The Dispatch Podcast - From Islamism to Nationalism | Interview: Ben Judah

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

Jamie is joined by Ben Judah, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Europe Center and the author of This is Europe: The Way We Live Now. The two discuss the future of Saudi Arabia and it's royal family, the crown prince's attempts to modernize the House of Saud, and the future for Jews in Europe. Show notes: -Ben Judah's profile at the Atlantic Council -This is Europe: The Way We Live Now -Judah: Sauda Arabia's empire of sand -Roger Cohen: For Europe’s Jews, a World of Fear -The Atlantic: Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. This is Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is Ben Judah. Ben is the director of the Transform Europe Initiative and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Europe Center. He also is a journalist who has just returned from Saudi Arabia a couple weeks ago where he wrote about the kingdom and how it is dealing with the regional conflict that's going on over there or the threat of regional conflict after the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza War. So we get in all those issues about what is going on in Saudi Arabia and the region and how they view Israel's fight against Hamas and Gaza. But we also discuss with Ben what is going on in Europe where he is from and has written about in books like, this is Europe and this is London, about what is the future of Jews

in Europe with the outbreak of anti-Semitism we have seen in that region. So we get into all those issues and many more and what I think will be a very interesting podcast for the dispatch followers. But without further ado, I give you Mr. Ben Judah. I wanted to have you on because I read that you were in Saudi Arabia and you wrote, and you wrote a couple pieces from there. But you also cover Europe, you're from Europe, Jews in Europe as a subject that you're familiar with. So I think you are a perfect guest kind of for the moment we are in.

But let's start in Saudi Arabia and maybe discuss when you were there, why were you there, whether the plan was to be there during what has it gone on in the region or that just happened to be a byproduct of the moment in time that you plan the trip. and what occurred on October 7. Well, it just so happened that I had been previously invited to go to Saudi Arabia for a major investment conference known as FI, A.K.A. Davos in the desert is how you'll find it referred to in the New York Times or the Washington Post. And, you know, as I was kind of making plans and preparing to go, the kind of terrible

events of October the 7th and what's come afterwards, really frame the trip in a whole a whole new light. And in the piece you wrote, I believe was it for the Times? I wrote several pieces. In fact, as you mentioned, I wrote one for the Times about how the geopolitics

in the Middle East kind of look like from Riyadh. And then I wrote a kind of longer essay for unheard about Saudi Arabia and the attempts of the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as,

or more universally known, MBS to transform his kingdom. And this is what you wrote in The Unheard, actually. This is Saudi Arabia seven years after MBS castrated the morality piece. But make no mistake, this is still a country where you can be beheaded for a tweet. The paradox is his kingdom has never been more liberal

or more dictatorial. Lay that out for us. What it was like in the Saudi Arabia of today? I think you've got to go a little bit further back to understand the Saudi Arabia of today, which is, you know, Saudi Arabia is kind of founded really for the third time as a kingdom really belonging to a family in a way that we would be very familiar with in sort of plantagenet, England or Capation, France, but the rest of the world has not been familiar with in these kind of phases of modernity. This took place in the kind of 1920s under Ibn Saud. And Ibn Sound really was a medieval warrior in a lot of ways that found himself at the intersection of British imperial interest, US oil interests, and towards the end of his life, kind of meeting Roosevelt in the Red Sea to form a kind of agreement about geopolitics and energy, which became one of the cornerstones of the world war.

It's a little bit like imagining that a figure from England's medieval and deeply devout past, you know, maybe we could say somebody like William the Conquer had found himself in contact with the Seven Sisters, oil companies, and being granted through kind of no action of his own, the greatest single family fortune the world has ever seen. Now, fast forward, you know, we see the current king of Saudi Arabia is the seventh, is the 25th son of Ibn Saud, and MBS is his seven son. There's a saying in the Middle East, which is that from the kind of works of Ibn Haldun, that no dynasty survives its third generation, and MBS and the kind of faction around him are deeply worried that their family, and it really is their family. have wasted the greatest fortune ever known to mankind, because Saudi Arabia, as oil begins its final decades, as the spice that the world economy runs on,

is, you know, is, it's going to run out as the kind of magic ingredient that's made Saudi Arabia, by some measures, the most cash-rich society that's ever existed. So they're extremely worried about the future of Saudi Arabia, and MBS sits at the end of really a long-running fight within the House of South over whether the country should be oriented in a kind of Islamist, internationalist direction, or whether it should be oriented in a nationalist direction. And MBS is very fond of saying to his advisers,

we are now entering a phase of nationalism. In American imagination, when people think of Saudi Arabia, they think of, you know, veils and kind of classic Arabic tribal kind of garb and dress. But you write in your piece that this is not a country where you saw many veils or at least as many as would be in popular magistration in the United States. And I guess that speaks to this tension between NBS and the clerics. What is that tension like, you know, has he been able to neuter kind of the opposition to perhaps his more liberal instincts, how is that playing out?

So you and I could have been having this conversation in, say, 2013, 2014, and I could have made a very persuasive case that people were freer in Iran than they were in Saudi Arabia when it came to what they could wear, what they could do, how they could be educated, how women could live, you know, what life was like, you know, on the street in the home for, you know, your average kind of person, certainly your average woman in Saudi Arabia. I'm not saying it's completely convincing, but you could have made a very strong argument. And now, really, that situation's been quite dramatically reversed, especially when it comes to the conditions of women, because MBS has part of his revolution

tried to break with that Wahhabis tradition and that kind of clerical power that goes back really to the founding of the House of Saud's kind of power in the kind of 19th century as an alliance between Wahhabis clerics and the kind of fighting arm of the dynasty. And a lot of the key things he's done are, for example, castrate that morality police, which used to really kind of terrorize inhabitants, allow people to kind of play music in public places, allow cinemas to open, relax and sort of end the kind of tyrannical kind of dress codes for women, allow women to drive. So we have this sort of this contradiction or this paradox in Saudi Arabia, which is one of the

most dramatic liberalizations for how your average person lives and certainly how the conditions of women are experienced has been pushed forward by one of the most autocratic leaders that Saudi Arabia has seen in recent memory, who is, of course, infamous for what happened to the Washington Post contributor Jamal Hashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where Saudi agents, according to CIA on the orders of MBS, dismembered him with a bone sort. That lays a good background, I think, to where Saudi is playing in what we see as a a regional conflict, at least not a hot conflict regionally, but certainly one where there's discussion of that. Were you able to get a sense of where, let's say, that the Saudi leadership is

on what is going on between Israel and Gaza versus maybe the man on the street to the extent you were able to talk to them? I'm not going to be able to talk about the kind of man on the streets or the people outside kind of re-ad in any kind of meaningful sense about their geopolitics because Saudi Arabia remains a very oppressive society where people are very frightened of talking about sensitive topics like sort of Gaza to kind of, you know, visiting foreigners. I can talk a bit about it, but I would just kind of, you know, it's very important as a journalist to know when people might not be telling you the true extent of their feelings. But I can talk about the view from the Royal Court and the view from the kind of political advisors

and that kind of Saudi elite about geopolitics. That goes back to kind of what happened with the rise of MBS. So the rise of MBS is not like Prince William, who will wake up one day and he will be, you know, God willing, the king of the United Kingdom and the crown realms beyond the sea. Saudi kind of monarchs emerge from within the House of Saud through the Chamber of Allegiance. They have to win it politically. So MBS coming to power is more like kind of Cromwell coming to power than it is like, you know, King Charles who simply had to simply had to wait. Now, MBS kind of found himself, as I said, the seventh son, the 25th son, as a kind of teenager when he was like many Saudi princes.

sunken, kind of lethargy and fast food addiction and video game, the long video game afternoons. He was told by one of his cousins that your dad's poor, actually. Your dad, despite being the governor of Riyadh, has not amassed a meaningful fortune of his own and is, in fact, deeply indebted to businessmen. And this revelation terrified the young MBS because he realized that if he and his father, or he couldn't move his father closer to the central center of power as the king, the family would sort of spin away in that constellation towards, if not poverty, but certainly very far away from power and certainly they might, depending on how these successions went, not have any influence, any power, any security at all.

So MBS, you know, went on a long-running attempt politically, take power, then the family to take power within reality. And he finds himself sort of in the same situation towards the Saudi state as he found towards his father. His father hadn't built up a fortune of his own and said he was very happy to live off essentially a kind of giant welfare check from the Saudi treasury.

And the Saudi state continues to live off what is essentially a check from Saudi Aramco and from the oil industry. So MBS, you know, envisions himself as a leader who's going to rule Saudi Arabia for the rest of his life. He's kind of same age. He's only a few years older than me.

I'm 35. But he's planning a long life for himself. And he knows that as he plots out a reign that he wants to measure in multiple decades, only around a third or half of that will be in the oil era. We're only looking at a few more decades where Saudi Arabia can rely on that giant,

well, that giant welfare check, before it finds himself in a new situation where it cannot pay for the state as it currently exists and the social system that currently exists. And he knows that that could be extremely dangerous for the House of South. So really, his geopolitics stem from that realization. And that's why he sees himself as wanting a less ideological Middle East, where he normalizes with Iran and would also like to normalize with Israel because he believes that he needs to turn Riyadh and Saudi Arabia into a new version of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates if he ultimately and the family ultimately is going to retain power. So what do you think he is doing behind the scenes right now, seeing what occurred on October

7th, how that may affect what his plans were to come to terms of some sort of agreement with Israel. You know, what, what, where, where does he sit right now? There's really important to kind of remember how Arab leaders look at their deals with Israel and they don't look at them ultimately as deals with Israel. They look at them as deals with the United States. And that goes back to the diplomacy that kind of Henry Kissinger did in 1973 and set the stage for the diplomacy after which, which is the deal between

Anwar Sadat and Monachin Bagan. was really a deal between Egypt and the United States to leave the Soviet orbit and to receive a large permanent subsidy, essentially, for its military and to find itself in a situation where it was protected by the benevolence of the American order and not finding itself in what the Egyptians had the foresight to see was ultimately only a short-term plan to be in any kind of Soviet orbit. And then all subsequent deals of Israel have operated more or less on the same measure. You know, Jordan made peace with Israel in, I believe, 1994 because the Hashemite kingdom, the last of Lawrence of Arabia's projects in the Middle East, had Batsdam Hussein, and it viewed a Treaty

of Israel as a way to repair relations with the United States. And the recent Abraham Accords were either in the case of the UAE, an attempt to become the most influential Gulf state in Washington in a way to secure better arms, or in the case of Morocco, a deal over West Sahara, where the United States would bat Morocco's territorial claims there. So MBS is looking at a potential deal with Israel, which he has specified he is still interested in doing despite the current war and the current conflict as a way to do a deal with the United States. So what does he want?

He wants some kind of relationship, some kind of security pact from the US, maybe not NATO Article 5, we pledge kind of come to your defense, Star Treaty, maybe, you know, article three and a half, or three and three and three quarter, something close to that, and a kind of civilian monitored nuclear program to transform Saudi Arabia. maybe is energy and implicitly to provide a counterweight to the fact that Iran is now a nuclear threshold, threshold state. So those are the things that he wants from the United States. And one of the reasons that he also would like to do this is about this kind of ideological battle. As I said earlier, he views himself as a nationalist who is bringing his country out of a phase

of Islamism into a phase of nationalism. He takes a lot of inspiration. from NBZ, who is the crown prince of Dubai, and he views him really as the kind of pioneer of what a kind of contemporary Arab leader can look like. And in order to win these sort of conflict against Islamism, which he believes has impoverished Saudi Arabia culturally and politically and left it, you know, sort of isolated and backward relative to where it should be,

it's very important to diminish those conflicts which could be used by them, such as either the conflict with Iran or the conflict with, all the conflict with, you know, all the conflict with Israel. And Hamas, and of course, it's kind of backers ultimately in Iran, understand this perfectly well, which is one of the reasons why the attack on October the 7th took place. It was also an attack on this plan. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take

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It's about how to save the House of Saud from modernizing Saudi Arabia's economy. How do they go from Riyadh to the new Dubai? And so they're not concerned about, ultimately, about Israel's security. They're concerned about, you know, how do events that going on in the Middle East play into that. They look at it like this. Situation A, Hamas rules Gaza.

backed ultimately by Iran is not a situation they like, they don't like it. Situation B, where Gaza could be run by some kind of UN trusteeship with international Arab forces and they would sort of pay for it

and the PA might return. They would much rather it was in that situation. But they don't know how to go from A to B without exploding the whole Middle East. And there are two things that they're very worried about. they are worried about Jordan and Egypt. They look at Jordan and they see this sort of half British king that's got more properties in,

more properties in Knightsbridge and in West London than many of the great British property developers as potentially at risk, given that his population is majority Palestinian, of some kind of overthrow, things get really, really, really bad. be chalked up as an Iranian win that you could see, hypothetically, you could even see Hamas take over large at parts of Jordan. And that's the kind of nightmare scenario for them. They don't want to see Jordan collapse.

That's not on the cards for now, but that's the kind of thing they're worried about. And they don't want to see Egypt fall back into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, of course, an offshoot. In a kind of spiritual sense, not a direct political sense, of the kind of Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. That was what General Sisi, you know, so brutally crushed and overthrew, you know, restoring his sort of military secularism to power. And the way that General Sisi is viewed from Saudi Arabia is not a very good leader.

You know, very bad of balance in the book, very bad economically, just hasn't done anything meaningful. Economies in a very, very bad state. there were protests that were already beginning before this conflict. So they were very worried when I was there about what could happen to Egypt. So that's why they had been publicly calling for a, publicly calling for a ceasefire and hoping the conflict could be, could be wrapped up, could be wrapped up sooner. But if they could get to a situation where Hamas had disappeared in the Middle East

that had not been completely exploded, they would be fine with that. As we're discussing, NBS has this interesting family dynamic. Is there a chance that when his father dies, that he could be removed from the de facto leader and not become king? Or as he so cracked down on dissent within, you know, royal descent within Saudi Arabia, that it's almost automatic that he becomes the king of Saudi Arabia. you when you arrive in Saudi Arabia, one of the things you immediately start seeing are his

portrait hanging in many locations like over lobbies next to that of his father. So it's he, when you go to the kind of museums that he's, he's open and there are the lists of the names of the kings. It doesn't end with his current father, the king, ends with him as the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. His image is everywhere. His face is everywhere. If you go to as part of his kind of modernization drive, you know, they've launched called the Riyadh seasons, turning this city where

in a lot of ways, fun was banned. Public fun was banned. Like music was banned. It was frowned upon to have, into a whole series of international events and sporting events and music events

and sort of boxing events. You were there, in fact. I'm a big boxing fan and there was a major, I mean, it looked like you were at the fight between Tyson Fury, the British heavyweight champion versus Francis Nagano, who was until he left the UFC, the heavyweight champion in mixed martial arts. Yeah, well, I'll tell you that I think that Francis was, I hate to kind of ever let down

a kind of a Brit, but I do actually think that Francis was robbed of that match. But, well, yeah, I'll tell you, you know, as that match began, there were, you know, videos of MBS kind of crowd, was encouraged to thank him for, thank him. for it. So, you know, he's not just kind of ruling from the palace in a kind of precarious way. He stamped his face and authority on Saudi Arabia. And he's treated as if he is already the king. You know, the House of South is a kind of mysterious family. And, you know, the upsets have happened before. So never say never. But it certainly looks like we're going to be sort of dealing with this guy for decades and decades to come. And this comes back to the question

of life. But Ben, it's maybe a brief second to explain maybe how these things happen. First of all, he would be the first generation post the sons of Ibn Saude to become king if he became king. And if I call correctly, you probably can explain better. The way this happens is when his father dies, there are different family factions that it's almost like the Pope meeting. You know, they come together and they determine the next king. And I guess the question is, has he alienated enough figures within that conclave, however it happens, that, you know, they turn on him once his father leaves? Well, it's always possible, but the read that you'll get from Western diplomats in Riyadh is that he has cemented his power over that kind of family conclave, the way that Oliver Cromwell, had over parliament at the end of the British sort of the English civil war in the sense

that there might notionally be a vote, but it's assumed he will be the sort of the next ruler of Saudi Arabia. So that's not what people are thinking. That's not how people are assessing the way things are going for or going forward. Never say never, never, Middle East is a strange place, you know, but I don't think that that is likely. It is likely. But you think beyond wanting to get a deal with Israel, which is still as objective, he has made overtures to Iran, is the sense that, you know, at one point there was this belief that Saudi Arabia was hoping Israel would strike Iranian nuclear plants and kind of decommissioned them. Is his view now that he just wants to make peace deals with even forces within Iran that might want to overthrow him?

Well, he's in a place now where he believes that Iran is a nuclear threshold state. And It's only a matter of kind of assembling the bomb, not getting yourself technologically in a place to do it. And the best thing in order for him to achieve his vision, vision 2030, as he puts it, of transforming the Saudi economy, is to try and normalize relations in the Middle East and to try and turn the Middle East away from a kind of conflict zone

and more to a marketplace. In many ways, he's in a kind of neoliberal phase, but you go to his kind of major, businesses. It's all about investment. It's all about opening, kind of borders. It's all about trade. It's all about trade. But it doesn't mean he's not a kind of temperamental kind of ruler. And Saudi Arabia is kind of kind of quoted at the beginning, remains a country where you can be beheaded for a critical tweet. You shouldn't have any illusions about that, illusions about that either. But his grand strategy towards Iran is that

The best thing that he can do is sign a deal with the United States, i.e. through a normalization with Israel, to acquire a defense accord with the U.S., comparable to NATO, but not exactly the same, and to get a civilian nuclear program, which would allow him eventually to be a nuclear threshold state too. The root parity with Iran goes through Jerusalem in his calculation. Before we move on from MBS, as you mentioned, this could be a leader that is with us for decades to come. You write in your piece, for the optimist, he is a Saudi Adirchuk or Peter the Great, the latest Arabian incarnation of a westernizing dictator for the pessimists.

They see the smile of Saddam Hussein, according to the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi and his strange facial tics. Which is he, do you think, Ben? What is your view of that? Well, I don't know is the answer. And, you know, but, you know, I'm all of Iraqi Jewish descent and Iraq's played a lot of roles in different sides of my family's history. And when you speak to, you know, people of my family who knew Iraq in the 1970s, they would tell you that Iraq was making huge progress, especially on the question of of women and complete equality

and that you could visit Baghdad and it looked too different then from visiting Kuwait or visiting Dubai or visiting kind of re-ad. Think about you know something Lord Atson said that

you know, supreme power absolute power corrupts absolutely and I think just it's very difficult to plot out somebody's mental state over 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years in that kind of in that kind of in that kind of position.

One thing that we can begin to judge is is MBS's economic plan working? Like you go to this kind of giant investment forum at FII, the Davos in the desert, you have all these stalls to these mega projects and these are like the

Mukha, a square skyscraper that's going to be in Riyadh, the cubic size of 20 Empire State buildings. It's like neon, the linear, city through the desert, 115, 114, 14 kilometers, I believe, I believe long, all of these many, many other mega projects as well. And the question is, is that an economy? Like, are these things even going to be built? Like, most of the people I spoke to there didn't believe that these things were going to be built. And if you look at the kind of raw economic data of Vision

2030, it's succeeding in some ways on its own terms. It's failing on most, on most to them. So we're now about halfway through this kind of economic program, this sort of, these kind of initial kind of multi-annual plan. The share of the Saudi economy, which is state, i.e. state oil versus private, has not changed. The share of private investment that's coming in has not changed. Unemployment has not meaningfully changed. The one area that has been absolutely transformed to the participation of women in the workforce. It was around kind of 30% before Vision 2030. They were hoping maybe to get it to kind of 40, 45% after a few years.

It's now over 65%. So really that transformation is the part that's working. So looking ahead, you know, it's important to start to ask ourselves, can Saudi Arabia balance the books? Now, the thing about decarbonization is it's a bit of a kind of infernal wheel for Saudi Arabia in which contrary to expectations, as the world decarbonizes, and we move essentially the core of modernity, we move it from a fuel-based economy to a metal-based economy. It's electric cars powered off lithium. It's, you know, that's kind of windmills, that's kind of solar panels. what that means is still a huge amount of oil

that's going to be needed and used for decades to come, but it's going to become much more expensive to get oil out of the ground in most countries in the world. So places like Ecuador, quite a high break-even price to get your oil out of the ground, you'll be incentivised by global decarbonisation standards and just by economic logic to kind of stop doing it. So it means that the amount of the amount of,

of oil being extracted in Saudi Arabia shoots up, and therefore Saudi Arabia earns more money in the initial phases of decarbonization before running out of money. So are we, all it takes right now with Saudi Arabia's books is Saudi Arabia didn't really have debt about 15, 20 years ago. And I mean, it just didn't have debt as a kind of, the country itself, unlike Britain or France, the United States, didn't have debt. Debt's beginning to shoot up. The budget doesn't balance about quite a high price of oil. Before COVID, when the price of oil really went down to about $20, it was a bit of trouble economically, not seriously,

but a bit of, it wasn't this kind of festival that we're in now. So it's quite conceivable that if a couple of things happen, such as the end of the energy war between Russia and the West, could happen, you know, or some kind of. of dramatic breakthrough in battery technology could happen. The FTEs full of our stories every day telling us that there's been some kind of small advance on sodium batteries. That could make life much more difficult for Saudi Arabia economically in the years to come. And we don't really know what MBS looks like as a leader without unlimited money. I want to transition to

Europe with the remaining time we have here. You've written extensively about Europe, about Jews in Europe. Once again, we have seen a conversation, which I remember the Atlantic published maybe four or five years ago, is there a future for Jews in Europe? I feel like that conversation has once again come to the four. From the New York Times, they reported that there's been a 240% rise in anti-Semitic incidents since October 7th from the prior year before in Germany. In the three weeks after the Hamas attack in Britain, there were more anti-Semitic incidents. that in any three-week period since 1984, Roger Cohn in the Times writes,

perhaps not since the Holocaust, which saw the annihilation of about two-thirds of Europe's Jewish community, have the Jews of Europe lived in an atmosphere of fear so acute that it feels like a fundamental shift in terms of their existence. And one way to transition it is, I believe, at the conference in Saudi Arabia, was Jared Kushner.

And I think he made a statement to the effect that he probably would feel safer in Saudi Arabia at the moment after October 7th than in some parts of Europe. what do you make of that? Is that over-exaggerated? Well, I think, you know, in the conference center, he might have felt very safe. But, like, you know, in a conference center in London, he would have felt very safe.

He would have felt very safe as well. But, you know, I just want to kind of say very briefly, I've always been very bored by anti-Semitism. I don't want to think about it. I shouldn't have to think about it. It's such an ugly, intellectually barren thing. But I've got to think about it. You know, Jewish, being a Jew is kind of you're forced to think about anti-Semitism. And I was, you know, when I kind of remember talking to my grandmother, it was a Holocaust survivor,

and I was asking her, you know, what was like in Nazi Germany or in Occupied France. She never really was interested in talking about what it meant to be Jewish then. She was always very interested in what it had done to society. She was talk about the mass marches, about humans having numbers, modernity itself perverted. And there's a way of looking at anti-Semitism, which is, you know, like when a body gets sick, you do a scan, the disease will show you which were the weak, organs and

antisemitism shows you what parts of modernity are shows you in a sense the nature of the nature of modernity. And if 20th century anti-Semitism was biologically racist and age of classification, in an age in which the anti-Semites were proud of

Western global dominance, the Jew was seen as some kind of infiltrator that had to be destroyed or to save that dominance. An age of mass parties anti-Semitism took on the form of mass parties in an age of like book length idea, you know, credentialed ideologues, anti-seemites were credentialed ideologues. And in the age of charismatic leaders, you know, the anti-semites

charismatic leaders. So when I look at anti-Semitism today in Europe, but also in North America, I think it's really a European story anymore. I think it's kind of Western, Western story. You know, look at what's been happening in Montreal over the last few days. In Montreal in the last few days, We've seen a near riot at a university, a professor yelling at a Jewish woman to kind of go back to Poland with an Arabic swear word. We've seen attempts to firebomb synagogues, bullets have been fired at Jewish schools. And all this is taking place in Canada, a country where not a single part of the state, no political parties, no government official is backing this. of anti-Semitism. It shows modernity for what it is, which is we actually live in these very weak states in a lot of ways in societies that are internet buffeted, where hysterias and

fandoms are coming out of the internet. We're living in societies that have not digested or really understood the consequences of the demographic transformation that has been the last the last few decades of, you know, transformative mass immigration. And it's a society that, you know, because it's so used to thinking about an ideology, having ideologues and publishing books and being credential, it doesn't want to kind of appreciate the fact that in an internet society, the fact that you've got large chunks of the further left or the further right, you know, sort of about leaders, but in a kind of.

of online culture of comments and posts and like ironic accounts with the kind of faces of bodybuilders or of kind of, you know, kind of smiling dogs spewing a kind of anti-Semitism. It doesn't mean it's not kind of, it's not kind of real. And I think that anti-Semitism is really kind of revealing society for kind of what it is. So I don't think that we are, I think in a way the kind of golden age of Western Jews, you know, after the Holocaust is coming to an end. But I don't think we're going back to the kind of dark ages before. I think we're going into something manic and gray.

And I think, you know, in the way the kind of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany didn't give you a portrait of the Jew, it gave you a portrait of the German. What's happening now gives you a going to portrait of a lot of what's going on, going wrong with Western societies or a lot of what's contested in Western societies. With that, Ben, thank you for joining the Dispatch podcast. Thank you. My pleasure. You know, Thank you.