Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/12/23 Max Blumenthal on What People Need to Know About Gaza

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

Max Blumenthal joined Scott on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss the situation in Gaza. They talk about what’s happening and put the events in historical context.  Discussed on the show: Dying to Win by Robert Pape Killing Gaza Goliath by Max Blumenthal Director and writer of “Killing Gaza,” Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project and the author Goliath, Republican Gomorrah and The 51 Day War. Follow him on Twitter @MaxBlumenthal. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, October the 12th, 2023, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com and the author of Enough Already, time to end the war. on terrorism. You find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them now going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org, and you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. All right, introducing our good friend Max Blumenthal. He's the author of the book Goliath that he wrote

while in Israel about a decade ago. And he's the director of the Grey Zone and a great journalist and the editor of a bunch of great journalists over there at the Greyzone.com. And welcome back to the show max how are you sir good how you doing i'm doing real good so listen um i have you here uh because you are so wise about so many aspects of the case of israel palestine and also i think in you know intuitively kind of really understanding what it is that other people don't understand and what it is that you feel like they need to know about all of this so our story begins with the giant jail break last Saturday morning, or Hamas, I guess a couple thousand, I guess they're saying Hamas fighters broke out, attacked an IDF base or two, and

in fact seized a couple dozen small towns, and including committed some mass atrocities, killed at least hundreds of innocent civilians. I don't know the exact numbers of IDF versus civilians, but many, many civilians were killed by Hamas, even people who were kidnapped. and then executed in order to what max to start a war why what the hell well there's been a war a non-stop war on the gaza strip especially since the so-called disengagement of 2000 that took place between 2005 and 2007 where 9,000 settlers illegal settlers were removed from Gaza in order to give the israeli army freedom of operation there that's when the judge giant military attacks with 500, 2,000-pound missiles began falling on Gaza.

That's when the residential towers and office buildings started getting dropped. That's when the mortuary started filling up. That's when the siege began. That's when Israel started counting the calories of each Gaza resident was entitled to under its siege and began manipulating the water and electricity flow. So it was occupation without the responsibility of the occupier. It was the Panopticon in which the jailer controls only 2% of the prison, according to Jeremy Benham's model.

That's all you need to control is the periphery. And so as the siege tightened, the ability of the armed factions inside Gaza, like the Al-Qasan brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, increased. This is a group that started out with one submachine gun that didn't work and was only used to display in marches they held. Now they have reverse-engineered Israel's military. They have drones. They have a quasi-navy, which consists of just small attack boats and diver teams.

They have what they would call like a cavalry, which is guys on motorbikes. And they were able to humiliate Israel's military by not just invading a couple of military bases, but taking over numerous military bases, which are used to maintain the siege. on Gaza, which were launching points for military assaults that took place between 2007 and earlier this May, which have left thousands of civilians dead and hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed. In many ways, for the fighters we saw go into what is known as now, now known as Israel, but what used to be Palestine, which used to house many of the grandparents and great-grandparents of these fighters, particularly the city of Ashkelon, which was known

as Majdal Ascalan and was the site of massive ethnic cleansing in 1948. This was revenge for their martyrs. That's how they put it. That's what fighters would tell us when we interviewed them for our documentary, killing Gaza. But it was also a tactic, a very clear tactic that was spelled out by the head of Hamas's Politburo Khaled Mishal, which was to alter the strategic, equation on the ground in which the Gulf states and the Western patrons of Israel were seeking to normalize and ignore the Palestinian question and the Palestinian plight and put Palestinians in the permanent historical icebox. And also to rescue Palestinian captives, this is from the Palestinian point of view, of which there are thousands and thousands in Israeli prisons,

languishing eternally. So remember that in 2011, Israel gave up 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for one captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. So the goal was to get as many captives as possible, civilian or soldier, but soldier would be preferable, and then use them as leverage because that is the only leverage that Palestinians in Gaza have. They have no diplomatic channels. They really have no way of negotiating their way out of this siege. And the Palestinian authority in the West Bank functions as a kind of Vichy organization that

also has no leverage despite the fact that it's put its arms down and arrests Palestinians. So that's why this took place. This was of the U.S. is making because the U.S. is the ultimate arbiter and guarantor of Israel's siege of Gaza. And they have blood on their hands. And yes, what these groups, it wasn't just Hamas. I mean, this was the second most popular faction in Gaza, the Palestinian Islamic jihad, which is not a jihadist group as we understand it.

They're not going abroad to attack people. Participated in this as well through their Sayyara al-Kud's armed faction with the same goal. And the goal was get as many prisoners out as possible and see if it's possible to use captives as leverage to relax the siege or change the strategic equation, undermine the Abraham Accords, put Palestinians back on the map as, you know, in the 1970s that was the point of taking hostages on planes, put the Palestinian cause on the map. And through ruthless activities that did lead to many civilian and innocent deaths over the years, that is how the world was forced to pay attention to possibly the most oppressed people on

the planet through violence. And that's the only way that Israel has ever dealt with Palestinians is through violence. So I could go on and on about the politics of violence here. But none of this surprised me at all. It didn't even shock me to see some of the brutality displayed towards civilians by these fighters, given the conditions that they were raised in and what I know of young Palestinian men who I've interviewed in the Gaza Strip, how they think. And they think about witnessing their own family members be chopped to pieces by missiles, killed by snipers, in front of their eyes. And that's how they emerged from tunnels and through fences with that in their mind.

And that's something we need to recognize. All right. It's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton. I'm talking with Max Blumenthal, director of the Gray Zone. And we're talking, of course, about the war in Israel, Palestine. And I wanted to clarify a point that you made there. I think I heard you right.

You said that this Hamas official stated explicitly, I guess, just before this in some way hinting of this attack coming, that the purpose of it would be to heighten the contradictions in the region in order specifically, you say, to sabotage the Abraham Accord negotiations. That was, that's a, I mean, that's a major factor. and it was called Operation Al-Axa flood. So the Al-Aqsa mosque is a major factor. And Lindsey Graham has said, this is a religious war. Well, what does he mean by that? The Al-A compound is the third holiest site in Islam. It has been the target of, I would say,

Jewish invasions by the most extreme political factions in Israeli society, sustained invasions over the past five to 10 years. which are actually forbidden by the Orthodox Jewish rabbin, which requires the sacrifice of 10 red heifers or the blood of a red heifer to be, I think, placed on the gates of Al-Axa for Jews to be able to pray there. So they're actually violating Jewish law by going in there.

And one of the leaders of these invasions is now Israel's security minister, Idemar Ben-Givir, who has functioned as sort of the legal voice of the most violent settlers in the West Bank. And so from the point of view of Muslims across the world, their holy sites are being defiled under the watch of the Israeli government. There is no authority in Jerusalem or group that can defend it. Palestinians have been disarmed there.

300,000 of them live totally defenseless under occupation surrounded also by walls, but they're surrounded by walls that prevent them from reaching other Palestinians in the West Bank, who are themselves prevented from resisting because they live under the Palestinian authority. So Hamas has appointed itself as the protector of this holy site of Islam to answer the humiliation of Muslim people around the world by these provocations.

And they're not just provocations. Idemar Ben-Gavir is a member of something called the temple movement, which aims to destroy Al-Axa and replace it with the third Jewish temple in order to herald the coming of the Messiah. And in doing so, they will actually end Jewish prayer at the Western Wall, which they consider heretical and un-Jewish, and replace it with the continuous slaughtering of lambs in the street. Blood will fill the streets of Jerusalem as they glorify God heralding the coming of the Messiah.

These are insane fanatics. The guru of their movement, Yisrael, actually attempted to blow up the Al-Axa compound in 1984. I believe and was arrested by Israel's shin bet so understanding the roots of this means actually looking in the mirror at our own leadership and how they have allowed this to fester and also looking into the psyche of Palestinians and particularly Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as well as the leadership of Hamas and then once you do so it doesn't all seem so illogical although it might still seem irrational.

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Again it's anti-war Radio I'm Scott Horton Talking with Max Blumenthal And you know Robert Pape wrote the book Dying to Win The Strategic Logic

Of Suicide Terrorism Explaining why even something that's so horrific Still makes tactical or strategic sense As one weapon of war And that includes, especially when you have such an asymmetric balance of power as you do in this situation, it includes terrorist attacks against innocent civilian targets in order to provoke reactions and counter reactions and counter reactions. And that's what we're talking about with Israel starts bombing Gaza. Then the Abraham Accords start getting into jeopardy. The crown prince of Saudi Arabia feels the pressure, even in his absolute monarchy, that he better get on the phone with the Ayatollah.

and pretend he cares about this at least for a minute for public relations purposes, if nothing else, and maybe worse, right? The government in Iraq has to take a stand. Hasbala has to take a stand. The Palestinian Authority on the West Bank has to answer for whose side are they on, and all of these contradictions are heightened.

And including, yeah, that means that they know when they do something like this. It's to provoke a massive bombing campaign because ultimately they believe, and I'm not sure this is right, Hamas, that is not the Palestinians, believe that it serves their interests, Max, to do that. I think it's sort of a price they're willing to pay, including, and they're willing to die for their cause, just as those Robert Pape surveyed in his landmark study, the suicide bombers were willing to die. But the suicide bombing tactic is no longer necessary because,

they have enough military capacity to be able to fight Israeli soldiers head on. But when you're sending a, what amounts to a special forces team, although they're guerrilla fighters, often with kind of homemade weapons, into an Israeli military base or into an Israeli city like Stereot, and then taking over a police station, you're accepting death as the likely cost of doing that. And it's for them the likely cost of liberation. For several hours or even a day, from the Palestinian point of view, territory that had been taken from them by ethnic cleansing, rubber-stamped by nations around the world, especially the United States, were liberated.

And that gave purpose to the lives of young men that had been mired in complete and total hopelessness. So that mentality extends throughout the Gaza Strip, where you have a completely un-earned. discussed plague of teenage and child suicide. You have children in Gaza who are killing themselves. People have been self-immolating in Gaza since the siege began. There is a drug everyone calls the happy pill. I think it's Ativan. And close to 50% of the population has been hooked on this as well as any other drug that can slip through the Rafah crossing to simply turn off from the hopelessness of reality in the second most densely populated place on earth

under total siege. I just wonder what Americans or even Israelis would do in that situation. Well, look, I mean, that's the obvious question, Max Blumenthal. You take the shoe and you put it on the other foot and the Palestinians won the war in 67 and herded all the Israeli Jews into the Gaza strip ghetto? Well, everybody knows. Richard Nixon would have sent in the Marine Corps. Or Lyndon Johnson, before Nixon got a chance, would have sent in the Marines and

put an end of that real quick. Nobody doubts that for one second. America wouldn't tolerate that situation. For 50 years? 60 years? Are you kidding? And that's how you know how wrong it is. Just apply the universal law to it for a moment. But now let me ask you this, Max.

And this might be the situation if the shoe was on the other foot, too. They say, Yeah, but it's Hamas. Look at what insane right-wing religious fanatic, butchers of civilians they are, massacurers of men, women, and children. We're supposed to somehow, or they are supposed to somehow integrate these people into their society. They're going to let them have an independent state next door that's allowed to arm up and attack them, or they're going to somehow give them all citizenship in one state and just invite the enemy inside. How do you answer that? Well, it may be too late for that, or it may be that the relaxation and end of occupation will produce a new mentality among Palestinians. But Hamas was formed in 1988. There had been some Islamist forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that were nonviolent

and were actually being propelled by Israel's intelligence forces to undermine the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which later became the PLO through Fatah. They gave him freedom of movement to hold rallies across Gaza, you know, gave him permits. They even funneled money into their accounts. And New York Times had featured editorials calling for support for Islamist factions to undermine the Palestinian secular wing. And the point is, there was still an occupation then. And Palestinians were still effectively living under siege.

The first intifada happened at this time because Palestinians were suffering so much. And Palestinians used rocks and nonviolent demonstrations, angry demonstrations, and they were shot. Yitzhak Rabin, who was hailed as some kind of peacnik, instituted the broken bones policy to smash the arms of Palestinian men who threw rocks. They were jailed. Every Palestinian young man has basically been to jail under occupation. And this is what fueled the rise of Hamas. Why did Hamas win in the city of Calculia in the West Bank during Palestinian legislative

elections in 2007? Because Calculia had been surrounded on all sides by the apartheid wall. And the Palestinian authority did nothing to resist that. So people just wanted someone to resist. And the situation, as the situation of siege and occupation deepens and the light at the end of the tunnel shrinks and diplomatic channels to Palestinians are cut off by the United States and by people like Tony Blinken, whose grandfather Maurice founded a think tank to actually lobby for the Zionist colonization of Palestine, who has said that he is now traveling

to Israel, not just as the U.S. Secretary of State, but as a Jew, who is sitting in on Israel's war cabinet discussions as a foreign official. As this takes place, the situation metastasizes and the desperation increases. And the only route is violence to alter the political equation on the ground. And so, yes, we are further away than ever before from any discussion of a one-state reality. But at the same time, how can we discuss that reality if Palestinians were to go gently into the dark night of occupation behind their walls

without shaking the gates of their occupier? How would we know they existed? So there's this paradox, and that's the paradox of the Palestinian struggle. Do we offer the olive branch or do we put forward the gun? and no one has taken the olive branch ever since Yasser Arafat

as the de facto leader of the Palestinian struggle at the United Nations offered the world and specifically the West the olive branch and said if you don't accept that we will continue to use the gun it's never been taken Arafat was killed in his compound probably poisoned as Israeli bulldozers moved in

and that's the end I mean that really was the end for me and for what was for me the end of any hope of some kind of peace agreement where there would be a handshake on the White House lawn and something real would actually change on the ground. And that was also for me the beginning, the beginning of my own entree into this situation as a journalist, as an activist, as someone who is going to try to wake Americans up to the real Israel that they didn't know. All right. It's Hans. War Radio. I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Max Blumenthal. And years ago, as he's saying,

he got the idea and needed to know more about this, the guy moved Israel, wrote a book about it called Goliath. And since then he wrote another called the 51 Day War, which is about the war operation cast led in 2014. And he also produced a documentary. He went to the Gaza Strip with a partner, and he filmed a documentary you can find online. It's called Killing Gaza. You can watch it for free online. And it's very enlightening. You know, no one in there talks about Allah says you have to kill Jews and stuff like that. Everything in there is all personal. They took my father's land. I'm taking it back. This kind of thing. They could be speaking any language. They could be standing on any patch of land in the world saying the

exact same sentiment. And we talked about this before. It's not that you edited out all the Islamist stuff. It's that that was never their point. And so, you know, can you talk a little bit about like what's the real insight of moving over there how much time did you spend there max because i think people got to be interested to know why a guy named bloominthal would care so much about the Palestinians like this or explain their side of the story so passionately the way that you do well i mean i went there first as an american jew if you're an american jew you're probably going to be indoctrinated in some way or exposed to a zionist indoctrinated in some way or exposed to a Zionist indoctrination. And while my family who are pretty well known in U.S. politics

were not particularly Zionist, I was exposed to it just from going to Hebrew school through osmosis at, you know, in a college where disproportionate number of the students were Jewish. I mean, you know, why are, why is CNN essentially functioning as the U.S. wing of the Israeli foreign ministry right now in all these media networks. I mean, it's because of the achievement, let's be real, it's because of the achievement of Jews in American life. We're at the top of finance, media. It's a fact. We should be proud of it. So, you know, if you're Jewish, you're exposed to that, and it's a pillar of your identity. And I went on a free trip to Israel. Birthright Israel gives Jews 18 to 25 the opportunity to go there for 10 days. Of course, you're

propagandized. They also encourage you to mate with other Jews. That's more the point of the trip. But now, like, propaganda is emphasized. And it was then that I started questioning. I'm like, why do they need to try so hard to convince me at a time when the second Intifada was just beginning? And so I came back and started questioning, watching what Israel was doing, destroying the Janine refugee camp. It reminded me of what I'd learned about Kristallnacht and pogroms against Jews. And I just, as I started, to rise through the ranks in journalism, online media. I decided to use my chops and my abilities as a journalist to expose what Israel was doing because the U.S. media wasn't going to do it.

And that meant, you know, moving away from more traditional channels of media, moving away from more acceptable positions in liberal media, and being completely independent. It led to first a series of YouTube videos from Jerusalem that exposed the racism, not just of Israeli Jews, but of American Jews who had been indoctrinated by Zionism, this genocidal racism. And videos from the West Bank showing the birth of the sort of nonviolent or unarmed Palestinian struggle against the apartheid wall that wasn't being covered in US media in the villages. And I culminated with my second book, Goliath, which was really, I just put everything I knew

about my whole experience there over the course of five years, just going in and out through the West Bank, throughout the West Bank, and through Israel proper, to explain where Israel was going and how it was not coming back from being this extreme religious nationalist, exterminationist, from supporting a kind of exterminationist government that saw Palestinians as an eternal enemy and prioritized walling them off in ethnic cleansing and what it was doing specifically to the Israeli Jewish psyche. And, you know, that book I thought would be my last statement, but I was led back in when Israel opened up its assault on the Gaza Strip in 2014. I wrote the 51-day war, just chronicling the assault and what I saw in the rubble of Gaza, interviewing families who'd lost every member, lost everything,

and now there are many more, 26 families have essentially been exterminated by Israel in the past week. And then did Killing Gaza, the documentary you mentioned, which is free online at the Grey Zone's YouTube channel. You have to look hard because YouTube is essentially blacklisted us. I did that with Dan Cohen and you know it took like two years of filming and three years of production. I think it really shows you what the Gaza Strip is and how people think there in their own words. There's very little from us. Right. And, you know, every time I try to get away from this, I get pulled back in, as you see right now. And right now, I just wanted to say in closing, there have been civilians killed in some brutal ways, apparently. in Israel. I think they have grounds for eliciting international sympathy from the Israeli point of view. It shouldn't be hard for them to elicit international sympathy when the world, you know, at least the governments of the world or of the West on their side, the sort of collective West. But that's not what they want right now. And we need to be clear about

this and understand what Israel and specifically Netanyahu wants. They want to, the establish a red line incident to draw the U.S. and its vassal states in Europe into a regional war that will end with regime change in Iran. And this for them is the beginning of a propaganda operation that will lead to a military operation. And the Biden administration with a very weak and senile president who thinks that he's going to be reelected against Donald Trump, who who fell under the sway of the Le Kudnik oligarch, Sheldon Adelson, as his largest donor, Biden is falling for all of these ploys. He lied yesterday and said that he saw images of beheaded babies in Khaar Aza, Kibbutz,

that had seen an incursion by Palestinian militants. And the White House walked that back, but they've already sent two aircraft carriers to dock in the eastern Mediterranean to support Israel. Blinken is there, and there are so many more deceptions and so much more context that needs to be applied to understand what's happening. Turn on CNN, and they are laying the groundwork for a ground invasion of Gaza City that will inevitably lead to Hezbollah entering the conflict. Hezbollah entering the conflict will totally change the equation and could fuel a regional

war. And so we need to be clear about where this is going and what Netanyahu wants to do. do this is the same guy who came to the U.S. and showed photos of Auschwitz and blamed the U.S. for not bombing the railways in order to psychologically manipulate the Obama administration into attacking Iran. Back in, I believe, 2011, this is the same government under Ariel Sharon that whispered in who, this is the same government that saw. Ariel Sharon, whisper in George W. Bush's ear immediately after 9-11, Arafat is R. Bin Laden.

They want the U.S. to fight its wars. So whatever you think about what happened, we need to be clear about where it's going. And if you're anti-war, you need to get in the way. Well said. Okay, thank you so much for your time, Max. Really appreciate you as always. Yeah, appreciate what you're doing, Scott. Thanks a lot. Aren't you guys, that's the great Max Blumenthal. Check out him and his whole crew over there at the gray zone.com. And again, he's the author of the book, Goliath, and also the 51-day War,

and produced the documentary, killing Gaza, obviously at issue this week. And that's it for anti-war radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton. Find the full interview archive at Scott Horton.org. Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton's show, and I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.

week.