from Sharon's military experience in the Sinai, separating and dividing and keeping the Palestinians uncertain on ill-formed boundaries, no security,

different layers of legal administrative security protection to keep them insecure in order to give, if you like, Israel is living beyond the green line in the occupied territories. To give them security, you had to give the Palestinians a sense of radical insecurity. And that is precisely, you've summed up exactly what the resistance is about. And so they don't see any sort of political solution. How could there be a political solution to that salami slicing over the years from that time? They don't see that. They think the only way is some sort of struggle that will, and finally, in, if you like, exhaustion, in a defeat, that Israel will come to the terms that Zionism

just is not a viable principle to run a state, especially as there are now seven million Palestinians and seven million Jews living between the river and the sea. And so demography is removing the idea of a one person, a one people, a unilateral state, a unified state, because then it's not going to be workable for most Israelis to live in a state where they do not have the privileges that are necessary to face what they see as their biblical future. The fanatic member of one of two or three, a member of Prime Minister Netanyahu's cabinet, a gentleman by the name of Itamar Ben-Gavir, the one who's the head of internal security, roughly the head of the equivalent of being the head of America's FBI, the one who said that if Palestinian children or women get too close to the border between Gaza and Israel, that they should receive a bullet in the head. The one who holds the keys to Netanyahu's government,

because if he and his other fanatics leave the coalition, Netanyahu doesn't have a majority, says that a Hezbollah strike on Safed, the area where Israeli settlers are, is a declaration of war. Okay, that's a long-winded question. My real question is, does Netanyahu believe this? Yes. Yeah, he's believed it for a long time. I think in the 70s, he was writing a book with Max Hastings, and he said, listen, in the next war, in the next war,

if we play it right, there will be no Arabs in this territory at all. They'll all have gone. So, I mean, that was from the 1970s, and progressively he's allied himself more closely. But I think, you know, the key point is, you know, it's time to stop viewing the people like Smotrich and Ben-Gavir as such extremists that they don't represent, have no real representation in the Israeli people. 7th of October have changed people's views, have made them passionate, have made them feel there's no alternative but killing everyone in Gaza. It's a terrible thing to say, but that's how many of them are feeling now. They don't feel deterrence, they won't feel that security and safety. They've just been asking people to go back in the next few months and to go back to the north.

And all of the people in the hotels in the Dead Sea are saying, no, we're never going back to some of these settlements. It's finished. And they're declaring the end of the Zionist project. And this is unacceptable to the majority of Jews, both in Israel and outside of Israel, because the Jewish state, let's face it and be frank, was to have found it in order to say, never again an Auschwitz. We are going to be safe in our area and secure. Only, I mean, the fact is, as you saw, to achieve that,

they have assimilated and practiced the settler colonialism and in the region a form of military, if you like, overmatch, which was designed to not allow anyone to challenge them in any way. choices, little solutions, firing rockets at the Iraqis, at the Houthis. But it doesn't work anymore because that type of military defense was effective in the past, but it isn't effective now. Look what's happened. Those carriers have gone. Firing missiles into Iraq is not going to calm Iraq. It's not going to stop the Houthis. All of these things are cascading into a failure that will really blight the United States, particularly Biden, because it will end up unless either the United States reads the right to Israel and says, look, you're not going to succeed in this. I mean, you're not going to succeed. You can't take on the whole world in this way unless they say,

come to your senses. This Zionist project has never worked and is not working. You've got to rethink how to live in the Middle East or go or whatever. But the United States does the opposite and supports it with these rather futile acts. And this is going to bring a failure down on the shoulders of the United States, which is going to affect its position in the whole world. Does the United States, do the United States elites, does the United States State Department, does the White House lack the understanding of the situation as you've just described it? Or because of the power of the Israeli lobby in the United States, do they lack the will to do anything about it other than their blind, continuous support for the Israeli Defense Force slaughter in Gaza?

It's clear that Washington, I'm talking then about, you know, the very senior people around the White House, are really concerned that the proposals being made by Washington, the type of state that they're proposing, just won't fly and that it will fail and that America will bear the consequences for this. And so they're very concerned that there's going to be a cascading failure for America with these tactics and with this approach of sort of embracing Israel and then being drawn more and more into something that becomes a possibly very serious regional war. Wow.

All right, Alistair, thank you very much. I mean, this stuff is so unpleasant and so gloomy and so dark. Well, let me ask you one other question. If the Israelis do attack Hezbollah, is that an unwise thing to do, no matter how popular it may be? I mean, the last time they fought Hezbollah, some people say they fought to a draw. Most people say they lost. The problem is hubris. Hubris in the United States, hubris in Israel. They can't imagine how Israel could ever suffer a real military defeat. They cannot imagine how the Israeli Defence Force could lose a war with Hezbollah. I think this is hubristic because we will see if this is what happens. But Hezbollah is a formidable military force now. It's not a group of barefooted tribesmen, as they like to call most of the people in the resistance, particularly the Houthis.

How on earth do these barefooted tribesmen manage to defy the United States? Well, they are. Alistair Crook, always a pleasure, my dear friend, no matter what we're talking about. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you. Sorry it was gloomy.

No, no, no. But listen, your analysis is not only spot on, it's second to none. So deeply, it is deeply and profoundly appreciated, as you know, by all of our viewers and, of course, by me. Thank you so much, my dear friend. Thank you. Of course. Coming up later this morning, American Eastern Time, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson,

and this afternoon from NIWard.com, Kyle Anzalone. All of our regulars this week, all of your favorites. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.