Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has 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 has to be respected because it s grounded in real experience. And I hope that wherever you stand religiously, ideologically, and in terms of your own affiliations, you find it a valuable and informative conversation. Remember, there s an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together. Stay free, and enjoy the episode. 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. We really appreciate you, our listeners, and want to bring you more content. Once a week, we bring you in-depth conversations with guests like Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., Sam Harris, Veena Shiva, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Mate, and many more. Stay Free, and Enjoy the episode! - Russell Brand . Subscribe to our newest podcast, There's a Podcast Every Single Day, on Podchaser and we'll be delivering a podcast delivered a podcast every day 7 days, 7 days a week. - And we'll bring you the latest in depth conversations with Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris and the rest of the world's finest, everywhere else. , by Jordan Peterson Jr., by R.R. Jr., and more! - R.K. & Sam Harris in a podcast like that's not getting the best of that on the podcast on that & more. R.B. on the show on the , R.M. and more like that on this episode on the other place on the Podcasts on this week's on that place on his ... R.S. in the description for you on ) on , and more on this post on the post on his post on that post on that s not getting it on the tweet here on my post on this out there on the ep on Insta ( ) is a tweet
00:00:00.000Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.
00:00:05.000We really appreciate you, our listeners, and want to bring you more content.
00:00:08.000We will be delivering a podcast every day, seven days a week, every single day.
00:00:13.000You'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.
00:00:23.000Once a week, we bring you in-depth conversations with guests like Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., Sam Harris, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Mate and many more.
00:00:31.000Now enjoy this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:34.000Remember, there's an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together.
00:00:49.000I hope you're having a wonderful time.
00:00:50.000I hope you feel free and liberated and ready to get educated because today on the show we have Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges.
00:00:58.000You 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.
00:01:11.000Chris Hedges, if you don't know, is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's been on the scene for a long time.
00:01:16.000In 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.
00:01:23.000And 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.
00:01:33.000Anyway, I hope you enjoy this conversation.
00:01:35.000It's absolutely fantastic and informative and difficult.
00:01:39.000And I hope that I took advantage of the wisdom available with Chris Hedges.
00:01:44.000And I hope that wherever you stand religiously, ideologically, and in terms of your own affiliations, you find it a valuable and informative conversation.
00:01:51.000Thank you for joining us, Chris Hedges.
00:01:53.000Chris, the global events that are defining the news narrative currently is an area in which you are an expert.
00:01:59.000You've recently been reporting for Al Jazeera in that region.
00:02:04.000I wonder how much of the US media's portrayal of the conflict we can take at face value.
00:02:11.000And then I wonder if you could take that into, say, if you... I was going to take this almost stumbling block by stumbling block.
00:02:18.000And 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?
00:02:29.000So 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.
00:02:45.000Well, it's a one-sided version of events, Israeli.
00:02:52.000The media is completely out of sync with popular opinion.
00:02:57.000Most Americans, including 53% of Republicans, want a ceasefire.
00:03:03.000I think that runs up to almost 80% among Democrats.
00:03:08.000Biden's base among younger voters has cratered over this.
00:03:13.000The Israelis, as usual, have made it extremely difficult for reporting to get out by cutting off the internet, cutting off cell phone service.
00:03:43.000And you have to put it in perspective, which I think a lot of people don't have.
00:03:47.000I 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.
00:03:57.000Now 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.
00:04:04.000I mean, almost thirty years later I still have nightmares about it.
00:04:08.000But you have to juxtapose that with what's going on in Gaza, which is really saturation bombing.
00:04:13.000Unlike anything we've seen, I think you'd have to go back probably to the war in Vietnam, maybe Chechnya.
00:04:18.000I didn't cover Chechnya, but colleagues of mine did.
00:04:21.000And the Russians were also very ruthless there.
00:04:24.000But we're talking about, on many days, hundreds of dead, over 5,000 children.
00:05:34.000It is more akin to murder, slaughter, genocide.
00:05:38.000I don't think the word genocide is inappropriate given the fact that Israel has cut off water,
00:05:44.000food, fuel, electricity, and has obliterated most of northern Gaza.
00:05:49.000Over 700,000 Palestinians are now homeless.
00:05:53.000They have been forced to flee to the south, many being attacked as they flee, and then
00:05:57.000are attacked in the south, in Hanaun, a city I know well.
00:06:04.000The scale is not being appropriately covered in terms of the press.
00:06:11.000And of course, it's this cartoonish vision of good and evil, black and white, democracy versus terrorism, all of which is fatuous and untrue.
00:06:20.000Now 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.
00:06:32.000So if you're watching us on YouTube, click the link in the description Right now to see the rest of this brilliant conversation.
00:06:38.000I recognize for many of you, some of the things we're discussing will be at odds with your own perspective.
00:06:43.000But here we like to welcome a variety of informed opinions that we may understand the world better.
00:06:49.000And 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.
00:06:56.000But 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.
00:07:17.000So 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.
00:07:29.000You can't negotiate with Hamas when their stated credo is the annihilation of the whole Jewish population.
00:07:35.000I've heard people say that even the chant from the river to the sea is a kind of a genocidal lyric.
00:07:42.000Certainly it's interesting because we're seeing a kind of an inversion of censorship.
00:07:46.000We're starting to see the left now again complain about being censored when they try to talk about pro-Palestinian narratives, stories, ideas.
00:07:56.000How do you cover The worst aspects of the, shall we say, the opposing view.
00:08:04.000And I would say that the October the 7th attacks were unprecedented evil.
00:08:09.000People would say like, you know, baby murders, Holocaust survivors executed, you know, like gory and graphic detail.
00:08:16.000But, you know, that's a sort of an editorial choice that people can make in such cases.
00:08:21.000And explicitly and specifically Hamas' sort of credo.
00:08:26.000How do you move beyond those kind of sticking points or stumbling blocks?
00:08:31.000Well, the fact is Israel has negotiated through the Egyptians with Hamas for years.
00:08:36.000Gaza is an open-air prison, in essence, a large concentration camp.
00:08:41.000Palestinians, 2.3 million, are unable to leave or enter.
00:08:46.000Many of the people who burst through those barriers On October 7th had never been outside of Gaza.
00:08:53.000And 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,
00:09:21.000something like 50%. Most are dependent, most Palestinians in Gaza are dependent on UNRWA, on UN aid.
00:09:29.000When you use and you take the march of return, they use snipers and shells to kill
00:09:36.000nonviolent demonstrators. This engenders of course, a very understandable rage. Now to
00:09:43.000understand is not to condone and I'm not condoning. But if you look at rebellions, look
00:09:48.000at Nat Turner, when the slave revolt, Nat Turner and his band during the antebellum South,
00:09:55.000they killed every white Go back and look at the Haitian uprising against the French in Saint-Domingue.
00:10:04.000The French planners were brutally tortured and killed, as CLR James documents in his great book, Black Jacobins.
00:10:14.000Um, that is an understandable rage on the part of the oppressed.
00:10:18.000That's what happens when you treat people with that kind of barbarity.
00:10:22.000The barbarity that is visited upon them, they visit on others.
00:10:26.000And again, I'm not condoning it, but I think we have to put it in context and understand it.
00:10:31.000So the line that Hamas has within its charter, the destruction of Israel, this is true.
00:10:38.000However, it is belied by the fact that for many, many years there have been direct negotiations or indirect negotiations through Egypt
00:10:47.000with the Israelis on ceasefires and all sorts of other issues. And of course, there were
00:10:52.000negotiations through Qatar for the expected release of the hostages. So it's just not true.
00:11:00.000And Hamas is a resistance organization.
00:11:05.000It functions the way resistance organizations in the past have functioned. It replicates the
00:11:13.000kinds of activities, including the violence of past. I mean, even in the French Revolution,
00:11:20.000the heads of aristocrats were put on pikes and carried through the streets of Paris. There's a
00:11:25.000very, and I covered revolutions, a very dark side to once that violence is unleashed and that rage
00:11:32.000is given expression through violence. But again, I think when we talk about the press, there's no
00:11:48.000Because they have seized 60% at least of the West Bank through Jewish settlements and closed roads and military zones and everything else.
00:12:02.000And that chant, from the river to the sea, I think is an expression, which I support now, of one person, one vote.
00:12:09.000That 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.
00:12:22.000I don't see how the chant, the river to the sea, is genocidal.
00:12:26.000A chant that is genocidal is death to Arabs, which is what's chanted at soccer matches in Tel Aviv.
00:12:35.000Chris, 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
00:13:02.000Republicans as a movement that's further to the right and more, shall we say, populist than
00:13:07.000otherwise might happen without the support of these candidates. Is Hamas ever been the recipient of
00:13:17.000And also, when you're having these...this is probably more relevant than ever before.
00:13:24.000We exist in these spaces where it's very difficult to even get the opposing perspectives to come together.
00:13:33.000When 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
00:14:35.000I knew his wife, who was just killed a couple weeks ago by the Israelis.
00:14:39.000They came out of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Fatah was a secular revolutionary movement.
00:14:45.000And 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.
00:15:09.000I 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.
00:15:26.000So yes, Hamas was, this was a strategy that of course has failed miserably.
00:15:33.000But the Palestinian Authority really functions as a colonial police force.
00:15:37.000It is completely under the control of Israel.
00:15:40.000It has very little popular support, including in the West Bank.
00:15:44.000And this notion that the Palestinian Authority is somehow going to administer Gaza is farcical.
00:15:52.000You know, initially the United States reached out to Egypt to see that after this devastation,
00:15:58.000would Egyptian security forces go in and occupy Gaza?
00:16:07.000It 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.
00:16:16.000And then, of course, ISIS and al Qaeda and all these groups just crossed the border.
00:16:20.000into Syria, and we ended up bombing the very people we armed.
00:16:24.000So it's very similar to that terrible, terrible miscalculation.
00:16:29.000So yes, Israel from the beginning nurtured, fostered Hamas, and Netanyahu in particular,
00:16:37.000there's statements by Netanyahu talking about the support for Hamas being an effective tool
00:17:52.000At one point, Netanyahu walked in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.
00:17:57.000And then, of course, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist and a follower of Netanyahu.
00:18:03.000And Leah Rabin, Rabin's widow, to the day she died, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for the murder of her husband.
00:18:12.000So the whole Netanyahu is a creation of this right wing, and I encourage all of your viewers to watch the lobby.
00:18:20.000Al 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.
00:18:32.000That 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.
00:18:43.000has put it up. But you see the power of the lobby. I mean, they're just putting $100 million,
00:18:49.000they just announced Apex putting $100 million to defeat AOC and the other, Ilhan Omar and the other
00:18:57.000members who have called for a ceasefire. They have tremendous reach. So Rabin was detested and hated
00:19:06.000because of Oslo. But Oslo was, I think Rabin's, there was a good and a bad side to Rabin.
00:19:16.000The good side was that he realized that the occupation was poisoning and destroying his country, and it had to end.
00:19:22.000The 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.
00:19:41.000Arafat, for all his quirks, and he had many of them, nevertheless drew a line.
00:19:48.000He 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.
00:19:57.000That'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.
00:20:08.000The Oslo Accords were never viable in terms of establishing an actual independent Palestinian state, because remember, Israel controlled the borders.
00:20:17.000And 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.
00:20:29.000And they could shut everything down in an instant.
00:20:32.000Including, as they have done now, with this horrific Assault on Gaza, the water supply, the electricity, the power plants, along of course with food.
00:20:46.000I mean people are seeing serious cases of malnutrition.
00:20:51.000There's no sanitation anymore in Gaza.
00:20:53.000Many people have been pushed to the south.
00:20:56.000Most of the north, 1.1 million Palestinians.
00:21:02.000It's only 20 miles long and five miles wide.
00:21:04.000It's one of the most densely packed places on the planet. You mentioned, Russell, about
00:21:11.000Hamas atrocities. There is no question that there were horrific atrocities that were
00:21:15.000carried out. But it is also an atrocity to drop 2,000-pound bombs in the middle of refugee camps. I
00:21:21.000am not absolving Hamas, but the atrocities that are carried out, I would call state
00:21:29.000terrorism on Israel, are even, I think at this point, even more egregious than what Hamas
00:21:34.000carried out on October 7th, certainly in terms of numbers. I mean, 5,000 dead children.
00:21:40.000Yes, 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.
00:21:57.000It's a commonly, it's sort of common parlance to think of drone strikes as being very bespoke and rational and
00:22:06.000targeted and discerning and and what are even even to use the term acts of terror as to
00:22:12.000be as being hysterical and sort of wild and and there are evident and
00:23:34.000I 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.
00:23:49.000And of course, any state is about the projection of power.
00:23:54.000So just as I would not consider Israel to be an expression of Judaism.
00:24:01.000I don't consider Saudi Arabia to be an expression of Islam.
00:24:06.000Theocratic states use, misuse religion to sacralize temporal power.
00:24:12.000We are now on the cusp of an election soon within a year in the United States.
00:24:18.000Trump has filled, he doesn't have any ideology of his own, but he's filled his ideological void with The Christian fascism.
00:24:56.000And Israel works very, very hard to erase that dividing line.
00:25:00.000So any criticism of Israel, any criticism of its policies, especially towards the Palestinians, then is equated with anti-Semitism.
00:25:11.000And 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.
00:25:22.000University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, where I went to school.
00:25:25.000And 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.
00:27:36.000So 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.
00:27:46.000The Iraq War being at the top of the list.
00:27:49.000There's been heavy lobbying by Netanyahu to go to war with Iran.
00:30:13.000So things can go horribly, horribly wrong.
00:30:16.000In terms of Israel's power within the international community, That comes through its arms sales.
00:30:22.000So Israel sells weapons as the 10th largest weapons dealer in the planet.
00:30:30.000I think $12.5 billion in sales last year.
00:30:34.000And it sells to the most retrograde governments in the world.
00:30:39.000It was a fervent supporter of the apartheid regime in South Africa when I covered the war in El Salvador and Guatemala.
00:30:46.000In the 1980s, Israel was supplying weapons and napalm to the Salvadoran military and to Rios Montt.
00:30:54.000It was carrying out genocidal campaigns in the highlands in Guatemala, the genocide in Rwanda.
00:31:03.000Most of the fighters were carrying Israeli weapons in Nagorno-Karabakh without ethnic cleansing of 80% of ethnic Armenians, they were supplied with Israeli weapons.
00:31:25.000Because the arms industry in many ways drives the policy of the United States, of industrialized nations.
00:31:33.000And 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.
00:31:50.000Uh, 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.
00:32:16.000Israel 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.
00:32:31.000When 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.
00:33:00.000It's used against anybody that any state, including the most despotic states, see As a threat, including, of course, journalists.
00:33:11.000It 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.
00:33:24.000But even in terms of weapon sales, my assumption would be that the United States are far more profligate and successful in that industry.
00:33:35.000So 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.
00:33:57.000If so, what does that suggest about a broader global agenda?
00:34:01.000Because 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.
00:34:09.000And 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
00:34:23.000to continue, and the war between Ukraine and Russia is a way of draining Russia, the
00:34:28.000potential South Seas wars, comparable objectives there, and ultimately this ascending Middle Eastern
00:34:34.000conflict will be used to facilitate the kind of institutional powers that lurk behind the edifice.
00:35:16.000Remember, the intelligence services are completely integrated.
00:35:21.000So 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.
00:35:45.000In terms of the American political scene, yes, you cannot defy the power of the Israel lobby.
00:35:53.000And 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.
00:36:07.000And Netanyahu got himself invited to the U.S.
00:36:10.000Congress, bypassing the White House, to denounce the Iran nuclear deal and attempt to sabotage it.
00:36:23.000setting himself up as an antagonistic to the Obama administration.
00:36:28.000They much prefer Trump. I look at Netanyahu and the Israel lobby as a kind
00:36:33.000of albatross around Biden's neck. Well, they don't care if they bring Biden down.
00:36:38.000In fact, when Biden was vice president, he went to Jerusalem and denounced the
00:36:45.000call for a halt on the expansion of settlements.
00:36:48.000On the very day he was there, Netanyahu announced the expansion.
00:36:52.000I think it was 1,500 or something new settlements.
00:36:55.000So there is a tremendous... I mean, he's not a very pleasant figure, Netanyahu.
00:36:59.000Also, no, I knew him when he was the Deputy Foreign Minister.
00:37:02.000He was very arrogant, amoral, cynical.
00:37:06.000But yeah, the Israel lobby is extremely powerful.
00:37:10.000As I mentioned earlier, Russel Laird just announced that they're putting $100 million to defeat a handful of House candidates because they're
00:39:54.000The atrocity, you know, I suppose there's an attempt to normalise actions.
00:40:00.000I 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.
00:40:23.000How has it had such an important and divisive cultural impact, where people that are not directly involved in the conflict are taking strong positions?
00:40:32.000That 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.
00:40:53.000What is it in particular about Israel that you're saying?
00:40:57.000Because when you say stuff like the arms industry or whatever, that's sort of a recognisable template.
00:41:02.000Is 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.
00:41:28.000And that's what we saw in South Africa.
00:41:31.000That's what we saw in Kenya, under the Mau Mau rebellion.
00:41:37.000Israel 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.
00:41:53.000That's really at the engine of what is driving this.
00:41:57.000So 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.
00:42:17.000And I think passions are so high because both sides recognize that this is an existential question.
00:42:27.000If 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.
00:42:42.000If 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.
00:42:59.000I think the way to understand what's happening in Israel is to look at settler colonial projects of the past.
00:43:08.000And 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
00:44:01.000You 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.
00:44:17.000For a long time, they have their roots in the radical rabbi Meir Kahane, who I knew and covered, who was later assassinated.
00:44:25.000The difference was that when I was in writing covering Israel, he was so unpalatable, Kahane.
00:44:33.000He was a racist and called for the eradication of Palestinians.
00:44:37.000His party, the Koch Party, was banned in 1994, but his heirs have taken control.
00:44:45.000And so when they make these statements and they come out constantly that the Palestinians, Netanyahu called them the new Nazis.
00:44:55.000There 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.
00:45:11.000And 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.
00:46:04.000So 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.
00:46:15.000But perhaps unique to this is the recent history of the Jewish people, in particular the Holocaust, and the
00:46:21.000fact that that region is almost the interface between Western colonialism, the counter-narrative
00:46:31.000posed by Islam and the post-Second World War and post-Ottoman Empire region, and perhaps is
00:46:38.000complicated further by the complexities added because it is a resource-rich area that still seems
00:46:48.000to be central to the global economy and remains a highly disputed and contentious region
00:46:56.000because of the requirement for control over resources there.
00:47:00.000So 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
00:47:22.000say, almost, I want to say, atavistic as national and religious interests? No, I don't think the
00:47:32.000instability is beneficial because a war with Iran would be catastrophic.
00:47:40.000It would be viewed throughout the region as a religious war.
00:47:57.000And I think the United States is aware of that.
00:47:59.000They 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.
00:48:14.000And 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.
00:48:26.000What happens in late empire, they're losing their influence, economic, political, that
00:50:31.000And this language of violence, this quid pro quo, state terrorism, which spawns militant terrorism, this is a death spiral.
00:50:39.000And 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.
00:50:47.000You can't keep brutalizing these people.
00:50:50.000This is not a policy that is anyway going to contribute to stability or peace.
00:50:58.000Few people listened, and now here is where we are.
00:51:01.000So instability within the Middle East is dangerous.
00:51:06.000I think even Washington wants to prevent it.
00:51:08.000Unfortunately, the Netanyahu government, their wet dream is the US war with Iran.
00:51:14.000And they have tried over and over and over.
00:51:17.000In 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.
00:51:39.000But this has long been on the agenda of Netanyahu, and that is very Because Iran has the possibility to do tremendous damage to Israel.
00:51:47.000And remember, Israel is a nuclear power.
00:51:49.000I mean, it could really go very, very bad.
00:51:52.000I'm surprised that you see, again, Israel as the senior partner.
00:51:56.000I'm just learning here, I'm here to learn.
00:52:00.000Because 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.
00:52:33.000And it seems to me, you know, that that remains the role of Britain on the world stage.
00:52:38.000And 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.
00:53:01.000So, 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
00:53:15.000and obvious power even if as you say and I'm certainly not queering it
00:53:19.000America is an empire in decline and also I'm sort of curious as what as
00:53:23.000to what follows that so yeah I do do I
00:53:28.000Are you saying that this cycle that we're experiencing is the sort of present decline of America?
00:53:36.000And I wonder how you see that being brought about and how immediate you imagine it being.
00:53:43.000So first of all, when you talk about Israel, we have to go back to groups like AIPAC.
00:53:49.000These are, you know, very right wing neocons.
00:53:53.000And they share a common ideology with the neocons in the United States, people like Blinken and others.
00:54:03.000And you know, Biden actually called for the invasion of Iraq five years before the war.
00:54:07.000Biden, his entire political career, he has been a puppet to these powers.
00:54:12.000He was one of the primary forces that got us into Iraq.
00:54:17.000I don't think Biden's very limited intellectually, and recently probably even more limited intellectually.
00:54:23.000But, nevertheless, he has been a servant to these forces.
00:54:28.000Israel has essentially wedded itself to the most retrograde right-wing forces in the United
00:55:04.000If you attempt to challenge it, and you can look at what's happening to Rashida Tlaib
00:55:10.000and others, then the- The boot of the Israel lobby will crush you.
00:55:15.000In 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.
00:57:58.000When 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.
00:58:18.000It seems that we're similarly We're referring to ideological forces that are transcendent of the limited model that the nation can grant us.
00:58:28.000Whether 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.
00:58:42.000And 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.
00:58:52.000It 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.
00:59:02.000when you talk about the likelihood of the dollar being displaced, how that would lead to a true collapse.
00:59:08.000And 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.
00:59:21.000I 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.
00:59:42.000if 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.
00:59:50.000So how does the United States cope with the rising economic power of China?
01:00:45.000It's not in anyone's interest for the United States to do this.
01:00:51.000I 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.
01:01:10.000Israel does not function as a separate entity.
01:02:31.000I mean, a very similar playbook is now taking place in Gaza.
01:02:34.000I 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.
01:02:46.000They'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.
01:02:56.000But now they're targeting, the South Hana Unas is right on the border with Egypt, it's right on the border with Rafa.
01:03:03.000And you can't, if you live in half of that city, according to the flyers that The Israeli Air Force has dropped.
01:03:09.000If you're a Palestinian, you're going to be attacked.
01:03:44.000Of the ones that remain, they don't have antibiotics, they don't have oxygen.
01:03:49.000What we're watching in real time is an act of genocide.
01:03:54.000And the United States has signed on for that project.
01:03:58.000And they've signed on for a variety of reasons, but I would argue, and I think that this is,
01:04:05.000you know, having covered American politics for a long time, the power of the Israel lobby
01:04:10.000is such that it is political suicide for a figure like Joe Biden to defy it.
01:04:15.000Not 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
01:04:43.000ultimately the drivers of what actions take place. That the agenda is set by those interests,
01:04:50.000whether they are military-industrial complex, whether they're like, what is it that seems to, it
01:04:56.000feels like there's a ghost, a phantom that moves through the observable, like we understand
01:05:02.000things in terms of territory and flags and religious ideology and sometimes even economics, but it
01:05:08.000seems that there is a, like, I know you would have obviously a far better place to
01:05:16.000It would seem that there's something else that's moving between it and beneath it.
01:05:22.000That, 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.
01:05:50.000And 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.
01:06:00.000If there were a kind of awakening, if there were a sort of essentially the application of a non-materialist worldview, different solutions become available.
01:06:10.000But it seems like that The tiles of nation are placed on top of what's happening at depth.
01:06:19.000And because it's so emotionally evocative, what it seems like a more likely outcome is the escalation of these conflicts rather than diplomacy.
01:06:28.000Because as you said, those things have been sort of taken off the board.
01:06:31.000So 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.
01:06:46.000And 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.
01:06:55.000Well, you know, I'm a longtime newspaper reporter, so I don't sell hope.
01:07:27.000And 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.
01:07:40.000But 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.
01:07:59.000And we see that in terms of the money saturated elections in the United States.
01:08:04.000It's just a kind of institutionalized form of legalized bribery.
01:08:10.000And then the lobbyists, the corporate forces that elected these officials, write the legislation.
01:08:15.000I 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.
01:08:24.000Look, 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.
01:08:44.000You deindustrialize A poor urban neighborhood, a black body on the street is worth nothing to a corporation.
01:08:51.000If 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.
01:08:58.000Everything within the prison is privatized.
01:09:01.000The money transfer service, the phone service, the commissary, it's a multi-billion dollar industry.
01:09:06.000And 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.
01:09:15.000That's just a small example of the corporate stranglehold that has essentially destroyed American democracy.
01:09:23.000It's probably better the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls it a system of inverted totalitarianism.
01:09:30.000That 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.
01:09:39.000And their interests are not in our interests.
01:09:41.000And that is, I think, what you're getting at, Russell.