Hedges: no
Kall: no?
Hedges: no, because the power of AIPAC is the power of money and you know they're out there donating to congressional campaigns in Nebraska with there’s probably three Jews in the whole district. As long as you vote the way they want you to vote on Israel. They understand Washington, they are a very effective lobby - they target the few individuals, both inside and outside the political arena, who dare to speak out - and their vicious
Kall: by the way, I'm Jewish, and I don't want to see Israel disappear and at the same time, I'm disgusted what they're doing and horrified by it. And I look and I try to see a way to get some kind of political change happening in this country. And with the influence of AIPAC it’s hard to see how that can happen. Do you have any ideas?
Hedges: well, I think it's very important to characterize AIPAC for what it is. It is not an Israeli lobby. It's a right wing kadima lobby - previously Likud lobby. I covered Itzhac Rabin’s campaign to be prime minister in Israel and AIPAC as sort of lesser right wing Jewish groups in the United States, involved themselves in that campaign - I mean, even to the point where people are outside Rabin's house in Tel Aviv, chanting horrible slogans against him. They sent over advisors, they gave money. There's been a real shift and I think it began, probably under Shamir, where AIPAC welded itself to the right wing within Israel, and when Rabin was elected prime minister, he did not invite AIPAC and most of the other Jewish groups to the inauguration.
There's a famous story about Rabin on his first trip to Washington. He was in one of the big hotels in Washington, the Schwalm or something and there were some figures from AIPAC and other groups that wanted to meet with him and Rabin, who was a very profane man turned to one of his aides and said "I don't have time to talk to scumbags."
So I think it's important that within Israel. There is an understanding that the Israeli lobby in the United States, lobbies for the hard right in Israel. Not for Israel, and I think that those of us as long as I have in the Middle East - part of my heartbreak. Is that I think that this behavior is deeply self-destructive in the long term, to Israel. Israel can't pick itself up and move to another geographical location. It is where it is. And the brilliance of the Oslo peace agreement, which Rabin got, was that in order to break the cycle of violence and the conflict since the foundation of Israel in 1948, you had to give Palestinians and economic stake within Israel. That's why there was a $5 billion aid package - that's why there was talk about integrating Palestinians into the Israeli economy.
It was that fundamental understanding that when you give off Achmed a worker from Gaza - the possibility to buy a refrigerator and to send his children to school and to have hope that he and his family can have a better life - you essentially began to weld together to peoples and give them a kind of common cause. You know, that's very much what happened with Northern Ireland.
It was the raising of the economic standards of the Catholics to the level of the Protestants that I think did more than anything else to break the back of this sectarian violence in the same was true after Oslo. Unfortunately, after the assassination of Rabin, the Israeli leadership did everything they could to destroy and scuttle Oslo and in many ways I think are responsible for creating Hamas in the same way that they are responsible not only for creating Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. But empowering Hezbollah two years ago, when they bombed Lebanon, saturation bombing including Beirut.
The goal was to free three captured Israeli soldiers who have not been freed of course, but to break Hezbollah. And of course we see the results in Lebanese politics, what they did was only empower Hezbollah, because these are groups that speak exclusively in the language of violence.
They are groups that build themselves on the corpses of martyrs, and when you carry out indiscriminate violence - the kind of violence is being carried out in Gaza, you radicalize the population. You drive - you essentially snuff out the moderates. I mean, how can you, when thousands and thousands of pounds of fragmentation bombs and missiles are being dropped all over Gaza - the voice of moderates. The voice of people who want to create cooperation between them and the Palestinians that have no credibility, and that delights Hamas.
Kall: the other day I wrote a piece that Hamas pimped Israel and I’ve run more since then, but my impression was, from what I understand Hamas was in trouble politically. Their ratings were lower than George Bush's - close to the level of Congress
Hedges: that's a very good point, because Hamas, and I first granted Hamas in 1988 in Gaza, when they were a fringe group - who the Israelis when they did roundups, never touched because they saw them as a kind of wedge to break Fatah at Yemeni within Gaza - I don't know that the actively supported Hamas, there’s some claims that they did, but they certainly looked the other way. They didn't persecute them they saw them as a divisive force within Palestinian politics and nurtured their growth without question.
Hamas’ great strength in Gaza on the West Bank is not so much its radical politics, but the huge charity organizations that it runs. I mean it's literally the delivery of bags of flour and cooking oil to families, week after week that gave Hamas, a kind of popular support that led of course to its elections - free and fair elections without foreign observers without question - they won a legitimate - their legitimacy is real
Kall: I've got a question about that, you know, they say that more than half the population of Gaza is 17 years old or younger - so they wouldn't have voted right?
Hedges: right
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