Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - 139: Notes From Bunderground, with Tony Karon of AJ+

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Matt and Daniel are joined by AJ+ Editorial Lead Tony Karon to consider the ghost of Theodor Herzl, Adam Friedland’s courting of his family’s ire in the presence of Ritchie Torres, and an explanation of bundism that somehow elides delicious, radial cakes.Please donate to the Gaza City Flour Fund: http://bit.ly/gazaflourfundJoin the patreon at https://www.patreon.com/badhasbaraSubscribe to Tony Karon’s substack https://tonykaron.substack.com/And follow Tony Karon on instagram https://www.instagram.com/rootless_cosmo?igsh=MTh6cDNhZWlrdzk5dQ==Bad Hasbara Merch Store: https://estoymerchandise.com/collections/bad-hasbara-podcastFind Tony at https://x.com/tonykaronGet tickets for Francesca Fiorentini, Matt Lieb and friends with Daniel Maté October 13 in Brooklyn: https://bit.ly/mattfranbellhouseSubscribe to the Patreon https://www.patreon.com/badhasbaraWhat’s The Spin playlist: https://spoti.fi/4kjO9tLSubscribe/listen to Bad Hasbara wherever you get your podcasts.Spotify https://open.spotify.com/playlist/50JoIqCvlxL3QSNj2BsdUR?si=fX8ubEarS5mpID7RGcw56g&nd=1&dlsi=c37394374aa349f2Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/4kizajtSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Moshwam hot bitch, a riband polo. We invented the cherry tomato and weighs USB drives and the iron d'all. Israeli salad, oozy stents, and jopas orange crows. Micro chips is us. iPhone cameras us. Taco salads us. Pothalamos us. Olive garden us.

White foster us. Zabrahamas. As far as us. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Bad Hasbara. The world's most moral podcast, which I won't even try to do in the South African accent. Yeah, no, it's an impossible accent to do, although I've heard that when I do my British accent, everyone thinks it's South African. My name is Matt Lieb, and I'm going to be your most moral co-host for this podcast. I'm Daniel Mate.

I'm your other most moral co-host for this podcast. That's right. We're both wearing, we're both wearing black. That was not planned, but we both look good. We got sort of a Twinsies thing going on. I like it. You look good. Nebishes in black. That's right. Mention black. This is my Hosono shirt. Oh. Horoomi Hosono. I featured his albums a few weeks ago. This is my shirt that someone sent me from a listener from this podcast. It's 1948. People think it's like a polo shirt. They're like a golf tournament. It looks like a golf tournament. I'm like, no, I'm pretty sure that's a guy throwing a rock. It's that picture from, I think it was a great march of return of that really svelte a hot guy who was throwing a rock and holding the flag.

I think that's him. It's the official t-shirt of the Palestinian shot-put team from the 1948 Olympics. Dude, I mean, that needs to be an actual Olympic game that sounds amazing. I mean, shot putt us, but anyways, so excited to have you all here. Five stars, reviews, all of those things. We haven't had...

I guess it was the Maccabi games technically. Anyway, go back, go forward. There we go. There we go. So we haven't had a review on Apple Podcasts in a month. And I'm getting a little bit, you know, I miss you guys. So please go to Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcast allows reviews?

I did not know this. Yeah, yeah, that's the... Oh, you mean for the show overall, not for you guys. all yeah not for individual and it doesn't allow comments no no no yeah tell tim apple what's up and uh say hi to him and also uh give us five stars and let everyone know to listen to the podcast do that as soon as you can an apple review a day keeps the hasbarabots away i like it uh also uh we still have a little bit of merch available uh on bad hasbara dot com uh we finally made a shirt so go ahead and uh if if if it's it's not in your size, then we're going to, we're going to make a few more. But we're going to,

we're going to make just enough to keep the, the hogs happy. And, uh, fuck that, man. If it's not in your size, either lose some weight or gain it, girth, or gain some. That's right. You grow into, you come to us. That's right. You know, after everything we've done, you can't change your body like Christian Bale and the machinist and or fat, fat, bastard and gold member. Yeah, so get yourself a t-shirt and, you know, stop complaining about it or something. I don't know. Shout out to producer Adam Levin.

He's always on the ones and twos. And please come to, oh, come to the Ice House in Pasadena this Friday. That's September, what, 5th. I don't have a calendar in front of me. Today is the second. The 3rd is Wednesday, 4th, the 5th, September 5th, Ice House, Pasadena, do that. Also, October 13th, we're going to be at the Bell House. Come to that.

How was Houston, man? Oh, Houston was great. Houston was a lot of fun. It was like, we don't have as much of a following in Houston. So it wasn't as sold out as the other ones have been. But it was really fun. Houston pro-Palestine activists are awesome. And I got to hang out with Sim Kern.

Oh, how nice. Sim was there. Yeah. We hung out afterwards. We had some Tex-Mex. I had some queso, yummy queso, which is cheese in Espagnol.

But it's melty and delicious. Did you say to the crowd at the end, Houston? We have no problem. Oh, that's a good joke. I should have done that. Use that next time you're in Houston. What if I use it in Brooklyn at my stand-up special?

I'll be like, hey, I wish I was doing this in Houston. You know what I would say then? If I was in Houston, I would say, No, what I did mention, though, was apparently Houston has a giant network of tunnels. And so I just kept talking about Houston has Hamas tunnels. That was a lot of fun. People enjoyed that. And today's episode is brought to you by the Gaza City Flower Fund.

Once again, the Gaza City Flower Fund is raising money to feed up to 250 families in and near Gaza City with two kilogram sacks of flour, purchased at disaster premium prices given directly to hungry families. from the last fundraiser that we've done that we did for them they are close to spent so we need to number one we need to do another live stream fundraiser and number two since you're listening and we're watching and there's a link in the description why don't you go ahead and go to bit.ly slash gaza flower fund donate now and also you know donate early donate often that's what I say Did you see the video of the woman, like, thanking us in Arabic? I did, I did.

My name? Yes, yes. I have that right here. This is... So, just I'll read it for those of you who do not speak Arabic, says, thank you, Bad Asbarra for this charitable effort, who provided us with this food aid during the siege. That's you all.

That's not us. That's you. That's you guys. And high prices and famine, let's see. May God bless you. May Allah reward you with goodness. And we hope for more of them. Very, very sweet.

Go back to the very beginning. I want to hear her actually say our podcast name. Oh, yeah, yeah, here it is. I mean, again, did not ask for that. I appreciate it. Of course, it makes me feel good to know that our, you know, fundraisers, you know, you're seeing it in action. Things actually getting to people in need in Gaza City, especially now. The siege is only ramping up, you know, bombardments of, you know, I think, killed 78 people since yesterday.

It is just insane out there. And so they need all the help they can get. So please donate. There's a link there. And do that. Daniel, homie, what's the spin?

Well, first of all, Matt, I'd like to give a special shout out to the gentleman on YouTube who on every single video of ours provides a timestamp, which says, to skip the spin. There's always one.

There's always someone. But that guy, you know, he's also shepherding people. He's shepherding people past the call to action, past the charity. That's right. True. Pass the theme song.

Dude. Yeah. Evil. Evil. Yeah. That's, but also. Evil, evil. Impolite and evil.

Do not. There it is. Do not skip the spin. Never skip the spin. People don't skip the spin. Most of the comments are people talking about the spin. It's starting to piss me off. Yeah, people like it.

Anyway, we just had Labor Day yesterday. Yes, we did. We were recording this. And I've got this compilation album. Not even a compilation. It's like a recording of a protest. in Washington, D.C. in 1982 released on worker records with Bayard Rustin and Pete Seeger and a bunch of folk singers and union leaders giving speeches talking about how Reagan is the

first president in X number of decades to propose cutting social security. And it's like a, you know, they're talking in real old school union language. It's really cool. Yeah. Then I've got the Beastie Boys, Check Your Head with the song, Funky Boss, Funky Boss, Funky Boss, Funky Boss, Funky Boas, Funky Boas, Funky Boss, Get Off My Back! Which is what all the workers say every day, but especially on Labor Day. That's the album, Check Your Head.

It also sounds like they're saying Funky Boaz, which is an Israeli name. That's right, Funky Boas. I know a couple of really good boazes. We have the very verbose, back-to-pack rapper Aesop Rock with the album Labor Days. Oh. Perfect for Labor Day, am I right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. Penultimately, we have Johnny Paycheck with Take This Job and Shove it. I love that song which should be take this job and unionize it but still it's an anti-boss pro-worker outrage song and finally

yes with the album 90125 which was yesterday's date wow look at that September 1st 1925 this is the record with owner of a lonely heart on it so

oh that's a great song I love that song I first heard it in I first heard it or became aware of it in a Weird Al Yankovitch, Weird Al Yankovitch Poka medley from the mid-80s. That's right. That's right. Back when he used to do the medleys. Yeah. You would pocify medleys. What a genius. That is what is spinning today and now to introduce our wonderful guest, someone I'm very excited to have on someone who I worked for when I worked at AJ Plus, the editorial lead of AJ Plus. Speaking of funky bosses.

Thinking of, yeah, this is a funky boss right here. Get on my back, I say. And let's ride into the sunset. I'm a horse. He is the editorial lead of AJ Plus. He's also a South African Liberation Movement activist. Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, welcome for the first time. Hopefully not the last time to this podcast, Tony Karen.

Hey, Tony. It's an honor. It's a, it's a misper. It is. Yeah, yeah. Simcha. Yes. I'm so glad you could come on.

I've, you know, I've wanted to have you on for a while. And it's, you're for me, one of the most interesting people I've met. I've probably never told me this. No, I know. To be honest, I say it home mostly. I don't meet interesting people. I meet a lot of DoorDash guys. They're pretty cool.

But in terms of other human beings that I've met who aren't delivering food, you are truly an interesting person. You are an anti-Zionist Jew. You are, you know, the editorial lead at AJ Plus. And also, you have had experience in movements for liberation. So can you start, let's start off by me asking about your time as a student activist. in South Africa. What was that like? Well, it was a real privilege to live through a moment where it felt like we were making

history, and we did, although, you know, it didn't turn out quite the way everybody wanted, but maybe that's how history works. Yeah. The ball is moved and, yeah, it definitely takes you to a better place. Can I ask you a quick question about that? Yeah, of course. Before I forget, is the fact that it ends up. it up differently than you planned or mapped out or what the ideal scenario was in the movement's mind.

Is that a caution to movements not to get too attached to a picture or anything? Or is it just shoot for whatever you're going to shoot for and then let the chips fall where they may? It's a relevant question, I think, to... Yeah, it's a big one. It's a big one. I mean, I think it's understanding that history is always in motion and there really is no end. So you are trying to roll a rock, but there's no destination in history. So every time you advance things, you change the conditions under which you continue to struggle for justice.

I mean, the lessons in terms of Palestine activism, we could go into this at length, but really, like, what was interesting, okay, so many things to talk about. Because I start off in the left Zionist movement because South Africa is so segregated that not. only politics I have access to as a teenager is Habonim. Habonim. Habonim. Habonim. Habonim, yeah, habonim. By the way, Joe Slover, I don't know if you know the name, he was also a member of Habonim.

Joe Slova becomes the head of the ANC's armed wing, the head of the South African Communist Party, but he'd been a member... Conto was Seizway. I'll tell you what, when I was a kid, joined a Habonim camp, the most hardcore movement people and the most hardcore Zionists were the Habonim South African exports who would come and work at our summer camp. Like they were intensely, fiercely,

I don't mean like militaristically Zionist, but passionately, full-throatedly. The left Zionism, which was a fantasy, which we... Look, one thing I'll say about Habonim is more of us in South Africa ended up in the liberation movement then ended up in Israel. Interesting.

Good. And the movement was very, I learned about all kinds, left theory and politics and ideology and in Habonim. So, you know, this was, and I've seen that over successive generations. The movement's very open to you making your own choices. I got Uri of Nairis, Israel without Zionism,

from Habonim Madrid in 1978. And I was like, oh, shit, you mean the Nakbah really happened? It wasn't just some propaganda. No, they were like Jews there doing it and not telling you about what they did. So I was like, you know, like it koshered kind of taking on the Nakba. It's like, you heard that you heard the word Nakpa in that context? I don't know if it was the word Nakba, but it was describing the, yeah, I mean, ethnic cleansing. Yeah.

And I know you have Nairi's there and he's talking about what he did. Wow. And so it's like, oh, okay, if Jews are saying it, then it must be, it can't be anti-Semitic. And that's one of those things. I mean, you know, it's the kosherizing of this stuff plays an important role, you know, whether or not it, you know, is necessarily the most pleasing thing to hear. It is unfortunate but true that you sometimes need to hear it from other Jews first before you can start questioning that thing in your mind that says,

why do I need to hear this from other Jews, you know? I think the reason is because we've all been raised in this kind of psychotic tradition that the Holocaust never ended, and that's all that matters. And so basically, we've been told we're a paranoid tribal entity that everybody hates and wants to destroy. So actually, yeah, it's why some people, and confessionally at the age of 17, I needed to hear that from Jewish people to make it true. I like that, kosherized. The lies need to be slaughtered halakhically. Yeah, right.

It's true. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, circle chaos. On the lie. When they, so, okay, there's a moment in that habbonim time. You know, look, I go to Israel on a Hadrachah course in 1978. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, oh, this is very familiar.

South Africa, you know, this feels like a partate. It's like, you can feel it's like, okay, I'm a little uncomfortable with this. But I remember having a fight with a Betar person a couple of months later, Betar being the youth movement of what Netanyahu represents today. Oh, yeah, we know. And we were like, these guys are fascists. The bare Jews. Yes, yeah.

Exactly. And they're, you know, they're unapologetically fascist. And, you know, you guys are fascist. You did Derea sin. That's a stain on the Zionist, like, you know, Orla Goyim, the light on two nations. You know, all this idealistic bullshit. And they say, thank you very much for the credit.

You know what they say. That's one of our favorite things on our resume. Well, they basically say to me, Huh, you think we'd have a state of Israel without Durya sin? Right. And I was like, you know what? They're right. And I can't be, which is why I can't be a Zionist.

And, you know, soon after the chaliyah, you know, emissary from Israel to Hibbonim, when I'm 18, basically says, no, you know, you're actually a bundist. Now, this is 1979. There's no internet. Like, what the fuck is a bundist? Yeah. So, you know, you have to go look it up. And it's like, oh, yeah, that's actually right. Like, the anti-Zionist, the first anti-Zionist organization was Jewish.

That was Yiddish. That's right. By the way, you know, my father spoke Yiddish to his mother. Yerhredna Bissell. And the Zionists try to shut down Yiddish completely. Like, they banned Yiddish theater in Israel in 1949. That's right. And, you know, it's interesting in terms of, you know, bundism.

By the way, anybody who wants to know about bundism, Mully Crab Apple is coming out with, like, you know, the book you have to read. But so basically... Can you explain Bundism, though, real quick, just for those of us who don't know? Yeah. The Yiddisha Abaita Bunt was the biggest political organization among Eastern European Jews. It was a socialist movement. It was part of the second international.

So it had a relationship with the Bolshevik party, but it wanted, you know, Jewish cultural rights, language rights. etc. And it was the first organization to fight Zionism, like literally fight. They would fight in the streets. They saw Zionism as like a petty bourgeois. I love using petty bourgeois as an insult. Petty bourgeois nationalist movement that basically, they had this ideology of doichite, which meant here we are, this is where we're staying. Like we don't need to migrate to a distant country or whatever. We're here to fight. And you fight anti-Semitism. along with everybody else who's fighting the anti-Semites, which are basically the Tsar, the people in power. And that for me is a life lesson.

In apartheid South Africa, you know, South Africa was... Have you heard that Europe now has an anti-Semitism czar? Literally. Yeah. I mean, this monstrous, like, what gets called anti-Semitism today is kind of like laughable. It's like, oh my God, there's a Delhi in Queens that's called Gaza. really feel unsafe. We got to send over the anti-Semitism Cossacks over to stop the they're ordered from the anti-Semitism czar. Yeah, I mean, but listen, in South Africa, okay, I grew up

with anti-Semitism, like the regime had been aligned with Nazi Germany, the National Party, the Prime Minister of Foster had been in, in Termin camp, because he was part of the underground operative of the Abwehr, it was called, the German intelligence. And the, the, and the These guys were anti-Semitic and, you know, there's a lot of country club anti-Semitism and kind of teachers coming into the class saying, they're too many Jews, yeah. And, you know, this kind of stuff. But, hey, in South Africa, you never could have imagined that we, a bunch of white privileged Jews, were the victims. Right. Like, it was obvious, you know, Anne Frank in South Africa was a black woman.

Right, right, yeah. And that, you know, that thing I see in America, it's just weird. It's weird how people, how this constructed holocaust memory, as in, you know, everybody's, everybody's still living through the Holocaust, and everybody's a survivor. You know, you could have been, I mean, you could have been an Arab Jew. I mean, even in America, because of the restriction, the blockage of Jewish immigration, most Jews in America evaded, you know, skipped the Holocaust because they weren't, they didn't allow the survivors to come here. Right. That is American anti-Semitism that never gets a mention. Okay, sorry.

There's a bit of a rant. No, it is interesting, though. It is, I mean, there's this almost this focus on a community trauma that, where you're, you almost have memories. It's like I have memories of the Holocaust because I was constantly inundated with Holocaust education. This is not- Immersive Holocaust. Immersive, immersive. That was designed specifically to implant. I mean, you know McLean talked to us about this prosthetic trauma.

It's implanted in you as if you were there. And that's how they purport or hope to teach you about the importance of it. But that's not what they're doing. They're teaching you to see it everywhere. I grew up maybe three, like a few blocks away from the Simon Wiesenthal Museum in L.A., the Museum of Tolerance, it's called. And, you know, we would go into these, you know, into these, like, field trips there. And it was immersive.

It was literally immersive to the point. And what was always, I always found interesting was, you know, I had friends who were parents were Holocaust survivors and whatnot. But for the most part, the vast majority of the Jews that I grew up with, you know, their family history was such that they moved, had moved, you know, in the early 20th century. before the Holocaust and yet there's this kind of, I mean, to put it, you know, a little bluntly stolen valor that comes from talking about the Holocaust, especially in a way, I mean, your experience as a South African Jew is very interesting to me because of the fact that you have such a legal systematized other such so as to not where you yourself are not the one who is the other like it is the law that you are not the other based on the fact that you're white which is

I think an interesting thing in sort of like post civil rights United States where now you know you have people saying with a straight face that they as a white Jew are facing as much, if not more, racism than black people in America, which is like just, it's patently absurd, but they say it with a straight face. I think that's what this engineer, this Holocaust, like the traumatization industry that is sort of Jewish communal life when it's undesionist sort of guidance, which is that basically the Holocaust was a singular event and basically nothing else matters. ever since. So, you know, me, I take the Primo Levy. It was Suey Genocide.

Yeah. You know, Primo Levy comes out, you know, survives Auschwitz and he's writing about the Holocaust's universal meanings. The kind of never again for anybody. But no, no, this is like, you can't do that. You can't situate the Holocaust in history even. Right. It's something that happens completely separate from history and it's the last word. And so, you know, the Holocaust Museum in Washington is opened when, 1993, I think. The African-American History Museum is open in like 2016. It's like, no, you know, this is what we talk about when we talk about racism and oppression. We talk about the Holocaust because guess what? We don't have to talk about Native American

genocide or slavery. It's American Jews have a gall to complain about African-American resentment of Jews. I mean, it's interesting because I'm not going to go there. Well, no, I mean, you know, James Baldwin wrote a great essay about it. You know, it's just, it's, it's one of those disconnects that I think is, if it weren't, I don't know, like plowed into your brain, you know, from a young age, I think, you know, you wouldn't have any excuse, but from a young age, you are, you are sort of told that this victimization didn't just happen in history, but it's still currently happening, even if with your own eyes, you can see that you're experiencing America as a white person, you know?

Yep. And there's a parallel, or it's even a more extreme version, inside Israel itself, where the march of the living, where you take every 15-year-old, I don't know about every, but you take tons of 15-year-olds to Auschwitz, and you have them, you subject them to this traumatic, you know, psychologically conditioning experience, and they come away believing they are survivors. And, you know, this is like a number of Israeli writers have drawn attention

to this. Like a majority of Israeli teenagers, like a few years ago there was a 17 year olds or whatever, 70% or whatever, believe themselves to be Holocaust survivors. Now, the majority of that cohort are actually Arab Jews. The Holocaust never touched their families

or they're, you know, this is, and literally Ben-Gurion is open about he brings Eichmann to Jerusalem partly because he has to immerse the Arab Jews in the story of that never happened to them. Right. But they have to be, they have to feel it.

They have to feel when they are going into Gaza and blowing up schools and hospitals and whatever else that they're finding Nazis. In the process, erasing any historical memory that they, in their lineage, would have of coexistence with Muslims of integration into Muslim society, of who their parents and grandparents' friends, neighbors, lovers, employers, employees were...

I was speaking of sort of the advantages of a Habonima education versus a lot of other Zionist youth movements. When I went to Auschwitz and Poland more generally in other camps, it was on a trip not March of the Living coming from North America for a couple of days and then being jetted to Israel for the cathartic happy ending. But rather, I was living on the kibbutz in the Negev for 10 months. And in the context of that, we went to Poland for 10 days. And they took us not just to the camps. They took us to Warsaw and Lublin and Krakow and we went to the old Jewish ghettos and we went to the old synagogues and we spoke to survivors and we spoke to Jews now

and we spoke to Christians now. And we learned about the thousand year history of relative coexistence there, obviously with hiccups and ups and downs, but a history of tremendous richness and culture. And as opposed to this lacrimose view or bleak view of Jewish history, taught something much different, which felt very different then to come back to Israel. We came back, we were already not under any, not too many illusions about what kind of country we were in, but it just didn't, it wasn't that kind of emotionally manipulative cold plunge into genocidal history and tribal attachments. I can appreciate that because if I'd had that, I think it may have been much harder for me

to work my way out. It was kind of a privilege in a way to be a Jew in South Africa, I mean in many ways, obviously, but actually being able to detach your Jewishness from basically the sort of Zionist worldview that kind of shuts everything outside of, you know, the sense that you are the primary victim in, through art history and, and still, because it was so obvious who the primary victims were. So, yeah, you know, and then you, you, you, the weird thing about, I mean, it's not weird, well, interesting, in South Africa, the Jewish

population was about 3% of the white population. So the white, of the white minority that like was, I don't know, 10% or whatever of, you know, the overall population, the Jewish population was just 3% of that. Right. Okay. The, when I joined the liberation movement, the generation just above me, I mean, many people, one of, actually, I had this fantastic moment of discovery in the 80s when working with a woman called Amy Ritzstein. Sorry, her pre-married name was Amy Ritstein. She was Amy Thornton when I was working with her. You know, like all Jewish lefty,

and she had been banned under the suppression of communism act in 1960, under house arrest and so on. But she'd been given, she'd been hiding Mandela when he was on the run, said a real good comrade. and she had been allowed to teach at a Hebrew nursery school. And I was like, which one? She said, Kamsby. I was like, what year, 65?

I went and found my report card signed by her. So, but, okay, why am I telling you? Wow. That's amazing. My closest I come to a red diaper. Yeah. But, okay, what's interesting, why I'm raising this is when I join the Liberation movement, the generation ahead of me, of the white comrades,

literally about 70% are Jewish, right? Jews are less than 3% of the white population. So there's a real tradition of kind of Yiddish left-wing. Really puts into perspective the American Jewish tendency to take credit for the civil rights movement. Right. I mean, we were there. We were there, but we weren't there in those numbers. No, but the numbers are still tiny.

We're talking relative. The numbers are still tiny. And what was to me really cynical after liberation, the Jewish Board of Deputies, et cetera, Oh, yeah, Jews played a, you know, really powerful role in the struggle. And here's, you know, here's George Sloven, and there's Ronnie Cazerls, and there's Ray Alexander. And they're like, yeah, what did you guys think of them back then? Because we were a minority, the people who joined the liberation movement, among Jews. And they were like, we are bad for the Jews.

We're going to get the Jews in trouble. Right. So maybe it's more similar than I'd like to think. It is. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. So I, you know, I want to hear about the tour.

the when things started to change before the end of apartheid because you know obviously I don't make it a habit of forecasting anything and I'm essentially a pessimist at heart that's a Yiddish trait yeah yes unfortunately I'm epigenetically a pessimist but you know I in terms of when things started changing when you actually started seeing something beyond kind of the same peaks and valleys of any kind of movement. What do you think, I mean, it's hard for me to ask you like, what was the one thing that did it? But what, give me like, I don't know, two things. What do you think changed? Well, what changed? I mean, look, the mass movement emerges, you know, begins to, to

form in the in in the in the 1980s you want the the the big picture history why is there a mass movement being created because the ANC leadership in 1979 goes to vietnam and you know until then the ANC been like you know doing sort of small guerrilla right to infiltrate guerrillas into the country and they weren't lasting very long and it wasn't having any impact in the vietnamese are like what the fuck are you doing um you have to build a political base like that's what's going to be, you know, decisive. And so the ANC's political underground was basically tasked with creating a mass movement, building civic organizations, women, student youth, trade unions, et cetera.

And, you know, not all of that was ANC. It was, the ANC was feeding into it. But so I come along in the 1980s when that stuff is just taking root. And it's amazing. You know, you suddenly, you live in this apartheid society, but suddenly, you know, on a weekend, you're in a whole full of, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of black people singing. Like literally, that's the thing I find saddest about American left-wing activist tradition.

They know songs. We can't. And every time, you know what, America, we're just too self-aware. Like, I include myself in this whenever I'm, you know, marching and someone like passes out like a lyric sheet for a song we're going to sing. I'm like, I'll let you guys do it. I'm not, I'm too shy. I'd be more up for singing than I am for chanting. And I get the value of chance.

But I agree. I was listening to the Solidarity Day album and the melodicness and the structure of the song, you know, which side are you on and solidarity forever? These are bops, you know. And for me it was a bit like shul, as in, you know, you're marching down the street, singing a song in Kosa. You don't actually know what all the words mean. It's like being in shodmaning while walking down.

All the loy in time. It's like, yeah. Words, words. So I'm a hosa, Darwin is great. Yeah, exactly. It's called the toy toy in South Africa. But I think, you know, what happens is, like this movement grows and it becomes, like, clear, the regime cannot destroy us, right? But also at a certain point, like around 89, so we can't actually destroy them either.

So there's kind of a, it's like a point, it's a point, it's a point. It points a situation in a boxing. It's a Mexican standoff is what we would call it here. Yeah, everyone's pointing guns and no one is firing and everyone's like stuck. What are how Mexicans feel about that? Yeah, this is. I think they remember some guns being fired. Listen, this is, if you watch a lot of Westerns, that's what they call it.

Is there, are Westerns races? I don't think so. But, Matt, are you disappointed by the answer that it wasn't Little Stevie who freed the? No, I mean. Sopranos fan, so, yeah, I think there's, there's more, I mean, I think, you know, honestly, so obviously, without the mass movement, none of this would have happened. Of course. It was far more important than the arms struggle.

It was far more important, you know, it was more important even than international solidarity stuff, even though that was important, was the fact that you basically had hundreds of thousands of people mobilized into structures, willing to actually confront the cops on the streets, etc. The thing that happened that really shifted the dynamic completely happened completely outside of our field of vision, which was that the Berlin Wall came down. And the American said to the South African regime, look, we don't actually need you as an ally against communism anymore. You should settle this while you're ahead or while you're still on your feet. And so they open space and they start negotiating. And yes, I mean, there's a

You know, South Africans democratized, no question. Like there's a one-person, one-vote election. You have governments that represent people now and so on. Could the ANC have done more to sort of push the social justice agenda? Absolutely. Right. Not at the negotiating table, but what happened was the mass organizations were kind of demobilized as soon as the... So, yeah, I mean, that's for another day.

So speaking of mass organizing and mass protests, I wonder what your assessment is from wherever you sit of what happens in the streets of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or the crowds that, I mean, there aren't massive crowds that go to the border to try and to try and support. But there are now crowds. There are now crowds. But, you know, we see hundreds of thousands of people. We see organizations like standing together. Right.

You know, I never know quite how to feel about these crowds because I don't hear a unified message. I don't hear a unified anti-apartheid message. I hear a lot of self-absorbed Israeli. This is bad for us. It's not nearly as radical or it doesn't seem nearly as morally outraged and as internationally self-aware as the Lebanon protests were in the 1980s. There seemed to be more of a sense of this is not who we want to be. What's your assessment? That's a very interesting question and I'd love to Yeah, your thoughts on it, too. I think the South Africa, the South African example that kind of comes to mind, because in some ways the numbers are not dissimilar.

We were a tiny portion. Like the people who were in the ANC or, you know, would even directly, unambiguously supported the ANC in the white community in South Africa was tiny. I mean, it was a few thousand, you know, out of a population of five million. But there's an outsized symbolic importance. to that as in, you know, showing, showing up, right, visualizing this kind of post-apartheid future in which, you know, white comrades are part of the struggle and are citizens of this new world that we are creating. So there's that dimension. But one of the things that, one of the things

we invested quite heavily in campaign-wise was something called the end conscription campaign where the idea was basically there's a grievance, a point of, a pain point of a part for white people, young white men essentially are being forced to serve in the regime's army. See, I didn't know that. There was forced conscription into that. Oh, wow. But there wasn't the enthusiasm for it that there is in Israel. Am I right? Because in Israel, it's since kindergarten, there's a looking forward to it. And now there's a kind of, oh, they're traumatized. They're coming back insane. But it doesn't seem to me that there's a mass movement about like, we need to change our entire culture. Right, because it is a cultural issue in Israel. It's like social stamina. It's,

you know, the way that they base self-esteem on the army is wild. No, it's much, it's a much hard to ask in Israel, no question. I was just going to say with the end conscription campaign, the idea was, we were all, the people who are running this thing are all basically anti-activists in the underground or whatever. But they understand that the purpose here isn't to build support for the ANC. The purpose here is to weaken the regime, to weaken the most dangerous enemy, the most dangerous element of apartheid by, you know, widening the schism. So even if the minimum consensus was just, we don't want to go. We don't want, you know, we don't care what happens to South Africa in the future, blah, blah, blah. We just don't want to be part of this thing.

That's fine. Let's build on that. Because the more, once you get people active, they get radicalized to work for want of a better word. Right. You know, that like you look at something like, if not now, starts off as not being anti-Zionist. It's just against the occupation and it's against like the, you know, extreme measures and so on. But the more people become active, the more they begin to understand what's happening here and they become anti-Zionists. Yeah, you strengthen the principles and then the contradictions get heightened and people

realize what it's going to take to enact those principles. Right. By then, they actually believe in them. I think there's an interesting question to be asked here in this space, the United States, right? because I think the United States is the absolute critical center of power, of Israeli power, in some ways. And so in some ways, you know, anybody organizing for Palestine in this space is kind of behind the lines, as it were. You know, it's organizing in a space where the consensus is basically backing the genocide in the establishment or whatever.

So, like, what's the strategic purpose of working here? And, you know, I think in some ways it's like working in white South Africa. It's like your primary objective strategically, tactically, is to stop the genocide and to do what you can, to must a maximum force around the very simple principle, stop arming Israel, stop covering for Israel, et cetera, versus, you know, there's often a bit more of a complicated chemistry that goes on here about how radical people want to be in sort of posture. Yeah, if you don't, if you don't publicly and vociferously affirm the principles of, say, the Twabet, or I don't even know how to pronounce it, but I'm often abraded for not more clearly speaking out in favor of that. And I'm just like, well, I've never condemned it. But what I'm doing here is trying to de-radicalize, fortify, encourage, you know, give people the kind of nutrition they need to feel the courage to even speak out. in the face of, you know, employment threats and things like that.

I mean, certainly in the Israeli context, there's also the problem. I don't know what the freedom of movement was like for black South Africans, but you can't get Ramallah to the streets of Tel Aviv. You can't get the Palestinians from Hebron, much less Gaza, to show out in force. So all you're going to get is those who have the luxury, the privilege, to show up in those streets, right? So it's not like the, it's not like the Jewish Israelis can join forces with a mass Palestinian movement because of Afrada, because they're separated. Right.

But also, you know, you think about, I mean, for me, strategy is about power. And progressive politics should be centered on the question of power. How do you build the people's camp and weaken the enemy camp to be really blunt in the language we used in in the 80s? So basically, you know, if somebody is coming onto the streets of Tel Aviv to go I don't want to go. I don't want to go to the army because I want to stay on the beach

in Tel Aviv and do my dot com, my, you know, whatever, IT company or whatever. Now ask yourself, is that strengthening the people's camp? No. Is it weakening the enemy camp? Yes. Yes. Yes. And so what's your priority in that space? I mean, you know, how many Israelis can you get to sort of, you know, fly the Palestinian flag and, you know, whatever, you know, statements of we want to live in a liberated Palestine versus how many can you get behind?

You know what, this consensus that Netanyahu operates on the basis of is not good for anyone. We need to stop this. We need to force an end to it, which is more helpful. It's not saying, you know, it's completely valid to aim for the, you know, you want people to identify with Palestinian liberation, Israelis to identify the Palestinian liberation. But that's not necessarily the most productive bottom line of your politics. Here also, maybe, I don't know. I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Well, we have a tendency also, I think, number one, to become, we're very easily sectarian when it comes to, like, social media posturing. I mean, so I almost take every insult or every, like, hot take with the largest spoonful of salt, because I go, like, this is... the natural outcome of people who do the entirety of their organizing online like they're not actually organizing they're just their commentators i mean they're you know uh text versions of us essentially um and you know there's to me i don't um you know i just don't breathe any air into that type of sectarianism i they have a you know their place online that you can yell into the void

I personally do not care. I have a question for you, because for me, I call it like the morbid dialectic of social media where we wouldn't know about Gaza. Gaza would be dying in the dark if not for social media. But on the other hand, it's a fetish. On the other hand, to the extent that we are holding a phone in our hands and engaging the world with our thumbs, we might as well be playing a first-person shooter video game. For all the impact we have, we're fingering a rosary of other people's woe.

Yeah. It's like, you know, you can only change the world when you put down your phone. Yes. And collective action. Yeah, I mean, but the... That's why we record this podcast on our laptops. That's right, exactly. We're doing our best.

We should be box popping. Yeah. We're doing our best to never live in the meat space. We are only digital people. No, but I think, you know, you see... a lot of, you know, online activism for a thousand, you know, different things, I think for this particular one, you know, this particular cause of there's a genocide happening, you are seeing it bleed. It is not, it bleed outside of the internet. It doesn't just exist,

you know, online. And I think that, to me is, I think that is, makes it different than a lot that I've seen. You know, you've got people who, I mean, half the time I get yelled at for some random thing online. I'm always just like, or people are complaining, you know, about people online or saying this and that. I just say, go outside. You're never going to deal with what you think you're dealing with, you know, outside. No one is ever going to talk to you in whatever way you worry they do, you know, because someone does it online. The difference is you see actual organizing happening that comes, you know, people will do it parasocially through the internet and they will actually come out. And I think what we're seeing now is more so than ever.

As someone who's like, you know, been talking about Israel for a while and talking about what's going on there, this is the first time I've ever seen it almost like a universal understanding of what Israel is, what Zionism is, what they are doing, even in the most basic sense of good guy versus bad guy. For example, the cultural shift can be seen in things like very recently there was a cold play concert. Coldplay apparently brings people up on stage to talk or whatever, like fans. And I want to play a video of something that happened at a cold play concert where

Chris Martin I believe is the name of the singer he asked the people where they're from and the way folks if you ever want to know which bands will never appear on what's the spin Cold play is one of them not because they're politics no it's been very humanistic and vaguely pro-Palestine but I just

yeah they're not your they're not your speed I understand I understand and yeah so here Here is Chris Martin. Yes, where do you come from? Okay, well, wow. Okay, well, listen. I'm going to say this.

I'm very grateful that you're here as humans, and I'm treating you as people humans or not. So as soon as he has, where are you from? He says, oh, from Israel, the crowd actually starts to boo those people. They might as well have said depths of hell. Oh, depths of hell. Great. Well, I just.

Yes. Uh, yeah, well, oh, fun. I have a cousin who lives in the depths of hell. Um, yeah, and, uh, he then goes on to try to calm the crowd and he says, regardless of where you come from or don't come from, thank you for being here. Thank you for being here. Or don't come from. Yeah.

If that is, if he met that as shade, eternal respect. Regardless from, regardless of where you hail from, wherever your, where your grandparents come from or settled and have no actual historical connection to. Regardless of whether or not the state you believe is there exists or deserves to, you know, cheers for being here. And then he proceeds to try to calm the crown further. Fine. And although it's controversial, maybe. I also want to welcome people in the audience from Palestine because we have a belief that we're all equal to you.

So he says, this may be controversial. I also want to welcome people in the audience who are here from Palestine because we're. We're all equally human. Now, I don't know who should be more insulted by that. Israelis or Palestinians. I mean, I get he's just trying to do the,

let's, I'm going to take care of your feelings a little bit and all that. It might be controversial for you, Israelis. Right. Yeah. Anyway. But, you know,

before we get into the reactions to that from Israelis, or more so from like Zionist Hasbara bots online, the thing that I find interesting is, is, you know, is just the mere mention, like that cultural shift of people jeering when they hear that someone is from Israel. Now, the right wing or Zionists or whatever are going to utilize that for, you know, proof of, you know, a vast anti-Semitic culture. Go ahead. It's not going to change the fact that the information war has been lost. Well, right. And that's why we use the internet sure sure uh what i find interesting about it is the fact that you know they can you know

they can try to spin it whatever they way they want as someone who's like understood or has been screaming from the rooftops for you know over a decade about like no guys you don't know is like fucked up it's like apartheid and it's like they do genocide and stuff like the fact that a general audience now has gotten to the point where just the mere mention uh makes them vocally upset, that to me is a cultural shift, a huge one. And I, I, I, I, you know, we talk a lot about the BDS movement and its origins in the South African liberation struggle. Can, can you tell me in terms of like the cultural boycott that was happening, you know, before the end of apartheid, did you was there this feeling of momentum where you saw that kind of shift happening and then

things started happening on the inside? In a nutshell, basically apartheid South Africa and Israel are settler colonial regimes. What does that mean? It means that the people who build these systems of power of apartheid imagine themselves to be part of the West. They imagine themselves to be the vanguard of the West of civilization against barbarism. Netanyan actually said that, right? Yes. Ritzel said villa in the jungle. Yeah.

Barack. Yeah, anyway. Sorry, Barack. Yes. He's the editor, dude. This is what he would do to me. Fact check. Yeah, fact check.

This is who you mean. But, okay. No, but this is really, really important. These guys assume that they are part of the West. That's where their whole sense of legitimacy comes from. Right. Then I will say to, you know, to Trump or Biden or whatever. Yeah, but you guys did Hiroshima and you did the Native American genocide.

So you understand what this is. So when anything happens that cuts their sense of being part of the West, when there's any sort of moral reproach that basically says, we, this is what you're doing here is untenable. We cannot, you know, get behind you. You need to be isolated. That's a huge psychological impact. In South Africa, it was particularly with sport with rugby, in fact, because that was the regime's game. And blessings to the New Zealand organization halt all races tours that basically displace. A Springbok rugby tour, like literally people fighting the cops on a rugby field, like

it became untenable to play these games. And that was a huge impact. It was for many, many people in South Africa. This was the first time that was like, whoa, what's going on here? In Israel, similarly, I think that's why this momentum that's coming in the football soccer space is really, really important because basically Israelis play their football in Europe. They play in all the club championships, the national team. et cetera. And there's real momentum building. You know, it won't be done the top, the corrupt, you know, federations that run the game are not going to have a change of heart.

Sure, sure. But when things start threatening to get disruptive, that becomes like a challenge to their business model. And that's huge in Israel. I mean, even when, you know, a singer, like Lord, the New Zealand singer, remember, she decides not to go to Israel. And they freak out. Like, Israelis are suing her in New Zealand courts. Like, it has an outsized impact. for what it actually is. It was one of the things that I found, you know, to be the most interesting thing about the impact of cultural boycotts and not even in a strict sense boycotts, but like cultural. Probeum. Yes. That you would, that it would have this impact on the citizens of said country, like

specifically in South Africa, the person who wrote the book who, later became the movie Invictus. Oh, John Conlin, he's a friend of mine. Yeah. Oh, so that's, it's a, it's a fantastic, it's a fantastic book. Yeah, the film is, I mean, it was all right. Yeah, it was okay, yeah. You know, but in that he describes what you just said was the first time that he had

experienced the kind of, I don't know, the people not liking South Africans for whatever reason, you know, it was when he was in New Zealand and they, they, they, they, basically wouldn't let the South African team on the field like they they were trying to get them to not play and he didn't understand well what's a big deal why do people hate us so much and um I always thought that that was fascinating to kind of be so um I don't know immune to apartheid that you don't even see it as like a moral I remember artists against apartheid in the mid 80s but when I really knew South Africa was cooked was in was it Beverly Hills Cup part two or three.

He trolls the South African embassy. He's like, yeah, I want to go to South Africa. Yeah, I totally remember that. But your blink. But I mean, this is like for me, you know, I think, you know, the thing about sports and cultural boycards is that they are noticed by the ordinary people, particularly sport, okay, the people who would be the most politically conservative are watching sport all the time. And so you remove this prop suddenly. What happened? Like, wait, why, you know, why is this

happening? People boycotting humus, you know, by all means, it's great, whatever. Nobody notices that in Israel, except the exporters. But if you take away, you know, wait, we're not, you know, Maccabi Tel Aviv gets kicked out of the UA for Champions League. Whoa. Yeah. That's, you know, basketball and football are the things that, like, your working class is really, oh, not they're working for. Someone's going to hear this interview and try to organize the American working class to boycott hummus and it's just not going to go anywhere. Yeah, yeah. The duck workers. The duck workers need to stop eating. The dog workers everywhere, man. Do you see that, I'm sure you saw that thing on the weekend. The duck worker from Genoa in Italy.

No. Saying that basically, if we don't hear from our comrades on that flotilla, for 20 minutes, that's it. We're shutting down the ports to all Israeli shipping. And then you think, you know, you've seen the same in Tunisia, you've seen the same in Barcelona, you've seen the same in Oakland for years. Like with South Africa, with Palestine, BLM. And it's like, yeah, dark workers, they seem to be the vanguard of internationalism. Yeah, they tried that in Vancouver too, where there's a major port.

Yeah. It's just, it's fascinating to see the parallels, you know, between these two moments, you know, this moment we are in the moment that you experienced being, you know, an activist in South Africa. And I, you know, my one concern has always been regarding this, the fact that Israelis are telling each other the story from early on that like, rather than it being a surprise that people hate them, it is a, well, this is, it confirms. what I've been told ever since I was a kid. How are they feeling about the cold play thing?

Well, we'll get into that, but I think we need to first take a really quick commercial break. So let's do that. Quick commercial break. Everyone, just sit tight. We'll be right back. And we're back this badass barrow world's most moral podcast here with Tony Karen. How you doing, Tony?

Still good? Good, good, good. Sweet. So we're talking about cold play, sorry. And the, you know, this video that went viral of them welcoming to Israeli fans on the stage and then saying, glad you're here, also Palestinians in the audience, I'm glad you're here. The response to this in the Hasbarosphere has been. Wild. First, I guess I'll show the, I guess this is one of the people who was on stage. Who put this out?

My understanding was this was the caption to the video. So this is the person who originally posted the video of this. I'm not sure if that's the case, but this is a concert goer. I see. The person who taped it or at least posted the video. Yeah, he's sort of the one of the core victims of this hate crime. Yes. Here we go. This is from at Yaron Samid. My wife and I, both Israeli, had been avid fans of cold play for two decades. So that's your problem. Traveling around the world to see them in concert several times. All right. I owe fish fans an apology. I know. You thought they were weird.

Oh, my God. The grateful comatose. Yes. That's why the slip-up by Chris Martin at Wembley Stadium is especially hurtful. When two young Israelis- He slipped on a banana peel of... He slipped on a banana peel of anti-Semitism. Yeah, of coexistence.

Yes. Human fellow feeling. When two young Israeli fans joined him on stage, Chris says, I'm treating you as eco-humans on Earth, regardless of where you come from. And, quote, although it's controversial maybe, I also want to welcome people in the audience from Palestine. Both of them, hateful statements.

Yeah, first of all, is this Derr-Stermer? Like, who says things like that? Chris, you've always seemed to be a kind, loving person that use music to bring people together. This was a tactless misstep that further tears people apart. It was all tact. It was nothing but tact.

And tears people apart and deeply hurt some of your most loyal fans. I hope you can take a quiet moment to look back at your choice of words and realize they came from a place of growing prejudice against Israeli people that have been drawn into a war they never asked for a people that were brutally slaughtered, raped, and burnt alive by Palestinians while dancing at a peace music festival similar to yours and that are still held hostage nearly two years later while you're on stage patronizing two of our sisters. You're better than this, or at least, I thought so.

Signed a deeply disappointed fan. Here's where I would make a cold play lyrics pun if I knew any cold play lyrics. Yeah, I guess that falls to me. No, I got nothing. Something about yellow. I don't know too much. Tony,

are you a big cold play guy? I feel it's funny. There's like a few bands out there who I'm like, we were all yellow journalists. Very good. Adam, very good. Always comes through in the crunch.

Like, there's a few bands who are out there like this who are like bands that I personally like can't stand who are, at the very least, you know, saying something in support of Palestinians, like Imagine Dragons, where I'm just like... Or Dave Matthews band. Yeah, or Dave Matthews.

You know, not my favorite music, but appreciate it. Always appreciate it, even if I never really put your music on because I don't enjoy it in my ears. But yeah, there was, you know, this is one of those, like, interesting outrages that only existed in or exists in the Hezbarosphere. You don't see it outside of just kind of the usual suspects, for example. Daniel, one of your favorite people. Oh, Dahlia.

Canadian Dahlia Kurtz. Yes. We'll be talking about her more on an upcoming episode. Oh, fun. Chris Martin told these women he'll treat them like equal humans, even though they're from Israel. It was a close call. He almost lost the crowd,

but then he welcomed anyone who made. be from quote Palestine prepare for a boycott of cold play the watermelons are more upset than us they absolutely are not uh i don't know there's the idea that the uh pro-palistine activists are upset about this clip when this clip is clearly just been spread around like pro-israel like hasbarist social media is is very funny to me truthfully i wouldn't blame them if they were a little irritated Like I said, like this may be controversial, but I also want to welcome Palestinians. Out of context, or maybe even in context, there's something rather patronizing and condescending and dehumanizing about that.

But I think people can correct for the Chris Martinness of the thing, the cold plainness of the thing. Yeah. And also enjoy the reaction of the crowd, which is much more of the point. Yes. Yeah. It is, it's interesting. I mean, you know, I think you're, you know, we're talking about this before the break, the cultural shift is something that I've never experienced before.

And, you know, this, like I said, the fear that I have is this conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment is sort of, it's still a quite operational wall that all, yeah, that a lot of Israelis have. I think there's something interesting, and as you were saying, the reaction of the crowd, And I think what that tells you is there's been a dynamic over the last couple of years of artists starting to speak out and connecting, obviously, with the people in the crowd who care about Palestine. But the beauty of BDS stuff in general is its jiu-jitsu function.

So basically, when the authorities come down, I mean, you know, when Cirqueh, Dharma tells you what's cool and what's not cool. You're basically applying a multiplier effect on popular cultures embrace of Palestine. It's like if the people, you know, the horrible people who are running things who are allowing this genocide, et cetera, saying, you know, Palestine action, oh, no, no, or kneecap, whatever. You're actually just boosting it, essentially. And I think that's what's happened. That's why you mentioned Israel in a crowd going to any genre.

of, you know, forgettable music, you know, that's actually, that's now been popularized, generalized. Yeah, yeah. And you're right. It is like this interesting multiplier effect where it's like you've got, you know, as soon as you are telling people that this is a no-go, you know, area or you start, you know, legally punishing people for supportive Palestine, that is, it only, it only helps. It only like increases the awareness, at least in everyday people's mind of like, well, I can very clearly see who has the power in these situations.

And it, you know, sure as hell isn't the, you know, activists. It sure as hell is not the, the Palestinians or, you know, anyone supporting them. So, yeah, it is, it's a fascinating time. and I do enjoy watching, you know, his bars still bite. They're still taking the bait. And, you know, they're still writing these angry screeds about any type of like cultural, you know, thing. Whether it's like a musician who speaks out or a TV show host that they like saying something that every time they need to, you know, they ramp up the outrage machine. And you can only hope that their own personal, I don't know, it's their own personal clout is a more, I don't know, is more of a motivator for them than the actual existence or continuing existence of Israel.

Well, it's kind of, it's moved in the cultural space, I think, from Zionism simply, you know, Zionism is not cool, but actually it's becoming, Zionism is very uncool. Yeah. It's like the worst thing that you can be in that kind of youth culture globally. Yeah. So it's lame. Yeah. Yeah. It's, and yeah.

That's what we try to do here. Let people know it's lame. Finkelstein used to make the argument and has recently that the term Zionism is useless in an organizing space or counterproductive because no one knows what it is. We should call it Jewish supremacy, which actually describes something. But I don't know that he's correct. I mean, maybe both things can be true. I think in one sense, the sort of sectarian.

and doctrinaire tendencies in activism thinking we need to, you know, speak with France Fanon like rigor and precision is not how you reach the masses, right? But at the same time, one way or another now, people do know what Zionism is because people see what Zionism does and what self-proclaimed. If we didn't have self-proclaimed Zionists, this is the difference. You know, you didn't have apartheid segregationists calling themselves proud settler colonialists, you know, but Zionism is a term of affection for Zionists, and they broadcast it, and we see how they act so great, the brand is tarnished. Why not use that? I think where you just said there, like you really hit, nailing something really,

really important, is that in this culture, particularly of kind of social media activism, there's a tendency to sort of imagine the world as if it's a literary criticism seminar. it isn't it's like you know battles over terminology and you know that kind of as you say I mean Phenon is an incredibly important thinker that we consult but you're not going to

you're not going to reach the masses by sort of channeling Phenon that's like a different space yeah yeah yeah and you know I think it more you know speaks to I'd love to take credit for the fact that People now see Zionism and immediately think settler colonialism, genocide, and joyer.

I think we've made a contribution to the word Hasbara. Well, yeah, at the very least that. But, you know, it is, you know, interesting seeing the fact that people are now becoming aware of it. And so you can talk about Zionism. And a lot of it is, again, this like you said, force multiplier of telling people over and over, what Zionism means to me, and then having people who are self-proclaimed Zionists be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, ethnic cleansing, good. So it's like, you know, people are becoming very educated in what these terms actually.

And then being like, was everybody always picking on me? Yeah. Speaking of everybody always picking on me, I want to move the conversation to talk about a recent interview that Adam Friedel uh did with uh representative richie torres now this interview uh was you know it came out last week sometime and it has been you know the subject of a lot of discussion he went on adam friedland's comedy show if you don't know adam friedland he comes from a podcast called cum town uh he is a comedian uh i would say he's like one of the like one of the like one of the like one of the like one of the those, like, irony-pilled guy, he's like, he's like us in a lot of senses, not necessarily

with less, with less sincerity in his, in his public approach, usually. Almost no sincerity, usually. Yeah, he sort of plays almost a character of a clueless, glib, yeah, sardonic millennial. Yeah, and, you know, he's done a few interviews, you know, he has a show, The Adam Friedland show, he sent interviews with people like Chris Cuomo, who Chris Cuomo called him a bad Jew and like a self-hating Jew to his face, which is hilarious for us. Norman Sincolstein wondered aloud, what am I even doing on this show? But he was having a good time. Yes.

I mean, they played together. He spoke to Anthony Wiener and mostly kept the interview about the fact that it's really funny that his name is Wiener and he kept showing Swiss Wiener. And, you know, so he's a comedian, he does comedic interviews. But he did this interview with Richie Torres, and I want to play a little bit of it and kind of talk about the reaction that people had to it. Here is one of the clips. There's this fixation with kids at a school that, and two examples of people at a restaurant that there was bang?

No, so he's talking to Richard Torres, who if you watch the show, you know who he is. He's a representative. I think he represents the Bronx, but I'm not entirely sure. Somewhere. Highest rate of child poverty of any district in the United States. And he mostly, like his, you know, at least since October 7th, but before then, too, he is a vocal supporter of Israel, and he's remained a vocal supporter of Israel, you know, post-October 7th.

He's also the first gay person of color in Congress. He grew up in poverty in the Bronx. So he's sort of. He has this scrappy, not rags to riches, but rags to power story, which he then, I don't know if we'll play that clip, but he sort of says that was in some sense the gateway to him sympathizing with the plight of Israelis. Yes. When he went there on a...

Well, right, he went on a free trip to Israel, and it was the first time he had ever been outside of the country, which, you know, is interesting. And he visited Sterot and... and he could only, having grown up in the Bronx, he could only empathize with the plight of Israelis who are routinely bombed. Yes. And then Friedland asks him,

well, did you go visit how Palestinians live? And he said, well, I support a two-state solution. I mean, just completely, as we're going to see here, completely robotic, pre-programmed, glitchy answers to direct questions, having anything to do with, do you have any human compassion for Palestinians or know anything about their plight? Yes.

examples. I mean, there are surveys on it. Give me the... Read the ADL surveys on it. Read the ADL surveys. Yeah. Yeah. So he's, in this clip, he's talking about, like, the claims of, you know, campus anti-Semitism and the way that that kind of overtakes any discussion when, you know,

it is not nearly as prominent or important as the amount of genocide that is happening. And he's arguing with him about that. It's hard for me to talk about this in public. clearly, I mean, you're, it's... You're being a dick. That's mean. No, no. I'm not being a minute.

It's an emotional topic. All right. I'll share with you what happened. I live there for... Sir, I lived there when I was 18, and I grew up in Zionist. And we were told, and our whole community in this country is told, that we have to defend Israel and love Israel, because it will stop at the Holocaust. It will stop another Holocaust for happening.

And my parents, my dad was born in 1951. That was six years after these atrocities. His friends' parents, he knew these people that had been through this hell, these skeletons. And it terrified us. And the understanding in our communities that we have to defend Israel. But I lived there, and I went to a settlement

at the end of my year there, and I looked down the hill at a Palestinian village and I saw how they lived and I turned back and I looked at this element and saw how they lived and people live in a world

where they're demeaned and dehumanized and surveilled constantly by people in and this isn't in Gaza by people in swap team outfits with semi-automatic weapons

and that's what the world is seeing and you keep telling me that the problem is someone's getting yelled at at a restaurant I'm sorry you're conflating two different issues Please, just, please. Me saying this to you right now will hurt people in my own family, okay?

Because this is a very important thing to us. And the fact that I still fucking care about being Jewish is embarrassing. I should just be a guy. But this feels like a stain on our history. And it feels like it's changed what being Jewish is. Because what being Jewish is isn't Israel. Judaism has existed for 4,000 years. This is a country for 75 years.

You don't, like, it is the oldest, one of the oldest monotheistic religions. Anti-Semitism is one of the oldest forms of hatred. People in my life are going to be mad at me about this, but I'm saying this because I am Jewish. You know, and I don't understand why you would be look how you

I feel like I'm here to be lectured not shut up that's not nice you can't talk I love it tells him to shut up at that point honestly I do I do wish Adam would cut to the chase there I mean God love him for doing this interview no I really do I really really really do I think it would actually be even more effective

and I'm not dismissing the interview some of the criticisms of the interview have been completely in bad faith. I think it's useful. I think ultimately it served its purpose. But in that entire thing, clip, takes up a lot of space. And he's coming at it from a lot of angles, but not quite getting to the center of the thing, which is you are supporting genocidal horrific policies. And I find myself a little impatient with it. I'm sure Richie Torres did too. But again, this is not a diss of Adam whatsoever. I really appreciate it, but I just don't know if I need to say that.

Yeah. I mean, I look at that and I looked at him you know, like that's a genuine moment from a guy who does not really do genuine moments, which I always appreciate, especially on this topic. What's interesting

about this interview and kind of where it goes is that like he is attempting to talk to a person who the only feelings he recognizes are the feelings of uh jews uh period you know when it comes to this issue if you were a palestinian you know it wouldn't matter he's not he's not appealing to him um on any level that he wouldn't understand he's appealing to him something he would which is like

i'm a jew and this is hurting jews and you keep claiming you're fighting in favor of the jewish people. Yeah, I think what's interesting about it is the way that he has since been, you know, attacked for what I think are very real feelings about, like, a lot of Jews in the United States and in the West, secular Jews, diaspora Jews, even some religious Jews, which is that, like, you know, the premium that's put on this identity has come to a point where, You, I think it's, it is not unnatural to say, I don't want to associate myself with this. I don't, I don't know, Tony, how maybe you feel, but like the, having to explain yourself as being, you know, separate from Israel seems to be something that causes a lot of tension for both the left and the right, where people, you know, want to, you know, say. that, you know, the Zionists say that it is anti-Semitic in and of itself for a Jew to say they don't want to be associated with Israel.

And then on the left, you've got people who say, like, it is not, you know, you're not, you're taking a sort of narcissistic approach and being like, well, this isn't my fault. What are your thoughts about the, you know, sort of the way in which the use of our feelings as Jews is used. to talk about this issue in particular? I think there's a really overwhelming priority for all of us, people like us, to really escalate that struggle to separate and to separate Zionism from the way in which the world sees us, these Jews, because I think we actually, you know, obviously they're not as many of us as there should be,

but, you know, there's this real sense that what the Zionists have done, effectively and are doing right now with the genocide is kind of making anti-Semitism great again. Because basically to the extent that the world buys the notion that to challenge Israel, i.e. to challenge this apartheid racist genocidal state is anti-Semitic, that effectively at some point starts to legitimize anti-Semitism. It's like for people who don't know the issues, you know, if people are saying this is being done on behalf of Jews, well, that makes it no more acceptable to most decent human beings. So basically what the Israeli side and the pro-Israel side

are doing is to basically essentially start to legitimize anti-Semitism by defining it as any resistance to Israel. What Israel is, right, an apartheid state, a settler colonial state, and a state engaged in genocide. That's not, you know, I don't buy the, oh, you know, there's a delusional thing in some, you know, you get it in, in the, in the, you know, you get it in the 92nd Street Y circles in New York. But this isn't the real Israel. There's the Israel that Bernie Sanders saw honey skibbutz in the early sixes. Like, dude, that was a fantasy to begin with.

Those were the people who did the Nakba, was the left Zionists. But also, like, you can't, you know, in human community interaction, in our interactions with one another, we judge people by what they do, by their actions, not by what they say about themselves. though. That's how you measure people in your personal life. So obviously it's the same with the state. Forget what Zionists tell you about who they are, what they are, et cetera. It's blindingly obvious for the whole world what Israel is. And so yes, I mean, so when you say people on the left saying, wait, how are you trying to separate yourself? It's like, no, no, you're buying a bullshit there about this connection. Should we be doing more to differentiate ourselves and to challenge Zionism's right to speak for Jews, of course, like that, you know, 100%.

But, you know, I see this come up. Like, you know, if you're a 25-year-old from Gaza, right, what Jews have you ever interacted with? Right. Only people who are trying to kill you in military gear emblazoned with the star of David. Right. So that is your sum total of your experience of Jews. How would you, you know. People whose nationality card.

call them Jewish, not Israeli, people who say they're doing it for the continuation of the Jewish people. Of course your term for them is going to be. Right. And then, you know, do people in sort of liberal kind of pearl-clatching society expect those people to make a distinction between Jews and Zionists? With the people doing the killing aren't making that distinction. That's a real, real problem. I do think Zionism has done more to amplify, accelerate, and generalize anti-Semitism in this moment than anything we've seen for the last century. Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, he talks about this to Richie Torres who spends a good portion of it trying to deflect with this line where it's like, oh, you're trying to make an excuse for anti-Semitism. There is no excuse for anti-Semitism, to which, you know, I would say, you know, largely, of course, I agree that I would never excuse anti-Semitism. What I would have said is, yes. I believe it is you and the state of Israel, you as in Richie Torres and the, you know, ideology he supports in the state that he supports that is doing the most anti-Semitism.

And not accidentally either because they need the anti-Semitism out there. It's their chief product and it's their chief fuel source. Yes, yes. It is how they continue. And it is one of the reasons why I think that attempt to separate culturally. And, you know, societally, Western or wherever, diaspora Jews who are saying this state does not represent us is important because one of the fundamental pillars that is holding up, at least, you know, from a PR standpoint, is the fact that you've got people who believe that this conflation is set in stone and is real. and it's a pillar that needs to be torn down. It's why it is essential.

It's why people, you know, have their list of, quote, token anti-Zionist Jews that, you know, Zionists love to talk about. Oh, these are all tokens. It's like, well, the reason that people are, you know, as they say, tokenizing them is because of the fact that they are being told that this idea that all Jews walk in lockstep with Israel is not real, and they are collecting more and more information about that. I agree with that with two caveats.

Number one, we shouldn't claim any false victories and pretend as if there's a massive groundswell of Jews with any power who are standing up against the Jews in our community who claim to represent it. I think we have to allow ourselves to be honest enough to say that the Jewish community has not looked good right now, and people should not be contorting themselves. to remember that, oh, no, the real essence of Judaism is goodness.

Well, no, I mean, look, we got to show them proof, right? And I'm not going to lecture anyone or browbeat anyone to being like, no, but just remember Einstein and remember Freud and remember Mandy Patinkin. Like, cool, like all those examples exist, cool. And Jonathan Greenblatt is the self-appointed and much-anointed spokesperson for American jury. That's number one. Number two, we should just remember, just keep being cognizant. listen, that while we're doing all this separating of ourselves from Zionism, right,

and all of this distinguishing ourselves and having our podcast, which people appreciate and all that and brings on all kinds of great guests, right? There are Palestinians who are having to live through this every day, and they may not be as excited about an Adam Friedland doing this with these tutorials. They may be very impatient, and they certainly are waiting to be asked questions about their experience and their authority on the matter is certainly no less than ours and if we're going to privilege, at least if we're going to think that the lived experience of people to whom Zionism has happened first and foremost matters, then it should be as close to the center

as ours, if not closer. I don't walk around talking about decentering or deep platforming and that shit, but any cultural space in which we're not listening to what Palestinians have to say is bankrupt. Just to clarify, because I think let's not, I don't think you need to beat yourself up on this one. The contents, in which I'm understanding the discussion we're having, is within a Jewish space that's designed to demobilize the most dangerous enemy of the Palestinians. Yes. Which is, so we are all mindful.

We are all 100%, you know, supporting the Palestinian liberation, so we'll be speaking for myself, at least. No question. This is about the strategic imperatives of a particular space from which the Zionists draw most of their power and need to demobilize. It's, you know, this is not about platforming, decentering, it's not about visibility. It's not about recognition. It's not an identity politics thing. It's about power. And that's, you know, so.

You don't need to make excuses for the kind of discussion we're having because this is 100% in line. Certainly in the South African liberation experience, with the strategic objectives of liberation, you have to have a strategy for weakening the most dangerous enemy. That's kind of what we're doing here. Also, Daniel, I mean, I agree with you. Let's not claim easy victories or imagine them. But I take a certain degree of encouragement, certainly, from the fact that six, 67% of New York Jews under the age of, I think it's 40 or 55, or I think it's 40, of voting for Zoran.

Yeah, you should. Despite the, despite the interests that are running against him, switching on the anti-Semitism blaring siren. So it's not an easy victory, nor is it a false victory. That's a very real shift and discontinuous, unpredictable, and very promising, I think. the Holocaust weapon is jamming. Yeah. It's like you can't, you can't be doing a Holocaust and keep saying, but the Holocaust, the Holocaust, the Holocaust.

Yeah, it starts to become. The kickback on that motherfucker is. Yeah. It's like that nail gun from season four, episode one of the wire. Yes, exactly. Kick back to a motherfucker. Yeah, no, I mean, listen, I, I, in no way, first of all, I would say that a good percentage of this podcast is us saying sorry that we have a podcast.

It's true. But, so at this point, it's tradition. But, yeah, no, I also. Matt, you got to play the sound. Oh, that's right. In some way, it is, it is, I got to find it. I just have too many. Oh, there it is.

There we go. In some ways, it is tradition. But, yeah, I agree in terms of the fact that we are seeing these things, you know, As much as I am trying to not pat ourselves, and I'm not patting ourselves, we didn't make 67% of New Yorkers, Jewish New Yorkers vote for Zoron, but it is nice to see that cultural shift happening. And we should be excited about that, especially since, you know, you are seeing these attacks that have been levied for decades. I've seen this kind of line of attack, especially politically, the ones that you say against Zoron or against anyone who speaks out against. Israel, be incredibly effective for a long time to a degree where, you know, I thought Roger Waters was an anti-Semite, an avowed anti-Semite when I was younger because I read that

he, that he was. And you're now seeing, like you said, this machine sort of jamming. And I can always kind of tell as to where the strategy is working and is affected. in terms of how many iron dome missiles they fire at the, you know, particular, like, cultural changes, you know, when you get pushback on Chris Martin giving a milk toast statement, like, I'm glad Israelis are here. I also love Palestinians. Like, that is, that's how you know. Oh, this is threatening. So strategically, you can see at least. some result or you can you can trust that a result is happening there was an article that came out regarding this interview that the article actually happened in 2024 but tablet re-released it

or or pushed it out um as a response as a response to adam friedland's interview with richie torres here's the tweet that they put out adam friedland says uh israel quote ruined being jewish for the rest of us. But the idea that Jewish virtue depends on Jewish powerlessness is both remarkably stupid and deeply selfish. That's so suspicious. That's just so fucking dishonest. Yeah. So they, Adam's not like, Adam's not like, uh, we loved being powerless and then you had to go ruin it. That's the fucking point. Yeah. As if he was like, I only like us when we're dead. But basically, when they say powerless, they mean the alternative to powerlessness, is Jewish supremacy.

I'll take powerlessness. Thank you. Right. Exactly. If those are the choices, you are giving us a binary choice, either Jewish supremacy and a Jewish fronted genocide or powerlessness. And it's like, well, you leave me no choice.

Like, what are you doing? And this article is going to accuse you of cowardice and moral abdication for making that choice. Yes. So here is the Jewish oyster problem. By Andres Sopoconoi. Okay, Spokoyni. Now, I need to tell you who Andres Spokoyni is. He is the president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, okay, which is a Jewish philanthropy

organization that does yearly conferences in San Diego. And they, or at least the last one was in San Diego. And they're obviously doing conferences with rich Jews to talk about immersive Holocaust and Israel education for kids and funneling shit tons of money into Zionist propaganda. Just why do you have to call it the Jewish funders net? It's just like every it's like when they made the Jewish news syndicate. Like don't do this to us. Don't keep naming

your thing something that I fucking gerbils would have written about. Why don't they call it jug the Jewish user's group? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Poundo Flesh Incorporated. Stop. Stop doing this. The large-nosed-shy-lock consortium.

Yeah, I swear to God everything they've done. It's like every single one it was named by 4chan. All right. In the Khuzari, one of the great philosoph, excuse me, one of the great Jewish philosophical treatises of the Middle Ages, Rabbi Judah Halevi depicts a fictional dialogue between the king. of the Khazars and a rabbi. Uh-oh.

Khazars. Speaking of fortune, the rabbi points out that Jews are peace-loving and that they don't kill like others. We can imagine the wink of the Khazar when he says, this might be so if your humility were voluntary,

but it is involuntary. And if you had power, you would slay. Ooh, sassy. Yeah, slay, bitch. Ouch, responds the rabbi. Or more precisely, quote, Thou hast touched our way. weak spot, O King of the Khazars.

Judah Halavi understands that there's nothing intrinsically more moral about Jews. It was our tribulations that made us uniquely nonviolent. And absent those, we may well revert to being like any other people and slay just like them. It says we may well, but I think he means we may as well. Like, let's just go ahead and do it. We might as well. We're in power.

Right. And also, if there's nothing intrinsically more moral about Jews, then why is Israel? the most moral army. Right. What, like, what, what confers that upon them? Anyway. Yeah. And why is everything, you know, put in the frame of this is, it's an, a moral imperative

that this state exists as opposed to other states, you know? Right. He seems to be saying that our morality not only is not correlated with power, but he's saying it's actually derived from power. Right. yet while aware of that reality and there are words for political movements that believe in that might make's right right

yet while aware of that reality Judah Halevi didn't oppose the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty rather the opposite there's a proto-Zionism in Halevi that led him to emigrate to Jerusalem he emigrated to Jerusalem therefore he believed in the creation of a Jewish modern ethno state 500 600 years later

yeah exactly yeah he moved there uh what in uh what year did he what century did he move there to become a lecudnik the 15th and he moved there and declared himself chief potentate of right that was uh that was the other dude uh shabotai zvi he declared himself the mosheer but yeah that's right yeah i need to go there and do that we have words for those in judaism too um in his native spain he had experienced the vulnerability of living at the whims of both Muslim and Christian rulers. Oh, the Muslim rulers with him Jews were allied in Spain. Yeah, the Convivencia. He saw powerlessness as an unmitigated tragedy,

and he illustrated as a moral failing the attempt to disguise that powerlessness as a virtue. This is what you get from the fact that he moved to Jerusalem. Okay. some modern thinkers however turn powerlessness on its head and present this tragedy which has caused jews millennia of persecution as a virtue in the nineteenth century the jewish enlightenment considered the jews a spiritual people untroubled by the messy realities of political power and thus capable of developing a higher form of morality the jewish existentialist franz rosensweig saw judaism's uniqueness as a result of this position quote outside of history giving us a time timelessness that other religions lack. Hannah Arendt echoed that sentiment, quote, Jewish history offers the extraordinary spectacle of a people which began its history with a well-defined concept of history

and an almost conscious resolution to achieve a well-circumcised, excuse me, well-circrucribed plan on Earth, and then without giving up this concept, avoided all political action for 2,000 years. Yeah. I mean, just like the more I'm, like reading this, the more I'm realizing how you can just, if you're doing Hezbara, you can switch between Jewish exceptionalism and Jews are just like, you know,

everybody like from one page to another, just this idea of like, well, first of all, just so you know, the idea of Jews being a moral, liberal people, you know, is racist against Jews because we are actually, you know, just as psychopathic as the rest of us. But we are the most important, most moral psychopaths who have existed and we need to. It's like, it's this, it just. And also, we've been denied our opportunity to exercise our right to psychopathy for so long. It's our time. Right.

That's all this is. That's all this is. This is like a 20th century movement, essentially, which is Zionism, and the idea of creating a Jewish state desperately. trawling through. I mean, it's just like the whole history of Zionist archaeology. Trying desperately to find the evidence that we've always been here,

we've always wanted a state. You know, my favorite example of this and I mean, you can't believe, Netanyahu understands just how stupid many American journalists are, right? Yes, clearly. So there's a George Will column from the early years of Obama, right? Where he says

in his office in a cabinet on the wall, Mr. Netanyahu has a ring. Inside this ring is inscribed the name of a Jewish official from 2000 years ago. You're, what? Okay, the name Netanyahu. Obama doesn't know who he's dealing with is what we'll write. So you unpack this for a minute. Okay, put aside the nonsense of Jewish officials 2,000 years ago in what was a village, essentially. There's the question of like, well, what does Netanyahu mean? It means given by God. So was this somebody's first name? Because 2,000 years ago, Jews only had patronisms.

They were no last names. And everybody knows that the Netanyahu family name is Milikovsky. Right. So, you know, it's a nom de guerre that is Nathan Yahoo. So it's like, what exactly are you claiming here? What you essentially demonstrating is nothing other than the utter ignorance that prevails in U.S. newsrooms among many of its top journalists. Right.

Well, Netanyahu tried to force that ignorance upon the rock group, Aerosmith. When they visited, he proudly showed that. That trinket, and he kept trying to make an aerosmith's song title reference jokes. Like, well, I know you don't want to miss a thing. So, yeah, exactly. Go to Tel Aviv and dance at the beach. You'll see a lot of dudes who look like a lady. And we are fine with that here, but they can't get married.

So then this next slide talks about sort of paying short shrift to the concept of Jewish genius like Kafka, Spinoza, and Freud. And the notion that vulnerability and the diaspora could give. give Jews a unique moral position to comment on society, which is something that I actually value very much. But I guess that makes me, well, the article's going to tell me what that article does. This is interesting here. Zionism called the bluff of Jews falling in love with their own oppression, seeing it as a form of dysfunctional cowardice transformed into virtue.

In Chaim Nachman Bialik's poem, by the way, he's a forbearer of Mayem Bialik, her great grandfather, I think, in the city of slaughter, written after the pogrom of If there's no empathy for the victims, but devastating and bitter mockery. And I won't read the clip from the poem here. You can go and read it. It's true. The poem is quite bitter, but it starts off with an uncanny description of Gaza today, shredded bodies flung against walls and all of that. But it's a very victim-blamy poem. Zionism understood that Jews did not avoid all political action, but that they were forced to avoid it. Normalizing the Jewish people, therefore paradoxically demanded a revolt against the destiny of

powerlessness that characterized the Jews for 2,000 years. As David Ben-Gurion wrote in also not his given name, 1944. What was his name, Tony? I don't remember. Yeah. It was definitely very Polish. No, it wasn't. It was like a Yiddish-Polish.

Yeah. Yeah. All other revolutions, both past and future, were uprising against a system, against a political, social, and economic structure. revolution is directed not only against a system but against destiny against the unique destiny of a unique people mm that's an incredible quote yeah so fuck you god it's hasadiba egoi from Jews his his name is David Gruen I just looked it up yeah what's interesting there okay for all of this boba maize because that's really what this is and we can talk about Bobamais Bobamize Bobamize Bobham

Is that bullshit in Yiddish? Well, it's got a, it's a tall tale. Oh, okay, okay. It's mistrans. I can't believe you guys grew up without Bobemais? No, I know, I grew up with... You're such an impoverished, you know, the Zionist erasure of Yiddish is really telling here. But basically, okay, for all of this, like, highfalutin rubbish that he's talking about,

What proportion of Jews in America migrated to Israel? For this destiny of a people of which they're apart, for this power that they're so lacking, et cetera. Like, where do the majority of the world's Jews live? The Zionism I grew up with was premised on the idea that the diaspora was doomed, the Galut, as they called it, meaning the exile, and that you had to basically get into the shelter just in time because it was all going to come down, etc. And, you know, basically, most of the Jews of the West stayed away. So, you know, Tony, you misunderstand the Zionist text. The whole idea was to buck destiny by giving this unique people a plan B in their back pocket

in case the Holocaust ever happens, right? So the idea is to live comfortably in Western states where they're pretty much not persecuted or oppressed, but just to have an exit strategy if they need one. And fuck whoever we need to ethnically claim. in order to secure that insurance policy. Right, but that wasn't the, you know, if you asked Ben-Gurian about it, you'd be like, no, no, no. Everybody has to come, everybody has to come.

So why don't they? Why, when Jews are free? Yeah. Yeah. I need to win. Yeah. But, yeah, it's like amazing how much cheetah Hebrew is stuck in my head, stop. Ulpan is no joke, man.

They really shove it in there. The end point of the unique Jewish destiny of powerlessness would soon be become plain. Those in this fucking Holocaust eschatology. Those enamored with Jewish powerlessness should have forever been chastened by the Holocaust. The Shoah proved that powerlessness is not some abstract philosophical exercise, but the very real extermination of our people. Some Jews still believe that our lack of sovereignty might have produced moral excellence. The point is a debatable one. What can't be denied, well, I'm glad he concedes that it's debatable. What can't be denied is that it produced an inconceivable amount of suffering

how else I can hear the ghost of Herzl saying, did you think this would end? Yeah, Herzl's at my house. He's in the next room being like, told you so. No, but where he is, actually, he's hanging in a portrait in the boardroom or main meeting room at the New York Times. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

More than one portrait, by the way. Well, there's one portrait and then one candid. Yeah, it is, you know, that's where he is, and that's where he's saying, I'd like. I told you so. Yeah, I'd like to think that my great-grandparents, before the gas was turned on in the Auschwitz gas chambers, were visited by the Ghost of Hurtzl, saying, how did you think this was going to end? Yeah.

But this, sorry, I'm jumping ahead, but Zionism became a majority movement is actually, you know, is highly debatable. You have to think, without American anti-Semitism, right, okay, take the numbers between, say, 1899 and 1925. How many Jews from the Russian Empire migrate from, you know, the Yiddishaheim to Palestine? Right. 60 to 80,000. Right. In the same period, how many migrate to the United States? Right.

2.3 million. Yes. And then the gates are shut in 1925. Right. So basically, what proportion of the people who actually go to Palestine, European Jews, are actually Zionists or simply people who have no alternative? that this is the only gate that's open to them so are they ideologically committed Zionists right yeah it is this assumption that like every single person who uh you know immigrated to Palestine after the holocaust uh or you know during the nazis rise to power they all went there

saying hurstle was right this is the only solution like it's uh yeah it's like the zionist urge to superimpose a right-wing settler colonial ideology onto every single Jew, you know, who was ever even visited on birthright, you know? This march back to power from the abyss of powerlessness is nothing short of one of the major transformations in human history. This march back to power from the abyss of powerlessness is nothing short of one of the major transformations in human history. Second only to the march back to power from the abyss of the, uh, the trance of the,

Treaty of Versailles for the Great Reich of Deutschland. Yes, yes. Both were really great marches. Most Improved Player Award goes to. Yet for some, six million dead wasn't enough proof that powerlessness fills the powerless. They have an unmitigated nostalgia for the times in which Jews could claim the purity of the mortal white shroud that gets buried without ever being soiled by the messy exercise of political action and sovereignty. This guy's not a bad. writer. He's a shitty thinker, but these sentences do have a certain snap to them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. According to the anti-Zionist writer Michael Seltzer, for example, quote, Jewish ethics and purpose derived from the rejection of power, from the actual contempt of power, which pervades the Jewish ethos. Well, yeah, I mean, if you listen to the prophets, that is true, if you give a shit about, like, fucking the rabbinical tradition and the Talmudic tradition, anyway, Old Testament kind of loves power. or blood at least. Right. Judaism for Selzer constitutes a revolution to, quote,

radicalize the world through Jewish powerlessness and suffering. In his view, Israel represents a bad counter-revolution against the noble, eternal Jewish essence of victimhood. Again, like we're superimposing this one very particular, you know, quote onto the entire idea that there would be any sort of anti-Zionist movement. But beyond that, it's like, we're also very, victim blaming again. We're also, we're back to the, uh, you know, Zionist victim blaming. Yeah, this, this self-hatred of this type of powerless, this weak Jew that went like lambs to the slaughter.

And, and I don't, I don't see how we can continue this constant haranguing of people who literally, like, like, they get their, at least their PR, their entire PR is based. on the idea of Jewish victimhood and Jewish powerlessness. It's not like Israel presents itself as like, well, no, guys, we are Nazi Germany and we're doing Nazi stuff. They present it as constant existential threat. So who's really doing the, you know, using the victimization of Jews here? Like, it's just entirely insane. And I love this without ever being soiled by the messy exercise of political action.

and sovereignty. It sounds like fucking sorkin. It's like, this is how the creplach has made, okay? Right. Yeah. If we ate sausage, we'd see how that was made, too. Maybe Imre Kertech, Kertes, which sounds like a Hungarian name, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature

best synthesized the bargain that Jews need to make, or needed to make. During a visit to Israel, a foreign journalist, aware of Kirtesh's humanist and pacifist leanings, asked him, how does it feel for you to see a star of David on a tank, apropos of what Tony said earlier, right?

Much better than seeing it on my concentration camp uniform, he answered. I mean, it's this entire, this binary again. We're back to the binary of powerlessness. How does it feel to be raping that puppy? Much better than being raped by the puppy. But also, I mean, that quote, I don't know if any of you have read Pankaj Mish, his book, you know, the world after Gaza.

No. He's the one who reports the, wasn't he even the one who reported that Biden, that Manachem Begin was shocked by Biden's suggestion that they bomb women and children? Yeah, I mean, he's got a lot of, but basically he synthesized the entire canon of Jewish Holocaust survivor literature. And let's just say the quote, that quote in there, doesn't quite capture what the Primo Levy's of the world were saying, which was actually, you know, a lot of those Holocaust survivors who were righteous

were absolutely horrified, not by the creation of Israel, because, you know, that's in a moment of desperation, but by what Israel turned out to be. Not now, not after October 7th, but, you know, from the 1950s onwards. One of the most striking things in this conversation was right at the very beginning, Tony, at least to me, was, when you said that in the 1970s, you went to Israel and said, huh, this looks familiar coming from South Africa. I've always thought that the apartheid metaphor came about maybe towards the first intifada, late 80s, you know, but that it was evident to you at the time.

As a Habonimnik tells me that there was even some backpedaling, there was some regressing by the time I was coming up, but that it was evident in the 70s is remarkable to me. I mean, just from when you went into the West Bank, for example. And actually the Habonim Madrigim at Kibbutzi Israel, where I was, because Began had just come to power. And Sharon was expanding the settlements as fast as he could. And the Habanim Madrigan was saying, this is basically a apartheid in the making. Because basically, if the Israelis don't give up the West Bank, then they're going to be ruling over TK, I don't know, three, four million Palestinians that have no rights, no citizenship.

hypnosis, that is apartheid, 100%. Parties is not just segregation. A part of it's a form of colonialism where a people is ruled by a state in which they are not citizens. That's right. And you talked about how the kibbutzniks did the knockabout. Well, they also did the settlement movement in the 70s. It was labor that was in power that put the majority of the settlers in there as far

as I understand. Anyway, wow. The article goes on. I guess we can link to it if people want to read the whole thing in the show notes. It's a fascinating line of attack on any, what I would say, the Adam Friedlands of America, which are kind of like Jews who grew up with, you know, Israel as being this good thing and are now seeing what Israel is doing in the name of Jews and going like, ugh, you know, if I have to choose between, you know, doing a genocide or being genocided,

But it's like you're putting me in this awful position of having to choose. And yeah, you know what? I don't think I want to be a part of this. And of course, people are taking that and turning it into Apologia or whatever. I would just add, though, that there's an incredible difference for this generation just at scale. Because Jewish anti-Zionism, certainly in the 1980s in South Africa, and pretty pretty much everywhere else. I mean, I remember coming here in the 90s and PEP, you know, progressive except for Palestine. You'd have complete lefties who would just turn into Likudniks when the question of Israel came up.

So the idea of walking away from Israel, from the tent camp, from the Lago or whatever you want to call it, was a little scary. Like you're going out into a world where your tribe is no longer embracing you. It feels, you know, emotionally risky in a way. But you have to do it because, I mean, for me, I was really lucky with that sense. in the liberation movement in South Africa, that it was also a space in which a lot of Jewish people were very prominent and had leading roles. It wasn't like, you know, you, it wasn't like you didn't see any Jewish space. It was a huge Jewish space in the liberation movement. But the scale

of Jewish rejection of Zionism and, you know, actually existing Zionism, like what Israel's doing is huge now. It's not, it doesn't take much. There's a huge, it's like come in, come and join the party. It's like, you know, it's a cost of tens of thousands, which it wasn't many years ago. Yeah, no. And, of course, you know, that cost is, you know, atrocious and horrifying. And, you know, we've, it is one of those fucked up silver linings of, you know, this moment is seeing a complete mask off, you know, moment for Israel and, you know, for Zionism in general. and people, you know, if you've better late than ever, you know, and it's, I've never been more, I don't know, like, kind of more optimistic at least about the,

the momentum that is building up when it comes to Jews, but also non-Jews in countries who are starting to have this kind of knee-jerk disgust for what Israel is doing. and doing it in our name or in the name of Jews in general. It's quite something to be both all-time pessimistic and all-time optimistic at the same time, which kind of sums up how I'm feeling, you know. Antonio Gramsci had a term for that. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the world. Yeah, very good.

Yeah, or what did Jomsky say? Tactically pessimistic, strategically optimistic. And your perspective on this is so valuable. and you've brought such great insight to this conversation, so we can't thank you enough for... Thank you for having me. It's been... You're also a natural fit for the third seat.

I hope you'll be available. Any time you, please. Yeah, truly. Like, I could do this for another two hours. But we will spare the audience that for now, Tony, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. And thank you to everyone out there listening. Patreon.com slash badass bar.

for all of our bonus episodes. Badhasbarra at gmail.com for all your questions, comments, and concerns. All right, everyone. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, from the river to the sea. You ready for this? I'm ready. Karen is Sharon, wise strategy.

Say again. Karen is sharing is sharing? Oh, Karen. Karen, Tony Karen, is sharing. Wise. No, Karen is not Sharon. I didn't realize that Sharon is also a woman's name. And there's certainly Israeli General War Criminal.

Yes. Sharon. Karen is Sharon. Worst sign-off ever, possibly. We're keeping it in. Jumping jacks was us. Push-ups was us. Godmaga us.

All karate us. Taking Molly us. Michael Jackson us. Yamaha keyboards. Us. Jarja Vink's not us, Andor was us, Keith Ledger Joker us, endless bread success. Happy meals was us, McDonald's was us, being happy us, bichworn yoga us, eating food, us, breeding air, us, drinking water us. We invented all that shit.

Thank you.