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JUST JOSH: Is Josh a Zionist? · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Can I hear them? Welcome to the space space for dangerous ideas, here's a dangerous idea for you.
• 0:09
  Zionism? What does it mean? Am I a Zionist? Are you a Zionist? Who's a Zionist? Who's not a Zionist?
• 0:16
  A Zionist or bloodthirsty pigs? Or are they innocent freedom lovers? And freedom fires on behalf of the Jewish people?
• 0:23
  I'm Josh Seps. Getting asked a lot more than I ever was, whether I'm a Zionist.
• 0:30
  And it's a question that I would have had more trouble answering in some moral respects prior to the attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7th.
• 0:42
  And yet it's more complicated to answer now than it ever has been just in terms of understanding what people mean by the word.
• 0:49
  So can we just unpack it a little and hopefully this will be a place to which I can point you and to which you might be able to point your friends and family members if you concur with what I'm saying for an explanation with a little bit of nuance about what we're talking about when we talk about Zionism.
• 1:05
  When I say that I'm being asked whether I'm a Zionist, I'm not being entirely truthful when I say that it's rare that someone comes up to me in the streets and goes,
• 1:15
  Good day sir, he was Zionist. It's more that people in a sort of state of perhaps shock or surprise will say to friends of mine and I'll hear it second or third hand.
• 1:29
  Wait a second, it was Josh's Zionist. As if to say, is Josh on the wrong side of a fairly easy moral question?
• 1:38
  Does Josh like babies being bombed and so on? I mean, even my spouse will, you know, have to field questions from people online. He has hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and people will say, hang on a second, what is Sean?
• 1:53
  Is it true that Sean is married to a Zionist? So let's clarify what we mean when we say Zionism. I think what most people are alluding to, which is what I am not, is a sort of checklist of opinions about the current conflict between Israel and Gaza.
• 2:14
  So let's run down a possible checklist. Is it the case that Israel is justified in what it's currently doing in Gaza in every respect? If that makes me Zionist, no, I don't think that's true. I think there are much better ways that Israel could have handled this.
• 2:32
  Is it the case that Israel has a right to occupy all of the occupied territories in Palestine? No, I don't believe so. I'm not a Zionist on that front. Do I believe that the Palestinians shouldn't have a state of their own? No, I'm not a Zionist on that front.
• 2:48
  Do I believe that the actions of successive Israeli governments have been pure and oriented towards peace? No, if that's the Zionist position, then I'm not a Zionist.
• 2:59
  Do I think it's okay for women and children to be buried in the rubble in cities in Gaza? No, if that's the Zionist position, then I am not a Zionist.
• 3:09
  Do I think that Jews around the world are sort of a unitary single force imposing their will on Palestinians? If that's the Zionist position, then no, I'm not a Zionist. I don't agree with that.
• 3:26
  So what are we actually talking about when we talk about Zionism? I mean, on the other side of the scale, the other far end of the spectrum would be a definition of Zionism that's a sort of a 19th century definition, which would just say, here's a group of people, an ethnicity, an ethnic group, they happen to have a common religion as well.
• 3:46
  But they're really, you know, you can be an atheist Jew and Hitler will still shovel you into the gas chamber nonetheless. So, you know, religion here, religion, religion sort of night here or there, here's an ethnic group that has been systematically driven out of every place that has ever tried to set up shop.
• 4:02
  And so they deserve the right to create a state in some form somewhere sometime. That would be the most tepid milk toast and a dying version of Zionism. Am I Zionist on that front?
• 4:18
  Again, prior to October 7th, I would have even been ambivalent about that. And I was publicly. It just felt a bit 19th century to be defining people on the basis of their ethnicity or religion. It just seemed a bit old-fashioned. Like, isn't the whole point of small, or liberal progressive universalism that we should get beyond tribes? Like, why should this tribe have a state?
• 4:46
  The whole point that they should be safe wherever they go, that we should set up Western liberal democracies in such a way that Jews are safe and Muslims are safe and Sikhs are safe and everyone is safe. Like, who needs a state? Why do we need to have a state?
• 5:00
  So there have been periods in my life, long periods where I would not have called myself a Zionist even by the most inoffensive and minimalist definition of that word.
• 5:10
  October 7th, what changed was the deployment of the concept of Zionism by people on the left to basically mean filthy Jew. At least that's the way it sort of sounds. Now I know the people will instantly say that's not true. I'm reading into it. I'm being an aggressive victim in just the way that I might sometimes accuse other highly politically correct or social justice oriented wokesters of being.
• 5:39
  But let me explain. I'm not saying that people who are banging on about Zionists and Zionist pigs all the time believe that Jews are bad people or are aware of the fact that they might be deploying timeless anti-Semitic tropes.
• 5:58
  I'm not saying they're motivated by a hatred of Jews. I'm not saying that they are consciously trying to denigrate Jews and are using code words to do so.
• 6:06
  I'm saying that there is a superstructure of cultural means that persist through time in Western culture that draw on traditional stereotypes about people.
• 6:20
  We have no problem understanding this when we talk about feminism or when we talk about racism towards people of color. We have no problem understanding that when a person, when a male and old sexist male uses some slightly demeaning language towards a woman and says, oh, you know, fetch us a cup of cup of tea with your tuts.
• 6:41
  He doesn't get to say, look, I'm not being sexist. I'm not I'm not motivated by any animus towards women. The reckoning of the past 10 or so years, at least five years, is that it's no longer good enough for the people who are unwittingly involved in a kind of instructional prejudice to claim ignorance.
• 7:01
  The people who are being prejudiced against the people who are being oppressed, the historically disadvantaged group, gets to point out that there are ways of talking and ways of caricaturing the other that are systemic and timeless.
• 7:16
  And sometimes that can go too far and we can read racism into everything or we can read sexism into everything or we can talk about the patriarchy as being more powerful than it actually is.
• 7:26
  That doesn't detract from the fact that they're really truly are ways of talking about minorities that people can engage in that they're inheriting from a long and sorted history of cliches about that minority.
• 7:41
  And they may not be thinking about it and they may not be motivated by prejudice and they may not be feeling any animus. But the fact remains that you can go to dozens of countries in Africa and pick a random person off the street, especially if they're Muslim majority countries.
• 7:58
  And you can ask that person about Jews and that individual may not only never have met a Jew, they may never have met anyone who has ever met anyone who has ever met a Jew.
• 8:11
  But I guarantee that if they've been visiting mosques, then they will have some strong opinions about Jews.
• 8:17
  And that's not because they're personally motivated by any hatred towards any Jew that don't know any.
• 8:22
  It's because they're caught up in a way of thinking about a particular minority that is pernicious and discriminatory.
• 8:30
  So Zionism.
• 8:32
  Zionism has become a kind of a code word a lot of Jews feel for bloodthirstyness, callousness, a disregard for human life.
• 8:44
  And one of the tragedies of the right wing settler movement in Israel and of Benjamin Netanyahu, who I've said repeatedly is a corrupt little hack who has done more damage to global Jews than any other individual since well in my lifetime at least.
• 8:59
  The tragedy of these successive right wing Israeli governments that have aggressively pursued settlements and have in fact found sucker with Hamas in order to split Palestinian interests between the moderates on the West Bank and the extremists in Gaza have tried to play them off each other in some kind of cynical game that they somehow magically thought wouldn't backfire.
• 9:20
  And of course it did tragically.
• 9:23
  So the tragedy of Israel being derailed in this way is that it's dragged all the rest of the world's Jews into this weird, fausty impact where we feel like we're expected to choose between this intolerable binary.
• 9:36
  Are you a Zionist or are you not a Zionist?
• 9:39
  Well, if you may, if by Zionism you mean all of the horrible things that I just articulated, then no I'm not a Zionist.
• 9:46
  And until you started banding around the word Zionism in such a cavalier way that smells so much of timeless Jew hating tropes, I would have continued to say I was not a Zionist in any respect.
• 9:58
  But now, frankly with all due respect, I do feel like the Jews need some kind of a safe haven because you've made it abundantly obvious that we don't have one.
• 10:08
  Should that safe haven be the nation of Israel? I don't know.
• 10:11
  Should it be a nation of Israel that stretches from the river to the sea with no homeland for Palestinians?
• 10:17
  Absolutely not. Should it be a nation state that treats Palestinians as Israel has? No.
• 10:23
  Should it be a nation state that is conducting a war the way that Israel currently is? No.
• 10:27
  Should it be a nation state that has such callous disregard for the well-being of Palestinians? No.
• 10:34
  Should it be a nation state that has refused over the past 20 years to seek a real resolution to the Palestinian problem? No, no, no, no, no.
• 10:45
  But should there be some safe haven for the most persecuted minority in the history of the world? Yeah, maybe, maybe.
• 10:55
  And on that front, if that makes me a Zionist, then I shudder to think who isn't a Zionist.
• 11:01
  Really, the only person who isn't a Zionist is a person who thinks that the whole concept of Israel was a misbegotten venture in the first place.
• 11:09
  And that somehow there'll be peace, lion sleeping with lambs, rivers of milk and honey, postmen hugging, a great dance and whatnot.
• 11:19
  If only Jews and Arabs are given a single state, like all those other great majority Arab, majority Muslim states in the world that respect women's rights and the highly innovative the way that Israel is and have amazing tech sectors and have great gay night life, all those great other Arab and Muslim liberal democracies that you would want to live in.
• 11:39
  That all the protesters who are on the streets condemning Zionism would want to live in that all the feminists on social media condemning Zionism would want to live in.
• 11:49
  Where is this mythical Palestine that is set up in opposition to the supposed filth of Zionism?
• 11:57
  You know, if Zionism is a bad thing, oh my goodness, is this Josh's husband really married to a Zionist, then show me the alternative show me the alternative Arab state, which is peaceful and well functioning and where there are lots of Jews where the Jews were driven out fleeing for their lives.
• 12:15
  None of this is to justify the actions of Israel. None of this is to justify settler violence. None of this is to justify the intransigence of the Israeli government.
• 12:25
  But I just want to clarify what we're talking about, we're talking about Zionism. It's become a kind of a code.
• 12:32
  Like Pakistan is another country that was built upon the creation of a homeland for a particular religious group of people.
• 12:42
  Pakistan is the homeland for the Muslims of South Asia. It was created in the same year as Israel when the British moved out of, you know, pulled out of South Asia.
• 12:54
  And it doesn't strike me that a lot of people object hugely to the notion to the principle of creating a homeland for the Muslims of South Asia.
• 13:05
  So should the Jews have a country has become so wrapped up, perhaps because of the misdeeds of Israeli governments towards the Palestinians, but I suspect it's deeper than that.
• 13:17
  So wrapped up in the idea of that there being an illegitimate clamoring for colonial land, that it's hard to remember that there are all kinds of countries that were built on war and bloodshed and that were created in order to provide safe havens for particular groups of people.
• 13:34
  Should the Gaelic people have a country because they do in Ireland, you know, Pakistan as I say is built for Pakistani people.
• 13:42
  Armenia is for the Armenians. The Armenians are an ethnic group of people. Like the Persians have a country. It's called Iran. That's where Persians are.
• 13:51
  The two holiest sites of Islam, Mecca and Medina are located in an explicitly Islamic country. It's not a crazy thing to create a nation state around a group of people to provide that group of people with safe haven from other cultures, especially when the cultures surrounding them in that part of the world have been deeply inimical to them.
• 14:14
  So it's easy to sort of see the current war and be horrified at the idea of someone aligning themselves with Zionism.
• 14:22
  But if you zoom out and don't just look at what Israel is doing to Gaza, but you look at Israel's position surrounded by a half a billion Arabs and Arab armies who detest them and have taken every opportunity to invade them and kill as many of them as they can whenever they can.
• 14:42
  I mean, starting in 1948, we don't have to go through the whole history again, but I think we all know it. The British pulled out. There was British Palestine, the United Nations created Israel and the bit around Israel, which is currently the occupied territories of Palestine was supposed to become an Arab state.
• 14:58
  It wasn't Israel that invaded it. It was the Arab countries that invaded it and Jordan sat on it for decades. And it was part of Jordan. It was a third of the country of Jordan was the West Bank and Egypt had Gaza.
• 15:11
  It was only when those nations then chose to invade Israel a second and third time that the Israelis managed to occupy all of the current territories.
• 15:21
  The second time they managed to occupy the third time they were almost wiped off the face of the planet. So none of this is to say that I support what Israel is doing. I have said repeatedly that there surely were more humanitarian ways of resolving the crisis of October 7th.
• 15:40
  You know, you could have imagined a humanitarian corridor in which women and children from Gaza were brought into a vast encampment in the north of to the north of Gaza in Israel proper and were treated well.
• 15:54
  And then Israel gives some kind of an ultimatum to military-aged fighters in Gaza that they can either come out unarmed and go through some sort of security check or they can stay there and a weight and basically be staffed out.
• 16:07
  You know, I don't understand why the Israeli military has to go through the tunnels physically, why they can't flood the tunnels, send in leaflets, send in warnings and give them as many warnings as you want, then fill them up with water if you want to.
• 16:20
  I mean, there are ways that you can imagine that whilst Makarb in themselves are a lot less devastating from a humanitarian perspective than simply bombing the shit out of the entire place as they seem to be doing.
• 16:31
  I'm opposed to that. I'm opposed to what's happening. I find it tragic. I also recognize that the Palestinians, the poor Palestinians, have been betrayed by everybody around them. Nobody wants to rule the Palestinians.
• 16:44
  You know, it's not just Israel that it has been responsible for the emiseration of the Palestinians. There is a long history of Arab leaders manipulating the Palestinian cause to rile up their citizens and entrench their own power.
• 17:00
  You've got this weird situation across the Arab world where the Arab street, including Arab leaders seem to care terribly about the Palestinian issue. It was the one issue where you can guarantee that there'll be riots in the streets if you ferment some enthusiasm about the poor Palestinians.
• 17:14
  And yet when it comes to doing anything to actually help the Palestinians, nobody does a thing. Nobody does a thing.
• 17:20
  The Gulf States, which could give work permits to Palestinians instead of giving them all to South Asians to come in and build their stadiums in places like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, don't. They don't employ Palestinians.
• 17:32
  Countries like Lebanon, which could provide a path to citizenship or a path to at least permanent residency for Palestinian refugees.
• 17:40
  We're talking about Palestinian refugees who were refugees from 1948, not necessarily refugees from six months ago from settler violence, they don't provide that pathway to citizenship.
• 17:49
  You know, there are all kinds of things you could do. You could allow them to enter into Egypt and you could provide work opportunities. None of these things are undertaken because it serves the interests of corrupt leaders in the Arab world and have misguided lefties in the West to have the Palestinians as this cause celebre that they can appeal to in order to denigrate Israel and by extension to denigrate the world's Jews.
• 18:15
  You know, it's a tricky, tricky situation, but I feel like Zionism is becoming wrapped up in all of the misdeeds of Israel. And when I say that I oppose what Israel is doing and that my heart goes out to Palestine and that I wish this weren't happening, I am also realistic enough as I would hope that anyone with a heart is realistic enough to recognize that after a nation and it endures a horrifying trauma, it doesn't always act as rationally as it might.
• 18:43
  Did the United States act perfectly rationally after 9-11? It was in shock. It did something stupid, it invaded Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9-11, and we're still living with the consequences of that today.
• 18:55
  It killed probably a million people in Iraq, a million people in Iraq, and yes, there were a few protests, but it didn't turn into a worldwide conflagration in which all Americans were treated as if they were effectively vermin and they were asked questions about my goodness.
• 19:09
  Are you married to someone who is an American, an American, the way that people talk about a Zionist? Is he a Zionist? Come on, we were able to separate the people from the political and military response.
• 19:23
  On October 7th, Israel for all of its faults, you know, for all of the problems and for all of the failures and for all of the corruption of its leaders.
• 19:32
  Israel, a democratic western liberal country where people go out to gay bars and where women and Arabs exist on the Supreme Court and in parliament in ways that they don't anywhere else in the Middle East, was invaded by a country where there are no settlements in Gaza or an enclave,
• 19:51
  or an enclave, or at least where there are no settlements, an enclave that had willingly elected a jihadist ISIS-style terrorist group to be in charge of them, one that still has 70 to 80% support across most of Palestine according to how much you can trust opinion polls.
• 20:08
  And hundreds and hundreds of their people were raped with rifles, children shot, I mean the most horrendous and barbaric ISIS-style attack ever.
• 20:22
  And within 24 hours, the world's streets were full of people not in opposition to that attack, but saying free Palestine and Israel is the problem.
• 20:35
  It's understandable that a nation state that feels so besieged might overreact. Do I condone that overreaction? No, as I've said a million times.
• 20:45
  When you say is Josh a Zionist, if what you mean is, do I support what Israel is currently doing, the answer is no.
• 20:54
  But it's a bit more complicated than that. I hope this somewhat clarifies the question of Zionism. I hope that someday we see a free Palestine alongside a free Israel, which raises my final point before I forget.
• 21:09
  Zionism simply means that there should be some state of Israel somewhere. Now since they're currently years of state of Israel that already exists, it would seem full-hardy to try to move it.
• 21:20
  Therefore, we need to have an Israel and a Palestine side by side.
• 21:25
  Many points in my life, I have been persuaded by the idea that you need a single state, a single Palestine where the rights of Jews are entrenched and the rights of Muslims are entrenched.
• 21:35
  I know long to think that's possible. I think the trust has been so eroded that there is no way that these two groups of people within any timeframe that any of us can imagine they're going to be able to live in the same society without persecuting each other.
• 21:47
  Therefore, you need two states and oftentimes when pro-Palestinian activists or when lefties in the west are talking about Zionism and they're talking about Palestine, they say things like from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, which means no Israel, which means no Jewish homeland, which means go back to the status quo ante of prior to 1948, when the Jews in random villages throughout Eastern Europe and the other places where they were mostly located in the West.
• 22:16
  Just had to go to bed at night, not knowing whether or not violent mobs would come and rape their children and behead them and stab them and drive them out.
• 22:27
  That was the norm. Those pogroms were the norm across places where Jews lived between the late 1800s and the mid 1900s.
• 22:37
  That was what started Zionism in the first place, the recognition that Jews have never been able to, I mean not only have they never been able to go to bed without feeling fear that they might be stabbed or shot in the night in a rampaging by a rampaging mob, but they've also just in their daily lives never been able to attain professional success, go to elite educational institutions be accepted into the club of elites, which might be hard to remember.
• 23:07
  To imagine now because Jews rule finance and media to some extent, but the reason why they're so dominant in finance and media is largely because they were excluded from all the other professions for so long so they had to get good at being middlemen and entertainers.
• 23:22
  Nonetheless, that's all the bigger side to say that let's be careful about Zionism and the existence of the state of Israel versus Zionism and the existence of a Palestinian state.
• 23:34
  Israel can coexist alongside Palestine, the Palestinians deserve nationhood, the Palestinians deserve their own state, but let's not start talking in ways that imply that such a state means that all of the Jews of the Middle East have to be eradicated because that's basically what's implied by from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
• 23:57
  God bless, I love Palestinians, I want Palestinians to be free, I want Palestinians to be at peace, and in some respect I also grudgingly now confess I am yes, as I am.