Stay Free - Russel Brand - Who’s REALLY Profiting From Israel-Palestine EXPOSED | Chris Hedges - STAY FREE #276

00:00:00.000 you you

00:01:51.000 you brought to you by Fyjer 1.00

00:02:11.000 in this video, you're going to see the future Oh, oh.

00:02:20.000 Oh In this video, you're going to see the future.

00:02:29.000 Hello there you Awakening Wonders.

00:02:31.000 I hope you're having a wonderful time.

00:02:32.000 I hope you feel free and liberated and ready to get educated because today on the show we have Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges.

00:02:39.000 You can find his work at chrishedges.substack.com and you can order his book Our Class We'll post those links in the description for you.

00:02:52.000 Chris Hedges, if you don't know, is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's been on the scene for a long time.

00:02:57.000 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.

00:03:04.000 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.

00:03:15.000 We 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.

00:03:22.000 We'll only be able to broadcast the first part on YouTube for free speech reasons.

00:03:26.000 You know Chris Hedges used to work for Russia Today I feel.

00:03:29.000 Uh, 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.

00:03:39.000 And I always think Chris Hedges is a good way of monitoring how the media and how our values have changed.

00:03:44.000 Someone that was once regarded as a kind of, well, he won a Pulitzer Prize.

00:03:47.000 He was a kind of darling of the media.

00:03:48.000 He's now someone who, you know, you can only Experience on the periphery, i.e.

00:03:53.000 independent media is now the only place you will hear dissenting voices.

00:03:57.000 The first part of this is on YouTube, but you can get our interviews early, right?

00:04:02.000 If 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.

00:04:19.000 Anyway, I hope you enjoy this conversation.

00:04:21.000 It's absolutely fantastic and informative and difficult.

00:04:25.000 And I hope that I took advantage of the wisdom available with Chris Hedges.

00:04:30.000 And I hope that wherever you stand religiously, ideologically, and in terms of your own affiliations, you find it a valuable and informative conversation.

00:04:37.000 But let me know in the chat.

00:04:40.000 I wonder how much of the US media's portrayal of the conflict we can take at face value.

00:04:46.000 The media is completely out of sync with popular opinion.

00:04:52.000 Today on the show we have Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges.

00:04:56.000 They don't care who they sell to. 0.94

00:04:58.000 That gives them tremendous power.

00:05:00.000 You can't defy that.

00:05:02.000 Are you saying that this cycle that we're experiencing is the present decline of America?

00:05:07.000 It's military adventurism.

00:05:09.000 It's essentially a military beyond control.

00:05:11.000 We are in this horribly self-destructive cycle of permanent war.

00:05:16.000 Nobody can stop it.

00:05:17.000 Thank you for joining us, Chris Hedges.

00:05:27.000 Chris, the global events that are defining the news narrative currently is an area in which you are an expert.

00:05:33.000 You've recently been reporting for Al Jazeera in that region.

00:05:38.000 I wonder how much of the US media's portrayal of the conflict we can take at face value.

00:05:45.000 And then I wonder if you could take that into, say, if you... I was going to take this almost stumbling block by stumbling block.

00:05:52.000 And the first one that comes to mind is how often at the forefront of reporting people say, how can you ever negotiate with Hamas, whose stated agenda is the annihilation of the Jewish people?

00:06:03.000 So if we could just start with the sort of general overview of how much of the US media's coverage we can trust and lead to that sort of certainly one of the points that I see mostly utilised to legitimise a unique stance in this conflict.

00:06:19.000 Well, it's a one sided version of events, Israeli. 0.69

00:06:25.000 The media is completely out of sync with popular opinion.

00:06:31.000 Most Americans, including 53% of Republicans want a ceasefire.

00:06:37.000 I think that runs up to almost 80% among Democrats.

00:06:42.000 Biden's base among younger voters has cratered over this.

00:06:47.000 The Israelis, as usual, have made it extremely difficult for reporting to get out by cutting off the internet, cutting off cell phone service. 1.00

00:06:56.000 Very courageous Palestinian journalists.

00:06:59.000 43 of whom have been killed, and I can assure you, having spent seven years covering Gaza

00:07:05.000 and the Israel-Palestine conflict, many of those were targeted, including the family,

00:07:09.000 the entire family of the Al Jazeera correspondent, because they don't want what's happening getting

00:07:16.000 out.

00:07:17.000 And you have to put it in perspective, which I think a lot of people don't have.

00:07:21.000 I 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.

00:07:31.000 Now that was four to five dead a day and two dozen wounded a day.

00:07:35.000 And I don't want to minimize what happened in Sarajevo.

00:07:38.000 I mean, almost 30 years later I still have nightmares about it.

00:07:42.000 But you have to juxtapose that with what's going on in Gaza, which is really saturation bombing.

00:07:47.000 Unlike anything we've seen, I think you'd have to go back probably to the war in Vietnam, maybe Chechnya.

00:07:52.000 I didn't cover Chechnya, but colleagues of mine did.

00:07:55.000 And the Russians were also very ruthless there. 0.80

00:07:58.000 But we're talking about, on many days, hundreds of dead, over 5,000 children.

00:08:04.000 So the scale of the attack.

00:08:06.000 And I think that's not transmitted.

00:08:10.000 To the American public and most of the rest of the public.

00:08:13.000 Hamas is demonized.

00:08:15.000 Hamas is a resistance organization. 0.75

00:08:18.000 That's not to excuse the war crimes that Hamas carried out on October 7th. 0.63

00:08:22.000 And I consider firing the rockets, which these rockets are homemade, manufactured, you know, don't actually can do much damage.

00:08:31.000 There have been some Israeli fatalities, but firing rockets indiscriminately on a civilian population is also classified as a war crime.

00:08:41.000 However, we have to then look at the, Israel calls it mowing the lawn, that is using its attack aircraft, its heavy artillery, its naval guns, its tanks to shell a largely defenseless population.

00:08:55.000 Remember, the Palestinians do not have an army, they do not have a navy, they do not have mechanized units, they don't have tank brigades, they don't have an air force, and you can't call this a It is more akin to murder, slaughter, genocide. 0.70

00:09:12.000 I don't think the word genocide is inappropriate, given the fact that Israel has cut off water, food, fuel, electricity, and has obliterated most of northern Gaza.

00:09:23.000 Over 700,000 Palestinians are now homeless.

00:09:27.000 They 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.

00:09:38.000 The scale is not being appropriately covered in terms of the press, and of course it's this cartoonish vision of good and evil, black and white, democracy versus terrorism, all of which is fatuous and untrue.

00:09:54.000 Now before the next question, Chris, we do have to leave YouTube for free speech reasons, which you will be aware of having previously been on Russia Today, which has now been banned from the internet in many regions.

00:10:06.000 So if you're watching us on YouTube, click the link in the description Right now to see the rest of this brilliant conversation.

00:10:12.000 I recognize for many of you, some of the things we're discussing will be at odds with your own perspective.

00:10:17.000 But here we like to welcome a variety of informed opinions that we may understand the world better.

00:10:23.000 And I will offer you one further time, if you are directly involved or ideologically involved in this conflict, I have complete respect for your views.

00:10:30.000 But my strongest view of all, above all others, is that unless we find a way to unite with one another, We will have no chance at preventing, arresting, or stopping the march of global elites to dominate, control, and destroy the world that we hold so sacred.

00:10:48.000 See you over on Rumble in a second.

00:10:49.000 Click the link in the description.

00:10:51.000 So Chris, I want to ask you, because I've had people on the show that have, you know, taken the direct contrary position about, here are some of the points that, you know, that we will continually hear.

00:11:03.000 You can't negotiate with Hamas when their stated credo is the annihilation of the whole Jewish population.

00:11:09.000 I've heard people say that even the chant from the river to the sea is a kind of a genocidal lyric.

00:11:16.000 Certainly it's interesting because we're seeing a kind of an inversion of censorship.

00:11:20.000 We're starting to see the left now again complain about being censored when they try to talk about pro-Palestinian narratives, stories, ideas.

00:11:31.000 How do you cover The worst aspects of the, shall we say, the opposing view.

00:11:38.000 And I would say that the October 7th attacks were unprecedented evil.

00:11:43.000 People would say like, you know, baby murders, Holocaust survivors executed.

00:11:48.000 You know, like gory and graphic detail, but that's a sort of an editorial choice that

00:11:52.000 people can make in such cases.

00:11:56.000 And explicitly and specifically, Hamas' sort of credo, how do you move beyond those kind

00:12:03.000 of sticking points or stumbling blocks?

00:12:05.000 Well, the fact is Israel has negotiated through the Egyptians with Hamas for years. 0.57

00:12:10.000 Gaza is an open-air prison, in essence, a large concentration camp.

00:12:15.000 Palestinians, 2.3 million, are unable to leave or enter.

00:12:20.000 Many of the people who burst through those barriers on October 7th had never been outside of Gaza.

00:12:27.000 And while I agree that there were egregious atrocities and war crimes that were committed against the Israelis, again, one has to put it into context.

00:12:38.000 Uh, 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%.

00:12:56.000 Most are, uh, dependent.

00:12:58.000 Most, uh, Palestinians in Gaza are dependent on UNRWA, on UN aid.

00:13:03.000 Uh, when you use, uh, and you take the march of return, they use snipers and Shells to kill non-violent demonstrators.

00:13:12.000 This engenders, of course, a very understandable rage.

00:13:16.000 Now, to understand is not to condone, and I'm not condoning.

00:13:20.000 But if you look at rebellions, look at Nat Turner, when the slave revolt.

00:13:24.000 Nat Turner and his band, during the antebellum South, they killed every white that they saw.

00:13:32.000 Go back and look at the Haitian uprising against the French in Saint-Domingue.

00:13:38.000 The French planners were brutally tortured and killed, as C.L.R.

00:13:44.000 James documents in his great book, Black Jacobins.

00:13:48.000 That is an understandable rage on the part of the oppressed.

00:13:52.000 That's what happens when you treat people with that kind of barbarity, the barbarity that is visited upon them they visit on others.

00:14:00.000 And again, I'm not condoning it, but I think we have to put it in context and understand it.

00:14:05.000 So the line that Hamas has within its charter, the destruction of Israel, this is true. 1.00

00:14:12.000 However, it is belied by the fact that for many, many years, there have been direct negotiations

00:14:19.000 or indirect negotiations through Egypt with the Israelis on ceasefires

00:14:24.000 and all sorts of other issues.

00:14:25.000 And of course, there were negotiations through Qatar for the expected release of the hostages.

00:14:33.000 So it's just not true.

00:14:34.000 And Hamas is a resistance organization.

00:14:39.000 It functions the way resistance organizations in the past have functioned.

00:14:45.000 It replicates the kinds of activities, including the violence of past.

00:14:53.000 I mean, even in the French Revolution, the heads of aristocrats were put on pikes and carried through the streets of Paris.

00:14:59.000 There's a very, and I covered revolutions, a very dark side to once that violence is unleashed.

00:15:05.000 And that rage is given expression through violence.

00:15:09.000 But again, I think when we talk about the press, there's no context at all.

00:15:14.000 In terms of the chant, the river to the sea, well, the Israelis have decided to make a two-state solution impossible. 0.84

00:15:21.000 Why?

00:15:22.000 Because they have seized 60%, at least, of the West Bank through Jewish settlements and closed roads. 0.99

00:15:34.000 of military zones and everything else.

00:15:36.000 And that chant, from the river to the sea, I think is an expression, which I support now, of one person, one vote.

00:15:43.000 That the only way out of this morass, 75 years of it, is a democracy and the abolition of a theocratic state, whether that's Jewish or Muslim or anything else. 0.82

00:15:56.000 I don't see how the chant, the river to the sea, is genocidal. 0.96

00:16:00.000 A chant that is genocidal is death to Arabs.

00:16:03.000 Which is what's chanted at soccer matches in Tel Aviv.

00:16:09.000 Chris, is it true that Hamas have been historically funded in ways that are surprising and unusual in much the same way, although with sort of obviously greater consequence, that the Democrats had kind of, what did they call it, like pied piper strategies to support Republican candidates that they would prefer to face or to bias the public perception of the

00:16:36.000 Republicans as a movement that's further to the right and more, shall we say, populist than

00:16:41.000 otherwise might happen without the support of these candidates.

00:16:44.000 Is Hamas ever been the recipient of funding that's, put simply, Israeli?

00:16:51.000 And also, when you're having these... this is probably more relevant than ever before.

00:16:58.000 We exist in these spaces where it's very difficult to even get the opposing perspectives to come together.

00:17:07.000 When I was most recently having a conversation with someone who had the contrary view to you, they were saying there have been numerous attempts to negotiate Yasser Arafat If I had an opportunity for a deal, the two-state solution

00:17:19.000 has been suggested many times.

00:17:20.000 So on one hand, I'd like to say, is part of Hamas's origin being, has Hamas been inflated

00:17:26.000 or funded in ways that were tactical and strategic in a deliberate attempt to destabilize that

00:17:34.000 region?

00:17:35.000 That's one part of my question.

00:17:36.000 And the other part of my question is, if you were taking the sort of perspective of your

00:17:41.000 opponent, would you highlight potential deals that have been offered previously that have

00:17:45.000 not been taken up by, I don't know, the PLO or former incarnations of the current resistance

00:17:51.000 movement, to use your phrase?

00:17:53.000 So Hamas was from the beginning. 0.85

00:17:53.000 Right. 0.85

00:17:56.000 So Hamas came out of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

00:17:59.000 It is a creation And the first leaders of Hamas. 0.97

00:18:03.000 I knew Rantisi, one of the heads of Hamas, until the Israelis assassinated him.

00:18:08.000 I used to have dinner at his home.

00:18:09.000 I knew his wife, who was just killed a couple weeks ago by the Israelis.

00:18:13.000 They came out of the Muslim Brotherhood and Fatah was a secular revolutionary movement.

00:18:19.000 And so when I started covering Gaza in the late 1980s, it was noticeable that the Hamas militant group, which was very small, was not swept up in

00:18:33.000 the mass arrest. Israel occupied Gaza at the time. All the focus was on Fatah.

00:18:38.000 Bibi Netanyahu followed this strategy where he allowed Qatar, and I was just in Qatar,

00:18:45.000 to fund Hamas because he saw those divisions within the Palestinian diaspora, in the Palestinian

00:18:56.000 community useful in terms of splintering powers.

00:19:00.000 So yes, Hamas, this was a strategy that of course has failed miserably, but the Palestinian Authority really functions as a colonial police force. 0.87

00:19:12.000 Completely under the control of Israel. 0.53

00:19:14.000 It has very little popular support, including in the West Bank.

00:19:18.000 And this notion that the Palestinian Authority is somehow going to administer Gaza is farcical.

00:19:26.000 You know, initially, the United States reached out to Egypt to see that after this devastation, would Egyptian security forces go in and occupy Gaza?

00:19:36.000 Egypt obviously refused.

00:19:38.000 So yes, this was a misguided policy.

00:19:41.000 It reminds me of what happened in Syria when the White House got this ridiculous idea that they were going to fund, quote unquote, moderate rebels.

00:19:50.000 And then of course ISIS and Al Qaeda and all these groups just crossed the border into

00:19:54.000 Syria and we ended up bombing the very people we armed. 0.60

00:19:58.000 So it's very similar to that terrible, terrible miscalculation.

00:20:03.000 So yes, Israel from the beginning nurtured, fostered Hamas and Netanyahu in particular. 0.74

00:20:11.000 There's statements by Netanyahu talking about the support for Hamas being an effective tool

00:20:18.000 to fracture Palestinian power.

00:20:23.000 What about the deals thing that I mentioned in the mix with that question?

00:20:27.000 Oh, Oslo.

00:20:28.000 Look, the Oslo Accords...

00:20:30.000 I covered the Oslo Accords.

00:20:32.000 I reported on them for the New York Times.

00:20:36.000 The Oslo Accords were driven by Yitzhak Rabin.

00:20:43.000 Yitzhak Rabin, because of the Oslo Accords, was hated by the Israeli right, in particular AIPAC and the Zionist or Israel lobby in the United States when he was running against Bibi Netanyahu.

00:20:57.000 I covered that election.

00:21:00.000 They pumped tons of money into the Netanyahu campaign.

00:21:03.000 Netanyahu is a creation of the right-wing Zionist movements.

00:21:07.000 Remember he speaks fluent English.

00:21:09.000 He went to MIT and lived outside of Philadelphia.

00:21:14.000 So Rabin was detested and at the Netanyahu rallies, and I was there, Rabin was dressed in an effigy in a Nazi uniform and burned.

00:21:25.000 People chanted death to Rabin.

00:21:26.000 At one point, Netanyahu walked in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.

00:21:31.000 And then, of course, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist and a follower of Netanyahu. 0.79

00:21:37.000 And Leah Rabin, Rabin's widow, to the day she died, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for the murder of her husband.

00:21:46.000 So the whole Netanyahu is a creation of this right wing, and I encourage all of your viewers to watch the lobby. 0.80

00:21:54.000 Al Jazeera did an undercover, sent a very courageous kid inside the lobby with a hidden camera, the Zionist or the Israel lobby, both in the UK.

00:22:06.000 That was broadcast on Al Jazeera, and then they did another one in the United States, and Israel put enough pressure on Al Jazeera so that it wasn't broadcast, but you can watch pirated copies on Electronic Intifada, I think.

00:22:17.000 has put it up. But you see the power of the lobby. I mean, they're just putting $100 million,

00:22:23.000 they just announced Apex putting $100 million to defeat AOC and the other, Ilhan Omar and the other

00:22:31.000 members who have called for a ceasefire. They have tremendous reach. So Rabin was detested and hated

00:22:40.000 because of Oslo. But Oslo was, I think Rabin's, there was a good and a bad side to Rabin.

00:22:50.000 The good side was that he realized that the occupation was poisoning and destroying his country, and it had to end. 0.64

00:22:56.000 The bad side is that he thought that by withdrawing, he could create a quizzling, in essence, colonial force, which was embodied in the Palestine Authority, that would do the bidding of Israel, and that's what Mahmoud Abbas does. 0.69

00:23:13.000 And I knew Arafat very well.

00:23:15.000 Arafat, for all his quirks, and he had many of them, nevertheless drew a line.

00:23:22.000 He was not willing to be an Israeli puppet, and I think there's very strong evidence, he ended his life under house arrest, that the Israelis poisoned him to death.

00:23:31.000 I 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.

00:23:42.000 The Oslo Accords were never viable in terms of establishing an actual independent Palestinian state, because remember, Israel controlled the borders.

00:23:51.000 And by controlling the borders, for instance in Gaza, they don't occupy Gaza, but because they control the borders, they control what goes in, what goes out.

00:24:00.000 And that was true before October 7th.

00:24:03.000 And they could shut everything down in an instant.

00:24:06.000 Including, as they have done now, with this horrific assault On Gaza, the water supply, the electricity, the power plants, along, of course, with food.

00:24:20.000 I mean, people are seeing serious cases of malnutrition.

00:24:25.000 There's no sanitation anymore in Gaza.

00:24:27.000 Many people have been pushed to the south.

00:24:31.000 Most of the north, 1.1 million Palestinians.

00:24:34.000 And we must remember Gaza is very tiny. 0.54

00:24:36.000 It's only 20 miles long and five miles wide.

00:24:38.000 It'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.

00:25:02.000 It's a commonly, it's sort of common parlance to think of Drone strikes as being very bespoke and rational and targeted and discerning and even to use the term acts of terror as being hysterical and sort of wild and there are evident and clear discrepancies.

00:25:26.000 It'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.

00:25:55.000 Where Is antisemitism a relevant framing for issues in this region, and where is it not relevant?

00:26:08.000 It's not relevant when we equate the policies of the Israeli government Or criticize or attack the policies of the Israeli government, and therefore are accused of anti-Semitism.

00:26:21.000 Israel is a state, and I will just throw in that I graduated from Harvard Divinity School.

00:26:27.000 I spent a lot of time reading the Hebrew Bible.

00:26:31.000 And the idea that the Israeli state represents the best of Jewish theology, of the Torah, of the prophets.

00:26:39.000 I mean, Judaism, like Christianity, These were religious systems that were written by oppressed peoples with an acute understanding of what it meant to be oppressed and the defense of the oppressed.

00:26:54.000 And of course, any state is about the projection of power.

00:26:59.000 So just as I would not consider Israel to be an expression of Judaism.

00:27:05.000 I don't consider Saudi Arabia to be an expression of Islam.

00:27:11.000 Theocratic states use, misuse religion to sacralize temporal power.

00:27:17.000 We are now on the cusp of an election soon within a year in the United States.

00:27:23.000 Trump has filled, he doesn't have any ideology of his own, but he's filled his ideological void with The Christian fascism. 0.76

00:27:30.000 I don't use that word lightly.

00:27:32.000 I spent two years writing about the Christian right in my book, American Fascists, the Christian Right and the War to Destroy America.

00:27:43.000 I spent months and months with these people and they are heretical. 0.99

00:27:48.000 They have used the Christian religion to sacralize the worst aspects of imperialism and capitalism and white supremacy as well. 0.95

00:27:58.000 So that is the dividing line.

00:28:01.000 And Israel works very, very hard to erase that dividing line.

00:28:05.000 So any criticism of Israel, any criticism of its policies, especially towards the Palestinians, then is equated with anti-Semitism.

00:28:16.000 And we have seen now groups at universities, students for Justice for Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace, are being shut down and silenced because of very powerful donors.

00:28:27.000 University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, where I went to school.

00:28:30.000 And it's very counterproductive, because by essentially attacking legitimate criticism of a state and branding it anti-Semitic, you are diluting or minimizing the real anti-Semitism, which of course is there.

00:28:51.000 I mean, racism exists.

00:28:53.000 It exists, I see it, in the coverage.

00:28:56.000 Palestinians are discussed or reported on.

00:29:01.000 They're not individualized.

00:29:02.000 They're a mass.

00:29:03.000 They're a dehumanized mass.

00:29:04.000 When we hear about Israeli victims, they're teachers, they're doctors, they're peace activists, whatever.

00:29:10.000 But that doesn't happen.

00:29:11.000 There are no doctors, teachers, taxi drivers, poets.

00:29:15.000 They're just Palestinians. 1.00

00:29:16.000 I mean, the language the press uses, the failure to use apartheid.

00:29:21.000 Israel is an apartheid state.

00:29:23.000 You won't see that that word in the mainstream press, the act of genocide.

00:29:28.000 When you seek to exterminate and certainly cutting off food, fuel, water, and the kind

00:29:35.000 of saturation bombing that we have seen against the Palestinians, when you seek to exterminate 0.88

00:29:42.000 a whole or part of a people, that is an act of genocide.

00:29:46.000 So that is another word you won't hear.

00:29:48.000 So a lot of it is the failure on the part of the press to use appropriate language and

00:29:55.000 driven by the Israel lobby, this very pernicious tactic of essentially branding any critic

00:30:02.000 of Israeli policy as anti-Semitic.

00:30:05.000 Does anti-Semitism exist?

00:30:06.000 Of course it exists and it must be fought, like all racism.

00:30:11.000 But criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic.

00:30:14.000 What unique strategic role and function does Israel have in that region?

00:30:20.000 How is it significant to American and in particular American corporatist and military industrial complex interests?

00:30:29.000 And is there a counterpoint to that strategic value that might be deployed by other players on the geopolitical stage?

00:30:37.000 For example, Iran, Russia, etc.

00:30:41.000 Right.

00:30:41.000 So Israel has pushed America into all sorts of military fiascos that are in the interest of Israel, but not in the interest of the United States.

00:30:51.000 The Iraq war being at the top of the list. 0.60

00:30:54.000 There's been heavy lobbying by Netanyahu to go to war with Iran.

00:30:58.000 That is not in America's interest.

00:31:01.000 It is in Israel's interest to weaken the power of its neighbors. 0.99

00:31:06.000 So the Israel lobby has been quite effective in Pushing the United States. 0.96

00:31:11.000 I mean, Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, was a cheerleader for the war in Iraq, and is very close to Israel.

00:31:18.000 So, I wouldn't say that the interests converge.

00:31:21.000 In fact, and the Pentagon has traditionally been the wall that has blocked the United States from carrying out a war with Iran.

00:31:30.000 That Bibi Netanyahu very much wants to take place.

00:31:34.000 Now, of course, this conflict in Gaza has brought him closer.

00:31:39.000 to that goal because the U.S.

00:31:43.000 has 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.

00:31:57.000 So 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.

00:32:15.000 In terms of other players, well yes, the key player is Iran, and that is why Israel has bombed the airports twice in Damascus and Aleppo, because those are the arms transit points to Lebanon, because Lebanon is a creature of Hezbollah, excuse me, is a creature of Iran. 0.84

00:32:40.000 And Hezbollah has, unlike the Palestinians, has the ability because of an arsenal of fairly sophisticated rockets to inflict pretty serious damage on Israel should it opened up a second front. 0.97

00:32:54.000 Up until now, there have been, you know, I would characterize them as relatively minor border clashes.

00:33:02.000 along the north.

00:33:03.000 I think Hezbollah does not want a war with Israel.

00:33:05.000 I don't think Iran wants a war with Israel.

00:33:07.000 I don't think Syria wants a war with Israel.

00:33:10.000 But once you open that Pandora's box of war, and I covered many conflicts, it controls you.

00:33:16.000 You don't control it.

00:33:18.000 So things can go horribly, horribly wrong.

00:33:21.000 In terms of Israel's power within the international community, that comes through its arms sales.

00:33:27.000 So Israel sells weapons as the 10th largest Weapons dealer in the planet.

00:33:35.000 I think $12.5 billion in sales last year, and it sells to the most retrograde governments in the world.

00:33:44.000 It was a fervent supporter of the apartheid regime in South Africa when I covered the war in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s.

00:33:52.000 Israel was supplying weapons and napalm to the Salvadoran military and to Rios Montt.

00:33:59.000 It 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.

00:34:24.000 They don't care who they sell to. 0.94

00:34:27.000 And that gives them tremendous power.

00:34:30.000 Because the arms industry in many ways drives the policy of the United States, of industrialized nations, and I think that's why you have seen governments in Europe, and of course in Washington, sign on for this genocide because that's a kind of secretive world, but a powerful one.

00:34:55.000 And Israel is in that club. 0.53

00:34:57.000 And 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.

00:35:17.000 That's an Israeli creation. 1.00

00:35:21.000 Israel uses the Palestinians as a laboratory to test its weapons. 0.97

00:35:26.000 They will actually, when they sell these surveillance facilities, drones, they're one of the biggest

00:35:33.000 producers of drones, militarized drones.

00:35:36.000 When they sell these weapons abroad, they call them, quote unquote, battle tested because

00:35:41.000 they've been used against the Palestinians.

00:35:44.000 Israel has face recognition software where every single Palestinian, and they did not, 0.64

00:35:51.000 of course, give their consent, is within that system, is immediately able to be identified.

00:35:57.000 This kind of surveillance technology is sold around the globe and used against dissidents.

00:36:05.000 It's used against anybody that any state, including the most despotic states, see as

00:36:12.000 a threat, including, of course, journalists.

00:36:16.000 It appears that you, in a sense, is this true, see Israel as the more influential or even the more dominant partner in their relationship with the United States.

00:36:29.000 But even in terms of weapon sales, my assumption would be that the United States are far more profligate and successful in that industry.

00:36:40.000 So are you suggesting that it's Israel that drive these policies, where there is a necessary collaboration between the United States and Israel, whether that's through funding, favourable reporting, many of the topics that have been covered in our conversation so far today.

00:37:02.000 If so, what does that suggest about a broader global agenda?

00:37:06.000 Because I've always assumed that the dominant partner in any relationship between the United States and another nation would be the United States, that it would be ultimately their interests that were being served.

00:37:14.000 And 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.

00:37:49.000 But 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.

00:38:00.000 Is that what you feel and understand?

00:38:04.000 Yes, but let me first address the issue of the arms industry.

00:38:06.000 You're right that the American arms industry is larger, but the American weapons and surveillance technology industry is completely integrated with Israel.

00:38:18.000 And they work closely together.

00:38:21.000 Remember, the intelligence services are completely integrated.

00:38:26.000 So in many ways, Israel is not necessarily a competitor, although Because of the $3 billion a year that we give to Israel, one of the ironies is that the American aid largely built that technology and arms industry that has now become so large within Israel.

00:38:50.000 In terms of the American political scene, yes, you cannot defy the power of the Israel lobby. 0.91

00:38:57.000 It's impossible.

00:38:58.000 And Netanyahu acts with tremendous arrogance Towards Biden, there's an animus among many Democrats, in particular Obama, because Obama was pushing through his Iran nuclear deal, which Netanyahu didn't want, and Netanyahu got himself invited to the U.S.

00:39:15.000 Congress, 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

00:39:32.000 administration.

00:39:32.000 They much prefer Trump.

00:39:35.000 I look at Netanyahu and the Israel lobby as a kind of albatross around Biden's neck.

00:39:41.000 Well, they don't care if they bring Biden down.

00:39:43.000 In fact, when Biden was vice president, he went to Jerusalem

00:39:48.000 and denounced the call for a halt on the expansion of settlements.

00:39:53.000 On the very day he was there, Netanyahu announced the expansion.

00:39:57.000 I think it was 1,500 or something new settlements.

00:40:00.000 So there is a tremendous... I mean, he's not a very pleasant figure, Netanyahu.

00:40:04.000 Also, no, I knew him when he was the Deputy Foreign Minister. 0.95

00:40:07.000 He was very arrogant, amoral, cynical. 0.84

00:40:11.000 But yeah, the Israel lobby is extremely powerful. 0.90

00:40:15.000 As I mentioned earlier, Russel, they just announced that they're putting $100 million

00:40:19.000 to defeat a handful of House candidates because they're calling for a ceasefire.

00:40:24.000 And because, especially with Talib, it's really stood up for Palestinian rights.

00:40:29.000 So that, yeah, you can't defy them.

00:40:31.000 You defy them.

00:40:33.000 And if you do defy them, it's not a matter of them withdrawing tremendous amounts of

00:40:37.000 financial support, but then they will use the money they have to mount campaigns to

00:40:44.000 defeat you.

00:40:45.000 And so, yeah, the political system on both sides is hostage.

00:40:49.000 Netanyahu could care less if Biden loses the election because they'd prefer Trump.

00:40:54.000 Trump gives them even more than Biden.

00:40:57.000 So it's kind of win-win for Israel. 0.78

00:41:00.000 But Biden is, you know, he may, right now Trump's ahead in the polls.

00:41:08.000 Biden, by essentially endorsing this Uh, massive killing project, not just endorsing it, but giving Israel $13 billion to continue it. 0.67

00:41:19.000 Uh, this, this is not politically good for Biden, but, but Netanyahu doesn't care.

00:41:25.000 If Biden goes, they get Trump.

00:41:27.000 That's even better.

00:41:28.000 Biden's support of Israel has been pretty consistent, enthusiastic and historic.

00:41:36.000 I think it's fair to use that term in terms with Joe Biden, given his extraordinary longevity.

00:41:44.000 But I feel, Chris, that when you're talking about I want to understand how Israel are able to assert such

00:41:51.000 what would seem to be atypical power, because my assumption would be that it's a

00:41:59.000 relatively modern country, in terms of its recent establishment in the 1940s, I mean, whilst I

00:42:08.000 completely acknowledge that it's an ancient land and their historic claims and all of

00:42:14.000 the origins of that situation, I'm not seeking to deny them. But when you talk about the

00:42:21.000 power of their lobby, the influence over American democracy, it seems that something anomalous

00:42:27.000 is taking place. And I want to understand, like, sort of, with both available positions on this

00:42:35.000 conflict, it seems that there is a tendency to amplify its uniqueness, to regard it as a very

00:42:42.000 sort of, you know, like when you talk to people that are pro-Israel, they say that...

00:42:49.000 You know, all nations on the earth have, you know, these kind of industries and have a military and have a past.

00:42:55.000 America has a colonial past.

00:42:57.000 So does Britain, etc.

00:42:58.000 And the atrocity, you know, I suppose there's an attempt to normalize actions.

00:43:05.000 I know that people in your position don't even like the use of the term both sides, but I'm really just trying to understand what is so particular about this conflict when in a sense it would appear to It appears to me that it ought to be regionalised, contained.

00:43:26.000 How has it become so defining?

00:43:28.000 How has it had such an important and divisive cultural impact, where people that are not directly involved in the conflict are taking strong positions?

00:43:37.000 That 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.

00:43:57.000 So what is it?

00:43:58.000 What is it in particular about Israel that you're saying?

00:44:02.000 Because when you say stuff like the arms industry or whatever, that's sort of a recognisable template.

00:44:07.000 Is there something unseen, distinct and peculiar about this No, I think that in fact, Israel is a settler colonial project and it functions like all settler colonial projects. 0.59

00:44:33.000 And that's what we saw in South Africa.

00:44:36.000 That's what we saw in Kenya under the Mau Mau rebellion.

00:44:42.000 Israel is acting in the same way that other colonial forces, or if we want to consider the Apartheid regime, the white Apartheid regime colonial, other forces and other settler colonial project act.

00:44:58.000 That's really at the engine of what is driving this.

00:45:02.000 So settler colonial projects from their inception are founded on lies because they have stolen the land. 0.94

00:45:13.000 of an indigenous people and those indigenous people mount resistance to fight back.

00:45:19.000 So Israel follows that template and I think passions are so high because both sides recognize that this is an existential question.

00:45:32.000 If Palestinian land is to be returned, remember if you are Jewish and you are born in Brooklyn and you don't speak a word of Hebrew And you've never been to Israel, you can fly to Israel and instantly get a passport. 0.82

00:45:47.000 If you are Palestinian, and remember from the 7th century until 1948, the land of historic Palestine was Muslim.

00:45:58.000 And if your family has lived in Haifa for generations, you're barred entry.

00:46:03.000 So I think the way to understand what's happening in Israel is to look at settler colonial projects of the past.

00:46:13.000 And what happens, because they constantly use force and violence as a form of control, they either attempt to buy people off, collaborators, that's what the Palestine Authority is, and if you can't be bought off, you're killed. 0.90

00:46:27.000 That's what settler colonial projects do.

00:46:31.000 But it doesn't work often, usually, over the long term, unless of course it's the United States where 90% of Native Americans were killed.

00:46:41.000 It doesn't work.

00:46:42.000 It also happened with the Patagonians in the south of Argentina, but they were all wiped out.

00:46:47.000 And 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. 0.63

00:47:05.000 And this isn't conjecture.

00:47:06.000 You have to go back and look at the statements over many years of many of the ministers in the Netanyahu government, because they have endorsed this kind of, they have euphemisms like transfer, but they have endorsed this kind of ethnic cleansing for a long time.

00:47:23.000 They have their roots in the radical rabbi Meir Kahane, who I knew and covered, who was later assassinated.

00:47:30.000 The difference was that when I was in writing covering Israel, He was so unpalatable, Kahane. 0.99

00:47:38.000 He was a racist and called for the eradication of Palestinians.

00:47:42.000 His party, the Koch party, was banned in 1994. 0.94

00:47:47.000 But his heirs have taken control.

00:47:52.000 When they make these statements and they come out constantly that the Palestinians, Netanyahu called them the new Nazis.

00:48:00.000 There 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.

00:48:14.000 You take it very, very seriously.

00:48:16.000 And 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. 0.85

00:48:33.000 Uh, that's what happened in, Kenya.

00:48:36.000 The British have still not dealt with this, of course, although King Charles was there.

00:48:41.000 That's what happened in South Africa.

00:48:43.000 And that's what happens in other settler colonial projects.

00:48:47.000 And that's where we are.

00:48:48.000 So I think that's the best way to understand Israel.

00:48:51.000 Of course, you do have the aspect of the Holocaust, which Israel, of course, has weaponized the Holocaust. 0.92

00:49:00.000 But the Palestinians did not carry out the Holocaust.

00:49:02.000 They had nothing to do with the I see.

00:49:09.000 So the paradigm you deploy is to see it as a settler-colonial model, and that often has the type of dynamics that you're describing.

00:49:20.000 But 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

00:49:58.000 It's a highly disputed and contentious region because of the requirement for control over resources there.

00:50:05.000 So I wonder in some kind of macro narrative, if such a thing can be offered, that it's kind of important that it remains unstable and the scene of ongoing conflagration, that it's somehow beneficial to the kind of institutional economic global forces that in a way, transcendent of something as, what do I want to

00:50:27.000 say, almost, I want to say, atavistic as national and religious interests? No, I don't think the

00:50:37.000 instability is beneficial because a war with Iran would be catastrophic.

00:50:45.000 It would be viewed throughout the region as a religious war.

00:50:48.000 Iran is Shia. 0.57

00:50:49.000 Sixty percent of Iraqis are Shia.

00:50:52.000 Three million Shias in Saudi Arabia.

00:50:56.000 Bahrain.

00:50:57.000 A huge Shia population in Lebanon.

00:50:59.000 So, no.

00:51:00.000 It would be very, very dangerous.

00:51:02.000 And I think the United States is aware of that.

00:51:04.000 They definitely do not want this to become a regional conflict, especially after two decades Of the military fiascos that were orchestrated in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan.

00:51:19.000 And I think that then, you know, just as I understand Israel through the dynamics of a settler colonial project, I understand the dynamics of the United States through late empire.

00:51:31.000 What happens in late empire, they're losing their influence, economic, political, that hegemony is breaking apart.

00:51:38.000 And in late empire, this is true for all empires, they seek to regain that hegemony through

00:51:44.000 military force, which plunges them into one military debacle after another, which is really

00:51:50.000 the history of the United States going all the way back to Vietnam.

00:51:54.000 I mean, this support for the wholesale slaughter in Gaza, it's going to take at least a decade

00:52:02.000 for the United States to repair its relations with the Muslim world.

00:52:06.000 I think the Muslims are what? 0.99

00:52:07.000 One, I can't remember, 1.2 billion or I can't remember the number, but I mean a significant percent of the world's population.

00:52:14.000 And of course the Global South, because the Global South is looking at this in utter horror.

00:52:20.000 You know, where is the rule of law?

00:52:22.000 Where are the Geneva Conventions?

00:52:25.000 Where is humanitarian law?

00:52:27.000 And that is a message that both Israel And the United States is delivering to the Global South and everywhere else.

00:52:33.000 The rule of law, international law, humanitarian law, it doesn't apply to us.

00:52:38.000 It may apply to you with, you know, taking war criminals from Iran to genocide and putting them... It does not apply to us.

00:52:45.000 And that is very, very frightening.

00:52:48.000 Because 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.

00:53:00.000 And what, you know, the lifeblood of resistance movements, radical movements, movements like Hamas are martyrs.

00:53:08.000 We have to look at Hamas as an idea. 0.99

00:53:11.000 And what Israel has done is essentially brutalized an entire new generation of Palestinians who will carry out acts. 0.96

00:53:20.000 I mean, all resistance movements are condemned as terrorists, which doesn't mean that they don't commit terrorism.

00:53:26.000 But if you don't have an Air Force, and you can't drop a 2,000 pound bomb on a refugee camp, then you strap on a suicide vest. 0.99

00:53:34.000 That's your Air Force.

00:53:36.000 And this language of violence, this quid pro quo, state terrorism, which spawns militant terrorism, this is a death spiral.

00:53:44.000 And for those of us, and I spent seven years covering Gaza, who were in there, we kept writing week after week, month after month, year after year, you can't keep brutalizing these people.

00:53:55.000 This is not a policy that is anyway going to contribute to stability or peace.

00:54:01.000 In fact, it will do the opposite.

00:54:03.000 Few people listened, and now here is where we are.

00:54:06.000 So instability within the Middle East is dangerous.

00:54:11.000 I think even Washington wants to prevent it.

00:54:13.000 Unfortunately, the Netanyahu government, their wet dream is the U.S. 0.73

00:54:18.000 war with Iran.

00:54:19.000 And they have tried over and over and over.

00:54:21.000 In 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. 0.54

00:54:40.000 And in the Bush administration and the Pentagon refused.

00:54:44.000 But this has long been on the agenda of Netanyahu.

00:54:47.000 And that is very, because Iran has the possibility to do tremendous damage to Israel. 0.74

00:54:52.000 And remember, Israel is a nuclear power.

00:54:55.000 It could really go very, very bad.

00:54:57.000 I'm surprised that you see, again, Israel as the senior partner.

00:55:01.000 I'm just learning here, I'm here to learn.

00:55:05.000 Because it would seem to me that the paradigm of the late empire, obviously, and by definition precedes the implosion or deterioration of a I'm trying to envisage what that would look like, you know, as a sort of a native of a former empire where it seems that our former British interests were easily folded into a kind of secondary role in support of the ongoing American imperial project.

00:55:38.000 And it seems to me that that remains the role of Britain on the world stage.

00:55:43.000 And I again wonder about the validity of even this kind of rubric Chris, when it's, you know, where do we place the, you know, the new American century project, where it was sort of clear that a war with, you know, Syria, Iraq, etc, many of the wars that have subsequently taken place, but Iran was on that list.

00:56:06.000 So, you know, the chief agitator being Israel, you know, it seems surprising to me that that would be the dominant force that was able to determine outcomes when such evident

00:56:20.000 and obvious power even if as you say and I'm certainly not queering it

00:56:23.000 America is an empire in decline and also I'm sort of curious as what as

00:56:28.000 to what follows that so yeah I do do do

00:56:33.000 Are you saying that this cycle that we're experiencing is the sort of present decline of America?

00:56:41.000 And I wonder how you see that being brought about and how immediate you imagine it being.

00:56:48.000 So first of all, when you talk about Israel, we have to go back to groups like AIPAC.

00:56:54.000 These are, you know, very right wing neocons.

00:56:58.000 And they share a common ideology with the neocons in the United States, people like Blinken and others.

00:57:08.000 And you know, Biden actually called for the invasion of Iraq five years before the war.

00:57:12.000 Biden, his entire political career, he has been a puppet to these powers.

00:57:17.000 He was one of the primary forces that got us into Iraq.

00:57:22.000 I don't think Biden's very limited intellectually, and recently probably even more limited intellectually.

00:57:28.000 But nevertheless, he has been a servant to these forces.

00:57:31.000 So Israel has essentially wedded itself to the most retrograde right-wing forces in the

00:57:39.000 United States.

00:57:40.000 When Rabin was inaugurated as prime minister, he didn't invite AIPAC to his inauguration

00:57:45.000 because he saw the Zionist or the Israel lobby in the United States as a political movement

00:57:51.000 which was deeply antagonistic to himself.

00:57:55.000 So 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.

00:58:09.000 If you attempt to challenge it, and you can look at what's happening to Rashida Tlaib and others, then the The boot of the Israel lobby will crush you.

00:58:20.000 In terms of what is happening in terms of the twilight of empire, well, we don't make anything anymore in the United States except weapons, many of which we use to slaughter each other with.

00:58:32.000 Our infrastructure is falling apart.

00:58:35.000 Everything is becoming privatized.

00:58:39.000 60% of Americans are living in pretty acute economic distress.

00:58:45.000 And, you know, what happens with all empires is that they hollow themselves out from the inside.

00:58:51.000 As Thucydides said at the death of the Athenian Empire, the tyranny that Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself.

00:58:59.000 And that's what's happened.

00:59:00.000 So 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.

00:59:11.000 to essentially crush dissent.

00:59:13.000 And let's also, just as a caveat, a lot of these police forces in places like Ferguson were trained by Israelis.

00:59:20.000 That's also a big project within Israel, is training police forces in very brutal forms of crowd control, which we saw in places like Ferguson, backed up by military-grade equipment.

00:59:31.000 And that's, of course, taken place in the United States.

00:59:33.000 So how does it die?

00:59:35.000 It dies ultimately the same way the British Empire dies, And that's once the pound sterling no longer became the world's reserve currency in the 50s, the British economy went into a tailspin.

00:59:46.000 Once the dollar, I'm not saying we're there yet, but once the dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency, the United States can't fund its empire.

00:59:54.000 It's all funded on debt.

00:59:56.000 And that creates a tremendous contraction, a terrible economic depression.

00:59:56.000 It doesn't work.

01:00:02.000 Uh, and that's where we're headed.

01:00:04.000 I mean, the, I mean, if climate change doesn't get us first.

01:00:06.000 So, uh, we are replicating the end of, uh, empires the way Tainter writes about it in the collapse of civilizations.

01:00:16.000 I think he looks at 24 different empires.

01:00:18.000 It's military adventurism.

01:00:20.000 It's essentially a military.

01:00:22.000 Beyond control.

01:00:24.000 I mean, that's what Arnold Thunberg says is the death of empires is they can't control their military industrial complex.

01:00:32.000 It becomes a state within a state, or as Alexander Berkman says, it becomes the enemy within.

01:00:37.000 And that's precisely it.

01:00:38.000 So we have to Ukraine, Israel. 0.96

01:00:40.000 Remember, most of this money is not going to Israel, and it's not going to Ukraine.

01:00:46.000 It's going to Raytheon.

01:00:47.000 It's going to Northrop Grumman.

01:00:49.000 It's going to the arms manufacturers.

01:00:53.000 And that's why we are in this horribly self-destructive cycle of permanent war.

01:01:00.000 Nobody can stop it.

01:01:03.000 When we were discussing a moment ago the religious ideologies present within different relatively modern nations within that region and you sort of broke down how it's primarily Shia Muslim populations and that would escalate any conflagration to a religious war that would be impossible to envisage how that would be contained.

01:01:23.000 It 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

01:01:43.000 It becomes pretty clear whose agenda is directing these events.

01:01:47.000 And whilst I am welcome and it's very helpful to have the provision of the end of empire model and how that is, you know, there are identifiable traits playing out.

01:01:56.000 It 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.

01:02:07.000 when you talk about the likelihood of the dollar being displaced, how that would lead to a true collapse.

01:02:13.000 And I wonder if you feel that these are the kind of geopolitical yet financial conflicts that are being played out with these sort of relationships, that BRICS kind of stuff that's going on.

01:02:26.000 I wonder how informative those ulterior yet Um determining issues are and if indeed they are doesn't that diminish the authorship of you know the Israeli state that sort of determined the initial uh guided the first part of our conversation i.e if Raytheon and the military industrial complex are making all the money if this ultimately becomes sort of an end game for the American empire

01:02:54.000 Isn't that what is determining these wide-scale global conflicts, of which, you know, what's happening in Israel is but one.

01:03:03.000 We've mentioned Ukraine, we're seeing the escalation in the South Seas and stuff.

01:03:08.000 Why don't we think about that?

01:03:08.000 Well, China.

01:03:09.000 China.

01:03:10.000 So how does the United States cope with the rising economic power of China?

01:03:16.000 It's through military threat.

01:03:19.000 And that, of course, is very dangerous as well.

01:03:23.000 So, the problem is, at the end of Empire, you only speak one language, and that's the language of violence, because it's the only language you can speak anymore.

01:03:32.000 I mean, that is essentially exemplified by the death of diplomacy.

01:03:38.000 I mean, here we have a wholesale slaughter, and the United States is blocking vetoing resolutions in the UN for a ceasefire.

01:03:47.000 I mean, this is insanity.

01:03:48.000 It's utter insanity.

01:03:49.000 It's not in anyone's interest.

01:03:52.000 For the United States to do this.

01:03:53.000 So, 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.

01:04:15.000 That Israel does not function as a separate entity.

01:04:20.000 And so they're working as one.

01:04:23.000 And you know, the United States is a settler colonial regime. 0.78

01:04:28.000 I mean, we bear a lot of the sins, which we have not dealt with.

01:04:34.000 Israel certainly hasn't dealt with them, but we haven't dealt with them either as to who we are.

01:04:40.000 We were a huge supporter of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

01:04:44.000 In fact, of course, it was the CIA that located Mandela and got him arrested.

01:04:50.000 You know, we will rewrite history afterwards.

01:04:52.000 Mandela and Clinton can become best friends, but the United States was deeply antagonistic to the ANC.

01:05:00.000 And so, I mean, you know, the sad fact is that the Palestinians are powerless.

01:05:07.000 And because they're powerless, at least within the circles of power, they're friendless.

01:05:11.000 Nobody cares.

01:05:12.000 Go back and look at the Armenian genocide, which was very public.

01:05:15.000 People knew that it was happening.

01:05:18.000 Anywhere between 600,000 and 1.2 million Armenians.

01:05:22.000 And there are many parallels.

01:05:24.000 They were forced out of their villages and homes.

01:05:28.000 They were attacked as they were being pushed into the desert.

01:05:32.000 They had no food or water.

01:05:34.000 People died of exposure.

01:05:36.000 I mean, a very similar playbook is now taking place in Gaza.

01:05:39.000 I mean, the idea is to create a humanitarian crisis in southern Gaza that is so unsustainable and so horrific That essentially the international community agrees to push them out.

01:05:50.000 That's Israel's playbook. 0.97

01:05:51.000 They've already... I mean, they told Palestinians they had to go to quote-unquote a safe zone, although they're attacked often when they go through these supposedly safe corridors.

01:06:01.000 But now they're targeting... The South Hana Unas is right on the border with Egypt.

01:06:07.000 It's right on the border with Rafah.

01:06:08.000 And you can't... If you live in half of that city, according to the flyers that The Israeli Air Force has dropped.

01:06:14.000 If you're a Palestinian, you're going to be attacked. 1.00

01:06:17.000 You are. 0.99

01:06:17.000 They're already bombing it. 0.99

01:06:18.000 So they've already killed many people.

01:06:20.000 They're attacking UN schools because those are where displaced people who have nowhere else to go are camping out.

01:06:27.000 They've shut down the hospitals.

01:06:29.000 I mean, this whole thing of Hamas command centers, they're not bombing these, destroying these hospitals because of Hamas command centers. 0.86

01:06:37.000 They're destroying them because they want no infrastructure, and in particular, a health infrastructure to exist.

01:06:43.000 And almost all the hospitals, even the few of their 35 hospitals, Israel shut down at least 21.

01:06:49.000 Of the ones that remain, they don't have antibiotics, they don't have oxygen.

01:06:54.000 What we're watching in real time is an act of genocide.

01:06:59.000 And the United States has signed on for that project.

01:07:03.000 And they've signed on for a variety of reasons, but I would argue, and I think that this is You know, having covered American politics for a long time, the power of the Israel lobby is such that it is political suicide for a figure like Joe Biden to defy it.

01:07:20.000 Not that he would anyway, but my feeling is that when you describe these trends, it starts to seem like the notion of nation provides a layer of opacity that conceals relationships that, as you said, when it comes to secret services and financial ties, there's a degree of integration, in your words, between Israeli and American interests that it appears to me are

01:07:48.000 ultimately the drivers of what actions take place. That the agenda is set by those interests,

01:07:55.000 whether they are military-industrial complex, whether they're like... What is it that seems to...

01:08:00.000 It feels like there's a ghost, a phantom that moves through the observable... Like we

01:08:06.000 understand things in terms of territory and flags and religious ideology and sometimes even

01:08:12.000 economics, but it seems that there is...

01:08:15.000 Like you would obviously a far better place to answer this question than I am.

01:08:20.000 It would seem that there's something else that's moving between it and beneath it.

01:08:28.000 It'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.

01:08:50.000 That region is governed differently and democratically and non-violently, and one can even sort of, you know, and I know we talked before, previously Chris, we talked about the necessity for spiritual values to prevail in these spaces, 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.

01:09:15.000 But it seems like that The tiles of nation are placed on top of what's happening at depth.

01:09:24.000 And because it's so emotionally evocative, what it seems like a more likely outcome is the escalation of these conflicts rather than diplomacy.

01:09:33.000 Because as you said, those things have been taken off the board.

01:09:36.000 So 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.

01:09:51.000 And 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.

01:10:00.000 Well, you know, I'm a longtime newspaper reporter, so I don't sell hope.

01:10:05.000 That's not my job.

01:10:07.000 My job is to provide the clearest assessment of reality.

01:10:10.000 That was certainly true in the wars that I covered.

01:10:13.000 People who had very Pollyannish views about, you know, their own immortality.

01:10:18.000 I knew a few war correspondents who thought that way.

01:10:20.000 They're not around anymore.

01:10:23.000 So we have to take a very sober look I mean, you ask about forces.

01:10:27.000 I mean, war has always been a business. 0.64

01:10:28.000 That's nothing new.

01:10:31.000 And it's a big business. 0.99

01:10:32.000 And of course, it hides behind the flag and patriotism and all the other stuff to seduce you into supporting this idea that you should send your teenage kids off somewhere to get killed.

01:10:45.000 But I think also coupled with that is the fact that we've undergone a corporate coup d'etat in slow motion, that all of the institutions that Once made popular participation and democracy possible if either atrophied or died, and been captured by oligarchic power.

01:11:04.000 And we see that in terms of the money-saturated elections in the United States.

01:11:09.000 It's just a kind of institutionalized form of legalized bribery.

01:11:15.000 And then the lobbyists, the corporate forces that elected these officials, write the legislation.

01:11:21.000 In the prison I was teaching, and I teach through a college degree program through Rutgers University.

01:11:27.000 I was in the prison last night.

01:11:28.000 Look, most of those students that I teach wouldn't even be in there, but for Joe Biden and Bill Clinton and the omnibus crime bill that more than doubled our prison population.

01:11:38.000 40% of the people in U.S.

01:11:40.000 prisons have never been convicted of physically harming another person.

01:11:44.000 They get them under RICO laws and all sorts of other ridiculous stuff.

01:11:47.000 So that's, again, a process. 0.96

01:11:49.000 You de-industrialize A poor urban neighborhood, a black body on the street is worth nothing to a corporation. 1.00

01:11:56.000 If they're free, put them in a cage, they generate $50,000 or $60,000 a year in terms of the salaries for corrections officers.

01:12:03.000 Everything within the prison is privatized.

01:12:06.000 The money transfer service, the phone service, the commissary, it's a multi-billion dollar industry.

01:12:11.000 And their lobbyists are the ones in Washington writing the laws to ensure that the recidivism rate, which is 76% after five years, remains the same.

01:12:20.000 That's just a small example of the corporate stranglehold that has essentially destroyed American democracy.

01:12:28.000 We live, it's probably better, the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls it a system of inverted totalitarianism.

01:12:35.000 That means we have the structures, we still have a Senate, we still have a House, we still have elections, but internally corporations have seized all of the levers of power.

01:12:44.000 And their interests are not in our interests.

01:12:46.000 And that is, I think, what you're getting at, Russell.

01:12:50.000 That is what I'm getting at, Chris.

01:12:51.000 That is what I've been getting at.

01:12:53.000 Thanks, man.

01:12:54.000 Thank you for joining us for a conversation that's not at all easy, but it's incredibly informative.

01:12:59.000 Thanks for giving us the benefit of your decades of experience on the front line.

01:13:04.000 It's fascinating and wonderful to hear you and to spend time with you.

01:13:08.000 Thank you, Chris.

01:13:10.000 Yeah, thanks for doing it.

01:13:11.000 Wow.

01:13:13.000 Coming up this week.

01:13:14.000 is if you have an economic system in which pharmaceutical companies benefit hugely from

01:13:19.000 medical emergencies, where a military industrial complex benefits from war, where energy companies

01:13:25.000 benefit from energy crises, you are going to generate states of perpetual crisis.

01:13:32.000 This war was totally preventable.

01:13:38.000 We knew the red lines, but we wanted to get beaten out.

01:13:43.000 The American people get it now?

01:13:45.000 National suicide, man.

01:13:47.000 If we wanted to annihilate the globe tomorrow, God forbid, we can do it like that!

01:13:53.000 This is greedy war on the general public.

01:13:58.000 All the hormones and all the toxins in our food are changing our biology.

01:14:03.000 We're losing our ability to reproduce.

01:14:06.000 Bill Gates pours money into Africa for feeding the poor in Africa and preventing famine.

01:14:10.000 What's he doing?

01:14:11.000 He's pushing chemicals, pushing GMOs, pushing patents.

01:14:15.000 Who hates the speech? 0.93

01:14:18.000 It's the elites.

01:14:19.000 Around the world we see censorship.

01:14:23.000 This cycle that we're experiencing is the present decline of America.

01:14:28.000 It's military adventurism.

01:14:29.000 It's essentially a military beyond control.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - January 02, 2024

Who’s REALLY Profiting From Israel-Palestine EXPOSED | Chris Hedges - STAY FREE #276

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