Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/10/23 Philip Weiss on the American Jews Waking Up to Netanyahu’s Extremism

Episode Date: March 12, 2023

Philip Weiss joins the show to discuss developments concerning the Israeli government’s support among American Jews. They talk about a column written recently by Thomas Friedman, who is essentially a neoconservative who presents himself as a centrist liberal. Friedman urged his fellow American Jews to push back against the direction Netanyahu’s government is taking Israeli society. Scott and Weiss discuss the significance of this development and frame out the broader context of what’s happening.  Discussed on the show: “Netanyahu Is Shattering Israeli Society” (New York Times) “American Jews, You Have to Choose Sides on Israel” (New York Times) Scott’s interview with Jonathan Ofir “A Threshold Crossed” (Human Rights Watch) “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity” (Amnesty International) Philip Weiss is the long-time editor of Mondoweiss.net. Follow him on Twitter @PhilWeiss. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's 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 than 5,500 interviews since 2004. 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's show hey guys on the line i've got phil weiss and he runs manda weiss.net which is just a really great site covering everything israel Palestine including american politics Israeli politics and of course

the occupation and persecution of the poor Palestinians and all of this stuff. And it's just great and you should read it every day. Welcome back to the show. Phil, how you doing? Great. How you doing, Scott? Man, I'm great. And I really appreciate you joining me on the show here. And there's so much doings and crazy things going on in Israel Palestine right now. And there's a lot going on in the world all over the place. It's hard for everybody to keep track. So I'm very happy to have your support here, really, in helping fill us in what the hell is going on. So, I want to start with Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times. Bill Clinton says he's the most important public intellectual in America, which is somehow meaningful.

He wrote this piece, Netanyahu is shattering Israeli society. So first of all, I was wondering, if you could please help us understand for those who don't know, who is Thomas L. Friedman, why does it matter that he has this opinion? I mean, what lens is he looking through? And what's the meaning of this, please, sir? Well, I think Friedman is very important because, of course, he works for the New York Times, and he's a very good writer in a kind of a mass audience tying away, makes things really simple and doesn't make people feel stupid.

And he has supported the neo-conservative right-wing agenda pretty much for the last, you know, 30 years in one form and another with a liberal gloss on it. And he's a leading Zionist. He was for, as he said, Israel had me at hello when he was a boy. And so he has promoted Israel for liberals and conservatives and for the Jewish community in the pages of the New York Times reliably for 30 years, for 40 years. And he has such reputation, I guess, because I think this is right, that he was an actual journalist for a while there.

I've read articles by him, like reporting from Lebanon in 1985 or whatever, something. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he made a name for himself as a while. reporter for the New York Times as a mid-ies correspondent. And I guess to his credit, I haven't read that stuff in a while. But, you know, he was somewhat honest about some of Israel's war crimes at one point, which was refreshing for the New York Times. It's important, I think, the way you say that, you know, he's not just a liberal Zionist, but he really has been kind of a handmaiden for the neocons this whole time where he'll say,

like, oh, those neocons over there? Yeah, those guys are some neocons and stuff. But he's with them 100% of the time. Sort of like Henry Kissinger. Prusually, yeah, as you pointed out in your book, Fool's Ernd, I think, or an earlier book, that this is a guy who when Palestinians were doing terror attacks in Tel Aviv back in 2000, he said that was an American issue and that we had to go smash something in the Arab world. And he supported the Iraq war on that basis. So there you have it.

He took an Israeli cause and said this was an American concern and we should go to war over it in Baghdad. And then I like it too because he will implicate himself and his buddies too because as he told Harretz, I have the block quote in enough already where they're paraphrasing him. So it's like you can tell some of it is direct quotes out of his mouth, but some of it is sort of the way that they phrase it. But it's him saying it's just one simple paraphrasing.

And it's him saying, all the guys who got us into the Iraq war are within nine miles from here right now. I think that was a quote, nine miles. And he's talking about the neocons. Yeah. You know, and he's saying, you know, this group of 25 guys did this. And it's like, yeah. And you put those, if you put those 25 guys on a desert island at the start of this, there would not have been a war. Right.

That's the point. Absolutely true. Yep. And he said, and Tom Friedman said that George W. Bush learned what that, that, what that, why his father was a one-termer was because he challenged Israel over settlements and he wasn't going to make that mistake he had to out Israel the Democratic Party great point yes sir you're asking about what he's doing now though right yeah well look I mean I think that's an important background absolutely so people understand if they don't already understand who this guy is it's

really important when he writes stuff a lot of the times this is the centrist you know center left liberal consensus, what we think about things. The world is flat and all of this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Let's do Iraq. Tom Friedman has decided, and I think for good reason, that right now is a giant crisis for Israel, the future of Israel, and he is going to make this more of a crisis by telling American Jews especially to split over Israel. He finally, is joining my column of Israel critics somewhat. We can get into the differences. But he's saying American Jews, you have been supporting Israel for the last 40 years. Great. That was where your marching orders. Now we're changing them. We want you to start criticizing Israel because

it's about to go down the tubes with this new Netanyahu government. And they are going to alienate the Western world, alienate the United States, unless we get them to stop some of these radical changes they're making. And yeah, thus the headline, Netanyahu is shattering Israeli society, he says. And there's been some astounding headlines about, you know, former Mossad chiefs denouncing Netanyahu special operations officers, I think, saying that they won't serve, they'll go AWOL, and they won't serve a government in its new form. What is happening over there?

Well, I think the military elites, which have always, are very worried by what Netanyahu is doing. You know, Netanyahu is leading the most far-right government ever. And because of his own fears of indict, well, he's been indicted, his fears of going to jail, he is trying to kneecap the independence of the Israeli judiciary. And he's got his fascistic right-wing coalition, a strong majority of 64 votes, who are going to help him do that. And the sort of people who are care about Israeli, quote unquote, democracy and how it looks to the world, say, if you do this, this is going to destroy our standing in the United States, destroy our standing among American Jews, and endanger the future of the Jewish state as a democracy and an outpost of the West in this undemocratic Arab world.

Well, it sounds like part of it has nothing. So that's where Friedman is. And that's where Friedman is. He's saying, don't do this. You're going to undermine the unshakable bond. And this is the goose that laid the golden eggs. Is American support, American Jewish support? How intertwine are the issues of the occupation of the Palestinians and the sort of, well, I don't know how to characterize it.

But the violence going on, the Israeli raids going on and everything in the West Bank right now. Bombing Gaza from time to time is. well um and to the demonstrations yeah and the demonstrations and net yahu's power grab and this and by the way when you use the f word on the show you have to explain what you mean because as you know as everybody knows in american society everyone to the right of bernie sanders is a fascist supposedly but in the real world that word has meaning and i know that you wouldn't use it so unadvisedly but that's how it sounds to people so i'd like to give you an opportunity to explain what you mean about just how right-wing is this coalition behind Netanyahu now, Phil?

Yeah, well, Netanyahu is dependent on a very far right-wing party that has called for deporting Palestinians and Arabs from the West Bank that is called for erasing Palestinian villages. So even people well to the right of me have said this party has fascistic political culture about it's fascistic. And so anyway, Netanyahu depends on this party. And the demonstrations are about the huge demonstrations that are stopping traffic in Tel Aviv and that are often run by these military guys in a very organized fashion are not about

Palestinians. They're about changes to the Israeli kind of constitutional. setup that would sort of destroy the independence of the judiciary and undermine international investment, cause high-tech businesses to leave. They don't care about Palestinian human rights. But inevitably, when you have this type of crisis, it does, Palestine is always involved because this government came in. The fascistic party that I'm talking about, they only became the third largest party out of nowhere because Israelis are terrified of Palestinians and they realize that the occupation is unsustainable, but they want to sustain it. They're subjugating in other people,

giving them no rights. And the Palestinians don't accept that and they resist it. And so the Israelis support harsher and harsher measures against them. So the Palestinian issue is inextricably bound up with this, but the demonstrations in Israel are not about that. Tom Friedman will talk about Palestinians somewhat. But, you know, his article begins with lethal attacks by Palestinian youths against Israelis are coinciding with the expansion of settlers and the torching of Palestinian villages by settlers. And later in the thing, he says, Israel has never experienced a Palestinian intifada, a Jewish settler intifada, and an Israeli citizen. in judicial intifada all at once.

But that's begun to unfold since Netanyahu's far ago. So back to his panic, right? Like, what does he care? His job is spinning for Israel and telling American Jews and everybody else that this is fine. So, but for some reason now he's worried. What is going on that makes a difference

to him, really? He thinks that six months from now, American Jews will look at Israel so much differently, in what way, really? I think that there are profound changes happening. in Israel. So you're looking at Tom Friedman. We've talked about Tom Friedman. We can also look at the J Street letter signed by 92 Democrats saying Biden, stop Israel from doing this. Okay. So 92 Democrats,

mostly liberals, not the squad, but also not right-wing Democrats, are saying, hey, Israel, you are going off the rails. So there is a broad concern among this sort of liberal Zionist component of American establishment. And regarding the settlements specifically? No, it's about quote unquote democracy, but it's also about the settlements. So that these people, this fascistic right-wing party is destroying Palestinian rights, even more, causing violence to happen in the West Bank, causing resistance to happen. You got us, you guys got to stop this so that this gets on the back burner again. We want it back on the back burner. And so we can continue to talk about two states. So there is a genuine radical movement inside Israel that has

of Jewish supremacy that has taken over the government. It's always been a Jewish supremacist government, but this removes the fig leaf. And suddenly you have these people who are openly fascist and openly saying that we need to deport Palestinians in ministerial positions. And it's embarrassing to American Zionists, and it really can hurt the cause. And that's why they're going ape blank. So, yeah, it ultimately comes down to the public relations of if they can keep the occupation and the subjugation of essentially half the population that's under Israeli rule out of the news, then they can keep up the pretension that there's this Jewish democracy there. Yes. But if they have to talk about the Palestinian,

all the time, and they have to admit that it's not really a democracy when half the people have no civil rights whatsoever, no civil liberty protections whatsoever, no representation whatsoever. Right. But that's what I'm thankful for the disruption here, Scott, because you and me, I mean, I hate to use this word with you, but you and me got woke on this issue some time ago. We understood that it's no democracy if Jews have rights and no one else. has rights, okay? We're not like Einstein. This is sort of obvious. So, okay, we were ahead of the curve. We're very independent thinkers. But I think that the danger of this disruption that's happening right now is they're not going to be able to put the fig leaf back on. Now, I'm

optimistic. I am convinced that anyone looking at this situation who has a reasonable and fair sense of how human society should be ordered would be appalled by this quote unquote democracy. I think that more and more people are going to come to our side because of this. Well, yeah, I mean, there's really a question of whether Israel is a Western society at all. I mean, they try to continue with this pretension. Of course, Benjamin Netanyahu speaks really good English, and a lot of the ruling cast are European Jews and that kind of thing. And yet, you know, they're really from Eastern Europe, mostly, and they're not, don't really have a, democratic, you know, legacy, unless you just ignore all the stuff you have to ignore to say that,

yeah, this is really kind of a Western liberal democratic society. Sort of never really has been. We're just talking about whether the veneer is on or off at this point, right? Yeah, it's been a farce on that score. And, you know, you're going a few hundred miles east of Istanbul anyway, okay? Yeah. So you're not in the West. And much of Israeli society, including the political structure and the settlements, too, are from Middle Eastern Jews who came to Israel. And Russians who came to Israel, some Jews, some not Jews. So, you know, it's, and those Middle Eastern Jews are Arab Jews, you know, who are many of them in the government and the settlement. So to talk about it as a Western country, it's not really a Western country. And Palestine is definitely not a Western

country and Palestine is much of what Israel is now. And so I think that, you know, those labels are helpful to Americans who are proclaiming this is the most important relationship we have, but they're BS. Yeah, sorry. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company. Man, this stuff is so good. They get all different flavors. Garlic Habanero, Honey Habanero, Pineapple Habanero, Poblano Halapeno, and the Blood Orange Ghost. They're all so good, I swear. And for a limited time, Tennessee hot sauce company is featuring official Scott Horton hotter than the sun thermonuclear hot sauce.

It's full of Carolina Reapers, Scorpion Peppers, Dr. Pepper, hydrogen isotopes, and all kinds of things that'll burn your tongue clean off. Seriously, it's really good. Get yourself a hot sauce subscription. Spend $40 or more and use promo code Scott to get a free bottle of hotter than the sun hot sauce. That's TN Hot Sauce code. com. Hey, y'all got to check out these awesome busts of our hero, the great Ron Paul.

They're made by the renowned sculptor Rick Casale, the 13 inches tall hand-painted bronze resin based on Casale's brilliant original. You may have seen mine in the background on my bookshelf in some recent interviews. The thing is unbelievable. Check out this incredible piece of art at Rick Casale.com slash Ron Paul, and you'll see what I mean. Use promo code Horton and you'll save 25 bucks. show will get a little kickback too that's rick casali dot com slash ron paul cassali is c-a-s-l-i rick casali dot com slash ron paul and there's free shipping too now so i don't know man i like to do the

analogies because i know they work and i know that as we've talked about for you know more in a decade now since i've known you that i'm i used to be of the understanding that i don't really understand what's going on over there and i don't really want to know because i know everybody's wrong because I don't believe God is anybody's real estate agent and I figured just it's a bunch of cynical you know whatever this and that I put off wanting to try to learn about it I knew that I couldn't understand it without really looking into it and I didn't want to and so I also presume that they wanted you to stay away right yeah exactly and and frankly like I think it's fair for me to presume that that's how most people are about it and so yeah instead what they get especially on

the right all they're going to hear is Ben Shapiro say it would be like if Mexico Mexico was attacking America. What would we do? Not defend ourselves. And my thing is that that's a lie. It's more like if the Apache were, or the Comanche or I don't know if there were any Comanche left. The Cherokee were, you know, firing rockets over the walls of their reservation. They've already been conquered, you know, eons ago and are surrounded by gigantic concrete walls. And, you know, essentially it's like the Attica prison uprising in New York. York is a closer analogy, you know, to a foreign invasion or anything like that. And I also like the one about Mississippi, where first of all, for the sake, for analogy's sake, think of it like the blacks were there first and all along before the whites came, not that the whites had, you know, brought the blacks as slaves, which is, you know, even worse, but same difference. Anyway, for the sake of argument here. Then you have a society where like the whites, rule the south and the blacks are mostly in the north, the Mississippi, or whatever. I'm not exactly

sure, but pretty sure I've seen maps like that. And then, but the whites have all the power and the blacks have none of the power, circa 1940, something, right? And then, so, um, then the thing is, if the whites had said during the civil rights era of the 50s and 60s, when the court decisions are coming down and the activists are demanding an end of segregation, if they had said, listen, we are not going to desegregate and we're not going to give black's equal rights. We're just not going to. But we are going to one day let them have northern Mississippi as a separate independent black state,

and then they'll have full rights then. But then someday never comes, and it's 30 years since Madrid and Oslo, and they were lying. That's what's going on here. Now you understand. That's true. That's true.

And it's so unfair to the Palestinians. It just sucks for them. It's absolutely right. ridiculous, and horrifying what happens, you know? Okay, but Scott, here's what I would challenge you about this, and that is that I know you're a genius politically, okay? But the things you just laid out, they are not rocket science. They are obvious to anybody who looks into this a little bit. And I think that more and more Americans are having that awareness. And crucially, going back to Tom Friedman. Tom Friedman leads, has a very Jewish audience. And Jews, I think, are the most

important American constituency on this. They are the ones who, as the Peace for Peace Now says in the Tom Friedman column and other Jewish leaders say in that column, American Jews are the ones who said, our job is to provide Israel with diplomatic support in the United States. And that the Israel lobby was composed chiefly of American Jews who cared about Israel. And so you have these people, my community, which has taken on this job for the last 50 years willingly and has spent a lot in political donations on this. Well, guess what? Right now, they are re-examining their role.

That is good news. So people who were always sort of somewhat taking this seriously, but then the neocon said, we got this. Okay, yeah, everything's cool. Tom Friedman says everything's cool. It's a democracy. They are getting to hear what you just said about, hey, guess what? This is like Mississippi, but even, you know, a dystopian, you know, they are seeing this. And so I feel like there is going to be in a more, more awakening, more and more Jews understanding, this is apartheid. And guess what? I'm not going to support it. I'm hopeful that way. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, and that's been pretty much your beat this whole time. It's the crack up on the liberal Zionist left in America, especially the Jewish liberal Zionists left. And throw in the squad. Throw in the squad. The squad is not on board on this. And the squad represents the left in America, the progressive left in America. So you have the identity politics left, which is saying, hey, we don't like this thing. We're, we are anti-Zionists. One thing they're good on.

I'm sorry? It's the one thing they're good on, the identity politics left. Okay, but they're anti-Zionists left. I'll take it. And now they have an address in the house. We have an address in the House of Representatives for anti-Zionism. I think that's great. Yeah.

Yeah, you're totally right. And look, this subject came up with your colleague, Jonathan Afir, who I interviewed on the show a couple of weeks ago. And he was talking about the, you know, insane, you know, vision, I guess, the policies, the planned policies of Netanyahu's new cabinet and how bad they are. But people are going to focus on this now. Tom Friedman is saying, look at this. Okay, there's this guy Smotrich, who's their finance minister, who's called for a racing

of Palestinian village, who's coming to Washington. The State Department allowed him to have a visa to come here, even though he's called for ethnic cleansing. And there's going to be demonstrations against him. Maybe they're going to be small. Maybe the squad is going to be out there. Great. Maybe the liberal Zionists will be there.

But at least there'll be people saying, guess what? We don't want ethnic cleansing in our name. We don't want to support it with American dollars. And so that's going to happen on Sunday, Israel Bonds conference in Washington. And so that's another moment of awakening. I guess I believe there's an awakening happen. Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like a difference is really being made there.

um you know people are and you know this is why there's such panic over the boycott divestment sanctions movement which i'm never for sanctions you know boycott and divestment that's all purely voluntary behavior but but uh the point of it is no one believes that the nation state of israel is about to be deprived of capital from you know international finance if they have a project that's not on the table right the question is Why would anybody boycott Israel? It's just a public relations thing. I thought Israel are our friends.

Aren't they just like us and they're our buddies over there and whatever? What's the controversy about anyway that somebody would boycott them? And that's what the panic is, is that it raises the question of what the problem even is. When most Americans, and I guess, you know, probably most people in the world who know anything about what's going on in the world, no. But Americans are just so propagandized about this, they might be surprised to find out. I remember Noam Chomsky's saying that when the first intercourse, Sepada broke out in what, 87? How the American people were like, what the hell is going on here? It was like, again, Israel was being attacked by a foreign invader because as far as the

press had ever told the American people, there are no Palestinians with any reason to be upset that they're being occupied and essentially enslaved and deprived of all their rights in the West Bank and then the Gaza Strip there. That's not a subject to discussion. So it was more like Mars attacks. Like, oh no, our poor Israeli friends are being killed. Scott, aren't you encouraged by how there's greater awareness now than there is in 1987 of the reality? Sure. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It definitely is growing. And again, that's why the panic over the BDS movement, and that's why to support it, at least the B and the D. Absolutely. And yeah, look, this is why, as we talked about a couple years ago, is why Bet Salem and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International all came out and said, all right, that's it. This is a part. I really urge people to read that.

You know, I posted those things on Twitter, and I've had people go, oh, that's crazy. How dare you say that? And it's like, hey, man, you should read this thing. Yeah. You know, it's completely indisputable. Yeah, I don't know what to tell you. It is one state between the river and the sea. That's a fact.

Yeah. And Shomsky says, I don't use the word apartheid. The reason I haven't is it's worse than a South African apartheid. Anyone who goes there says, this is worse, who has some knowledge of what's. South African aparthe. I mean, it's obviously South African apartheid was no picnic, but, you know. Seriously. Yeah, this is gold standard of oppression right there, man. That's the benchmark for, you know, having a racist caste society like this. It's completely crazy. That's right. And so I should just say, you have liberal Zionists now saying, I thought it was anti-Semitic to talk

about Jewish supremacists, guess what? Jewish supremacy has taken over Israeli government and is affecting the American Jewish community too. Liberal Zionist rabbi saying that. God bless her. Yeah. That's just amazing. And you know what it is? Thomas Friedman's probably making it easier for them and vice versa too. Yes. That, yeah, there's a new consensus. This crack up is coming. It's been a long time coming. But it's pretty hard to reconcile. If you have a anything like, I don't know about communist ones and really real leftist ones, but if you have any liberal values, then it's pretty inconsistent that you would support the society. And frankly, the leftists have been better than the liberals this whole time based on whatever principles,

you know, I guess really just equal rights for minorities and that kind of thing. Right. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, there's, there's really any, look, even if you're a rabbi, as you're just saying, like, you could be a rabbi who's been a Zionist your whole life. and still look at this and be like, hey, this isn't right, because it's not right. It's not right. It's not right. And they've gotten away with this progressive except Palestine forever, you know, supporting minority rights in the United States, supporting civil freedoms and, you know, and over there, pure apartheid. So that contradiction is coming to an end. I hope. I hope. Hey, look, this is an important symbol or signal or at least it should,

as I was just babbling and I'm now repeating, it should make it easier for people who before wouldn't say this. This is a little bit of a pressure valve that like, hey, look, Thomas Friedman is saying that this is a real problem. Maybe people who were, you know, I don't know if we're going to go that far. Maybe it's okay for you to talk about this now. That's great.

It's all social psychology anyway, man. I know because I studied it for a couple of months in junior college. it's good it's my speciality it helps i don't know how to use it to manipulate anyone to believe what i want but i do see the way it works on people you know i think you're doing a pretty good job i don't see um listen thank you man you do a great job and and your website is fantastic and uh thank you for it cool okay have a great weekend man you too you guys that's great phil weiss he's at manda weiss dot net and so or a lot of other great writers too. Go check it out.

The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.