Chapo Trap House - 718 - The View feat. Norman Finkelstein (3/28/23)

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

We’re joined by author and scholar Norman Finkelstein to discuss his new book “I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It,” as well as a candid discussion of the political situation in Israel, the modern left, Obama’s legacy, and our old friend Alan Dershowitz. Find “I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It” here: https://itascabooks.com/products/ill-burn-that-bridge-when-i-get-to-it-heretical-thoughts-on-identity-politics-cancel-culture-and-academic-freedom

All right. Hello, everybody. It's Monday, March 27th. This is Chapeau Trap House, and let's get right into it today because joining us this week is Norman Finkelstein, who has a new book out this year called I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It, which turns a withering eye to the state of the contemporary left. Norman, thank you so much for joining us on today's show. Thank you for having me. I've heard a lot about your program. I honestly don't watch the web very much, but I know that you guys are held in very high regard, so I'm glad to be here, and I hope this will be a substantive exchange of opinions.

Praise from Caesar. Yeah. Pleasure is ours. I want to talk about the book, but I guess I just want to begin with, because it's been in the news all weekend, I just wanted to get your take on the protests going on in Israel right now over the proposed reforms to their judicial system. What do you make of these protests against Netanyahu's government? It's hard for me to assess it right now. I haven't followed it closely. From my point of view, of course, my interest has been the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the Palestinian

dimension just doesn't figure into the current protests. What you have now in Israel is a kind of... It's not unlike the United States. It's a kind of culture war, and part of the culture war is being played out in the status of the Supreme Court. As you all know, in the United States, it's not very different during the Roe v. Wade or the undoing, the reverse of Roe v. Wade. There were serious concerns raised, and now that there are six solid conservatives on the Supreme Court, that there was going to be a rollback of what's called... I'm not entirely wedded to the description, but what's been called the progressive legislation of the last 50 or so years. In the same way in Israel, there is a culture

war between what you might call a solid right. It really isn't a center in Israel. There is a right. There is a far right, and there is an ultra right, which is unusual in the world, incidentally. Most countries in the world, be it, say, in Brazil, where you have a far right, the Bolsonaro regime, but the Bolsonaro was... There was a counterforce, which was the Lula, the workers' party, and now Lula is in power. Bolsonaro is out. On the United States, we have a similar phenomenon. We had the Trump right, and we had the Bernie Sanders left, which more or less balanced each other out. Israel, that doesn't exist. There is no left in Israel. There is a what you might call a secular enclave in Tel Aviv,

and it also has expression in the cultural and political life. Again, not unlike the United States, where the liberal, so-called progressive element in our society is over-represented. You have a kind of culture war going on in Israel between that secular, liberal enclave in Tel Aviv, and in Israel, which the religious dimension, the non-secular dimension, it's a formidable force. Right now, it's playing itself out, as I said, in regard... It's playing itself out, that kind of culture war in the Supreme Court, but the Palestinian issue is completely marginal. It's irrelevant to what's going on, and it's very striking where you hear, and I don't want to sound like a polemicist or a political purist, just

as a factual matter. As a factual matter, there is one state now between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It's incorrect as a factual matter, and in particular as a legal matter, to refer to an occupation, namely the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza. It's no longer an occupation. Under international law, what distinguishes an occupation from an annexation is an occupation is supposed to be temporary. That's the critical distinction. If it's not temporary, it ceases to be an occupation. It becomes an annexation. After 50 years, remember, Israel entered the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem. It's 1967. After a half century, and with a government or a series of governments in the past decade

or so, making it absolutely clear they have no intention from withdrawing from the territories that they occupy in 1967, it ceased to be an occupation. There is one state. These territories have been annexed by Israel. Whether they have been juridically annexed is totally irrelevant. As a legal matter, these territories have ceased to be occupied territories. They are illegally annexed territories. Why did I give you this whole legal disposition? Very simple. You now have a state which is half free to use Abraham Lincoln's language, and a state which is half slave. Now, there are gradations. There are gradations. The Palestinian Israelis, those who are citizens of the state of Israel, they enjoy what you might call second or third

class rights. But the Palestinians in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza, they have no rights whatsoever. They don't have the right to vote, and they don't have all the rights which derive from that right to vote. Remember what our 15th amendment did? There were those three critical amendments after the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment, 13th amendment about slavery, 14th amendment allowed for what's called the due process and what's sometimes called the liberty clause in our Constitution, and the 15th amendment gave the right to vote. Now, that's critical. That 15th amendment is not a trivial afterthought in our Constitution. It was critical in order to enable African Americans to become equal

members of our society. Half of Israel does not have that right, nearly half because you have to exclude the Palestinian Israelis who do have the right to vote. So what's the point? The point is, I know this was a very long-winded answer, but the point is it's being billed, this whole, these demonstrations are being billed as a struggle for democracy in Israel. That's not true. Half the population of Israel has, of the real Israel from the Mediterranean to Jordan, has no rights. So what are you talking to me about? Suddenly there's a struggle over democracy. That struggle occurred about, you could say, 50 years ago when the territories were annexed and Palestinians were denied any rights, or I should say 50 years ago they

were occupied, and the Palestinians had no rights, and by now those territories have been annexed, illegally annexed under international law, and the struggle for democracy has to begin with enfranchising the Palestinian population. If there were a battle for, let's just take a case in the United States. Let's say there were a struggle between the southern states and the northern states, but that struggle had nothing to do with slavery. Would any abolitionists say the struggle, assuming it had nothing to do with slavery? Would any abolitionists say this is a struggle about democracy? If it excluded the issue of slavery? Would any serious Democrat claim this is a struggle about democracy? Half your population

has no rights. They have no rights. They don't have that 15th amendment. So to me, I recognize something is happening in Israel, and I don't want to be one of those purists who say it's all irrelevant, so on, so forth. No, something substantial is happening. A cleavage has opened up in Israeli society. One shouldn't, I don't think one shouldn't trivialize it, but on the other hand, one should see the bigger picture. The struggle for democracy is first and foremost the enfranchisement of half the population. If you leave that out, in my opinion, the foundation of any struggle about democracy there has been lost. It's been erased. So I'm not going to trivialize what's happening. Probably something significant. I don't want

to dispute that, but on the other hand, we should be realistic about this. Well, yeah, I don't think there's any disagreement there. The only point of convention anyone might have would be that they do have a lula over there, a hood old mayor who is spotted participating in the protest yesterday, making this a real grassroots movement. I'm not denying it's a grassroots movement. I was joking. Yeah, but I recognize it is a grassroots movement, and it's a grassroots movement totally apart from the fundamental breach, the fundamental grotesque violation of democracy, half the population exactly like Abraham Lincoln said. That country is half slave and half free. Now, I think that such a state can't long endure,

and you know, I hope that's the case. I hope that is the case, but it's endured for quite a long time. You know, it's endured now for a half century. Taking what you said that like, you know, in practice, Israel is it's only one state, half slave, half free, as you said. What are the implications of that for a Palestinian state or a proposed two state solution, which has been, you know, like that's what's held up as like a solution to this, but like how practically does that go forward if there is only in practice one state? I can't answer that because for the moment, and actually for quite a long time, unfortunately

for quite a long time now, the Palestinian struggle has been more abundant. And until a new leadership emerges, until new organization emerges, you can't predict what's going to happen. Remember, you know, we have to be careful about two-facile sloganeering. It is one state now, but how the Palestinian question will be resolved, I can't predict. There are many states, as you know, that were one state and then decomposed into many states. That's what happened with Yugoslavia. It was one state, it decomposed into many states. And that's how the principle of democracy and self-determination was resolved in the case of Yugoslavia. In the case of South Africa, it was resolved with one state. And between

multi-states emerging from one state, same thing happened the Soviet Union, it resolved itself, as you know, into on the one hand, many parts of the Soviet Union split off. Other parts remain in the, what do they call it now, the Confederate, the CIA, the Confederate States. And other parts of the former Soviet Union, they remain part of, I'll call it, though it's technically incorrect, they remain part of Russia. So there are many, if I can put it this way, there are many permutations and combinations of what might emerge. I don't know. Is it likely that it will emerge as one secular state, the slogan of the anti-apartheid movement, one person, one vote? Is it likely? I think it's a tough question, to be honest

with you, because there's a young friend of mine, a comrade of mine, a brilliant fellow, and he's been writing his doctoral dissertation on the topic that you raise, his name is Jamie Stern Weiner. And one of the things that distinguishes dramatically the South African situation from the Israeli situation is, in the South African case, I don't know how old you guys look pretty young, in the South African case, the idea of white self-determination, which is what the whites in South Africa claim. They said there are many nationalities in this area. We're going to give X number of Bantu stens, independence based on different nationalities. There was trans sky, cis sky, Bofu Vatswana, many Bantu stens they create for what they

call different nationalities. And they said we're also a nationality. That's what they claim, the whites in South Africa. The difference between the whites in South Africa and the case of Israel is the idea of a white self-determination in South Africa, even if you could prove that right by virtue of all sorts of international law, white people constitute in South Africa, constitute a people, people have the right to self-determination, you can apply all the definitions of international law. But the bottom line is it commanded no legitimacy. The international community did not accept the idea that a white self-determination in South Africa had any moral, legal, or political legitimacy. Now, as I said, as a legal point

actually South Africa had an argument, that's one of the points that Jamie Sternweiner will show in his thesis. But as a political matter, it carried no weight. On the other hand, in the case of Israel, in my opinion mostly for historical reasons, but also historical reasons which Israel has quite cleverly exploited, the idea of a Jewish state does command a lot of international legitimacy, based as you no doubt can infer, the historical suffering of the Jewish people that climaxed in the Nazi Holocaust. And it is a fact, it is a fact that large portions of the left recognized that legitimacy. So for example, the Soviet Union in 1947, it recognized the legitimacy given the suffering of Jews during World War

II, and their historic suffering. They recognized there was some legitimacy in the idea of a Jewish state. Similarly, I'm not sure why this is happening. Similarly, are you hearing that sound? Yeah, phone ringing again. Okay, I'll just give me one half second to get rid of it. Money's gone. He's doing the spread. Okay, guys. So please excuse me for that. No, no problem. No worries. No worries. Okay. So the Soviet Union, Foreign Minister Gromyko, in his historic speech at the UN General Assembly, he said, given the historic suffering of the Jewish people, in particular during the Nazi Holocaust, though he didn't use that phrase, he said that if the Jews and Arabs can't figure out a way to get along,

then the Soviet Union would support a Jewish state. Incidentally, so did Leon Trotsky. Leon Trotsky did say we, meaning we communists, even though we don't recognize, we don't believe a Jewish state will be a solution to the problems of the Jews. Still, if those Jews who want to form their own state proceed to do so, that I recognize the legitimacy of that aspiration. So that's another long-winded way of saying we can't simply extrapolate from the South African experience and assume that a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which includes the creation of an Arab majority in that area, and the effective dissolution of a Jewish state because Jews will no longer be the demographic majority, whether the international

community will support that. So we, I don't believe that issues like where international public opinion stands is irrelevant. In the case of South Africa, for all the heroism organization leadership provided by the African National Congress, it's unlikely that on their own they could have defeated the apartheid regime. It was in addition the fact that the entire continent of Africa regarded the idea of a white supremacist state on the continent as an affront to the whole continent and the existence of after World War II, the anti-colonial movement most notably in China, in India, in Indonesia, what was called back then in 1955, the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Countries. It was led by Tito in Yugoslavia, Nehru in

India, and Nasser in Egypt, that this global opposition to the idea of a white supremacist state in South Africa was a critical factor in ultimately isolating South Africa and forcing the end of apartheid. Now, is that kind of global unity likely to emerge totally, totally rejecting, repudiating the idea of a Jewish state? I would say at this point in time, I'm a little bit skeptical. Yes, the Nazi Holocaust occurred 75 years ago, but as I said, Israel has been very clever in manipulating and exploiting that memory, keeping it alive, not that it should be forgotten, not that it should be forgotten, but most things that happened 75 years ago actually are forgotten. My students, for example, have no concept

of the Vietnam War. No, I'm serious about that. I'm being literal here. You might as well be talking about World War I or the Civil War. The Vietnam War is completely forgotten. So the fact that Israel has succeeded in keeping alive the memory of the Nazi Holocaust and exploited it means that the consciousness of the legitimacy of the Jewish state is still quite profound. I would add, incidentally, when I hear the Europeans, in particular those Nordic Europeans, like van der Leyen from the European Commission, this blonde-haired, Nordic type, and when they, on the one hand, speak with such sympathy for the Jewish people, also Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, another Nordic, he's from Norway, they speak with

such sympathy for the suffering of the Jewish people, and then speak with such belligerence, such bellicosity against the Russian people. Hey, guys, yes, 6 million Jews were killed, but guess what? About 30 million Russians were killed. You hear me? By those same Nazis, and the people of Russia, and I don't just mean Putin, and I don't just mean the whole leadership in Russia. I'm talking about the Russian people. They're not about to allow their country to be encircled again by a hostile military power that wants to plant nuclear tip missiles within five minutes range of Moscow on their border. So, it's a very selective sympathy by these Europeans whose hearts bleed for the Jews, but are blind to the suffering,

the murder, the death, and destruction that those same Nazis inflicted in their war of extermination in the East. I mean, you mentioned, sorry, historical memory, like your current students may not know anything about the Vietnam War, or it may not be a real thing to them, but you think Russians of the same age, they probably have some awareness of the Eastern Front and World War II in a way that... Ready for this? Putin is my age. He's my age. We're both 70 years old. If you go to Wikipedia, I don't know how fast you can bring it up, but if you go to Wikipedia now, you enter

his name, there's a little section called childhood, and if you look at that little section called childhood, you have it in front of you. So, read those four lines. Putin was born on the 7th of October, 1952, in Leningrad, Soviet Union, now St. Petersburg, Russia, the youngest of three children of Vladimir Putin and Maria Ivanova Putina, his grandfather. Putin's birth was preceded by the death of two brothers, Albert, born in the 1930s, died in infancy, and Victor, born in 1940, died of diphtheria and starvation in the 1942 Siege of Leningrad by Nazi Germany's forces. Okay, so one brother dies in the Siege of Leningrad. Okay? For those of you who don't

know the Siege of Leningrad, it went for 800 days. About 2 million people were killed. Large numbers of them died from hunger, starvation, and disease. Go ahead. Continue to read. Putin's mother was a factory worker, and his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy, serving in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. In the early stage of Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union, his father served in the destruction medallion of the NKVD. Later, he was transferred to the regular army and was severely wounded in 1942. Putin's maternal grandmother was killed by the German occupiers in the Tver region in 1941, and his maternal uncles disappeared on the Eastern Front during World War II.

Okay, that's it. You know this, guys? The whole of his childhood as distilled by Wikipedia is just about the Nazi invasion. Who was killed? Who was fighting? Guess what? That was my whole childhood. That's how I grew up. My whole family and my mother's side was exterminated by the Nazis. My whole family and my father's side was exterminated by the Nazis. And do you know what? I carry that memory to this day, just as Putin carries the memory to this day. There was a very good article that John Mirsheimer, the University of Chicago professor, he sent me the other day. And it was very striking at the very end of the article. It talks about Putin's calculations. And Putin's calculations, it

said, well, Stalin was not prepared for the Nazi invasion. He did not believe Hitler would attack. It was a major strategic blunder. And the Nazis swept into Russia and wreaked death and destruction of massive dimensions. In fact, Stalin was very unpopular and had Hitler not embarked on the war of extermination, probably could have won over a lot of the Russian people. But his was a war of extermination to wipe out the Slavs and to replace them with German colonists. So the article that Professor Mirsheimer sent me, it concluded Putin was determined when he made the decision to invade Ukraine not to repeat the error of Stalin, of waiting too late, of waiting until those nuclear-tipped missiles are already

on Ukraine's border targeting Moscow. So it's no surprise to me, because when I looked at that Wikipedia entry of childhood, I thought to myself, we had the same childhood as me. All we talked about was the war. Above, in a living room, we lived very modestly. I'm not going to pretend to poverty, never felt hunger in my home, but certainly never felt luxury. In the living room, were four or five pictures above the couch of my mother's dead family. No pictures survived of my father's dead family. And right now, you ready for this, guys? If I were to move the camera, you'll see above the piano in my living room are those same pictures that we had hanging in our living room growing up. And I can assure

you, it's the same thing in Putin's home. You carry that memory. You carry that memory. But the disgusting, arrogant, bellicose Europeans, they carry on. We're going to send tanks made in Germany on the Ukrainian border with Russia. For Russia, its history is a history of invasion. When Tolstoy had to write his great novel about Russia, the Russian soul, he then chose the Crimean War. He chose the War of 1812, the Napoleonic invasion of Russia. So that's the memory of the 19th century. The 20th century, what's the memory? It's the great patriotic war to resist the Nazi invasion. And now, 75 years later, they're starting up again with Russia. And I am quite confident that the Russian people will deal

with them, these new invaders, as they have done in the past, with other invaders. Now, you might say, this guy is nuts. He's turning history on its head. It's Russia that invaded Ukraine. No, it's not. It's been 30 years of this relentless push by the Western powers, the U.S., of course, leading the PEC, this 30-year push. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990, 1991, this relentless push to expand NATO and to bring it onto Russia's border. And at the end of the day, if you know the actual history, Putin tried over and over and over again, as did Gorbachev before him, as did Medvedev in between the two Putin eras, as did they all try to stop this relentless juggernaut. This relentless

juggernaut determined to strangle now Russia, determined to strangle it. And I was not at all surprised, I wasn't at all surprised, that when I read the article that Professor Mirsheimer sent me, that at the very end, at the very end, when they're describing Putin's calculations, it said, uppermost in his mind was not to repeat Stalin's error of waiting until it's too late. That's how I see it. If I could return to the idea of historical memory and you brought up your own household and what it was like. And over the course of your career, as someone who's engaged with the relationship between Israel and the United States and the project of Zionism,

I'm wondering, what have you seen over the course of your career, particularly among young people today? How they see Israel and the United States, particularly among young Jewish people in this country? Has it changed at all? Or the sort of meaning of Jewish kind of being in this country? It is a completely different scene. It's changed 180 degrees. There were three stages and I'm not sure what detail I should go in. There was the initial stage, Israel's creation, which was overwhelmingly supported by Jews around the world. There was a kind of vindication, a kind of statement. And the statement was, we still live. The Jews still live. And I

have to say, there was an element of legitimacy to it. My parents, whose humanistic sympathies ran very deep, they nonetheless believe that in light of the experience of Jews during World War II, Jews needed a refuge. The way they saw it, I don't entirely agree with them. But the way they saw it, in the moment of truth, the whole world abandoned the Jews. They wanted to admit them in their respective sovereign countries. And therefore, the Nazi Holocaust vindicated the idea that the Jews needed a refuge. And so it commanded a lot of among Jews, a lot of popular support, the idea. However, not really, however, it's an end. After the state of Israel was created, Israel receded in the memory of American Jews.

You're way, way too young to remember. Israel played no part in American life when I was growing up. It played no part whatsoever in American Jewish life. Why? Because Israel was a backwater. It was very poor, very spartan existence. Yes, it had these kinds of romantic qualities, like the kibbutzim. But for American Jews, a kibbutz was cool to hang out in as if it were a summer camp. But it's not a place you're going to live. Why? Because after World War II, all the obstacles to making it in America had cleared away for Jews. Before World War II, there was significant anti-Semitism in the United States, and it was a real obstacle for Jews to get into law school, law firms, medical profession. After World War II, all

those obstacles were cleared away, and Jews were ready. They were reared to reach to storm the heights of American society. And that aspiration, that aspiration turned out to be very real. If I were to tell you now, guys, I attended a public high school, lower middle class, okay, in Brooklyn. If I were to tell you, among the graduates of my high school, my public high school, where Charles Schumer, current Senate Majority Leader, his father was an exterminator. Bernie Sanders, his father was a door-to-door salesman. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, even Judge Judy. Wait, you went to high school with Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Judge Judy, and Ruth Bader

Ginsburg? No, I'm saying that was the era. Jews were poised, were on the verge of making it here. If I were to tell you, not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, six, six Nobel laureates in physics, in chemistry, in economics, they attended my high school. So, Jews felt that if you work hard enough and you've got the smarts, we can conquer the dizzying heights of American society. And guess what? They did. So, Israel, why would you want to think about Israel? Israel is this very smart, spartan, tiny place in the Middle East, far, far away in the Middle East.

So, why would you need a Jewish state when New York exists? Exactly. Well, not just New York. I mean, it was also Washington. You were talking about the commanding heights of our society, which they entered. I'm actually, I'll give you a laugh. I'm the only one who didn't enter it. Can you look up your high school yearbook, most likely to succeed? I think I was the most likely to fail. I'm too proof to be a valid inference. No, in the medical profession, in the legal professors, a lot of my friends turn out to be top professors in the country, top, top. I mean, like, chair of the department at Cornell University, the

history department, top people, top people. So, the idea of Israel was just a complete irrelevance. Significant things happened after the June 1967 war, when Israel became what came to be called the strategic asset of the United States in the Middle East. And American Jews derived a certain amount of pride from this fighting Israeli. You know, they were called the fighters. And American Jews have this, you know, the image of American Jews back before 67 was that you was a kind of Nebish, a kind of fragile, nerdy type. A Nebish is a nerd. It was like a Woody Allen or a Franz Kafka. If you remember Kafka with the big ears and the going to face, that was a Jew. And now along comes 1967. And the whole

new Jew comes along. It's Marsha Diane, with the pirates, the pirates. I patch, I patch. And he's a womanizer. You know, very exciting for American Jews. And it kind of effaced the memory of what happened to Jews during World War II. Because I think it'll come as a surprise to you that before 1967, to have parents who were Holocaust survivors was a badge of shame. It wasn't a badge of honor. Yeah, because as you've mentioned, it's just like, if you survived, it implied that you did like you collaborated or you just like a word or whatever. Or either you did something dirty, you were a couple. That was the word a couple meant

the collaborator. Or you went like sheep to slaughter. So it was an embarrassment to be the son of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. I'll tell you something which is, you know, you'll find kind of odd. I traveled in the smart circles, not that I was so smart, I wasn't. No, facts are facts. And I'm willing to acknowledge I have to acknowledge you because it's a fact. I my credo in life is never quarrel with facts. But I like to be around smart people. Okay. Now, I did have a unique family. Both of my parents were in the Warsaw ghetto. Both of them were there until the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Both of them were deported to my Donna concentration camp, a death camp. And then my father was

in the Auschwitz death march. My mother was in two slave labor camps. So at the very least, there's a history there. There's a history there. My friends, remember, we lived in times in which the atmosphere was pervaded by, confused by history, politics, it's the anti war movements, the civil rights movement, everybody, everybody's talking politics, politics, politics, politics, politics. My friends were the smartest of the smart, really brilliant. Some of them just really, I never understood how brilliant they were because I saw them as brilliant in my milieu. I didn't realize on a national scale, they were also the Kremlin, the La Krem. But here's the point. I can say, I'm going to hold up my hand and put my thumb

to my wrist. I can, I would say, I can say without fear of missing a beat, not one of my friends or parents of my friends ever asked either me or my parents. Remember, I grew up long, long before this crazy phenomenon called play dates. We played in the street. Without the street. Yeah, you raise your own play date. Yeah, it was like the Little Rascals. We went out and played. Yes. You can't imagine Alfalfa asking his mother arranging a play date with Darla. So we went into each other's houses. Everything was very informal. No one ever asked my parents a single question about anything that happened in their lives. Nothing. Nothing. Nobody was interested. Nobody cared. And if anything, as I said, it was a source

of embarrassment. I'll even tell you a story, an anecdote. I hesitate. Yeah, I will name the person. I don't know. I have a friend, a childhood friend. He's now a top rate, a top, a first tier historian. Okay. And he's the professor of humanities at an Ivy League university. And in 2003, I saw him at a conference. And it was at the time after the invasion of Afghanistan on the verge of the invasion of Iraq. I was speaking on campus, I think it was Duke, but don't hold me to it. I think it was Duke University. He was also speaking that night on campus. And we only saw each other like once every 10 years or so. And I met him in the corridor. And it turns out he was speaking on a very right wing panel.

And I said, oh, I guess you're the Tolkien liberal. He says, no, I support the wars. And I looked at him as scant. And then he tried to pry out of me. He says, well, of course you support the war in Afghanistan. And I thought, no. But then we got to talking about our childhoods because I said we only see each other once every 10 years or so. And he said to me, you know, I'm calling him now. Your mother was the weirdest person I ever met. And he said, I'm going to write a novel and I'm going to include her in it. I thought to myself, you stupid fuck. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid fuck. Did it ever occur to you that my mother was weird? Because her mother, father, two sisters and

brother were deported to Treblinka and ended up in gas chambers. You stupid fuck. And then I thought the other day he's now the university chair in the humanities. That's a funny one. Well, I mean, this is my like, I was hoping to lead you and I do want to talk about your new book. But I guess like my last question in this vein is like, you know, per everything in our previous conversation, I'm just wondering, like what you see as like the rather moribund state of the project of liberal Zionism in this country, like it's certainly because of like the tenor of the Israeli government, like, but like, how do you see like, is this

mostly dead at this point? Or are they like, are they still beating this horse over? It's over. Because American Jews tend to be at the moderate to liberal end of the political spectrum. And the dead noir of American Jews as liberals and moderates is of course Donald Trump. But Donald Trump was a hero in the state of Israel. There are only two countries in the world where the populations overwhelmingly supported Trump during his tenure. One was in Africa. I think it was Liberia, but I could be mistaken of that. And the other was the state of Israel. Because as I said, in Israel, there's no left. There's not even a center. There's a right, a far right, and an ultra right. That's its spectrum. And for American

Jews, their spectrum is a center, a liberal left, and a Bernie Sanders left. So we are mirror images of Israel. And so now Israel has become a kind of embarrassment. It's like the Meshugah and Meshugah, you might know as the instrument word for crazy. Israel is now the Meshugah ant in the attic of the Miss Havisham of the American Jewish community. For those of you who've read Jane Eyre, you'll remember Rochester's wife was in the attic. I always forget her name. The caretaker was Grace Poole. But I forget it was Bertha something. I have a very brilliant English friend named Deborah McCoby. And she knows the Brontes very well. And she tried to clear my mind on these names. Anyhow, the Meshugah, and

the Rochester, it's the Meshugah wife. And every once in a while, the Meshugah wife, who's been taken care of by Grace Poole, goes on the rampage in the house. And in the end, the rampage, you know, the house burns down, Rochester loses his eyesight, but Jane Eyre doesn't care. She's in love, marries the guy. Happy ending. But Israel is like the crazy ant in the attic, the Meshugah ant. Every once in a while, goes on the rampage, American Jews are so embarrassed. What are we going to do? They're destroying Gaza. They're killing these kids, killing those people, you know, crazy state, completely lunatic state. And so, American Jews, I'm not saying they're going to openly dissociate themselves from

the state of Israel. That's, I would call, a bridge too far, but they're not going to support it. It's too embarrassing. It's a crazy state. It's a lunatic state. So, that I wrote a book in 2008 called, Knowing Too Much, Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End. And the point, the thesis of the book is, Israel's human rights record, Israel's foreign policy record, Israel's, the liberal sheen, the liberal veneer is gone. And the real Israel is actually a pretty ugly place. You brought up how popular Donald Trump is in Israel. I'm wondering if you saw the story that was published in The Nation over this weekend by James Banford about how basically

the redacted parts of the Mueller report included all this stuff about how Netanyahu was directly colluding with spies to, let's just say, intercede in the American election in 2016. I didn't read that. I know James Banford from a long time ago. He was a kind of like Seymour Hirsch. He must be 2 million years old now, but I didn't read that particular story. But I'm not surprised at all. I mean, this obnoxious, utterly obnoxious Jewish supremacist Netanyahu barging into our Congress, it was such a, I'm no patriot, you know, all I care. No, yeah, you don't have to be a patriot for that to be the wrong way. And hey, he went to high school with Reggie Jackson of the New York Yankees.

Here I say, I'm not impressed. Chris Rock went to my high school, but he dropped out. Okay. Well, I mean, like Israel as the lunatic state, but I mean, I want to talk about your book and, you know, Are you making a subway from lunatic to lunatic? Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I hope this show will help prove this, but you're underrated for how funny you are. And like I said, the book is very scathing about like the current contours of like left wing political discourse. But I want to go in, I want to talk about like, you have a long chapter on Barack Obama. And it was very funny. And like just like

I said, a withering about what Obama represents as like the kind of the apex of kind of like this cool guy identity politics. And like, and then also the people in his cabinet, you called them a revolting retinue of bootlickers. And the section on cement the power is very funny as well. But like, just like, could you just talk a little bit about your like, your take on Obama in the new book? I should begin by saying, I don't examine Obama in terms of his actual policy record. First of all, it's so barren that whole examination would probably take about two paragraphs. But I was there's been obviously a large amount of literature written on Obama's foreign policy,

Obama's domestic policy, how Obama handled the banking crisis, Obama as the porter in chief and so forth. And I wasn't prepared to plunge into that literature. And I didn't frankly believe I would have anything really new or original to say what I wanted to do in that chapter was invest, explore Obama as a cultural phenomenon, in particular, how culture created Barack Obama, and how Obama himself exploited this kind of woke culture in order to catapult him into eventually the presidency. And what seemed to me, first of all, let's go to the end and then move up to the beginning. It was clear for anybody who reads the record with a certain amount of candor honesty, there

was nothing there with Obama. You probably know Obama's really his authoritative biographer in many ways is only biographer is a guy named David Garrow. And David Garrow wrote this manga's book titled Rising Star. Okay, it's 1500 pages. It has 300 pages of end notes, 300 pages of end notes. And the end notes are double column. Okay, so we're talking about a guy who investigated every aspect, every tangent, every nook and cranny, every crevice of Obama's life. And what does he conclude at the very end of this 1500 page exhaustive to the point of being exhausting biography of Obama. I'm quoting him now. He says on the last page, last paragraph, he says, the vessel is hollow. There's nothing there.

I had to laugh at that. I called it in my chapter, the Guinness Book of World Records. He, for wild goose chases, Guinness Book of World Records, wild goose chases, he spent 10 years tracking down Obama. Every aspect, every facet of Obama's life, only to discover after 10 years of chasing every aspect of his life, there's nothing there. He's not particularly bright. He's not particularly insightful. He doesn't have any deep seated principles. He has no particular conception, vision, aspiration. He's not a particularly hard worker. There's nothing that rises above outstanding mediocrity in Obama. And so then the question becomes, if that's true, then how did he pull it off? And still, to this day, command so much, not as much, but still a lot,

a lot of moral authority. And that's what I try to explain in the book, that what happened with Obama, and there are many aspects to it. It's a long chapter. It runs to 130 pages. But for me, the key fact with Obama, the key fact with Obama is, whereas people talk about Obama being half black, in fact, the key to understanding Obama is he's half white. Why do I say that? Because, well, as a factual matter, his father, as you know, was a no show, and his mother was pretty much a no show. She spent most of her time in Indonesia with various projects. Obama was raised by his mother and father. His mother and father, if my memory serves, were from Kansas. They were very much your typical Americans, apparently extremely decent people, extremely decent people. They raised

Obama. Obama basically grew up in a white milieu, and also an unusual milieu in Hawaii. But more importantly, he knew white people inside out, because he was always around white people. And he was also around your, quote unquote, typical American white people, like his mother and father. His mother was a very competent bank executive. She had worked her way up, excuse me, his grandmother. His grandmother was very competent. You could say secretary who then worked her way up to like executive secretary, very competent woman, judging from what I've read. And his father was a salesman, also competent and nice people, nice people. So he knew white people inside out. And he knew just which buttons to press to make white people feel good about themselves

because they felt good about Obama. And so that was his, you might call it, his secret. He was cool. If you want to know who was the precursor to Obama, I used to think before I wrote the book, I thought it was Oprah Winfrey, a black person who made white people feel at ease. And Oprah feel the same role for white America, very safe, and somebody in whom you could confine confine your heartbreak. And Obama, that's who I thought was Obama's precursor. But in fact, I was wrong. His real precursor was Whoopi Goldberg, the hip, cool black person with the dreads and the granny glasses and always dressing in these kinds of weird bohemian clothes, but absolutely safe. It just allowed me to complete the point. So you're not too young to remember when on the

view, the TV program, the view during the Iraq war, one of the women on the view was Rosie O'Donnell. Do you recall that? Yes, I do. Okay. So Rosie O'Donnell, she was very tough on the Iraq war. She used to come in each day armed with the facts, and she would go to war, so to speak, with this woman named Elizabeth Hassanfuss, who was they described as white bread. Okay. And it kept on escalating and escalating until one episode, Rosie O'Donnell just lets it all hang out. What happened? She got fired. The next day, Barbara Walters, who owned the show and was the host, fired her. Why do I bring all of this up? You're all wondering where the hell is this guy going? And if this guy watched the view, okay, why do I bring it up? You know who they replaced

Rosie O'Donnell with? Don't you guys know? Was it with Whoopie? Yes, they brought in Whoopie because they wanted to show they were hip, they were cool, but they knew Whoopie would be safe. And Whoopie, when she was interviewed a few days before her first appearance, she said, you could check, it's either the Daily News or the New York Post. She said, I'm not going to do that stuff that Rosie did. She did. I'm not going to do that stuff that Rosie did. And that was Obama. He's hip, and he's cool. So the liberals love their down with the hood. They're down with the hood. Obama, they're down with the hood, but they also knew he was safe. Okay. Well, we've seen sort of an evolution of this, and you get into it in your book, going from liberals who need a

non-white, a black or non-white man to make them feel good or safe. But you also get into like post-Obama, I think we've seen like a different direction about people who have made quite a career for themselves now. And like, you know, at books and in like sort of talks and like lectures aimed at liberals, that is all about making white people feel as bad as possible all the time. And like, look, we've made fun of on the show, Robin D'Angelo's book, White Fragility. You also talk about this guy, Ibrahim X. Kendi as well. Yeah, Ibrahim X. Kendi. And something, I never read his book, but in it, you talk about that he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he decides that figures like Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois are racist and compares them disfavorably

to Harry Truman and Kanye West. What is going on with this? What's going on with that? Ibrahim X. Kendi did not write a book. What he wrote was a comic. There are supervillains and there are superheroes. The villains, which is a very large number, it's a very large cast of villains. It includes anybody who believes that black people have any imperfections. If there is any, you know, you say there's a problem of crime in the black community. If you say there's a problem with poor performance in schools in the black community, you're immediately blended by Ibrahim X. Kendi, you're a racist. Blacks are immaculately perfect. That's the standard for being an anti-racist, according to Ibrahim X. Kendi. Now, Frederick Douglass, the giant of the 19th century,

everybody agrees on that. He was absolutely, listen to me, he was absolutely breathtakingly extraordinary. There can't be any question about that. His prose, now remember, he wasn't able to read until he was 18 because he was disallowed. He did learn to read, but if you were caught reading, it was a big problem in the South. I won't go through all, he's written a lot on, he wrote read autobiographies, so he describes that period at great length in his book. But by the end, I won't even say by the end, in his 20s, his first of the three autobiographies, it's breathtaking, breathtaking. I've never seen prose like that. He knew Robert Burns very well, he mastered it, mastered Shakespeare, mastered the Bible, and Dickens. Those are apparently his

main influences. I could be wrong in details, but I'm pretty certain about those four influences, and it shows. He was a spectacular figure in the period up to the Civil War and afterwards, because he had a long career afterwards. According to Kendi, he was an assimilationist, because Douglas believed that you should struggle for full and complete participation in American life, and he didn't want, you can agree or disagree, okay? Fair enough, you can agree or disagree. He didn't want to be confined to the ghetto of a kind of black solidarity and an accentuation of difference. He thought we should accentuate what we have in common and join the whole of humanity. And because he was in, in Kendi's reckoning, an assimilationist,

and for Kendi an assimilationist is a racist, because it denies, and the assimilationist denies the specificity of black people. Kendi seems to be of the strange opinion, well not so strange, there are quite a few people who believe that. Blacks think differently than other people. Blacks process information differently than other people. Black people have their own language called ebonics, and unless you recognize that specificity of blackness, which Douglas rejected whole cloth, he learned the classics of quote-unquote the Western tradition. Unless you accept the specificity of being black, according to Kendi, you're a racist. Now it's kind of funny, it's kind of funny. If black people think differently than

white people, if black people have a different language than white people, if black people process information differently than white people, then why is Kendi at all these white institutions? If you take him literally, they couldn't possibly understand the word he's saying. Why is he writing books in English? I don't understand it. He says black people, their language, it's a fully developed language, it's called ebonics. So why isn't he writing his books in the ebonics? How could the MacArthur Foundation, Dean Kendi a genius, which by the way is about as laughable as you can get, how could a Dean Kendi a genius, if according to him, they can understand the word he's saying? They process information differently than him. He says he

loves black spaces, he loves black people, he loves black, black, black, black, black, black, black, so why did he take his anti-racist center to Boston University? He could have set it up at one of the historically black colleges and universities, the HBCU's. Why did he go to a white institution? It's all such a crock. It's just a pose. It's a fashion statement. Kendi, he took a crowbar and stuck an X into his name, and then everybody gets excited, the chills, the freesome. Kendi, that's why people like Amy Goodman and Democracy Now, they drool over him when he comes in. It's all a fashion statement. And for white people, you know what it is? It's a life insurance policy. You wonder, what is he talking about? A life insurance policy? Yes. Why did John Dorsey,

the ex-CEO of Twitter, give Kendi $10 million? Why did Jeff Bezos give Obama $100 million? Why did Jeff Bezos give Van Jones $100 million? Now, listen, guys, in case you're unaware, $100 million is a lot of money. A lot of money. Why? Because Ben Bezos knows the writing on the wall is going to be a big stripe at some point in Amazon. That's as inevitable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. And so, you know, and I know, where Mr. Obama and Mr. Van Jones will stand when that strike occurs. These are the ruling class buying off all of these so-called radicals, radicals, buying them all off for the future and also for the present, for the present. It was very striking. You know, somebody mentioned, somebody wrote me a very

nice guy, Adam Rose, from the University of Chicago. He teaches the great books there. And he said to me, a lot of the nuggets in my book, you know, the sharp points, they don't come until pretty late in the book. And I had to say to myself, you know, he has a point. Why? Because as I'm writing the book, I'm figuring things out. Things start occurring to me. I didn't have the chance to re-draft the book and put those thoughts at the very beginning. It was kind of, as my editor, Debora Mccabe said, it's like the reader goes on the journey with you. Watches how you work out your argument. And it's true. It only occurred to me while writing the book, it only occurred to me that this whole identity politics stick. It only revealed itself

during the Bernie campaign. When all the high priests and high priestesses of identity politics, they all coalesced to stop Bernie, to stop that class struggle locomotive. So Tanahisi Coates shakes his head, Bernie's weak, on the reparations question. Joe Biden is very strong on this question, by the way. Angela Davis, Bernie is weak on conceptualizing black oppression. Kimberly Crenshaw, Ms. Intersectionality, she says, Bernie is, she doesn't use this expression. I'm using it. He is this old white Jewish schmuck. The real action, the real action is the corporations, because they're all adopting the woke language, and they're having a Black Lives Matter Day, and they're posting things in

their website. So Kimberly, Ms. Intersectionality Crenshaw says, the real revolutionary action, it's happening at the high precincts of the corporations. Then Whoopi Goldberg, she has Bernie on the view, and she snarls at him, quote, when are you getting out of the race? That's what she said. When are you getting out of the race? And then Joy Reed, she brings on a body language reader. Oh, God, I remember that. That was great. The quote, that Bernie is a congenital liar. So what you saw was at the moment of truth. And I called it at this point in my book, a remark I came across in Leon Trotsky. He says, there are all these assorted people who start sounding so radical and so radical,

and they become more radical than they even thought they were. But then he said, I'm calling him now, in the moment of truth, they reveal their real colors. And that's what all these woke people did. And the moment of truth, when you had the most extraordinary mass movement in American history since the 1930s in a century, the most extraordinary movement in a century at exactly that moment, they came out of the woodwork because that's what they're paid to do. Just like Jim Clyburn in South Carolina, when he endorsed the Biden at the last minute and stopped dead in its tracks, the Bernie locomotive, they came out of the woodwork because that's what they're paid to do. That's what Obama is paid to do. So after Bernie lost in South Carolina, Obama picked up the phone,

called the Buddha cheek, get out of the race, if you want a future in the Democratic Party. Klobuchar was called, get out of the race, or you have no future in the party. All these identity politics. Unless you remember, Elizabeth Warren stayed in. She didn't have a phone call, surprisingly. And if you remember, Ta-Nehisi Coates, he said, Elizabeth Warren, she's good on the reparations question. Passing the endorsement, that was the tacit endorsement. None of the high priests and high priestesses of woke culture, identity politics, none of these radicals endorsed Bernie. You know why? Because then the plug is pulled and you're not going to be invited to a soiree at Martha's Vineyard. You think that's a joke? No, that's literally the case.

No more invites at Martha's Vineyard for these people. Now, I'll tell you something, guys. I'm saying guys, but Matt Christman hasn't opened his mouth yet. There's another guy, I don't know, Felix hasn't opened his mouth yet. Chris is just a blank screen, so I'm really only talking to Will. When I wrote the book, when I wrote the book, I got a very negative reaction from my generation, my age cohort. I mean, it was so nasty, gratuitously nasty. People telling me, don't publish the book. People telling me it's an embarrassment. You're just going to ruin your name, though I thought that was a little late in the day. I thought that happened. You're going to ruin your name, don't publish it. And there's been almost no negative comment.

I did write to John Meersheimer. I said to him, I haven't received any negative comment yet. I said, well, truth be told, I haven't received any positive comment either. Overwhelmingly, because times are changing. I don't call it a tipping point, but something is happening. How do you know something is happening? Because Whoopi Goldberg has not been denouncing woke culture. That's something new. With all these rewriting of books, the rewriting of James Bond and now the rewriting of Agatha Christie and all the others, she said, no, no, no, no. If you rewrite all these books to make them politically correct, we won't know anything about our history. Whoopi's very attuned. She has that finger

in the air. She's got the antenna about where public opinion is going. And the woke culture, I think it went a step too far. And now it's alienating a lot of people. And the book has found a kind of resonance. And I'm happy about that. Because as somebody said to me the other day, he says it's true. Woke culture is, it's now, I won't say it's on its last legs, but it's facing a problem. But he said, the problem is, people don't know if you oppose woke culture, where do you go except the right? You end up a Tucker Carlson, or you end up a DeSantis. People don't know where to go if you attack the woke culture. And I felt I provided a refuge. I'm a person of the left. My entire life was on the left. And it's going, I'm going to die on the

left. About that, there can't be any doubt at this point in my life. I'm not about to change colors. And I said to myself, you know, as a person of the left, there's a place as a person of the left to ridicule, mock, and expose. And I do all three simultaneously. I ridicule, I mock, and then I systematically, methodically, I expose this, the charlatan reads, just pure, or just charlatans. Some of them were always charlatans. And some of them are very big disappointment to me, people like Angela Davis, who ought to know better, and does know better. I don't know why she went down this route. Maybe you get old, you get tired, and you enjoy finally, a kind of recognition from the mainstream.

No, Norman, I'm sorry, like, we've gone long today. But I just want to get out of here. We've talked about some some serious topics. But I'd like to get you out with a question that is not serious about a not serious person. But I have to ask it, because we've had so much fun at his expense on the show. And I know you guys are old, old friends. So I just have to ask to get you out of here. One not serious question. How is Alan Dershowitz these days? And, you know, how's he been? And have you been following his career lately? It's an interesting question, because I don't want to get into ad hominems. I would say, no, I actually don't. I actually don't. You grew up in a Orthodox Jewish environment.

You went to a Yeshiva. You went to a modest college. You went to Brooklyn College, right each went to a modest college. And at some point, you graduate first in this class at Yale Law School. That's not a mean achievement. That's a serious achievement. Okay. And coming from Brooklyn College, that's very impressive. I think he got carried away. And he got carried away in the celebrity culture. If you know anything about him, and I suspect you don't, most of Alan Dershowitz, he's always described as a civil libertarian. He's always described as this great civil libertarian lawyer. Most of his civil liberties just have to do with pornography and wife beaters, wife killers. No, really, wife beaters. Yeah, class one, Bulo, O.J. Simpson,

you know, go to the list. Even the very Bulo, Simpson, Mike Tyson, that was his career. He wasn't a civil. Yes, it's true. He opposed the death penalty. That's correct. And during the 1960s, he did a little, you know, marginal pro bono work. But mostly his career was on pornography. He was Harry Rheem's lawyer in deep throat. He was the lawyer for the film I Am Curious Yellow. These were all landmark pornography films in the 60s and 70s. And he was just, he was a nasty, he was a nasty person. I won't say despicable. I'll say a nasty person on things like the Israel, you know, Israel-Palestine conflict. He did a lot of things, destroyed a lot of careers, destroyed a lot of careers, did a lot of nasty, nasty work. None of that caused him any waves. We didn't make any waves

in the liberal Martha's Vineyard community. If you go and look, and I wish your viewers would listen, go to YouTube and listen to, he had, I think, three full days, three full days of panels, panels at Harvard Law School, shared by Martha Minow, who was the director of the law school, was then at that time, everybody, the whole who's who, the who's who of American arts and letters, singing the praises of Alan Dershowitz. After his having, you know what Martha Minow said, Martha Minow is one of the world's, you know, one of the world's biggest frauds and fakes, this fake liberal. She says, Barack Obama's the most brilliant student I've had in 40 years of teaching. Yeah, Martha, sure. Another lick spittle, another groveling lick spittle. In any case,

so she fashions herself a feminist and she's singing the praises of Alan Dershowitz. And at one point, you know what she says? And Alan Dershowitz has always been very fair to the Palestinians. Alan Dershowitz, fair to the Palestinians, you know, sickening. So now, for reasons which I have my own theory, not important, he became Trump's supporter of Trump, then he was finished. You know, Jeffrey Tubin, you know, Jeffrey Tubin, who contributed. I'll try not to do what he did on this call, but go continue. His only contribution I can think of is he contributed a new verb to the English language, to Tubin. You know, when you're a pleasure in yourself during a conference school, that's Tubin-ing. He wrote this article, I think it was in even New York or New Republic,

what happened when Dershowitz linked his fortunes with Trump? What happened to Alan Dershowitz? Such an enigma. He was so perfect. He was so exemplary. He was such a wonderful, wonderful human being, always devoting himself to the cause of humanity. What happened to Alan Dershowitz? You know, first was the Trump and then there was the Epstein thing. But originally with Epstein, you know, in 2008 when Epstein had his first trial and Dershowitz was his lawyer, there was no condemnation of him. Nobody criticized him. But the Trump, you know, the Trump factor, suddenly they discovered Alan Dershowitz has a fatal flaw. Never noticed before. We can't have contempt for these people. You know, the other day I was talking about aiming wax,

this kind of in-your-face racist, the brilliant one, no question about, in-your-face racist, who teaches at University of Pennsylvania Law School. And she says, you know, these really horrible things, like, there are too many South Asians and Indians in science and in medicine, she said, quote, I'm quoting her, they're poisoning the profession. That's, that was her adjective. They're poisoning her profession. So I said, in my opinion, she went over the line with things like, with statements like that, she should be barred from the classroom. And I said, if a student of mine came up to me and told me that story, I said, I would make a beeline for her office. I would ask her to confirm that she said Asians, Indians, South Asians,

Indians are poisoning the profession. I consider that a Nazi statement. My parents, my mother attended Warsaw University. She was in a math, she was majoring in math at Warsaw University. And as you know, back then, the language of the Nazis was Jews are, particularly in the medical, the, what we're called, the professions. Jews were poisoning the medical profession, poisoning the legal profession. So my immediate reaction is to recall what happened to my mother back then. And I said in the program, if a student told me that, they could be lying for her office, and I would ask her to confirm that statement. If she did, I said spit in her face. So people were very, a lot of people were very uncomfortable with me saying that. And frankly, they have a point,

you know, why all of these professors deserve spittle. So why did I, why did I focus on her? Why did I focus on her? They're all so contemptible, these bootlickers, these licks spittles, these groveling sacks of shit, to the extent that a sack of shit can grovel. Norman Ficklstein, we got to leave it there with you today. But I want to thank you for joining us. The book is, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It. Once again, Norman Ficklstein, thank you for your time today. Okay, thank you so, so much. I wish I heard from the other three guys, but maybe you're technical.