Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/28/24 Ramzy Baroud on Israel’s Plan for the West Bank

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

Scott interviews Ramzy Baroud about what’s happening in the West Bank and Gaza. They start with the West Bank, where Baroud clears up some misconceptions related to the recent Israeli military operation there and the broader Zionist objective to carry out a de facto annexation of the territory. Baroud also explains what’s actually happening on the ground in Gaza. Discussed on the show: “Prolonging the genocide is a smokescreen for Israel’s other war in the West Bank” (Middle East Monitor) Thomas Friedman calls Netanyahu the worst leader in Jewish history Ramzy Baroud is a US-Arab journalist and is the editor-in-chief of the Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of My Father Was A Freedom Fighter: The Untold Story of Gaza and The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story, These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons, and more. His new book is Our Vision For Liberation. Follow Ramzy on Twitter @RamzyBaroud and read his work at RamzyBaroud.net. 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

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 dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show aren't you guys on the line i've got ramsie brood from the palestine chronicle of course and he is the author and editor of a great many books including our vision for liberation and these chains will be broken. The second Palestinian Intifada.

My father was a freedom fighter and many more. We run pretty much everything he writes, I think, at anti-war.com, including this one. Prolonging Genocide is a smokescreen. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Ramsey? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Scott. Yeah, man, very happy to have you here.

So listen, I've vomited blood everywhere this morning when I read Reason magazines take on Israel defending themselves in the West Bank from Iranian armed terrorists? And I thought, I want to hear Ramsey Baroud tell me what's really going on in the West Bank instead. Right. So, you know, those who have been following my articles on anti-war, I've been writing about the West Bank for years, even prior to the October 7 war and everything that else. that happened since then in Gaza. And the main argument that I've been trying to make regarding the West Bank is that Israel has decided to shelf the idea of annexing the West Bank in a kind of a de jory sort of matter as in making that annexation a legal and political decision made from the very top and change that strategy into a de facto annexation. of the West Bank, which entails the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from various parts of the West Bank, particularly in the north, but also in areas south of Hebron, in the South, and in the Jordan Valley region.

And kind of doing it in an incremental sort of way and in the process of doing so, building new settlements, illegal colonies throughout the West Bank, and then kind of have that de facto reality impose itself and with time, a legal annexation as in this is part of Israel and that's that and you Palestinians have to live with it and of course they have friends in Washington and elsewhere but particularly in Washington who will always find a way to you know kind of move on rather quickly and agree that this is the new reality and Palestinians have to contend with that. We also know that during the Trump administration Mike Pompeo and other officials in the U.S. administration, also made it clear that Israel, that the United States recognizes

the illegal per international law, West Bank colonies, to be part of Israel, and they are no longer illegal. The same logic applied to the illegal Israeli occupation of the Syria Golan Heights. So they already have that kind of, you know, political, you know, buffer zone that would allow them to make that annexation a reality. Then October 7 happened, and that kind of messed up the Israeli plans in the West Bank. Forced the Israeli army, most of it to either be fighting in Gaza or in northern Israel against Fizbullah. That opened up some space for, and again, I've been writing about this for such a long time, the armed rebellion in the West Bank, especially in the Northern West Bank.

there have been an increased number of attacks by Palestinian fighters, and the Israeli army has been feeling kind of they are fighting at so many fronts, and they needed to consolidate their gains, and they need to push their agenda in the West Bank. Here is the thing that is different of what is happening right now in the West Bank than what has been going on in the last 10 months, in fact, a few years. I believe that this is not an attack as many analysts. have got it strong targeting Palestinian so-called militants. This is rather a siege on specific regions in the West Bank,

particularly Jinin, Turkarim, some areas in Nablus, other refugee camps, that Israel has always felt needs to be depopulated. Now, they are saying that they are attacking the infrastructure of these Palestinian so-called terrorist groups. There is no such thing as infrastructure for Palestinian terrorist groups. Whether you think that they are terrorists or not terrorists, it doesn't matter, but there is no such thing as infrastructure. These are young people who are operating from ordinary homes and ordinary neighborhoods. They don't have underground bunkers.

They don't have factories. They don't have any sort of anything that could be referred to as infrastructure. What Israel is attacking, they are besieging hospitals, they are destroying clinics. They are basically besieging the main roads leading to all of these towns and refugee camps. They are destroying roads, large streets, imposing Israeli military presence everywhere. And they are going after the electric and water supplies that feeds these refugee camps and these towns with their needed electricity and water use. by doing so, they want to create, make these areas uninhabitable. Thus, kind of recreating the Gaza model in the West Bank.

This is precisely with the idea. There are no Iranian infrastructure in the West Bank, even if we would argue, and it's really useless to even make that argument, that Iran indeed is supplying the West Bank with weapons, right? Which means that Iran would have to find a way to get the weapons to Syria and from Syria to Jordan and from Jordan to the West Bank. Even if we assume that Iran has done so, there is nothing that Israel is doing as of today in the West Bank

that could be of any relevance to that claim. They are basically attacking civilian infrastructure. The foreign minister, Ily Cohen, of Israel today, called on the residence of several Palestinian refugee camps to leave, to leave these areas because they said, He said these are active military operation zones and they need to leave. They want them to leave and never to return. That's the idea.

So they are trying to implement the Gaza Strip model in the West Bank. I think the ethnic cleansing that is already taking place, by the way, the West Bank has been taking place for quite some times now. I think this kind of ethnic cleansing underway is going to start being a kind of internal displacement from the north, let's say, to the center. and so forth, as a test balloon to what would happen if we actually push Palestinians out of the West Bank. And what this test balloon depends on two things. Number one, the Palestinian willingness to follow military orders, but also the international response. If the international response is mute or ineffectual or just, you know,

governments being concerned and, you know, about what's taking place in the West Bank and so forth, then most likely Israel will find a way to push Palestinians out of the West Bank. And I think as I argued in that article that you mentioned in the beginning, this is really ultimately the Israeli strategic plan to the West Bank. Well, it makes sense, too, as you say for the real reason, why they're prolonging the war in the Gaza Strip is just to get away with more on the West Bank. On the other hand, I wonder, why do you think, think they're not just bombing the crap out of Ramallah and Bethlehem and Janine and everywhere

that they want to take in the way that they're doing to the Gaza Strip. I mean, they're killing toddlers in Gaza. It's not like they're Hamas. So why don't they just cry Hamas like an American cop yelling waste band and then just start bombing the crap out of the West Bank? If they can cleanse two million Gazans, they can cleanse three million West Bankians, right? That's a brilliant question, actually, because indeed, there are those in the government, particularly Beasley-Smotech, finance minister, who is effectively the governor of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. As of recently, he has hired a civilian administrator of the West Bank, an Israeli far-right politician who is essentially kind of replacing the Palestinian Authority, even in areas that were. in theory, under the control of the Palestinian Authority. So they are kind of going back to the days, the original days of the Israeli occupation

in the post-1967 war when the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem were declared to be entirely governed by the so-called civilian administration of the Israeli army. So we are back in that area. So if anybody comes to tell you in the future area, A, B, and C, please just chuckle and move on. There is no such thing. The West Bank is officially now under Israeli. military occupation, as if the Oslo Peace Accords never happened and does not exist.

So you have those people in the West Bank, who are making, I mean, rather in the Israeli government, sorry, who are making the argument, let's treat the West Bank as of Gaza. Bingvir and others are preparing for it. Bingvir, the Israeli National Minister of National Security has been arming with thins of thousands of weapons, the already armed Israeli settlers in the West Bank, supposedly to defend themselves. and you would say, but wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense. Why would an already armed constituency of these illegal settlers in the West Bank be armed again? I think there is some fear, and this is really kind of, I'm doing this round about way of answering your question, but I will get to your question a second here.

This is really the real fear that the, of the far right component of the Israeli government and Israeli society, that, the army that is not yet fully under the control of the far right might not want to play along with their plan in the West Bank. Their plan in the West Bank is total annexation, ethnic cleansing of various areas, and turning the whole thing into a military zone in preparation of the whatever final, you know, plan that they have for the West Bank. The military, on the other hand, especially the Sheenbate, the Israeli equivalent of the FBI, has been warning against namely Jewish terror. That's the phrase, that's not my phrase, that's the phrase of the head of the Sheenbate

in Israel that a couple of days ago, he warned against Jewish terror, and that and being verbal was extremely upset by it. So the reason of why they are not yet treating the West Bank, as if it's Gaza, is because the Israeli army feels that we are already. are splintered between various fronts, and we are not able to win a single war in any of these fronts. And you are going to take us to fight in a much larger region. The West Bank is 20 times the size of Gaza, right?

And you have groups all over the West Bank, and we just don't have the manpower. The Israeli army, per the Israeli soldiers admission, they are seeking volunteers on Facebook to fight for them in Gaza. They can't go into an all-out major operation in the West Bank that could last for months, if not more. Well, the far right is saying, listen, this is our perfect opportunity to finish the job in the West Bank. We have been, you know, kind of dilly-dallying for years, and we haven't moved at all in terms of the official annexation of the West Bank. This is our opportunity, and this is, again, that's why this is all a small screen.

Israel knows that there is no territorial gains in Gaza. There is no land to colonize in Gaza. All of this nonsense about Jared Kushner wants to build resorts in Gaza, there is just no space for that. There is no areas. There's no territories. But as long as you keep the war going, Netanyahu saves his right-wing government and the right-wing government. On the other hand, make sure that whatever other plans that have been delayed in the West Bank are being carried out. and actively so.

What does it mean when Ben-Gavir talks about building a Jewish temple on the temple mount of the Alaksa Mosque and all that? Right. So in Israeli politics, you have this character. In fact, I'm writing my next article, which will be sent to anti-war about this character in Israeli politics, which is, you know, what they would call agent provocateur or Asian provocateur. This is the person whose job is, he is not in a position of power. Therefore, he doesn't have political repercussions of what the, of his actions. But he always appeals to the most extreme component of Israeli society.

And as of late, majority of Israeli society has kind of interned into that kind of far right extremism kind of camp. And what they do is they try to push regardless of the consequences, especially when there are no consequences. They would push in every possible direction and they would win love and support of more and more Israelis. So when the time is right, they make their move and they become the next prime minister or the next leader of Israel. I think Etymar being there will become the prime minister of Israel at one point. And this is a position that actually Netanyahu has developed so well. This is a profile, a role that he played so well. He was the Asian provocateur during the times of Izzhak Rabin,

who was the Prime Minister of Israel, signed the Oslo Accords. And that allowed Netanyahu, this kind of the rising star of the Likud Party, to come and present himself as the savior of Israel. He did the kind of provocations and incitement against Rabin until one of Netanyahu's supporters killed Rabin. And he played that role again. So Netanyahu became a prime minister, I believe in 1996 for a short period of time. Then later on he returned when Sharon left Gaza, when he agreed to leave Gaza and dismantled the settlements there and impose a siege in Gaza. Netanyahu stood up to Sharon, and he played.

that same role again. And that brought him back to power. And he lost it in power more than the very founder of Israel, David Bingarion. Now, Binvir is playing that role. So he is pushing every possible direction to make his constituency happy and make it grow in numbers in preparation for his move to become the new leader of Israel. There is absolutely no particular strategic value of building a synagogue over the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem as far as the Israeli occupation is concerned. But this is of immense value to Bing Vier and his constituency, which has been arguing for years that it is time to demolish the Haram Sharif and to kind of rebuild the temple. This has always kind of existed on the margins of Israeli political discourse,

the last few years, it has moved from the margins to the center. So when Bingvier makes a statement of this kind, he finds no repercussions. You know, there was a gentle reprimand by Netanyahu, but aside from that, nothing serious has happened. It means that they are now, you start pushing the language first and after the language, you start taking action. And he has been raiding Al-Aqsa and Haramish-Sharif and the Muslim and Christian sites in Jerusalem for, for, for, months and months now, the number of rates is increasing, the number of Israeli military involvement in these rates have been, have increased, you know, and so this is all kind of part of the build-up towards that ultimate moment. It's not about the religious significance

of that move as much as it is about the kind of the cementing of Israel's colonial plans in East Jerusalem. If you remove the threat, which is the Palestinian, spiritual connections to their holy sites with a Muslim or Christian. In East Jerusalem, you kind of sever the last bond that Palestinians have to the city and then you can comfortably then claim it 100% as your own and try to build, you know, the needed international recognition of that. That's his ultimate plan. That's what he wants to do.

But again, he is suffering no political consequences to the contrary. He is going, he is already appearing in Israel to be. the bold, you know, leader who doesn't worry about balances of power and, you know, trying to appease this party or that. And he is pushing as hard as he can to really cement his position as the new potential leader of Israel. Yeah. And now, so for people who are newer to this topic, it might sound strange that, geez, isn't this just a matter of freedom of religion? Everybody gets to pray wherever they want or this kind of thing.

But that's not what we're talking about at all. We're talking about not a free country at all, but an ethno-religious war of one side conquering the other. And so the point being, as you're saying here, breaking the status quo, it doesn't just mean that, oh, Jews get to go there and pray. It means another brick in the wall, another major move toward eventually blowing up that mosque and building the temple in its place, which is something that was it back in the 1980s, that Shinner, Bet busted a bunch of these cooks who had already planted the explosives and were ready to go to blow up the mosque. And the Israeli FBI, the Shinbet, are the ones who caught them and stopped them from doing it. But then this goes to one more thing here real quick, and you can say whatever you want also. But address this too is that the reaction in Israel against this said, hey, man, we got the Shiites right where we want them,

which means we've suborn and made sock puppets out of all America's Sunni kings in the Gulf Cooperation Council. And you're going to screw that up. And we're much more interested in back in the Sunnis against the Shiites right now than taking on all Muslims. So shut the hell up, Ben Gavir. So I wonder how you think that plays into it, too. Well, not anymore. This last point that you've raised was perfectly really kind of summed up the kind of the political struggle. in Israel regarding the status of Al-Aksa Mosque.

Of course, it's obvious that international law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention, would put certain limitations on the behavior of an occupying power in an occupied land as far as places of worship are concerned. People have the right to practice their religion in peace with no violations to the places of worship or to the people of certain faith and certain sects. This hasn't been the case in Israel at all.

And I know that the Israeli propaganda have been so successful in the U.S. in trying to present kind of an alternative reading to this. But let me just really kind of finish this part of the conversation rather quickly to tell you that as of January of this year, so we are talking about, I believe, three months or so or four months after the the start of the war in Gaza, out of the 1,100 mosques in Gaza, 1,000 were destroyed. So we can, you know, be quite certain that the remaining 200 have already been destroyed. It means that every house of worship, including the three major churches in Gaza, have also been destroyed.

So this is not even, there's no margins of conversation here about, well, you know, the Israelis are doing their best, but what can you do sometimes the militants hide in mosques and they destroyed every house of worship, even those that belong to a very small but historic and rooted Christian community in the Gaza Strip. They are all gone. So, yeah, Israel doesn't have freedom of worship for Palestinians, and it's been doing this in total violation of international law. Al-Axamask is a different story because Al-Axamask is not just a house of worship. It's a representation.

It's a symbolic representation of the political aspiration of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, which is recognized as an occupied city per international law. And so this is the place that keeps bringing a Palestinian together every Friday. Well, every day, five times a day, but particularly every Friday, Palestinians from all over the West Bank used to go there in their tens of thousands. It's a rare moment of Palestinian unity, social, political, and spiritual unity that happens once a week every Friday. The Israelis know that very well, and they want to deny them that platform. And not just that they have linked the very salvation, sadly, of the Jewish people, to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from that area as well. And of course, I mean, you don't have to be, you know, very well-educated in the issue to realize that it can't be that it is an ancient religion that exists to argue that, you know, we can only achieve salvation if we exist in the ruins of another religion.

So this is a total exploitation of the Jewish religion as it has been done by Zionists for such a long time. We Palestinians know very well that, you know, there is a clear separation. between Zionists and Jews and not that Zionists do not represent all Jews. And it's a political movement, by the way, that was created in the late 19th century and exploited the Jewish religion for those purposes. Well, there are Jews that live in Israel right now who are anti-Zionist Jews because they go back to before Zionism and we're perfectly happy to live side by side with Muslims and Christians there and would like to again more.

Of course, of course. And, you know, we have a name for them. We call them Arabs because they were the, you know, we are all Arabs, you know. So we are with our Arab Christians, Arab Jews or Arab Muslims, the establishment of Israel, you know, based on, you know, European migration, kind of mixed these identities in such a way that fooled a lot of people to actually think that Zionism represents all Jews. And it canceled the Arab component of Judaism, by the way. I mean, The majority of Israeli Jews are actually Arabs. They are either the Safaridim or the Mizrakhis or many of them come from Yemen, many of them come from Iraq, from Egypt, from Morocco, North Africa in particular, and so forth. So this is how the process of manipulation have taken place. But what is so worrying, though, is that this kind of crazy kahanist, you know, in reference to the extremist rabbi mayor Kahanah, who was. assassinated in the U.S., you know, who have been kind of pushing for the ethnic cleansing

of the Palestinians and violence against Palestinians. Those kahanists who are recognized, by the way, the khanas movements, is an illegal terrorist movement per the FBI designation, not Ramsey-Berruth's designation. The FBI recognized the kahanas movement as a terrorist organization and is banned in the United States. Well, one of his, of Mayor Kahana's biggest and most influential students is Etemar being there, the current national security minister of Israel. And in fact, the Israeli liberals within the Zionist movements who also equally want to kill Palestinians are referring to the, you know, the kahanas are destroying Israel because they have their own kind of extremist religious agenda that is taking us into the wrong direction. But those kahanas are now, you know, not only in the seat of power, but they have so much power over Netanyahu himself.

Now, Netanyahu from an ideological point of view, he's much, much closer to these guys than anyone else, but also Netanyahu is a politically savvy individual. And he would have wanted to keep the balances between the military and, you know, the various parties and keep his coalition together. But because of the kind of, you know, they are the kingmakers of his government, they basically, ended up redefining his role to become an equally far-right politician. So Netanyahu used to be referred to as a right-wing Israeli prime minister, but really from a practical point of view, he is now a far-right politician, not just also because of the genocide he's carrying out in Gaza, but because of his political discourse is much closer to that of Smotrich and Bingvere

than of anyone else. Yeah, that was one thing I was going to ask you was, how much worse than Netanyahu are these guys and I mean are they kind of running cover for him and now he can be as bad as he wants to be or at least worse or is he really captured by them and Ben Gavir is really the one wagging the dog here yeah yeah this another great question because Netanyahu has been you know I as of late I actually discovered that Netanyahu is being perceived funny enough as an intellectual so he actually has been. books written. And so I've been kind of trying to decipher some of the political language he's using or the language he uses in his books. And it really is as messed up as that of being there. So it's not, you know, this whole idea. And I even see Arab analysts at Al Jazeera and others kind of communicating that point and they are wrong that Netanyahu is, you know, he's a survivor. He just wants to survive. He just doesn't want to go to prison. Everything he's doing is just

doing it in order for him to protect himself from imprisonment. No, no, no, no. This is way beyond prison. This is way because, you know, Eir Lepid, the head of the opposition in Israel, told him, listen, dude, I will give you the political cover you need so that Bing Vier does not topple your government. Shall you go to a ceasefire in Gaza and sign a ceasefire agreement with Hamas in Gaza? I will cover you.

You know, I've got this. He refused repeatedly. LePed made that offer many times. by the way. Why? If this is really about the very survival of Netanyahu, why wouldn't he liberate himself from the confines and limits imposed on him by the extremist? But that's because Netanyahu is an extremist himself. And he knows that his constituency will never forgive him if he departs or he kind of part ways with Bingvir and others. This is his comfort zone and he can only survive within that comfort zone.

Now, maybe Bing Veer would want to do things ahead of the plan. Maybe he is pushing Netanyahu in ways that, like, for example, I think Netanyahu is aware of the fact that the Gaza war cannot be won. The military is telling him this. The top military and political analysts are writing about this. And according to, I think, David Brick, if I remember, you know, the, they called him the angel of death in Israel. He's a very famous political commentator and ex-general.

He said, I spoke with Netanyahu more than once, and he told me that there is no military victory in Gaza. So why do you keep fighting this war? Well, he is fighting this war in Gaza, because he knows that Bingver made it very clear that if you sign a ceasefire agreement, the government is going to collapse. And if the government collapses, it would be very difficult for Netanyahu to create a stable

coalition like the one he has right now. So Netanyahu has his own calculations, but he is definitely in the far-right camp. It's not a pretend. He's not putting on a mask just to survive for his own individual reasons. No, he's actually doing it because he believes. In all of this, the disagreement is, you know, is being we're running. ahead of everybody else. Maybe he needs to slow down a little bit. I have a different

plan in mind. But they are definitely all going in the same direction. Yeah. And look, I don't know if Netanyahu is a religious guy or if he's considered to be one, but he's clearly dedicated to his father's Lakud Doctrine, which is Greater Israel. He's never wavered from that. It's just a question of

timeline, right? Right. Absolutely. And again, his political discourse is indicative of that. Because, you know, it's one thing that what you say in statements on Twitter videos on Facebook and that sort of thing. But it's a whole different thing what you say and you write in your, you know, ideas in Hebrew, in, you know, to your own constituency. So this is not written for you, Scott. It's not written for me or for an American or a European audience.

It's it is the legacy, the intellectual and political discourse legacies created by Netanyahu throughout the years. And he is very much situated with. that kind of prophetic, you know, religious, spiritual agenda about the land of Israel that cannot be divided. The West Bank is not a West Bank. It's Yehuda and Samaria. It's all biblical references, all biblical language. And, you know, another thing that's also interesting, and I do believe I wrote about this

for anti-war as well, when he made that argument a few years ago, when he said, I shall be the first Israeli or Jewishly. He didn't say Israeli leader. He said the first Jewish leader, who takes Israel to survive into its 80th year? There is a curse that many in Israel believes in, that Israel was destined not to live past 80 years. And Netanyahu made that promise publicly. You can Google it where he said that I'm going to be the first leader to take Israel past it.

So there is this obsession with history, this obsession with the past. And by the way, we, or, you know, many American mainstream thinkers, politicians, analysts are feeding into this. I mean, they are really feeding this Israeli propaganda about history and, you know, and the connection between God and his promises and spirituality. And what they are doing to the Palestinians. One of them, for example, is Thomas Friedman when he wrote an article a few months ago when he said, not only is Netanyahu the worst leader in the history of Israel, he is the worst. leader in the history of the Jewish people. Now, I, you know, I would really like to underline that. Thomas Friedman wrote that in the New York Times. Thomas Friedman wrote that. And the thing is

the debate after that was like, wow, Thomas Friedman is really giving it to Netanyahu. Yeah, he's a straight talker, you know, straight talker. But wait a minute, why would you make that reference to the Jewish people? So are you saying, indeed, what Bingver and Smoltswich And Netanyahu are saying that there is a connection between Israel, you know, the supposed connection of history that extends perhaps to 2,000, 3,000 years. And what, Netanya, I mean, aren't you implicating? I see what you're saying. He's smuggling in all these implications and inferences into that condemnation. Yeah, that makes sense.

So you are feeding that. You are all feeding into that as well. Yeah. Hey, you guys, coming up this October 7th through the 11th, join Mikhail. Host of the expat money podcast, the heroic Ron Paul, the great Tom Woods, Doug Casey, Mark Faber, Tom Luongo, myself, and many other great speakers for the online expat money summit, 2024. My presentation will be on the subject of my new book, Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine, which is not quite out yet. And learn how you can reclaim your freedom by moving abroad, legally reduce your tax bill, and protect your. your assets. More than 8,000 people attended last year. And it's free. My guys, Kyle Anzalone and

Dave DeCamp from the Institute and Anti-War.com will be joining a panel discussion as well. Just go to 2024.xpatmoneysummit.com for all the info. That's 2224.xpatmoneysummit.com. Well, I guess it was just a matter of time. I drank so much coffee I turned into some. Hey guys, check out the Scott Horton show special blend at Moondoseartisan coffee.com. It's a blend of organically grown Ethiopian and Sumatra and coffee beans. Two very different coffees combined to create a unique blend. Ethiopia is smooth and medium-bodied, Sumatra, rich, heavy-bodied coffee. And it's got caffeine, lots of it, which is good for if you have to drive drunk or get up in the morning.

Click through from the link in the right-hand margin at Scotthorton.org to save 10% on your order. It's the Scott Horton Show Blend From Moondose Artisan Coffee Hey guys, I had some wasps in my house So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model With the improved salt reservoir and bar safety I don't have a deal with them But the show does earn a kickback

Every time you get a bug of salt Or anything else you buy from Amazon.com By way of the link in the right-hand margin On the front page at scothorton.org So keep that in mind 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. All right. Well, look, so when the war broke out, you said, this is already over, man. You know, the Palestinians are going to win.

They did last time and they're going to again because they can hide in the rubble and hide underground and shoot an RPG at you. And the IDF has already shown that they're not willing to take it that hard in the teeth in order to get the job done. And as we've seen in the Gaza Strip for almost a year now, they're essentially playing whack-a-mole chasing the insurgency around on, I don't know if it's exactly McChrystal's ratio or not, but the insurgent math shows they keep recruiting more fighting age males into the movement to resist them. And they're just chasing them around all over the place. And getting nowhere, you said, you quoted Netanyahu himself, and of course all different military leaders and on the American. side as well, not in the White House, but like at the Pentagon, talking to the papers, saying that they know that they can't win this as a counterinsurgency type operation that they're trying to do here. So, but then my question is, what's it going to look like when they finally wind it

down, do you think? Right. And it is, you know, it is kind of winding down a little bit, not in terms of the number of Palestinians getting killed. I mean, since dawn this morning, 54 Palestinians being killed, just awful images that you can never, ever get used to seeing mutilated children, you know, just dying for no reason whatsoever. But you know what, wait, wait, let me, let me stop you there. That was going to be my next question anyway. Why don't you just go ahead and talk about that for a minute? We'll get back to after in a second.

But as long as you brought that up, because this is all very academic, but no, it's not either. And yet a lot of people, you know, not everybody can just read anti-war.com every day and keep up with all the very worst of it. I can't stand it myself. So can you like give us an update? What are people missing? What are Americans not know about what the people of Gaza are really going through right now, Ramsey? Right. So, you know, the since Israel took over the Philadelphia corridor, which is the region, you know, kind of separating between Gaza and Egypt, and they burned, literally burned down the only crossing that connects Palestinians to any other entity aside from Israel, therefore, you know, kind of locking them all into that space. Since then,

they pushed the Gaza's population of about 2. Well, whoever left, let's say, about 2.2 million people into an area of about 10%. Now, imagine this. The Gaza's trip was already one of the most and some argued the most crowded spot on earth, right? And you have already, and one of the most impoverished. And yet, you push that population to 10% of that existing, of the pre-existing most populated spot on earth. And they have no access to food. And then you decide, well, you know what,

I'm going to declare some safe zones for you to escape to. schools, hospitals, you know, areas in which, you know, the army is going to leave you alone. And then you do so, and then you start bombing them in these areas. They bombed hundreds of schools. They destroyed 36 hospitals in Gaza. Actually, all of Gaza's hospitals, all 36, I apologize, 34 hospitals in Gaza, completely destroyed. So there is no safe zone and there is no food. People are eating grass.

people are drinking polluted water, and now you have the polio pandemic, the poliovirus, is one of the latest diseases that have been added to a whole host of diseases that are killing Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The degree of destruction is beyond anything anyone could possibly imagine. We are talking about entire areas that have been completely different. demolished. Homes, schools, masks, everything, everything. Even the little spaces where kids played football in the sand, you know, football pitches and that sort of thing, everything, you know, has been destroyed in Gaza. And then this leaves Palestinians who are crowded in these tiny little regions to, you know, the sea, to go fishing in the sea. Well, fishermen are also under attack by

Israeli drones and quadcopters, they are killing them as well so that. So basically, Israel not only has canceled any possibility of life in Gaza with the hope of pushing Gaza's out when the time is right. And I think if it were not for Egyptian resistance to the Israeli and American goal at one point, the Gaza would have been completely emptied by its population. So they are now killing them incrementally. They are dying from, and by the way, those who are dying from bombs are now not even the highest number of deaths.

People who are dying from lack of medicine, starvation disease is now higher than the number of people who are actually being killed by Israeli war planes. And so the degree of despair is beyond anything. You know, there's, you know, there's killing, you know, killing people over the course of a death,

or a week, maybe something people can tolerate and then try to rebuild their lives after that. But just the fact that there is no end inside to this death machine, it is something that from a psychological point of view, people are breaking down, breaking down. We are breaking down watching our families break down. Imagine living under these conditions.

And again, American media is not telling us any of this. I mean, you have to watch it on the Al Jazeera, you have to go to anti-war, you have to go to the Palestine Chronicle to see images like that. But this is the everyday reality of Gaza at this point. Yeah, and, you know, looking at anti-war.com every day, you see the obvious pattern of just the liberal war crimes. I mean, when they invoke Dresden and Tokyo as the model, they're admitting right there that they're going back to before the Geneva Conventions were signed,

including by Israel, and that they're bound by that law at all. And they're invoking Dresden and Tokyo and even Nagasaki and Hiroshima as their excuse to do whatever they want. As though they're fighting Imperial Japan or the Third Reich instead of the people locked in the Warsaw Ghetto, which is the much more appropriate comparison there. And then just, you know, even the Wall Street Journal, when the Post of the Times and the journal say, this is like Dresden. Like it took longer. They didn't do it in two nights with just napalm or whatever, but still you have. approximately the same amount of dead and the same amount of destruction on the ground over the course of that was like within the first six months maybe within the first four or five so um and then the thing is on uh what i was saying there about reading anti-war to com every day is you see all these different people bearing witness see i'm writing this book so that's my excuse to not be on twitter and not consume the the visual media of the horror show of god every day but I still am reading about it um and there are all these you know some surgeon

talks about how he's you know got toddlers who were shot twice in the chest twice in the head you know uh obviously very deliberately by Israeli snipers um and then you you know whatever um you know especially the doctors talking about the horror show of trying to treat these people with no medical supplies or equipment or, you know, Kyle Anselaun talks about how I love this one, man, just for the horror, like, irony of the terribleness of it, where they took this term dual use, which meant something that could be used as a weapon, like, say, I don't know, shipping them a bunch of metal pipe for water, but then they could make a rocket out of that or a rocket launcher out of that or something. That would be dual use, right? Or a magnet that could be used for science. but could also be used for enriching uranium, right? So now they say dual use. They use the same term, but they just changed the definition. Now it means somebody else could use it.

So now antibiotics are dual use. Not that antibiotics could ever be used as a weapon, like chlorine could. You could weaponize chlorine even though, come on, they're just treating water with it, like in Iraq War one and a half under Bill Clinton, right, and the sanctions there, the blockade. But here's no, antibiotics. gauze, scissors, you know, rubbing alcohol. These are dual use as though they can be turned into weapons. No, it just means Hamas could use them to treat themselves or each other if they're wounded in battle.

And so screw the civilians if they could get them. The trucks got to turn around. No gauze allowed. No antibiotics allowed. And, I mean, this is some just absolute barbarianism. If it was, if this was not America's side doing it, can you imagine the PR campaign against the Ayatollah or Putin or whoever for doing this kind of thing? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't want to undermine anybody's pain or anybody's struggle in any other part of the world, but we have seen, we have seen wars being launched on premises of, you know, just a small group of people being put. persecuted or whether you know how much of it is true how much of it is propaganda but nothing

compared to what is happening right now 17,000 orphans in Gaza children orphans in Gaza 16,000 plus killed so far just numbers that are like you just need to say the number anybody with a conscience anybody within with you know an a yota of a heart We just look at the numbers and say, okay, there can be no political conversation to be had here. You know, it's not about right to defend yourself by destroying a whole generation. What's right? What are we talking about here? You know, but the media is, I think, even though they are doing everything in their power to hide the facts and the truth,

I just came back from Europe. I was there for two months on a long tour. And wherever you go now in Europe, Palestinian flags are. everywhere, from Rome to Paris to, you know, in the streets, street signs. I mean, people, there is a global consciousness that is being built around Gaza and around Palestine, destroying years and years and years of Zionist propaganda, A-PAC propaganda, that had tried to sway public opinions in their favor for such a long time. All of this is failing in the face of this horrendous genocide against the Palestinians.

Yeah. All right. And then I diverted you from that other, question about what's it going to look like when they finally go back to some form of probably something like the status quo ante right right so so what israel you know they are claiming that they have entered into stage three stage one was the aerial bombardment of of Gaza that lasted for 20 days that before it was joined with stage two which is the invasion of population centers and stage three or just kind of like find these kind of permanent positions in gaza and strike at well, you know, in what they call precision strikes, you know, it's just in and out, in and out.

They've achieved nothing, and not even phase one succeeded in doing anything, let alone speaking about phase three. Today I was watching the latest operation video coming from the Al-Quds Brigades. And what is so different about the operations now, the nature, the tactics of the guerrilla warfare that have been used by the Palestinians have changed. from defensive to offensive because the Israelis basically they have nothing else.

I mean, they can't do anything. You go to Bait Hanun and again and again. You go to Jabalya again and again and again. And you think there are no positions to destroy. The entire place is destroyed. The earth itself is destroyed. The trees are burned. The water resources are destroyed.

There is nothing for you. Keep going back and forth, back and forth. So they are kind of like more or less stationed in these areas that, you know, kind of a military strategy used by Ariel Sharon when he was kind of governing Gaza in the past called the Sharon Fingers, which is kind of creating these kind of five different military zones in Gaza and dividing that tiny little Gaza, dividing into five regions and try to kind of subdue them separately. So Netanyahu thinks he's very clever, so he's recreating that theory of the Sharon fingers in Gaza.

So through the Nitzirim, you know, a region in the central Gaza, you know, some areas in the Philadelphia Corridor in Rafah, some areas in the east and so forth. But what is happening right now, and that's the change in the tactic used by Palestinians, they are actually raiding the Israeli military camps. They are raiding the areas in which the Israeli military is being kind of sheltered. And they are killing a large number of soldiers. Again, the media doesn't say much about this, but, I mean, you see it on video. You see the action happening in front of you. How long can Israel sustain that? They keep playing with numbers, Scott.

They keep saying, you know, a single hospital somewhere in Bersheva or Bera Sabah in South Israel said, we've received 5,000 soldiers just alone, you know, coming, being treated here between medium and critical injuries. And then the Israeli army attacked them for revealing the numbers. They said, oh, well, you know, we kind of checked the numbers again, and it's only 2,000. Then the army itself declares that over 10,000 have been injured. So there's a lot of misinformation. They are playing with numbers to lower the kind of their losses, because their losses are extreme, are beyond extreme. You can't sustain that.

Imagine this. If Sharon could not sustain the occupation of Gaza, when Gazans have. had nothing. They had stones and slingshots and few old pistols they stole from the Israelis or both from the Israeli soldiers. And he could not sustain the occupation of Gaza, and he ended up redeploying his forces in what he called the disengagement plan in 2005. Can you actually control Gaza now when you have these powerful militias that are building their own weapons undergrounds and they are rising in numbers day after day after day. Obviously not. Obviously there is no military solution to Gaza and the military knows it. They are begging Netanyahu,

leave. We can always come back at any moment, but please leave. And Netanyahu doesn't want to because he is not thinking in terms of military strategy, he's thinking of terms of political strategy. And that's going to cost him so much in the future. Yeah. All right, man. Well, I'll let you go. But thank you for coming back on my show. It's so great to talk to you again, Ramsey. Always pleasure. Thank you very much, Scott, and give up the good war. Thank you, man. You too. You guys, that's a great Ramsey, Barute. He's written a bunch of books. Our vision for liberation, engaged Palestinian leaders and intellectual speak out is

his latest. And, of course, his website is palestinechronicle.com. And you can read all of his stuff at anti-war.com as well. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM. in LA. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.