June 11, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Hello, everybody. This is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I have on the line Ivan Eland, who is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute. | |
| He is a graduate of Iowa State University, received an MBA in Applied Economics and a PhD in National Security Policy from George Washington University. | |
| And he wrote an article which really caught my eye about the recent attacks by the Israeli forces on humanitarian aid ship heading towards The conflict seems to be portrayed as either very simple, i.e. Israel was simply defending itself against potentially terrorist arming ships, and it also seems to be portrayed as very complex, i.e. | |
| nobody can figure out who's right and who's wrong. | |
| And I thought that your written article struck a very nice balance between those two, pointing out Some of the legal problems in terms of international law that could be ascribed to the Israeli side. | |
| So I was wondering if you could just go into the thesis about even if we accept the Israeli version of the attack upon the ship, that it still has significant legal problems. | |
| Yes, of course we see the footage of the people using things to attack the Israeli commandos, but it's hard to claim Self-defense when you're attacking a ship in international waters. | |
| The way the system works is each country has a 12-mile limit, and that's originally derived from the fact that the eye can see over a flat surface like the ocean about 12 miles. | |
| So the countries have this limit because that's what they could see back in the old days, and that's what they could police. | |
| So this is the international rule. | |
| Well, this ship was, I calculated, it's about 40 miles off the coast. | |
| So they attacked it in international waters. | |
| And even if they thought it was carrying arms, they should have waited until it got closer. | |
| I mean, it's not like they're going to lose this flotilla of six ships because they're certainly very visible. | |
| And, of course, the Israelis knew there weren't any arms on board in advance because there had been talk to the Turks and everything beforehand. | |
| And the United States was also involved in trying to calm Israel's response down. | |
| But I think sometimes Israel wants to prove a point. | |
| And also the other problem with this is that blockade is an illegal blockade of Gaza. | |
| and it's also a blockade in international laws and act of war. | |
| So if your ship is being attacked in international waters during the war, then you have a right to defend yourself. | |
| Those people didn't have to just let the Israelis board their ship. | |
| They could fight back under any concept of self-defense. | |
| So I think there's a lot of problems with the Israeli version, even if you say that the people attacked the commandos on their way down. | |
| Right, right, right. | |
| Because they were repelling down ropes onto the ship. | |
| So even if the people attacked them when doing that, they're essentially attacking a ship much like the Somali pirates attack ships Off to the coast of Somalia. | |
| Of course, the Somali pirates are doing it for economic reasons, to get booty, that sort of thing. | |
| And the Israelis are doing it ostensibly for self-defense, but of course, that can be argued. | |
| Right. I mean, as far as I understand it, the very brief history is that because there has been these rocket attacks, and I believe the rockets do not have explosives in them, but there have been rocket attacks that have come out of the Gaza Strip, and as a result, about three years ago, | |
| Israel began this blockade, which has been absolutely catastrophic, where I think upwards now of 80 to 85 percent of one and a half million people are entirely dependent Yes, | |
| but the UN has said That the conditions in Gaza, and I think the U.S. government agrees with this, so they're trying to get Israel to pull the blockade because the conditions, the U.N. and other relief organizations have said they're deteriorating. | |
| And the problem with this is it's a blanket blockade. | |
| This is not just interdicting arms and potential materials to make arms. | |
| This is trying to put pressure on the Hamas government To change its policies towards Israel. | |
| Now, when we see bombers, and they do, whether it's suicide bombings or regular bombings, and they do it for political reasons, to get the population, they attack the population, to get the population to pressure their government, we call that terrorism when small groups do it. | |
| But we don't usually apply that to a blockade, but if Israel is attacking the population, that is to say, squeezing medical supplies, food, etc., To try to get the people of Gaza to pressure Hamas to change the government's behavior, Hamas government's behavior. | |
| Well, that's sort of a slow-motion style of terrorism. | |
| It's not like bombing people, but it's still, if you're killing them slowly by, or at least a portion of the population, by starvation or malnutrition or lack of medicine, You could describe this as a terrorist act to be consistent with Hamas, but of course terrorism is never applied to states and particularly never applied to Israel, at least in the United States, because Israel is a close ally. | |
| But of course we apply it to Hamas and that sort of thing when they shoot these rockets into Israeli And that should be labeled terrorism. | |
| Hamas should be labeled terrorism. | |
| But I think we have to be consistent, too. | |
| Governments, when they engage in collective punishment, which is whether it's bulldozing houses of suspected terrorists or putting this blockade to not only try to interdict arms but to squeeze the population to get them to pressure the government, I think you have to label that as a terrorist act as well. | |
| Right. And it's very hard to believe that governments believe that these kinds of blockades work. | |
| I mean, they certainly didn't work against Iraq in the 1990s. | |
| They didn't work against South Africa. | |
| They haven't worked against Cuba. | |
| They don't work to bring about political change. | |
| It's hard to believe that anybody can think of any empirical evidence that this works. | |
| And it seems almost like just emotional, punitive rage rather than any strategic economic or political approach. | |
| Well, I think they are just needlessly enraging the population there. | |
| And Israel often acts like the United States. | |
| We go in with military force, and our military force is at least initially successful because the Israelis are like us. | |
| They've got a lot of military equipment and taken some of their doctrine from us. | |
| They're very efficient militarily, at least in taking over places. | |
| But, of course, When they're occupying them, as we found out in Iraq and Afghanistan, they find out in the occupied territories, governing these places using military force. | |
| Eventually, that's not going to work. | |
| And the more they aggravate the population, it may work in the short term. | |
| They may have a military victory, but in the long term, they're hurting themselves as well. | |
| And they're not solving the problem. | |
| And I think the U.S. really needs to address this because We provide $3 billion a year in aid to Israel. | |
| Israel is a very rich country. | |
| It's almost getting embarrassing to do that. | |
| And I think this is contributing to some of Israel's behavior. | |
| If they didn't get that aid, they would probably be somewhat more amenable to the Palestinian cause, or at least settling it with the Palestinians. | |
| Right, right. I mean, I've heard tell from people I've talked to in Israel that it's almost a generational thing, that the younger generation has less hostility towards the two-state solution, but the elder generation has really dug in as far as maintaining the status quo, which is becoming increasingly disastrous. | |
| Do you think it's a generational solution, or do you think that there may be something that could come up sooner that would bring about a better resolution? | |
| Well, I think it could be a generational difference if the Israelis Don't make the younger generation mad, too, with embargoes and blockades and that sort of thing, because when you're strangling a population as they have been for the last three years in Gaza, you're going to inflame Islamic militants in the territory, and you're going to have a bigger problem. | |
| I mean, Israel created Hamas in the first place to go against the PLO under Yasser Arafat, and they're paying the price So actions now can have unintended consequences later, and that's one example. | |
| Another example could be this blockade. | |
| You're radicalizing a whole new generation, and it may make Yasser Arafat and the PLO, even in his early days when he was labeled a terrorist, look good if this Islamic fundamentalism really gets going. | |
| So far in Gaza, Hamas is an Islamic fundamentalist group that's ruling Gaza, and it could actually get worse if they keep doing this. | |
| So I think this blockade is really not in Israel's interests either. | |
| And I think some of the time, the United States ought to tell its ally that, you know, maybe this isn't the best way to approach things for your own good either. | |
| Right. Now, as far as U.S. support for Israel goes, just looking at it from an amateur outsider's view, it appears to me that there are two main driving forces. | |
| One, of course, is the prevalence of the Jewish lobby, which is not inconsiderable in American politics. | |
| And the other, though, seems to be, going out slightly on a limb, that they're among the more fundamentalist Christian Yes, and actually, it used to be that the Democratic Party was more pro-Israel than the Republican Party because a lot of the Jewish votes were going to Democrats. | |
| Not all of them, but a lot of them. | |
| But then we see in the beginning of the Reagan administration, Reagan became very pro-Israel because the fundamentalists were rising in the Republican Party, and of course they took over the Republican Party in the 1990s, and so they're a lot bigger group than the Jewish community, and you're right, they support Israel for these end times prophecy reasons. | |
| And therefore, now the Republicans are as pro-Israel and sometimes even more pro-Israel than the Democratic Party. | |
| So I think we have both parties now really wed because of domestic violence. | |
| This is largely, the Israeli-Palestinian issue is largely a domestic issue here in the United States rather than a national security issue for the United States, although you would never hear that in the news media. | |
| Sorry, can you tell me just what you mean by it's a domestic issue? | |
| Well, they portray this as, well, we have to solve this problem in our foreign policy. | |
| Now you see Padreus and Obama Alluding to the fact that some of these Islamists are attacking the U.S. because we're friends with Israel. | |
| And that's true, but they're also attacking us for our occupations of Muslim lands primarily, but they regard Israel as a colonial occupant of Arab land and the U.S. as a helper of Israel. | |
| So it's all the same sort of issue. | |
| But I also think that they are attacking us for that reason. | |
| The solution is not to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem. | |
| The solution is to tell other people to solve it. | |
| In fact, the U.S. has succeeded in making things worse, I think, over time. | |
| The real breakthroughs came during the Oslo process, which the U.S. had nothing to do with, essentially. | |
| And so I think the U.S. is not an honest broker and is not perceived to be an honest broker. | |
| The Arabs have some vain hope that the United States is going to pressure Israel into some sort of a settlement. | |
| But the United States, because these domestic lobbies have so much power, it's really going to—the U.S. is impossible to do that. | |
| So a president like Obama, I think, would be probably smarter to disengage from the Israeli-Palestinian issue rather than to attempt to solve it. | |
| I think everybody might be better off. | |
| That would put more pressure on Israel to to do something about it and it would also probably help the Arabs more than they think it would because it would take away this patron of Israel which is pumping all the aid in and making Israel more intransigent in the process. | |
| So I think you can make an argument that they're not really ready to solve the problem yet and the US Yeah, I mean Switzerland is not against Israel and they don't get attacked because they're also not funding it with money and weapons, so they're really off the page as far as the Islamic fundamentalists go, and that's where the America would be if they didn't have yet another government program that was going to achieve the opposite of its intended effect, such as the peace process. | |
| Right. Well, during the Cold War, I suppose you could make some remote argument that Israel was a democracy and the Soviets were supporting mostly Arab states and they were a counterweight. | |
| But if your goal is to get oil, being friendly to Israel and not only being friendly but pumping it with a lot of aid and That sort of thing is the last thing you would really want to do if you're worried about getting oil from having Arab countries sell you oil because, of course, they don't like U.S. policy towards Israel. | |
| Now, the last question, I know I'm tossing some tough questions at you and I appreciate your hitting them very well, but the last question I'd like to ask you is the resistance within Israel to, I think, what everybody accepts as the most reasonable short-term solution, which is a two-state solution. | |
| Is the resistance within Israel primarily because For religious or cultural reasons, in terms of a feeling that the land is theirs historically and supernaturally, I guess you could say. | |
| Is that the main resistance? | |
| Or are there more pragmatic considerations against the two-state solution? | |
| Well, I think there's other factors besides that. | |
| That's certainly motivating the Israeli right. | |
| They believe that the greater Israel is biblical and that sort of thing. | |
| And actually biblical scholars have even questioned The greater empire of Solomon and David, which is what they're making, the biblical empire, questioning the veracity of that. | |
| But that aside, there's also water. | |
| A lot of the water flows down through there, and they also... | |
| We need to defend the industrial heartland of Israel is right by Tel Aviv, and Israel is a very thin country, so they would like to have those occupied territories for security reasons as well. | |
| And so there's other reasons, more pragmatic reasons, why they are not settling. | |
| But I think Israel may eventually have to settle this simply because of the demographics. | |
| The Arab populations are growing so much that if they don't settle it, there'll be a majority... | |
| of Arabs in Israel and the occupied territories. | |
| So they may eventually have to settle it and even some on the Israeli right recognize that. | |
| But I think they may be stalling and that's why this settlement is so important to Israel that they don't want to shut it off. | |
| Obama's been trying to get them to shut it off. | |
| They're very reluctant to do it because they want to get as much of the good land as they can before they turn it over to the Palestinians and they want to leave the Palestinians with the Worst land. | |
| And of course all these settlements are built around key places and key Jewish cities like Jerusalem, etc. | |
| So I think eventually Israel will have to solve it or they'll have to give up the Jewish state idea because there'll be more Arabs in the Jewish state than Jews. | |
| So there may be an eventual settlement, but I think the Israelis would like to stall it out as long as they can. | |
| Yeah, it is a terrible and grim irony of history that the Jews who rightly complained about being ghettoized are now doing the same thing to their own surrounding populations. | |
| It is just a grim, grim example of how power can corrupt. | |
| And I really do thank you for your article. | |
| I thought it was very helpful. | |
| And I also wanted to mention to my listeners that independent.org is a fantastic resource for, I think, the highest quality free market arguments and pro-laissez-faire arguments. | |
| So thank you very much for your time. | |
| I really do appreciate it, and I wish you the best of luck. |
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