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Ted Rall: Good morning. Thanks for joining us. You’re watching the DMZ America podcast. Coming to you from the left, I’m editorial cartoonist Ted Rall.
Scott Stantis: For those of you who wonder about the behind-the-scenes stuff, nothing is more interesting than watching two old guys try to figure out a tech problem. Like, you weren’t there, and then you were there, and I don’t even know.
Ted Rall: You have to tell me what you did to be there.
Scott Stantis: I unplugged all my microphones and all the audio stuff, and now I’m just doing this through my computer. So if it sounds a little hollow, I apologize for that. It’ll be as hollow as your voice, Scott, will sound as hollow as America’s soul.
Ted Rall: For the record, I’m just using the computer mic too. Hopefully, we’ll sound about the same, which I think is more important because it’s weirder to have one host sound really different than the other host. Anyway, let’s get into it. So, Scott, you and I have long disagreed about Israel and its policies, and generally, the way they do things. This week, there are a lot of developments in the Gaza conflict, which has become by far Israel’s longest war. Israel is a small country that has short wars. This war has dragged on nearly two years. It will be two years this October 7. It just seems like there’s no end in sight. Ceasefire negotiations are basically at a complete standstill and have effectively broken down. There’s no end in sight there. There are widespread reports of major famine in Gaza. There are photos of skeletal babies all over the internet, and groups like Doctors Without Borders report that their own doctors are literally starving to death and passing out while attempting to treat patients and conduct surgery due to famine themselves.
Even the BBC and other major media organizations have said that their reporters are starting to die of starvation in Gaza. The food distribution networks have pretty much been taken over by a US-Israeli joint private organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, GHF. It was predicted that it wasn’t going to go well, and it hasn’t. Every time there’s a food distribution point, there are shootings. There are different narratives, but there’s no question that dozens and sometimes hundreds of people are killed every time they open the gates. It’s not being well managed. Most notably on the diplomatic front, France has joined the ranks of nations that have diplomatically recognized Palestine as a state, and they’re going to exchange ambassadors and so on. Lots to disagree on here, Scott. We always try to find common ground even though we disagree politically about a lot of things, and we usually succeed in doing that.
Scott Stantis: I think so. It has in our private conversations. I don’t see why it won’t here. If anybody’s looking for us to start calling each other names, I think that’s extremely unlikely. You can tune away.
Ted Rall: If you’re here for a thoughtful conversation about a very difficult subject, please like, follow, and share the show as much as you can. It really helps us out, helps us justify doing this. If you have a question or a comment that you would like us to react to, post it in the live chat if you’re here live, and if we like the question or really hate it enough, we will answer it. That’s super exciting, isn’t it?
Scott Stantis: It’s awesome.
Ted Rall: So, Scott, let’s get into it. Let’s start with France. Emmanuel Macron had teased that he might recognize Palestine. It’s not the first country in Europe to do so. Spain and Ireland already have. Spain’s an important country, but somehow it didn’t really make a huge splash when they did. Ireland has a history of not liking colonization, and they’ve been oppressed, so you can see why they feel like they have common ground. But France, in my opinion, is a big deal, and here’s why. France is a major diplomatic power. It is a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto power, just like the US does. It is a G7 country, and until maybe about sixty or seventy years ago, French was the lingua franca of international diplomacy. If you were a diplomat from any country on earth, you had to be fluent in French, and you would meet your counterpart and speak in French. It’s impossible to overstate the iconic, historical role of France in international diplomacy. France is not just another country. France was also, alongside Germany, one of the two countries that founded the European Union. I think this is going to open the floodgates. Already, about 153 of the world’s 197 nations or so recognize Palestine, but those are mostly in the developing world. France joins Russia, China, India, and other major countries, and this means they can call more credibly for intervention in Gaza, maybe sanctions against Israel.
Scott Stantis: Let me jump in on this, Ted, because I just want to say, first of all, France is not important anymore in the sense that you describe it. It was an important diplomatic country back in the seventeen hundreds when we wore powdered wigs. Happily, we don’t do that anymore. I find it laughable, and I’m not trying to sound like an asshole, but this is a laughable turn of events because it’s like saying I’m going to recognize Clovis. What am I recognizing? There’s nothing to recognize. There are no defined borders. There’s no defined government. What are you recognizing? It’s preposterous on the face of it because there’s nothing to recognize. I’m just laying down a very practical groundwork here.
Ted Rall: It was a big deal when the United States recognized Israel in 1948 because their borders were, let’s just say, fungible at that time also.
Scott Stantis: Yeah, but Israel, the 1947 map, established Israel and Palestine, and it was preposterous. If you look at it, it looks like the markings of a giraffe. It was just pockets here, a majority of Jews here, a majority of Palestinians here. It was this weird patchwork. But don’t forget, Ted, in 1947, think about what the world was like. Germany, France, Italy, even England, but certainly the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Russia—they had lost millions of people and had the shit bombed out of them. The only country truly standing was the United States, and so we could dictate that type of thing. You’re right about the fungibility of the border back then, but they did establish it within forty-eight hours. There was a war, and Israel kicked ass, very quickly.
Ted Rall: The events, when you read a history of Israel by a Zionist, by the way, are astonishing when you realize how day by day, how quickly events were moving at that time.
Scott Stantis: The French movement, you called the other day very excited. You said this is the beginning of the end of Israel as a country that has widespread international support.
Ted Rall: They’re on their way to becoming an international pariah, much the way that South Africa was under apartheid. I predicted this would happen a long time ago. I was early. This may be the beginning of the end of Israel as a welfare state. They get billions of dollars of aid from the United States, not to mention support from the United Nations and so on.
Scott Stantis: It’s not the beginning of the end. It can’t be. That’s absurd.
Ted Rall: It’s the beginning of the end of them as a country that has widespread international support. They’re on their way to becoming an international pariah, much the way that South Africa was under apartheid. I do think we’re headed that way. I think this is part of that. We’re going to look back at this moment and say, this is really a big deal.
Scott Stantis: Let’s jump now to current events and what’s happening today. You and I disagreed. I thought that the response to October 7 was not just a response to that one heinous attack where they murdered and raped thousands of people, especially young people.
Ted Rall: At most, 1,200. One is too many.
Scott Stantis: Yeah, but it was a lot. It was brutal. It was a heinous attack. But this wasn’t just a response to that, Ted. It was also a response to the continual attacks from Gaza, launching missiles into Israel. If they were lobbing missiles into New York or into Hoover, Alabama, where I live, I’d have a growing disdain for the people who were doing it. Couple that with October 7, and you have—
Ted Rall: This has to be obviously—you can’t be so context-free here. Hamas was installed in large part by the Israeli government, by the Netanyahu government. The Netanyahu government literally delivered millions and millions of euros in cash to Hamas higher-ups. They installed them. They wanted them as a divide-and-conquer strategy against Fatah in the West Bank. That’s been the Israeli strategy in Palestine all along. Israel’s been blockading and oppressing Gaza for a long time. The joblessness, the poverty, the misery in Gaza predates October 7. Here you have people who are completely enclosed by Israel’s security wall. They can’t come and go without Israel’s support allowing it, and for the most part, they didn’t allow it. They’re miserable in there. Every now and then, Hamas lobs some Roman candle over the wall.
Scott Stantis: It’s not every now and then, Ted. It’s almost daily. That Roman candle blows up.
Ted Rall: If you look up the actual casualties on the Israeli side, I think more Israelis get struck by lightning. One to three per year is too many, but that’s kind of like a drop in the bucket compared to traffic deaths or something. They’ve been doing that for years, but that’s a reaction to Israel. Israel has created a blockade. This is Israel’s fault.
Scott Stantis: Let’s go back to Yasser Arafat, the PLO. He got 90% of what he wanted in Oslo and then walked away from it and declared an intifada. The borders were open. There was a de facto two-state solution. The border was pretty porous because Israel used Palestinian labor to grow its economy.
Ted Rall: That border wasn’t porous. I was there in 2000 in February, a week before the intifada started. That border was not porous. There were controls. I’ve crossed some porous borders, and that was not one of them. A Palestinian from Gaza could pass into Israel on a daily basis, but the PLO and Arafat decided to start blowing up buses. The Israelis insisted that a future Republic of Palestine be completely demilitarized and have no military whatsoever, that the Israelis reserve the right to come and go into the future independent state of Palestine as they please, and they wanted to create Bantustans throughout the West Bank with no contiguous corridor to connect the Gaza Strip to the West Bank. This was a state that was doomed on paper.
Scott Stantis: I disagree. Arafat signed it. Clearly, there was something there that he liked. You start from some place. That’s how things build.
Ted Rall: Where do you want to start this? In February? In 1948? In 1920 with the Balfour Declaration? In 1888 when Zionists first started immigrating to Palestine?
Scott Stantis: I want to go to October 7, 2023. Hell, it was a good day. The fourth crusade didn’t even get to Israel. They ended up in Albania or Algeria and just started killing people there. They said, anyone with a funny hat was dead. Literally, they went to Istanbul and were killing a bunch of Christians because they wore funny hats, assuming they weren’t Christian.
Ted Rall: We can take this back five thousand years. Let’s talk about what’s happening today.
Scott Stantis: Where Ted and I can agree is that I don’t see an endgame. The Colin Powell doctrine—go with overwhelming force, have a stated goal, know what victory looks like, and when you achieve it, get the hell out of there—I don’t see those last two things anymore. I simply see a gutting of a region. You’re seeing abject famine, though I don’t think it reaches the technical definition yet.
Ted Rall: People who are more expert on this than us, like Doctors Without Borders, are saying it is a famine.
Scott Stantis: You’re the only person I’ve ever heard use the word famine so far.
Right, but if you look up Gaza and famine right now, you will find many people saying that. Are there people smarter than us, Ted? Maybe not at this hour because the coffee’s kicking. Those who support Israel, those who support the Palestinian movement, anyone who looks at this situation now has to be aghast and say enough is enough. What is the endgame?
Ted Rall: What do you think is the goal here? Nobody except the Israelis really knows for sure what the Israelis are up to. Certainly, we heard some bloodthirsty rhetoric after October 7 that we’re going to kill them all, turn off their food, turn off their water. That’s being dismissed by supporters of Israel as intemperate language, reacting in rage to the atrocities of October 7, 2023. Let’s say that were true, but those people never retracted those statements, and they were allowed to remain in government. If I worked for President Stantis and went off on some wild intemperate tirade and said, we’re going to kill all the Canadians and turn off their food and medical care, you’d be like, “Ted, you gotta walk that back, or I’m going to fire you.” If you didn’t do that, it would be because you agreed with what I said.
Scott Stantis: The political background of this is that Netanyahu stays in power and vis-à-vis stays out of jail because of an alliance with profoundly religious right-wing parties that are just batshit crazy. To your point, Ted, some of the language used by not just those parties, but the settlers, who are, in my view, illegal and crazy, is dehumanizing of Palestinians. A lot of them are from right here in New York. I was talking to my wife this morning about this issue, and it’s like, “never again” until it does. There may be an addendum to that slogan. This is now reaching a point where it’s heinous. You asked me several times, Ted, when is enough enough? We’ve reached that point.
Ted Rall: Here’s the thing that’s honestly peculiar. You and I, we’ve studied history. We know a lot about war. I can’t say that I’ve seen a lot of wars that really follow this kind of trajectory. It starts out not that unusual. They don’t commit a lot of ground troops. They bomb the shit out of the place by air. We’ve seen that before. Then they send in ground troops to try to figure out the Hamas people who are based in the tunnels underground. That I understand too. That’s kind of like what we saw in the Battle of Fallujah. But then things start to turn hanky because the Israelis keep saying, okay, evacuate from this town, go somewhere else. Everyone packs up and goes. Then they go in and bomb the shit out of that town. In many cases, according to reporters, there’s no Hamas anywhere to be found. Then they send in demolition squads to demolish and detonate any building that survives and carefully, methodically level it. They bring in bulldozers to level it. Then they tell the population, okay, you can go back there, but there’s nothing to go back to. Then later on, they issue another evacuation order for the same place that they already leveled to the ground, and then they bomb it again, but there’s nothing to bomb. The Gaza Strip is a small place, Scott, about the size of Manhattan Island. If you’re bombing every single day for a year and a half, there probably wasn’t much left after three months. The Israeli air force is very effective. At this point, it’s almost like they’re running around in circles.
Scott Stantis: I don’t know if it’s circles, Ted. This is where you and I will find some common ground because we’re not being told. I’m passionate about transparency and communication, especially from the powerful to those of us who are not. I want to know what the hell the endgame is here, and we’re not being told. The only conclusion you can make is that they want to obliterate any Palestinian presence in Gaza. They’re moving in on the West Bank and also on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Ted Rall: They’re pushing the entire population to the south of the border with Egypt, which they did before. Then they let them back north. Now they’re pushing them back down there. The Egyptians think that the Israelis are about to open the door and just expel the population into their territory, and they’re saying, no, no, no, no, no.
Scott Stantis: They’ve done it before in Jordan and Syria, and all three countries have at some point said, okay, these guys are radical, and we don’t want them in our country. Not 2,000,000 people. Starving babies are not radical. I’ve been around babies. They can be annoying, especially when they haven’t eaten for a long time. If you look at a map and you look at the Sinai, you think Egypt has done nothing with it. Is it a practical place to create? It’s large, and you could have a lot. Yes, it’s arid desert, but you can change that. We’ve proven that with Arizona. You may be right. They may just be squeezing them out and saying, okay, they’re gone. It may really become Mara Gaza.
Ted Rall: I don’t think the Egyptians will allow it. The domestic politics of Egypt will not permit it. Al-Sisi can’t allow the Palestinians into Egypt for a bunch of reasons that, as Americans, we don’t think about because it’s not our country. Egypt’s a poor country. If you’re an Egyptian, do you really want to be competing for jobs with a massive new population? Think about the migrant influx and the political consequences we’ve seen here in the United States. It goes quadruple there where people are poor and they’re competing for scarce resources. They’ll view it as a betrayal of their Muslim brothers. Egypt once went to war with Israel to fight for the Palestinians, and now you’re going to let the Israelis get away with stealing Gaza and the West Bank. The Israelis have already stolen 60% of the West Bank. Mubarak was overthrown by a revolution in Egypt. Al-Sisi came in as a result of that revolution. He’s got to know bad things could happen to him if he were to allow this. He’s being squeezed, but he’s got to be more scared of his own people than he is of the Israelis.
Scott Stantis: That’s interesting. I had not considered that. The Egyptian public will not be happy about this at all. You brought up a very practical point that’s happening here in the United States. How many times on your other show, where your producer Robbie, who lives in Montana, talks about immigrants coming in, undercutting wages, and so on? That’s something I hadn’t considered, and you’re absolutely right about it.
You did mention that they just want to level it and annex it. That is the only conclusion we can come to now because there’s proof of nothing else.
Ted Rall: We’re trying to read the tea leaves. I was thinking about Netanyahu’s statement in response to the French decision. He said, no one should recognize a Palestinian state next to Tel Aviv. That’s an interesting way to word it. A Palestinian state is going to be next to Tel Aviv no matter what. If you were not interested in ethnic cleansing and genocide and killing or displacing the entire population of Gaza, 2,000,000 people, then you would say something like, of course, Israel will look forward to working with, recognizing, and being close friends and allies with a free and democratic Republic of Palestine not run by Hamas or terrorists, with whom we can partner and walk boldly into the future together as brothers. But he didn’t say that. He said, no one should recognize a Palestinian state next to Tel Aviv. Gaza is always going to be next to Tel Aviv. That’s just geography. That to me signals that they will never allow any kind of Palestinian population there anymore.
Scott Stantis: We’ve reached the point where this is enough. We need to know what you’re doing, and we need you to stop it. We need you to allow Doctors Without Borders and other relief organizations to come into Gaza and relieve the suffering.
Ted Rall: They’re kind of there, but they’re not being given any security guarantees by Israel. Israel’s not allowing proper supplies to come in. Even their own doctors are literally collapsing as they’re trying to take care of their patients because they’re not eating either. Any reasonable person who believes in humanity recognizes that miles away, people in Israel are sipping sweet red wine and eating couscous. There’s no shortage of food. Famines are almost 100% caused by human beings. It’s almost never drought or other pestilence. It’s always humans starving people out. If that’s part of the strategy, if that turns out to be what they’re very consciously doing, that’s not a legitimate strategy for Israel or any country to be deploying in a post-medieval era.
Scott Stantis: Warfare in the twentieth century changed dramatically from World War I to World War II. It went from battleground fighting, flags, and unfurling banners to the bullshittery of World War II, where we’re going to bomb the shit out of everything, including civilians. Part of the stratagem of World War II from both sides, as we were attacking Germany and Japan, was to make the population suffer. Mission accomplished. Is that the strategy here? If it’s a strategy here, then you’ve accomplished it. I’m to the point where tell me what you’re doing. Tell me what’s next. My fear, for someone who loves Israel the way I have, is that the batshit crazy conservative religious parties have such sway and have dehumanized the Palestinian people to such a degree that starving them to death, wiping them off the face of the planet, is the right strategy. Any person with any shred of humanity inside them can’t look at that and say that’s okay.
Ted Rall: I put up a comment: “Fuck Israel and fuck the both of you.” Supposedly, I’ve been lumped in with you, Scott. People are so angry, even though I’m a huge critic of Israel and have been supporting the Palestinians my entire life. Scott, I’m going to diagnose you with a major case of cognitive dissonance here. How can you still love a country that’s doing this? When a country devolves from the high standards of its founding to where it engages in depraved behavior, this is depraved behavior. It’s as depraved as it gets. Children are literally dying for no reason whatsoever. The Israelis are just having fun, and they don’t care. We haven’t heard a single statement of hearts and prayers from the Israeli government or from the prime minister.
Scott Stantis: You are hearing it from the people of Israel. There are protests.
Ted Rall: Not much. There are some, but I’m talking about the government.
Scott Stantis: The core of Israel’s existence, the core of its founding, I still find more than just compelling but important in the world. I cling to the idea and the ideals of Israel, not what’s happening right now.
Ted Rall: When a country devolves like that, at a certain point, you can’t just say, well, you guys were awesome back in 1948 because they weren’t. The Nakba is a real thing, but I don’t want to relitigate the Middle East. The point is you’re judged by what you’re doing now and what you’ve been doing. This is who and what Israel is. After World War II, there was the idea of collective judgment against Nazi Germany. We felt that the Germans had a moral obligation to overthrow Hitler, and we punished them because they didn’t. As we know, it was very hard, dangerous, and scary, so you can see why people didn’t. The idea of collective punishment has been lobbed against the Palestinians by the Israeli government. They’re saying, you guys should have overthrown Hamas because you didn’t do that, and we’re going to bomb you until you do. If fair is fair, the Israelis are being judged by what they’re doing now, and we’re going to hold you all accountable.
Scott Stantis: I’m not sure it’s who they are. There’s certainly a large number of them, but in the elections, it’s not everybody. Can you continue to love a country? You can because in its DNA, I still believe that it is a democracy in a sea of nondemocratic states.
Ted Rall: That’s objectively untrue. There’s the Israeli Arabs who live in Israel proper, and they don’t have the same voting rights and citizenship. They’re second-class citizens under Israeli law to Jewish Israelis. Everybody who lives in Gaza and the West Bank has no voting rights. They’re effectively part of Israel, occupied by Israel, owned and completely controlled by Israel. Israel decides whether you can go visit your relatives in New Jersey if you live in the West Bank. There is no Palestinian state. Israel controls roughly all these millions of people, over half the population that they control can’t vote. How’s that a democracy?
Scott Stantis: You can’t have it both ways, Ted. You can’t say they are part of the State of Israel or they’re part of the State of Palestine. There is no State of Palestine yet. What France is recognizing is symbolic at this point.
Ted Rall: The international community is moving toward recognition of a Palestinian state, but on the ground, there is no Palestinian state. There are no Palestinian coins, stamps, soldiers guarding the border, military, or passport. This is a country whose national policy is to lay siege to this enclave, which is 99% civilian, and starve them to death. How can you still support this country?
Scott Stantis: The country can revert back to what it was. It has the mechanisms in place where they can have religious freedom. You can have mosques in Jerusalem, churches in Jerusalem, as well as temples.
Ted Rall: Except you can have a church in Gaza, and it was even the pope’s favorite church. The Israelis know very well where that church is, and they just blew it to bits.
Scott Stantis: It’s the new warfare. There was a monastery in Italy during World War II as the troops were moving up. The Germans were holed up in it, and there was an interesting debate with the Allies saying, should we bomb it or protect it because it is so sacred? Eisenhower said, they’re shooting down on us, killing American boys. Bomb it. They did, and unforeseen circumstances, it created even better hiding places for the Germans. My point is that the gist and the bones of Israeli democracy are strong, and that’s what I respect. If they do what Zelensky has done, which is have no elections and get rid of democracy altogether, saying we’re at war, then—
Ted Rall: They have suspended elections. It’s not martial law, but as a parliamentary matter, they’ve declared a war cabinet, which allows them to effectively suspend the normal schedule.
Scott Stantis: Didn’t a member of the Liberal Party leave the war cabinet? You can do that. That’s why I continue to cling to the idea and the ideals of Israel, not what’s happening right now.
Ted Rall: You could’ve made the same argument in 1943 as a supporter of Germany. On paper, the Weimar Constitution was never abolished. The Reichstag continued to meet. All the institutions of the German state that preexisted Hitler in 1933 remained in place. When a country ceases to function as a democracy and does evil shit, does it deserve support? It’s like, oh, well, we’re all assholes, but we voted for it.
Scott Stantis: As I mentioned at the top of the show, you asked me how do you support it, at what point is there a critical mass? They’ve gone there now. They are there. They haven’t lost my support yet because my hope is that they will do the right thing. The continued process they’re doing now, clearly causing humanitarian harm, and as long as this continues without a stated endgame, it’s impossible for those of us who support Israel for the reasons we support it to continue to do so.
Ted Rall: What would be a bridge too far for you?
Scott Stantis: The continued process they’re doing now. Just more of the same. They are clearly causing humanitarian harm, and as long as this continues without a stated endgame, it’s impossible to continue support.
Ted Rall: Would you then move to supporting a Palestinian state?
Scott Stantis: I’ve supported a two-state solution. I think that’s the most practical. It makes the most sense. But this fractured Gaza and West Bank makes no sense at all, especially when there’s no way to get from one to the other. It’s not unprecedented. Pakistan and Bangladesh didn’t work out well, as we saw in 1971. The governance of Gaza and the West Bank diverged. They went in their separate directions with very different governments and sensibilities. If I was President Stantis, I would be negotiating for a cessation of hostilities, to allow humanitarian aid in with provisions. If Hamas takes the aid and starts lobbing missiles again, Israel will be forced to respond to that. But right now, you’ve got a humanitarian catastrophe that you have to fix and address.
Ted Rall: Would you agree that it’s Israel’s responsibility in both senses of the word? In other words, it’s their fault, and they have a responsibility for the well-being of the population of the occupied territories.
Scott Stantis: It’s the Colin Powell “you broke it, you bought it” policy. Under international law, if you occupy it, you own it. So, yes, I would. We don’t know what their endgame is, and they haven’t told us. If there is no endgame other than what we can deduce, as you rightly point out, we can only judge on things that are happening right now and what they’re doing right now. What they’re doing right now is heinous. It has crossed a line. If they continue to do that, then they lose my support, and I would imagine many people like myself who are finding it more and more difficult to support them.
Ted Rall: If the goal was to get rid of Hamas, I bet that goal could be attained very quickly. It would look like an agreement to allow the leadership to go into exile.
Scott Stantis: If anyone understands the construct of terrorist organizations, it’s you, Ted. You’ve practically made a career out of it. You recognize that they’re smart enough not to have a Hamas Tower in Gaza City. They have hundreds of locations. They’re fractured, which makes perfect sense under the surface. Asymmetric warfare. They know they’re outgunned by the Israelis. The war on terror sounded great, but what does it mean? What is the end of that look like? Hamas is fractured. You’ve de facto created many new Hamas fighters by your actions here. The children who are suffering now are not going to suffer in silence for their entire lives. Where does this go? Does Gaza get rebuilt? If I was President Stantis, I would approach the Egyptians and say, how do you feel about ceding part of the Sinai, and Israel will cede part of Gaza and southern Israel to make it Palestine—a land swap.
Ted Rall: Gaza is the Palestinians’ home. They’ve lived there for centuries. These people have been there continuously.
Scott Stantis: That’s why I included it. If you look at a map, you can have it along the sea, Gaza, and then go into Sinai. You can have humanitarian aid, Israel will help build a Palestinian state. Obviously, the Palestinians will be there and help do the same. We can talk about desalination, agriculture that is effective in arid countries. There’s a lot you can do going forward to make this a viable, peaceful, prosperous country. That would help Egypt as well. If your neighbors are rich, that kind of helps your property values. My take, my reaction, my hope is for a humanitarian response. We’re not seeing it now. Israel has to tell us what they’re doing. I know I keep coming to that, but I think it’s essential. I don’t know what I’m supporting now, which makes it impossible to support. I’m not in MAGA nation where I can just say, my guy is saying this, so that’s fine with me. I can’t do that, and no thinking person can. Going forward, I have to hand it to you, Ted. You may be right. In terms of Israel’s long-term strategy for Gaza, it’s looking more and more like you may be right. They’re going to level it, annex it, and there will no longer be a Gaza as you and I have come to know it.
Ted Rall: What do you think about the debate about whether or not this officially constitutes genocide? I’m of two minds about this. I read the dictionary definition established after World War II, and I’m like, it’s genocide. But, in a way, who cares? Whether you’re doing genocide evil shit or non-genocide evil shit, it’s evil shit, and it’s the evil shit that I’m focused on, not the g-word.
Scott Stantis: Using the word genocide in this context is explosive for obvious reasons, given the history of Israel and the history of the Jewish people in the twentieth century. I’m loath to use that word, and I don’t know if it applies when you are responsible for creating a famine. We’re not at a famine yet, but we’re close.
Ted Rall: I’m surprised the famine took so long, actually, because not enough food supplies have been entering Gaza for a long time, and the price of food has become absolutely insane there, where people are talking about $50 for a can of whatever.
Scott Stantis: I don’t know enough about the Palestinian diet. What is a staple of that diet?
Ted Rall: The same shit that the Israelis eat.
Scott Stantis: Grain of some kind, I would assume. You bring it in and give it away. You set up structures that demand civility so you’re not having—
Ted Rall: This was all existent until fairly recently. There are plenty of aid organizations that know how to do this. It’s not a new thing to distribute food in crisis and war zones. People do it all the time. There are hundreds of trucks full of food ready to come into the Gaza Strip, and the Israelis didn’t allow it to come in. Israeli settlers intercepted the trucks, looted them, and trashed them as the IDF stood by and laughed. The Israelis are kind of lying, saying that Hamas is stealing the food. That’s not true. Armed gangs are stealing the food, and there are armed gangs that the Israelis are supporting against Hamas. It’s a shit show.
Scott Stantis: America’s never supported somebody and had it come back to bite them in the ass later. Supporting random goons is always a good idea. What can go wrong?
Ted Rall: Even Germany, ironically, one of Israel’s closest allies, and France was a close ally of Israel until very recently.
Scott Stantis: Most Western countries were. They should have, especially countries like France and Germany that were responsible for genocide during World War II. France, the Vichy regime, deported 76,000 French Jews to their deaths, and that’s not even counting Northern France under direct occupation. The French turned to Nazi roundups of French Jews, well over 100,000. The Germans, we know what they did. There’s been guilt. They did that, so they have to be nice to Israel now.
Ted Rall: The French thing is a big deal in part because it’s France saying, okay, this is really, really wrong. It doesn’t change the facts on the ground. Does it make life different for anyone in Gaza or Israel? No. But symbolic gestures matter. Think about the struggle of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement, the French government in exile during World War II. The struggle for them to get legally recognized by the United States was huge. Throughout World War II, the Roosevelt administration legally recognized and exchanged ambassadors with the Vichy puppet Nazi collaborationist regime rather than the Free French. It was only in the last couple of months of the war that FDR came around because Eisenhower forced him to.
Scott Stantis: Ted knows why I’m laughing because de Gaulle was so insufferable. The United States government would rather recognize the Vichy regime.
Ted Rall: In fairness to de Gaulle, whose politics were far to the right of my liking, he was trying to defend French sovereignty, and that’s the only thing he cared about. The one thing I admire most about de Gaulle, not just his steadfastness for the sovereignty of France, but also during Algeria. He went to Algeria and said, this is bullshit. This is a dumb war. We’re done.
Scott Stantis: He had support, and a lot of Frenchmen were furious. They tried to assassinate him.
Ted Rall: They tried that a lot. He was hard to hit for a big guy. There’s a museum in France that has a picture of his kepi, that funny little pillbox hat, with a bullet hole that went right through it while he was wearing it.
Scott Stantis: It’d be less impressive if it was somewhere else, like they were getting drunk around a campfire.
Ted Rall: We’re leaving on a happy note, but it’s a sad situation. I do want to hit you up for this. Is there a way forward? The two-state solution appears to be unwanted and dead by all parties now. Israel certainly doesn’t seem to have any interest. The Palestinians don’t have any interest. At this point, everyone’s fighting for the whole schmear. The Israelis want the whole thing all to themselves, and the Palestinians want the whole thing to themselves. Who speaks for the Palestinians?
Scott Stantis: I don’t know if there is anyone. If you establish—they don’t have elected representatives. Even if they did, they’d be dead by now. There’s always a way out. It just seems dark, arduous, and long. The Stantis proposal is a two-state solution if they can partner with Egypt because they need the real estate. It doesn’t need to be a lot. If they could partner with Egypt and create honest-to-God lines on a map, this is Palestine.
Ted Rall: Wouldn’t that set a terrible precedent that rewards Israel for its behavior here?
Scott Stantis: We’ve talked about Ukraine and said the only plausible peace there is to cede the Donbas region, Crimea, and let the borders stand where they are. The Russians have far more of a legitimate claim to Crimea and the Donbas than Israel has under international law. Israel has no legitimate claim to Gaza. Sometimes you have to say, okay, the bad actors, however you perceive them to be, get part of what they want. I don’t think Israel is in any mood to cede or talk about a two-state solution.
Ted Rall: You heard what Netanyahu had to say about not wanting a Palestinian state next to Tel Aviv. I thought those words were very carefully chosen. Netanyahu does not speak intemperately, but he’s always careful.
Scott Stantis: You’re right. There is a way forward. Whether or not any of the parties take advantage of it or grasp it or even start discussing it in any serious way doesn’t look that way anytime soon, which is terrible.
Ted Rall: International pressure will continue to build on Israel. At a certain point, the US will probably be Israel’s last remaining ally. Is that going to be enough? How long will the US stand by Israel, and can Israel survive without the US running interference for it at the UN Security Council with their veto, without the US sending them $4 billion plus a year, without the US supplying them with intelligence cooperation with the Mossad and arms?
Scott Stantis: If the current leadership remains in place, Israel will throw up its hands, roll its eyes, and say, okay. They’ll make a nominal concession, and the world will go, yay, we’re moving in the right direction, but that’ll be it. If the current leadership remains in place, I don’t see any serious movement toward what you and I are discussing in terms of long-term peace, and that’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate for Israel. It breaks my heart because you could live in a region where you have a peace treaty with Egypt, with Jordan, a possibility of one with Syria, and a few years ago, there was discussion of one with Saudi Arabia. Now the Saudis are amenable, but they have a domestic political context to consider. Now we throw in Donald J. Trump and his perfect negotiations, the best deals. He wants that Nobel Peace Prize so badly. This kind of thing can’t just be banged out in a couple of hours in Doha. It would take years of shuttle diplomacy back and forth by careful, considered, smart, calm diplomats. None of those work for the Trump administration. Palestinian and Israeli spokespeople don’t fit that mold at all. It’s heartbreaking. There are times during this conversation, Ted, where I seemed harsh and heartless, and I’m not. I do recognize—
Ted Rall: I know you’re not. I’m glad you said that because I know you really well, and you’re a softie. This has got to be tough for you to see.
Scott Stantis: Of course not. I’m a supposed Christian, by the way, which we always forget. There are a lot of Palestinian Christians we always forget about. My faith and my personality tell me that getting along is far better than not. Because I don’t like you doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to exist. I think the Israelis want Hamas to leave. I think they like it just the way it is because Hamas gives them the cover to do what they want. The hits against Hamas—Hamas may be gone, certainly for the time being. Hezbollah was degraded to an extent. Hezbollah’s puppet masters in Tehran have been shockingly quieted. The ease with which the Iranians have had their nose bloodied shocked Ted and me. We talked about this in a phone call recently. I didn’t see that one coming at all. I thought their Republican Guard was the same as Saddam’s Republican Guard, a million-man army that seems daunting but folds like a house of cards as soon as it gets hit. Iran didn’t scramble their sizable, up-to-date air force. They didn’t put the F-14 Tomcats up there. Their lack of nerve to escalate the exchange with Israel shocked me too. Their response seemed shockingly sedate compared to what Israel’s or the United States’ would have been. Hezbollah is still going to limp along. Hamas is significantly damaged, if not obliterated. But now you’ve created something else. You and I both know the history of the Middle East. When you get rid of these guys, they’re rarely replaced by better guys.
Ted Rall: Almost never. You also know what happens when a whole population is traumatized by having their relatives killed. You’re in a part of the world where revenge is part of the culture.
Scott Stantis: There was a “Mad Men” episode where the Roger character, who fought at Iwo Jima, has a meeting with a Japanese automaker, either Toyota or Honda, in the early to mid-sixties. Roger goes off on them. It speaks to what you’re addressing, which is how do you find forgiveness for people who shot you, tortured your friends and family, bombed you, blew the head off your best friend standing next to you? That’s a huge ask, and we tend to ask it a lot in this world. You and I have a lot of phone conversations we probably should record. The South African reconciliation courts said, what I did was wrong, I feel remorse, and you move forward. That’s a huge ask, but it’s the only way to survive.
Ted Rall: I can’t possibly argue with you about that. So, Scott, you know what time it is.
Scott Stantis: Let’s lay off the music on this one. This has been a difficult topic.
Ted Rall: Agree. As soon as we’re done here, we have to go fuck ourselves.
Scott Stantis: Good point. Hope I can reach.
