Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/21/23 Jeremy Hammond: Yes, What’s Happening in Gaza Is a Genocide

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

Scott is joined by Jeremy Hammond to talk about the war in Gaza. They discuss Israel’s strategy of making Gaza uninhabitable and look at the relevant history that has led to this moment. They also discuss the proper language to use when talking about the conflict. Hammond argues that what Israel is currently doing meets the definition of a genocide and that people shouldn’t shy away from using that word. Discussed on the show: Obstacles to Peace by Jeremy Hammond “Visualizing Israel’s Goal of Making Gaza Uninhabitable” (JeremyHammond.com) “Netanyahu’s Support for Hamas Backfired” (Antiwar.com) “It’s All About Provoking Your Reaction” (Antiwar.com) “Palestinian Girl, 12, Lost Her Family and Her Leg in an Airstrike. She Was Killed While Recovering at a Gaza Hospital” (The Messenger) Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent journalist, political analyst, and author. He wrote Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, along with many other books. Follow him on Twitter @jeremyrhammond. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; 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

Hey, you guys, Scott Horton here to remind you that it's fun drive time at the Institute right now. We only do this twice a year, but it's got to be done. And I'm proud to do it, too. We've got an incredible crew of the best writers, authors, and podcasters in the Libertarian Movement. From Jim Bovard, Lori Calhoun, Tom Woods, and Ted Carpenter, to Keith Knight, Kyle Anzalone, Hunter Durenc, Connor Freeman, and all the rest of the guys. It's the best team around. We've published three books this year. Keith Knight's Voluntaryist Handbook, Lori Calhoun's questioning the COVID company line,

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author of the book, Pools Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan, and the brand new enough already time to end the war on terrorism and i've recorded more the 5,500 interviews since 2003 almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show okay guys on the line i've got jeremy r hammond and he is the author of the great book about America's role in the Israel-Palestine conflict called Obstacle to Peace, which is just an incredible piece of work.

I hope that you'll take a good long look at it. And he writes at jeremy r Hammond.com and of course including very critical stuff about the current slaughter taking place in the Gaza Strip. Welcome back to the show. Jeremy, how are you, sir? you and all right scott all things considered thanks for having me on again it's uh honor and pleasure to speak with you again uh great well happy to have you here on this show and you have some really important work here that i do hope people will look at i mean first of all this one visualizing

israel's goal of making gaza uninhabitable and this is based i believe on a story in the new york times and satellite pictures that they got a hold of and the devastation station that they're showing in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, at least, as far as this piece goes. So can you take us through that and what made you decide to write this piece? Yeah, sure. So it is from the New York Times. The New York Times had a kind of an interactive feature where as you scroll down the page, they have these satellite images, and they have a before and after, and you can just grab a slider and slide left and right and see the before and after of these images of what has happened on the ground in North Gaza.

And the images are just so devastating. And you can see what you can see that Israel has been implementing what officials have been declaring is their intent, which is to make Gaza uninhabitable. And you can see it on the ground where there were formerly communities and buildings and restaurants and. and seaside resorts, schools, all these orchards, greenhouses, everything gone, everything turned into a moonscape, just completely flattened, completely, everything is bulldozed. It's quite obvious what the intent of Israel's operation is.

And even the mainstream media at this point have come around to stop, you know, you don't see them saying anymore like well Israel says that it does everything possible to avoid harm to civilians they're not passing that off as though that's like objective reporting even the mainstream media have started to come around and saying like well this is you know it's starting to acknowledge how what we're seeing on the ground is not at all reconcilable with this claim that the Israeli military tries to avoid harm to civilians this is not a military operation targeting Hamas this is a military operation targeting Hamas This is a military operation targeting the civilian population of Gaza.

It's just so brazen and blatantly obvious that that's what their intent is. And essentially the plan is that the people of Gaza, the Palestinians, inhabiting this concentration camp, this huge concentration camp, as it was described by then Israeli National Security Council, the head of the National Security Council in Israel, Giora Island in 2004, describing Gaza as a huge concentration camp. That was before the 16-year escalation of the blockade that has been underway since. And, of course, before the homoest atrocities of 10-7, after which, since which, Israel has been imposing a complete, a near-total siege of Gaza, preventing the shipment into Gaza of humanitarian goods that they depend on for survival. And so their aim essentially

is, you know, their position is the Palestinians can flee to go live in tent cities in the Sinai desert or they can die. That's the clear and explicit aim of Israel's military operations. Yeah, all right. Well, look, I mean, as they say, a picture. speaks a thousand words and all that people can go and see for themselves as you say not just bombing but then bulldozing and clearing out entire massive communities and they'll say hey look we're just hunting for Hamas tunnels and I guess that's the PR strategy is we'll just keep saying one thing while we're doing another and that'll be enough to kind of confuse the issue and yet at the same time isn't it clear Jeremy that through official statements and also sort of semi-official

through former government officials, that the Israelis have made it very clear that they need to take the whole strip. Yeah, absolutely. And keep the Palestinians off it. The genocidal intent has been there since the beginning. I mean, you have Netanyahu himself invoking the Bible and the Israelite genocide of the Amalekites in the Bible. And he describing the Palestinians as the Amalekites.

And so in reminding Israelites that we're in a war against Amalek. I mean, Netanyahu knows what that means. He understands how that is inciting genocide. I mean, it's so clear. You know, you have Israeli defense minister describing about Palestinians as human animals saying we're going to eliminate everything in Gaza, the IDF's coordinator of government activities and the territories, the occupied territories, that is, or the Kogat,

saying human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water. There will be only destruction. You wanted hell. You will get hell. IDF spokesmen saying the emphasis is on damage, not accuracy. You have, you are a Giora Island, who I had mentioned before, no longer an Israeli official, but the former head of Israel's National Security Council, writing multiple articles in Israeli newspapers, clearly describing the goal of, like explicitly saying that we need to make Gaza uninhabitable and that we need to target the civilian population, saying things like we need to tell the civilians to flee to unrose schools, which are the shelters, the schools that are being used for shelters in Gaza and the Shifa Hospital. And then we immediately,

after that, we need to bomb those targets. It's just, they're so explicit. and clear in their genocidal intent that anyone who at this point is still trying to deny that genocide is what is happening is just it's just it's just it's just pure willful ignorance now they say the people i guess who i think you accurately described there as in denial we'll say yeah but there's still hamas guys out there and of course they're begging the question and assuming the conclusion that there's only one way to fight them and that is to decimate the entire strip this way. But let's say for the sake of argument that, and I don't know what your opinion is on this, but let's say for the sake of argument that you wanted to grant the Israelis

that, sure, they'll never be safe unless Hamas is completely eradicated. Would there be a way to do that short of what they're doing here? Or not really? What do you think? No, not at all. I mean, first of all, Hamas is essentially a creation of Israeli policies. We need to remember that Hamas, the existence of Hamas, is a consequence and not the cause of the Israel-Palestine conflict. When Hamas was first founded in the late 1980s, Israel supported it as a counterforce to the PLO, which had dangerously accepted the two-state solution. And so was, you know, Israel was threatened by the prospect of having a legitimate peace partner,

someone who the international community viewed as a peace partner for Israel, that was a threat. So there was a threat of peace. Israel doesn't want peace. Israel wants the land, but it wants the land without the Palestinians. This has always been the aim of the Zionist movement, modern political Zionism, from the start, from the time of the British mandate period, the mandate that was enforced, specifically to deny the Palestinians, their right to self-determination. and the mandate, the belligerent British occupation that facilitated the ethnic cleansing

of Palestine in 1948. And then Netanyahu has had an explicit policy of utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally. And you've written about this. You've, you know, you've got that great article at anti-war.com, you know, using Hamas as a strategic ally for the specific aim of blocking any movement toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians. And every other round that we've seen, you know, you had Operation Castled, December 27, 2008 to January 18th, 2009, Operation Pillar of Cloud, Operation Protective Edge. Every single time Israel goes into one of these, you know, operations, they just call it mowing the lawn. Every time they mow the lawn in Gaza, it doesn't,

Hamas doesn't come out weaker. It comes out stronger because when Israel goes in and targets civilian infrastructure and massacres innocent civilians, it only bolsters the more extremist elements. And it only further radicalizes people who have just like all hope has been taken away from them. All prospects of some kind of meaningful future have been deprived. have been taken away from them. And, you know, when you lock up, what, 2.2 million people in a concentration camp, the size of Wichita, Kansas, you know, I always hear the argument that you kind of alluded to, you know, you hear people trying to defend the slaughter saying, you know, what else do you expect Israel to do? So, well, what else do you expect the Palestinians to do?

I mean, if we're going to justify violence as a response to violence, well, then why wasn't Hamas' attacks justified? by the same reasoning. Of course, I reject that reasoning. There was no possible justification for the atrocities committed by Hamas on 10-7. Obviously, there's no possible justification for the crime of genocide or the lesser crimes of war crimes that have been committed in every round of Israel's mowing the lawn in Gaza. And so what you had on 10-7 was you had, you know, these youth, members of Hamas, who had grown up in this concentration camp, I had no nothing but the deprivation of living in this huge concentration camp. And you had a situation where I think the main goal of Hamas' operation,

which it called Operation Al-Axamah flood, I think was really to shatter the status quo and to remind the world, hey, the Palestinians are still here. We're still here. And, you know, especially in light of the so-called normalization processes that were underway with Abraham Accords, negotiations with Saudi Arabia, of course, with U.S. backing to try to normalize relationships, which essentially just means that getting the issue of the Palestinians off of the table politically among these other Arab states. That's essentially what that's about. Yeah. And so Hamas wanted to remind the world that the Palestinians are still there.

Well, so I absolutely agree with that. And I'm not sure if you saw my piece one before last about they're trying to provoke a reaction here that's how it works in terrorism and yet um well i hate to cite max abrams because he's been just so horrible on this but he is a terrorism expert and has shown in that sort of academic way analyzing all different cases uh throughout you know at least our modern era that usually terrorism doesn't work it makes matters much worse take for example the sunni insurgency committing mass suicide bombing attacks against Shiite pilgrims during Iraq War II. And the purpose of that was to provoke a Shiite overreaction to drive more Sunnis into the arms of the al-Qaeda types leading the insurgency.

But they ended up just getting their clocks cleaned. The Shiites just had a 60-20 super majority situation going on, never mind the Kurds in the north there for the moment. And the Sunnis got their asses handed to them, Jeremy. and it looks here like Hamas sure got the reaction and the overreaction, and for that matter, all the counterreactions that they were going for, or some of them. They sure took Gaza and Palestine from the back burner and put it on the front burner again. You're not just going to ignore us and look at Eastern Europe instead.

We still matter and all of that. And yet back to our top of the story here, man, visualizing the absolute desolation. of the Gaza Strip that they provoked with this recent round and I understand who's occupying who but you know they kicked off this recent round of fighting on the seventh there and um they were always running the risk that the reaction that they would provoke would be far too much to handle and I wonder whether you think that they really blew it even from their own point of view here I understand and they'll probably survive, but to rule over what? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, not only morally, of course, but strategically, it was a horrible mistake, I think. Because anytime you give up moral high ground, you're losing. You know, you can't win strategically when you do that. On the other hand, you know, you do have the world kind of awakening. On the other hand, you know, if there is a silver lining to whatever, is happening, which is hard to find, but looking as optimistically as possible, you know, there is kind of an opportunity. What is happening is basically the thin veil has been pulled away and the true face of modern political Zionism is revealed. And so we see what it is. And so the true

nature of the Jewish supremacist state that exists between the river and the sea is coming to light in a way that even the most ardent apologists for Israel's crimes against the Palestinians are incapable of not seeing. You know, anyone with eyes to see can see what is really happening and what Israel's true intent and goals are. You have Netanyahu coming out and saying, I'm so proud, you know, he had always tried to maintain this pretense of kind of like being in favor of some kind of Palestinian, you know, autonomous areas minimally, you know, which the Western media report is his support for a two-state

solution, which is ridiculous. But he's at least always tried to maintain a pretense of, you know, maintaining some kind of, you know, like willingness to engage in diplomacy. But that mask has come off. And he's, you know, just recently announced how proud he is of blocking that, you know, any peace negotiations for as long as he's been an honest. office and what a wonderful accomplishment that's been and in his rejection of the two-state solution it's all it's all just brazen and blatant and explicit now so there's the veil has been lifted and and people can see now the reality of what israel is the reality of what the so-called jewish state is it's a jewish supremacist state that controls all the territory between the jordan river and the mediterranean sea

including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And you have this oppressive apartheid regime, which increasingly has been acknowledged by, you know, you have Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, numerous UN agencies and inquiries, Israeli human rights organizations, Betzelam, Gisha, et cetera, all describing the situation as apartheid. Yeah, and I think in that the real important point here,

Jeremy, is that this two-state solution illusion thing, it was the perfect public relations scam for, what, 30 years? Ah, there's a peace process. We're going to peace process. There's a map. John Kerry's meeting with the guy, and they're going to not do anything, but we're going to take up some time here and Annapolis here and this and that roadmap. But then, as you say, the mask is off where Netanyahu in 2020 and 21 said, no, forget it, dude. That's it. We're not doing a two-state solution.

There will always be one state from the river to the sea, but it won't be free. It'll be ruled by me. And you guys are just going to have to learn to live with it. And in fact, that was his big speech before the United Nations just a couple of weeks before the October 7th attack was essentially, I got away with it. You said that I couldn't make peace with the Arab states, that is the American Sunni sock puppet kingdoms of the GCC, unless I gave up a Palestinian state. first. But the Netanyahu doctrine was, no, I don't either. I'll just get the Americans to buy enough fighter jets for these guys that they give in and normalize relations, which is what he did. And he held up a map of the whole place, one color, no West Bank, no Gaza Strip there. It's all

Israel from the river to the sea and crowed that essentially got away with it. And this is the policy over the last couple of years, just the last two, three years where he's admitted this outright is what really caused these groups like Betselem, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and I guess a lot of politicians and others to say, and including Israeli politicians, to say this is apartheid. What else can you call it when it is one state and you're not pretending that they'll ever have independence again? In fact, as long as I'm rambling about this, let me end it in the form of a question, Jeremy, and you can answer whatever you want about what I just said too. But delusional, senile old Biden has been saying, you know, after this,

definitely got to do a two-state solution with the PA in charge of Gaza. And Netanyahu just said, forget you, man. We are not doing that. And one of his ministers said the same thing on the BBC there. You could just forget it, dude. And as he's saying, you got to keep me, because I'm the only one who can prevent a two-state solution. Now, see, Big Bad Biden's going to try to force us to accept it.

Only I have the power to resist his will is what Netanyahu's running on now. outright avowedly saying only he can prevent there from ever being an independent Palestinian state. So I wonder what you think about Joe Biden and whether he's serious there and whether you think that even there's a chance of that at all or what you see happening here. Yeah, well, that ties right into the question of what the exit strategy is and you have Biden pushing, you know, for what's happening in Gaza. I mean, and you have Biden kind of saying, well, once Hamas is gone, you know, with this, again, delusional idea that they're just going to go in there and eradicate Hamas, and that's going to be the end of it. So once Hamas is gone, well, we need to have the Palestinian authority move back into Gaza and take over control. And in that, you know, I'm responding to that saying, nope, not going to happen. We're not letting the PA in here either.

So what is the exit strategy? And, you know, as far as the two states, I'm sorry, as far as the so-called peace process is concerned, going back to 1967 and the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 242, we have to understand the distinction between the two-state solution premised on the applicability of international law to the conflict and what the U.S. has always backed and proposed under the so-called peace process of a two-state solution, two completely different things. And, of course, Resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw its forces

after the 1967 war, which it started on the morning of June 5th, withdraw its forces to the pre-June 5th armistice lines, which are the same as the green line, sometimes called the 1967 lines, also known as the 1949 armistice lines. The understanding of that resolution, the intent of that resolution in the Security Council, which is the only legitimate interpretation of the resolution,

was that Israel must immediately and fully withdraw its forces from the territories that occupied. which was the Syrian Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, and of course the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel, of course, is rejected and remains in violation of that resolution because it had its own unilateral interpretation of the resolution, whereby it didn't need to withdraw until there was some kind of peace agreement that was negotiated. And so the Israel's interpretation is that the people living under the occupying, power and the occupied territories must negotiate with their occupier over how much of their

own land they can continue to live in and maybe exercise sort of kind of some kind of limited autonomy over. So that's that's Israel's framework and that is the exact framework that the U.S. adopted from the start in the immediate aftermath of the passage of resolution 242. The U.S. has accepted Israel's unilateral interpretation over the interpretation of the Security Council. And that was the whole entire basis of the so-called peace process, which is premised on a rejection of the applicability of international law to the conflict. So in just clarifying those two points. And so the two-state solution really just means an into the occupation, which might be a first step, but it can't be the last step. And my thinking on this has changed just since I,

published Obstacle to Peace in 2016, where I do now think that there isn't even a remote possibility of implementing the two-state solution, of course, but even a two-state solution, as advocated by Israel, not in Yahoo, certainly, but at least, you know, they had spoken words about a two-state solution, never sincerely. But, you know, even that, there's just no possible way. The peace process is dead. it's never going to come back to be revived at this point. There's just no possibility for it. It has no credibility or viability.

And I think that the only real solution at this point is just for an end to the Jewish supremacist state. And when I say that, it's not just that there's this apartheid regime in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There's also just discriminatory laws against Palestinians, Arab citizens of Israel. I mean, just to point to one clear, explicit example, the Jewish nation state law, which actually defines that it says that the exercise of the right to self-determination in Israel is an exclusive right of Jews. So there you have it. You know, this idea that Israel is some kind of, you know, democracy, and it's this liberal democracy with equal rights for all citizens. This is also a delusion.

And that's a very recent law. It's a few years back. I don't recall maybe 2019 or so. But yeah, it's not that old. And there's a lot of other discriminatory laws. There's there's a database. I forget the name of the organization. I think they count something like 69 or so, you know, just discriminatory laws, including, you know, like there's this housing committee law that enables municipal areas to exclude residents and not allow people to move into their communities. on the grounds that they want to maintain their distinct character, which of course is directed at Arab citizens of Israel, so that they can maintain the Jewish character of their communities. So the idea that there's no discrimination against Arabs in Israel is also a delusion. But these are the reasons why you have these organizations coming out and describing the situation as an apartheid regime.

Well, so, you know, I certainly agree with everything he said there about the difficulty of doing a two-state solution when the whole thing was an illusion anyway, and as you describe in your book, even under the best case scenario, it was going to be this state minus and sort of continuing the occupation. And I know that, you know, when I talk with Palestinian activists like Ramsey Baroud or Ali Abu Nima or some of these guys, forget the two. two-state solution men they're not falling for that illusion anymore at all they never were if they were it was a hell of a long time ago and it's got to be one state or nothing but then when you talk about how difficult it would be to ever do a two-state solution we run into the same problem here where the idea of and the the policy of keeping a jewish supremacist state as you call it there in not just in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but in London and in Washington, D.C. as well. And for that matter, the rest of the EU and Berlin and the rest, this is completely non-negotiable.

And they're not going to let that happen. And I think that it's mostly nonsense. And if you look at the number of Israeli Arabs or Palestinian citizens of Israel, as they call them, who live there now. And, you know, I think it puts the lie to the idea that if they just freed all the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and called them Israeli citizens, then they would, oh, kill all the Jews and push them into the sea and all these things. I don't think there's any reason to think that. But I do think that there's reason to think that the Israelis sure think that. And certainly in the aftermath of October 7th, they think that. I'm sure people listening to this show right now are going, oh, yeah, just tear down the fence and tear it down.

down all the walls and then just see what happens, huh? And so we can't have that either. So how are we going to do a one-state solution that's any more realistic than a two-state solution or any more realistic than what Lakud has apparently decided here, which is when they're done force marching the Gossans on their trail of tears into the Sinai Peninsula or into the sea to drown, as it were, that then they're just going to have to turn to the West Bank, build a railroad across the Jordan and purge them too, sooner or later anyway. And there's your one-state solution. The Palestinians have to go, according to the Israeli government here. But can you describe a realistic scenario to the contrary, I guess, is the question.

That's a really big challenge, obviously. But, you know, when I wrote obstacle to peace, my answer to that question was, well, it needs to be done in stages. I mean, I agreed back then with the overall goal of a one-state solution, but then my question was, well, how do you get there? And so I figured that it needed to be done in stages. Stage one would be implementation of the two-state solution, effectively just meaning ending the occupation. And then step two would then be to resolve the refugee problem and finding, you know, finding justice and some kind of reasonable solution for the for the refugees but you know my thinking at this point is you know it's evolved and at this point I don't know that that's a feasible path forward either but but no matter what happens

no matter what the what the steps would be at this stage the first thing that needs to happen is for US support for Israel's crimes against the Palestinians to come to an end and that's really up to us as Americans to affect the paradigm shift and to make a it politically and feasible for that support to be able to continue. Because that really is, you know, in my view, the biggest obstacle to peace, apart from the Israeli government itself, because it's the U.S. government that enables and empowers Israel to go on maintaining its occupation, expanding its illegal settlement regime, arming Israel, providing Israel with, you know, $3.8 billion annually in military aid. So it can go into.

Gaza and mow the lawn with its raids in the West Bank, protecting violent settlers in the West Bank, protecting the radical extremist Jews who marched through Jerusalem chanting death to Arabs, you know, I mean, all of this just needs to come to an end. The crimes against the Palestinians, the U.S. support for those crimes just need to stop. And if we can't get there, then then Israel is just going to continue to commit these crimes with impunity. And we see this with the ongoing genocide, where the U.S. is absolutely complicit in the genocide apart from arming it and protecting Israel, but also protecting Israel in the UN Security Council by continually blocking efforts to pass a ceasefire resolution, which then goes to both times this has happened

that the U.S. has used its veto twice now in the UN Security Council, and then it moved on to the General Assembly, where the international community expressed its voice that there needs to be an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. And of course, the U.S., in the most recent vote there in the General Assembly was alone with Israel and, you know, a handful of its vassal states, essentially, in voting against the General Assembly resolution. So, you know, the U.S.'s complicity in an ongoing genocide is also absolutely clear. And, you know, so what really needs to happen is also the international criminal court. The ICC needs to get involved here. There needs to be accountability. War crimes need to be prosecuted. And the perpetrators, whether they're

Hamas militants or Israeli government officials, U.S. government officials, there need to be prosecutions for war crimes and the crime of genocide, the crime of apartheid. There needs to be, there needs to be accountability on that this is kind of a first step. You know, and without that, how can we talk about step two? We need to get to the, we need to get to the place where there's actually accountability for the crimes that are continually committed. Yeah. Hey, y'all, Scott here.

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Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. Well, look, I know this would probably make a lot of people my audience angry, you know, people are very made up their mind about this. But I'm really not a 9-11 truth. I mean, what the hell? If the Saudi intelligence helped al-Qaeda carry out the attack or something, then, you know,

that raises some questions and things, but still they're piggybacking on Osama bin Laden and I'm in Al-Zawahiri's war against the United States. And I think there's so much credible evidence and reporting. to show it doesn't all come from the torture of college Sheikh Mohammed, right? I mean, there's all kinds of reasons to understand and believe that they had decided on this policy of uniting the international jihadist movement against the United States, because it was one thing that he could get, bin Laden could get others to really agree on. And because the idea was that as long as the American Empire is there to back up all the dictators of the region, then they're

never going to get anywhere in waging their local revolutions. They've got to get rid of us first. So to replicate the American-sponsored war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 80s, they would lure us in Afghanistan, bog us down, bleed us to bankruptcy, force us out the long and the hard way so that then they could do what they wanted. And I think that that is the real story behind al-Qaeda's war against the United States in the 90s, even as Bill Clinton continued to back them in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya, they still were attacking us all through the 1990s and leading up September 11th, and the thing of it is, a huge part of the motivation for the hijackers themselves was Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and the Lebanese with the military

and financial support of the United States of America. And if somebody just said, look, the terrorists hate us because we support Israel, you might just say, well, F them, we like Israel, and you can't intimidate us, and we don't negotiate with terrorists and this kind of thing. But we're not talking about just supporting Israel. We're talking about Israel committing absolutely horrific war crimes against men, women, and children for decades on end and only with the complicity of the United States of America, helping them get away with it all, with America's dominant power in the region. And this is literally, whether Bin Laden ever gave a damn or not, which I think he did, he knew that this was successful recruiting.

shtick to get guys to hijack planes and crash him into our towers to kick off a generational war. And quite honestly, I am just so grateful right now that he is dead, dead, dead. And that whether Zawahri is around or not, he never commanded the respect that bin Laden did. And apparently whoever is his successor in running these various kind of offshoots of ISIS and al-Qaeda, like Jolani, CIA's sock puppet in Syria, you know, right now, that none of these guys have the charisma that it took for bin Laden to corral these men and turn them against the United States in this way. And we ought to feel really lucky right now. We're still at risk of so-called lone wolf attacks. And God knows if some group, Sunni or Shia or whoever, could infiltrate

the United States and hit some soft targets. Our country is certainly lousy with them. This is the kind of fire that we're playing with. And again, I'm not talking about appeasing anyone other than just doing the right thing and stopping doing the wrong thing that we shouldn't be doing in the first place. And it was American support for the Israelis in Palestine and Lebanon, along with the Israeli insisted upon policy of dual containment of Iraq and Iran from bases in Saudi Arabia through the 1990s that got us into this whole damn terror war, Jeremy. And I think that, as Ron Paul said, we think if we, he's speaking in the royal we, unfairly taking responsibility for the rest of the government's actions, good old Dr. Paul, if the government thinks that they can just go around the world, doing whatever they want to people and dropping bombs in these ways and at no risk to themselves or to the people of this country, then they'd do that at our own peril, as we saw on September 11th.

And it took, you know, even when he nailed Giuliani in the Giuliani moment, it's still never all the way took that it ain't Islam. It's radical politics that motivates these men to want to kill us. And we need to think smart about what makes it worth it or not. And is serving Benjamin Netanyahu really worth it when you're at risk of losing your skyscrapers and at risk of kicking off another era of terror war after the blowback coming? from this one, it's just nuts that we're doing this at our country's expense on behalf of this country that does not deserve our favor whatsoever. So how about that in a form of a question? What do you think, Jeremy? Yeah, I mean, I agree with you for the most part. I mean, on 9-11, I mean, there are people who believe it was like a false flag in the sense that

like there were no hijackers and, you know, I mean, there's some kind of crazy ideas out there. do believe that there was, you know, we were lied to. I don't, by no means believe the full official story. We were certainly lied to about the events of that day. For example, there was foreknowledge and there are issues like that. And certainly, in whatever case, we know that the neo-conservatives in power in Washington certainly used that event as a catalyzing event to push forth their agenda, which, you know, really accords well. I think with what you were saying. And I think that was kind of a gift to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda that the neocons were in power at that moment in time.

Agreed. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, I'm a reverse 9-11 truther. I think that the neocons are secret agents of Al Qaeda all along. How's that for a conspiracy theory? You know, why not? As long as we're making up stuff, that makes more sense, really. Right. But, you know, also you made the point about, you know, it's not about appeasing appeasement. It's about doing what's right and what we should have been doing in the first place. And, you know, the same is true for, you know, I get asked, well, what should Israel do?

You know, well, you're against the genocide. What should they do? This stupid question. As though there was no other choice for Israel but to commit genocide. But, you know, I mean, my response is, well, it should end its systematic violation of Palestinian's human rights. you know, that's not, that's not appeasement. It's just doing what they should be doing and should have been doing in the first place. You know, and that also, you know, there's this, you kind of touched on a point where, you know, it's not, they're not, you know, it's like 9-11. They didn't attack us on 9-11 because they hate our freedoms, you know, and Hamas didn't, you know, you can say what you want about Hamas, but generally speaking, it's not an issue. the root cause of the conflict is not some kind of inherent Palestinian hatred of Jews.

You know, Jews and Arabs got along peacefully as neighbors in Palestine before the Zionist movement. And you had, you know, you can go back in the 1920, 1921, 1999, there were Arab riots and which Jews were murdered. And of course, the Zionists like to point to those. Look, see, the Jews can't live with the Arabs. Arabs hate us, and they try to point to those as though that that proves that the root cause of the conflict is just inherent Arab hatred of Jews. But of course, you can look back at the British commissions of inquiry and into each one of those outbreaks of violence under the mandate period. And it was their conclusion, and they thoroughly backed up their conclusion that there was no inherent anti-Semitism among the Arab inhabitants. of Palestine that what they that the riots were basically an expression of their frustration at number

one they're the promise the British promise to support to in during World War I the British had promised the Arabs support for their independence from Ottoman rule they violate broke that promise to instead support the Zionist project to reconstitute Palestine into a Jewish state so they were frustrated about that and of course they were frustrated about the scientist leadership in their aim implicit at first and later by 1937 explicit their aim of expelling the Arab population to be able to create a demographically Jewish state when Arabs were the majority and owned most of the privately owned land. Jews at the time of the end of the mandate owned less than 7% of the land. Arabs owned more land in every single district in

Palestine and they also remained the majority population. And so the root cause of the conflict is this rejection of Palestinians' right to self-determination. And of course, the hatred and the violence is a consequence of this suppression. You know, you can't keep people suppressed and oppressed and systematically violate their human rights for more than 75 years consistently, perpetually, and not expect there to be blowback. And so, yeah, the right thing to do is to, of course, to implement sensible policies that respect human rights. But, you know, this is something that Israel doesn't want to do. And it's enabled by the U.S. government, which, of course, has its own horrific record of terrible, you know, violations of human rights abroad, certainly. Yeah, well, that's absolutely right.

So there's so many issues to go over here, but let's talk about the big G word here for a second. Now, I'm kind of reluctant to use the term genocide in the very Rome statute, legal definition of the term, because it seems like it's such a narrow definition that then you can apply it to lots of things. But I look at, for example, the war in Yemen, where, hell, they must have known they weren't going to dislodge the Houthis by, I don't know, month three or four. And they weren't really, you know, erasing and replacing the population of Yemen, destroying the nation. But they were deliberately inflicting a famine on them, putting them under total blockade, and then bombing all their crops and bombing their fishing boats, bombing their fishing boats, bombing their, grain silos and bombing their flocks of sheep and everything that they could, bombing all the waterworks and the sewage in order to poison people. Once they get cholera, they bomb the cholera

hospital. That's Saudi and UAE backed by Barack Obama and Donald Trump's United States of America from 2015 through, you know, at the beginning, well, really the first year of Biden to, you know, the war finally really came to an end. It may restart now, but it had come to an end by, you know, early 22 there. But we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people killed, hundreds and hundreds of thousands, mostly deprived to death in this, you know, the world's greatest superpower, deliberately inflicting a famine on these people. And so, I don't know what you call that other than genocide.

then I look at what's happening in Gaza and it's clearly what they call ethnic cleansing which I guess is just a stupid and horrible euphemism for genocide in the first place maybe and they're certainly killing tens of thousands of them they're forced marching them is what they're really doing right they're removing them and I wonder

does that count as genocide really because when you use the G word it sounds like you're using the H word and you know as everyone knows no fair. Not even the Ukrainians can compare their Holodomor to the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide under the Turkish Ottomans. Not even they can compare their genocides to the Holocaust. But if you use the G word at all, it sounds like that's what you're doing and how dare you and that kind of thing. Maybe it even shuts down discussion and makes your side sound unreasonable,

possibly. I don't know. What do you think of all my rambling there, sir? Yeah, well, no, I do see it. There is a distinction in my mind between ethnic cleansing and genocide. And I don't use the word genocide lightly. I've never used it to describe anything in the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict until the recent operation swords of iron that IDF is perpetrating. So in 1948, I've never described what happened as genocide. That was an ethnic cleansing in the sense that while there were massacres and those massacres were used to to terrorize the Palestinian population into flight. There were direct expulsions, you know, fear campaigns. But mainly for the most part there, I mean, it wasn't a systematic attempt to exterminate the Arab population. They just wanted them gone. You know, the Zionist just wanted them gone. And that's what happened, 750,000, which was the majority of the Arab population of Palestine, became refugees.

This is different. What's happening now is different. You have clear, explicit intent to number one, the very first thing that they announced was that they weren't going to allow food, water, fuel, electricity to the population. These are goods necessary for survival. Before 10-7, people need to understand also, you know, the population of Gaza, 70% of the population are refugees from the 1948 ethnic cleansing or their descendants. About half of the population are children, youths, children and adolescents, people who know know nothing but living in this huge concentration camp. And before 10-7, the population was already dependent, you know, living under a 16-year blockade since 2007, where Israel has controlled what goes in and what goes out of the concentration camp. And the situation before 10-7 was that there was a requirement of 500 trucks a day going into Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid just for the Palestinians living there to live at subsistence level. And to block the humanitarian aid, for the first couple weeks, it was a total siege. The U.S. government put a little bit of pressure on Israel to say, hey, come on now.

at least pretend, pretend like, you know, you have some kind of humanitarian, you know, some concept of humanitarianism and let in some trucks into the Rafa crossing Israel acceded to that demand because, of course, you know, it wants to please the U.S. So it continues to receive U.S. support for its ongoing atrocities. And so there was a tiny trickle of aid allowed in, you know, just a cynical, really a cynical policy, a PR stunt, because the trickle of A doesn't even come close to even beginning to meet the increasing needs. What needed to happen was not a decrease

of the amount of supplies that are allowed into Gaza, but of course a major increase. And it went from, you know, and then just in the last, like yesterday or the day before, finally, again, as a result of pressure from the Biden administration, again, really just like a cynical public relations ploy, because it doesn't really do much to meet the demands and the need, but Israel finally opened the Karim Shalom crossing in the north of Gaza to allowing humanitarian aid through there. But you have a situation, first of all, where, again, it's just, it remains just

a trickle of aid, and it's just nowhere near. What needs to happen is there needs to be an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, and you need to have hundreds and hundreds of truckloads going into Gaza on a daily basis, all the crossings need to be open to allow this to happen because reports now, the World Food Program has said that half the population is now starving, you know, severe food insecurity. You have a situation where people don't have potable drinking water and they're drinking whatever water they can find, which of course, you know, is just, there's already disease outbreaks, you know, and more people could die from disease than from the bombings. You have a situation where the IDF in the beginning ordered the entire north half of Gaza.

Everyone living north of the Wadi Gaza, which is this wetlands area that kind of bisects the north and south halves of Gaza. Everyone north of that line must flee south, creating, you know, this huge, disqualance. displacement of the population and of refugees fleeing, refugees again made refugees twice now, fleeing South while Israel continued to bomb the South. You have them fleeing into schools, UN-run schools that are being used as shelters. And then the shelters being bombed. You have Israel systematically targeting civilian infrastructure necessary for their survival. water treatment, you know, facilities, shutting off all electricity, not allowing fuel in for the hospitals to run the generators, to be able to, for the hospitals to remain

operative, systematically targeting the hospitals to shut them down so that they can't provide health care and they can't treat the injured. It's just way beyond ethnic cleansing. And then you have now, since there was a one, one week period where there was a ceasefire in exchange of hostages. Since that ended, Israel has been vowing to do the same thing that it did in the north of Gaza and the south of Gaza. And it's been working toward that goal.

And it's been telling people in the south of Gaza now to flee where are they supposed to go? While it continues moving south and it's just expanding its operations in the south, this is clear, you know, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as any number of acts that are committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national ethnic, ethnical, racial or religious group. That can include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. I think these criteria have clearly been met in the case of what's happening in Gaza.

Yeah, well, listen, man, I'm so sorry we're out of time, but in addition to your great articles at Jeremy R. Hammond.com, I just wanted to point to this thing that we ran as the picture story on anti-war.com yesterday about this 12-year-old girl who lost her entire family and her leg in an airstrike, I think, two weeks ago. and she was recovering in the hospital and the media had come and done a profile of her and she talked about all she wanted was to someday go abroad and get a fake leg so that she can play again well then they killed her because the Israelis attacked the hospital in the nasser hospital in con unis was struck by an Israeli tank shell and killed the 12 year old girl whose leg they had already blown off that's the war that america's backing in gaza right now and you know i don't know man i don't really believe in karma or any kind of spiritual sort of um retribution or anything like that but there is just sort of the basic

reality of what goes around, comes around. And as Ron Paul said, our government is playing with fire that can burn all of us here in this country as it has before again for participating in this. And it's just sickening. Yeah, you know, Scott, on that point, it's in all of our best interests to speak up and stand up and not be afraid of the accusations of anti-Semitism and all these intellectually dishonest and morally cowardly types of arguments that are produced by the other side, you know, we all need to speak up and stand out because it's in our own best interest. Yeah, absolutely right.

All right. Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your great work, and we're going to be in touch here. That's Jeremy R. Hammond.com. There are two books. First is Obstacles apiece, which is the definitive everything you need to know here. but he also has this free e-book, the Israel-Palestine conflict,

a collection of essays that you can get if you sign up over at Jeremy R. Hammond.com, which I haven't looked at, but I've read all the essays before, so I know it's the very best of stuff as you've just been hearing. So thank you so much again for your time, Jeremy.

Really appreciate you, man. Thanks, Scott. Appreciate you too, and an honor to be on a show again. The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM, in LA. APSradio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.