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- [00:05]
A
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of Ask Khaliv. Anything coming to you from the road from Bergen, Norway. I'm here with Adam Lewis Klein, who is a scholar, PhD candidate at McGill University, did his BA at Yale in philosophy and has written almost even just at the social media level. Just really fascinating, thoughtful and consistently fascinating and thoughtful opinions about everything that's happening today. That makes a lot of people I know, especially in diaspora Jewish communities, very nervous. The rise in anti Zionism, the rise in all kinds of new old anti Semitic views, the laundering of it all, the sort of everyone getting used to the crazy. The idea that elite institutions and elite discourse can be bigoted against certain groups, can be prejudiced against certain groups, that there's a righteousness to the idea that we have to go after some people, not others. All of that stuff we're going to tackle today and I really appreciate that Adam is here with me. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by the Jewish Community of Minnesota, who asked me to say that this community, they call themselves the Frozen Chosen. Because folks, if the joke is available, you don't leave it on the ground, you pick it up. The Frozen Chosen are this wonderful, sweet community. I gave a talk there last year. There's nobody more welcoming than the American Midwest. The colder it is, the nicer the people. But they have not just sponsored this episode. They've done something that's become a really beautiful tradition in this community basically that has developed which is to dedicate this episode to someone we lost on October 7. And in their case, it's someone that they know well and love very much. Noy Maudi, Israeli American dual citizen who taught in the Minnesota Jewish community for five years. And he was 29, from the Southern town of Yeted in Israel. He was murdered on October 7th along with many others of his family, including his nephew and his brother in law at a music festival near Kibbutz Narim. Noi loved teaching, he loved music, he loved Shabbat dinners. He was known as friendly and peace loving. He had a very close and tight knit family and many, many friends. And he actually was a beloved teacher, Hebrew teacher at the Talmudura of St. Paul, Minnesota from 2015 to 2021. So in Minnesota there there are many young people who learn their Hebrew from from this young teacher. His colleagues treasured him and considered him a wonderful teacher, full of creativity and enthusiasm. He leaves behind his students, his family, his colleagues who carry his legacy and are grateful that they have the chance to share their lives with him. He survived by parents Tamar and Shimon, siblings Sapir, Chani and Sivan, ex wife Sophia and many, many nieces and nephews. Thank you so much to the Frozen chosen for that very, very poignant and powerful dedication. Adam, thank you for joining me. The goal of this podcast is to crack open windows into things that we don't often see or that are hard to see or that are hard to understand. Some of the times the things that worry us the most are things that we we understand. The I'll say it differently. I think it's in the introduction to one of Charles Taylor's books, who is a famous important Canadian Catholic philosopher. He writes that the things we talk about the most can be the things that confuse us the most. Talking about them all the time makes us feel like we've somehow sorted through them, penetrated them. But in fact we talk through our confusion again and again and again and don't cut through. And reading you at, I apologize, a shallow level. I haven't read your PhD which you're now working on. What is your PhD about?
- [04:28]
B
So my PhD is something that first sight seems unrelated, but turns out to actually be quite connected. So I went to the Amazon to study with the Dishona people and learn about their relationship with Christian missionaries and how the Bible has been translated into their language. While I was there, I came to understand more and more about the Dishones own understanding of themselves as a people, as a kind of chosen people, and as having their own destiny. And so when I came back to academia right after October 7th, I was in a small town in the Amazon and I had had no Internet or phone service for months. And October 7th was the first thing I saw people fleeing from the Nova Festival. I realized that what I had been doing with the Tasana, trying to work with them to articulate their own unique history and destiny in the face of erasure, was actually what was happening in academia to my own people. And then that made me rethink what it means to be a part of a people and to put a peoplehood actually at the center of one's thinking. And why in academia today that seems impossible. And so the work that I'm doing, I try and make it not only about critiquing anti Zionism, but also trying to speak from a Jewish place as a place that's a legitimate voice to develop new theories and new ways of understanding the world in the academic context, which currently is made impossible by institutionalized anti Zionism.
- [05:54]
A
Tell me a little bit more about that. The dishonored people, what is happening to them? When you draw that parallel to what is happening to Jews, certainly in elite discourse, but in this entire intellectual world and ideological world, how do, how do you see that parallel? What, what, what are the dishonored people going through?
- [06:09]
B
So the dishonored people have undergone a lot of forced assimilation. You know, first of all, it was the Catholic Church that came in, it reorganized their societies. They used to live in a communal longhouse that nucleated them into monogamous households and sent the kids to boarding schools and tried to force them to speak other languages. It's very similar to how native people were treated in Canada, for example. And so that is, this isn't when.
- [06:37]
A
This is present day Brazil and Colombia over the last century, over the last year.
- [06:43]
B
Yeah. So the Catholics arrived in the vopes region in 1914, and then later that was the Monfortians, and then later was the Havarians who arrived and continued the project. Later there were evangelical missionaries, and the evangelicals were the ones who translated the Bible. So what they have undergone is colonialism. So colonialism is these processes of forced assimilation where you try and annihilate other people's identities, whether that's through genocide, which means physically exterminating people, or through trying to destroy their own distinctness. And so when I came back to academia, that is what I saw. I saw that Zionism really is just a cipher in many ways. I think many Jews feel this way, that it's just a cipher for saying peoplehood, that Jews are a people and our peoplehood has always been connected to Israel. Sure, we might have been in the Diaspora for a long time. Sure, some people might have thought that theologically you couldn't return to Israel. But Zionism, it just means we're a people. And I think ultimately that is what is being attacked in anti Zionism. It's our right to exist as a distinction people. And so that's why also they say we're just white, etc. We don't have any culture, we're fake. They're trying to force us to assimilate, they're trying to force us to disappear because they see us as a threat to their civilization.
- [08:11]
A
And why do they see us as a threat? And maybe this is a good way to get into what is anti Semitism, what is anti Zionism? Why do they see us as a threat?
- [08:21]
B
That's a good question. I mean, I could go back to the theological issues, but I think also that we have our own moral value system that's not identical to Christianity, for example. I don't think we fetishize powerlessness in the same way. I think we also scramble their categories. We're kind of a impossible point, let's say, within their systems categories, especially for a society that's so based on racial opposition, particularly around white people and black people. They don't really know how to categorize us because as a kind of ethno religious group, we don't fit into religion and ethnicity. And when we don't fit in that way, we're not legible really as to what kind of people we are. And whenever I think we confront things that don't fit into our categories that can feel threatening, I'm going to start.
- [09:13]
A
By throwing at you extremely simple baseline questions. Now, you and I know in this business those are the worst questions. If someone comes to you and says to you, what is anti Semitism? That's a much harder question to answer than, you know, what specifically does St. Augustine say about the Jews? Right? That's a very easy question to answer, but I think that it'll frame the conversation for us and then we'll dive into it and try and sort some of these things out, build out a vocabulary, help people to handle this moment and also to understand what it is that worries us. What is anti Semitism? ADAM LOUIS Klein so I would say.
- [09:53]
B
Anti Semitism can be boiled down to basically one thing, actually, and it's such a simple operation with such far ranging consequences. And I would say that that thing is libel, essentially. So how does libel work? The whole point of libel is to exploit a basic, almost metaphysical fact about making a statement about anything. So if I make a statement about something, the fact that I've made that statement raises the possibility that it's true, right? As long as there's minimal plausibility to that statement. So when you want to construct another group of people as sort of inherently under suspicion, you don't actually have to prove the things you're saying about them are true. You just have to raise the possibility that they're true. Because as long as it's possible that the things you're saying are true about this people, then this people is under suspicion. And as long as it's just plausible enough, other people will be able to spread this libel and repeat it until that group of people looks as shady and suspicious and negative as possible. And I think it's a really simple and profound mechanism with immense consequences.
- [11:13]
A
So this is sort of the classic and, you know, you bring into libel or slander or this is the Classic sort of, how long have you been beating your wife? Right. Now go explain that you aren't married. Right. Or things like. Like you start with the accusation and then you've already won. Like, then we're just right. Sartre once said that the anti Semite does not say lies about Jews in order to debate the Jew. The anti Semite says lies about Jews just to watch the Jew turn out his pockets and try to prove that he isn't the thief. Right. So it's a kind of abuse. So I want to just double down on the first question, which is, then why the Jews? This is something that people will use against their enemies. It's almost a natural human instinct. You hate somebody, you start with the slander, you know, take it from there. Why are the Jews so important as a conversation? I mean, I'll just say the thing that it's tired, it's annoying, it's in some ways also sometimes true, sometimes not true, but nevertheless, the international discourse is so utterly obsessed with Israel. I was talking with an American journalist who spent some years in Sweden, and he says, you know, and he says to me that in America, when he says to a lot of journalists, why are you so focused on Israel and not on China, Yemen, Congo? Places where if 40,000 children in the Congo are basically enslaved in cobalt mines and the cobalt is used for American iPhones, like for the cell phones that Americans walk around in, why is that never part of the American debate? Why do the systems that create knowledge in American society not care about that? Why is Israel so fascinating and Gaza so much more important? Now, this is not at all exonerating Israel of anything. It's not a useful argument for Israelis, but it is a question that's worth asking for Western societies. Why are Jews so fascinating? So if we have this strange fascination with the Jews, why specifically the Jews? Do you have a specific understanding of that or how do you see it?
- [13:20]
B
So of course, I think there's the theological basis, which is kind of a deep structure of Western civilization and arguably of Islamic civilization as well. In the Western story, the Jews are made to play a particular symbolic role, obviously as the killers of Jesus, also as the chosen people who renounced their own salvation. And I think when you construct your whole metaphysic, your whole cosmic story in a way that another group of people has to play a certain role. You're already in that dangerous space of dehumanization, because what matters is not the people themselves, it's the role you're constructing. And so we see across history, then that there's a need to continue to reconstruct the Jews in that role, regardless of the ideology that we're in at a particular time in history. So I think David Nuremberg, his book on anti Judaism, understood this really precisely, that the Jew basically comes to signify the antithesis of whatever is valued at a particular time. So in Christianity, obviously it's the killing of Jesus. But when we see the emergence of nationalist and romantic movements in the 19th century, for example, then Jews are seen as sort of inherently outside of national spirit or Geist or the German values in this context. And now what we see today is in the post colonial leftist context, Jews are now constructed as the arch colonizer or the arch white colonist. So what's stunning about antisemitism, I think, is how much range you can get out of just this formal operation. You know, it's a Manichaean kind of game in which you construct the Jew as the opposite of what's good. But I think coming back also to the question of libel, the fact that Jews are such a small minority is also part of what gives libel its force and why the Jews really matter here. Because what libel does is it grants you a certain power just by repeating it and joining with a. With a herd mentality. So by repeating and circulating this libel, you're sort of granting the majority a sort of force and power and demagoguery over a minority group. So I think those two things come together. The theology that positions the Jew as a negative symbol and the power of libel to enforce power to the masses and galvanize people.
- [16:02]
A
I have a book of essays on my shelf called Jews and Orientalism, edited by Derek Penslar from Harvard, I believe. And one other person, I forget the name, apologies to whoever it is. And the introduction is short, sweet, and to me was very fascinating because they argue there that Edward Said made an argument essentially like yours, but about the east, the Oriental east in the European imagination. And he said the Europeans a piece of Orientalism. Of his argument about Orientalism that kind of took over the Middle East Studies institutes of America and the West. He says the European west constructed its sense of self by projecting the opposite of itself onto the East. And so where the European west thought of itself as rational, we're Talking about the 19th century and scientific advances and the middle sort of triumph of the middle class. Where the European west thought itself is rational, masculine, you know, I don't know what hard working. If you were going to, you know, coffee houses, everyone has to drink coffee and go work hard. The east must therefore be lazy and irrational and the opposite of whatever the west was. And what's fascinating about this book of essays, and some of these essays are really wonderful, and some of them I kind of skimmed and got less out of, but that it's an examination of that very mechanism on Jews. In other words, where did Europe learn to project itself? It's, you know, anything bad that wasn't it, that it wanted to define itself as the opposite of onto the east, on the. On the Jews that were called the Oriental people for centuries by European Christians. And so it's strange to me that it's so hard for an intellectual world that drew so much from Said and Said sort of students and that whole world, the thing that they are deconstructing in themselves, was first done to choose why don't they see it? Why don't they see how strange it is that absolutely nothing on this earth could set the streets of every European capital on fire, of every American elite college campus, but this conflict could. Now, again, this is not an argument about Gaza itself or the war itself, any view you have of it. But, you know, the Yemen war was fought with American weapons by American allies and the most advanced American weapons. And 85,000 children starved to death in that conflict. And it was only like six years ago and nobody in America noticed. Now that's a tiny bit of an exaggeration. Congress said something. There was a little bit of tension with the Saudis for a short time, but nothing like this. Why is this a touchstone of culture? And why don't they ask that question? They're so busy analyzing themselves and deconstructing their narratives of power. And Said's very premise is of Orientalism, of something the west did that's evil was learned on the Jews. And so why is it so hard for the Jews to be. For the way they treat the Jews to be visible to them?
- [19:20]
B
Well, so I think Said was doing something very important which came from Soviet anti Zionism. So it was the Soviets who first constructed this notion of Holocaust inversion, where it was extremely important for them to try and show that Zionism actually disrupted and inverted the position of Jews as victims of the Holocaust. And they did this in order to align with and support Arab nationalist movements against Israel. So they started constructing Jews as Nazis. Right. And that fit really well also with their own sort of national mythos of defeating the Nazis in World War II and defeating fascism. So then again, they constructed the Jews as the opposite of socialism and constructed Zionism as Nazism. And then so what Said is doing is perfectly continuous with that. So when he says that the Palestinians are the victims of the victims, he's doing this inversion process. So I wouldn't say that they don't understand that Jews have been sort of oppressed or victims. I would say that they see it as an obstacle and a threat that they need to both neutralize and invert so to essentially restore the position of the Jew as oppressor or as a kind of demonized figure. And in order to do that, they need to neutralize and invert the Holocaust. So I think that's what's happening. And that's why they aren't able to apply critical tools to antisemitism. Because their very notion of critique is basically that they are opposing oppression, but at the same time, in order to invalidate the Jew, they have to construct the Jew as the oppressor. And thus it would create this blind spot.
- [21:03]
A
So anti Zionism, I asked, what is anti Semitism? What is anti Zionism?
- [21:11]
B
So I think there's really two forms of anti Zionism that are always getting confused and strategically by anti Zionists themselves. So obviously we have Jewish anti Zionism, and scholars of contemporary anti Semitism today have a kind of consensus around writing that with a hyphen. So this was anti Zionism. It was an actual Jewish opposition to Zionism as a movement to construct a nation state of the Jews for various reasons. You know, some came from left wing opposition to nationalism, skepticism about nationalist projects, especially after World War I and the rise of Nazism itself. And then, you know, others came from an ultra Orthodox religious point of view, believing that you needed the Messiah to found a Jewish state and it would have to be a Halakic state. Now, after the Holocaust, obviously Jewish anti Zionism became very much a minority position because it was essentially refuted by the fact of the Holocaust. Assimilation in Diaspora countries did not save the Jews. What has happened over time with groups like Jewish Voice for Peace or certain professors in Jewish studies today is they think that this Jewish anti Zionism is the same anti Zionism that we are seeing on college campuses, that we are seeing in people who support Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian regime. And it's not so that anti Zionism, which we should write without a hyphen, has a completely different lineage. So it goes back to Hajimen Al Husseini, who worked with the Nazis. He integrated conspiratorial Nazi antisemitism into an Islamic vocabulary, constructing the Jews as inherently opposed to Islam and seeking the annihilation of Jews. And then what Happened of course is these same anti Zionist ideas filtered their way into Soviet anti Zionism as the Soviets now took on the task of supporting Arab nationalism and the project of destroying Israel.
- [23:09]
A
Can you tell us more about that story? Hajimeen's a good place to start. He didn't invent all of it. He learned it from Rashid Rida and others. And there were even as far back as 1905, I think there's a gentleman Arab thinker, writer, travels through France, picks up French sort of conspiratorial Dreyfus style, anti Semitism and then translates into Arabic. So this is something that very much is out there that he has that he can draw on, but he systematizes it and turns it into a real alliance with the Nazis. The Nazis are sweeping across North Africa. They're going to take Egypt. People don't know if they're going to take Palestine. And there were already plans being drawn up. There was an Einsatzgruppen established for Egypt by the Nazis. It was called Einsatzgruppen Agibtum, if I'm not mistaken. That was also going to then liquidate the Jews of Palestine in the war. And they were stopped at El Alamein by Montgomery. But Rommel could also not have been stopped. And so Hajamin spent the war not only in Berlin, but actually raising military units among the Muslims in for example the Balkans for the Nazi war effort. So this is a, a specific part of Arab nationalism as it develops into anti Zionism, uses Nazi vocabulary, uses Nazi terminology. We saw this in Baghdad. I mean people should really literally just look up the Nazi presence in Baghdad. The Nazi embassy in Baghdad ran what was basically the largest youth movement in Baghdad. The vicious, the Ali Rashid regime that supported the Nazis and turned on the Jews. The farhout of 1941, the massacre of Jews, Jews, all this stuff was in constant discourse with Nazism. And it's there. It's not the sum total of Arab nationalism. Some Arab nationalists thought the Jews could stick around to be part of some kind of regional order. But it is absolutely there at the beginning. And then what? How does the Soviet story come in? How does it get to the American elite, to American left wing academic scholarship?
- [25:19]
B
So I think early on in Stalinism, after World War II, there was already an emergent anti Zionist movement that Stalin promoted with the Doctor's Plot in which a number of Jewish doctors were accused of conspiracy and executed. And then there was the whole notion of rootless cosmopolitans which was kind of connected to Stalin's intention to Create socialism in one country and thus effectively bringing back certain nationalist notions and then reconstructing the Jew in this classic anti Semitic image of the wandering Jew who is rootless, ironically now bound to Zionism. And that's an important paradox, I think, of anti Zionism as well, to keep in mind that it both constructs Jews as ultranationalists and sort of blood and soil fascists in Israel, but maintains this notion of an international conspiracy in which Jews are more of an abstract force of power and domination. There are Israeli stooges which are sort of have a network around the world imposing Zionist power.
- [26:26]
A
And is that why we sometimes hear them talk about us as artificial, as fake, as not a real country, not a real people, not a real identity. It plays into that kind of a game that they're trying to have it, have it both ways.
- [26:37]
B
Yeah. So I think they want to construct us as creating a, a blood and soil fascism to make us look like Nazis. And then they are also trying to delegitimize us fundamentally and treat us as a fake people who don't really deserve to be in Israel. And I think that contradiction was already there in Soviet anti Zionism. But the Soviet anti Zionist campaign really picked up after 1967 with Israel's victory over the Arab League and the need to construct Israel as an aggressor and as fundamentally opposed to third worldist anti colonial movements. So I think that's the basis that anti colonial anti Semitism that has led to where we are today. Obviously later on it gets filtered through the whole settler colonial paradigm, which adds a new element that really I think excites, you know, Anglo American and Australian people to really identify with it. Because now they're comparing Israel to, you know, U.S. american genocide, elimination of the native population in the U.S. and then the elimination of the native population in Australia. And that really brings it all the way and sort of maximizes it, I think. So now you've constructed the Jew as the settler who is intrinsically genocidal in this, in this settler colonial theory. So I think the anti Zionism we're seeing today is, is much worse than Soviet anti Zionism. If you go back and you read Soviet anti Zionist hate literature, literature like Ivanag or something, it comes off as comparatively tame. I mean, a lot of the tropes and libels are there about apartheid and colonialism, of course, but there's a tameness to it because the Jew is more like a traitor, a spy, etc, not so much a full on genocidal aggressor.
- [28:32]
A
Okay, what Is settler colonialism and why is it different?
- [28:36]
B
Yes, settler colonialism was a theory that emerged in the 90s. The foundational text is by Patrick Wolf, the foundational author. And he basically said that there are certain societies that are fundamentally built around the appropriation of land. So his big move was to move away from the usual capitalist framework of the expropriation of labor and look at societies that really required the appropriation of land and demographic replacement of native populations. So he argued that when settlers arrive in foreign lands and they have a project to make use of these lands, a dynamic emerges which is almost inherently genocidal. So he calls it a structure, not event. That was his famous phrase. And it's a way of saying that there's almost a deterministic driver behind settler colonial societies where they can't do anything but ultimately eliminate the native. And what this leads to then is a certain construction of the settler, because the settler is now essentialized as basically a person who has to commit evil. And at the same time, what you have is a Manichean struggle that takes place between the settler and the indigenous, where the settler is inherently going to commit genocide effectively, and the indigenous is inherently going to resist. And this is actually the basis of practically all of the people today who are saying that Israel is doing a genocide using scholarly authority. So one of the most important people is Dirk Moses. So he sits at the center of this entire circle. He runs a journal called the Journal of Genocide Research, and he tries to reconstruct the very concept of genocide in terms of settler colonialism. He actually rejects the legal concept because, of course, the legal concept depends on intent, depends on moral decision making, that people chose to try and eliminate a people as such. And he says, well, no, settler colonial societies just have an intrinsic dynamic that leads them to mass violence. And so he actually rejects the concept of genocide itself. So it's really stunning, actually, to know this, to know that at the center of all of these attempts to say Israel is doing a genocide is a theory that tries to destroy the concept of genocide and international law itself. And I think more people need to know that.
- [31:11]
A
And so if you subscribe to this perspective, then you will take the complex history. Let me try and just bring us down a little bit to simpler terms. I think in simpler terms, I was a very left wing teenager. That's a known problem in human societies. I thought that the Israelis were powerful and the Palestinians were weak and we could take some serious risks because the military rule over the Palestinians was unsustainable. I was a Passionate supporter of Rabin and of the Oslo process. And my also dad was just a very left wing activist for many, many years as a young man, as a law student, as a parliamentary aide in the Knesset. And that blew up for me in the second intifada, in this wave of 140 suicide bombings. And what I thought at the time, as a voting soldier, I would say I was a soldier by then. I was a teenager in the 90s, in the late 90s, and then I was a soldier in 1990, 1999. The second intifada blows up in the fall of 2000 and I have an awakening where I say to myself, wait a second. I genuinely was willing to pull back. I genuinely was willing to withdraw. I genuinely think that ruling the Palestinians is not sustainable and not moral. But they are gripped by an ideology, by certain ideological elites that tell them that they can win this and that all people peace's betrayal. And therefore since all that, since total victory is available and therefore no permanent forever war and, and you know, 20 years later, we're basically still in that moment, they don't see any of that. I, as a settler colonialist, have no choice but to ultimately push the Palestinians into destruction. There is absolutely no way that this could ever have gone any other way. Independent of Palestinian action. There is no Palestinian agency. And in fact I was just going to swallow it all up and leave them dead or expelled. And that was inevitable. And the entire lived experience of just to explain the entire Israeli left, that we really could have had a Palestinian state, the idea of independence for Palestinians and ending the occupation won three elections between 1992 and 2007. Roughly. All of that's fake. They ignore it, they leave it aside. Every Israeli who talks about that is a propagandist. Even if it's 15 years of their life experience, it's nevertheless propaganda. And the total domination of Israel by Israel, of Palestinians is inevitable. It's structural to Zionism. Did I get that right? Yeah.
- [34:03]
B
And I think what you're describing is two completely different frameworks to understand human events. And you are speaking in a common sense framework that is based on moral responsibility and on the assumption that history unfolds because there are actors who make choices. We don't make choices within circumstances of our own choosing, but we still do have freedom within those circumstances. I believe it was actually Karl Marx who said something like that. And then there's another framework which is, as you said, Zionism itself structurally or essentially has this dynamic. And everything we see Israel do and the Palestinians do is Just an unfolding of this kind of evil essence. So while these scholars often think of themselves as doing, like, materialist or political analysis, what they're often doing is creating a very abstract and essentialized concept of Zionism. So it's very similar actually to how most racist ideologies work. They construct an essentialized figure that has inherent negative qualities, and they will also sometimes use particular figures. So I've noticed, especially with anti Zionism, I think the Israeli right is an obsession of theirs because it's both a way to say, look, I'm only concerned with criticizing Israel, Israel, I'm criticizing the Israeli government, etc, when pressed on it. But what they're actually doing is they take these extreme or unsavory figures and they. They blow them up. They become stereotypical characters that are then used to reaffirm our foundational assumptions about a kind of evil Israel, that all Israelis should be tainted and that all Jews ultimately should be tainted.
- [35:54]
A
This is the New Yorker interviewing Daniela Weiss. This furthest most, you know, saying, saying that Israel needs to conquer Iraq because Iraq is part of the great divine promise of the land to Abraham, or some crazy stuff that. I don't know how to put this. The most extreme people in Israeli politics don't talk that way. And she's beyond them. But the New Yorker finds her and gives her this enormous, enormous interview to sort of explain that this is also a voice, when in fact it's not a voice, it's interviewing a UFO abductee to describe American culture. It's just that fringe and insane and so that kind of discourse that pulls these people out. I am now visiting Norway and I was at a town called Arndal, which I thought was pronounced Arend. And I was actually in Frozen, but it's not pronounced Arendelle. And everyone in the city is very upset with Disney. And I was giving a talk and I had a protest, a protester, a pro Palestinian protest, flying the flags, some Muslim, some local, outside my talk. And one of the protesters I actually talked to, they didn't know who I was. And I talked to before the talk, and they were collecting sort of a bunch of signs. And one of the signs showed the promised land against exactly this thing that the New Yorker interviewed Daniela Weiss to explain to people, Israelis secretly want to conquer Iraq, but it had that map of the Middle east that the Jews secretly want to conquer, including Iraq and half of Egypt and Syria. And I said to her, why? You could just be anti a terrible, painful war. That's a legitimate position. Why do you have to be insanely conspiratorial and bigoted. That's not actually helpful to Palestinians. Like, if you came to Israelis and said, we want to talk about this terrible war, you might have a conversation with them. But if you come to Israelis and say you shouldn't exist, you're the paradigmatic evil in this world, stop trying to conquer Iraq, you're not able to have that conversation and you stop being useful to Palestinians. Why? Why go insane when you'd be more useful, sane?
- [38:12]
B
Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think it's a completely legitimate feeling to feel horror at the death of innocent civilians. And sometimes you will hear anti Zionists claim that this is all they're doing and that they have compassion for children. But of course, it's a compassion that immediately is turned into hate through a logic of blame. So, right. No one denies that civilians are dying. The question is, who's to blame? And I think that this whole movement, this explosion of propaganda and libel in many ways, is a kind of projection and inversion of what happened on October 7th. So there was a recent article that was published in Cambridge University Press by Avraham Shalev, and he really made the legal case that what hamas did on October 7th was a genocide. And still in the public discourse, we don't talk about it that way.
- [39:07]
A
Can you explain that? Because I'm going to use the word only in a way that hurts me physically, but it's only, you know, 1200 dead. The usual common understanding of the word genocide is the destruction of a people. Why would the legal term, or how are we understanding the word when he uses it?
- [39:25]
B
Right? So usually when we think about a genocide, we have in mind the Holocaust, but we might also have in mind it's not the case that the Holocaust was the only genocide or we can't compare to other genocides, as some anti Zionists claim. We also have in mind Rwanda, you know, where they killed, I think, 800,000 people in an incredibly short time. But as the case law has evolved, what the legal scholars have come to the conclusion as is that all genocidal actors are limited by their capacity.
- [40:00]
A
Right?
- [40:01]
B
But once you have the intent to commit a genocide, you undertake acts in order to exterminate an entire people. But every genocidal actor, right, will only go as far as they are able to. So the total number of deaths is actually not what constitutes a genocide. What constitutes a genocide is intent and often the. The ideology around it. So what's great about Avraham Shalev's article as well is it Also gives a lot of great information to really get inside of Hamas's head, because that is also completely obscured in the global media the extent to which this is a fundamentally racist, genocidal ideology that sees Jews as cosmically and essentially evil, that fundamentally does not believe in the distinction between Israeli civilians and combatants. They claim since Israel is a, you know, a militarized society and there's a compulsory draft, then all Israeli civilians can be considered to be combatants. So what Hamas did was a genocide according to the case law. Right. And so I think that what you see after that is a lot of attempts to invert and so to project and to get rid of the aggression that's there in society supporting what Hamas did and feeling aligned with Hamas's so called struggle. You need to flip the script in order to absolve yourself of your own aggression and violence. So I think that psychoanalytic lens there is actually really helpful to understand this massive onslaught of libel and inversion that's occurred.
- [41:42]
A
So we have two understandings of the word genocide, and each understanding has a purpose. And maybe I'm asking the same question in a different way. I don't know. I apologize if I am. The legal understanding is very focused on intent. And that's what you're talking about with Shalev. And Hamas intends a genocide. I mean, it claims it, it celebrates it, it crows about it, it's on its telegram. The reason the legal definition is on intent is that they're trying to prevent it. They're trying to look, locate people who have that intent and prevent it. Now they're not relying on the incompetence or inability to commit genocide of the perpetrator. They actually are worried about whether that's what you're trying to do. And then there is this cosmic, spiritual, theological kind of genocide, which is that genocide is very much profoundly not a thing that is measured by its own characteristics. But it depends on who's doing it and where. I place them in this theology of the deep structures that make them settler colonialists. Right? That's this intellectual. In other words, everything Israel ever does must be ultimately genocide. It can't not be genocide. And that's how you get a lot of this discourse about how Israelis, they're so fake, they don't have a culinary history, they only steal from Palestinians food, they steal from Palestinians language and identity and land. Their very existence is theft. What is the purpose of saying that it's genocide? In other words, what are you trying to do by framing the Israelis as that version of genocide? That understanding of what genocide is, you're trying to essentially say, and therefore destroyable, and therefore Israel is destroyable as a people. Now then they'll say to you, we're not trying to destroy you as a people, we're trying to change your behavior. We're trying to end apartheid, we're trying to make everybody equal. Ultimately, it's not to let the Jews have a state that is powerful and can defend itself and self reliant and able to survive in the present day.
- [43:56]
B
Yeah, and the Nazis, for example, said that the Jews were attempting to exterminate Germans and the Hutus said that the Tutsis were attempting to exterminate Hutus. So reverse genocide accusations are actually a known feature and pattern of genocides that have happened in the past. And as you said, if you construct a group as inherently genocidal, then it seems clear that the solution is to destroy that group. So constructing a group as inherently genocidal is actually a kind of genocidal ideology. So we're seeing mass inversion that's taking place.
- [44:32]
A
There is nothing in this vision that the Jews of Israel could do to not be genocidal. Except what? What could they do? Leave? Dismantle their society? Presumably not everybody is the most extreme version of this, right? We hear the extremists screaming all day long, but presumably there are people who think, no, no, you could just be an America style civic democracy and somehow Israelis and Palestinians are going to live together in peace and harmony in the modern Middle east despite the cultural, ethnic, religious differences. I can call those people naive, but they're not necessarily genocidal. But is that it? I mean, how do I stop being genocidal if I'm a Zionist Israeli Jew in this intellectual world?
- [45:16]
B
I think you're probably right. It's leaving or allowing yourself to be murdered in the redemptive act of resistance, right? You are to be a sacrifice for redemption because you are a scapegoat of the fundamental evil that the left sees in the world, in the Western order, in international law itself. What's so ironic about their position most of the time is that it depends on a conspiratorial notion that all of our concepts of international law, the principle of proportionality, the principle of distinction between combatants and non combatants, these laws of warfare that Israel at least tries to follow and which also have a clause which allows for civilian casualties, Right? All of that they claim, someone like Dirk Moses, for example, they will say that all of that is actually a sort of illegitimate tool of Western power, an illegitimate tool whereby settler, colonial, Regimes can enact mass violence in ways that appear legal, right? So, so they're simultaneously delegitimizing international law, saying this is a Western construct, Israel's actually evil, you can't hide behind this. And at the same time, they want to use international law as a bludgeon to say Israel's committing war crimes, et cetera. And so that requires them of course, to start transforming and distorting international law with these concepts like settler colonialism that don't fit in.
- [46:48]
A
That to me is absolutely fascinating, that way of using international law. It's what it feels like, but it's great to hear it articulated. If international law is that I can't fight wars, then international law is not going to be helpful to me and useful to me. And if I inherently, because my society is inherently not legitimate, can't fight at all, you, I mean, there's, I'm gonna go off and I mean, you can you no longer have a claim on me that you had when you were saying to me, hey, you know, you gotta defend yourself. You got enemies, ideological enemies, you got people who want to kill you. You're not perfect, but you gotta obey certain minimal baseline rules to stay fundamentally within, you know, civilized. That argument to me is very powerful. And I know that every, you know, Israeli general keeps a lawyer next to them to make, because they, for many reasons, but one of them is that they genuinely want to think that they're okay. They don't want to think that they're evil. But if everything they are is fundamentally inherently evil, why would they do this? They would just say, screw you, the Jews will still survive. The last living Jews in the eastern hemisphere of this earth don't have to die because you decided it's illegitimate that they live. This mixing of these two worlds, of these two ideas, this legitimate claim Palestinians have and this legitimate complaint that Palestinians have and international law has and then this just destruction of Israel idea and ideology and different ways of framing it are totally contradictory. They're not just contradictory in Western discourse. It's not just that they actually are antagonistic in the Western debate. One actually wants international law obeyed. The other one thinks international law is part of, of the evil in the Israeli mind. They fall apart. You cannot at the same time come to Israelis and say behave better and at the same time say to them, and we're going to destroy you. This doesn't end because you're fundamentally illegitimate, but also, please obey our rules. These are self erasing, right?
- [48:51]
B
I mean, yeah, there's a huge difference between opposing what Israel is doing and opposing what Israel is. But also these are being fused in, in the way that libel functions, right? Because the point of libel about Israel did this evil act. Israel did this evil act. Israel's starving children, Israel's killing journalists. You know, each new libel and the libel cycle, just the news we get on the mainstream media from Israel is just a cycle of libels. They try one libel for a while, like the intentional starvation, you know, they circulate these photos in the New York Times of kids with congenital diseases. That's basically debunked and there's some pushback against it. And then they move to a new libel. Now Israel's killing journalists again. There was an al Jazeera journalist, etc. The point of these libels, and you can see it in the way it affects people, is not to say Israel is doing something wrong, it's to confirm or suggest that there is some evil fundamentally about Israel's essence. And you see this when, with Peter Beinart, for example, his book is called Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza. It violates the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti Semitism, which he signed, which said that holding all Jews responsible for Israel's actions is anti Semitic. So he sees Israel, what Israel is doing now as reflecting on Jews as such or on Judaism. Shaul Magid is the same thing. He says Judaism is burning. Harari says the same thing, Judaism, this is a problem with Judaism. And then Ezra Klein, you know, in his various NOW articles, he's on a kind of crusade now to legitimize the debate around Israel committing genocide. He says, you know, what does this say about Israel as a state if it was founded, you know, to protect people from genocide, but is doing a genocide? So you'll notice that none of these people seem able to talk about Israeli actions without also talking about Israel's essence.
- [50:53]
A
Are you optimistic? I think a lot of people have this sense that you articulate better than most that this conflict, it's not the problem solving kind of conflict. It's a theological kind of conflict, not just in the religious sense, but in the sense that everyone treats it as grand and cosmic. Certainly Hamas does. As long as Hamas has a say, none of this ever ends. There are people also on the Israeli side, they don't run the place, unlike on the Palestinian side, in my view. I'll defend that on Twitter. Come at me. But the point is that if it's a cosmic conflict, Manichean, all or nothing, it's not ending anytime soon. And there's a lot more Suffering to go. If it can be brought back down to earth and become a political conflict where reconciliation is the main goal, where the removal of Manichean cosmic kinds of actors like Hamas is a goal, and where everyone's willing to invest massively in Palestinian, you know, the sympathy Palestinians have certainly deserve comes into play, then we can rebuild and we can have reconciliation and we can find political solutions. Even talking that way feels. So are you optimistic about a conflict whose sort of foundational intellectual roots, the way all these actors around the world are cheering it on instead of asking for it to stop, they want a ceasefire as long as Hamas survives. If Hamas dies, that's a terrible end to the conflict. If Hamas is removed from Gaza and Gaza can actually be rebuilt. Right. What do you think about the end of this conflict? Are you optimistic?
- [52:40]
B
So I think sitting here in August 20th, in 2025, I think we see some very contradictory developments occurring. So I think the United States has. I'm not necessarily some pro US government or position myself necessarily as pro west in some kind of. As a kind of banner, but I think the United States has, and the current government has done an excellent job in trying to shift the conversation to a pragmatic one and to a utilitarian point of view that values the lives of Palestinians not as sacrifices, as cogs in a machine for endless war. And it has attempted to propose real solutions on the ground and allowing people to leave a war zone if they want. Now, of course, it's not just about the conflict, it's about the global spread of anti Zionism as well. Even if things start to resolve on the ground, we're seeing this new anti Zionist metaphysics really take over institutions within Europe and the United States. Obviously, Israel's diplomatic relationships with Europe are crumbling due to the pressure that's being brought by this movement. So at that level, I think that we're also seeing contradictory movements. We're seeing the United States has taken a really strong position in fighting back against anti Semitism. I think we've seen the left, anti Zionist left, grow much quieter. They don't seem as sure of themselves as they were, although they also have been committing terrorist violence. So we, we see a kind of. We're in a cultural space that I think is very ambiguous. On the one hand, we see anti Zionism being pushed back. On the other hand, it's not yet clear if anti Zionism will still have the institutional power to reassert itself, especially after Trump is gone.
- [54:36]
A
So what do Jews do now?
- [54:39]
B
So I think we need to build A new discourse, a new Jewish discourse, to articulate what we are feeling, what we are thinking, and how we understand what we're doing and to make that public. And I think that starts with internal clarity. And once we have internal clarity will also be better to project this outward and explain to non Jews and others what's going on. And I think part of that involves shifting the conversation from anti Semitism, which obviously we're still talking about, but also to anti Zionism as such. Because I think that the larger public is fatigued by anti Semitism discourse. Many are sick of Holocaust memory. And of course Holocaust memory is important and we have to maintain it. We have no choice, right? But also it makes it sound not contemporary sometimes. So when we talk about antisemitism, and often our rhetoric is to say, look, what's happening now is really just like medieval antisemitism. It's something we've seen before, it's familiar. It's antisemitism that has a place. Because we need to understand the continuities of past forms of antisemitism in today, but also at the level of our language, we need to be able to call out anti Zionism itself, show that anti Zionism itself is racism so that people understand what's happening in the moment and that this is a real live movement. It's not a movement that politically critiques Israel with some people who cross the line into antisemitism or there's a few prejudiced people in this movement. We have to understand the movement actually structurally and the ideology itself and deconstruct and attack that ideology.
- [56:23]
A
We have to understand that there's this idea that the thing that stopped the Jews dying, the establishment of Israel, was the moment the Jews of the Eastern hemisphere stopped dying and stopped running away. They finally have a place to run to. That moment is demonized and turned. I don't mean demonized in the narrow sense. I mean literally turned into something demonic. And that that is an attempt at erasure and a permission structure for war and destruction and genocide, genocidal war and destruction. And we have to be able to call that out. I think you'll agree with me that any criticism of Israel is legitimate, except, as you said, criticism of Israel's very being and of this whole nation with its own language, its own culture, its own life.
- [57:16]
B
I think the big difference right now, obviously, is these radical anti Zionists don't have power. Right? That's what makes it not 1933. 1933, the Nazi movement gained power and thus could start implementing its project. Right. Right now, anti Zionists are not in control of any state, but they could become, you know, someone in control of state, and then that would be an emergency, I think.
- [57:45]
A
Adam, thank you so much for joining me.
- [57:48]
B
Thank you so much, Havi. I really enjoyed it.