Transcription
[Music] [Music]
They have flattened Gaza entirely. There's been targeted destruction of hospitals, places of worship, and schools—just eradicating the whole place. Israel is seen as more moral than any other state in the world; the Israeli Army is the most moral in the world. The idea that Israel could perpetrate any crime in international law became basically unimaginable. Impunity for Israel is baked into the international legal system from the very beginning.
Nany wants to make it very, very clear that what Israel is doing is presenting Israel as the front lines of the battle against the Arab world, against the Muslim world. This brings up the question of the West. Part of the argument that the Arab world is making is that, oh, Israel is just the Western implant in the Muslim world. If you think about it historically, Jews in Europe were over time described as not being of Europe; they were seen as Oriental, as people who came from elsewhere, who had customs and habits and beliefs that were contrary to European civilization. Much of the impetus for Zionism is that Jews were, we say now, othered. Once they come to Palestine, they start seeing themselves—even before they come—they start imagining themselves as being representatives of the West in the Orient.
To a certain extent, they succeed in persuading the West that they are the sort of Western island in the sea of Muslims, Arabs, all these Oriental others. There is this non-Western nature of the Jew that then becomes westernized in a political, imperialist, colonialist project called Zionism. Zionism tries to reconstruct a Jewish people. It reconstructs a Jewish people because, for Israel to be the national home for the Jewish people, there has to be a Jewish people. But this notion of a Jewish people is somewhat of an artificial construct.
So what do you think about this idea of the Jewish people? What happens, I would say, in the mid-19th century, which also takes you to Zionism, is the attempt to transform the Jewish people into a Jewish nation. Most modern nations today trace themselves to stories that they tell, narratives that they weave, some of which have some historical semblance of truth and some are completely mythological. They invent a mythology—it's a myth of creation of a group. The Jews had the same kind of story that they told themselves from very early on, and people will accept that it may be a myth or may not, but they now see themselves as part of a certain unit that is distinct from all others.
If we go back to the Bible, obviously, the story of Abraham—the birth of the Jewish people is really tribal; that's the tribal root. It's the birth of a family, and over the course of history, of course, that family absorbs many other peoples within it. So obviously, the people are not all necessarily descendants from Abraham. The very notion of a people is a fiction, but it's a fiction that has certain scriptural roots and certain roots of memory.
[Music]
The stories of the Jewish people were for centuries passed down as oral history until between the 9th and 6th centuries BCE, when they were written down in the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, as the decreed word of a single Creator God. In one story, the biblical God enters into a covenant with a character named Abraham. God tells Abraham to leave his home in Mesopotamia and take his family west to the land of Canaan. Once there, he was to carry out God's work and lead a great nation. They are chosen to be God's people, and this is the land that God gave them. So the land of Canaan, which becomes the land of Israel, is really, in a certain sense, seen as the promised [Music] land. The story is told in scripture, and it doesn't really have much corroborating material outside of scripture.
They come into the land, and then they establish a kingdom basically, and they build a temple eventually in Jerusalem. The temple is destroyed; the Jews are banished. Seventy years later, they come back, they build a second temple. That temple exists for some hundreds of years; they are eventually taken over by the Roman Empire. They begin to rebel against the Romans; the insurrection is flattened, and the Jews are dispersed.
It's important to note that the Jews never all lived in the land of Israel when they're exiled the first time, and when they come back, most of the Jews stayed in Babylonia. They didn't come back to the land, but the land of Israel became the centerpiece of what became the Jewish religion. Jews dispersed across the Near East and into Europe, some through coercion, many by choice.
Just as a new religion formed by the followers of a preacher known as Jesus was set to change the course of Jewish history, Jesus's followers understood Jesus to be the long-awaited Messiah figure—the one who would bring about the end of days, when people finally get what they deserve: when the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished. Jews did not.
What Christians did was not only criticize the ways in which Jews interpreted the Bible, they began to criticize Jews themselves. The term "Jew" became a slur. You have this depiction of Judaism as the negative opposite of Christianity. You have negative depictions of Jews as those who rejected Jesus, as those who demanded that Jesus be killed, ultimately as those who killed Jesus themselves—not just slurred as Christ-killers. Jews were accused of murdering Christian children, using their blood for ceremonial rituals—the so-called blood libel.
They were made to live apart as a lesser creed, subject to violence, forced conversions, and expulsions, while being excluded from almost all professions except money lending—the work opposed by Christian morality. It was a perilous existence that often relied on the whims of kings. To the extent that Jews could choose where to live, they often gravitated toward places with powerful kings, because the king might extort money from you, might expel you, but the king would protect you from the mobs.
[Music]
As early Christian Europe defined itself in opposition to Judaism, the rise of an Islamic empire—spreading from the Middle East to Iberia in the 7th century—stirred Christendom to repurpose old scorn for a new foil. Christians othered Jews and othered Muslims. They began to define Muslims as pagans or as heretics or as Jews; it’s a slur. It's a way of criticizing those people who are your rivals, those people whose ideas you find threatening. "Don't be like the Muslims; they're Jewish."
The Islamic empire also subjected Jews, including Sephardic Jews of Muslim Spain, to a second-class status, but crucially, they were protected as dhimmis—people of the covenant. Not the equal of Muslims, but essentially free to contribute to the business, art, science, and culture of a multi-faith society.
When Spain was reconquered by Christians, Sephardic Jews, along with Muslims, were forced out of Iberia, with many resettling in Arab lands. The Jewish diaspora was broadly divided between the Sephardim, spread across North Africa and the Middle East, and the Ashkenazi, who had long been scattered in Europe. Life for Europe's Ashkenazim remained ghettoized and insecure, but as the Middle Ages gave way to modernity, new laws began to emancipate Jews from many of the restrictions they'd lived under. Times seemed to be changing.
By the 1800s, Europe's Industrial Revolution was restructuring economies and societies, offering new opportunities for Jews to succeed and progress. But making progress came at the cost of also making enemies.
There's now a new type of anti-Jewish animosity that comes under the label, created in the 1870s, of anti-Semitism. So you have a combination of thinking about Jews as those who have now become the cause of unemployment, of poverty, of lack of education, of being uprooted, and still the older imagery of Jews as demonic. Jews are seen as different.
Now, on top of this, this is a period of what is called scientific racism; that is to say, there is an idea that you can actually identify different races of man. Africans are seen as savages, as inferior; Jews are seen as a different race. But they’re not simply inferior to the Nordic, white, Germanic races; they are also subversive and dangerous to society, and they take up all those positions that give them that power. They’re conspiring to take over the world, and we may not even know that they've done it.
[Music]
In 1881, anti-Semitism fueled pogroms against Jews, scapegoated for the struggles of a fading Russian Empire. Thousands were killed, their homes and communities destroyed in riots watched over by state authorities. These pogroms kindled the belief among a small minority of Europe's Jews that the only way they could be safe from persecution was in a Jewish majority state. It was at best a fringe idea but was taken up by an Austro-Hungarian journalist by the name of Theodore Herzl.
In 1896, Herzl published a pamphlet called "Der Judenstaat" (The Jewish State). In it, Herzl argued that Jews needed a state of their own and that its most fitting location was Palestine. The idea of a Jewish state in Palestine seemed to be such an outrageous and unrealizable idea.
What does it mean for Jews who have been living in Europe for a thousand years to go and move to this area of the world that was completely underdeveloped? It didn't really have any reality to it. Traditional Jews not only didn’t think of going back to their ancestral homeland; in fact, they were not supposed to. You were supposed to come back to where you were exiled from only when the Messiah arrives, and if you go earlier than that, then you're basically going against your own theology.
This idea of Jews recreating a homeland in Palestine took on the name Zionism—a Biblical reference to the land of Israel.
Herzl's vision had little support among European Jewry, religious and secular. But Herzl wasn't appealing to his fellow European Jews as much as he was to Europe's leaders. An echo of centuries past, when seeking the king's favor was crucial to securing Jewish interests.
In "Der Judenstaat," Herzl aligned a Jewish state with Western civilization, claiming that a Jewish homeland in Palestine would serve as a sector of the wall of Europe against Asia and the outpost of civilization against barbarism. Zionism was using the racist tropes of the white Western world to dehumanize the people of the Muslim world— the same tropes Christian Europe had long used to dehumanize both Muslims and Jews—and in the process offered Europe an answer to its unresolved Jewish question.
Zionists knew that part of the success of their project was the upsurge in anti-Semitism and that, in fact, if there was no anti-Semitism, Zionism would really have no reason to exist. Herzl was going to offer a win-win situation to the anti-Semites of Europe. He said, "I have a deal for you. I can take the Jews off your hands." A lot of European leaders said, "Yeah, that sounds good; if you can solve our problem, we’ll help you solve yours."
His thinking is very European; it’s progressive nationalist colonial thinking. It's about creating a European outpost in Palestine because they are European and part of a European culture, but that European culture no longer wants [Music] them.
The pogroms had convinced hundreds of thousands of Jews to leave Eastern Europe and start new lives in the United States. But an estimated 25,000 made the move to Palestine; they were followed by a second wave of Jews fleeing more pogroms in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. They headed to a land of some half a million Arab Muslims living alongside small Christian and Jewish minorities, putting paid to the Zionist lie of a land without a people.
But new Jewish immigrants had already established their own farms and factories and built their own towns on land bought by elite Jewish families like the Rothschilds, whose banking riches helped finance a whole civic infrastructure—set apart from the Arabs.
At that point, the Arab population began to see that something bigger was going on. This was not just Jews who wanted to come to the land of Israel; there was some project; they were trying to build a society. The people coming from Europe had come with an idea to create their own Jewish communities, not simply to be part of an Ottoman [Music] society.
By 1917, with the First World War still raging, Ottoman society was on the brink of collapse. Britain, the leading world power, was itching to seize the Ottomans’ Arab lands, including Palestine. Britain's imperial greed converged with Zionist ambition, securing the support of wealthy European Jews, so the British thought, would boost their chances of victory. Once the war was won, a friendly Jewish state planted in Palestine would be a proxy for British rule and a buffer against Arab hostility. But the convergence went much deeper.
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour were both Christian Zionists. They understood the return of Jews to a Biblical homeland as a precondition for the second coming of Christ, when those who accepted Jesus as the Messiah ascended to heaven and those who didn't—most notably the Jews—were left to perish.
[Music]
Christian Zionism was a way to free Europe of Jews. So there's that kind of complicated relationship, where anti-Semitism and Zionism are working together, where Zionism is a perfect answer to that problem. And this is all coming from a colonialist mindset, where the Middle East is just like outside of civilization, like it doesn’t matter what happens there.
In November 1917, before the war had been won, Arthur Balfour issued a declaration that announced the British government's support for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, saying nothing of the Arab people already there. It doesn’t mention the Arabs. Its attempt is to say we’re going to create some kind of European-like Jewish state in Palestine where Jews can live and flourish on a portion of their historic homeland—not the entirety of their historic homeland, but a portion of their historic homeland.
Palestine was already in the process of being hived off for the growing Ashkenazi population, but now one of Zionism's leading figures, David Ben-Gurion, recognized the potential of what the Balfour Declaration promised and was quick to address those thirsting for more than just a part of Palestine.
Ben-Gurion made a very, very impassioned speech, trying to convince many, many Zionist detractors who were not in favor of partition because for them they wanted from the river to the sea. Ben-Gurion convinced them that this was the first step and that they would move on from there. This was ultimately the convincing narrative that brought most of those Zionists on board.
From that point of view, those Zionists are thinking, yes, there are people there, but we are coming to create our own national home. What will happen with the people who live there? That was to be seen.
One of the things that I wanted to also ask you about is this question of orientalism and the view of the Muslim as other. There is this division between the West and the East, the Christian world and the Arab world, and the orientalist understanding of what the Arab is—both in terms of the attractiveness and also the rejection of the stereotype of the Arab.
But how does the anti-Muslim sentiment—which goes back to the Middle Ages and Christianity versus Islam—play into the kind of Zionist project that is kind of like reviving this medieval battle between Christianity and Islam in terms of the West and the East?
Look, I mean, obviously, the view of the Orient in Europe—especially later in the United States as well—is a complex one. Europe has, as it does with Jews, a long history with Islam. This goes back to the reconquest of Spain and to such areas as Sicily, taken over by Arabs and then taken over by Normans and so forth. All of those events are sort of deeply embedded, I think, in the European memory of their own history.
Now that, of course, combines again with power politics, that Europeans can actually go and grab these territories or have power over them—which is what they do at the end of World War I. If you add to that the way the Balfour Declaration specifically speaks about the territory of Palestine itself, the fact is it does not speak about the rest of the population, which is the vast majority of the people. It only refers to the Jews as those who have particular rights.
Zionism says, well, we can self-determine as a nation. So once they move to that land with that ethnonational ideology, they speak directly, completely openly and proudly of colonization. They call themselves colonizers. And that process creates what is functionally a settler colonial process, and they get exactly the response that one can expect by competing over land with the people who live there.
They create their own position; it is, in that sense, a profoundly dialectical process. I wanted to just bring up a sketch of the Jewish immigration to Palestine, the land of Israel, from the mid-19th century on. There's a community of Jews who are living mostly in Jerusalem and other places that are referred to as the old settlement Jews. These are Jews that are mostly traditional. They have come to the land of Israel from some of them from the early 18th century and were not Zionists—in fact, they were the core of the anti-Zionists and were very opposed to the Zionists coming in the 20th century—and for the most part lived in pretty good company with the majority Arab population.
It’s really the second immigration, from 1904 to the First World War, that’s considered to be the first real Zionist immigration. Over 50% of them went back to Europe within five years; it wasn’t really a successful immigration. Now, these were the people who were building colonies; these were the people who were building what later became much of the settlement of that period.
This settlement was funded by Jewish millionaires in Europe who were assisting those early colonizers to build colonies—colonies which were based on the idea that the Jews who immigrated would run them, and they would have workers working them there, and those workers would be locals, would be Arabs.
The second aliyah, the second immigration, are the people who come already, as you say, with more of an idealistic view of the kind of society they’re going to create. That group is deeply critical of the first group precisely for issues of labor, because those early colonies, as I said, used Arab labor to produce on their own agricultural colonies. This new group that comes in starts speaking about the conquest of labor—that is, the part of the Zionist undertaking is both to take over work and take over land. In the process of doing that, they transform themselves and become workers of the land.
There is a growing realization within the Arab population that there’s a group now that is beginning to establish cities, establish communities, take over land, and that brings about resistance. The Allies’ victory in the First World War granted Britain a mandate to administer the lands of Palestine and Transjordan—territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire.
The mandate was an instrument for imperial rule, and at its heart was the Balfour Declaration's commitment to creating a Jewish home in Palestine. In the early 1920s, Britain sanctioned the resettlement of thousands more Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. Palestine was dotted with new Jewish towns with separate economies that excluded indigenous Arabs, who forcibly resisted what they recognized as brazen colonization. Clashes between Jewish immigrants and Arabs became more intense as the Zionist project acquired new territory for a new Jewish state—one that would be home to a whole new Jew.
The new Jew was the “sabra,” muscular, secular, and Kadoorie, and that was basically offering a revolutionary revision of the entire tradition to create a kind of nationalistic Jew of [Music] power. They wanted to create the kind of Jew who could escape the degradation that built up over 2,000 years of exile from their land. The Western idea of masculinity was something that was deeply influential in rebuilding the new Jewish personality.
Now, on the other side—and this is somewhat ironic—the Arab, portrayed as being feminine, becomes a feminization of the Orient for the purposes of domination. The Arab, in the Zionist imagination, becomes what the Jew was in the Christian European imagination. The Zionist leadership, headed by David Ben-Gurion, clung to the delusion that Palestinians still might welcome a Jewish state, despite increasingly fierce resistance.
But there was a more realistic vision. In a 1923 essay called "The Iron Wall," Ben-Gurion's political rival, Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, recognized the reality of Zionism for the people of Palestine. Zionism manifested itself in the settler colonial project—that is, to take the land of an indigenous group, in this case, Palestinians, and build a different society on it, in this case a Jewish society, but really, actually, a white settler Jewish society.
Jabotinsky asked, "Do you know of any indigenous group in the world that accepted a colonial movement?" The answer is, of course not. Jabotinsky became the head of the alternative, the revisionist Zionist movement. He said, "We all know that the Arabs will not accept us here," and his idea is that they will have to do it by force.
They will have to build an iron wall; they will have to show that they cannot be removed. Jabotinsky believed that eventually the Palestinians would give up and would accept a reality that they cannot change, and at that point, they can be welcomed and accepted as individuals with full and equal citizenship rights. But they will not have national rights within a Jewish state in Palestine. For Jabotinsky, that wasn’t simply the river to the sea; he wanted to see a Jewish state in the entirety of the original British Mandate of Palestine.
He felt that this was going to require a sense of this new Jewish personality that would not be the defenseless Jew, but really the Jew of power. This was the policy that was adopted—the policy of force. In 1939, Zionist militias collaborating with British troops used brute force to help put down an Arab uprising.
Jews in Palestine were gaining strength just as Jews in Europe faced devastation. The Second World War revealed the true horrors of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler's monstrous anti-Semitism, steeped in the fallacies of racial science and conspiracy theories about Jewish power, was to claim the lives of six million Jews.
[Music]
At the end of World War II, there were hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews in Europe with nowhere to go. They could not go to the United States; they could not go to Great Britain. Another way to put it is, when Western powers encouraged the creation of a Jewish state, they didn’t have to take in the immigrants themselves.
Europe's unwanted Ashkenazi Jews were occupying more and more of Palestine that was now nearing the end of British rule. But its fate remained in the hands of Western power.
At Flushing, Long Island, the General Assembly of the United Nations has made its decision on Palestine. The map shows what partition means: the Jewish state colored light, the Arab state dark; Jaffa to go to the Arabs, Jerusalem internationalized.
The 1947 United Nations partition plan was skewed in favor of the 630,000 Jews living in Palestine, handing them more than half of the land while leaving 1.4 million Arabs with the lesser share. The resolution was adopted by 33 votes, 13 against, 10 abstentions.
The Jewish people at once began to celebrate the United Nations decision. The Arab reaction was to follow. Palestine's Arabs resisted the UN plan that formalized Zionist colonization. Fighting between Arabs and Jews was a commonplace occurrence, and there were many casualties on both sides.
In the midst of intense Arab resistance, the Zionist paramilitary group Haganah began clearing the way for a new Jewish state. They launched an operation in April of 1948, opening the axis of transportation, and they did that by attacking villages. Their policy, by and large, was to empty those villages. They did that by intimidation; they did that by force; they did that by killing.
In one of those cases, there was the notorious case of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem. It was a massacre; women and children were killed there, and news of that massacre traveled quickly to other Palestinian villages. People were terrified, and so there were also large numbers of Palestinians who fled from their villages whenever they heard a rumor that Jewish forces were on the way, because they were afraid of massacres.
On the 14th of May 1948, at the official end of the British mandate, David Ben-Gurion declared the birth of the independent Jewish state of Israel. The death and destruction and forced dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians in the creation of Israel would be known as Al-Nakba, "the catastrophe." Nakba denial becomes a foundational issue in Israel, of course, but also in the West.
It's very important to understand the origin. In 1948, we have the Genocide Convention. The immediate background of the Genocide Convention, of course, is the Holocaust. The Nazi assault against Jews is perceived as a unique phenomenon. In order to detach Nazi Germany and Nazism and the Nazi assault on Jews from colonial genocide, what this does is create a hierarchy meaning that what we now call the Holocaust is perceived as worse and more terrible than genocide.
But this also creates another hierarchy because Israel, which emerges as the state of Holocaust survivors, is immediately placed as more moral than any other state in the world. This is the origin of this idea that the Israeli Army is the most moral in the world. So from the very beginning, we have these kinds of what really are Jewish supremacist ideas that meant that the idea that Israel could perpetrate any crime in international law, not to mention genocide, became basically unimaginable.
This, of course, immediately necessitated Nakba denial. Nakba denial, therefore, becomes a structural element of the post-war international legal system. It means that impunity for Israel is baked into the international legal system from the very [Music] beginning.
The beginning of Israel triggered an immediate war with its Arab neighbors. When a UN-brokered ceasefire brought fighting to an end, Israel had gained control of 78% of historic Palestine. What remained for the Palestinians was split in two: the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with Jerusalem divided between an Arab East and an Israeli West.
The Nakba had vanquished the vast majority of Palestine's Arabs and stripped them of any right to return to their homes. A minority remained in the new expanded state of Israel: full citizens of a country that saw itself as morally superior and saw them as a racially inferior enemy within.
But Israel's new Labor government needed a new labor force—new people to do the essential manual jobs unattractive to many European Ashkenazi—and so it turned to the Sephardic Jews in the Arab world. Those Jews that were living in Arab countries generally were not Zionists; Zionism was really a European phenomenon, but their lives were now in danger in many cases. There is a particular case of AOG against Jews in Baghdad, but there were also attempts by the Zionists to incite anti-Jewish sentiment in Iraq so as to persuade people to leave.
But when those populations arrived, they were seen by much of the Jewish European population as Arabs, and the Arabs, of course, were the enemy. They were called the "Mizrahi," the Jews from the East, and they were being used as media labor. The Ashkenazi Jewish elites regarded Mizrahi as less than, as inferior, as uneducated—their seen as not fully Jewish; they’re not fully civilized. The rhetoric is to civilize them. It is a de-Arabization that meant to Europeanize them, which meant to Zionize them.
What actually happens is that many of those immigrants become basically a second-class group within Israeli society. Israel was building racial inequalities into its new society, but its existence in the Middle East remained precarious, surrounded by hostile enemies.
Israel, like Jews in the Middle Ages, was looking for the support of a powerful ruler. In the middle of the 20th century, the United States of America was the most powerful nation on Earth and looking to assert itself in a cold war with the Soviet Union. Its communist enemies—an important way of asserting how different we in America are from those godless communists—is that we are religious and that we value our religious heritage under this broader umbrella of Judeo-Christian.
By saying "Judeo-Christian," we embrace all people who have inherited this Western religious tradition and that we accept Jews under this umbrella too, because they share the same basic starting culture—religious culture.
Israel's early years coincided with America's opportunistic embrace of a contrived Judeo-Christian identity that conveniently whitewashed America's own anti-Semitism by folding Jews into white Western civilization. There is no way to understand that embrace without understanding the symbiotic relationship between the embrace of Israelis as Westerners, as Judeo-Christians, as white, and the rejection of Arabs and Muslims as different, as other, as outside of our sphere.
An inescapable conclusion is that Jews and Israelis came to be seen as insiders, as people who were like other Americans and like the United States. The United States gathered Israel into its fold just as events were about to bring the two countries even closer together.
In 1967, Israeli air strikes triggered an all-out war with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The Arab armies were defeated in just six days. There's a certain kind of pride in that victory and a certain sense of invincibility. The Jews go from being the disempowered, weak victims of the Holocaust to being almost like a superpower.
But the dark side is that this is also the beginning of the occupation. Israel captures all of historic Palestine and beyond, which includes the Gaza Strip, and the area of most interest for settlers is the West Bank. This is the beginning of the settlement of the occupied territories.
If we think about Jabotinsky, that was the Iron Wall; Israel said we are here, we can defeat you now is the time to finally reach a final arrangement. But with the tasting comes the appetite, and Israel does not do that. A new movement is created: the idea of a greater Israel—a greater Israel meant the whole of historic Palestine and possibly beyond.
An overwhelming military victory proved Israel's strength to its Arab enemies and proved to the United States that it could be a useful proxy in a region vital to American interests. 1967 helps to usher in this idea of a military alliance. Israel became the Western democracy that was connected to these global powers in terms of interests that had to do with everything from oil to labor to technology.
Israel became the American footprint in the Middle East. I would say, on this invention of the Judeo-Christian universe, the Judeo-Christian ideology within the European context—and you can talk more about the American one—it is completely a creature of the post-World War II, post-Holocaust attitude of Europeans toward what happened in Europe during the Holocaust and then rethinking the tradition—centuries of European anti-Jewish animosity and anti-Semitism.
That is that Christianity, as a religion, played a role in depicting Jews as outside of our moral universe. When you try to apply that to attitudes toward Israel, it becomes very interesting because Israel, in a sense, is the answer to the problem that Christian Europe now plays a role in creating—a Jewish state—and therefore fulfilling its moral obligation to the Jews that it had betrayed during the Holocaust.
In a sense, it's inverting anti-Jewish attitudes into an invention of this kind of moral universe where we are all on the same page; we always were, but we have this burden of guilt about the anti-Jewish attitudes that had led to the Holocaust.
I think, in the American case, it's somewhat different. I think it is different. You have something called the Tri-Faith America movement in the 1930s, where you had—I can’t remember their names— a priest, a pastor, and a rabbi going around the country preaching coexistence between Judaism, Christianity, and Catholicism or Protestantism, which is an interesting again play, given the fact that the Jews make up a tiny percentage of the population. They’re included in that Tri-Faith America.
The Judeo-Christian tradition, really, in a certain sense—and here I'm very influenced by this essay in 1969 by Arthur Cohen called "The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition"—basically demonstrates that the Judeo-Christian tradition really means the Christian tradition and that the Jew is already Latinized and-Christianized in its articulation.
They just become subsumed in Christianity. So, with an expression of generosity, it’s actually another form of supersessionism. However, it's now ubiquitous in the halls of Congress. People will get up and talk about the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Post-9/11, it really has taken on a vehemence of an anti-Muslim tradition. That is to say, the Judeo-Christian tradition becomes a weapon against Islam.
I don't think it's a very provocative thing to say that Israel changes after 1967. The Six-Day War is over; Israel increases its territory by about one-third. Not only increases its territory, but now has dominion over populations in the Gaza Strip, which is Egypt; the West Bank, which was Jordan; and the Golan Heights, which was Syria.
It was first seen as the liberation of territories and then becomes the occupation. They can't easily annex the territories to become part of the state because then the Jewish majority—which is kind of the rationale of Zionism—would be undermined. They get involved in a situation that seems to me to be one where nobody really has a plan.
What becomes a settler movement, however, does have a plan, and the plan is kind of Greater Israel, territorial maximalism. This is seen as something messianic. Palestinians were now considered to be, ironically, as in Europe, the Jews were considered to be the enemy within; the Palestinians are now considered to be the enemy within the trajectory of Israeli policies.
Not just policies but Israeli aspirations of returning to the historic lands of where the Israelites were. They weren’t living in Tel Aviv; they were living in Nablus; they were living in Hebron; they had conquered Jericho, and suddenly all these places are under Israeli rule. The trajectory is: how do we keep it?
Israel wants the territories; its problem is what to do with the people living in them. Another thing that happens after '67, which is on the sort of geopolitical level, is that after '67, the United States sees that Israel is a potent military power, and it starts investing in that.
The third thing that I would mention: Israel changes; the country itself changes. It becomes a much more cosmopolitan society. It opens up to the West; people travel more; there’s more media coming in; it opens up to the world; and at the same time, it increasingly becomes a country much of whose existence is managing an occupation.
So it becomes a society that, on the one hand, is increasingly modernized, open, and cosmopolitan, and less conservative. At the same time, it is preoccupied with how do you hold down half of the population under your control.
[Music]
Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War brought with it a military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. But instead of being condemned, Israel consolidated its place within Western power, with Jews embraced as part of a white Judeo-Christian world order.
The United States increased its military and economic aid to Israel to unprecedented levels while turning a blind eye to the plight of Palestinians—the people outside of the white Western fold. An armed struggle against the occupation now grew more intense.
A vicious act of sabotage, which killed 11 people in a Jewish market in Jerusalem, political violence against Israel by groups such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization was avenged by the Israeli state through assassinations and more repression in the occupied territories.
Then, in October 1973, on the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur, a coalition led by Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack. The Arab armies made shockingly early gains against an Israeli military that would eventually reclaim the upper [Music] hand.
But Israel's initial failures were damning; its sense of invincibility now lost. The Labor Prime Minister Golda Meir resigned. Three years later, in 1977, the Likud Party, headed by Menachem Begin—once the leader of a Jewish terror group—was elected to power for the first time.
Israel had a right-wing party in government with an avowed disciple of the hard-right ideologue Ze'ev Jabotinsky as Prime Minister. But Begin's rise wasn’t just rooted in the failings of the 1973 War; it was fueled by the rage of Israel's Arab Jews—the followers of the Revisionists.
That's the party that was established by Ze'ev Jabotinsky and is now, in 1977, led by Begin. The people who elect him are the Mizrahi, the people, or the children of the people who came from North Africa and the Middle East—the people who had deep hatred for the Ashkenazi establishment; the ongoing resentment of how they were treated as second-class citizens, how they were treated like Arabs.
[Music]
Israel's Labor Party, made up of an Ashkenazi elite, had purged Mizrahi of their Arab heritage, reinforcing the racist idea of Arabs as inferior, worthy only of contempt, while treating Mizrahi as a Jewish underclass.
The Likud party itself, dominated by Ashkenazi leaders, stoked Mizrahi disaffection with Labor's elites while stirring hostility against Palestinian Arabs. But a new radical figure was about to turn Arab hatred into a political movement too extreme even for Begin's right-wing government. His name was Meir Kahane.
The JDL in Israel has made it quite clear that it is ready, willing, and quite able to go and kill Arab terrorists. Meir Kahane is an American-born rabbi who immigrated to Israel, and he begins to build a political party that becomes known as the Kach Party. Very, very militant, very Jabotinsky-like.
Then, in 1984, he wins one seat in the Knesset, and this is really a shock to the Israeli political system because Kahane is advocating transferring the Arabs out, making them worse than second-class citizens.
"Any Arab who is ready to live here as a non-citizen with his personal rights and not his national rights can stay here, and any Arab who is not and who looks forward to that day when Israel will become Palestine must leave. That’s not racism, that’s common sense."
There is a certain kind of hatred and anger and militancy against Arabs that is, even for the political right in Israel, frightening. There is no such thing as Jewish terror; there is Jewish vengeance, perhaps.
His rhetoric taps on to a sense of insecurity, of disorder again, latching onto people who are Mizrahi to drive his point home. It is a politics of resentment and of rage. "I am going to the Arab village of Um al-Fahm, a nest of vipers and snakes, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, and I’m going to walk through those streets just like our ancestors walked through the streets of Jewish cities, and I’m going to say Kahane is here, and you’ll be leaving soon."
They also feel motivated to use violence because the regime itself is using violence. Meir Kahane and his followers, many of whom were Mizrahi, carried out deadly attacks on Arab targets. Where the Israeli state strove to deny its violence against Arabs, Kahane openly celebrated it.
In 1988, his Kach Party would be outlawed as a racist terror group; he was subsequently assassinated in America some years later, but his influence continues to grow among some of the radical factions of the settler movement. In 1994, an American-Israeli opened fire on Palestinian worshippers at a West Bank mosque; 29 people were shot dead.
The following year, a Mizrahi Jew shot and killed Israel’s then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Both killers opposed the 1993 Oslo Accords; both opposed the possibility of a Palestinian state. Both were devoted followers of Meir Kahane.
Meir Kahane was himself a devotee of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the architect of the Iron Wall doctrine and the ideological godfather of another Likud leader. In 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu would become Israel's youngest-ever Prime Minister.
Netanyahu was steeped in Jabotinsky's ideas of forcing Palestinians into submission and in the ideal of a greater Israel that swallowed all of Palestine. This was the ideology that Netanyahu shared with the extreme right—the same ideology that had dictated Zionist policy since the early 20th century.
The policy of all Israeli governments, Labor or Likud, left or right, since Israel's creation has been one of total conquest—of absolute force. Force was used to beat down the first and second intifadas, the Palestinian uprisings against an illegal occupation.
Force was used to collectively punish Palestinians for attacks by the military wing of Hamas, the group Gaza elected to power. Force was the hundred-year policy, hidden in plain sight, and all the while, Israel forced through its settlement building, expanding its footprint in the West Bank, laying waste to the possibility of any viable Palestinian state.
It was Jabotinsky's Iron Wall made real, and its consequences would be shocking.
[Music] [Music]
Within hours, the scales of the attack were unfathomable. October 7th was a state in collapse and a military that failed miserably in protecting Israeli citizens. The whole project of Zionism was to prevent this from happening.
If you keep people caged for decades, you’re brutalizing yourself and you’re brutalizing them, and what can you expect will happen? They will respond. There will be massacres, as Jabotinsky said about the Arabs in the Iron Wall—subjugated people will rebel one way or another.
[Music]
The Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, against Israel resulted in the death of an estimated 1,200 people. Israel's response was an all-out war on the Gaza Strip.
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed the words of Zionism's founding figure Theodore Herzl as he reached for Judeo-Christian solidarity in Europe and the United States. "This is not a clash of civilizations; it's a clash between barbarism and civilization."
The response was unequivocal: you know who must make sure that they have what they need to protect their people today and always. There is a necessity to continue to support Israel unconditionally, to send even more weapons to Israel, to stand behind Israel even more.
What we're seeing here is the Western identity and how if we need to really come to terms with Israel, we need to come to terms with Israeli genocide, which is a continuation of the Nakba. Then we need to think about settler colonialism at the heart of the international political and legal system after World War Two.
This means that we also need to come to terms with settler colonialism in the U.S. and in the West. Who wants to do that? But we can't understand that without thinking about what sits at the heart of settler colonialism—that is, white supremacy.
In Israel, white supremacy manifests itself as Jewish supremacy. One could make the argument that it's a settler government at this point and that the ideology of greater Israel in the movement becomes the government itself, which is why Nany is very open in saying there will never be a Palestinian state.
Israel has flattened Gaza entirely. There's been targeted destruction of universities, of hospitals, of places of worship, of schools—parliament. Just eradicating the whole place, making it impossible for them to come back because there's nothing to come back [Music] to. They've clearly been war crimes—crimes against humanity—and there won't be any other way to call it but a genocidal campaign to destroy the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Meanwhile, in the West Bank, under the leadership of the two extremist ministers—Smotrich, who is not only Minister of Finance but also Minister within the Ministry of Defense, and Ben Gvir, who is the Minister of Internal Security and Police—there is a creeping ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.
Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government is propped up by right-wing fanatics like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Netanyahu has continued the Likud strategy of appealing to far-right elements among Israel's Mizrahi for support, but is beholden to the extremists to keep him in power and out of prison as he fights charges of alleged corruption.
Unlike Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir are religious Zionists, disciples of Meir Kahane, but all three share a devotion to Ze'ev Jabotinsky and a commitment to his vision of an expanded greater Israel.
While our eyes are set on Gaza, what's going on in the West Bank is as alarming. You have these settler militias that are armed—there's no police, there's no law enforcement. All the red lights are flashing because when you have these groups that are weaponized, that’s a recipe for atrocities.
In extreme cases, such as the Hilltop Youth, these are the kids that feel that they're reacting to some sort of a crazy biblical story as if they are just shepherds in the hills of Judea, ignoring the fact that behind the Jewish settler there’s a tank and an [Music] F-16.
In the 1920s, when the Zionists first came and started thinking about a state project, there was a term called the "Arab Question." How are we going to integrate this population? Or can we integrate this population into this state idea?
In some very horrific ways, October 7th is like the Arab question coming and smashing the country over the head.
In some sense, how do you see October 7th within the larger history of this whole Zionist project from the 20th century?
Look, I mean, from the sort of Zionist and Israeli point of view, the Arab question is not the issue. The issue is the Jewish question, and Zionism was created; it claimed to solve the Jewish question. That’s its project.
The Arab question is a footnote to resolving the Jewish question. So over all those years of Israeli occupation from '67 to the present, one has to understand that a secular mentality in Israel had developed—not only that you can manage the occupation, but also that the people we are occupying, we don’t see them.
They’re on the other side of the fence; they basically have undergone social death—they are removed from their jobs, from their homes, and so forth, and people just didn’t see them anymore.
If you don’t see people, then you stop thinking of them as being human beings such as yourself. They don’t want to solve the Arab question; they want the question to go away—hopefully by a miracle that the Arabs will just disappear.
That it won’t be only in Gaza but, as is now being implemented, also in the West Bank. One way of making the problem go away is you make Gaza uninhabitable and the people go someplace else. But of course, other countries are not willing to take millions of traumatized people, just like countries weren't willing to take the millions of traumatized Jews after the Second World War.
So, you know, I want to take us back to the beginning and the beginning of Zionism, actually, which was a response to real oppression, discrimination, and persecution. Nowadays, when you say that Palestinians are fighting against oppression, you don’t have to condone mass murder by Hamas, but you can say, actually, I think you must say, that resistance to oppression is moral; it’s also legal by international law.
But when you say that, you are called anti-Semitic, and that to me is turning everything on its head. Because you have to remember that, in order to liberate yourself from oppression, you have to resist. The oppressor will never stop oppressing you unless you resist them.
The state of Israel was an answer to centuries of Jewish persecution, but Zionism's leaders, from Theodore Herzl to Benjamin Netanyahu, understood that a Jewish state in Palestine meant the removal of those already there— the Arab [Music] Palestinians.
So Gaza is destroyed, thousands of Palestinian children killed, and Lebanon bombed as Israel's war attempts to draw in the wider region and possibly further beyond. The world continues to support a genocide, but something is beginning to shift.
The legal institutions set up after the Second World War to serve the new U.S.-led world order—institutions that have long denied Palestinians justice—might at last be standing up for the Palestinian people.
I have reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Galant bear criminal responsibility for the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population, as well as crimes against humanity of extermination and/or murder.
Because genocide indeed is so clear, and because impunity originally is tied to the crime of genocide as it emerged, now we start seeing the cracks in Israeli impunity. That’s related to the case against Israel in the International Court of Justice; it’s related to requests for arrest warrants by the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan.
This is an accident of the system; this was never supposed to happen, but it is happening. It speaks to other ways in which the international legal system has, of course, failed so many people around the world—primarily in the global South.
What we’re seeing now is such an unprecedented moment that it’s very difficult to say what might happen, but there is potential for a significant change in the international legal system. There are broader implications; we can think about dozens of millions of forcibly displaced refugee people around the world.
This is why the global South has rallied around the case of Gaza, because people in the global South, who know very well that they've been discarded by this international political and legal system, they see the potential here for transformation, for change—that’s not only about Israel and Gaza, but through Israel and Gaza it can happen.
But the forces pushing back are incredibly powerful.
[Music]