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. In this episode, Chris Hedges talks about how much of the US media s portrayal of the conflict we can take at face value, and how the media is completely out of sync with popular opinion. He also talks about why he thinks the current cycle that we re experiencing is the present decline of America, and why we should be worried about it. And he also explains why he doesn t care who they sell to, and what gives them tremendous power. And why he believes that we are in a self-destructive cycle of permanent war that no one can stop. And that we can t stop it. We hope that wherever you stand religiously, ideologically, and in terms of your own affiliations, you find it a valuable and informative conversation. And I hope you enjoy this conversation, wherever you re standing, and where you stand, you can take advantage of the wisdom available to you. You can find his work at chrishedges.substack.org. We'll post those links in the description for you. You can order his book Our Class. In this video, you're going to see the future. You'll be helped by our sponsor, Fyjer. You're gonna see the Future, You're Going to See the Future. -Fyjer? - And I d love to know what you're gonna do with me in the chat, I'm going to be helping me know the future, I'll be helping you do that by helping me do that in the future? - I'll post them on Rumble on Rumble, I want to help me do the best of my own podcast on the show on my own place on the social media site, I can help you do it in the podcast, and I'll let me know how you can help me help me out in the show, too say it out on Insta: and I'm gonna give me a shoutout on the other place on Instafeed? -- Thank you, FYJER, I love you,
00:02:31.000I hope you're having a wonderful time.
00:02:32.000I hope you feel free and liberated and ready to get educated because today on the show we have Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges.
00:02:39.000You 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.
00:02:52.000Chris Hedges, if you don't know, is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's been on the scene for a long time.
00:02:57.000In 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.
00:03:04.000And 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.
00:03:15.000We want to showcase a variety of views here and I'd love to know what you guys feel so let me know in the chat.
00:03:22.000We'll only be able to broadcast the first part on YouTube for free speech reasons.
00:03:26.000You know Chris Hedges used to work for Russia Today I feel.
00:03:29.000Uh, he spoke to Snowden over there and Slavoj Zizek about, you know, when Russia today were exorcised from the world, his show disappeared along with it.
00:03:39.000And I always think Chris Hedges is a good way of monitoring how the media and how our values have changed.
00:03:44.000Someone that was once regarded as a kind of, well, he won a Pulitzer Prize.
00:03:47.000He was a kind of darling of the media.
00:03:48.000He's now someone who, you know, you can only Experience on the periphery, i.e.
00:03:53.000independent media is now the only place you will hear dissenting voices.
00:03:57.000The first part of this is on YouTube, but you can get our interviews early, right?
00:04:02.000If you press the red button now and become an awakened wonder, then you can get our full conversations with, like, Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, Chris Hedges, Vandana Shiva, RFK, way before we stream them on Rumble, in some cases, because we, you know, for a variety of logistical reasons I don't want to come into, we sometimes book them in advance.
00:04:19.000Anyway, I hope you enjoy this conversation.
00:04:21.000It's absolutely fantastic and informative and difficult.
00:04:25.000And I hope that I took advantage of the wisdom available with Chris Hedges.
00:04:30.000And I hope that wherever you stand religiously, ideologically, and in terms of your own affiliations, you find it a valuable and informative conversation.
00:05:17.000Thank you for joining us, Chris Hedges.
00:05:27.000Chris, the global events that are defining the news narrative currently is an area in which you are an expert.
00:05:33.000You've recently been reporting for Al Jazeera in that region.
00:05:38.000I wonder how much of the US media's portrayal of the conflict we can take at face value.
00:05:45.000And then I wonder if you could take that into, say, if you... I was going to take this almost stumbling block by stumbling block.
00:05:52.000And 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?
00:06:03.000So 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.
00:06:19.000Well, it's a one sided version of events, Israeli.
00:06:25.000The media is completely out of sync with popular opinion.
00:06:31.000Most Americans, including 53% of Republicans want a ceasefire.
00:06:37.000I think that runs up to almost 80% among Democrats.
00:06:42.000Biden's base among younger voters has cratered over this.
00:06:47.000The Israelis, as usual, have made it extremely difficult for reporting to get out by cutting off the internet, cutting off cell phone service.
00:07:17.000And you have to put it in perspective, which I think a lot of people don't have.
00:07:21.000I was in Sarajevo for the New York Times covering the war when it was being shelled by three to four hundred shells a day, constant sniper fire.
00:07:31.000Now that was four to five dead a day and two dozen wounded a day.
00:07:35.000And I don't want to minimize what happened in Sarajevo.
00:07:38.000I mean, almost 30 years later I still have nightmares about it.
00:07:42.000But you have to juxtapose that with what's going on in Gaza, which is really saturation bombing.
00:07:47.000Unlike anything we've seen, I think you'd have to go back probably to the war in Vietnam, maybe Chechnya.
00:07:52.000I didn't cover Chechnya, but colleagues of mine did.
00:07:55.000And the Russians were also very ruthless there.
00:07:58.000But we're talking about, on many days, hundreds of dead, over 5,000 children.
00:08:18.000That's not to excuse the war crimes that Hamas carried out on October 7th.
00:08:22.000And I consider firing the rockets, which these rockets are homemade, manufactured, you know, don't actually can do much damage.
00:08:31.000There have been some Israeli fatalities, but firing rockets indiscriminately on a civilian population is also classified as a war crime.
00:08:41.000However, 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.
00:08:55.000Remember, 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 It is more akin to murder, slaughter, genocide.
00:09:12.000I 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.
00:09:23.000Over 700,000 Palestinians are now homeless.
00:09:27.000They have been forced to flee to the south, many being attacked as they flee, and then are attacked in the south, in Hanayouna, a city I know well.
00:09:38.000The 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.
00:09:54.000Now 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.
00:10:06.000So if you're watching us on YouTube, click the link in the description Right now to see the rest of this brilliant conversation.
00:10:12.000I recognize for many of you, some of the things we're discussing will be at odds with your own perspective.
00:10:17.000But here we like to welcome a variety of informed opinions that we may understand the world better.
00:10:23.000And 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.
00:10:30.000But 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.
00:10:51.000So 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.
00:11:03.000You can't negotiate with Hamas when their stated credo is the annihilation of the whole Jewish population.
00:11:09.000I've heard people say that even the chant from the river to the sea is a kind of a genocidal lyric.
00:11:16.000Certainly it's interesting because we're seeing a kind of an inversion of censorship.
00:11:20.000We're starting to see the left now again complain about being censored when they try to talk about pro-Palestinian narratives, stories, ideas.
00:11:31.000How do you cover The worst aspects of the, shall we say, the opposing view.
00:11:38.000And I would say that the October 7th attacks were unprecedented evil.
00:11:43.000People would say like, you know, baby murders, Holocaust survivors executed.
00:11:48.000You know, like gory and graphic detail, but that's a sort of an editorial choice that
00:11:56.000And explicitly and specifically, Hamas' sort of credo, how do you move beyond those kind
00:12:03.000of sticking points or stumbling blocks?
00:12:05.000Well, the fact is Israel has negotiated through the Egyptians with Hamas for years.
00:12:10.000Gaza is an open-air prison, in essence, a large concentration camp.
00:12:15.000Palestinians, 2.3 million, are unable to leave or enter.
00:12:20.000Many of the people who burst through those barriers on October 7th had never been outside of Gaza.
00:12:27.000And 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.
00:12:38.000Uh, that, uh, when you and I, and I covered, uh, 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, uh, to work, um, there's no huge unemployment among the youth, something like 50%.
00:15:22.000Because they have seized 60%, at least, of the West Bank through Jewish settlements and closed roads.
00:15:34.000of military zones and everything else.
00:15:36.000And that chant, from the river to the sea, I think is an expression, which I support now, of one person, one vote.
00:15:43.000That 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.
00:15:56.000I don't see how the chant, the river to the sea, is genocidal.
00:16:00.000A chant that is genocidal is death to Arabs.
00:16:03.000Which is what's chanted at soccer matches in Tel Aviv.
00:16:09.000Chris, 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
00:16:36.000Republicans as a movement that's further to the right and more, shall we say, populist than
00:16:41.000otherwise might happen without the support of these candidates.
00:16:44.000Is Hamas ever been the recipient of funding that's, put simply, Israeli?
00:16:51.000And also, when you're having these... this is probably more relevant than ever before.
00:16:58.000We exist in these spaces where it's very difficult to even get the opposing perspectives to come together.
00:17:07.000When 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
00:18:09.000I knew his wife, who was just killed a couple weeks ago by the Israelis.
00:18:13.000They came out of the Muslim Brotherhood and Fatah was a secular revolutionary movement.
00:18:19.000And 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
00:18:33.000the mass arrest. Israel occupied Gaza at the time. All the focus was on Fatah.
00:18:38.000Bibi Netanyahu followed this strategy where he allowed Qatar, and I was just in Qatar,
00:18:45.000to fund Hamas because he saw those divisions within the Palestinian diaspora, in the Palestinian
00:18:56.000community useful in terms of splintering powers.
00:19:00.000So yes, Hamas, this was a strategy that of course has failed miserably, but the Palestinian Authority really functions as a colonial police force.
00:19:12.000Completely under the control of Israel.
00:19:14.000It has very little popular support, including in the West Bank.
00:19:18.000And this notion that the Palestinian Authority is somehow going to administer Gaza is farcical.
00:19:26.000You know, initially, the United States reached out to Egypt to see that after this devastation, would Egyptian security forces go in and occupy Gaza?
00:19:41.000It 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.
00:19:50.000And then of course ISIS and Al Qaeda and all these groups just crossed the border into
00:19:54.000Syria and we ended up bombing the very people we armed.
00:19:58.000So it's very similar to that terrible, terrible miscalculation.
00:20:03.000So yes, Israel from the beginning nurtured, fostered Hamas and Netanyahu in particular.
00:20:11.000There's statements by Netanyahu talking about the support for Hamas being an effective tool
00:20:32.000I reported on them for the New York Times.
00:20:36.000The Oslo Accords were driven by Yitzhak Rabin.
00:20:43.000Yitzhak 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.
00:21:26.000At one point, Netanyahu walked in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.
00:21:31.000And then, of course, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist and a follower of Netanyahu.
00:21:37.000And Leah Rabin, Rabin's widow, to the day she died, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for the murder of her husband.
00:21:46.000So the whole Netanyahu is a creation of this right wing, and I encourage all of your viewers to watch the lobby.
00:21:54.000Al 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.
00:22:06.000That 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.
00:22:17.000has put it up. But you see the power of the lobby. I mean, they're just putting $100 million,
00:22:23.000they just announced Apex putting $100 million to defeat AOC and the other, Ilhan Omar and the other
00:22:31.000members who have called for a ceasefire. They have tremendous reach. So Rabin was detested and hated
00:22:40.000because of Oslo. But Oslo was, I think Rabin's, there was a good and a bad side to Rabin.
00:22:50.000The good side was that he realized that the occupation was poisoning and destroying his country, and it had to end.
00:22:56.000The 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.
00:23:15.000Arafat, for all his quirks, and he had many of them, nevertheless drew a line.
00:23:22.000He 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.
00:23:31.000I think 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.
00:23:42.000The Oslo Accords were never viable in terms of establishing an actual independent Palestinian state, because remember, Israel controlled the borders.
00:23:51.000And 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.
00:24:03.000And they could shut everything down in an instant.
00:24:06.000Including, as they have done now, with this horrific assault On Gaza, the water supply, the electricity, the power plants, along, of course, with food.
00:24:20.000I mean, people are seeing serious cases of malnutrition.
00:24:25.000There's no sanitation anymore in Gaza.
00:24:27.000Many people have been pushed to the south.
00:24:31.000Most of the north, 1.1 million Palestinians.
00:24:34.000And we must remember Gaza is very tiny.
00:24:36.000It's only 20 miles long and five miles wide.
00:24:38.000It's one of the most densely packed 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.
00:25:02.000It'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 even to use the term acts of terror as being hysterical and sort of wild and there are evident and clear discrepancies.
00:25:26.000It's often argued that this issue is Undergirded by anti-semitism, even with 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 that have taken place there in the last couple of decades or whatever, there is not the same appetite to target the perpetrators of those kind of acts of violence.
00:25:55.000Where Is antisemitism a relevant framing for issues in this region, and where is it not relevant?
00:26:08.000It'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.
00:26:21.000Israel is a state, and I will just throw in that I graduated from Harvard Divinity School.
00:26:27.000I spent a lot of time reading the Hebrew Bible.
00:26:31.000And the idea that the Israeli state represents the best of Jewish theology, of the Torah, of the prophets.
00:26:39.000I 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 the defense of the oppressed.
00:26:54.000And of course, any state is about the projection of power.
00:26:59.000So just as I would not consider Israel to be an expression of Judaism.
00:27:05.000I don't consider Saudi Arabia to be an expression of Islam.
00:27:11.000Theocratic states use, misuse religion to sacralize temporal power.
00:27:17.000We are now on the cusp of an election soon within a year in the United States.
00:27:23.000Trump has filled, he doesn't have any ideology of his own, but he's filled his ideological void with The Christian fascism.
00:28:01.000And Israel works very, very hard to erase that dividing line.
00:28:05.000So any criticism of Israel, any criticism of its policies, especially towards the Palestinians, then is equated with anti-Semitism.
00:28:16.000And 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.
00:28:27.000University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, where I went to school.
00:28:30.000And 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.
00:30:41.000So 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.
00:30:51.000The Iraq war being at the top of the list.
00:30:54.000There's been heavy lobbying by Netanyahu to go to war with Iran.
00:31:43.000has deployed aircraft carriers and fleets in the Persian Gulf, which is a threat to Iran, and they have a fleet in the Mediterranean, which is a threat to Hezbollah, which is the Iranian proxy.
00:31:57.000So in many ways, Netanyahu and the Israeli government has traditionally been able to manipulate the United States into doing It's dirty work, which are not in the interests of the United States.
00:32:15.000In 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, excuse me, is a creature of Iran.
00:32:40.000And 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 opened up a second front.
00:32:54.000Up until now, there have been, you know, I would characterize them as relatively minor border clashes.
00:33:18.000So things can go horribly, horribly wrong.
00:33:21.000In terms of Israel's power within the international community, that comes through its arms sales.
00:33:27.000So Israel sells weapons as the 10th largest Weapons dealer in the planet.
00:33:35.000I think $12.5 billion in sales last year, and it sells to the most retrograde governments in the world.
00:33:44.000It was a fervent supporter of the apartheid regime in South Africa when I covered the war in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s.
00:33:52.000Israel was supplying weapons and napalm to the Salvadoran military and to Rios Montt.
00:33:59.000It was carrying out genocidal Campaigns on the highlands in Guatemala, the genocide in Rwanda, most of the fighters were carrying Israeli weapons, and Nagorno-Karabakh, with that ethnic cleansing of 80% of ethnic Armenians, they were supplied with Israeli weapons.
00:34:30.000Because 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, sign on for this genocide because that's a kind of secretive world, but a powerful one.
00:34:57.000And remember, many of the, like the Pegasus spyware that was used to track my friend Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who went into the consulate or the embassy in Ankara and was cut up, I mean, we haven't found his body, by the Saudi regime.
00:35:21.000Israel uses the Palestinians as a laboratory to test its weapons.
00:35:26.000They will actually, when they sell these surveillance facilities, drones, they're one of the biggest
00:35:33.000producers of drones, militarized drones.
00:35:36.000When they sell these weapons abroad, they call them, quote unquote, battle tested because
00:35:41.000they've been used against the Palestinians.
00:35:44.000Israel has face recognition software where every single Palestinian, and they did not,
00:35:51.000of course, give their consent, is within that system, is immediately able to be identified.
00:35:57.000This kind of surveillance technology is sold around the globe and used against dissidents.
00:36:05.000It's used against anybody that any state, including the most despotic states, see as
00:36:12.000a threat, including, of course, journalists.
00:36:16.000It 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.
00:36:29.000But even in terms of weapon sales, my assumption would be that the United States are far more profligate and successful in that industry.
00:36:40.000So 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.
00:37:02.000If so, what does that suggest about a broader global agenda?
00:37:06.000Because 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.
00:37:14.000And my sort of broad, albeit somewhat shallow, certainly compared to yours, assumption or assessment would be that United States have an appetite for a unipolar hegemony to continue and that the war between Ukraine and Russia is a way of draining Russia, the potential South Seas wars have 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.
00:37:49.000But in your response to the last question, it seems to me that you're suggesting that it is Israel that are authoring current events at least.
00:38:04.000Yes, but let me first address the issue of the arms industry.
00:38:06.000You're right that the American arms industry is larger, but the American weapons and surveillance technology industry is completely integrated with Israel.
00:38:21.000Remember, the intelligence services are completely integrated.
00:38:26.000So 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.
00:38:50.000In terms of the American political scene, yes, you cannot defy the power of the Israel lobby.
00:38:58.000And 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, and Netanyahu got himself invited to the U.S.
00:39:15.000Congress, bypassing the White House, to denounce the Iran nuclear deal and attempt to sabotage it, essentially setting himself up as an antagonistic to the Obama
00:42:58.000And the atrocity, you know, I suppose there's an attempt to normalize actions.
00:43:05.000I 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.
00:43:28.000How has it had such an important and divisive cultural impact, where people that are not directly involved in the conflict are taking strong positions?
00:43:37.000That spaces, cultural spaces I mean, that were becoming unified, particularly on the so-called libertarian right, are now themselves A kind of a 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.
00:43:58.000What is it in particular about Israel that you're saying?
00:44:02.000Because when you say stuff like the arms industry or whatever, that's sort of a recognisable template.
00:44:07.000Is 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.
00:44:33.000And that's what we saw in South Africa.
00:44:36.000That's what we saw in Kenya under the Mau Mau rebellion.
00:44:42.000Israel 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.
00:44:58.000That's really at the engine of what is driving this.
00:45:02.000So settler colonial projects from their inception are founded on lies because they have stolen the land.
00:45:13.000of an indigenous people and those indigenous people mount resistance to fight back.
00:45:19.000So Israel follows that template and I think passions are so high because both sides recognize that this is an existential question.
00:45:32.000If 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.
00:45:47.000If you are Palestinian, and remember from the 7th century until 1948, the land of historic Palestine was Muslim.
00:45:58.000And if your family has lived in Haifa for generations, you're barred entry.
00:46:03.000So I think the way to understand what's happening in Israel is to look at settler colonial projects of the past.
00:46:13.000And 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.
00:46:27.000That's what settler colonial projects do.
00:46:31.000But 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.
00:46:42.000It also happened with the Patagonians in the south of Argentina, but they were all wiped out.
00:46:47.000And 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 in Egypt, where they will never return, and they will then turn on the West Bank.
00:47:06.000You 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 kind of, they have euphemisms like transfer, but they have endorsed this kind of ethnic cleansing for a long time.
00:47:23.000They have their roots in the radical rabbi Meir Kahane, who I knew and covered, who was later assassinated.
00:47:30.000The difference was that when I was in writing covering Israel, He was so unpalatable, Kahane.
00:47:38.000He was a racist and called for the eradication of Palestinians.
00:47:42.000His party, the Koch party, was banned in 1994.
00:47:52.000When they make these statements and they come out constantly that the Palestinians, Netanyahu called them the new Nazis.
00:48:00.000There was this song that's been circulating with Israeli schoolchildren singing Uh, you know, about a song lauding the annihilation of the Palestinian people is, you know, something that the Hitler youth would have sung about Jews.
00:48:16.000And I think that when we see Israel as a typical settler colonial project, then we understand its behavior because at the end, uh, they, uh, seek to carry out really genocide, massive amounts of force to eradicate the problem.
00:48:48.000So I think that's the best way to understand Israel.
00:48:51.000Of course, you do have the aspect of the Holocaust, which Israel, of course, has weaponized the Holocaust.
00:49:00.000But the Palestinians did not carry out the Holocaust.
00:49:02.000They had nothing to do with the I see.
00:49:09.000So 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.
00:49:20.000But perhaps unique to this is, yes, 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
00:49:58.000It's a highly disputed and contentious region because of the requirement for control over resources there.
00:50:05.000So 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 in a way, transcendent of something as, what do I want to
00:50:27.000say, almost, I want to say, atavistic as national and religious interests? No, I don't think the
00:50:37.000instability is beneficial because a war with Iran would be catastrophic.
00:50:45.000It would be viewed throughout the region as a religious war.
00:51:02.000And I think the United States is aware of that.
00:51:04.000They 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.
00:51:19.000And 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.
00:51:31.000What happens in late empire, they're losing their influence, economic, political, that hegemony is breaking apart.
00:51:38.000And in late empire, this is true for all empires, they seek to regain that hegemony through
00:51:44.000military force, which plunges them into one military debacle after another, which is really
00:51:50.000the history of the United States going all the way back to Vietnam.
00:51:54.000I mean, this support for the wholesale slaughter in Gaza, it's going to take at least a decade
00:52:02.000for the United States to repair its relations with the Muslim world.
00:52:48.000Because when you give that message to the rest of the world, then if their assumption, their quite legitimate assumption, Is that if it doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to us.
00:53:00.000And what, you know, the lifeblood of resistance movements, radical movements, movements like Hamas are martyrs.
00:53:36.000And this language of violence, this quid pro quo, state terrorism, which spawns militant terrorism, this is a death spiral.
00:53:44.000And 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, you can't keep brutalizing these people.
00:53:55.000This is not a policy that is anyway going to contribute to stability or peace.
00:54:19.000And they have tried over and over and over.
00:54:21.000In fact, it was after The Bush election, after George W. Bush, at the end of his term, when he was, so there was a dead period when he was a lame duck between November and January, Israel pushed very, very hard for a war.
00:54:40.000And in the Bush administration and the Pentagon refused.
00:54:44.000But this has long been on the agenda of Netanyahu.
00:54:47.000And that is very, because Iran has the possibility to do tremendous damage to Israel.
00:54:52.000And remember, Israel is a nuclear power.
00:54:57.000I'm surprised that you see, again, Israel as the senior partner.
00:55:01.000I'm just learning here, I'm here to learn.
00:55:05.000Because 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.
00:55:38.000And it seems to me that that remains the role of Britain on the world stage.
00:55:43.000And 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.
00:56:06.000So, 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
00:56:20.000and obvious power even if as you say and I'm certainly not queering it
00:56:23.000America is an empire in decline and also I'm sort of curious as what as
00:56:28.000to what follows that so yeah I do do do
00:56:33.000Are you saying that this cycle that we're experiencing is the sort of present decline of America?
00:56:41.000And I wonder how you see that being brought about and how immediate you imagine it being.
00:56:48.000So first of all, when you talk about Israel, we have to go back to groups like AIPAC.
00:56:54.000These are, you know, very right wing neocons.
00:56:58.000And they share a common ideology with the neocons in the United States, people like Blinken and others.
00:57:08.000And you know, Biden actually called for the invasion of Iraq five years before the war.
00:57:12.000Biden, his entire political career, he has been a puppet to these powers.
00:57:17.000He was one of the primary forces that got us into Iraq.
00:57:22.000I don't think Biden's very limited intellectually, and recently probably even more limited intellectually.
00:57:28.000But nevertheless, he has been a servant to these forces.
00:57:31.000So Israel has essentially wedded itself to the most retrograde right-wing forces in the
00:57:40.000When Rabin was inaugurated as prime minister, he didn't invite AIPAC to his inauguration
00:57:45.000because he saw the Zionist or the Israel lobby in the United States as a political movement
00:57:51.000which was deeply antagonistic to himself.
00:57:55.000So 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.
00:58:09.000If 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.
00:58:20.000In 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.
00:59:00.000So 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.
00:59:13.000And let's also, just as a caveat, a lot of these police forces in places like Ferguson were trained by Israelis.
00:59:20.000That'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.
00:59:31.000And that's, of course, taken place in the United States.
00:59:35.000It 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.
00:59:46.000Once 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.
01:01:03.000When 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.
01:01:23.000It seems that we're similarly 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
01:01:43.000It becomes pretty clear whose agenda is directing these events.
01:01:47.000And 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.
01:01:56.000It seems sometimes, Chris, that you're referring to ulterior trends that only become visible if you have a geopolitical lens that can be applied, i.e.
01:02:07.000when you talk about the likelihood of the dollar being displaced, how that would lead to a true collapse.
01:02:13.000And 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.
01:02:26.000I 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 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
01:02:54.000Isn't that what is determining these wide-scale global conflicts, of which, you know, what's happening in Israel is but one.
01:03:03.000We've mentioned Ukraine, we're seeing the escalation in the South Seas and stuff.
01:03:19.000And that, of course, is very dangerous as well.
01:03:23.000So, 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.
01:03:32.000I mean, that is essentially exemplified by the death of diplomacy.
01:03:38.000I mean, here we have a wholesale slaughter, and the United States is blocking vetoing resolutions in the UN for a ceasefire.
01:03:53.000So, in terms of, I think we have to look at that, 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.
01:04:15.000That Israel does not function as a separate entity.
01:05:36.000I mean, a very similar playbook is now taking place in Gaza.
01:05:39.000I 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.
01:05:51.000They'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.
01:06:01.000But now they're targeting... The South Hana Unas is right on the border with Egypt.
01:06:29.000I mean, this whole thing of Hamas command centers, they're not bombing these, destroying these hospitals because of Hamas command centers.
01:06:37.000They're destroying them because they want no infrastructure, and in particular, a health infrastructure to exist.
01:06:43.000And almost all the hospitals, even the few of their 35 hospitals, Israel shut down at least 21.
01:06:49.000Of the ones that remain, they don't have antibiotics, they don't have oxygen.
01:06:54.000What we're watching in real time is an act of genocide.
01:06:59.000And the United States has signed on for that project.
01:07:03.000And 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.
01:07:20.000Not 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
01:07:48.000ultimately the drivers of what actions take place. That the agenda is set by those interests,
01:07:55.000whether they are military-industrial complex, whether they're like... What is it that seems to...
01:08:00.000It feels like there's a ghost, a phantom that moves through the observable... Like we
01:08:06.000understand things in terms of territory and flags and religious ideology and sometimes even
01:08:12.000economics, but it seems that there is...
01:08:15.000Like you would obviously a far better place to answer this question than I am.
01:08:20.000It would seem that there's something else that's moving between it and beneath it.
01:08:28.000It's possible to envisage 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 there is an end to, to use your term, apartheid.
01:08:50.000That 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, that 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.
01:09:15.000But it seems like that The tiles of nation are placed on top of what's happening at depth.
01:09:24.000And because it's so emotionally evocative, what it seems like a more likely outcome is the escalation of these conflicts rather than diplomacy.
01:09:33.000Because as you said, those things have been taken off the board.
01:09:36.000So do you feel that, you know, as this, 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.
01:09:51.000And I wonder if you ever glimpsed, Chris, if it's even possible for you to feel any kind of optimism when all of this seems so desperate.
01:10:00.000Well, you know, I'm a longtime newspaper reporter, so I don't sell hope.
01:10:32.000And 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.
01:10:45.000But 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 if either atrophied or died, and been captured by oligarchic power.
01:11:04.000And we see that in terms of the money-saturated elections in the United States.
01:11:09.000It's just a kind of institutionalized form of legalized bribery.
01:11:15.000And then the lobbyists, the corporate forces that elected these officials, write the legislation.
01:11:21.000In the prison I was teaching, and I teach through a college degree program through Rutgers University.
01:11:28.000Look, 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.
01:11:49.000You de-industrialize A poor urban neighborhood, a black body on the street is worth nothing to a corporation.
01:11:56.000If 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.
01:12:03.000Everything within the prison is privatized.
01:12:06.000The money transfer service, the phone service, the commissary, it's a multi-billion dollar industry.
01:12:11.000And 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.
01:12:20.000That's just a small example of the corporate stranglehold that has essentially destroyed American democracy.
01:12:28.000We live, it's probably better, the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls it a system of inverted totalitarianism.
01:12:35.000That 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.
01:12:44.000And their interests are not in our interests.
01:12:46.000And that is, I think, what you're getting at, Russell.