Episode Transcript
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Hi, friends. This is Dick Flax. Along with Duraka Larama hall, we're starting a new set of episodes of our, of our podcast talking strategy making history.
We decided we really had to come to grips to some degree with aspects of the crisis in the Middle east, of the Israel Palestine crisis, and ramifications, both politically and humanly. And we've got a couple of episodes planned. We're going to tell you about that in this introductory conversation we're about to have. Welcome, Duraka.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you. So in this episode, we just want to do a short introduction and talk a little bit about the crisis in Gaza, what our thoughts are about it and the political context around it, what's at stake for the left and why it's been, or often is such a difficult topic for progressives of good faith and to sort of make sense of, and very fertile ground for people of bad faith to make mischief with. So it is something that has, I think you'd agree, Dick has long been a challenge for the left, for progressives, is how to make sense of foreign policy and be consistent on it, principled on it, and not find itself ripping at each other and splitting over it. So we are going to take a few episodes to listen to other people, be in conversation with folks who are closer to the issue than Dick and I are, to try to make some sense of it, suggest concrete and practical things that people can do to make the situation better. But we thought we'd start with this short introduction, kind of laying on the table where we stand, where each of us stand, what our general perspectives are on the conflict, on the cause of palestinian statehood, and the role of this issue in the left so that we don't have to repeat ourselves in further future episodes. We aren't tempted to monologue so much because we really do want to center other voices here and listen to them. So with that, I prepared a couple of questions that I thought would be good to guide our discussion and sort of provide a little bit of background for our listeners in terms of where each of us is coming from on this issue. In no small part because it is the kind of highly emotional set of questions that people tend to not necessarily listen with the most generous of ears and are always sort of like listening for the thing unsaid and make conclusions about your politics based on that. So I thought it'd be good to kind of get on the record before we're engaging with other people to sort of say our piece and make it clear where we stand. So we'll start with you, Dick, and with the first question.
What kind of personal connection or biographical history do you have with the Israel Palestine conflict, with the movements for statehood in either community? Any way you want to approach where? How long have you known about this problem?
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Well, I come from a background.
I'm a red diaper baby, as it's been clear, I think, during our whole conversations together. And my parents were jewish. They were american, born of both of their parents sets, were immigrants from Eastern Europe. And my grandfather on my father's side, was one of the charter members of the Workman circle, the arbiter ring, which was a jewish working class socialist organization founded around the turn of the 20th century.
And he was always a working class guy, but not particularly political. Anyway, the point is, I was raised in a pretty assimilated, not particularly focused on jewish identity at all kind of family situation. But I went to work at age 17 in Camp Kinderlin, which was just celebrated its 100th anniversary. It was a camp founded by the left wing of the workman circle in 1923, and it was very consciously a framework, a cultural and educational framework that's supporting a definition of jewish identity that was very much the diasporic identity. In other words, it was aimed at, came out of yiddish speaking, working class people in New York who were socialists, who supported the Bolshevik revolution in Russia because they thought, in part because they thought it would be an end to pogroms and anti Semitism to support that. And the camp itself was proudly inculcating yiddish language and the prophetic biblical tradition.
[00:05:43] Speaker C: In Judaism, which was critical of authority, critical of state authority in biblical times and down through the ages, that was socialistic in values. So I didn't know much about this until I went to work at Kinderlin. It was at Kinderlin, after a couple of years, that I met my future wife, Mickey, who was very much raised in this yiddish socialist communist culture in the Bronx that was quite flourishing back.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: In the first half of the 20th century.
[00:06:17] Speaker C: That's what she grew up in. I learned a lot from the camp.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: And especially from Mickey, who was very.
[00:06:24] Speaker C: Fluent in Yiddish and very conversant with all of the nuances of this identity.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: That I'm referring to.
[00:06:32] Speaker C: Well, one feature of that identity was it was not only non zionist, it was really anti zionist.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: If Zionism means a notion that the only salvation for the jewish people was to have a homeland that Jews could emigrate to, and that would be the defining feature of jewish identity if you could establish the homeland. This was not at all the identity that she was raised with and that we learned to embrace. And Zionism was really scorned, I think, by the kind of socialist oriented jewish activist folks that I'm talking about before World War II. One more point, though, about my connection to Israel is that after the war, Israel's foundation was supported by the communist movement globally. The first country to recognize the state of Israel was the Soviet Union, and the second was Czechoslovakia, which under a communist party government. So that's a striking historical fact that I remember. No one else does.
But hebrew language was introduced into the public schools of New York just about the time of, and not coincidentally, with the formation of the state of Israel. And since I never had a religious jewish education, but all my friends did, I thought, well, it'd be great to learn Hebrew in junior high school. And so I did take hebrew classes, learn to read Hebrew, learn to speak the hebrew dialect that became dominant in Israel, namely the sephardic dialect, you might say. And since Yiddish is written in the hebrew Alphabet, it was good for me to learn both that Alphabet for both learning some Yiddish and learning Hebrew. So in my junior high was, I think, most of us in New York. Jewish kids in New York, no matter what your politics thought Israel was good thing. It was a haven for the persecuted european jewish population, seeking a resting place, seeking a new life. And the dominant politics in Israel was definitely socialist. The kibutzim were models of almost utopian socialist organizations. So all of the values that seemed to be present in Israel were okay. It wasn't that I felt personally any need to be identified with Israel strongly, but it was something that I thought was a good thing at first. And I'm sure that view was shared. So that attitude began to change as Israel began to develop.
And what I came to finally realize, and this is a basic view I had of this whole situation, that Zionism as came to be practiced in Israel, has a fundamental error at the heart of it, in my opinion, and the error is the belief that you can embody a religious and moral and cultural identity and value system and have it connected to a state. A state in the world of states is not a moral framework. And the very expression reasons of state distinguishes what state reasons are from what ordinary human moral judgments might be. So to preserve a state, violence, force, and every kind of strategic action is justified from the point of view of the state. But that contradicts the zionist idea that this was a jewish state which would fulfill the jewish values and jewish identity.
I can't see how these two can be easily reconciled. And there are indeed, I think, forms of Zionism from the previous to the establishment of the state that didn't think that a state was essential for a jewish homeland in Palestine because of recognition of something like what I'm trying to say.
In fact, I knew one guy who went to Israel, went to Palestine to help create a kibutz in the 1920s when he was a teenager and help build the infrastructure for what became Israel. He was an engineer, and he left Israel in 1948 when the state was established. I met him decades later. I said, why did you leave at that very point? He said, because I knew it wouldn't work. And what he meant by that was morally so that was a kind of important encounter to meet this guy and have that said, anyway, I'm going on too long. But that's the answer that I would have to what you're talking about. And I'm laying those cards very much on the table because I think if there's a meaning to the phrase anti Zionist, I guess I would accept that. Not that I think Zionism needs to be abolished, but it's just not. I'm an anti Zionist from the point of view of the jewish people. I don't think Zionism is the answer for the jewish question as far as Jews are concerned.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: That's interesting. And, yeah, good that we're getting a lot of these sort of, like, categories and loaded terms out there. From the beginning, I'd say to start where you ended and then go backwards.
I've often defined my politics around Israel as being anti anti zionist or in the sense that I don't think that jewish people have any less of a right to a nation state than any other group of people. And the way that sometimes people talk about the uniqueness or not of Israel today as an ethnostate or a state that subsidizes religion, it's talked about as if it's rare or unique in the world, and it's not. I mean, every country in Europe is an ethnostate. Many of them know, either very recently or still today, subsidized churches or relationships to churches. It's sort of a very strangely american perspective on the world that the norm is not an ethnically based nation state, whereas the norm in the world is very much that it is. I think there are problems with all nation states. I think having a healthy critique of them from the left, from a humanist, internationalist, civil libertarian, minority rights perspective, all of those perspectives is good, but I want to be consistent and apply the same theoretical critique, know rigor to Sweden that I do Israel. And I feel like sometimes the discussion about Israel is decontextualized and sort of everyone treats it as a special case.
Whether they hate it or they love it, they're treated as special case. And I want to treat it as less of a special case. And how I got there was growing up in a very pro palestinian home with a father who was very engaged in the palestinian solidarity movement, was, as an attorney, defended a group of palestinian and one african immigrant activist in Los Angeles that the federal government was trying spuriously to deport for many years. And so these were people that I grew up meeting and were the adults in my life, were people from Palestine, from the diaspora, from other liberation movements who all. Yeah, a victory for the PLO, a victory for the palestinian people as a moral imperative. And so I think as a young person, okay. And then the counter came from my mother. As it often happened in families where we debate politics, was like lot of kitchen table debates about what was happening in the Middle east, about Israel, about Palestine, about the palestinian struggle, about all of those things. Like through the height of where it was no longer a conflict, the arab israeli conflict between Israel per se and arab states sort of gave way to a conflict between the PLO and allied liberation movements engaging in terrorism to try and dislodge Israel. So that's what I grew up with. And having my mother be more sympathetic to Israel, to the existence of Israel, to the plight of israeli victims of terrorism. And my father very much putting the whole struggle into the context of struggles against imperialism, against occupation, against the vestiges of colonialism and so forth. So it wasn't until, well, when I was in college and got involved in DSA, which is a very jewish organization, and I would, or was then, I should say, in the. Also, I think, interestingly and importantly, it was an organization where there were lots of jewish folks with very different opinions about Israel. No orthodoxy. There was no, like one line.
There were lots of people who came from. Who were raised in exactly the tradition you were talking about. Dick Bundist, anti zionist, you know, internationalist marxist tradition. In fact, one of the most interesting little experiences I had as a DSA youth section organizer was being at the hundredth anniversary banquet of the jewish labor boond in New York and meeting all these people who joined in their youth at the beginning of the 20th century. So there were like, folks with that background that was very rich and interesting and fascinating to learn from. There were zionist socialists and people very connected to the left in Israel and had been active in the creation of Israel's estate.
And the support for what had been was until the dominant force in israeli politics, which was the left, which was the labor left, the socialist Zionist left. So a lot of people that I encountered had those kinds of politics. And then, just like tons of people who were very secular jewish folks who didn't feel strongly about Israel but thought it was sort of a done deal, its existence was a done deal, and people shouldn't bomb kids, but that the big political project was freedom for Palestine and the establishment of a palestinian state. And all three of those groups, I would say, strongly supported palestinian statehood and independence. And so in that milieu, I saw a more nuanced sort of set of perspectives on it than I had grown up with. But also all of it was in the context of the peace process, the Oslo process of the 90s, where both sides, you could say, had given up on a military victory. And the idea was, well, nobody can win this militarily. We have to sit down and create a reasonable path to two states and move on. And so a lot of my political formation on the issue happened in that context. People who came from a radical pro Palestinian, support the PFLP, support the PLO, support their military actions against occupation, et cetera. But oh my. Like, actually, we can't win that way. We can't hijack and bomb our way to victory. So we need to sit down and do something peaceful. And then people from the other side of, like, we're going to defend the existence of Israel, but realizing you can't occupy people and that it's not going to be safe until there's two states. So from there, through DSA, doing work internationally and with other democratic socialist youth organizations, I had, at the end of the very brief, wonderful, amazing opportunity and sort of political education of being active in the International Union of Socialist Youth and the Socialist International at a time in which both of the leading parties on the israeli and palestinian sides were socialist parties, were members of that international family. So you had not just the Labor Party of Israel, but also Moretz, the further left socialist party, and then both Fatah from the palestinian side, as well as the Progressive Party and progressive youth in Lebanon. And one of the sort of backside stories, footnotes, you could say, about the Oslo process was that a lot of the initial agreements, the initial discussions, the initial frameworks, were worked out in that partisan context between those parties behind the scenes, not acting on the behalf of their.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: To.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: So I was sort of raised in that sense in that time to think of the issue in a partisan way, as in, like, there's a left in Palestine, a left in Israel. They would like to come together, get beyond violence.
Fatah will recognize the existence of Israel.
You had Rabin and Perez saying, there's no Palestine without Jerusalem, et cetera. That was the moment that really shaped me. And then lastly, I would say, know after that was a long time ago. And as Oslo has become more and more of a footnote in history, a know set of maybe missed opportunities, I would say, is the time that I've been active in the democratic party. And until I was kind of removed and purged by reactionary forces, you could know I played a role in the California democratic party as someone who could help bring people together that were coming from a pro palestinian or pro israeli standpoint, get us to a partisan political discussion and enable the party actually to say some pretty important and groundbreaking things about palestinian rights, about a long term solution and these sorts of things, and bring a lot of different kinds of people together. Again, that was like, from a party within a party context.
And this sort of tees up. The next question is that, I have to admit, is that so much of my thinking about the issue, and it's something I've cared about since I was in the crib and there was a portrait of Yasser Arafat in my apartment to today. It's an important issue to me. But I realize that a lot of my formative experiences, like where I developed my political analysis of it, is a long time ago now, is that period of the 90s where we were having a very different discussion, I think, than we are now. So that was a long answer as well. But hopefully that at least gives listeners a sense of where both of us are coming from and why we might talk about Zionism or palestinian statehood or terrorism or freedom struggles or any of these things in the ways that we.
[00:22:41] Speaker A: Let me just make one thing clear. I don't know if I believe that any people have the right to form a state, but there is no question that Israel exists and that any idea of abolishing the ability of the israeli people to sustain their society, I am opposed to. In other words, it's not even though I'm opposed to the zionist state project.
The fact is this state now exists, the nation exists, and there is no solution that does not recognize the right of the people in the land there to remain. So I just want to make that clear. But I think we'll talk as we go forward, even today. We'll touch on what we think the future might hold and that's an interesting question right there. In terms of the future of the jewish state in the context of Israel Palestine is still to me an open question.
[00:23:43] Speaker C: It is in Israel an open question.
[00:23:45] Speaker A: I believe, for quite a few people. Anyway, I just thought I'd make.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: That's actually a good segue. The next question is if you were going to give an elevator speech about where you stand, and let's do try to make this an elevator speech, but describe yourself and your politics and on the issue, what do you think the future should be? What is a long term solution or where do you stand on it?
[00:24:09] Speaker A: I'm influenced a lot by Peter Bynard is one example. He's a very serious and deep, I think, an analyst of this issue because he once was a pretty devout Zionist who's made 180 degree turn. And where he is now is something that I understand and agree with, which is the two state is not a solution in the long run because the framework for a palestinian state geographically has been so quite deliberately disrupted by israeli policies and practices, terms of settlement and so forth. But what's more fundamental is creating a. And this is what I think his position is. And is what I position is. It seems more utopian and yet I think it's more realistic in the long run, which is to have a single state in which all people, regardless of their ethnic or religious identity, have equal rights and equal chance to be part of a democratic process in that country. And that includes the occupied West bank areas in Gaza, I would assume, or not excluding those from what I just said. And this makes sense to me in part from having been to Israel a couple of times and seeing the actual color of the population in the street. For one thing, there's a large number of people in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv who are not european looking. They are middle eastern looking. And you can't really tell physically that much difference between someone who's a palestinian and someone who is jewish in the streets of those cities, I think. And secondly, having had the chance in Israel or when we were in Israel to go to Ramala and to meet some palestinian intellectuals over the last 2025 years ago and realizing how similar they are to us, I mean, in terms of class identity, if you might say, in terms of cultural interest and in terms of ways of thinking even. And I don't know that most israeli Jews have had that experience that we had when we had the chance to go there. So I guess what appeals to me right now, and I hope we able to explore this directly during our podcast about this is formations now in Israel like standing together, which is a emerging movement, political movement of Jews and Israeli Palestinians to form a new political force on the grounds that I'm just talking about standing together, meaning we both mutually come to take fully seriously both sides that we are here together on land that we both legitimately claim. And the conflict between those claims is real, but there could be a political outcome that meets the needs and recognizes the full validity and dignity of both of these two peoples on the land. Sounds utopian, but that's what I'm thinking is the future that Israel needs, that the Israeli Jews need, and that includes intermarriage, it includes a lot of cultural interchange, which doesn't happen now, and Israel Palestine becomes part of the Middle east in a full and acceptant way. That's what I'm not only hoping for, I think it's the most realistic path. And I think Beinart would say, if you need a two state process before that happens, some sovereignty for the Palestinians in order to get to the point of full equality, so be it. But the real goal needs to be a genuinely democratic state or nation state that embraces the land, both people's claim. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's where I'm coming from.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think that that's a politics, a sort of one state, two peoples, or.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: That's.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: Right. Lots of blending is definitely like an emerging or is a position, right. I'm a two stater only, and not because I think it's the best solution, but because I just think anything else is just going to be bloodbath at this point. And what has happened in israeli society and in palestinian society over the last 20 plus years, since the failure of the last serious attempt at a two state solution, I think that this is just not two societies you can blend under like a nice democratic government and have it work at this point. But the one mean I concede completely is that while people like me outside of the region have been talking about, oh yeah, but we're for two states and we need to get back to peace process and two states this and two states that.
Israel has been making a palestinian state as unviable as possible with sometimes the admonishment of the United States and other international actors, but never with anything tough enough to stop it, and with the expansion of settlements with a government that is blatantly pro annexation of current palestinian lands, I realize that talking about two states, a two state solution just sounds absurd and sounds like a faint right like an elusion. It's a way of changing the subject so that we haven't been focused or people don't watch as just, we've had decades of Israel undermining and destroying the, you know, at certain points, explicitly supporting the growth of Hamas as an alternative to the PLO run official Palestine that could actually be recognized and is recognized by countries around the world. So the profidity of the Netanyahu governments over the last several decades, I get it, has made the two states seem like a moot point, but I still think there's the only solution. Now, the tough part of that is that strong, where we need real leadership, is that creating a viable palestinian state at this point will take both a revitalization, a very big change in current palestinian leadership, which is incredibly old, entrenched, corrupt, and discredited among the people. But it's going to mean kicking a lot of settlers the fuck out of their settlements and like, a recreation of a viable palestinian map. And that is going to have to be led by an israeli government that's either forced to do that or is willing to do that as part of a long term settlement or a long term agreement, I should say, not to confuse the word settlement. So I guess I'm still a reluctant two stater, but I think that both of the states involved are horrible states at this.
Like, we need two different states. Which is like, the last thing I'll say is that we can't talk about Israel or Palestine as polities, as political entities with rose colored glasses at this point. People who think of Israel as this pioneering, progressive, left leaning country out making the desert bloom and building kabutzim and schools and blah, blah, blah, and like, oh, yeah, we've got to work something out with the Arabs. That's a 40 year old mythology if it was ever true.
Israel right now is run by an incredibly right wing country that includes fascists, racist lunatics, as every bit as loony and fucked up as the Trump administration, and that's who's prosecuting the war in.
Yeah, we can't talk about imaginary Israel, and we also can't talk about imaginary Palestine or do these weird games with, like, I support the right of Palestinians to resist. So I'm not going to say anything specific about Hamas as an organization. Know, can't blame the victim. Like, whatever bullshit goes on on the left about not wanting to face up to the fact that Hamas is a reactionary terrorist group that should, like, nobody should want to be in charge of anything. And the Palestinian Authority is a mess at best. So realism, talking about these things without the mysticism, I think is really important.
[00:33:22] Speaker A: My impression is that there's a civil society, you might say, in palestinian world that does not feel great affection for Hamas or for the Palestinian Authority. And yet people in that world are capable of leadership. And one of the names that keeps coming up as a potential different kind of leadership for the palestinian world is Baghdi, who is sitting in jail on a 20 year sentence in Israel, but who has embraced what he says is a Nelson Mandela way of dealing with the process, namely reconciliation. Except, and I don't know whether what he thinks of in terms of two states or whatever, but Peter Bynard is one who know Bargoodi. He should be released, allowed to resume his capacity for leadership. And I don't know whether it's one individual or what he represents. But anyway, there are options. But you're right, it's not the current leadership in either camp that we can hope for for the most part, or for any part for that matter anyway.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: So why are we talking about this?
Why does this one foreign policy or foreign affairs things? What's at stake? This is our last question. What's at stake for?
[00:34:42] Speaker A: That's a great question because most of my life, especially before we ever went to Israel, Mickey and I, my wife and I, we both wanted to ignore it, basically in favor of a lot of other political things that we thought were much more in our control and in our things that we could come to grips with.
I think one thing that, first of all, war needs to be opposed. That's a basic principle that I've adopted in life.
And the United States of America is a fundamentally key part of the current situation.
And I think the odd thing about October 7, not od, but the sort of dialectical thing about it, is that it probably has brought new possibilities in a positive sense that one can envision, which is the recognition, and it goes along with things that you were just alluding to before. That uncritical embrace of the israeli government by the United States is not good on so many fronts, including for Israel future itself, and that a much tougher and more conditional stance in which the United States declares there's only certain kinds of behavior that Israel can do that will continue to have american support. That's a direction that I think now has political possibility of coming into being that it may never have had before. Even though we see publicly Biden actually.
[00:36:33] Speaker C: Embracing Netanyahu physically, that isn't necessarily the only part of the story that is possible.
And I'm not saying I have great hopes here, but I think that's one factor. So there's a political job for the left in this country, and I think it's not simply to endorse the palestinian cause, but it is in this particular circumstance, the demand for a ceasefire, as I interpret it, and that demand, coupled with, of course, the release of the hostages, but that is intended to be a peace process being initiated, isn't just a ceasefire to stop the war. It's a ceasefire to create new possibilities for serious acceptance of palestinian freedom as part of a settlement. That's what I think the general left of center in this country needs to be pushing for hard.
And there are different ways and different angles of that and different levels of commitment to this or that set of principles. But the general common ground is to take much more seriously and foreground that kind of pathway to settlement. But the big thing for you, Duraka, and me on this podcast is something else. It's the way in which anti Semitism, definition of it is being forced to include any criticism of Israel, really, and any support for palestinian freedom is being defined by important key elements of the, let's call it jewish establishment as anti semitism. And anti Semitism in their usage, is increasingly being weaponized against the left in general, not just on Israel questions, but trying to draw a wedge between the jewish communities of this country and the left, is, I think, a project actively being sought. So how the current situation affects the jewish left, and it's one thing that we will explore, I think, on the podcast, future episodes, and secondly, how this relates to responsibilities and possibilities for the left more broadly in this country, can we overcome the fearsome threat of split towards some kind of new agreement on a common front with respect to the politics and the demands that we want to make? That's, I guess, why we want to talk about it.
[00:39:39] Speaker A: Does that make sense?
[00:39:40] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I agree with all. Definitely agree with that. And I think talking about what we can do concretely as Americans to impact american foreign policy, which then impacts the actual situation on the ground, is really important because the alternative to that right is the resolutionary socialism that we get stuck in so often, which is arguing about and putting our energy into theorizing the best and most just or politically sound theoretical solution to the problem. And I think that is, for me, some of the stakes here are internal to the left and just speak to the need for us to develop a better political culture around how we agree and disagree when it comes to foreign policy. I guess what's in it for me, is using this as an opportunity to talk about some of the dysfunctional habits that the american left has, where sort of a kind of anti Americanism of just dividing the world into good and evil. There's good countries and then there's the bad countries, and the fact that how many Marxists can fit on the head of a pin become litmus test questions for politicians and electeds and other activists. And I've just seen the way that dogmatism on this issue, both just totally crazed, insane Washington consensus of just uncritical support for Israel on the one hand, and then a naive, uncritical, kind of leftier than thou rhetoric on the pro palestinian side, that both of those things are just like terrible for the kind of pluralistic, focused, reformist left that we need to build and doesn't help Palestinians get free or keep anyone from getting bombed to pieces in. So my stake here is a how do we focus on actually being helpful to people who actually live through these atrocities? And number two, how do we keep issues like this in the future from just being like divisive, circular firing squad kind of things? It's just amazing to me how, and I think you and I could probably come up with a list of reasons why it is, but it is so striking that there's a world of oppressions, inequalities, occupations, wars. There's lots of things going on in the world that are unjust that american and european and western progressives, progressives, the left and rich countries don't talk about at all, don't give a fuck about, don't know about, don't, certainly don't make into life or death, litmus tests, et cetera. But this one we do.
That's a red flag to me always when it's just like, oh, okay, there's one issue that gets elevated and people don't know anything about any others, what's going on there. And so that's where your point about the weaponization of anti semitism where watching these right wing, like watching a fascist in the Congress who believes in the great replacement theory and wants to dewokify higher education, in other words, destroy it, successfully, quote unquote, wreck the careers of three distinguished academic presidents of universities, and then be cheered on by people that know exactly what the MAGA forces are up to.
That's very disturbing. We can't afford that kind of shit, right? We can't allow the right wing to play us. And that's what it feels like. It's like the right wing is playing this issue to great effect against us. So that's what's the stakes for me.
[00:43:56] Speaker A: It's not good for the Jews either.
All of this stuff we're criticizing is claimed to be necessary for jewish survival. And in fact, to my mind, very dangerous on that score. All of this that increases the unsafety, the danger, the isolation of the jewish people. To have that kind of leadership and that kind of politics become dominant is just so morally wrong and practically wrong from that point of view. So we've already done one conversation, which we're going to post together with this conversation between you and me, and that is a conversation we had the other day with Ariel angel, who's the editor in chief of Jewish Currents magazine. She's a young leader of a group of young people who've taken over this pretty venerable and marginal jewish left magazine and made it into venerable and marginal.
[00:44:59] Speaker B: Well, that's going to be both of our tombstones.
[00:45:04] Speaker A: Okay.
Anyway, I won't comment on that. That's great. That conversation covers a lot of ground, and it's a companion to what we've been doing right now. And we'll have both of these up very soon. And then what else do we want to promise?
[00:45:25] Speaker B: Yeah, so I've reached out to, and we've got good responses from a variety of folks we want to interview, including progressive politicians in Israel, folks from the arab, israeli and palestinian communities who do voter mobilization and engagement in those communities, which I think can bring a really important perspective. Pro palestinian activists here in the United States who've been know I can talk about the repression and moral panic that's going on both on campus and just in the community in general, the repression of pro palestinian activism that's happening around the world. And, yeah, so we've got, I think, a lot of interesting and informative conversations coming up that I'm sure will piss some people off in good ways. And yeah, I think it's a tough issue, but talking about it bravely, openly, straightforwardly, straightforwardly and with, I think an attempt to be morally clear always is really important, is very important.
[00:46:36] Speaker A: I think also we're going to try to post on our Facebook page and on our patreon.com site some reading and sources like that. And I don't know when we'll get around to actually making that up, but in the next few days, hopefully we'll begin to do that. And if you who are happening to listen to this, have suggestions of this kind, you can go to our Facebook page and put those things up that you have in mind as well. And hopefully we can get a discussion going on some of what we've been raising. At first, I think Doraka, you and me were kind of thought it was strange to embark on this particular path, but I think it's going to be fruitful. It already feels like we have something to offer, because in my feeling is, and it's a healthy thing in a way, lots of people I know think, got to really do some studying, some learning about the past, and some real patient thinking and discussion about where to go with all of the issues that you and I have just been touching upon. So stay tuned, folks, and anytime you've got thoughts, comments of any kind, we'd love to hear from you. Patreon.com tsmh patreon.com tsmh that's where you might best reach us for that kind of commentary. And that's where you can actually subscribe to.
[00:48:08] Speaker B: Hit like and subscribe. Yeah, thanks for listening.
[00:48:12] Speaker A: Thanks.
[00:48:12] Speaker D: And everyone needs their vine and victory shall live in peace and unafraid and everyone shares turn their soul shall live in nation shall learn roar no more every hand if their vows turn their soul shall live in nation shall learn roar no more and every hand it turn their soul shall live in nation shall learn war no more and every hand into plowshares turn their sword shall live in nations shall learn war no more and into plowshares turn their sword nations shall learn war no more.
