B (3:34)

I mean, obviously it's a huge escalation in many ways, but one that so many of us were expecting. And so, of course, so many of us were. Were shocked but. But not surprised about this massacre. I think the hardest thing since this massacre is to see the discourse that's emerging. And my own personal feeling that this discourse is caught in a kind of broken loop, essentially that there's a lot of Jews responding, saying, this is anti Semitic. We are upset, we are angry. We want something to be done about this. And then of course, there are government officials. There are even anti Zionists like Zahra Mamdani or Ilhan Omar who are perfectly happy to come out and say, this is anti Semitic. We condemn this completely. And then we see Jews come along and say, you know, we don't want to hear from you. You are the anti Zionists. Right? Or they're not necessarily saying anti Zionist, but they're saying, you know, you were saying globalize the intifada. Like there's been a whole. There's maybe been 15 articles saying this is what globalize the intifada meant. And so how can you stand by and condemn this? But, you know, that is actually the structure of the discourse today. So the way they set up their anti Zionism always allows them to disavow this anti Jewish violence as something that's one. It's either disconnected from anti Zionism, from Israel. So they can say, well, this has nothing to do with Israel. It has nothing to do with anti Zionism. So it's not us, not us, we don't have responsibility for this. Or they can say something that's almost contradictory but makes sense within their sort of distorted ideology. Which is that Israel is to blame. Right? So people shouldn't be attacking Jews. Right? But if Israel wasn't committing a genocide, if Israel wasn't doing all these evil things, people wouldn't be so upset and take out their anger on innocent Jews. So their very discourse always basically functions to disavow their own responsibility. But when we just call them antisemitic, we aren't necessarily calling them to account because that's already baked in to what they're doing. Right. So I really feel that anti Zionism, as I write about and talk about a lot these days, needs to be named and seen as the source of the problem. Both of the violence, which was, as we can get into, was an Islamist version of anti Zionism, but also Western anti Zionism, which itself has this entire permission structure inside of it.

A (6:16)

I want to stay with Bandai for a minute. One of the striking things for me has been this question of blaming, of blame. So many people, Australian journalists, major mainstream, you know, Australian broadcast company journalists, so many people online, so many people on the Internet. Bernie Sanders decided to make his condemnation of the Bandai massacre half the statement. And it's like, I don't know, eight, nine paragraphs. Half the statement is about Benjamin Netanyahu. So many people have said that the story here is a radicalization of some kind. If they're isis, that's not what it was. But let's imagine that it's possible that they're radical, radicalized against Jews because they saw what is happening in Gaza. And what struck me as astonishing is that is not done with any other group. In other words, in the massacre of Muslims in New Zealand back in 2019, this horrific massacre, nobody then came out and said, well, you know, if great many Muslim ideologies and states and regimes weren't carrying out massive crimes wars, genocidal wars, Yemen and Syria and Sudan and all these other places, people wouldn't be radicalized into massacring Muslims in New Zealand. Many of these perpetrators in the Muslim world in the last just decade have done it for Islam, in Islam's name. Now, do they represent all Muslims? Obviously not. And to argue that a massacre of Muslims in New Zealand can be pinned to that is such an obvious bigotry, it's such an obvious linkage that is so illegitimate and yet it is literally mainstream for Jews to the point where progressive Jews are now online posting on TikTok. Somebody sent me saying, I'm a Jew and yeah, I feel unsafe and it's Israel's damn fault. There's Literally never been an anti Semitic line. The Jews haven't adopted as their own Jews. The first, the first blood libel about the killing of Christian children was literally invented by a Jew converted to Catholicism and wanted to show his Catholic bona fides. Is that how you say it? Bona fides? I don't. I don't. One of those things you only ever read. Point is, I've never heard that said about Muslims. I've never heard that argument that something other Jews might be doing bad on the other side. Never mind whether it Israel is good or bad. Let's imagine Israel is evil. For the purpose of this conversation, that is somehow a reasonable thing to raise as a moral discourse about a massacre of Jews in Australia. That is something that's unique about anti Zionist discourse that I have never seen it in any other place. Anti Zionism to me is so utterly obviously anti Semitic. Just for that reason. It's only ever deployed around Jews, about Jews talking to Jews in ways that nothing that happens in the Muslim world is deployed against Muslims.

B (9:01)

Yeah. You know, it's almost like anti Jewish ideology is a kind of lingua franca. It's a kind of cultural code. And when something contradicts anti Jewish ideology, there's a lot of kind of narrative cleanup that starts going on to say, well, let's not turn this into an anti Islamic moment. Let's not turn this into an Islamophobic moment. And of course, you had someone like Randy Fine, he's certainly not the best representative.

A (9:30)

He's an American congressman. Right.

B (9:32)

He's an American congressman.

A (9:33)

And he said something like this. He actually did say, you know, all this stuff happening in the Muslim world, we have to stop immigration from the Muslim world, stuff like that.

B (9:41)

He said a lot of virulent anti Muslim things. He started saying we should basically deport and denaturalize all Muslims, which would be a very Islamophobic response to such attacks. And when he says that, he gives fodder then to people who want to do this narrative cleanup and make this about Islamophobia. Right. And the reason they do that is to try and create this neutralization. Right. You have anti Semitism, you have Islamophobia, you have pro Palestine, you have pro Israel, and you can always basically take anything that supports Jews, that gives Jews some kind of moral capital as victims or legitimizes Jews, and you can sort of neutralize it by saying, well, there's also this issue of Muslim victimhood, of Palestinian victimhood. Right. So it's really a way of trying to sort of subvert any acknowledgement of the problem of anti Jewish ideology. Not because there isn't Islamophobia, but because there's an attempt to constantly re legitimize anti Jewish ideology as a kind of lingua franca that Israel needs to be maintained at the center of attention as what's evil. Right? Because if Jews are victims in Bondi beach, maybe that means Jews are a vulnerable community. Maybe that means then that Israel has a right to self defense. Right? Because we know that Israel was created in the first place, at least in part as a means to protect Jews. And if the people who are killing Jews at Bondi beach are connected to Hamas or share a similar ideology to Hamas, that also is a different way to read everything that's happened since October 7th. That the attack on Israel was not legitimate resistance, it wasn't just political, quote unquote, that it was actually an extension of anti Jewish hatred. It's the same hatred killing people in Kfar Aza as it is in Bandi Beach. Right? And that's a completely different way to look at the whole situation. And it's one that risks legitimizing Israel and legitimizing Jews.

A (11:45)

So now I'm completely confused. You argue that anti Zionism is distinct from antisemitism and you just argue that it is a permission structure for denying Jews legitimacy. Legitimacy of self defense, legitimacy of having a country that can defend them, the legitimacy of their being targeted. And they do this essentially by saying, look, if Jews weren't so evil over there on the other side of the world, nobody would target them. Jews somehow have to be de victimized and therefore we have to ignore the danger they're in. And it doesn't matter how many massacres or attempted massacres we see. It doesn't matter what ideologies are percolating. It bothers me that the Australian Prime Minister can't talk about Islam. I would be delighted if he said, we know from our friends in Indonesia that there are pacifist versions of Islam in this world. Islam can be one of the most beautiful gifts to humanity. We're dealing with a serious version of Islam that is absolutely brutal, genocidal, and has come to our shores and we need to deal with it. Seriously. Why can't he say that? Why can't he say it? If it's the simple obvious truth, why can't he say it? If the people engaged in this kind of violence are saying it, actually claiming that that's what it is that they're doing, what is this Thing where the Jew can't have their 10 seconds of victimhood in the immediate aftermath of a massacre, while the religion of the perpetrator, the community of the perpetrator has to be the victim in the aftermath of a massacre by somebody from that world. What is that? Isn't it anti? Semitism?

B (13:22)

You know, I think that the distinction the anti Zionists make between Zionist and Jew, right, which can exist in real life because there are Jews who aren't Zionists and there are Jews who are anti Zionists, but it's something that they themselves produce at the level they mark Jews as Zionists. I think this distinction is, is sort of the inverted image, let's say, of a more valuable distinction that is based in a more moral conception between Islamists and all Muslims, right? So they try and say anti Zionists. Well, I don't hate all Jews, right? I only hate Zionists. Zionists are these evil, genocidal, brutal, violent people, but the rest of Jews are fine. Now of course that's not true. The people they mark as Zionists, they're actually just libeling in that way. They're often just ordinary Jews, people with a connection to Israel or people who are marked as Zionists for all kinds of reasons. They don't pass the litmus test of the anti Zionist movement, but they're not evil genocidal people, right? Whereas the distinction between Islamists and Muslims, particularly jihadists, to be even more precise, those who pursue Islamist aims using violent means, right, that is actually a valuable distinction and it is actually true that not all Muslims are doing this. But to be even more precise, I think to get out of this problem of is it Islamophobic to point to anti Zionist and anti Jewish violence and is it always going to be caught up in this neutralization game of Islamophobia and antisemitism together or competitive victimhood between Jews and Muslims. I think we need to hone in again on anti Zionism and just see what's happening here as the Islamist strain of anti Zionism. It's a, it's, there are, there are different versions. There's the Soviet strain of anti Zionism and in the Soviet strain it was very much developed to be different from classical antisemitism, to not look like Nazi style racism or racial pseudoscience, but to be about colonialism and racism and apartheid and genocide. And the Western anti Zionism really derives from the Soviet anti Zionism. So Zionism is racism and Zionism is Nazism. These foundational libels are still the same ones we See today, you know when, when your average Iranian bot or, or just anti Zionist who has a Ph.D. calls you a Zionazi, right? That's the same language that the Soviets created and it is separate from classical anti Semitism. What you see in the Middle east is a different kind of convergence of different forms of anti Jewish hatred. So there is of course an Islamic anti Judaic strong tradition. So Andrew Boston, for example, did great work in really uncovering this and looking at the primary texts because often we don't want to look at this, right? We want to say, oh, it was all European Nazism which made its way into the Middle east in the 20th century through people like the Mufti or Johann von Leers who was a Nazi propagandist who moved to Cairo, converted to Islam under the Mufti, spread the Protocols, the Elders of Zion in Arabic throughout the Middle East. That all plays a role. There's also anti Judaism within Islam. It comes from the Hadith and the Quran. There's a whole set of stories about Jews rejecting Muhammad's prophecy, plotting to kill Muhammad, faking the scriptures so that the Torah basically has been doctored and is not an original copy of the prophecies to Moses, rejecting Islam and losing the Jewish status as the chosen people. So all of that exists, all of that is part of what the Mufti is doing in his speech in 1937. Islam and Judaism, all of that is inside Ketob and all of that's also in, in Al Qaeda and isis. So ISIS today too, that even the anti Zionists admit ISIS is evil, right? They've been kind of constructed as this universal Nazi figure that everyone sort of agrees is evil, strangely, even though they are not so different from Hamas or Al Qaeda, but it's one one ideology. So instead of saying that anti Zionism is anti Semitism, which I think is a very ambiguous statement and it's inaccurate in certain respects, I would say that in the Middle east anti Semitism is anti Zionism, that there actually isn't any antisemitism in the Middle east that is not also anti Zionism. That hatred of Jews in the Middle east is always expressed through this civilizational war that is maintained against Israel and against Zionism.

A (18:17)

There's a deep ahistoricity to it. In other words, I consider anti Zionism to be, to have only one of two kinds. Either it is ignorance or it is bigotry. You know, all the Jews of the Eastern hemisphere are basically dead except for those who became Zionist. In other words, Jews did not have Options in the Arab world, in the Muslim world. A Muslim world that could empty of all its Jews. A Muslim world where the vast majority of the Jews who left the Muslim world left as refugees. The Farhud pogrom in Baghdad is famous, but there's a dozen such pogroms in that period against Jews in Libya and in other places. And so this whole idea of I don't go to this sort of intellectual constructions, I go to simple historical experience. I don't know if you can say historical experience is ever simple, but just to follow what ordinary people actually live through and then you discover that what does it mean to be anti Zionist? Are you wishing the world hadn't treated the Jews in a way that left Israel as their literal only option? Australia itself didn't take in Jews at their most desperate moment. Many of the Jews of Australia are Holocaust survivors, descendants of Holocaust survivors. But that happened afterwards. That didn't happen before. Australia wasn't taking in Jews when they needed another option and they had no other option. Israel was built by people who literally had no other option. And if they didn't take the Zionist option, they died. Most Jews weren't born Zionist. Most Jews weren't Zionists at the beginning of the 20th century. They were Zionists by the 1930s. You'll never guess why. Right. And so to be an anti Zionist is to what? What's the argument? You wish history hadn't happened that way? I agree with you. But you didn't say anything or you deny that history happened that way. It is a falsifying of history to invent a criminality to destroy a people. That is anti Zionism, isn't it? Is it?

B (20:06)

Yeah, sorry. The sophisticated anti Zionist I think would say they recognized Jewish victimhood and they recognized the Holocaust and they might even say, oh, we recognized that Jews needed a place to go to. But the whole scheme was based on European colonial assumptions that essentially even if Europeans had mass murdered Jews in the Holocaust, and of course millions of people collaborated in different countries that the Germans occupied and conquered, right. And there were millions of, of ordinary peasants, of ordinary administrators, et cetera, that collaborated across Europe. Even if Europe had this hatred for Jews and committed this mass crime, well, European colonialism is still the true global crime. It's the great explanatory framework for all evils in this world. And it was because of European colonialism that Jewish victimhood was privileged over Arabs and Palestinians. So Arabs and Palestinians were not seen as human and so they were seen as being able to be replaced essentially by Jews. So Europe conspired to create this settler colonial project where they would ship off the Jews. Of course, this narrative basically removes all the agencies of Jews themselves, except when it's convenient to blame them. But Europe would ship off the Jews to Palestine and would forcibly transfer or ethnically cleanse the Palestinians to create the state. And on that basis, this state then is fundamentally colonial and it fundamentally requires the elimination of Palestinians. So that set of libels of colonizer, apartheid, genocide is also an argument for why Israel is inherently unjust and one that can seemingly legitimize the notion that European antisemitism is wrong and that it was wrong to want to kick out Jews or kill Jews. And that Jew hatred itself, you could even say is wrong, and that all they want to do is reverse this injustice against Arabs and Palestinians. And if Arabs and Palestinians are doing violence against Jews, it's just a result of this injustice. And so it's the broader kind of structure of European Zionism that is the problem.

A (22:30)

But that wouldn't. I have not yet found an answer to my argument, including among these Jewish professors who are anti Zionist in their scholarship of Jewish history. And then I make this simple argument and no one ever offers an answer. What you are saying, I think is a reflection. I mean, you and I are on the opposite side of the debate from them. So let them come forward. I'm happy to debate them on Twitter. If they have something interesting to say, they could come on the podcast. But I have heard them say that. But that doesn't answer my actual point, which is the Jews caught in that vice, in that moment are the, you know, if, if you, if you wish history hadn't gone that way, Europe hadn't behaved that way, the Ottoman collapse and the collapse of multi ethnic empires into the new nationalisms hadn't been so dangerous and destructive for Jews and many other minorities. And the only thing that had actually gotten Jews to a place of safety was Israel. If you wish history hadn't forced the Jews into that position, to not acknowledge that it forced them into that position is simply lying about history. To wish history hadn't forced them is fine. That's a totally legitimate critique. But it's the critique of every single country on earth except Israel. Do you want to deny Israel existence? You want to make Israel unviable? You want Israel not to have been so successful at pushing back Palestinians up to the 1947 partition line or further in the 4849 war? Or you want Israel to have failed? Maybe the Arabs shouldn't have kicked out Every last Mizrahi Arab Jew. Because then Zionism would not have been viable, maybe. Do you know what I mean? Like if there had been until the Jews, until America closed its doors, something like 80% of Jews fled to America when they were fleeing the pogroms and the violence and the brutality and the oppression of Eastern Europe. They did not become Zionists. And many others also fled to Britain and Canada and other places. They became Zionists when left with no other option. So even that argument isn't an argument to the Jews of Israel, it's an argument to everybody else. Everybody else really does owe a lot to the Palestinians. The only people in this story who literally had no choice in the story, by the way, after the establishment of Israel. And the Jews have their safe haven. Any policy, any decision, any war, any bombing, any Darius scene is legitimate fodder for critique. It's a country doing something. Obviously it's legitimate to debate and critique it. The very existence of Israel being wrong is the argument that the existence of this nation is wrong, that this nation should not exist. Do they have an argument to that? Because anti Zionism seen in the historical lens rather than how you tackle it from the anthropological lens to me is totally untenable. It's just, it's a ridiculous invention of a fake history. Or literally they don't even invent a fake history. They just pretend like 40% of the book isn't in front of them when they read the history and then move on from there to an ideology.

B (25:26)

I think the way in which they set up the discontinuity between anti Zionism and anti Semitism is key because they can say that they're not doing European antisemitism. Because European antisemitism was based on the notion that Jews are an alien force that are infiltrating our societies and we don't want them there. So we tried emancipation, we tried giving them civic rights, starting with the French Revolution and the various processes of liberalization in the 19th century Europe. And then by the end of the 19th century, Europeans had decided, many Europeans had decided that was a mistake and needed to be rolled back. And so antisemitism really was a rejection of Jewish assimilation. But anti Zionism is actually kind of the inverse. And in this sense it really is distinct from antisemitism. So anti Zionism says, well, actually we don't have a problem with Jews in non Jewish nation states. We think that Ashkenazi Jews, Jews from Poland, Russia, France, Britain are actually just British, French, Polish and Russian people. And Mizrahim Jews from Arab countries or Iran are actually just Arabs or Persians, I guess. And it's actually kind of the opposite of antisemitism in that way. And so that allows them to basically say, well, we are not doing antisemitism. And of course that's actually kind of true.

A (26:50)

But then where's. I'm getting angry at you for anti Semites, I apologize, but you're such a helpful explainer. But where's the rage at the Arabs? Because in 48, in 47, at the partition talks, at the UN, you literally had Arab ambassadors at the UN debate on the partition plan from Syria, from Iraq saying the Jews don't deserve their own say because they're not a nation, they're merely a religion. And a Syrian Jew is a Syrian Arab. He is not a Jew by nation. And then saying, and if the Jews dare to do this thing of founding their own state, then the Jews of Syria and Iraq will be deeply unsafe. We will turn on them and we will oppress them and I will not be able to control my people from doing this terrible thing. The Polish government literally said, a Polish ambassador to London said that if in 1938, after Poland stripped non resident Polish Jews of their citizenship and convinced the Nazis to actually, because they did that act, the Nazis actually rounded up 17, 17,000 Polish Jews living in Germany and pushed them to the Polish border because they didn't want to end up with non citizen, you know, stateless Jews on German soil. So there's basically a concentration camp that forms on the Polish German border in 1938 before the war, because the Poles are starting to strip citizenship of Jews. And Poland turns to the world and says the whole world needs to take these 17,000 Jews in. Poland's not going to take them in. We just took away their passports. And the Polish deputy ambassador to London literally publicly says they don't. The only thing Polish about them is their passport. They're not Poles. Everybody everywhere says they're strangers. For centuries, for centuries, the Jews in the Russian Empire were not Russians, they were Jews according to everybody, especially the Russian government. For centuries, the Jews of Germany and the Jews of Iraq and the Jews of Morocco, they're something separate. And so they only become Moroccans and Iraqis and Poles and Russians when they're being separate has now become a problem. In other words, when they needed to be Russians, they weren't allowed to be Russians. And now that there's something else, they have to go back to being Russians that they never were. According to the Russians, that's basically the discourse. And that's the only way you can actually hold to this view. I don't understand the anti Zionist. I literally don't understand this person. How do they square the circle? Is it just ignorance? Is that the evidence of bigotry? That this whole thing falls apart at the slightest examination? How can an entire academic edifice constructed to see these structures miss this about Jews? To see these power structures, to see these ways of othering, to see all of this stuff, not see this, not see what they themselves are engaged in.

B (29:34)

So I'm going to give a response that might make some people a little bit upset. And it's because I think it is at least partially because of the Jewish community's own models and language for describing this. Right? Because they've outpaced us, really. It's because the anti Zionists actually are so sneaky. They've outpaced us and they've evolved Jew hatred. They've transformed it from antisemitism into anti Zionism and they're waiting for us to catch up because they know that anti Zionism is distinct from classical antisemitism. But they see that we are still describing it as anti Semitism, as if it's exactly the same thing. We're looking for the same tropes. We're looking for tropes of financial conspiracy or racial infiltration or dual loyalty. While many of these people don't require these tropes, they only need this core anti Zionism that constructs Israel as evil, colonizer, apartheid, genocide, which is basically the inverse of the great moral values of our age. After Auschwitz, after the civil rights movement, after apartheid and decolonization, the colonialism, apartheid and genocide are the great evils. And anyone on the left, anyone who's a progressive, anyone who believes in human rights would be opposed to that. You don't need to be a fringe skinhead neo Nazi, right? It's respectable people who want to oppose a colonial, apartheid and genocidal regime. And they are not against all Jews anymore. They're not against a Jew just because they're wearing a kippah. At least a respectable Western anti Zionist, I.e. they are against Israelis and Israel. And we demand that it be shown to be anti Semitic, right? As if anti Israeli racism, as if a hatred of Israelis themselves were somehow okay as long as it wasn't anti Semitic. And so I think we need to show the anti Zionism. We need to catch up with the anti Zionists and say, we see you, we understand what you're saying, we understand that it's not classical antisemitism, that you don't want to push Jews out of Europe, you're demanding they go back to Europe. Well, that's hateful in its own way. It's an anti Israeli racism. It's anti Zionism. And anti Zionism is a violent politics. Anti Zionism drove Jews out of Arab countries by marking them as Zionist traitors, as Zionist spies, and as people who didn't belong within an Arab nation for that reason. Right.

A (32:06)

Including huge numbers of very loyal anti Zionist Jews who found that the world they lived in, the Iraq they were living in, the Libya they were living in, wouldn't tolerate them. How do we do that? All right, let's say I accept your premise. Anti Zionism has reframed the entire debate, shifted it away from Jews. It's an erasure of history. It's an obsessiveness. It has all these characteristics that are rather easy to find in that Venn diagram overlapping with anti Semitism, but it has enough difference that they can tell themselves that they're okay, that the essential thing is different, and so they're not anti Semites. So I accept that and that. I certainly accept that they think it and that that's how they perceive it. So all they are is just hatred of the last living Jews in the Eastern hemisphere, which is totally not anti Semitism. It's. It's something else. If the Jews agreed to have not have survived the 20th century, they'd have nothing against them. Or if the Jews had agreed to all get up and leave and move to France, maybe they'd have nothing against them. Right. It's anti Zionism, not antisemitism. How do you build a campaign? And this brings us to the movement you founded since the last time we talked. Tell us about that movement. How do you build a campaign that just says, wait a second, anti Zionism in the anti Zionist's own framing of it is also just a bigotry. How do you frame that? How do you explain that? What is your argument for that and how do you teach that?

B (33:32)

So I think part of the reason we're so attached to antisemitism as both a word and a concept is because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was such an immense trauma for us as Jews and also for the rest of society as well, to really process how it was possible that sophisticated, advanced, civilized European cultures could have committed such a crime. And after the Holocaust, the term antisemitism, which really just referred to a specific political ideology emerging with Wilhelm Maher in 1879 and obviously becoming the central ideology of the Nazi Party. That term was now refashioned to refer to all Jew hatred across history. So it's all anti Semitism, including medieval anti Judaism, which has nothing to do with Semites, nothing to do with constructing Jews necessarily as a kind of infiltrating race. It's more theological. Right. The Holocaust is seen as a kind of culmination of that entire history. And so antisemitism becomes the paradigm of all forms of Jew hatred. But when we look at anti Zionism, we're actually looking at a lineage of Jew hatred that is oblique to the lineage of classical antisemitism. So it intersects with it because we have people like the Mufti, right, who he incorporated Nazism into his attacks on Zionism and on Jews in Mandatory Palestine. But at the same time, the corporate we have another lineage that's not necessarily culminating in the Holocaust. It's taking its own trajectory. It's going through Soviet anti Zionism. It has its Islamic, independent Islamic component as well. And it's coming into the west and then being transformed by this academic settler colonial theory, this anti colonial critique that's very prestigious within the academy. So it's really kind of its own phenomenon. Right. And so the movement against anti Zionism helps people to see that phenomenon and make it legible. And it works to help the Jewish community and allies and anyone start to name anti Zionism as the core problem that we're seeing today and recognize that we've entered the anti Zionist age. So the dominant structure of Jew hatred today is anti Zionism. That doesn't mean that classical anti Semitism doesn't continue to exist. Or even medieval anti Judaism people who call you a Talmud devil, right, they're still doing medieval anti Judaism. Anti Zionism is a permission structure for those older forms of Jew hate to find space. But it's within this broader frame, within this anti Israel zeitgeist, with an Israel constructed as the center of evil, as the symbol of all moral wrongs in our age. And in order to understand Islamist Jew hatred, we have to also embed it in anti Zionism so that Islamist anti Semitism is anti Zionism. It is through anti Zionism that violence against Jews has happened throughout the Middle East. It's happened in Palestine. It's driven the Israeli Palestinian conflict through a radical rejectionism of the existence of a Jewish state. And it's had horrible consequences for Palestinians. It's the cause of Palestinian suffering. And it's also what's driving attacks against Jews in the Diaspora. So it's not about antisemitism versus Palestinian suffering or pro Israel people weaponizing antisemitism to legitimize violence against Palestinians. Actually, anti Zionism is the core problem behind both the suffering of Jews and the suffering of Palestinians.

A (37:15)

I feel like I agree with you, but something is holding me back. It shares so much. It shares the standing the Jew up to be judged, that whole dynamic. It shares with antisemitism, that heart, that core idea from early, early Christian and Muslim antisemitism of the Jew standing in the way of the redemption, refusing the great revelation, rejecting that. Then Marx secularizes into the Jew as the paradigmatic capitalist because the Jew doesn't farm the land, the Jew only runs capital. Right? And then is. Is again reframed by everybody. The Jew is the great danger to the folk for Hitler, and the Jew is the great danger to the worldwide communist brotherhood of nations, to Stalin and, And so the Jew always standing in the way. It could be opposite things, but it's always the Jew. And here the Jew is standing in the way. Just you said it the way you said it. Anti Zionism, you know, posits that Israel, that Zionism is the distillation of all the bad things in the world, of all the evils of the world, really. I mean, Zionism and not like the Chinese regime. Zionism and not the brokenness of all of the bottom billion and all the UN Human development reports. Zionism and not tyranny. Zionism and not Vladimir Putin. I mean, really, I mean, just in how isn't it just. I'm sorry, last time I'm going to ask this. I really feel like an idiot. I feel like you're saying something they can hear. And so you're the guy who needs to be campaigning there. But I'm sitting in little old parochial me right over deep, deep inside the Jews. And I'm looking at this and I'm like, this is exactly the same thing. The Jew is again standing in judgment. They weaponize Jews who agree with them in exactly the way that the old Catholic Inquisition would weaponize Jews who converted and were the, you know, sometimes the most virulent of inquisitors because they were trying to prove, right. They, it's, it's all the same models. I'm, I'm standing in the way of the redemption of the world. I'm not even talking about whether I'm doing terrible things that are wrong. There's a terrible, terrible war in Gaza with huge costs. There's, there's a worse war In Sudan with even bigger costs and genocidal ideologies and mass starvation and Islam as the cause. Differences in these ideologies as part of the driver of the war. And that doesn't exist. That's uninteresting. That's just a Zionist attempt to deflect. I don't mind people coming at us over the Gaza war. Not, I don't mind God forbid there should be a war without criticism on this earth in human history. What's happening. The West's ignoring of Sudan is a tragedy. The west not ignoring Gaza is not the problem. They should pay attention to Gaza. But I'm standing in the way of the redemption of the world. I'm the distillation of all. Isn't this just the thing? I'm not going to ask it again. I just. Isn't it just the thing? The old thing?

B (40:14)

So I think there are functional invariants across time and one of them is the scapegoating of the Jew, right? Of making the Jew a symbolic evil for all the problems in the world. And so that is certainly similar. But of course it's a shift of logical level, right? Because it's not Jews in the Diaspora, really, it's the Jewish state. It's Jews as a kind of people or collective that certain Jews can be exempted from. And now I like actually the analogy you made to anti Judaism and these sort of Jewish converts to Christianity like John Piffercorn or Pablo Cristiani, right, who would act as these kind of experts on the Jews for the non Jews to explain, you know, oh, I come from this community. I'll tell you that. I, I know that they are really evil. You know, when Omar Bartov goes on the New York Times, he says, I'm Israeli. So I can confirm for you that all these Israelis sound exactly like Nazis during the Holocaust. And he studied the Holocaust as well. So he has all of that accumulated authority. I actually like the analogy to anti Judaism because I think the anti Zionism is more similar to medieval anti Judaism than it is to classical anti Semitism. My concern is to continually see anti Zionism.

A (41:25)

Wait, hold on, hold on.

B (41:26)

In terms of classical anti Semitism, okay.

A (41:29)

So lay that out for us. Modern anti Zionism is closer to the classical religious anti Judaism.

B (41:38)

Yes, to religious anti Judaism. Let me explain why. Because the religious anti Judaism, it constructed itself as if it was opposed to a kind of belief system, to a kind of ideology, right. That you could convert out of. So the problem wasn't Jews themselves. The problem was Judaism. It was the beliefs of Judaism that Christ was not the Messiah and that they should follow instead the Talmud and the laws of the rabbis and these kind of overly legalistic and corporeal kinds of regulations that had no real love and heart and spirit to them. And that was because they rejected Christ. So that was really what anti Judaism was. And anti Zionism constructs itself in a very similar way. It's not opposed to Jews themselves as a kind of race, but it's opposed to a supposed belief system called Zionism. And if Jews reject this belief system and become anti Zionists, they will be saved. They'll join this universal vanguard of people standing up for equality and justice against the horrors of Zionism. So I think anti Zionism is new and it's distinct from classical anti Semitism that came before it. And that's why I like the analogy actually to anti Judaism because it shows that it's distinct from classical antisemitism of the 19th and 20th century.

A (43:01)

That was very helpful, thank you. I'm glad I took that one extra question, that sort of stupid sounding question, to get that, because that clarified it for me. I do think I see it much more clearly now. You wrote a piece in the Free Press where you made the following argument. This latest assault only reaffirms the ongoing reality of anti Zionism as an essentially violent ideology, one that drives out Jewish communities wherever it takes hold. I think you're talking about the Arab world through exclusion, discrimination and even murder. This is not about a political opinion that crosses the line into antisemitic violence. We're dealing with anti Zionist violence itself. The targeting of Jews as Zionists legitimized by specific anti Zionist libels. What academia has dabbled in as ideology is constantly being translated into violence. And you know, we had the murders in Colorado and Manchester that came before Bundy Beach. And there's going to be more, you know, I'm telling you there's going to be more, dear listener, viewer. And everybody will be just as shocked and everybody will be, you know, very worried about not overly victimizing the perpetrators. It's an inherently violent ideology and it's being espoused by people who claim the mantle of great morality, by pacifist kinds of people in academia who on the altar of this anti Zionist idea structure, are building out a permission structure for this kind of violence. Is that the strategy is explaining that is showing that the strategy for tackling this thing, for pushing back against anti Zionism.

B (44:47)

So think about the paradigm that is so often used today both by the Jewish community and by broader society and by anti Zionists, which is that there's something called anti Zionism which is presumptively legitimate. It's a political opinion, it's a criticism of Israel, it's a criticism of Zionism that at some point crosses the line into anti Semitism. We hear that all the time. And what emerges is this kind of endless debate that's sort of designed to be insolvable of where exactly is the line? Because of course, it's been defined in such an abstract way and anti Zionism has emerged as a new ideology. It's not the same as antisemitism that no one knows where to draw it. Right. And we have three different definitions of antisemitism. We have the ihra, the International Holocaust remembrance alliance, we have the Jerusalem Declaration of Anti Semitism, the jda, we have the NEXUS Declaration of Antisemitism. And they all draw the line differently because it's already been constructed as a kind of political debate. Right. If I'm really critical of Israel, I'll probably be more permissive, right? I'll draw the line, you know, more restricted, more permissively. Right. And if I'm a huge supporter of Israel and I love everything the Israeli government does, then I want something that says that lots of stuff is anti Semitic and it'll be really restrictive.

A (46:07)

So I've never met that person, that last person. But. But I take your point.

B (46:11)

Yeah, but the way it's set up is like that. So it basically implies that someone who calls a lot of things anti Semitic is more supportive of Israeli policies and someone who is more critical of Israeli policies calls less things anti Semitic. So it's basically just a political debate. And our lived experience of Jew hatred as Jews is turned into a debate. And our authority to speak from our lived experience as victims of Jew hatred and is stripped from us essentially and turned into this abstract debate. And we reproduce that paradigm. That same paradigm is operative when we say anti Zionism has become anti Semitism. This was an anti Semitic attack. It crossed the line into anti Semitic violence. So we talk about anti Semitic violence, but we don't talk about anti Zionist violence. It's like anti Zionism has to become something else to become violent. So in that quote, what I was trying to get at is that anti Zionism is its own source of violence. There's a specific violence that comes with anti Zionism. And because it's driven by anti Zionist libels, the colonizer, apartheid, genocide, and the marking of Jews as Zionists as a specific kind of character A specific racialization as an object of hatred, the evil Zionist. And if you're in an academic environment or activist space that's anti Zionist, you can just feel this so palpably that the Zionists are doing this. This is kind of poisonous tone when they say the word Zionist. Right. And that's because the Zionist is really the object of hatred. So we need to teach people about the history of anti Zionist violence. Like in Arab and Muslim countries that drove out 850,000 Jews. Or in the Soviet Union that discriminated against Jews, that purged Jews. Or in Poland in 1968 where they drove out 13,000 Jews with this mass anti Zionist campaign, all while classical anti Semitism was illegal. So the government of Poland at the time could say, we reject antisemitism. Antisemitism is racism, it's Nazism, it's fascism. We're absolutely against it. And drive out 13,000 Jews using anti Zionism. Right. And that just shows to the degree to which just getting the IHRA through, just getting organizations to even recognize that anti Semitism as a problem, which basically everyone does today, is not enough. One has to see anti Zionism as its own problem.

A (48:42)

When the bigot seeks a defensive line, the defensive line will be, I'm not anti Semitic, I'm anti Zionist. So we say, okay, but anti Zionist is a violence producing bigotry that generalizes people, that libels people constantly, that is, you know, supported by classical antisemitism in some ways, that is supported by older anti Judaist Jewish ideas in some ways, especially in the Muslim world. But nevertheless it is its own bigotry. So when we say that, then they will say, but what about all the Jews? 30% of New York Jews may have the polls, I haven't seen recent polls, but very early polls suggested voted for Mamdani and Mamdani is no fan of Zionism. Are those Jews misunderstanding who they are when they start coming at us and say, well, what am I allowed to say against Israel? What's the answer? How do we actually carefully articulate what the anti Zionism argument is, what our argument against anti Zionism is, and why we think it is an illegitimate hatred rather than not just because some people take it to violence. Some people take good ideas to violence, arguably. I mean, that's not itself a proof. What inherent to anti Zionism is evil. And when is it not evil?

B (49:56)

It's always evil. So the way I respond to that basically is they want to say, well, tell me what I can say about Israel that's not Anti Zionism or that's not bigoted. Well, that's not my role and I don't think it's necessary. Right. Instead of saying what anti Zionism is not, I try and get people to see what anti Zionism is. And once you see what it is, it's a very specific thing. I think of anti Zionism, it's like an apple. It's an object in front of you. You see it, it's a phenomenon. And when you see a real thing, a real phenomenon, it's not an abstract debate where you don't know where to put the borders. You see the line around it, you see its outline and you see its border, you see it's something specific. So today no one really argues about when a critique of Jewish assimilation becomes Nazism. Right. We all kind of just recognize what Nazism was. It had all these weird theories about Arianism and Semites and the replacement of Aryans by some kind of Semitic spirit that was alien. Right. It's a specific ideology. Anti Zionism is. Is incredibly specific. It has a. It's grounded in settler colonial theory, which is not an evident theory. Right. Basically, settler colonialism is saying that there can be a type of colonialism where, where people just shows up and they build a community somewhere and. And then they become genus inherently genocidal. Well, well, that's not intuitive on its own. There's a lot of ideological baggage that you need to have to already believe that people migrating to a place and setting up a community are inherently genocidal toward others. Right. Then there's the Nazi and Islamist and Soviet lineage that's completely different from this pre1948 Jewish debates. Whether that's Satmar Hasidism, whether that's Bundism, or even Jews who were drawn to Marxism just because they wanted to. They believed that anti Semit could be defeated by a world working class revolution. So anti Zionism has its own lineage, it has its own ideological content. And it's so specific that once you see it, there's no point. Basically, the debate falls apart. Right. The debate about where to draw the line will fall apart because everyone will know what anti Zionism is. And that's the point we need to.

A (52:16)

What is anti Zionism that makes the debate fall apart? How do I know it when I see it? It.

B (52:22)

Let me give you an example. When I see problems in Israel that disturb me, when I see a Jewish extremist movement in Israel that is engaging in language that I find to be very barbaric or violent or they want to turn Israel into a kind of pseudo biblical Halakic state where potentially we might bring back the Sanhedrin and then stone people for desecrating Shabbat. Israel no longer looks like something that's incorporated positive liberal democratic enlightenment values into its society, but becomes a kind of Jewish Iran. That is all very negative to me. I'm critical of that. I don't want to see it. I don't think it's the right direction. I don't think it's consistent with Jewish values as I understand them. But I don't think that critique has anything to do with anti Zionism because it's actually the opposite of anti Zionism. So when I see these problems, when I see someone like Ben GVIR and his rhetoric, I don't see that as an extension of white colonial European Nazism. It's actually the opposite in this case. It's a kind of failure of Israel to really integrate and reconcile its Jewish identity with democracy or really with its belonging to the West. So because Jews are sort of both Middle Eastern and Western and have to find a way to integrate those two components of their identity. Right. So it's not about being a European colonist, it's actually about not being fully integrated into Europe and the west and how to manage that. So there's a whole space of critiques, of internal discussions and debates that Jews can have, that others can have too, about Israel. But that has nothing to do with anti Zionism. And that is almost based on completely distinct premises. Because the premises of anti Zionism are just about scapegoating Jews. They're just about using Israel as a symbol of what the west now sees as wrong as Western colonialism, racism, apartheid and genocide. So we need to basically identify that so we can clear the way. Basically we see anti Zionism, we can set it off to one side and then we can keep so called critically discussing Israel. But as long as we can't clearly identify anti Zionism, we're not going to be able to clearly identify that space of criticism either. And we'll keep calling things criticism that are actually just anti Zionist libels.

A (54:49)

So let's bring that back to the Middle east and also therefore to the massacre in the Muslim world. We started with this. You started with this. In the Muslim world it operates differently. Anti Judaism of the old kind is much more prevalent. You point to the connection between classical anti Semitism and some of these ideas of the Muslim Brothers, etc. Of these people in Cairo, Baghdad, of course, Ali Rashid regime and all that during the, during the war and the enormous influence of Nazi embassies in the Arab world and their publications during the period of Nazi rule in Germany. But all of those connections, all of those connections are nevertheless not determinant. In other words, the Muslim world had the ability to despise Jews. The status of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, certainly toward the end, when the Ottoman Empire turned on its Christians, the Greeks, the Armenians and also the Jews on the non Muslim minorities didn't need the help of European ideal, those European ideologies with glee and joy, but it didn't need them to turn on the Jews. And so you have these ideologies in the Muslim world. It's different. It's different from the progressive discourse. Isis, Al Qaeda, Hamas, drawing on Sayyid Qutb, drawing on the Muslim brothers of the 1920s. They don't need this progressive discourse. Is that also anti Zionism? If we understand anti Zionism as this series of, of libels that are based in progressive Western or morality. I mean, a colonialist is only a problem if you don't believe in the Muslim conquest of the world. Right? If you, like Hamas, do believe in the Muslim conquest of the entire world, why is colonialism bad? The only problem is who's doing the colonializing. Right? So is that different? Is that the same anti Zionism? How do you see the distinction there?

B (56:33)

Yeah, if we think about the Red Green alliance, basically what's happened is that a conquering society, a colonizing society, the second most successful imperial project in history, which was Islamic civilization, has been recoded as a victim of colonialism because they were defeated by another imperial colonizing society, which was Europe. Right. And the Ottoman Empire, of course, collapsed with World War I. They sided with the aggressors and they were defeated. And of course, Britain and France, when they were carving up the Middle east, had colonial aims and ambitions. They wanted to extract oil, they wanted control over the Suez Canal, etc. And that did sort of harm Arabs. Right. So Arabs had many ambitions to have a, an Arab nationalist super state. They didn't necessarily want to be carved up according to these random borders. And since that time, there has been great instability. I mean, it's the same instability we've seen across the world in terms of creating these colonial partitions, exacerbating ethnic conflicts and sectarian religious conflicts throughout the world. And at that level, the problems that have occurred in the Middle east can be compared to the kind of decolonial tensions and genocides that have happened in Africa as well. But of course what you have here is that there's a colonizing civilization that's being framed as the victims of colonialism. And thus they can then take on the mantle of anti colonialism since they oppose the west, since they oppose Europe and they now code Jews as basically a force of the west, as white colonizers. Right? They can take on the mantle of anti colonial justice while pursuing an imperial project. And I do think that the world really needs to understand and begin to see Islam again as a civilization in crisis. Right? Because it's a civilization that grew out of conquest. I mean, Sharia law was codified by conquerors, the dhimmi regulations on minorities throughout the Middle east, where, you know, a dhimmi can't ride a horse, a dhimmi has to build their house lower than a Muslim. All of these humiliating regulations were ways of encoding imperial dominance. And they're built into the Islamic religious tradition because the religious tradition was not separate from the political structures of this empire. And so when you get to modernity and you get to an international order and a world of nation states based on human rights and liberal values, there's a kind of crisis as to how Islam fits into this world. Right? And so I don't see it as Islam is evil. I see it as Islam is in a crisis. It has these internal problems of how to evolve, how to reform itself, how to maintain their identity as Muslims, which is valuable while also fitting into this order of human rights and liberal values. And it's the same problem that I was just saying that Israel has.

A (59:46)

How does anti Zionism fit into that?

B (59:49)

So I think anti Zionism partially fits into that by being the scapegoat mechanism where Israel is really blamed for the problems of Islamic civilization, for the difficulties of Islam to fit into the modern world, and for all the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that exist in the Middle East. They're all the result of the evil Zionists of the little Satan is Israel and the great Satan is the U.S. but actually the little Satan is controlling the U.S. because of course, Al Qaeda believed that the U.S. was being controlled by Jews from the World Trade center. And radical anti Jewish ideology has motivated Al Qaeda and ISIS, etc. Because they all share this, this concept that Israel and the occupation of the Holy Land is the great problem. Right? So I think Muslims or Islamic civilization needs to move beyond anti Zionism to succeed and to do something else than trying to restore a lost empire.

A (60:50)

Adam Lewis Klein, thank you so much for joining me. We're cutting it short here. You have to go I have to go, but this is an hours long discussion that we will continue in our next opportunity. Thank you for everything that you do and for helping us clarify these issues and for debating these issues. I really do think Jews entered this moment utterly confused, totally confused. They did not know these ideas in academia, these kind of luxury beliefs of weirdo academics talking about these coded words, these terms d'.

B (61:22)

Art.

A (61:22)

They did not know that this was real and substantive. And the rubber would hit the road, and it would do so in massive violence, and it would do so in protests, and it would do so in hatred. And so thank you for helping to create a vocabulary about that moment, which is the beginning of being able to actually have agency and do what we need to do.

B (61:44)

Thank you, Haviv. Really enjoyed it.