Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - 198: Facts Don't Care About Jewish Feelings, with Susan Abulhawa

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Matt and Daniel are joined by author Susan Abulhawa to discuss Israel’s disdain for diasporic Jewish expression, making the right people uncomfortable, and faux-righteousness from the Jewish right.Committee to Protect Journalists petition to release Ahmed Shihab-Eldin: https://bit.ly/ahmed-petitionWrite a letter to the US State Department on behalf of Ahmed Shihab-Eldin: https://bit.ly/freeAhmed-eldinBuy Susan Abulhawa’s Every Moment Is A Life: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Every-Moment-Is-a-Life/susan-abulhawa/9781668222362See Francesca Fiorentini and Matt Lieb April 23 at the Ice House in Pasadena: https://events.leapevents.com/event/new-world-disorder-04-23-26-8-pmNew Bad Hasbara Merch: https://estoymerchandise.com/collections/bad-hasbara-podcastSubscribe to the Patreon https://www.patreon.com/badhasbaraWhat’s The Spin playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/50JoIqCvlxL3QSNj2BsdURSkad Skasbarska playlist: http://bit.ly/skadskasbarskaSubscribe/listen to Bad Hasbara wherever you get your podcasts.Spotify https://spoti.fi/3HgpxDmApple Podcasts https://apple.co/4kizajtSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Everybody and welcome to Bad Hasbara. The world's most 420 friendly podcast if you're into that sort of thing. And if you're not, the world's most hardline on drugs or bad podcast. Sure, sure, sure. My name is Matt Lieb. I will be your most moral co-host for this podcast. It's really the world's most moral podcast. I'm Daniel Matta.

You're the co-host. That's right. I am the co-host. We are all co-hosting here, and we are so happy to be co-hosting you, find people out there listening to this podcast slash watching this podcast on whatever apps you choose to do so. It is another wonderful week of fun news. And we are ready. More hits from the Hasbarabong. That's right.

Oh, boy, do we have a show for you? But, you know, please, first and foremost, give a shout out to producer Adam Levin on the, ones and twos making sure that y'all see and hear and look at the show that you are currently watching and we mean shout wherever you are just holler just start shouting make a scene make a scene make it make a do a whole thing get weird with it um give us five stars in a review on whatever podcast app that you use uh and subscribe on youtube and tell your friends about it you know maybe you have friends who uh like shows and you're like hey i have show i watch uh check this out and then send them link do that for us it would be really nice uh and also we have a patreon patreon patreon dot com slash bad hasbar you get an extra

episode every week of this show if you join the patreon so do it do it and you know uh just a little preview we're going to have some new fun tiers on the patreon coming up so uh if you are not satisfied with the idea of just getting an extra episode? Well, fear not, because there will be more fun prizes at some point on the Patreon. So keep... Way more tears. Mm-hmm. That's a little Ozzy Osbourne. Was it? Okay. That's what it was. No more tears. Yeah. So yeah, keep an eye out for that. You can always subscribe for free. You don't get the extra episode, but you get, you know, notifications about all the fun stuff that we're doing, including early access to tickets for live shows and the like. So do that. Today's episode is actually brought to you by something very

specific and close to our heart on this show. Our former guest and a colleague of mine at AJ Plus when I used to work there, Ahmed Shahab al-Din, he was on the show. You remember him from both this show and from a bit part that he had in the movie, Palestine 36. He is a journalist and he has been detained in Kuwait since March 2, 2026. Apparently, the charges that he is being detained on are spreading false information and harming national security. This was after he posted verified footage of a U.S. fighter jet that crashed recently. in Kuwait. He posted that and they immediately arrested him for it. And right now, there are two calls

to action in order to try to get him out of a Kuwaiti detention. The committee to protect journalists put out a petition, which there's a link in the description. You can click on that and sign that petition. You can also send a form letter to the State Department. asking for his or demanding his release. The link for that is also in the description. Please do both of those things because it is an absolute crime that he's being detained for doing his job of journalism. And we love him and we miss him and we hope that he is safe and want to see him safely taken out of Kuwaiti detention. So do that for us.

Thank you so much. Daniel. Sir. What's this been? Well, I've already intimated that the day we're recording this is April 20th, 420. 420, baby. Yeah, it plays it. The typical thing to do would be to do, you know, Bob Marley and Pink Floyd and whatever.

I'm not doing that. But these are all albums celebrating Hitler's birthday. That's, it'd be funny if it also was at Luce birthday. It is. Not what? Is it? Yes. Oh, I didn't know that. I didn't realize that. Is that why we get high? Yeah, that's why we get high so that we can, so we can praise it? I don't know, man.

Well, maybe there's some tie-in, but I just chose records, not that are about smoking weed or praising Hitler, but that are, might be, you know, both of those things might be enhanced by listening to these albums. I don't know. Yeah, all right, fine, fair. First, we have the Flying Burrito Brothers, the gilded Palace of Sin. This is in 1960s, sort of late 60s, like, psychedelic type. Flying burrito brothers. Is this a munchy's themed spin, or is this just really good to listen to what we eat? It's just, yeah, music that I think would go well with that experience if I knew anything about that experience. Yeah, which we don't.

For firsthand near daily experience. drugs are bad. I think, drugs bad, okay. There are times when you get suckered in. I'm sorry. And sex with women. Speaking of brothers,

Los Hermannos Gutierrez, not to be confused with Los Poyos Hermanos. Yes. These guys are a new duo that are really cool, spacey, trippy, tremoloed out, guitar-based music, I think mostly instrumental.

From where? From where? I think they're Mexican. Either that or they're Mexican American. It's a great album cover. It is a great, yeah. Sonido Cosmico, Cosmic Sound. Frank Zappa Hot Rats is a trip.

Instrumental album of Zappa tunes, including Peaches and Regalia. I'm going to be honest with you. And maybe at some point we need to start a side project where you explain to me why Zappa is why people like Zappa to me Zappa is like the Blues Brothers like maybe I was just born too late

but I do not get it I think he's more annoying than the Blues Brothers I generally am not super into Zappa I have a few mothers of invention albums when he sings I can't stand him I just find his the sarcasm and the sort of he almost drips with contempt

but this is all instrumental and he was an extremely gifted guitar player and arranger. He was a session musician, right? Yeah, I think so. And he played with incredible musicians and, you know, free jazz people love him. And this album Hot Rats is all instrumental, except I guess one song that has Captain Beefheart on it. But anyway, the opening song was the alternate title for this podcast.

Hot Rats, yeah. The opening song will remind you of the canteen band from Star Wars. Oh, hell yeah. Okay. All right. Now I'm into it. It's really cool. A nice chill stoner album would be DJ Crush. Meso. DJ Crush is Japanese. And he's got a few American rappers on here, C.L. Smooth and Black Thot of Malik B from The Roots and Guru. So this is a cool kind of Dan tempo dusted instrumental hip-hop album with a little bit of vocals. And then a few just two. I'm trying to limit the spin to six albums per week from now on. That's just a cool. That's just, for episode. Yeah, it's just too much. And, you know, less is more. So a couple of albums that are for those frenetic highs where you want to just bug out and have your mind blown, Mr. Bungle's second album, Disco Volante,

is absolutely bonkers in the best way. Hell yeah. Including a song called Desert Search for Technoala. But the whole thing is amazing. And finally, I had to do this. This is definitely jumping aboard a bandwagon, but I think it's a great bandwagon. Megan. Anzine de Poitrine, this Quebecois group that plays microtonal math rock that's taken the

internet by Storm. Everyone is listening to them. They are, I think, truly fantastic and fun visually and musically. And this is a really fun album, their new one, volume two. So that's what's spinning. That's what's spinning. Happy smoking, but I think any of those albums would go fine with an evening with Minkom. Sobriety. And yeah, a sober reading of Minkv. I don't know if I'd want to. to read Mind Kampf high. No, yeah, I think I would have a full on panic attack. That is what's spinning microtones, man. The internet is obsessed with the microtonal musicianship now. Yeah. There's something about the- And I kind of love it because me, I'm a dissonance guy.

You give me something dissonant and I will listen to it forever trying to figure out why I like it so much. And the answer is I don't know and I still don't know. All right. It is, time to introduce our guest. I'm very excited for this episode. We have a wonderful guest. First time on the podcast, Palestinian writer of much acclaim and much controversy recently due to the mayor of New York. Need I say more. Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, welcome to the podcast, Suzanne Abouhawa. Hi, guys. Hi. Did I do the last name good? You did, you did it perfectly. Okay, thank you.

But before we start, before we start, Daniel, I saw you holding up like vinals as a, are they like, is that new? Or, because it sounded like it's a new band. No, this is a thing he does.

He holds up vinals before every show. Those are all vines. I've got an obscene vinyl collection that. No, no, no. I was asking, are they like making a comeback or you're just holding up? Or are vinals making a comeback? They've been making a comeback for maybe the last 15 years, but especially in the last 10.

I mean, there's a huge, CDs are dead. CDs are absolutely dead, whereas vinyl's are, I mean, it's a big deal when there's a new vinyl release of something old. Yeah, so that's what I was asking. Millennials and even Gen Z, like young, young people I know are like collecting records now. Oh, my God, I love it. Friends of mine who are parents of a teenager, the kid has a record player, and the kids' records. record collection is stocked with like stuff I listen to. Like the kids are more than all right. Yeah. You know, when I was in grad school, I left a massive vinyl collection with,

she was a lab tech and along with my record player, which was like, you know, state of the art at the time. Yeah. Just because I was moving, I couldn't take everything with me. And that's why I lost it. It's all gone. I had like hundreds of vinyl, you know, the usual. I even had, um, I had a vinyl of thriller with Michael Jackson's signature on it. Oh my God. Yeah. A friend of my God. You know what that would be worth now?

Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Why did you leave it behind? Well, I was leaving. I was going overseas and I wasn't sure when I was coming back. And, you know, she told me, she was like, it's here when you come back. And I was like, yeah, just take it.

I just, you know, I was a kid. I didn't. No, I get it. But also at the time. Finals were completely going out of style. I mean, I really thought we'd never see them again. CDUs were the new thing. Well, that died.

Those days are over. Yeah, yeah. I miss finals. I love them. I love my turntable and, you know, trying to figure out the, fix the scratches. You can come over and I will take requests and you can listen to any vinyl you want anytime you're in New York. No, his apartment is like his own personal, like, tower records.

It's insane. I'm just glad to know they're making a comeback. I really, I just learned something. Thank you. Well, that's what this podcast is about. It's about learning. It's about music. And it's also about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and a genocide perpetrated by our government and their government in Israel. And unlikely comebacks. Yes, and unlikely comebacks. That's right. It's all connected. It's all connected in some way. Susan or Suzanne, excuse me, thank you so much for coming on the show. I have been binging your work. I've been watching interviews with you and I was very excited to talk to you. So I'm really appreciative that you would come on this show and talk to us, especially given that comparatively to other shows

that cover the subject. We're pretty silly and stupid. So I want to thank you for for showing up to this one. Thanks for having me. Of course. I want to start off with something that is going to lead to a tweet that you put out recently regarding the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. So yesterday, April 19th, was the 83rd anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was the largest act of armed Jewish resistance during the holidays.

Holocaust, fighters held off the German troops for, I think, about a month before the ghetto was completely liquidated. I just need to say something about the timing of that. Following up on what you and I talked about a week ago, Matt, just the insensitivity of people doing anything on Israeli commemoration days, and there are 365 of them every year, it's kind of insensitive of the Warsaw ghetto partisans and fighters to do their uprising

two days before what would eventually become the Israeli soldiers remembrance day. That's true. It's just like upstaging in advance, you know? It's just tacky, I think. I think it's... I agree. Antisemitic. It is anti-Semitic and on that same note I think it

is really insensitive for them to do it one day before Hitler's birthday. I mean, you know, this guy is trying to just celebrate another year around this grand old son that we have and all of a sudden the people he's trying to liquidate are resisting against him. Really not nice. The official account of Israel on Twitter tweeted about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I want to read you that tweet real quick. Today marks 83 years since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Facing Certain Death Jews chose to fight, not for

victory, but for dignity, identity, and the right to resist. Their message endures. Freedom isn't granted. It's defended, even against impossible odds. We remember them not only for how they died, but for how they chose to live and fight. I'm sorry, I'm having an irony overload. I was just thinking, oh, the irony. And also adding to the irony, the fighters in the Warsaw uprising had dug lots they used tunnels. Oh, they had Hamas tunnels. Well, very shady of them.

Those were the good tunnels, but they definitely used tunnels. I think if Israel had known about the tunnels, then they would be condemning them for building such tunnels because that is a cowardly. If you're going to uprise against a monolithic, hegemonic, genocidal army, at least make it a fair fight,

right, hiding underground like moles. I mean, what are you doing? Unfair, completely. They posted a couple of pictures. Human shields.

Using human shields doing all of the things that we are against if Palestinians do it. These pictures that you are seeing right here, they posted, were immediately community noted. The picture on the left is not of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It's a photo of a French resistance fighter in Marseilles in 1944, specifically Bedukian Sarkas, a famous French Armenian resistance member is in the foreground with a gun. I love that even in, like, they can't go a day without lying

about something completely trivial. Like, just no real reason to lie or to get that wrong other than they just don't really care. And they can't honor our ancestors without dishonoring our ancestors. Right, it's impossible. Which reminds me of my favorite tweet by you, Susan, where you said Jews are literally

the only people in history who have been bamboozled into hating their ancestors. I thought that was an incredibly incisive gut punch of a truth that you told there, because it's true, like this, just this, the contempt and then the using of the memory fraudulently, as we're seeing here, for whatever purpose, to shield themselves from the terrible irony of the similarity between the people they're ostensibly commemorating and the people, they're actively genociding and their right to resist, which they don't acknowledge exists. Yeah. And also there's this implication that all the people in the Warsaw ghetto uprising were all, you know, Zionists too. Oh, always. Definitely implied. Yeah. I mean,

they go back and forth in terms of, you know, implying that either they were all Zionists or if they died, implying that had they been Zionists, they would have, they would have lived. It all depends on how they're feeling, you know, depends on it's like, do I want to honor our martyrs today or do I want to lambast them for being lambs to the slaughter? Yeah. Yeah, but there was a tweet that a friend of the show, Ty Kiki, put out in which he pointed out this particular Warsaw ghetto uprising fighter, who was the last surviving leader of the uprising, this guy, Merrick Edelman, who I was looking up some history on him. He was one of the founding members of the Jewish Combat Organization, which is an underground resistance group that led

the revolt against the Nazis. Following the death of the commander Mordecai, Anyel, Anjelovich, who was the person who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, he became the de facto leader and actually was able to escape underground using the sewers and survive the massacre that ensued. He was also a pro-Palestine, pro-Palestinian resistance person who is a, he was a Jew who was pro-Palestinian before it was cool. During the second Intifada, he wrote a letter to all the leaders of the Palestinian military, paramilitary, and guerrilla organizations to all of the soldiers of Palestinian militant groups.

He wrote a letter in the spirit of solidarity from a fellow resistance fighter and as a former leader of a Jewish uprising, not dissimilar in desperation to the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories. What year was that? In 2002. He wrote that in 2002. He wrote that in 2002. With the second intifada in full swing. Yes. Yes. The supposed red line for, Right. You know, people of, you know, good liberal conscience to, you know, that's where we lost a partner for peace. That's where the Palestinians went off the rails. And here's someone who knows from resistance. Yes, exactly. Sticking to his principles. And I mean, that's, of course, not part of the mainstream consciousness, not part of the mainstream narrative. This stuff is all, you know,

purposefully hidden. And it's hidden especially from Jews. Yes. A hundred percent. Yeah. And, and of course, This letter infuriated the Israeli government because this person was a Jewish resistance fighter during our, I mean, I don't want to say our only act of armed resistance during the Holocaust, but the only one I really know about. I mean, and at least in occupied Poland, the fact that the person who is the only surviving leader of this uprising, recognized the kinship with the armed militant Palestinian organizations who are fighting the Israeli government and fighting their occupation. There's nothing, I think, that the Israeli government and Zionist in general fear more than that. So of course they're going to, you know, relegate a guy like this to the fringes. They're not going to mention his existence. He's not a name that anyone knows. You're not going to learn it in Shul. You're not going to learn it from

you know, from A-PAC organizers or the ADL. That's more active solidarity than Luke Skywalker showed. That guy went off to some, you know, after his resistance, he goes and retires on some planet and drinks green yak milk. That's right. The most he'll do is, you know, holographically implanned himself as a decoy. But, you know, it's not like he was actively, you know, cheering on the new fight. Yeah.

And so, you know, Tyg wrote, you know, know, why don't you post a picture of Maurek Edelman? You know, why not? Why wouldn't you, if you're talking about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? And you wrote this tweet, which I love, you wrote, the parasites are terrified of anti-Zionist Jewish heroes, which is, for me, I thought it was like, oh, this is the perfect tweet to, uh, to start this conversation, because every, um, you know, since I think Zoran, Mamdani disavowed you, I say you in quotes because it was sort of

I don't know if he knew you personally Some version of you A version of you Whatever version was being sold to him By the you know The charlatans over at the New York Post Ever since then people I've used Your use of the word parasite

In order to condemn you fully As being filled with anti-Jewish hate And in the same breath Talking about an anti-Zionist Jewish hero. I think that would make most Zionist brain explode. Because, wait, aren't you supposed to say, don't you think all Jews are parasites? And that's my first question to you. Are all Jews parasites? Or is it just the bad ones? So look, I mean, I'm not interested. I mean, I'm, you know, forgive me, Matt. I'm not going to accept that

question and I'm not the idea of centering Jewishness in this struggle is is not something I do. We are talking about, you know, really unspeakable horrific crimes that we have only witnessed in really small measure. I mean, this is something that's been going on for, you know, for nearly 80 years now. And nobody really understands the depth of the terror and the pain and the misery that Zionists have caused us. The fact that they happen to be Jewish is beside the point. And for some reason, for me, it's beside the point. because, you know, the rage we feel, the hatred even, the contempt, the desire to just, you know, just use bad words,

because that's all I can do is to use bad words against them, would apply no matter what their background is. But for some reason, the fact that they are Jewish is supposed to make them exempt. Right. And that's the part that I reject. And so the people doing this to us, committing this sort of industrialized terrorism at this point, and stealing, endlessly stealing layers upon layers upon layers of theft, theft of life, theft of land, of home and heritage, theft of story, of clothes, of food. theft of identity, you know, of history even.

All of these layers of theft, yes, they are parasites. And I think there's this level of self-censorship that we all engage in, and myself included before this genocide, in order to protect sort of Jewish feelings. And, you know, by using, using these words that are wholly appropriate and barely descriptive, frankly. I mean, I think they're far worse than what these adjectives describe. By using these words, you know, I'm just rejecting the self-censorship that I used to engage in. I'm rejecting the idea that I have to be careful, that I have to protect Jewish feelings.

and just because the people who are committing a genocide happened to be Jewish. I'm sure you must have found prior to that that there was no level of gentleness and care and conscientiousness and discernment and self-censorship that could possibly even satisfy these supposed standards. Right. Exactly. It's really only subservience that is welcome from us.

Either we die or we are subservient or we're champion. And either we champion our own demise or we die quietly. And as Yahyazinawar said, like, we're supposed to be the polite victims and or, you know, Muhammad al-Curd wrote a whole book about it, the perfect victims. And, you know, I, but, but still, like, most Palestinians even are, are hesitant because we are so indoctrinated. and I just, you know, whatever the cost is to me, I want to break out of that. You know, it's really also because I am truly angry that all mainstream Jewish organizations, whether it's the ADL, the Jewish Federation, and on and on every single, and even Holocaust museums,

that is the mind-blowing part, are supporting this. are supporting our genocide. Well, they're part of it. They've always been a part of it. Exactly. They're fundraising for it even. They support it rhetorically. And that's just on a national level or international.

Also local synagogues, local temples are also implicated. They are also complicit in it, which is a truth that people don't want to confront. And in fact, they're trying to pass laws to make it. illegal to confront them with that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Even, so there was, I tweeted about this too. Jared Kushner said something about, you know, they're in the Middle East trying to clean out the mosques and stuff. I mean, the kind of casual racism against Muslims is perfectly normal. So I tweeted a response that, you know, what if we really, what we really need to clean out the synagogues? And to people's, to people's ears, that sounds terrible.

terrible, right? But he literally just said it about mosques, but that seems acceptable to people. And so I think, you know, I think it's our job to confront people with these words, with this hypocrisy. And that's ultimately the truth. This is the thing. I really appreciated that clean out the synagogue's tweet for a joint reason. Number one, it made me uncomfortable. I had an association to it, right? I have encoded in, if it's not my DNA, then it's my limbic system from conditioning, you know, some kind of tribal memory of, you know, my people being compared to things that should be cleansed and cleaned out, right? Purified. It's offensive. Because it is offensive. But my point is that, you know, why is it offensive for one group, but it's perfectly

normal and logical for another group 100% and to be said yeah by such an authority you know that's right but the thing is that a tweet like that because I get complacent in my allyship and I feel good about myself because I host an anti-Zionist podcast

and I get validation from you know Palestinians and anti-Zinist Jews and all that I'm in an echo chamber to have something from someone I respect that can shake me up a little it's a bit of you know it's a cup of coffee It's a bit of a wake-up.

And then I have to deal with, well, what am I uncomfortable with here? Well, if I turn you into a caricature, and I have to do that in order to not have curiosity about what did Suzanne actually mean, the person who tweeted that, then I can just go to town with my first associations, which is, oh, she must mean the thing that would be the most offensive to me, the most terrifying, as opposed to, oh, maybe she's a person with a heart, a conscience, a mind and a worldview and experience that gives her a perspective.

And she's saying something else. And then I can ask, okay, well, what does she mean? And the minute I ask that, it's obvious. And it's actually, I would go further than what you said. You're not just juxtaposing, well, why is it good for this group and all that group? I do think we should clean out the synagogues, not of Jews, but of certain kinds of behavior, certain things that are tolerated, certain flags, certain prayers. There's a lot of, and I'm saying that from a perspective of someone who would like to

preserve what's beautiful and wise and true about Judaism. You can't have a, you can't have a, a Torah service. We are connecting with the truth of the universe and the, the Lord and master of the universe who decreed, thou shalt have no gods before me and fucking do a prayer to fallen Israeli soldiers while you're standing there with an Israeli-American flag. You can't do it. That should be cleaned out. So it's like, I have to be willing to, first of all, deal with my own trigger and realize that I'm the one carrying the explosive material. You just set it off with your words. And number two, think about, well, what could she mean?

And what, like, what's the generous interpretation? It turns out the generous interpretation, you're being charitable, I think. So that's how I process that tweet. I really appreciate it. Well, I'm glad it, you know, it stirred this retrospection in you. I, you know, and what you heard were words. That's it. Yep.

What we get are actual bombings of our mosques, the places that we revere. You know, you're having this reaction because you know the people who populate the synagogues. And they are family and they are friends and they are kind. And so you have... And once every three years, they are me. Right. And so I have, all Muslims have the same reaction. These are our fathers and our mothers and our family in these mosques.

And these are mosques that have withstood time. These are hundreds, thousands of years old, at least. The Omari Mosque was 1,200 years old that Israel bombed. And our churches, the churches that were bombed in Gaza and in Lebanon. I mean, these places hold our spiritual life. They hold our memories. They hold our refuge. And they're bombed.

And then they talk about it like it's okay. So, you know, so imagine, you know, I mean, you're reacting this way just to words. So imagine how we feel. Right. So it's words, of course, Kushner said them, but he's echoing what have been. what are said constantly by politicians and leaders and people with actual power, not like, you know, poor writers like myself, you know, who have words. Right.

So. Yeah. The amount of normalization of this genocidal language against Muslims, against Palestinians, against Arabs is it's almost, you know, obviously it's beyond words because we're talking about bombs. We're talking about actual violence and destruction and death, but just in the way it's talked about, just in the way it is casually referred to and not given a second thought. There is no tone police. There is no woke police in your head for talking about, you know, for how you talk about a mosque, for how you talk about the deaths of Palestinians. With, you know, Jews and Jewish people

in America, in Israel, anywhere, the amount of, I mean, it's not just one tone policeman, it's an entire battalion of tone police. It's a tone police paramilitary force in your brain. Armored platoon. Yeah, who are, I mean, constantly telling you what adjectives are allowed and aren't allowed and constantly telling you that in order to, you know, gain your freedom, you have to only speak in this particular way and you can't show your humanity and you can't, you can't be angry. You're not allowed to be angry, which I think when I read your tweets, what I see is a clear rejection of that, a rejection of the politics. of politeness, the rejection of the idea that Jewish people need to be catered to by the people

who are being oppressed by the Jewish state or by, you know, Zionist media or, you know, Zionists in Washington. And so for that, I appreciate it for those reasons. I see people who are, I think, ostensibly allies who find themselves going down this rabbit hole of looking at tropes that you have done in your tweets and whatnot, like Parasite, for example, and trying to build a narrative around it about your own, you know, what's in your deep, dark heart. I see you're rolling your eyes at that. That's my reaction to it too because it seems like people want to paint you as someone who has been radicalized by social media. And so I want to ask you about that. When you hear that critique, do you say to yourself, yes, I have been radicalized by social media? Or have you been radicalized by something else?

Has there been anything worse than social media in your life that may have led you to stop giving a fuck about Jewish feelings in your tweets? I wonder what it could be. I wonder. What could it possibly be? Yeah. So once again, like I, you know, to engage in that conversation is once again to center the well-being of the people who are destroying us. And I'm not going to do that. I my entire life has been defined by the crimes committed by Zionists against my family, against my country, against everything and everyone I love.

And, you know, as a student of history, as a as a merchant of words and language, as a storyteller, I have long. known the stories, the depravity Zionists have shown us, the cruelty, the mean-spiritedness, the just, I have long known it and I've experienced it.

And I saw it again during the second Intifada when I went to Janine when there was a massacre there. And I remember thinking that, you know, I thought I understood the Sabre and Chatila massacres because of everything I'd read about it and all the photographs.

But what you, what I could never get from those, from those readings was the smell, the smell of, of, of, of, of, you know, there were decomposing bodies under the rubble. And I worked with crews to pull out, um, skeletal remains. and and I remember thinking like I didn't understand subrencha Tila I remember thinking that nothing you read can ever kind of and I suspect that even nothing I experienced sort of you know walking through the aftermath

could adequately capture what it's like to live through that you know I try to imagine and and you can't really. But you understand that it is a horror beyond horror. And then, you know, and then comes Gaza and the amount of devastation, the, you know, families, one family after another, gathering the remains of their loved ones and fucking plastic bags, seeing your children, like, childhood is gone in Gaza. The children there are traumatized beyond any.

anything you can possibly imagine. We are running two schools, the organization that I founded, Playgrounds for Palestine, we have 870 students, 87, 877 students. And, you know, we try to provide psychosocial support.

And, you know, but the trauma is so profound. Israel has once again really just tried to decimate entire generations. to, you know, and then to know of the horrible things they're doing to people that they've kidnapped to our hostages, 10,000, none of whom have faced charge or trial or conviction or anything of the sort. We're being systematically raped. We finally have Israeli soldiers admitting that Israel was using dogs, specially trained to rape. I mean, what diabolical evil minds come up with that.

And somehow I'm supposed to like really talk about and explore how my words are hurting their feelings. I'm not. I won't. And I hope I hurt their feelings. I don't care. I really don't. And frankly, in a way, I really want Jews to wake up. Because I really do.

Same. You know, I want Jews to wake up. And because frankly, I think Zionism and Israel have replaced Judaism for the most part. You don't go into a mosque and see like national flags. flying everywhere. We don't do that. It's a place of spirituality or it's meant to be a place of spirituality, of connecting with God, of re-centering yourself in goodness, of finding all that is human and really just, you know, just grounding yourself in common humanity. That's the point of these spiritual centers. But it seems like in synagogues with, you know, Israeli flags waving

everywhere and sometimes the American flag. It's like this exhibitionist nationalism. And for a country that's committing genocide, it's unforgivable. And it's hard for me to understand. And sometimes I try to think about and I try to understand. And then I get mad at myself and I'm like, I'm not going to even think about it. I don't care, you know, because I need to be thinking about like the victims. Yeah.

Yeah, so, I mean, it's, yeah, that's... Well, look, look, this is not, I'm not about to say what I'm about to say because you need to understand, but just because it sparks my own curiosity. And if, I don't know, maybe you'll hear something in it that you find interesting, when you talk about Jews needing to wake up, I mean, that's, this podcast exists primarily because Matt and I are screaming at our own and, you know, we're doing this, instead of calling up our childhood rabbis and talking to the most extremist, you know, members of our former youth groups or whatever, we're hoping the word gets out. And we're also trying to help people

feel less insane, including ourselves. But when it comes to Jews waking up, I do think, like I said earlier about like, I think whenever we get triggered in life, it can be a wake up call or it can be a double down moment, right? And this happens in personal relationships, right? I can use, if someone close to me makes me feel a certain way or, you know, so they say something. nothing and I have a reaction come up, I can use that as a moment to ask a question, like, what am I carrying? Or I can double down and reconfirm what I already believe to be true, which will always be self-exonerating or self-pitying or self-victimizing or whatever. On the tribal national level, that's fucking toxic and it's murderous, actually.

And when it comes to you're saying you don't want to be caring about the feelings of those doing it, Well, I can already hear some of the Jews I know who live inside of me too. All kinds of different parts, right? I'm just kind of, I have some facility to hear my different parts and not identify with them. But I hear some people, some voices saying, but we're not the ones doing it. It's Israel. We're anti-Zionists. We oppose it.

Don't you see? So on and so forth. To which I would say, well, that's fine. And if you still resemble that remark, if Susan's saying that makes you go, what did you say about us, well, that's on you. That means that you haven't cleared out the synagogue in your own mind. You haven't fully divorced yourself from, you know, you're not entirely clear that Israel and Jews aren't the same thing. As they say, a hit dog will holler. There you go. A Hitler's dog will holler. A Hitler dog will holler. Hitler's dog will hollered. Blondie, that was the name of the

Hillary's dog. Can we not talk about dogs getting hit, please? Yeah, yeah. We're like some dog lovers here. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. A skin cat, well, no, never mind. Is it an anti-Semitic trope? Yeah, probably. I'm probably going to get dragged for that.

Everything's a trope. I wanted to delve into your background. Oh, no, please. Before we go to that, yeah, you want to respond to this? I want to just say, yeah, I think, so, you know, when ISIS came on the scene, and I mean, and now we know that ISIS was actually a CIA Mossad creation, right? We all, we know that from the WikiLeaks. but at the time we didn't know it.

We thought it was this like, you know, crazy, radicalized, violent group of Muslims who were committing unspeakable crimes in the name of Islam. Right. So what happened was every major Muslim institution rebuked them. They repudiated ISIS. And mosques repudiated them.

So there is this, you know, when groups commit crimes in the name of a larger group. And all the major institutions of that larger group support, you know, this entity. It is a problem. Right. It's a big problem. And for, you know, for people like me, for Palestinians everywhere. who are the primary recipients of this violence, you know, there is a tendency to like, is it all of them?

Now, I'm lucky that I live in the U.S. and I'm exposed to all kinds of people, Jews across the spectrum of, you know, of Zionism, from, you know, right-wing Zionists to die-hard anti-Zion. People in Palestine aren't. the only Jews they have ever known, for the most part, are the people coming to kill them. And I think people need to understand that. And there's also this thing, and I talked about this a little bit on Brianna Joy Gray's when I did that interview with her,

that people think that their frame of reference or their history applies to all of humanity. Yes. And that's another thing that I think we need to untangle because, Europe's history with their Jews is not my history. Right. It bears no resemblance to my frame of reference. It bears no resemblance to my country, my family's frame of reference. My grandmother, God rest her soul, told me that they had Jewish neighbors and they used to share a taboon.

What is that? Tabun is an outdoor bread making oven. It's just a communal oven. It's made of clay and it makes the best bread. You know, you slap the bread inside or you put it on top. And this is wholly consistent with Palestine's history where, you know, people just lived. And it was accepted that people were different. Like some, there were Muslims and there were Christians and there were Armenians and there were Jews and there were Moroccans.

And but everybody was Palestinian at the end of the day. Everybody was in and actually it was more like because the people identified at the time with like their actual provinces like the Nabulsis would say were Nabolsis or the Bethlehemites would say were Bethelamites and, you know and so forth. There were Jerusalemites. So I mean it was more, you know, if you go back hundreds of years. Well, and of course Zionists love to use that. Oh, well, Palestinians weren't nationalistic. Yeah, no shit. Neither were Jews.

nationalism is a modern phenomenon. Palestinian nationalism is a reaction to all the nationalisms that have subjugated them. Yeah, exactly. But they didn't start it. Yeah, exactly. And the fact that, yeah, you're right, they always like to say, well, Palestine never existed. And it was never a country called Palestine. My favorite one is they don't even have the letter P.

I'm like, motherfucker, can you say Jerusalem in Hebrew? Can you say Jew in Hebrew? You need a special squiggle in Hebrew to do a double. in Hebrew to do a just saying. I can't even say Jew. No, Yehudi, Jerusalem, Yistrael. Yeah.

You mentioned your appearance on the bad faith podcast and during that appearance, you relayed this story in which you, like, almost in passing, mentioned an experience that you had while living in an orphanage.

And I kind of stopped myself and go to wait, wait, I need to know more about this. And I realized that I don't know your history. I don't know, how you grew up, where you grew up, how you got to where you are now. Can you maybe let us know about that so that our listeners can learn about you, Suzanne? I'm so tired of us having to ask Brianna Joy Gray's follow-up questions, you know? Right, exactly. Learn to interview, Bree.

Exactly. Yeah, learn an interview like me. Don't be dissing my girl, Brianna. She's so much better of an interviewer than me. Learn to interview like me, Brianna, in which every question is meant to be rejected. In which ask ironic questions more, Brianna. No, but I am truly interested, Suzanne, in your history. I mean, I've written about it in a few essays, and somebody picked up on it, and so part of it is on my Wikipedia page. So my parents were removed or dispossessed in the night. 1967 war, they separately, and then they ended up in Kuwait and that's where they got married and that's where I was born.

Where were they displaced from? Jerusalem. We're from Jerusalem. We're from Bittur. It's a village right on top of the Mount of Olives. It's not in the old city. My paternal grandmother is from the old city, actually. It's from the Rename family.

Her home has been taken over. over her family home. But my father and the rest of my family are from Atour. Actually, I have this, I'll send you the post of my great-grandfather, who is also my great-uncle on my mother's side, who purportedly lived to be 142. And in 1936, yeah, there's like Associated Press archival footage of him. 142? Yeah, supposedly.

Who knows? But he had an Ottoman-era birth certificate that identified his name and his age. And so in 1957 is when he kind of became this international sensation. There was all these articles written about him. Wow. And he would have been 136 at that time. Anyway. That's wild.

I'm going to send you. You come from good stock. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just like, okay, I just want to live, I mean, maybe it's in my teens, you know? Yeah. Suzanne's going to be around for a while. You should get Suzanne to do some, like, longevity pills ad reads for us, you know? Unfortunately, other members of my family have died young, so.

Okay. Well. So I don't know. But they were smokers, not like him. He purportedly used to have, like, he was an olive, he had olive farms, olive orchards, and he used to drink shots of olive oil. So. Dang.

Maybe that's the key. Anyway, I will send you that if you guys want to incorporate it. I did a whole little segment on it. And so I lived in Kuwait and then when I was around 9 years old, my kind of my parents divorced when I was very young and my mom went to went off to work and they, you know, I kind of fell through the cracks. because I was with my grandmother and then kind of between families. And my grandmother actually snuck me into Jerusalem. So this would have been in the late 70s, early 80s. And there was no like, there was really heavy, you know, like searches and things like that.

I remember I have this image in my mind of like there was this really big room. and there were tables everywhere with suitcases splayed open on these tables and like soldiers kind of looking through every item in suitcases. And then they took us into this room. We all had to take off our clothes. They took our shoes away and they took our clothes away. And no, sorry, they kept, I think, like we had our underwear on.

but the shoes definitely and they and we all so we were all waiting like these are just like images in my head so we're in this like long narrow room and we're all kind of lined on the wall half naked women and girls and so and then this Israeli soldier comes in with this like wheeling something and then she dumps it on the floor and it's all of our shoes and I just remember like I was worried some other, like, girl was going to steal my shoes. Like, that was what's in my head, so I had to find my shoes. They were nice sandals or something, I guess. Yeah.

But before we went in, my grandmother said, there was a family. I guess she had made a deal with them or something. She's, who had a lot of kids. And I was a runt, you know, I was little. I still am short. And she said, look, just stay with this family. Just don't look up in any soldier. just move where they move.

And she, at that time, I had, like, all Muslim kids. Like, I knew a lot of Quranic suras. She was like, just keep reading those in your head. So that's what I did. I just stayed with that family and then, you know, kept my head down, kept, you know, reading Quran in my head. And then, you know, just like my grandmother said, we were on the other side.

And then she, took me to Jerusalem. I lived in that orphanage. She's actually a really famous institution. It was started by Sotindal Hosseini. She was a young heiress in the Hussaini family who turned her home and an adjacent hotel that she owned into shelter for children that she gathered up after the D'Aryasine massacre. These were all children. whose families had been slaughtered by, before the Israel was created even a month before in April of 48. Would have been the Haganah at that point or the.

Yeah, they would have been, they would have been Israeli terrorist gangs, basically, who later became the IOF. Right. So Sotendid Hosseini created just. You know, she, she gathered them all up and it just, it became an institution for girls to support girls, their education, their aspirations, and so forth. So that's where my grandmother left me. But when I turned 13, so in Israel, if you, well, at least this is how it was back then, if you don't have papers as a 13-year-old, that's when you're considered an adult or something. then you're an infiltrator, and I didn't have, you know, proper papers and documentation.

So I was, I had to leave. Right. I actually didn't know that. I always thought that, like, my father sent for me or something, and it was only later in life that I realized, know that that's what happened. Oh, wow. Anyway, so I, that's when I came to the U.S. when I was 13. And I, you know, a fun fact, I couldn't read or write English, except like in a very rudimentary level, like a first grader when I was 13 years old. And it was my big, deep, dark secret, speaking of my dark heart.

It was buried in darkness. And I, but the way I learned. So this was in Charlotte, North Carolina. And the way I learned, I used to, and I didn't, I wasn't doing this to learn English, but it was more to feel like I could read and write because I was so ashamed. I used to copy the entire front page of the Charlotte Observer. Wow. Not really knowing what I was writing.

But eventually, like, it started to click somehow. And yeah, and so I slowly improved until I became a writer, I guess. Until he became a writer, which is incredibly impressive. Do you remember reading any headlines or stories about your homeland on the front page of that paper? I don't know. I don't remember. I'm thinking that would have been around 1983, probably would have been in the news.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So, I mean, it's just to me. me, it's important to talk about, you know, your history being face to face with the IOF, with Israeli soldiers and with Israeli society because of the fact that, you know, so much, hey, is made over the, you know, tweets you're right or something that you say and people seem to lose their minds trying to erase the context. that you grew up in, the things that you have experienced, all of that, you know, goes out the window

and doesn't matter as soon as you use a, the things that you know that they don't. The things that you know that they can never know the way you know them. That's the thing I can't believe. The lack of humility, the lack of epistemological humility of like, wow, here's someone who might, in fact, does. Right.

Know things in a way that I can't, maybe I could learn from her. Yeah. Maybe before we transition to our break and talk about some other things. I'm sure there's curiosity that certainly is over here with me. What has the aftermath or the wake of that whole dust up with the mayor's office and the media been like for you?

I don't know if it's been two months now since that happened. We played extended clips of your very excellent response video, which we praised at the time and still do for its wisdom, it's patience. I made a satirical video about it as well in which I pretended in which I played a a liberal Zionist who felt that we needed to purge our movement of problematic Palestinians. Like we we discussed it a lot because of how much discourse was going around about it and the concerted attempt to drag your name through the mud.

But it's been, however long since then, what has been the aftermath of that? To be honest, like I just, I don't pay it much attention. I know that, you know, on a professional level, this harms me, and it has harmed me, you know, even before this controversy. but I feel that like I you know I made a promise to myself a long time ago that I would not become the kind of person that I really just didn't respect and you know I saw a lot of people really kind of sell their soul in some ways

or compromise or prioritize their careers or whatever and I I never want to be that person And at the end of the day, like, I feel like, um, whatever price I have to pay is nothing compared to the price that so many are, are paying for our liberation, for our collective liberation. So, you know, what can they take from me? Well, they can, you know, they can take my, um, my,

they can take opportunities they have. They can, you know, disinventive. invite me, they have. They can smear me. They have. They can curtail my livelihood. They have. They can, you know, whatever possessions I have, maybe they'll try to take that. At the end of the day, like, do it, you know? Like, yeah, fuck you. Yeah, I love that. You know, I think, I think being honest and being true. And being free to express yourself. Yes.

I think that's more important. Because, you know, our lives are, especially the lives of writers. We continue to live after we die. And what we do in this life, what we see. say, what we write matters. And so I think of that. I think of future generations of Palestinians. I don't want them to be afraid. I don't want them to self-censor. I want them to love their ancestors. We all love our ancestors and I want them to defend our ancestors, to defend their memory, to defend this glorious heritage that has been bequeathed to us. And so that's where I'm coming from.

So whatever, you know, whatever harm may have come to me is not the point. I'm very happy. I'm secure. I'm surrounded by people I love. I only associate with anti-Zionists. You know, I just, my, my immediate world is filtered. So, yeah, I see a lot of the hate. but it just, you know, like Teflon.

Yeah, well, that's beautiful to hear. And I completely respect you for, you know, keeping an eye out for that, you know, in your own, you know, life where you go. Like, I don't want to be a person that I can't respect. And that I think is the type of dignity that is denied a lot of, Palestinians because of the shackles of, you know, polite politics and, you know, language that has, you know, been thrust upon you by people who, you know, some are your direct enemies and some are people who are purporting to, you know, work in your interest. And I think that is, I think it's great. Yeah. Be the freedom you want to see in the world. Yeah. And I have that privilege to do that.

Right. And you bring up a really important point, Matt, because a lot of people that I love who are in Palestine can't do that. Right. Because their lives, the lives of their children, the lives of their parents, their homes, everything is on the line. Yeah. So, you know, I feel like given the privilege that I have, it's the least one can do is to speak, you know. Yeah. Well, I think that's great. I think that is a perfect way to segue into a quick commercial break. We have ads that are coming up probably.

If it's for the CIA, don't join. I'm trying to get the CIA ads off of our podcast. I don't know why they keep replacing ICE ads with CIA ads. And I will look into it further. But until then, listen to these ads and we'll be right back. And we're back this badass bar of the world's most moral podcast here with our guest, Suzanne Abouh. Abulhawa, there we go. Abulhawa, I always start freaking out when I have to pronounce a name.

Forgive me. Suzanne. Abul, how are you doing? That's how you remember that one? It's Abu, how are you? Yeah. Anyways, hope that was okay. Suzanne, thank you for come back with us.

we have more news to talk about. Yeah, now we get to treat you to the rest of what we do on the show, which is just just put our snouts. But yeah, put our snouts in the slop trough of borrow bullshit and just spray it around there. But before we do, I just say I spent the break in a kind of contemplative, meditative state wondering about something Suzanne said, which is that, you know, as writers, you know, writers live on even after they die.

and I'm just wondering and sort of wishfully thinking that maybe that also applies to podcasters. Maybe we live on for like a week after we die maybe? No, we're discarded, I think, almost immediately. As soon as the pod is over. We don't even live on. We don't even live on after we log off. History will tell.

I just, I'm using the benefit of hindsight, you know, history. We don't yet have a history for podcasters. That's right. I suspect you will live on. You will live on. Be careful what you say. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I am a hosimandias, potter of pods. Look upon my feed and tremble.

Yeah. So we have a bunch of just, it's kind of a grab bag of things that have cropped up across our screens in the past few days. You were mentioning, Suzanne, that, you know, when it comes to destroying mosques, it's just, there's not even a second thought. to it. It's just part of Israeli and American policy. Certainly a lot of churches have been destroyed too and vandalized and desecrated.

But sometimes sometimes a lone bad apple goes too far. Sproils up. Messes with the body of Christ and gets his country in a whole lot of hot water and there are consequences.

So, Eunice Tirawi posted this and his Israeli soldier smashing the head of a Jesus Christ statue during operations in southern Lebanon. And we see a fully uniformed and behemitted I.O.F. soldier with a sledgehammer. Yeah. Literally rubbing salt and adding insult to crucifixion. Right. Yeah. So they knocked over the statue, you know, his feet are still. Saddam Hussein next Moimodar Gaddafi,

and finally Jesus of Nazareth has fallen. Yeah, exactly. That tyrant. The people of southern Lebanon have been freed from the cruel yoke of the Prince of Peace. That's right. And what's interesting, I think, about this is we have seen so much religious desecration throughout the last two years of, you know, both the genocide and Gaza, and also, you know, the attacks on southern Lebanon.

And, of course, the West Bank. And, I mean, shit. In Iran, they're going and blowing up the oldest synagogues in Iran. They're blowing up synagogues in Iran. We've seen this before. It's not new. It's not something that is an outlier for the Israeli military. But in this case in particular, for the first time,

I think I've seen almost a universal condemnation by both Zionists, you know, in Israel and abroad, and the Israeli government themselves are saying, this is not us. It's only because it caught on. That's the only reason. These soldiers have been destroying statues of Jesus of the Virgin Mary. They have been, you know, going back to 2002 when I went. went to Janine, one of the things that they had done in the mosques, they shit all over the mosque, and they used pages of the Quran to wipe their asses.

Like, so they, and they cart, like, they, you know, they desecrated the mosque in every possible way. They, they habitually spit on Christians in Jerusalem. You know, they bombed the tomb of St. Peter. It's just that for whatever reason, this image caught on. And because it, because it got a large. public reaction, Israel decided to use their bad apple narrative. It's almost like Israel has a, it's almost like Israel has like a checklist, like a treasure hunt, and they're playing some kind of game.

Right. And for every single Jewish holiday that commemorates an indignity done to us, we have to act it out, but up the ante. So Hanukkah is all about the desecration of the temple and the rededication of it. And, you know, what did the, what did the Assyrians do? They knocked over some vats of oil. you know, they extinguish the eternal flame, whatever. Wow, we can, you know, anything you can do, we can do better.

Exactly. You know, BB get your gun. We will shit all over your mosques. We'll desecrate your holy books. Except Muslims never did any of that. Exactly. Right, exactly. So anything they did to us will do to you.

To everybody. Right. Yes. It's transferred, you know, thousands of years of, you know, Jewish liturgy and, you know, victimization, real and imagined, you know, including like the slavery of Jews in Egypt, which is, you know, not the most historically accurate thing in terms of who built the pyramids. But, you know, taking all of that and just putting on, on Palestinians and Arab neighbors of Israel. That is, you are, you know, you are the punching bag for the

crimes committed by not you. And speaking of the crimes, commits, I think part of the reason this got so much condemnation, it's one of these cases where it caught on, but also I think didn't the soldier themselves post it? It's like one of these cases where, so when that, yeah. Like it's not even like you look at the picture and it's not an action shot. No, it's not a pose. It's a pose. He is, he is, he is, Jesus Christ pose. Posing his disrespect towards this particular statue is, you know, it's, he's, he did this as a bit. This is what they've been doing in Gaza as well, where you see them wearing women's clothes or riding on children's bikes. And you have to ask, why do they do it? Right. Because this is,

like, this is appealing, because it has mass appeal among their peers. Yes. And, yeah, and you know, when you mentioned the, the embalming the synagogue in Iran, it ties back to what, to what we were talking about at the very beginning of this segment in that, Israel hates and they want to destroy all Jews who were anti-Zionists. Yes, that's right. And Iranian Jews are clearly holding fast to their homeland, and they are, you know, they defend their country and their government and their homeland, which is Iran, and they, you know, they likewise hate Israel.

So this is what Zionists do. Yes. I don't want to, I mean, you guys know the history of Zionism, I'm sure going back, but like, you know, early on Zionists were detested. They were a French group. But they really successfully, you know, basically brainwashed everybody and set up schools and really decimated their opponents. Well, and they got the imperial powers on their side by appealing to their expedient interests.

But from the very start also, you talked about how they despise any Jews who are not part of the tribalist cult. They hated the Bund, for example. No, they hated all of European jury for their victimhood, for their sensitivity, for their bookishness. Including victims of the Holocaust. They hate them too. But even prior to that, victims of the pogroms, we are not the Jews of trembling knees. We're not going to be the ghetto Jew anymore. We're going to be some strong, brave Paul Newman Aryan Jew in the desert where we don't belong.

Right. So anyway, this incident provoked more outrage than usual, and we ended up with a denunciation. Well, first of all, so the first things we got were we're going to look into this, make sure it's not fake, we will do a thorough investigation. And here after the investigation, the Israeli Army official account said this, following the completion of an initial examination regarding a photograph published earlier today of an IDF soldier harming a Christian symbol, it was harming a Christian. symbol. It was determined that the photograph depicts an IDF soldier operating in southern Lebanon. Yeah, no shit. Good. They determined it, guys. They used their advanced technology. It's, you know, their drip irrigation and their desalination plants to figure out that, yes, indeed, it is exactly what your eyes saw. They threw a cherry tomato at it and it bounced off,

which means it was genuine. Yeah. The IDF views the incident with great severity and emphasizes that the soldier's conduct is wholly inconsistent with the values expected of its troops. Right. The values expected of its troops is keep it down, guys. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, there really is a messaging crisis in that arm. I mean, I've never seen a less disciplined.

I mean, you're going to be a bunch of genocidal lunatics. They don't care. You're right. I think the Iran-in-funders-in-law doesn't care. And also, I think, you know, Israel has a well-tried history of doing whatever they want, lying about it and getting away with it. Right. Just like, you know, for example, the sloppy, their husband is really sloppy.

Like, for example, you know, what you showed in the very beginning of the, the Warsaw ghetto uprising, having to showing the wrong photos. And, you know, the reason for that lack of care and the lying when they don't really have to lie is because it's never mattered. Right, right. They've never really faced any scrutiny. Thank God for the Internet and for the archives that people can easily pull up to, you know, to expose their lies. But this is kind of part for the course. Well, and they're even admitting it now. There's an Israeli Hasbara spokesperson, the head of public affairs or whatever, who recently gave a speech or he basically said, truth doesn't matter anymore. Facts don't matter. We're not dealing in facts. We're not worrying about that, you know. So it's just a, it's just, it's just. you're right. When they have to put out a statement, they'll put out a statement. Now, speaking of Sloppy, we have a video by Rabbi Sloppy, who tries to...

Oh, you're going to subject me to this guy. Not only are we subjecting you to his face, but it's a close up of his face. Now, Susan, we're going to be watching your face as we watch his face, and we're going to be monitoring your heart of hearts, okay? So I don't want to see any tropes going on in there. I don't want to see any generalizations. You're going to see my deep dark heart. Yeah, we're going to see some dark heart here. This is Rabbi Shmooley. God.

Jesus Christ. Already I'm like, get behind me, Gerbils. Hi, everybody. Let me immediately condemn the idea of soldier who was depicted destroying a statue of Jesus in a Lebanese village. Let me just be clear. The Jewish people in general and the Israeli people in particular love our Christian brothers and sisters. The greatest proof is my sons are right now risking their lives to protect Christians who live in Israel. What? I'm a son in Lebanon right now. And my children were

raised with a father who ran an organization in Oxford that had 500 Jewish students and 4,500 Christian students. My children were raised in a home where this is so this is amazing. So the Israeli army in Lebanon are soldiers for Christ? Yeah, to see, that's the thing. That's what this is about? His proof of like, we respect Christians is that if it wasn't for the IDF, Christians around the world would be, you know, targeted. And especially Christians in Israel. So remember, it is us, the Jews who are protecting you Christians in Israel from the Islamic hordes.

It's such bullshit. Even my dog Yeah, I know, your dog showed up to protect you. Yeah, yes. Do you know how much we love Christians? We told them a couple of weeks ago that you are absolutely safe and secure as long as you don't house Muslims under your floorboards.

That's right. Otherwise, we're going to come and kill you. Yeah, that's right. And we have to spit on you in Jerusalem because we hate you that much and we have to spit on your cemeteries. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

What I find fascinating about this, and in terms of why this caught on, I'm convinced it is because of the tide turning on Christian Zionism, especially within like the conservative movements, you know, in the United States. The Tucker Carlson's and the Candace Owens and whatnot who are divorcing their conservative worldview from Zionism. I mean, for multiple reasons. One is, you know, because they, some are shocked by seeing genocide and are like, well, this is wrong. And some are doing it, you know, for other reasons that include like Western, pro-Western civilization. And they don't believe that Jews are a part of that or whatever. But the fact is, it's happening. People, Republicans, right-wingers are more and more looking at Israel as, you know,

not a friend of Christ, but as an enemy of Christ. And they're trying to stop that bleeding because it is that that has actually been able to uphold the order in the Middle East more so than anything else. I mean, it's like without the Christian Zionists, without the funding of Christian Zionists, without the support of right-wing evangelicals, they are in a much more precarious position. I wish BB had just come out instead of his stupid apology tweet and just said, let me be clear. I am not, how you say, anti-Christ. I am the pro-Christ. Yeah. Some people are even looking close into my forehead, looking for the mark of the beast, the 666. It is not there.

You can't find it there. I love Christ. Yeah, it is truly fascinating to watch the nervousness of someone like Shmooley who realizes that this is something that could lead to a cascade of Christians pulling their support. If one dildo falls, the rest are sure to follow. Yeah, exactly. You guys are on a roll. This is our wheelhouse. Just like stupid content and then dumb puns.

Yeah. But it's just, it is, it's fascinating to watch because you see sort of this. almost manufactured outrage when it comes to... It's so disingenuous. It's so disingenuous. Even like, you know, when he's trying to conjure his personal, like, protection of Christians. And, you know, there's a hesitation in his voice. Like, what are the next words?

Right. I mean, you know, it's not, it's completely... Also, like, some of the words, the concepts that he uses are also a historic. I mean, even talking about the idea of like the Jewish people. Frankly, you know, this is kind of a Zionist construct in many ways. Judaism is, you know, 3,000 plus year old religion. And there were Jews everywhere. There is no moment in history when there was this singular, you know,

group called the Jewish people. It didn't exist. And prior to, prior to Zionism, there was no, no European Jew ever looked at an Arab Jew, for example, or an Ethiopian Jew, and said, that is my brethren or my sisterin. It just, it was not, it wasn't real.

They, in fact, you know, very much harbored that their European countrymen, women's antipathy and contempt for brown people. for Arabs, for Africans and Asians. So even this idea of, you know, saying the Jewish people is also a historic and made up. There's a book about that by an Israeli historian, Shlomassan. Shlomazans, right? The invention of the Jewish people.

And what's interesting about that to me, and this is, I've always found this, you know, to be something that isn't really talked about is the, it was a local thing. I mean, regionally, there's a Jewish people in that it's my Jewish community, right? You know, it is sometimes it can be a national thing in terms of like, in my country, the Jews, you know, live here or whatnot. This idea of a singular culture that is felt by every Jew around the world, every person who practices Judaism is very much a Zionist construct because of the fact that you see. them trying to replace everyone else's Jewish tradition and culture with one singular Jewish tradition. You see that in terms of, you know, even language. I mean, modern Hebrew supplanting any other type of Jewish language that was out there.

Yiddish is pretty much decimated. Yes. Lidino is long gone. Yeah. Somebody made a tweet that nobody in history has succeeded in destroying more Jewish. traditions in Israel. 100%. And indeed, they collapsed all of these ancient traditions from all over the world into

a singular, really invented concept and construct and with a, you know, invented belonging in a singular place. I mean, all of it is a historic. All of it is a fairy tale. At best, it's hearkening, at best, it's hearkening back to a very, very, very long time ago and particularly geographically located, liturgically. liturgical, I mean, there are prayers in, like ancient prayers in Hebrew that say, you know, Kivana, vachata and Tanya Kiddash, to me, holhamim, the one who's, you know, exalt,

not exactly exalted, but sort of sanctified and made us unique among all the nations. Okay, right, right. So there was a time and place when, when that was the self-concept. This was also localized. This was also localized. Like, the idea, again, it's like. Jews lived throughout the Middle East, even at that time. Right.

And talking about nationhood in this way. is, I mean, it's disingenuous because it supplants the original sort of meaning of nation with nation state. And those are different things. Those are absolutely different things that people just kind of like, Israel is taking full advantage of the fact that now when people think of nation, they think of a nation state. And that's how they've been able to supplant any kind of other Jewish ethnic identity, religious identity, you know, liturgical tradition, all of it, language. So, yeah, it's bullshit in his framing. You all have different identities. Like, for example, you know, I belong to womanhood, for example.

Right. That does not mean that there is, you know, a nation of womanhood that is, and the same thing goes, you know, for Islam, right? I'm not Saudi. I'm not, do you know what I mean? I'm not Yemeni. 100%. We all belong to a nation of Muslims, but we are not a nation. state, you know, I belong to a nation of mothers, you know.

Even the nation of Islam isn't a physical nation. Exactly. Like, this is, yeah, it's totally just taking that concept and turning it into nation state. And I think that his, you know, disingenuous, like framing of it that you see is all part of the same, you know, project. What I also find funny is that in him talking about, in Rabbi Shmouli talking about, you know, guys, just so you know, Israel, we are completely against this. Jews of the world are against this. We love Christians. He can't then think of an example of how. So he just instead says, in fact, we are the Christians' best friends. We protect the, like, he can't stop himself from centering the heroic Jewish nature. And that's why I sent, and that's why I told my sons, you have to go die. Right, exactly.

To protect the Lord on Earth, Jesus Christ. And by the way, later in the same video, he talks about the scourge of Islamism. And he's careful to say, not Islam, not Muslim. We love Muslims. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, but Islamism. And I just like, we need a word that's the equivalent of Islamist, for Jewish, you know, that's better than Zionist.

Like I, like, Judeoist, like, I don't know, you know, I don't want to say Judeo-Bulshevik. Jewist. Jewist, yes. We love Jewish people, but we hate Jewish people. It reminds me of what, when you talked about ISIS, Susan, like, it reminds me of what Ahead Tamimi said. She said, I'm not going to stop talking about the Jews. You, it's on you. to fight the Judeo supremacists within your religion that have hijacked it the same way that I fight

ISIS that's tried to hijack mine. Yes. You do that. I'm not going to do that. Right. Yeah. And she also said in that, and this is, you know, something I mentioned earlier, that, you know, the Jews that have been in her life are the ones who are destroying her.

Yes. And who are oppressing her. Right. And those are, those are, you know, her, her life and her country and has been destroyed and dismantled by Jews. And that's, and again, like, we are all kind of, I think, you know, especially those of us in the West. And I, well, let me just speak for myself. There was, I think until, until the genocide in Gaza, there was always a part of me that was willing to give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe there is a way to coexist.

You know, we always kind of were trying to find a way. We always, you know, the assumption was that we were, we had to live together. I no longer have that assumption. I, I, I, these people have to leave. Or they agree to live like everybody else. They will not be our masters. They will be nobody's masters. Right.

except masters of themselves as individuals, period. And I will say that I hate them. I can't hate them enough. And nobody should have a reaction to that. It is the most natural response to a people who are literally celebrating and dancing and putting music to unspeakable horrors. I don't know.

I mean, I guess, you know, I was trying, I tried to think of like historic corollaries where there has been a society that did this. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think about like this, you know, in the south, you know, when they, when black people were lynched, I think. Oh, the United States, absolutely. In the United States. There's Jim Crow. Some of that. Yeah.

There were, they sent postcards with photos of lynchings. they made Christmas cards out of them. Yeah, the history of the etymology of the word picnic is like based on lynchings. It's like crazy. Oh my God, that makes sense actually. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, lots of terms in the, in the American lexicon are based on really horrendous things like alligator bait. They call it baiter bait.

Do you know what that is, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They use literally black babies to bait alligators to catch alligators. But anyway, but even then I think it wasn't the whole. country. It was really like this was a small group because, you know, I think about when, when, when Mrs. Till decided to have an open casket for her son, Emmett, it shocked the whole country. Right. And so, so like, there was still this sort of common humanity that When people see, regardless of what they think or their political disposition, when you see this kind of horror inflicted upon children especially, there is it like normal people just recoil from that.

But Israelis don't. By and large, they were celebrating this. They were putting like on their dating profiles, like photos of cruelty to us. And I just think like, who are these people? Like how do you? Or they ignore it. How do you get to be that like that? Well, I think there's, we could trace that, the answer to that question psychologically,

but we won't do that right now. And we still wouldn't come up with a satisfying answer. But I do want to say that in response to a couple of things you said, you know, that Israeli society has no shock threshold anymore, the way normal people do, the way you can't live with these people in their current form. They actually have to be transmogrified. I mean, either removed, right, which is a, that's a heavy thing to imagine and even logistically, never mind morally, but certainly, like, they cannot continue to, never mind the right to exist.

They have no right to persist in their current form. They'd have to be completely transformed into a different kind of society. How's that going to happen? Well, some kind of shock has to happen. And that reminds me of something that Omar Bartoff said in a recent interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker, which I found interesting in its own right. I'm not sure how much time we have to get into it in depth. Well, we have the video. Yeah, we'll play the video. Listen for where he talks about the need for that Israel needs what he calls shock therapy. Now, he doesn't specify what that

means or what outcome he means, but in and of itself, it's a striking language. Another word that evokes a lot of emotions, Zionist. Zionist, when I was growing up, I'm just a few years younger than you, and something quite different. It had a very different electrical charge to it. For who? For who, David? Yeah.

I mean, this is what we're going to see here. Now, Omar Bartsov is a professor, expert on genocide. He came out in the New York Times and wrote an article saying, I'm sad to say that this is a genocide. He's often cited as an example of, look, even Israelis are saying it. And I'm not going to dismiss the value of that kind of voice, although, as you've said, Suzanne, including in a tweet today,

the testimonies of victims should be enough. We shouldn't need someone from the oppressor society to corroborate it. But David Remnick is speaking to this Israeli-born scholar of genocide. and you notice, he says, when I was growing up Zionism meant something different. No, Zionism, and this is what you're always going to see. You see it in Ezra Klein, who's lamenting and admitting the hard reality of the one-state reality. But somehow, as Nora Erichot says, it tries to preserve this nostalgia for something that never existed, which was a kinder, gentler Zionism.

What it was was a Zionism with a bit more public decorum. I also want to say that what he said really reminds me of the same. seen in the office, the American office, where Michael Scott is like, you know, when I was growing up, gay meant lame. And now it means a man who loves another man. And it's like, nope, not like, it's just incredibly, incredibly, that's what he's doing. It's like, you know, growing up, Zionist meant hero. It meant, uh, yeah. It's funny, this kind of lexical creep how words can just change meaning over time for no reason. Yeah, for no reason, absolutely.

Yeah, here. Quite different. It had a very different electrical charge to it, depending on what community you were sitting in. What does it mean to the students that you teach? What does it mean to you? One of the things that went deeply wrong is that Israel never had a constitution, and the Zionism became a state ideology. It became something else, and it kept transforming itself.

to what it is today, which is an insupportable ideology of extremism, of militarism, of racism, and eventually of genocide. Anyone who supports it becomes complicit in the acts of that particular political ideology. Do you think Zionism is not reformable? Zionism is not reformable. The state of Israel is. The state of Israel is reformable, but the state of Israel has to be reinvented, and it cannot be reinvented according to this kind of ethno-nationalist principle that has taken hold of it.

What Israel needs right now is shock therapy. And despite all the horrors that it has inflicted on others and has also experienced itself since October 7th, it is not still come to identify the limits of its own power. Because those limits are in Washington, D.C. and it's there that those limits have to be set. And it's only then that some forces in Israel will start generating a new way of thinking about Israeli society. It's an interesting interview. I mean, it's an interesting clip because it's doing a lot. I mean, one of the things it's doing is, despite some criticisms that I have that I'll get

to, having a mainstream liberal institution, like, what is that, the New Yorker? That's the fucking New Yorker. about Zionism in ways that don't include the heroism of the Jewish soldiers or in ways that don't excuse the horrors of Zionism

by, you know, invoking the Holocaust. Having it just be, you know, coldly, Zionism is not reformable is the needle moving. It is. Which is, you know, something that I would have loved two years ago. But, you know, it is something that's happening. Susan, what's your response when you see that exchange?

Well, Zionism has always meant the same thing to us. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And, you know, this idea that Zionism morphed into something brutal is actually an ahistoric narrative. Right. Zionists were quite barbaric and violent from the very beginning. and we know that our grandparents told us.

And history, the historic record is catching up with what we have always been saying. So the idea that... And when was it not the state ideology? Exactly. It was what was there in place of a constitution, and it was the reason there was no constitution, because you can't have both. Exactly, exactly. It's the reason there is no constitution.

It's the reason there are no declared borders. because the idea from the very beginning was to, was expansion. It was to adapt whatever laws they needed to adapt in order to get rid of the indigenous people and take their place. That was, that was the, that's the basic seed and the core of Zionism. And that could not be achieved if they had a liberal constitution, with a set of moral laws and so forth. Yeah.

So, yeah. I would say my biggest critique, I'm sorry, Daniel, you go. I think probably we're going to say pretty much the same thing, but go ahead. Well, my biggest critique is Zionism can't be reformed Israel can and trying to divorce Israel from an ethno-nationalist project. And for me, I go, that's a fun little alternate history to

present but it is not the history of Israel and is not currently the definition of Israel to people who support Israel. Two people who support Israel, ethno-nationalism is the final, is the form. It is not Israel. It is not, quote, a Jewish state without the ethno-nationalist element to it, without the demographic majority. So to suggest that there's a reform possible, I think is a little bit wishful thinking, and it's a little bit kind of rewriting what Israel means to those who still support it. Very much so. The phrase,

the state of Israel is an ethno-nationalist, full stop. There's no other version of that phrase. You could say that land is reformable. You could say even that you could even make the claim, and you'd have a hard time persuading many people of it, including our guest, but on a sort of deep, humanist faith in the possibilities of human reform and grace and forgiveness and all this, that that people is reformable. Those human beings are reformable. Or maybe their children were. Maybe their grandchildren will.

Or that the history can be redeemed. But you cannot do that if you're still clinging to any vestige of these illusions. And Bartov, it's the frustrating thing about even the most incisive main, like Israeli thinkers with mainstream purchase. like Mikko Pellid would never say something like that. Ronnie Barkon would never say something like that. And I'm pretty sure that even Nadav Lapid, the filmmaker who made this new film that I just saw called Yes,

which is the most brutal excoriation of that society I've ever seen, he would never say that. But Bartov is still clinging to like certain threads of the illusion. And maybe he's only doing so for the Remnick audience. Maybe he's, but I don't think talking down to these liberal these liberal Zionists, so-called, is actually effective. Because the shock therapy they need is the cold truth. And Bartov is going maybe 75% of the way there,

but it's always that last unsayable bit. That's where the devil is. That's the details where the devil lives. I think it's the wrong conversation entirely, frankly. Yeah, tell us. I mean, why is this the conversation? Why are we talking about the destiny and future of the Jewish population? Why is it, honestly, the only conversation that people should be having is the liberation of Palestinians.

Nobody ever thought, like, what is the future of white people in the South if we liberate black people? Right, or the Boers. What's the future of white South Africans if we allow indigenous black, did I say black Africans? I meant white. You said white. I think it's white. Yeah, yeah. Like, what's their future if indigenous South Africans are liberated, are accorded basic freedoms?

That's never the conversation that anybody should be having. and when you do have this conversation, you're not fully recognizing that Israelis are the monsters in this equation. And, you know, you guys were talking earlier about this, early in the segment about this sort of the voices in our heads. It's not just voices. The entire landscape of public imagination, the entire infrastructure of our language and our thought

is premised on Jewish victimhood and protection of Jewish people. It is taught to us in school. It's taught to us in the media, in public discourse. It is taught to us in Hollywood, in TV series. And so, yes, while it feels like this is, you know, we really need to talk about what's going to happen to Jews, right? But no, I want to talk about what's happening to the victims. Right.

You know, how do we liberate victims? How do we make the perpetrators accountable? Yeah. That conversation is secondary to all of that. Fair enough. That's a completely fair point. I'm glad you said it. The only tiny, not even a caveat, but I just like on the side,

a little side card of that that I would say is, I expect that a part of human programming is self-interest, and then when it comes to the future of, let's say, the Jim Crow South, I would expect, and I'm sure some white people did, as in South Africa, the shock therapy that apartheid South Africa received impelled white South Africans to ask themselves this question, what is our future if we don't relinquish power? Sure.

What is the future of Germany if we continue down this path? And I'm very content for, and to speed the day when all Jewish Israelis have to be asking themselves that question 24 hours a day and not being able to sleep. If that's what contributes to them waking up, because I'm not counting on them waking up one day and suddenly having altruism take over or humanism takes over or universalism take over because they have no language for that whatsoever. No, I agree. And I recognize you guys also have a particular audience.

I'm speaking from a more, certainly from a Palestinian perspective, but a more kind of global conversation. Because the global conversation continues to be about Jewish safety and Jewish feelings and so forth. And that's what I'm reacting to. Right. To a degree that is ridiculous. To a degree that is imaginary in many senses.

Because it's not a conversation about Jewish safety within Israel or within the settlements of the West Bank in which you can actually at least physically talk about a conversation that could happen, right? It's about whether Cheryl Sandberg's neighbor would hide her. Right. It's about whether, yes, Cheryl Sandberg, a literal, what is she, a billionaire? A billionaire, a billionaire should be afraid of pogroms, you know, somehow reaching her in New York.

Yeah. Her castle high rise in New York City. like completely, you know, devoid of any, like, reality. And so the conversation constantly centering the safety of Jews, I can imagine for people who are Palestinian or just for, you know, people in general who are not Jewish or Jewish supremacists or Israeli or Zionist, what they see is the centering of Jews and Jewish safety and Jewish feelings is about like trying to figure out the line in which Jews feel just safe enough to allow their boots

to be lifted off the necks of the people they're oppressing. And I can only imagine that contributes to people's general, fatigue in terms of talking about Jewish feelings. Like, are we really negotiating your feelings about how much your foot hurts right now? Is that really the conversation we're going to have before you can, before you can recognize the humanity in the people that are being rushed? Before you can get out of my house. But it's also not just about safety. It's like, but that, that is the conversation. That's definitely the conversation. But the reality is not just about safety. Most

Jews, most Zionists in Israel are not, they are conducting themselves from a position of power. Yes. From a position of conquest. It's not about keeping themselves safe. They want Lebanon, right?

Yeah. They talk about it. They talk about getting more property and having more water. They talk about getting Lebanon's gas fields. They talk about going skiing on Mount Hermon. Right. They talk about ruling the Middle East.

They do. Exactly. They do. You guys, they just want some more realm for leban, you know? That's right. That's right. Leben's strong. Yeah.

I say leban let leb. That's what I say. Leban in Arabic means yogurt. Or if you're Egyptian, it means milk. Oh, well, look at that. Yeah, Egyptian dialect is always a little backwards sometimes. Now I learned something. Milk or let milk.

But yeah, it is, I think, you know, to round out just that, the conversation is also more, I look at it in the strategic light where I go like, I can't imagine, like I can't imagine being you, Suzanne. I can't imagine being a Palestinian who has to constantly like be within this particular framework. always have to operate within the strategic framework of not offending Jewish people, not offending Western people. Right. Not anymore. Well, right. But it's so I can't even imagine what it's like. So what I see, I take with, you know, a grain of salt, but I go like, strategically, there has to be that pressure. There has to be a moving of the needle.

And to see any movement always gives me a little bit of hope. And it's very personal for me because it's coming from a place of spending whatever a decade, you know, yelling at people who I know that like they're they are completely ignorant about Zionism. They're completely ignorant about Israel. Everything they know is a lie. And me sounding crazy. So it's only it's only, you know, now becoming more and more talked about in a way that makes me. in a spiteful, bitter way, feel a little bit of vindication. Yeah, and seeing the editor of the New York Time,

the New Yorker who has, you know, they've published some decent reporting, they've also published a lot of garbage, seeing him being put, here we are in 2026, being put in the position where he's saying to this, you know, the furthest left person on the topic he can stomach listening to, who's this Israeli scholar of genocide, and having to sit there and listen to words like ethno-sopremacy, genocide,

militarism, all this, and then ask, but can't I still have a little bit of crack in my pipe? And the guy's like, no, you can't have it even as a treat. I'm curious, like, that makes me want to tune in for what's going to happen in 2027. In the inside elite discourse, I enjoy watching it sort of fray and fall apart. I don't expect you or anyone else to take too much heart from it, because it's still missing so much. But we're just in this interesting moment

where things are moving and yet things aren't moving. And things are changing and yet some things are absolutely stagnant and static. And it's enough to drive you crazy, but that's why we do this and that's why we so value your willingness to come on and have this conversation with us.

And Suzanne, I want to give you the last word here in terms of your feelings about needle movements in terms of public opinion about this. Do you see, is there a, any optimism in you at the at the very least that the idea of changed public opinion resulting in something positive for Palestinians and for people of, you know, that region in general? I want to respond first to, you know, saying that you can't imagine, you know, what it's

like to be me. And I want to say that, like, I honestly. I can't imagine what it's like to be you guys, to be moral human beings and yet be identified with the monsters of our time. I mean, I would rather be among the oppressed who are nonetheless dignified and resisting bravely than to be identified with. with monsters, frankly. Well, we're both men, so we're used to it. Yeah, that's right, sure. Not quite.

I don't think anything rises to the level in modern day to Israel, and increasingly the United States as well, with the United States, I should say. In terms of moving the needle, you know, I'm not, I guess, you know, it's, of course, course, Western public opinion matters. And I am,

I am encouraged by people's awakening. But my, my hope for our liberation, which I believe is going to happen, like that I kind of have no doubt. I really have no doubt that Palestine will be liberated one day. I don't know what that will look like. But I am immensely hopeful for that to the point of feeling assured.

That doesn't really come from necessarily public opinion, but it comes from just the steadfastness of our people. It comes from our, you know, just our continued resistance, as we have been doing in whatever form it may be. the shifting of public opinion in the United States would not have occurred without that. So it is ultimately Palestinian resistance that is ushering a truth. Absolutely. Yeah. But also because Israel is not sustainable. Correct.

It is, you know, the kind of supremacist ideologies that torment entire populations for years and decades upon end is not a sustainable model. I think in the Zionist consciousness in the Zionist mind, if we can just, you know, generalize in this way, I think there is, or at least in the leadership, there is this sort of vision for the future in which they have subjugated the region and I think this hope has been

bolstered by AI technology and the enormous reach that they have both militarily and technologically the technological infiltration that has happened globally they have told us it's not just the pagers

they have embedded themselves in everything around the world I mean the Mossad told us that in open daylight and I think they are sort of counting on this kind of dominance to impose their will and again that is not a sustainable model

and they also think that and again going back to what Jared Kushner said of cleaning out the model They have this idea that with future generations, they are going to be able to brainwash Arabs. They have had some success in that. I mean, you look at the UAE, Saudi Arabia, for example. Sure.

But again, it's not sustainable. Because they don't understand us. They really don't. They have these caricature, you know, depictions of us in their mind. And they don't understand the depth of our rage of what we have with. witnessed. And it doesn't matter how many textbooks they change. And they have been in the, they have been doing that throughout the Arab world among Palestinians as well. But they have this idea, because of their past success of being able to commit horrendous crimes and then whitewash

them in people's minds, they think it's going to keep working. And I don't think it well. I think that part of their model is collapsing in real time. And so, again, it's not sustainable. And it's really a shame. Maybe I will, like, you know, bring the Jewish feelings into my final. As a treat? Yeah, I'll throw your bone. I mean, to have your heritage.

your religion so completely captured by a truly violent ideology that is so cruel, is tragic. And self-hating, quite frankly. It's a self-having. Yeah. Like to really, to create this ecosystem of imagination where you hate your ancestors. Like, that is a part of me that, like, I can't understand that at all. I revere our ancestors for what they gave. With all of their flaws and everything,

you know, it's what ushered us into the world. And, and yeah, it has really deranged Judaism, I believe. And I think maybe if Jewish people finally wake up, I think that would be an important shift.

But I don't think they have. I think they are still either lost in, they are drunk on power or they are diluted or they're paranoid or whatever. Look, the alarm is going off, but they keep hitting snooze. And eventually the snooze button will break.

And I'll say this just also in parallel to all that. The other thing that's not sustainable is the Israeli psyche. that country is having an absolute nervous breakdown in real time. And I don't expect you to keep your finger on the pulse of that. I don't expect you to give one solitary shit about how Israelis are doing. It's in my wheelhouse and my breeding and my range of interests and the fact that I speak some of the language and all this kind of stuff and the contacts

I have. I am keeping my eye on it. I've never seen anything like it. There's an absolute national nervous breakdown. Now, it's happening in slow motion. It's nonlinear. It's not like it's going to happen tomorrow. but and I'll speak some other time on this podcast,

maybe mad after you see this film, yes. Oh, right. I'm a depiction of a national nervous breakdown like I've never seen before. It's exhilarating and disturbing and I'm not saying it's a perfect movie. But that society is beyond the point of it can't bear the load of itself forever. So there's multiple things happening in parallel.

There's the Palestinian resistance which needs to be centered. There's the Jewish reckoning and awakening, which is happening way too slowly. And then there's just the inevitable collapse and implosion of a society that literally drives people crazy, scours their souls with borax, and leaves people shells of themselves, and has no ancestry or genuine history to fall back on, which is what all healthy cultures need. So, you know, we all have our lanes and our things to focus on. Well, sorry, go ahead, ma'am. Well, you finish and then I'll say my final.

I remember many years ago reacting to, there was a news story of Ashkenazi Jews protesting a kindergarten because it was allowing, it allowed Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews to also be in the kindergarten. And these, they were literally protesting outside of a kindergarten. garden. And I remember writing that, you know, Israelis literally hate each other and they would collapse, but the only thing holding them together is their hatred of us. Like, we are literally the only thing holding them together. Otherwise, it is a society cobbled from all corners of the earth thrown into a relatively small space. Right. With vastly different backgrounds who hate each other to begin with.

Right. Telling each other, do racism to each other. We love racism. Yeah. So that can only, that can only lead to the eventual collapse as well.

I think that incident was known as Brompton versus Board of Education. Oh. Very good. Very good. Very good. There is a fourth element,

you know, to the eventual collapse. And I'm ending with this. That fourth element is, of course, the bees. Bees have swarmed thousands of them this month all over Israel. No one knows why, but they have stopped machinery from working.

They've stopped planes from flying. And I just want to give a big shout out. A shout out to the bees who have been the comrades in the fight that we have long needed. And shout out to God for sending those bees. bees to Israel to disrupt. Buzz buzz. Yeah. What's the buzz?

Tell me what's it happening. Oh, that was so bad. Let's just end on that. Listen, it's always going to end bad. Suzanne, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and talking with us. We really appreciate it. It was lovely to talk with you both. Thanks for having me.

Lovely to talk with you. Where can people find some of your writing? And is there a book that you have? that you'd like to plug? So my publisher yelled at me and said, why don't you hold up the book? And I always forget. I'm like,

I'm total shit at self-promotion. Oh, I am too. So this is the anthology that, Mamdani's wife, by the way, this was the origin of that controversy. Oh, right. Yeah. It's called Every Moment is a Life, Gaza and the Time of Genocide.

This is the English side. And then on the other side, it's in Arabic. So this side, yeah, it's size Arabic and this size of English. It's a relatively small book in two languages. 18 young writers in Gaza telling short stories about their lives. And it's, yeah. Well, we'll have a link to that in the description of the show. Suzanne, truly a pleasure.

Thank you. Likewise. Likewise. Thanks for everything you're doing, guys. Nah, weird pleasure. Doing Dick Joe. with humor. Yeah.

We're doing dick jokes in the middle of a of a Holocaust. And thank you to everyone out there who are faithful listeners. You can always listen to us for free or you can go to patreon.com slash bad as barra. If you would like to listen to an extra episode every week, you don't have to though.

You can always listen to us or watch us for free wherever you get your podcast. Baddusbar at gmail.com for your questions, comments, concerns. Hi, doggie. I want to kiss that dog. He's like, please stop podcasting. Can you dogcast please?

Can we have a dogcast? No, dog cat. Thanks everyone so much for listening. And until next time, from the river to the sea. Whatever will be will be. Palestine will be free. Bye, everybody. Jumping jacks was us.

Push-ups was us. Garmagah us. All karate us.