Q+A’s Paul Holmes interviews Robert Fisk

The interview has been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can also be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

Q+A is repeated on TVNZ 7 at 9.10pm on Sunday nights and 10.10am and 2.10pm on Mondays.

ROBERT FISK interviewed by PAUL HOLMES

PAUL This Easter Sunday we turn to the Middle East. The United States relationship with Israel appears to be in some crisis, appears to be damage, as Israel pushes ahead with a legal settlement building in not just East Jerusalem but again right through the West Bank. The Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu was elected on the promise that he would naturally grow settlements in both areas. To make matters worse when American Vice President Joe Biden was in Israel recently reaffirming the United States Israeli relationship, yet more building in East Jerusalem was announced. Well yesterday I spoke to the renowned Middle East Correspondent Robert Fisk via satellite from Kuala Lumpur where he is in Malaysia, he's also a prolific author of course, most recently The Age of the Warrior, a collection of his columns has been published an I started by asking Robert Fisk about that announcements during Vice President Biden's visit to Israel and what damage that announcement had done to Israel's reputation with the American government.

ROBERT FISK – Middle East Correspondent

Well you know I think this is a lot of theatrics involved in this, people keep telling us in newspaper articles, especially written by journalists who are close to the US government this is the worst break in relations between America and Israel in 30 years, 50 years, 60 years whatever. I don’t think that Obama has the political power to force Israel to stop building its internationally illegal settlement for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, stolen Arab land, at any time in this current presidency or indeed even if Obama wins a second presidency, at the end of the day you know governments are not about good guys and bad guys, you know Obama versus Bush, they're about power, and the use of power, and the Israeli supporters in Washington have enormous power in the House of Representatives, Congress and so on, and it's not going to disappear because Obama suddenly says oh I'm very upset that Netanyahu announced 1600 new Jewish homes in East Jerusalem when Joe Biden was visiting.

What was very interesting I thought was that Hillary Clinton said oh it was an insult, an affront, to announce these homes when Joe Biden was visiting. The insult and the affront was to the Palestinians who are losing their homes in Jerusalem, not to the Vice President of the United States who has a very nice home in the United States, who is not being dispossessed of his land. It was very interesting that the Americans took affront to the fact that they were being insulted, their government was being insulted, they didn’t pay any attention to the fact that the Palestinians are being much more insulted by losing their land.

PAUL So what you're saying is that even if Obama is pushing Netanyahu to stall the development of those homes in East Jerusalem he hasn’t got a hope in hell of succeeding, is that what you're saying?

ROBERT I think you put that extremely well, I couldn’t put a better world on it, no, I fear very much – I was in Israel, well Palestine – "Palestine" in quotation marks, a few weeks ago, and you’ve got to realise that even the land they're negotiating over which is 22% of the original Palestine, 60% of that which is called Area C is permanently occupied by the Israelis, so they’ve really only got about 9% of the territory of Palestine to negotiate over and in some of that the Israelis have the right to move around as well, so basically I think there is not going to be a state of Palestine, and in a sense it's a kind of cruelty for Obama's administration particularly you know Mrs Clinton, to utter these words suggesting that the Americans are gonna stand up to Israel's desire for more land, when in fact I don’t think they're really gonna do that and they have no means of doing so.

PAUL You’ve called Obama weak, and you’ve called him weak several times.

ROBERT I've called him gutless actually, not weak I've called him gutless yeah.

PAUL Alright you’ve called him gutless not once but several times, you therefore probably believe that he is weak. He has made overtures hasn’t he to the Arab world. Do you think there is still some affection for Obama, some credibility for Obama in the Arab street?

ROBERT No, well I'm not sure the Arab street exists in a land of dictatorships, most of which are supported by us in the west of course, like Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan and Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, you know I went to Cairo when he made this famous reach out as his cliché has it to the Muslim world, and I was in the University of Cairo when he was speaking and what was very interesting was that even though he appeared to be saying you know we've made mistakes, we've done things wrong in Iran like the coup d’état which the CA staged along with the British against Mosedak in the 50s, he kept even then avoiding certain words, he never referred to refugee camps for example, which is the whole issue of the Palestinians. At one point he wanted to refer to the Nakba, the disaster, the catastrophe as the Arabs call it, which happened to the Palestinians when 750,000, three quarters of a million were either fled for their lives or were driven out of that part of Palestine that became Israel, but he didn’t call it ethnic cleansing, he didn’t call it refugees, he said the relocation of the Palestinians, as if these people suddenly said oh let's go and live somewhere else, it might be more pleasant or nearer the sea you know. so there were clear signs of weakness even in that allegedly famous speech.

PAUL You believe the two state deal is dead, you’ve written that it's dead, the Palestinians of course are fractured at the moment, you’ve got Hamas versus Fatar, you’ve got Netanyahu with a Cabinet with some serious hard line right wingers in it, why are the Israelis so seemingly bloody minded on these settlements, particularly the settlements in East Jerusalem, surely they want peace.

ROBERT Look, I think that the actions and the words of the Israeli government have shown that they want peace and more land, and this naturally enough the Palestinians do not accept. You know one of the problems over the last years, particularly because of the Palestinians ability to stage suicide bombings which was a terrible blow to their own cause of course, especially suicide bombings aimed at Israeli civilians, most Israelis I find when I'm in Israel are not really interested in land for peace any more, they're quite happy to have the wall there, albeit that the wall actually takes more Arab land, and the impetus on sort of the Israeli left which is smaller and smaller these days, has pretty much disappeared, and the Palestinians because of their preposterous infighting, I mean they did the same when they were in Beirut when I was there in the 70s and in the 80s when they were doing this land, because of their inability to have a unified government they're allowing in a sense the Israelis to get away with the theft which is what Israel's doing of more land.

PAUL That’s right they are divided, and hopeless for it I guess. Can we just move on quickly to Afghanistan, the situation in Afghanistan whether you think that is progressing, whether there are improvements for the NATO forces there, the SAS from New Zealand of course are also involved, but the Americans are trying a new approach, and the field manual now directs the Americans to make securing the civilian rather than destroying the enemy their top priority. Is that too little too late, will it work?

ROBERT It will not work, the Americans will leave and you will leave, and the British will leave Afghanistan, it is a hopeless cause. The government which they are supporting and which they're encouraging the people to believe in, is totally corrupt, it includes warlords and murderers, and as we know the very election in which Mr Kazai was supposedly re-elected President was utterly fraudulent. You will remember that Mr Evana then telephoned him and congratulated him on his election, in an election which the Americans themselves said was fraudulent, Afghans do not believe in Kazai, they believe that his government is corrupt, his Police Force is corrupt. I was looking at some classified documents the other day of another NATO country, not your own, where one of the NATO commanders was complaining that while he was trying to introduce Afghan army officers to villagers, in a village which the forces he was commanding had just taken over, he realised that all the officers were stoned, they were on drugs, they were hardly able to speak in their own language, this is the army we are supposedly training to take over Afghanistan so we can leave, it's preposterous and I think we're being fed a tissue of lies by our political masters about how we're going to transform Afghanistan, NATO is going to win. What is NATO doing? It's the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, it's the first time I realised that Afghanistan was on the Atlantic Ocean, it clearly isn't if you look at the map, it's preposterous, it's hopeless, it will not work.

PAUL So a very bleak prognosis there from Robert Fisk.

ENDS

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