Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/22/23 Michael Tracey on Ethnic Cleansing on the West Bank

Episode Date: November 25, 2023

Michael Tracey joined Scott on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss his experience reporting from Israel. He explained why he decided to travel there and what surprised him about the country.  Discussed on the show: Defamation (IMDb) “Biden admin officials see proof their strategy is working in hostage deal” (Politico) Michael Tracey is a New York-based journalist. You can find his writing on Substack and follow him on Twitter @mtracey 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, November the 23rd, 2023. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all, welcome to the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. Actually, celebrating 13 years here on the radio. on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.

I am the editorial director of anti-war.com and I'm the author of the book Enough Already, time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show. And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare,

at Scott Horton Show. All right, introducing the great Michael Tracy, independent journalist and writer at m tracy.net that's also his handle on twitter where he's raising hell all the time and doing a lot of great original reporting for us too welcome back to the show michael how are you sir oh good thanks for plugging mtracy dot net that's actually a soon-to-be relaunched portal to my substack so i appreciate that i just got the URL yeah absolutely that's great and isn't it neat that substack will let you do that they don't even care if you have substack in your URL they just let you I don't understand the logic exactly but I go with the flow that's great

yeah and great writing great work as always and what the hell else was I'm going to say I forgot but um we have so much oh I know what it was I was going to say after how are you where are you Michael Tracy where am I right now right now I'm in Tel Aviv I was in Jerusalem for about two or so weeks. I went into the West Bank, East Jerusalem, a number of times. Very interesting. Okay, so when did you go over there? About a couple of weeks in the war, you decided, and go see for yourself, huh? Yeah, so I was in the UK on October 7th, and after a week or two, it occurred to me that I was about five or six hours closer to Israel than I would be if I was in the U.S. So I figured that's as good as reason as any to head over there for the first time. It's my first experience

in Israel. Unlike others, I never had a burning passion to go and, you know, reunite with my biblical ancestry or anything. But it's a newsworthy time. So there I went. And it's, it's been pretty enlightening thus far. Man, well, do tell everything, especially, I guess, you know, if you want to just go through chronologically, where you've been and what you've seen? You went first to West Jerusalem. Is that right? The first I went to, I was in Tel Aviv for a couple, for, for, for, a while. And I, by chance, happened to stay essentially right across the street from the Israeli Ministry of Defense, which is an apt location. They were using you as a human shield in the war or what? No, I wasn't used as a human shield. As far as I know, I mean, the Mossad have a lot of tricks. So maybe

unbeknownst to me, I was being used as a human shield, but nothing that I was consciously there. But they put the Ministry of Defense right in the middle of populated city. The Ministry of Defense is right, the middle of a populated city. That is true. So I guess you could argue that I was being used as a human shield, or I volunteered myself as a human shield for the time that I was staying there. But, you know, the first, like, observation that just pops out at you or popped out of me anyway is how suffuse Israel is with nationalistic imagery. And the only parallel that came to mind for me was post 9-11 in the U.S. I happened to be in the tri-state area of New York,

so northern New Jersey, close enough where, you know, there were lots of people who were affected by 9-11. And even there, everywhere you looked, there was an American flag draped out a window or on a balcony or there are all these new flag poles going up and whatnot. And I don't know, I'm sure you remember every cable news, Chiron had an American flag graphic for a while. And in Israel, it's like that, but times, I don't know how many.

And so there's just an Israeli flag virtually plastered everywhere that you look. And lots of, lots more soldiers that I'm told are around and just kind of visible and present than having the case, which makes sense because a large number of them were called up from the reserves for, for the war. And so that's, that's point number one. just that there's this all-consuming visual symbolism and imagery that's clearly designed to galvanize support for the war effort. Now, a lot of it's also organic, so it's not as though ordinary Israelis have to be propagandized by the government to express their nationalistic affinities with the state at a time of war. That's done organically in large measure, just like it was in the U.S. after 9-11. but nonetheless, it's just very garrishly displayed all over the place. That's kind of the first thing that you notice.

So it's anti-war radio on Scott Horton talking with Michael Tracy. It's interesting that you say that. I've never been over there, but I know from talking with Max Blumenthal, who lived over there for a little while he was writing Goliath. And there's a great documentary called defamation that's made by an Israeli Jew, who essentially goes out in search of anti-Semitism. But the show begins, the documentary begins with him explaining that in Israel, I guess what you're describing now, Michael, is not a reaction just to October 7th, but that it's always like that. And he says, you know, it's essentially America in 2002 is Israel all the time.

And that's in terms of the propaganda about just how in danger your mama is at any given time and that kind of thing, you know? Yeah, I mean, it's always present to some. extent and that I would have been aware of even before coming but you would as you would imagine in the in a time of war fever that gets ramped up to another level so it's it's the pre-existing dynamic but drastically amplified yeah um now there's lots I could get into but now we have limited time so just give you we got half an hour so take your time I'm very interested to hear whatever insights you have here yeah yeah so I'll give you the west bank stuff because that I haven't really divulge anywhere yet and it's pretty interesting um so i ended up making contact with

a settler a jewish settler who lives in one of these what's what are called pill top communities in the west bank and they're called illegal now i tend not to buy into the whole paradigm of international law because it seems totally toothless and meaningless to me and people make appeals to it as though it carries any particular weight and so i just kind of bypass that whole point of reference but her international law allegedly it's illegal but certainly the people who are in the hilltop communities don't care one way or another because in large part they are only viewing themselves as bound by divine law or divine writ well it's worth mentioning that the Israelis have signed the geneva convention so they're bound by them whether the u.s.

overlord would ever enforce the law against them or not is sort of a separate question but are they really bound by it though because they I mean the occupation has been in place since 1967 well in the same sense that you have the right to bear arms even if Bill Clinton passes a law that says you can't have a rifle he's just violating your rights in this case they're violating the law but it's still the law violating international law but what's the enforcement mechanism there is them yeah but that's not different than any law really a meaningful law but that's not different than any law anywhere in the world right Cops run red lights, kill people, do whatever they want.

They holler wasteband. Judges get away with framing people in conspiracy with the prosecutor. There's no law that applies to them either. All laws just make leave. But if somebody wrongly deprives you of your liberties in the U.S., you can, in theory, go to a court. You can sue them. You can bring criminal action. You can appeal to certain authorities.

You need a conventions. You get a U.N. Security Council resolution that America bombs you. That's how the law is enforced, you know. Okay, I guess Mike, as a brief digression, my point on international law is I would, I think that, look, it's not to absolve Israel of anything by noting that international law tends to be a farce. I would just wish people would make appeals to moral reasoning or argumentation about the rightness or wrongness of what Israel or anybody is doing without invoking these kind of hollow and, um, well, I somewhat agree with you. hollow nostrums around international law that clearly are only at the place only enforces the pleasure of the hegemon in the international system, which is the U.S., which Israel is an extension of. So at a certain point, you're just kind of like barking up the wrong tree. Yeah, but look, I mean, it's the same thing as saying under the U.S. Constitution, only Congress can decide whether to start a war.

And it's wrong for Congress to just pass these resolutions allowing the president to decide instead. And so they're breaking the law. And that's not the whole point. That's not what makes having these wars wrong, but it's part of it that they're breaking the law. And they're the ones in charge of enforcing it. I think the law such as it exists within a certain polity, like the United States, which has a constitution, which has courts. Well, as Al Gore said, there's no controlling legal authority, right? I mean...

Right. There's no controlling legal authority for international law at all. except at the whim of the hegemon. Yeah, but it's the same thing about the people who run the state here. There's no controlling legal authority that binds their behavior either, other than, I guess. Let's not get bogged down in that theoretical argument. But on the settlements, they're called Hilltop settlements. And they're populated by some of the most ardently messianic Jewish settlers.

And the one that I met and rode around with in his Jeep, which was an exciting experience. actually have just rain that day, so I didn't even know where to make it through some of these mud roads and things, because you got to remember, because even per Israeli law, some of these settlements are not legal, they have to, like, construct their own infrastructure and pay their own roads and stuff, which oftentimes the army and the police turn a blind eye to, so they tolerate it and they acquiesced to it tacitly, but a lot of the infrastructure is a mess. So we were riding around in these kind of backwood areas. And amusingly, the guy likened himself in his hilltop settler community to American rednecks. That was his closest analog. Now, I don't tend

to begrudge rednecks, but that was what he brought up. So, okay, I'll take it. And, you know, and he self-described to me, and by the way, I'm not naming him. I'm not naming most of these people because it's a miracle that they even talk to a journalist at all. Thankfully, I don't have like one of the scary institutional affiliations that they might be turned off by. So this is how I sort of got it. And he just self-described to me as a fundamentalist Jew who is awaiting the return of the Messiah. I'm not joking. It's going to sound like I'm exaggerating.

I'm not. He actually, they actually wave in these areas flags. let's say Messiah in Hebrew, and then they put that flag, including on army posts and police checkpoints, they fly the Messiah flag in Hebrew higher than the Israeli flag. So they actually view the paramountcy of the return of the Messiah as their ultimate authority rather than the Israeli state. So they actually are not, in some sense, Zionist in a way that, is ordinarily as practiced or espoused within Israel because they don't, they don't really

abide by the dictates of secular law. But what this guy was showing me was that there was a, and I posted, I posted some photos of it a few days ago, when, after October 7th, there was basically a vacuum of resources in the West Bank because there was a mad shuffle to get the four, a raid for the now six-week-old war in Gaza. And so some of the military and police who might have ordinarily been stationed in some of these places and the settlement areas were not there. And although they might turn a blind eye in certain respects and even maybe join the

settlers in certain regards, because there are some military reservists and full active duty military who are themselves settlers now. But anyway, there was a, there was basically a vacuum that emerged. And so these genuinely rabid fundamentalist settlers decided to take advantage of the opportunity, and they basically drove out some of these Arab Muslim Bedouin ramshackle villages, which in some cases have been there for decades. necessarily ancient villages because they're sort of like nomadic in a sense settlements so i don't want to make it sound like they you know destroyed the ancient like a

Babylon or something or some like incredibly a deep rooted settlement but obviously these people have been in the area forever and um they have these settlements that are set up in an area in one of the west bank areas so there's area a b and c and the in the in the in not area a is full Palestinian controlled and then the following two are combinations where there's either full Jewish control or a mix and so there are certain areas where there are a mix of Jewish settlements and Arab settlements and so what the settlers use the opportunity to do is just physically drive out certain of these Arab Muslim Bedouins encampments and they're very modest encampments to begin with

but they were driven out and then I was also taken on a tour by another by somebody else, a rabbi actually who goes around and monitors settler activity and there were a number of these small villages where you go and they're just, they just didn't have been abandoned. They've been ransacked and abandoned

and a lot of this happened after October 7th when there was this kind of vacuum of control. Let me stop you right there for a second. Give me just a moment. minute here. At the Libertarian Institute, we published books, real good ones. So far we've got Will Griggs's No Quarter, Sheldon Richmond's coming to Palestine, and what social animals owe to each other, and four of mine, fools Aaron, enough already, the great Ron Paul, and my brand new one,

hotter than the sun, time to abolish nuclear weapons. And I'm happy to announce that we've just published our managing editor Keith Knight's first one, the Voluntarius Handbook, and an excellent collection of essays by the world's greatest libertarian thinkers and writers, including me. Check them all out at libertarian institute.org slash books. And for a limited time, signed copies of enough already and hotter than the sun are available at Scott Horton.org slash books. Hey, guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir

and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback. every time you get a bug of salt or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org. So keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. It's Michael Tracy here on anti-war radio,

and he's in Tel Aviv now, but he was on the West Bank investigating doing journalism with some settlers, embedded with some settlers there, and getting toured around. And I saw on Twitter where you posted photos of this Bedouin village that they had, I mean, do you have details about what exactly happened or you just know they were ran off? Well, that one that you're referring to that I was brought to by one of the settlers who was just telling me boastfully that people in his milieu basically just they went and showed up that they en masse went into one of these little encampments. and just berated the people, you know, there was some, I don't know if there was violence at this particular encampment, but there was definitely violence at other encampments where the Jews used physical coercion and force to basically demand that the settlers flee.

They steal, you know, the Jewish settlers will steal stuff. You know, a lot of these settlers are, you know, I saw some of them yesterday, actually. I went on a separate trip yesterday with this rabbi, and we pulled up, the side of the road to an olive grove that this rabbi who was pouring me around said was privately owned Palestinian land and what the Jewish settlers do is they bring their sheep into the Palestinians olive grove and let them just eat up the olive groves trees so they're no longer able to produce olives and they're under the protection of IDF as they do this stuff right? Well, I didn't see any IDF soldiers actively protecting them, but this rabbi who

was, I was with, he's more of a liberal, progressive rabbi, so he's opposed to the settlers. And he makes a point to call up the local police and try to convince them to come and enforce the law against these Jewish settlers, because again, this is actually also, in a sense, technically against Israeli law. But they turn up line. die or they never should the the police never showed up they basically just gave him a whole bunch of excuses why they weren't going to come and so yeah I mean the settlers operate with impunity but the thing that that really stood out to me I'm just observing these particular settlers was that they're just a bunch of kids I mean they these the one that came up to us just like to talk to us he couldn't

have been older than like 16 or something so I don't know it just uh that kind of enhances the the depressing quality of it in a sense because essentially they're just like rival shepherd communities. Um, but one of the one of the shepherding communities has the either overt or tacit backing of the state. Um, so yeah, that was that was interesting. And there's lots of other stuff that's been pretty wild to. Well, it's anti-war radio. I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Michael Tracy, the great independent journalist. And he's at M. Tracy. That's his substack. He's in Tel Aviv now, but he's just back from the West Bank where he's been touring around with some settlers and with, as he says here, kind of reformed Jewish rabbi who's a critic of the settlers, but kind of gave him a tour around showing him what's what. And do you have, I've seen a few numbers and I know that this is not exactly what you're doing on the ground there, but do you have some numbers? Can you tell us a little bit about the extent of the cleansing campaign in the West Bank? I mean, be just the two little Bedouin settlements settlements that you saw yourself there, but can you give

us sort of an overall sense of what's happening in the West Bank now as this horrible war is going on in Gaza? So I don't have any numbers that I've independently gathered or verified. I can just tell you that I personally have seen maybe five or six of these Bedouin settlements or villages in this area of the West Bank that is under. That's joint Palestinian-Israeli, where in some cases, settlements that Arab settlements that have been there for decades are now ravaged. Personally seen and can vouch for at least five or six of these Arab Muslim settlements or encampments or small villages that were basically ravaged by the hyper-religious Jewish settlers. as far as broader data, I don't know.

It's hard to say. There are lots of different factions, always collecting data. So I'm not really in a position where I can give you anything that I could personally, with confidence, say it's like objective and the full truth. But I could just give you what I've seen myself. And then, but I guess both the settlers and the critical rabbi both told you that this is all escalated since the war broke out in October. this oh yeah i've seen i've seen a bunch of the settlements where mostly in the week or two after october 7th the settlers use the opportunity where there's this vacuum of control to basically expel or drive out the bedouins yeah and that was that was told to me both by the critic and the

supporter of it so it leads me to believe that there's some truth to well any plans on going to Hebron or Ramallah and trying to, or East Jerusalem and looking at things from the Palestinian's point of view. What's going on right now? I've been to East Jerusalem. I did go there for a day. Oh, great. I'm chatting with people.

You know, it was interesting. People think that there's, you know, what I, but the Palestinians who I've talked to who told me is that everything is just getting drastically worse for them since October 7th. they have they speak in like whispered tones they're always looking over their shoulder um you know an interesting event that i personally was involved in is um i went to a protest at a courthouse in jerusalem a week or two ago or this history teacher his name was mire baruchin uh he was detained by the israeli police which is under the control of ben guvier the national security minister,

who is from one of these radical settlements. And this was an Israeli Jew who was detained for basically posting stuff on Facebook that was deemed overly critical of the Israeli war effort. And so you had an Israeli Jews who were showing up to protest the detention of this history teacher. It was mostly older people. And when I was there one morning. and all of a sudden this band of riot police they're called Yassoum

ambushed this crowd of older Israeli people again not young men who are rabble-rousing and trying to cause trouble these were older people I was talking to a lady who must have been in her 50s and then another lady who must have been in her 70s or 80s when we all got ambushed including the older women and everybody was just totally shell-shocked because what they explained to me afterwards

meaning the Jews who were ambushed by these early police was that these are tactics that they would have ordinarily associated with police conduct in Palestinian areas. Now they're even using the similar tactics against the few remaining dissident Israeli Jews. But yeah, I've talked to Palestinians who obviously are, who are, have said that they cannot say anything because they'll just be beat up. and I haven't I didn't see that myself personally but it's it's not hard to come across just any ordinary Palestinian who will test to the climate drastically worsening for them since um since October 7th I was warned not to go I'm actually leaving tomorrow I'm going to probably maybe come back next month um but I was warned not to go to Palestinian towns by people who say that I would be at risk now I tend to doubt that I'm pretty sure I can wrangle it. Um, but, you know, East, East Jerusalem was, was fine for me personally in terms of safety. I mean, I think, I think a lot of that does tend to be slightly exaggerated, though, you know, hard to, hard to stay with specificity. I haven't gone to one of the area A, Palestinian enclaves,

as they're called, where there's supposedly full Palestinian control in places like, you know, Janine or, um, Romala or whatnot, but I'll, it seems like if you make your contacts first, you'd be fine, you know, I mean, there is a war on. So it's not like there's no risk, but It seems like you should be all right on the West Bank. I was going to ask you, I would never put this on you, man. I was going to ask you if you had any intention of trying to get into Gaza. But I think you probably know better than that, huh? As far as I can tell, the IDF only allowed, I mean, who actually, it might be slightly

slightly different now because there's purportedly this ceasefire slash hostage exchange or prisoner exchange deal that's underway, although I don't know if that's been officially initiated yet. Um, but as of now, the only entry that's allowed to Gaza, which is obviously being blockaded by Israel for the media is these guided tours where you have to abide by certain conditions. Mm-hmm. And so like NBC and Fox and New York Times have done it. Um, Fox, they seem to give that guy, Trey Yings, a lot of access. And he just shows whatever like a, you know, rifle they see lying around on the ground.

You might actually appreciate this about Israel. Everywhere you go, there's just like guys in sandals and sweatpants with their rifles slung around their shoulders. So it's a, it's way, a much more gun-friendly society than even the most pro-Second Amendment parts of, like, Texas or something. So there's, it's pretty interesting in that regard. And although that's more about, I haven't tried to go to Gaza. That's more about oppressing the other than just self-defense in the American tradition. But on the media here, I want to point out this piece. from Politico today. You mentioned the ceasefire and the questions that raises about access to

Gaza. Well, according to Politico this morning, quote, there was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause, that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel. I'm wondering, I would love to know which, which officials. are being paraphrased there. I know, me too. But, of course, we do know that Politico is very close and friendly with the Biden administration. So this is probably not just some smear by a Republican congressional aid or something, you know. I want to say one thing in Israel's favor, which I promise I'm not being compelled to do by Hasbara or anything. It's just my genuine observation. Before I came here, you know, just in casual discussions with people who are generally critical of Israel. there was a fairly confident assumption that I would face problems entering the country because they, maybe they would, like, go through my social media or something, because I'm generally critical, I guess you would say, are more toward that side of the debate, or that I'd be harassed

or followed, or that I would encounter big obstacles in my ability to kind of travel around freely. I have to say, I've had no problems whatsoever. I've been to the Knesset twice, including today. I've met people from different political factions, really unhindered. And look, I'm an American with an American passport, which is in a way kind of like getting out of jail free card that gives you certain liberties that are not going to be enjoyed by others in this part of the world. But for whatever it's worth, you know, it really hasn't been anywhere near as onerous as I think, I probably would have assumed before I came here. Now, people might want to accuse me of doing propaganda for Israel.

Look, I mean, please. I'm just calling it like I see it. And I acknowledge lots of other problems, but that's one thing I do think is worth acknowledging. Sure. All right. Well, good times, man. I appreciate you going all the way over there and especially going to the West Bank and reporting what you saw with your own eyes and what you learned from the settlers

and that rabbi that took you around and the Palestinians you met. there in East Jerusalem and the rest. It's been very enlightening, man. So thank you very much. Yeah, I'm going to post some roundup stuff in the coming days. So people want to see some more photos and whatever and some other reporting. Log on to mtracy.net. It'll be there. Okay, great. All right. Well, thank you for coming back on the show, Michael. Really appreciate it. All right. Enjoyed it. Aren't you guys? That is Michael Tracy. He, of course, is M. Tracy on Twitter. And m.tracy.net is his website reporting there from Tel Aviv, just back from the West Bank.

And that's it for Anti-War Radio. For today, I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director at anti-war.com, and author of Enough Already about the Terror Wars. Find the full interview archive at Scotthorton.org. And follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton's show. We're here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. Thank you.