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The Chris Hedges Report
The Shared Mythological History of Israel and the US (w/ Joan Scott) | The Chris Hedges Report
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- [00:10]
Chris Hedges
Amy Kaplan's Are American the Story of an Entangled alliance dissects Israel's symbiotic relationship with the United States. She tells the story of how a Jewish settler colonial project captured the imagination of the American public, intertwining Israel's national myth with our own. American exceptionalism mirrors Israeli exceptionalism, the belief that America, ordained by God to lead the world, replicates Israel's messianic vision of itself. The two countries, because of their similar national myths, insist they are exempt from international humanitarian law. They share an open disdain for the lesser breeds of the earth, each tracing their roots to European colonialism. Israeli Jews, Kaplan writes, are at once eternal victims and lionized for their military prowess. Palestinians in the process, have been at best rendered invisible and often demonized as sub humans representations of the barbarians the United States and Israel seek to suppress in their clash of civilizations. What makes Kaplan's book unique is that she is a cultural critic, seen in the myths and stories disseminated by writers, filmmakers, artists, and journalists the enforcement of the peculiar beliefs that sustain the bond between the Zionist state and Washington. She opens the book with a dissection of Leon Uris novel Exodus, as well as his film adaptation, which shaped a generation's understanding of Israel in the Middle East. She probes Joan Peters 1984 book From Time Immemorial, which was the template used by pro Israeli historians to argue falsely that the Palestinians never existed as a distinct people. Israel's myth, she notes, is protean depending on the shifting historical realities. The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, for example, and the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, the Palestinian uprisings or intifadas, required new narratives to buttress the Israeli American ties. Suddenly, the Holocaust, which was a footnote at the beginning in the popular narrative, assumed central importance. Israel, especially with the establishment of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, was intertwined with the Shoah. The genocide became central to Jewish identity, and playing the card that it could happen again, Israel was given license to engage in savage repression of the Palestinians, dismissed by Israeli leaders as the new Nazis. Kaplan ends the book by chronicling the rise of Christian Zionism, which has emerged as a bulwark of support for the apartheid state of Israel. Kaplan, who died in 2020, was the Edward W. Kane professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book is recently been reissued by Harvard University Press. Joining me to discuss Kaplan's book is Professor Joan Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, an adjunct professor of History at the Graduate center of the City University of New York. Her many books include the classic Gender and the Politics of History, the Politics of the Veil and Knowledge, Power and Academic Freedom. Let's begin with Kaplan. I've read many, many, many books on the Middle East. I spent seven years. I did find this book unique in the way that it approached the subject matter, as I mentioned to you when we spoke. It reminded me of Gramsci's understanding of cultural hegemony, how culture essentially creates a narrative that buttresses policy and just talk a little bit about her and then we'll go into the book.
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Joan Scott
Well, I met her. I just have to say, Chris, your summary of the book was just terrific. Enviable because it could be a kind of review that should be everywhere so that people would know what is in this book. I thought you summarized it really, really well. She was, as you said, a professor of English and American Studies at Pennsylvania. She was here at the Institute. You know, people come to the Institute to do research and writing for a year. She had a fellowship at the institute in 201112 when she started this book. And she was just digging around to kind of as an American studies person, she was interested in just what you put your finger on in the cultural stuff that produced this special relationship, the untouchable, special relationship between the United States and Israel. And she worked away at it. She gave a seminar here, which was that first chapter of the book on Exodus. And those of us who grew up in the 50s and early 60s, I think the novel was 57 and the film was 6, 1960, with Paul Newman.
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Chris Hedges
Blond and blue eyed.
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Joan Scott
Is the blonde and blue eyed as.
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Chris Hedges
The embodiment of Jews, Right? The archetypal Jewish.
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Joan Scott
No, it was really. And she did it as a seminar here. And her reading of it was just terrific. I mean, people were just astonished. And those of us, as I said, who had sort of grown up knowing how popular that film had been, were really taken aback at how astute she was in her readings of the ways in which a certain stereotypical image of the feeble, victimized Jew is replaced with by the Paul Newman figure, who was a heroic fighter for the future of Israel and the future of the Jewish people. So she worked hard on that. And then it took her a while. The book was published finally in 2018. I remember reading many chapters of it as she was producing them. And then she was tragically diagnosed with brain cancer and died two years later in 2020. So that she never got to publicized the book the way one usually Does. Giving talks all over the place, having discussion sessions of a kind, where she would respond to critics and so on. And then a year or so ago, her daughter, her adult daughter now, in the wake of all of the discussion going on about Gaza and the genocidal war in Gaza, thought that this would be a time when this book would weigh in in a way that no other book does on the question of Israel, Palestine. And she started a campaign with Harvard University Press and convinced them to publish it, to issue it in paperback. It was already published, so they issued the paperback as of March 1, I think, and many of us who were committed to Amy's memory and to the book decided that we would go to our local bookstores and promote it and talk about it, which is how you and I first discussed the book at the Labyrinth Bookstore in Princeton. So that's the story of it. And I think, rereading it for our discussions, I was struck once again with how much insight it provides into this so called special relationship, we should say.
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Chris Hedges
First of all, Rashid Halili, the great Palestinian scholar, gave it a glowing review in the Nation when it came out. And she herself, I know this only from you, had come out of a Zionist background, Right?
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Joan Scott
Right. And that was part of what this was about, I think, was exploring where she had come from and what this indoctrination had been as she was growing up herself. In fact, in the acknowledgments, she mentions the fact, I think her father died before the book was published, but she says he would have disagreed with everything I was doing here, but he would have acknowledged my right to do it, something like that. So you get, even in that small acknowledgment, a sense that she's coming from a place which she had to interrogate critically in a very deep way. And she did. She would come in at lunch. We all have lunch, lunch together, the people who are fellows at the Institute. And she'd come in and she'd say, I can't believe it. I have. Stone and the Nation were great supporters of Israel in the 40s.
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Chris Hedges
This was very depressing.
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Joan Scott
Well, for those of us for whom I f. Stone was the hero, the journalist hero during the Vietnam War, this was like, how could this be? He recanted. He, in fact, changed his mind quite significantly on this question. But in the 40s, he was absolutely on board for the land with no people, for a people with no land.
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Chris Hedges
That was Joan Peters, who she takes down. I mean, one has to admire her. Deep, obvious what comes through from the book. Intellectual not just profundity, but integrity, clearly. So just broadly, there are two templates that are used to bond Israel and the United States. The first is the mythic version of the settling of the west, and the second is the Bible. Just broadly. Can you talk about that?
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Joan Scott
Sure. She has a quote in the. The title of the book, our American Israel, comes from a 1799 sermon preached in a New England church which says something like, America is the realization of the biblical Israel. We're here. I think it's on. It's on page. As I remember, it's page five. The phrase our American Israel comes from a Puritan expression of colonial American exceptionalism. And his quote was this sermon traits of the resemblance in the people of the United States of America to ancient Israel. It has often been remarked, the guy says, that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with ancient Israel than any other nation upon the globe. Hence our American Israel, a term frequently used and common consent allows it apt and proper. So the biblical Israel is there from the 18th century on and gets recovered again in new form by the evangelicals. You mentioned the last couple of chapters, or the. The next to last chapter of the book deals with the way in which American evangelicals pick up this notion this time that the second coming of Christ will come in Israel somehow, and at that moment, those Jews who convert will be raptured up along with the Christians and everyone else will be destroyed in another apocalyptic moment of biblical transformation. So the biblical theme runs through from the beginning when it's America is the realization of the dream of Israel to the 20th, 20th century or even the 21st century, when Israel is the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Bible.
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Chris Hedges
And the same biblical passages the Puritans were using, the stories of the Amalekites, you know, which Netanyahu has repeated about, you know, decimating, destroying, I think even their children and animals and everything else. They were using exactly the same biblical passage to justify the genocide against Native Americans.
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Joan Scott
Yeah, yeah. And that she. She develops that really nicely, too. The. The Native American parallel and the. And the Israel and the Palestinian parallels, which in fact echo that theme of a land with no people for a people with no land. It's the same argument made here. There's no one here when the Americans came and they wipe out or tried to wipe out the Native Americans. Similarly with Palestinians.
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Chris Hedges
Well, and this was pushed by the 1984 book by Joan Peters, which was taken down when he was a graduate student by Norman Finkelstein, which argued that they had no national identity. The Palestinians had no national identity. That those Palestinians who were there had actually migrated because the Jewish colonists were reinvigorating. I mean, all of which was false. And she deals with the importance of the Peters book because it was used by pro Israeli historians for a long time to justify this very false narrative. I want to start with as she does. You mentioned I of Stone, his book Underground of Palestine, but I found that this. On the one hand, you had the left eye of Stone being part of the counterculture, but this identification of the counterculture with this settler colonial state. And as you said, eye of Stone recants. I'm just going to read that little passage. This is his book, Underground to Palestine, his first book. Stone's book included the major tropes of the narrative that progressive Americans told about Zionism in the years following World War II. His personal discovery of kinship with the Jews of Europe added poignancy. He realized that if his parents hadn't emigrated from Russia to America, he might have gone to the gas chambers or ended up a ragged quote unquote and homeless refugee. As he drew closer to his Jewish brothers, he recorded their plaintive Yiddish songs, which expressed longing for a world lost to catastrophic violence. At the same time, he narrated their journey in resolutely American tones. That's a fundamental theme of the book as a story of rebirth in the transformative voyage from the old world to the new. In contrast to the defeatist spirit hovering over a shattered Europe in he was amazed by the tremendous vitality of the refugees and by their determination to build a new life in a new land. In his book, Stone focused on the journey, not the arrival, chronicling the dream of a Jewish homeland uncluttered by Arab realities that disrupted these dreams, realities that he had noted in his earlier reports from Palestine. Let's talk about that link between the left and. Stone was himself persecuted, blacklisted. He couldn't even get a job at the Nation. He ends up printing if Stones weekly in his basement, as you said, not only about the Vietnam War, but about the Korean War, exposing many atrocities in the Korean War. But there was this marriage. And then we'll go in and talk about Exodus, the book and the movie. And I find that coupling kind of fascinating.
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Joan Scott
Well, one of the things I think was that the attraction on the left to the socialist vision of Israel, the kibbutz, which. How many books were written about, that this was the future possibility not only for leftists, but for feminists. You know, you had collective child rearing, collective meal preparation, all of the kind of domestic tasks that were thought to be oppressive. For women are shared in a different kind of arrangement. So I think that was one thing and certainly that attracted him as well as Frieda Kirschway at the Nation and others. This was a kind of socialist experiment that was very attractive and very possible. The other was the notion, and she uses this term several times in the course of the book, of the invincible victims. That is, on the one hand, Jews had been victims of horrific treatment in Europe and historically victims of antisemitism of all kinds. But here they were invincible. That is, they were going to prevail. There was a kind of resilience that could be admired rather than the kind of awful notion of victimization. The notion of resistance is important to the left as well. The Warsaw Ghetto becomes a kind of proof that the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto becomes a proof of the fact that Jews are resist. They're not just pathetic victims, they're as she calls them again, invincible victims. That is, whatever happens, there's a kind of resilience and resistance that prevails. And that Israel then becomes the embodiment for many people on the left as a result of that. I think.
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Chris Hedges
Well, she talks later about the importance of the Holocaust. But it's important to note that initially, with the establishment of the State of Israel, those refugees from Europe, victims of the Holocaust, were considered somewhat shameful for not having resisted. And it was only later that the Holocaust became part of Jewish identity and a trope and a part of. But not initially, not at first. And of course, as you well know, the irony of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is that the only commander, deputy commander of the uprising, Marek Edelman, condemned the apartheid state. The settler colonial state recognized Palestinians right to self determination and resistance, even armed resistance. Drawing analogies between his resistance, the resistance he and the ghetto fighters carried out in Warsaw and the resistance in Palestine. So on the one hand, yes, they used the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, but the only major historical figure was an anathema, was a pariah in Israel itself.
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Joan Scott
Well, one of the things you're mentioning that one of the things she tracks really nicely is the way in which there is always a dissenting voice like his, like others. Even when she talks about the history of the founding of the state of Israel, there were many people, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, who thought that the idea of a Jewish homeland, a Jewish state, was a dangerous ethno national way of thinking about a place, a homeland or a place where. Where Jews could come. But what she shows so clearly is how carefully and Ruthlessly, those positions were eclipsed. Those voices were, if not silenced, were just so muted that they couldn't be heard. And your notion of Gramsci, I think, is right. This hegemonic vision, cultural sort of appreciation of the importance of Israel for America and prevails every time. There are places in chapters where you think, oh, good, there's some criticism being articulated here. And she goes into it at some length. And then you just watch it being slapped down by the major forces of the media, by politicians and by what becomes defined as the Israel Lobby or the lobbyists who are going to the Anti Defamation League. And what becomes aipac. Those groups acquire a predominance that manages to silence any kind of criticism.
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Chris Hedges
Well, Yeshayashu Leibowitz, we should mention another, the great Israeli philosopher who saw it all coming where we are. I also want to talk about journalists, because she. Boy, she got it. I mean, the way journalists. There's two things. Having spent 20 years overseas, I found with people, especially people who parachuted in because they really didn't understand the situation around them, they immediately deformed the situation to make it palatable for an American audience, but to Americanize it. And so there's. She talks immediately after, of course, 750,000 Palestinians are dispossessed. Jaffa was largely a Palestinian city, completely emptied in ethnic cleansing. Thousands were killed. The Deir Essin massacre. And then you have the journalists who come from the United States and they report about it, and they can't even see what's in front of their eyes. There's this passage he's writing about Frida Kirchhoe, who visited the silent, quote, unquote, silent and deserted city of Jaffa to address the question, why did the Arabs run? She registered the momentousness of more than 50,000 people fleeing from Palestine's largest Arab city. And she briefly noted the attack and siege by the combined forces of the Irgun. This was underground terrorist group, my lead, led by Begin, right, and the Haganah, which was the more established Israeli militia army at the end of April. Yet she did not mention the impact of this attack on the population. Instead, she claimed that the mass flight from Jaffa and from other Palestinian cities and villages seemed to have little to do with the fighting itself. At stake. This is going on the bottom of the paragraph. At stake for Kirsue, in the image of the humane soldier, was her investment in the Jewish refugee as a universal symbol of noble suffering and the creation of the Jewish state as a moral triumph for civilization over fascism. I saw that Every war, every place I ever covered, I fought it. But I had to fight not only the mythic narrative that was being peddled to the American public, but my own colleagues in the press. Because I was with the New York Times, I didn't come and go. I lived there. I mean, I was six years in Latin America, seven years in the Middle East. But these people who parachuted in, who didn't have any linguistic facility and didn't have really any historical knowledge, immediately fed the kind of tropes that Americans can understand and that allowed them to make sense of what they didn't understand. She gets that really, really well in the book.
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Joan Scott
Well, I also think that it comes also from the notion that some of these journalists think they have to feed what you said a minute ago. They have to feed the information in terms that their readers can already understand, rather than understanding their role as producing knowledge that people then have to deal with and that you see that now dramatically in journalism covering the Gaza war. The fear that they will offend readers is far greater than the notion that their job is to communicate to readers information that might not be comfortable but that they need to really know. And I think you're right. She shows you with very fine tuned analysis.
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Chris Hedges
Yeah. Very clear examples.
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Joan Scott
Yeah, yeah. And how that operates. But I think that's what we're living with now, of course. Doesn't the New York Times have a list of words you're not allowed to use?
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Chris Hedges
Yeah, well, and it's when they talk about the student encampments, they characterize them as they harass Jewish students. Jewish students may have been harassed, but the bulk of the repression was carried out against the protesters and 100 of whom were arrested on the campus of Colombia. People who have been deported, people who've been suspended. Ruha Benjamin at Princeton is teaching under probation. That goes unmentioned. And so, yes, you do see it now. And of course, we should also note the fact that, and this is something I and other international journalists went to Egypt to protest is Israel is locked out. There's no foreign press in Gaza for the obvious reasons. And over 100, over 120, I think Palestinian journalists have been killed, many of them targeted. I want to. Let's talk about Exodus. Okay. We'll talk about a trashy novel and a trashy writer. Leon Uris, you know, the other, the other book that was like, that was. Oh, Jerusalem. That was another one. The Israelis were. Remember that history of the, of the war, I think it was anyway, of the founding of Israel.
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Joan Scott
You know, I Was. I was probably in. In high school, just beginning college. And when, when the. The novel came out and I just remember it, everybody was reading it. You ride the subway in New York and people were sitting there reading.
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Chris Hedges
Well, they said. So it was. I'll just read this. It had been compared in epic scope and massive sails to Gone with the Wind. Well, there's another piece of propaganda on behalf of slaveholders which transformed the history of the Civil War into a shared national past. But Exodus is different in that it is not a story told by Israelis about their own country. That's very important, but one told by an American author for American readers. And then she writes later, one cannot overestimate the influence of Exodus in Americanizing the Zionist narrative of Israel's origins. 20 million copies were sold in 20 years. Now you and I need those kinds of sales. Then we can all go to Bermuda forever. So, I mean, it is just remarkable. I mean, she rips it to pieces. I mean, just the main characters. And you talk about the film, which also was very. The main characters in the film, because of their whiteness, are easily seen as Euro Americans. Meanwhile, when this film appeared in 1960, the majority of Jewish immigrants coming to Israel from Arab and North African countries, although not well treated by the European, you know, Netanyahu Yaskenazi. And Avi Shlom writes a very good book on this. I think it's called Three Worlds or it's very, very good, his memoir. And then just one more pass and let you talk. So they have, of course they have the Christian protagonist, Kitty, who represents the American who discovers in Zionism the mystical qualities of the Holy Land that she heard about in Sunday School. Kitty speaks the language of the recently invented Judeo Christian tradition which embraces. Embraced Catholics, Protestants and Jews and a shared American identity and during the Cold War united them in faith against godless communism. In Exodus, it also unites them against Arabs.
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Joan Scott
Yeah, I mean the interesting thing in, in that and. And she develops it in the book all along is the Europeanness of these Jews who have been murdered in Europe who are not admitted in large numbers into the United States. I mean, everybody's really happy about Israel because it can take the Jews they don't want the European, the Anglo American European countries do not want Jews in their.
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Chris Hedges
And let me just interrupt you on the 1952 McLaren act, which was authored by Senator McLaren, a rabid anti Semite, which is now being used against Palestinian activists who have green cards and student visas and everything else was designed to keep out victims of the Holocaust and not let them into the United States. That's why he wrote it.
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Joan Scott
Yep. No, and so. So, but. But what you have in that film, and she describes it really well, is the Europeanization, the whitening of the Jew. No longer this sort of stereotypical dark, pathetic, feminized masculinity, but this Paul Newman character who fights to the death and who is bringing civilization to the Middle east. Because that becomes another of the tropes that get associated with Israel, that it is the only democratic, only force for enlightenment and democracy and European values in the Middle East. So the film enables that kind of new representation of who Jews are and what they represent.
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Chris Hedges
She writes, Exodus reenacted the primal myth of the American frontier as a tale of regeneration through violence. She's quoting Richard Slotkin, of course, his great book. The hero in a Western ventures across the border of the civilized world to the wilderness in. In order to colonize dark, chaotic regions and learn the way of the Indians, thereby ridding himself and the society he represents of darkness. It is the barbarism of the other, whether Indian or Arab, that forces the hero to become violent. He adopts their methods in order to defeat them and to establish a border between legitimate and illegitimate violence. So when she talks about the Bible and the west, the story of Israel is tailored or created to parallel precisely our own mythology about the settling of the west by Europeans and Euro Americans.
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Joan Scott
So, Chris, I wondered what you thought about the violence theme as well. I mean, I thought that was. It was really interesting the way she maps the justification of violence from the very beginning. But then when you get to the war on terror, Israel becomes the model for how to deal with terrorists in your midst, how to deal with any kind of uprisings or protests. They provide some of the technology and the advice, not only to the national government, but to local police forces about how to contain or find track terrorism and contain it in their cities. I mean, I thought that the way in which the story becomes the idyllic socialist utopia in the 1940s and 50s becomes this arms supplier that provides the technology of war for the war on terror in the United States and becomes the model for how to resist it, I thought, was another fascinating aspect of the book.
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Chris Hedges
Yeah, but. So she talks about how particular mythologies like this one don't hold up, especially after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. I think 17,000 Lebanese were killed. They bombed West Beirut, saturated bombing of southern Lebanon. The war was a disaster for Israel. You had, as she notes, you had foreign correspondence that was also very important and Good part of the book you had foreign correspondents based in Beirut who were watching it, John Chancellor, for instance, and were appalled at the savagery. So suddenly there had to be a new narrative. And that's when the Holocaust took off. And maybe we should talk about that just before we go. Just in terms of the way Exodus and the narratives portrayed Arabs, they were accused like blacks in antebellum south or even during Jim Crow, as sexual predators. They were. She exaggerated Arab cowardice. So, you know, there was a characterization of Arabs that very closely paralleled our own defaming of the character, in particular of African Americans in the United States. But let's talk about the Holocaust. And Finkelstein wrote his book the Holocaust Industry. So the Holocaust is not, as we mentioned earlier, a huge part of the narrative. And then after Lebanon, things change. So there's a savagery. And the Holocaust takes preeminence in the narrative. There was a miniseries. I've never watched it. Maybe you watched it, but she writes about it in the book called the Holocaust. You have the Holocaust Museum, which she writes about, raising the question of why is there a Holocaust museum on American soil? It's a pretty good question. But let's talk about the use of the Holocaust, because that's very much part. And after 9 11, this is all turbocharged, as you said. But ideologically it's justified by the near annihilation of the Jews. And just as a caveat in defense of Jewish refugees, the ones who survived World War II, they were locked out of everywhere, number one. And when they did try to go home to places like Poland, there were pogroms. I mean, we're talking about after World War II. So they really, I mean, that's the part of the tragedy. They had nowhere to go. There was that book Neighbors, which is very good on people trying to Jewish families after surviving the death camps, trying to go back to their farms or their homes and being killed. So, I mean, that is, I think, the tragedy for all of us who have covered Israel extensively. But let's talk about the Holocaust, because the Holocaust becomes weaponized and boy, she takes down Elie Wiesel, of course, who becomes, you know, Mr. Holocaust, who I knew actually. But let's talk about the Holocaust and its uses and what she writes about it.
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Joan Scott
Well, it's Peter Novik also, who writes about the Holocaust industry, and I think he dates it even to 1967, after the Six Day War. It becomes more and more of a justification for the kinds of things that Israel is doing. And then in the 80s it comes into its own as an attempt to justify what can't be justified in terms of the. The war in Lebanon. But I think the point she makes about it is that it becomes again, it's tied to that invincible victim thing. There's always the threat the Holocaust happened, but it's never going to go away. That is, it happened, but it always exists as a possibility for happening again. And so part of the invincible victim story is that Jews have to always be alert about defending themselves against any sign that the Holocaust is about to reappear and then attributed to Palestinians the possibility that they will bring another Holocaust. So the whole defense industry of Israel, the whole occupation of Gaza and the west bank become a way of arguing against the possibility of another Holocaust. What does she call that chapter? The Holocaust anticipated or the Apocalypse soon? She calls it the two chapters, the future Holocaust and apocalypse soon are the arguments about we can never rest because once it's happened, it always will happen again. And the existence of Jews by definition, somehow suggests the possibility always of a holocaust. And that makes them. You can't criticize anything that's being done in the name of not only sort of repairing the damage of the first Holocaust, but of preventing the next one.
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Chris Hedges
And this is Abba Ebon, who I also knew. Very charming. Another factor that worked against the image of Palestinians in America was the overt effort by Israeli spokesmen and sympathetic journalists to undermine the revolutionary appeal of Palestinian resistance. Abba Eban protested that the guerrillas were not, quote, fighting for freedom, but were in fact fighters against freedom. He explained that, quote, the image that world opinion should have of them is not the image of the Marquis or resistance fighters, but the image of the ss, the image of the guards at Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. We've seen that during the genocide where now, you know, was it Begin who equated. Yeah, Begin, who told Reagan that when he was bombing West Beirut, he was attacking Hitler. I mean, he was attacking Arafat. But that he drew that analogy that has not gone away, that now becomes the raison d' etre for the subjugation of the Palestinians and the decimation of.
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Joan Scott
Gaza and Hamas is the new Nazi force. She has a thing where it's interesting where she talks about this further. She says terrorist violence by non state actors, no matter how heinous, lacks the powerful state organization behind the systematic industrialized violence that characterized the Nazi slaughter of millions. Nonetheless, the repeated analogy between terrorism and the Holocaust had the powerful effect of tarring the entire Palestinian cause as a hateful reincarnation of the Nazi project to exterminate the Jews at a time when the Carter and Reagan administrations continued Kissinger's pledge to Israel not to speak directly to the plo, the conflation of Palestinians with terrorism and Nazism contributed to the public perception of the illegitimacy of the PLO and the cause it represented. And that goes on now. I mean, I don't know how many people I've had. Fortunately, they're not friends, they're just people I know who I've had conversations with who say, well, but Hamas is just like the Nazis. They want to exterminate Jews. They want to destroy the state of Israel. And you say to them, well, it's not the same thing. And there's no. The Nazi image attached now to the Palestinian cause is really hard to argue against.
- [39:30]
Chris Hedges
That's a very important point. CLR James makes the same point that she made in Black Jacobins, where he acknowledges that there were atrocities carried out during the only successful slave revolt in human history, but that it didn't have the state apparatus behind it, it didn't have the imperial power. But it's a very, very, very important point. I don't want to sugarcoat Hamas. I spent a lot of time with them. But that point is key.
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Joan Scott
And.
- [40:03]
Chris Hedges
She writes about Christian Zionism at the end of the book. Israel becomes more and more unpalatable to a younger generation of Jews. Of course, a significant percentage of those protesting the genocide. We're Jewish. We have Jewish Voice for Peace. We had students at Columbia just chain themselves to a fence in protest at the deportation order against Makwin Khalil held in a Louisiana detention center. And so they have turned more and more to. And she writes about this, these Christian Zionists, Hagee these figures. And it's fascinating because they themselves have expressed very open anti Semitic tropes, but they become key. And then there's organizing all these course of tours of the biblical Holy Land. And I would argue as well that as Israel has become more and more despotic, that has also built these relations with figures like Viktor Orban, because it's the model of how figures like Netanyahu seek to run the Israeli state. They're all heirs of Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Mussolini called a good fascist. Mayor Kahanna. I covered Kahane, I knew him. But let's talk about that, which she does at the end of the book, about Christian Zionism.
- [41:40]
Joan Scott
Well, I think we talked about it a little at the beginning. It's the notion that somehow or another the Biblical prophecy has the end times happen in Israel when the second coming of Christ will bring about a new world order and in which converted Jews will be raptured up with the Christians and the rest of us will burn in hell or just burn. But the power of that, and you're right of these anti Semites who are endorsing the Israeli cause, and sometimes even she has moments where Netanyahu and others realize that, that they're dealing with anti Semites, but it doesn't matter because they're bringing a large sector of the American population, a powerfully politically influential sector of the American population, certainly now with Trump, to support the activities that Israel is engaging in. When Trump moved the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, it was a fulfillment of the demand that these Christian Zionists had been making to prepare us for the eventual second coming. I mean, it's tied really tightly to their notion of. Their notion of history, if we want to call it history.
- [43:21]
Chris Hedges
But it's also tied to their mythic version of America, of a white patriarchal America, of battling against the subhuman elements. And of course, the Ashkenazi European elite like Netanyahu. His family comes from Poland. Netanyahu was raised in Philadelphia and went to mit. That. That also correlates with the very demented vision of Christian Zionism.
- [43:55]
Joan Scott
Well, in fact, there's a part, as you're saying it, identification with Israel did not mean identification with actual Jews, however, either in America or Israel. La Haye warned that Jews as a group have often yielded to secularistic, even atheistic spirit. Brilliant minds have all too frequently been dedicated to philosophies harmful. Once Jews have been restored to Zion, they would have a second chance to redeem themselves from the sin of choosing Jesus. But then she says, and this is the part that I think you're pointing at, just as Israel enabled God to fulfill his promise to the Jews, so could America become the promised land for Christians. And this is a quote from Jimmy Swaggart. America is tied by a spiritual umbilical cord to Israel. He writes, the Judeo Christian concept goes all the way back to Abraham and God's promise to Abraham. The Jewish people represent Judaism. The American people represent Christianity. Swaggart viewed the American people as white evangelical Christians, while Israel alone represented Jews and Judaism. I mean, there's the link that you're.
- [45:01]
Chris Hedges
Talking about, because as she points out, America is not in the Bible. I mean, there is no direct biblical passage that can be used to call Americans the chosen people. And so that identification with Israel becomes a way to essentially bridge that gap. Yeah, I just want to end with. She does a masterful job of taking down Thomas Friedman. I find great joy in this.
- [45:40]
Joan Scott
Yes, I actually loved that part.
- [45:42]
Chris Hedges
And Shipler's books. Shipler's book, Arab Jew, Friedman's book From Beirut to Jerusalem. And she calls them out for the false narrative of equivalence. I'm just gonna read this paragraph. This narrative of equivalence relies on potent analogies with America that kept Palestinians from capturing the moral high ground in the battle for representation. At the beginning of the uprising, when the Israeli army. This is the intifada, when the Israeli army faced criticism for firing live ammunition at protesters. I was there. Friedman instructed television viewers on how to view the violence they were not watching the equivalent of Birmingham in 1960 or Berkeley in 1968, he wrote, but the equivalent of Bull Run in 1861. Yeah. It would no more occur to them to use rubber bullets against the Palestinians than it would have occurred to the north to use rubber bullets against the south in the Civil War. The civil rights analogy compares Palestinians to black Americans fighting for equal rights against violent police powers. The Civil War analogy, in contrast, conveys the impression of two matched military forces capable of doing equal harm to each other. That's really, really important. And Shipler does it. Friedman does it. Just about even most of our quote unquote, liberal commentators on Israel, Palestine. Friedman's no friend of Netanyahu, of course, do it. And she just, she's not buying it. And let's just close by talking about that false equivalency.
- [47:30]
Joan Scott
Well, and she says in that section that you were reading, she ends by saying the Civil War analogy conveys the impression of two matched military forces capable of doing equal harm to each other. Which is still how the. Well, which is now how the Gaza war is presented. It's as if Hamas and Israel were the same or the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and domination were. It was the north versus the South. On the one hand, you have a nuclear armed military giant against a Palestinian resistance that is nowhere near. Has nowhere near the force or the.
- [48:16]
Chris Hedges
Well, they're just. They're just insurgents. They're just insurgents, asymmetrical insurgents with small arms. The other thing she points out is how they. The use. The way these writers like Friedman will justify Israeli atrocities is they will always search out David Hartman. Rabbi David Hartman used to be the figure they'd all. He was quoted every week in the New York Times about their angst about, you know, we wish we didn't have to shoot them kind of thing.
- [48:45]
Joan Scott
Yeah, well, he says again, in that he recognizes this is Friedman, the brutal record of Israeli rage in the X rays. Hundreds of Palestinians who had their arms or legs or ribs broken by Israeli soldiers. Yet he wants his readers to understand, quote, the real fear behind the Israeli clubs, the fear of never feeling truly at a home, at home in a land claimed by others, the land that they have taken from the others.
- [49:11]
Chris Hedges
So just. She also writes by seeking symmetry in the human equivalence of two sides unstructured by political power relations. That's key.
- [49:21]
Joan Scott
Yes, absolutely.
- [49:22]
Chris Hedges
Liberals like Shipler and Friedman implicitly rejected the perspective Edward Said called Zionism from the standpoint of its victims. Instead, they expanded the Zionist standpoint to incorporate Palestinian perspective perspectives. But these perspectives were dependent on Israeli identified narratives. And that is never, unfortunately, changed.
- [49:45]
Joan Scott
Yeah. Yeah. So it's a book for. For now. It's. It's just.
- [49:50]
Chris Hedges
No, it's a very smart book. And as I said, it's well written. I didn't mean to dump on all academics when we were together. I know some academics make an effort. I wish more did, but. But it is. It's. It's really smart, really lucid. I really enjoyed it. I've read so many books on the Middle east and this. I found it refreshing because there was just a lot in here that made me think, and I'm not sure I'd ever read. I don't think I've ever read a book that approached the conflict as a part of cultural studies, which was really, really smart.
- [50:24]
Joan Scott
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, the nice thing about that is it you could say that our books live on after we don't. And this is a case. It's a real tribute to Amy Kaplan that she has given us something that we can still use, even though she's not here anymore to talk about it.
- [50:43]
Chris Hedges
It's a really, really good book. Thank you, Joan. We're talking about Our American Israel by Amy Kaplan. I want to thank Diego, Thomas, Sophia and Max, who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.