Pod Save the World - Fox News loves war crimes

Episode Date: May 22, 2019

This week Tommy and Ben check their anxiety levels when it comes to potential war with Iran, try to understand why a Fox News host is lobbying to protect men accused of war crimes, discuss Bernie's foreign policy record as mayor of Burlington, get an update on far-right parties in Australia and Austria and explain why milkshakes are Britain's hottest new protest. Then Noura Erakat joins to talk about Trump’s middle east peace plan and what it will take to create a Palestinian state.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. Ben, what's going on in Chicago? Ben, what's going on in Chicago, man? Just seeing some worldos, man, talking to some college kids. I love. The University of Chicago here on the south side, Barack Obama's roots, so it's good to be back here. Those kids are intimidatingly smart. Be careful. They're wicked smart. It's impressive. I have to say. I did not get in here either.

No, I didn't even apply. This week, we're going to talk Iran. We're going to talk about which Fox News hosts are encouraging Trump to pardon people accused of committing war crimes. That is not a joke. A New York Times report on Bernie's foreign policy views in the 80s. This week in far-right politics in countries that start with A and why milkshakes are the hottest new form of protest. Then Palestinian-American human rights attorney, Nora Erica joins to talk about Trump's Middle East peace plan and what it will take to create a new Palestinian state. You ready, Ben? I'm ready to roll. All right, let's start with an Iran check-in. So as all of our listeners know, you and I were quite worried about the risk of conflict with Iran as recently as last week.

My blood pressure went down a little bit when I started to read stories that seemed like maybe authorized leaks trying to ratchet down some of the tension. But then our rattle-smashing president tweeted, if Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran, never threatened the United States again, which frankly echoed a tweet he sent that was basically the same a year ago. Today, the acting defense secretary said that the Iranian threats were quote on hold because of all the things the Trump administration has been doing. So, Ben, I guess my question is, how you feeling at this point? Like, where's your anxiety meter what comes to Iran? Well, my, look, the anxiety

meter is down a little bit. And I want to make a point that I think is important for people listening. It kind of reminds me a little bit of health care in the sense that they're trying to do something. They're trying to push an ideological agenda. And then people made a bunch of noise. And, you know, there's a recognition of how unpopular this was. And in that case, you had Congress. And so you had a McCain who could cast a vote against it. What kind of felt like was happening the last few weeks, and you and I've been calling this out, is this kind of sleepwalking into a war with Iran, you know? And we don't have to relive it, but basically they're deploying military assets, they're

referring to vague intelligence, they're issuing threats, and it felt like they were setting the stage to provoke the Iranians into doing something or to claiming a pretext for them to take some action. And, you know, people started to make a lot of noise. people in Congress started to make noise, some people in the press, you know, hopefully some people out there listening to the show. And then you have Trump come out, say, well, wait a second, I don't want to go to war with Iran, because they know that a war with Iran is unpopular. I think it's really important for people to keep saying, don't do this. This would be a disaster. People don't want

you to do this. Trump, you said you're going to keep us out of these wars. I think there's a need to remain vigilant because they did respond, and they've tried to walk it back, because I think they looked over the precipice of this thing, and Bolton was driving the bus, and then they decided, looks like, you know, maybe we should put the brakes on. As you said, Trump is still, you know, one day he's saying he wants peace, and the next day he's saying he could destroy the entire country. So I think people need to remain vigilant here. The risk of an escalation is still high, but it does feel like it's worth people making a lot of noise about this and about how this is not something that people would support, because I think Trump seems to respond to them.

I agree with you there. One thing I want to ask your gut check on, there was a report that Oman's foreign minister visited Tehran and that Pompeo had reached out the Omanis. They've historically played a helpful go-between role for the U.S. and the Iranians. Did that make your blood pressure go down and all? Well, it went down and went up. It went down because, yes, the Omanis are among all the Gulf states who are all majority Sunni states. The Omanis have maintained good relations with the Iranians, and they have lines directly into the Supreme Leader. And so when we were in government, they hosted the secret negotiations that led to what became the Iran deal. And so they would be the natural middleman to open up a channel of communication between the U.S. and Iran, which I think there needs to be.

I also noticed Trump saying, well, you know, we don't want to go to war. We just want Iran to agree to a limit its nuclear program. And I'm thinking, well, we have this thing that we negotiated called the Iran deal with the Omanis. and it seems like they're kind of going back to the beginning of that process. But, you know, given the choice between that and a war, I'll take it. I still think people have to be vigilant because the context that the administration said and even what Trump said about threats, they could take any event in that region and use it as a pretext. Yeah.

Or the Saudis could say, oh, the Iranians, you know, as they attacked one of our vessels, and then they're calling Trump and saying you have to hit back against Iranians. So we got a year and a half left of the first term of the Trump administration. the possibility that that pretext could emerge is still there. Better for them to be, again, warned off of war and hopefully to at least try to establish some channel communications, I'd rather have a very weird North Korea-like diplomatic process with the Iranians and a war. So if the Ammanians can execute that, that would be good. And they would be the party that can do that, because neither Saudi Arabia or the UAE or these other Gulf states have the same relationships in Iran that Amman has.

That's why we use them. presumably that's why they're emerging now in the middle of this picture. Yeah, amen to that. There was also a big New York Times piece by David Sanger, where he walked through the fact that the goal the administration seems to be articulating for what an Iran deal 2.0 could be was basically the exact same thing, the exact same time frame that Obama negotiated, but, you know, whatever. Another data point on the roller coaster of our blood pressure.

So the AP reported that Iran has quadrupled as uranium enrichment production capacity. They said they'll stay under the three. 3.67% enrichment limit set by the nuclear deal, but it's likely that their stockpile of an enriching uranium will go beyond what's allowed. Ben, none of that sounded like English to anyone listening. Can you tell us in layman's terms if that's a big deal? Yeah, so I think there's ways to think about this. The Iran deal had different pieces to it. So in one piece, the Iranians roll back their program. So they took out two-thirds of their centrifuges. They essentially filled the core of the reactor that could build plutonium with concrete, so it can't do that.

those are the steps that they took to set back their nuclear program. Then they secondly agreed to a series of steps that limited their stockpile so that they just had less raw materials to deal with in the country if they chose to restart their program. And then thirdly, they agreed to a bunch of inspections, very intrusive inspections to monitor their nuclear program so we could see what was going on there. We could make sure they were keeping their commitments.

What I read is that the Iranians, in response to Trump pulling out of the deal and re-sanctioning them for a year, essentially announced that they're going to begin to plus up the materials they have, the stockpile they have. That suggests to me it's not the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is they kick out the inspectors, they start installing centrifuges, and they're in a situation where they're dashing off to build a weapon.

It feels to me like they wanted to do something to show that there were consequences for Trump violating their own deal, and they maybe wanted to create some conditions where, if they chose to restart the program, they might be starting from a slightly higher base. And so it's a testing by the Iranians of how far they want to push here. It's not, again, the worst steps that they could take. It's not them kicking out inspectors. It's not them installing all their centrifuges. It's them trying to send a political message, not unlike North Korea testing weapons, that we're frustrated that you guys have violated

this deal. We're going to push the envelope too. We're going to put ourselves in a position to have some more materials here, so that if this thing all falls apart, you know, we're starting from that position instead of from the position of all the restrictions of the Iran deal. Right. You know, that Trump people say they want to negotiate something better, the reality is there's not that many different formulations here. You know, we had a deal that shipped out 98% of their materials that rolled back, you know, eliminated the ability for them to produce plutonium, that rolled back the number of

centrifuges that they had so they couldn't produce a weapon. within a year if they chose to break the deal and try to get all the material for a weapon. And that's what the Trump people are now talking about doing. And they could try to bring in some other elements like Iran's ballistic missiles. But at its core, any nuclear deal with Iran is going to look somewhat like our deal. You know, and the question is, do you want a deal like that in place or not? And I think the Trump people are presented with what we always said would be the choice, which is either you have a deal like that in place or it goes away,

and you're left with this question of whether you go to war with the Iranians to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon. That ultimately is the decision space. And I hope that they choose the course of trying to return to some diplomacy here. Yeah, me too. Let's go to a little bit more disturbing story. So President Trump is reportedly hoping to celebrate Memorial Day by pardoning members of the military accused of war crimes. I guess this is a idea that Fox News host Pete Hegseth is pitching to him. One case is a Navy SEAL who is turned into the authorities by his own guys in his unit for killing civilians, including children and a teenage hostage.

The others are members of Blackwater, a private militia force. They killed dozens of unarmed Iraqis in 2007. There are some Marine Corps snipers charged with urinating on dead Taliban fighters. Ben, we were lucky to work with and around a lot of unbelievable U.S. service members from literally every branch of service. I mean, can you imagine the men and women we worked with wanting to celebrate Memorial Day by associating their service with war crimes? No. I mean, it's hugely offensive to the vast majority of U.S. service members who conduct themselves with remarkable professionalism in incredibly difficult circumstances. Look, people should read these stories.

I mean, this one guy, this one Navy SEAL, was literally just decided to shoot a child and, kill that child. You know, it decided to execute a prisoner, right? Freaked out his fellow service members such that they reported him, which, you know, is a drastic act within the kind of brotherhood of the Navy SEALs. Yeah, and he was their boss. Yeah. And, you know, and number one, so it sends a message everybody else that, you know what, like these guys are heroes, you know, the guys who broke the rules, and the people that blew the whistle on them are the bad guys. That's sick. You know, that's disgusting. It has messages

beyond the United States. We have been at the center of trying to have there be rules that govern how people fight wars. A lot of these rules date back to War I and World War II when you had the mass slaughter of innocence, and people deciding, we don't want to do that anymore. We have Geneva Conventions. We have protections for people who are prisoners of war. We don't just randomly shoot civilians. That saves untold lives around the world, the fact that you have the United States and other countries invest in those rules. And the United States pulls. out of that, not only does that put civilians in danger, it puts our service members in danger. What if it happens if they're caught in the conflict?

We count on those rules to protect our service members, so it's ultimately potentially putting them in danger. And for what? Because culturally, like Donald Trump and some fucking Fox News host who I've never heard of until you just said his name, like think it's good politics to say, well, what's wrong with the guy? He's a seal, and so what he killed the child. Like, how can you defend this?

This is indefensible. It's indefensible. And this is not how the commander-in-chief. of the world's most powerful military should be acting to take our kind of culture war, Fox News, bullshit, political grievances

and give life to them this way sends a dangerous message that will put civilians at risk around the world and ultimately put our troops at risk. Yeah, and like that case, that individual murdering a child or a hostage, I'm sure everyone hears that and thinks

that's a no-brainer, that person should go to jail. People might listen to this and think, okay, so some Marine Corps snipers urinated on dead Taliban fighters, isn't that a lesser case? But I can think of so many meetings that you and I were in when there was some really ugly incident like desecrating a corpse or a Quran was desecrated that led to protests or riots that could last weeks or months that were clearly and obviously insulting to people in the

region. And that's a separate set of issues. But again, to your point that we could put our own service members serving abroad at risk, these instances like led to massive instability and like people were killed. You know, I mean, it's a big deal to say. send a message that we don't care about protecting the corpse of an Afghan soldier. Yeah, you remember how much this mattered of Petraeus, right? Yes, yes. I mean, remember that crazy guy, Terry Jones, the guy who would burn Korans? And Petraeus, when he's commander in Afghanistan, would be the most upset about these things

because he said there would always be a spike in Taliban attacks against his guys when some nutcase would burn a Quran on YouTube or something. I mean, so this is not just a bunch of lefties. He's talking about this stuff. Our generals were constantly blowing the alarm bells that, you know, if you are desecrating the Quran, urinating on corpses, like, that is the lifeblood, the propaganda that people use to motivate others to come attack our people. Yeah, that's a really ugly one and a no-brainer.

So let's turn to some reporting on Bernie Sanders' foreign policy record. The Times did a feature on Bernie in a follow-up interview with him about his foreign policy record as the mayor of Burlington. Apparently he visited Nicaragua. It's funny even on his face to say that. He visited Nicaragua in the mid-80s. He strongly opposed Reagan's anti-communist policy agenda. Generally, he formalized a sister city relationship between Burlington and Yaroslavl, which I hope I'm pronouncing that right, a city in the Soviet Union. He went to Cuba. It's very interesting that he dug into these issues as a mayor. Ben, I was curious what you made of this story, both the fact that he was just so active on foreign policy, but also the policy.

sees themselves, like opposing the right-wing militias we were supporting in the region, for example? Yeah, I mean, look, I thought this whole episode was kind of interesting because, you know, first of all, it's a reminder than the 80s. There were these contested issues, and if you were on the left, like Bernie, you know, you were raising all these concerns about the U.S. support for the Contras and the death squads and right-wing militias in Central America. You know, I personally, like, probably wouldn't have gone as far as like a sister-city in the Soviet Union.

but, you know, Bernie was doing his own form with detente out of Burlington. What I think is revealing, though, is that Bernie's getting all this shit for this, as if it was wrong to oppose the Reagan administration Central America policies. And this is relevant today because the guy who is the engineer of those policies, L.A. Abrams, is in charge of the regime change policy in Venezuela right now, right? And it's interesting to me that it's more, you know, seemingly outside of the mainstream that Bernie took these views, then for what Elliott Abrams did. I mean, it's one of the things that hold the mirror up to how American journalists and

American politics look at farm policy that it somehow a problem for Bernie, that he was opposing actively U.S. Central America policy in 1980s, whereas it's not necessarily as big a problem for the guy who's the architect of a policy that killed innocent and civilians that supported death squads who's now serving in a high-ranking position in the Trump administration. I mean, whether or not you would go as far as Bernie did in the 80s, he was reflecting, I think, some pretty valid critiques about how far the Reagan administration was going, particularly in Central America. And, you know, I think Bernie deserves credit for being himself and not walking those back. Yeah, it was interesting because the Times posted their investigative story, and then Bernie did an interview. And you could tell in reading the interview that the story pissed him off a bit, especially questions about an event he attended in Nicarago, or I guess there were anti-American chants or sentiment.

And so it's interesting because the frame of the question is basically, I don't know, the subtext is, would this sound bad if used against you in a political ad? You know, would this look bad on Fox News? And Bernie's trying to make the case like, oh, well, of course there was anti-American sentiment in a country where we were supporting one side of a civil war, right? But I don't know. It was hard for me to read that question and not feel his pain, feel Bernie's frustration in the way it was framed to him, but then also wonder to myself,

what would Fox News do with this story if he were the nominee? Yeah, I mean, I think, look, and to be clear, like, you know, some of these guys like Danny Ortega, the guy down there that Bernie supported, you know, he wasn't a great guy either. But at the same time, I think, first of all, you know, Bernie's not someone who spent his whole life thinking he'd run for president, right? and you know what, like he's the mayor of Burlington. He's on the left.

He opposes our Central America policies with some very good reason. He goes down there. You know, he's not someone who's sitting there in the 80s thinking like, if there's some videotape of me at a rally where people are saying any American things, how will that look in, you know, 30 or 40 years and I'm running for president. And I kind of think it's dumb to hold people to a standard that if, like, there's anything in your, it's like Reverend Wright, you know, like Obama, when he went to church on the south side, wasn't thinking like, while this video of my pastor sound, you know, my presidential campaign,

some of that is just out of your control. I do think that it's right to push back and say, wait a second, why is this question coming at me about the optics of what I did and not about the position I was taking, which is, you know, again, why is it more controversial to oppose the U.S. support for Contras and Desquads in Central America than it was to support that. There's something weird about the political incentives around foreign policy that always favor the kind of more hawkish, aggressive interventionist position, and Bernie's trying to blow the whistle on that. I do think, to be fair to the times, yeah, like this is going to be out there. Bernie's going to have to explain it like anything else in a presidential campaign. And, you know, Bernie's getting scrutiny that he might not have gotten last time because he seems like a frontrunner.

And so that's, like, that's part of life. And you might not like it, but it's going to be there. I think the goal for him should be to just kind of make his case. for why he believed what he did believe then. And as you and I know, we can complain about the media until the end of time, but it's going to be there. So take it head on, address it. Yeah, I agree.

And it's also, I think, an open question if people really care about things from the mid-80s or 90s when we have a president of the United States currently, who is a massive scumbag for all of those decades, and no one seemed to care because we elected him. Yeah, and it should be pointed out that you have a president of the States who said, like, oh, well, we've had some killers, too, in the United States. And it's not like Trump has never said anything bad about American foreign policy. He said, frankly, probably a lot worse things than Bernie Sanders in the last several years about American foreign policy. Yeah, I mean, he knows more about ISIS and the generals, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay, let's talk about a section we're calling this week in far right politics and countries that start with A. First, Australia, their conservative coalition won a surprise victory in last week's general election. It's hard to spin this one. It sucks. It's a huge blow to those who want. on action on climate change. Ben, any brief thoughts on this bummer? It's a bummer because it looked like the right was going to be dislodged here. My one brief thought is like, hey, message to worldos in Canada.

You know, you don't want to wake up after your election and have some far right guy who's against action on climate in there either. Hopefully it galvanizes, progresses in the next big election in Canada to say we don't want to end up there. Yeah, agreed. That's a very good point. Okay. So the next one is Austria. Okay, so this is a truly wild story. Austria called for snap elections after the far right vice chancellor resigned. So this guy, Heinz Christian Strach, I think is his name of the right-wing populist party. Freedom Party of Austria was caught in a sting operation where he was filmed eating, drinking and hanging out in a villa in a biza with a woman who claimed to be the niece

of a Russian oligarch, as one does. She said she wanted to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a major Austrian newspaper and use it to help the Freedom Party, the right-wing party, win in exchange she wanted big government contracts. So I guess my first question of this one is kind of meta, Ben. It's like this was an amazing elaborate sting. We don't know who did it. The newspapers who published the stories do. But like these guys rented a villa.

They wired it with cameras and microphones. Like who has this capability? Is this a foreign intelligence service? I don't know. I don't think it has to be. I mean, because like first of all, kudos like just exposes what everybody knows, right? that, A, these people are corrupt, B, they're full shit when they say they're working for you and not looking out for themselves. And three, they're more than happy to jump in bed with the Russians, right?

And, you know, swap out Austria for United States, Hungary, any other number of countries. Right. These people are exposing what everybody suspected about this crowd of, you know, right-wing, neo-fascists who are pop it up all over the world. and in the reality is you know anybody with a checkbook can rent a villa and set up this kind of thing frankly that the trolling is usually come at us from the right

this is pretty damn effective trolling from somebody coming from another direction and look at it the reality is it exposes who we already know these people to be you know I mean part of the reason why it's even more damaging is it kind of sends the message that all these kind of far-right people in Europe are more than happy to be corrupt, more than happy to try to control the media,

again, more than happy to accept help from the Russians. And so hopefully this ripples out, not just in Austrian politics, where hopefully there's a chance to get rid of a far-right government in Austria, not a place where you want a far-right government. But also a chance for progress to say, look, this is who this crowd is, and let's throw them out everywhere. Yeah, and going back to our episode last week and the week before, I mean, these guys were looking at Victor Orban and what he's done as the model. They wanted to build a media landscape similar to his. The timing of the publication, it was Der Spiegel and Sudzsche Zeitung. I can't pronounce that.

I'm sorry, my parents are German too. This comes out, this published right as these far right populist parties are campaigning for seats in the European Parliament and look likely to do well. So I don't know, maybe it was time for some maximum political impact in a way we might like for once. No question it was. And you're right, by the way, to point to Orban. You know, because his whole thing was get some oligarchs on the business side, who can fund my campaigns, get some oligarchs in the media, who can be my mouthpiece. I hate to break it to us Americans out there. You know, look at the Coke Bros. and Rupert Murdoch, we have those oligarchs here in the United States, which don't call them oligarchs.

Right. But, yeah, this is European parliamentary election. It's hugely contested. There's been a concern for a long time that if the far right does particularly well and gets enough seats in the European Parliament, they can kind of grind the European Union to. a halt, you know, and they can make it even more dysfunctional and divisive, and that will fuel the anti-European sentiment in different countries. And that's why what is usually kind of a second-tier election is getting so much attention. And clearly, you know, Trump was trying to affect that, as we talked about last week by, you know, inviting his neo-fascist buddy into the

White House, Victor Orban, but whoever did this is trying to blow the whistle and say, no, no, no, look at who these people really are. Look at what the far right really represents in Europe. We don't want that here. And clearly, I think it was time to have impact on those elections. And it will be fascinating to see how those elections play out. But it will also have impacts in Austria and potentially ripple out. And look, I think as a general matter, you know, it's a slippery slope to end up in a situation where everybody's running sting operations against everybody else. The core question, though, is what are people doing?

Because frankly, the surest way to make sure that you're not caught trying to accept help from some woman Russian oligart seeking to buy friendly media is to not do that. So that's the core question in play here. Yeah, don't go to Wabiza and spend six hours negotiating with an All-GARC. All right. Last topic for us. Britain's hottest new protest movement is dousing people with milkshakes. Brexit party leader Nigel Farage certified asshole was doused with banana and salted caramel.

Earlier this month, a man threw a strawberry milkshake on Tommy Robinson. He's an anti-Muslim activist running for a European parliament seat. There are a bunch more examples, so many that police are actually trying to prevent the sale of milkshakes near political rallies. We also probably remember Egg Boy in Australia who hit a far-right candidate in the head with an egg. So, you know, Ben, at the risk of reawakening a tired debate about civility politics, I'm curious what you think about this form of protest. I mean, I worry personally about anything that could be even on the border of violence or threatening or a physical act. But, you know, I think there are probably others who disagree. What's your take?

Well, first of all, I'm just glad that best British friend of the pod, David Lammy, has obviously escaped the milkshake treatment as he deserves to. Obviously, like, people are feeling incredibly pent up frustration at the Brexiteers and the Nigel Fragers of the world peddling a bunch of bullshit and are seeking to embarrass them, humiliate them, get attention. I tend to come down where you are that if anything could injure somebody, right? And presumably like a milkshake could be thrown away that could injure somebody, that that is the line that I don't cross.

Maybe you could just dump the milkshake in front of somebody. I don't know. But to me, if it gets to a point where somebody can be physically harmed, right? That's the kind of speech that I start to get uncomfortable with. I do think if there are other ways to just point up what, like, what, like, full-of-shit buffoons these guys are, like, that is a generally useful exercise. I think there are other ways to do that. There are other ways to challenge Nigel Frage. There are other ways to probably even to use milkshakes directly hitting somebody.

And look, I think part of what we're seeing in the world, Tommy, is interesting to watch play out. And, you know, we've talked about a couple examples. the right wing kind of took trolling to a pretty aggressive extent, you know, particularly on social media, but also, you know, I was investigated by Black Q, we talked about this on the pod. And I think you're seeing like just this kind of frustration and version of trolling and response, you know, and ultimately that's not like the story that's going to win, right? But I do think it shows you that these tactics end up taking different forms in the hands of different people. And what I'd like to see is that people who are feeling that frustration,

there are plenty of places you can channel that energy to beat these people where it actually matters, which is at the ballot box, right, and which is getting engaged and getting active and being outspoken in your community, running for office, challenging people on social media, you know, batting back false narratives, putting forward your story. That ultimately is going to be how people win in this competition of stories is taking place around the world. But, you know, every now and then somebody wants to have fun. As long as nobody gets hurt, that's my test. Yeah, I won't pretend I didn't laugh at Nigel Farage yelling into security guards because he was mad that it happened.

But I just, I do worry. You know, you throw something, then a security guard could beat you up or someone around you. I mean, things can go south in a hurry. And also, you know, it's just likely that the bigger fascist in the argument is going to go further when it comes to violence. So it's just something we need to be mindful of. Yeah, we had a good buddy, Mark Lippert, right, who's our ambassador in Seoul. And he was speaking in some event, and some dude ran up to him after and, like, caught him with a knife and hurt him pretty bad. Yeah, cut his face.

And I'm not saying that the people of milkshakes are doing that, but I'm saying is once you start invading the personal space of these people, then, you know, maybe one guy sees the milkshake and things. well, I'm going to hit him, and then the next guy says, I'm going to cut him, right? And so it's just a dangerous place to go. I will say that, you know, the Nigel fraud of the world sit in the biggest fucking glass houses on Earth, right? Because their rhetoric is downright incitement to violence against Muslims against immigrants, right? And then, you know, they get old milkshake on their suit and get all bent out of shape. I mean, if we're really talking about protecting people, you know, that should also be people rejecting the kind of hate speech. that emanates from the Nigel frauds of the world as well, because in the long run, that probably

has led to much more harm being done to people. You know, there were, you know, as in the United States, where you saw the rise in Islamophobia and hate crimes in the recent years, after Brexit, there are a lot of reports, you know, I think of foreigners being harassed, and you can draw a straight fucking line from some thugs on the, you know, London underground messing with some immigrant to the kind of garbage. that comes out in Nigel Farage's mouth. Yeah, agreed with that. Well, that's all I had, man.

Anything else from your end? No, man, I'm good. I'm on this never-ending book tour, and I have to say that I've gotten more feedback on my queen's story than I think anything I've said aloud in years. So I'm glad people out there like that. We have more material to mine in the weeks and pods to come here. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the best stories. I could believe you didn't put it in the book. You would have sold another, you know, 10,000 copies.

What I don't know. Great talking to you. Please send my love to Chicago. And now we will throw it to my interview with Nora Erichette. On the line is Nora Erichat. She's a Palestinian-American human rights attorney, an assistant professor at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, and the author of Law and the Question of Palestine. Thank you so much for joining the show today. Thank you for having me, Tommy. So I know you like I have been waiting with bated breath as Jared Kushner works on his secret Middle East plan for what two years now, I guess. We are starting to learn how this will get rolled out.

So the administration announced that the first phase would be an economic workshop in Bahrain next month to get, I guess, a bunch of rich golf donors to commit to invest in economic development for the Palestinian people in neighboring countries. I guess Jared is going to try to get this money first and then get into the much harder negotiations about territory second. Do you think that sequencing makes sense? Well, let me, you know, I giggled. a little when you were saying that we were waiting with bated breath, because I wasn't sure if you were being sarcastic. The reason that I... Oh, I am. You, okay. Because, you know, I didn't expect much from the Trump administration the signaling, the signals that they had given us

of what they planned on in the Middle East when Trump shifted even during his campaign on this question from first beginning to tell us that he believed in, you know, a Palestinian state and then stepping back and adopting the line of a very pro-Israel stance that left Palestinians with the crumbs that they can accept or not. The appointment of David Friedman, who is a settler, lives in illegal settlements, and a bankruptcy lawyer appointing him as the ambassador. And obviously subsequently, we've seen a number of detrimental moves, including cutting $364 million in humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees, moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But what, you know, what I expected was,

what will the U.S. come up with that won't be, you know, counterproductive? I didn't expect them to move us forward, but I wondered of what wouldn't be counterproductive. And what they're announcing and what they're rolling out is a plan that basically is telling Palestinians, we will pay you to relinquish your political demands. And it's insulting, frankly. So the idea of thinking about sequencing, should we think about the sequence, of this. I think sequencing could be contemplated in how we resolve an issue if we knew that there was a commitment to resolve those political issues. But what we understand is that the Trump administration

is basically telling the Palestinians the refugee question is off the table. A capital in Jerusalem is off the table. The idea of an independent state is off the table. They want to consolidate the current status quo of 20 non-contiguous landmasses in the West. Bank of the bifurcation, legal, geographic, political between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, all of these things will remain intact. And in exchange, money will be pumped into, you know, these 20 non-contiguous, what I call Bantustustans in the West Bank and into the Gaza Strip. And it's paying people off to surrender their political rights without the horizon that this

would be a way to empower a Palestinian base to then govern themselves. And so I find that, you know, we've already, the Palestinian leadership, which has been acquiescent and subject to tremendous critique from a Palestinian base, even they have refused to, you know, be a part of this meeting in Manama, Bahrain. We know that the Palestinian businessman, who would be part of the founding core in terms of funding this enterprise, are boycotting the meeting. So even those sectors of Palestinian society who would otherwise be the most conciliatory have signaled that this is a non-starter. Yeah, I mean, look, I share your cynicism really with anything that was likely to come out of this administration, I guess, given how little we have and

trying to take it at face value, but that gets very hard when the Palestinian leadership says they were not consulted about the conference before they read about it in the newspaper. They have not authorized a delegation to attend. I know. the U.S. and the Palestinians have not met since Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital. So this seems like a very bad way to kick off what seems likely to be a flawed process to begin with. Yeah, and what it signals for us is, you know, an attitude that this administration has towards the world, that the world is much like a corporation and that money has a preeminent value that trumps other things that are not, you know, that are metaphysical like dignity. like community, social networks, things that are not quantifiable in those terms.

And it's really, you know, I think for anybody watching this, there's something that's out of sync, right? There are many things that you do in politics that don't necessarily, aren't necessarily rational. So when you think, for example, about the Sioux Nation, they've rejected a $1.5 billion settlement for violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty, basically saying, you know, the U.S. has violated its treaty with this indigenous nation will give you $1.5 billion in response to basically alleviate your poverty on the Pine Ridge

Reservation. And these people have said, no, we want the Black Hills back because of its sacred significance. So for some people, that doesn't make sense. Like, why wouldn't you just take the money? And for others who understand, this is about, you know, seven generations forward. This is about a people's willingness to survive and thrive and not just overcome, you know, material deprivation in this very moment. And I think that another way to think about it is there is an absolute direct correlation between what the Trump administration has done to the Palestinians in these past two years by, you know, cutting funding to the Palestinian refugees to East Jerusalem hospitals, U.S. aid projects in the West Bank, the embassy, shepherds. down the PLO office in Washington, D.C., and then is now offering them this payout, basically.

They're creating an environment where Palestinians in order, are forced to surrender, which is how they're responding to it. And it's the same as if, you know, you can ask a penal population, incarcerated population, and you can ask, you know, a regular population out of prison, what will you accept for a living wage? And that answer is probably going to differ based on the circumstances, right? And so here we have a situation where the Trump administration just assumes if we starve the Palestinians enough, either they take it or they're going to surrender and Palestinians are rejecting it.

Yeah. And, you know, I honestly worry that it might even be worse because there's no official dollar figure released, but there's these anonymous diplomats getting quoted saying the goal is to raise $68 billion. for the Palestinians, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. So I worry that this might actually be money routed through those governments as an effort to say, okay, we're paying you to carve out some sort of territory in the Sinai, say, to create a home for the Palestinian people as opposed to giving or creating a state. Oh, absolutely.

I think that that's really, you know, even if we don't have the dollar amount, I think that the amount of money that the international community would be willing to pump into this is basically endless. We've already seen that. I mean, one of the things that Israel has benefited from, you know, there is no peace process. If you look at all the original documents or all of the treaty documents, right, since 1993, not a single document mentions a Palestinian state.

A Palestinian state is not on the table. That's not what they're negotiating. They have been negotiating autonomy, which is basically, you know, some forms of self-governance, akin to black homelands in South Africa, akin to reservations in North America. And yet we're not talking about that. We keep talking about, oh, but do you believe in the two-state solution? And yet that's never been offered, and that's not in the horizon.

Nonetheless, Israel, under this framework, the veneer of a peace process, has basically punted its responsibility as an occupying power to the international community, which now funds through donations and charity and aid all of the humanitarian need. of the Palestinian people. They've made it cheaper. The diplomatic international community has made it cheaper for Israel to maintain the status quo,

which is otherwise untenable. And so they're hoping to do the same thing. I think it has to do with fatigue. There is a lot of fatigue in the international community that this is outstanding, that there isn't a resolution. But one thing that, you know, the international community hasn't tried

is shifting the way that we think about this, where it de-centers Israel as a priority. and just begins to contemplate Palestinians as being equally deserving of a dignified future. And so what would that look like if we actually made that shift? What would it look like when we accept that there is no situation in the entire world where a privileged country or a privileged population voluntarily relinquished its privilege because of a change of heart? It requires pressure.

It required pressure in order for men to allow women. to vote in the United States in 1921, and it was a right that woman won. It required pressure by the black community to end de jurey segregation and earn the right to vote. It required pressure to end the apartheid in South Africa. And this situation will be no different. And we have to start thinking, not how do we appease Palestinians so that they surrender and stop demanding freedom. How is it that we pressure Israel to relinquish their domination and their privileges

that's predicated on ongoing. Palestinian removal and erasure and denial of their existence in this context. So let's start in the place you mentioned. Like, what do you think setting aside all the negotiations and the history, like what do you think a fair outcome looks like for the Palestinian people if we could start from scratch? Being able to live in freedom, right? And that's a very broad thing.

So what is freedom? It's being able to live without fear. It's being able to decide what your future can look like without the limited horizons about well, I can't even dream of going to college because I don't even have permission to leave. Or I can't really dream of building a home because I don't know if that land is going to be confiscated to make room for a settlement. Or I have a dream of having a family because I don't know if my child might be, you know, killed through shrapnel, like Sibba Abu Arr, a one-year-old girl in Gaza who was killed in the past two weeks while sitting in her on Slap in our home because of Israeli Shrapnel in the Gaza Strip.

So one, just on a very basic level, we're talking about a freedom struggle. And so this isn't about a pragmatic solution. How do you share and make everybody happy? This is about a people living without freedom and are subject to a settler colonial project, which basically insists on the removal of a native population and their replacement with a sovereign population in their place. That project is regulated through a racially discriminatory regime that many analysts have said it tantamount to apartheid according to the 1973 UN Convention.

And so at the basic level, Palestinians need freedom. Now, how can we imagine that freedom that's fair for everybody? Now we get to imagine what does it look like. And I think we have to get ourselves outside of what I call a lot. sovereignty trap of trying to decide how, you know, two people will divide ownership. Because that's a mutually exclusive equation, right? My gains are your losses. Right.

And I'm trying to think about what is a possibility where we can all exist where it could be mutually reinforcing rather than being mutually exclusive. And those possibilities are born, frankly, by relinquishing sovereignty claim. And we haven't been able to do that because since, especially since the U.S. is involvement in the region in 1967, Israel's claims to having Jewish national sovereignty has remained preeminent. Whatever it is we can imagine, it stops at the edge of ensuring that right for Israel, which has basically been, you know, a trap.

It's a trap for us to imagine how we can reorganize ourselves, to actually live in harmony with rather than other, rather than in some discord. It's that logic that actually within Israel, the state and society mark the existence of Palestinians as a threat, not because they pose a security threat, but because they exist. Israel literally, in its policy papers and its planning papers for city planning, in its highest forms of government, labels Palestinians as a demographic threat. The more of them there are, the less Israel is secure. So the problem is that Palestinians exist.

It's not that they pose a security threat. So I'm suggesting that an over-to-overcome that limited frame of thinking, I think that we have to abandon the idea of, certainly Jewish-Israeli, settler sovereignty as a priority, and start to imagine what is it that actually ensures, viability of all people. I mean, so how do you think you get there? Is it the sort of classic negotiations process that involves the U.S. and in both parties in the international community to try to negotiate two states living side by side? I'm just trying to imagine what a scenario

would look like where you think you could achieve the outcomes that you walked us through? This is a really good question. And I think one of the things, so here I just want to repeat, that, you know, Palestinians in a radical turn in their thinking, abandoning, in the idea that they would have one state for all people, which they articulated in 1968. It's Palestinians who said, look, we're happy that Jewish Israelis want to be here. They just can't be here as our masters, but they can be here where we're all people together. In 1988, Palestinians made a radical turn and said, okay, we're willing to try something else. We'll forego the dream of having all of Palestine and establish a state in the West Bank in Gaza. And that's

where the emergence of the two-state solution, you know, that's where we see it become fully imagined and celebrated as a road to freedom for Palestinians. This isn't about two states. Israel has been a juridical reality since 1948. So really what was proposed is establishing a Palestinian state. But from the beginning, since, and especially laid out in the U.S. brokered peace talks and is encapsulated by Oslo, also as the Declaration of Principles of 1993, three, there was no Palestinian state on the table. It's not in the documents. It's not an outcome.

So when people say, oh, if only Israel complied with Oslo, then we would have a state, it's not true. Oslo is set up to achieve the outcome that we have today, which is basically, you know, discontiguous landmasses where Palestinians don't have the right to sovereignty. The two-state solution is dead as a matter of just geographic, political, legal, realities on the ground. And so negotiating, what negotiations have been so far have basically been forcing Palestinians, you know, or asking them, how would you like to decorate your prison cells? Because you're not going to get to govern yourself. And so the, you know, the fact that we keep talking about negotiations rather than talking about, well, this is duress is part of the

problem. The fact that we talk about two-state solution when really what it is, is will there ever be a Palestinian state is also making, you know, it's creating false parity where none exists between the only nuclear power in the Middle East, the 11th most powerful military in the world, and a stateless people. And so getting to that next place of being able to imagine new horizons means, frankly, a few things. It means abandoning Oslo. Even if you're the most ardent supporter of two states, you should know that the Oslo Accords

in that peace process that it governs is not going to get us to two states. It's what torpedoed the Palestinian state as a possibility. Number two, it means that we have to get out of U.S. brokered bilateralism between Israel and Palestinians. This needs to be a multilateral process that is settled on an international level. We have to internationalize the negotiations because, as such, Palestinians are trapped and are forced to surrender. And number three, we need to accept that there is power that is dictating everything

in this issue. Palestinians cannot arrest a single Israeli. They cannot demolish a home. They cannot prevent the movement of Netanyahu from leaving Israel the way that Israel at any moment can prevent Mahmoud Abbas from leaving Palestine. There is no power parity. And so once we understand that the third thing that we need is to understand there will be no solution without placing tremendous amount of external and internal pressure on Israel in order to change. course. And then we can begin to actually force everyone to start imagining, well, how is it that we could all live here? Israelis don't have to deal with that question at all, ever, because they basically don't have to even see Palestinians or contemplate the future for them.

There's no accountability for what Israel does. Their regular lives, more or less, are not affected. It didn't even come up in the elections. The recent, um, elections where it was the blue and white party and the Jewish power party never even mentioned Palestinians. It's not even electoral issue. That's how invisible Palestinians are, and it's because of the lack of accountability and the way that Israel can act with impunity. So I think those three things are preconditions, at the very least, to begin to think about, okay, now what? Yeah. So the point you make about the power dynamic is well taken, and I think really just under-recognized in any conversation about this issue because, you know, as much as people

express frustration with the Palestinian leadership at times, it is always, to me, seemed like they don't have a lot of autonomy in their decision-making, at least as compared to the Israeli government. I would like, the devil's advocate response to what you said is that the U.S. was supposed to be the party that could pressure and push both sides into a negotiation to call for a stop of settlement construction, et cetera, et cetera. It sounds like you think that that frame work has just completely failed. It was never on the table. And so there's the short answer saying, I mean, Aaron David Miller, who was a U.S.

advisor to force, you know, successive U.S. presidential administrations, basically said the U.S. was never a broker in negotiations. It always acted as Israel's lawyer. So just, you know, that's the Americans telling us as much. But if you want to dig even a little deeper and think about when the U.S. steps up, it's, you know, its involvement in this issue. It wasn't until after the 1967 war during the Johnson administration. And it was in the context of the Cold War where the Johnson administration basically realized Israel could be a significant Cold War asset and established, you know, inaugurated two policies.

One was to ensure Israel's qualitative military edge so that it can defeat, you know, singularly or collectively any threat of military force in the Middle East. And the second was a land for peace framework that basically established that Israel would return. turn, Arab occupied lands in exchange for permanent peace. And because of that quid pro quo arrangement, which is enshrined in Security Council Resolution 242, the U.S. has said politics and political negotiations over international law, over human rights norms, whatever the parties agree to is actually going to be what we consider just. And so as a result of that, the U.S. has been providing unequivocal financial, military, and

diplomatic aid to Israel since 1967 and has enabled Israel to expand its settlement enterprise and entrench it and simultaneously speak out the other side of its mouth and condemn it as being counterproductive to the peace process. And so what we see the Trump administration do when it comes in, you know, assumes power and basically, you know, moves the embassy, acknowledges that Israel can be sovereign in the Golan Heights, hints that Israel can establish sovereignty, over Area C or 62% of the West Bank says that we're going to pump money into the region and basically end this conflict, we see what I described, not as a rupture in U.S. foreign policy, but basically it's honesty.

This is when, you know, the Trump administration has removed the emperors closed and told the world the U.S. is part of the problem, and its involvement will continue basically the decimation of any potential of Palestinian freedom. So I imagine a lot of listeners to the show saw Bibi Netanyahu get reelected and we're pretty fucking bummed out. They're listening to our conversation now and hearing the history and what feels like a very challenging negotiation. And they want to see an outcome where the Palestinian people have self-determination

and have a state and have peace and security and the situation in Gaza is alleviated. but it feels like this massive generational intractable problem and they don't know how they could fix it. What would you say to someone listening who cares deeply about the Palestinian people and justice and equality and wants to push to a better resolution? I would say you are the solution.

It's because of relentless organizing on behalf of ordinary people who have been involved in a freedom struggle, right, who have identified. that this is not a matter of conflict, peace and conflict resolution. This is a matter of ending an apartheid regime. And so that means placing pressure on Israel that because of acknowledging that this is a justice struggle, they have been able to shift the discourse in the United States, which is a primary player.

We're not just far away witnesses, right, Tommy? We're actually part of the problem. We provide Israel with $3.8 billion. of U.S. military aid a year. Since 1967, we have issued our veto in the Security Council 43 times to shield Israel from any kind of accountability and basically impede an international resolution. The resolution is within reach.

The U.S. is an impediment to that reach. So what we do here in the United States has everything with what you can do for the future and for Palestinians and frankly for Jewish Israelis, because there's nowhere to go. We're stuck with one another. And so now we have to figure out how is it that our future does not have to be mutually exclusive. And I think that the people have done that through boycott divestment and sanctions,

getting your university to divest, getting your church to divest from Israel, sanctioning arms sales to Israel. We have been part of that movement that now has created a space for U.S. Congress people, and frankly, U.S. Congresswoman, like that. like Ilhan Omar and Rashid Akleb, to be in office, and for the first time ever talk about this issue. Talk about BDS and criticize Israel, which used to mean political suicide.

Now it's equated to political capital. It's the reason it's this work that has made it possible for the Black Lives Matter movement to incorporate Palestinian freedom and endorse BDS as part of its policy platform. It's the reason that the Women's March has now seen intersectional feminism as including the liberalism,

of Palestine, that is all movement work. That is all movement work. So if people feel hopeless, you should actually feel hopeful because our work has shifted the way we talk about this issue. For the first time ever, Israel is not a bipartisan issue, but you can actually measure through polls, as people have showed us, that now it has become increasingly a Republican issue, and not a democratic one, and especially not amongst progressive Democrats, I see all of this as incredible signs of hope. And I see it as basically an affirmation that people's movements are where change really happens. This is going to be from the bottom up.

The real change is going to be from the bottom up and not the top down. And so keep on keeping. Keep on believing. Freedom is possible. An other world is possible. And we let us lead and let government leaders follow us, not the other way around. So what would you say to people who are worried about the BDS movement and worry that it will not lead to a resolution because it presupposes the outcome of what are supposed to be final status issues? It doesn't necessarily support a two-state solution or recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state.

What do you say to well-meaning people who want to see both states serve well in this outcome? Well, here's what I would say. There's two questions in there, right? So one is about, you know, the efficacy of BDS, and the other one is about how does BDS possibly preclude an outcome of basically preserving this idea of Israel as a Jewish state. And so let me start with the first of seeing efficacy. BDS is not that efficacious, right?

It's not in the sense that it has not resulted in a lot of change on the ground. And frankly, it's not a national liberation movement. It's a solidarity movement. It's basically asking folks like us American taxpayers who are part of this problem to stop being part of the problem. It's a bare minimum of, you know, based on the principle of cause no harm. And so the other thing, the other really effective thing that it does is it creates room to talk about this issue. People in the United States in almost every industry from journalism to the academy to, you know, politics, certainly. talking about Israel and criticizing it has been met with severe punishment.

And what BDS has done has created enough space to be able to break that taboo to at least have a debate about what it means. And finally, because it basically points a finger at Israel and says that Israel is a human rights violator that needs to be held to account, it's finally also shifted the conversation where Palestinians don't have to be in a defensive posture of constantly answering the question, we're not terrorists, we're not terrorists, and instead make Israel answer the question of how do you justify racial discrimination and a racial caste system that's tantamount to apartheid? So all those things make BDS effective in that way while also recognizing its weaknesses. As to the second question of what does this preclude the possibility of a Jewish state? Two things on that.

The first is that what that outcome is really up to the people, depending on what they want. Palestinians recognized Israel in 1988, have recognized Israel again in 1993. The state of Israel has never been in question since 1993. And yet we see Israel single-handedly torpedo the surest way of ensuring

its settler sovereignty by basically decimating the possibility of a Palestinian state through the expansion of, you know, its settler population from 200,000 in 1993 to 600,000 today, the building of the apartheid wall, which is also known as the separation barrier, 85% of that wall runs through the West Bank

around the settlements and confiscates 13% of the West Bank, the siege of Gaza, so on and so forth, basically the bifurcation of people and undermining their national cohesion. So here's, you know, Palestinians have said all we want is the state.

And Israel, had it accepted that, would have been able to have it, but basically wants the whole land under, you know, a framework of Eritz Israel that runs from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan. And so you really have to ask, why would Israel do that? Why would Israel continue to expand its land takings and its colonial takings when it could have ensured this option?

So that's, you know, the second thing. And then finally, frankly, and this is my belief, and maybe it's because I do not think that nationalist solutions are the right ones. What the Jewish question posed to us is how can Jews be accepted within society rather than subjugated first on religious grounds of Christian persecution and then on secular grounds through orientalizing dehumanization that basically cast them out of Europe as non-citizens and non-people that led to the annihilation in mass genocide during the Second World War, right?

that question is real. And one of the answers that has been posed is this nationalist answer. But I don't think that's an answer. I don't think Jews are any safer and are overcoming anti-Semitism. I don't think that just answering the Jewish question alone and without a holistic framework is good for the rest of the world. And I don't think that nationalism in general is the answer, for example, to our black question in the United States.

Marcus Garvey suggested establishing a black nation for blacks to leave and establish a state, I think the answer is basically to end racism in the United States. The same that I believe to end the Jewish question. We have to end anti-Semitism. And how we end anti-Semitism is entwined with how we end other forms of racism, including the idea of Palestinian dehumanization. So I'm not, when people say, but what if BDS doesn't allow for a Jewish state? I'm like, well, guess what?

we might get something even better that not only answers, you know, the question of how do we enable Palestinians to be free, but also answers the question of what can we offer to the rest of the world in terms of actually overcoming subjugation and unfreedom for all populations and not just one. Nur, Errikat, thank you so much for the time. This is a very interesting conversation. I would like to have another one very soon about your book, in particular, our law and the question of Palestine because the debate is not going anywhere anytime soon, unfortunately, for all of us. Thank you so much.

That's it for Posit of the World. Thanks for tuning in. I thank you to Noura Ericat for joining the show. And look forward to talking with you guys next week.