Was Zionism the Only Answer to European Anti-Semitism?

Did you know about the Jewish Bund movement, an alternative to Zionism?

Molly Crabapple learned Yiddish and spent 7 years researching this book on the Jewish Labor Bund, which was a movement that opposed Zionism before Israel was formed. Video

• The Bund was a model of strength, but without oppressing others

Summary:

1. The Jewish Labor Bund and the Philosophy of “Hereness”

• Definition and Origins: The General Jewish Labour Bund was a secular, socialist, and revolutionary Jewish party founded in 1897 within the Tsarist Empire. It arose during a period of severe anti-Semitic oppression, pogroms, and state-sanctioned discrimination (such as the Pale of Settlement restrictions and extreme military conscription).

• Core Mission: Rather than seeking to escape oppression by moving elsewhere, the Bundists aimed to overthrow the Tsar to build a democratic socialist state that embraced all ethnic groups equally. Simultaneously, they wanted to live full, proud lives as Jewish people—fostering Yiddish language, theater, and literature.

• “Here Where We Live Is Our Country”: This central Bundist slogan encapsulated their rejection of Zionism. They believed that fleeing anti-Semitism normalized racism, and they argued that their fight for safety and liberation belonged exactly where they were born and where their ancestors had lived for a millennium.

2. Historical Clash Between the Bund and Zionism

• Mutual Hostility: From their shared inception year of 1897, the Bund and the Zionist movement intensely opposed each other. The Bund explicitly labeled Zionism as an “enemy of the organized Jewish proletariat” because it viewed emigration as a capitulation to oppressors.

• Opposing Tactics: The transcript highlights a stark historical contrast: while the Bund focused on local resistance, early Zionist leaders like Theodore Herzl attempted to make deals with anti-Semitic government figures (such as Russian Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve) to facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine in exchange for suppressing socialist/Bundist activities.

• Early Critique of Colonization: The Bundists immediately recognized that establishing a separate state would inherently require the colonization of land and the oppression of the indigenous population already living in Palestine.

3. Analysis of Modern Zionism and State Ideology

• Ethnonational Purity: Jamjum connects early 19th-century European concepts of ethnonationalism to Zionist doctrine, arguing that the movement did not set out to create a pluralistic democracy, but rather an ethnically pure state where non-dominant ethnicities are treated as “impurities” to be cleansed.

• The “Iron Wall” and Expansionism: The speakers touch upon the historical precedent of Revisionist Zionism (via Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” doctrine), asserting that the modern expansionist policies, land acquisition, and systemic displacement of Palestinians are not temporary aberrations but foundational, century-old doctrines of conquest.

• Christian Zionism: The conversation critiques modern Western political rhetoric (citing a clip of a US Ambassador) by tracing it back to 18th-century British Christian Zionism. They argue that Christian Zionism weaponizes Jewish identity to fulfill biblical end-times prophecies, which inherently strips away the local, humanistic agency of diasporic Jewish populations.

4. The Shift Toward Overt Fascism and Silencing Dissent

• Erosion of Liberal Discourse: Jamjum posits that Israeli political discourse has shed its historical “liberal mask” of multiculturalism and tolerance. Instead, internal political competition has shifted toward overt fascism, where politicians openly vie for popularity based on who promises harsher military measures, more land theft, and greater destruction.

• Western Complicity and Censorship: Crabapple reflects on what she views as a resurgence of Western fascism, referencing the actions of the US Trump administration, the Biden administration’s full-throated support of military actions in Gaza, and the UK Labor government’s ban on leftist commentators who criticize Israel.

• The Weaponization of Anti-Semitism: The speakers critique the severe modern conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Crabapple shares her own experiences of severe online harassment from Zionists who weaponize the Holocaust against her book—mocking the fact that historical Bundists were killed by the Nazis—simply because the Bund represents an alternate, liberatory model of Jewish history and strength.

5. Revolutionary Resistance and Social Frameworks

• Beyond Armed Struggle: In detailing the height of the Bund’s influence in interwar Poland, Crabapple emphasizes that their model of revolutionary resistance was deeply tied to building progressive social infrastructure. They didn’t just advocate for armed self-defense; they revolutionized daily life by creating self-managed mutual aid institutions, progressive schools for children, shelters for women, and networks for people with mental illnesses.

• A Common Human Demand: Ultimately, the transcript concludes that the fundamental desire of Palestinians is not unique to their ethnicity, but a basic human demand shared with historical movements like the Bund: the refusal to be killed, colonized, or stripped of their dignity, and the assertion of their right to build beautiful lives where they live.

QUESTIONS:

1. Had you heard of the Bund before? Is that surprising?

2. Are you surprised that the Bundists recognized that Zionism could not involve “a land without a people for a people without a land” and would require oppressing other people somewhere else.

3. Why do you think Zionists hate/d the Bund?

4. What did you think of the comment that many European countries, such as France, were not able to stop the Nazis, so it should not be surprising that the Jews in Poland and Ukraine were not able to stop the Nazis?

DETAIL: Transcript

00:00 Introduction
03:09 Who was the General Jewish Labour Bund?
08:38 Zionism’s solution to anti-Semitism
10:25 The Bund’s political philosophy: Fight oppression, not run away from it
11:58 Zionists and the Bund ‘hated each other’
15:00 Christian Zionism
17:52 European anti-Semitism
21:21 Israel is an expansionist ethno–nationalist project
28:09 Fascism shifts liberal discourse
32:35 Conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism
45:00 How do New York Jews feel about Israel?
47:25 It’s not Netanyahu. It’s always been Zionism, now we’re just seeing it.
53:05 The unspoken crime of Zionism, destroying Arab-Jewish relations
58:22 There is a hatred in Jewish history of anything seen as weak
01:03:15 Pretence of indignity
01:09:46 Zionism hijacked Jewish identity and turned it into a genocidal project
01:13:00 Genocide continues as 33 killed during Eid in Gaza

Chapter 1: Introduction

The Bund really hated Zionism because they felt that it was submission to their oppressors. And the Bund says that Zionism is the most evil enemy of the organized Jewish proletariat.

I mean, we we’re talking about the world’s first anti-zionist. Exactly.

Yes. The the Bund was had a trajectory of an entirely different future of what it meant to be Jewish in Europe, right?

I do not have to justify myself to the world when I say that I am anti-Zionist because Zionism killed my family. It killed the people in Palestine.

Very fundamental level. Palestinians like anyone else just don’t want to be killed. There’s nothing particularly Palestinians about what Palestinians want. I think what’s particular is that Palestinians have had to live for the last 80 years under this kind of fascist genocidal regime that gets to parade itself as a liberal democracy. and whenever it needs to take off the liberal democratic mask and go full genocide, the whole world teams up together and puts sanctions on the people it’s killing. But when you read Molly’s book, the first thing that the Bundists are saying uh is they immediately recognize that this is going to involve oppressing people somewhere else.

There are so many reasons that Zionists hated the Bund and that they still try to erase their memory. But one of those reasons I believe is because the bund was an alternate model of Jewish strength. He wrote that it was ironic that Jews who are the primary victims of totalitarianism should be adopting those methods. And he said it is as if the slaughterer has infected the victim with his germs during the slaughter.

Today on Palestine Deep Dive, we’re asking one of the biggest questions in modern political history. Was Zionism inevitable? And what other Jewish futures once existed before the creation of Israel?

For decades, we’ve been told a very simple story that Zionism was the natural answer to anti-semitism, that nationalism and separation are the only possible answers to fear, that Jewish safety required a Jewish state, and that Palestine was simply the place where history arrived.

But history is messier than that. Our guests tonight will help us recover histories that are being deliberately buried.

We’re joined by Molly Crabapple, artist, writer, and author of Here, Where We Live Is Our Country, a remarkable exploration of the Jewish Bund, a secular socialist anti-Zionist movement that once represented a completely different Jewish political future. And we are also joined by Hezem Jamjum, historian, translator, editor, and one of the most important Palestinian thinkers working in our archives, political memory, and anti-colonial history today.

Today we’ll talk about Zionism, anti-Zionism, how colonial powers reshaped relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the Bundest idea of hereness, and what happens when entire political traditions are erased from public memory. And we begin with simple phrase from the Jewish Bund. Here where we live is our country.

So thank you so much for joining us here in the studio. It’s uh very lovely to have you both. Um to start with uh this phrase um Molly many people are told that Zionism was the inevitable political uh reaction and expression of Jewish safety.

Chapter 2: Who was the General Jewish Labour Bund?

But your book recovers a major Jewish movement that rejected that idea. Who were the Bund and what did the phrase mean to to them and for you?

The Jewish Labor bound was a secular socialist and defiantly Jewish revolutionary party that was born in 1897 in the Tsarist Empire. And to understand who they were, I need to say a little bit about what it was like to be a Jew in the Tzarist Empire. Yes, it was probably the most miserable place in the world to be a Jew at that time. Jews were not just a religious group. They were a racialized minority who were subject to all sorts of laws that were meant to constrain their futures, to destroy their possibilities. Jews were confined to a swath of land called the Pale of Settlement, a western strip of provinces. There were quotas to limit them being in university. They were subject to a 25-year term in military conscription as opposed to five years if you were Christian. They were forbidden from a number of jobs. They were blamed for the revolutionary ferment that was starting to rise against the Tsar. It was actually the Tsarist autocracy that printed and distributed the protocols of elders of Zion. And many historians believe that it was that government that created it in the first place to deflect the uh anger of the poor people of the empire onto a scapegoat. And also as we know whenever a government targets a minority this gives license to all sorts of freelance bigotry and violence and racism. And it’s not a coincidence that the word pogram is a Russian word. Yeah.

So the Jewish labor bund was founded by young Jewish Marxists who and we have the election. Yeah. I love I love this from 1918 from Kev. They wanted two things. They wanted to overthrow The tsar and create a democratic socialist state in Russia that would be for everyone, all of the many, many different groups that lived in the empire. But also, they wanted to live full and beautiful lives as Jews. They wanted to speak their own language, Yiddish, that’s the language of the Eastern European Jewish working class. They wanted theaters and schools and literature and not just to be tolerated like you tolerate uncomfortable shoes but to to live as equals in the land where they were born in the land where their ancestors had lived for a thousand years. Yeah.

And then you wrote this book. It’s a wonderful book, a New York Times bestseller book about the history of the Bond in um in Eastern Europe which is really amazing. I recommend people to buy it and read it. you went there uh to cave and Eastern Europe and you studied the Bund and their history, but more importantly, I think you have a personal connection to the Bund. Your great-grandfather was one of them. So, can you tell me more about your personal connection to um the Bund?

Well, I grew up obsessed with my great-grandfather. He um he was a painter. He taught my mother how to paint. My mother taught me how to paint. And so I always viewed the very fact that I was a painter as a gift from him. I was surrounded by his paintings, by his sculptures. I um knew all these amazing stories about him. He was what you’d call a character. He he took his paintings back from the Brooklyn Museum because he didn’t like where they hung it. Yes, exactly. And then he made a what he called the Rothbour Home Museum of Direct Art on his lawn in Brooklyn and he said it was competing with the Museum of Modern Art. And I um knew about how he was someone who was a humanist. He was someone who detested violence so much that he was a vegetarian for moral reasons. He was someone who at a time of a lot of racism in America. He accepted my Puerto Rican father. And he was someone who even though he had left the Tsarist Empire in 1904 for New York City, he had created a body of work that immortalized it over 600 paintings that he called memory paintings. And there was one that I always loved so much. It was a a young woman and she had like a long skirt and her hair was all done up like, you know, a woman would be at the end of the 19th century. And she’s standing on a miserable dirt road at twilight and she was throwing a rock through a window.

Whoa.

And her boyfriend was next to her offering more rocks. Whoa. You know, a lady, she should not carry her own rocks. And it was called Ita the Bundist, Breaking Windows. And for me, it was so different than how I ever imagined a young woman in, you know, a little town in the Tsarist Empire would be at that time that I thought the secret to why she was different had to be in that name, in the Bund.

Cool. Nice. Yeah. So, Hezem, when you hear the the Bundist phrase, here we live is our country. As a Palestinian thinker and historian and someone who’s witnessing the genocide and the force displacement and the think cleansing of Palestinians, what do you think of this phrase?

I think it’s incredibly powerful uh even as a kind of entryway into a much bigger political philosophy, right? the the there’s something very um non-typical

Chapter 3: Zionism’s solution to anti-Semitism

about Zionism, right? That’s it’s one of really less than a handful of mo movements historically globally where a group of people say we’re experiencing oppression. Uh the solution to this is to go somewhere else uh on mass um and in and in the case of Zionism to go and become the oppressor somewhere else. Yeah. Right. Um and you know maybe this sort of land with a people for a people without a land maybe we can say oh well maybe um European Jews didn’t know that Palestine was inhabited etc. But when you read Molly’s book the first thing that the Bundists are saying uh is they immediately recognize that this is going to involve oppressing people somewhere else. the things that they’re writing and saying from the very beginning and only increasingly so after the Zionist movement begins to have its Aliyah and and uh start to move people to become settler colonists in Palestine is the Buddhists are saying a um my fight is right here why should I go anywhere else to fight it exactly I’m I’m just normalizing anti-semitism if I’m just saying oh no you can be anti-semitic here I’m going to go somewhere else the solution is to fight this and end anti-semitism. Um, but also within the same breath, everywhere you see it, uh, these these passages that you quote in the book, they’re saying, I’m I’m not going to kind of come from this history of fighting oppression so that I can go and be an oppressor somewhere else, right? And I think there’s a lot to learn from this like even for today um in the sense that the the Bundists create

Chapter 4: The Bund’s political philosophy: Fight oppression, not run away from it

um or kind of like establish a a political philosophy of resistance which is don’t run away from oppression, fight oppression. Exactly. And and I think like that really is a very solid internationalist standing starting point for a very ethical political practice for uh a coherent and consistent moral philosophy. Um and so in a way it’s kind of not surprising that the bun’s been written out of the history because that’s a very dangerous idea, right? To say when you see oppression face it head on. Don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. You know, the Bundists are also coming in a moment where a lot of European Jews um have developed a kind of conservative position which is well, we’re almost white. Maybe if we change our names and the way we dress themselves, they’ll, you know, we’ll blend in and assimilate, right? Or um kind of hide the fact that you’re Jewish and maybe you’ll be okay. Um which becomes a swear word, right? They become called assimilationists. And this not these young Jewish people growing up in the 1880s and ‘90s are saying, “Wait, we’re going to allow the racism to continue to exist and just pretend we’re part of the racist society?” Like, is that really a solution to anything? So, um, you know, and this is one of the starting points of Zionism as well. And it’s no coincidence, I think, that that Zionism and the Bund are kind of come about in the same moment, the same year. Literally, literally the same year. So how was that received by the the Zionist in East

Chapter 5: Zionists and the Bund ‘hated each other’

Europe who were starting this movement to make the the Jewish people migrate to Palestine? How the Buddhist rece how the Zionist received the the ideas of the Buddhists?

I mean the two groups just hated each other from the start. There are quotes from Whitesman, you know, who later will become the first president of Israel, where he says in I want to say 1901, everywhere our hardest battle is fought against the Jewish labor Bund. And at the same time, the boon says that Zionism is the most evil enemy of the organized Jewish proletariat. And they debated each other on lecture stages, in pamphlets, um sometimes occasionally with their fists in the street. And particularly in the early years before Balfour because Balfour declaration changed everything. The Bund really hated Zionism because they felt that it was submission to their oppressors. There’s a moment I talk about in the book where Vladimir metam who is a major Bundist theorist. He goes to observe one of the Zionist congresses just to kind of like report about what’s going on. And at that congress, uh, Theodore Herzl brags about meeting with this notoriously, uh, racist Russian government minister. His name was Vicheslav von Plev. This is a man who Jews at the time held responsible for some of the most savage pograms. And not only did Herzl meet with him, he tried to work out a deal where in exchange for von Plev uh helping him, you know, acquire land from the Ottoman Sultan to colonize, Herzl would somehow suppress the activities of the Jewish labor Bond. Not that he had that power, but he he tried to make that deal. And it just shows the contrast between the people who thought the solution was to go elsewhere and colonize land and the people who thought the solution was to stay and fight.

And this isn’t the only or first occasion where Zionist leaders and thinkers will say we will accept harm to Jews outside of Palestine so long as it contributes to more Jews coming to Palestine. Exactly. Right. And this is I think more than almost anything else shows what Zionism is about. Exactly. And to be honest, as a Palestinian person who was raised in all of my life and um and and knowing about the phrase uh the Christian Zionist phrase of um land without people, for people without land, I’ve always reflected it as operation for Palestinians. But in newly with everything that’s happening and more understanding and awareness, I understood that it’s actually also oppression for the Jews. Why would all the Jews be uprooted from their countries because of racism and be pushed and forced to live in Israeli colony to oppress other people so they can actually claim that they might have safety? It’s very very oppressive. It’s very ugly. It’s very it’s it’s very weird that the world is still allowing such thing. And on that on that remark

Chapter 6: Christian Zionism

we have the US uh ambassador at Israel saying something on those lines. We can watch this video together.

I want you to know I’m not a Zionist because I’m Jewish. I’m a Zionist and an unapologetic one because I believe the Bible and because I recognize that Jews around the world representing only 0.2% of the world’s population have created outsized impact on the world. And unfortunately, there are people who hate you for that. But I’ve determined that they really more than they hate you, they hate the God who chose you 3,800 years ago as his people and gave you a place called Israel and gave you a purpose which was to present the law and the light to all the world. You being faithful to that task is not simply something that you should do. It is something that you must do for there’s no one else to whom the creator of the universe has given such a mission.

Listening to Oh my [ __ ] god. I’m so sorry. I’m not supposed to curse. I’m Forgive me. I’m from New York. Can you not curse when you hear that? Yeah. So, what do you think about the V? What do you think about what he says? What’s he smoking? Oh my god. I I mean I no I I you know when you hear when you see something that’s like so stupid and so incoherent and also so simultaneously like condescending and also so out of step with the actual genocide that’s being committed that you don’t even form you can’t even form words for it like you can’t even do it the respect of deconstructing the argument because it’s just the blatherings of a lunatic. I don’t know how else to describe it.

It’s the US ambassador. It’s not anyone else. It’s Huckabee. Yeah. Yeah. So I think to really understand this video we need to understand Christian Zionism. Yeah. Um which I don’t think is really part of the No, not not at all. Um the the thing is that Christian Zionism predates political Zionism that we know. Right. So Christian Zionism is from the late uh 1700s early 1800s Christian movement. It started in the UK. Very strong in the UK. Yeah. It’s very strong in the UK. It doesn’t necessarily start here. Um but definitely part the the Britain is part of its beginnings. Um and there’s no such thing as the UK at the time. Uh okay the uh the basically I mean the the Kafani in on Zionist literature is one of the first people to really tell this story. um you have a situation where we have that kind of classic anti-semitism, you know, the Shillock anti-semitism, the like all of the tropes that we think of when we

Chapter 7: European anti-Semitism

Think of the anti-semitic tropes around uh Jewish Europeans. Um but there’s this shift. there’s this beginning of a shift which is that um okay Jews are humans too and they are virtuous as well but they can’t be fully human and fully virtuous in Europe here with us Christians they need to go somewhere else go and be virtuous there and it’s not anywhere else it comes out of that very strange part of the Bible which is the book of revelations which talks about this prophecy and the the return of the Messiah or the coming of the Messiah or whatever. Um, and so the idea is, uh, Jews are here to fulfill that prophecy by moving to Palestine and and kind of, um, creating that situation that’s going to lead to the end of days and so on.

So, if we kind of take a step back from that, what a Christian Zionist is saying is that if you’re Jewish, your only like divine purpose on this planet, and this is Huckabee as well, right? I mean it doesn’t sound like it cuz he’s like I love you guys. I love the Jews et but the and he’s saying you must Yes. Exactly. He’s not even being subtle about it. He’s very clearly talking about Christian Zionism which is the purpose your purpose as a Jewish person is to move to Palestine to fulfill prophecy. Prophecy which involves um the Messiah coming and all of you Jews will either convert to Christianity or we’re gonna kill you all.

Yeah.

I I I really wonder how do you respond to that as a Jewish person? How do you feel when someone tells you that you’re not fully a human being? You’re not virtuous human being unless you move to another land. Isn’t that belittling of your humanity as a as a Jewish person?

Well, it’s I mean it’s obviously it’s disgusting. I mean it’s classic. It’s classic European racism. Europe has always had a problem with Jews that you know I think it’s probably based in Christian Catholic theology. Um and then when Jews are um you know emancipated in the 1700s that a new sort of racial conception of Jews comes in and also you know Europe has always had a problem not just with Jews but with diasporic people. I mean look at how Romani people are treated as well. It’s this idea that for people to be normal and for people to be legitimate, they each have to have like their little bordered ethnic state where everyone in that state speaks the same language and has the same religion and builds, you know, their buildings the same way. It’s this deadly dull idea that has led to constant murder and bloodshed inside Europe. And I think Jews as a diasporic people, just like Romani people, as a diasporic people, they rub up against that idea. And first, you know, Christian Zionism, which is like a theological argument, but also European ethnic cleansing, all sought to expel Jews from Europe because they just could not deal with the fact that there are some people that are diasporic people.

Yeah. And this Huckabee is the same man who responded to Tucker Carlson saying that it’s okay if they take it to one and he meant if the Israelis can take all the land between the river the Nile River and the uh Euphrates in in in Syria and Iraq. Now Netanyahu said a few days ago that he is going to take 70% of Gaza to start with. Let’s let’s watch this video together.

Chapter 8: Israel is an expansionist ethno–nationalist project

You see how disgusting is that so they will start with 70% of Gaza. They will take more of Gaza and they will take more of the West Bank and then actually they might expand to take all the lands as promised by the Americans by Mike Huckabee. What do you think Kazm is the future of the region and of the region and what is Israeli plans? Um there’s nothing new here. Yeah.

Uh this is Zionism. This is this has always been Zionism, right? I mean, if the starting point is a people without a land and then you realize there’s people on the land and your response is, well, let’s just make it a people without a land, uh, or a land without a people, right? Um, Zionism, I mean, what what more do we need than the Nakba of 1948? What more do we need than the massacres that have followed year after year after year? What more do we need then? All of the body of policy and practice that the Zionist state has created which is maximum land minimum Palestinians. Every single one of Israel’s policies concerning land and demographics since 1948 until today has been this right and it’s just a matter of pace.

And they will use something like the World Cup to go and ethnically cleanse land. They’ll use something like a US election to depopulate an entire territory. The fact that they they began this round of the genocidal war in Gaza. Uh they bombed a hospital. Yeah. In a way that was clear what they were about, right? This wasn’t about a military skirmish. This wasn’t about some battle on the ground. This was about eliminating the health care system’s ability to heal people. Yeah. And killing the largest number of people while doing it. Yeah.

And you know, so so they’ve never hidden who they are. I mean, they’re okay. In the 60s and 70s and 80s, maybe they would like try to play a certain diplomatic game where they would say, “Oh, like Arab leaders issued radio broadcasts and told the Palestinians to leave. That lie was debunked. They came up with another one.” There there’s a game that they play, but fundamentally they’ve never hidden this. I mean, one of the main characters in this book is the Jabotinsky, right? the the father of revisionist Zionism who in the 20s and 30s was already saying to the labor Zionists, “Guys, stop pretending like we can be nice about any of this stuff. No indigenous people leaves because you ask them to or pay them to or even make them uncomfortable to remain. The only way we’re going to make this Zionist dream come true is through conquest. Is through sheer military might where we go and he called this the iron wall doctrine. basically kind of like build an iron wall where the Palestinians will either like bash their heads on it until their skulls crack or go away on their own. Um so and and and that’s been the military uh demographic geographic doctrine of the Zionist state and the Zionist movement even before the state from day one.

And like we still pretend like we’re shocked when we hear this. He’s just restating a century’s worth of Israeli doctrine which is we’re here to establish a Jewish state like what Molly was saying about European Ethnonationalism. These early 1800s philosophers of nationalism uh ficta herder all German but most of them German right and the direct tributary to other European Ethnonationalism movements. um the the idea was always about a certain notion of purity, right? So this isn’t we want to when we say like when Zionism was the movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine, when we say Jewish state, we’re not talking about a kind of civic state or some kind of pluralistic state. That’s not when a Zionist in 1902 or 1922 or 1932 is saying the word state. They have a very clear idea in mind which is an ethnically pure state. There’s no room for messiness in what ethnicity and race is. Right? This is somehow you can draw a very clean line and a border um around the people and the land.

And so the idea that this kind of modern notion of the nation state emerges not as a notion of kind of pluralistic democracy. It emerges as a notion of um each the world is divided into types of people. Each type of people should have a piece of territory that’s theirs and anybody who’s not from that type of people who’s there is an impurity.

Yeah. Right. And then this border would expand too and then expansionism becomes this other thing right and so like Hitler in the same breath that he’s talking about a kind of Germany for the Germans also talking about Lebanon and we need to expand because there’s a German over there I need to expand the borders of Germany to include it right but also when we have this kind of unite the right marches here and they’re talking about um I mean they talk you know cleaning the country etc we all become impurities right and it’s this notion of human beings and human societies as something that can be dirty and pure and when it’s dirty you can clean it right and to clean in this sense is ethnic cleansing right and mass murder yeah unfortunately if you are enjoying this show please don’t forget to hit the like button and subscribe on YouTube and if you want to support our work we warmly welcome you to become a paid subscriber your support help us build independent Palestinian le media in a world which has never needed it more. Find the link in the description below.

And that’s true. But we always have to keep remembering that watching Netanyahu and others talking in this vicious language about ethnically cleansing people and taking their land is something that I don’t know we shouldn’t accept. We never accepted it. But I think I think it’s worse when they pretend to be what they’re not. I think this there’s something relieving in the honesty.

Um yes true it’s increased with the genocide they started to show more well I mean and this is another interesting facet of fascism

Chapter 9: Fascism shifts liberal discourse

right which is that if we watch Israeli so you know in in in western media there’s all of this silencing of what you can and who gets to come and talk and what can be said about Israel and whatnot. Israeli media is moving with Israeli society. The fascinating thing about fascism and Israeli fascism and all fascism is that um it shifts the discourse from the kind of liberal acceptable discourse of we’re being nice and tolerant and pluralistic and multicultural and whatnot, which is what Israel would brand itself as, right? Like the the only place where you can be safely gay in the Middle East. Now that you have this shift to the mask coming off and an overt fascism um and a genocidal fascism, um Israelis are now trying to one up one another and compete on who’s more fascist.

When Netanyahu gives this kind of talk, um this isn’t just kind of like Netanyahu being honest or something. This is also uh political speech. Yeah. He’s selling himself. He’s selling himself. He’s selling himself as I’m the guy you want here. You may hear others saying that they will kill more people than me. They’re lying. I will kill more. You may hear I did. I’m the one who killed all of those people. Others may tell you that they want to have war with Iran and they want to ethnically cleanse South Lebanon and they I’m the one doing that. I’m going to do it even better than I’ll kill more people. I’ll take more land. Vote for me. Keep me in power. Stop protesting again. Insane.

But but I mean this is the kind of like it is it is a um you know on some level like this was the thing with things like the ICJ um deliberations on whether this is genocide on the things that uh something as powerful as the Hind Rajab Foundation and what they’re doing is that now the the internal conversation in Jewish Israeli society is no longer like how do we make ourselves look good? How do we make ourselves look like the liberal west? How a the liberal west is now a fascist west? Um B, the liberal west saw us do what we did at the hospital, let it slide, and we committed massacre after massacre. Our own soldiers filmed themselves doing it, and nobody lifted a finger. Um and uh and and so this is you know and c um it’s no longer popular within Israeli society to talk about liberal democracy and pluralism and peace process and reaching out and compromise and whatever. What sells what gets votes what gets popularity is to say I will kill more than the other guy. Yeah. Right. I will steal more land than the other guy. I will commit more warfare than the other guy.

Are we really are we seeing the end of liberal democracy in the west? I mean recently even the UK here banned two um left uh two leftist uh commentators Shin Kuger and um Hassan [ __ ] from coming to the UK because they criticize Israel. There’s a huge conflation between anti-Zionism and anti-semitism. I mean it’s crazy. Even in the UK we’re banning Americans from coming to this country because they criticize Israel. They call them anti-semitic because they are anti-ionist. You are Jewish. You’re anti-zionist. How do you feel about that? And do you think we are um in an era where fascism is coming back to the west?

I mean fascism is actually is absolutely coming back to the west. I I’m from Trump’s America, right? There’s a network of concentration camps for immigrants he has built where people are being murdered by guards every day. There are people who have been yanked off the street for daring to criticize Israel or for daring to criticize Trump as well. US citizens have been shot in the head for protesting against the kidnappings of their neighbors. Every single supposed institutional check and balance on Trump has failed. And the road for this was really paved by the hypocrisies of the Democratic Party, including their full-throated support for the genocide in Gaza. And in terms of the conflation of anti-zionism and anti-semitism, I mean, this is as

Chapter 10: Conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism

Disgusting as saying that it’s Islamophobic to oppose ISIS in my opinion.

True. It’s it’s it’s something that I I almost I feel I’m sorry that you have to keep repeating over and over again that anti-zionism isn’t anti-semitism. You have so many better things to do, so much more important journalism to do about the the murders, the wars of conquest of ethnic cleansing. And I truly I’m so sick of having to and and that you as well have to repeat this over and over again. And I mean, I don’t think that liberal democracy is dead in the West. And in part, that’s because I live in America and I continue to live in America. And I I fight for something better in America. But I think that there are many people, very powerful people in the west who are utterly willing to stamp out the flickers of liberal democracy in support of a genocidal ethnostate and also in support of sociopathic billionaires at home. But you know, I want to say something about um Hassan [ __ ] and this like disgusting ban against him. Hassan [ __ ] is an extremely strong force for anti-fascism, for anti-racism in America. You know, he has been doing so much work um electoral work to elect Democrats who are fighting against the the senile weakness of the party. I mean, he’s been a I’m a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, you know, like like our mayors are on Mamdani. And Hassan has been tirelessly traveling all over the country trying to elect better democrats so that we can actually save our liberal democracy. And the idea that someone like this is banned from the United Kingdom because he correctly speaks about the genocide in Gaza is disgusting to me.

And banned from the Labor government in the UK. Yeah. That makes it even worse.

Exactly. Exactly. I mean there’s the same re reason right that in in some ways I think it was even more morally disgusting that it was a democratic president that um began the support of the genocide in Gaza. If it had been Trump I think Americans might have been able to tell themselves this is an aberration. This is not you know not our country. But to have a totally ensconced establishment democratic president that was full-throatedly supporting the genocide and then to have the Democratic party not even allow any Palestinian elected official, any Palestinian to speak at the DNC to have DNC staffers cover their ears while people read the names of children who were murdered. It’s I mean this is this is a betrayal of all of the moral values that humans should share. And you know, I think it’s a it’s a long hard road to claw ourselves back from that. The one that we you know, we have to do in America in order to overturn this um suicidal fascism that our country has plunged into.

And before I approach this question differently, if you don’t mind, though, um which is that I think liberal democracy is fascism when it’s comfortable. Um and fascism Yeah. And fascism is liberal democracy when it’s in crisis. So, and this is kind of hasn’t a better socialist than me. Um the I mean a um was it liberal democracy like was what black people and indigenous people in the United States lived under in the ‘ 60s ‘7s 80s the heyday of liberal democracy was that democratic or liberal right the largest prison population in the world the the constant ethnic cleansing ongoing genocide against indigenous people the ongoing legacies of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade in the form of one of the most egregious racist regimes just kind of like institutionally and socially racist regimes in the world um where anti-blackness was on TV in the streets in the police stations in the prisons etc and just so obvious and all of the stats around that and the lived experience around that right um but then when it’s in crisis it closes up so I think it was no surprise that it was the Democrats in power that presided over the genocide in Gaza. And it’s no surprise that it’s the so-called Labor Party uh in Britain um that presided over the genocide in Gaza, right? They where are they now, you know? I mean, Starmer is still in power here. Genocide expanding into Lebanon.

Still denies it. Denies it.

Um and what was the big change in terms of Israel policy when it switched from Biden to Trump? Nothing.

Nothing. Right. imperceptible.

Um, you know, it’s just more kind of Trumpian personal business deals for his own personal wealth is the major change, right? This board of peace and the kind of Gaza Riviera turn it into a real estate deal, not just an Israeli military plan. The Israelis knew how to pitch it to him as a real estate deal. So, he’s like, “Oh, okay. I can my family will make money from this.” True. Um so ju just to say like we really should I mean there is something in liberal democracy that is very important and can be very revolutionary which is that a certain kind of political pluralism a constitutional baseline where we have rights a separation of powers that kind of prevents corruption and stuff like this. Yeah. No I mean people will be like oh communism works in theory. liberalism works in theory, right? And there is something but then when you see who are the victims of liberal democracy, whether it’s in the colonized world, right? I mean I um what the United States did through those years of its kind of liberal democracy in the ‘ 60s, ‘7s, and 80s throughout Latin America, even in Europe, I mean the Italian elections were messed up by the CIA when it looked like communists were going to win right after World War II.

In Greece as well, it was the first use of Nate Palm was actually on a Greek communists. Yeah. the usual for them.

Okay, we we will watch two videos very quickly uh for Hassan Biker and uh Shink.

This is precisely the reason why I am terrified of the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-semitism. The conflation is dangerous. Valid criticisms against the state, especially as all of the violence is unfolding and everyone can see it. um valid criticisms against the state committing these atrocities and tying it back to Judaism as a cynical ploy to stop all matter of of conversation is truly terrifying. And I think it directly causes anti-semitism to fester. We’re all going to ask ourselves later, what did we do to stop a genocide? And so what people who are Zionists and fervent supporters of Israel do is they hide behind anti-semitism and they use anti-semitism as a weaponized charge to defend the disgusting immoral actions of a foreign government.

For what it’s worth, and I speak to the British public every day for three hours, 5 days a week, nobody in this country thinks you can’t criticize Israel. I want to ask I just got banned for it.

Well, well, we’ll see. We’ll see exactly what the reasons were given and then you may you may be right that that has happened but people but that is the reason they gave they gave it to the press. That’s the government. I’m talking about the people of the country. Can I ask the people of the country are beautiful. They agree with me.

Can I well not all of them do but can I ask is that not the kind of inflammatory language that might have contributed to being banning because most let me let me finish my question. More disgusting than the Holocaust. More disgusting than Cambodia in our lifetime. It’s that’s the kind of inflammatory stuff that does get people fired.

Okay. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s insane. So, wait a minute. You want me to just give a pass to this foreign government? That’s so No. Then how? No, no, no, no, no. These are all tricks. These are all tricks to say, “Don’t criticize this way. Don’t criticize that way.” No. You’re immoral if you’re not deeply criticizing the Israeli government. They are disgusting the the journalist. I I I believe. But I want to say something before I forget. Thank you for saying that we Palestinians, we should not justif yourself and say being anti-zionist is not anti-semitic. I don’t owe anyone an apology. I don’t need to like find a justification for people when I say anti-zionism is not anti-semitism. Israel killed my family. Israel killed committed a genocide in in Palestine. They’ve killed tens of thousands of people. And me as a victim, I do not have to justify myself to the world when I say that I am anti-Zionist because Zionism killed my family. It killed the people in Palestine. But I mean, what do you think of this journalist who is I mean, the thing that’s getting people fired up, I believe that was the word she used is seeing children slaughtered every day for 3 years, right? It’s seeing the most foul and obscene crimes being done against the Palestinian people, against people in Lebanon, by the Israeli government. That’s what’s making people angry. It’s that we’re living at a time where we’re not reading about these horrors in the newspaper 6 months later. We’re watching them as they happen. And we’re watching live. And we’re watching the people in Gaza with profound eloquence. Eloquence that comes from depths that I don’t think certainly someone like me would never have been able to summer to summon in that level of extremity. explaining their own genocides, protesting their own documenting their own genocides, the slaughter of their families, and protesting for their own humanity. That’s what’s getting people fired up. And this demand that people aren’t supposed to f be angry at this genocide that they’re watching every day is a demand that people close their eyes to reality and close their eyes to the basic demands of the human spirit.

Yeah. On that remark, Hezem, what do you think the Palestinians want or that, you know, like some people claim that the Palestinians uh like what’s happening is anti-semitic and the Bian liberation is anti-semitic and all of that, but what do you think the Palestinians actually want?

Well, I think Palestinians are like anybody else. There’s a contradictions and different uh political trajectories and different views. I think at the very fundamental level, Palestinians, like anyone else, just don’t want to be killed. Exactly. And don’t want to be mass incarcerated and don’t want to have their mobility restricted no more than 5 kilometers without hitting a checkpoint. They don’t want to live under apartheid in a genocidal regime. They don’t want to be treated like garbage. I mean there’s not, you know, but in terms of like the bigger picture, what is the goal of Palestine, etc., you know, there is this sort of is it a partition and a Palestinian statehood that denies the rights of all the refugees and 48 Palestinians and whatnot, or is it um a fully liberated from the river to the sea, or is there a kind of deeper understanding that we need class liberation and gender liberation and and all kinds of social liberation and revolution is every day or not at all. Um, and so I think it depends which Palestinian you ask on these bigger questions. But I think at the fundamental level it’s there’s nothing there’s nothing particularly Palestinians about what Palestinians want. I think what’s particular is that Palestinians have had to live for the last 80 years under this kind of fascist genocidal regime that gets to parade itself as a liberal democracy. And whenever it needs to take off the liberal democratic mask and go full genocide, the whole world teams up together and puts sanctions on the people it’s killing, right? Like and when when the Palestinian Authority gave in to Western demands to hold elections in 2005 and like voted in the wrong party, Western didn’t like it. The rest of the world was like, “Oh, that’s not the democracy we had in mind. we’re we’re cutting you off from all aid until you switch to non-democratic and then we love you and then we’ll love you. And then when that didn’t go exactly as planned, Israel imposed this a complete medieval style siege on the Gaza Strip supported by the world and the world was like okay yeah that’s this is something that they love unfortunately I I I want to go back sorry again to you Molly you are you are Jewish and you live in New York and New York is the the the most populate Jewish populated city after Israel. No, it’s No, it’s it’s the largest largest Jewish city in the world. Okay, my bad. More Jews live in New York than in Tel Aviv. But something’s really Oh, really? Yes. Okay. I didn’t know that. I thought it’s second largest city. Okay. But there’s something happening in New York now with the New Yorker Jews. They’re changing their views in Israel. They’re protesting and they show up in the pro Palestine protest in in New York. You elected Zoran Mumani who is a pro Palestine who is a Muslim as a New York mayor. What is really happening with the New Yorker Jews and why are we seeing this shift?

Chapter 11: How do New York Jews feel about Israel?

I mean the New York Jewish it’s even a misnomer to call it a community. There are so many different types of Jewish people who live in New York. There are anti-zionistic Jews, pro-Zionist Hessidic Jews. There are secular Jews who are pro-zionist secular Jews who are anti-zionist. There’s every when you think of a group of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people right this like this it’s impossible to say that there was ever any one view and I would also say that so much of the socialist history of New York which is the tradition that’s overrun Mandami walks in is a history that was built by Eastern European Jewish socialists these were the people who built the garment unions who built public housing who really were the backbone of the socialist social democratic left in New York City and in a larger sense in America. And so I think what’s happening is that for a long time this sort of liberal Zionist delusion, a delusion that could not exist in Israel, that only exists in America where people are able to put reality out of mind. This liberal Zionist delusion is cracking right under the reality of this genocide. It’s cracking both because people are watching these horrific murders live streamed, but also because people are seeing what Israeli officials say. And what Israeli officials say and the way Israeli officials act is repugnant to um not to really the traditions of American liberalism and there are so many things that are wrong with liberalism. Not defending it, but it’s true. It’s there is nothing about even that even an American liberal would see like a smaller Bengavier and find themselves in it. And so I think what’s happening is that at first you had, you know, liberal Zionists that were in this kind of like grief stage where they were like, “Oh, maybe it’s Netanyahu. It’s not Israel.” But after three years that’s becoming increasingly untenable. That’s they’re realizing, “No, this actually this is this is Zionism. This is Israel. This is Zionism. It was always this. Now we’re just seeing it.”

Chapter 12: It’s not Netanyahu. It’s always been Zionism, now we’re just seeing it.

And I think that in New York, many many Jewish people are obeying the demands of basic morality that people all around are and are saying I can this is this is disgusting. This is not in my name. This is not what I want. And they’re also looking at the fact that, you know, in you’re going to laugh at me, but in my view like New York is the greatest Jewish history Jewish city in the history of the world. You know, it’s like I it’s a place where you can be whoever you want and express your religion, express your culture in any way. And I think Jews are also looking at that and being like, why do I need this attachment to this ethnostate that’s doing a genocide whose language maybe I don’t even speak when right here, this is where I actually live. And you know, our Jewish Voices for Peace chapter in New York is huge. I’ve been arrested protesting against the genocide myself. Wow. And search for that. Oh, it’s it’s it’s nothing truly. Um, and I think for many Jewish people, young people, but also older people as well, so many older people, people in their 70s and 80s, they’re just saying like this is this is not who I am. And I I am disgusted. I’m disgusted by this genocide and I want nothing about me to be associated with it. And do you know like this means a lot for the people in Gaza and we have our correspondents in Huda who speak about what Zas mean to them what they understand of uh Judaism and anti-semitism and all of that. So let’s watch this video together and um and see how they react.

Hello everyone I am Aliske and I am Heske and we are both writers from Gaza. When a settler colonial state carries out a genocide under a religious banner, it wants the world to believe this is a religious war. Here in Gaza, we refused to swallow that bait. Growing up under a blockade, our world was shrunk, but uh our vision to things and to the truth was not. The occupier wants us to react with uh blind hatred, conflating oppression with faith uh to show our resistance as a form of anti-semitism. But we believe that our struggle and our suffering is against Zionism which is a colonial ideology and embers always creates uh racist myths to dehumanize the oppressed and to justify uh genocide and for Israel that myth presents colonial violence as Judaism. By keeping this distinction sharp we protect the truth. When Israel um bombs our homes, destroys our universities, and kills our people, uh they are practicing raw imperialism, not faith. Uh we stand in deep solidarity with everyone who refuses to uh let identity be um as as a shield for a colonial uh cage. our resistance through um our words and through our um weekly reports on Palestine deep dive um is a universal demand uh for um for a liberation. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having us guys. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Very lovely um young journalists from Gaza. They lived through the genocide all of it. They lived their life in Gaza and the blockade, Israeli blockhead backed by the western countries and and they still like they understand they understand everything. They understand that differentiation and they understand that the Palestinians or anyone who’s under oppression will be fighting the oppressive. It doesn’t matter their religion. Doesn’t matter if they are like even if they’re like Muslims or Christians or atheists or it doesn’t matter if they are killing us if they’re ethnically cleansing us will be fighting back and it’s a normal reaction for any human being but at the same time I remember what you said Molly we as Palestinians those as survivors of genocide they don’t have to be involved in such conversations it’s not their business their business is to live actually without genocide without colonialism without occupation so what do you make of this uh remarks from both of Houdan Ali,

I mean, I’m just so moved. I mean, I’m I’m so moved. I mean, most people when they are living beneath bombs and when they’re subjected to torture camps and when they’re subjected to murder, most people do not draw those distinctions. You know, I I reported from Ukraine. Um that’s not a distinction that um many Ukrainians draw, you know, with Russians. And that’s normal. And it’s it’s a normal human thing. But I also think that the fact that they continue to draw it as an act of profound nobility.

Yeah. True. Um Hamm um I heard a rumor that you want to translate Molly’s book into Arabic and that we should bully him until he does it. Good luck with that. 450 pages.

Yeah. It’s very powerful.

Yeah. I mean, we’re we’re talking about the world’s first anti-zionists. Exactly. Yes.

Chapter 13: The unspoken crime of Zionism, destroying Arab-Jewish relations

But tell me tell me uh about life in the Middle East before Zionism. I mean, the the Jews, Arab Jews, lived in Palestine, they lived in in um in Morocco, they lived in Iraq, they lived in Yemen, they lived in Egypt, in Syria, they lived all over the Middle East. And we were getting along well with each other. I mean I remember my grandmother telling us how in Jafah they used to have like their neighbor who was Jewish and they had really good relationship with each other and then Zionism came and everything had changed. Tell me more about that. What how did Zionism destroy our relations with with the Jewish uh the Jewish Arabs?

This is the unspoken Zionist crime, right? the there’s the Z the Zionist colonial settler colonial genocidal crime against um the indigenous people of Palestine. Um but then there’s the crime against part of that indigenous population that’s also a a global population of Jewish people. Um because what Zionism did said we we represent Jewish people, right? And it fought hard against the Bundists for that claim. Um uh but what it did was it kind of recast Jewish people from the south and east Mediterranean from our region as outsiders, right? It created this awkward condition between people who like you said were neighbors and brothers and had married from one another and had all kind the kinds of things you have in a society um between one another. Um, and you know, as Palestinians and I I don’t know which of my friends growing up were Christian, but then I was I was in my twenties like, “Oh, his name was George.” Of course, he was Christian, but like I didn’t would never have thought it growing up, right? And I can imagine my great-grandparents having almost a similar thing with their Jewish and and just like it’s my baker, it’s my neighbor. That’s not that’s their most that’s what I think of them as. It’s my friend. It’s not, oh, this is Jewish, this is Shia, this is Sunni, this is and even we don’t differentiate. You wouldn’t know that they’re like Christians or something at all. They’re just your classmates. They’re your neighbors, the same culture, the same everything. Yeah.

But what Zionism did was it came in as this kind of a it came in on the tanks of the imperialists. Yeah. Right. That’s I mean that the world the 1897 meeting of the world zionist organization that creates or this world zionist organization its strategy for implementation of Zionism is to hitch itself to the wagon of empire right they basically come out of that meeting and write to every emperor and say can you give us a piece of your empire right whether it’s in Argentina or Uganda or in Florida or Madagascar um and for some ideally Palestine that right this is Zionism is we are part we are going to be the people who team up with imperial power in a moment where 86% of the globe is part of an empire uh and hope that one of these empires will say here you can take that little bit right um and what this does is it recasts Arab Jewish people Jewish people in our region as part of this the first people in Palestine to warn against Zionism were Jewish Palestinians for sure right And the reason is a they’re kind of reading the types of press that will have news of something like the Basil Conference of the World Zionist Organization. But more importantly, Zionists want to come in as Jews, right? This isn’t like we’re Zionists. This is kind of like not specific to a particular community. They’re coming in using our identity as Jews. So we’re more interested to know what this is all about. And so then to realize, oh wait, they want to come and take the country and expel my neighbor and my classmate and my barber and my baker and my babysitter and the kid I babysit and make me an enemy and make me an enemy to my cousins and my neighbor. No, this is not acceptable. You want to come, you come like everybody else. Armenians came and chians came and North Africans came and they came and they’re part of the fabric of the society and have been for centuries and centuries and centuries. And now you want to come to one of the most multicultural places in the world using my religious identity and remove 99% of the people that Jabotinsky makes a point about Zionism and Zionism gave Judaism a territorial dimension that accentuated Muslim Jewish differences in the in the Arab world and the Palestinians ultimately had to pay the price for eur European racism. So Molly what is the way out of it? the way the way out of it. Oh my god. Um, in 2 minutes or less, how do you liberate Palestine?

I mean, I uh I think that’s that’s your job to spell that. Spell that out. I I mean, I utterly agree with what Aishlam said and what you were saying, Ham also. I mean, basically what it is is they adopted the ideology of the European ethnostate, right? an ideology that everywhere it’s been imported because it’s been imported all over the world, not just Palestine and white supremacy as well. And also there’s a Zionist concept, it’s called the negation of the diaspora. And this is the idea that even the culture of European Jews, right?

Chapter 14: There is a hatred in Jewish history of anything seen as weak

Like even Yiddish culture is something that’s an enemy. It’s something to be ashamed of. It’s something to be um to be destroyed. that everything that Jews had from all of the many places that they lived right from you know they lived from Kolkata to Samarand to Vienna to New York all of that it’s nothing that the only thing that matters is this creation of this sort of new man this new Israeli Israeli man in Palestine and you know those those cultures those relationships those bonds they were wiped out violently and while of course you know Yemeni Jews Iraqi Jews Jews, Palestinian Jews were the primary recipients of this violence. I mean, even Yiddish was violently suppressed in Palestine. Um, Yiddish new stands were firebombed. Um, events were people beat up the speakers. And it’s because, yeah, it’s the create it’s the imposition of European ethnism on one of the most diverse places in the world. And no one talk about them or talk about the Zionism

Chapter 15: Pretence of indignity

Let’s watch this video where um Israeli soldiers are pushing a child to um So a Palestinian child is carrying a flag is for them the crime that that child have done and they are forcing him to hold it and videotaping him to capture the evidence of the crime. So that was the the crime of the Palestinian flag of the child. Yeah. So like this Zionist ideology, this Zionist policies are are going so far to the level of criminalizing a holding of a flag. So what do you make of this video? I mean, Zionism has always been built on the eraser of Palestinians, on the murder of Palestinians, the destruction of Palestinian villages, the planting of pine trees over the ruined villages, the eraser of of names of parts of the landscape like, you know, filling in wetlands, of cemeteries, of architecture, and even the flag is viewed as a threat. And it’s a fundamentally insecure ideology, right? It’s trying to create this pure ethnostate on a place whose original inhabitants defiantly insist on their continued existence where even the landscape itself defiantly exist insists on its existence before this you know colonial imposition. No, it it comes out of a profound insecurity. I would say 100%. It’s fragility. Yeah, it’s fragility. No, nobody who is sure in themselves behaves like this. This is a very deep and fundamental recognition that it’s uh an imposition. Um also an imposition that is 1 million% um requires billions of dollars of external support and immense diplomatic and political efforts to keep going.

Yeah. And you know, I mean, like there’s these shocking things about there’s sort of two moments in US history where the US kind of said no to Israel. And and the way that the US said no was in in the 1970s, Nixon threatened to remove the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund. No. And that was enough to change Israeli policy. And then again to get the Israelis to go to the Madrid Madrid conference. Um the Israelis had asked for like $10 billion uh kind of like guarantee on a loan um to build settlements for the new Russian uh settlers coming in from the kind of collapsing Soviet Union. Um and the and the US said like you know we might consider not guaranteeing the the 10 billion uh the loan you know like really kind of minuscule on the larger scale of US support for Israel but even just a wrinkle in that creates this panic in the Israeli state. just to say like it’s it recognizes that I mean there’s this sort of like um um abundance of energy put into pretending like Israel is somehow indigenous and organically part of the place um but a very deep and fundamental recognition that everybody’s parents came from Poland and Ukraine and uh Ethiopia lot of their their parents came from all over the world but but this feeling that like any any crack can end this project, right? Make them very Yeah. And that the claim to indigenity like this like oh hummus is our food, olive oil is our crop on the l air hostess flights, right? And and now there you know like in this genocide many people are using the watermelon as simple for Palestine and like Palestinian liberation and all of that. And Germany like I don’t know when I saw the news I was shocked but also I was laughing. Germany have banned the use of watermelon. We’re months away from somebody banning the watermelon as a fruit because it’s anti-semitic. It’s insane. It’s It’s literally It’s insane. I remember I I mean, so in, you know, my my book, right? My book, it’s a Jewish history book that’s about a Jewish movement. Um, a proud Jewish movement, right, that fought for Yiddish, that fought for Jewish safety and freedom. And the comments that I get for Zionists from Zionists, my social media is basically unusable because of the stream of comments that I of rage from Zionists that um write things like, “LOL, the Bundists were all gassed. Objectively hilarious. They failed. They got themselves killed.” You know, deflecting the blame from the holoca for the Holocaust from the Nazis onto their victims. But it’s like, you think about this, the Boon has not been a politically active organization for 80 years, right? It was an organization of the Jewish masses of the Eastern Europe that no longer exist. And yet there’s such anger, such rage that it is even mentioned, right? Such anger that my book was written, you know, on on Barry Weiss’s free press on their weak and anti-semitism. The main banner thing was my book. Can you imagine? And it’s because it’s not funny. It is funny. It’s I would I would laugh. I would laugh. It’s It’s actually extremely funny. It’s extremely funny because it’s so lunatic. And this is because any any little thing, whether a watermelon, whether a Jewish history that was liberatory and solidaristic, whether a reality, any little thing is it’s too it’s too much. And you know it’s like there are obviously there are many you know Jews from Arab lands in Israel there who you know ate humus who um you know who had shakshuka cuz they’re from Morocco or whatever. It’s not that it’s the insistence not that you know our families ate this too but that only our families did it. It’s only ours. It’s our exclusive property. No one else. This is what I said wasn’t about kind of like a migrant history. It’s about the claim to indigenous. So it’s it’s it’s that the Moroccan or or Amaz kind of country Jewish person comes to Palestine becomes an Israeli but then doesn’t talk about Shakshuka as my food because it came with us from Exactly. It’s because I’m Jewish and Indigenous to this place that I eat hummus and shakure of the Tunisia and Morocco. It’s the pretense of an indigenity here. Exactly. And I just want to add, you know, the fact that they’re so freaked out by your book, it’s they’re not it’s not some kind of overreaction. It’s what

Chapter 16: Zionism hijacked Jewish identity and turned it into a genocidal project

you guys were saying in the introduction of the the Bund was had a trajectory of an entirely different future of what it meant to be Jewish in Europe, right? And that is profoundly threatening to Zionism because like you were saying, it talks about the Jewish European as a strong person, right? We didn’t need Zionism to be strong. We were fine. I mean, we were strong. We produced not fine, but strong. We were strong. We were fighting the racism. We were building bridges with other socialist and communist movements. We were fighting for a different a world that wasn’t just safe for Jews, but a better world for everyone. Yes. And you guys came and hijacked it and turned it into a genocidal project and destroyed Jewish identity or attempted to. hopefully we’re going to make you fail, but you and destroyed kind of hijacked Jewish identity and latched it on to a colonial settler colonial imperialist genocidal project. How dare you? Exactly. If that is the, you know, and that’s a profound sentiment. Yeah. Exactly. Because it destroys Zionism. No, absolutely. I mean, so the Boon, you know, this is a Polish Jewish organization. 90% of the Jews in Poland were murdered by the Nazis. um Poland after the war there were over a thousand Jews are murdered after the war by nationalists. You know this is you know a these these are lands of profound violence that Jews were living in profound racism against them that you know ended in a genocide and yet the Bund still believed in human solidarity even after this genocide. I mean, I found newspapers that the Bund wrote in 1947 um during the first days of the Nakba where they were demanding the right of return for Palestinian refugees and they kept up that demand for many years and they opposed the creation of a Jewish state. They always opposed it. They saw that it would lead to ethnic supremacy, eternal war against neighboring countries, eternal war against the Palestinian Arab minority, whatever remained, and an eternal war of extermination against other Jewish cultures as well. And there’s a line from Schlomma Mendelson. Heen was a Buddhist pedagogue. was in 1948 um before the announcement of the state of Israel, the first the first months of 1948 that he wrote when talking about how Zionists imposed their hegemony on the Jewish community. He wrote that it was ironic that Jews who are the primary victims of totalitarianism should be adopting those methods. And he said it is as if the slaughterer has infected the victim with his germs during the slaughter. And when I launched this book, this book debuted at number four on the New York Times bestseller list. I’ve toured it all over America. Hundreds of people come to my events, you know, Jewish and not Jewish, all ages. But so many Jewish people, what they tell me is they say like, you know, I’ve rejected Zionism because I’m because I’m a moral person, right? But I didn’t learn anything about any other Jewish history. And so I have like a hole in me. It’s like I don’t It’s not something in you to be anti-zionist, too. Thank you very much. Um, we will have to wrap up in a minute, but I want to ask a question to you Hezem. Last week and actually to you as well. Last week when we recorded our chat show, it was on a Wednesday on

Chapter 17: Genocide continues as 33 killed during Eid in Gaza

and is one of the major holidays in Palestine and the Muslim world as well. Two billion Muslims around the world celebrate. It’s a day of celebration, joy, charity, and all of it. On that day, Israel killed 33 Palestinians in Gaza on the we did not report on that yet, but we need to talk about it. And also, the Palestinians in Gaza have been banned from doing Hajj for the for the past three years right now. So, what is the responsibility of Muslims around the world toward the Palestinians right now? And what is the responsibility of people of other faiths and religions towards the Muslims in Gaza who are banned from their practicing their rituals whether it was an aid or in Hajj? Let’s start with your Yeah, I don’t think you need to be Muslim to to think about it this way, you know. I think just fundamentally um pe people wanting to practice normal people things you know like breathing, eating, celebrating important days, going to school, traveling, seeking medical treatment. Everyone should have that water, food, right? The basic means of survival, but also you need that it’s it’s not even just about like basic and fundamental rights. I know we we always kind of fall back on this. People have a right to kind of flourish. People have a right to excel. People have a right to be their full humanity. Um and um and you know Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, apartheid, Israel, global empire etc. is making that impossible for the majority of the people in this world. And in Gaza is this kind of almost like highest concentration of all of these contradictions which is kind of shocking. It’s such a small place. such a right like I mean it’s been an open air prison for 20 years and this um and so I think you the the the fact of it being on you know makes it somehow more egregious than if it was done the day before or the month before if when it was done the day before and the month before but I think the I think there’s something there’s something here though which is that this is what Palestinian political prisoner the kind of like molding of consciousness. There’s an Israel didn’t invent this, but they’ve kind of come close to almost like trying to perfect it or they’ve made it their mission to, which is to make it so that if you ask for dignity, right? If you demand dignity, if you say no to kind of this level of oppression that we will make the cost so great for you, so nobody will do it again. Yeah. Right. And so from for the past 80 years, it’s it’s become such a standard part of the Israeli playbook and now they’ve really let loose in the last 3 years in Gaza, which is that um oh, you’re going to resist, you’re going to say no, we’ll wipe out a village, we’ll wipe out a family, we’ll stop as we’ve done inification. Yeah. I mean, this is disgusting. Horrific, right? But and I think this is the point. is like, “Oh, you think you’re going to celebrate your religious festivity? We’re going to kill 30 people.” Um, and the idea here is that somehow this is supposed to make Palestinians so afraid of everything, right? That they’ll somehow like make them own their own selves disappear. But that’s not what humans do. That’s not what the Bundist did when Hitler came for them. That’s not what indigenous people in North in Turtle Island are doing to fight the genocide with arms, right? The Bundist. Um, they fought the Bundist. They fought. Yes. They they fought with fists and arms. Also with arms struggle. With arms with arms struggle. They fought culturally. They fought politically. And they fought with arms when they needed to. And by the way, the the near the end of the book, there’s an incredible section about also the mutual aid institutions that they built, right, as part of their resistance. This wasn’t just about producing a political line and getting arms training and whatnot. It’s also building things for children, for people with mental illness, for for women etc. shelters and also to do it in a revolutionary way. Please tell us more because like again it’s not like oh we should open up a school so that people will like us more or let’s do some service provision. It’s like let’s revolutionize the whole idea of education as we do it. Exactly. So, in in inter war Poland, which is really when they were at their height, all of the organs of Polish power in the late 1930s were about um deporting Jews from Poland. Um the Polish government literally paid terrorist youth militias to go through Jewish neighborhoods throwing bombs into shops and beating people while screaming Jews to Palestine. the whole the the government literally wanted to push their 3.3 million Jewish citizens to to Palestine to force them to leave to steal all of their things and to force them to leave. And in response to this intense racism and violence, the Bund built a beautiful alternate world. It did not just comprise of elected officials nor of their militias. There were amazing Yiddish schools. There were newspapers that told bund that told working-class Jews in Warsaw about socialism in China, about a vanguard literature. There was a woman’s movement that fought for free child care. There were hikes and summer camps, youth programs. There was a a sanatorium for tubercular slum kids that was a jewel of the world. And you know, even when the Nazis invaded and when Jews were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, the Boon continued these underground schools, these underground newspapers, these underground poetry readings. And you know, when I would look at what people did in Kaza under the genocide, that commitment not just to have bare life as a human body, right? But to also assert yourself as a thinking being, a thinking artistic being who can who can analyze and who can live. It is so similar to what the boons did in the ghetto. And you know, I I visited Gaza in 2015. Um I reported from there for advice. Um and I I know people who are still in Gaza. And one of the things that struck me was the fierce commitment that Palestinians in Gaza had to making things beautiful. I remember like there were these little cars that they made for kids to ride around on the park that had like bright lights and flowers. And it was like despite everything that the Israeli state would steal from people in Gaza, they insisted that no, we are human and we are alive and we’ll make our lives beautiful for ourselves and each other. They do it very powerfully and very like in a very strong way. But this chapter and everything in this book is very important and worthy of not just being read by everyone but also being translated to Arabic because also in the rebuilding of we need to learn of how the Bundist and others have gone through those massacres and those crimes. So it’s very important to be connected. Uh but on that note, we have to finish. I’m so sorry for that. It’s a very powerful and insightful conversation. Thank you so much for uh coming and being part of it. And uh for everyone who’s watching until now, thank you so much for joining us. We see you next Wednesday on 700 p.m. Thank you so much. Have a good evening.