DeProgram with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall - Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History (Interview with Benjamin Moser) | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.00:14 Show Open: Ben Moser Interview and Today's Headlines 02:29 Herzl, Colonialism, and the Early Zionist Project 12:48 Religion Versus Ethnicity and Jews in the Muslim World 19:31 Fear, Victimhood, and Why Zionism Feels Like a Prison 28:17 Can Israel Survive Isolation and the South Africa Parallel 35:36 Hebron, Apartheid Comparisons, and Stopping the Violence 45:54 Interview Recap: Zionism Versus Judaism 50:21 Gulf Reconstruction Money and the Belarus Potash StoryToday we discuss:• Join us for a live interview with Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser for an enlightening conversation about “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History,” his new book. Moser traces a long, buried lineage of Jewish rabbis, artists, lawyers, journalists, and activists who opposed Zionism on religious, ethical, and political grounds—and paid for it with exile, censorship, and worse. He argues that anti-Zionism is not a synonym for antisemitism but a Jewish tradition older than the state it critiques, one that warned against a nationalist project built on exclusion. We’ll discuss Zionism founder Theodor Herzl, the myth of consensus, and what this hidden history means now.• US taxpayers have spent $44 billion to attack Iran, are sending $3 billion more to Israel for bombs, and now the WSJ reports that Trump wants to send $5 billion to oil-rich Gulf states to repair the infrastructure damaged in the US/Israeli war against Iran.• Belarus’s leader Alexander Lukashenko says that there are no available volumes of fertilizer to send to the U.S. This comes after Trump announced that he was working on a “massive Deal” to buy potash from Minsk at a steep discount amid the trade war with Canada.MERCHANDISE: DeProgram.MySpreadShop.comLIVE ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@DeProgramShowLIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShowhttps://x.com/tedrallhttps://x.com/JamarlThomas#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

Morning you are watching or listening to D. Program with Ted Roll and Jermarle Thomas. It's Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026 this morning. We've got an interview with Ben Moser. He is the author of anti-Zionism, A Jewish History, which is a great title because it's self-explanatory. We will be having him live in just a couple of minutes. Also, later in the show, if we have time, we'll see how it goes. We'll talk about the Wall Street Journal report that says that Trump wants to send $5 billion to the Gulf states to repair the infrastructure from the Iran War. And this kind of wild story about Belarus, where Trump basically was looking to solve the fertilizer problem for American farmers by sourcing potash, something we don't talk about very often in the news

here and sourcing potash from Belarus, inexplicably, a very close ally of Russia. So I don't know how that would have worked. And Belarus is like, yeah, we kind of don't know what you're talking about. So we're going to get into all that. Good morning, Jamar. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. You don't know right? I am doing very, very well. I'm very excited about our guest this morning. Benjamin Moser, I will just read his bio from the book. I've been reading the book for the last week. He's the author of Why This World, A Biography. of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a New York Times notable book of 2009. I will admit I'm jealous of that last one.

For his work, bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil's first state prize for cultural diplomacy. Sontag, her life and work, won the Pulitzer in 2020. Great book. I enjoyed that. And the upside-down world meetings with the Dutch masters came out in 2023. He completed anti-Zionism of Jewish history at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Colman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. I don't know if that's the same place Robert Caro worked on his magisterial power broker about the early development of New York City and the area, the highways and stuff around there. But anyway, let's go ahead and bring in Ben. Good morning, Ben.

Hi. Great to be here. It's great to have you. I've been reading your book with great interest. I was looking forward to it even before I read it, but it exceeded expectations. So, you know, I think the first thing we should just get to is obviously the timing of it couldn't be more potent. But obviously, you know, I can imagine you're going to be dealing with some considerable controversy. But I guess the first thing is if maybe you can just sort of lay the groundwork by explaining you know, Theodore Herzl and the sort of the early days of Zionism in the late 1800s

and how basically, what were the roots of Zionism as we know it today and that culminated with the creation of the state of Israel? Well, one thing that's really important to understand is that in the 19th century when Herzl starts out writing this book called the Jewish State, he's writing it in an explicitly colonial time where you can pretty much, if you're a white person from Europe, you look at the map and you think, where can I put my new colony? And you pick out someplace somewhere, always not white parts of the world. Like you would never say the Jews are being oppressed in Russia, which they were, therefore we should take a place in Russia. You would always look to the non-white parts. And so he looks to a part of the world

that's Lestine. But at the same time he's starting this project in the Jewish state, he writes, Well, we could also go to Argentina. But the weird thing about this book, and there's a lot that's really weird about it, and I had never read it until a few years ago. I just knew him as sort of this famous figure from history, is that he devotes three paragraphs to this question. It's called Palestine or Argentina, and it's literally three paragraphs. He says, well, Argentina would be great because they have a lot of land,

and it's a very rich country agriculturally, so maybe that. On the other hand, there's Palestine where it's, you know, our historic home, and maybe we should do Palestine, we'll tell the Sultan that we need this land for... I mean, it's almost like Trump wanting Greenland. You know, it's just really weird. And he says, we will form a wall of civilization against barbarism.

So he's inserting it in this very explicitly colonial and racist and imperialist kind of context, which Zionists later go on to deny. I mean, they devote a huge amount of effort to saying, that this is an indigenous liberation movement. The problem is that at the time that Zionism, Zion settlement starts, Palestine is between 95 and 97% non-Jewish. So what are you going to do with the 97% of the population?

And from the very beginning, they all agree. It's not a land without a people for a people without a land. Not really. No, and I mean, this is what I kind of grew up thinking. This was the story that Jewish kids used to get told. I hope less now, although I'm not so optimistic about it. But yeah, something that simplistic. And Zionism always was really simplistic.

Like it gives you a very easy solution. You say, well, the Jews are being oppressed here. So why don't we just take off to Palestine, which is our homeland, and we're going to just live there and nobody's going to bother? I mean, it sounds great except for a few obvious questions, like, does anybody live there? And does anybody want us there? And does anybody do other people just like,

like just pack their things and say, okay, you can have my house and my country and we're going to move somewhere else. I mean, but it doesn't occur to Herzl. And so the thing that's really fascinating about reading him is how absolutely crazy he is in a lot of ways. Like he has this fantasy about making his four-year-old son the doge of the Jews. And he has, and before that he has this fantasy about converting all the Jews to Catholicism. And he's going to bring the Pope in and the Pope's going to say something. and touching words and all the Jews are just going to become Catholics. But he never says, like, who are these people that are going to do this?

Jews aren't going to just, like, not like an every single Jew and the whole of Central Europe is just going to say, great, never mind. So it's really weird to read it because you kind of want to make fun of him and you kind of want to be like, dude, you're a fucking nut. But on the other hand, you have to take him seriously because these ideas did catch on. And they've had consequences for millions and millions of people. I'm sorry, was this a, I mean, I sort of read it as an analogy to Marcus Garvey in the Back to Africa movement.

Basically, we're an oppressed people. We get attacked and abused everywhere we are in the world. We've got to have our own place or we'll never be safe. Is that basically right? That's basically it. I mean, Marcus Garvey is very different. But like if you want to make a comparison similar to that, you can compare Liberia to that, which is basically like black Americans are never going to be accepted in this country.

It's irredeemably racist. We need to get out of here and just go back to Africa. But what happens in Liberia, which is exactly what happens in Israel, is that this basically Europeanized or Americanized population sets themselves up in the same kind of master slave, you know, dynamic that they were escaping from. And so, you know, so with the anti-Zionist that I write about my book, what we, I can now say we, because, you know, I've been part of this movement for a long time, but we are part of the movement that wants to say, everybody should be equal. It doesn't matter where you live. It doesn't matter your religion or your race or your sex or your sexuality or whatever it is. People should be equal. And that's a very, that's a very compelling concept. But it's a concept, of course, in the 20th century with the Holocaust and everything comes under. an incredible amount of pressure. And people just say, you know what, like, this is, it's a great idea.

Sure, like, everybody should be equal. But practical thing is, you know, this is, we're getting killed. We need to have our own place. And that's very understandable to people. And it's very understandable to me as well. It's just that when you read the history of this movement and the history of the Jews who have said, this is going to end badly. And then you look at the fact that the most dangerous place in the world for Jews by a massive,

massive margin since 1940s Israel. Explain something to the audience, and I guess maybe to myself, how did they originally get onto the land and how did they originally start getting the land itself as they started to expand in the Palestine? Meaning, well, so it's very, yeah. Yeah, I mean, so in the 19th century, what they do is they set up little colonies,

little settlements, little towns, you know, they buy some farmland or they buy some a little, you know, set up a little village or something, which, by the way, like people did all over the world. I mean, a lot of people, if you think about the settlement of this country, you know, in the 19th century, like people, like, I don't know, like a community of Swedes would buy a little area in Minnesota and they would all settle a bunch of Swedes there. The difference with Israel is that very, or with Zionism in Palestine, is that very quickly they start trying to ethnically cleanse and shut out the local population. So there's a whole, dynamic where they come in, they don't come as immigrants. I think this is the big, big difference.

They don't come in as immigrants. They come in as conquerors. And they explicitly say this. They boycott the Native Arab population. They won't let them work on their farms, which creates real dislocation for a lot of people. And as more and more people come in, it creates more and more problems. And it's not until 1917 to 1919, really, when they get the Balfour Declaration. They know, Herzl knows they have to have an imperialist backer, just like they have today. They have to have the U.S. paying their bills or otherwise the whole thing falls apart in 30 minutes. So they get the British Army basically to support them because they're still a tiny minority. I mean, even it's like, you know, even the Balfour Declaration is 1917. They've been at it for more than a

generation and there's still less than 10% of the public. So with the, I mean, the Balfour Declaration sort of seems to presage in my reading of your book, you know, sort of this unholy agreement between Nazi Germany and the Zionist movement where basically you have anti-Semites in the case of the Imperial English regime. And it's kind of like, oh, you Jews want to not be in Europe anymore? Oh, yeah, we like that.

That's fantastic. We can work together. This is really, I mean, just going back to like, because Marcus Garvey's a separate. topic. Going back to Liberia, this is really what they said, too. I mean, this is what the early founders of Liberia really appealed to American races. They said, like, you want to get rid of black people? Great. Get rid of us. We're going to go. The thing is about Zionism's bond with anti-sendom. They understood, Herzl says from the very beginning, our closest allies will be the anti-Sum. And they appealed very explicitly. I mean, the thing that's so weird

about Zionism is that they're always really, they say all this stuff. You know, you don't have to dig deep into the quotes to find this step. They know that they have to appeal to anti-Semitism in order to make this feeling. And so the British cabinet is pretty explicitly anti-Semitic. At the time the Balfour Declaration is adopted, and the only Jewish member of the cabinet, Edwin Montague who I write about in the book, says this is anti-Semitic in intent,

and it will have anti-Semitism as a result. And boy, was he right. To this day, you see how much Zionists, Israel, appealed to anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitic leaders, but also to the threat of anti-Semitism and the whipping up of fear among Jews. They were always very good at making Jews afraid. Ben, can you tell us a little bit about the, I mean, to me, it seems like, I mean, there's a lot to unpack here, so I'm glad we have some time to do it, but there probably won't be enough time. what it seemed to me that the big philosophical shift that creates that allows zionism to take hold

is the idea of judaism not as a religion anymore in other words like i grew up catholic catholics live all over the world except for vatican city there isn't really a catholic state anymore but you know catholics abound right um and judaism but for but for zionists um the religion, the faith, takes a back seat, and it becomes more of an ethnicity, more of a national status. And if you're an ethnicity, like the Kurds, then, you know, you need a homeland. If you're a religion, you can live anywhere. And I mean, so it's kind of a two-part question.

And you also point out something that I think is really forgotten now, is that Jews were living peacefully throughout the Arab world, throughout the Muslim world, before the creation of the state of Israel, and you talk about if you can, I mean, I was blown away, pun intended, by your discussion about what happened to the Baghdadi Jews, that community of over 100,000 people. The oldest in the world, yeah.

Well, I mean, the thing about it is that the Jews are both an ethnicity and a religious group. So, you know, in some parts of the world, like, and I'm sitting here in Brooklyn, New York, and believe me, I'm white. You know what I mean? Like, nobody's like, I'm... If I was living in Poland in the 19th century, well, then no, right?

Like, the Jews are seen as this separate thing. They have a separate language. They have separate ways of dressing. They have separate professions. They have separate neighborhoods that they live in, in some cases, like real ghettos. But the thing is, as the Jews get emancipated in the 19th century, a lot of, which happens first in the United States, and then it happens in France. And then France conquers most of Europe and brings Napoleon conquers most of Europe.

And then brings these progressive laws. into Germany and Italy and even into Poland and to a certain extent into Russia. So it's a real revolution. And throughout the 19th century, the Jews do pretty well in Europe, actually. And they are allowed to integrate and they're allowed to go to universities. They're allowed to enter professions. They're allowed to live in other neighborhoods. But at the same time, there is a distance.

I mean, there's a difference between views that some people, like the rabbi at the beginning of the book, He says, what we're not trying to be like other people, which is what people say is assimilation. You know, we're not trying to be exactly like other people. What we want is civil rights. We want equality. It doesn't mean we want to disappear. Now, the Zionists were extremely anti-Jewish religion. And this is something that is really hard to explain if you don't really, because there's this conflation of Jews and Zionists, but actually the Zionists really didn't like Judaism. They thought it was medieval. evil, they thought it was holding the Jews back, they thought it was all these stupid rules,

and you know, you have to have a beard, and you have to do all this stuff, and you have to look weird and all the stuff. And they, they really, which was understandable that people found that appealing, because these were a lot of the younger Jews and these places where Jews were repressed, they really were eager to, you know, be part of the modern world. So that's very understandable. But the problem with Zionism, I mean, there's a lot of problems with is but the central prohibition of Judaism is murder and violence. Judaism was a pacifistic religion. And so they understood that as soon as you get a state and as soon as you get an army,

the only way to do that is to overturn the most basic law of Judaism. So you actually kind of had to get rid of the religion entirely. And so a lot of people said that, yeah, we are like Catholic or we're like, you know, Episcopalians or whatever. or we're just, you know, we're Americans, we're of a Jewish religion. Or just like you can say, like, I'm an American Catholic or an American Muslim. But that was, you know, that was, that was actually quite a conservative response. And in the book, I do, one of the things I liked about learning about it is that there were also,

I always knew the left-wing responses to Zionism and to, you know, the pro-Palestinists. left. Actually, there's a pro-Palestine right, and there's a Jewish anti-Zionist right wing as well that may, they come out of the same place, which is that Zionism is bad, but they come at it from very different reasons. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit? Well, so, I mean, so if you're an American nationalist, basically, you don't have to be a crazy American nationalist, but, you know, you basically, you are American and you want to stay American, you see that Zionism is setting up a thing, which they're doing now, by the way, very actively, which is that basically you are sort of temporarily in America, but you're not really there.

Your actual homeland is 10,000 miles away. Or else. And this was something that was very appealing to anti-Semites as well, because they always said, well, Jews are just this fifth column. They're not really like us. And the Zionists definitely played up. on that by saying like you're not safe here this is what they're doing now i mean you know i'm in new york now and like people are whipping up fears of anti-semitism and you know i'm i'm here like

it's the idea that a jews are unsafe in manhattan is so crazy but like people really believe it because a lot of us including me were brought up with a sense of okay it feels okay now you're good but just that's what they thought in germany too like my grandfather was a German refugee from Nazi Germany. So they thought, well, you never know, and so you have to support Israel, because if stuff goes wrong here, then... That's Plan B.

Plan B. And so that's also very appealing to people. But, you know, the anti-Zionists always said, listen, like, you're not safe in Palestine either. Nobody's safe forever everywhere. You know, we don't live in utopia. We live in history where things come and go. And in fact, in Jewish history,

quite a lot of times, it's gone. very well as it is now. You know, I mean, the U.S. is not an anti-S. country. And for people to... Despite what we're being told in the news every single day. I'm still walking down the streets in Brooklyn. What's the psychology of that?

You know, I live in New York. I have a Columbia alumni card. So I got out to campus, even though it was locked down during the... Right. During the protest, it's on the lawn. I walk in there, and I've told the story here on the show before, but there was a Jewish woman, a young woman with her rabbi, and she was convulsed in tears. It's very upset.

And I looked around to see what had provoked this. And there was just the encampment, which was very sleepy. I mean, literally, the kids were inside the tents. The tents were closed. They were sleeping. There was nothing going on. No chanting. No walking around.

No marching. Nothing. It couldn't have been more boring. I was really disappointed trying to report on it. And I was looking around and I was like, and she's like, how could they think this? How could they be like this? In other words, it was the idea of anti-Israel pro-Palestine protest, Pekhafia's, you know, Palestinian flags that was just had her, you know, in hysterics. And I just, I thought it's all in her mind.

And I was just like, what is the psychology? there. Well, I mean, it's a really unmovable psychology in a lot of ways for certain people. I mean, I was brought up with a little bit of it. Like, I didn't grow up in a really, I always emphasize, like, I didn't grow up in a super Zionist environment at all. I grew up in a pretty normal American, you know, middle class world where we were taught about anti-Semitism, but I also grew up in the U.S. South. Like, you know, my parents grew up under Jim Crow. Like, we learned all about that stuff, too. We learned all about, you know, feminism, you know, the women's suffrage movement. We learned about all these movements.

And I think that we were taught. I was taught. I thought I was taught. The moral of the story is don't discriminate against people. Take people as they are. And, you know, don't, this is bad for Jews. Yeah, sure, it's bad for everybody else, too. Like, let's not do this.

But I think a lot of people that grew up in really strictly Jewish environments, where they really didn't know other people. Like, I didn't go to school. I went to normal schools. You know, like, I didn't go to school with just Jews. But the over-emphasis on the Holocaust, and I think that we should learn about the Holocaust, obviously, I think we should learn about slavery.

I think we should learn about the genocide of the Native Americans. Like, I don't think that anybody has this exclusive thing. Like, you know, they're on oppression. But a lot of people who grow up in those Jewish environments, they are so brutalized, really, into believing themselves to be victims. And you say, like, wait a minute, like, you've been suburban New Jersey. Like, you're okay. Like, the Holocaust did not happen in, you know, Santa Monica, California, or wherever you're from.

But, like, they can't get out of that. And it's really a prison. I think Zionism is a kind of prison for Jewish people. Like, they can't step aside and say, wait, wait, I am walking down 116th Street or wherever you were. you know and that's exactly it yeah and like somehow i'm jewish and still like going to go to cvs and buy some toothpaste or whatever i was doing that day they can't but like i do understand it because i have this holocaust background myself and there is a sense of okay let's see um we'll hopefully He's got him.

He finally got him. The IDF. We've been looking for that. All right. We'll talk. Well, he'll be back. He'll be back. Oh, there you.

Okay. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Sorry. I got a phone call on my other phone that came through. No worries. It happens.

Sorry about that. No, but so I do understand that psychology, but I think the question is always like, what is what you're being told true? So I had to do a lot of my book, at least the beginning, it's like, what was I told in my background that turned out to be not true? And it's actually quite a lot.

And it's really quite upsetting to think that the people, like my parents, who again, my parents are not fanatic at all. They never even set foot in Israel, you know? There weren't like those people that were, I mean, there were people like that. Like, if you're Jewish, like, you know those, like, Israel fanatic people. But they weren't like that. And they're actually quite liberal people.

But they did sort of, you know, they kind of in the back of their head. They always had this idea of, like, what if it happens again? So, yeah. It's well. I don't, like, it's somebody who's Native American and African-American have both. We don't, we never really got that capability of using, either genocide or slavery as a justification for anything. And the idea of using it now, people will look at you like you're insane.

And yes, because we're white. Is that what it is? Yes, of course it is. I mean, I think it is in this country. I think that, like, Zionism, if you look back, a lot of what becomes real toxic identity politics in this country, it actually originates with Zionism in certain. Because if you look at the history of black or Native American struggle, just to take two, you know, black people weren't given the option to kind of melt into the melting pot.

Right? No. And we were. But like I think that a lot of what I thought of as Holocaust education, right? Like I thought about like this is good. It's good to learn about this. It was actually a kind of way of allowing Jews to be victims in a way that we really weren't. Because actually, like, if you look at income and education and all that stuff, Jews are at the very, very top, the whole American scale, and have been for at least two or three generations. So, you know, where is this oppression?

But we all have this memory of oppression that is actually very recent. You know, my grandfather was a, as I said, was a refugee from Nazi Germany. So it's not that far away. So it's not crazy to me. But I think what the anti-Zionists were always saying, they were saying it in all these different voices was, this is just going, this can't work. It's going to be a total disaster. And here are the reasons. So I try in my book to give as many of those reasons as I can.

Well, it has been a disaster. I mean, just be clear, this idea of this victimhood thing, what is taking place in Israel currently has, I would argue, destroyed that narrative. But not for some people. Not for some people. That's the thing. So, like, I grew up, the way I grew up, and I think, I mean, I don't know, I'm sure other people have this, too, you know, from different backgrounds. I don't know if you had this as a black or Native American person growing up, but, like, I was really taught to think of myself as lucky, to think of myself as, despite all this stuff, you have to do certain things. You can't, you have to represent certain things.

Like, you can't bring Jews into disrepute by certain behaviors, such as things that anti-Semites associate with Jews, you know, like especially money stuff. You know, like, you have to be as honest as you can. You have to be, and you can't. And the other one was racism. You know, you can't complain. Like, you're lucky in America, and you should be on the side of trying to help other people who are actually. But, like, if I had started whining about, like, I'm being repressed.

because I'm walking across the campus of Columbia, like, I can just see my grandmother like whooping my ass. Like, you know, she would have been so embarrassed. She was like, you think you're in Nazi Germany? What the hell are you talking about? Like, this would have been so undignified. And I think that, like, that sense of dignity has gone missing from a lot of the ways that a lot of Jewish people now

are interacting with society. And you see it in ways, I think, because of social media, you just see that, like, Zionism is sort of a, it's almost a mental illness. Like, people who are inside of Zionism, like they really, they're either inside of Zionism because they're actually bad people and they're really legitimately racist.

Or a lot of them are just, they're really, they're traumatized, but it's not their trauma. You know, it's someone else's trauma. And that's the part that's really hard for me to accept. Let me skip ahead a little bit. I mean, now we have three, and I want to go back to Israel itself as an apartheid state or the brief against it as an apartheid state.

We now have really existing Zionism, right? Three quarters of a century. We have a nation state. We have the experiment. We see how it's gone. I mean, obviously, it's hard to predict the future. But at this point, it looks like Israel has a, at least in the foreseeable future,

is going to be really isolated, right? I mean, support in this country is just running out like the tide. You know, young people have turned against it. voters of both parties have turned against it. I mean, it's not hard to imagine in 10, 15 years that the U.S. relationship with Israel is not going to be anything close to what it is now politically. I think it'll be unsustainable for either party. I mean, what happens then, if I'm right? And Israel becomes basically like, you know, it's a city state in the middle of the Middle East.

It's just, you know, it's all by its lonesome. I mean, is it able to continue somehow? Or is there any, or is there any also, is there any reckoning about, you know, what happened in Gaza and what is going on now, well, also in Gaza still, but also in the West Bank and now Lebanon and Syria and all that? Everywhere. I mean, because it's not just a city state that's just sitting there, minding its own business, right?

It's a city state that has been bombing and murdering people on an enormous, almost, unthinkable scale. Because, you know, we see a little corner of what's happened in Gaza. We see a little corner of what's happened in Lebanon, like Syria. No, I don't think, I think it's very much, it's a completely unsustainable project. I think that 10 or 15 years is probably generous. I think that they know that. And that's why they're just trying to create as much mayhem as they can. But I think that... Forgive the analogy, but it reminds me of like, you know, 1944, when the Nazis knew they were going to lose. And they were like, we've got to kill as many Jews as we can,

before we go out of business. Or in my book, I think the better analogy in this case is apartheid South Africa. So, you know, Ronnie Castle is, who's this great struggle hero, who spent 27 years in exile fighting for free South Africa. He says, don't forget apartheid was never as violent. Because this is a thing, like once you get, you know, so apartheid actually starts, I mean, officially there's all sorts of, you know, racial operation, if you want to call it that, before 1948 in South Africa, which is the year of the state of Israel, it's also the year of the official

beginning of apartheid as an official policy. And, you know, for a long time, you know, even in the 80s, they thought that they could sustain apartheid, because South Africa was actually very rich economically, and it was very strong militarily, in large part because of its collaboration with Israel. You know, they got the nuclear bomb from Israel. They were, they supported each other. They had the same basic view of the neighbors. Put it that way. And then, you know, something goes wrong economically. That's basically what happened and militarily.

And I mean, Israel is in a very bad position. I very much hope that it can be, that Zionism can be destroyed. And that a state equality and a non-racial state can be established there. But, you know, we're not, I mean, I don't make predictions about it. I just think from history, you know, these regimes don't survive historically. Rhodesia didn't survive. Algeria didn't survive. South Africa didn't survive.

Nazi Germany didn't survive. You know, Herbie of Milosevic didn't survive. There's Rwanda, you know, the Hutus in Rwanda didn't survive. So, I mean, there's just a very low chance historically that you can get away with something. Would there be consequences? because I have a hard time. I have to be honest with you. I don't know how the state collapses without.

Let me ask you this. Do you think that the state collapses without America's support? Meaning I think America is going to go through hard times at some point, meaning whether it's economic, whether it's military, I don't think we can maintain the way that we've been engaging. But that also means that Israel and the billions that we get, the weapons that they get in order to continue this kind of military, expedition. I'm curious from your take. Just as an aside, a conversation that's often had,

whether it's, whether Israel is the dog on a leash or whether Israel is controlling America in this case, where do you follow on this? I'm just as a aside, you've done research into Israel and everything else. I think it's, I really, I mean, I'm shocked by what Israel gets there's no other country in the world that we get away with this and get away with interfering in American elections, with punishing American politicians, with interfering in our media, you know, buying up TikTok, buying up now CBS and Paramount and all this explicitly for the purpose of protecting Israel. You know, if China did that, or even if France did that, you know, if an allied country that nobody's really afraid of or England did that, people would freak out.

But no, I think Israel controls a lot. I mean, there is no question about it. And this is one of the things when we're talking about anti-Semitism is, like, how do you react when there's an anti-Semitic theory, you know, like the Jews control the media? And then you have Larry Ellison saying, I'm buying TikTok to protect Israel. Like, you don't even, it's, it's, it's, what do you even, how do you even talk about that without, you know, falling into anti-Semitism? We're the Maclemore thing. That's a great example. Well, that's actually really, I mean, I'm obsessed with that, actually, because I think it's a big shift because that was like three weeks ago, two weeks ago.

And you see the reverse surprise and effect, which even a month ago, people were getting canceled. People like me, it's changed. And now the shoe is on the other foot. And they're not going to, they've been used to bullying us and pushing us around and smearing us as racists and smearing us as whatever. that I think that there's not really a lot of muscle memory among Zionists for really having consequences because you say consequences but like they haven't had any so as you know if you've ever raised a child or a dog you know if you let them if you let them do stuff they'll do it and so I think that that's gonna there's going to be a real price tag and and you know I think the anti-Zionists had been warning of this for more than a century, and nobody listened. I think, yeah, I mean, you say this in the book explicitly. I couldn't agree more. It's like,

it was people, clear-headed people, Jewish people, saw this 150 years ago. This was the logical outcome of this philosophy. We have a question from a viewer from under, Archbishop Tutu, who grew up in South African under apartheid, visited the Occupy, West Bank and saw Israeli a part hide was far worse. Have you been to Israel? Yeah. Have you? Yeah, yeah. Well, I will. What do you think? Yeah. Well, I'll tell you something that I think is the origin of this book. I was in Hebron, which is in the West Bank, which is an ancient city. And I was allowed to walk down a street, literally a walk down a street because of my quote unquote race and because of my foreign, you know, good passport, right? Like I have an American passport.

I can kind of come where I want to go. And there was, and I was guarded by people, these soldiers, quote unquote, Israeli soldiers. And I talked to them, and even though I've lived abroad for a long time, I still speak English. And I can tell when people are from like, you know, Brooklyn or California. And I was like, and these are the quote unquote

indigenous people who have come there. I'm allowed to walk down the street. Now, I grew up, as I said, I grew up in Texas, you know, I mean, I know I wasn't there for Jim Crow, but it wasn't that far away. You know, like when I learned about Martin Luther King and stuff, it felt like the middle ages that like black people couldn't go to the movie theater or something. And it's just like, it sounds really weird.

But like, I remember, you know, I still talk to my parents about it. Like, it was really, like, that was just the reality of their society. And it felt so disgusting to have that. And then I went to South Africa for this book. I mean, just feels physically like, I don't want to be in a place where, like, actual inhabitants of the city are not allowed to walk down the street because they're of the wrong race. That just doesn't, that just earns my stomach. But then I went to South Africa to interview Ronnie Castles for this book and he said, oh, he said, South Africa was never as bad as bad.

And that's what, you know, you quote Archbishop Tutu, but Nelson Mandela said the same thing. Oliver Tambo said the same thing. I mean, there was never like a black city in South Africa that looked like Gaza. They just basically wanted to keep black people down to, to to clean their toilets, you know, and to mine their diamonds, but they weren't actually murdering them. I mean, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was post-apartheid that Archbishop Tutu also led, they determined that about 8,000 people

had been killed under the 50 years of apart, almost 50 years of apartheid. Now, like, Israel reached 8,000 deaths in Gaza within a couple of weeks. So Israel's, the mass killing machine of Israel is, It's on a much more airifying scale than even that. I mean, there's, it's just, there's really nothing that compares to it. How do you even get them out of that mindset?

I mean, to put it in perspective, Israeli soldiers, rape the man on TV. Yeah. The audience, 60% said that should be okay. And even when there were protests in Israel where, what's like, not many people, you got like a million people on the street. They were there because they wanted their hostages back, not because he cared about what Nanyahu was doing from the standpoint of the murder and mass killings

of all of the people that were effectively there and putting them in camps. Well, they put those in four of the Wringtists too. Yeah, which is kind of my point. A population like that, how do you retrain? How do you? And toward that, can I just add to that? I mean, it's also, I mean, to what extent,

how isolated is the information space within Israel, I mean, given the fact that first of all, you know, they're the only people in the world who speak this resurrected formerly dead language and the media is carefully controlled, right? So that they're not, you know, most Israel, many Israelis are not really getting a sense of what, how they're perceived. No, no, they know exactly. Oh, really? Okay, exactly. First of all, they have the same phone you and I have. They do speak English. Yeah, most of them do. Yeah, they're from Europe. Yeah. We'll see them in Hebrew. We'll see. Some of, a lot of them are from New York, obviously.

But like, not, but, you know, but they're not, they're not in North Korea. I mean, that's one of the weird things about Israel. And if you look at the polling, you know, you have like something like 82% of the population supports the genocide. So, like, what do you do with those people? I honestly, at this point, I don't really care. What I care is what do you do with the Palestinians? And how do you stop the killing of the Palestinians?

And how do you save them? Because I think there's... They're doing it. I mean, we've been paying them to do it, but they're doing it. they're doing it and we are paying. And it's so like they have to live with themselves ultimately. But I think that Palestinians also have to live with them. And when you say like how many people, it's only 7 million Jews.

And something like 500,000 Israeli Jews have been directly involved in the time, either as soldiers or a support staff or something where they've actually, you know, they're not just looking at their phone. They're actually doing it. So I don't know. I just want to, my concern now is really with the Palestinians. And how do we stop the bombs falling as Jews and also as Americans and as citizens of these lots of countries, not just Americans, who have helped this? And I don't have the answer.

Well, stopping the bomb falling is easy. Stop giving them money. Stop giving them weapons. Stop supporting them in the United Nations. Stop, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, that's American. And if that happens. Economic isolation.

Yeah. Well, that's happening. I mean, that's going to happen. They can buy their way out of everything they want. You see what they've done. I mean, here we are in Rumble. But, like, there's all these platforms now that are not controlled by scientists people. And they're growing and growing.

And the people don't trust the mainstream media. And it's not just, I mean, there's lots of reasons people don't trust the New York Times and all these other places. But a lot of it's been. How are you being treated, by the way, as an. author. I mean, you have, you're with a major publisher. You know, is it hard to get publicity, get interviews from mainstream media outlets?

It's hard to get fair interviews. It's hard to get fair attention. It's hard to get out of what I write about in the book, which is the speech rules. But you have to say, do you support Hamas? No, I don't support Hamas. Do you do this? Do you do that? To actually get to the moral and ethical and

intellectual core of my book, which is the question of like, why are Jews against this? Should more Jews be against? this. They'll go quite far out of their way to question your intellectual credentials, to smear you. I mean, I've gotten a lot of smears. You know, I'm anti-Semite. I'm a Nazi. I'm a self-hating Jew. I mean, you see in the book, like, this vocabulary is so consistent that it's like they've been saying. It goes all the way back, yeah. Oh, like they haven't had a new thought in years. All they do, every once in a while, they get a new, like, you know, they hire a new PR agency. But basically, they've gone on and on mirroring people, Nan Golden, who, you know, the book ends with, the famous photographer.

You know, I mean, she is like, you know, this quite small, you know, now older woman who is a photographer. And the things they say about her. I mean, it's just, you can't imagine the hatred that they... For Jews who protest that. I mean, not to mention Palestinians. who are hardly even human for them, hardly even matter at all. It's, so yeah, so, I mean, it's, we're in the same media environment, but I think they don't understand how much it's shifted

and how much of an audience there are for, I mean, I don't know how many people are watching here today, or, you know, after it's online, but there's a massive, if you look at just any YouTube thing about Palestine, you have hundreds of thousands of people watching. I suspect this will do well, yeah, for sure. Let's hope. It shared anything is a really good indication of that.

Like, I don't know if you saw recently. He came out, gave this scripted apology. Oh, my God. And we're crying at the end of the show. You know, it was so pathetic. It was that German word, Freundschaman, you know, where you. Freud. You feel like for someone who's making a fool of themselves.

Yeah. It was, I was going to do another foreign. expression, which is in Spanish, they say you don't have any blood in your face, which means like you're so shameless that you don't blush. Isn't that good? Like, you have no fucking shame. And that's, I felt like that guy, I was like, you have no blood in your face. You are coming out here and you're still giving this thing.

I think that, like, if he had sincerely apologized and he had said, listen, like, I'm a performing artist and I rely on people like Robert Kraft. I'm really embarrassed that I caved into this pressure and I apologize. Free Palestine would have been a hero. But like, but you know, I mean, so what I always want to say is that like I have an evolution that I tell about in this book.

I'm not giving anyone a purity test. Like a lot of people have made mistakes including me. And I've written things and said things that I'm totally mortified by. I meant it well, but I still thought that there was something about Zionism or Israel that could be saved. And I don't think that anymore. But if other people haven't gotten there yet, I don't want to bully them and say they're stupid or they're racist or all this other stuff that people say. I just want, like, if someone can read my book and they're like 40% skeptical about Israel and Zionism and I can get into like 46%.

Then I feel like, okay, you know, I feel like I've at least not betrayed what I think of. is my moral obligation. And that seems like a great place to leave it. Thank you so much for coming on and for writing this amazing book. It was a real pleasure to read it, and it was a pleasure of speaking to you. Thanks so much for having me on. Any time? Absolutely, man.

Thank you for this. All right. Thank you very much. Take care. All right. All right. So that was Ben Mosier. For people who joined us in the middle of it,

I would encourage you to go back and watch the interview from the beginning. He's the author of Why This World, a biography of Clarice Lus Specter, but more importantly right now, the author of the book we were just talking about, anti-Zionism, a Jewish history. And he's, you know, he's a smarty pants. He won the Pulitzer Prize. I'm jealous. I was only a finalist.

So anyway, yeah, I thought, I thought, I mean, I knew this was going to be good, and it was. Yeah, that's fascinating. We had to get Robert Shapiro on. Rabbi Shapiro is in a similar vein where he makes the argument. I don't know if Shapiro wrote the book on it, but he goes into this notion of anti-Zionism, Zionism and how Zionism hates Judaism. And as Moser pointed out.

Which is so perverse. I mean, Zionism is an apostasy of Judaism. It's anti-Jewish. It's a really. No. I mean, it really is. It's a political movement. And the argument that is usually made is, I mean, because they always try to make it.

It's rejecting like the study of Torah, right, in favor of like, let's set up our own ethno state where we can be the batterers. Yes. Yeah. It became that. I think it was awesome. I think it was awesome. I mean, he didn't duck. J.T.

He answered questions. He was. He didn't see what about serenia. There was no sonaliisms. He didn't sonali either. It's amazing. So you come on, you ask a question. And he gives you.

answer. You can agree with it. I can disagree with it. It's an amazing for an interview. Like, hey, it's the sun hot. Yes. Be like, whoa. It's fucking hot. No, he's great. He's great. I would have him back anytime. Sure.

One thing I would love to ask, you know, either him or or some other anti-Zionist rabbi. And this is from a fundamentalist Christian aspect. to a Jew. How do we break the power of Zionism and dispensationalism in the Christian church? Because that's the shield that Israel has. In the U.S. Yeah, for now. But you heard what he said. I mean, he kind of agreed with me that, you know, the, you know, it's, things aren't looking good for team Israel these days. And it doesn't, it's not, you know, this relationship's not going to last. The dispensationalist, I mean, pardon me. What is dispensationalist?

Just so I'm clear, I want to make sure we're on the same projects. So what dispensationalism is, so there's two different pillars of it. One is that they believe that God works in different dispensations of time. So think about chapters in the book. And one chapter, God works one way, another chapter. He works another way. Then another chapter works in other way. So basically it's like he's playing 5D chess.

He's not consistent with what is it with what is he asked. do. The one thing that the dispensationalists teach, though, is that Jews, not the children of Abraham, but Jews specifically are always the chosen people of God. So if God changes his mind based on what chapter of the book that you're in, why does this one footnote with this astrate always go right on through? That doesn't make any sense, especially since the Bible over and over and over again says, I have the Lord like God, I change not. He never changes. And so, me, no, I'm a Baptist. I believe that you're saved by faith. Faith in what? Faith that I will be redeemed. I'm a sinner. I'm fallen. How do I get my sins forgiven by asking for forgiveness?

Ethnicity doesn't play into it. My race doesn't matter. No, if you go through, if you read the Paulian Gospels, no, he was a Pharisee. He studied under the chief rabbi of the time at the temple, him Gladriel, is that I counted all as dumb. My religion profits me nothing. My race prophets me nothing. We're all one in Christ. And so the thing is, I hate to interrupt this, but we have 10 minutes left in the show. We have a hard out at 10 o'clock, and we do have to hit two topics. So, okay, bye-bye. Okay, sorry about that. Thanks, Robbie. That was very rude of me. We'll break down back away. Couldn't be helped. Okay. So let's get to it. U.S. taxpayers have already blown $44 billion or more, more, really, to go after Iran with Israel.

we're sending $3 billion more of your money to Israel for bombs. Now the Wall Street Journal says that Trump wants to send $5 billion more to the Gulf states, who last time I checked were not poor people, in order to repair the infrastructure that got destroyed by the Iranians because we attacked Iran. I mean, I can see the case. I can see the argument here. I mean, after all, it's like, hey, the reason that their shit got broken. blown up is our fault. I mean, that's kind of true. On the other hand, okay, go.

They made their agreements. They made their bit with the U.S. They chose Fat Tony to defend them. Meaning they made all of these choices. And the idea that Donald Trump is talking about sending billions when he claimed that Saudi Arabia was spending a trillion dollars in the United States. Okay, if they're spending that much money in the U.S., just tell him to keep five billion of it. repair their infrastructure. Why do we need to send them money? No, they made their bed in this. They chose to work with the U.S. They chose the Axe America to go after Yemen. They chose the stuff. Obama didn't go to Saudi Arabia, said, hey, would you like to bomb Yemen? Saudi Arabia came to Obama and said, we would like to bomb Yemen. Obama might have given them the green light, but Saudi Arabia is the one that chose to do it. Saudi Arabia has been running, I'm not going to call it a genocide, even though I call it a genocide like operations. in Yemen for the last, what, 10 years? They made their beds. Why are we paying for the bed that they made?

Tomorrow, effect on the midterms, right? I mean, this just seems like just another brick in the wall for the Republicans where it's like another story about how, you know, everything, prices are going up, incomes are going down, and we're sending taxpayer money not to help Americans, but to help people who could well afford to take care of themselves. A head shopping dictator. Right.

I mean, it seems like a whole lot of, of bullshit. Okay, P.W. Walker, 1360, thanks for the five Canadian dollars. Ellison used the U.S. government to force the sale of TikTok to him, so it's worse than just the purchase itself. And $10, thank you very much, from Tullio Pantacoloni. Biden has literally stated that he's a scientist on video multiple times. Vandirland says that they follow the principles of the Talmud. how do we remove these psychopaths? Well, Biden is no more, but Trump is just as bad. Yeah, all of them are horrible.

I mean, like, keep it, I don't know if you saw. By the way, do you agree with what I just said? Because you could say, did JT? I think you're out of your mind. I think the U.S. is pushing. No, I think you're, you could, look, I was, no, you're, look, you're right. It's like they climbed into bed. I mean, look, they did the stupidest thing that you can possibly do.

Instead of making nice with their next door neighbors, they went and, and, and, up sucking foreign cock from the other side of the planet from another hemisphere. And then they're surprised that, like, you know, they're getting their ass kicked for in return. It's like the Ukrainians, right? Like, you should, the Ukrainians, job one, if you're the president of Ukraine, is to make nice with Russia because it's a big, powerful, culturally similar, next-door neighbor with hundreds of miles of common border. You know, I mean, similarly, if you're Qatar, job one is to make friends with all of your neighbors, including Iran. And if you choose not to do that, and Iran controls the critical

Gulf of Hormuz that you need in order to get your shit in and out of, unless you're flying, then, like, you know, that's on you. You get your, you went to, you, you basically went to war as a vassal state of Israel and the U.S., and yeah, you lost for it. And I mean, I'm thinking from the point of view of the U.S., you know, Fat Tony sometimes needs to say, okay, okay, I'll take care of you because you did this for me. But, you know, but, yeah, it's all about fat Tony these days. And let's see. We, let's see.

Oh, Richie says, I've had Robbie's playlist on AutoPlay for at least 24 hours. I'm going to put that back up here. That's on YouTube. Go to West Glacier Gaming. Do the same thing. Go to a playlist and play Robbie's longest playlist over and over. He needs that. It's important to us. And thanks for joining us and all that. If you miss the Ben Moser interview, I recommend that you go back and check it out. TMI coming up in five minutes, but we do have time to talk about Belarus. So fertilizer is, you know, it's partly an oil byproduct. And the price of it's been going way up. Farmers are getting their asses kicked financially here in the U.S. due to the war.

due to inflation, due to oil prices, blah, blah, blah. So Trump said, oh, don't worry, I have a solution to you. Even though I've declared a trade war with the Canadians, and the Canadians, I've pushed them off to become associate members of the EU, and I have giant tariffs against them. And so your fertilizer costs are going through the roof where you normally source it from Canada. Don't worry, I've got your back.

I've talked to Alexander Lukashenko of the president, president of Belarus and he's got your back. He's he's he's shipping that sweet, sweet Belarusian potash all the way across Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean to the great United States of America and you will now have cheap fertilizer. The problem is someone talked to Lukashenko and he's like, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. We don't have, we barely have enough for ourselves. We ain't exporting nothing to no one. So I don't know. I thought this was very droll. You know, it's like, it's just, it's just another, it's just another ridiculous story, right?

I mean, it's, I mean, Trump just makes shit up. And then people discover that they're being lied to. I don't think it's a, you know, I mean, they, they know instantaneously. Farmers are very smart people. They have to be in order to stay in business. I mean, what is Trump losing his mind? I mean, what is this about? And not to mention, Belarus is literally in a national union with the Russian Federation.

It's literally like this, right? I mean, there's no way they're sending anything to the United States without checking with Vlad. And Vlad would, they don't need to check with Vlad because Vlad's saying no. I mean, it's Joseph Goebbels. The last days of 1944, Gerbil's said, I'm sure you've seen it. It's famous. It's kind of like the Baghdad Bob of his day. So don't worry. We have we have panzer divisions waiting to intercept the the Russian hordes on the eastern border.

We're going to be fine. It's coming in. Trump was looking at the economic numbers. Trump does know how to read polls and spreadsheets. And so he sees what to read at all. And so he knows what he does. He doesn't know numbers. You can't go into debt the way that he did without understanding of what the red number good, black number bad, right?

So he understands that we are heading for a really. rude awakening. And he's like, don't worry. Everything's fine. Your housing prices should be going up. That's okay. We love the inflation. That's quote ever. If I were the Democrats, I'd have that on loop.

Look at Wall Street. It's doing so well. Which is true. But that's what Trump is looking at. I mean, the guy, he is the Joseph Gerbils of our day. Well, I think they may be looking at a war to get us out of it. We're in. We're in two of them. I mean, where do you need? Like, I give an example. Right now, EU or the NATO countries have put out a propaganda film trying to get white Europeans ready to die at the hands of the Russians.

It's not like Europe is geared up for it. Russia has geared up for it from the standpoint of legislative. I mean, Russia put through a policy through the Duma, many people may not have paid attention to it. That effectively points out that if they're Russian citizens anywhere that are being maligned in any particular way, Putin has the legal authority to go in and get those citizens. Looking at you, Estonia. Meaning, meaning they are gearing up for this. Russia's not playing with this. They have hundreds of thousands of men in weight with new military kit and hardware and everything else in preparation for a larger war with Europe, that Europe seems to be doing everything in their power to provoke. Will the U.S. get involved or would the U.S. just look at it as here's a business opportunity?

Good question. This will bring us out of Amoraz. That does it for today. By the way, it's just some clarification about something that came up yesterday. The YouTube's really are $5.10 and $20. the higher sums that were cited were if you pick the tax-free options. So it sort of automatically adjusts. But if you just use your, if you do this through your phone,

I think it ends up costing more than if you do it through like a desktop, iOS, or, you know, whatever. So do it through, you know, if you don't want to pay that higher, I don't know. I'll have I'll have Robbie come on to explain this, but we've got to go. Okay, we'll see you guys tomorrow. Two-hour show, 9 to 11 a.m. Tomorrow morning, Eastern Time. Looking forward to it. See you then.

Bye, everyone. Bye, JCP. Bye-bye.