Episode Transcript
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Welcome, folks. This is the 37th episode of Talking Strategy, making history. I'm Dick Flax. My partner in this crime is Diraka Larimer hall. And we very, very privileged this time to have as our guest Phyllis Bennis. Phyllis is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. She's the director of that institute's new internationalism project, which focuses on middle eastern issues, especially palestinian rights and UN issues. She's a fellow at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She is a founder of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which is a 25 year old organization devoted to that cause. She's been on the board of Jewish Voice for Peace and served as its international advisor. She's very well known in anti war and palestinian rights circles and has addressed the General assembly of the United nations. She's been one of, I think, relatively rare people on the left who have worked in United nations spaces for quite a long time and is respected there. She's written or edited eleven books. Most particularly relevant for our discussion is her book in seven editions, I think it is called understanding the palestinian israeli conflict. And she's a really one of the best informed people in the anti war movement on the intricacies of diplomacy and international rights issues. Let's tune in to our conversation with Phyllis Bennis. So we're living in very extraordinary times as well. And I was very glad that you were able to join us because you have a perspective that's not very much available to a lot of people on the left, which is to be someone who's been immersed in diplomacy issues, in international diplomacy, in the United nations, and particularly in the Israel Palestine situation. You've written or edited more than a dozen books. I know that. In fact, why don't you start by telling us you have an important book project that people may know about, but if they don't, they should now be able to know about it.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Well, thanks for that. The book I think you're talking about was one of a series of primers, Middle east primers, that I did with my friends at Interlink Publishing. And the most recent one was the 7th updated edition of the one on Israel Palestine. That's called understanding the palestinian israeli conflict. A primer. And we had addition after addition, adding new faqs to it. It's done in the form of faqs, and finally decided that it was getting a little too unwieldy and not very well organized anymore. So we're doing a whole new edition of it, which hopefully will be out in September or October, and the title will be a little different. It's going to be called understanding Palestine and Israel.
And hopefully it'll be useful for both folks who are not really familiar with the issue at all and some of the folks who have become very immersed, very involved, very connected to the issue in these last nine months or so and are looking for some background and some history. So that's what the role is.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: And what's the quickest way to get it?
[00:04:01] Speaker B: The easiest way will be through Interlink itself. It's interlinkbooks.com dot. People can also use it. One of the great things about Interlink is that they're really committed to getting these books about the Middle east out and available so people can buy bulk copies and sell them either for a discount or sell them at full price and keep the additional money for their own work on campus, return what they don't use. They make it really easy for people to get copies.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: Okay, so we're in the midst of this truly horrible war that everyone with any right mind, and that's not everybody at all, wants to bring to an end. And the United States, by everyone's agreement, and maybe, unless you disagree with this, has theoretically quite a bit of leverage to be brought to bear on that. And we have the strange situation, and this is really what I would hope we to begin commenting on. What's your insight into it? On the one hand, the administration claims to have a ceasefire clan that can lead toward some kind of positive resolution. But all of the behavior seems to be to continue to support Israel's waging of the war. And not only the war, this war on Gaza, but even supporting, or it seems, the widening of the war into, into Lebanon and the West bank actions. All of these things is the US. So is there a contradiction here? How do we understand it?
I reach out to you to try to give some insight into that.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: Well, that's a big question, but I think the clearest way of thinking about it is that in these recent months where we've seen such extraordinary mobilization of people across this country and around the world demanding a ceasefire, one of the things that's happened has been that our understanding of what ceasefire means has expanded. So there's been a really unusual, at least in my experience, level of what we might call message discipline in this movement. Quite rare in spontaneous mobilizations that I've been familiar with for, well, a lot of years, let's just say.
And that is that people have stuck to the demand for ceasefire now. But it means something very different than it did eight, nine months ago, seven months ago. Six months ago, where it was just about, we need to stop the bombing. Right now it means stop the bombing, but it doesn't only mean stop the bombing. When people say ceasefire, it means immediate and permanent, and it means absolute access to all of the level of massive amounts of humanitarian supplies and aid and everything that's so desperately needed inside. And the most important, it means the US has to stop sending weapons that enable the genocide. And so all of that is now tied up with what we think of when we say we want a ceasefire. And that's been hugely important. But as you say, we haven't accomplished that. There has been a broader and wider and deeper level of mobilization around this country on this issue than we have seen in a generation or more, but we haven't won even that basic understanding of a ceasefire. And it goes to the question of the commitment not only of the Biden administration, not only of a majority in Congress, but of Joe Biden, the person who, as we know, had his famous meeting with Golda Meir back in 1974, right after the 1973 war, and she somehow convinced him that Israel was. And several people I've talked to about how Biden sees this have used the same gesture. For those of you who aren't seeing it, I'm holding my hands cupped in front of my face where mayir, Golda Meir told him that Israel is this precious little jewel that must be protected. And that is the definition that Biden has stuck with for more than 50 years. Where the fact that Israel is now, by far, has been for many, many decades, the strongest military in the region, that it has the only nuclear arsenal in the region, that it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world, none of that changes his view of precious little Israel that needs to be protected.
And nothing that Israel does seems to change that understanding. So even when he's clearly hearing the voices of this movement that has sprung up so powerfully, and from what I understand, most importantly, what he's hearing is the voices of those across the country who have been voting uncommitted. Where he's seeing that?
15% in Michigan. I was just in New Mexico, 10% in New Mexico, and they had only worked on that campaign for two weeks.
This is something unprecedented. The number of people who have resigned their positions, both high ranking political appointees and civil servants in all ranges of the government. 500 people in the State Department, 1000 people in USAID signing open letters, people resigning, the White House interns, my personal favorite here. These are the kids who are probably the most ambitious kids in the country. They all want to be president, right? But they are willing to come forward publicly and say, mister president, we are not the leaders of today, but we aspire to lead in the future and we can't lead if you have this policy.
The staff of the Biden Harris campaign committee, 17 of them, wrote an open letter saying, mister president, we can't do our job. We can't get you reelected if you don't change your policy.
And yet from what we can tell right now, Biden stands to become the first us official of any level, let alone president, to risk losing an election because they are too pro Israel. That's never happened before. It's never happened. And this is what we're facing in this moment. So this notion of contradiction between the us words and us actions, that's not new. We've seen that for, you know, generations.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: But what's different here is we're seeing a massive shift in public opinion that has been faster and more powerful than anything like it we've ever seen. You know, I think the work of the palestinian rights movement over the last 20 years or so has accomplished a great deal in changing the public discourse. You know, the fact that massive numbers of people who read the reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch all understand Israel as an apartheid state, that's new. That had never been a normal part of the discourse before. Palestinians, of course, had used that language for decades. South Africans had used that language for decades. And a few of us in the United States recognized that was the right language. But it was never the commonly understood language that you could use that and assume that people understood what you were talking about. Now, it took 20 years to normalize that language. It took like 20 days to normalize the language of genocide to describe what Israel is doing and has been doing in Gaza for nine months.
[00:12:19] Speaker A: Well, it's been helped. That word has been helped very much by the words of people like Netanyahu and people in his cabinet. I mean, they've made and the entire conduct of this war, not only the.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: Conduct, but the fact that they are willing. What makes a genocide? Unlike a lot of international law, the genocide convention is pretty straightforward and pretty easy to understand. You need to not only do these terrible things, you need to make clear that you're doing it for a specific intention of wiping out part of or all of a group. And the Israelis make that easy. They say what they're doing. They say, these are animals. We're going to treat them as animals.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: And as Aria and I are pointed out, you know, the use of famine as a weapon is genocidal and intended to be. And many reports we've been having of, you know, ordinary people in Israel, and we might get to this point why this is feeling, yeah, they have no compassion for the Palestinians and do, you know, somehow believe that their very well being depends on, if possible, eliminating or greatly reducing those people.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: I want to add a couple of other things about the politics of this internally here, though. Netanyahu really insulted Biden directly in response to this, putting forward this ceasefire plan. So it's not just that it's unpopular to continue to support the war. He is wrecking his own presentation. I would say, as the president, the president of the United States needs to get his will achieved if he's going to be taken as a credible figure. And I don't just mean in terms of getting votes, but internationally as well. So that leads me to ask whether there's another possibility here, what your understanding of it, that under the radar, as often has been the case in the past, there's something else happening which might end, in fact, the achievement of the kind of ceasefire thing that, that Biden is proposing. Do you think there's anything like that.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Happening, as far as we know? No. I mean, that's what's happening here.
There are talks underway sporadically, mostly in Qatar, sometimes in Cairo, but there's no motion. This wasn't hard to figure out. Biden decided to go forward and say this was the israeli position.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: And so everybody should embrace it because it's what Israel wants. The problem was the prime minister of Israel had no intention of letting him say that and get away with it. In fact, it is what a number of israeli leaders had called for, and it certainly is close to what the families of the hostages are calling for. But it is not what Bibi Netanyahu wants, because Bibi Netanyahu's personal get out of jail free card, if you will, is rooted in permanent war. He has no interest in ending this war. He has an interest in figuring out how to deal with the fact that the most credible moral voice in his country are the families of these hostages. And they're saying, sign this ceasefire and he's saying no. So he has to figure out how to maneuver through that. But his definition is clearly not including what's going to be necessary to abide by what Biden had said. The problem is, Biden later admitted that this was not the Israelis initiative, although they had agreed with most of it. It was actually rooted in the palestinian initiative from Hamas that had come out a month earlier and said, but it's almost what Hamas wanted, as if it was just a couple of little pinpoints of difference. The big difference was whether this would actually lead to an end to the war or not. What it calls for now is first release the hostages, and then Israel will go back to war, and it will not be in violation of this agreement if they signed onto it in this form. So not surprisingly, Hamas is saying, we can't sign on to that. We're not going to do this again. We did that in November, and look what's happened since November. How many more tens of thousands of people have been killed.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: So one other piece to this is that Netanyahu is supposed to come before our congress, amazingly enough. And I have to tell you that I'm a dangerous person to pay attention to because I have rose colored glasses that I can't removed from my eyes. So I'm kind of imagining as possibility that he'll come to Congress and say, yes, we have this initiative that we hope we'll bring. I don't believe that's the case. What I find unbelievable is that Schumer has agreed to have him come. I can't imagine with what hope they have of that. Do you have any knowledge or perception?
[00:17:50] Speaker B: I mean, on the one hand, I don't think it's any surprise at all. Chuck Schumer has been one of the main supporters of Israel for decades. So the fact that he would do anything possible to make Israel look good, it's, you know, it's what he does. This isn't anything unusual. I think there is a possibility that there was a belief that if enough of Israel's friends called for support for a ceasefire and then as an inducement to Israel offered this invitation, that maybe they would take it as an inducement. Why they would think that, I don't know. They've dealt with Netanyahu much closer in than I have. I've gone head to head with him twice in press conferences in Madrid in 1991 when he was the spokesman for the israeli delegation. But I haven't ever dealt with him in a closed room diplomatic setting, for sure. But I've seen what he does. Look what he did when he came in 2015. He came for the specific reason of undermining the president of the United States. The president wanted to get Congress to embrace the Iran nuclear deal.
Netanyahu was having none of it. And when the Republicans invited him to come, he not only came and insulted Biden with such sorry, insulted Obama with such extraordinary levels of racism that of the 60 members who skipped the speech in 2015, almost all of them were from the Black caucus, most of whom had never been critical of Israel for anything. But they were responding not to the question of Palestine, but to the question of racism.
And that's why they didn't show up. That's why they skipped the speech. What he did when he got inside that room was act as if it was his house, as if he was in the Knesset. He pointed to his guests in the balcony as if he was delivering a State of the Union address. It was an astonishing, horrifying thing to see. And yet here we are, almost 20 years later. No. How many? My math isn't very good. You didn't teach math, luckily, so I don't have to blame you for it. From 2015 until now, it's like almost ten years. Almost ten years later, he's coming again to undermine the president, undermine even the president's rhetoric, because the president's rhetoric has reflected a change coming out of this movement, calling for a ceasefire, but not doing the one thing he has to do to make it happen, which is stop sending the weapons.
Until he does that, there's no reason in the world why Netanyahu or anybody else in Israel should care what Biden says. They only have to look at what he does.
What he says really doesn't matter. When he said on the day that the seven humanitarian workers from world central kitchen were killed, not coincidentally, only one of them being palestinian, all the rest were from white colonial countries, we might say the US, Australia, Canada, etcetera. But it was a tragedy. It was a horrifying event. And his answer was, my heart is breaking.
And 6 hours later, he signed off on another batch of weapons to Israel. So really, mister president, who cares whether your heart is breaking or not? If your broken heart doesn't lead you to change your policy, we don't care.
[00:21:25] Speaker A: Do you want to jump in, Diraca?
[00:21:27] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:21:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:28] Speaker C: Because that's an interesting, like, nexus of things there, because it seems like a very democratic thing. Unfortunately, it's my party, but we love to do this. The Democratic Party. Yes, yes. We have this habit, our leaders especially, of, like, paying the political price for a thing and not even doing that thing. So here was Biden just barely making a tiny little sound of like, hey, maybe at some point Israel might cross a line and we're going to stop just giving them a bunch of weapons and just saying that had the Republicans going crazy on us and using it as political fodder. And then Netanyahu gets on tv and is like, how dare the president of the United States even think about not giving us everything we want? And it's like, but you didn't even withhold any of the arms and you paid all of that political price or you had to deal with the consequences. So why not just actually do it? And that's the baffling thing through this whole sort of dance with the ceasefire proposal also of like, okay, you're going to pretend that it came from Israel so that you can stand up and make it sound like you're leaning on Hamas to agree to their own proposal. Sort of, right. Everything that you just outlined, all of this song and dance, but then at the end of the day, like, you let him come and address Congress and you know, that the Democrats had signed off on it all, is just seems like a lot of self inflicted wounds for no progress. But the question that I have about all of that, right, is that, oh.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: Great, okay, yeah, yeah.
[00:23:17] Speaker C: Is why is when I talk to folks in Israel, one of the things that they often say is that even a tougher line from an american president, that Netanyahu would simply, he's sort of like Trump in that he'll just turn that into a strength. Like, yeah, they're not going to tell us, the Americans are going to tell us what to do to protect ourselves. And that, like, if an american president sounded like we would like them to sound on this, it would just sort of cut off any chance of having an influence over Israel and so forth. So they don't want Biden to go too hard. Does any of that make any sense to you as an analyst of what's happening there?
[00:24:04] Speaker B: Well, what makes sense is the contradiction that we spoke about earlier between the words and the actions. The words, you're right, don't matter the words. If you look at the words that Trump said when he went to Israel in 2018 and took all the positions of the most extremist wings of the israeli right wing, starting with moving the embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing the annexation of the Golan Heights, saying that the future annexation of the whole West bank would be fine, that the settlements are somehow legal, and the position of Biden, who was then a candidate, was, this is outrageous. We don't agree with any of this. This is completely in violation of all the history of us policy. Well, guess what? It's been three and a half years and Biden has reversed none of them.
So these are Biden's policies. Whether he agrees with them or not is really quite irrelevant. Those are his policies that he left intact when he came into office.
And that's what the israeli people are seeing. Why should they believe anything he says when his actions are so consistent? So, you know, when you see this, the lawsuit that's underway in the California courts, for example, around charging Biden, Lincoln and Austin with violations of the requirements of the genocide convention as complicit in israeli genocide, what if countries around the world start raising those kinds of cases under the principle of universal jurisdiction? What if Ireland, you know, Biden's home base in a sense, internationally, what if the irish courts took up that Ireland is one of the greatest supporters of palestinian rights in the world? I would imagine that there's people in Ireland that are considering such things. So I think that those kinds of actions are the result of this massive contradiction. You know, we had, what was it two months ago? Biden said very explicitly, there is a red line. And the red line is if they go into Rafa and then they changed.
[00:26:12] Speaker C: The definition of go into, then they.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: Changed the definition of go into, then the tanks appeared inside Rafa and they just stopped talking about it. They don't now deny that there's a red line that was crossed. They just don't say the words red line. There is no red line anymore. And the question is, well, what's the impact of that on the elections?
That's a huge challenge.
[00:26:38] Speaker C: What do you think?
[00:26:39] Speaker A: So people, well, let me just throw in a thought on that, which is that the polls show Gaza, etcetera, Israel, Palestine, they're not top of the line for most of, you know, in the polls, but it's the perception of Biden that I think spreads beyond this.
[00:26:57] Speaker B: So I think it's a couple of things. I think the perception of Biden globally is a very important.
[00:27:02] Speaker A: And domestically.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: Yeah, and domestically. But it's also this notion of, it's not just about when you ask people what's your list of most important things, that's one thing. But when you talk about the people for whom the issue of Gaza is at the top of their list, who are those people? They're not just voters. You're talking young people, black people, muslim and arab voters.
These are the constituencies that Biden has to win, and these are the constituencies that do the work.
So if you're talking about, say, what's the, what's the percentage of people who voted uncommitted, say in California? It doesn't really matter one way or the other. California is going to go blue for Biden no matter what. But there's a ton of people in parts of California who every four years traipse off to Nevada and Arizona to do the precinct walking. If they decide that they're not going to do that, it's not going to change the vote where they live in California, but it may well change the vote in a swing state like Nevada or Arizona. The same thing is true in, say, Massachusetts. Massachusetts is going to go for Biden. That's not a question. But there's a bunch of people who every four years traipse on up to New Hampshire. If they don't do that, that might change the vote in New Hampshire. So this is a very explicit electoral reality. You know, I work for a nonprofit. We don't take positions on what should happen, but we certainly spend time trying to analyze what is happening and what does it mean and what will the consequences be. And this is a very serious thing where we've never seen before.
In my 50 years of working on palestinian rights, I've never seen a situation where any candidate risked losing their election because they refused to change the vote to what the people wanted. 80% of Democrats want an immediate and lasting ceasefire. 68% of all voters want that. So when Biden doesn't do that, that's going to have an impact. And all the efforts of the Democratic Party leadership or whoever that tries to say, it's you people, it's you people who didn't vote for him, who should have. You're the problem. They're lying. They know full well that the problem is the refusal of the administration and the candidate to change their position to allow people to vote for, you know, whoever they want, but without having to feel like they're voting for the person that's enabling genocide.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: So I guess you're suggesting that there's still a possibility that that electoral situation might be a lever on what happens. But you don't sound very optimistic about that.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: I keep thinking that it must matter. I can only. I mean, Biden is. He's old, right? He doesn't have to. He could. He could claim a legacy of having repaired a lot of the damage that was done by his predecessor. That could be a legacy. Biden could claim he made a decision to run again because he presumably wants to be president, to do whatever it is he wants to do.
If he wants to be president, he has to be.
You know, he's old, but he's not stupid. He's got to be aware of the consequences of this. And if he's not, the people around him are, and they're just keeping it from him, which is not impossible. But I'm not a fly on the wall there, so I have no idea. But somebody around him is reading the papers and seeing the polls. So somebody there knows. And if they're not prepared to do what's necessary, the problem is outside for our movement. We don't really know yet. What else can we do? The whole process of the uncommitted campaigns has been hugely important.
But that was for the primaries. The next stage is not at all clear what it's going to look like if more people resign. Will that do the trick? I don't know. How many does it have to be? How many will it take? If you have 2000 people at USAID sign an open letter, will that be enough instead of just 1000? I don't know what has to happen.
Maybe five countries around the world have to bring new charges of complicity and genocide.
[00:31:43] Speaker A: Well, and those. I was going to ask you about the international cases that are already in process. So they are going forward, right? And they are.
[00:31:52] Speaker C: And they're maybe quite.
[00:31:54] Speaker B: There's people that are saying that there should be a move in Washington to try and arrest Netanyahu when he comes. It's a bit dicey on the legal side because the international criminal court has not yet issued the arrest warrants. But they're about to. I'm guessing that they're deliberately holding it.
[00:32:15] Speaker C: Even, even Keir Starmer has said that if there are ICC arrest warrants, they would arrest him. In Britain.
[00:32:20] Speaker A: He did.
[00:32:21] Speaker C: Under a labor government. That's a gigantic ship. Yeah, I'm not gonna hold my breath.
[00:32:26] Speaker B: Don't hold your breath. Yeah.
[00:32:27] Speaker C: But I also think that probably he just, he wouldn't go.
And that's a big deal. This is a big deal.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: Very big deal. This was the big deal with Kissinger. When Kissinger was indicted under the policies, it was the Pinochet precedent that set this in motion. And IPS, my institute, was very involved with that because of Pinochet's assassination of two of our colleagues in 1976 in Washington DC.
In that context, you have a situation where Brazil and Belgium both had said they would execute the warrants issued by the. It wasn't the international criminal court at the time, it was Interpol. And the result was every time Kissinger traveled, he had to check in with the state Department to find out if the country he wanted to go to had a warrant out for his arrest. That's pretty amazing. So that would be something. I don't think Joe Biden wants to have to do that as his legacy.
[00:33:23] Speaker A: There are some people who are planning or calling for demonstrations at the democratic convention in Chicago, which is in, brings back nightmares of our past in a way. And I wonder what you think of that particular thing, if you care to say anything. Too soon?
[00:33:42] Speaker B: Well, I don't think it's too soon to recognize that there will be things that need to be protested, whatever.
[00:33:47] Speaker C: Oh, I was joking. I meant too soon from 68.
[00:33:51] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, there's going to be protests. They're going to be big. I hope that they are allowed to be militantly nonviolent and allowed to function the way they were not allowed to function that way in Chicago. I think there's some people, I think, believe that what happened in Chicago was somehow the initiative of the protesters when that was a police riot that attacked the protesters, and that could happen again.
That's the danger. The criminalization of protests that's been underway this last year or more is a very dangerous precedent.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: But I guess we have some hope because the mayor of Chicago is a very different person than the mayor in 68.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: That's true, but it's not clear what the plan is yet for moving forward. So I'm worried about that. Whether the police will abide by the mayor's decision, for instance. There's a big question. But I also think that there's the issue of what's the expectation of what comes after, what comes after the convention.
There's speculation underway that if things haven't gotten any better for Biden and maybe depending on what happens in the debates, all of that, that maybe what will happen is he'll show up at the convention, get through the first round of, you know, claim it as, as a victory, and then say, I'm stepping out and opening up the convention, that we'll have an open convention for the first time in however many years it's been, I don't see any evidence that that's happening. I've seen some speculation in the press about it, but I'm not optimistic that that's going to be the possibility.
[00:35:38] Speaker A: Well, it's a bizarre, bizarre time. And you said, not in your experience, I'm quite a bit older, and I would say not in my experiences, as reality escaped itself, you might say.
And yet I agree with you. This movement that's grown up has been effective. It's been strong, and I think it's been evolving in its sophistication, you might say, and how to build alliances. I think a lot of us were earlier concerned about the palestinian movement being too narrow and not able to reach out for that. And that seems to be potentially changing. And I wanted to, in the remaining time, talk about the jewish participation in this movement. Now we do have jewish voice for peace. You're one of the founders, I think, of jewish voice for peace.
[00:36:35] Speaker B: No, but I was on the board for six years and I'm now there.
[00:36:40] Speaker A: And it's a. That's a good title.
As you get older, it's great to be an advisor. So.
And JVP has grown enormously since October 7.
But I'm interested. I spend a lot of time in the more liberal rather than left kind of jewish community that we have in Santa Barbara. And I believe that the majority of people in that community want the ceasefire, want the war over. And I'm kind of thinking that part of a strategy is to enable a parallel jewish mainstream jewish movement for peace, whether or not it's fully allied with the palestinian rights movement. I don't know if you've had any thoughts about that interrelationship.
[00:37:35] Speaker B: I mean, I think at this stage, we're building a movement against genocide.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: Right.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: That's the equivalent of a movement against fascism, which means you need a very broad front, not only of the left, you need liberals. Does that mean that the left should give up its principles? Absolutely not. But a movement in parallel? Absolutely. I'm not seeing it yet in mainstream jewish organizations. I'm seeing a move to groups like JVP, the rabbis for ceasefire that started with 15 people. I worked with them when they did their amazing sit in at the United Nations Security Council. They then later met with the secretary general to make clear that they were there not to protest the UN, but to defend the UN against the efforts of the US to undermine the UN. They've done amazing work. So you have that as a new organization. They now have 350 or so rabbis across the country that are in it. So all of this is important to whatever degree. The mainstream jewish organizations, some of them are coming way late to coming out against the war. And it won't be surprising, and it won't be wrong for people to be furious with them for that. It took too long. Where were you? Good. You're here now. But don't get arrogant about it. Don't think that that makes it okay that it took you eight months. And how many tens of thousands of people being killed before you were willing to move? There will be.
[00:39:03] Speaker A: My own feeling is that the weaponization of anti semitism by the jewish establishment organizations here and in Britain is designed to try to move the jewish population out of the democratic, out of the liberal frame and into the right.
[00:39:20] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:39:21] Speaker A: The polls continue to show most jews are going to vote Democrat. And the idea that Trump is that Netanyahu wants Trump to win doesn't win the support of most of the Jews in this country.
[00:39:36] Speaker B: Well, but look what just happened with the defeat of Jamal Bowman.
[00:39:39] Speaker A: Well, we don't have time to really delve into that.
[00:39:43] Speaker B: But, yes, of the jewish component of the pro Israel, which is only one part of it, but it's a very powerful and very wealthy part of it. And they're the ones who are orchestrating a lot of this weaponization of anti semitism.
[00:39:57] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:39:58] Speaker B: And it's leading to things like the defeat of one of the best defenders of not only palestinian rights, but certainly including that, but of the rights of people, of poor people, small d democracy in the Congress. It's a huge loss.
[00:40:13] Speaker A: I mean, part of it, he was redistricted in a way that made it very unlikely that he was.
[00:40:19] Speaker C: Yeah. So I read a very good piece in the Guardian today, actually, that was talking about that race and putting it in the context that, like, yes, they took one victim. They got, you know, in this. They got, it's definitely a blow for the left and for the palestinian solidarity movement, but they had to spend $20 million to get rid of him, to knock him out.
Whereas ten years ago, there was no one in Congress that was really pro Palestinian at all, and now they can only knock out the one that was kind of the lowest hanging fruit and had been redistricted and, let's be honest, made some pretty big blunders himself as a candidate, things like that.
I thought that was a good way of flipping it. It's very sad what happened. It's very frustrating and angering what happened, but it almost shows the weakness of that, of the sort of AIPAC hold on the democratic party rather than its strength, that they have to go all out in order to enforce what used to be just 100% expectation of loyalty.
[00:41:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
I don't want AIPAC to be able to claim a victory in this case.
[00:41:31] Speaker B: No. But if we look at this whole question of the weaponization of anti semitism.
[00:41:36] Speaker A: Very much a and that's a whole topic which we're not going to deal with today. Maybe the one thing I did want, we have in five minutes. This is ridiculous, what I'm about to do, but you've thought quite a bit about a future possibility for the land of Israel Palestine, however we want to define it. And like many of us, you probably started with the idea there should be a palestinian sovereign separate state. But your views, have you never thought that? But anyway, why don't you just outline in a short time your imagination of what a different world it would be in that land?
[00:42:22] Speaker B: Well, I will say that I can easily do that in five minutes, because I have for many, many years, I supported a one state solution. I always thought that was the appropriate. Where one person, one vote, equality for all, human rights for all, period, full stop.
I also have come to recognize that my view in the matter is really of no consequence and I have no right to be saying, you know, it's one state, two state, red state, blue state. It's not my call. I'm a jewish girl from California. Why do I get to say how many states there should be 7000 miles away, right? I don't live there. Nobody in my family lives there. No one in my family ever lived there. So who am I to say it's kind of like the pope saying, who am I to judge? My line is who am I to say?
[00:43:08] Speaker A: You don't even claim a biblical ownership of the land. No, no.
[00:43:13] Speaker B: First of all, I don't think God wrote the real estate contracts, so that.
[00:43:17] Speaker A: I'm totally with you on that.
[00:43:18] Speaker B: I know, but I do think what's important here is that there is a reality that as analysts we can look at and say whatever we think about a two state solution. And I could see how it could have been possible. I don't think it was just. But I think it could have been possible. In 1967, 68, 69, it could have been possible. But once the settlements took over, it's no longer possible. And now when you have 900,000 israeli settlers who are violating international law every morning just by getting out of bed because their houses are built on illegally expropriated land, there's not going to be any land. There isn't any land left for a viable palestinian state. And there really never was. Because if you look at what the proposals were, the real ones, like Oslo. Oslo was a real proposal. It was never allowed to, but it was a real proposal. What it proposed was not two states. It proposed a state with nuclear weapons that would remain strategically ambiguity, all of that, and a non state entity without control of its borders, without control of its resources, without control of its population, without control of its coastal waters, without control of its electrical grid, without any control of anything, and forcibly disarmed from outside, you know, not like Costa Rica decides they want to use their money for healthcare and education and not have an army great. That's a good decision. I would support anybody doing that. This isn't that. This is. We're going to impose the lack of an army on you. So it was never going to be a state. So my line is we are people in this country whose tax money and name is being used to support a genocide. Instead, we should be demanding support for a government that is based on international law, human rights and equality for all within any state and between every state.
[00:45:15] Speaker A: Small goal?
Well, I think that's a view that is getting more and more to be what people who have any kind of hope for the future are contemplating, even though we're not going to design what that could be.
But it's important to get rid of the idea that it's the removal of Jews from Israel that is the desired goal of the. Of the movement we're talking about. Never was right. And instead I'm hearing even mainstream voices saying we need a way to embrace a situation in which both peoples, each having valid claims to live on this land, come together with a recognition that neither is going anywhere. They have to be free and equal. And that may mean something if you go on to talk about a democratic state. It may not be a jewish state as such.
[00:46:14] Speaker B: In fact, it means jewish supremacy, and that means it's not democratic. So that's an easy.
[00:46:19] Speaker A: And so, and I like in all of our episodes of this particular season, we've come to the similar kind of ending point as we are now, which. Making these points, and not the. That I expect to see it in my short remaining time on earth. But it's something to imagine, at least with some hope. So, Phyllis Bennis, thank you so much for the beginnings of this conversation, because there's so much complexity to it that we could dwell much further on it. We haven't talked about.
[00:46:54] Speaker C: Ada got very excited about the process, end of the war. It's been happening her whole life.
[00:47:01] Speaker A: So I haven't met, we haven't mentioned Ada's presence this time, but Ada has been with us as she. She's been with us for several weeks now and very glad to have the.
[00:47:10] Speaker B: Chance to meet her.
[00:47:11] Speaker A: Yeah, me too.
[00:47:12] Speaker B: Thank you for inviting me. This was a great conversation.
[00:47:22] Speaker D: This is genocide.
It is not a war. It is a slaughter in a ghetto by the shore.
A ghetto with no arm. A ghetto with no ports. A ghetto under the jurisdiction of the military courts of an occupying power with the target, everyone killing them with bombs and chemicals and guns.
[00:47:46] Speaker B: This is genocide.
[00:47:48] Speaker D: They're using famine and disease as our lives go on. Just across the seas. The occupying ark is imposing starvation on everyone in Gaza, of every station, parents or children, people anywhere. They're being killed because they're still living there.
[00:48:10] Speaker B: This is genocide.
[00:48:13] Speaker D: It's happening now. The western politicians talk about how they must stop the bombing and let it be.
