Chris Hedges - on Israel-Palestine, The Corporate Takeover of America & The Business of War
Joining me today is Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, Chris Hedges.We will be talking about the war in Israel-Palestine, the legacy media reporting of the conflict and the censorship surrounding it.You can find Chris' work over at chrishedges.substack.com ; and you order his book ‘Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison' --💙Support this channel directly here: https://bit.ly/RussellBrand-SupportVisit the new merch store: https://bit.ly/Stay-Free-StoreFollow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.
We really appreciate you, our listeners, and want to bring you more content.
We will be delivering a podcast every day, seven days a week, every single day.
You'll get a detailed breakdown of current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, but if they are covering, they're amplifying establishment messages and not telling you the truth.
Once a week, we bring you in-depth conversations with guests like Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., Sam Harris, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Mate and many more.
Now enjoy this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Remember, there's an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together.
Stay free and enjoy the episode.
Hello there, you awakening wonders.
I hope you're having a wonderful time.
I hope you feel free and liberated and ready to get educated because today on the show we have Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges.
You can find his work at chrishedges.substack.com and you can order his book Our Class We'll post those links in the description for you.
Chris Hedges, if you don't know, is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's been on the scene for a long time.
In the old days, when the legacy media was less corrupted, he worked at places like the New York Times and has been in war zones reporting on the front line.
And when he talks about something like the current conflict in the Middle East, he has a very particular and specific opinion that It has to be respected because it's grounded in real experience.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this conversation.
It's absolutely fantastic and informative and difficult.
And I hope that I took advantage of the wisdom available with Chris Hedges.
And I hope that wherever you stand religiously, ideologically, and in terms of your own affiliations, you find it a valuable and informative conversation.
Thank you for joining us, Chris Hedges.
Chris, the global events that are defining the news narrative currently is an area in which you are an expert.
You've recently been reporting for Al Jazeera in that region.
I wonder how much of the US media's portrayal of the conflict we can take at face value.
And then I wonder if you could take that into, say, if you... I was going to take this almost stumbling block by stumbling block.
And the first one that comes to mind is how often at the forefront of reporting people say, how can you ever negotiate with Hamas, whose stated agenda is the annihilation of the Jewish people?
So if we could just start with the sort of general overview of how much of the US media's coverage we can trust and lead to that sort of certainly one of the points that I see mostly utilised to legitimise a unique stance in this conflict.
Well, it's a one-sided version of events, Israeli.
The media is completely out of sync with popular opinion.
Most Americans, including 53% of Republicans, want a ceasefire.
I think that runs up to almost 80% among Democrats.
Biden's base among younger voters has cratered over this.
The Israelis, as usual, have made it extremely difficult for reporting to get out by cutting off the internet, cutting off cell phone service.
Very courageous Palestinian journalists.
43 of whom have been killed, and I can assure you, having spent seven years covering Gaza
and the Israel-Palestine conflict, many of those were targeted, including the family,
the entire family of the Al Jazeera correspondent, because they don't want what's happening getting
out.
And you have to put it in perspective, which I think a lot of people don't have.
I was in Sarajevo, uh, for the New York Times covering the war, uh, when it was being shelled by three to four hundred, uh, shells a day, constant sniper fire.
Now that was four to five dead a day and two dozen wounded a day, and I don't want to minimize what happened in Sarajevo.
I mean, almost thirty years later I still have nightmares about it.
But you have to juxtapose that with what's going on in Gaza, which is really saturation bombing.
Unlike anything we've seen, I think you'd have to go back probably to the war in Vietnam, maybe Chechnya.
I didn't cover Chechnya, but colleagues of mine did.
And the Russians were also very ruthless there.
But we're talking about, on many days, hundreds of dead, over 5,000 children.
So the scale of the attack.
And I think that's not transmitted.
To the American public and most of the rest of the public.
Hamas is demonized.
Hamas is a resistance organization.
That's not to excuse the war crimes that Hamas carried out on October 7th.
And I consider firing the rockets, which these rockets are homemade, manufactured, don't actually can do much damage.
There have been some Israeli fatalities, but firing rockets indiscriminately on a civilian
population is also classified as a war crime.
However, we have to then look at the, Israel calls it mowing the lawn, that is using its
attack aircraft, its heavy artillery, its naval guns, its tanks to shell a largely defenseless
population.
Remember, the Palestinians do not have an army.
They do not have a navy.
They do not have mechanized units.
They don't have tank brigades.
They don't have an air force.
And you can't call this a war.
It is more akin to murder, slaughter, genocide.
I don't think the word genocide is inappropriate given the fact that Israel has cut off water,
food, fuel, electricity, and has obliterated most of northern Gaza.
Over 700,000 Palestinians are now homeless.
They have been forced to flee to the south, many being attacked as they flee, and then
are attacked in the south, in Hanaun, a city I know well.
The scale is not being appropriately covered in terms of the press.
And of course, it's this cartoonish vision of good and evil, black and white, democracy versus terrorism, all of which is fatuous and untrue.
Now before the next question, Chris, we do have to leave YouTube for free speech reasons, which you will be aware of having previously been on Russia Today, which has now been banned from the internet in many regions.
So if you're watching us on YouTube, click the link in the description Right now to see the rest of this brilliant conversation.
I recognize for many of you, some of the things we're discussing will be at odds with your own perspective.
But here we like to welcome a variety of informed opinions that we may understand the world better.
And I will offer you one further time, if you are directly involved or ideologically involved in this conflict, I have complete respect for your views.
But my strongest view of all, above all others, is that unless we find a way to unite with one another, We will have no chance at preventing, arresting or stopping the march of global elites to dominate, control and destroy the world that we hold so sacred.
See you over on Rumble in a second.
Click the link in the description.
So Chris, I want to ask you, because I've had people on the show that have, you know, taken the direct contrary position about, here are some of the points that, you know, that we will continually hear.
You can't negotiate with Hamas when their stated credo is the annihilation of the whole Jewish population.
I've heard people say that even the chant from the river to the sea is a kind of a genocidal lyric.
Certainly it's interesting because we're seeing a kind of an inversion of censorship.
We're starting to see the left now again complain about being censored when they try to talk about pro-Palestinian narratives, stories, ideas.
How do you cover The worst aspects of the, shall we say, the opposing view.
And I would say that the October the 7th attacks were unprecedented evil.
People would say like, you know, baby murders, Holocaust survivors executed, you know, like gory and graphic detail.
But, you know, that's a sort of an editorial choice that people can make in such cases.
And explicitly and specifically Hamas' sort of credo.
How do you move beyond those kind of sticking points or stumbling blocks?
Well, the fact is Israel has negotiated through the Egyptians with Hamas for years.
Gaza is an open-air prison, in essence, a large concentration camp.
Palestinians, 2.3 million, are unable to leave or enter.
Many of the people who burst through those barriers On October 7th had never been outside of Gaza.
And while I agree that there were egregious atrocities and war crimes that were committed against the Israelis, again, one has to put it into context that when you and I and I covered Gaza for many, many years, when you treat people with that kind of cruelty, when you humiliate them, when you make it impossible for them to work. There's no huge unemployment among the youth,
something like 50%. Most are dependent, most Palestinians in Gaza are dependent on UNRWA, on UN aid.
When you use and you take the march of return, they use snipers and shells to kill
nonviolent demonstrators. This engenders of course, a very understandable rage. Now to
understand is not to condone and I'm not condoning. But if you look at rebellions, look
at Nat Turner, when the slave revolt, Nat Turner and his band during the antebellum South,
they killed every white Go back and look at the Haitian uprising against the French in Saint-Domingue.
The French planners were brutally tortured and killed, as CLR James documents in his great book, Black Jacobins.
Um, that is an understandable rage on the part of the oppressed.
That's what happens when you treat people with that kind of barbarity.
The barbarity that is visited upon them, they visit on others.
And again, I'm not condoning it, but I think we have to put it in context and understand it.
So the line that Hamas has within its charter, the destruction of Israel, this is true.
However, it is belied by the fact that for many, many years there have been direct negotiations or indirect negotiations through Egypt
with the Israelis on ceasefires and all sorts of other issues. And of course, there were
negotiations through Qatar for the expected release of the hostages. So it's just not true.
And Hamas is a resistance organization.
It functions the way resistance organizations in the past have functioned. It replicates the
kinds of activities, including the violence of past. I mean, even in the French Revolution,
the heads of aristocrats were put on pikes and carried through the streets of Paris. There's a
very, and I covered revolutions, a very dark side to once that violence is unleashed and that rage
is given expression through violence. But again, I think when we talk about the press, there's no
context.
At all.
In terms of the chant, the river to the sea, well, the Israelis have decided to make a two-state solution impossible.
Why?
Because they have seized 60% at least of the West Bank through Jewish settlements and closed roads and military zones and everything else.
And that chant, from the river to the sea, I think is an expression, which I support now, of one person, one vote.
That the only way out of this morass, 75 years of it, is a democracy and the abolition of a theocratic state, whether that's Jewish or Muslim or anything else.
I don't see how the chant, the river to the sea, is genocidal.
A chant that is genocidal is death to Arabs, which is what's chanted at soccer matches in Tel Aviv.
Chris, is it true that Hamas have been historically funded in ways that are surprising and unusual in much the same way, although with sort of obviously greater consequence, that the Democrats had kind of, what did they call it, like Pied Piper strategies to support Republican candidates that they would prefer to face or to bias the public perception of the
Republicans as a movement that's further to the right and more, shall we say, populist than
otherwise might happen without the support of these candidates. Is Hamas ever been the recipient of
funding that's, put simply, Israeli?
And also, when you're having these...this is probably more relevant than ever before.
We exist in these spaces where it's very difficult to even get the opposing perspectives to come together.
When I was most recently having a conversation with someone who had the contrary view to you, they were saying there have been numerous attempts to negotiate Yasser Arafat If I had an opportunity for a deal, the two-state solution
has been suggested many times.
So on one hand, I'd like to say, is part of Hammers' origin being, has Hammers been inflated
or funded in ways that were tactical and strategic in a deliberate attempt to destabilize that
region?
That's one part of my question.
And the other part of my question is, if you were taking the sort of perspective of your
opponent, would you highlight potential deals that have been offered previously that have
not been taken up by, I don't know, the PLO or former incarnations of the current resistance
movement, to use your phrase?
Right.
So Hamas was from the beginning.
So Hamas came out of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
It is a creation And the first leaders of Hamas, I knew Rantisi, one of the heads of Hamas, until the Israelis assassinated him.
I used to have dinner at his home.
I knew his wife, who was just killed a couple weeks ago by the Israelis.
They came out of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Fatah was a secular revolutionary movement.
And so when I started covering Gaza in the late 1980s, it was noticeable that the Hamas Militant group, which was very small, was not swept up in the mass arrest.
Israel occupied Gaza at the time.
All the focus was on Fatah.
I was just in Qatar to fund Hamas because he saw those divisions within the Palestinian diaspora, in the Palestinian community, useful in terms of splintering power.
So yes, Hamas was, this was a strategy that of course has failed miserably.
But the Palestinian Authority really functions as a colonial police force.
It is completely under the control of Israel.
It has very little popular support, including in the West Bank.
And this notion that the Palestinian Authority is somehow going to administer Gaza is farcical.
You know, initially the United States reached out to Egypt to see that after this devastation,
would Egyptian security forces go in and occupy Gaza?
Egypt obviously refused.
So yes, this was a misguided policy.
It reminds me of what happened in Syria when the White House got this ridiculous idea that they were going to fund, quote unquote, moderate rebels.
And then, of course, ISIS and al Qaeda and all these groups just crossed the border.
into Syria, and we ended up bombing the very people we armed.
So it's very similar to that terrible, terrible miscalculation.
So yes, Israel from the beginning nurtured, fostered Hamas, and Netanyahu in particular,
there's statements by Netanyahu talking about the support for Hamas being an effective tool
to fracture Palestinian power.
What about the deals thing that I mentioned in the mix with that question?
I covered the Oslo Accords.
I reported on them for the New York Times.
The Oslo Accords were driven by Yitzhak Rabin.
Yitzhak Rabin, because of the Oslo Accords, was hated by the Israeli right, in particular
AIPAC and the Zionist or Israel lobby in the United States.
When he was running against Bibi Netanyahu, I covered that election, they pumped tons
of money into the Netanyahu campaign.
Netanyahu is a creation of the right-wing Zionist movements.
Remember, he speaks fluent English.
He went to MIT and lived outside of Philadelphia.
Rabin was detested.
At the Netanyahu rallies, and I was there, Rabin was dressed in an effigy, in a Nazi
uniform and burned.
People chanted death to Rabin.
At one point, Netanyahu walked in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.
And then, of course, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist and a follower of Netanyahu.
And Leah Rabin, Rabin's widow, to the day she died, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for the murder of her husband.
So the whole Netanyahu is a creation of this right wing, and I encourage all of your viewers to watch the lobby.
Al Jazeera did an undercover, sent a very courageous kid inside the lobby with a hidden camera, the Zionist or the Israel lobby, both in the UK.
That was broadcast on Al Jazeera, and then they did another one in the United States, and Israel put enough pressure on Al Jazeera so that it wasn't broadcast, but you can watch pirated copies on Electronic Intifada, I think.
has put it up. But you see the power of the lobby. I mean, they're just putting $100 million,
they just announced Apex putting $100 million to defeat AOC and the other, Ilhan Omar and the other
members who have called for a ceasefire. They have tremendous reach. So Rabin was detested and hated
because of Oslo. But Oslo was, I think Rabin's, there was a good and a bad side to Rabin.
The good side was that he realized that the occupation was poisoning and destroying his country, and it had to end.
The bad side is that he thought that by withdrawing, he could create a quizzling, in essence, colonial force, which was embodied in the Palestine Authority, that would do the bidding of Israel, and that's what Mahmoud Abbas does.
And I knew Arafat very well.
Arafat, for all his quirks, and he had many of them, nevertheless drew a line.
He was not willing to be an Israeli puppet, and I think there's very strong evidence he ended his life under house arrest, that the Israelis poisoned him to death.
That's not conclusive, but there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that I think leads those of us who knew him and covered it to believe that that's what took place.
The Oslo Accords were never viable in terms of establishing an actual independent Palestinian state, because remember, Israel controlled the borders.
And by controlling the borders, for instance in Gaza, they don't occupy Gaza, but because they control the borders, they control what goes in, what goes out.
And that was true before October 7th.
And they could shut everything down in an instant.
Including, as they have done now, with this horrific Assault on Gaza, the water supply, the electricity, the power plants, along of course with food.
I mean people are seeing serious cases of malnutrition.
There's no sanitation anymore in Gaza.
Many people have been pushed to the south.
Most of the north, 1.1 million Palestinians.
We must remember Gaza is very tiny.
It's only 20 miles long and five miles wide.
It's one of the most densely packed places on the planet. You mentioned, Russell, about
Hamas atrocities. There is no question that there were horrific atrocities that were
carried out. But it is also an atrocity to drop 2,000-pound bombs in the middle of refugee camps. I
am not absolving Hamas, but the atrocities that are carried out, I would call state
terrorism on Israel, are even, I think at this point, even more egregious than what Hamas
carried out on October 7th, certainly in terms of numbers. I mean, 5,000 dead children.
Yes, I acknowledge that there are discrepancies in reporting the types of violence that are conducted perhaps by groups, regions, organisations that are disempowered versus imperial power.
It's a commonly, it's sort of common parlance to think of drone strikes as being very bespoke and rational and
targeted and discerning and and what are even even to use the term acts of terror as to
be as being hysterical and sort of wild and and there are evident and
clear discrepancies.
It's often argued that this issue is undergirded by anti-semitism even with
the regard to the way that reporting on other deaths, Arab deaths in that region
for example in Syria as a result of the sort of conflicts have taken place there
in the last couple of decades or whatever, there is no there's not the
same appetite to target the perpetrators of those kind of acts of violence.
Where Is antisemitism a relevant framing for issues in this region?
And where is it not relevant?
It's not relevant when we equate the policies of the Israeli
government or criticize or attack the policies of the Israeli government
and therefore are accused of anti-Semitism.
Israel is a state--
and I will just throw in that I graduated from Harvard Divinity School.
I spent a lot of time reading the Hebrew Bible.
And the idea that the Israeli state represents the best of Jewish theology,
of the Torah, of the prophets.
I mean, Judaism, like Christianity, these were religious systems that were written by oppressed peoples with an acute understanding of what it meant to be oppressed and and the defense of the oppressed.
And of course, any state is about the projection of power.
So just as I would not consider Israel to be an expression of Judaism.
I don't consider Saudi Arabia to be an expression of Islam.
Theocratic states use, misuse religion to sacralize temporal power.
We are now on the cusp of an election soon within a year in the United States.
Trump has filled, he doesn't have any ideology of his own, but he's filled his ideological void with The Christian fascism.
I don't use that word lightly.
I spent two years writing about the Christian right in my book, American Fascists, the Christian Right and the War to Destroy America.
I spent months and months with these people and they are heretical.
They have used the Christian religion to sacralize the worst aspects of imperialism and capitalism and white supremacy as well.
So that is the dividing line.
And Israel works very, very hard to erase that dividing line.
So any criticism of Israel, any criticism of its policies, especially towards the Palestinians, then is equated with anti-Semitism.
And we have seen now groups at universities, Students for Justice for Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace, are being shut down and silenced because of very powerful donors.
University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, where I went to school.
And it's very counterproductive, because by essentially attacking legitimate criticism of a state and branding it anti-Semitic, you are diluting or minimizing the real anti-Semitism, which of course is there.
Racism exists.
It exists, I see it, in the coverage.
Palestinians are discussed or reported on.
They're not individualized.
They're a mass.
They're a dehumanized mass.
When we hear about Israeli victims, they're teachers, they're doctors, they're peace activists, whatever.
But that doesn't happen.
There are no doctors, teachers, taxi drivers, poets.
They're just Palestinians.
I mean, the language the press uses, the failure to use apartheid.
Israel is an apartheid state.
You won't see that that word in the mainstream press, the act of genocide.
When you seek to exterminate, and certainly cutting off food, fuel, water, and the kind
of saturation bombing that we have seen against the Palestinians, when you seek to exterminate
a whole or part of a people, that is an act of genocide.
So that is another word you won't hear.
So a lot of it is the failure on the part of the press to use appropriate language,
and driven by the Israel lobby, this very pernicious tactic of essentially branding
any critic of Israeli policy as anti-Semitic.
Does anti-Semitism exist?
Of course it exists and it must be fought, like all racism.
But criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic.
What unique strategic role and function does Israel have in that region?
How is it significant to American and in particular American corporatist and military industrial complex interests?
And is there a counterpoint to that strategic value that might be deployed by other players on the geopolitical stage?
For example, Iran, Russia, etc.
Right.
So Israel has pushed America into all sorts of military fiascos that are in the interest of Israel, but not in the interest of the United States.
The Iraq War being at the top of the list.
There's been heavy lobbying by Netanyahu to go to war with Iran.
That is not in America's interest.
It is in Israel's interest to weaken the power of its neighbors.
So the Israel lobby has been quite effective in pushing the United States.
I mean, Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, was a cheerleader for the war in Iraq
and is very close to Israel.
So I wouldn't say that the interests converge.
In fact, and the Pentagon has traditionally been the wall that has blocked the United
States from carrying out a war with Iran.
That Bibi Netanyahu very much wants to take place.
Now, of course, this conflict in Gaza has brought him closer to that goal because the
that goal because the U.S. has deployed aircraft carriers and fleets in the Persian Gulf, which
U.S. has deployed aircraft carriers and fleets in the Persian Gulf, which is a threat to
is a threat to Iran.
Iran.
And they have a fleet in the Mediterranean, which is a threat to Hezbollah, which is the
And they have a fleet in the Mediterranean, which is a threat to Hezbollah, which is the
Iranian proxy.
Iranian proxy.
So in many ways, Netanyahu and the Israeli government has traditionally been able to
manipulate the United States into doing its dirty work, which are not in the interests
of the United States.
In terms of other players, well, yes, the key player is Iran.
And that is why Israel has bombed the airports twice in Damascus and Aleppo, because those
are the arms transit points to Lebanon, because Lebanon is a creature of Hezbollah, is a creature
of Iran.
And Hezbollah has, unlike the Palestinians, has the ability, because of an arsenal of
fairly sophisticated rockets, to inflict pretty serious damage on Israel, should it
open up a second front.
Up until now, there have been, you know...
I would characterize them as relatively minor border clashes along the north.
I think Hezbollah does not want a war with Israel.
I don't think Iran wants a war with Israel.
I don't think Syria wants a war with Israel.
But once you open that Pandora's box of war, and I covered many conflicts, it controls you.
You don't control it.
So things can go horribly, horribly wrong.
In terms of Israel's power within the international community, That comes through its arms sales.
So Israel sells weapons as the 10th largest weapons dealer in the planet.
I think $12.5 billion in sales last year.
And it sells to the most retrograde governments in the world.
It was a fervent supporter of the apartheid regime in South Africa when I covered the war in El Salvador and Guatemala.
In the 1980s, Israel was supplying weapons and napalm to the Salvadoran military and to Rios Montt.
It was carrying out genocidal campaigns in the highlands in Guatemala, the genocide in Rwanda.
Most of the fighters were carrying Israeli weapons in Nagorno-Karabakh without ethnic cleansing of 80% of ethnic Armenians, they were supplied with Israeli weapons.
They don't care who they sell to.
And that gives them tremendous power.
Because the arms industry in many ways drives the policy of the United States, of industrialized nations.
And I think that's why you have seen governments in Europe, and of course in Washington, Uh, sign on for this, uh, genocide, uh, because of that kind of, that's a kind of secretive world, um, uh, but a powerful one.
Uh, and Israel is in that club and remember many of the, like the Pegasus spyware, uh, that was used to track my friend Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was, uh, went into the, uh, consulate or the embassy in Ankara and was, I mean, we haven't found his body by the Saudi regime.
That's an Israeli creation.
Israel uses the Palestinians as a laboratory to test its weapons and they will actually, when they sell these surveillance facilities, drones, they're one of the biggest producers of drones, militarized drones.
When they sell these weapons abroad, they call them quote-unquote battle tested because they've been used I mean, Israel has face recognition software where every single Palestinian, and they did not of course give their consent, is within that system, is immediately able to be identified, and this kind of surveillance technology is sold around the globe and used against dissidents.
It's used against anybody that any state, including the most despotic states, see As a threat, including, of course, journalists.
It appears that you, in a sense, is this true, see Israel as the more influential or even the more dominant partner in their relationship with the United States.
But even in terms of weapon sales, my assumption would be that the United States are far more profligate and successful in that industry.
So are you suggesting that it's Israel that drive these policies, where there is a necessary collaboration between the United States and Israel, whether that's through funding, favourable reporting, many of the topics that have been covered in our conversation so far today.
If so, what does that suggest about a broader global agenda?
Because I've always assumed that the dominant partner in any relationship between the United States and another nation would be the United States, that it would be ultimately their interests that were being served.
And my sort of broad, albeit somewhat shallow, certainly compared to yours, assumption or assessment would be that The United States have an appetite for a unipolar hegemony
to continue, and the war between Ukraine and Russia is a way of draining Russia, the
potential South Seas wars, comparable objectives there, and ultimately this ascending Middle Eastern
conflict will be used to facilitate the kind of institutional powers that lurk behind the edifice.
of American democracy.
But in your response to the last question, it seems to me that you're suggesting that
is it Israel that are authoring sort of current events at least, is that what you feel and understand?
Yes, but let me first address the issue of the arms industry.
You're right that the American arms industry is larger, but the American weapons and surveillance technology
industry is completely integrated with Israel.
And they work closely together.
Remember, the intelligence services are completely integrated.
So in many ways, Israel is not necessarily a competitor, although Because of the $3 billion a year that we give to Israel, one of the ironies is that the American aid largely built that technology and arms industry that has now become so large within Israel.
In terms of the American political scene, yes, you cannot defy the power of the Israel lobby.
It's impossible.
And Netanyahu acts with tremendous arrogance Towards Biden, there's an animus among many Democrats, in particular Obama, because Obama was pushing through his Iran nuclear deal, which Netanyahu didn't want.
And Netanyahu got himself invited to the U.S.
Congress, bypassing the White House, to denounce the Iran nuclear deal and attempt to sabotage it.
setting himself up as an antagonistic to the Obama administration.
They much prefer Trump. I look at Netanyahu and the Israel lobby as a kind
of albatross around Biden's neck. Well, they don't care if they bring Biden down.
In fact, when Biden was vice president, he went to Jerusalem and denounced the
call for a halt on the expansion of settlements.
On the very day he was there, Netanyahu announced the expansion.
I think it was 1,500 or something new settlements.
So there is a tremendous... I mean, he's not a very pleasant figure, Netanyahu.
Also, no, I knew him when he was the Deputy Foreign Minister.
He was very arrogant, amoral, cynical.
But yeah, the Israel lobby is extremely powerful.
As I mentioned earlier, Russel Laird just announced that they're putting $100 million to defeat a handful of House candidates because they're
calling for a ceasefire.
And because, especially with Talib, it's really stood up for Palestinian rights. So that, yeah,
you can't defy them. You defy them. And if you do defy them, it's not a matter of them withdrawing
tremendous amounts of financial support, but then they will use the money they have to mount
campaigns to defeat you. And so, yeah, the political system on both sides is hostage. Netanyahu could
care less if Biden loses the election because they'd prefer Trump.
Trump gives them even more than Biden.
So it's kind of win-win for Israel.
But Biden is, you know, he may, right now Trump's ahead in the polls.
Biden, by essentially endorsing this massive killing project, not just endorsing it, but giving
Israel $13 billion to continue it. This is not politically good for
Biden.
But Netanyahu doesn't care. If Biden goes, they get Trump, that's even better.
Biden's support of Israel has been pretty consistent, enthusiastic and
historic.
I think it's fair to use that term in terms with Joe Biden, given his extraordinary longevity.
But I feel, Chris, that when you're talking about I want to understand how Israel are able to assert such
what would seem to be atypical power.
Because my assumption would be that it's a relatively modern country, in terms
of its recent establishment in the 1940s, I mean.
Whilst I completely acknowledge there is an ancient land and their historic claims
and all of the origins of the situation, I'm not seeking to deny them.
But when you talk about the power of their lobby, the influence over American democracy,
it seems that something anomalous is taking place.
And I want to understand, with both available positions on this conflict, it seems that there
is a tendency to amplify its uniqueness, to regard it as a very sort of--
when you talk to people that are pro-Israel, they say that--
You know, all nations on the Earth have, you know, these kind of industries and have have a military and have a past.
America has a colonial past.
So does Britain, et cetera.
The atrocity, you know, I suppose there's an attempt to normalise actions.
I know that people in your position don't even like the use of the term both sides, but I'm really just trying to understand what is so particular about this conflict when in a sense it would appear to It appears to me that it ought to be regionalised, contained.
How has it become so defining?
How has it had such an important and divisive cultural impact, where people that are not directly involved in the conflict are taking strong positions?
That spaces, cultural spaces I mean, that were becoming unified, particularly on the so-called libertarian right, are now themselves A kind of anti-authoritarian peripheral movement, an anti-establishment movement at least in media spaces in the United States are now divided once again around this issue.
So what is it?
What is it in particular about Israel that you're saying?
Because when you say stuff like the arms industry or whatever, that's sort of a recognisable template.
Is there something unseen, distinct and peculiar about this No, I think that in fact, Israel is a settler colonial project, and it functions like all settler colonial projects.
And that's what we saw in South Africa.
That's what we saw in Kenya, under the Mau Mau rebellion.
Israel is acting in the same way that other colonial forces, or if we want to consider the apartheid regime, the white apartheid regime colonial, other forces and other settler colonial project act.
That's really at the engine of what is driving this.
So settler colonial projects from their inception are founded on lies, because they have Stolen the land of an indigenous people and those indigenous people mount resistance to fight back.
So Israel follows that template.
And I think passions are so high because both sides recognize that this is an existential question.
If Palestinian land is to be returned, remember, If you are Jewish, and you are born in Brooklyn, and you don't speak a word of Hebrew, and you've never been to Israel, you can fly to Israel and instantly get a passport.
If you are Palestinian, and remember from the 7th century until 1948, the land of historic Palestine was Muslim, and if your family has lived in Haifa for generations, you're barred entry.
I think the way to understand what's happening in Israel is to look at settler colonial projects of the past.
And what happens, because they constantly use force and violence as a form of control, they either attempt to buy people off, collaborators, that's what the Palestine Authority is, and if you can't be bought off, you're killed. That's what
settler colonial projects do.
But it doesn't work often, usually, over the long term, unless, of course, it's the United States
where 90% of Native Americans were killed. It doesn't work.
It also happened with the Patagonians in the south of Argentina, but they were all
wiped out. That, I think, is also an important historical template to remember, because what
Israel is attempting to do is push all of the 2.3 million Palestinians over the border into the Sinai and
Egypt, where they will never return, and they will then turn on the West Bank.
And this isn't conjecture.
You have to go back and look at the statements over many years of many of the ministers in the Netanyahu government, because they have endorsed this, they have euphemisms like transfer, but they have endorsed this kind of ethnic cleansing.
For a long time, they have their roots in the radical rabbi Meir Kahane, who I knew and covered, who was later assassinated.
The difference was that when I was in writing covering Israel, he was so unpalatable, Kahane.
He was a racist and called for the eradication of Palestinians.
His party, the Koch Party, was banned in 1994, but his heirs have taken control.
And so when they make these statements and they come out constantly that the Palestinians, Netanyahu called them the new Nazis.
There was this song that's been circulating with Israeli school children singing about a song lauding the annihilation of the Palestinian people, something that the Hitler Youth would have sung about Jews.
You take it very, very seriously.
And I think that when we see Israel as a typical settler colonial project, then we understand its behavior, because at the end they seek to carry out really genocide, massive amounts of force to eradicate the problem.
That's what happened in Kenya.
The British have still not dealt with this, of course, although King Charles was there.
That's what happened in South Africa, and that's what happens in other settler colonial Projects.
And that's where we are.
So I think that's the best way to understand Israel.
Of course, you do have the aspect of the Holocaust, which Israel, of course, has weaponized the Holocaust.
But the Palestinians did not carry out the Holocaust.
They had nothing to do with the Holocaust.
Although now they are, of course, condemned as Nazis.
I see.
So the paradigm you deploy is to see it as a settler-colonial model, and that often has the type of dynamics that you're describing.
But perhaps unique to this is the recent history of the Jewish people, in particular the Holocaust, and the
fact that that region is almost the interface between Western colonialism, the counter-narrative
posed by Islam and the post-Second World War and post-Ottoman Empire region, and perhaps is
complicated further by the complexities added because it is a resource-rich area that still seems
to be central to the global economy and remains a highly disputed and contentious region
because of the requirement for control over resources there.
So I wonder in some kind of macro narrative, if such a thing can be offered, that it's kind of important that it remains unstable and the scene of ongoing conflagration, that it's somehow beneficial to the kind of institutional economic global forces that are in a way, transcendent of something as, what do I want to
say, almost, I want to say, atavistic as national and religious interests? No, I don't think the
instability is beneficial because a war with Iran would be catastrophic.
It would be viewed throughout the region as a religious war.
Iran is Shia.
Sixty percent of Iraqis are Shia.
Three million Shias in Saudi Arabia.
Bahrain, a huge Shia population.
Lebanon.
So, no.
It would be very, very dangerous.
And I think the United States is aware of that.
They definitely do not want this to become a regional conflict, especially after two decades Of the military fiascos that were orchestrated in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan.
And I think that then, you know, just as I understand Israel through the dynamics of a settler colonial project, I understand the dynamics of the United States through late empire.
What happens in late empire, they're losing their influence, economic, political, that
hegemony is breaking apart.
And in late empire, this is true for all empires, they seek to regain that hegemony through
military force, which plunges them into one military debacle after another, which is really
the history of the United States going all the way back to Vietnam.
I mean, this support for the wholesale slaughter in Gaza, it's going to take at least a decade
for the United States to repair its relations with the Muslim world.
I think the Muslims are what?
One, I can't remember, 1.2 billion or I can't remember the number, but I mean a significant percent of the world's population.
And of course the Global South, because the Global South is looking at this in utter horror.
Where is the rule of law?
Where are the Geneva Conventions?
Where is humanitarian law?
And that is a message that both Israel and the United States is delivering to the global South and
everywhere else.
The rule of law, international law, humanitarian law, it doesn't apply to us. It may apply to you
with taking war criminals from the Rwanda genocide and putting them. It does not apply to us.
And that is very, very frightening because when you give that message to the rest of the world,
then their assumption, their quite legitimate assumption, is that if it doesn't apply to you,
it doesn't apply to us.
And what, you know, the lifeblood of resistance movements, radical movements, movements like Hamas are martyrs.
We have to look at Hamas as an idea.
And what Israel has done is essentially brutalized an entire new generation of Palestinians who will carry out acts.
I mean, all resistance movements are condemned as terrorists, which doesn't mean that they don't commit terrorism.
But if you don't have an Air Force, and you can't drop a 2,000 pound bomb on a refugee camp, then you strap on a suicide vest.
That's your Air Force.
And this language of violence, this quid pro quo, state terrorism, which spawns militant terrorism, this is a death spiral.
And for those of us, and I spent seven years covering Gaza, who were in there, We kept writing week after week, month after month, year after year.
You can't keep brutalizing these people.
This is not a policy that is anyway going to contribute to stability or peace.
In fact, it will do the opposite.
Few people listened, and now here is where we are.
So instability within the Middle East is dangerous.
I think even Washington wants to prevent it.
Unfortunately, the Netanyahu government, their wet dream is the US war with Iran.
And they have tried over and over and over.
In fact, it was after the Bush election, after George W. Bush, at the end of his term, so there was a dead period when he was a lame duck between November and January, Israel pushed very, very hard for a war in the Bush administration and the Pentagon refused.
But this has long been on the agenda of Netanyahu, and that is very Because Iran has the possibility to do tremendous damage to Israel.
And remember, Israel is a nuclear power.
I mean, it could really go very, very bad.
I'm surprised that you see, again, Israel as the senior partner.
I'm just learning here, I'm here to learn.
Because it would seem to me that the paradigm of the late empire, obviously, and by definition precedes the implosion or deterioration of a I'm trying to envisage what that would look like, you know, as a sort of a native of a former empire where it seems that our former British interests were easily folded into a kind of secondary role in support of the ongoing American imperial project.
And it seems to me, you know, that that remains the role of Britain on the world stage.
And I again wonder about the validity of even this kind of rubric Chris, when it's, you know, where do we place the, you know, the new American century project, where it was sort of clear that a war with, you know, Syria, Iraq, etc, many of the wars that have subsequently taken place, but Iran was on that list.
So, you know, the chief agitator being Israel, you know, it seems surprising to me that that would be the dominant force that was able to determine outcomes when such evident
and obvious power even if as you say and I'm certainly not queering it
America is an empire in decline and also I'm sort of curious as what as
to what follows that so yeah I do do I
Are you saying that this cycle that we're experiencing is the sort of present decline of America?
And I wonder how you see that being brought about and how immediate you imagine it being.
So first of all, when you talk about Israel, we have to go back to groups like AIPAC.
These are, you know, very right wing neocons.
And they share a common ideology with the neocons in the United States, people like Blinken and others.
And you know, Biden actually called for the invasion of Iraq five years before the war.
Biden, his entire political career, he has been a puppet to these powers.
He was one of the primary forces that got us into Iraq.
I don't think Biden's very limited intellectually, and recently probably even more limited intellectually.
But, nevertheless, he has been a servant to these forces.
Israel has essentially wedded itself to the most retrograde right-wing forces in the United
States.
When Rabin was inaugurated as prime minister, he didn't invite AIPAC to his inauguration
because he saw the Zionist or the Israel lobby in the United States as a political movement,
which was deeply antagonistic to himself.
It has a political orientation that fits, that is in sync with the very right-wing political
orientation that Biden has served throughout his lifetime as a politician and is serving
now.
If you attempt to challenge it, and you can look at what's happening to Rashida Tlaib
and others, then the- The boot of the Israel lobby will crush you.
In terms of what is happening in terms of the twilight of empire, well, we don't make anything anymore in the United States except weapons, many of which we use to slaughter each other with.
Our infrastructure is falling apart.
Everything is becoming privatized.
Sixty percent of Americans are living in pretty acute economic distress.
And, you know, what happens with all empires is that they hollow themselves out from the inside.
As Thucydides said at the death of the Athenian Empire, the tyranny that Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself.
And that's what's happened.
Also the harsh tools of control on the outer reaches of empire, wholesale surveillance,
militarized police, all of that is brought back into the heart of the homeland to essentially
crush dissent.
And let's also, just as a caveat, a lot of these police forces in places like Ferguson
were trained by Israelis.
That's also a big project within Israel is training police forces in very brutal forms
of crowd control, which we saw in places like Ferguson, backed up by military grade equipment.
And that's of course taken place in the United States.
So how does it die?
It dies ultimately the same way the British empire dies, and that's once the pound sterling
no longer became the world's reserve currency in the '50s.
The British economy went into a tailspin.
Once the dollar, I'm not saying we're there yet, but once the dollar is no longer the
world's reserve currency, the United States can't fund its empire.
It's all funded on debt.
It doesn't work.
And that creates a tremendous contraction, a terrible economic depression, and that's
where we're headed.
I mean, if climate change doesn't get us first.
So we are replicating the end of empires the way Tainter writes about it in The Collapse
of Civilizations.
I think he looks at 24 different empires.
It's military adventurism.
It's essentially a military...
Beyond control.
I mean, that's what Arnold Thunberg says is the death of empires is they can't control their military industrial complex.
It becomes a state within a state, or as Alexander Berkman says, it becomes the enemy within.
And that's precisely it.
So we have to Ukraine, Israel.
Remember, most of this money is not going to Israel, and it's not going to Ukraine.
It's going to Raytheon.
It's going to Northrop Grumman.
It's going to the arms manufacturers.
Uh, and, uh, um, and that's why we are in this horribly self-destructive cycle of permanent war.
Nobody can stop it.
When we were discussing a moment ago the religious ideologies present within different relatively modern nations within that region and you sort of broke down how it's primarily Shia Muslim populations and that would escalate any conflagration to a religious war that would be impossible to envisage how that would be contained.
It seems that we're similarly We're referring to ideological forces that are transcendent of the limited model that the nation can grant us.
Whether that's your description then of the magnetic power of the military-industrial complex, if so many of the resources are finding their way into the military-industrial complex, then It becomes pretty clear whose agenda is directing these events.
And whilst I am welcome and it's very helpful to have the provision of the end of empire model and how that is, you know, there are identifiable traits playing out.
It seems sometimes, Chris, that you are referring to ulterior trends that only become visible if you have a geopolitical lens that can be applied, i.e.
when you talk about the likelihood of the dollar being displaced, how that would lead to a true collapse.
And I wonder if you feel that these are the kind of geopolitical yet financial conflicts that are being played out with these sort of relationships, that BRICS kind of stuff that's going on.
I wonder how informative those ulterior yet Um, determining issues are, and if indeed they are, doesn't that diminish the authorship of, you know, the Israeli state that sort of determined the initial, uh, guided the first part of our conversation, i.e.
if Raytheon and the military industrial complex are making all the money, if this ultimately becomes sort of an end game for the American empire, uh, isn't that China, China.
So how does the United States cope with the rising economic power of China?
It's through military threat.
And that, of course, is very dangerous as well.
Israel is but one. We've mentioned Ukraine, we're seeing the escalation in the South Seas
and stuff. Why don't we think about that?
Well, China, China. So how does the United States cope with the rising economic power
of China? It's through military threat. And that of course is very dangerous as well.
So the problem is at the end of empire, you only speak one language, and that's the language
of violence because it's the only language you can speak anymore.
I mean, that is essentially exemplified by the death of diplomacy.
I mean, here we have a wholesale slaughter, and the United States is blocking vetoing resolutions in the UN for a ceasefire.
I mean, this is insanity.
It's utter insanity.
It's not in anyone's interest for the United States to do this.
I think we have to look at, as I said before, that the relationship between Israel and the United States is one that on an intelligence level, in terms of arms production, these are relationships that are completely integrated.
Israel does not function as a separate entity.
And so they're working as one.
And you know, the United States is a settler colonial regime.
I mean, we bear a lot of the sins, which we have not dealt with.
Israel certainly hasn't dealt with them, but we haven't dealt with them either as to who we are.
We were a huge supporter of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
In fact, of course, it was the CIA that located Mandela and got him arrested.
You know, we will rewrite history afterwards.
Mandela and Clinton can become best friends, but the United States was deeply antagonistic to the ANC.
And so, I mean, you know, the sad fact is that the Palestinians are powerless.
And because they're powerless, at least within the circles of power, they're friendless.
Nobody cares.
Go back and look at the Armenian genocide, which was very public.
People knew that it was happening.
Anywhere between 600,000 and 1.2 million Armenians.
And there are many parallels.
They were forced out of their villages and homes.
They were attacked as they were being pushed into the desert.
They had no food or water.
People died of exposure.
I mean, a very similar playbook is now taking place in Gaza.
I mean, the idea is to create a humanitarian crisis in southern Gaza that is so unsustainable and so horrific That essentially the international community agrees to push them out.
That's Israel's playbook.
They've already, I mean, they told Palestinians they had to go to quote-unquote a safe zone, although they're attacked often when they go through these supposedly safe corridors.
But now they're targeting, the South Hana Unas is right on the border with Egypt, it's right on the border with Rafa.
And you can't, if you live in half of that city, according to the flyers that The Israeli Air Force has dropped.
If you're a Palestinian, you're going to be attacked.
You are.
They're already bombing it.
So they've already killed many people.
They're attacking UN schools because those are where displaced people who have nowhere else to go are camping out.
They've shut down the hospitals.
I mean, this whole thing of Hamas command centers, they're not bombing these, destroying these hospitals because of Hamas command centers.
They're destroying them because they want no infrastructure, and in particular, a health
infrastructure to exist.
And almost all the hospitals, even the few of their 35 hospitals, Israel shut down at
least 21.
Of the ones that remain, they don't have antibiotics, they don't have oxygen.
What we're watching in real time is an act of genocide.
And the United States has signed on for that project.
And they've signed on for a variety of reasons, but I would argue, and I think that this is,
you know, having covered American politics for a long time, the power of the Israel lobby
is such that it is political suicide for a figure like Joe Biden to defy it.
Not that he would anyway, but my feeling is that when you describe these trends, it starts to seem like the notion of nation provides a layer of opacity that conceals relationships that, as you said, when it comes to secret services and financial ties, there's a degree of integration, in your words, between Israeli and American interests that it appears to me are
ultimately the drivers of what actions take place. That the agenda is set by those interests,
whether they are military-industrial complex, whether they're like, what is it that seems to, it
feels like there's a ghost, a phantom that moves through the observable, like we understand
things in terms of territory and flags and religious ideology and sometimes even economics, but it
seems that there is a, like, I know you would have obviously a far better place to
answer this question than I am.
It would seem that there's something else that's moving between it and beneath it.
That, you know, that it's possible to envisage, like, you know, if you've got, you know, after some, in some kind of reverie, after some kind of epiphany, a world where there could be a different agenda within Israel that would mean that, you know, that there is a sort of an end to, to use your term, apartheid and that That region is governed differently and democratically and non-violently.
And one can even sort of, you know, and I know we talked before, previously Chris, we talked about the necessity for spiritual values to prevail in these spaces.
If there were a kind of awakening, if there were a sort of essentially the application of a non-materialist worldview, different solutions become available.
But it seems like that The tiles of nation are placed on top of what's happening at depth.
And because it's so emotionally evocative, what it seems like a more likely outcome is the escalation of these conflicts rather than diplomacy.
Because as you said, those things have been sort of taken off the board.
So do you feel that, you know, God, I wonder if America is the last empire of this kind, possibly for reasons that are way beyond our control because of the potential devastation that could be wrought if the end of empire game is going to be a militaristic one.
And I wonder if you ever glimpse, Chris, if it's even possible for you to feel any kind of optimism when all of this seems so desperate.
Well, you know, I'm a longtime newspaper reporter, so I don't sell hope.
That's not my job.
My job is to provide the clearest assessment of reality.
That was certainly true in the wars that I covered.
People who had very Pollyannish views about, you know, their own immortality.
I knew a few war correspondents who thought that way.
They're not around anymore.
So we have to take a very sober look I mean, you ask about forces.
I mean, war has always been a business.
That's nothing new.
And it's a big business.
And of course, it hides behind the flag and patriotism and all the other stuff to seduce you into supporting this idea that you should send your teenage kids off somewhere to get killed.
But I think also coupled with that is the fact that we've undergone a corporate coup d'etat in slow motion, that all of the institutions that Once made popular participation and democracy possible have either atrophied or died and been captured by oligarchic power.
And we see that in terms of the money saturated elections in the United States.
It's just a kind of institutionalized form of legalized bribery.
And then the lobbyists, the corporate forces that elected these officials, write the legislation.
I teach In the prison I was teaching, and I teach through a college degree program through Rutgers University, I was in the prison last night.
Look, most of those students that I teach wouldn't even be in there, but for Joe Biden and Bill Clinton and the omnibus crime bill that more than doubled our prison population.
Forty percent of the people in U.S.
prisons have never been convicted of physically harming another person.
They get them under RICO laws and all sorts of other ridiculous stuff.
So that's again a process.
You deindustrialize A poor urban neighborhood, a black body on the street is worth nothing to a corporation.
If they're free, put them in a cage, they generate $50,000 or $60,000 a year in terms of the salaries for corrections officers.
Everything within the prison is privatized.
The money transfer service, the phone service, the commissary, it's a multi-billion dollar industry.
And their lobbyists are the ones in Washington writing the laws to ensure that the recidivism rate, which is 76% after five years, remains the same.
That's just a small example of the corporate stranglehold that has essentially destroyed American democracy.
It's probably better the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls it a system of inverted totalitarianism.
That means we have the structures, we still have a Senate, we still have a House, we still have elections, but internally corporations have seized all of the levers of power.
And their interests are not in our interests.
And that is, I think, what you're getting at, Russell.
That is what I'm getting at, Chris.
That is what I've been getting at.
Thanks, man.
Thank you for joining us for a conversation that's not at all easy, but it's incredibly informative.
Thanks for giving us the benefit of your decades of experience on the front line.
It's fascinating and wonderful to hear you and to spend time with you.
