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- [00:01]
Omer Bartov
Bye for now.
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Announcer
Will Gear Theatricum Botanicum returns this June 6th through October 4th with outdoor repertory theater events and educational programs for all ages. A Midsummer Night's Dream is back alongside Romeo and Juliet, Treasure Island, Noel Coward's Waiting in the Wings, and Bernardo Cubria's dark and incisive new comedy, the People of Pompeii. Set in the Aftermath of the 2025 Palisades fire, the is located in Topanga Canyon just off the 101 freeway in the shade of the California live oaks. Explore and picnic in the gardens before the show. Further information available at www.siatricum.com and@kpfk do.
- [01:04]
Hannah Feldman
Foreign.
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Omer Bartov
Hi, this is jamie cromwell.
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David Feldman
You are listening to 90.7 fm, kpfk, los angeles.
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Bruce Fein
I'm tom morello, and you're listening to the ralph nader radio hour.
- [01:19]
Omer Bartov
Stand up.
- [01:20]
David Feldman
Stand up.
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Omer Bartov
You've been sitting way too long.
- [01:27]
Hannah Feldman
Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. My name is Hannah Feldman. Your host for today, Steve Scrovan is off, so I'm here with my co host, David Feldman. Hello, David Hello, Hannah. And the man of the hour, Ralph Nader.
- [01:41]
David Feldman
Hello, Ralph hello everybody.
- [01:43]
Hannah Feldman
On today's show, we're talking to historian Omer Bartov about his new book, what Went Wrong. Omer Bartov grew up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of his life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer, and spent most of his career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust. But with his recent work, he's turned his attention to his native country of Israel. We'll speak to him about the history behind Israel's genocide against the Palestinians, how ethnonationalism has shaped Israel's law and culture, and how Jewish Israelis reconcile their Jewish identity with their Israeli identity. Omer Bartov will be our primary guest for today, but friend of the show and international law expert Bruce Fine will be joining us us to add his insight to the conversation as well. As always, we'll check in with our intrepid corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokheimer. But first, what went wrong in Israel?
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Host/Interviewer
David Bruce Fine is a constitutional scholar and an expert on International Law. Mr. Fine was associate Deputy attorney General under Ronald Reagan, and he's the author of Constitutional Peril, the Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy and American Empire before the Fall. Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. Bruce Fine, thank you. Omer Bartov is the Dean's professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. A historian, Professor Bartov was born on A kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv and served in the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War. He went on to become a leading scholar of the German army and the Holocaust before turning his attention to his native country. His early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II. He then turned to the links between total war and genocide and interethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. His current interest is reflected in his recent books Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel, Palestine, First Person History in Times of Crisis, Israel what Went Wrong and the forthcoming the Broken A Personal Political History of Israel and Palestine. Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. Professor Omer Bartov, thank you so much
- [04:17]
Omer Bartov
for having me and thanks for this kind introduction.
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David Feldman
Thank you very much, Omer. I want to start out with some questions I think our readers would like enlightenment on. They often relate to myths that have been promoted by apologists for Netanyahu. Netanyahu calls Israel a Jewish state. You make the distinction between a Jewish state and a state for Jews and you say if it's going to be a Jewish state, it has to address the religious framework of Israel, namely Judaism. So my question is what is left of Judaism in Netanyahu's Israel? And I want to refer to a number of years ago, 400 Israeli, Canadian and US rabbis sent a letter to Netanyahu protesting the demolition of civilian Palestinian homes as a violation of Judaic scripture. Just by way of background, but what is left of Judaism in Netanyahu's Jewish state?
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Omer Bartov
So you know, Ralph, I mean, the whole idea of creating a Jewish state, and it says so in the proclamation of the state from May 1948, is that it would be a state for Jews, that it would be both Jewish and democratic. And that has proven to be not possible. A Jewish state can be both Jewish and democratic only if the overwhelming majority, if not all of its citizens, are Jews. So one problem is the very idea of it being both Jewish and democratic. Secondly, interestingly, Israel has become more Jewish in two ways. It's become more Jewish in that it is more focused on it being a state for Jews that is ethnically Jews. And it has passed various laws to that effect, especially the basic law. Israel is the nation state of the Jews. That was passed in 2018. That makes the Arab citizens of the country legally second class citizens. And at the same time it has become also a more Jewish state. That is, there are more people in Israel today certainly than there were when I was growing up there who practiced Judaism. I grew up in a secular environment. My school was secular. Most of the people around me were secular. My grandparents were Orthodox. But the trajectory was that the state was becoming more and more secular. That has entirely changed. But when you talk about what kind of Judaism there is in Israel now, Judaism has been transformed in Israel into something that would not be recognizable by people like my grandparents or going back many, many generations. You'd have to go back to the zealots who were rebelling against the Roman Empire in Masada to find that kind of Judaism. It is completely different. It's also a kind of Judaism that would not be practiced by any sane Jew outside of Israel because it is Jewish supremacist. It truly believes that Jews have a superior right over other peoples. It's aggressive, it's racist, it's violent. And in that sense, Israel has become more Jewish, but more Jewish in a way that is completely foreign to the kind of tradition that you allude to, which had to do in large part with the fact that Jews, for most of their existence after the exile, were a minority.
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David Feldman
Well, how do you interpret this in the context of numerous Israeli human rights groups, including one who is described as Rabbis for Human Rights. Do they have any role or are they crying in the wilderness?
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Omer Bartov
B'tselem is an organization. Most of the people in B'tselim whom I know are secular. They don't belong to this brand of Judaism in Israel today. You have to understand that the kind of Judaism that developed in Israel is a product of the settler movement. So it begins as something that was a national religious. It originally was a rather moderate party. It was taken over by very extreme rabbis. It established the thing called Gushamunim, the block of the faithful, which were the engine of the settler project that began after 1967. And that group, which initially was a minority, has become now major player in Israeli politics. They may be about a third of the electorate in Israel, but they are extremely powerful. They have penetrated the military, the security services, the government. So, yes, you have some liberal religious people in Israel, but they are a distinct minority. And much of the more liberal opinion in Israel is not coming from the religious community. It's coming from the secular community.
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David Feldman
And.
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Omer Bartov
And that community is besieged and speaks about itself in terms of being besieged. And then there's a third element that's important to understand. There is a large ultra Orthodox community in Israel. The ultra Orthodox are not Zionists. They're, in fact, theologically, they're anti Zionist, but they participate in the politics of the state as they would participate in the politics of any state. They have become very numerous. They're part of a major division in Israeli politics today. And because they're needed usually to form a coalition in Israel, because Israel is a parliamentary system that needs a coalition, they have immense amount of power. They don't support these national religious people. They're actually opposed to any Zionist politics. But they are a major player in Israeli politics in terms of taking over much of the budget and of refusing to serve in the Israeli military and of manipulating Israeli politics to their own concern and trying to make Israel into a religious state, into a halachic state that is a state that's ruled by religion to the extent that right now there's a law that is making its way through the Knesset to create gender separation within the Israeli military and gender separation within Israeli universities so that Israel would look much more like Iran than it would like any Western state.
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Bruce Fein
Omar, I wanted to ask you described the particular zealots, if you will, in Israel as believing in Jewish supremacy. How would, in your view, distinguish that from Adolf Hitler's master race theory for the Aryans during the Third Reich?
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Omer Bartov
You know, I spent much of my career studying the Third Reich, studying Nazism. I'm not a great fan of comparing anything to the Nazis because the Nazis always went out. They were more extreme, they were more genocidal, they were more racist than anybody in history. I don't think we need to compare them to that. We can just say that they're racist, that they're violent, that they believe the land belongs to them. They don't believe in democracy because they're messianic. Democracy is in the way. They don't believe in any liberal values whatsoever. They have elements that are slightly more moderate and elements that are more radical. And the more radical elements are gradually taking over. And they don't really believe in any blood theories. It's not this kind of racism. They simply believe that the land belongs only to the Jews and that the Arabs or anybody else, including Christians, should not be there. And if they are there, then they should be a tolerated or not particularly tolerated small minority. That's where their thinking is. And they believe that history is on their side. So in that sense, yes, they are similar to communists, they're similar to fascists, they're similar to Nazis in that they believe that they can see the way forward. They know the logic of history, and the logic of history, as they see it is on their side.
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David Feldman
In your book, you describe the absence of a written Constitution in Israel and the consequences. And you focus on the Declaration of Independence, which is in writing that was issued in the late 1940s by the New Israeli state and had a lot of small d democracy rhetoric. So can you tell us what the core recognition of human rights are in the Declaration of Independence and then discuss the plight of Arab Israelis and as the Washington Post just pointed out, the attack on Christians in Israel where the government shows little concern. That's an article By Jerry Shi, July 5th of this year in the Washington Post. Can you go from the Declaration of Independence and then talk about it on the ground in terms of Arab Israelis and Christians?
- [13:27]
Omer Bartov
Sure. So you know, the term Declaration of Independence itself is a misnomer. That's not what the document is actually called. The document is called a Proclamation of the State of Israel. It is known in Israel as a Declaration of Independence, and it's not clear independence from whom, because the document was issued and read out by David Ben Gurion, the founder of the state and the first Prime Minister, on May 14, 1948, in the afternoon and that midnight, the British left and they left off their own accord. So Israel was not declaring independence, he was declaring a state. The document itself is an interesting document. I tell the history of this document in my book because it was forced on Israel. It was forced by the UN on November 29, 1947, the UN issued a resolution 181 on the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The leadership of the Jewish community accepted that petition. The leadership of the Palestinians and other Arab states rejected it. They had good reasons for rejecting it because he gave more than half of the land to a third of the population. The Jews were only a third. But that resolution demanded from both states that they issue a declaration of a state where they would offer a bill of rights, that they would declare themselves to be a democracy and they would give equal rights to all citizens. And so the proclamation does that, and it says there will be equal rights to all groups, all religions, all genders. Now it says that those Arabs who decide to stay in the State of Israel will be given equal rights. It's a bit ironic because when the statement was being issued, there was already ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians simultaneously at that time. But about 150,000 Palestinians remain in the State of Israel and are given equal rights or given citizenship by the state. However, immediately thereafter, they're subjected to military rule, and they live under military rule for the next 20 years. Now in the declaration and in this proclamation, that is known as the Declaration of Independence. The state also commits itself to issuing a constitution by October 1st of that year of 1948. And that constitution was supposed to be in the spirit of the proclamation, that is to include the Bill of Rights. And that constitution was never issued. Israel has no constitution. And so the two things that would define the state, first, a constitution that defines its legal framework. And secondly, the borders of the state, another demand from the UN that Israel did not fulfill, are never defined. There is no constitution, and Israel never declares its borders. All the borders that Israel has had since 1948 are ceasefire borders. There's no recognized border of the state. So this is the situation that is created in which I describe as the moment at which Zionism, which was a movement that thought to liberate and emancipate Jews who were a minority and a persecuted minority in Europe, becomes a state ideology that is increasingly ethnocentric, violent and expansionist, and the rotten fruits of that we see today. Now you ask about the case of Christians. Most of these Christians are Palestinian, but not all. The State of Israel in 1948 ethnically cleansed most of the Palestinians from what became the State of Israel. The majority of them were Muslims. There was a Christian minority. For its own political reasons, Israel at the time was reluctant to ethnically cleanse Christian Palestinians. And so many of the Palestinians who remained in the states were Christian or Muslims who fled to Christian cities, such as to Nazareth. The population of Nazareth, which was mostly Christian, changed in 48 because many Muslim Palestinians fled there and were protected by being in a Christian state. What you see now, attacks on Christians, as reported, as you said in that article, that's something quite new in Israel, and that is actually a manifestation of precisely what I was talking about before. That is that nowadays you have radical Jews, both Orthodox, who have become radicalized, and these national religious who see it as their duty to attack anyone who is not Jewish, Christian or Muslim. And the state under Netanyahu, which has also veered dramatically to the right since he formed his last coalition, doesn't pay much heed to that and is increasingly less concerned with what is said about it in the rest of the world. That was the main reason that Christians were more protected, because Israel's main allies are Christian states. And that has changed too. So that's the reason for why you see these attacks today.
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David Feldman
Let's go to another myth. When they started slaughtering civilians after October 7 in Gaza, the explanation was that Israel does not intentionally target civilians and that Hamas fighters are using civilians as human shields. Well, it turns out that the history contradicts this, that Abba Ebon, for example, in the early 1980s, the foreign minister of Israel, celebrated scholar, fluent in Arabic as well as Hebrew, stated, of course, Israel has targeted civilians from day one. And he was very clear about that at the time when a high security official was affirming exactly that, that they target citizens. But the Western press, especially in the us, kept repeating that and blaming Hamas fighters as human shields. Well, as one scholar of Middle east history, Charles Smith, a professor at the University of Arizona, and he wrote in the Washington Post a letter saying, in fact, Israel has used Palestinians as human shields for decades, including placing individuals in front of Israeli soldiers, making children move wires in homes to see whether the home was booby trapped, etc. This practice was finally outlawed by Israel's high court in 2005 after years of protest by human rights activists. But they're at it again, putting young Palestinians ahead as they go into the tunnels. And they actually have a name for that practice, and it's widely used by Israeli soldiers in Gaza. What's your observations here?
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Omer Bartov
Look, I mean, first of all, I've taught Shah Smith's book many times, and he's a very important scholar, and I agree with what he wrote and his response. Israel has targeted Palestinian civilians for a long time. In 1948, as I just said, Israel ethnically cleansed the vast majority of Palestinians from what became the State of Israel, 750,000. In 1956, when it occupied Gaza again, there were plans to ethically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza. But then the United States acted very differently from today and told Israel that it had to get out of the Sinai Peninsula. In 1967, there were talks about ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza, and there was in fact, an ethnic cleansing of populations, of Arab populations from the west bank, several hundred thousand from the west bank and from the Gaza Strip. And in military tactics, of course, there were. There has been use of Palestinians as human shields. So this is actually well documented. I would say that what Israel has done in Gaza is on a completely different scale. And you have to go back to 1948 for the scale of what Israel was doing, including the use of Palestinians as human shields, as you say, and going into tunnels and so forth. Probably that's the least of the crimes that were committed by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip. As for Hamas, look, Hamas is not a vegetarian organization. Hamas knew when it attacked Israel on October 7 that there would be a savage response. It may not have known how savage it would be, but he knew that it would be. Hamas did dig tunnels all over Gaza. The IDF assumed that if it were to destroy Hamas, if it actually were to try and destroy Hamas as a whole, it would have to destroy Gaza. There was no other way to destroy Hamas. And in fact, the IDF destroyed Gaza. But Hamas is still standing. It's still there. And so if you think, if you create a guerrilla movement in an area like Gaza, which was before October 7, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, where are you going to fight from? You have to fight from areas that are densely populated. That's where you're fighting from. And that, of course, gives your enemy the excuse to destroy not just you, but the population. Until October 7, the IDF used tactics that did cause the death of large numbers of civilians. But the scales changed after October 7th, and we know this now. Even the algorithms for the Israeli Air Force were changed. That is, how many civilians are you allowed to assume would be killed from going after one militant? Is it 20? Is it 50? Is it 100? These algorithms were changed. So the goal by that point became very different. The IDF was not trying not to hit civilians and was not actually trying to destroy Hamas. What the IDF was deliberately and systematically trying to do was to ethnically cleanse Gaza. And that's what people sort of get confused about. If you look at what the IDF was doing from day one, it was pushing the population from the north to the south. That is militarily not a terribly wise way of destroying your enemy, going from one direction alone. It is a tactic that is meant to push the population from the north to the center to the south, meaning to the Egyptian border, so as to force them to leave. And as Netanyahu said, at some point in May 2025, he said, we have destroyed their homes. They have nothing to go back to. Our only problem is to find states that will take them in. So the tactic was not to destroy Hamas. The tactic was to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. But that failed because the Palestinians had no place to go to. These 2 million people could not cross over the long border with Israel, could not go into the sea, and could not cross over to Egypt. And so what was planned as an ethnic cleansing that is making it impossible telling people to leave their homes and demolishing their homes, making it impossible for them to come back so that they would eventually leave the territory altogether failed because they couldn't leave. And that's the big difference between 2023 and 1948. In 1948, in the Nakba, in the Catastrophe, as the Palestinians refer to it as. Palestinians could flee because the borders were open in 20, 23, 24, 25, they couldn't. So this was actually what the IDF was doing. And the whole story about human shields is simply false. It's not what the IDF was engaged in.
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David Feldman
You make a point in your book that the Israeli regime now views all problems that they exaggerate as existential. Like Hamas is no existential threat. Israel never was. It doesn't have an air for have any of the weapons. Of course that would constitute the veracity for such an outlandish claim. But it's all military in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, in Iran, under US patronage, Democrat and Republican alike in the White House. How can this possibly be turned around? Because you say it's supported by the vast majority of Israelis, not Israeli Arabs, but Israeli Jews.
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Omer Bartov
Look, the last war Israel fought there was a real war. That is a war between the Israeli military and other armies with tanks and airplanes and artillery was. The war that I was in was the war of 1973. In that war, at least there was a sense at the beginning that Israel was under existential threat because Arab armies, the Syrian army and the Egyptian army were actually driving into Israeli held territory and large numbers of Israeli soldiers were killed. Since then, Israel has only fought wars of choice and has only fought against militias. And those were militias of its own making. Hamas was created by Israel. Hamas was a tactic that was chosen by Ariel Sharon when he was then still commander of the Southern Command and then Minister of Defense before he became Prime Minister, as a response to Fatah, which was the main armed wing of the plo. And he thought, well, let's support Islamic fundamentalists in Gaza who would be on our side, because most of what they're doing is just serving the population needs, creating schools and so forth. Hezbollah was created by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. There was no Hezbollah before that. Israel has not fought a war against an actual army since 1973. It has created these kind of militias that it then claims pose an existential threat. And as you say, of course Hamas and Hezbollah cannot take over Israel. That's nonsense. So why do people buy into that? Well, they buy into that in part, as I describe in the book, because in Israel, since the 1980s, really since after the war of 1973, with the rise of the right wing in Israel in particular, the Holocaust has come to serve a particular purpose. Instead of being commemorated as an event that happened in the past that we should remember and commemorate and research it's become a kind of image of an imminent danger to Israel and the father. Israel is moved from the actual event of the Holocaust. And the more the Israeli army has become the hegemon, the military hegemon in its region, the more this alleged threat of an Auschwitz around the corner has been used by Israeli governments. Why has it been used? Because Israel actually needs to explain to itself and to its citizens why is it bossing it over millions of Palestinians? Half of the population under Israeli control are Palestinians. Two million are citizens, but they don't have equal rights and the others have no rights at all. They're simply under arbitrary military rule. So how do you explain that? You explain that by telling your population and the rest of the world that those Palestinians who have no power, who can never pose a threat to you, are an existential threat. And in Israel, that has worked quite well. And the result of that is that by now, certainly after October 7th, because as I said before October 7th, there was this idea that the occupation can be managed, meaning Israel can take more and more territory slowly but surely, and marginalize the Palestinians. More and more after October 7, the policy has become, as they say in Israel, every problem can be solved with force. And if force doesn't work, use more of it. That is, Israel has completely abandoned politics and it will not go back to politics, not the current government, because politics is not its view of the world. It will only go back to politics under major international pressure, which can only come in the form of sanctions, of major military, political and economic sanctions on Israel that would force Israel to return to politics. Right now, the limits of Israeli power are not determined in Jerusalem. They are determined in Washington D.C. and there, there are no limits on the use of power by Israel. Once those limits are returned to Israel, to Jerusalem, then there won't be any other choice but for Israel to go back to politics and to abandon this notion that every problem has one solution and that solution is to bomb it out of existence.
- [30:45]
David Feldman
I want to give Bruce Fein an opportunity to converse with you. Bruce?
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Bruce Fein
Yeah, Omer, Let me first congratulate you. I think your response has been brilliant and insightful, and thanks for making time here. I wanted to make the observation that many of the things that you describe in Israel apply in spades in the United States. We also have an administration that says we're being invaded militarily by Venezuela gangs, so we have to go kidnap their president and annex Venezuela. We've stated that Iran is an existential threat to the United States because at some future time it's conceivable they may get one nuclear weapon. We have 5,000. Israel probably has what, three or 400? I make the argument that we are being invaded by defenseless immigrants across the southern border. And it does seem to me that all countries. I don't think it's unique anyway, the United States or Israel, but it's generally true. Those in power are there to manufacture fear, to inflate fleas into elephants and say, my gosh, tomorrow the sky is falling down. We need to have national emergencies, rule by decree. Everything is in imminent danger. The communist domino theory, it's a very challenging issue. I say what you've described in Israel is not unique to Israel. We confront it every day right in the United States. And it works. If you look, for example, at our military budget, which passes by like unanimously between Democrats and Republicans, like, we need to spend another $500 billion. 5,000 warheads isn't good enough. We need to be able to fight a five front war with 15 aircraft carriers and everything else under the sun. We're perhaps the only country in the history of the world that has zero existential threats. And I really don't know how you deal with the issue of so easily. The masses are frightened and they're convinced, yeah, the sky is falling, and the politicians are experts at playing that up. And we need to get some kind of unified approach to try to get out of the business of manufacturing fear. But that's basically what our intelligence communities do here in the United States. You know, when they want a budget increase, there'll be a leak story in the New York Times or Washington Post. Oh, my gosh, new terrorist group someplace, somewhere, whether it's Al Qaeda is revived or ISIS is revived or Iran or Iraq has got some secret Shia group that's going to attack the United States. And, oh, we need another 50 or $100 billion. You can predict it like the sun rising in the east and setting in the West. I imagine that happens within Israeli intelligence, too. Shin Bet will come out or Mossad with some forecast just at the time you need more military spending. And I really study as much as I do not only Israel, us. I don't know how you deal with this defect in human nature. And it causes people to end up being like herds and they do the craziest things.
- [33:39]
David Feldman
Omer, you want to comment on that? Sure.
- [33:41]
Omer Bartov
Look, I mean, obviously there are similarities, not surprisingly, between Israel and the United States. And the similarities have grown over time. And there's been a kind of Israelization of some of American politics. Actually, I've experienced that in my lifetime. I came to the the US in the late 1980s and just political discourse in the US was completely different from what it is today. And now it resembles very much what there always was in Israel. It's a very violent ad hominem aggressive. So, yes, there are similarities. There are also huge differences, of course, because the US is a superpower, it's a vast continent, it's got 350 million people. And Israel is a very small country. It's a country where even today, many people just know each other. The event of October 7 was felt by vast numbers of Israelis. Many, many Israelis had a connection to people murdered by Hamas, including myself. So it's very small and it feels very vulnerable. And it has an ethos, a memory, a collective memory of its foundation. And its foundation does trace back to the Holocaust. So it has a kind of dramatic memory that is easy to mobilize by the kind of politicians that we see acting in Israel today. It's also a country that is an occupying country in a way that is very different from the United States. As I said, you're talking about a country that has altogether 14 million people in it, and half of them are Palestinian and half of them are Jews. Imagine that situation in the United States. And it's an ethno national country. And the United States has a historical legacy. It's very foundation, which I, as someone who came to this country and my wife who came to this country from yet another country, have appreciated that it's not an ethno national country. It does have a memory of, of itself being a country of immigrants. And while it now is going through this sort of white Christian national phase, which it has had many times in the past, at least in the past, it was went one way and then tilted in the other way because so many American citizens can trace themselves and their families to other countries, to other cultures, to other languages. So the differences are just as, as big as the similarities. But I would say on your comment, of the kind of politics that we see today, and we see that in the US we see that in Israel, we see that in other European countries now there is a rise of populism, there is a rise of intolerance, of racism, of fear of immigrants, of fear of others, of xenophobia, and of reliance increasingly on using brutal means to get your way. And the public is today, I think, frighteningly unable to respond to that. And I would say that one issue in particular that I find really disturbing is not so much the Rise of the right, what some people call new fascism or whatever, or populism or xenophobia, the far right. What I find most disturbing is that on the other side of politics, and you see that everywhere, you see that in the US In Israel, in Britain, in Germany, in France. On the other side, there is no good response to that, whether it's Democrats or Social Democrats or Labor, there is no good response to people's sense, large parts of the population in those countries, in democratic countries, that something has gone wrong for them, that they were not. That the promises that were made to them were not delivered, that their children will not have as good a life as they or their grandparents did, that social mobility has slowed down. There is no good response. And that you can trace that probably to the fall of communism and to the idea that capitalism is now all triumphant. But as long as there is no such response, we can expect more of that. And it really behooves our own people, intelligentsia, academics, media, to actually provide a new way of addressing the social ills that people do suffer from, certainly in the United States, so that they will not be so easily taken over by the kind of demagogy that we hear now in the United States.
- [38:24]
David Feldman
In the early years of the Israeli state, Martin Buber, a leading Israeli philosopher, and others like him, had a completely different view on how to live peacefully with the Palestinian inhabitants. Could you enlighten our listeners about Martin Buber, his philosophy?
- [38:43]
Omer Bartov
You know, Martin Buber was the teacher of my father and mother at the Hebrew University on the eve of the war of 1948, and afterwards they took classes with him. I would say that what is important in this case with Martin Buber and Magnus and a number of other people at the time was that in the 1930s, there was an organization called Bridge Alom, alliance of Peace. And that organization saw, and Buber was a very important voice in that saw, the trajectory of Zionism on its way to creating a state under the aegis of the British Empire, that it would be an ethno, national, violent, intolerant state. And those people knew what they were talking about because they saw this happening in Europe in their lifetimes. They saw exactly where ethno nationalism would lead. In fact, ethno nationalism was the birthplace of Zionism itself. And they talked about creating either a binational state or creating a confederation, that is to find a way for the Jewish population and the Palestinian population to share that space. And it has to be said that those were not just empty ideas. There were many people who supported Them My parents were members of MAPAM which was the left wing part of the Labour Party whose youth movement was a shomer at Seir I was born in kibbutz of Hashemiratz because my parents went to that kibbutz in the early 1950s and they believed in a binational state they were afraid of the kind of potential of Zionism to become this ethno national violent ideology they failed and the death knell for that was the war of 1948 the combination of the Holocaust in which those masses of Jews who were supposed to come from Europe to create a Jewish majority state were murdered and the war of 1948 where the other solution for creating a Jewish majority state was implemented which was ethnically cleansing the majority, the Palestinians and thereby creating a Jewish majority state those ideas died then and were only revived in the early 1990s during the Oslo Peace Accords which ended with the assassination of Rabin So you know Tom Segeva, who is an Israeli journalist and historian, wrote a book I think 20 years ago called Palestine One Complete in which he talks about the 1920s and 30s and he tries to trace when was the moment the Jewish and Palestinian coexistence was no longer conceivable but whenever that moment was, whether it was in 1929 with what is called the riots in Hebron, whether it was 1936 with the Arab uprising which was brutally put down by the British with Jewish help whenever it was there were people hoping for that and many of the most powerful Mayans who decided to leave the country because they felt that Zionism was heading in the same way of those national movements that turned against the Jews in Europe Let
- [42:07]
Bruce Fein
me read if I can Omer, this is a quote from Ben Gurion it's reported, I guess by name Goldman Let me just read it and I'd like to get your response whether you think his observations are correct and there's any remedy and I'm beginning the quotation if I were an Arab leader I would never sign an agreement with Israel it is normal we have taken their country it is true God promised it to us but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There's been anti Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz but was that their fault? They see but one thing. We have come, we have stolen their country why would they accept that? Would you concur with Ben Gurion sentiments? And how do you overcome them, if at all?
- [42:47]
Omer Bartov
Of course, I mean, Ben Gurion, you know, was a pragmatic statesman he had a goal he was a visionary in that sense. He knew what he wanted, but he was very pragmatic. And he. In many private conversations, he dismissed the kind of rhetoric that he himself spouted when he was speaking publicly. When he said, oh, Nasser is like Hitler and so forth, he actually initiated much of that rhetoric that now has become commonplace in Israel. But in these kind of conversations, and this is quoted from a private conversation that he had, he, of course, responded the way that Jabotinsky also spoke. That is, yes, we are coming here. We are taking over the land, and they will resist it. They will naturally resist it. We would have done the same. When Israelis talk today about Hamas or Fatah or Hezbollah as being terrorists, well, what were the Jews doing against the British? They were doing the same thing. But in Jewish mythology, those are heroes and these are terrorists. That's very common. That's not a Zionist invention. You know, the resistance fought bravely against the Germans, and then the same officers went to Algeria and put down the FLN using the same tactics that the Nazis used on them. So that's common. The question is, what do you do about it? And I am a historian. I'm also relatively pragmatic. I know that people like my grandparents who came to Palestine actually believed that they were coming home. They really believed that this was their ancestral homeland. I also know that had they stayed in Poland like the rest of their families, they would have all been murdered because they were. All those who stayed behind were actually murdered. So now you have a situation, and that's a situation that has existed since 1948, where you have two populations that live in the same space and neither of them is going anywhere. Each group would like to wake up tomorrow morning and to see the other population move to Canada, but they're not. They're not moving to Canada or to Eritrea or anywhere else. They're right there facing them. And what they have to face is the reality that both of them belong there now. Whatever happened in the past, they're there, and they have to find a way to live side by side. And for Zionism, that became impossible. That notion after 1948, that we have to correct this moment, the moment in which we kicked one population out. And as the Palestinians say correctly, the Nakba was Not only in 1948, it's an ongoing process. It's still going on. As long as the Nakba is still going on, these two groups will keep killing each other, with Israelis obviously killing far more because they have far more weapons and much more international support. The only way for these People to finally put an end to it is as Jabotinsky said when he wrote the Iron War, I think in 1927, it came out and he said the Zionists have to put up an iron war. So until the rest of the Arab world will accept our existence here, and then we can decide on how do we manage our coexistence. Israel reached that point. It could have done it. The rest of the Arab world, despite all the propaganda you hear, actually wants to accept Israel. Saudi Arabia offered a peace with Israel in 2002. Lebanon wants peace with Israel. Egypt and Jordan have peace with Israel. The Gulf states want peace with Israel. There's one issue that hasn't been resolved that Israel refuses to resolve. And that's the issue from 1948, that is, what about the Palestinians? And as long as that is not resolved, as long as Israel and the Palestinians do not find a way to share that space in binational confederation, which is what I support, whatever it might be, one state for all its citizens. However you do it, this will continue.
- [46:53]
David Feldman
Let's go to Hannah, please.
- [46:55]
Hannah Feldman
Could you speak to how Hebrew as a, you know, an official national language functioned in building this national identity and maybe crowded out some of the other living languages that Jews around the world and people living in Palestine before the state was established, how it kind of crowded out their identities?
- [47:15]
Omer Bartov
Yeah, you know, that's a fascinating issue. We could probably talk about it for another hour. So Danism at some point decides, not right away, the language of Jews in Israel would be Hebrew. There's a language war, and it's not only between Hebrew and Yiddish, because people like Theodore Herzl, for instance, who came from Austria and was really a German nationalist, originally believed that German was the language of culture, just like my grandmother also believed that was the Kultur Sprache. And so what would be the language was a little bit of a struggle in the early decades, the first one or two decades of the 20th century. But eventually Hebrew wins out. And what is interesting here is that the creation of the state, the creation of a Jewish national entity in Palestine, and the creation of Hebrew as a modern language, synonymous. They work hand in hand. There's myriad educational institutions dedicated to that. Poets, writers, essays, creating a modern Hebrew, because of course, modern Hebrew is based on biblical Hebrew. And part of it is what Zionism called the normalization of Jewish existence. Because Zionism took over much of the anti Semitic view of Jews in the Diaspora. The Jews were weaklings, Jews were cowards. Jews couldn't do any physical work. Jews existed Only doing luft gescheft, sort of air businesses, wheelers and dealers and Zionism wanted to recreate Jews as something else, as people rooted in the soil. And for that they needed also to go back to that Hebrew language. In fact, for a long time in Zionist circles even you go Back to the 1950s, the talk was not about Jews, but about Hebrews. And when you spoke about Hebrews, the allusion was to those people who lived at the time of the Maccabees or the time of the rebellion against the Romans. So the creation of Hebrew as a modern language and the creation of the state and of nationalism are tightly bound to each other. There are two aspects to this that are interesting. One is that this is very typical of all nationalisms. You find this in Czech nationalism, in Finnish nationalism, in Norwegian nationalism, that you create a language, the language of the people. In Russian nationalism too, the Russian at least spoke French. The second thing is that because of the focus on Hebrew, to create Hebrew as a mother tongue for children whose mothers didn't speak Hebrew, because of that, there was a great antagonism towards speaking any other language. And the notion of having bilingual schools, that is of having schools in Palestine where people would learn both Hebrew and Arabic, the language of the place, is not entertained by the vast majority of educators. Now, if you think about what would it have, what would have been the result of having bilingual schools already in the 1920s and 30s, the children could speak each other's language and recognize each other's culture. That could have had a huge effect on how Zionism developed and how the state would have developed. But in today's Israel, the only bilingual population are the Palestinians. Palestinian citizens of Israel speak Arabic and Hebrew. Most Israelis don't speak Arabic. And most Israelis who trace themselves were in large numbers not to Europe, but to North Africa, the Middle east, where their parents and grandparents spoke Arabic. This was their language, have forgotten that language and were ashamed of their parents speaking it because it associated them with the Arabs. So the loss in this kind of creation of the nations around one language was the ability to imagine yourself as sharing the space with another group.
- [51:15]
David Feldman
You know, Omer, I have to give our listeners a sense of where you're looking in the future. And on page 203 you have a pretty fascinating predicate. You say that the long term consequences of the genocide in Gaza, about that. And you say, quote, the license that Israel, the land of the victims, has long enjoyed and abused, may be expiring. The sons and daughters of the next generation will be free to rethink their own lives in their future beyond the memory of the Holocaust. They will also have to pay for the sins of their parents and bear the burden of the genocide perpetrated in their name. They will have to reckon with what the great, often forgotten Israeli poet Avat Yeshuram wrote in the aftermath of the Nakba, of which we have witnessed a repetition or continuation. And then you quote the poet, quote, the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust of the Arabs of Eretz Israel are but one holocaust of the Jewish people. The two of them stare each other directly in the face. It is of this that I speak, end quote. And then you say, can this race to the abyss be stopped? Can you summarize how you answered that, Professor Bartow?
- [52:43]
Omer Bartov
Yes, thank you, I'll try. First, anyone who loves poetry should try to read the vote. Speaking of languages, he wrote Hebrew, but his Hebrew was mixed with Arabic and Yiddish. And this poem is filled with all three languages, so it's hard to read, but it's an absolutely extraordinary poem called Passover Caves. As for your question, look, I support a movement that is called A Land for All. And any of your listeners can Google that, just Google A Land for all and you will find the basic ideas of that movement. It is a movement that was formed by Israeli Jews and Palestinians together. There's actually, I think from yesterday, the two leaders of this group were interviewed by Ezra Klein in the New York Times. What is important about this movement is that it tries to envision a way for Jews and Palestinians to live between the river and the sea by way of creating a confederation. So it sets out from the idea or the realization that the two state solution is dead because there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers in the west bank and there's no realistic way of removing them. So how do you create two states? And the notion is that there would be two states, Jewish and Palestinian. Both states would have the two elementary or most important elements in them, which would be a right of self determination and a right of return. But unlike the traditional two state solution, those states would distinguish between residence and citizenship. So you could be a citizen of one state, vote for its parliament, but you could live in the other state. And the borders between the two states, since they would be in a confederation, would be open to movement between one area and another that would recognize the link that both groups have to the whole land and their need and desire to have a state of their own. And they would have common institutions in Jerusalem which would be a shared capital between the two states. That's an attempt to square the circle of the need of the two groups to rule over themselves while recognizing that these two groups are completely mixed with each other and the whole space is so inextricably mixed that you can no longer cut it apart. It can't happen today. Obviously, there's not enough support for it. I believe that it's very important to continue working on this plan because when the situation changes, and I think that it will largely because Israel has basically put itself in a way that the rest of the world is turning against it. So when the situation changes, it would be good to have this kind of blueprint prepared for a future for both these groups.
- [55:51]
David Feldman
On that note, Omer, we do have to conclude, is there any last minute comment you'd like to make to our listeners who are serious people and are committed citizens in a democracy they're trying to save.
- [56:06]
Omer Bartov
Look, I mean, I, first of all, I want to thank you for this conversation and for the questions by everyone here. And I just want to say yes, because we are all citizens in what are still democracies, we should use that power that we have to influence our own politicians to help, in this case in particular, to help Israel, not because we want to punish it, although there are people there who surely should be punished, but because we also want to help that country, both Jews and Palestinians, to find a better life for themselves and for their children. And the United States is the only country right now that can do that. And if we use our power, our persuasion, our votes, we can help politicians steer in that direction.
- [56:59]
David Feldman
On that note, thank you very much. We've been talking with Professor Omer Bartova. Thank you very much. Professor BARTOLF thank you. And thank you. Bruce Fine.
- [57:11]
Bruce Fein
Well, thank you, Ralph, for inviting me. Goodbye.
- [57:14]
Hannah Feldman
We've been speaking with Bruce Fine and Omar Bartov. We will link to their work@ralphnaderradiohour.com now let's check in with our corporate crime reporter Russell Mokhyber from the National Press
- [57:26]
Russell Mokhiber
building in Washington, D.C. this is your corporate crime reporter Morning minute for Friday, July 10, 2026. I'm Russell Mokhiber. Since the Trump administration and Congress's decision to roll back limits on overdraft and non sufficient funds or NSF fees, many of the country's largest banks have begun to ratchet up their overdraft fee take overall, struggling families paid over $12 billion in overdraft and NSF fees in 2025. A new report from the National Consumer Law center outlined steps states can take to limit fees and abusive practices imposed on people who can least afford them. A new issue Brief analyzes the 2025 overdraft fee revenue of the 20 largest consumer banks and spotlights several in the overdraft hall of shame. For the corporate crime reporter, I'm Russell Mulcarber.
- [58:19]
Hannah Feldman
Thank you, Russell. Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. I'm Hannah Feldman along with David Feldman and Ralph. And that's our show. I want to thank our guests again, Omer Bartov and Bruce Fine. For those of you listening on the radio, that's our show. For you podcast listeners, stay tuned for some bonus material we call the Wrap up featuring Francesco de Santis with in case you haven't heard, join us next
- [58:41]
Host/Interviewer
week on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. Thank you, Ralph.
- [58:45]
David Feldman
Thank you, everybody.
- [58:47]
Omer Bartov
Stand up, step up, step up. You ought to step up.
- [58:52]
David Feldman
Rise up, arise up, I know you wanna rise up?
- [58:56]
Bruce Fein
Stand up, stand up, stand up. Step. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr want to go to war with France, while Thomas Jefferson dissents. If this money were spent making roads, improving the arts and finding employment for the idle poor, then all nations would be much stronger, richer and happier together.
- [60:03]
Announcer
Tonight.