Phyllis Bennis examines the dire situation in the West Bank with a rising number of murders of Palestinians and land seizures by Israeli settlers — and ongoing deadly Israeli attacks in Gaza that’s been lost in most of the corporate media coverage, overshadowed by the Iran war. She also discuses the important issues raised in her recent article, “The U.S.-Iran War is Illegal. Here’s Why That Matters.”
SCOTT HARRIS: Right now, I’m very happy to welcome back to our program our good friend, Phyllis Bennis, director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ New Internationalism Project and author of books, including her latest, Understanding Palestine and Israel. Phyllis, thank you so much for making time for us again this evening.
PHYLLIS BENNIS: Always great to be with you, Scott.
SCOTT HARRIS: So I was just going to read a couple of the headlines. There was so much that happened today and this horrendous war that continues. And first off, of course, we have seen in the news today, the fragile ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran is being tested after both sides fired shots in the Strait of Hormuz. In addition, the United Arab Emirates, the U.S. ally, said its air defenses engaged 19 Iranian missiles and drones on Monday. Donald Trump warned Iranian forces they would be blown off the face of the earth, quote unquote, if they attempted to target U.S. ships in the strait or the Persian Gulf. The president says the U.S. struck seven Iranian fast boats after vowing to help stranded vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz. Of course, the impact on the economy is enormous here in this country in all around the world, especially in Asia with oil prices rising just stratospherically.
And you have problems, of course, with fertilizer and agriculture and food supply and all the rest. Phyllis, maybe as we begin, we’re going to be talking about the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon in a moment, but I wonder if you just share your views on the current ceasefire that appears ready to collapse and what that could mean for reigniting the U.S.-Israeli war and Iran that we saw in March could very likely expand to many other nations across the region.
PHYLLIS BENNIS: Yeah. Those are really important points, Scott, all of them. I think the first thing we have to be clear about is that this isn’t a fragile ceasefire. It’s not a questionable ceasefire. It is not a ceasefire. When you have the U.S. continuing a blockade of all ships going to or coming from Iranian ports, that’s an act of war. The war is still going on. The bombing had stopped for a while, but the war had not stopped. It had taken a different form. It may, hopefully not, but it certainly is quite likely that it will escalate again to direct military assaults. But both sides actually are carrying out actions which are in violation of any kind of a ceasefire because any kind of blockade makes a ceasefire non-existent. Iran has imposed limits on who it will allow to transverse the strait. They basically said that any boat or ship that’s flagged with anything resembling or having any connection to either the United States or Israel would not be allowed through, but that other ships will be as long as they abide by the Iranian rules that have new rules that have been set that include paying some kind of fees to transit the strait.
This was something that never existed before the U.S.-Israeli war. So before the war, the state was open. We were being told various versions of either the U.S. has destroyed completely all of Iran’s nuclear capacity. Or that whatever was left of it was so buried so deep under rock and stone outside of the city of Isfahan that it would be impossible for Iran to even try to get to it without the U.S. knowing the moment they made a move in that direction.
All of that’s gone now. All of that has gone because the U.S. and Israel decided to go to war with Iran. And one of the things, Scott, that we’re not hearing, which I think it’s really horrifying. We’re hearing a lot about the impact of the war, as you said at the end, which is the economic question. It’s raising the price of gasoline in this country.
The rest of the world is being hit far harder than we are. The poorest countries, of course, are as usual, being hit the hardest. The things that you mentioned, the shortages of fertilizer, seed, grain now is soon going to be translated into shortages of food all around the world. We’re going to see children and elders, the most vulnerable starving to death, I have no doubt in the poorest countries.
But the part we’re not hearing about is the absolute destruction of Iran that has accompanied these first two months of this war, beginning, of course, with the first day of the war on Feb. 28, when the U.S. opened its Iranian version of shock and awe. At least in shock and awe, we knew what they claimed to be doing. Here, we don’t have a clue what they’re trying to do. But they opened with a massive violent bombing attack that first killed, assassinated the supreme leader of Iran.
And within an hour after that, attacked a girl’s school in the north of Iran that led to the immediate death of about 175 people, the overwhelming majority of whom were 7- to 12-year-old girls. So this was the opening of this war. The estimates so far, there’s a number of estimates, but the average of the estimates is about 3,600 people who have been killed so far in Iran. Half of them are civilians. At least 254 of them are children. That’s including the 175 that were killed that first day. Beyond that, there have been over a 100,000 homes destroyed by Israeli and US bombs. Three hundred health centers have been destroyed. And the financial destruction—what it’s going to take to even begin the process of rebuilding—is estimated as somewhere between $145 and $300 billion. That’s just inside Iran. That doesn’t even touch the casualties, the civilians killed, the destruction, the displacement in Lebanon, in the West Bank, in Gaza where genocide continues.
This war has been an absolute disaster and it is far from over. We had an extraordinary thing today from President Trump when he was talking about, rather proudly, about how the U.S. military is sending destroyers into the Strait of Hormuz to quote escort any other ships. Destroyers are sent there for one thing to destroy ships and they have attacked now at least two Iranian ships and destroyed them. But when Trump was bragging about it, he said, “We destroyed them ‘like pirates, like pirates.'” The definition of piracy in international law starts with the notion that the action was carried out by non-state actors. The actions of a government can be illegal, they can violate international law, they can do all kinds of illegal things. But to be an act of piracy, it’s only non-state actors who are not accountable to a government. And in that context, here you had the president of the United States bragging that his troops that he had deployed as a head of a government were acting like pirates and he was so proud of it.
And he said, for that reason, the 60-day limit of the War Powers Act, which of course the U.S. Constitution makes clear that the initial assault that Trump had launched on the 28th of February was already illegal. But when an illegal war begins, it then has 60 days before the Congress is obligated to take the control back from the White House and make a decision that it should have made on day one, but somehow it gave the Congress 60 days to decide whether or not they want the war to continue, if they do, to authorize it. And if they don’t, to order it stopped. Trump is now saying that the 60 days was paused days ago because there’s a ceasefire. The fact that the ceasefire is not an existing ceasefire. The fact that the war is still going on because they are still refusing to allow ships to transfer through the Strait of Hormuz that the U.S is blockading Iranian ships and Iranian courts and says that it has the right to do so anywhere in the world.
That means the war is still going on. So this notion that the 60-day limit imposed by the War Powers Act somehow doesn’t apply is simply a lie. I mean, that’s the only way to identify it. It’s an absolute lie. It’s a complete misreading, deliberately so, of what is in the text of the law. It is completely illegal, this law, both under U.S. law and under international law. This war is absolutely illegal.
SCOTT HARRIS: And I know you have an article dedicated to that particular issue and we’ll mention that at the end. Phyllis, I did want to ask you about possible negotiations. You have Pakistani and negotiators from Oman who are trying to get the U.S. and Iranian officials together on some kind of plan. And the irony here is that Donald Trump in 2018 tore up the international U.S. nuclear agreement with Iran. And it looks like many of the points that they’re coming to understand will be hopefully a solution in the end to this war. And Iran doesn’t want just a cessation of hostilities. It wants a permanent end to this long, decades-long war. But many of the points that they need to agree on were right there in the JCPOA that the Obama administration successfully negotiated with John Kerry back then, it was just torn up now that we’re here again.
PHYLLIS BENNIS: We’re here again. And it’s quite likely, I’m afraid that the negotiations from the vantage point of the United States are really not going to go as well as those did back in when the JCPOA was signed in 2015. It took, Scott, almost two years to negotiate that agreement. It was not something that was done overnight. They didn’t send President Obama’s kids off to negotiate. I could just see Sasha and Malia being sent on the plane off is about as useful as sending Jared Kushner and the other real estate guy. The notion that they … And not only that they were the lead negotiators without any training in diplomacy, without any familiarity with Iranian politics, with who they were dealing with, they didn’t take with them any of the technical experts, the folks who actually know what people are talking about when they talk about nuclear weapons.
What does enrichment mean? What is 60 percent enrichment versus 20 percent enrichment? They don’t know any of that, which is fine. Diplomats don’t have to know all the technical stuff, but that’s why you have a technical team that goes with you to interpret it all for you. They went off without a technical team.
So what a surprise. They haven’t been able to get any kinds of serious negotiations underway. I don’t know whether the Pakistani efforts are still underway. They were not at any point leading to direct face-to-face talk between the U.S. and the Iranian sides. There was one example of that, but it didn’t happen in the context of these negotiations. It was all through the Pakistanis and through the Omanis who would act as it was sort of a kind of shuttle diplomacy where they would go from room to room reporting what the other side said.
So it’s a very difficult way of negotiating, but the Iranians have been clear. They’re prepared to negotiate. They just put forward another proposal, which the U.S. dismissed within a matter of hours. It’s not even clear who read it. Did they take it to any experts on Iranian politics, on what it might mean, what might be a negotiating position versus a red line?
They don’t have a clue. They don’t have a clue. So we’re stuck in this horrific situation where the likelihood is very strong that there will be a resumption of the bombing leading to more death and destruction in Iran. And in the meantime, we have the acts of war, which Trump describes proudly as the U.S. military acting like pirates. When we don’t have the capacity to go back even to the existing agreement that had been signed more than 10 years ago, but it is … Let me just say one other thing on this, Scott, before we get to the regional component here and the link between this war and the earlier war in Palestine, in the West Bank in Gaza, as well as the current war in Lebanon, it is important. I think we hear so much in the mainstream press, and it’s a good thing that people are saying this, that this is such a senseless war, that it’s not ever been clear what anybody is fighting for here on the U.S. side, why they launched this war with Israel.
And I think that it’s important for us to recognize this war is not senseless. It’s not legal and it’s not for any purpose that is something we would consider legitimate. But it’s not being done for no reason. In my view, the main reason has to do with the question of hegemony. Both the United States and Israel are and want to consolidate their position and in fact strengthen their position as the regional and global hegemon, respectively. So Israel wants to be able to do what they call mowing the grass. This was this horrific term that was first coined in the Israeli media and in the Israeli Knesset among Israeli academics. At the time of Israel’s war against Lebanon in 2006, they said, “We have to go in occasionally to mow the grass.” Some of them said to mow the lawn so that we would remind people there who is actually in control.
It wasn’t because they were responding to some act of violence. It wasn’t because they wanted to destroy an organization, although that was a convenient excuse. What they wanted was to show that they are empowered, that they have not just the military, but they have the ability to attack anywhere in the region to steal the land from whatever country they wish, whether it’s Lebanon, whether it’s Palestine, whether it’s Syria, which they have been doing with abandon to kill any number of people in any of those countries, to destroy homes, destroy infrastructure, destroy the very ability of people to survive as a nation in that country as they have done in Gaza without any consequence.
That’s what Israel means by regional hegemony. For the U.S., it means having control over the whole world. The U.S. wants to focus right now, according to President Trump, on the Western Hemisphere, fine, go back to the Monroe doctrine, expand it, include Greenland within it, because we need to have someplace up near the North Pole.
All of that has to do with power and control, so that there is no accountability, there is no consequence of these military strikes. Three days into his second term, the Trump administration was bombing Somalia. Christmas Day, bombing Nigeria. In April, bombing Yemen. And all we heard was, did Hegseth actually violate the rules because he allowed a journalist onto what should have been a private call, a call that was held under the strictest of security.
We never talked about the fact that what they were talking about was the killing of civilians in Yemen. All of this goes on with the expectation that there will be no accountability. And indeed, that proved true. The UN Security Council voted in a resolution condemning only Iran for using its right of self-defense too broadly and attacking civilian targets in some of the Gulf States, which was indeed illegal and should be condemned.
But the notion that the victim is the only party being criticized for its too far right of self-defense when the perpetrator who had carried out the crime of aggression, that being Israel and the United States, were not even mentioned in the resolution, took no responsibility for it.
So this is what the New World claims of hegemony are all about.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Phyllis, you really focused there on some of the critical issues that we all need to pay more attention to and not get distracted by the secretary of wars’—his phone calls, and the less important issues.
I certainly want to continue this conversation in another moment. I know we really do need to focus more on this program, on the demise of international law and what we can do about it, but also want to have you back to talk more about the spiral of death and destruction in the West Bank, Gaza, as well as Lebanon that we didn’t get a chance to do much on this evening, but we will soon.
PHYLLIS BENNIS: Yeah. I’m sorry for that.
SCOTT HARRIS: No, no. We were talking about the stuff front and center as well. I mean, there’s so many things that we need to really get some good analysis that you provide and we’re happy you could do that tonight, Phyllis. Thanks for all you do.
PHYLLIS BENNIS: Thank you, Scott. It’s been a pleasure.
SCOTT HARRIS: Take care. Goodnight. Bye-bye. That’s Phyllis Bennis, director of the Institute for Policy Studies, New Internationalism Project and author of the book, her Latest, Understanding Palestine in Israel.
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