Oil reserves

https://www.unz.com/mhudson/the-truth-about-the-destruction-of-gaza/

ANIA: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to my channel. Today I have with me for the fourth time, I’m still counting, a very, very special guest, one of the best professors in economics and financial analysts in the world. And I’m very glad we are reconnecting with Professor Hudson again.

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Welcome back, Professor Hudson. Thank you so much for joining me today for this conversation.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Thanks for having me back again.

ANIA: And I would like to say to the audience as well that this video is dedicated to what is taking place, especially in Gaza and Israel. Of course, we will address other countries related to this situation, but Professor Hudson has sent me a very in-depth email after our last live stream a week ago, also on Friday, and we actually decided after we ended that live stream to have this particular topic to be the main topic of this video. So, I give this to you, Professor Hudson, where would you like to start this conversation, please?

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think I should start with my own background, because 50 years ago, in 1974, I was working with the Hudson Institute, with Herman Kahn, and my colleagues there were a number of Mossad agents who were being trained. Uzi Arad was there, and he became the head of Mossad and is currently the main advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu.

So, all of what is happening today was discussed 50 years ago, not only with the Israelis, but with many of the U.S. defense people, because I was with the Hudson Institute, which was a national security agency, because I’d written Super Imperialism, and I was a balance of payments expert, and the Defense Department used my book Super Imperialism not as an expose, but a how-to-do-it book. And they brought me there as a specialist in the balance of payments. Herman brought me back and forth to the White House to meet with cabinet members and to discuss the balance of payments. He also brought me to the War College and to the Air Force think tanks.

So, all of what is happening now was described a long time ago, and Herman was known as a futurist. He was Dr. Strangelove in the movie. That was all based for him on his theories of atomic war, but he was also the main theorist behind Vietnam. And nobody seems to have noticed that what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank now is all based on what was the U.S. strategy during the Vietnam War. And it was based on the “strategic hamlets” idea, the fact that you could cut back, you could just divide all of Vietnam into little parts, having guards at all the transition points from one part to another. Everything that Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere throughout Israel was all pioneered in Vietnam.

And Herman had me meet with some of the generals there to explain it. And I think I mentioned I flew to Asia twice with Uzi Arad. We had a chance to [get to] know each other very much. And I could see that the intention from the very beginning was to get rid of the Palestinians and indeed to use Israel as the basis for U.S. control of Near Eastern oil. That was the constant discussion of that from the American point of view. It was Israel as a part of the oil.

So, Herman’s analysis was on systems analysis. You define the overall aim and then you work backward. How do you do it? Well, you can see what the Israeli policy is today. First of all, you isolate the Palestinians and strategic hamlets. That’s what Gaza had already been turned into for the last 15 years. It’s been carved up into districts requiring electronic passes from one sector to another to go into Israel, to go to Jerusalem, or to go to Israel for jobs to work.

The aim all along has been to kill them. Or first of all, to make life so unpleasant for them that they’ll emigrate. That’s the easy way. Why would anyone want to stay in Gaza when what’s happening to them is what’s happening today? You’re going to leave. But if they don’t leave, you’re going to have to kill them, ideally by bombing because that minimizes the domestic casualties. Israel doesn’t want its soldiers to die any more than Americans do. So, the American form of war, as it was in Vietnam, is bombing them. You don’t want person-to-person contact because people fighting for their lives and liberty tend to be better fighters because for them it’s really essential. For the others, they’re just doing soldier’s work.

So, the genocide that you’re seeing today is an explicit policy, and that was a policy of the forefathers, the founders of Israel. The idea of a land without people was a land without Arabs in it, the land without non-Jewish people. That’s really what it meant. They were to be driven out starting even before the official funding of Israel, the first Nakba, the Arab Holocaust. And the two of the Israeli prime ministers were members of the Stern gang of terrorists. The terrorists became the rulers of Israel. They escaped from British jail and they joined to found Israel. So, what you’re seeing today is the final solution to this plan. And the founders of Israel were so obsessed with the Nazis, essentially, they wanted to do to them what they did to us, is how they explained it to people.

For the United States, what they wanted was the oil reserves in the Middle East. And again and again, I heard the phrase, ‘you’re our landed aircraft carrier in Israel’. Uzi Arad, the future Mossad head, would be very uncomfortable at this because he wanted Israel to be run by the Israelis. But they realized that for Israel to get by with the money that it needed for its balance of payments, it had to be in a partnership with the United States.

So, what you’re seeing today isn’t simply the work of one man, of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s the work of the team that President Biden has put together. It’s the team of Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, Lincoln, and the whole deep state, the whole neocon group behind them, Victoria Nuland, and everyone. They’re all self-proclaimed Zionists. And they’ve gone over this plan for essentially America’s domination of the Near East for decade after decade.

But as the United States learned in the Vietnam War, populations protest, and the U.S. population protested against the Vietnam War. What the Biden administration wants to avoid is the situation that President Johnson had in 1968. Any hotel, any building that he went to, to give a speech for his re-election campaign, there were crowds shouting, LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? President Johnson had to take the servants entrance to get away from the press so that nobody would see what he was doing. And essentially, he went on television and resigned.

Well, to prevent this kind of embarrassment, and to prevent the embarrassment of journalists who were doing all this, Seymour Hersh described the [Mai Lai] massacre, and that helped inflame the opposition to Johnson. Well, President Biden, who’s approved Netanyahu’s plan, the first people you have to kill are the journalists. If you’re going to permit genocide, you have to realize that you don’t want the domestic U.S. population or the rest of the world to oppose the U.S. and Israel. You kill the journalists. And for the last, ever since the October 2nd Al-Aqsa event, you’ve had one journalist per week killed in Israel. That’s part of it.

The other people you don’t want, if you’re going to bomb them, you have to start by bombing the hospitals and all of the key centers. That also was part of the idea of the Vietnam War. How do you destroy a population? This was all worked out in the 1970s, when people were trying to use systems analysis to think, how do you work back and see what you need? And the idea, if you bomb a population, you can’t really hide that, even if you kill the journalists. How do you kill a population passively? So you minimize the visible bombing. Well, the line of least resistance is to starve them. And that’s been the Jewish, the Israeli policy since 2008.

You had a piece by Sarah Roy in the New York Review, citing a cable from 2008, from Tel Aviv to the embassy saying, as part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to the embassy officials on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gaza economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge. Well, now they’re pushing it over the edge.

And so Israel has been especially focusing after the journalists, after the hospitals, you bomb the greenhouses, you bomb the trees, you sink the fishing boats that have supplied food to the population. And then you aim at fighting the United Nations relief people.

And you’ve read, obviously, the whole news of the last week has been the attack on the seven food providers that were not Arabs. And this was, again, from a systems analyst point, this is exactly what the textbook says to do strategically. If you can make a very conspicuous bombing of aid people, then you will have other aid suppliers afraid to go, because they think, well, if these people, aid suppliers, are just shot at, then we would be too.

Well, the United States is fully behind this. And to help starve the Gazan people, Biden immediately, right after the ICJ finding of plausible genocide, withdrew all funding from the United Nations relief agencies. The idea, again, the hope was to prevent the United Nations from having the money to supply food.

So when the United States is now trying to blame one person, and Biden goes on a television recorded call with Netanyahu saying, please be humane when you’re dropping your bombs, do it in a humane way. That’s purely for domestic consumption. It’s amazing how nakedly hypocritical all this.

And ever since the Al-Aqsa Mosque was raided by Israeli settlers on October 2, leading to Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Flood retaliation on October 7, it was closely coordinated with the Biden administration. All the bombs have been dropped day after day, week after week, with the whole of the US. And Biden has said on a number of occasions, the Palestinians are enemies.

So I think I want to make it clear that this is not simply an Israeli war against Hamas. It’s an American-backed Israeli war. Each of them have their own objectives. Israel’s objective is to have a land without non-Jewish population. And America’s aim is to have Israel acting as the local coordinator, as it has been coordinating the work with ISIS and the ISIS commanders to turn them against targets provided by the United States.

Basically, that’s the duopoly that’s been created.

And I think Alastair Crooke has cited Trita Parsi, one of the Israeli political leaders, saying the objective really in all this, of Israel’s conflict and Biden’s acquiescence to it, is that Israel is engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to destroy existing laws and norms about warfare. And that’s really it.

You have people, you have reporters, such as Pepe Escobar, saying that the United States is a chaos agent. But there’s a logic in this. The United States is looking forward to what it’s going to be doing in the Near East, in Ukraine, and especi