Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/6/24 Kyle Anzalone on the Deteriorating Situations in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon

Episode Date: June 8, 2024

Kyle Anzalone was back on Antiwar Radio this week to talk about what Israel is doing in Gaza, the West Bank and on its border with Lebanon. They also discuss Joe Biden’s fake “Israeli” peace plan, the IDF strike on a Gaza school, the disastrous US pier and more. Discussed on the show: “US-Provided Bombs Used in Israeli Strikes on UN School in Central Gaza” (Antiwar.com) “IRGC Vows Revenge for Israel Killing Iranian Military Advisor in Syria” (Antiwar.com) Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman. Follow him on Twitter @KyleAnzalone_ This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: 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

For Pacifica Radio, June the 6th, 2024, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all, welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com. and I'm the author of the book, Enough Already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, more than 6,000 of them now,

going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show and all the other video sites slash Scott Horton Show and all your favorite pod catchers out there. All right, so our guest today is the great Kyle Anselone. He's our news editor at the Institute and opinion editor of anti-war.com. And he's the host of the great podcast, Conflicts of Interest.

Welcome back to the show. Kyle, how you doing? Doing well, Scott. Thanks for having me back on here. Very happy to have you here, although for the unfortunate circumstance of talking about all the bad news, but I guess I'll start with a little bit of the politics of the bad news, which is that Joe Biden came out

with a proposal by him, not just his people or his state department, right, by the White House. for a peace deal in Palestine. So what are the developments there? Yeah. So last Friday, Scott, Joe Biden came out in the afternoon and delivered what was supposed to be a big address. And he presented what he said was an Israeli peace plan that would first establish a sit sweet

ceasefire where hundreds of Palestinians would be released from Israeli jails. And then some of the hostages, I believe the female soldiers and anyone who is in a serious medical condition would be freed during that time. And then they would use that since we sissis up a permanent ceasefire. And again, Biden presented this as Israel's plan. But pretty soon after the speech, it became clear that the Israeli government had not signed onto this proposal. And then Yahoo made that clear over the weekend that Israel had not signed on to this proposal. However, it did almost match a proposal that was put forward by Egypt, which Hamas signed on to, I believe, in March. And so this is something that Hamas has agreed to, but not Israel.

But now, Scott, you had the State Department out there blaming everything on the Palestinian saying, well, if Hamas would accept this, this war would be over tomorrow. And in reality, it's the American allies, the Israelis, that are the ones that are refusing to sign on to this deal. Well, so what is going on there, Kyle? Did the Biden White House just lie that this was an Israeli deal or the Israelis were jerking him around? And so, so, what is going on there? And so. said, yeah, go out there and say that and then they double crossed him? Or what's going on? Well, you know, it's possible that Biden just made it up, claimed it was an Israeli deal, hoping that the Israelis would feel pressured. The other option, of course, is that the Israelis

were yanking the Biden administration around. I think a third potential option, and this is just reading between the lines of things that Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson and John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesperson have said, is that maybe there were members of the Israeli War Cabinet. So I'm thinking of maybe Benny Gans here, who did sign on to this, but the leadership Netanyahu had not. And serious members of the Israeli cabinet had not either. And so it means it's not going anywhere. But they did say that there were portions of the Israeli government that did agree to this proposal. All right. And then so I've been reading more and more about hostages dying. Do you have numbers on that or the body?

being handed over? Israel has reported that they've recovered some of the bodies. I'm not exactly sure what circumstances those bodies were recovered under. There was an estimated, I think, 130 hostages in Gaza still. From my understanding, the number estimated to be alive is between 60 and 70, and that was as of about a month ago before Israel started attacking Rafah. So that number could have declined pretty significantly in recent weeks. Yeah. All right. So talk about the bombing of this school here. It's at the top of the page at anti-war.com.

Right, Scott. So this was an unrest school located in the Central Gaza Strip. And Israel has been increasing its military activity in the central Gaza Strip in recent days. At around the same time, they invaded Rafa that was in the beginning of May. They also invaded areas of northern Gaza and carried out a pretty heavy bombing campaign there and killed a lot. lot of people. And after they pulled out, they then moved back into central Gaza. And so this is a part of the campaign. Israel said they were targeting Hamas targets. They do admit to carrying out this strike, but it seems to be a wholesale slaughter of women and children. At least nine women, 14 children dead, 47 others wounded, 40 people killed. And the Gaza health ministry is reporting that a lot of those who are wounded are likely going to end up dying because they're in serious critical condition. And we know, Scott, that a lot of people in Gaza who have had treatable wounds

have ended up dying just because of a lack of medicine, medical equipment, space in hospitals, functioning hospitals to treat them. There's only one hospital right now open, treating all the people in the Central Gaza Strip. Yeah, and this is something that we talked about before. I wonder if this is still the case. You had explained essentially that they had repurposed the phrase or the term dual use technology from being something that could be used like chlorine for example to clean drinking water or as a chemical weapon right or a heavy magnet that could be used for certain scientific experiments including nuclear ones right something like that instead they said dual use means somebody else could use

So, and then they applied that to antibiotics and applied that to anesthesia, which we're talking about people who are completely maimed here, including men of all ages and women and children as well. So they're saying, if Hamas could use anesthesia, then nobody can have any because it's somehow equivalent to a magnet that could be used for a nuclear weapons program. Right. And this has gone all the way down to essentially bandages, gauze, and even safety scissors. They had a child's medical kit with children's scissors in them. And Israel turned around the entire truck and said, this is now a banned item and forced the whole truck to rego through inspection because it had a pair of children's scissors in them. And I think the situation is now far worse, Scott. It's not necessarily that they have a list of banned items. there's very little medical aid getting in at all. The doctor who saved Tammy Duckworth's life in Iraq was stranded in Gaza. And one of the points that he made was if he left Gaza, there wasn't another team of doctors ready to rotate in.

And what these doctors are doing, Scott, is they're packing their luggage full of protein bars and medical equipment. So they're not bringing in extra clothes, personal items, any kind of comfort items. a lot of the medical equipment that's currently entering, not even equipment, I shouldn't use that word, just any kind of medical aid, you know, bandages, gauze, all this kind of stuff, is only entering with the doctors in their suitcases. And so not having a new team of doctors roll in because the Rafa border crossing is closed means that not only are they losing the medical doctor team that they need to function these hospitals, but also the equipment that the next round of doctors was going to bring in. So this is anti-war radio. And, you know,

we're a bit in the weeds here with Kyle Anzloin talking about Israel's war on Gaza. And one thing, though, that's always been frustrating to me, or certainly, you know, when I was younger, was I would watch the news and they would say, well, Israel's bombing Lebanon today, but they would never say why or who's who or what is really going on. And I imagine for a young person now, you hear well because of October 7th or something. When people talk about the Israelis and the Palestinians, it sounds like the Palestinians are the country next door. Palestine is the country next door to Israel, but it's not. Palestine is the land that Israel's on top of. And what's left is the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But they've been under Israeli occupation and control since 1967. And so that's what we're talking about here. It's not a war between two countries, even a powerful one and a weak one. We're talking about a war between a country and an Indian reservation. where the people that they've conquered have been rounded up, essentially in a large concentration camp. And they're being killed in what is, amounts to a canned hunt where these people are trapped and slaughtered.

And you might have imagined at the beginning when the policy said that all the Palestinians should run south. Everybody go to Rafah. We're going to destroy everything left behind because anybody who's not Hamas, go south and then all that's left will be Hamas and we'll just bomb them you might have imagined I could have seen a scenario it is a relatively small area here and a relatively powerful Israeli army where they could have really moved virtually the entire population south and then set up a big cordon and let people through one at a time to where only Hamas was left there trapped down in Rafa, fighting age males, and everyone else would have been allowed to go back

north of the line somehow, and that they would try to isolate the insurgent fighters that way. But that's not what we've seen here. They're just hurting them around back and forth here and there and bombing their tents, bombing their women and children, bombing their apartment buildings, chasing them to and fro. But nothing like a systematic attempt to, separate separate the innocent civilians from the insurgent fighters, who, after all, are former civilians themselves, the force into circumstances. They're not exactly a standing army. But still, they are fighters. But we don't even see that. Instead, we see essentially what looks like the Israelis having fun, slaughtering people for the entertainment of it, blowing up cars full of civilians blowing up apartment buildings full of civilians to show how tough they are

bulldozing entire cities what's left after they bombed them and it's really incredible it's happening on all of our watch right now in our name with our money at the hands of our government which supplies virtually every bomb

America and the Germans but America is the vast majority of it supplies every bomb all the intelligence So every bit of the war crime that you hear Kyle Anzloon describe here on the show today, this is all the United States government's responsibility, and then to whatever degree you perceive it, your own, to try to stop it. That's where we're at. So, Kyle Anzalone, speaking of the slaughter of the Israelis bombing a United Nations school,

killing scores of civilians. In other words, a Wednesday over there in Palestine. Tell us about the rest of the humanitarian crisis. I know, you know, as we've discussed, they have all these insane restrictions on the aid getting in. But can you tell us what aid is getting in at all and or elaborate, if you could, about the consequences for the civilian population there being essentially completely cut off from any kind of trade or aid from the world at all here. All right. So, Scott, there's a lot there, but I think we should start with Biden's peer, which is now crumbled and sitting in an Israeli port as they're trying to put it back together. This was Biden's real solution for getting aid into Gaza, even though it was only going to get

a token amount of aid in anyways. I think they're hoping for between 90 and 160 truts worth of entering the pier. And apparently that pier was only going to be able to operate in ideal weather with 15 mile per hour winds and three foot high waves, it fell apart. And so that's got a lot of problems. And additionally, Scott, with that, while the Pentagon said there would be no American boots on the ground, we actually now have confirmation from the telegraph that the U.S. went in part a M-LID, which is a mine resistant vehicle with a bunch of electronic equipment and a 30 millimeter chain gun on top of it on the beach in very shallow water. You could see a picture of it in probably two to three foot water.

And this is a weapon designed for war with Russia and they're field testing it in Ukraine. It's designed to shoot down slow, you know, first person drones and things like that. And so they actually brought that to the beach of Gaza and we're field testing it just to show how deep the American coordination here is with the Israeli military. Other places throughout the Gaza Strip, aid isn't entering through Rafa. They say some aid is coming in through the Kareem Shalom border crossing, but aid agencies say it's too irregular and there's not established routes as far as we're going to get this truck to this warehouse and then we're going to cook food or distribute food to people in this region. None of that is set up right now. So they say the aid coming in really isn't helpful at this point in time.

A little bit of aid is trickling in through the north. But humanitarian agencies are saying once again, the people of Gaza are on the brink of famine and areas of northern Gaza are in a full-scale famine. And this means that at least a small number of people are starving to death every day in northern Gaza. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the Institute, and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along.

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slash Horton. Find the link and the QR code in the margin at Scott Horton. that's moondos artisan coffee.com slash horton all right well let's talk about the danger of well first all talk about the present of the strikes back and forth between hesbala and southern Lebanon and the Israelis and then also the potential for that getting much worse there's been threats all along of the border conflict there turning into a real war right and we've had uh jason dids at antiwar com covering for this almost every day, writing up the Israeli airstriets in Lebanon and then

the Hezbollah response in Israel. And again, this has been going on every day. Now, three times now throughout this tip for tad escalation between Israel and Hezbollah, the Western media and Western officials have started to warn that Israel is on the brink of going to war in Lebanon. The first two times, it obviously didn't pan out. This time, the Brits are telling the Lebanese that, hey, Israel is really thinking about invading mid-June.

I'm not sure if this is London trying to work with Tel Aviv to bully Hezbollah to just agree, or if this is an actual warning like, hey, Israel is really about to go to war here, prepare yourselves. And the Qataris are also warning Lebanon as well. So it does seem like this is something that we're potentially going to see in the coming days. The Israeli government is saying that they're ready for war with Hezbollah, but again, they have been saying that for the past eight months. Yeah, I wonder about whether they're really prepared for that.

I mean, we saw what happened in 2006, and it seems like the Lebanese would be much more prepared. That was, you know, 18 years ago, and they've had small strikes here and there, but their weapons stores have been slowly building virtually this whole time. So it seems like it'd be a hell of a fight for an IDF who, can't seem to really accomplish their goals in the Gaza Strip beyond just killing people. Right. And I do think that has to be a part of the discussion here, Scott, is that Hezbollah is capable of doing a lot of damage to Israel and really hurting the Israeli state, probably killing a lot of Israeli civilians. And of course, Israel could absolutely decimate Lebanon.

And so I'm sure there's a lot of understanding here on both sides that this really isn't a war that's going to benefit either of our people at the same time leaders have known this before and we've still ended up in major wars yeah you know i'm thinking about this uh israeli that i was talking to when the war first started last fall uh who was i guess you know kind of a twitter friend and i interviewed him once or twice and he was an Israeli veteran of that war and he talked about how kind of non-committal it was and how he deployed to a room where they sat and what played cards I forgot exactly what he said, but they sat there and did nothing and then went home. And the guys who fought got their asses handed to them and turned around.

The whole thing lasted just a few weeks. There were real concerns that that thing could escalate, but his ball just handled themselves, and that was it. I'm trying to remember now, like, how bad their missile barrage was against northern Israel. I'm sure they had to evacuate the northernmost settlements there. But I've heard rumor that now they're expected to have. missiles with the range that can hit Tel Aviv. So how effective they would be against Israeli missile defense, I guess, would remain to be seen. But the idea, you know, they say they have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of these rockets of different ranges, that if it came to

like a real, you know, everything at stake, total victory or defeat type situation, and they were to unleash all of that, I don't know if anybody could shoot all that down, you know. Absolutely, Scott. And you also had to think of, if not the Syrian government, because Bashar al-Assad isn't particularly strong, but certainly Shia militias in Iraq and Syria and the Houthis in Yemen may contribute to the strides on Israel to help overwhelm the Israeli missile defense system. I do think that if Israel did commit and start a war in Lebanon, it would be very hard for them to turn tail and run when you have real lunatics like Imar Ben-Gabir and Betzel Smoltrich in the Israeli government. Who would, I'm sure, prefer to New Beirut short of leaving Lebanon? Yeah, well, that's true. And that's a major part of the background to this whole story is the lengths that Netanyahu has had to go to build a coalition to stay in power and the cooks that he's aligned himself with. And so, and it also always, we should mention how much this highlights the absolute bifurcation. indifference in American and Israeli national security interests in the Middle East. Our

enemy is al-Qaeda, radical Sunni bin Ladenites what knocked our towers down. And the Israeli's enemies are the Shiites, the Iranians and their friends in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. But I don't care about them at all. They didn't do nothing to me other than defend themselves from Bush and Obama's wars, but otherwise, that's the Israelis problem. And most of the time when we're fighting on Israel's side against their Shiite enemies, we're fighting like in Iraq directly on behalf of Al-Qaeda, flying as their Air Force, just the same as we saw in the war against the Houthis for all those years from the Obama through the Trump years. And so that's something that we should always highlight that the bin Ladenites are still out there and they're still

dangerous and our government is de facto committing treason every time that they choose Israel's interests and fight the Shiites. They are essentially fighting on behalf of the bin Ladenites too. Anyway, I should come up with a question to ask you. Okay, so and yes, speaking of which, so there's a headline on anti-war.com today. IRGC vows revenge for Israeli killing of Iranian military advisor in Syria. So shades of what we just went through with the assassination, uh, of the military officials at the consulate building there, right? Yeah, so that was on April 1st, Scott, that Israel carried out the killing of seven Iranian officials as well as nine Syrian civilians when they blew up the Iranian consulate building

in Damascus with an airstrike. And for about a month after that, Israel really toned down, and I don't think they carried out a single air strike in Syria. But since the start of the invasion of Rafa, Israel has started to again bomb Syria, probably two to three times a week. This seems to be the most significant strike. It was an area north of Aleppo, so pretty deep into Syrian territory. They killed the IRGC commander in the region and Iran is valuing a response. It's going to be interesting to see what happens here, Scott, because for years and years and years, Israel killed a lot of IRC personnel in Syria. I mean, they've been bombing

Syria since 2012 for 12 years now. Israel's been bombing Syria and a lot of the times they're hitting Iranian targets. And Iran really hasn't responded to Israel throughout that time. But after the April 1st bombing, Iran kind of set a new standard, I think, with their massive missile and drone barrage. They fired against Israel that called the U.S., the U.S., the U.K., Jordan, to all have to intervene and help the Israelis down all these missiles. So I'm not sure what Iran is going to do in response, but it does seem like they are prepared to actually issue a response and just not take this one on the chin. Yeah. And all right now to, I'm sorry, zoom back in to Palestine for a moment here from the region. Can you tell us about what's going on on on the West Bank? It's absolutely horrible, Scott. And part of the issue with the war in Gaza dragging on like this is it's really getting all the attention while Israel has slowly continued to expand the settlements and drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank. There's a lot of settler violence going on. A lot of times the Israeli military is standing by watching it happen.

of course that the Palestinians were to take up and try to defend their, you know, homes or something like that, they would then be intervened on and potentially even killed by the Israeli official, so they just have to take the violence from the settlers. This includes burning down homes, olive trees, killing livestock, to outright just driving people out and killing people over 500 dead in the West Bank since October 7th. And we also just had the Israeli flag day that I think is the 5th of June, where the Israelis marched through the Arab sections of the old city of Jerusalem and giant death to Arabs and wave flags. And there you had Heretz reporters attacked by young Israelis before the police intervened after some time. But there are some pretty gruesome images of the Israelis, you know, throwing bottles and rods at Heretz reporters on the street.

All right, you guys, that's Kyle Anselone. He is the news editor at the Institute and Opinion Editor at Anti-War.com and check out his great podcast, Conflicts of Interest, as well. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you, Scott. And with that, that's Anti-War Radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton, and my website is Scott Horton.org, and I'm here every Thursday from 230 to 3 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.

See you next week.