Air Date: 11-3-2026
Israel was formed to create a safe haven for Jews in the wake of World War II, an admirable goal. Since then, there have been major wars every decade, terrorist attacks, and Netanyahu has been warning about Iran getting a nuclear weapon since 1992. There were prominent Jews at the time, including Albert Einstein, who saw all of this coming and warned against the creation of a Jewish state with borders and an army, because they feared exactly what has come to pass because of the peril it would put Jews in and the damage that Jewish nationalism would do to the Jewish faith. The tragedy of Israel is that those warnings were not heeded and then that this perspective was effectively removed from the discussion entirely, making the path to true safety for Jews and everyone else, essentially invisible. We're exploring that history and those perspectives today.
Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.
Israel was formed to create a safe haven for Jews in the wake of World War II, an admirable goal. Since then, there have been major wars every decade, terrorist attacks, and Netanyahu has been warning about Iran getting a nuclear weapon since 1992. There were prominent Jews at the time who saw all of this coming and warned against the creation of a Jewish state with borders and an army, because they feared exactly what has come to pass because of the peril it would put Jews in and the damage that Jewish nationalism would do to the Jewish faith. The tragedy of Israel is that those warnings were not heeded and then that those perspectives were effectively removed from the discussion entirely, making the path to true safety for Jews and everyone else, essentially invisible. We're exploring that history and those perspectives today.
For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include
The Newshour
Democracy Now!
The Intercept Briefing
Against the Grain
The Dig
and Downstream
Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;
Section A, The Jewish Case Against Zionism
Section B, The Bund and the Road Not Taken
Section C, Inside Israel, From the West Bank to the Ballot Box
And Section D, Complicity, Crackdown, and Refusal
And now, on to the show.
Israeli Settlers Attack West Bank Olive Harvesters Part 1 - Newshour - Air Date 10-16-26
For Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, the annual olive harvest is a moment of immense cultural importance and economic importance, and also increasingly fearfulness.
The official start date of the harvest, of shaking the olives from the branches of trees, some of which are hundreds of years old, was yesterday, Thursday. Today came the unofficial response from some Israeli settlers targeting olive groves in several locations. Among them, the village of Abu Falah, close to the Palestinian city of Ramallah.
That's where several dozen settlers clad in black descended from nearby outposts. Those are unofficial, in fact, illegal, small Israeli settlements. They ordered about a hundred Palestinians and activists, some of whom are left-wing Israelis there to try to protect the harvest, they ordered them to leave.
The BBC's Lucy Williamson was witnessing it. The settlers have been moving slowly down this road towards the olive grove, and they've now begun setting fire to trees on either side of the road. Some of the Palestinians have been moving up towards them. It's a stalemate, a standoff, and it could explode at any minute.
Within minutes, stones were being thrown towards us. We saw settlers using slingshots. Palestinians gathered here today hoping for safety in numbers. Some used fireworks to push the settlers back, but the settlers charged towards them. They're kicking somebody. Israeli forces fired tear gas into the Palestinian fields to end the confrontation, but this pattern is being repeated day after day as illegal settler outposts increase and the harvest season is getting more violent each year.
Well, caught in that stampede was The Washington Post photojournalist, Heidi Levine, who says she was attacked by a group of settlers. She was taken to hospital in Ramallah, where she spoke from her bed. You could see, Molotov cocktails. I didn't see any army, and I got jumped, and I saw in the very beginning, at least twenty-five, maybe fifty of them.
And I was on the ground, and they were kicking me and, and for, ten minutes, and I was trying to hold on to my cameras and to my bag. I had my camera bag and my pouch with my, my passport and my telephone was on a rope around my neck, and they broke that off, and they broke my cameras off me, and they broke my bag, and they kept kicking me.
And I had a helmet on and my flak jacket, and at least that protected me and protected my head. And then they made me stand up, and then they kicked me again. And this went on for, at, at least over ten minutes. All I remember afterwards is that, Palestinians managed to come and rescue me and, and try to carry me, and an ambulance came and brought me to Abu Falah, to the medical center and then brought me here.
Just absolute craziness, and I didn't see anybody trying to stop it. The veteran Washington Post photojournalist, Heidi Levine. And not far from where she was beaten up today is where Hussam Aida has his olive groves. He has fifteen hundred trees close to the small town of Sinjil. Hussam is a Palestinian American.
In fact, he sells his produce, his olive oil, in the US. That's when he can harvest his crop. Hussam, began by telling me about the problems he's previously had getting to his land. The settlers, they put their animals in my, land. They break all my olive trees, and, I couldn't believe it. 'Til, this year, which is around, a week ago or ten days ago, I have a land inside the village.
Which is I, I go there every day. But they went, the settlers, and they start picking up the olives, and they damaged around, five trees. I went over there. I start s-shouting a-and the, the soldiers, they ask me if you have proof that this is your land. I said, "Why are you asking me? Do I have p-proof for that land?
How about you? How about these, guys? What are they doing in, in Sinjil, town?" Hussam, tell me- Okay ... the olive harvest has just, it has an official start date as, as and, and that official start was yesterday. Are you- Yeah ... able to harvest any of your olives this year? No. No. None? None. And today what they, what they call it, in, the town next to us, so they call Turmus Ayya, and they try to take their olives.
The settlers mo- over 100 people, they came. They, they burn around 12 cars in that, village, and they hurt maybe three guys, and they burn the whole mountain of, olives. So what's going to happen to your trees? I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. It's like somebody comes to your house and try to take y-your, your rooms out of your house, and that's exactly what's g-going on with us.
I presume that y-your olive trees are the basis of your income. How much is it worth if you do manage to harvest this, these olives? How much is it worth to you each year? At, at least between 150 to 200 can of oil, which is I sell, I sell it in United State, and I pay taxes- Mm-hmm ... for that. And how much do you, would you get from that- But the best, the best
if you were able to, to harvest it? How much would you get? I used to get around, 40,000 after, all the expense I, I, I make. $40,000. Do you have other ways of, of making money? in United State, I live for, 55 years in United State, which is I get, 1,500 every month. You have a pension from the United States.
Yeah, I h- yes- Yeah ... I have pension. But presumably this $40,000, that, that's quite important to you, for you- It is because- ... and your family ... because 1,500 is not enough for me and my family to live on. Yeah. So what are you going to do? I have no idea. I have no idea, except I keep looking. My house is, you could look at across the street from, my farms.
I feel sorry. Sometime I cry. Sometime I, I don't know what to do. I, I really don't know what to do. And if you go hit, hit one of the guys over there, either they kill you or if you kill somebody, they're gonna damage your houses, your family, everybody. We couldn't do anything. Does the army ever intervene to try to protect you?
The first year, I went to pick up the olives, and one of the army cars came. They asked me what are you doing? I said, "Well, I'm picking up olives." When he saw that I speak English, he speak English, the, the, the captain or whatever he is, and he is from United States. When he asked me where I live, I told him I wa- I live in Brooklyn, and what the street, I gave him the street.
He said, "Oh, we're in the same area." So he brought two soldiers to protect me to pick up these olives. He said, "I wanna advise you not to go. When they put something in the road, do not cross it. Otherwise, we have the right to shoot at you." So that's why I, I can't go there. You're sounding really upset by- It's-
by what's happened ... believe, believe me, I never wish this feeling to anybody, not enemy, not a friend, because it's really, it's hurt to see something wrong, and you can do nothing about it. That's, that's the bad thing, and especially I, I lived in Uni... I, I raised in United States for almost 55 years, so I know that you could do something.
You could re- say yes, no, but not here. You can't say anything.
- Air Date
if you can talk about that quote and say, you say, "Hamas set the process in motion October 7th, and immediately lost control of that process." What do you mean? Yes, absolutely. clearly, the, the attack of October 7 was the trigger, for what came after, and my argument is that we know about what came after, basically the past two or three years from those very first 12 days after October 7th, and it started with ideology.
genocides don't start with bombs. They start with ideology. And in this case, the ideology has been, decades in the making, a century I would even say in, in the making in the sense of, the establishment of a racist, supremacist system, regime that had been in control of Palestinians and Palestinian life and destiny for the past 80 years.
occupying them and dispossessing them and discriminating against them. This has been going on for many decades. So that was ready, intact on the eve of, October 7, October 8. And then there was the dehumanization. Immediately after October 7, October 8, 9, 10, we saw this extraordinary campaign of dehumanization of the Palestinians as animals, Nazi-like.
You cannot deal with them. They don't understand. They are, they are primitive. They only understand the language of force and violence and, and so on and so forth. After that s- immediately came the hyperbole, the exaggeration of what exactly happened October 7. October 7 was bloody, and it was horrific, and your earlier guest testified to the fact that this was not easy for hundreds of Israeli civilians.
But Netanyahu and his government had to go overboard to exaggerate, to lie, to deceive about what exactly happened, and they're role in it as well, invoking the so-called Hannibal doctrine where they themselves joined the bombing of, those, in- involved in the conflict during October 7. Marwan, explain the Hannibal doctrine.
So the Hannibal doctrine was something that was invoked in the early 1980s by the Israeli military saying, "We cannot afford to have Israeli soldiers being captured, because then we, we're gonna have to negotiate their release, and that will cost us Palestinian, or in that case, Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails."
So because they did not want to release Palestinian or Lebanese prisoners, this, they decided that if any one Israeli soldier, later on civilian, is captured by any kidnappers, that the Israeli military then will take extraordinary measure to kill, the operation, including, if it need be, to kill the soldier, the Israeli soldier or the Israeli civilian.
So on October 7, immediately after the war s- after the, after the operation started, in the early hours of the morning of October 7, apparently the Israeli military invoked the Hannibal doctrine, and Israeli aircraft aircrafts, jet, bombers and tanks started carrying attacks against, suspected, conflict zones, whether it's kibbutz or settlements, or whether it is convoys going back to Gaza.
So the invocation of that, of that, controversial military order clearly led to the death of Israeli civilians, and many as well, among the Palestinians, whether it's Hamas or any of those Palestinians who came into Gaza. All of that, you know, taking that into consideration, what happened soon after that is the worst part of it, right?
The establishment of a war cabinet, the declaration of war, the, the deployment of 100,000 soldiers on the border with Gaza, the recall of 350,000 reservists from the Israeli, army, and setting up a strategy under the rubric of lethality, which has been developed over many years of wars in Gaza. And lethality is the one that involved mass destruction, not discriminate destruction, that involved the use of the so-called Lavender System, Gospel System, Where's My Daddy or Daddy System and so on and so forth, that would actually lead to massive devastation of Gaza, and that's where the intention came.
They've said it in press conferences, in war rooms. They've said it in public, in declarations, ministers and opposition leaders, about why there is no innocence in Gaza, and why we're gonna have to bomb all of them. Some of them spoke about nuking them. Some of them spoke about nothing is gonna be left standing in Gaza.
We're gonna d- turn it into a deserted, strip. And all of these things were then repeated by the soldiers, not only as slogans, but even as songs, right? Repeated by the soldiers. So the orders went down the hierarchy from the government ministers to the, to the army, and was implemented by the generals who boasted of, o- of, of, of, of bombing Gaza back to the Stone Age, and they certainly tried to do that.
Mahmoud Khalil We Cant Afford to Stay Silent Part 1 - The Intercept Briefing - Air Date 10-2-26
You and your team have expressed concerns that any ruling at the Supreme Court could backfire, right, and further curtail the rights of pro-Palestine students.
I wonder if you could talk more about that.
For now, what we're taking to the Supreme Court is only whether a federal court has jurisdiction-
Mm. -
to look into constitutional claims. th- for me, my constitutional claim is that the Trump administration wanted to deport me because of, my activism on, on Palestine.
so that's what we're bringing right now to the s- to the Supreme Court. so this wouldn't necessarily directly impact, or have a larger impact on, on the movement as, as a whole. but the basic thing is already the government is doing everything in its power to chill the speech of whether students or citizens who are speaking out, for, for, for Palestine.
so what we're trying is actually to prevent that. But the other part is, we seek accountability also, from the, from the public themselves. A-- You don't get accountability only through courts. Mm. You get accountability through the people who are now, voting in, progressive candidates into Congress who may be able to change the law.
So that's how I get accountability. I get accountability when I see that my book is out and people are reading what this administration tried to silence, that they want to make an example out of me, but they failed. And, and that's how I seek also accountability. It's not only from the court itself, because at the end of the day, people are who are-- like, who create the law, who actually push for the law.
Because everything we got right now, the, the rights that, American citizens or anyone in, on, on, on this land, have, it was a product of a fight, whether it's a fight during the civil rights movement or the, anti- anti-slavery movement before, before then. It's n- did not happen because a judge woke up and decided to do what's right.
It's because, actually people pushed for that to happen, and that's my part of the fight right now.
Mahmoud, you were not a random target. We know now that ICE took names from the pro-Israel doxing group Canary Mission to create a list of targets. Far-right pro-Israel groups like Canary Mission and the USA chapter of the militant ultra-Zionist group Betar, considered by even the Anti-Defamation League as an anti-Muslim hate group, targeted you.
Betar later crea- Beitar later claimed credit for ICE's abduction of you and other students and said it shared, quote, "Thousands of," we now know it was about 5,000 names of pro-Palestine students with the Trump administration for further action. In the lead-up to your abduction, Beitar targeted you by name, as did actors at your alma mater, Columbia University, another group documenting Jew hatred on campus at Columbia, and a professor, Shai Davidai, who called specifically for the Trump administration to deport and arrest you in the days leading up to that abduction and tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
You write in the book, "What I did not anticipate was the US government would one day consider the recommendations of hostile Zionist groups to target me and then act on it." You sued for communications between these groups and the Trump administration. What more have you found out about how much they coordinated to target and arrest you and other students?
The targeting of me and other pro-Palestine protesters was written in a document called Project Esther- Mm ... that was produced by the Heritage Foundation. And in there, what they said, "For this plan to work, we need, we need friendly administration that would listen to us and work with us to implement it."
and that what happened after, because Stephen Miller was part of them, part of the Heritage Foundation or consulting for them, and then he became part of this administration and actually worked on implementing this plan, from A to Z. From the discovery that the case in, in Massachusetts, AAUP versus Rubio-
This is the American Association of University Professors lawsuit against, Secretary of State Marco Rubio
Secretary
Rubio- Yeah ... a Reagan appointee, found that the government officials conspired between themselves to deprive us from our freedom of speech. one of ICE agents or one of DHS agents, testified that, "I never s- I've never seen something like this happen in our, in our department, that such request would come from really senior, individuals in the administration."
So now what we are suing for is to see this, this communication between, between these private actors, whether it is Canary Mission, the Heritage Foundation, Beitar and other, others as well, like what we call them, Zionist hated groups, and these administrators, whether it's Rubio, Stephen Miller, or, DOJ, and the Attorney General, because It was all in public.
Betar went out and said that, "We take credit for that. We actually communicated with the administration about that." Yeah. That's what we know publicly. Yeah. so now we're asking for these communications. this case, have already-- we, we filed it in July, take some time, but we're hoping to really expose these networks that, that pushed anti-Palestinian bigotry to be instit- institutionalized within the US government itself.
Because I got used to, sm- smear campaigns and doxing before my arrest, and to me, that was part of an intimidation campaign and, to make me-- to terrorize me, not to speak out about Palestine. And the-- To me back then, the, the thought process was, usually they target your employer, they target your university, your father's employers.
And to me, I'm like, why would I work for anyone who doesn't agree with my views on Palestine or who sees them as, extreme or anything? I don't wanna work for them. and that's how I... I never wore, wore, a mask to, to hide my identity because the risk, the risk to me wasn't that, that high.
in Syria, I wore masks because the risk back then was getting shot by Assad forces- Right ... or getting disappeared by Mukhabarat or intelligence officers. I never imagined that what I fled from would happen to me in the US, the land of the free.
Arendt focused much of her critique on the mainstream tradition of Zionism, the Herzlian tradition, Herzlian referring to Theodor Herzl To what extent did she see the Herzlian tradition as being associated with nationalism?
Yeah. So in short, she saw Herzlian nationalism as a version of tribal nationalism. So it's worse than just the nation-state identity. At least if it was the conventional nation-state identity, then, in principle, this, this new entity of Palestine is, would have to be a shared national identity of all the residents.
and even if, it does envision, expulsion of some, there would have to be at least a, common new national identity o- of all residents. For tribal nationalism, and, certainly this was very explicit for the mainstream Zionists, and so she conveniently links it to Herzl, is this element that's Jews will only be oppressed elsewhere.
So non-Jews you can never trust for very long. So the only place Jews can be secure is where they dominate. So this element, it's not that Herzlian Zionism treated non-Jews as a subspecies, so let's say that she's not arguing it's as ugly as the, the Nazi German species of tribal nationalism. But it is still saying that there's no possibility for Jews to live over the years with non-Jews without the non-Jews ultimately trying to do harm to the Jews.
So the sense that Jews can only live in safety, among their own people. So to her, that's a tribal nationalism in the sense of Jews can only live among themselves, and no interest even engaging with non-Jews, because ultimately there's not much hope, un- under the Herzlian version of Zionism, which was the mainstream version, as she saw it.
Right, and there's no hope because, in part because, in large part because Zionist tribal nationalism, in Arendt's view, was fixated on eternal antisemitism, which she said had become the common sentiment of the Jewish masses. What is eternal antisemitism?
Well, here's a, a, a way I frame it to students.
There's that old movie, The Exorcist, from 1972, where Linda Blair plays the teenager who's possessed by a devil, and there's the young priest that lives there that, knows the family well. But they bring in this old priest who's a specialist in doing exorcism. And when the young priest meets the old priest, the young priest says to the old priest, Father, I would like to give you, the background of this situation, of the family history."
And the old priest says, "I don't need any background. The devil is the devil." And so for eternal antisemitism, I see it as analogous, is we don't need any background of who the players were. Whoever they are, they're going to just look for opportunities to do harm to Jews. So the eternal antisemitism goes hand-in-hand with tribal nationalism and arguing that it's just- Preordained in some kind of mystical fashion that non-Jews are going to look for opportunities.
There may be some brief periods of peaceful times, but the, the orientation of doing harm to Jews will come back.
Yeah, and according to what you write, to Arendt's alarm, Zionists actually welcomed. It's, it's not just that they thought, "Okay, well, there's this eternal antisemitism, and that'll force us never to trust anyone other than Jews and therefore..."
but also that they actually welcomed eternal antisemitism. Why?
Yeah, this is why Arendt likes to call it Herzlian antisemitism, not just because Theodor Herzl is the modern founder of Zionism, but because Herzl really did appeal to this idea that antisemitism is always there. And remarkably, Herzl sees it as a good thing when the antisemitism gets bad enough because that will both shake up a Jewish community to see that their only, way out is forming their own states, but insomuch as you can now just convince others, "Look, we'll get rid of your Jewish community."
So whether it's the Ottoman Empire, the Brits later, "We'll- we'll- we'll take care of your Jewish minority that really are alien outsiders," so it's a win-win. And so that element of Herzlian or mainstream Zionism having this thing where antisemitism outside is a good thing in terms of being able to develop the political momentum for a Jewish state and also, after the state is founded, when she's critical of the Israel's trial of Eichmann, is that idea that here's the reason why we still need to keep promoting a Jewish state because of how bad antisemitism is elsewhere.
All right, now that we understand some of the features and contours of the eternal antisemitism mentality, why did or what did Hannah Arendt think of it, and why did she frankly reject it?
So what bothered her about eternal antisemitism is it kept Jewish communities stuck in place where it would be led by, the Jewish notables.
There'd be limited political engagement, and there'd be a cluelessness about what trends are taking place. If you just, in, in Arendt's mind, assume an eternal antisemitism where it's just the, the devil, it's just demonic, and didn't look at how antisemitism is a dynamic variable that's affected by external forces and also by internal forces, how the Jewish community interacts with the outside, and how the Jewish community organizes itself internally.
That eternal antisemitism is preventing any informed, productive Jewish response. So for, in Arendt's mind, it's both a troubling negative consequence for the fate of the Jewish people, but also for the global community. It's getting, it's getting in the way of a new, more just, more peaceful society that would benefit Jews and everyone else.
Yeah, so she saw the eternal antisemitism syndrome or belief as distinctly ahistorical, right?
Exactly.
And y- you write that, with all Gentiles predisposed to hate Jews, Jews' destinies were seen as different than other nations, and therefore, mainstream Zionist Jews were, were not inclined to engage with others.
I wonder, if you have your book, can you turn to page 62 and read that, that last full paragraph?
Sure. In sum, Arendt berated the Zionist movement for updating the failings of Europe's Jewish communities instead of acting as a vanguard for a new emancipatory Jewish politics. Mainstream Zionists chose separation over engagement with the outside world.
Similarly, just as Europe's Jewish notables bypassed the public and worked closely with governments, the Zionist leadership courted great powers as allies, not other oppressed groups. Summarizing her overall dismay, Arendt reflected on the, quote, "spectacle of a national movement that started out with such an idealistic élan, sold out at the very first moment to the powers that be, that felt no solidarity with other oppressed peoples, and that endeavored, even in the morning dream of freedom and justice, to compromise with the most evil forces of our time by taking advantage of imperialistic interests," unquote.
Destruction of the Jewish Bund with Molly Crabapple Part 1 - The Dig - Air Date 8-14-26
it's not just millions of individual Jews who were murdered. The Nazis destroyed an ancient Jewish civilization in Europe. They destroyed European Jewish, Jewish socialism as a place-based social world and political project. And, and in doing so, they remade the fabric of the Jewish people from what was disproportionately, though not exclusively, we've talked about all of the various factions in Polish Jewish life, a left-wing revolutionary force in, in the case of those people who moved to Palestine into settler colonialists, people who today in Israel Often hold fascist beliefs, ideologies that in many ways echo that of the Nazis.
And you note in your book that veterans of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were just a few years later undertaking the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages. How do you even begin to think through the profound imbrication of the Nazi Holocaust and the Zionist foundation of the state of Israel, and thus also the Nakba upon which it was premised?
And then there's also a third catastrophe of a far less murderous one that spills out of this sequence, which is the end of the Arab Jewish world, a destruction of a life world for which I don't even think there's a particular word. No, in some very profound way, I feel like the Nazis won, In the sense that they ended European Jewish civilization, right? When I was researching my book, I'm going to places like Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and I'm going to these places like Bialystok. That's near where my great-grandma was from. This was a 60% Jewish place before the war.
Lviv was 35% Jewish. Jews were not a small minority in these areas. Often they were the majority of these cities, and that's gone. That's just, that's just gone. And, and not just the people, but even like the, the architecture, like the wooden synagogues. It's like a beautiful Jewish, architectural art form just burned en masse, right?
these places had their guts and heart pulled out, and, while there are like, efforts... like there are still, Jewish people in Poland, and you, Ukraine, obviously Ukraine has a Jewish president. there's like actually lots of Jews in Ukraine. There's lot...
there's still like a strong Jewish community in Riga. It's not the same, right? It's not, it's not at all the sort of like intrinsic part of these societies. It's not the like huge percentage of cities that, that it once was at all. Poland had 3.3 million Jews before the war, and I think it has 7,000 Jews now And I don't know if that can, ever come back, And for me, visiting these places, it was sitting with that just, loss and devastation, which is something that I also felt very strongly when I was in, in Jaffa, and I was seeing all these, beautiful Palestinian homes that are now, hotels, and Israeli-owned hotels and restaurants because the Palestinians of Jaffa were ethnically cleansed and forced to go into boats, under, under mortar fire, you know, and forced from their homes.
And it's... Life worlds can be destroyed and not, not come back. And yeah, I had some, some real, moments when I was, when I was in Eastern Europe sitting with that and, and also when I was in, in Palestine in places like Lod, where there, there was a very famous, massacre. But I think the thing that sometimes will anger me is people will tell me, "How can the Jews, of all people, who have been through a genocide, how can a state that calls itself Jew- the Jewish state perpetrate a genocide after Jews have been through a genocide?"
And the implication is always that having been through a genocide ought to have made you better, that it ought to have made you good, and understanding, and humanistic, and compassionate. But anyone who looks at post-colonial countries knows that is not true, right? Anyone who looks at places that have suffered under the boot of unrelenting, violence and oppression knows that it didn't turn all the people into those places into saints and prophets.
It, it usually just makes people profoundly fucked up, right? And often narrowly concerned for their own survival. And, there's no story about the Taliban, right, that does not include the brutal Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There's no story about ISIS that does not include the murderous American invasion of Iraq.
There's no story about the violence of partition that doesn't include the violence of the British Empire. We're able to understand that all of these things are not because of the intrinsic depravity of Iraqis or Afghans or Indians, that they're actually refractions of the shattering violence that these societies went through.
And I think Zionism is very much the same
It is actually exactly the sort of violent supremacist movement that deeply traumatized people in refugee camps so often adopt because it promises them dignity through strength. It is no different than any of the other fucked up exclusivist supremacist ideologies adopted by shattered people except insofar as it won, right?
And I think, at this point, while there are, still Jews living all around the world obviously, the two main Jewish centers of the world are, are Israel and America. And Jews in America are still to this day largely kind of liberals. For whatever fucked up beliefs they held, that's, that's, that's their orientation, right?
They're, they're not Trumpy fascists, right? And Jews in Israel, by and large, even though obviously there are, like, valiant, brave people fighting this, I'm not saying they're not, but by and large, their orientation is fascist, and it's not just a problem of Netanyahu, right? It's a problem of, a deeply supremacist and sick society.
And it's so obvious that these two communities are headed for a massive fucking divorce Because it's like believing in liberal democracy is... And I'm not even talking about radicalism, I'm not talking about socialism, I'm not talking about anti-colonialism. I'm just talking about being- believing in, basic liberal values is incompatible with believing in an ethno-state where KKK-style lynch mobs are rampaging around the West Bank shooting kids in schools.
these are just not compatible things. And I think that there is a, a fundamental reckoning that is, is already happening over that, and that is about to become very much more loud very soon. But yeah, the Holocaust fundamentally changed European Jews, and in part, it's not just the Holocaust, it's also the failures of solidarity, right, by other countries.
It's not just that Nazis murdered Jews in the most savage fucking ways and then, harvested their teeth, their gold teeth to put them in Swiss bank accounts.That's not just what it is. It's also that they did this while many powerful countries, including, our own, chose not to even do the basic bare minimum of letting in refugees 'cause they were racist, right?
And I think it's that global failure of solidarity, the failure of solidarity of Europe, the failure of solidarity of America, that leads to this feeling of abandonment that's so complete that allows this sort of violent supremacist I will get mine ideology to, to achieve hegemony, right? And I think this is why one of the many reasons solidarity is so important because if it is not extended full-heartedly and s- and adequately, why wouldn't the victimized people turn to violent supremacist ideologies?
You've seen it happen over and over again in, in history. And the blame for Zionism also has to be laid at the feet of, of Europe and of America for their horrific failures, right? And I think the real thing that you can see from this is just that all of us have s- the seeds of the, the perpetrator and the victim inside of us.
There is no group of people that is noble, that is noble on the basis of their culture, that is noble on the basis of their suffering. Suffering sanctifies no one. I'm thinking of Olufemi Taiwo's work there. Exactly, yeah. That suffering is not a finishing school. Mm-hmm. And the sooner that we realize that, the sooner that we start saying that there's, the goodies who are the oppressed of history and the baddies who are the perpetual perpetrators of history, but rather start looking at humans and all of their fucked-upedness and capacity for greatness and violence, the sooner we can have some realistic hope of changing the world
Gaza Has Exposed the Hypocrisy of the West with Omar El Akkad Part 1 - Downstream - Air Date 10-18-26
I wanted to start with a simpler version of it. One Day Everyone Will Be Against This. Do you see, do you think that's happening?
it's interesting that you describe it as ironic because to me, of course, it's an ironic title. But there's two things that have happened with respect to the title since the book came out that I didn't anticipate.
Maybe I should have, but I didn't. The first is the number of people who took it quite literally. There are plenty of people who are against this right now. I would argue that most people on Earth are against this right now. we live under systems of endless taking. We live under fundamentally insatiable systems.
And that almost by definition means the number of people who are having something taken from them is ever-growing, whereas the number, the number of people doing the taking is endlessly shrinking. there's a reason Jeff Bezos, Bezos has a $500 million mega yacht and most of us don't. this is not particularly f- profound thing that I'm bringing up.
and there are people who will be for this for the rest of their lives and are proudly for this. you almost want to afford more respect to someone who openly says that they are, they are fully in favor of what's happening. I was thinking of a very specific kind of well-meaning centrist liberal who looks up every once in a while to gauge polite society and whether this is acceptable or not.
And with respect to that, I was very much, and I remain very much convinced that this is going to be essentially analogous to trying to find a good, well-meaning American liberal who will tell you that they used to be in favor of segregation, or a good, well-meaning South African liberal who will tell you that they used to be in favor of apartheid.
But, one way or another, everything in this book is going to be proven right or wrong. Maybe not during my lifetime, but certainly everything in here is, is a, a, a gambit of sorts. But the other thing that has happened with this title that, that took me by surprise is the number of people who think that if you are to accept that this one day is coming, and certainly we've seen it with a number of officials, for example, from the Biden administration, who miraculously, once there was no more professional obligation to do otherwise, suddenly became aware of how terrible this is just in time for their, PR circuit.
but I was, I was somewhat taken aback by the number of people who think that if this one day should arrive, that when it does, it'll be a sort of celebratory occasion, and I've never once thought of that. I thought the exact opposite because I, I, I can't discount the frustration at how many people had to die and how much misery was inflicted before we reached a place that by every historical analog we were always headed towards.
No, I certainly didn't take it as, as a, as celebratory. I, I think that's what I meant by the irony. for me it implies, the deep scrubbing of records, some amnesia settling in, some mechanism by which the system which has allowed this to happen perpetuates itself by, you know, as, as a fact, as you say, it points to the book, potentially celebrating as, some feat of resistance or something like that in the future, sanitizing it, making films, films, whatever.
so I didn't, I di- I definitely didn't re- read it l- like that. In fact, I-- But, but I, but it, but it nonetheless r- rung really, really true to me a- as, as a title. I know particularly in the original tweet, and actually the co- the, the, the full title on the book is the original tweet that you did on October of 2023, but the, the title is, is, is just part of it.
This phrase when you say it's too-- "When it's too late to hold anyone accountable." And it made me wonder what you thought accountability might look like in this situation. Accountability for the US, for the Democrats, for Israeli society. what, what does that look like? The thing that, that will never arrive.
Yeah, it's interesting. I, I, I often go back to this, There's this sketch comedy show in Canada, and they had this sketch, where, I don't know what it's like here. I, I suspect this isn't the case here. But in North America, if you go to a Canadian or American literary festival, almost every panel starts with a land acknowledgement.
Mm-hmm.
somebody will get up and say, we acknowledge that we are on the unceded territory of," whichever group of Indigenous people the land was stolen from. And so the sketch is at a, poetry reading, and the director of the festival gets up on the podium and says, just before we begin, I want to acknowledge that we are on unceded territory of the Indigenous people that..."
And then somebody raises their hand and says "Oh, so we should leave, right?" And she's like, "No, no, no, no. We're, we're not gonna do that. We're going to..." And I think about that a lot because, we have, we have templates of what acknowledgement looks like, We have templates ranging from an honest telling of what happened, which is-- which sounds like the most basic thing, but actually is an incredibly dangerous thing, right?
You have to exhume the bodies, right? All the way to, to tribunals, right? We have people being held legally accountable for war crimes And I could list you every one of these tools of acknowledgement or, or tools of whatever might be deemed in the most overarching sense justice. I suppose a shorthand way of getting at all of this spectrum is to simply imagine what would happen if the people being murdered were considered sufficiently human, which in the context of the whi- of the West is white people, right?
Eh, I, I had this conversation. It was a deeply unpleasant conversation. I don't know why I'm rehashing it now on a podcast for the permanent record, but if I'm being honest, this comes closest to addressing the thing I'm f- I'm trying to think through here with you. Where I was-- You know, in the US, no part of this book generates more antagonism and more heated conversation than the part where I talk about my inability to continue voting for the lesser evil.
this idea that I c- I just can't do it because at one point, even the lesser evil is too evil. And this really, really upsets people because in the United States, which is a place that loves binaries, there's the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and the Republican Party is openly monstrous, so you hold your nose and you vote for the Democratic Party regardless, right?
This is an oversimplification, but I don't think it's that much of an oversimplification. And again, we were getting into this discussion, which happens over and over and over again. "Yes, but the other side is worse." I said, "Yeah, I know. I understand. I'm not telling you to vote for, for any... You vote for whoever you're gonna vote for."
And finally, I lost my cool, which I try not to do because I am an Arab Muslim guy, and I have to be this calm all of the time, or else who knows what, what I'm believed capable of doing, right? And I lost my cool, which I'm not quite proud of, and I said, "Listen, I want you to imagine something. I want you to imagine that the next president is exactly the person you want in every way.
They run on ev- climate change, democratic renewal, whatever. Everything you want. Not only do they, run on these promises, but then they are put into power, and they accomplish these things, right? This is everything you have ever hoped for as a member of, of a citizenry, participating in the democratic process.
There's just one thing. At one point, they bomb a school in California. they had to. There were terrorist tunnels underneath the school. They bomb the school, and they kill 200 school kids. You'd vote for them again at the next, at the next election, right? It's the rational thing to do And we had this strange standoff because what we were getting at essentially was not that there isn't a line.
Everybody has a line, and once that line is crossed, you will refuse to participate. I promise you this. What we were actually arguing about is who's human enough to legitimize the drawing of that line, right? Because there are tens of thousands of dead kids. In one fell swoop, 200 Iranian schoolgirls were murdered with my tax money, right?
And if that had happened to people that in this part of the world where I live were considered sufficiently human, all hell would break loose, and everybody knows it. So really what we're arguing about is not this form of ackn- of acknowledgment versus that form of acknowledgment. there's a million dead Iraqis who are never going to see George Bush in The Hague.
That's never going to happen. Instead, he gets to paint his shitty portraits of whoever it is he's painting these days. The other architects of that illegal war are sitting around in tenured professorships at law schools or whatever the hell it is they're doing The only thing I keep coming back to with respect to what acknowledgement means or what any kind of restitution or justice in the overarching sense means, is what it would mean if the victims of all of this calamity, of all of this vi- viciousness, of all of this slaughter were considered sufficiently human.
And as soon as a person makes that determination, I assure you there is no more cloudiness about what justice would look like.
We've just heard clips starting with
The Newshour documenting the escalating settler violence against Palestinian olive harvesters, with settlers burning trees, hurling stones, and Israeli forces firing tear gas into the fields.
Democracy Now! laid out how Israel's genocide in Gaza was built through ideology and dehumanization before ministers openly called for leveling the strip entirely.
The Intercept Briefing detailed Mahmoud Khalil's lawsuit seeking communications that would expose how pro-Israel groups coordinated with the Trump administration to target him and other pro-Palestine students.
Against the Grain examined Hannah Arendt's rejection of the mainstream Zionist faith in eternal antisemitism, the ahistorical idea that non-Jews will inevitably turn against Jews.
The Dig held Europe and America partly responsible for the rise of supremacist Zionism, arguing their refusal to shelter Jewish refugees left a shattered people seeking dignity through strength.
And Downstream argued that justice for Israel's genocide in Gaza would look obvious the moment its victims were considered sufficiently human.
And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,
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I sometimes ask a discussion question to kick things off.
Here's today's question:
I'm curious if you've witnessed or participated in an intergenerational discussion about Israel and Gaza. If so, let us know how it went.
I recently saw a boomer and a zoomer in his first year of college discuss Israel and it was fascinating. They were completely aligned on condemning the actions of the current government in Israel, but their views on the conflict were obviously colored by the information environments that each had been raised in.
For the zoomer, their opinions were shaped by the last 5 years of information and what can be gleaned on social media. For the boomer, they had decades of awareness that had all come through the traditional American media.
When the zoomer mentioned the Nakba, I knew we were living in a fundamentally different world than the boomer had grown up in. That's not the kind of phrase almost any American had ever heard before a few years ago, and here it was coming out of the mouth of an 18-year-old.
The Nakba is the Palestinian term meaning catastrophe that they use to describe the 1948 war and its aftermath, when roughly 700,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes in the territory that became Israel.
You don't even have to be sympathetic to the Palestinians to acknowledge that having their perspective erased from the discussion will dramatically influence people's perception of those events and everything that followed.
It seems to me that the very possibility that an 18-year-old living in America could know that word is foundational to the dramatic shift in opinion away from supporting Israel, which used to be a broad bipartisan consensus.
Obviously, that's not the only way an intergenerational conversation like that could go, so let us know about yours.
If you would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message or email us through our link in bio in the show notes.
Now for some more of my general thoughts,
The idea for today's episode originated with an email from a listener who sent in a few historical quotes from people like Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein. They were opposing either Zionism entirely or the form of Zionism that ultimately became the dominant form we know today, which ties itself fervently to ethno-state nationalism of the kind that otherwise mostly draws applause only from the far right.
What becomes clear immediately when you read these old quotes is how the debate has been squashed and narrowed dramatically compared to where it began over a hundred years ago.
As someone who has followed politics closely for more than 20 years, the ramping up of the rhetoric arguing that any opposition to the State of Israel's policies should be equated with antisemitism felt relatively new, mostly within the last 10 years or so. But given a broader perspective, it's clear that recent shifts are really only an escalation, and descendant, of the same debate that has been going on since the beginning, predating World War II.
Just as many are trying to eliminate opposition to the politics and policies of Israel from the range of acceptable opinions today, the arguments put forward for why the creation of Israel may very well be to the detriment of Jews worldwide were successfully extinguished from the range of acceptable opinion decades ago.
One of the first things you will hear in any defense of Israel is the question, "Do you believe that Israel has the right to exist?" This is always asked as something close to a dare, because it's understood that if you say anything other than "yes," your opinion can be dismissed immediately as entirely unacceptable and not worth engaging with. It is deemed outside the range of acceptable opinions.
In doing the research for this episode, what I realized is that question is actually an echo of an earlier question that predated the creation of Israel, which was, "Should Israel be created as a Jewish state at all?"
It was a very real point of debate, and it wasn't being debated between people who wanted to protect and benefit Jews versus those who didn't. It was a debate between people who all had a genuine interest and personal stake in Jews being made safe in the world. Reform Judaism's official platform rejected any return to Palestine in 1885. The Bund, the biggest Jewish party in the cities of interwar Poland, was founded the same year as the first Zionist Congress and stood for Jewish rights where Jews already lived. And of those who argued over the decades for Jewish immigration to Palestine, many argued for one state shared with the Arabs rather than a Jewish one.
That perspective has all but been lost to time, though in a practical sense, it is reasonable to stop debating whether Israel should be created after Israel was created. The reality on the ground simply negated the debate almost entirely, fair enough. But something else was lost sight of when that debate ended.
Albert Einstein followed a very nuanced path with his opinions. On one hand, he was a Zionist and wanted Jews to be allowed to immigrate to Palestine, but he also opposed the creation of a Jewish ethno-state defined by borders and protected by a standing army. But once Israel was created, he accepted it as done - beyond further debate, and shifted to supporting the country.
That feels like a microcosm of the path the debate took in its entirety, regardless of what side you were on before the creation of Israel. Once it existed, large elements of the debate were negated, and the scope of reasonable opinions narrowed. No longer was the question, "Should Israel be created?" It was replaced with "Does Israel have a right to exist?"
These sound like very similar questions, but I think they're actually dramatically different because the question "Should Israel be created?" was being debated between people who had different visions of how best to protect Jewish people in the world. Once Israel was created, the focus shifted to, "Does Israel have the right to exist?" which is not actually about debating how best to protect Jewish people in the world. Now it is a question about how a state defined as a Jewish ethno-state, with borders and a military, should be allowed to act.
Because if a country has a right to exist, then the next logical step is that it also has the right to defend itself, which is the second talking point you will hear in any discussion with someone defending Israel.
Now the subject is military strategy rather than the more fundamental question of the best way to protect Jews, and that entirely excludes the possibility that the best way to protect Jews in the world might not be a military solution.
But the debate has been narrowed to Israel having the right to exist and the right to defend itself. And since Israel was created in a place and in such a way that required mass violence and oppression, the creation of this "safe haven" for Jews itself gave the displaced and the oppressed every reason to oppose it, and gave some of them a motive to attack it. That doesn't justify attacks but that is what a state built that way guarantees itself, which is a permanent enemy, and a debate further locked into military solutions to the exclusion of all other options.
The creation of Israel as an ethno-state with a standing army was very clearly warned against in advance as very likely to be extremely detrimental to the safety of Jews worldwide. That warning has played out almost to a T, and the very discussion that needs to happen to attempt to chart a different path that would be genuinely better for the Jewish community is precisely the discussion that has been rhetorically taken off the table and cannot be considered.
The history of Israel is such a tangle of weeds that it is essentially impossible to have a clean discussion on the subject without it devolving into a debate over contested facts and what-aboutism. Another frequent and effective strategy to silence criticism is to state flatly that the situation is too complicated for most to understand, giving another reason to dismiss any opinions a defender of Israel doesn't like. It's true that the history of Israel is complicated, but it doesn't actually logically follow that the moral reality of the country is too complicated to understand.
But what if you stepped back from the complicated details of Israel to the much more simple, ostensible purpose of Israel?
Consider the question that was debated 100 years ago but with the benefit of hindsight they were missing: What is the best way to protect Jews worldwide, knowing everything we know now? Would your answer be to construct a militarized ethno-state that would demonstrably be perpetually under siege, causing it to act out in ever more aggressive ways that draw widespread condemnation from around the world? Or would you hope there might be a better way?
1948 was a big year. It is both the year that the state of Israel was established and also the year when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the newly-formed United Nations.
In essence, these were both answers to the atrocities perpetrated during World War II. They were both answers to the question, "How do we keep people safe?" but they pointed in very different directions. Israel was based on the idea that safety for a group comes from insularity and the power to protect oneself with force. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the framework intended to create safety for all by establishing a global culture and structure of international law that allows people to coexist peacefully with equal protection for all.
Though Albert Einstein was a Zionist, he believed in the version of Zionism that aligned much more with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, arguing for a shared country in which he hoped to come to “agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living
And this wasn’t entirely wishful thinking. Jews had lived alongside Muslims and Arabs in relative peace for hundreds or thousands of years in various cases, though they had often been treated as second-class citizens. That history is another way to understand the diverging options for correcting that historic inequality.
The universal human rights answer was to establish equality and guaranteed protections for all. The other option was to create a mirror of that historical oppression. If Jews had traditionally been treated as second-class citizens in the countries where they lived, then the answer, some Zionists thought, was to create a country where they would be first-class citizens. The goal wasn’t equality, it was to be the ones on top for once. It was wrong when a structural class system was used against Jews and, though it's understandable to want to reverse roles, that doesn't necessarily make it morally right or practically effective.
There are any number of reasons why Einstein’s vision of establishing an agreement with the Arabs of Palestine to live together in peace might not have worked out, but we didn’t get to test that theory, and Israel went down the path of militarized insularity instead.
In other countries around the world, the basic tenets of human rights were slowly and fitfully established as national laws, aiming to design structural equality into society, benefiting everyone living in those nations, including the Jewish citizens.
It’s not a clean experiment, nothing in history is, but we’ve now run a natural experiment on these two theories put into practice for nearly 80 years while real lives were on the line and were lost along the way, and I think it’s clear that the results are in.
By the primary measure Israel set for itself, keeping Jews alive and safe, the human rights and equal protection path has been the safer one. Israel has fought a war or a major military operation in every decade since 1948, has buried more than 25,000 soldiers, and lost around 1,200 people in a single day in October 2023. Outside Israel, the line appears to run the other way. The deadliest single attack on Jews outside Israel since the Second World War was in 1994, when a bombing in Buenos Aires killed 85 people, but as the tenets of equal rights and protections took hold and became normalized around the world, no year since has come close. The worst year in three decades was 2025, when 20 people were killed around the world in anti-Semitic hate crimes, all year, and the groups that count these attacks say the rises track alongside Israel’s wars. The people who shoot up a synagogue over a war in Gaza aren't correct in their analysis and are solely to blame for their actions, but they are making the same mistake Israel’s defenders make, treating every Jew on earth as the state, and a state built to stand in for every Jew on earth is precisely what the warning a century ago was about.
So, if your intention for defending Israel is because you care deeply about the safety of Jewish people, then I think what’s missing is an examination of the bigger questions about where safety really comes from that we have all but stopped asking.
Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.
And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;
Section A, The Jewish Case Against Zionism
Followed by Section B, The Bund and the Road Not Taken
Section C, Inside Israel, From the West Bank to the Ballot Box
And Section D, Complicity, Crackdown, and Refusal
Republicans Palpable Panic; The Jewish History Of Anti-Zionism with Benjamin Moser Part 1 - The Majority Report - Air Date 9-28-26
let's talk about, what happened in Houston. I, I had- Sure ... no idea of this history whatsoever, and it's fascinating. what, what was the date and where... and, and give us the the context, for this schism, as it were.
Well, thanks for asking me about that. I don't think anyone has asked me about that, but I found that ul- utterly riveting because this is something my family was involved in.
And I knew they were involved, but I didn't know really what was at stake. So this is 1943, Houston, Texas, where I'm from. the largest synagogue in the South, Beth Israel, and the oldest synagogue in Texas. It, it dates back to the Republic of Texas, to the 1840s. And it was the most respectable
You can imagine what Yom Kippur looks like there. just very, very... The, the Jewish bourgeoisie of, of, of, of Houston. And I chose Houston not only 'cause I'm from there, but because I didn't want the story to just be New York Jews, which is usually how it's told. American Jewish history is really told through New York, and everybody is on Riverside Drive with Woody Allen, But that's not the reality of a lot of Jewish, a lot of Jewish, life in this country. the synagogue, putting it shortly, cracks up in the middle of World War II over the question of Zionism. And it-- there's a schism and in fact, the Zionists go to this one synagogue, which is the synagogue I grew up when learning about Israel and learning about, apples and honey for Rosh Hashanah.
And the other stayed anti-Zionist for a few years, not, not for that long. But the violence of this schism was something that was really fascinating, and I tell it through the story of the rabbi who comes in from New York as a peacemaking figure to try to solve this problem. And what I learned about it, which I really didn't know, 'cause I don't know if you grew up Reform.
I did.
Yeah. So I didn't know how interesting Reform Judaism was. I actually thought Reform Judaism was boring and It was the most mild form of being Jewish in a way. but Reform Judaism's entire point in the 19th century, the reason they broke off from Orthodoxy, is because they didn't like nationalism.
They didn't like tribalism. They didn't like stuff that made the Jews seem different from people around them, except in a religious sense. So they said, we're basically like Catholics or like Presbyterians or we're, we're not a separate nation. We are not, different except that we have our own religion, and we wanna keep our religion, but we don't want all this hocus pocus."
So all the stuff about, what the priest is allowed to wear, the sacrifices in the temple in the restored Jewish state, prayers that say things like, "Thank God for not making me a woman," they got rid of all of that stuff. And they got to this purified form of Judaism as they saw it, which was basically about ethical monotheism.
And this, and, and so part of that was absolute refusal of Jewish nationalism and Zionism. And one of the real tragedies of the 20th century, I think, in, in the Jewish world, is that Beth Israel, for example, the church of the church, the synagogue that, that, that stayed anti-Zionist for a time, is now actively on their website today raising money, for the IDF in Gaza.
So this is a story about what happens to the Reform Jews in this country, I shouldn't say it's still raising money today. I haven't checked it today, but until very recently it was.
it is, fascinating. just over the course of, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, I went to two different, Ah
synagogues. And to see the, the, there's, there, just even in visiting two different ones, I saw a, a spectrum within the, the, the Reform movement. but where, what ultimately happened with that fi- because one of the stories, it seems to me, about anti-Zionism is how effectively, effectively it was quashed.
Yeah. there, and, and part of that is a, I think, well, obviously, the Holocaust, Mm-hmm ... created a, a real material impetus, and support for Zionism. But there was also not a coherent- Institution or entity or even ideology that was competing with it. And, and, no plan loses to a plan, type of thing, and, and that, that dynamic.
So how did it, how did, how did it resolve in Houston?
Well, so this is a very interesting and important story, and it's a story that only 30 years later, I could grow up in Houston in the same synagogue and not have any idea this happened. Everybody was a Zionist. I think it's really important to say, just as all, all of our politicians until last week were 100% Zionist, not just Jews,
I didn't grow up in a totally Jewish world. I don't know about you, but I grew up in a... I, I went to a mixed school. I didn't go to a Jewish school. I went to... My parents were left, liberal Democrats. I... It wasn't like that at all. It was just everybody assumed that everybody was Zionist and always had been, and we didn't really understand the Arabs and the Palestinians.
But in my world, we didn't really know Arabs and Palestinians. I think that's really important. So the, the thing resolved, I think first of all, when the Holocaust becomes fully known after '45, so that's only two years after the split in Houston, and this was a split, by the way, that, I, I chose Houston, but this, this happened all over the Jewish world.
the news of the Holocaust was so shocking to people that they thought of Jews as victims and people who needed to be made safe, and then only three years later comes, the, the independence of the State of Israel. And everybody what you sketch there, it's just the Holocaust leads to Israel.
That was such a clean move, and it seemed so justified and such a... It seemed not more, not just justified, it seemed like almost divine providence, that after this disaster, okay, that was horrible, but we're the phoenix that rose from the ax- ashes. We're the State of Israel now, and thank God we're gonna be safe and no one's gonna knock the Jews around anymore.
That was such a simple story that I think that the stories of the anti-Zionists who basically said, "This is not gonna work. This is gonna lead to hate, wire, murder, mayhem, and, and destruction," they weren't even listened to because they didn't even seem Normal. I didn't encounter any of these people.
The only thing I ever heard about people against Zionism were about ultra-Orthodox people, and I remember people said, "Oh, well, 'cause they're waiting for the Messiah, and they think the Messiah is gonna bring them back to Israel or something." And that just sounded kinda weird to, middle-class Americans in Houston.
the Messiah is gonna- Right ... bring you back to Israel. that was the only argument. I had no idea. in my book, I sketch how many arguments there were, how many people there were, how they were not only, censored and, and even murdered, as we discussed, but more than that, just ignored.
Well, I think that, it's also a lesson about how an orientation towards power or capital makes, the, the... It's a snowball effect for a certain kind of argument. I am not Jewish, but, I can say just after October 7th, having conversations with older family members, the Zionism is, reflective a- and, and, and, it's almost because I think World War II and our role in opposing the Nazis became such a potent nationalist narrative in America in particular, that there's a generation, I think, of Cold War era, just Americans that see support for Israel and th- a- a- and honestly, frankly, this reflexive Islamophobia, Yeah
as embedded in a, a national pride that also has a connection to World War II that younger generations are less tethered to.
Yeah, but I think it's really good that you say that because a lot of what... I think World War II, the defeat of Hitler, is the main American myth. I think it's the myth that we all grow up with.
More than the Civil War. I don't think anybody remembers the Revolutionary War. I don't think... World War II replaced that. And who places themselves at the center of World War II? It's the Jews because of the Holocaust. And so this becomes, a war that's fought in a certain sense for America and a, in a certain sense for the Jews, and these things almost become conflated.
And when I talk about, in my chapter about Hannah Arendt, I talk about how she explodes this myth in 1963 when the Israeli state is trying to take charge of the story of the Holocaust and use it quite explicitly and quite brutally and quite dishonestly to place Zionism at the center of the story.
So you have Hitler. Hitler's defeated. Israel rises. Israel punishes Hitler, in the form of Eichmann, the Nazis. And that feels so clean that it's very hard, historiographically, just telling people that that's not really how it went, and in fact, the story of Zionism and Nazism is not a very clean story at all.
if you wanna say a little bit about the trajectory of the book in which you show how anti-Zionism slowly became a minority opinion from being an overwhelming majority opinion. Or vice versa, you mean? Or, yeah. Well, yeah, this is something that people don't know. I grew up in a completely Zionized world, where I didn't even meet anybody who was anti-Zionist until I was in my 20s. And again, I grew up... I, I just turned 50, so we're talking about the '80s and the '90s. I grew up in Houston, which I write about in the book.
my parents were not at all fanatic Zionists. They were just American Jews. They never went to Israel. They, they... I write in the piece I, I wrote in Equator, that I think Israel was like a dog shelter. everybody was "Isn't it nice that there's a dog shelter?" And nobody was really against it, and if you said, "Will you give us $100 for the dog shelter?"
People would say, "Sure," but no one was obsessed with the dog shelter. And this is taking... It, I, it makes me feel like an ancient, survivor of some medieval age. But it really wasn't... And but, and at the same time, it was so unanimous that I don't even think people had to think about it that much.
It wasn't something that demanded some opinion or some, some reaction or some label, because afterwards, this book is about labels also. what does it mean to be anti-Zionist? What does it mean to be this or that? And, and these are very contested things. But, but what is so fascinating about it is that the unanimity that I grew up in was totally recent And, in fact, from the very beginning, people thought- Which you didn't realize at the time, of course
No, because it was like being for apple pie or something. it was you didn't devote that much time to this. But, and it was very, very connected to being American. and also, unless you were Muslim or, or, or, or Arab or Palestinian, most Americans were Zionists, not just Jews, and it wasn't that controversial.
And as I write in the book, it wasn't that Israel wasn't controversial, because Israel was controversial. but the idea of Israel's existence was something that nobody really... I, I was shocked the first time I heard somebody say that. But in fact, if you go back only 20 or 30 years, and then all the way into the 19th century, you find that Zi- Zionism was the most ferociously debated question in the Jewish world.
it was, it was considered crazy. the founder of Zionism, Herzl, was in fact pretty crazy, as I write in the book. and that's a word that you throw around, "Somebody's crazy." But he actually, he was a f- he was a fantasist, and he was a sci-fi writer, which is really, I think one of the keys that I, as I was writing this book.
He writes about this kind of Robinson Crusoe society that's gonna come up somewhere. And in the Jewish state, he says he only devotes three paragraphs to where it should be. You would think, well, Theodor, okay, Jewish state, great, but where? And he says, "Well, it could be in Argentina." Okay, that's a nice country.
It has a lot of land. Or it could be in Palestine, which is where we come from, and we will go to Palestine. We'll form a barrier against the barbarism of Asia. So, but then he moves on to how many hours a day you should work and all... And so it's really weird, and this weird moment in the, in the, in, in, in my reading of my grandfather's copy of Herzl, which I didn't read until I was in my 40s, was this moment where he says, "I gave The Jewish State," which is the book he publishes in 1896, which is the, the, the, the shot heard around the world of Zionism.
"I gave it to this friend of mine." He bursts into tears. And he says, "Oh, friend, I was so moved by this book too. When I was writing it, I was crying because it's, Jewish history is finally coming in full circle." And the friend's "No, Theodor." "I'm crying 'cause you sound insane." And I was reading this, and I was "He sounds insane."
And then he writes this, but that was the reaction of a lot of people. They thought this was crazy, and the book is really about why did people think it was not only crazy, but why it was so poisonous, and why it would create such a disaster for both Palestinians, but also for the Jews.
Yeah. I was, I was struck by that.
The, you... I, I've never heard or read a, a, a description of Herzl and, and going back and looking at Der Judenstaat, which I did after I read your book. Crazy, right? I realized, yes, I never had... I never saw it in this light. the other...
Another thing I was struck by in the early going in the book is you're touching on a very controversial, verboten in fact, topic, which is the relationship between Zionism and antisemitism.
You write in the book, "From its very foundation, Zionism depended on antisemites, cultivated them, flattered them. The antisemites will become our most dependable friends." This is Herzl, by the way. "The antisemitic countries are allies," you say Herzl wrote. and you then go on to cite Balfour, Lord Balfour, Balfour Declaration.
Bloody Balfour to the Irish for those of you who follow that train of colonial settler monstrosities. you cite Balfour writing in 1919, who said that Zionism, here I'm quoting Balfour in an introduction to a book on Zionism. In fact, "Zionism would mitigate the age long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a body, the Jews," that's in brackets, "which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or absorb."
These are the words. These, this is garden variety antisemitism. Yeah. Balfour was a dyed in the wool antisemite. We know that from the most important act of the government he headed, which was... Or one of the most important act, which is the Alien Exclusion Act of 1905, to keep Jewish refugees from czarist pogroms from coming to England.
The most antisemitic act in English history since Edward I in 1290 expelled all the Jews from England. Yeah. So if you would say a couple words about this, because we're not supposed to talk about this. We're not supposed to talk about it, and yet when you read this literature, and this is the funny thing about Zionism, funny quote unquote, but the funny thing about Zionism is that they are so explicit about what they're going to do.
So Herzl says, "We are going to need the antisemites on our side, and in order to do that, we are going to-" not only flatter them, because what happens pretty soon after is they start getting involved in actual incitement of anti-Semites against Jewish communities in order to force people to go to Palestine.
And this is something that's very dark, and it's very, That I, I write a lot about what happens to the Jews of the Arab world, because what happens to the Jews of the Arab world is one of the great myths of Zionism, which is that basically the Nakba happens in Palestine, they kick out all the, the Palestinians.
However, the Arabs then kick out all the Jews in their countries, so it is a wash, right? This is the story I, I heard as a, as a, as a young person. but the degree to which Zionism was in bed with anti-Semites is, is it's hard to say it without actually reading all this stuff that I- I try to write about some of it, but, as with many things about Zionism, there's always more.
th- they really did understand that this project was not going to succeed unless you could get Jews to go to Palestine, and Jews didn't want to go to Palestine. there's survey after survey about where did people wanna go, even people who had been victims of pogroms and stuff. The, the, the first place they wanted to go was always they wanted to go back to their own country, and they wanted to have civil rights in their own country.
The second choice was always obvious. Here we are. It was America. The third choice was maybe some other Western country. Maybe they'll go to Australia or they'll go to Argentina or they'll go to, England or somewhere like that. The fourth choice was, was Palestine. So they had to generate, a motive for people who had no intention of going to Palestine, had never really even thought about it, and didn't know anybody there, and didn't speak the language, and didn't understand what they would do there professionally, to go there.
And so, and so the, the story of Zionism and, and its partnership with the anti-Semites, it goes on to this day, by the way. Netanyahu was very close to Orban. they've... we, we live in France, as we were just discussing, for, for part of the year, and, and they're, they're constantly trying to freak out the French Jews.
and now since the genocide began, since October 7th, they're trying to convince the American Jews that they're not safe here, and a lot of people unfortunately believe them.
Republicans Palpable Panic; The Jewish History Of Anti-Zionism with Benjamin Moser Part 2 - The Majority Report - Air Date 9-28-26
let's, talk about, Ronnie Kasrils. Oh. because, he was, arguably I think, my late co-host, Michael Brooks' favorite, South African, or one of, And one of his favorite guests, definitely. Yeah. Full stop. b- but, I, I wasn't, as aware of his anti-Zionism. tell us about him
Well, he's...
It is a absolute honor that I got to spend several days sitting on his porch in Johannesburg talking to him about-- He's eighty-eight now. He is one of the real legends of the South African anti-apartheid struggle. He's a Jewish guy who grew up making the connection between how Blacks were treated in South Africa and how Palestinians were being treated in Israel.
And he suffered enormously for this conviction. He spent twenty-seven years in exile. and he finally comes back. this is really making a long story short, but he finally does come back in triumph, Because in South Africa, unlike in Palestine, the, the, the freedom and democracy struggle is victorious, and Ronnie comes back, and he gets to be an, a minister in the first democratic government under Nelson Mandela and then under Thabo Mbeki.
And hanging out with Ronnie Kasrils, it's it's, it's an incredible experience of just being with somebody who has stuck to his guns for all these decades. And he also tells this story. So everybody in my book, I, I want them to tell their own story, but I also want them to tell another story about some concept.
So, Hannah Arendt is the story of, of what Zionists... First of all, how Zionists conduct smear campaigns against prominent Jewish figures, and secondly, how, how Zionism is involved in using the Holocaust to promote its own, its own thing. So Ronnie's chapter really is about, what is apartheid?
I don't even think... I grew up... So I'm fifty, so I grew up with apartheid as something we knew about and talked about, but it's been more than thirty years since apartheid, disappeared, thank God. So I'm, I'm wondering, people use this word apartheid. what does it mean in Israel?
What does it mean in South Africa? what are we talking about? So in South Africa, we're talking about racially segregated, physical areas. So, Black people can't go into certain businesses or professions or schools, which is very similar to what we had in the US South, where I grew up. but they use this word apartheid to describe Israel.
But what you see in Gaza, which is, the carpet bombing of a city of two million people, that never happened in South Africa.
South Africa was really about racism and about economic exploitation. and s- so it's very interesting to see how Ronnie also witnessed from outside how the apartheid leadership of South Africa was so best friends with Israel and how these Nazis, real Nazis, would come to Jerusalem and sign the book at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, and say, "We stand together side by side against intolerance and racism."
and how these South African exiles were reading this in the newspaper, and he said, "We just wanted to gag
wh- how has it been, just in general, for you... there... People don't anti-Zion- Zionist Jews- Yeah ... speaking out, much about it. in some areas they do.
but the, it is a real threat to, again, the conflation of Judaism and Zionism is a real tool to protect Israel, and Zionist ideology. Anybody trying to puncture, or sever that tie, it seems to me, gets a certain amount of, of grief. I wonder w- how has it been, for you so far?
on the one hand, it's fantastic.
because I, I think that by bringing these stories back of these incredible heroic people, a lot of Jewish people who felt like we didn't have a voice or, felt like we were crazy, we were the, 'Cause we're, we're smeared so often. a lot of people come up to me every day and say, "Thank you so much."
"I finally feel less alone reading this." And so that means a lot to me. On the other hand, when you write a book called Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, you know they're gonna come for you. And of course they've come for me. and it's not pleasant. it's one thing to write about what they do to Hannah Arendt.
It's another thing to, open your telephone every day and, look at your, look at your Instagram messages full of hatred and threats and everything. and to, to read discussions of it in the press that are so caricature, they're just so dishonest that you can't even respond to it.
that's not fun, but at the same time, I am so strengthened by... I saw NAZA the other day. I don't know if you've had a chance to see it. No.
Oh. I'm-
Did you see it, Emma?
No, I, I, I didn't, and I'm, I, I'm, I'm not looking forward to it, but I know that it's gonna be essential viewing, and I've heard it's just, an absolutely condemning portrayal of Israeli society and the willingness to kill and understanding what is actually, what they're doing.
Yeah.
Well, it's such a powerful film because it's so much... There's really nothing in there you don't know. and yet, and yet, it is, to see it put together that way and to hear it in the voices of these people, it's like if you had a film of the Nazis talking about, "I had a rough day at Auschwitz, so I went out and had a sandwich, and then I felt better."
that's almost literally what they say. they, they work in the morning, and then they go out to lunch. It's just unbelievable. But when I see that, and I see the price that Palestinians have paid and are still paying, when I think about what happened to the people in my book, a lot of them, when I think about their heroism and their dignity and their perseverance, I just think, "Okay, someone s- wrote a bad review," or, "Someone sent me an asshole email."
that's my, that's my sob story? And I really have had so much contempt for the whining of so many Jews over the last few years who are- determined to find antisemitism under every stone, and they're not looking at what is causing antisemitism, which is Israel and Zionism, and what is also actually happening to people in Gaza.
I just, I grew up with a f- f- a family of Holocaust refugees, and if I had sat around, if I even sat around about it's too hot, I don't wanna mow the lawn or whatever, I got, "Yeah, how do you think it was in Auschwitz?" that was the, we just, it was very much about stop whining.
That was a lot of my education. S- don't sit around feeling sorry for yourself. Do something and do something for other people. And I would have thought that that was something that every Jewish kid grew up with. w- it was absolutely, not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
And I'm amazed by how many people thought the Holocaust was only about the Jews, the fight against racism was only about the Jews, the fight against economic injustice was only about the Jews. so yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a tough time, to be, to be Jewish, and it's a tough time to be out there publicly opposing this.
But I think it would be much harder for me not to be out here.
Anti-Zionism, A Jewish History Benjamin Moser with Rashid Khalidi Part 2 - The New York Library - Air Date 9-22-26
one of the other things that I, having, lived in this country more than half of my life, one of the things that I really appreciated in this book is, your description of what you describe as speech rules, the things you can say and the things you cannot say, and these are rules that have been rigorously enforced.
You, you talk in the book about reactions to people who are anti, anti-Zionist. you say, "Zionists would thunder. The fury with which," some statement, "was greeted was theatrical, histrionic." you describe, the rabbi of the congregation your family, was associated with, being attacked with flamboyant metaphors, fabrications, ininimitably, inimitably florid style, overwrought language, lies.
you talk about the reaction to Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. you write, and I'm gonna quote a long passage, "The campaign followed the time-tested Zionist playbook. Slander the opponent as an anti-Semite." Any of you heard that before? "And a self-hating Jew." Familiar with that one? "Or even, in Arendt's case, as a Nazi.
Divert the debate into something irrelevant, usu- usually employing a generous helping of personal innuendo." If you read a couple of the reviews of this book, you will notice every single one of the things I'm talking about here, by the way. "Ignore the substance, and focus on what would later be called tone policing, and respond to even the most sober scholar or journalist or rabbi or activist with hysterical, shrieking, overwrought emotion, rendering actual debates about actual facts impossible."
Everyone, virtually everyone, not everyone, 11 of the 12 anti-Zionists that you, whom you profile in this book, were subjected to this treatment. I've, I, I, I've noticed it in my own experience actually. and I'm sure it's recognizable to members of our audience. can you say something about this particular peculiar discursive style?
That's putting it elegantly. To which we've both been- Let's see. That's very- ... subjected. Right. I've never... I have no idea what you're talking about. it's funny because, speech rules is, is a word that Hannah Arendt writes in her book about Eichmann, and it refers to the Nazi practice of if you're gonna deport a bunch of people from this town, they give you a speech rule.
So you don't say, "We're deporting them to the, to the camps." They e- they say, "They are being relocated for agricultural labor." And it's called, a speech rule, in German, Sprechregel. And Zionism has always relied... And she says it means what in ordinary language would be called a lie. and Hannah is a, she's just such a, such a great person to read more of and to read into, as I did for this book.
I, I got to know her really well. But, there's something about it that is extremely, it's extremely repetitive in a way that you can hardly believe when you go back 100 years, that the same things they're saying about Nan Goldin, last week, they were saying about Jacob Israel de Haan in 1921, and it's not even that they've updated the software very much.
it's, it's incredibly repetitive, and it is, as you point out, or as, as you point out that I point out, there is this, there is this emotional side to it. Absolutely ... and- That's the most striking thing about it. That it's- It's not intellectual. No. Well, because they can't make the argument because the, the basic question of Zionism is, do the European Jews have the right to come to Palestine, which is a country that's 95 to 97% not Jewish, and establish- colonies there that then boycott a, in-institute apartheid against, economically destroy, eventually ethnically cleanse, and all the way down to now commit genocide against the native population.
So that is the question which we can translate into English. The question there is, or translate into Zionist English is, does Israel have a right to exist? And this is the ultimate question that will unlock, this kind of reaction. And what's scary about it, and, what, what we're here trying to break through, because I'm trying to break through because, Palestinians, they get different speech rules than we do.
the way that Arabs and Palestinians are censored and are discredited and are marginalized by Zionist language, it's different. But it happens to Jews as well, and the purpose is to create rhetorical parameters. So you're not allowed to ask if Israel has a right to exist. just in the same way you, but you were allowed to ask, for example, could South Africa transform itself into a multiracial democracy?
Well, nobody's talking about- You could say that. You could say that. Yes. You can't say the same thing, 'cause when we talk about does Israel have a right to exist, we're talking about a regime. We're talking about a, a state that discriminates against more than half of the population, and much more than half if you include all the refugees.
so that seems like a, a question that we need to ask, and I feel like as a Jewish person of my age, I just turned 50, and I have written books, and I have a certain ability to sit on this stage and talk to you and talk to you. I feel like especially since the genocide has begun, that we have a real obligation to try to break down these speech rules, and we have a real obligation to try to speak clearly and, and it's, it's scary.
you're gonna get, you're gonna get the blowback that we all know. but I feel like that's part of what being a writer should be. It's part of what being a, a, a, a, a, an adult should be. Mm. you have to find your own words, and you have to speak your own language. Mm. One of the things that really struck me when I heard you speak in, in February upstairs at the Cullman, was your description of so much of this as intellectual thuggery.
I think you s- you t- you said they were intellectual thugs or they're thugs. And I'm, I was struck by that. in the book, you talk about the, in the chapter devoted to Jacob de Haan, who was a, a anti-Zionist Dutch writer in Palestine who was murdered in 1924 at the orders of a man who became the second president of the state of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, by the Haganah, a crime that w- for which nobody was ever punished.
that's, that was actual thuggery. But I think what, what's m- m- more interesting, actual thuggery we can talk about. But what's more interesting is this intellectual thuggery, this use of florid, emotional, his- almost hysterical language to defend what I would argue from a, what I would argue as a rational perspective, is the indefensible.
How can you defend killing 20,000 children? as as, as an example. How can you defend- It's a good example ... emptying, emptying 500 villages of their entire population? And I, I, I, I think that the, the, the, one of the many, many virtues of this book is it talks about that intellectual thuggery. I, I, I'd appreciate it if you'd say a little bit about that.
Well, you're right. there's two sides to the thuggery. The first is the physical violence, which is so devastating, obviously, against Palestinians and also against Jewish dissenters. You, you mentioned de Haan, who was, the first Jew killed in Palestine by Jews. but the intellectual thuggery really is a consistent theme that goes through the book of people being discredited, people being, people being defamed, but also just trying to make people seem like they don't know what they're talking about.
This is very common. they'll say that Arabs are, they're just racist. They just don't like Jews. And they'll say about people who aren't Jewish, they'll say, "Well, you don't know what you're talking about. It's very complicated." But to, to Jews- That's my favorite word. Right. Complicated. It's complicated.
It's not that complicated. 20,000 children. Right. Nothing complicated. Right. Right. 450 villages. Nothing complicated. Not complicated. No, but it relies on that sort of rhetoric to intimidate people into thinking that they don't really know what they're talking about, and that they're not qualified to talk about it.
And they'll often say, "Well, you didn't... I survived the Holocaust," or, "I, I, my child got blown up in a Palestinian terrorist attack," or whatever. They'll always... They will never... Because ultimately, and they've always known this, Chaim Weizmann knew this actually very early during the First World War, that it was def- it was indefensible on any grounds that modern people could really accept.
Because we modern people, At least in our, we thought... I have to say before the genocide, I thought more people were against genocide. It turns out they're not against genocide, so, we grow up and we learn things about the people around us. But there is a real, there is a real threat to scholars, to professors.
I write about Felicia Langer, who's this incredible lawyer who becomes the first Israeli lawyer who, who advocates for the Palestinians. And, her, her, her son is tortured. She's spit on on the street. People try to run her over as she's walking down the sidewalk. She eventually leaves.
she leaves because she, she says just being a lawyer is ex- is, is playing along with this facade of democracy. you have a court and you have a judge and you have a jury and you have a this. But, as we, we know if we've studied the Israeli justice system, quote unquote, the conviction rates in these courts are something like 99.5%.
And she describes, mentally ill people who can't even stand up being, being sentenced to 10 years in these horror- horrible prison camps. So, it's something that, that, the thuggery takes a lot of forms, and I think that... I hope that we're, I hope that we're going in the other direction now.
Mm-hmm. But it's still there.
Arendt on Zionism Part 2 - Against the Grain - Air Date 11-7-26
And how did Hannah Arendt see Zionists viewing Palestine's Arabs? What did she notice about that and, and how did she critique it?
Well, she looked at it, I'd say, as two ways. One was the Jewish community bypassed the Arabs of Palestine altogether. This would be, as, as she thought too, a common imperialist pattern of outsiders just ignoring, the indigenous and negotiating directly, in this case with the, with the British imperialist overseers.
The second element was adapting the eternal antisemitism now to the Arabs and the Palestinians of Arab in particular. That's, again, coexistence is not possible. They're non-Jews. What- whatever else they want, they are going to look for opportunities to do harm to the Jews. So it was a combination of a standard European imperialist indifference, but then the added twist is this eternal antisemitism would also apply then toward the Arabs in Palestine and in the neighboring region.
And if under eternal antisemitism, Jews who adhere to that see themselves as surrounded by enemies, hostile enemies, implacable, implacably hostile enemies, then what did she see? Well, she saw a Jewish state guided by mainstream Zionists as becoming obsessed with, with defending itself, right? With defending itself from hostile forces.
Yeah. To her, this would just be a siege mentality. It'd be a Spartan state, so where the militarism element overwhelmed every other aspect of the society. It'd be a siege mentality.
And I imagine that siege mentality means that such a heavy priority is put on self-defense and militarism that other things, other things vital to, Jewish culture or just to universal culture would be ignored or deprioritized, and, and she lamented that, right?
She did. I'll just quickly, read from, the, the quote, the, the passage I quoted. She writes, "The land that would come into being would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionists, and non-Zionists. The, quote, victorious, unquote, Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absolved with physical...
absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be a concern of the whole people. Social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries."
Given Arendt's dislike, distaste for the, the conventional nation state model, the idea of a, of a homogeneous, a nation state, which often just wasn't the reality, how did Arendt think Jews should act vis-Ã -vis Palestine's Arabs?
What did she think collaboration could or should result in? What was, what was the end goal or maybe the fantasy in her mind of what Jews and Arabs could build together?
The end goal was a, an affirmative binational society. When I say affirmative, it meant that yes, both, the Jewish community and the Arab community in Palestine would have their distinct language, distinct cultural heritage.
They, would have their own educational, cultural practices and some in- internal political autonomy. But the affirmative part would be extensive engagements, so regular interaction over governing of, say broader municipalities, bro- broader cities, common security. So, so in this case, a binational federation that would have a place for distinct national identity, but for it to really break from a model that had been so disastrous.
One needed-- Now, what, one needed institutional structures and an attitude where we are ultimately in this together. So the, the shared governance, the interaction is constant. So that was, that was her fa- that, that was her ideal. So you wouldn't, you, you wouldn't move to the point of just assimilating everyone to just some kind of new generic Palestinian identity.
The distinct national identities would be there, but it would be there in a way that would enable both distinct national identities to flourish, but affirmative, very active co-engagement of the communities, co-governance.
You write that Arendt's plea to find innovative modes of political organization, along the lines of what you were just discussing, remains imperative today for the prospects of both a just peace and a desirable Jewish homeland.
Elaborate on that.
Okay. Yeah, yeah. That's music to my ears about w- what's the appeal of Arendt now. Her dire warnings are all the more relevant now for anyone who follows the, the current state of Israel and Israeli political culture. It's far uglier than it was when she was writing, and the, the degree of tribal nationalism, siege mentality, the undermining of even conventional liberal democratic values are all at an all-time high.
And what also remains is you have two very distinct national identities across Israel, Palestine. by Palestine the occupied Palestinian territories. But if we look at the, the region of the original Palestine mandate, there really are two national groups with deep attachments to essentially the same territory.
And so the, the idea of Of developing a imaginative political system that accommodates both distinct autonomy, cultural language development, religious development of each people with affirmative active joint governance remains essential. What form that takes specifically, we'll, we'll wait to see, but that idea of some type of binational federation is essential.
And I, I'd say it's, it's essential, for the, for the Jewish community if one wants something other than a victor society. If one just wants a victor society, then, Israel's in, or the Israeli Jews are in pretty good shape. they still have an overwhelming economic military advantage and political advantage in terms of, US support.
But if one wants actually a decent society, then one is going to have to figure out some ways where, some ways to institutionalize and develop a shared governance and a shared sense that, that we're both connected to all of it, and we need to start thinking of other kinds of institutions. The specific form will, will not probably be the same as what, she and others were proposing in the 1940s, but the element that one needs, one needs not a rigid separation of Jews and Palestinians, but a means where they can actively coexist, that remains essential, and that means imaginative new political structures.
Next, Section B, The Bund and the Road Not Taken
The History of the Jewish Bund with Molly Crabapple Part 1 - American Prestige - Air Date 8-12-26
So the Bund becomes not very important, as people could guess, in, the Soviet Union, but it continues, to live in Poland. Could we maybe talk a little bit about the relationship of the Bund to Zionism, as Zionism itself becomes a more important ideology amongst the Jews, of Europe? So just because I don't want to end it on such like a, a, a downer note and people won't realize- For sure how high I got, I do want to say that the Bund had their golden age in Poland. This is like th- this was their height. But Zionism. So Zionism, like the Bund, is a reaction to European antisemitism and the psychopathic ethnonationalist brain poison of the 19th century, which was responsible for infinite mutual ethnic cleansings and border wars over incomprehensible nonsense, like for about 100 years.
So Zionism comes out of that as both a reaction to it and a doppelganger to it. If European ethnonationalism saw no place for Jews or, or other diasporic people, if it thought, if European ethnonationalism thought that all legitimate peoples had to have a nation with their own language and their own, little ho- homogenous block of land, Zionism picked that up.
That's, that's where it gets that idea. Zionism's founder, Theodor Herzl, was a totally assimilated Jew from the Habsburg Empire who would have happily lived a totally assimilated life except for witnessing the psychopathic antisemitism of the Dreyfus trial and becoming convinced that this sort of, just hallucinatory racism was baked into the bread of Europe.
And the answer that Zionism had for antisemitism was that Jews should go somewhere else. fir- really could have been anywhere at first. They would have chosen Uganda, but eventually they settle on Palestine. They sh- and they should use the powers of colonialism to make that a Jewish majority state.
And it's important to note that no early Zionist group that had any political power at all or any political plan gave a fig's leaf for Palestinians. They did not care about the fact that Palestinians were the, overwhelming majority of the people of that land. Now, it's an irony of history that Bundism and Zionism were born the same year, 1897, and they loathed each other from the start.
They could not have been more opposite. if the Bund was founded by young Marxist troublemakers with long rap sheets in the attic of a safe house in Vilna, world Zionism makes its debut at an extremely fancy casino in Basel, Switzerland, with all of the, pomp and circumstance that the international press can give it.
These are opposite movements in terms of ethos and in terms of class. And the Bund hates Zionism for a variety of reasons. they find it highly impractical. They do not think that millions of people, are likely to move to the Levant, a place they've never been, and begin new lives as collective farmers.
They dislike Zionism's dependence on the Jewish bourgeoisie. They, are... They see that a very similar dynamic is going on then to what goes on now with wealthy philanthropists, washing their names by giving a grant here or there while pay- and then paying their workers starvation wages.
Jewish capitalists were doing the same thing. They would endow Yeshiva in Palestine, but pay their Jewish workers back in Russia so little they could barely afford to die. But there was also, this real- ethical hatred that they had. And it came out of the fact that the Bund was born in an era where many powerful forces did not think Jews had a place in Europe.
They thought that Jews were swarthy foreigners who ought to dick off somewhere else. And Zionists agreed. Zionists also thought Jews had no place in Europe. And I always think about this quote that is from a Bundist pamphlet in 1901 that says, "We are not strangers here and not guests, even though the Russian government considers us as such.
This land is soaked through with our blood, and we will stay and we will fight for that which belongs to us, which is our human, our civil, and our political rights." And in a very real way, they felt that Zionism was submission to their tormentors. Now, after the Balfour Declaration, there's another element because the Balfour Declaration means that Zionism does have a chance of succeeding.
It now has the backing of the British Empire The Bund at that point starts opposing Zionism because they're socialists, because they're anti-imperialists, and because they believe in the dignity and equality of everyone, and that everyone includes Palestinians. Bundist journalists will report about the brutal evictions and land seizures that Zionist land purchases always entail.
They, they will literally be writing Yiddish articles for newspapers in Poland so that Warsaw Jews know exactly what's going on on the ground in Palestine. They report about the Palestinian National Movement. Victor Alter, who is, one of the leaders of the Bund in Poland, will visit Palestine in 1924 and meet with Musa Kazim Pasha al-Husseini, the, you know, nationalist Palestinian leader, and he will faithfully report what, Musa Kazim tells him.
And they just oppose an ideology that is built on the dispossession of other people. Yeah, I just wanted to just very quickly... I, I do wanna maybe just talk bri- briefly about how this was the golden age. There were all these- Mm ... associations. There was a vibrant socialist life. this... And you could also...
I'm more familiar with Weimar Germany and, secular cult. The, the... This was really, the '20s was really this moment of, socialism having, an associa- associational life. So maybe just briefly talk about that so it's not all doom and gloom. Yeah. 'Cause it's about to get pretty doomy and pretty gloomy.
No, it's very... This is actually the, the... This world that they build in Poland, I think it's incredibly important to understand this. So Poland in between the wars is a, a messed up place, right? It's, it's poor. There's a lot of racism. There's a major political party called the National Democrats that wants to kick all the Jews out of the country, but it also is a place that has a sort of flawed form of democracy.
It has stability, and the Bund is able to build there. And what they build is extraordinary. They build an entire alternate world. They create incredibly powerful labor unions that represent over 100,000 workers. They create schools, summer camps, youth movements, socialist Boy and Girl Scouts, a woman's movement that's fighting for equal pay and for childcare.
They have publishing houses. They have multilingual newspapers. They have theaters. They have night schools that are for teenage workers who never got to learn how to read. They have a sanatorium that's called the Medem Sanatorium. This was a place that was for slum kids that was at, that were at risk for tuberculosis, but it was also...
It was called the Children's Paradise. It was like a Montessori school before they had such a thing, right? With, petting zoos and no punishments, and children getting to have their own newspapers and parliaments. They had- an electoral program. They ran people for city council and they won. By 1939, the Bund was by far the most popular Jewish party in Poland in terms of votes at the ballot box.
They, defied the religious conservatism of their communities. They, sometimes I, I would read about them. They would have a clubhouse where they'd be serving free ham sandwiches on Yom Kippur. They, they could be a little bit Dawkins-y with the atheism. But nonetheless, it was a, it was a daring thing.
one of my characters, Zofia Dubnowa, she was a sex columnist who was highly influenced by, the thought that was going on in Weimar Germany, who was... she was writing for Bundist young people about, a woman's right to orgasm and about, sexual ethics, for teenagers. They also had a militia, and, most social democratic parties at that time had a militia like, Red Vienna and, the Iron Front in, in Germany.
But the Bund's militia was crucial because it was defending their communities from these racist attacks. as the '30s went on, and especially after the death of, Marshal Józef Piłsudski, who is the, considered the father of modern Poland, the government became, this paranoid, quasi-fascist Military sort of pseudo-dictatorship run by some, brainless metal h- metal-wearing colonels they were called.
And their big plan for addressing Poland's economic woes was to try to kick all the Jews out of the country, and to that end, they were funding terrorist youth paramilitaries. They were doing, boycotts meant to bankrupt Jews. They had introduced, racial segregation to Polish universities, and the Bund is fighting this in the streets.
At the same time, they are building this program that's based on, solidarity across difference. That's always been one of the Bund's primary demands and primary offerings, the solidarity of people who are different than you. They never thought that, all non-Jewish people were racist or that all non-Jewish people just hated Jews, that not at all.
They believed that, racism was a tool by the ruling class to keep workers divided, and so they built really strong bonds with the Polish Socialist Party, which was the, like, Polish social democratic, group. And, these bonds meant that they were fighting against nationalist thugs side by side.
They were striking together. They were going to jail together. The Bund sent fighters to Spain to defend the Spanish Republic. They organized weapons shipments to the Spanish Republic. Bundists, set up an illegal radio station to broadcast into Germany during the Nazi occupation, and they even... And this is crazy.
They, they sent Jewish journalists into Nazi Germany to report on what Jewish life was like under Hitler. you, you... We think about, the courage of journalists now, you know, imagine, right? And they basically built a beautiful, thriving, solidaristic, tough, resilient counterculture out of love and grit.
And the achievements of this, even the specifics of this, they, they remind me of, the Black Panther Party. They remind me of the, the greatest, social democratic parties of Europe, and they, sometimes even remind me of the culture that DSA is trying to build today. So what they achieved in those years was astounding, and they were rewarded for it by being elected the most popular Jewish party in Poland.
Here Where We Live Is Our Country Part 1 - On the Nose - Air Date 7-23-26
we've talked about this. I feel like you've really been thinking about this book as a way to give anti-Zionist Jews back their lineage, and also to, present this alternate lineage to people who might be on the fence or need an off-ramp from Zionism.
That basically this book exists as a kind of strengthening force against the forces of Zionism. And I have to say that, for me, I hope you don't mind me saying so, but this book really put me back into the mind of the Zionist. The graphic, graphic descriptions of pogroms. I'm gonna read from the book.
"It didn't matter who one was or what one believed. Everyone killed Jews. Everyone raped Jews, burned their houses, threw them out of trains. When Jews tried to form self-defense units, they were outnumbered, and the sight of Jews with weapons only provoked their attackers more. Each pogrom aimed not just to kill, but to humiliate, to prove the victims' subhumanity to them and to an audience often made up of the victims' acquaintances.
Pogromists, drunk, singing, laughing, slit open their neighbors' bellies, burned their children's babysitters alive, forced their classmates to dig their own graves. Pogromists rewarded themselves by filling their carts with so much loot it made their horses groan and selling it cheaply in the bazaars that sprung up around killing sites."
Sometimes they just left it in the gutter. Why not? They'd gotten it for free. Everyone claimed these massacres were justified. Poles said Jews sided with Ukrainians. Ukrainians said they sided with Russians. Russian Whites said they sided with Russian Reds. Russian Reds said they were capitalist exploiters.
Jews were spies for every side, Christ-killers, traders, internationalist financiers, unscrupulous speculators, and above all, revolutionaries. Everyone agreed they had it coming. You are reintroducing pogroms and the Holocaust to a generation that on some level has had to consciously push it out of mind in order to do the work that they're doing.
They have seen a different Jewish life. They've seen a very comfortable American community and a genocidal Israeli one. That work feels very important and cuts in multiple directions at once. Not clean in terms of, inculcating feelings of, here where we live is our country. The t- the title Here Where We Live Is Our Country, it's not a prescription.
sometimes it's said joyously and defiantly, and sometimes it's said with bitter irony, and sometimes it's said as a lament. dear God, here in this hell, this is where we live is our country? And sometimes it's... I could imagine it being said with, a cruel and bitter laughter at the bitterness of being born in this place that just wants to expel you or to murder you.
And I think that there's another kind of book that I could have written that would've been like, "Here's seven easy steps to liberatory anti-Zionist Judaism that will make everyone safe and free and hug it out." And that's not this book, right? This book, it's the story of the first half of the 20th century from the point of view of the defeated, which is an unspeakably messy tragedy in which Jews were horrifically victimized, and sometimes perpetrators as well.
Nothing about the book or about that history only goes one way. It's sort of something that cuts in all directions, and I didn't want there at any point to be something easy. I wrote about how in the Warsaw ghetto, the Jewish ghetto fighters murder a 13-year-old Jewish boy because they're not sure if he's spying on them, and they have no way of knowing.
But they murder him because they think he might be. I wrote about how the same Red Army that saved Eastern Europe from the Nazis also sat at a suburb just across the river from Warsaw and watched as the city was burned because Stalin wanted the Home Army and the Germans to eliminate each other. I wrote about how a young Bundist who was probably my great-grandfather's friend in Volkovysk comes back to Volkovysk wearing the black leather jacket of a Soviet secret policeman.
I just don't think that anyone who reads this period deeply and honestly can come out of it with anything but wounds. I hope that you understand. what I'm saying is, is that I think it's so important because I feel like this recognition is falling out of our analysis of the present on some level, the recognition of the violence.
The sting of, for example, hearing people say to contemporary Israelis, "Go back to Poland," after reading a book like this feels harsher on some level because it lacks the analysis of what has happened here, like what the last century looks like. I think it would've been interesting to think about what it would mean for Jews to have returned to Europe, and also there's the reality of what it looked like and, the murders even after the Holocaust.
I think it's important to keep all of this violence in frame to have a more realistic and compassionate politics to understand how we got to where we got. History is like playing with fire. you don't know... It doesn't lead in, a clear direction. you don't know which way it's gonna break rhetorically on some level.
But I do have a question about what it means to reintroduce the pogroms and the Holocaust at this moment of Jewish genocide. What was it like to dig into the violence of it in such a direct way? I think that there was two periods of doing it, right, which was The majority of my research was before October 7th and before the genocide began, but then there was also the experience of, writing this after the genocide began.
I did the bulk of the writing after the genocide began, and the bulk of the research before it. The Bund tried so hard to stay in Poland. They tried so hard, and they were morally right. People have the right to stay in the land that they were born. But when I was writing this, I was like, "Man, I would've left.
I would've left for New York City on the first boat." What is it, what do they say in your book? you could smell the ships. You can smell the ships. That's a line from, Yakov Pat, who is a Bundist who returns to Poland in 1946 to distribute aid to the survivors. He says, "In Poland, you can smell the ships," and it doesn't really matter if they're going to America or to Palestine.
People just want out, right? emotionally, it did me in to not just look at, the sheer facts of the violence, but the way that it was often disregarded by socialist allies or by the larger world because it just wasn't convenient. It wasn't interesting to them. It was, something that happened to a minority, and these were groups who were concerned with majorities.
For all, all of these reasons, I guess I thought a lot about other groups that also lived in countries that were seemingly devoted to their degradation, to their diminishment, to crushing them, and I thought about how those groups also Responded to it both with ideas of escape, but with ideas of, of staying and fighting.
And I don't know, I thought about Paul Robeson's testimony, to the House of Un-American Activities Committee, where he was saying, he's like, "I'm not a stranger here. My people built this country, and it's mine." And I felt that there was a very similar spirit in the Bund, and it's not just me imposing that.
I remember reading Bernard Goldstein's memoirs of the Warsaw Ghetto, and he writes the book from the Bronx, that he ends his life in the Bronx. And when he's looking back on it, he's like, "I think we felt similarly to Black Americans, who know damn well that the country's extremely racist and violent against them, but also by and large did not want to colonize Liberia.
They wanted America to stop being racist." He wasn't saying that to say that the experience of Black people and Jews are the same, and they're not, but just simply to say that there is a lot of precedent for being a minority that faces murderous violence that still believes that they can change the country where they're in to live dignified and equal lives.
Destruction of the Jewish Bund with Molly Crabapple Part 2 - The Dig - Air Date 8-14-26
Perhaps the most, for me reading her book, the most profound contradiction that it surfaces is that while the Bund was clearly morally in the right, it's the Zionists who can argue in a sense Perhaps that they were historically right about Europe, that there where they lived in Poland was, it turned out, not their home, that Jews were surrounded by people who would, in many cases, help the Nazis murder 90% of them. How do you, how do you untangle this, this twisted way in which the Nazis settled the debate in Zionists' favor? And I think this has been the kind of primary line of attack on your book from, from Zionists. Yeah. It's a, it's a major line of attack. I think there are, there are two things, right? The fact that the Jews of Poland were murdered and that the Jews of the issue of in...
the Jewish community of Palestine was not murdered does not come down to anything more than historical contingency. The reason that the Jews in Palestine were not all murdered by the Nazis was 'cause it was a British colony, and the British, not the Jews, the British, were able to stop, the Nazi general Rommel at El Alamein in Egypt.
And if the Nazis had been able to take Palestine, which they wanted to, they would have murdered every single Jew there, and there was no plan to prevent that. And perhaps people with the condescension of history later would be looking at that and thinking how stupid it was to concentrate an entire community that was the target of genocide so close to Europe in one little place.
So to me, that's... it's contingency, and I just don't believe in making your political and life philosophy based on something so utterly contingent. But that's one, that's one thing, right? But in terms of was Poland, was Ukraine, was Lithuania, were these places so fucking racist that there was nothing that you could have done, and they...
these were just incomprehensibly racist places. And while, okay, there were good people there, there are, there, there are comrades, not, no, no group is entirely one way or the other, but was the society as a whole just so fucking racist that Jews could- would never be able to make a decent life there?
So to this, I wanna talk a little bit about what happened after the war, right? After the war, a, Soviet-backed dictatorship was installed in Poland, and a nationalist insurgency arose against it, and that nationalist insurgency murdered 1,000 Jews in the war's aftermath, equating Jews with communists, including an extremely famous incident where, dozens of young Jews were, burned in a hostel in Kielce in Poland on false accusations that they were using blood to make matzah 90% of Polish Jews were murdered, but that meant that about 300,000 Polish Jews survived, which was the largest community of survivors, right, in Europe of any country.
Within a few years, most of those will have fled the country because of the grinding racism that still remained and the murders that sometimes were about the conflation of Jews and communists, but sometimes were just murders of Jews who went back to their house and found that someone else was living in it It would be extremely hard for me to look at that and say
Wow, people who left were dumb. You know? Jesus. I think it's amazing that people like Marek Edelman, the great Bundist, he did stay. He stayed his entire life. He took part in the Solidarność movement that, you know, that overthrew the communist dictatorship. he died in Poland in, in 2008, and the Bund's anthem was sung over his coffin.
And he was u- he was not invited to the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that whichever prime minister of Israel at the time- Yitzhak Rabin ... attended. Mm-hmm. Yeah, Yitzhak Rabin. He was not permitted to speak 'cause he was not a Zionist. And, honor to his memory, right? But by the same token, most Bundists fled Poland after the war, the...
Most Bundist survivors, including people in my book, like Bernard Goldstein, who ended his life in the Bronx. And it was that combination of the political repression of living under a Stalinist, dictatorship, the constant racist murders, and, the horror of living on a place that was essentially a graveyard, right, for, for, for the Jewish people of Europe.
And I guess the thing that I want to add to complicate it is that it's very hard for people to know, right? there have been many minorities, I think about, Black Americans, who have been subjected to the most foul and murderous and evil types of violence again and again and again and again and again, and yet still have fought not to colonize Liberia, but to have decent, dignified, free, liberated, and equal lives in the land where they were born and the land that they helped build.
And I do- don't think anyone could look at them and say that they were naïve, or that they were wrong, or that they were doing anything but engaging in the basic human right and duty to insist that here where you live is your country. And the shame for me, it's on Europe. It's not on Jews who thought that they could fight to make Europe better
The History of the Jewish Bund with Molly Crabapple Part 2 - American Prestige - Air Date 8-12-26
Molly, I, before we really get into the, the '30s and the '40s, can you talk a little bit more in terms of, the Bund's relationship to Zionism and its dialogue with, especially, the, the different strands of Zionism? for an example, I think it's, interesting that somebody like Jabotinsky, and, and reactionary Zionism kind of emerges in this place, in the same, part of the world.
but at the same time, there's a lot more kind of ideological tension, affinity, and therefore tension between what the Bund is saying and what Labor Zionism, for example, is saying because they're, that's a, that's a, it seems like a more bitter fight because they're fighting over the same territory to some degree.
Oh, absolutely. the revisionist, Jabotinsky's revisionist Zionists and his m- youth movement, Betar, the Bund just called them little Jewish fascists, and they, they had brawls with them, and they were just looking at a movement that was clearly inspired by Mussolini's Squadristi, and they knew how they felt about fascists.
This was not a, it was not a hard decision. These were their enemies. Labor Zionism emerges in very much the same milieu as the Bund. They- It's also an Eastern European movement. It's also a movement by, People, who would consider themselves Marxists. But the Bund also hates Labor Zionism from the start.
They do not think it is a legitimate socialist movement, and there's even a line about, Labor Zionism that I remember in, a pamphlet, that was written in 1929 after the Palestine riots, that was, it was called What Can We Learn... What Can The Events In Palestine Teach Us, where they refer to, the ugly snout of chauvinism peeking out from beneath the beautiful red mask of socialism.
And to give you an idea of sort of the intimacy of this hatred, and, an intimacy that comes from, very often people in the same families, taking rival ideologies. I'm just gonna tell a story that I got from Tom Segev's biography of David Ben-Gurion, which is that David Ben-Gurion, came from a Polish town called PÅ‚onsk, and that's where he got his start as a young Labor Zionist activist in Poalei Zion, the Labor Zionist group.
And a- as a young man, he has an, a public debate at a synagogue with a Bundist, and he loses, in part 'cause he has a annoying high-pitched squeaky voice. And instead of taking the L, he starts screaming, "We have weapons, and we will shoot you down like animals." And, someone might call that foreshadowing, but this just shows you, the relationship.
these people really, really knew each other. And They really were competing for the same working class Jewish youth, and the Bund just thought that Zionism and socialism couldn't coexist. there's a guy named Yosef Brumberg who was the Palestine correspondent for the Bund. He lived in Palestine for six years while he was, hiding out from an arrest warrant in Poland, and he has a line where he says, "When Zionism starts talking, socialism shuts up."
Because you can't have a movement that's based on human equality combined with a movement that's based on taking, other people's land and kicking them out of their homes. So, unfortunately, we don't have time to get into the rest of the book, but I would just say people should really pick it up.
It's a re- a really genuinely riveting tale about what the Bund does, after the Nazi invasion of Poland during World War II, how it deals with, the fact that the, the Holocaust is centered in Poland.but Molly, maybe before we go, what do you think that people should take away from this history?
I forget, maybe I was actually listening to you on a podcast or, or maybe it was someone else, so apologies, but someone essentially... I don't, I can't recall, but someone essentially said that, a Zionist would say, "Well, history decided what happened to the Bund." like there were all these fantasies of Jewish socialism and connection, and then the Holocaust happens.
So like H- h- history decided in favor of Zionism and ethno-nationalism. so I'm curious, what, how do you think through that problem? And, and es- especially for the many Jewish leftists listening to this podcast today, what would they say to that, to someone who says, "Okay, this, if, if, if history had been different, maybe the Bund could have existed and we'd all be social democrats today"?
but what are your thoughts on that issue? And then I think we will close it out. What I would say is that the reason that Jews in Palestine were safe during the war was not because of their own military efforts. In fact, they only contributed 30,000 fighters to the war effort, as opposed to the 550,000 American Jews who fought, who fought, or the 500,000 Soviet Jews.
The reason that Jews in Palestine were safe was because Palestine was a British colony, and the British Empire protected Palestine. The British Empire was able to stop Rommel, the Nazi general, at El Alamein in Egypt, and if the British Empire had not stopped Rommel in Egypt, all of the Jews in Palestine would have been slaughtered.
There was no practical plan to save or protect them. So the reason that they survived is because of contingency, and I just don't believe in deriving one's politics or one's ethics from contingency, from luck, right? But the other thing I would say is I fundamentally reject the idea that safety can only be attained through ethnic cleansing and mass murder.
The Bund's demand of solidarity across difference, it's fraught, it's betrayed, it breaks all the time, but there's nothing else in the world. There's nothing else that can save us. All there is without that is just a series of taking turns as victims and genocide heirs until we all murder each other in the end.
All we have is each other. There's only one world. We all have to live together, and we all have to fight for something better and more beautiful together.
Here Where We Live Is Our Country Part 2 - On the Nose - Air Date 7-23-26
I wanna talk a little bit about solidarity and the failure of solidarity. And, I'm gonna read from the end of the book. I'm sure you know which passage I'm gonna read. Polish Socialist passage. Do you wanna read it? Could you read it? So this part is set in 1946 in a town in Silesia, and it's told from the point of view of Jacob Pat, a Bundist whose family has been murdered in the Holocaust, who's returning to Poland to deliver aid to survivors.
"At the Polish Socialist Party's clubhouse next door, the young secretary poured Pat a whiskey. He spoke of solidarity, of the brotherhood of peoples. He rolled up his sleeve to show the number on his arm. The secretary raised a glass. He toasted his friends, Socialist resistance fighters who had been shot by the Gestapo.
'Bolek, Antek, Zdzisław, let's drink to their memory. Let's drink to the memory of our Jewish comrades. Let's drink to our brave dead.' Then he looked at Pat as if to seek forgiveness. 'Brother, believe me, we Socialists are not guilty in all this. the Jews and the other things. Believe me, I'm ashamed of what is happening in our country.'"
The secretary spoke across a chasm carved by genocide, and when I first read his words in twenty eighteen, I could not imagine myself in his place. He was a Pole. I am a Jew. My tribalism precluded understanding. But two years into the annihilation of Gaza, I feel only empathy for him, along with my own inadequacy.
What had I done to stop this genocide still live-streamed on our smartphone screens? Not enough. The secretary had also tried to stop mass slaughter. His sacrifices were far graver than anything I could comprehend. Yet it didn't work. If we also fail, what chasm will we look across to seek forgiveness?
The secretary's sentences trailed off until all that was left was a supplication. "Comrade, brother, we socialists this one hurts. Yeah. It hurt me to write it. It really hurts. I wanna go back to, something I was saying earlier about your ability to both see how the failures of solidarity are structural.
I, I actually feel your empathy for, obviously for the Polish socialists and also for the rest of us who are struggling and failing to stop this genocide, Where does it leave us? again, it can put one in the mind of the Zionist. I know in the end you say, "I'm through with monsters.
I don't wanna be a Zionist, even if the failure of solidarity might suggest that this is our only, full, security." I felt, a little bit fatalistic reading this. the failures of solidarity are assured. Even though we act, and we act, and we act against them, that the forces of history are larger, and I don't know what to do with that.
The thing is that there is no other way besides solidarity across difference. There just isn't. The only thing that you have without that is just people taking turns ethnically cleansing each other until we're all dead. That's all there is, right? There is no perfect safety and wonderful thing that lies at the end of cutting yourself off from all of humanity.
What lies at the end of that is increasing psychopathy and murderousness until you are doing a live-streamed genocide and rifling through the panties of women you murdered. that's, that's what lies at the end of rejecting the basic truth that humans are tied together in this world, And the book is very much about solidarity and its failures, but it's solidarity and its failures.
It's not solidarity fails inevitably, because it doesn't fail inevitably, right? the mere fact that they do the uprising is because of the solidarity of some people. They wouldn't have been able to have gotten the guns, right? To have gotten the explosives, to have done anything without that. It's not that every single human betrays the Jews.
It's that too many people with power did. Too many people who could've done otherwise did. But it's not an absolute, and I guess writing this, I'm like, those moments, those shards, those sparks, however rare and difficult and fraught and problematic they are, there's literally nothing else on this earth except to To nourish and to feed them.
No, and the Bundist slogan from within the ghetto, "For your freedom and ours," even as they're being slaughtered, they're reaching out to Aryan Poles to invite them into their own liberation, es- a shared liberation. It's, so completely inspiring. And I've seen, actually, the cover, the actual cover with the hands shaking from over the ghetto walls.
It's extremely, extremely moving. you mentioned them getting the guns from outside, but you also mention over and over again how basically the Home Army, which was Polish internal resistance, both were like, "Why don't they fight back and refuse to give them guns?" Ma- mostly because they felt like it wasn't the right time for them to mount a resistance, that they wouldn't be able to bring people outside the ghetto into that, if I'm remembering correctly.
And so, often the failure of solidarity is couched in this strategic question. For, at least for the people who are, like, closest, the Polish Socialist Party and the Home Army and even the Soviets, the people who could help are continually basically finding strategic reasons why it's not the right time or the right move.
It really, hit me how the failure of solidarity is couched in strategy. And the Polish Home Army, right- I don't mean to lump them in with the Polish socialists, by the way. I'm sorry about that. No, no, but the Polish socialists, they were part of the Polish government in exile, and they, they were a part of the Home Army, too.
And, the Home Army, which was the largest resistance force that would ever exist in Nazi-occupied Europe, by the way, their strategy was that they would try to, murder Nazis where they could, sabotage where they could, but really, it was about building up weapons and men until either the Soviets or the Western Allies were close enough.
And this was not, a fake thing that they made up to avoid helping Jews. It was a very sound strategy, and it was because they knew that if they did a nationwide uprising without a larger force to relieve them, that they would just be crushed and that it would just be an act of mass suicide At the same time, it's very clear that probably the majority of the Home Army and the Polish government in exile, not the Polish socialists, the, the majority of what I would call, the mainstream political landscape, didn't view Poland's Jewish citizens as their problem, that they did not view it as their responsibility to rescue them en masse, to punish Poles who blackmailed them until the end of the war.
To save them. They... These were their citizens, and yet they still did not view them as their responsibility. Because of that, it wasn't just that they didn't launch a citywide uprising, during the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, 'cause if they had, it would've been suicide for Warsaw. It's not just that. It's everything leading up to that.
And I remember... So Naomi Klein was the first friend of mine who, who read this book. We, or I was tormenting myself and just talking over and over again about this moment when the Jewish Combat Organization has launched an uprising. They're sending out, pamphlets to the Polish side of the city saying, "Poles, brothers, soldiers, and freedom.
we're fighting this battle for your freedom and ours." The city is not responding, and the Home Army is not coming to the rescue, and there are, strategic reasons for this, but also, oh my God, it's, it's driving me insane to write about it. And the conclusion we came to is that when it's gotten to this point, it's almost too late, right?
Like, when it's gotten to the point where you have the whole country occupied, where you have people sectioned off into a ghetto being liquidated, it's almost too late, and all the choices are impossible. And the actual thing isn't what snappy lessons you can learn from that, but it's how do you avoid fucking getting there?
One of the ways that this all could've been averted, right, is if France and England had followed their mutual defense pact with Poland and came to their aid when the country was being invaded by the Nazis. It could've been averted if the majority of the Polish population refused and resisted the ghettoization of Jews.
there are so many points before people are being burned in a cage in the center of a city that things could've been averted, and it's all those other failures of solidarity that led to this moment. And maybe this will sound twee, but during, the sort of lead-up to this book and the book release, I was looking at Minneapolis, and I was looking at how all sorts of people, including a lot of white American citizens, were like, "Not today, motherfuckers.
You're not taking our neighbors. You are not grabbing our friends and neighbors off the street and putting them in concentration camps." And, two American citizens were, were shot for doing that and killed. While the concentration camps continue and while the ICE kidnappings continue, the Occupations of entire cities have not continued, right?
That sort of militarized flooding of an entire city to just grab people off the street, it's, it stopped after Minneapolis, right? And the reason that it stopped is that a lot of Americans refused. It just made me be like, that is what's necessary. It's the complete refusal before it becomes too late
Now, Section C, Inside Israel, From the West Bank to the Ballot Box
Israels Election Wont End the Genocide Part 1 - Current Affairs - Air Date 10-16-26
before we get to the fact that the parties in Israel actually rather line up, more than the image of a contentious election would suggest, one of the... A- and I hadn't even really thought of it as a kind of gerrymandering or a kind of rigging of the electorate until I read your article, but y- y- you almost talk about, I don't mean, and I don't mean to trivialize at all by saying, the Nakba as gerrymandering, but I, but what, what, what I, what I mean is that in your article you point out that- It, the democracy has ch- th- such as it exists, has chosen its electorate.
So the first question is, who gets to vote in these elections, and who is outside of the zone of participation? And because Palestine is under an occupation where people don't get to vote in these elections, there is first a rigging of the electorate Yes, and it's actually the primary... It's so interesting, and I wish I had been able to go more into this.
Ind- there's such good work on it. The analysis has been done by many Palestinian academics, so people should go read them. but it, what I wanna strike home specifically on that is Israelis know this. Israelis central to liberal and fascist Israelis, they will talk about doing policies to affect the demographics of Israel.
And when they talk about d- affecting demographics, they're doing precisely that. They're choosing the electorate. They are saying, "We are asking these people, and we are not asking these people." And the central primary thesis of Israeli demographic, gerrymandering is to keep a Jewish majority within Israel proper.
And they have a bunch of tools for this. I highlight some of them, the Nakba being the most obvious, extreme, and ongoing process of it, but also I point to the Bantu-stanization of the West Bank. Right, for those of y'all who don't know, the Bantu stans in South Africa, apartheid South Africa, they took all the native Africans and put them in fake countries and said, "You're citizens of these countries now, not South Africa."
And, y- it's very similar to what they've done in the West Bank. They said, "You're, you're a member of this, proxy, quite controlled Palestinian authority that we consistently chip away the power of and give no real administrative or military power to, and that is an excuse for us to deny you citizenship."
And interestingly, because a primary blind spot for liberals is imperialism and nationalism, that works really well with liberals because it is a blind... It, the second you can say someone's not part of your nation, then, well, democracy doesn't apply to them of course. Who's gonna vote? And this is why I open the article saying, should Iraqis be able to vote in American elections?
Because arguably, America has been the most consequential governing body over Iraq in the past 20 years. What is a democracy, if not that? And so it challenges, it's a good segue to challenge the fundamental precepts of nationalist liberal democracy Well, because one of the defenses that is made of Israel as a democracy is, oh, well, there are Arab parties.
And, and before, obviously- Yes ... now, there may not be, but, What you point out is yes, but the, the system has been set up in such a way that ensures that those Arab parties cannot win elections, right? So it, it c- it, it deliberately keeps them in minority status. So what is the point of, w- what contribution does that make to democracy if you've, if you've made sure that there will not be enough people for these parties to have, any significance?
Yes. And, and that's a real question. I, I actually, I'm always drawn whenever, whenever I'm talking to liberals, these questio- or leftists, these questions of what's the point. I wanna take that seriously. What is the point of having an Arab party in an ethno-state? And I would say largely the point of having an Arab party in an ethno-state is so that they can make that defense to the international world.
Apartheid South Africa also made these liberal forms. "Oh, we gave the Bantustans some representation. We gave them concessions. Look at the money we gave them." And it is largely to make that argument, and internally, right, you get a lot of co-opting or, the development of, what we in America might call gusanos, right?
People in the oppressed class, selling out their, their countrymen, to benefit from the apartheid system. It is life or death for some people, right? Like, when we criticize the Palestinian Authority for being weak and feckless, et cetera, or for enabling the Israeli state, the, the threat is either you become complicit or you get expelled.
And so, most important to understanding that and being able to properly understand people who do that is properly understanding that they are victims of the system of oppression and complicit in it. and that's really what this election demonstrates is the many different ways and debates in which we can incorporate different groups of people and different ideologies into complicity with the apartheid state, 'cause that's fundamental to it.
An apartheid state by definition cannot be a democracy as much as liberal democracy means anything formative, on its face. And so, we've mentioned there your point about how the electorate is selected in order to ensure that nothing that could challenge the basis of the exclusionary system can come to pass.
let's talk about the aspect of your article that focuses on the consensus positions across the Israeli political spectrum. That is to say What does the opposition oppose and what does the opposition not oppose? Yes. So there's a necessary logical correlate to the idea that if you transgress against the state in a certain way, you will be expelled from the, from the electorate.
That the electorate must have some agreement, right? 'Cause it's, you draw a circle around something, everything within the circle has a commonality. But there still will be disagreements on it, and the way I've consistently phrased it about what the debate is, what are they debating, and in what way is this election material and consequential, is how to go about the apartheid.
And this goes into Americans, but typically there are ... I, I try and describe two tendencies within committing imperial violence that I very roughly call the liberal and fascist tendency. And for example, Netanyahu really represents this fascist tendency, which I, I talk about as a, an, an emotional mobilization of the fascist base.
So Netanyahu's base being the violent settlers that want to ex- consistently, expand the frontier, consistently aggress against the neighbors, consistently even expel more Arabs and bring in more Jewish people to increase the, the demographic shift. But that has its issues. That has its natural limitations.
You get, you get feedback, maybe you spread your base too thin, and you get, America or, or, more bleeding heart Europeans putting sanctions on you. And so the rational voice in the room is not the one that is against the violence that he supports. The rational voice in the room, and the argument they consistently make, is, "Hey, we're facing feedback for this.
We only have so many settlers. We only have so many IDF troops. You're not treating the IDF troops well when you send them to war, war, war, war, war. We could do this better if we slowed down, if we treated our base nicer, if we did more propaganda incorporating more people into the fascist base." Because what happens when you have a supremacist ideology is, if you're, for example, fascists are consistently misogynistic, if you are misogynistic, then you will expel half of the base you could mobilize, of women.
And so liberals will bring it into the imperial fold, and that's where the joke always comes, is it better to have women fighter pilots? The, the type of liberalism that we see in an empire will be one in which the inclusion of new groups into the political project, which is seen as progress, is, built upon their complicity of it.
So put that into direct forms, the, the issue that is at the heart of this election is the draft, and I think that really epitomizes, this issue as a whole. Who are we including in what is fundamentally a military project? Are we forcing Haredi Jews, who are Orthodox Jews that tend to go to yeshiva rather than the IDF, are we including them in the project?
Are we taking them off of this pedestal we've given them so that we have a more egalitarian military society? Do we force Arabs to join the IDF? Do we have a, a more egalitarian, less identitarian fascist base? That's the liberaler position, whereas the fascist position is maintaining pure supremacy and infinite acceleration in, in many, many ways.
Eisenkot, for example, the quote ... He's not a liberal. He doesn't even call himself a liberal. He's the liberaler of the two. he wants to Can, he wants to protect the settlements more, and part of protecting the settlements more is controlling them a little more. Whereas Netanyahu wants to expand the settlements more.
So it's always that distinction between pragmatic fascism and maybe evocative fascism.
Israeli Settlers Attack West Bank Olive Harvesters Part 2 - Newshour - Air Date 10-16-26
And Jon, I, I think we have to be honest about this.
one of the reasons we're covering this is, yes, it's the start of the olive harvest, but it so happens that a bunch of journalists were on hand to witness this. Yeah, I think it's crucial that we emphasize that this is not a particularly serious incident. incidents like this are happening on a daily basis.
I've just got back from three weeks reporting out of Jerusalem, and every day we were getting reports of settler violence against Palestinian communities. I'm just looking at the figures. Since twenty twenty-three, six thousand two hundred attacks by settlers causing casualties or damage. that's according to the United Nations Humanitarian Office.
So I think the reason this got a lot of attention today is 'cause the settlers actually publicized they were gonna try and disrupt the olive harvest. They sent out flyers asking people to go along. A lot of journalists went along. The BBC went along. Mm. So it's getting some attention. The IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, has put out a statement saying that it strongly condemns this particular incident, and views any manifestation of violence with the utmost severity.
the government has a consistent line saying, yes, there is trouble, but it's about a hundred and fifty hooligans. Given that, why do you think it, it, it seems to be that the, the violence does continue? Well, I think the accusation from human rights groups and Palestinians is that the settlers, no matter how violent they are, are by and large allowed to act with impunity.
So you're right, the line from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers is, "This is a few bad apples, it's a handful of delinquents who are causing this problem." But if that is the case, then how can it be that one of the most powerful armies in the world is not able to stop them? Now, of course, the army has strong connections with, settlers in the West Bank.
Many serve in the army, and there is a feeling that, they are not working hand-in-hand, but they're not, doing as much as they could because of those connections. At the same time, you've also got two far-right ministers within the Israeli government, the National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, with a huge amount of authority over the West Bank, including policing and financing, and the accusation against them is they are actively inciting, this violence.
Two far-right ministers in the current coalition government. Given that there are gonna be elections, within a couple of weeks, in Israel, were there to be a change of government, how far could that then possibly see a, a change of atmosphere in the West Bank, do you think? Well, I think there could be a change.
I think if Gadi Eisenkot is to be the next prime minister, which is by no means certain, it's a pretty tight race, I think you could s- see a shift to try and crack down more on these acts of violence and maybe limit some settlement projects. So you've got this big project called E1 right outside Jerusalem, which would, in effect, split the West Bank in two.
So you could see him pulling back from things like that to try and lessen the criticism that Israel is now getting from much of the international community.
Israels Election Wont End the Genocide Part 2 - Current Affairs - Air Date 10-16-26
you point out that across the Israeli political, quote-unquote, "spectrum," there is now almost no support for a Palestinian state. That is to say, there is a total consensus on de- continuing indefinitely to deprive Palestinians of the basic right of self-determination. but, it's interesting that even back when the two state position was a live position in Israeli politics, in that there were liberal Israeli, politicians who would be willing to say, "I think there should be a Palestinian state," oftentimes the arguments were of that same kind. That is to say, if we are to maintain Israel long term, they would often say, it, it, to, if we're gonna avoid, the, in the long term, an anti-apartheid struggle, right?
we need to give the Palestinians something, some crumb. Yes. That is to say, a, a, a bad two state. we need to give them- Yes ... some arrangement that looks like- Or, or worse than an anti-apartheid struggle. Enfranchisement. Yeah. Notably worse for them, a re- Yeah ... militant struggle, giving them the vote.
Yeah. How terrifying. We're gonna see, but we're gonna see a push for them to have the vote. And so what they would warn is, if you don't give, the, the arguments would be very straightforward. That is to say, if you don't give the Palestinians something that will appease them and will look like a state, it might be a little, less than a state as, well, I think Rabin said, he said, "We'll give the Palestinians something.
It won't be quite a state, but it'll look enough like they have self-determination to where they won't push for enfranchisement." And those were the kinds of arguments that were made, were like, "How do we make sure that we get to maintain ethnic supremacism?" But everyone across the Israeli p- believes in, a, an explicit ethnic right to rule.
Yes, of course. Otherwise, you'd cease to be Israeli. Otherwise, you'd be Nakba. Right? That's this is the logic of it. If you break that consensus, you are expelled from... It is illegal in Israel. this is how they, this is how they justified expelling the Arab parties from the election, which the Supreme Court has overruled now seemingly.
It is that they accuse the Arab parties of doing agitation with Palestinians to undermine Israel as a Jewish state, which is a constitutional right in the basic laws of Israel. So of course, you violate the Constitution of Israel when you mobilize against it as a Jewish state, and, that is ethno-supremacy.
obviously, the international law requires e- equality and egalitarianism and non-ethno-supremacy within these states. So yes, of course, and they have the legal apparatus to, in so many words, exclude anyone that breaks that consensus, and that's exactly what we see. When they go on English-speaking press, for example, they completely deny this and say it's a liberal democracy, but don't actually go into any description of that until you get into the 10 trillion, points of propaganda they use to defend it. Well, I, I, I keep coming back to It's all... I think, I think The Atlantic just published another big article going like, "No one knows what Zionism means." it's such a contested term. But I keep coming back to the fact that, and South Africa is a very helpful comparison because it's the moment you believe that, that an ethnic group, defined as an ethnic group or an ethno-religious group, has a superior right to another group to rule within its territory, that, that they get the right of immigration, and that people whose, families may have lived in the area for 1,000 years don't get the right of return.
the moment you have... These are the liberal Zionist positions, right? which is Israel gets to... We at least believe Israel gets to exist as a Jewish state. Yes. Which sounds like they say, "Now, of course, I criticize Netanyahu and the settlements, and I criticize the Gaza war, and I may even say it's a genocide, and wah, dah, dah, dah.
But I, but I will, continue to affirm." This is what they're pushing Abdul El-Sayed to do is, "All we want you to say is that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state." But then that i- just basic Zionism. You can have anything, you can have any other belief, but you've got to have the consensus.
Yes. And then you realize that consensus is an ethnic supremacist state. It is a radical consensus. It is not a moderate position. Yes. And, and very importantly, it will always push you towards a fascist position. Because in many ways, in many ways, I always talk about this, the right-wingers in Israel are honest.
Go- Ben-Gvir is saying what he means. Ben-Gvir wants to expel all Arabs, and you don't need to read through the lines when he says this. Obviously, I vitriolically hate Ben-Gvir, but when I want to understand what's happening in Israel, I read him. Because he's honest and, in some ways, in the logic of genocide, he is correct.
In order to commit genocide, you must consistently mobilize your base. It is the liberals that internally are incorrect. Externally, they have some arguments about how to complete it. And so when you accept the fascist premise of how to commit genocide, you lose even your logically coherent ability to criticize how that is done because the fascists have quite an effective completion of genocide, which is mobilizing a radical base to complete it.
And so it must be questioned on a fundamental level, otherwise you will either make nonsensical and delusional arguments, as we see liberals doing, like the two-state solution always was, or you will be pushed to be a fascist and just hiding that. And that, that's the job of many peoples of leftists, exposing the many, obscurities they, they put upon that, general obvious consensus.
Well, it's, it's funny because, they- You're so right about this, right-wing honesty about the implications of the belief. and I think of, Jabotinsky, who wrote The Iron Wall, back in the 1920s, where he said, "We have to... Basically, we have to be honest. if we're going to do this, you have to have, you, you have to be willing to expel the Arabs by force, because otherwise you're not gonna be able to establish a Jewish state herein a country that is, at this time, not majority Jewish.
So you need... You're going to need a, you're going to need violence, and you're gonna need to be comfortable with violence." And Benny Morris says the same thing. Benny Morris says, l- that, his quote is, "The idea of transfer," that is ethnic cleansing, "was inbuilt and inevitable in Zionism because you, you literally cannot establish a state that is for one people in a country that has another people unless you're willing to, to do things that are, that are, that are forceful and that are violent to maintain those ethnic distinctions."
There, there really is no other way around that, and people from Jabotinsky to Morris, who've been horrifying when you hear them go like, "Yes, of course I support ethnic cleansing," Do like at least are willing to confront the implications of the, of the underlying belief system. Yes, it makes it a lot easier, and I think a lot of the work that needs to be done when looking at these elections is understanding how built into this project y- you...
The, the debate will always be pushed back to that, and this is what I say in the article. When you ask a soldier, for what they care about, it will never be ending war because that is their job. And so when you centralize in politics the question of Zionists who are inherently the privileged class within this apartheid state, it will never be to deconstruct the privilege they hold in that state, even if in the long term that is better because the resistance organization is going to win, which is my, long-held belief.
Apartheid ended in Israel, apartheid ended. And when making that comparison, by the way, I'm, I'm inclined always to remind everyone Israel was a tight ally of apartheid South Africa. It is not just a comparison. They had direct consistent communication, and directly to Bantustans, there were Zionists at the time of the Bantustans saying that they should model the West Bank after it.
There's an article by a Zionist about this, and w- the Bantustan presidents, two of them visited Israel allegedly. That was the closest they ever got to international recognition. So it's, it's, it's not just an academic comparison. It is a very real political existence of they are direct continuities of the exact same project, which is ultimately settler colonialism and the process of developing ideologies to justify violent apartheid projects. and that is recreated whether you are a liberal tendency lying to yourself about the consequences of this apartheid project or a fascist tendency being honest about it or, I always say they have a bit of a fetish for the violence of apartheid violence that, the liberals do actually correct.
it's a very emotional, evocative ideology that they lean into that is very effective in committing violence. That's of course why you go read fascists and why they speak like that.
And Finally, Section D, Complicity, Crackdown, and Refusal
- Air Date 10-7-26
If you can talk about, what is the power that the US has over Israel. many said for example with the Iran war that Israel brought the US into it. but do you see it in that way? And what about Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law, just visiting with, the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, also meeting directly with Hamas, but not meeting with the head of the PA, the Palestinian Authority.
And if you can talk about where all of this stands right now as people stood with a moment of silence on this October 7th. People at the music festival, Israelis mourning the dead, they could hear the boom of Israeli airstrikes continuing in Gaza. talk about the board of peace, talk about the Palestinian government that was set up in exile in Cairo still not allowed to come into Gaza by Israel.
So let's start, with the most relevant to, the issue at hand, which is the Biden administration first, right? Because nowadays, anywhere you look in The Atlantic, where you are, The Atlantic magazine, or The New Yorker, or The New York Times, or even, hosted by our brilliant, or your brilliant anchor, Jon Stewart, you have these former Biden administration officials trying to whitewash their record.
They lie, they deceive, and they continue to, claim, no responsibility for the genocide, that actually took place in Gaza over the past three years. But they are directly responsible. Not only they aided and abetted, they were part of the operation taking place in Gaza the past two years, part of the war.
They were in the war cabinet meetings. President Biden himself attended the war cabinet meetings on, October 18 back in 2023. Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, attended war meetings. Secretary Blinken attended war meetings. So when you watch people Jake Sullivan, the na- the former National Security Advisor, sitting on Jon Stewart's show talking about how they tried their best to have a ceasefire, and they really put pressure on the Israeli government, and they succeeded, 15 months later, it's all humbug.
It's all BS. They were part and parcel. The, the, the, the, the banality of evil wasn't in Israel, it was in Washington. Because the kind of support that Washington provided to Israel, diplomatic support, financial support, military support, they were talking about, "We were trying to help the Palestinians," while, while actually giving Israel the arms to shoot the Palestinians before sending them the Band-Aids to take care of their injuries.
So Washington, in that sense, in the sense of the Biden administration and its officials, were part and parcel, were complicit. We're, we're cooperating, coordinating the war effort that actually was a genocidal war in Gaza. We really must underline that because we are seeing history rewritten as we speak.
In the US publications as I remember it, after the d- the 2003 war when many of the, then, the Bush administration tried to whitewash their crimes, and the journalists who supported that war, just like those who supported the, the war in Gaza, are now trying to wash, wh- whitewash the record. I wanted to- It's very important for us to- I wanted to go to- Yes
the former top State Department official under President Biden admitting a genocide has taken place in Gaza. Wendy Sherman serves as deputy secretary of state until her retirement in July 2023. She spoke on a Bloomberg podcast. I think that it is critical that Israel remain an ally of the United States and that we protect the right of a Jewish state.
But I also believe that the prime minister has led us down a road, and we have been part of it, that has, in essence, created a genocide in Gaza. And then there's former State Department spokesperson Matt Miller, who spent more than a year as the face of the Biden administration's, foreign policy and repeatedly defended Israel against allegations of war crimes and genocide in Ghaza- Gaza.
He later admitted on a podcast, interview with Sky News that, yes, Israel committed war crimes. I don't think it's a genocide, but I think the, I, I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes. But you wouldn't have said that at the podium. Yeah, look, 'cause I... And when you're at the podium you're not expressing your personal opinion, you're expressing the conclusions of the United States government.
And then you have Brett McGurk, who's just come out with his new book. It's called Brink. the headline in The New York Times, Ready to Blow His Stack: How Biden Nearly Cut Off Netanyahu Over Gaza. and that's talking about what McGurk is saying in the, in his book. Marwan Bishara. This is- Take us- Yeah
take us through to the Trump administration now Yes. there's no doubt that, even according to, McGurk and, Sullivan, that they paved the way for the Trump administration to take over the war effort. That, that they paved the way in, in the worst possible manner for the Trump administration then to take it on and to do whatever it wants, including the weaponization of hunger and the weaponization of the, the food aid to the Palestinian people.
we sunk into a whole new abyss with the Trump administration. During the Biden administration, the United States was basically complicit in genocide. During the Trump administration, on, on, on, on the very first few days when it took over, they start talking about ethnically cleansing Gaza out in the open.
President Trump spoke of ethnically cleansing Gaza, the entire Gaza Strip, in order to have a beachside property called Trump Land or whatever, or called, The New Riviera in the East. So the cynicism, that the Trump administration built, in its first year with the Gaza issue, taking up the mantle from the Biden administration, that was really- just so dis- di- depressing to watch in the sense that w- from one administration to another administration, we see complicity with genocide.
We see the United States, aiding an Israeli government, protecting an Israeli government, and instead of having them stand up for the responsibility for the war crimes, they attack the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, which is unprecedented for, for an American president, for, for, for, for the United States to be so hostile to international law, international legality, international institutions, the United Nations.
Even the United Nations, y- relief agency, like UNRWA and so on, so forth, that were indispensable for the people in Gaza when the policy was to starve them, to bomb their bakeries and schools and universities, to turn their, their schoolyards into graveyards. You at least needed something like UNRWA, but no, UNRWA has to be demonized.
UNRWA has to be cut down to size. UNRWA has to be blocked and to be, again, demonized by not only Israel, but also by the United States. So the Trump administration did everything possible in order to achieve some sort of a Israeli victory and a Hamas surrender, and, and forced the United Nations Security Council to adopt a resolution, which to my mind, Amy, is illegal.
And I say that not being a legal scholar, but certainly being a student of history. The United Nations Security Council, under pressure from the Trump administration and because the genocide was going on and they had to do something, they adopted a resolution that, that recognized the, the, the, the border peace without this border peace ever being defined Without knowing zero about what is this board of peace.
So they adopted the revolu- the resolution, and this allowed the Trump administration then to go on and to define this board of peace as it wishes, including appointing President Trump as a, life, life member, that heads it, and Netanyahu of course, and Putin, as members of the board of peace.
So you can imagine the, the, the surrealism, right, behind this kind of an effort in order to turn a two-year genocide into a mockery of international law.
News Brief 2028, Israel's Progressive Rebrand and the Risk of Genocide as Rhetorical Box Check Part 1 - Citations Needed - Air Date 10-6-26
let's start with the recent news about Troy Jackson in Maine and the kind of media flurry around that and, your thoughts on that. Can you start by teeing this up for us?
So the word genocide has implications and obligations, as we've mentioned on the show before. It's not just a label you throw out to look maximally angry.
It actually requires the persons making the claim or the institution making the claim to follow through on a certain set of obvious and implied commitments. 22 members of Congress and all Democrats have said that Gaza is a genocide. That's only 8% of Democrats in Congress versus the 77% of Democrats who believe it's a genocide.
But that aside, what we're seeing emerge now is candidates, especially those who are either running right now in, in competitive midterms and need to not upset their base, but also those who are very clearly running in 2028. We've discussed this before, Chris Van Hollen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna.
Now, Chris Van Hollen has not called it a genocide somewhat conspicuously, but he does say it's ethnic cleansing, which I think also has certain implications and obligations. and they're, they're checking the box of, of outrage, but not necessarily following through on the logical implications of what that word means.
Van Hollen, also has been, has been fairly consistent, throughout, not, not always rolling over, and doing hand-wringing, I think.
Yeah, he's been decent, but he has still held on, he has still grasped on to the axioms of liberal Zionism, which matter because in the event that there's a President Van Hollen, and let's say there's another, October 7th style attack or something, 10...
Even 10% of that, we're still gonna commit to, quote, unquote, "eliminating Hamas" and, quote, unquote, "securing Israel." All these bromides that necessarily inevitably lead to, m- mass carnage i- in the event that the occupied people decide that they're gonna do something besides, I don't know, vote for Mahmoud Abbas for the, or whatever safe, expression of, of politics they're permitted to have, and, and that they're just gonna be met with pure an- annihilationism versus a genuine solution, involving equal rights.
And so this is all to say, there was recently a, a, a, an article I wrote for The Real News where I detail how the Democrats are... When you actually look at their statements, are not really breaking from Israel. we talked about this a few months ago, I think about six months ago, maybe even a little longer ago, about the pseudo breaks from Israel, because what's important to understand is that, support for Israel among Democrats is a fringe issue.
it is no longer some 50/50 issue. It is a twen- 80/20 at best. their polls showed that 13% of Democrats have a favorable view of Israel. That is less than the amount of Democrats who are young Earth creationists, who believe in full abortion bans, and who support p- Christian prayer in school. it is a fringe right-wing issue, okay?
Nevertheless, 80% of Democrats in Congress have the inverse opinion and so what they understand is that when they need to have legitimacy and credibility, they need to look like they're breaking from Israel, and so enter public relations. Enter the whole pri- point of this podcast, which is, which is, the, the, the, the, the necessary cognitive and epistemological frameworks to paper over the thing that is obviously in contradiction.
Which is, I'm acknowledging these horrible war crimes in, in this instance, I'm acknowledging these horrible war crimes in Gaza. I c- usually I'll call it a genocide, I'll call it ethnic cleansing, but I vaguely gesture towards this unprecedented level of death over the last three years, but in particular in the first two years.
But also, I need to keep the weapons flow to Israel going. Now, if I accuse a country of genocide, two things logically follow from that conclusion as I detail in, in my, in my article for Real News, which is A, I would support a full-blown un- unequivocal arms embargo on that country. I think that goes without saying, right?
I can't think of other genocidal states, whether it's, Nazi Germany or Rwanda or Yugoslavia, whether it's, you name it. And there's a second... In, in addition to a full arms embargo, there's a second condition that one would support, which is BDS, which is a boycott and sanctioning of the country itself, right?
Called for by, by the civil society of the people who are being occupied and, apartheid and ethnically cleansed and genocided, right?
So for some reason, and this includes, Ocasio-Cortez and Ro Khanna, chief among them, and of course Van Hollen and, and, and of course others, they support a highly qualified, very tortured arms embargo and do not support BDS.
I don't know how you say a country's committing genocide but don't support boycotting and sanctioning them, and don't support a full no qualifier arms embargo.
And this is why we call it a rhetorical turn, right? A rhetorical box check without the requisite responsibility and accountability that follows saying that.
It, it me- it, it means genocide as a term, as a label, as a description, and as a fact, affirmed by every, human rights organization, in the world, genocide scholar associations. this is not in dispute, and yet it's, it's like that, that word is used as, as we just said, as a thing to signal rather than a responsibility, to address.
And so that's why actually we think it's really important when that word is used to describe things. But as you said, Adam, there are necessary actions that follow
Yes. And the sanctions that have been on offer from people like AOC and Ro Khanna and Van Hollen are the sanctions you would give if Israel, vaguely stepped out of line, or maybe, had, had too high an execution rate or, or some m- m- human rights abuse around...
It's not like you commit someone to genocide, it's "Well, we're gonna still send you Iron Dome missiles to defend." obviously that's absurd. and we know that because none of these people support providing, quote-unquote, defensive weapons to Russia or Iran. So, we, w- everybody already does the thing where you categorically say, "We're not arming a country."
But for whatever reason, Israel doesn't get this, doesn't get this, this, this standard. I think the reason's obvious, which is they have to do the thing that makes them look outraged without actually changing the fundamental arrangement of US imperialism in the Middle East and its, and its relationship to Israel.
And so therefore, genocide becomes a kind of box you check. And, and we'll talk about their refusal to also sign on to any kind of pledge to not hire any of the people responsible for genocide under Biden, but we'll table that for a second and talk about, There was a tweet by Dave Weigel of Semafor News I really think kinda captured this, this dynamic in a, in a real soulless beltway, it's all a game, politico mentality.
in response to Troy Jackson, who's running for Senate in Maine, issued an apology for some ham-fisted point he made about the, the genocide in the context of the Jewish Holocaust. but then Dave Weigel chimed in on protesters who, who had, who had, heckled him at an event because they wanted him to reaffirm his position that gen- Gaza was a genocide because he had...
there was reporting in, The Guardian and then followed up by Dr- in Drop Site News that he had surrounded himself with a bunch of AIPAC consultants after taking Chuck Schumer's, Democratic Senate money. And they were "Well, this sounds like a pretty good reason to see that you've maybe wavered on your supposed commitments to Palestine," which is a reasonable fear to have.
And then Weigel smugly writes, quote, "Something quite a few Dems have noticed. Jackson has already said there was a genocide in Gaza, and it didn't stop voters from showing up to his event to demand he say it on camera again, or rumors that he could no longer... he would no longer say genocide because consultants told him not to.
I.e., pass the genocide litmus test, and you might be forced to retake it again and again," unquote. So this is a completely batshit and psychotic thing to say for a couple of re- and it's also very, of course, very dishonest. number one, it's not a litmus test. Saying the word genocide is not the test. The test is acknowledging the reality of genocide as one would acknowledge climate change or the tides or the reality of gravity as an objective fact of, of, of the world, and then carrying through on that acknowledgment to its logical endpoint, which is to say, doing something about it Rather than just keeping the arms flow going.
So when Jackson takes on a bunch of AIPAC-affiliated consultants and donors, it's reasonable to question if the word genocide he uses is in fact something he genuinely believes to be true, or is it simply a box he checked to get pesky activists and leftists and progressives off his back? And to Dave, this is all a, it's all, it's all a game, right?
You check the genocide box, the Litmus test
He already said it. Why do they keep harping on this? It's because, b- because-
There was new items of information that came out, you fucking dipshit
Right. It, it's not, it's not just about saying the word, folks. literally it's not just about saying the word.
They want it to be about saying the word so that they can actually then skirt the issue of what you do about it. That is the entire, that is the entire game being played here.
Yeah, and it's part, it's part of this Matt Yglesias, internet poison c- centrist thing of "Oh, you can never satisfy the progressives.
The, the goalpost is always gonna move." No, the goalpost is the genocide happened, that's reality, and you need, and we need to fully sanction an arms embargo Israel. Boom, end of story. That's the fucking ask.
Mahmoud Khalils 104 Days in ICE Detention Part 1 - Fresh Air - Air Date 9-29-26
Mahmoud, I wanna take us through you arriving at this detention center.
So the next morning, after immigration agents booked and processed you in Manhattan, they put you on a plane, and no one would tell you where that plane was going. And at one point, you write about this in the book, that you thought maybe they're taking me to Algeria. And you write that your first feeling was, "At least I'd be free."
Mm-hmm. What was the second feeling?
The second feeling was really... And, and I w- I would put it, as the first feeling is just the fear about Nour's safety because the last thing I heard before being shoved into the unmarked car of ICE was them threatening Nour of arrest if she does not leave me.
Right.
Mm-hmm. And,
and all these two days when I was basically left and, without any communication with the outside world, I was "What happened to Nour? Is she okay? Did they actually arrest her? Is the baby okay?" And these were the most, I would say, difficult two days of my life, where you are expecting only to follow orders.
No one would tell you anything. I would ask to call Nour, to call my lawyer. they wouldn't. They would say, "Later, later, later." and being taken from one place to another, being, after I was served with the Rubio determination that I am somehow a, a foreign policy threat, that was shocking to me because I was "Does the government have anything against me that I don't know of?"
Mm-hmm. "Are they making up something?" every scenario. In a place you are alone, you're only with officers. Literally every scenario ran in my head, and that was terrifying, these two days.
Remind us again what that determination was from, Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
So the charge is that the foreign policy of the United States found my presence in the country to have adverse consequences to the, foreign policy of the United States and threat to national security.
and in a- We discovered later because that was only one sentence on my charge. But later, a month later, when the government had to show the evidence, they only had the actual determination, which was a, a short document saying that my activities, in the United States, otherwise lawful, have created a hostile environment for Jewish students, and it goes against the United States' efforts to combat antisemitism.
And that was very cynical to me and I, I laughed when I, when I saw this. I'm "If I'm a threat to the foreign policy of the United States, what kind of foreign policy does the United States have?"
I wanna actually play a clip of President Trump in the days after Marco Rubio's determination, and, he is at a press conference.
A reporter asked him about you, and here's what he said. Let's listen.
And President Trump, there's this protest leader from Columbia University that the administration is moving to deport, and he said that his arrest is gonna be the first of many. How many? I think we ought to get them all out of the country.
They're troublemakers. They're agitators. they don't love our country. We ought to get them the hell out. I think that guy, we ought to get him... I heard his statements, too. They were plenty bad, and I think we ought to get him the hell out of the country. I watched him. I watched tapes. Specifically, I watched tapes, and, you can have him, okay?
You can have him.
That is President Donald Trump talking about my guest today, Mahmoud Khalil. Mahmoud, you heard him. He said, "You don't love our country. You can have him," presumably talking about deporting you. And you said this just a little bit earlier, but for a moment, you actually thought... You tried to rack your brain, "What did I do?"
Mm-hmm. "Did I do something fatal that I wasn't aware of?" Tell me a little bit more about that moment when you realized that your name was being spoken by the President of the United States.
that was another one of the other shocking moments. But I think, at that moment, I literally thought that this, this is the end of my life in terms of my career, what's gonna happen next?
What do they do with someone who's a foreign policy threat? Do they just deport them or, actually they would send them somewhere else? my lawyers at that point were literally checking flights to Guantanamo, Mm ... fearing that I would be taken there or to CECOT in, in, in El-- in, El Salvador.
so, during his campaign, President Trump vowed to set the Palestine movement, for freedom in the US back twenty years. and he was hoping by targeting me that he would be able to achieve that. so I, I wasn't, really surprised by, the language, but more of, the overreach and, and, and, and, and the law.
I'm, I'm a firm believer of the rule of law. I came to this country because I also, of course, love the principles of this country. I, I... when, when I came here, only three years ago, it's a place where I, I found that I, I may have a great life here, that I would have, potential in, in, in, in, in my career.
but also it's a place where I want to raise, my children here. and that what kept me fighting, just That this administration is trying to portray me as someone who is violent, someone who hates this country, someone who's working to undermine the principles of this country. Mm-hmm. it is the total opposite, actually.
Mm-hmm. because I fled, I fled Assad's Syria because of the authoritarian regime there, because of the forced disappearance, because of the arbitrary detention there, because of the lack of respect to the rule of law. That's why I left that country. And the United States was actually, supporting these, the, the Syrian people and their aspiration for freedom and justice and dignity.
You've also been called pro-Hamas, which Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by the US and Israel. But I was just wondering, did anyone from the government ever sit across from you and ask you what you believe?
Never. And, during the immigration process, when they had to show some evidence, they did not bring anything except for some articles from tabloids like the New York, Post and these very, right-wing groups.
But there was nothing about my thoughts. in reality, I mention in the book, I'm someone who worked in the past for the British government. I interned at the UN. But also I interned at the Palestinian Mission to the United Nations. That's, rival of Hamas. that doesn't... just, the story does not add up at all.
but to them, just the fact that they can portray me as pro-Hamas, that would be enough for people to buy into the story that this is someone who's violent or this is someone who's really against the American interests.
What do you think of Hamas?
I think Hamas is one of the political factions in the Palestinian society, that gained popularity due to the failures of the peace process that was led by the PLO.
and when people felt desperate for any change, they turned into Hamas, and Hamas was providing, or at least, showing that there is a path in resisting Israel, and that's how the people turned to be, with or, to support Hamas. I'm someone who, who's against all Palestinian political parties right now because I don't think any of these political parties, really, rise to the aspirations of the Palestinian people.
and that's why, it was to me offensive to be called, a pro-Hamas or even, pro-PA, the Palestinian Authority, or any of the Palestinian factions because in fact I'm not. and that's part of also my fight to unite the Palestinian people.
People want you to condemn Hamas.
You've said what you said to me many times, many places. Mm-hmm. But there seems to be something like a pushing, a pulling, th- a drawing out that they want of you to say something stronger.
Mm-hmm. that's, that's their problem because I'm not sure they're interested in my views about Hamas or whether I condemn them or not.
to them, this question has become a litmus test, or they're trying to make it as a litmus test. if you condemn Hamas, then you are worth of listening to. You are, now, you are a Palestinian who we can talk to. But if you don't, then you're not. because that's part of the dehumanization of Palestinians.
They want Palestinians to be a certain image, and if it's not that, then they are not worthy of listening to. That's why when I refuse, it's not about refusing to condemn Hamas, it's about refusing to answer the question from the start because I refuse the premise of that question.
News Brief 2028, Israel's Progressive Rebrand and the Risk of Genocide as Rhetorical Box Check Part 2 - Citations Needed - Air Date 10-6-26
This is not something that is a incremental step. It is not a step forward. It is, in fact, the definition of... It is a definition of, it's the definition of counterinsurgency. It is something that looks like it's progressive and moving forward, but is in fact doing the exact opposite, and is, and will indeed further intertwine the militaries.
And so it's in that context we need to talk about the Drop the Genocide 20 campaign, because I think this also heightens contradictions and reveals the, I think, lack of commitment to the concept of genocide as a word that some of these progressives are using. So I worked with, I'm working with and consulting on this, this coalition of groups, comprised of DSA, Track AIPAC, J- Just Foreign Policy, as well as, Palestinian Youth Movement, as well as Peace Action and About Face to demand that the, that pol- that liberals, elected politicians, anyone of good conscience sign a pledge to not hire Who the, the group determined were the top 20 most responsible people for genocide in Gaza.
So, under the Biden administration. So you have your, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken, Jon Finer, Brett McGurk, et cetera, et cetera. And keep in mind, the list should be, it should be way longer, but for the purposes of activism, you concentrate on the biggest 20 just, or the, the, the most obviously guilty 20 just to see if people will sign off on it and, and pledge to not hire them or platform them.
Right. If folks don't want to, hire 40 former Biden officials, that's great, too.
Right. Well, that- That's just our- Again, the, and the, and the, and the limitation section, it's very clearly it's not a... Not being on the list is not exculpatory, right? Just to be clear. But it, it's basically a, an, an, a bare minimum accountability ante to see if one is, again, takes the label genocide seriously, or even ethnic cleansing seriously.
It is the first step to accountability. It is a bare minimum start to a conversation about accountability.
But it is actually a pledge and an action you can take rather than just rhetorical.
It's also not one of these during the height of the Bush administration, people would say, "We need to sign a pledge to arrest and send to the ICC Bush officials," and it's yeah, that would be great, but that's not gonna happen, and it's also, it's not actionable.
This is exceedingly actionable. So that being said, it's very revealing, and we've, we've asked them, we've had Just Foreign Policy who has relationships with Ro Khanna, Ocasio-Cortez, and others. We have asked them to sign the pledge, and only two members of Congress beginning in January of next year have agreed to sign the pledge and did so enthusiastically.
One of them was Rashida Tlaib, of course, and one was, Chris Rabb, who's, who's almost certainly gonna be a shoo-in in November in Pennsylvania. And Rashida Tlaib, of course, was actually the very first person to sign. that was, that was a, I guess a no-brainer from her perspective. But AOC hasn't signed.
Ro Khanna's ignored it. They've all ignored it. Are they obligated to sign the pledge that DSA and Palestinian Youth Movement and Just Foreign Policy and Track AIPAC sign? not necessarily. But what they haven't done is they haven't offered themselves when asked multiple times, 'cause, 'cause Prem Thakker at Zeteo announced the, the campaign for us, and he himself as a journalist went to go ask them and got categorically ignored, by everyone except for Chris Rabb and, and Rashida Tlaib.
and so they have not offered any plan for accountability as far as I know. Again, this could change. I know, I know Chris Van Hollen may be working with one group to do something. so I'm not saying that this is a, a final verdict, but I think it's clear that AOC and Ro Khanna in particular appear to have zero interest in making any baseline commitment to any kind of accountability for the administration's role in the Gaza genocide.
And I think I know why it is, and I'm gonna speculate here. And now I, I understand this could change, right? The point is not to, is not to scold for its own sake. The point is to get people to a yes. but I think the reason is, is because if you actually look very carefully at the comments that AOC and Ro Khanna and many other progressives and Bernie Sanders have made, is they've accused Israel of genocide.
But who have they not accused of genocide or assisting genocide or aiding genocide? Joe Biden
The ones that fund and
defend The people who are funding and arming and supporting and blocking ceasefire resolutions. Yeah. Now, I think a lot of people in their mind have mentally connected those two things.
They've assumed, because that goes without saying, since the, Israel's genocide wouldn't be able to last more than, four or five days without US military support, is that they actually haven't made the ideological leap to accusing Biden or any officials of supporting or aiding genocide.
And I think that's a very clever way of dodging the issue. Aside from being completely in- dishonest and not at all accurate, I think it's a way you signal outrage about Israel, but you still maintain your partisan loyalties. and that is one of the reasons why this cycle of immunity is permitted to continue, whether it's the destruction of Vietnam or whether it's Iraq War, whether it's torture.
The most sacred religion in Washington is elite immunity, bipartisan elite immunity. You can criticize around the margins, you can be, you can, you can even, you can name-call, but fundamentally, no one in power have to, has to actually be held accountable, even in the most bare minimum way of being excluded from future administrations, think, think tanks and liberal spaces.
And the idea of American exceptional nobility, that that myth is paramount.
Yes. So because, again, and now you have Abdul's, Abdul El-Sayed, who, who again, I think has been pretty firm in this, has had a pretty decent anti-Zionist position. He is now campaigning with Kamala Harris, who of course was one of the primary propagandists of the genocide when it mattered the most, and of course refused to break from Biden.
So to what extent is, is he using her to win elections to promote some meta-anti-Zionism, or to what extent is she using him to launder her reputation for her in- inevitable 2028 run? I think it's more the latter. and so that, so now Kamala Harris is being, is back in normal company. okay, fair enough.
I know a lot of people I spoke to, a lot of people who worked in, a lot of the resignees said Harris wasn't involved in the day-to-day with Gaza. But whatever, right? When she took the nomination, she promoted all of its central lies. and of course had the opportunity to break and didn't. So certainly she's someone who should fall within the realm of someone who is responsible or had a role, a central role in the promotion of genocide in Gaza.
So I guess, I guess now she's okay. obviously, you have these promo- you have these propaganda book tours, Brett McGurk and, and, and Tony Blinken all have books either coming out, have already come out, or they're coming out soon. And they're doing the rounds with the, "I was changing things from the inside."
That's right.
So they're not gonna face any accountability.
I wish we could have done more. I thought we were close. It was a trap that we fell into.
Yep.
h- how could we have known? Yeah.
So we're not the only game in town. There's another effort I can't reveal yet. They're gonna be pro- coming out soon, that is also doing a, accountability project.
They have, a pretty sophisticated mechanism to do it. I'm excited about that. And then Drop The Genocide 20 is going to aggressively start lobbying progressives in Congress and liberals in Congress to support the initiative after the midterms. So we're gonna be doing a whole, a whole promotion with that, and I'm gonna support it to the extent I can.
And you can find, you can find information about, the Drop the Genocide 20 pledge and campaign at dropthegenocide20.org. So just, just to be clear, you can actually find out more there.
Right. 'Cause the plan is to just move on, right? This is, again, this is O- the Obama look forward not backwards, and this is something that...
And what's important to understand is about the vibe to move on and about how Abdul El-Sayed and Ocasio-Cortez and Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders, and all these people will always give you pro- my, I'm just speculating here, but they'll give you some line about, "We don't need to relitigate the past. We need to, we need to win power so we can change policy," or other, some other such, high-minded claptrap.
But what's important to understand is that in those fateful days in October and November of 2023 when lies were told about beheaded babies by the White House, when they denied death counts, when they said there was a, they being John Finer among others, said there was a Hamas command and control center under the Al-Sh- Al-Shifa Hospital, effectively condemning hundreds in that hospital to death, including babies on incubators.
When they made these fateful decisions to condemn the people of Palestine and the people of Gaza to mass death, which everybody knew was going to happen, when they spread lies, when they sent weapons, when they blocked ceasefire votes at the UN-
Because it had been happening for fucking decades, to be clear
they knew that in the event that this came to matter in a couple years, that they could just wi- wiggle, wiggle off the hook with some self-exculpatory myth-making. They could sell their memo- their memoirs. They could leak stories about how they were really changing things from the inside. They could butter up progressives and liberals.
They could go back to the Center for American Progress. They can go b- box. They were all duped by Netanyahu, that Biden was actually the guy, and conveniently enough, he, he was responsible for everything and he's dying of cancer And so they knew that. They knew that because that's what happened with Bush and Iraq and the Democrats who supported it.
They knew that the bipartisan cycle of elite immunity is the highest civic religion in the land. You cannot hold anyone accountable because it's awkward, because it's uncomfortable, because, "Well, I need to campaign in Michigan. I don't have a choice," right? We have to come together as a party, and then you get these groups who come together and they, and they threaten you.
They say, "You need to come together as a party or we're gonna do X, Y, and Z." And you say, "Okay, I'll make a compromise this time. I'll make a compromise this time. Just this time," right? And I pride myself on knowing the difference between strategic retreat and surrender. I really, I don't always think you need to have the morally correct position at all times.
I get that there's a bigger picture sometimes. But boy do those recei- boy do those strategic retreats begin to look like surrender really fast. and what you're seeing is a, is a, is there's no leadership on this. No one's talking about this. There's zero people who are in progressive media, mainstream progressive media, liberal media, or even so it's, to, to say nothing of electeds who are mentioning the fact that these Biden officials have been lo- have been r- are rotating back into think tanks and progressive spaces, are getting, cushy academic jobs at Columbia and Harvard.
No one's talking about this. No one will sign on to the Drop The Genocide pledge except for Chris Rabb and Rashida Tlaib. And, again, and I'm not saying they have to to be serious on this issue, but none of them are offering what it means to have accountability. None. AOC, Van Hollen, Ro Khanna, Bernie Sanders, no one is offering any kind of pathway for accountability, which to me indicates they do not take the word genocide seriously at all, that it is a buzzword you use, that it is something that you need to signal your outrage, but basically the status quo is going to remain the same.
Right. And so that's why actual actions of accountability matter, right? so it's not just a thing you say, which has now become the pro-genocide line, accusing people of not even meaning it. And it's well, yeah, they don't seem like they mean it. You're r- you're right. they're, they're saying genocide, and then they're not doing anything about it.
If Troy Jackson doesn't support a full arms embargo, he doesn't mean it. really, if you don't support a full arms embargo and BDS, you don't mean it. But I'll even grant BDS as to whatever. If you don't support a full arms embargo categorically, without exception, without qualification, then you absolutely do not mean the word genocide.
Mahmoud Khalil We Cant Afford to Stay Silent Part 2 - The Intercept Briefing - Air Date 10-2-26
Mahmoud, you mentioned this already, the, the logic of exception regarding Palestine. You write about this in the book. It's this idea that only certain categories of Palestinians are deserving of rights. You talk about how you've internalized that in some ways as well, and this comes up in what I've noticed as attempts, even by well-meaning people, to paint you as, one of the good ones among university students that have been portrayed as an otherwise unruly mass, on, on a rampage, in, in protesting this genocide.
there was a similar effort around your Columbia colleague, Mohsen Mahdawi, who was also targeted and abducted by ICE for his, pro-Palestine activism. During the Columbia encampments, you were active in the protests, and you also worked as the negotiator between protesters and university administrators, one of whom told The New Yorker that you stood out from other protesters for your level-headedness, which I found very interesting.
What is the effect of trying to separate you from the rest of the pack as the right kind of protester, and how do you overcome that?
That really enrages me that you have to be a perfect victim to be worthy of people's sympath- sympathy, to be worthy of the rule of law. because what we protested is a genocide.
That's what we protested, and that's the right thing to do. It shouldn't be criminalized. And unfortunately, we internalized that. I talk a, a little bit about, how I myself would highlight the numbers of women and children, just to, to appeal to more people that "Look, young women and, and children are being killed by Israel."
But what about the men? because then, that's, that's the dehumanization, the level of the dehumanization of Palestinians in this country that it only took the Trump administration to mention my name as Mahmoud Khalil and Palestinian for people to paint a certain, a certain image of me. but in reality, I, I'm a Palestinian who believes in a free Palestine, where everyone from the river to the sea deserves safety, dignity, and freedom.
and- And just like the fact that, I had to be that perfect vict-- because I'm not, I'm not perfect. No one is perfect. Palestinians are, Humans. ... this, humans, the same as any other- Yeah ... any other nation. Yeah. we have, we have our aspirations, we have, our culture, we have our deficiencies.
it's, it's not, we're not, out of this, planet. but yet the media in specific insists on treating Palestinians or s- on, on a different standard. when they ask me, about condemning or not condemning all of that, I'm "You're not interested in my views about Hamas.
If you're interested about my views about Hamas, you would ask me what are my views about Hamas or, or, or a different question." But they use that question just, as a litmus test. Exactly, yeah. if you say yes, then maybe you are a human worthy of talking to. If not, then you are that villain, that this administration is, is talking about.
That's why we refuse the premise of the question as a whole. It's not about, the question itself. The whole premise of the question, we, we, we, we refuse. and I think it's, it's for Americans to reckon with Why we are here, why we are treating Palestinian stories different from any other story. the, whether it's the Zionist lobby that for tens of years has fed this hate into...
Whether it's the media itself or Hollywood or, just, the institutions themselves fed that hate, and fed that image of, of the Palestinian as, as, as violent rather than just a human being. or recently just how, it's not only the Trump administration, it's the, it's before them, the Biden administration before them, Right
the, the, the Obama administration, and goes back, to every other or every administration- Right ... this country had about, dehumanizing Palestinians. because Trump wouldn't have had the power to do what he did with me weren't for what Columbia portrayed or said about the movement or the T- the, the Biden administration as well.
As we've written about a lot at The Intercept, the, the beginning of this crackdown on campuses started under Biden.
Absolutely.
Yeah. I, I wanna deviate quickly just because you mentioned this question, and I had written a question that I wasn't sure we would have time to get to about being asked about Hamas, because this c- this comes up in The New Yorker article, and I was curious what you thought of how it was f-- I don't know if you read the, the latest one from last month.
The profile.
Yeah. Yeah. Because I was curious about how it was framed because he says that you pushed back on the framing of the question, right? He asked you about your views on Hamas and that you, protested the premise of the question. and then it said what your explanation was.
But I thought it was interesting to, print your defense of, of why you, you reject the premise but still print your answer to the que- question.
Yeah, no.
Yeah.
To me, Hamas is, is a, is a political faction that has a military wing, that got most of its popularity because of the failures of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO, in bringing peace after the Oslo Accord, where, a lot of Palestinians were excited about, the prospects of, of peace.
But, when they saw that Israel is, is undermining any prospects of a Palestinian state, a lot of Palestinians turned into Hamas as, that resistance movement, that may bring something. Mm-hmm. and as I explain in, in my book that Palestinians supported Hamas not because of ideological reasons as much as because they wanted a way forward.
And, for me, I'm, I'm against all P- all Palestinian political factions because Not one of them, whether it's Hamas, Fatah, or, PFLP rose up to the aspirations of the Palestinian people, unfortunately. and that's why, I'm, I'm, I'm a strong believer in international law. I'm a strong believer in, in, in the fact that Palestinians have the right of self-determination, have the right to resist under international law, have the right to, to really, tell the world what they want.
So, So that's that's what I, I want, my answer about, such a questions to be, That's
not what people wanna hear.
Yeah, exactly. They want just a yes or no. Yeah. that's it's a black and white. Yeah. I can't tell people how to resist. That's from- Yeah
being in the United States, for someone who's going through bombardment, who's going through, checkpoints, whose house is being graded, and at night by the Israeli army, who h- the drones are above their heads all the time. Hmm. I can't from here tell them how to resist, but for me, I'm a firm believer of an international law, and that's how I see the way, the way, the way forward.
and again, I'm, I'm a Palestinian who's, I believe in a free Palestine where everyone from the river to the sea have, the right to live in with dignity, with justice, with freedom, with equality. That's what we're asking for.
Gaza Has Exposed the Hypocrisy of the West with Omar El Akkad Part 2 - Downstream - Air Date 10-18-26
One of the things that, struck me in, in, in your book is that you've got this, this bit, and I'll let you, I'll let you explain what you meant, but I, but I found, I found it strike- really striking where you talk about how there's this kind of backwards-looking a-a-ap-ap-approach to the, to the colonized where they're with the distance of time, they're permitted some resistance that can be celebrated.
Maybe they'll get a Nobel Prize, maybe they'll make a film out of them. But at the time of the colonization, everything is terrorism, every f- every form of resistance. And, and one of the things that struck me is, and again, I don't know if this was, was a choice deliberately, I'm just curious about it, is that you refer to Hamas as a terror group.
and maybe that's what you-- that, that's what, that's what plenty of people believe, right? but I just thought w- do you think that that's something that with time might-- you might change in you?
It was interesting. I was having this conversation a while back with someone about, it was a do you condemn Hamas type of conversation.
I was trying to talk about it within the context of where I grew up in the world and the governments I grew up in, and how it has instilled in me a natural sense of, of real reluctance to endorse any governing body in the part of the world where I grew up. And I was, trying to think through this, and I could see the person tuning out completely because the purpose of the, the question that was put to me in the first place was not to get some kind of nuanced discussion about any of it.
It was to get me to shut the hell up, right? Because the way this is supposed to go is, do you condemn Hamas? Of course, I condemn Hamas. And, a-and then you're on the back foot, and you can't make the claim that perhaps the wholesale theft of a people's land and their mass slaughter is a bad thing.
One of the things I've had to come to terms with, and this is a failing of mine, very much a failing of mine, is that I can sit here and tell you that I am this, deeply engaged, pacifist. and I might believe that about myself. all violence is wrong, all that good stuff.
But there's a number of things that I've had to come to terms with, and again, I probably should have come to terms with this a lot sooner, related to my ability to say that and what it actually means, right? True pacifism is incredibly, incredibly difficult, right? It usually ends you up in jail because you stop paying your taxes, right?
I have had to come to terms with A, the fact that I have absolutely no right to tell anybody how to resist their occupation B, the fact that by virtue of how my tax money is spent, I am one of the most violent human beings on Earth. It's just done very cleanly for me. It's done from a great distance. I don't have to get my hands dirty.
And C I don't know that there's a single thing I believe ideologically, whatever the case may be, that wouldn't change in an instant if it was my kid that was killed, right? And so how do I think that Hamas is gonna be talked about? I think in huge portions of the world, they're not gonna be talked about.
And I should say, I, I doubt most things. I don't doubt that Palestine will be free, because I think the natural state of colonialism is to get up every morning and tell yourself a lie. And, and however brutal the treatment of the colonized, there are few things more brutal than having to get up every day and tell yourself a lie.
It's unsustainable in the long run, as it has been in the case of every colonizer ever
Those are the only conditions, true justice, true freedom, under which a, a group like Hamas ceases to exist, right? Th-th-this notion that you can Bomb a people and humiliate a people and murder a people into accepting the terms of their humiliation is fantasy, right? There, there is nothing I want more than a world in which Hamas does not exist because it will mean that the conditions that prompted a group like Hamas to exist in the first place no longer exist.
But this notion of whether I get to sit here and tell you that this is a terror group or not, what an incredible privilege for me to sit there from a distance knowing full well that if it was my family caged and if I woke up every day and was humiliated in every conceivable way, that I would somehow be high-minded enough to respond with love.
I hope so. But man, it's an incredible privilege to not test that theory.
Just, yeah, the reason I, I brought it up, it just, it just struck me that, that in the book you use, you use the term terror. and the ter- terrorism is something that we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll come back to. But it was-- I guess a lot of the writing as well was happening at a time where there was no way in the public of not justifying, but even merely explaining the facts that may have given rise to this.
you're constantly asked to condemn at, at, at all term- turns. And, in this country, I don't know if you know this, because of our terror infrastructure and Hamas as a proscribed group, it's actually very difficult, potentially even legally difficult under the Terrorism Act, to talk about things like resistance or liberation, because these can sound like laudatory terms, and expressing support for terrorist groups is a, is a criminal offense under the Terrorist Act.
So I wasn't, I wasn't asking it as an, an accusatory sense. I was just wondering- No, but I think- ... whether those pressures were- I
think you should be asking in an accusatory- Yeah ... sense, because I think it is a, a failing of the book, right? To, to, to sit there and, and be raining down these notions of who is a terrorist and who isn't when I am watching industrial-scale slaughter, right?
But it's being done cleanly, right? And afterwards, a nice man in a, in a, in a nice suit gets up at a podium and justifies it, right? It, it's the, the, the, the, the fascinating part of the, the question for me is, is this notion of, of a future, reading of this, right? because I can tell you, having essentially lived the entirety of, of my adult life in the post-war on terror years, my sense of faith in what my government deems terrorism or not terrorism could not be lower, right?
But I, I, I do think that as a result of this conditioning of, "Hey, it's a lone guy with a bomb. Hey, it's a lone guy with an AK, this is terrorism. Hey, it's an entire military wiping out a village or a school, it can't be terrorism. We're civilized." I think because of that conditioning, what I suspect is going to happen is that people will just decide to never talk about it as though this group never existed, as though resistance never existed, as though the violent, ugly part was never there.
but I don't know. I genuinely don't know.
Mahmoud Khalils 104 Days in ICE Detention Part 2 - Fresh Air - Air Date 9-29-26
You've said that there were some anti-Semitic things that happened at Columbia, some unacceptable things. What did you see?
I believe the Palestinian movement or the movement for Palestinian lib-liberation at Mo- at Columbia was really rooted in dignity, safety, and equality for everyone. And we are so proud to have built this movement with our, Jewish peers, whether they are, students, but also faculty.
And to me, the movement itself, absolutely, there was no antisemitism. There was no place for antisemitism there, and that's what I keep repeating again and again, against, the, the narrative that Columbia itself helped push because, we must take antisemitism seriously, like all forms of bigotry.
we have also to acknowledge when antisemitism is being used or weaponized to chill or, to protect Israel from, from criticism. and I went to Shabbat dinners at the encampment. There were Seder meals, and that's where I learned a lot about the Jewish faith, about why these Jewish students were also protesting Israel, because they refused all these crimes that Israel is committing was basically committed in their names, and they refused that to happen.
Of course, there were, some sporadic antisemitic incidents that happened from-- mostly from individuals outside of Columbia because they felt that Columbia was, the hotspot for, for activism. but the students were very conscious of, of that, and, and they s-- I, I remember, we had a teach-in at Columbia about, I think it, it was-- I remember it was, Antisemitism 101- Mm.
just also to, to help us, understand the same way we had a lot about, anti-Blackness, and, teach-ins, and about, Palestinian and Black solidarity, Palestinian and Jewish solidarity. So these students were really, trying to learn.
you mentioned this earlier, that before your arrest, you had a job waiting for you.
Mm-hmm. And the things that come with a job, just very simple things like health insurance for you and your new young family. What do your days look like now, and how are you supporting your family?
I don't have a health insurance, neither me or my, my wife. Mm. we got Dean health insurance just, this month.
we were able to do that through the New York Health marketplace. We raised over half a million dollar to cover my, my, my legal fees and, just the emergency fees. I'm also lucky to be Represented by mostly pro bono lawyers. They have over, at, at this point, over 30 lawyers working on, on my cases, a lot of them pro bono.
so it's really I'm, I'm very grateful for this community around me, because without that support, I don't think I would be able to sustain myself and sustain this fight because it is so expensive, insanely expensive to, to have even one lawsuit. Now, I'm, I'm part of over seven lawsuits with- against the government, against Columbia, or, private actors, who made my target, my targeting possible.
so that's I think, yeah, on the personal level, my wife is a dentist. dentists thankfully get, get good, good pay in this country, but she, she can't work. she, she, she was working up until recently, but with the uncertainty that we're living right now about possible deportation at any moment, it's so difficult for her to find another job, and also it only takes, one Google search to, to learn about who she is and at a time where, we're really concerned about our safety,
Right.
There are these two realities you're, you're living. you move through the world hyper-aware. You're checking restaurant politics before you book a table. You're choosing where to sit on a subway car, and yet this same city that you live in, New York, keeps telling you that it's glad you're here. You mentioned the, the people who have been helping you.
people see you on the street and praise you. Baristas won't take your money. The government, though, is still trying to deport you while these strangers keep telling you that you belong here Which of those has more power over your sense of whether you belong?
I'm still fighting, so that tells you the answer about, of course, the kindness and the support, of course, wins.
there is a space, there is a possibility to live up to the American principles, to the American dream. otherwise, I wouldn't be fighting this fight.
You could be deported at any time. how... That, that is the, the reality of things, right? And your lawyers did tell you that there was a door. You could sign a paper.
You could leave on your own, never come back to the U.S. What keeps you fighting for this particular stake?
because if I leave and don't fight, whatever this administration said about me would be the record. the... I wouldn't be able to look Dean in the eye, my son Dean in the eye, and tell him that I gave up on the fight at a time where I consider myself one of the privileged Palestinians who, who knows that, Dean will be fed tonight, that my family wouldn't be bombed tonight by an Israeli missile, that I wouldn't be stopped at a checkpoint going to my school.
so, so I take that responsibility with so much care, that I need to fight. I shouldn't just shy away. Because, my silence wouldn't end anything. That if I leave this country, I don't think that would end much of the misery of the immigrants' family in this country, but also for the Palestinian people.
And I'm also encouraged, very encouraged, by how people have changed over these two, three years. I was so happy, to read so many letters in detention of people who did not follow Palestine or follow, any of these political questions. But, my story made them think more about it.
So that gives me, so much hope and, so much, I would say, encouragement to continue to do what I'm doing right now.
That's going to be it for today.
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On the Nose
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Current Affairs
Newshour
Democracy Now!
Citations Needed
Fresh Air
The Intercept Briefing
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