By Robert Scheer and Ray McGovern / Original to ScheerPost
In this week’s conversation between the two old guys from the Bronx, Robert Scheer and Ray McGovern, the pair discuss what the breaking of the ceasefire in Gaza means for the foreseeable future, including the Trump administration’s crackdown on protestors and universities within the U.S.
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Transcript
This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.
Robert Scheer
Hi, this is Bob Scheer, Robert Scheer, with another edition of the, what is it, the Bob and Ray Show or Two Old Coots from the Bronx or Tuesday with Ray. I don’t know what it is, but it’s an interesting conversation with two guys who did start out, we’re both in our eighties here and we started out in the Bronx. He grew up in an Irish neighborhood. I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood.
Never the two would meet unless in an adversarial hostile way, unless it was the postman or the cop or something. Then you could talk. But, you know, he went to Fordham, the Jesuit school. I went to City College and then he went into the military and volunteered. Then he was with the CIA for twenty seven years. And I went first through graduate school and then into journalism.
And I would say during the 27 years he was in the CIA, I spent a disproportionate amount of my time trying to expose what the CIA was up to, what they were doing, and holding them accountable for overthrowing governments and killing people and so forth. So we come at it, this from different life experience, but we’ve hooked up here trying to make sense of this world that we’re living in, and hopefully we’ll stick around for a while or maybe departing from.
But that’s it. And today I want to talk about what’s going on with this so-called was a peace agreement or a ceasefire agreement with Israel and Gaza. And now it’s just got to descend into ultimate madness, ramping up the genocide and what have you. And I don’t know, it’s such an appalling situation, but I want to start with a provocative question.
And that is where does it fit into the grand scheme of what Trump is all about and where America is headed and indeed where the world is headed? Because on one hand, you have Trump talking about peace with Russia, you know, and maybe even with China and ending the war in Ukraine and there’s negotiations going on. On the other hand, we have an intensification of this horror in Israel and Gaza, no talk at all about peace, unleashing Bibi Netanyahu to do his worst, killing children, killing innocents and so forth.
And I’m trying to get these things together and just begin with one little odd historical thing. Recently, the United States sided with Russia, Putin’s Russia, in resisting a UN Security Council resolution on the Ukraine war and presenting a more pro-Russian position. And Netanyahu’s Israel joined Russia and the US in that view, were backed by it.
And so I’m wondering, in this new world order that Trump is bringing about and in the one of the one that the China and Russia have been talking about, multi-polar world, where all these different countries, what happens to people who don’t have a country? What happens to people from a country that doesn’t have nuclear weapons, that doesn’t have a lot of power? And that’s the situation of the Palestinians.
And a situation is evolving where, yeah, there might be peace over Ukraine and there might be a new understanding between the United States and Russia and maybe even with China. And that all bodes well for the world. On the other hand, people struggling for their freedom who don’t have it, and in fact have had it denied for them for all these, you almost gone on a whole century now, or certainly seven decades, the Palestinian people, they’re going to be betrayed. And they’ll even be betrayed by Arab governments and people who have professed a concern about them.
And in fact, even China and Russia have expressed support for the Palestinians. Is that all going to be abandoned in this new great power arrangement? So I want to throw that out to you and take it where you want.
Ray McGovern
Well, Bob, you’ll recall that our last conversation focused on me trying to explicate the implications of Trump thinking that he was saved by God. He was saved by God. He said so. I think he may even believe it. Saved by God to do what? To wage genocide? Well, that’s my kind of God, okay.
What he’s done now is blessed or supplied, given 2,000 pound bombs to a person who’s renewed the genocide just this morning, killing over 400 Palestinians as they slept or as they tried to make do in their tents and so forth. This is beyond the pale in terms of our being Americans and our tolerating our citizenship without testing really, really loud against this genocide.
Now, just to give you a little context here, when you told me you’d like to talk about this just five minutes ago, I went back and I said, you know, on October 7th, one of my very close family members, a young woman who cares about these things, cares to three kids, but she still cares to keep up. She said, hey, dad, here’s the question.
Can you give me a brief synopsis of what’s happening in Israel? Brief synopsis, okay. Well, it took me three pages in this essay that I did for my own website. But I talked about the religious justification, this business about the Zionist Jews, like the ones in power in Israel now, eschatological Jews, the end days willing to risk the end days, not only for themselves, but for all of us, because they think they’re entitled to do that.
And is Trump one of them? Deuteronomy, they say. This is why we treat the Arabs. They say that, what is said, Deuteronomy 15:4 says, you shall have, you shall have this land of milk and honey. And the second part of that says, so long as there are no poor among you.
It doesn’t say only you. It doesn’t say the people you would displace in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians. It doesn’t say that, okay? It says so there will be no poor among you. So sort of a deal, okay? So it’s like, oh, you could call it covenant. You shall have this land, living it preciously, but as long as there is no poor among you. So that’s the, it was an only if sort of thing. Okay.
Then in 1967, the Israelis decided, well, they could easily expand their borders. And as most people know, they expanded to well beyond what is now Israel, what Israel proper was. And they got the West Bank, they got Gaza, they got part of Syria.
And, you know, people said, well, you know, they were being attacked by the Arabs, I mean, the Egyptians were trying to attack them. Well, not really. It’s easy for you to say, McGovern, we mean not really. Prime Minister Menachem Begin said in Washington, August 8, 1982, it was the New York Times. Look it up. So what he said, quote, in June 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations and the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him. Period. End quote. Whoa.
So that whole 1967 war was sort of a war for [inaudible], what the Germans called more a living space, okay? So what happened? Well, that was June. In November of that same year, 1967, the Security Council of United Nations unanimously condemned Israel and said, have to return from the occupied territories, okay? Did they do that?
Well, give them a break. It was only 1967. How many years since then? No, they haven’t returned. Matter of fact, or recently, they’ve occupied parts of Syria that have no business occupying, but they just do it. Now, what else? Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention 1967. It was a big year. There was that war, Six-Day War. It really a five-day war, but, you know, they want to say Six-Day War because it has to do with the Sabbath. What happened? Well, there was the US intelligence ship right off [inaudible].
And it was collecting signals and intelligence about what the Israelis were doing. In this war, that was by then three days old. The date was June 8th. And what happened? Well, the Israelis sent aircraft around to inspect the USS Liberty. It was in international orders. And then later they sent fighter bombers to sink it. To sink it, okay? And then two patrol boats to torpedo it.
What were they trying to do? They were trying to sink an employment on the Egyptians to get us even more involved in the Mideast. OK, so what happened? Well, President Johnson and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, covered it up. So 32 American sailors, no, 34 American sailors were killed.
170 plus sailors were injured. Most of the crew were casualties, but LBJ, McNamara and to their discredit, the head of the army, I’m sorry, the head of the Navy covered it up. So what did they give the Israelis to believe? Now, listen, this is really easy, okay? This gave the Israelis to believe that they could get away with murder. They could get away with murdering US citizens.
And there would be no consequences. Were there consequences? No. The Navy was ordered to cover it up and it did. And I know several of the USS Liberty survivors are friends of mine. want to hear what shell shock, in the old days, what they called that, PTSD is? Talk to them. So there’s one thing. Now, I won’t go on forever, but that was ‘67.
Later, when the Israelis imposed this blockade on Gaza, there was another American citizen killed on the MV Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship, which the Israelis riddled with bullets. This was 2010. And one American was killed, you know, nothing said about that. Now we were, this is sort of interesting because it’s a personal experience, I was part of this US boat to Gaza.
These very, very justice-oriented, courageous and imaginative women bought a boat registered in the US. It was a US charter, US under US [inaudible]. We’ve outfitted it. We all chipped in. It’s not money. And we decided to sail, to bring letters and other things together. And we were ready to do that in 2011 at the end of June. What happened?
I get this notice at the end of June. I just did this thing out because, and I even wrote about it. I said, look, I’ve been told by a friend with real good contacts in the National Security Council of the United States that the White House does not plan to do anything to protect you if the same thing happens to you at the hands of the Israelis as what happened to that Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara.
Matter of fact, I’m glad be told said this source that they would be perfectly willing to have cold corpses of activists shown on American TV. End quote. Now that was just one source. Okay. But it was pretty plugged in. So I went with it and I wrote about it. Craig Murray, ambassador, former UK ambassador saw this. He’s a friend of mine.
And when he wrote, says, you know, I know Ray to be an honest man, but I thought it would be possible that his source was exaggerating. And therefore I sent my own diplomatic sources to work in Washington without giving them any indication of what Ray said. They came back with an independent report from a different source, close to Hillary Clinton. And they said, that actually same thing that they told Ray with a warning they gave Ray.
I was told that Obama will welcome an Israeli attack on this US ship as giving him a chance to confirm his pro-Israeli credentials and improve his standing with AIPAC ahead of the presidential election race. And fatalities would, quote, not be a problem, end quote. Well, do I feel strongly about this? Yeah, I do. I probably should tell people that in the event of the people in Greece where we were docked, posed all kinds of impediments to our departure.
The most ridiculous one was that they saw a defect in our air conditioning system. Anyhow, we decided to go out there anyway, and we made it all the way nine nautical miles out of port from Piraeus outside of Athens and the Greek Coast Guard very apologetically said, can’t go any farther. We’re under orders. Okay. Then they threatened to board us. So we had to turn back and then we learned that Obama had leaned all over the Greeks.
He said, look, you need a lot of support from the IMF for those new loans you need. If you let those guys get out into the high seas, we’re going to look very, very closely at all that. So Obama was responsible for us not getting up and maybe for me still being alive today. But that’s the kind of personal experience that kind of gives you an idea of how cheap life is when the Israelis are pursuing a political agenda.
Robert Scheer
Well, let me throw in my own personal connection. I happened to cover the Six Day War for Ramparts magazine, where I was an editor and actually got into the West Bank and Gaza after the aftermath of the war. And it was a different Israel than Netanyahu’s Israel. It was an Israel governed by the Labor Party, and even on the top ranks of people who like Moshe Dayan, was the hero general here and Allon leading political figure.
They were great pains to tell me, given that I was coming from a more leftist publication in the United States. And everyone else I talked to said, if we occupy these people, these millions of people, we’ve now come into control of because it wasn’t just the land. know, the original Israeli slogan, Zionist slogan was a land with no people for a people with no land.
The Jewish people didn’t have a land. There were no people living. Well, there were lots of people living there. And by then the Israelis knew this by the time the Six Day War, because they had plenty of them living in Israel proper. And they suddenly had these millions of people and a comparable population actually to their own when you put the two together. And then the question is what happens to those people?
And those people, the original Israelis that I talked to in the leadership of the Labor Party said we cannot occupy these people forever. Something has to be worked out. And Isaac Rabin, the leader of Israel, did take the steps to try to recognize a Palestinian state and live side by side.
He was killed for his efforts by a Jewish fanatic and that his widow has actually pointed out she held Netanyahu and his party, a movement responsible for stoking the flames of hatred towards her husband, who had also been an Israeli military person and a hero of considerable respect.
So, you know, we’re now in this situation where here is Donald Trump, who, full disclosure, I also have a German father, but I had a Jewish mother give me a different perspective on things. But Donald Trump, who accepts enthusiastically the idea that the major attack to Jewish people in this world has come somehow from the Palestinians, who actually were not involved militarily in the Six Day War.
Israel got along quite well with Egypt after that war. They along with Jordan after that war, they were involved in the hostilities that were emerging. And yet the Palestinians were held responsible. They didn’t have an army, they didn’t have weapons and so forth. So we’re in a situation now where you made a joke at the beginning, will my work be threatened? Will I be threatened?
Well, our justice department, as it’s called under Donald Trump, now has units going out to investigate universities, investigate life, and anybody who dares criticize Netanyahu’s Israel, whether they’re Jewish or not Jewish, whether they have a lifetime of concern about Jewish people, which I would claim I do, and my Jewish mother lost her, we lost our whole family in Lithuania. I went there after the war, couldn’t find any remnants of it, remembrance.
Yet now, if you dare criticize Netanyahu, your security in America will be threatened. You know, even if you’re a judge somewhere and you rule that people have a right to demonstrate and criticize Israel. So I want to focus on that a bit. And you’re somebody who was paid by the taxpayers to analyze, you were an analyst in the CIA. I have to always point out you were not one of the killer squad or the torture squad.
You were an analyst, an intellectual. How do you explain what is going on now and where is, there is something about peace movement. A lot of Jewish people are in that movement, Jewish Voice for Peace and so forth. But particularly the establishment is afraid to take on this issue. And of course, Biden and the Democrats were very supportive of that, Yahoo, and did not in any serious way criticize him.
So give us your analysis of where we are. Are Palestinians the easy target, the expendable to be eliminated, which is after all what Hitler thought he could do with the Jews, right? And succeeded, unfortunately, in destroying six million Jewish people that he could get away with it because the rest of the world wouldn’t care.
So here you have Trump getting back to my original point, apparently willing to make peace with Russia, maybe get along with China, these powerful countries that have big armaments. But when it comes to Palestinian people, he’s going to kill every one of them. He’s actually made that threat people who claim to be speaking in the name Hamas don’t conform.
And now it was Israel that broke the negotiation, it was not Hamas, but now he says, well, then they’ll all have to die. This is a surreal but terrifying moment, isn’t it, for those who care about human rights.
Ray McGovern
I agree, Bob, and especially with respect to Columbia University, [Mahmoud] Khalil and the 400 million that the U.S. has taken away from Columbia if it doesn’t behave and fulfill a list of conditions that won’t quit. Our civil liberties are in great peril. Now, it’s an anomaly that I really don’t understand the way I like to understand things, but it is a fact of life that the Israel lobby has inordinate influence, not only in our government, but in our media.
And media is key. Now, when Jewish voices for peace demonstrate in Grand Central Station or elsewhere in New York City.
Robert Scheer
Well, they did it at Trump Tower, too, just recently.
Ray McGovern
That’s right, yeah, and what, 200 got arrested? I know those people. I always can single out three or four or five faces that I’ve stayed at their houses over the week, did various justice actions together. They are very sincere, very courageous people. They’re the kind of people that bought the US boat to Gaza, equipped it, and then manned it with 50 people, including people like Alice Walker, a New York Times correspondent also.
I mean, maybe that’s why we escaped what befell the Turkish ship. There was no Alice Walker or New York Times reporter on that ship. But, you know, I just I know what the situation is. I know the power that the inordinate, the inordinately great influence of the Jewish lobby on the media is now.
Robert Scheer
I don’t want to call it the Jewish lobby because there’s a disproportionate number of the people who object to what is being done in the murder of the Palestinian children and women are Jewish. In any demonstration I’ve seen it on college campus, I’ve seen anywhere there’s a very large number, much larger than their percentage in the regular population of Jewish people protesting.
So I think, you know, it’s people who believe in that. You know, it’s ironic. We have a Jewish, in fact, in Ukraine, right? The person that Israel betrayed by supporting with Russia is Jewish, right? Zelensky, you know. In Mexico, someone who has actually spoken out on these things is Jewish, right? Sheinbaum. So we actually have two leaders of countries that are Jewish right now at this moment. That doesn’t stop the Zionist lobby.
Anybody who does something different or shows how Jews can be involved in issues in a more universal way, like caring about what happens to the people of Mexico or Ukraine, that’s not their cup of tea. It’s the same.
Ray McGovern
You make a good point, Bob. There is a big distinction between Jewish and Zionist. OK, let’s say Zionist. I misspoke, but I already talked about my very courageous Jewish friends in Jewish Voice for Peace and elsewhere. Yeah, it’s the Zionist influence. And of course, the Zionist project is a political one. And it has from its outset the notion that Jewish are the Israelis and Jews are entitled to a special blessing or dispensation from God.
And when Trump says, yeah, that’s why God saved me, know, to do what? To encourage genocide against the Palestinians? I don’t think so. And so what we need to do is have some hope here. Now, 40 years ago, let’s say, I had no hope that when democracy came to South Africa, it would come peacefully. No hope at all. Now, [inaudible] came in and he was enlightened and he said, you know, we don’t want a bloodbath here.
And he acquiesced in majority rule. Mandela came out of prison. It was a peaceful second. Yeah, they still have lots of problems, but apartheid was gone. OK, so there’s that there’s that possibility that could conceivably work out for the Middle East. But in those days, the US was kind of wishy washy. They didn’t really support one side of the other. This time they do.
And what I’m saying is the Zionists, many of which are at top positions in our government, I mean, it’s not a coincidence that they occupy many of our cabinet posts and many of our editors of prominent newspapers happens to be, call them Zionists if you want but yeah there they are so this inordinate influence is something that really from the very start of our nation George Washington warned about he said you know it’s foolish to identify yourself with the interests of another nation yeah when the other nation doesn’t share your exact goals or interests and so do other people other prominent statesmen.
So what we need to do is sit back and say to Trump, look, whatever you’re doing in Ukraine that might result in peace, what you’re doing in Gaza, mass starvation. Only the Houthis are attacking now. Now, only the Houthis? I think it will be more. I mean, the Houthis are giving what I think is an edifiable example because they don’t want people to be starved to death.
And they said, as long as you have peace there and feed the people, we won’t block the Red Sea. I think that there’s a possibility that some Arab nations will have cojones finally and say, look, know, this is really not only unjust, but if we don’t do something about it, our own Palestinian populations are going to rise up and throw us out.
I have to wait over the next months, I suppose, but within the interim, we have maybe probably half Palestinian people, women, children, old people, killed, exterminated, just like the Jews were. And we support that. They couldn’t do it without us. If I was going to say Biden, for God’s sake. If Trump got on the phone and said, Netanyahu, knock it off. I’m sending my enforcer Steve and he’s going to tell you why but knock it off. It’s a little too embarrassing for you.
Robert Scheer
They didn’t do that. Let’s just wrap this up. was warned. He was told in advance this was happening and it was endorsed. We’re going to wrap this up now. We promise to keep these things down to a half hour. But it is a horribly sobering experience. I return to my original point. It’s quite possible for the great powers, people who have armies, have nuclear weapons, who have resources to get along and divide up the world.
Maybe that’s what will happen now. But if you got the people who are the outsiders, who have been marginalized, who have been oppressed, who have been in effect imprisoned, as was the case of the Palestinians, they’re going to be left out of the grand bargain. They’re going to be screwed and they’re going to be murdered and they’re going to be eliminated. And you know what? As to what happened with the Jews.
Most of the world looked away. I know, I’m older than you, Ray. I was alive when this was happening. I was a kid, but I was alive and I followed it. And most of the world studiously ignored it, did not let it intrude. And that’s what’s happening now. Most of the world will go along with the elimination of Palestinians. But we’re gonna wrap this up for this.
Ray McGovern
I have to intercede here and just say that you’re quite right and what you say is exactly right as a reporter. I’ve been called lots of things, most recently an activist. So what I’m saying here is that it’s up to us, it’s up to us U.S. citizens to act not with the sheepish submissiveness that Germans acted in 1933, ‘34, ‘35.
It’s up to us to act and the Jewish voices for peace shows us the way. BDS is another way, boycott, disinvestment and sanctions. Those are movements that were used successfully against South African, the white South African government. We can use them again. Like we shouldn’t have to just depend on the Houthis to do it.
Robert Scheer
I think we need to speak out, but Ray, just want I’m sorry you put it in a way that bothers me. The Germans didn’t. The Germans went along because at the end of the day, they embraced Hitler. They embraced genocide. This is something I’ve had to recognize with the part of my family that were German and not Jewish. I think Donald Trump should have to reckon with that in his own family they all German and all in some sense complicit.
And the fact of the matter is it was convenient to go along and fed into chauvinistic ideology and fed into and one of the great ironies here is once again the Jews are being used because after all the justification for supporting them on the part of right-wing Christians in America is this will bring on the Armageddon and the only people who rise to heaven will be Christians and not Jewish.
And it goes back to the, if you want to talk about antisemitism, once again, the Jews are dragged in to justify antisemitism. That’s what’s happening because this attack on Jewish Voice for Peace, this attack on any, know, here’s Trump even says that the leading Jewish senators, and some of whom like Schumer have so been blindly loyal to Israel, he now challenges whether they’re Jewish.
I mean, it’s the most bizarre situation here that the, it’s, you know what it is. I mean, it was the big lie. That’s what Hitler was about. The big lie. You avoid your real problems. You avoid all your other ambitions, your greed and everything else, and you blame it on the most vulnerable. Then it was the Jews, now it’s the Palestinians and those who dare speak out for their rights. I’m going to wrap this up.
Ray McGovern
You’re right, except for one thing. The Germans were afraid. Afraid. They were terrorized. They had the majority when Hitler came in and their political leaders folded. What I’m saying is don’t be afraid America. This is our chance to stand up before it’s too late.
Robert Scheer
Okay, well put. I’ll give you that. I want to thank you, Ray. We’ll be back next week with another edition. And I want to thank Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction, Max Jones, who does the video, and the JKW Foundation, and a member of Jean Stein, a fiercely independent writer who did speak out for the rights of Palestinians as well as other marginalized, exploited people.
And in Integrity Media in Chicago, which gives us some support, and a terrific lawyer, principled Len Goodman, for helping us out here. And see you next Tuesday with another edition here for ScheerPost. Okay, Ray, take care.
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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, an independent ScheerPost podcast with people who discuss the day’s most important issues.
Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27 years as a C.I.A. analyst included leading the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and conducting the morning briefings of the President’s Daily Brief. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
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