Jordan Elgrably reminds people of the crucial stories behind those being bombarded daily in Gaza.
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Amidst the relentless cycle of terror, death and destruction endured by Palestinians daily, the full extent of their suffering is evident to those who witness these atrocities via social media and independent media. Yet, what is frequently lost in these images is the profound humanity of those who once lived vibrant lives in the very region that is now almost completely rubble.
Jordan Elgrably is an American, French and Moroccan writer and literary editor at The Markaz Review. His new book, “Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction,” explores various short stories from the perspective of Middle Eastern and North African writers. On this episode of Scheer Intelligence, Elgrably recounts to host Robert Scheer the often forgotten stories of Palestinians, whose voices desperately need to be heard.
Elgrably paints a vivid picture of the impending future of Palestinian children and teens, pointing to only one aspect of the destruction. “Right now we’re looking at a situation where all of the universities in Gaza have been destroyed. Most of the libraries are gone. A lot of the schools are gone,” Elgrably lamented. “And so imagine you have a whole generation, a lost generation of Palestinian kids and teens that are not going to be able to go to school for who knows how long. They’re saying it’s going to take years to be able to rebuild even places to live, that people are going to be living in tents now. The Palestinians have been refugees for generations over and over.”
As writers, Elgrably and Scheer both see through the distortion of these stories in the subtle ways that penetrate Western society’s perception of people like Palestinians and Muslims in general. “Arabs and Muslims have been convenient stereotypes and clichéd, two-dimensional characters in Hollywood movies, in our imaginations, especially since 9/11, and Israel exploits this because they don’t refer to Palestinians, they refer to them as terrorists,” Elgrably said.
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Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest. And in this case not just raw intelligence, but knowledge, experience about a part of the world that’s obviously front and center of the news. He refers to it in his latest book as the center, stories from the center and it’s Jordan Elgrably. I know him by his work and his byline. Unfortunately, I’m still not good at pronouncing names. But what you bring to the table and in your book, you actually say rises above politics as it’s a collection of writings by different people from North Africa and the Middle East.
And you talk about rising above, but I’m going to bring you right back into the current crisis because you have so many different avenues here. You’re part Moroccan, part French, part born here, part Jewish, part Arabic. And I only know you as a very well known writer that has been based in LA as well as in France, and for 20 years or so, you were the editor of a website, the Marquez Center, which I guess means the center. And, so tell us what you bring to the table and how you feel about what’s going on and how it relates to your literary work.
Jordan Elgrably: Thanks so much for having me on, Bob. I appreciate it. You and I go back a little bit, a few years, when we worked together on an issue that dealt with the CIA. But, okay, the book is called “Stories from the Center of the World.” And the word “the markaz” is an Arab word for center. It’s the same word in Hebrew, as well as Persian, Turkish, and Urdu. And so “Stories from the Center of the World” is a book full of 25 short stories by writers from all over the region, what the CIA actually calls the Greater Middle East, which we like to refer to as SWANA, which stands for Southwest Asia and North Africa.
Yes, there are Palestinian writers in the book, writers also from Pakistan, Greece, Lebanon. the U.S., Sudan, Somalia. Mostly Muslim countries, most of the writers in the book happen to be Muslim and also, I think a lot of them are probably atheists or agnostic, which is not a discussion that we hear very much. When we hear about Palestine, we seem to think that everyone is Muslim and everyone is either a Hamas supporter or whatever. But if you want to talk about Gaza, should we talk about the famine, the imposed famine, because Israel’s not letting in enough food to… the children are getting 250 to 300 calories a day. Do you want to talk about the use of U.S. weapons, our taxpayer dollars used to send Israel more 2,000 pound bombs? The fact that all 13 universities have been destroyed. What is the possible explanation for that? Or what we, do you want to talk about the over 100 journalists who’ve been killed in the last few months?
Some of them have been called on the phone and told they were going to be targeted and they, sure enough, a few hours or a day or two later, they were killed, often just with their entire family. Bomb dropped on their house. I don’t know what angle you want to come at this from.
Scheer: I want the angle of affirming the humanity of the people that are being killed, whatever their origin and in this tragedy and historically, one of the great tragedies, UN is investigating the question of genocide. The president of the United States, in an obscene speech, tried to use the memory of the Holocaust on Holocaust Memorial Day to justify, what seemed to me, indifference to genocide as long as the victims are not Jewish. This is the sickest idea, the slogan, “never again,” has to mean no sector of humanity is targeted to eliminate their national or religious identity.
The obscenity, I’m sorry, you provoked me so I’ll go into an editorial here. But the president just gave this, I’m using the word I think correctly, an obscene, disgusting speech where he tried to co-opt the memorial to justify the very policy you just outlined, where we supply 2,000 pound bombs that can only kill innocents. Too big to control just killing the acclaimed target. So take it wherever you want. You’re a person of mixed background and that’s a blessing in this situation because we want to objectify people. Oh, they’re all Muslim fanatics or they’re all innocent, pure Jewish Israelis. Even the Jews that killed Rabin when he was moving to Israel towards peace must be innocent. And so I would like you to unravel the situation. And people don’t know much of the history. You mentioned North Africa, we had great wars for liberation throughout Africa and everywhere, and the U.S. wasn’t always on the right side. I think of the battle for Algiers and so forth.
Elgrably: The French occupied Algeria for decades. And you know relating that to Israel, some people think that Israel is a settler colonial state. I think most Jews would be shocked to conflate that but more and more people are saying that. The Palestinians lost a lot in 1948. They lost everything in 1967. And now in 2024 they don’t have a lot left in Gaza and they’re being killed as well in the West Bank. But to go back to the Holocaust, you know what Biden did is buy into this Israeli attempt to completely own and co-opt the Holocaust. and Jews will say, Oh, you can’t compare, nothing else compares. The Holocaust was millions of people. It was sanctified by the state, by Germany, and it was so organized and it was mass killing and so forth. But never again does mean no genocide for anyone, whether it’s in Rwanda or Bosnia or in Gaza. And I wanted to mention that I feel very strongly that Israel has gained this impunity, and I trace it back, and you might remember this, people who are a lot younger than us will not have heard of this, but I traced back Israel’s impunity to their attack on the USS Liberty, which is a U.S. intelligence gathering ship, which they bombed in June of 1967. Israeli warplanes strafed and bombed this American ally intelligence gathering ship that was docked outside of Egypt in the Mediterranean, and the Israelis claimed it was an accident. But the ship was flying American flags, the sailors waved at the Israeli pilots, they flew over a couple of times and they came back and they tried to sink the ship.
They killed over 30 people and wounded over 100 people. And what happened was that Lyndon Johnson, with the collusion of the Israelis of course, brushed it under the rug. The survivors got $20,000 each and they were, I think they had to sign NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, and Israel basically got away with what would be an act of war, right? They attacked and killed American servicemen and intelligence operators and no one ever brought it up. And I think ever since then, they felt that they have the U.S. in their pocket and Netanyahu has been caught on video talking to settlers saying, Oh, we have the Americans where we want them, don’t worry. I can get them to do this, that, or the other. And they’ve been building these settlements consistently now, since the 1980s, right? And Oslo was supposed to be an attempt to give the Palestinians in the West Bank some sense of autonomy. They were supposed to have, I think, five or six years to get organized and begin to build the infrastructure of their own state.
And while all this is going on, Israel is building more and more settlements. It was very bad faith negotiations on their part, which Edward Said saw through at the time. I think a lot of us thought that Oslo was a time for hope, right? But what happened soon after that, you just mentioned, Rabin and how he was assassinated. The guy that killed Rabin was a protege of a party that Netanyahu was part of. So these extreme right wing Israelis have been around doing their work, building settlements and trying to keep all of historic Palestine since, at least, since the late ’80s, early 1990s. That’s where we are today.
Scheer: I think there’s so many threads here to explore. And, yes, there’s vast ignorance. That’s convenient ignorance about the whole region. And what everybody forgets is that colonialism was basic to the whole division of these countries. The drawing of borders, whatever country, Syria, Jordan, Israel and so forth. And this attack on the Liberty, and I did do a podcast quite recently with one of the American helicopter pilots who flew in and tried to help and so forth, and he’s written quite a bit about this, but it was clear that the Israeli government did not want this American ship to pick up inconvenient facts about this war by surveillance and that it might leak out.
And what everybody forgets is that the Six Day War, and the reason we have to discuss it, if we’re going to talk about Gaza and the West Bank, is this is how Israel came to be the occupying power. And it was not as if the Palestinians living in Gaza or Jordan attacked Israel. This is garbage. In fact, there were even Palestinians in what had originally been the Israel area who actually even contributed blood and so forth to the Israeli effort and the war really was supposed to be against Egypt and to some extent Jordan, which had occupied the West Bank; and Syria, which had the Golden Heights. And I just want to tap into your wealth of knowledge here because up until that point and I went there at that time at the tail end of the Six Day War and was in Egypt and then went over to Cyprus to get a different thing stamped on my passport and then go over into Israel and so forth.
So I was right there at that time and the big concern in Egypt was the Suez Canal. There, after all, had been fighting with the French and the English and so forth. And where did Israel stand on that? Where did the United States and was Israel merely an outpost of Western colonialism and neocolonialism? Everybody forgets that history and the irony of the whole thing is that it was a preemptive war, presumably, in the David and Goliath image. Egypt was supposed to be the Goliath and all these Arab countries. And then they replaced Egypt and Gaza and they replaced Jordan in the West Bank and so forth and made peace with both of those countries. And yet the Palestinians are still held responsible. And you mentioned the Holocaust. The last thing I’m saying, to my mind, is the greatest distortion. Then after all, here was Germany that authored the Holocaust and then you somehow visited the responsibility for that on the Palestinians who had nothing to do with it. This is a distortion of history, maybe on the grandest level of all such incidents. I promised my wife I wouldn’t interrupt my guests anymore the way I do all the time, but you got me going on this one. I’ll try to shut up from here on out.
Elgrably: Listen Bob, of course, the Palestinians have paid the price for the Holocaust. And three years later, just three years later, they lost their autonomy. They lost a lot. They lost over 400 towns and villages, which were destroyed. Three quarters of a million people were driven out and not allowed to come back. So many people lost their property, lost their businesses. A lot of people lost their lives and that was almost, what, 75, 80 years ago. And that process of, I would want to call it ethnic cleansing, let’s call it what it is, or colonization, hasn’t ever stopped. It has continued. And so this Gaza war is the culmination, is the inevitable result of that and I think Hamas felt, as you I think we’re beginning to suggest, that the Palestinians were being forgotten and with the Abraham Accords, you know with all of the relationships that Israel has been establishing with Morocco and Qatar and so forth, they planned their attack. They didn’t think of it as a I don’t think as a terrorist attack.
They thought of it as a last gasp military raid; let’s see if we can get some hostages and get to the negotiating table. However, I doubt that they anticipated the total wrath and the sort of scorched earth response that Israel would lay on them. I can’t imagine that they, I know they expected a harsh response, but I think the level of atrocities in this war, in the so called war, are beyond expectation.
Scheer: You’re known as a writer and a student of fiction and editor of fiction and writer and so forth, and the whole point of literature is presumably to provide depth and empathy, feeling for people that are written about, the context of their lives, their aspirations, their feelings. And you print all of these writers who engage a complex view of the human experience. And when we were briefly talking before, you mentioned, yes, they are Muslim, but there are Christians, but there are atheists, and we know this through the writers. But also human beings, they interpret their religions in different ways. After all, Indonesia is the largest Muslim country and it’s quite different from Saudi Arabia and method of government and so on. So I’d like to take the time, we have limited time today, to get into your writer, editor brain. And, tell us why you put this fiction out there in these collections and mention the specific ones. One’s not coming out now for a few more months. One just came out, I think, today, right?
Elgrably: Yes, “Stories from the Central World,” came out today from City Lights.
Scheer: So I’m the first person to actually be able to talk about that. People can get the book today, right? Is there a Kindle version or do they have to get it from City Lights?
Elgrably: There is a Kindle version. They can also get it at their local bookstore. It’s already out and they can get it on bookshop.org. Pretty much anywhere. I saw there was a stack of them at Politics and Prose in D.C. which is one, of course, one of our favorite bookstores.
Scheer: And you’re speaking at City Lights, what, this week in San Francisco.
Elgrably: I’ll be speaking at City Lights on Thursday night, yes. And then going to Berkeley and then Sacramento and then L.A. next week on the 16th at Beyond Baroque. People want to come out to that. These are all, of course, free events. At Beyond Baroque, there’s going to be a party afterwards because I have so many friends in L.A. and so many writers.
Scheer: So tell us, because what is basically involved in the propaganda about this war is the denial of the human component, of human complexity, and people are reduced to caricatures. And one caricature which is dominated is, of course, the David and Goliaths. Innocent Israel, weak, small, in a hostile Muslim world, and threatened. But now Israel, of course, is the only nuclear power there, unless you go all the way over to Pakistan, and Israel is hardly, as clearly, the David, can eliminate people with smart bombs and extensive weapons and no really serious military threat or opposition, but related to your work…
Elgrably: Yeah, let me do that because what I think what we forget is that Arabs and Muslims have been convenient stereotypes and cliched, two dimensional characters in Hollywood movies, in our imaginations, certainly since 9/11, especially since 9/11, and Israel exploits this because they don’t refer to Palestinians, they refer to them as terrorists. Basically every Palestinian is a terrorist or a potential terrorist. And I was reminded of this when I saw the Clint Eastwood movie, American Sniper, a few years ago, in which all the Americans refer to all the Iraqis as Hajjis. They’re not real people, they’re just two-dimensional Muslims who might be a threat. Their life stories you don’t know, you don’t really know much about them. The purpose of the work that I do with the Markaz Review is to give these other Arab and Muslim voices, whether they’re in Pakistan or in New York or in Paris or Berlin, whether they’re a Syrian refugee, an Iraqi writer who was in Assad’s prison, the chance to be read in English.
We translate a lot of work from Arabic. In fact, a number of the stories in the City Lights book, “Stories from the Center of the World,” were translated from Arabic, also translated from Persian by Salar Abdoh, who’s an Iranian American writer whose published five novels. And we translate quite a lot of, the content in the Markaz Review and, almost half of the stories in this City Lights book are translated. I don’t know if you remember, Ben Affleck’s movie, Argo.
Scheer: Yeah, I remember quite well. One of the great distortions of…
Elgrably: Do you remember that, in that movie, the Iranians are at the embassy and I think for about three quarters of that movie, almost until the end, the Iranian speaking Persian were not translated. There were no subtitles. What effect does that have on you as a viewer? It makes them much more menacing and threatening and scary if you can’t understand what they’re saying. Watch the movie again, you’ll see that they are not translated. And that was totally intentional, to make them scarier. Because if you actually translate what they’re saying, you’re gonna you’re not going to be as afraid you’re going to start to ask yourself questions, well why are they doing this? Whereas they were just portrayed as hostage takers and the evil Iranians. It’s so insulting to the intelligence
Scheer: The big distortion of that movie was a denial that the United States in a very cynical, deceitful, misinformation way, had totally distorted the history of one of the great movements in human history, going back to the war with the Greeks and Alexander and everything. And made it a caricature and overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh, who was the last secular elected official of Syria and a very cynical CIA, of Iran.
Elgrably: He was elected in a free election by the Iranian people in 1953. And the Brits and the Americans had oil rights, and they didn’t want those oil rights to be messed with. Mossadegh said no, Iranian oil should be for Iran, and we want a much better deal. And we’re going to cancel the contracts, and we’re going to redo all this, and MI6 and CIA said no, it’s not going to go down that way. We’re going to get rid of this guy. And they fomented the coup, got rid of him, and they brought back the Shah, of course, which led to the downfall of relationships with Iran for now, what, 40 something years. Yeah, America has always had an imperial thumb on these Middle Eastern countries, and we don’t take responsibility for it. You and I know better. But a lot of people are not aware of this history.
Scheer: But people should understand this is not a conspiracy. It’s very interesting, the word, conspiracy theory and so forth. Who controls the narrative? There’s probably no more thoroughly documented episode by using official U.S. … I actually interviewed Kermit Roosevelt, who was the CIA guy who went in with his millions of dollars and bought off people in the bazaar and everything. I actually have personal knowledge of it. There’s a very good movie recently made by a Persian filmmaker on the whole thing. But you couldn’t have… I was at Kinzer’s, I wrote a whole very good book about it. And the story is really one wiped out by that Hollywood movie, which made it sound like American innocence was always at its play. And it wasn’t. It was the United States really. And this is what Vietnam was all about, people now talk about, bring that back a bit, but it was really about an anti-colonial movement worldwide, to pose this world order that now everybody celebrates.
We want a world of order, but in fact, the order was one that was incredibly oppressive. And one of the ironies here is that South Africa is bringing charges against Israel, they know well about apartheid and Western domination or indifference at best and so forth. But that whole history is denied. And the fact of the matter is, when we talk about Israel as a settler colonial project, that it was in fact in keeping with the, you know a lot about France, but who were the million French that were in Algeria? They were settler colonialists. And again, I don’t think that many people will, unfortunately, won’t read your collections and your books.
Let’s keep pushing it so people might actually buy it. But the big disconnect we have is between recognizing humanity, or demanding that our humanity be front and center, that we are the center. And that anyone else in the world, their history, their aspirations, their kind, whether they’re in China, wherever they are, India, anywhere, there are no account. There are no accounts, their history doesn’t really matter. We and the arrogance that we can define human freedom and yet be so callous in our disregard for human freedom when it doesn’t conform to us. I don’t know. We only got about five minutes here left, but…
Elgrably: Let me plug the book again. It’s called “Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction.” And I think people will get a lot out of it because there are just some excellent, really good writers in there. Hanif Kureishi, Salar Abdoh, Leila Aboulela, Mai Al-Nakib, just very talented people. And the other book that I have coming out in the fall that I’m doing with Malu Halasa, is called “Sumud: A New Palestinian Reader,” and that’s coming out from Seven Stories Press.
And that is a collection of essays, art, poetry, and fiction. And it’s a whole other way of looking at the Palestinian people. Right now we’re looking at a situation where, as I said earlier, all of the universities in Gaza have been destroyed. Most of the libraries are gone. A lot of the schools are gone. And so imagine you have a whole generation, a lost generation of Palestinian kids and teens that are not going to be able to go to school for who knows how long, they’re saying it’s going to take years to be able to rebuild even places to live, that people are gonna be living in tents now. The Palestinians have been refugees for generations over and over.
The book that we are doing in the fall, sumud by the way, means steadfastness, or persistence, or resistance. And we’re not hitting people over the head with the politics of it because you can get that in other places. But with the poets and the short stories and the art. And the personal essay is the personal experience. We want to humanize,well look, Arabs say, you don’t have to humanize me. I know I’m human. If you don’t know that I’m human, that’s not my problem. But that’s the purpose of my work. It’s the only thing I can do. I can’t stop Israel from dropping bombs on Gaza. And I can’t convince them not to starve people to death. So all I can do is hand the microphone or the online opportunity or the books to the American reading public and say, look at another angle of this conflict.
Scheer: But actually our cultural institutions that are supposed to be doing this kind of work, I think of, PEN, the writers, presumably the writers group once was, now run by somebody coming from the State Department to… was in the business of justifying this extensive use of power, but it goes back a long way. We had the, I forget their names now, the Congress on Cultural Freedom, and weaving in defense of intellectual rights with the Cold War, with nationalism, with your cause. And what we destroy in there is any sense of universal principles. Whether the Russians do it, or we do it, or anybody does it, they’re really denying the integrity of art. And it seems to me, because I’ve followed your work for decades now, you’re asserting the essential independence and necessity for an independent art.
Elgrably: Yes, but let’s not forget that Stalin killed writers. He killed Isaac Babel and Franco was afraid of writers. And by the way, Franco was a journalist who wrote under a pseudonym. He knew what the power of the word was. He had the best poet, the greatest poet, maybe of the 20th century, Federico Garcia Lorca, assassinated. Regimes kill writers because they’re afraid of what writers can do. Words are powerful, and Israel has killed more writers in the last few months than were killed, more journalists I should say, than were killed in all of World War II, which is an astonishing fact. And how are they going to answer that? What are they going to say, if they have to explain themselves in the International Court of Justice? Why do they target over 100 journalists? I want to hear that explanation.
Scheer: I want to hear from you then in the closing minutes. There’s a part of you that’s Jewish, right? And yet you’ve spent your life, and this is one of the things that got me when I went to the end of the Six Day War. How close both, not the European Jews who were there, but the people who were coming from a lot from the Arab world, and, so forth, but, everything, the music, the food, the whole thing. And to turn it into a nationalist anti-religion of certain kinds, symbols, and all this is sort of a denial of this really important human experience that was shared by people who end up following Muhammad or the people who stick with the original Hebraic trail. So maybe you could just take a few minutes to put yourself in this.
Elgrably: Sure, yeah, I’d be happy to. Most of the Jews who settled in Israel before 1948 came from Europe. So they were of Ashkenazi background. When they arrived in historic Palestine, they found that there were some Jews still living there who were Palestinian Jews. They basically spoke Arabic. They didn’t speak Hebrew. Maybe they spoke English, but they didn’t speak Hebrew. They spoke Arabic and they were Jews. And I think for European Jews who came from Poland, Germany, Russia, they were not familiar with the history of the Jews of the Arab Muslim world. And, it’s a great history and it goes back a couple thousand years.
Iran had a very strong Jewish community. Morocco also had hundreds of thousands of Jews. And the king of Morocco protected the Jews from the Nazis in World War II. When a representative of Hitler came to the King of Morocco during the war, and said, we’ll take care of your Jewish problem. He said, I don’t have a Jewish problem. I don’t have any Jews. I only have Moroccans. I don’t know. I can’t help you. He sent them packing basically, they got nothing. And what happened was Ben Gurion realized that all of these Palestinians had left, and now there, there was going to be, there were still a lot of Palestinians left when the dust settled after 1948.
And he had to balance it out because otherwise Jews would be the demographic minority in their own country, Israel, in the new state of Israel. So that’s where they figured, oh, we have to import all of these Jews from Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Africa. But they were uneducated about that population, and they assumed, incorrectly, that all of them came from backwaters and that they were uneducated, poor. Some of them were, but they weren’t all that way. The Iraqi Jews were often very educated and well off, well to do. Same could be said about some of the Iranian Jews and some from Morocco, but when they arrived in Israel, these Arab Jews who came from these cultures had been there for a long time, were given the worst jobs and the worst towns and the worst opportunities.
And in order for Israel to justify its continued oppression of the Palestinian people, they had to teach these new, Middle Eastern Jews who were from Arab countries, that their culture was wrong and inferior, that they shouldn’t speak Arabic in public. There are tons of stories and novels in Israeli literature about Jews from Egypt or Iraq who were informed by their family that they should only speak Arabic at home, and they should try to pass through native Israeli Hebrew speakers.
Scheer: Yeah, so how do we get out of this?
Elgrably: I think you should learn Arabic, and if you don’t have time to do that, then, watch some Arabic movies with subtitles. At least expose yourself, this is for everyone, expose yourself to some other stories. Get out of your little comfort zone. Stop your doom scrolling. Go read a book. Read stories from the center of the world. That’s a good place to start.
Scheer: It’s interesting, the notion of the center of the world. It’s not the only place that makes that claim, but it’s instructive because generally, and, this is, obviously you and I are both children of immigrants, and the whole illusion of the melting pot, which of course was celebrated when I was a kid. It’s a long time actually before you were born, but still. There was this mythology that somehow we have taken the best of everybody and somehow formed, almost like Stalin’s idea of a new man, a new human, the melting pot. And it didn’t. What we did was we formed a new basis of arrogance. We didn’t really… I remember as a kid, my mother spoke Yiddish and Russian. My father was from Germany and all these languages in the neighborhood and everything. And in school, they told us to get rid of it, get rid of our accent, get rid of, and deny the history of our family.
And learn something else if you went to the Catholic school and you learned Latin or something, but then also, oh no, you have to learn French. No, I don’t want to learn French. I don’t know any French people, and so really right what’s going on in the world now, if I were to introduce an overarching idea, this whole argument about the multipolar world, all the tension, which unifies a lot of countries that all normally don’t get along that well. China and India is a case in point, they have their own histories, their own rivalries, their own nationalism, but what does unite them is a rejection of the U.S. as the empire, as the center. As the center of logic and decency and rules and so forth. And it’s a very difficult thing for people in the United States to realize that they’ve absorbed this idea that we are central. And yet when things go awry, we don’t take any responsibility, then we don’t say well, for example, and let’s close this on this, the bombs that are dropping on Israel are American made bombs, primarily.
Elgrably: You mean the bombs dropping on Gaza?
Scheer: Yeah but Gaza, that, oh, that’s an interesting slip on my part, if you want. The fact of the matter is, Israel is responsible because it has controlled Gaza for so long and the West Bank. You can’t take that view as the other. They, I’ll tell you just as a little footnote, when I was there, I remember very clearly talking to some very top people, listening to them, the Moshe Dayan’s and the Allons of this world and so forth. And they all said, you come back in 10 years or 20 years, they said, and we’re still occupying, we will not be the Israel that we want to be. Whether they believed that, really believed it or not was just propaganda. I don’t know but I remember that very clearly. And I think it was Dayan, if I recall correctly, who prided himself on becoming knowledgeable about Arabic and, knowing something, of the region. And what have you he actually…
Elgrably: There were some generals in ’67 who didn’t want to keep the territories. They wanted to give it back, but the cabinet decided otherwise. And so some of them were drummed out of service, like General Peled. They saw an opportunity and Israel missed that opportunity. The Israelis always say the Palestinians never miss an opportunity. But, there’s a new book coming out by Raja Shehadeh next month. He’s the Palestinian lawyer, of course, wrote “Palestinian Walks,” Raja Shehadeh, and the book is, asked a question. He says, look, the Berlin Wall came down in 1939, and the world celebrated the end of the Soviet Union. Apartheid ended a few years later. And all of this, the spirit of freedom was in the air. Why didn’t Israel seize that opportunity? And supposedly they did with Oslo, but then what happened with Oslo, they built more settlements. So Israel has had a few chances to help the Palestinians and make peace and get rid of this burden of this military occupation. And they keep missing the opportunity. So I don’t know what’s going to happen now. I think we may be at a tipping point.
Scheer: We may what?
Elgrably: We may be at a tipping point. Israel may be at a point where there’s no, going back to what they’ve been living with for the last 56 years, since 1967. Something has to give, something has to break, and maybe we’re only two or three years away from a major shift here. I think the two state solution is moot now, it’s impossible. But, maybe one state shared equal rights for everyone. Will happen in our lifetime, Inshallah.
Scheer: Okay, but, President, as we record this, was is it May 7th today,, the President of the United States made a very strong statement that, that anyone who opposes Israel is in the position of Nazi Germany. That’s what this distortion of Holocaust remembrance is all about, never again. And that gives license to Netanyahu to do whatever he wants.
Elgrably: It’s true, but it’s nonsense. And unfortunately, Joe Biden is going to lose the election for his support of Netanyahu.
Scheer: Yeah, but his opponent is even more extreme and more celebratory of Netanyahu than Biden so it’s a reflection. We’ve exported democracy to the world. We’ve messed up people’s lives in the name of democracy and now we have these two, when it comes to the subject, we’re talking about ignoramuses, who are going to settle the future, maybe of all humanity, but that’s all the grumbling I have time for.
I want to thank you.
Elgrably: Yes. Thank you, Bob. So we’re going to end on the note that the chickens have come home to roost.
Scheer: Yeah, if people want an insight into the complexity. I forget what, Viet Nguyen, who won the Pulitzer Prize and a brilliant writer about Vietnam and its exile community. Do you have the blurb he gave for your book?
Elgrably: I don’t have it off the top of my head, but it’s a very good blurb. Scheer: Yeah, and he says, no, but he said he paid tribute to the complexity one is exposed to in reading your book. And that is really, jingoism is the denial of complexity. And that’s what the whole debate now and what the president endorsed today, a denial that there’s another, there are other humanities, there are many concerns, there’s a contested history, and they just asserted this, and as somebody who’s half German, it is so insulting that somehow Germany and the Western Europeans and everything who authored, and along with the antisemites in Eastern Europe, who authored all the, horror of the Holocaust, that somehow they get now to feel innocence as they supply the bombs that destroy children in Gaza. That’s just mind boggling. Okay, on that note, let me just thank, by the way, thank you for doing this. Thank Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian at KCRW, the important NPR station in Santa Monica, for posting these shows. Joshua Scheer, our executive producer. Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction. And Max Jones for doing the video treatment, including his wild collages. And the J.K.W. foundation, in memory of Jean Stein. And you probably know of Jean Stein, a great writer and independent voice who was very close to Edward Said, who you mentioned and came from a very prominent American Jewish yet, took out of her Jewish tradition, to really have a very strong alliance with Edward Said in support of his work let’s leave on that note of tribute. Thanks and see you again with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
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Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer, publisher of ScheerPost and award-winning journalist and author of a dozen books, has a reputation for strong social and political writing over his nearly 60 years as a journalist. His award-winning journalism has appeared in publications nationwide—he was Vietnam correspondent and editor of Ramparts magazine, national correspondent and columnist for the Los Angeles Times—and his in-depth interviews with Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev and others made headlines. He co-hosted KCRW’s political program Left, Right and Center and now hosts Scheer Intelligence, a KCRW podcast with people who discuss the day’s most important issues.
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Originally Published: 2024-05-10 05:00:00
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