Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/28/23 Robert A. Pape on Israel’s Major Strategic Mistake

Episode Date: December 30, 2023

Scott is joined by Robert A. Pape to discuss the dangerously flawed assumptions behind Israel’s strategy in Gaza and with the Palestinians more broadly. Scott and Pape talk about how these same mistakes have been made numerous times in recent decades by the United States and Russia, always with the same bad results. They also touch on the difficulties the Israeli government would encounter if it attempted to take full control of the West Bank. Discussed on the show: “Israel’s Failed Bombing Campaign in Gaza” (Foreign Affairs) “It’s All About Provoking Your Reaction” (Antiwar.com) The Perils of Dominance by Gareth Porter “I didn't suggest we kill Palestinians” (Jerusalem Post) Robert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science and Director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats and the author of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War. Follow him on Twitter @ProfessorPape 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

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All right, you guys, on the line. I've got Professor Robert A. Pate from the University of, see Chicago, and he is the author, of course, of dying to win the strategic logic behind suicide terrorism, as well as cutting the fuse. I forgot the subtitle for that one. It's the follow-up on the same topic. And I'm, I guess we're just reminiscing a little bit. It's sad to say that here we are. It's been, I think, 18 years since we first spoke, and all these issues are still relevant. Welcome back to the show, Robert. How are you, sir? Great, Scott. Thanks for having me on again.

I'm so happy to talk to you again, despite the reason why it'd be really nice if I could find my tab here. But here it is, I knew I had it. Israel's failed bombing campaign in Gaza, collective punishment won't defeat Hamas in foreign affairs. Yes. So here's one thing that I know about you, although I don't know enough about this about you, which is that before you became the world's greatest expert in the motivations of suicide, terrorists, you're the world's foremost expert in military air power and its efficacy. So can you give us like a thumbnail sort of four points of what are the main things that you've

discovered about air power and what it's worth and then start to apply it to this case here for us? That's right. So for really over 30 years, I've been studying air power, not just simply terrorism. And I did this because I was really interested in. and why we lost the Vietnam War. And I went to the library and I wanted to get a book looking at all the air campaigns in the 20th century.

I couldn't find one. All these great histories of individual air campaigns and so forth. So I ended up writing a book called bombing to win, air power and coercion and war. And what I discovered is that there's a core reason why many air campaigns fail. It was a core reason why the air campaign

and North Vietnam failed. And it's because many people, that is civilian leaders, military leaders, think the way to win with air power is to punish civilians. And they think this largely for deductive reasons. They largely just think that, well, if you put morality aside, if we really have an emergency for our country, we should just slam the enemy's civilians. and that will create a shattering of their morale or that will cause them to even rise up against

their governments. And that has been a common strategy and mistake, Scott, going all the way back to World War I. And this has been a lesson, which has really been hard to learn because really wasn't a book that put all this together, looking at all the air campaigns. And then I taught for the U.S. Air Force in the 1990s, where I had for three years the best and the brightest, those who know how to put bombs on targets arguing about every page of this book with me because they really wanted to know, well, wait a minute, maybe we just weren't smart enough about how we were going to coerce these civilians and so forth. Well, it turns out this lesson here is terribly important, and it's not just about history in the past. If you look at Russia's

failed campaign in Ukraine. You'll see they Putin has lurched to civilian bombing as a war-winning strategy, and this has produced counterproductive effects. And if you look at what's happening in Gaza today, Israel has lurched to punishing civilians as a war-winning strategy. And it's been anything but that. And that is, in fact, the lesson that we can see in over 40 strategic bombing campaigns in the 20th century and basically every bombing campaign since, which is that leaders, and I'm sorry to say, publics really think that when there are securities on the line, they can win by punishing the enemy's civilians. And it almost always fails, but it almost always leads to counterproductive effects, makes the enemy stronger, not weaker.

All right. But do you have as a mistaken premise that what Israel's trying to do here is win some sort of counterinsurgency campaign as opposed to simply carpet bombing these people to death and driving them off of their land and into the Sinai Peninsula so they can steal it? And isn't a bombing campaign actually a great way to accomplish that? Well, it would seem, again, on the surface, without knowing a lot about air power history and how publics react under air attack, that in fact, if you take the gloves off and we really decide we're not going to let morality stand in our way, we're just going to punish the enemy civilians that this is going to shatter their morale. And if you look at the campaign that Israel has unleashed against Hamas, you will see. that the campaign here is highly indiscriminate. So, yes, Israeli leaders will say that they are targeting Hamas and they're targeting Hamas fighters or targeting Hamas tunnels and so forth. But if you look at the nature of the campaign itself, the use of the 2,000-pound bombs that are going to have reverberation effects

knocking down whole apartment buildings and so forth, you can see that it's in fact fits right and long. with some of the most indiscriminate bombing campaigns we have seen in history, where it's commonly the case that the attacker is saying they're going after military targets. It might be useful for your audience to know that when we use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, we said that was a military target. So we use that language all the time. Attackers use that language all the time.

But when you just peel down a little bit, you don't have to get even that deep into the history to see that the indiscriminate nature comes right to the floor. And that's really what we're seeing in in Gaza. In fact, when you want to defeat a terrorist group like Hamas, the core issue in counterterrorism or counterinsurgency is to separate the group Hamas from the local population. In fact, Israel's military campaign since October 7 has been fusing the group tighter and tighter into the civilian population in Gaza. And then Israel says, well, then of course, we have to kill civilians to get at Hamas. But the Hamas fighters are not further away from the population. They're more embedded in the population than ever before. And that is, it doesn't matter

if Israel says, well, you've got a population move from northern Gaza to southern Gaza. Well, Hamas fighters just go right with them. And so, and they don't wear uniforms. And so it becomes the case that the safest place to be, if you're a Hamas fighter, is with civilians. And by the way, this is normal in counterinsurgency. There's nothing special about what Hamas is doing. This is the same as the Viet Cong and the Vietnam War. So we can go back in history and study efforts by states to attack terrorist groups, insurgent groups, and what you discover is they often end up in punishing the civilian population because that's basically what they can hit Scott. And they end up doing a very bad job of actually killing the fighters they're going for and end up producing more terrorists than they

kill. All right. Now, but wouldn't you also say that a lot of times terrorism campaigns by the week against the strong backfire and fail and they end up getting smashed. I mean, as Randolph-Borne said, war is the health of the state unless you lose and then you're, what force you do have is crushed. I mean, if they're driven all the way out of Gaza, then maybe the rally around the flag effect has more support for Hamas within the poor now even worse off refugees than before living in the Sinai. What did I just say Gaza? I meant to say driven out of Gaza into the Sinai Peninsula, that, you know, at that point, you know, yes, some periodic victory for you there as the Gaza Strip is turned into beachfront real estate for Israel to recolonize.

So the power of a terrorist group, Scott, is in its political support. Terrorist groups are not like nation states. They don't have an economy. They don't have a technological base. the power of a terrorist group is not in its material power. It's in its political support. And so what terrorist groups often do is a provocation strategy, a bait and bleed strategy to create an overreaction that is attack a democracy to produce an overreaction by the democracy so that the attack by the democracy helps it gain political support.

We saw this with Zarqawi in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, and he in fact wrote a whole letter to Osama bin Laden explaining that he couldn't get many Sunnis to support him. So what he was going to do was deliberately attack Shia civilians so that the Shia government would attack back and kill many Sunnis and helping him to recruit, which is exactly what happened. And Hamas' provocation strategy on October 7 is another example of a bait and bleed. In fact, we have at my center, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. I now have an Arabic language propaganda team. And there are propaganda videos by Hamas on Telegram explaining exactly this goal in their strategy on October 7. They were waiting.

They wanted the lash back because the fact is, this is. is helping Hamas gain support. And what do I mean by gaining support? Number one, before October 7, look at the Abraham Accords. Israel was on the verge of normalizing relations with Egypt, with Saudi Arabia, with the UAE. This would have been to the great detriment of political support for Hamas. Great benefit to Israel's political support. What happened after October 7 and then Israel's invasion of Gaza is that's off the table. The second thing is we now have opinion poll data in the Palestinian among Palestinians. And we can see support for Hamas and Hamas leaders is surging. It's surging in Gaza and also in the West Bank. And in fact, the alternatives to

Hamas say the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, are collapsing to basically the margin of error in the polls. So what we are seeing in the last three months is not Hamas losing power. What we're seeing is Hamas gaining power. And if Israel goes even further and cleanses two million Palestinians out of Gaza, first of all, this would take months and be fiercely resisted here. Right now, 20,000 Palestinians are dead. Think of an ethnic cleansing campaign here that goes on for months. You could have 100,000 Palestinians' debt. This is a major operation that would be really, really punishing beyond this, what's occurred so far.

Which Net Yahoo has said just in recent days, he has said explicitly, this is going to go on for months and months and months. We're not anywhere near done yet. This is a major operation. Your exact words, he said. Yes, and in fact, to put this in historical context, back to the air power context. So right now, the fact is that the Israelis have killed 20,000 Palestinian civilians. That's 1% of the Palestinian population in Gaza. Seventy percent of those are women and children, by the way. That puts it already in the top 25% of all civilian

punishment campaigns in history. If it goes further and it were to ethnically class, Scott, those numbers could easily not just double, but triple quadruple, and you would be possibly the most intense and heaviest civilian punishment campaign short of atomic bombing in history. So this is because, and the reason is this is such a small population of two million in Gaza. So these numbers are just horrendous and horrific here. And what that is going to do is that will cause a nor the amount of international support Israel's lost right now will seem like nothing compared to what Israel would likely face here several months from now after an ethnic cleansing campaign. And you can already see even the state that's supporting Israel the most, the United States, there's a lot of distress in the body politic on this. It's not just limited to progressives.

This is, you know, dividing the American Jewish community. There's a lot of consternation and concern because the moral issues here are right in front of Americans as they go forward. And we're about to get into a political campaign where this will become even more manifest, if you see what I mean. So this whole, this does not bode well for Israel's security, not just in the short term, but in the medium and in the long term. So an ethnic cleansing campaign of the kinds we saw in Bosnia or so forth for Israel to do this, this would just tremendously shift the power even further toward Hamas and then also future terrorist groups like Hamas. well so first of all i got to pet myself on the back for my article that i wrote right after october seventh it was called it's all about provoking your reaction so wise up and i said just what you said that the reason hamas did this was to provoke israel and to doing what they're doing

now although i don't know if they anticipated it was going to be this damn bad but in order to create the counter reactions to that as we've seen all over the region and so you know another thing is like look even if Israel annihilated the people of Palestine in or at least of the Gaza strip in response to what happened on October the 7th and there was no Hamas left to be stronger it still would be forcing every other Muslim power in the region to have to choose sides and right now this is something that somebody smart has got to be studying is the politics of all of the puppet Sunni kings of the region, from Erdogan down to Oman, every one of those emirs and sultans and kings with their solid gold airplanes and their coke and their horrors flying around. Everyone knows

that they're the slaves of the Americans, but the Shiite alliance is outside of American power. We gave them Baghdad, George W. Bush did. Obama made Syria more dependent on them than ever before by backing the al-Qaeda terrorists there 10 years ago. And so now you have the Houthis, of course, also Obama and Trump forced further and further into Iran's arms with their war from 2015 through 22 there. So you have a Shiite alliance in the region that's more powerful than ever

and essentially united. We got strikes against American troops in Syria and Iraq right now by the dozens and scores at least, and including American strikes in retaliation too against Khatib Hezbollah in Iraq and other, they say, Shiite and Iranian-tide groups in Syria, I guess, believably. If I was ISIS, I might sit this one out for a minute, too, while the Americans and the Shiites are fighting, and you got the Houthis firing off rockets.

And anyway, so on one hand, we're risking regional war here. On the other hand, the Sunni kings are risking the Shiites running away with being the only people who give a damn about the Palestinians. And that could be a real problem for them. It doesn't seem like, you know, Saudi, you know, Riyadh and Tehran to unite against us or something like that. But it surely throws the politics of the region into disarray, you know, risking regional war. And then on top of that, further civil war or further reshuffling of all the political alliances in the region over this. The threat of even Kudatazan overthrows.

Who's keeping the King of Jordan in power anyway, Robert? You know? You're putting your fingers on all. a lot of the core issues for the longer term. Before October 7, if you looked at the regional environment for Israel, you could actually paint quite a positive picture for Israel, because it wasn't just the Abraham Accords. You had the Sunni-Shia split, as you're talking about. And basically, you have the beginnings of a possible counterbalancing coalition, including Israel and Arab governments against Iran, which would have been to Israel.

security advantage. Now what's happening is a result of Israel's brutal campaign inside of Gaza that, as you say, looks like could go on for another three, six, nine months here and even become worse, is you're seeing all of that go away. You're seeing, in fact, a counterbalancing against Israel emerging across the region. And this is not to Israel's benefit, not just in terms of like the game of risk or numbers of states, but it's important to remember that there are only 7 million Jews in Israel itself. Israel has 5 million Palestinians. And there's another 2 million who are Arab Israelis that are 80% Palestinian extraction. And then Israel is then surrounded beyond that with another 300 million Muslims, virtually none of whom are Jews

here. That is going from Iran to Iraq to Turkey to Egypt. And so you end up with a situation where a true counterbalancing coalition where Israel unifies all of that against itself. This is not good for Israel's security in the long run. So Israel's position has been publicly that, well, they were attacked, therefore they have the right to defend themselves. But what's happening is Israel is self-encircling itself. And that is going to work to its detriment because it's simply not a powerful enough state to stand up to three, 400 million Muslims and multiple governments unified against it. So this is really the part that's being left out of the conversation is that the security

and strategic issues here are more, are central. It's, it is a humanitarian disaster of the first order to be sure. But in this case, it's a disaster that is working against the security interest of the state perpetrating the disaster. Yeah. Hey, y'all, I got a new coffee sponsor. moon dose artisan coffee at moondose artisan coffee.com when I wake up in the morning I feel like my brain is all dried out

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And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me for free. Just sign up the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org or go to Scotthorton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. Searchlight Pictures presents, The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things,

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Well, as often the case, you know, America and Israeli policy kind of mirrors each other over this last, especially generation, but I'd give you 10 or 20 years before that, too. Now, oh, what was I going to say? It was going to be really smart. I don't remember, but let me go back and ask you this. You mentioned Bosnia there. Is it the case? I have to assume that this is the result of your research. It's the result of mine. Based on Bosnia and Kosovo, especially the Democrats, have told themselves that you can just win with air power at 30,000 feet like they tried to do with their drone wars in Pakistan and in Yemen. And when the actual history of the war in Bosnia is that the Americans gave in on all their demands and sold their most. friends down the river at Dayton in order to end the war. And at Kosovo, they dropped all of the

most objectionable stipulations in the Ramboyer fake peace accord in order to, and essentially gave in to Milosevic after their 72 days of bombing achieved absolutely nothing. But they're liars, these Democrats. So they lie to each other and they lie to us and they lie to everyone and they say, look, Wesley Clark and a few fighter bombers can do the trick. So whatever examples you have from Vietnam, Mr. Pape, you're just, Dr. Pape, you're just not looking at the, at our great examples from the 1990s. We just need to get Bill Clinton back in there, man. He knows what to do. So I call this, I have a name for this, Scott. I call it the smart bomb trap. So when I lecture, someday I'll be, I'll publish this, but I give lectures at the University of Chicago in my classes. And one of them is the smart bomb. trap. And what you see is that it is extremely seductive of precision guided weapons. They give you the allure of omnipotence and power. And we have also sensors. We have a lot of support systems

behind it. And we also, of course, have tremendous PowerPoint presentations that we can give based on this that looks really impressive in the opening days. And by the way, I strongly suspect Putin fell for the smart bomb trap as well when he started the war in Ukraine. So I don't think this is only an American Western phenomenon. But I do think that the seductiveness of precision weapons creates this allure of omnipotence and power. And what it can do is it can seductively create this idea of false optimism and how easy this victory is going to be. And then as you're pointing out, you described 72 days of bombing, we can have other campaigns and describe this as well. What you discover is the weakness, you're in the trap. Now you're trapped. You can't easily

just disengage. So now you're trapped. You're inside. So you're working and you're trying to come up with all these alternative ways, which are often whittling against your interests here that you went to war for in the first place. That's effectively what you were saying, Scott. And That is the real danger of the problem of too much power. You see, we often, as realists say, I am a realist, but I'm a realist who has a healthy humility for having too much power, not just too little. When we have too much power, we can have that air of omnipotence and that hubris to think, oh, it's going to be the cakewalk.

And how often in our lives, Scott, you and I are old enough to go through many of these, where it's been, you know, the Clinton administration with Kosovo or George W. Bush in the opening days of shock and awe, where we're going to have these cakewalks. And then it turns out to be we're really in the quagmire and we're in the mud. Well, Israel is now going through this itself. We've made these mistakes. The difference between us and Israel is we were the world's sole superpower. We were incredibly powerful and still are quite powerful compared to Israel. Israel is very powerful compared to other states in the region one-on-one.

Israel is not so powerful if they're all coalesced against Israel. That's a different story. You see, in 2003, America was so powerful. We could even stand up when Germany and France distanced and didn't want to support our war in Iraq. That was okay. We could do that. It was a mistake what we did, but we could get away with the mistake. Here, Israel is in a much weaker position.

They are not the sole superpower. They are not the United States. And it's very important to see that it's incumbent on them to think smarter, be even more strategic about their security, and not to fall so easily for the smart bomb traps. I mean, Israel can blow up all the tunnels they want. uh in uh in gaza and but notice there's no bodies there we're just watching the videos today on cnn of the big new you know uh tunnel that israel found but there's no bodies there

israel's um mas's power is not in a tunnel hamas's power is people power that's where this comes from um and the bottom line is that israel here is is is likely producing more terrorists than it's killing. And that's really a problem for a country that's based on seven million Jews. It's not just a small territory. This is only, I've been to Israel just recently is December 2019. This is a relatively small population base here. And they are surrounded by potential opponents and enemies. Now those are being unified against Israel. That is something that really is important for us to take seriously. And as Israel's great friend, the United States, this is, Israel is no better friend than the United States. It's important to point this out

because otherwise, this is not, this is enabling Israel to get down a hole, but even the United States is really not going to be able to bail Israel out of. Well, it's certainly beyond us to try to, meaning, you know, regional war against all our former friends and current allies and who knows what over there at the same time. They've all been our friends and allies and enemies at one point or another in the last 75 years, right? But look, what you talk about there, this is Gareth Porter's book about Vietnam is called The Perils of Dominance. That's about how America had way too much power. They knew how weak the Soviet Union and Mao's China were, unlike what they were telling the American people. And so this was an example about how we can do

whatever we want. What's Ho Chi men going to do about it? What's the Viet Cong going to do about it in their sandals and pajamas? And then just completely writing off all of the downsides. Like, say, for example, fighting in a jungle, right? Things like that. As their guys just get chewed up by the tens of thousands and cheat, nothing can lose anyway. It's just sick. And the idea that the American people would have let them go back to these kinds of wars, just one generation. after Vietnam is just still completely mind-blowing led by a bunch of draft Dodgers too

is great and that is true regardless of Dan Rather's phony document that he laundered the story is still completely right about W. Bush dodging the draft who launched us into the war in

Iraq War II and Afghanistan both but I wanted to bring this up because I think this goes possibly to Netanyahu's mindset here because you're talking about you know this well i brought it up the risk of regional realignment here and the danger to israel from that and you got to figure i think this is clear isn't it that i'm not talking about all israelis but the right wing nationalist factions religious and otherwise that control the israeli state they want the west bank that's

judea and samaria and all of jerusalem the undivided capital they don't even really care that much about Gaza. Gaza doesn't have as, I don't know exactly, but not nearly as much of a religious mandate anyway. That's just prime real estate on the beach. That's just nice. If we can kill those people and steal their property, then it's land rustling time. What they really want is to cleanse the West Bank. So the question here is, well, and also what they really want is to be rid of all those Palestinians they kidnapped when they stole the West Bank back in 1967. they don't know what to do with, right? And a friend of mine had sent me this article. It's very important. It's from the Jerusalem Post from 2004. You may already know of this. It's an interview with geographer slash demographer Arnon Sofer. And he worked for Ariel Sharon. And he is credited as being the brainchild of the disengagement strategy. Now, this is two years before the election. of 2006, three years before the coup d'etat that failed, that led to Hamas having total power in the Gaza Strip, such as it is as the strongest gang in the Israeli prison over there.

And what he's saying is, there's just too many damn Palestinians, and they're having too many babies, and no, we're all enemies. This is a Lakud guy talking, essentially aligned with them. And he's saying, yes, we're enemies of the Oslo process. We do not want to give them an independent Palestinian state because that includes treating them as equals and negotiating with them and this kind of thing. We don't want to set that precedent. We just want to have our way with them. But we want rid of them.

And so one of the things that we have to do is separate from them. And he's not saying give up the West Bank, but he's saying give up the Gaza Strip because essentially they just don't want to have to, quote unquote, disengage. They don't want to have to count these people toward the numbers of the population, right? stuck with a three-fifths compromise type problem, which everybody always misquotes that, like they were saying black slaves were three-fiths of a man each. That's not what it was. It was, we're going to count three-fiths of them rather than five out of five of them toward representation in Congress, right? You got all these, you know, this is the problem that Israel

has with the Palestinians. You can disenfranchise a minority, I guess, if you promise them a two-state solution that never comes for 30 years, fine. But when they are, the substantial and outright majority of the country. It becomes completely untenable. And what he says here is, we're going to have to withdraw from Gaza, surround the thing with a fence, and then he says, kill and kill and kill. This will be our policy, what they later called mowing the grass. And this is, again, before Hamas's take over, years before the takeover. This is one year before, this is in fact right after a vote when Netanyahu helped obstruct the disengagement policy before Sharon eventually got his way in 2005. That's the occasion of the interview here.

And this guy's denouncing Netanyahu and the other lacutniks for being ignorant and not understanding how important it is for them to do this. And so that's really what they're up against here is really they're stuck with this population and especially millions, I think he said, it was, is it 5 million live on the West Bank? It's $5 million on three on the West Bank. Three on the West Bank. It's $5 million. And think about the alternatives here as you're laying them out.

So you're pointing out a railroad to the east, right? You build a railroad and a bridge across the Jordan River and you put them all on box cars, right? That's the plan. And many of those $5 million are not going to want to go. And it's important to also note another number. which is fighting age males among those five million are at a minimum 500,000. So we talk about Hamas fighters being 30,000, and some people say, wow, that seems like a big number. But wait a minute, there's a lot more mobilization potential among those five million than Hamas has currently mobilized.

So this is not, Hamas, before October 7th, Hamas was probably plateauing, probably near, a peak and in fact likely going to face a declining future with the Abraham Accords, etc. Now it's the opposite. And you're also quite right to point out, or I think you're hinting at, that if you were to try to ethnically cleanse Gaza very quickly, the Israelis who support that would realize that's only half a loaf. They really want to cleanse the West Bank even more. Might as well go for it now. That's, I think what you're pointing out is that that's probably going to be that you start down this road, in for a dime, you'll be in for a dollar. But this is going to be an enormous escalation here of this.

And that's just the escalation in Gaza and the West Bank now coming into play. And that we were earlier talking about, you know, northern Israel. We were talking about things wider in the region. So what you are describing here is a strategic. disaster of the first order that would be, really, this is part of the concern I have about why I don't think Israel can really pull this off. It's not the moral issues alone. It's the strategic combined with the moral that point out that this is just beyond, I think, what Israel can really, so you may go down this road, but with the,

price that Israel will pay for even trying this, I think that this is just going to be a non-starter. It's going to weaken. People worry, well, could Israel really go out of existence? I mean, in my lifetime, I never thought Israel could ever go out of existence. I just didn't think that was possible. But if we start coming up with these, you know, extreme plans of ethnically cleansing five million Palestinians. I mean, my goodness, that opens up a, that's a game changer of the first order. And I can't say for sure that Israel would, of course, but now we're in that conversation. You see what I mean? We've changed the conversation to a level that is like well beyond anything that, and that's why these plans here, Israel needs to shelve these plans.

And the two-state solution, of course, there are many in Israel that this will not be desired. Netanyahu probably among them. But what really are the realistic possibilities for a viable Israeli state 20, 30 years from now? Yeah. What's the real possibility here? Well, you know what? I mean, to be quite clear about this, there's got to be a dozen or two major statements by major government. officials and former government officials, but very close ones, if you think of Rumsfeld's generals,

kind of a thing with some of these trial balloons, where they are talking about cleansing the Gaza strip. There have not been a bunch of trial balloons that I have seen about taking this all to the West Bank and removing the people of the West Bank, not now. And previously, I have always believed that they would probably have to wait until America gets into a war with China or something like that. And just the whole world is looking east and then quick build a railroad and try to you know, carry out some crazy new force march. But, you know, the Trail of Tears was only 40,000 people. And the NACPA was 750,000. And they were just completely unarmed and helpless. And, I mean, quite frankly, the Palestinians of the West Bank are pretty damn disarmed themselves.

You know, you talk about the 500,000 fighting age males. I don't think they have 500,000 AK-47s or RPGs. Maybe in... No, but they would have, they would have many, many hundreds, if not thousands of suicide bombers. So it is quite true that the idea that you would end up with a true army coming out of the West Bank is a non-starter. But one of the things, what we have seen with really intense occupations over time is not on day one, but six months, nine months later, we start to see the rise of suicide attacks. These are often coming in areas that you wouldn't have thought. So before we invaded Iraq, nobody was predicting. I was the lone predictor that we would end up touching off the largest suicide terrorist campaign in modern times. And it's because

many people said, well, Saddam Hussein had killed all the Islamic fundamentalists and therefore there was no risk of suicide terrorism. Well, a year after we invaded Iraq, there was massive of suicide terrorism. It didn't happen like instantly, but it did the seeds were planted. And it's because that occupation, it seems worse and worse and worse over time. And for folks on the West Bank here, watching what's happening to Gaza, are they really going to count on the benign intentions of the Israelis not to do this to them down the road? So why would they be waiting if you see what I mean? They're not, I'm not telling you they're eager for this to touch off. What I'm telling you is that it's going to start to become hard to prevent preemptive moves on the part of West Bank Palestinians.

And it's not because they are like sure to win. It's because they don't have many other choices and they see what can happen if they don't act. And so anyway, I am quite concerned that that again, as time, goes on this will simply the seeds of greater escalation are already planted and but it's it's it's like a pot boiling you know they talk about the story of the frog in the pot and the frog doesn't realize how this is a boiling pot and uh israel is that frog um and so i think it's just a very very dangerous game for seven million jews to really be taking on this kind of a cold where more and more, and it's millions who are organizing now against them. This is just not a good plan where your solution is you're just going to keep wapping off heads. This is what a lot of powerful states thought in the past, and they ended up self-encircling,

and they couldn't get out of the quagm, the hole they dug themselves. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts and Roberts, Brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted markets. If you've got any savings left at all, you need to protect them. You need to put some at least into precious metals. Well, Roberts and Roberts can set you up with the best deals on silver, gold, platinum, and palladium. And they've been doing this since 1977. Hey, if you just need some sound advice about sound money, they're there for you too. Call Tim Fry and the guys at 800-874-97760.

That's 800-874-9760, or check them out at R-RBI.co. That's R-R-R-B-I.C-O. You'll be glad you did. Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scott Horton's show.substack.com, and if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else, but not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh?

Scott Horton's show.substack.com. Hey, y'all, Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton Show and Libertarian Institute shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's libretasbella.com. You know what? So rewind one step because I was the one going off on the slippery slope argument about cleansing the rest of the West Bank and all that. Go back to the current situation. If they finish cleansing the Gaza Strip and they force all those people into the Sinai Peninsula or they just through fate accompli forced them into Egypt or elsewhere in the world, as they keep saying forcing the rest of the world to absorb them. That was Netanyahu's words two days ago. if they succeed in doing that then they just reduced their apartheid problem at least in the sense of being a bare minority ruling a majority now they've gotten rid of two million of the five million never mind nobody counts the refugees living in Lebanon and in in in Jordan anymore but uh of the you say you got three million Palestinian Muslims and Christians on the West Bank and that includes, I guess, East Jerusalem, and then you have the two million in Gaza.

If they get rid of the two million in Gaza, quite literally kill them and or drive them out, then they can say, yeah, well, whatever, as they say, ask permission later, or apologize, forget asking permission, just apologize later. So, yeah, we shouldn't have done that. But anyway, that was back in 2003. Why you got to bring up old shit? Don't you want to still be friends now and get along further in the future? And now it's not that bad. I'm an apartheid situation because now it's, how many did you say, six or seven million Jewish Israelis ruling a minority of three million occupied Palestinians on the West Bank. And so somehow that makes it not as objectionable than if it's a minority ruling the majority.

Let's just imagine. Let's just take that scenario, Scott, and really develop it. So let's say that two million move out. And let's even. skip over the 100,000 who will be dead in the meantime. So that's already a horrendous, horrendous thing. But now you're outside, what, 20, 30 miles away from the West Bank or from Gaza? And now all of a sudden, how are, how is Israel securing that whole border now? So we don't have the wall anymore. So they're outside of the Gaza wall. So I've been to Gaza, I've been to the Gaza wall. I've been in here. So that wall, it did get penetrated. but that wall is still a wall. Well, that wall took a billion dollars to build and a long time to build.

That wall is not going to be built in a few weeks, a new wall. And it's going to be a lot more difficult to secure that border from those two million. On top of that, Israel complains about all the weapons that somehow gets secreted into Gaza and so forth. There's going to be no stopping the flow of weapons. going into this area here. Oh, in Sinai, because they'll have direct access to the Red Sea, right? You have direct access to the Red Sea. So right now, we have, what, 150,000 rockets here by Hezboa over time.

How many rockets and missiles with a lot more payload is going to be developed in a situation where you've got these two million here? And now all of a sudden Israel is going to be saying, oh, it's not our fault. It's we're going to get Egypt to come and clobber these pales. I don't think this is realistic. In fact, Egypt may end up funding a lot of this, maybe using plausible deniability along the way. But the bottom line is there going to be so much anger at the ethnic cleansing here, it's going to be extremely difficult to stop the massive arming of this new group or cluster enclave.

And it's also going to be hard to stop inroads into Israel. I think the days of Israel having, you know, population, maybe even south of Tel Aviv. I mean, this is really going to create real challenges for Israel's security in this area that are going to make Gaza look like an easy, like the cakewalk, like the easy one, because this is a much more difficult security perimeter to defend. It's got to be, it's the amount of weapons that can go into that enclave are going to be enormously larger. The amount of support here for doing that is going to grow. So I don't see that even if Gaza were emptied of Palestinians, this is reducing the threat to Israeli civilians anytime soon.

all right well listen before i let you go dr peep is there any other you know major important issue here that i'm overlooking um this thing is just so ugly and people are just desperate to figure out a way to end it or the right argument to use to end it the the important point that somehow is the key that we haven't turned here yeah the key reason there seems to be no end is because Israel made a decision to sequence military outcome first, political solution second. By doing that, by pushing off the whole idea of a Palestinian state here, what that has done is left Palestinians with no option but to support Hamas or a Hamas-like entity that is pro-using weapons.

And whether those 2 million Palestinians live in Gaza or outside of Gaza, that's going to be the case. And so that whole idea of what kind of political solution does Israel want? And I would suggest that the idea of cleansing this area and then deciding it's going to be, you know, somehow secure. I think this is missing the reality that what Israel should be doing is now today going back to the two-state solution because otherwise it's setting itself up for an unwinnable future. And that's just the reality of seven million Jews in a tiny country with virtually no international support and losing international support even from the United States. States. Well, as I'm sure you know, Netanyahu has said, he's running again on I'm the only person who can prevent a two-state solution now. And one of his ministers went on the BBC, or it may have been Channel 4, I believe it was the BBC. And they said, well, listen, Joe Biden is saying in the

newspapers that next is a two-state solution finally. And she just scoffed and said, hell, freeze over first. Forget it. It's not going to happen. This is the Netanyahu doctrine. The Palestinians lose. And they're either going to have to die or just get used to being occupied. But nothing better than the status quo from before October the 6th is in the offing for them ever. Not a one-state solution and citizenship and not a two-state solution either. The only thing I would point out is many of your listeners will be like us, old enough to remember the Second Iraq War, when the Bush administration also appeared completely immovable. The second, and then Bush got reelected, and the second Bush administration actually ended up with a reasonable, more reasonable set of policies.

And that was not perfect by any stretch, but it was movement. And so I don't give up on the idea that even the Netanyahu government could move toward a more set of policies that would be more to the benefit of the country. And the reason is just because of what I said, that if this is, it's not just morality that's at issue here. This is truly the future of Israel. And people can say they want a perfect future for Israel where they've cleansed it and so forth. But if that actually ends the state of Israel, well, that's a different story. And so I think that this is really the national conversation that we should be having. And I'm glad we're having it here, Scott, but when I call for at the end of that foreign affairs piece, a national conversation, this is what I, this is the conversation I'm imagining.

And I also think we should be having this with congressional hearings. I don't mean just on podcasts. I think that the national conversation we should be having, and I think that the listeners, what they say, what can I do? What they can do is they can call their representatives and call for congressional hearings. about the genuine alternatives to this really disastrous security policy that has occurred. And having it on Capitol Hill in the U.S. Congress, now we're having a conversation in a place that's really going to matter here. Now, I think podcasts actually do matter, but I think the next step here is a national conversation

that gets beyond the podcast world and that actually gets into the U.S. Congress. And there are, you know, a number of leaders that I have talked to who are interested in such thing. I think if the public showed they were interested in this, this would be quite, this would be pretty important. Our leaders do care about what their constituents think. And so if, in fact, the podcast world can move toward calls for serious hearings where real alternatives are being discussed and the downsides of the current situation are being discussed in the halls of the most important halls we have in America, I think this would really be to America's advantage and also to ultimately Israel's advantage. Mm-hmm. Well, and, you know, I'll just tack this on at the end here because I think it just goes to, I mean, obviously, you're an academic from the University of Chicago, just, you know, as objective as you can be about this stuff, that's the job here. But, you know, if anyone felt like they needed to cover their right flank, how about Ehud Olmert, the previous prime minister, who was Ariel Sharon's protege when Sharon split off and formed Kadima and then, was Sharon's handpicked successor. So this is not a man of the left at all, never labor party guy at all. He's a man of the right, just like Netanyahu. And he has said Netanyahu should resign.

They should cease fire. They should stop this war right now. And he's the same guy who had said previously. Look, these policies are sticking us, or painting us into a corner into this apartheid trap. We should give up, which by the way, he could have done the job while he was prime minister. and didn't, but he's still right when he says, and Ehud Barak had said the same thing, the Labor Party prime minister before him, who after all was defense minister under Netanyahu in a coalition there for a while. They both said, look, the policies here are self-defeating and self-destructive. We've got to give up the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and, okay, the suburbs of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians so that we don't have to keep the Palestinians,

Right? It's not for their own good. It's for our own good that we get rid of these horrible people we hate so much. Netanyahu is determined to keep them all prisoner. And that ultimately will destroy Israel. So if that is a good enough take for Ehud Olmert, then that just means that Bennett and Netanyahu and the other guys to the right of him, they're just nuts. And the Americans who agree with them, they don't know what the hell they're talking about. This is, you couldn't wish. for a worse enemy for the Israeli state than Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet. Look at what they've done. Longest serving prime minister in Israeli history from the clean break all the way through today. There's so much there, Scott. I just want to really, though, emphasize

that one of the biggest advantages we have, that we have not lost. We talk about the parts of democracy we're losing, is our ability to discuss. The podcast world has opened up democracy to many, many, many people. However, we need to still go further because having these conversations morph into the halls of Congress creates a lot of power to that conversation, both domestically in the United States and also internationally. And I really think that this is an issue where Israel has been so critical.

crucial, there's been such a special relationship between the United States and Israel. Whatever you think about it, for the plus of the minds, it's just been the case that this really warrants that level of national conversation. And if it doesn't really, if it doesn't happen, then really what we're doing is we're just going to let things morph and it's just going to evolve on its own. And there's, you know, some possibility it will improve, but there's a lot a risk that things are going to go down an even more negative path. And so I do think that this is what democracy still has the possibility of having some moderate self-correction, some moderate. I don't want to overstate this because obviously there's challenges in our democracy. But at the

same time, this is an issue where I think we really would benefit by having this. And we can let all sides come in. And in fact, having a real discussion, like we just had here, the first discussion I think I've seen about what would be the consequences of ethnically cleansing Gaza. What would that really be? What would they look like? Well, if that was happening on the halls of Congress, this would be a very different set of consequences here, because suddenly now that reality being discussed, I think, would be extremely clarifying as a very different. we go forward. I mean, are, is this really the world that, that we want to embrace here? And that, but I think that this, this is, uh, the way to do this is, as I said, morphing this

from the podcast world to the halls of Congress. All right. Thank you so much, Dr. Robert A. Pape, professor of political science, right? Yes. Professor of political science at the University of Chicago, author of bombing to win, dying to win, cutting the fuse, and this important piece in foreign affairs right now, Israel's failed bombing campaign in Gaza. Collective punishment won't defeat Hamas. Thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Scott. Thank you very much for having. 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.