Jermain Botsio: Iraq and Syria opposed Trump’s Middle East peace plan, creating further tensions where U.S. troops deployed. Why are people against this plan here, specifically Iraq and Syria? What why are they against this?

Barry Nussbaum: There are really two answers, Jermain. The answer number one is in autocratic dictatorships where there are no elections, which are the countries you’re mentioning, the best way to keep the people under control is to distract them from the fact that they don’t get to vote, they are horribly repressed by brutal dictators, which every single country is like that. There are no elections in these countries, Jermain. You get to be president probably by killing the previous president or taking over when he dies. And you’re there till you go out in a body bag or you flee to another country, usually the former, not the latter. All of them are distracting their people with, “You’re screwed because of the Jews in Israel.” Here’s the irony. I have met with ambassadors from Israel. I’ve met with military leaders from Israel and governmental leaders in the country of Israel, and they all tell me the same thing. The leaders of the moderate Western-leaning Arab countries, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Dubai, and Jordan, behind the scenes, are cooperating very strongly with Israel. And by the way, I include Egypt in that list. That’s the majority population of the entire Middle East. That’s not Shia, which is the crazies in Iran that want to destroy the world if you don’t believe in Mohammed. The moderate Arab states are all in favor of the Trump plan because they’re done with sending billions to the Palestinians that ends up in Swiss bank accounts while the Palestinians are abused, tortured and slaughtered if, God forbid, they would like another election. Keep in mind, the leader of the Palestinian people, Mahmoud Abbas, took over when Arafat died. He was elected for a four-year term in 2005, Jermain. He’s still the president either until he falls over dead, which might be soon because he’s really old and he’s really sick. The people close to him in military intelligence are told that if he were to recognize Israel and negotiate the peace deal, the crazies there would kill him, rise up, and pull the same thing they pulled in the Gaza Strip, which is Hamas took over, killed everybody that opposed their government, and God forbid you to demonstrate in the street in Gaza for elections, you’ll be killed too. And probably your family will probably be tortured. I’ve been there, right up to the fence with a major in the army who gave me the full breakdown. They can see Hamas executing non-Hamas supporters every day right through the fence. It is brutality, the likes of which in the west, we just don’t have experience. Except we’ve seen ISIS on television. It’s kind of like that. So let’s look at what the peace plan talks about. It says wherever you live now, Arab or Jew, you get to stay. That seems kind of reasonable. Nobody gets moved out. Number two, they’re going to arrange for billions and billions and billions of dollars to come into the Palestinian territories to build economic zones, the like of which nothing in the Middle East has ever seen. Number three, Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people for three thousand years. The entire Bible mentions Jerusalem in almost every chapter and verse. Do you know how many times it’s mentioned in the Koran? Zero. Why? It’s not part of their religion. It has become it in the last century because the politics demanded that so they could drive out the infidel invaders. It’s about property and land control, not religion. OK, so when you talk about who gets to control the territories, well I’ve been on the Golan Heights, all over the Golan Heights, it was Jewish territory. The Israelis liberated it in 1967 largely because Syria used to set up there with mortars and cannons and tanks and lob shells down into the Galilee. I’m sure you’re familiar with that, where Jesus walked and killed farmers and blow them off their tractors and high-five each other. Israel will never give back the Golan. They annexed it. In the West Bank, which is Judea and Samaria, the ancestral home of the Jewish people, where Abraham was, where Isaac was, where Jacob was, where the matriarchs were, there are towns and those towns will remain and where the Arabs are, those will remain. But the Arabs will not be allowed to create an army because that army will be looking right through the fence into Israel. There is another key point in this peace plan that I think we should talk about. You mentioned it a minute ago, and that’s called the right of return. What that means is in 1948, a number of Arabs were living in the Palestinian territories. Until 1948 it was called Palestine, and they had a flag, and it was a Jewish star on it, and everything was called Palestine, which was a Roman name for the Philistines who had conquered the Jews two thousand years ago. And the Romans called it that to wipe out the Jewish connection. They were being insulted, and the name stuck, unfortunately. So obviously, the Jews changed it. And the Palestinians loved it. So that’s why they adopted it. So in 1948, all the Arab armies told the Arabs living in Israel, we are invading, we’re going to kill all the Jews, run away. And you can come back in a couple of weeks, and you can take their houses and their factories and their farms because they’ll all be dead. Well, several hundred thousand left fled Arab countries, and Israel disappointed them because he didn’t lose. They won, and there was peace. So the Arabs got stuck in refugee camps. And the Jews that were forced out of all the Arab countries were not allowed back to their country, and they had to stay in Israel and to be absorbed and became Israeli citizens and learn the language. And they were all broke because they ran out of Iraq and Iran and Lebanon and Syria, Egypt and Jordan and all the places where they’d lived for generations. And they were all driven out by the Arabs in those countries. The Jews told the Arabs they can come back. Unlike the Arabs telling the Jews, you can’t come back. But most didn’t. They’d been in refugee camps ever since. And those hundreds of thousands have turned in millions and millions and millions. So in the history of the world, there’s never been a refugee camp that has residence for more than a generation. Now we’re three to four generations later, and there are millions. And Israel says you can’t come back. We won’t be a Jewish state anymore. The Palestinians are pushing for it, and Trump said, “Hey, it’s never happened in world history. It’s not going to happen now. No more right of return. That’s absurd.” So those are the key parts of the plan. Billions in investment.Israel keeps Jerusalem undivided as its capital. It keeps the Golan Heights, which it conquered in ’67, in a defensive war. And it keeps the property on the West Bank where Jews are living on property that they bought from Arabs and built little towns. And where the Arabs are, they stay. Now, you’d think with the billions that are being offered, the Palestinians would jump all over it? Well, ironically, Jermain, many Palestinians in the West Bank, are in favor of it, but their leadership isn’t because their leadership has been skimming for generations. When Yasser Arafat died, he was worth several billion dollars. He’d stolen all the aid for twenty-five years, and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, has been doing the same thing. And they say he’s got seven hundred million in Swiss banks. It’s a good business and you ought to see the way he lives, in a palace. And Yasser Arafat’s heirs live in Paris in palaces because they have billions that they stole. Why would you want to disrupt that, right? Now, there’s one other key thing that Trump has pointed out, and I don’t know why, but I can guess why this doesn’t have press. I’m sure you know about the pay for slay plan of the Palestinian Authority. What that means is if you’re a Palestinian, which is an Arab that lives on the West Bank, and you kill an Israeli, you blow up his house, you stab his children, you ram into his car, you run over soldiers at a bus stop, you’re a hero. You get a square named after you in a Palestinian town. If you die, your family gets hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you go to jail in an Israeli prison for murder, you’re paid more than any other job on the West Bank. More than a doctor earns more than a lawyer earns more than an engineer earns more than someone who works in government. They pay you to kill people. Horrible, isn’t it? And yet when Trump sat down with Mahmoud Abbas, and he told him to his face, you must stop paying people to slaughter Jews Mahmoud Abbas said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if it ever happened, I’ll stop it.” They shook hands in the Oval Office. It’s on tape. You can look it up. He went back to his headquarters on the West Bank, and he promptly announced on Palestinian radio that will never happen. We will never stop paying the Martyrs Fund. And I will never honor my promise to President Trump. Well, unlike previous presidents with no cojones, Trump said, “Stop it, or I’m cutting off the money.” And he did. Trump did what he promised to do because he got lied to.