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How Zionism Failed w/ Omer Bartov / American Prestige · The Nation Podcasts

0:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello, Prestige heads and welcome to American Prestige.
0:24
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Danny Bestner here as always with my friend in Comrade Derek Davison, and we are especially excited to welcome to the podcast today, Omear Bartov, Omear's Dean's Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.
0:37
[SPEAKER_02]: He is the author of many books.
0:39
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the first books I read in graduate school was his book, Hitler's Army.
0:43
[SPEAKER_02]: about their vermarked and this primary group connections that they had.
0:46
[SPEAKER_02]: But most recently he is the author of Israel, what went wrong and we invited him to talk about that book.
0:53
[SPEAKER_02]: So Professor, thank you so much for joining us.
0:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for having me.
0:57
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think we should just start with the book does, which is your own personal connections to Israel, how in your view the state was formed, how it changed over time.
1:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And answering this question, you know, what went wrong implies that something could have gone right?
1:13
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think this is, as we just talked briefly off mic, a question that many Jews of my generation, particularly in the so-called diaspora are asking is was this project necessarily doomed was the liberal Zionism impossible from the beginning or could there have been another path so there's a lot there, but why don't we start with your political history?
1:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I was born in Israel in the mid-1950s, I was born in the Kibboots, I was raised in Tel Aviv.
1:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I went to school and I saw myself for four years in the idea of a period that overlapped with the War of 1973.
1:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I ended my service as an infantry company commander.
2:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Then I studied in Israel, I did a first degree at Tel Aviv University, D. Phil at Oxford University, taught several years at Tel Aviv University, which included the beginning of the first in T. Fada.
2:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And then in 1989, I moved to the US.
2:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I started teaching here.
2:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I have always kept in close touch with Israel.
2:27
[SPEAKER_00]: My parents live there.
2:29
[SPEAKER_00]: They're now buried.
2:30
[SPEAKER_00]: They're the key boots of my birth.
2:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a son who lives in Israel.
2:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I have two grandkids there and I have many friends there.
2:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And over the years, I, you know, I spent the significant periods in Israel and have many friends there, many connections there, or so many colleagues there.
2:50
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's in terms of my own personal history.
2:54
[SPEAKER_00]: My departure from Israel in 1989, partly was academic.
2:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I just had a fellowship at Harvard that was very hard to turn down.
3:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And after that, I just stayed in toward the Rutgers university and then Brown since 2000.
3:15
[SPEAKER_00]: But it also had to do with growing discomfort with what was happening in Israel, and particularly there are Draco, the first it defined.
3:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I write about that in the book.
3:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I expected to be called up as a reserve officer, and I was happy to make my way to Cambridge Mass instead.
3:37
[SPEAKER_00]: As for the big question, what point wrong was it always wrong?
3:43
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I have to say, once the book came out, I've received responses from both sides, of course, of some people write me
3:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what?
3:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It was always wrong.
3:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, Zionism was a bad idea, or Zionism was a general side to ideology from the beginning, and everything was predetermined.
4:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I obviously don't think that, and that's not what I write in the book, so I try to identify
4:10
[SPEAKER_00]: moments of which things could have gone in another direction and I do that both because I think that's the case and because I don't really believe in kind of predetermined history.
4:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think that everything that happens was inevitable and the fact that it happened doesn't mean that other things could not have happened.
4:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So choices can always be made I think
4:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I also get responses from the other side who say the only thing that went wrong is me and you know a part of went wrong and the estrus it's perfectly fine and and that to me is actually good because it means that on some place in between and I don't really accept either
4:55
[SPEAKER_00]: position.
4:57
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'll explain very briefly what I think went wrong.
5:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And the whole book is about the professor before I do want to hear that before we get on.
5:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I just have a question as long as I have you hear.
5:08
[SPEAKER_02]: So obviously there's always a sort of a contingency in humans and act agency.
5:13
[SPEAKER_02]: But from a structural position, how do you address the question of ethnic nationalism?
5:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, there's a fundamental structuring ideology.
5:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, absolutely, so that's exactly what I was about to say because Zionism begins within the context of ethno-nationalism.
5:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Zionism is born from ethno-nationalism.
5:35
[SPEAKER_00]: As Zionism is born in East Central Europe where ethno-nationalism spreading is exclusive, it has to be to one degree or another racist
5:49
[SPEAKER_00]: A particular ethnic group has the right to a particular territory, and it doesn't want any other ethnic group there.
5:55
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the whole idea.
5:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And so Zionism is one Jewish response to those movements, which among other things start thinking about Jews, it's not belonging to where they are.
6:08
[SPEAKER_00]: An 80% of our jury live there, and many of them respond to this newly invented Jewish question
6:19
[SPEAKER_00]: the vast majority actually go to North America and become American and Canadian Jews.
6:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Others trying to assimilate into their societies as some succeed and some don't.
6:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And many others join socialism and communism because they believe that the revolution will do away with all these questions of religion and ethnicity and will all just be, you know, the working class free of its chains.
6:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And some, in a minority initially, say, well, why don't we also do what everybody else is doing?
6:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's emulate the going.
6:56
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll also declare ourselves to be a nation, and Zionism is an ethno-national movement.
7:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And it takes many, if you compare it to Polish or Ukrainian nationalism,
7:11
[SPEAKER_00]: of ethonationalism of those groups and declares the Jews to be also a nation itself, determines itself as a nation and the only problem the Jews have is that they don't have a territory.
7:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The policy, this is Polish territory and the Ukrainians and Jews don't belong here.
7:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ukrainians say the post don't belong here.
7:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The Jews don't belong.
7:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The pros and the Ukrainians agree on one thing, the Jews don't belong.
7:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they start thinking, where do we belong?
7:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And eventually, they end up on well, we'll go back to ancestral homeland, mythical religious, historical, we'll go back to Palestine.
7:49
[SPEAKER_00]: To ellity soil.
7:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, one Zionism starts going to earthy soil and lo and behold, of course, there are people living there, which was not really part of this Zionist imaginary.
7:59
[SPEAKER_00]: They weren't thinking about other people living there.
8:01
[SPEAKER_00]: But there are people there that encountered them for the very beginning of 1882.
8:05
[SPEAKER_00]: There are absolutely nothing there.
8:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And then what happens was that Zionism, in many ways, becomes very much what the other ethno-national movements that it was trying to rescue the Jews from were, that is, it finds itself as in conflict with the indigenous population on two levels.
8:26
[SPEAKER_00]: One is the way the Palestinians experience ourness.
8:30
[SPEAKER_00]: As an ethonational movement, it comes, and it settles the land, it comes from elsewhere, it colonizes it.
8:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not shy about saying that, it says we are colonizing, we are building colonials, we're building most of all, that's what we are doing, we're conquering labor.
8:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And for a sense, respond as any indigenous population does to this encroachment they try to resist it.
8:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The second thing that happens is that this brings about also the creation of Palestinian nationalism.
9:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you not only have a conflict between in a settler colonial movement, but also a conflict between two ethno-national movements.
9:12
[SPEAKER_00]: One is anism, and the other is Palestinian.
9:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So in that sense, Zionism has built into it the characteristics of an ethno-national movement.
9:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Ethno-nationalism is violent, it's exclusive, it has clearly racist potential.
9:32
[SPEAKER_00]: and it can normalize over time, so Poland today we don't think of Poland today as a general side of the state.
9:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But Poland is actually built on nationalism and Poland after World War II accomplished that it became a state only for mostly for polls.
9:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
9:52
[SPEAKER_00]: There was genocide that was ethically cleansing a lot of horrible things happened, then there was communist rule for 40 years.
9:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And finally, when that was lifted, Poland is a land for poles.
10:03
[SPEAKER_00]: There are few Ukrainians there slightly more now because of the war in Russia.
10:07
[SPEAKER_00]: There are few Jews there slightly more now because some Jews have come back, but it's mostly Roman Catholic poles.
10:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's sort of genocide of the state that's part of the U, we think it's not a bad place at all.
10:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So ethno-national movements can be very violent and have been and can become genocidal and can also then normalize in one word or another.
10:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So for me, the question is, when the Zionism change, when didn't, yeah, go on.
10:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I just have a question.
10:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Are there historical examples of ethno-nationalist movements not being
10:43
[SPEAKER_02]: even not genocidal, but not contributing to ethnic cleansing, because it seems like the dialectical relationship that's naturally established is that it's going to require some sort of expulsion at the very least if not full on genocide.
10:56
[SPEAKER_02]: The ones that immediately come to mind, United States, Australia, the most of the Western Hemisphere, they do seem at least, ethnic cleansing seems in necessity.
11:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Are there examples of that not happening?
11:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, the examples you give are examples of set of colonialism, the U.S. generally is not an ethno-national entity.
11:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the opposite.
11:24
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why I...
11:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Ever played with whiteness, I think.
11:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I think there's something going like with the indigenous genocide and slavery.
11:32
[SPEAKER_02]: I agree.
11:32
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not pure ethno-nationalism.
11:34
[SPEAKER_02]: But in the 19th century, you could argue that Anglo-German Concord dot was a sort of new world version of ethno-nationalism.
11:41
[SPEAKER_02]: What then whiteness sort of papers over saying you could say that?
11:47
[SPEAKER_00]: You could say that and obviously the has been white supremacy in the U.S. has been a huge amount of racism in the U.S., but you also have to concede the two and a half million Jews for instance came from Eastern Europe to America and became Americans and eventually came to be white.
12:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally.
12:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally.
12:07
[SPEAKER_00]: People like me.
12:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Coming from Israel and my wife coming from Hong Kong came here and were accepted in ways that if we were to come to Germany or Britain or France would have been much more complicated.
12:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, Turkey.
12:21
[SPEAKER_00]: So the US and Australia
12:25
[SPEAKER_00]: countries that actually took in different ethnic groups, but they are also central colonial states.
12:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So they did carry out genocide, so the indigenous population without having an ethonational grounding.
12:41
[SPEAKER_00]: That's another sort of species, it's related, but it's another species in Europe.
12:49
[SPEAKER_00]: There is ethonationalism, which is really nationalism of a particular ethnic group that is usually linked to the territory in which most members of that ethnic group lived before ethonationalism was invented.
13:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And it gives them this kind of...
13:05
[SPEAKER_00]: it describes them in a particular way.
13:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It makes them into a nation which they were not before.
13:10
[SPEAKER_00]: They were just from there.
13:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And now they belong to that nation.
13:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're reinvented as members of a particular ethnic and the national group.
13:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Are there other examples of
13:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Look, I mean, it depends on the context, there was less.
13:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't say that there was ethic cleansing in Lithuania, and Lithuania sees itself largely as an ethno-national state.
13:36
[SPEAKER_00]: There wasn't really ethic cleansing,
13:38
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a degree of ethic cleansing in Western Ukraine of polls and in eastern Poland of Ukrainians.
13:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the same territory.
13:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just seen from two sides.
13:49
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is a pretty election toward that.
13:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't always end up in genocide.
13:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The case of Zionism, to me, is interesting in the sense that in the 1920s and 30s you have Zionism exercising both its faces.
14:06
[SPEAKER_00]: it has two aspects.
14:08
[SPEAKER_00]: One is the ethno national phase.
14:10
[SPEAKER_00]: More and more Jews are coming to Palestine, they're encroaching and more and more Palestinian land at least to more and more conflict.
14:16
[SPEAKER_00]: That's one and it's both as I say it's a national conflict and it's a it's a settler colonial conflict and all this under the ages of the British Empire that facilitates all of this.
14:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a second aspect of Zionism at the same time that Jews are being increasingly persecuted in Europe and have fewer and fewer places to go to.
14:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The US closed its gates off in the early 1920s, other European countries certainly after the Great Depression, don't want foreigners, certainly not a student.
14:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And so from the point of view of Jews, those hundreds of thousands of Jews who come to Palestine, as Zionism would claim were saved.
14:57
[SPEAKER_00]: That includes members of my family.
15:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Had my grandfather's not decided to leave Poland in the 1920s and 30s, as did most of the extended families.
15:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I would not have been born, not in Eastern Europe and not in Palestine, because everybody was there there was murdered.
15:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So Zionism has this claim that it also served as a safe haven, for Jews which was what it said it would do.
15:24
[SPEAKER_00]: At so, to me, the moment at which these two faces of genocide become one and become the aggressive, militant intolerant and increasingly racist one is 1948.
15:37
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1948, the state is created, it is a Jewish majority state and it becomes death through ethnic cleansing.
15:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
15:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the masses of Jews that were expected to come from Eastern Europe are dead, they can't come anymore.
15:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So how do you create a Jewish majority state in a territory with 2,000th of the population in a Palestinian and only a third of Jews?
16:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you do it as
16:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you have a choice.
16:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you have created with Zionism one to a Jewish majority state, 80% of the population of Jews, only 20% of the Palestinian.
16:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, to me, that's a moment at which one could have, and it would be better over that.
16:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not just imagining this.
16:29
[SPEAKER_00]: One could have, ask oneself, what sort of state do we want?
16:33
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we move forward from here?
16:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Zionist movement, headed by Ben Gurion, issues a declaration, a proclamation of the state in which it promises that it would be a state where all citizens would be equal.
16:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, he does that under pressure of the UN, of course.
16:52
[SPEAKER_00]: They, they weren't happy about doing it, but they did it anyway.
16:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And they promised to issue a constitution within a few months.
17:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The proclamation is on May 14, 1948.
17:05
[SPEAKER_00]: They say by Oktober 1, there will be a constitution that would be in the spirit of the proclamation that includes the spill of rights.
17:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is never issued.
17:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's at that point that the state having not formed for itself a legal framework.
17:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And having not declared what its borders are, it didn't then, and it still hasn't done so, makes Zionism into a state ideology.
17:31
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a state, and there is an ideology.
17:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And despite the fact that the ideology accomplished what he wanted to accomplish and could now be consigned to the archive, it actually becomes the ideology of the state.
17:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And a such, once that ideology has a state as an army, has a police.
17:48
[SPEAKER_00]: As all the structure of the state, it can now exercise the more radical elements of ethonationalism, which it does over time.
17:59
[SPEAKER_02]: it's very interesting.
18:00
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, to me, that seems quite over-determined.
18:04
[SPEAKER_02]: If the wrong turn is in the literal, basically, founding of the state.
18:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, the historical contingency of the Holocaust, obviously, in this world jury, and maybe if there's no Holocaust, maybe the Jewish question would have also been answered differently.
18:19
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the Holocaust wipes out, basically,
18:26
[SPEAKER_02]: One could appreciate why in the late 1940s ethno-nationalism did not appear like a radical or unnecessary decision, but it does seem kind of baked in if the initial wrong turn is in the literal founding of the state, which I think raises questions about particularly Jews in the diaspora relationship to Israel going forward.
18:45
[SPEAKER_02]: But Derek, I know you had a question.
18:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Sorry, oh, if you want to, if you want to.
18:48
[SPEAKER_00]: No, just to say, I do not claim that as a 48,
18:54
[SPEAKER_00]: everything that happened was predetermined, quite in the country.
18:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's not predetermined.
19:00
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't mean to suggest that.
19:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I just know that that's unsophisticated.
19:03
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't mean to suggest that.
19:03
[SPEAKER_02]: No.
19:04
[SPEAKER_02]: But again, there's paths.
19:06
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, man, man, make their own history.
19:09
[SPEAKER_02]: The dinner, yeah, et cetera.
19:11
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, I just want to make that clear, but please.
19:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, as I say, it was not predetermined, but a particular framework for that was created.
19:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that a constitution would have made possible, or I'll put it otherwise, would have made it impossible potentially,
19:32
[SPEAKER_00]: for Israel to impose 20 years of military rule over the Palestinians who remained in the country and to use those 20 years to take away most of their lands.
19:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It might have created a legal framework that would have made it possible or necessary to to some extent come to terms with the Nakhba, with the expulsion
20:01
[SPEAKER_00]: repatriation, partial restitution to actually face up to the issues that were created by the creation of the state in the way it was created.
20:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Not having it meant that the core issue of the state of Israel.
20:17
[SPEAKER_00]: From 48 to today, and that I would maintain, the core issue is that it has never come to terms with the fact that it is a country that was born from massive expulsion of the indigenous population at that then in 1967 took over many of the same people that had expelled, but has kept them
20:42
[SPEAKER_00]: situation under different regimes.
20:45
[SPEAKER_00]: That is that Israel's a country that was a Jewish majority state for only 20 years and after that became a 50-50 state in which half of the population live under different types of regimes.
20:59
[SPEAKER_00]: That is at the core issue of Israeli existence and it's something that most Israelis over time have learned how to effectively ignore.
21:09
[SPEAKER_01]: So I want to ask you about the various ways of reckoning with the Holocaust.
21:15
[SPEAKER_01]: You have an entire chapter in the book devoted to the question of never again and what does that actually mean?
21:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, this runs the gamut, of course, from the hyper-specific, like, you know, never again will an Austrian dictator massacre the Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe in 1940.
21:33
[SPEAKER_01]: are in the 1940s, to the universal, which is, you know, never again will be allowed genocide to happen.
21:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And obviously, the international community has failed repeatedly in that regard.
21:44
[SPEAKER_01]: But as you say in the book, the architecture has been put in place to treat that question as a universal question.
21:50
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got the international criminal court.
21:52
[SPEAKER_01]: We've had tribunals in other cases modeled on, you know, some of the things that were done at Nuremberg.
21:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, there is an effort, at least, by the international community, universalized this.
22:02
[SPEAKER_01]: to never again, whether it be a genocide.
22:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And then somewhere in between is this never again, well, anything like this happened to the Jewish people.
22:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And if it takes just placing a population in Palestine, ethnically cleansing them, committing even genocide in Gaza, then so be it.
22:19
[SPEAKER_01]: But never again, well, this happened to your kids.
22:21
[SPEAKER_01]: So maybe you could talk a little bit about how these questions have been kind of bad at around and sort of how people have come to these positions.
22:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so, again, it's a larger issue, of course.
22:36
[SPEAKER_00]: There were people right after World War II who, including quite a number of prominent Holocaust survivors, who spoke about never again, not never again, what happened to them, and the Holocaust itself because by then it was over, but never again, such inhumanity.
22:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole concept of genocide, the whole concept of legislating against crimes against humanity, against genocide, was based not on never again having the Holocaust, but never again having similar mass crimes against innocent civilians or groups.
23:18
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to remember that the Holocaust itself was not a big player in any of this and we tend to think of the Holocaust as always being on people's minds.
23:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Raphael Amkin, who coined the term genocide had the Holocaust on his mind because his family was murdered in the Holocaust.
23:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, there were people had it on their minds, but the Holocaust received
23:43
[SPEAKER_00]: in collective memory everywhere for another 40 years and it starts remerging in the 1980s and 1990s.
23:51
[SPEAKER_00]: So this notion of an international regime, a legal regime created to prevent genocide the mass crimes is first of all not necessarily about the Holocaust.
24:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Secondly, it doesn't really kick in very well during those first 40 years for another reason, and that's the Cold War.
24:13
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can't really have, you know, international tribunals if there's the Cold War and the world is divided into this bipolar division.
24:22
[SPEAKER_00]: But in Israel there is a particular process and that process has Israeli peculiarities and it's more I think it informs our understanding of why Israel behaves the way it does, better when we focus on that.
24:38
[SPEAKER_00]: In the early years after the Holocaust in Israel, as I write in the book, there is a sense of discomfort with the Holocaust.
24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: There's actually a sense of discomfort also with Holocaust survivors specifically.
24:51
[SPEAKER_00]: because they're foreign, they look funny, they behave in strange ways, there were jackers, they cover the tattooed forearms, with long sleeves on the beach.
24:59
[SPEAKER_00]: There's all of this, which I also remember, but in the educational system, there's hardly any teaching of the Holocaust.
25:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just not there, and there's a reason for it because there's a sense of shame about the Holocaust.
25:14
[SPEAKER_00]: When we studied about the Holocaust, which was not much, when I was a school in Israel, it was mostly the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
25:21
[SPEAKER_00]: We studied the Holocaust because it taught us that you have to resist violence, but most of the Jews, as we internalized it, growing up in Israel, went like sheep to the slaughter.
25:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's not a very good lesson for Zionism.
25:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the opposite of what we wanted.
25:39
[SPEAKER_00]: We were supposed to look forward and to be militant and strong and have hairy legs and be tanned and know how to fight and not go like sheep to the slaughter.
25:51
[SPEAKER_00]: That starts changing, I would say, with the Aishman trial and I have memories of listening to that, but the main change is much later.
25:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The main change is after 67, even more so after the World of 1973, and radically when Manachimbegin comes to power, when the right wing comes to power, under Manachimbegin specifically because he had memories of Poland and of the Holocaust,
26:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And he starts speaking, this is 1977, and he starts making all these analogies to the Holocaust.
26:25
[SPEAKER_00]: There's the famous saying by him in 1982 that Araphat in Beirut following the Israeli invasion, there of course, that attempt of regime change, not the current one, that Araphat hiding in Beirut is like Hitler in his bunker.
26:40
[SPEAKER_00]: These kind of analogies become increasingly ubiquitous in Israel.
26:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And it said that point, and, you know, my former professor, Yudal Kanah, who was a professor of history when I was an undergrad, wrote an article in 1988 with the outbreak of the first anti-fired accord in praise of forgetting.
27:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And what he wrote there was this education by then of young Israeli men and women that the Holocaust was a major part of their identity and that it was not only something to remember, but something to fear happening again.
27:20
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a process that he identified the really early on and became increasingly ubiquitous in Israel.
27:27
[SPEAKER_00]: That the Holocaust is not something that we should commemorate, remember and write about it is an imminent danger.
27:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about to happen to us.
27:36
[SPEAKER_00]: and the curious thing about this mechanism is that this kicks in precisely at a time when Israel no longer is facing an existential danger.
27:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The last major war that Israel fought, a real war, was the war that I was in.
27:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Was the war of 1973 when I was 20.
27:55
[SPEAKER_00]: All the other wars that is of four cents were wars of choice against insurgents, militants who largely were the products of Israeli policies, where there's Hamas or it's Hezbollah.
28:08
[SPEAKER_00]: These were all created by Israeli policies that were responses to Israel, but neither of them or any other country presented an existential threat to the idea of the idea
28:23
[SPEAKER_00]: in its own region.
28:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And secondly, the Holocaust comes to play a major role at a time when few and few people have actual memories of it, because most of those people died, and so it becomes something else.
28:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It becomes a license.
28:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It gives Israel a carte blanche.
28:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It can do what it likes and to whom.
28:43
[SPEAKER_00]: To those that it rules and oppresses, those who cannot
28:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Physically, materially, militarily cannot present an existential threat to it.
28:55
[SPEAKER_00]: they are those that it rules over, and they are those who are presented as the people who must somehow be kept under the boot because if we let them go, they will destroy the state of Israel.
29:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course that kicks in with a particular bloody-minded energy after October 7th when they do break out and then all the demons are set loose.
29:19
[SPEAKER_02]: So a couple of questions is very interesting.
29:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Something similar is happening to the United States at the exact same time.
29:25
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean with the new justification.
29:26
[SPEAKER_02]: I think a new justification for empire and the post called world obviously very different from Israel, but but basically between 89 and 90 2001 in September 11th.
29:36
[SPEAKER_02]: human rights, responsibility to protect that becomes a justifying logic for empire, so you have basically human rights being used in this perverse way.
29:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Even if in the American case at least there were some, you know, one could argue just causes embedded there.
29:49
[SPEAKER_02]: So just as an analytical matter, why do you think that this historical memory became embedded in this particular way between the Lakuda sentient in 77?
29:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And October 7th, why was there, again, if it wasn't over-determined, what are this particular structures and personalities that lead this to become the logic of Israeli Empire?
30:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a good question.
30:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there are two reasons for this, I think.
30:20
[SPEAKER_00]: One reason is that the weaks leading to the War of 1967, and I remember that very well I was a teenager in London at the time, which were a moment of enormous fear, you know, with the Kamala binasa saying that, you know, the truth would be thrown to the sea, and all of that.
30:44
[SPEAKER_00]: and had a huge impact not only in Israel, but also Jewish communities around the world in France and the UK and the US.
30:52
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the beginning for law and Jewish communities of South America.
30:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, we really need that state of Israel because there was a sense that it might be destroyed.
31:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It might be extinction.
31:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the War of 1973, which was experienced by me, too,
31:12
[SPEAKER_00]: as an existential war.
31:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Now it actually wasn't, and it was preventable, so you can, but it was experience such, with Musha Dayan saying this is going to be the fall of the third temple.
31:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The same Musha Dayan who said better having Shah Masha, without peace and peace without Shah Masha, two years later says this is the end of the third temple.
31:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the sense that the whole thing might just disappear, plays into it, and you know people don't think about it, but among soldiers in 1973, there were reservists who had been children in the Holocaust, who actually had memories of the Holocaust.
31:54
[SPEAKER_00]: There was still a personal connection.
31:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that these two words that both end up with Israeli agemony, military agemony, but our experience also is moments of existential threat play into the the the remergence of the Holocaust.
32:15
[SPEAKER_00]: That's I think an important element in that.
32:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The second thing is the occupation.
32:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The occupation is as a phenomenon, if you actually try to think about the fact that in 1967, when the occupation begins, I was 13 years old, I'm now 72, so that's the almost the entire length of the state of Israel.
32:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It's being a state that oppresses fast numbers of people who don't want to be ruled by it.
32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you rationalize that?
32:53
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you keep an idea of yourself as being just and right?
33:00
[SPEAKER_00]: While you are actually creating an apartheid system?
33:04
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you do that?
33:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Even in South Africa, there were arguments that, well, we don't have a choice.
33:09
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the only way that we can somehow survive as a white group bossing it over millions of Africans or black Africans.
33:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the Holocaust plays a legitimizing role in what is clearly illegitimate.
33:29
[SPEAKER_00]: illegal, immoral, unethical, unacceptable, according to any understanding, including of Judaism itself.
33:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And to say that we have to do it,
33:42
[SPEAKER_00]: because if we don't, this represents an existential danger to us, alleviates the responsibility of just facing the truth and saying that the situation has to be changed.
33:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can see that the use of the Holocaust as a tool,
34:00
[SPEAKER_00]: to justify the occupation increases as the attempts to respond to the occupation disappear.
34:11
[SPEAKER_00]: There's much more use of it after Rabine is assassinated after they also accord their encounters.
34:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And now it's ubiquitous.
34:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So in that sense, it justifies the unjustifiable.
34:29
[SPEAKER_02]: So I got a couple of quick questions.
34:31
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you're, you're, you're so steeped in German history.
34:34
[SPEAKER_02]: This reminds me a little bit of the old functionalist versus intentionalist debates.
34:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Is this an argument about no 67, no 73?
34:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Israel is very different?
34:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Look, I mean, that's a little bit of, you know, counterfactual history, but 67,
34:56
[SPEAKER_00]: is the great breakthrough of Israel, definitely, because as I said, Zionism accomplished its goal in 48, it created the Jewish majority state.
35:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, then it first of all kicked out the vast numbers of Palestinians, then it mistreated the Palestinians.
35:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It's say there, you could say Israel was a democracy only for six months between December, 1966, when the military rule over the Palestinian citizens of Israel was lifted and 1967, when then all these hundreds of thousands of formerly expelled Palestinians come under its ready rule,
35:36
[SPEAKER_00]: But at least he was a Jewish majority state, that is, it could argue that it was on the way to creating a Jewish and democratic state.
35:47
[SPEAKER_00]: After 67 that was not possible and many people talked about it, there were years in the immediate aftermath of 1967 when people said, well, if we want to keep Israel Jewish and democratic, we have to use these occupied territories as bargaining chips.
36:07
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to resolve the major issue.
36:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was not done.
36:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And then that was not only not done, but the whole idea of even talking about it, or even saying the word occupation, which is disappeared from Israel.
36:22
[SPEAKER_00]: People never use occupation anymore.
36:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It's only sort of left-wing, radical left-wingers, say occupation.
36:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It's gone.
36:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And with that, yes, with that, of course, the main notion that it could be a democratic state.
36:38
[SPEAKER_00]: disappeared.
36:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It became at the best second priority.
36:42
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would say without 67, it would have been a different state.
36:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I would agree with that.
36:50
[SPEAKER_00]: But was it was it possible not to have 67?
36:54
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to remember.
36:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
36:56
[SPEAKER_02]: That's that's the other question, which is that there was 56.
37:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
37:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And 56 Israel, you know, took over Gaza, and there were discussions in 56.
37:05
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we kick out the Palestinians from Gaza?
37:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
37:08
[SPEAKER_02]: This is the question.
37:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's the ultimate question.
37:10
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, was it a bus to send an inevitability, but that's worthy of more than a conversation.
37:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Derek, did you have a question?
37:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I wanted to talk about another chapter in the book about the missing constitution.
37:23
[SPEAKER_01]: This is an interesting element of this that I never really considered before, but you know, basically in terms of enshrining the ideals of Israel's declaration of independence into a document that would set out the parameters of the state that would say this is going to be a democracy or this is going to be
37:39
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, how is this going to be structured?
37:41
[SPEAKER_01]: What are the borders going to be?
37:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Like none of this stuff in Israel now functions on basic law series, a basic law is rather than an enshrined constitution.
37:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And it creates a situation where, you know, you can change these things, seemingly fundamental things about the state relatively easily.
37:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So can you talk a little bit about what
38:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Why even though was envisioned, I think, in the partition agreement, like in the very basic kind of understanding of the creation of the state of Israel that there would be a constitution why this never actually materialized and what that what that means in terms of the modern the contemporary state.
38:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so the first thing is that Israel issues this proclamation of the state.
38:25
[SPEAKER_00]: which is not in Israel as a declaration of independence, although it's not clear independence from whom, because the British were leaving that very midnight on the midnight of May 14, 1948.
38:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It's issues that impact, because it has to do that.
38:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The UN Partition Resolution demands that the two states that there was supposed to be an Arab state in a Jewish state would issue a declaration that would be followed by a constitution that would provide for democracy and for a bill of rights.
39:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And Ezra wants to become a member of the UN.
39:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the most important political move in the creation of a state for Ezra to be recognized by the UN.
39:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the process of articulating the declaration
39:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The proclamation of the state is in large part informed by the demands that you can find.
39:31
[SPEAKER_00]: If you read the partition resolution, all the demands are there.
39:34
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to say that there would be equality for all citizens, all races, all religions, and so forth.
39:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And the debate's over that, so for instance, the proclamation does not use the word democracy.
39:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not there.
39:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It says a Jewish state.
39:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't actually say the democratic state, but it's implied within the declaration.
39:54
[SPEAKER_00]: That declaration,
39:56
[SPEAKER_00]: which gives both a stalker background for why a state should be created and then defines where the state would be, but there's not defined as borders because Ben Gurion opposed defining the borders in the proclamation and said let's see we don't know there's going to be a war let's see what kind of borders will have so he does not accept the partition borders or at least he doesn't say so specifically that was supposed to be
40:27
[SPEAKER_00]: A constitution would have had to have all these elements that were in the proclamation.
40:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The proclamation ends up having no legal or at least I would say disputable legal value.
40:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The Supreme Court at the time decided not to give the proclamation legal standing because it expected the constitution.
40:51
[SPEAKER_00]: But there was no constitution.
40:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Why was there no constitution?
40:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the simple answer is that Ben Gurin was opposed to it.
40:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And Ben Gurin really, what he said went.
41:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason that he opposed it is said to be mostly because of the outer religious.
41:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the outer religious said, we don't need a constitution.
41:12
[SPEAKER_00]: We have the Torah, who needs a constitution?
41:14
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a sort of Goisha concept.
41:18
[SPEAKER_00]: But the fact of the matter is that the author looks for not a major element in decision-making policies at the time.
41:25
[SPEAKER_00]: So they were used in large parts as an excuse.
41:28
[SPEAKER_00]: What is between the lines is that if a constitution included these elements that were in the proclamation, that would have given equal rights constitutionally to the Palestinians.
41:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And that the state was not willing to do, and again, that means that the issue that is not in a lot of legal experts in Israel, and I was reading all these debates, before the issue, they don't want to talk about it.
41:59
[SPEAKER_00]: They say yes, it's the religious elements.
42:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The core issue is the relationship between Jews and Palestinians, which is the relationship between being a Jewish state and a democratic state.
42:10
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the core of it, so not having a constitution did what is ready politics is excellent to doing, it's postponed it, it left it to some indefinite future and it created the mechanism and alternative mechanism that there would be constitutional laws.
42:29
[SPEAKER_00]: that would eventually be put together as a constitution.
42:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you want to understand why there was and is and ongoing, judicial coup, so-called overhaul in Israel now, it is an attempt to overturn the constitutional laws of the early 1990s, the same early 1990s, which also saw the last real effort to change the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians.
42:58
[SPEAKER_00]: to create some kind of alternative.
43:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't a great alternative.
43:02
[SPEAKER_00]: There were a lot of issues with also, but it was an attempt at least to recognize the issue of the occupation and provide some kind of remedy to that.
43:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The same time, these two constitutional laws of 1992 tried to create, to recreate, to reinvent Israel as a state with the Constitution and with the Bill of Rights.
43:26
[SPEAKER_00]: That, of course, is over 10 in part already in 2018, because you can pass any constitution law that you like if you have a majority in parliament and declare that law to be constitutional.
43:37
[SPEAKER_00]: In 2018, Ezra passes a constitution law that flies in the face of the previous laws that is that Ezra is the nation's state of the Jews.
43:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It relegates Israeli, Palestinian citizens to second-class citizenship.
43:53
[SPEAKER_00]: and it declares that Israel has a right to settle all of the land of Israel, meaning not only the state that is recognized internationally within the 67 borders, but also the occupied territories.
44:13
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what the basic law does, but that's insufficient for the people who are now in
44:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the last thing I would say is, and I read about it in this chapter, and was very interesting for me to figure out, and I was using, and I have to say, I was using a lot of what Micros Fathers written, he has a book in Hebrew, which I hope for come out in English that explains a lot of this.
44:41
[SPEAKER_00]: He's a civil rights lawyer in Israel.
44:46
[SPEAKER_00]: We think of the Supreme Court in Israel as the protector of rights in Israel and it's highly beleaguered by the right.
44:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's true that it tried to protect the rights of Israeli citizens, the secular of Ashkenazi, of Tel Aviv dwelling, Israeli citizens to put their gay rights and so forth.
45:08
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is a Supreme Court that actually created the legal mechanism that facilitated the entire settlement project in Israel.
45:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It's created the legal section for Israeli citizens who are living exteriorally in the occupied territories to be ruled by Israeli law while Palestinians living there are under military law.
45:31
[SPEAKER_00]: That is, it actually facilitated the creation of an apartheid system in the West Bank that very same Supreme Court under Arun Barak, the most liberal of all the justices, the man who led the revolution, the constitutional revolution of the early 1990s, and then claimed that Ezra had a constitution, that same court, now had there been a constitution.
45:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It is possible that none of this would have been possible because the Supreme Court could not have twisted legal reality in that way.
46:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It would have been constrained.
46:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And so again, we don't know whether that would have happened and Israel could have always chucked away its constitution created, the different constitution, but it would have created some framework and our framework was missing even for the Supreme Court itself.
46:23
[SPEAKER_02]: One question I had was you've spent the last 37 years or so in the diaspora in the United States and I'm just curious you your thoughts on diasporic Jews and particularly liberal Zionism as expressed in this country, which was the predominant mode of Zionism and how you've you're seeing.
46:43
[SPEAKER_02]: That transform or or not transform obviously there's been a lot of discussion with the Jewish community about generational divides and what is the future of US is really policy when both political parties seem to at least have factions that are very critical of it.
46:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that ironically in the democratic party.
46:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I think they're going to turn hard away from Israel.
47:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not sure if Tucker calls in tomorrow at Marjorie telegram have as much influence in the Republican side remains to be seen.
47:07
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's a lot obviously going on with the diasporic jewelry and I'm curious your thoughts on that.
47:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, look, I mean, you know, I had a couple of discussions with Gidon Levi, the journalist from Harvard who has proclaimed himself now to be Antazanis.
47:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said that has criticized me for being not saying that I'm Antazanis.
47:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm saying that because there is now, and I meet, you know, my, my own students, people who say that they're anti-Sanus, and that that is the one response to what people perceive to be liberal Zionism while supporting Israel was Zionism is anything but liberal.
47:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And simply cannot be defined as liberal.
47:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So first I'll say something about anti-Sanism.
48:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I generally don't like ideologies that are anti, whatever anti they are, because it's not an attempt to think about something positively, to create something, to negate something, that's a strange way of starting off an ideology.
48:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But I also think that if you think of Zionism as one assertion, which is the Jews have a right of determination, then you have to decide, are you in favor of that or not?
48:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that nationalism is a terrible idea, and ethonationalism is even worse, and has
48:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you support self-determination for one group, then you have to be consistent.
48:56
[SPEAKER_00]: If you against self-determination for Jews, I don't see any reason why it would be in favor of self-determination for Palestinians.
49:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So for anybody else, either you're for that or you're against that.
49:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not against that.
49:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a bad idea.
49:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I would rather nationalism disappeared, but we live in states.
49:17
[SPEAKER_00]: We know that the alternative is worse because being stateless is a really bad idea as the Jews learned themselves as Hannah Arents or any outline.
49:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And so to be a purist and to say, well, I'm against that.
49:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So what are you in favor of that?
49:37
[SPEAKER_00]: That's one question, and in this, my possession on Zionism is not that the Jews did not have a right of self-determination.
49:47
[SPEAKER_00]: They had the same right as the Poz and the Ukrainians for that.
49:50
[SPEAKER_00]: What you don't have is a right to exercise it by pressing and killing other people.
49:56
[SPEAKER_00]: If you do that, you may actually lose that right.
50:00
[SPEAKER_00]: If that's the way you exercise it over time, if that's your only understanding of what it is.
50:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So this anism that exists now in Israel, that's anism has discredited zanism as an ideology entirely.
50:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't think that anyone today
50:19
[SPEAKER_00]: can be a Zionist without being affiliated in one way or another with Jewish supremacy, which is what Zionism in Israel is today.
50:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a genocidal racist Jewish supremacist ideology.
50:32
[SPEAKER_00]: That ideology has to be discarded.
50:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't believe that you can be a liberal Zionist in New York or in LA.
50:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It's if what Zionism in Israel is doing is not happening.
50:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have to find an alternative and as you know, Zionism in America from the 1970s became a matter of identity Wasn't that people with anis in the sense that Zionism meant it meaning that they would go to Israel Also them didn't go.
51:00
[SPEAKER_00]: There was anis.
51:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It was part of their identity.
51:02
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't think too much about it They went to Sunday school and got nice Descriptions of Israel.
51:08
[SPEAKER_00]: They went on these trips to Israel and met nice
51:11
[SPEAKER_00]: They bought a billion trees for Israel.
51:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, or they were covered 14 times in trees for all the trees that Americans bought.
51:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, or they found a nice husband or wife among handsome young Israelis and then took them back with them to LA or to New York, but he wasn't really thought through as an ideology in the way that Zionism was at the beginning and in the way that it implemented Zionism in Palestine
51:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that now an American jury is facing two major crises.
51:49
[SPEAKER_00]: One crisis is its relationship to Israel.
51:52
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a major crisis.
51:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And my sense is that it would be impossible.
51:58
[SPEAKER_00]: If Israel continues on this trajectory, if it doesn't redefine itself, which it could do, but it's not very likely these days,
52:08
[SPEAKER_00]: As you say, there's a different political leadership in the United States that redefines the limits of Israeli power than it's possible, but that's in the long run.
52:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think that most Jews in the United States will be able to associate themselves with the state of Israel the way it is today and in the direction that it is going, because it will be a danger to their own safety.
52:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It is already a major trigger to anti-Semitism around world, and in that sense I think there would be a growing sort of shift away from it, but there's another element, and that's religion.
52:51
[SPEAKER_00]: In Israel, Judaism has reinvented itself.
52:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It has become something that is more akin to the zealots of Roman times than to anything that any Jew living out of Israel can adopt.
53:04
[SPEAKER_00]: You cannot be a Jewish supremacist in New York.
53:09
[SPEAKER_00]: or in LA, that's shooting yourself in the foot.
53:12
[SPEAKER_00]: You are minority in all those countries.
53:15
[SPEAKER_00]: You are only a majority, although not even an Israel, you're actually a majority, but at least you have the monopoly of power in Israel.
53:23
[SPEAKER_00]: You do not have it elsewhere.
53:25
[SPEAKER_00]: So the kind of Judaism that exists now in Israel, which is a perversion of Judaism that we have not seen for two millennia,
53:36
[SPEAKER_00]: cannot be the same Judaism that people would have in the diaspora.
53:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And that will call for major shift in people's understanding of what they are not only in relationship to Israel, but their relationship to their own faith and tradition.
53:53
[SPEAKER_02]: So you're not in favor of the third time.
53:55
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just kidding.
53:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It's fairly a 1973.
53:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no