Judging Freedom - Phil Giraldi: Israel’s Rule of Law

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Phil Giraldi: Israel’s Rule of LawSee 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 Wednesday, August 7th, 2024. Phil Giraldi joins us now. Phil, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for joining us. You have yet another interesting, fascinating piece out on Israel and its understanding of its own rule of law. Let me ask some big picture questions before we get granular. Is the state of Israel a liberal democracy? I don't think that Israel fits that definition by any stretch of the imagination. Israel is what we used to refer to with countries like South Africa as an apartheid regime. Now, that means basically you have certain structures and certain ways of of going through the rules but this did not impact on the where the real power was and that was in uh places like praetorian johannesburg and and cape town uh where mostly the white population lives. So we see in Israel the same thing,

except the difference between how it treats the groups that inhabit the same land are based on religion. Israel, back two years ago, the Knesset, its parliament, declared that or passed a law saying that Israel is a Jewish state. And that meant very specifically that many things that the state did applied in certain ways to the Jewish population and not to the other people. There are different laws, are there not, for the Israelis and for the non-Israelis, whether the non-Israelis are Palestinians, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, atheists, whatever they are. It's a set of laws for the Jewish people, for Jews, and for non-Jews. Is that fair? Actually actually it doesn't quite work that way okay correct me please most of historic palestine uh is under occupation now

but in what is the state of israel there is a considerable Palestinian population, which since the foundation of the state of Israel, are Israeli citizens. So these people technically are subject to the same laws as any other Israeli. But in practice, it doesn't work that way. This is why we see if a Palestinian is being shot dead by a settler, the settlers being allowed, this is one example, being allowed to carry weapons, the police and the army will look the other way. And this settler will probably never go to court and never be tried and never punished. And there is a law pending now in the Israeli Knesset relating to the army and police granting them full immunity if they kill a Palestinian. If they kill a Jew for some reason, they have to go to the courts and will be tried and will be imprisoned and punished.

But if it involves a Palestinian, there is complete immunity for them. So this is how the law applies in different ways to different ethnicities. I would imagine that this immunity proposal in the Knesset is the same one that would grant immunity to members of the IDF who rape, torture, and abuse Palestinian prisoners. And I believe, again, correct me if I'm wrong, Phil, there is a section in the law that would allow the jailers summarily to execute Palestinian prisoners. The stated purpose is to provide more room for more prisoners. Yeah, that's exactly correct. This is the second law of that nature. Both these laws were proposed by Itamar Ben-Gavir,

who's the national security director in the Israeli government. And he basically is saying, he has said, there's overcrowding in the prisons because the Israeli government can imprison Palestinians without making any charges, without taking them into a court and saying, you did this or you did that. They can put them in prison just as a precaution as they see it. And the fact is that they are doing this to such an extent that the prisons are all overcrowded.

There are over 10,000 Palestinian prisoners currently. And so Gavir uh proposed this law he said why why why not just take them out and give them an ounce of lead behind the back of their head and just shoot them and um another senior minister smotrich who's the finance minister uh just proposed uh two days ago that uh, or he made a, shall we say, a comment at a conference saying, you know, it really morally and judicially would be perfectly all right to starve the Palestinians in Gaza, all 2 million of them, by cutting off all food supplies. But the only reason we don't do it is because, gee, the rest of the world might be mad at us. I saw that statement, and it is horrific.

I don't know if Prime Minister Netanyahu condemned it. I doubt it. He's terrified of these two. And Ben-Gavir is not just a member of the Knesset and a member of the cabinet. He is the equivalent of the head of the FBI in Israel. He is the senior person in charge of a domestic national law enforcement. He's not a local cop. He's the head of the Israeli equivalent of the FBI. Hasn't the UN court with authority over this, the International Court of Justice, ruled that the occupations of Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank are unlawful under international law.

Yeah, they have. And one of the reasons they made this judgment was the fact that Israel is clearly, if not going all 100% in starving the Gazans to death has been specifically targeting relief shipments and blocking them, destroying them, allowing settlers to attack them and dump their goods. This has been going on every day. And they've cut back so much on food and medicines and things like that, and attacked hospitals and schools and that sort of thing, and that this is a genocide in motion. And they have specifically called that these acts are acts of war, and they amount to genocide. Under international law, the entity that is being occupied not only has a right, it has a duty to resist the occupiers. Is force the only way to end these Israeli occupations? That's a good question. One would hope that moral suasion of some kind

by other countries, and by other countries I mean the Europeans who have been very tolerant of Israeli behavior, and the U.S., which is complicit in all this and I'm sure if it ever went to trial the U.S will be found legally complicit and uh by continuing to give weapons to the Israelis and knowing what they're using and how they're using them and by continuing to provide political cover and it's that sort of thing it's it's like uh uh recently with this uh case that you were talking about of people being tortured in the Israeli prisons, the State Department spokesman, I think it was Miller, I don't know, it was the Indian, Patel, responded that the U.S. State Department was looking into this and was very concerned about it. But we'll just let it play out with the Israeli authorities doing the investigating and doing what they see fit to counter it. And this, of course, is a free pass to do whatever you want and kill how many you want. Chris, I think we may have had, it's not on our list,

but we may have had that clip. If you find it, give me the high sign and we'll play it. It's inconceivable that these spokespersons for the State Department are telling the truth. They are just mouthing what their bosses, of course, want them to say. And I guess in one respect, that's their job. That's what they get paid for. Phil, is the Israeli war against Gaza and the coming war against Hezbollah having a unifying effect in Israel so that the Zionists and the liberal Jews are unified

or getting closer? Well, I wouldn't say that it goes so far as to say that they're unified, but the fact is this is providing a lot of cover. The more you go on about Israel being under siege. And this is, of course, what Netanyahu did when he was in Washington and about the Iranians being a threat. And they're they're developing nuclear weapons and they're doing this and they're doing that. They're responsible for every evil in the region. It's playing this card and it does have an effect.

Opinion polls show that something like 90% of the Israeli public is very supportive of what's being done to the Palestinians right now. And there's also a very large percentage that's very supportive of military action against both Hezbollah in Lebanon and against Iran. And, of course, that, again, was a major mission on the part of Netanyahu to get that spineless wonder in the White House to agree that under all circumstances, the U.S. will, quote, defend Israel, even though Israel pulled off these assassinations that have triggered the current crisis. This is what America is all about. Here's Matt Miller, the chief State Department spokesman, fighting with a reporter that on an almost a daily basis presents him with challenging questions focus on jurisdiction for a second who does have

jurisdiction here so the governor of israel has uh jurisdiction over the occupied territory over gaza which is not entirely they have jurisdiction into looking at at uh the actions okay so the palestinians if they have complaint, they have to bring it to Israeli courts. We have jurisdiction with the use of our equipment. I'm sorry, how do you have jurisdiction? With the use of our military equipment that we have provided. Matt, how do you have jurisdiction? If you look at the Leahy Law, if you look at...

That's not jurisdiction in a criminal process. Not in a criminal process, but it has to do with the determinations that we make and the policies that flow from it. But Matt, long term, you were right. You used the word for DOJ, Matt. Come on. The U.S. does not have jurisdiction. I wasn't referring to criminal jurisdiction, Matt.

There are different ways to look at this. Long term, we agree with you that the Palestinian people should be a state and have the ability to make these determinations. But that's not where we are today. That's where we're trying to get to. Obviously, they can't answer that question. Let me ask you, will Palestine ever be free without the use of force? I think there has to be, well, put it this way if the united states were actually living up to the wonderful things that we included in our constitution about human rights and about individual liberties and stuff like that it would immediately fix this situation by cutting off Israel's money and cutting off its weapons, because Israel could not

take on all its neighbors without support of that kind coming from the United States. Biden could do it in one day, and Donald Trump could do it in one day, but neither one of them is about to do it, and nor will Kamala Harris. And, you know, this is the tragedy of the situation. We have this tragedy playing out in front of us, right in front of us, our faces every day when we open the newspaper, turn on the news, we see this. And the killing just is not stopping. And it's all being done by the Israelis.

And it's, you know, it's something that is contrived to get the United States to intervene directly and militarily on their behalf. And indeed, we have aircraft carriers and support vessels moving up towards the Lebanese coast, even as we speak. This is the tragedy of it. They have abdicated their moral responsibility in Washington, and they are war criminals just like Benjamin Netanyahu. Chris, do we still have the clip of Netanyahu before the Congress attacking the freedom of speech. For all we know, Iran is funding the anti-Israel protests that are going on right now outside this building. Not that many, but they're there and throughout the city. Well, I have a message for these protesters.

When the tyrants of Tehran, who hang gays from cranes and murder women for not covering their hair, appraising, promoting, and funding you, you have officially become Iran's useful idiots. That is an attack I submit on the First Amendment, on the freedom of speech. It garnered the longest standing ovation of the 58 interruptions with ovations in his speech. The people doing the applauding took the same oath you once took and the same oath I once took to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, which includes the First Amendment. It was truly one of the most reprehensible rejections of duty in a nonviolent way that I've seen. And to make it even worse, two of the regular contributors to this show, Colonel Larry Wilkerson and Max Blumenthal were right there, right outside the

Capitol, demonstrating. And according to them, nobody received a nickel from Iran. There is absolutely no evidence that Iran funded any of those activities. And myself being kind of connected with a lot of these groups that were active in the demonstrations, I saw where they were getting their money from. And it was very clear. It was money that was coming from the people themselves who were demonstrating. This was self-funding. And they were doing it because they felt it was the right thing to do the demonstration that preceded the uh uh the uh actual day when when bb spoke uh that that were arrested uh were from the uh Jewish voices for peace they were they were Jewish and there are a lot of people in America are waking up to all this kind of thing. It's funny that Bibi says, oh, there weren't many of them.

Well, there were 50,000 of them. And, you know, I searched papers and everything the next day, and not a single mainstream news source mentioned how big this demonstration was and how active it was. And they tried to make it look like it was a bunch of jokers out there getting paid by America's great enemy, Iran, which is another fiction. You know, this is the nonsense that goes on, that we are being deluded with what our own government is doing to us and is doing it on behalf of a terrorist like Netanyahu, a war criminal like Netanyahu, on behalf of a country that's carrying out an act of genocide and they get away with it because the people we have elected to high office in this country let them get away with it and let them do it it's uh it it's hard to it's hard to buy all of this. You mentioned earlier Mr. Patel arguing over the International Court of Justice. We have that clip. Chris will play it now.

Thank you. I know the State Department and Secretary Blinken have made clear that the ICC doesn't have jurisdiction in your view over the Palestinian conflict, but I wanted to get your response to remarks from Netanyahu just today, especially in context of the conversation we just had about the campus protests. He said, branding Israel's leaders and soldiers as war criminals will pour jet fuel on the fires of anti-Semitism, those fires that are already raging on the campuses of America and across capitals around the world. Do you agree with that assessment that it's antisemitic for the ICC to pursue Netanyahu? And what do you make of him connecting this to the protest?

So fundamentally, at the heart of this, Julia, we do not believe that the ICC has jurisdiction over this issue, and that's what the crux here. Beyond that, I'd let the prime minister and officials within the Israeli Government clarify or offer any commentary on his comments, but the crux of this for the United States is that we do not believe that the ICC has jurisdiction on this. That being said, we work closely with the ICC in a number of key areas. We think that they do important work, important work as it relates to Ukraine, Darfur, Sudan. But again, on this particular instance,

in this particular instance, I'm sorry, They just do not have jurisdiction. I guess he forgot that the American government wrote the UN Charter, which includes the International Court of Justice, to suggest that this court does not have jurisdiction over what two members states are doing. The Israelis occupying Palestine is, of course, absurd. Your favorite senator from South Carolina recently introduced legislation which purports to be an authorization to use military force against Iran. Yeah. I don't think this is going to get anywhere in the Senate, but this is Senator Graham. How is Iran, if at all, a threat to the United States?

Iran is not a threat to the United States. It never has been. Iran may have sometimes, since its revolution, been a threat to some U.S. interests, which is a whole different thing. But it's not a justification to go to war. And what really scares me about this act that our good friend from South Carolina initiated was this is declaring war on a country before you even know what that country is allegedly doing that is making you declare war on them uh this is so ridiculous especially since this is coming from such a clownish buffoon of a senator it's uh it's so ridiculous that uh there should have been cries in whatever chamber this was this thing was touted to impeach him, for God's sakes.

You know, when you watch these people and you listen to them and you realize that they're not honest, they know these things are true. They're not that stupid. And yet they can't be honest with themselves or honest with the things they learned maybe in Sunday school or in kindergarten class or things that we learned in growing up in America, that suddenly these things don't matter to them anymore. All they matter is to who's lining their pocketbook and who's making them feel good and uh this is this is this state that our Republic has sunk to is an abomination how extensive and effective is the control over Washington by the Israeli government? It's total in some areas.

And foreign policy, obviously for the regions or parts of the world where Israel has an interest, it's total. As we saw with the Netanyahu visit and the crawling that went to him afterwards by the president, by the president candidates. This is, it's pathetic. And as long ago as William Fulbright, smart people in the U.S. government and people who actually cared about things were pointing this out, that this was developing at that time. And now the control is complete.

And it's called, I have $100 million. What will you do for me? These are not happy topics, Phil. But I thank you for the candor and clarity and courage with which you address them. We'll talk to you again. I hope you'll come back next week, same time and day as usual. All my best. Well, thank you very much for having me on.

We have to talk about this. Yes, we do have to talk about it. The public needs to know it because they're not going to get it in mainstream media. And it's the reason that our numbers of viewers are continuing to skyrocket because we do have colleagues that do what you and I do, but they're few and far between, and you have to find them. And if you don't find them, you're going to get an entirely different version of world events one the government wants you to believe thank you phil thank you of course uh more of this uh in 30 minutes aaron mate four o'clock uh eastern judge napolitano for judging freedom Thank you.