Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/4/24 Dave DeCamp on Gaza, Biden’s Peace Plan and the Likelihood of War in Lebanon

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

Dave Decamp was back on Antiwar Radio to discuss all the news coming out of Gaza. He and Scott review the recent flare-ups in northern and central Gaza, the floundering of Biden’s peace plan, the humanitarian situation and the likelihood of war spreading to Lebanon and Syria. Discussed on the show: “World spending on nukes explodes to more than $90 billion” (Responsible Statecraft) Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen “Bowman crushed by GOP-fueled AIPAC cash” (Responsible Statecraft) “TikTok investor Jeff Yass wants to shape US foreign policy too” (Responsible Statecraft) Eli Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and Investigative-Journalist-at-Large at Responsible Statecraft. Follow him on Twitter @EliClifton. 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, July 4th, 2024, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all, welcome this show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com. and the author of 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's show. And I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 of KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. And happy Independence Day to everybody. Now instead of justifying a war, we're going to oppose one, introducing again, anti-war.com's news editor, news director, newsman, the great Dave DeCamp.

Welcome back to the show. How you doing, ma'am? I'm good, Scott. Thanks for having me. Very happy to have you here and very sad to be talking again with you about the situation in Gaza. It's unbelievable, although predictable, in its own way, too, that this war is still going on in July. After kicking off last October, this tiny little county-sized, very small county-sized strip of land on the eastern Mediterranean shore there, this Indian reservation basically, where the Israelis have been slaughtering these people by the tens of thousands for just months and months on end. So I guess I want to start with what's going on in Rafo, which I gather is still the heart of the current.

battle for, I don't know what, it used to be claimed the policy was to eradicate Hamas. Now I don't know exactly what the battle is to do since the Israeli government has announced that they know that they cannot eradicate Hamas, but now it's to at least fight them. And so if you agree, let's start there or whatever, wherever the worst of the fighting is taking place now. Well, the military has said that they can't eradicate Hamas, but you have Netanyahu's still claiming that that is the goal. In other words, he's just writing himself a blank check to accomplish what his own military says is an impossible task. Exactly. Yeah. And the U.S. is still backing it 100%. So the fighting actually really escalated in the north and kind of central Gaza recently.

Rafa's been cleared out of, you know, about 1.3 million people fled from there and kind of scattered across Gaza. And there's been, actually, the big thing that happened this week was also in the south in Con Unis. Israel ordered another evacuation in that city, which they just recently withdrew from back in April. They pulled out and left the city, you know, completely in ruins. More than 80% of the buildings were completely destroyed. So now it looks like they're going to go back in there. And I mean, it goes to show, you know, they leave this city and declare victory over Hamas. And then they say, oh, well, we got to go back in.

So they ordered this evacuation, which affected about 250,000 Palestinians in communists. And many of them fled there from Rafa after the Rafa invasion. And so you've had these people, you know, I was reading a lot of accounts of Palestinians in Rafa, you know, before Israel started. of the big attack there, saying that they were displaced, you know, five or six times at that point. So if some of them went to Eastern Con Unis and were told to flee again, I mean, it's just really, it's hard to put to imagine what it's like for these people. And Israel continues to bomb what they call, you know, these so-called safe zones. There was one account of a family who left Con Unis in the middle of the night when they got this evacuation order. They went up north to

central Gaza, Dar al-Bala, is the name of the city there. and they were hit with an airstrike, and nine out of 12 of the family members were slaughtered. A lot of them were women and children. And there was more strikes in the El Mawasi camp on the coast, which was where they told the people in Rafah to go. So there's just no safe place for them. And it looks like strikes have kind of escalated more in a neighborhood in Gaza City, in central Gaza, and then now they're picking things up again in Kan Unis. So it's not, you know, you see the death toll that's reported.

by Gaza's health ministry, the daily death tolls around, you know, a few dozen, you see, like in the 20s usually. So it's not as bad as it was, you know, in the early months of this thing, but it's still just relentless. And Israel announced last month that they were going to do these pauses to allow aid deliveries, but that hasn't even blink in the other day said that that has yet to be seen, you know, any sort of drawback from Israel. So, and it's just tough to know what's going to happen next. You have now they're saying that the negotiations are going on again. Israel's looking at this latest response from Hamas. But I just read a report today from Wynet, from the Hebrew language version of Wynet that says Netanyahu and his allies. And,

you know, what they call the far right, Itamar Ben-Gavir, and these really extremist settlers are all working together to really sabotage the chance of a deal. And I think that's obvious to anyone who's been paying attention that that's been what that's what's been happening for these past few months so yeah it's just tough to say what you know their kind of long-term plan is right now when you have them threatening escalation in Lebanon and just it's just a complete mess all right so i want to talk a little bit more about the al-mawesi thing that you touched on for a second there this is the area i remember seeing journalists post pictures and say well look, there's nothing here. This is basically just some sand. And this is where they're telling

everyone who was fleeing Rafa, which had been the safe zone, supposedly, that now this is the safe zone. Flee Rafa and go here. But now you're telling me they're bombing that too. Yeah. I mean, so yeah, it's basically a tent city. And this happened. I was just on vacation for a couple weeks in Australia. Air strikes on tents, Dave. As far as I understand it, this happened last week. It was June 20-something. There was a strike in this camp that killed about 25 people. And then there was reports of more strikes there or kind of in the vicinity of the camp. I'm not sure about the casualties there.

But yeah, they've been, you know, and there's other areas that are supposedly safe zones in central Gaza that they've been bombing as well. Okay, so let's get back to the politics that you're mentioning there about basically the sabotage behind the scenes, no matter what they're telling the international press CNN had a story this morning oh it looks like they're about to make a deal Biden went up there I don't know if anybody really knows what was going on when Biden went up a few weeks ago and said yes this Israeli peace plan when it was apparently nothing of the sort and then hilariously he was still talking about it the debate the other night even though the whole thing was already dead on arrival anyway but Netanyahu is in a coalition with the leaders of these as you said as they say, far right parties, and particularly Ben Gavir and Smotrich, and anytime that Netanyahu

even hints at something reasonable, they balk. And I'm sure he's in on that. That's sort of their game that they play. But even if not, give him the benefit of the doubt, that's part of him being in a coalition with them instead of more moderate forces, is essentially they can bring down his regime at any time if he's willing to compromise on anything so can you tell us a little bit more about who these men are and their parties and how this has worked maybe a few examples of how this is worked over the last few months of the war yes so i mean these guys you know both you mentioned smotech and he's the leader of the religious Zionism party and he is the finance minister but He also has a ministry position in the defense ministry where that basically makes him the de facto

occupation governor of the West Bank. And we had Connor Freeman wrote a story about just the other day, Israel approved like the biggest land grab in the West Bank since 93, since the Oslo Accords. And they're advancing these settlements. And this is the result of having these guys who are settlers themselves who live in the West Bank. And, you know, for years have openly called for the annexation and the, and the, you know, expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank. And they have very influential positions. And so Ben Gavir is the minister of national security. He's the leader of the Jewish power party.

And this isn't some, I mean, this is a really important position because he's in charge of the Israeli prisons of the Israeli police and the border guards. And he just wrote this whole long thing on X the other day about, yes, I've been, you know, cutting off food to the prisoners, basically saying, you know, we have to start killing them, executing them to make room in the prisons. I mean, these are the people in charge of this stuff. And, you know, they want to conquer Gaza. They want settlements in Gaza. Again, they're open about this. They go to these rallies, you know, and they all dance and talk about how they want to take over Gaza. And we've seen, you know, whenever there's any sort of peace deal, they threaten to sink the government. So for a little while, Netanyahu had

Benny Gantz and his coalition as part of the emergency government. this emergency war cabinet that they formed after October 7th. But Gantz recently just left. And Gantz always kind of said, you know, we could bail you out if these guys quit. But Gantz also doesn't seem interested in actually ending this thing. It looks like his whole move, I think, was just political. He thinks if he comes out against Netanyahu and quits, this is what I think. His thinking was, you know, make this big political show of challenging Netanyahu and then quit the government.

And then in the future, that'll give him an edge in the election. elections maybe because right now Netanyahu's not popular, but people still support the war. So right now he's again completely beholden to these guys who can, you know, at any time break the coalition and then, you know, force elections and all the polling shows that Netanyahu wouldn't stand a chance in it if there was an election. So I think as long as this is the arrangement, I don't think there's going to be any sort of ceasefire deal. it's anti-war radio i'm scott horton talking with dave de camp from anti-war dot com so smotrich by the way if people go back just a year or so he was the guy saying hamas is an asset and the Palestinian authority is a liability

they don't want a partner for peace and that was the nettingahu doctrine that was the policy that failed on october the seventh yeah and he Smotrich really spelled it out more than anybody, you know, explicitly said that, you know, they view Hamas as an asset. So I think an important thing, you know, I know you've talked about this a little bit on your show, but so there, you know, you mentioned the Biden thing. Biden came out with this big ceasefire proposal. It's pretty clear what happened, you know, just from reading Israeli media, this is essentially what happened. Biden comes out and they claim this is an Israeli proposal. And it did seem like the Israeli, you know, people involved in

the negotiations might have, you know, given it some sort of approval at some point. And apparently that deal was vague enough that Israel thought they could enter the first phase of it with Hamas because Hamas is big thing is that they want a permanent ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal. And that deal was, you know, first phase, six-week ceasefire, initial hostage and prisoner exchange. And during that time, they'll negotiate the permanent truce. So Israel thought, okay, it's vague enough. we could enter the first phase and then restart everything after that. But Netanyahu came out and rejecting a permanent, you know, constantly saying, you know, basically saying he was against the deal, he was against a permanent ceasefire.

And that led Hamas to asking for stronger guarantees, you know, they wanted in the first phase, you know, the beginning of the withdrawal and the start of the permanent ceasefire. And that's what kind of sabotaged it, was Netanyahu coming out and saying, you know, no permanent ceasefire. And again, this is Israeli media, Israeli sources. The Israeli military is very unhappy about this, apparently. So I think it's clear that this is what's happening. You know, how long can Netanyahu keep doing this and pulling this off? I don't know. I think he's looking forward to November when Trump will probably be elected. And you heard Trump at that debate. What did he say? You know, Biden said, oh, Hamas is the only thing standing in the way of a ceasefire.

Trump said, well, what are you talking about? Israel doesn't want to ceasefire. You know, they want to finish the job. That was funny. And then he said, you're a Palestinian. You love Palestine so much. And then he goes, but they don't like you because you're such a lousy Palestinian or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So I do really think that that's a big part of the calculation here. I mean, but it's tough to know when Netanyahu was thinking because, you know, a few weeks ago he comes out and he puts out this video. It seems like he's intentionally antagonizing the U.S. He says, oh, they're withholding. all this military aid, which doesn't seem to be the case at all. So, you know, is that him playing

off maybe kind of the domestic politics here? Because you have all the Republicans in Congress are trying to, you know, put themselves forward as the very pro-Israel party. 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. Make a deal with Expanddesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you.

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Terms apply. it's anti-war radio kpfk i'm scott horton talking with dave de camp from antiwar dot com news dot antiwar dot com and so um tell me a little bit more about what's going on on the west bank here you mentioned that this is smotritch's deal is to expand the settlements on the west bank where a two-state solution has already been made impossible according to virtually every expert there Yeah, I mean, they, this is kind of, I think Smotrich's revenge for the Palestinian Authority supporting the kind of international legal action against Israel. They, you know, kind of encouraged, or this is what Smotrits says, they encourage the, the ICC to go after Netanyahu. You know, he was withholding the tax revenue. They just handed some, some over to the PA, but this is, uh, seems.

to be the excuse that they're doing for the expansions of settlements and everything. And of course, this is also going on with the backdrop of Gaza. So there's just much more attention on Gaza than the West Bank, even though, you know, over 500 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since October 7th. And that's the settlers taking advantage of the tensions and the attention off of them. So this is just the slow march toward annexation. Well, it has been a slow march, but it's really speeding up. Yeah.

All right. So let's talk about hunger. You know, in Yemen, in that war, after not very long, I don't know when on the timeline, but probably, I guess, within the first year, I started calling it a genocide. just because famine had begun, and it was a deliberate famine. It was inflicted by the United States through a total blockade, air and sea blockade, and then also Saudi, you know, American-abetted Saudi and UAE air campaign against their farms, against their food stores and marketplaces and everything.

And so what do you call it when some nations deliberately inflict a famine? on another nation. Genocide. So, I don't know about all the quibbling over the term. I know most people think it just means a Holocaust, like the absolute worst case scenario. And then, I guess you have to wait until it's over before you can use the G word or something.

And then others will say, oh, no, you don't even have to have one single cold corpse on the ground. It could just be a mass relocation, like what happened at Artsok, Nagorno Karabakh, last year, where at least in the final stage there, no one was killed. They were just forced out. And so, I don't know. I know a lot of people are curious about this, and I am too, not just where you, when or where you use the term or would you, but what really is the reality of famine in the Gaza Strip, which, of course, to whatever degree it is real is being inflicted again by the United States of America this time in alliance with

Israel. Well, it's tough to know, you know, exactly what the situation is on the ground. You know, as far as the numbers, the only thing that has been like kind of officially reported is that a few dozen people, children have starved to death, have died of malnutrition, a few elderly people as well. but I mean you read accounts you know this is you know collective punishment inflicted on the civilian population there's no doubt about that you know you can't argue that that's not what's happening here and that's the fourth Geneva Convention 1949 direct violation and it's a war on children I mean the amount of children that have been killed on the estimate is somewhere around 15,000 and but it could really be much higher there's a thing Kyle Anzloan wrote up recently that 20,000 children

are missing or so. So I think it's fair to call this genocide based on that, based on just, again, the intentional war against civilians and children. And they are intentionally blocking aid. They kind of play this game with the U.S. that, oh, yeah, we're going to let aid in here. And sometimes some trucks come through. But lately, it's been, as far as I understand, it's been a very small amount, basically

since they captured the Rafa border crossing. the UN said that they were that this latest evacuation order has all just completely upended again you know the the age distribution there's a lot of crime now so you read accounts there's a good article from Mondo Weiss about this just an account of a Palestinian man trying to get food for his family you know they can't afford basically the only thing he can afford is canned goods and and this is you know kids eating like this for you know almost nine months now um I think we probably will see a lot more deaths when it comes to malnutrition later this year if this thing doesn't end because even if they're eating food, you know, they're not eating

nutritional stuff and any sort of kid. And that's what the few dozen that have starved to death that we know about at least. They had other, you know, medical conditions and, you know, if they can't, couldn't get proper food and it killed them. So I'm sure we're going to see more of that. It is tough to know the real scale of it. you know, you have people, the fact that you have, you know, you've had an American official, you've had the World Food Program officials, Cindy McCain say that there is famine happening,

I think is enough, you know, should be enough to stop this, but apparently it's not enough for Joe Biden. But yeah, I mean, there's just no question that this is a war, you know, there is this starvation blockade and this is collective punishment of civilians and children. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, you can see, obviously, the institutional. interest that Cindy McCain has as the head of whatever nonprofit she's running there to do that. But it's also good that that's the position she's in. It should mean that

people are willing to listen to her. So I don't know, did Cindy McCain get in trouble for this? Did they call her an anti-Semite over it? Not that I saw, no. You're just going to try to ignore it until she says it again. We'll see. I bet she got some phone calls. Her daughter, she was going off about, you know, she's horrible on this whole thing. It's like, just kind of funny. Is she still on daytime TV? I don't know. I've just seen her on Twitter.

I have no idea what she's up to. Yeah. Would that be interesting if Megan McCain got in the position of defending her mom's point of view on that, right? Someone ought to make some hay out of that. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't just mean like Zionist making her. turn on her mom, which I'm sure they already are trying to do. Yeah, probably. Yeah, she was defending

Israel or something. And I like retweeted her and I said, according to your mom, they're starving the Palestinians to death. So you should maybe talk to her. There you go. When I said someone should, you already did. Yeah. The great Dave to camp, everybody. All right. Can you give us a brief tour around the region here, Dave, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen. In other words, the Iranian back Shiite alliance. Yeah, I mean, Lebanon's the big one right now to watch. Over the past few weeks, few months, there's been all these threats from Israel, basically saying that they're ready to invade.

There's been all these reports saying that they're planning to invade this month in July. But on the other hand, their military is not really ready to open up a new front. And this is something there's this big report in the New York Times about the Israeli generals, the top brass, they all want to ceasefire in Gaza, and part of the reason why is so they can prepare for war in Lebanon. And this is, so I think Lebanon's kind of the big one. And if Netanyahu does decide to go ahead with some sort of incursion or invasion, you know, you have Iran has been basically saying, you know, you don't know what's going to, you know, we could all, you know, the resistance axis, you know, is going to get involved is essentially what Iran is saying. So that

could really explode. And what's really concerning is that there's this guy named Harrison Mann. He was an army major who resigned from the Pentagon's defense intelligence agency over the support, Biden's support for the genocide in Gaza, for the slaughter in Gaza. So he was just in the Pentagon as an intelligence analyst. And he's saying, he thinks that, you know, they might go ahead with it. And it's basically Netanyahu wanting to continue to be a wartime leader. So there's not election, you know, so, you know, he's basically saying he needs that to stay in power. And he's also saying that Hezbollah could hit Israel very hard to the point where it might make the U.S. intervene directly, where he thinks that Biden's not going to be able to sit

out if Israel's really getting hit hard in the north. So that is concerning to see someone who is, again, just in the intelligence saying that. And he said, you know, the least escalatory step that the U.S. could take is hitting Hezbollah supply lines and Iraq and Syria, basically hitting the Shia militias. But, you know, when this thing pops off, you never know what that could turn into. So that's the big thing to keep an eye on. Iraq and Syria, when it comes to like attacks on U.S. troops, that's been pretty calm lately. The militias have been, you know, firing some drones and things toward Israel. I don't think they've really been doing much. But they're threat, you know, they're going to funnel into Lebanon if Israel invades. So if Israel invades, we might see a big

escalation of Israeli strikes in Syria and Iraq as well. And in Yemen, same thing continues. The month of June was actually the most Houthi attacks on commercial shipping of the year. So that hasn't de-escalated at all. The U.S. bombing campaign has been a total failure. So that's still happening. They're kind of more of their own entity, you know, the Houthis, than the militias in Iraq and Syria, which have toned down, you know, because at Iran's behest, basically. But yeah, so that's the situation. Lebanon's the big thing to keep an eye on. Didn't I tell you guys that the Houthis are not Hezbollah? That was how used Hilterman put it in foreign policy back in 2014, 2015, that they're not the sock puppets of Iran the way

Nasrallah and Hezbollah are. And the Ayatollah might ask them nicely, but they don't have to say yes to him. They're Shiites, but they're a different kind of Shiite. And they're just, you know, Hezbollah was almost sort of kind of founded by Iran. You know what I mean? This is just a whole Hispala is Iran's 51st state. The Houthis are not

Ansarala are not. And so the degree of control there is more of bribe than true loyalty to shared agendas, you know? But yeah, anyway, I

if real war breaks out in Lebanon, I see what you mean that the dominoes could fall down real quick. If Hezbollah hits Israel hard enough that Joe Biden calls out the B-52s or starts, you know, really hitting targets in Syria and Iraq as well, that could tip the whole thing into regional war right there. I don't know. The Ayatollah doesn't want to fight. After he dies of old age and we have a new Ayatollah, it'll be a different game. I know this one does not want a war, but it doesn't mean he won't fight. one you know all government's got their red lines as we've seen so yeah it's not uh you know and I think another part of Netanyahu's thinking is that if if there is a big regional war then he can you know kind of do do more of what he wants in Gaza yeah then he can finish the ethnic

cleansing of the West Bank too while America's busy fighting Iran yeah hey why not just build a railroad put some box cars on there and ship am east for the leban's round it's jordan trans jordan that's the real palestine dave don't you know yeah all right i'm sorry we're over time and got to go but thank you so much for your time as always man great to talk to you thanks god thanks for having me know you guys that's the great dave de camp he's our news editor over at antiwar dot com that's news dot antiwar dot com and i'm scott horton i am the editorial director over there And I am here for anti-war radio every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.