Netanyahu’s Palestinian Genocide Is Also a Betrayal of the Jews

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Apart from the death, destruction and suffering bestowed upon the Palestinian people in Gaza by the hands of the Israeli government, an ideological battle is taking place around the world, especially in the United States, where Jewish people face discrimination, prejudice and attacks on their identity by the hands of other Jews.

Former University of Pennsylvania—where former president Elizabeth Magill has just resigned because of this very issue—deputy dean Larry Gross and host Robert Scheer, “two old Jews,” as Scheer puts it, discuss the troubling, McCarthyite times that are transpiring now in the wake of the October 7th attacks and the subsequent daily bombardment of Gaza.

“It’s an attempt to silence opposition through a kind of rhetorical intimidation, and nobody should accept it. It is shameful and wrong and I would say it’s embarrassingly ignorant when the U.S. Congress votes for a resolution that defines criticism of Zionism as anti-Semitic,” Gross said.

The simple and objective realities that Jews like Gross and Scheer discuss could now be construed as anti-Semitic, despite them being Jewish. This “card,” Gross and Scheer argue, along with the “Holocaust card,” is illogical and stifles crucial dialogue. 

Gross says “it is intellectually bankrupt, morally reprehensible and politically opportunistic,” while Scheer pleads “this idea that the U.S. Congress could tell even Jewish people that if you dare criticize this political movement of Zionism that you’re anti-Semitic, this is one of the greatest distortions of thought.”

“They pull out their victim card and accuse anybody who criticizes them of anti-Semitism. And as you know, if you’re Jewish, then you’re a, what do they call it, self-hating Jew? That’s the kind of trick psychoanalysts play, which is you can’t win no matter what you say,” Gross said.

Despite their vast experience with both Judaism as a religion and Israel as a state, with Gross spending eight years growing up in Israel and Scheer reporting on the Six-Day War when it happened, their contributions to the discussion of the war on Gaza can now be labeled and disregarded, thanks to the efforts of people like Elise Stefanik against university presidents in Congress and the rest of the establishment figures who uncritically take Israeli government officials’ words as fact.

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Credits

Host:

Robert Scheer

Producer:

Joshua Scheer

Introduction:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy. 

Robert Scheer Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence and I’ve got a guest I’ve had before, Larry Gross. But I just can’t think of a better person to turn to. He was the Associate Dean at Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, which has been a center of well, what? The president of the school was forced to resign over her congressional testimony. Penn has been roiled by big contributors. And then after Penn, [Gross] came to the Annenberg School, where I teach and was my boss, at the University of Southern California for many years. And he’s just now retiring. But the particular reason I wanted to talk to Larry is I think there’s a real issue now of what are the rights of Jewish people to speak about what’s going on in the state of Israel in relation to the West Bank, a state that claims to speak for all Jews. And yet, if you dare criticize that state, people will attack you.

If you are not Jewish, they’ll tell you you’re anti-Semitic. But even if you’re Jewish, they’ll tell you you are self-hating or anti-Semitic. And Larry is somebody who has very strong, independent, academically supported views on many subjects. But you lived in Israel and in a sense, I think of this as a current McCarthyite period, of which we’re trying to intimidate people from speaking out. And your father, who was involved in the U.S. government, I think beginning with Roosevelt, you went to Israel at the age of ten, you were there until you were 18, in a way, as a refugee from American McCarthyism. So what is your assessment of where we are now, where Israel is now and the whole question of the right of a Jew or a non-Jew to speak out on what’s happening? 

Larry Gross Well, let me give two kinds of answers to that. The first is that Judaism, in contrast with many other religions, does not have a uniform hierarchical structure. I mean, in some ways it’s the most different from the Roman Catholic Church, where it is considered indisputable that there is a hierarchy and that the pope is at the top of the hierarchy. And when the pope speaks in his most whatever the word is, most official voice, he is infallible because he is Christ’s vicar on Earth. Jews are very different than that. There are a lot of jokes about, you know, if you have two Jews, you need three synagogues, one for each of them and one they wouldn’t be caught dead in. They’re famous for debate, dispute and argument. In fact, it’s sort of built into the centuries long tradition of Judaism. That one makes a point by disagreeing with somebody, it’s through disputation and argument over the exact interpretation of a text that you arrive at an understanding. So Jews are sort of temperamentally disputatious and there is no hierarchy, there’s no Jewish pope, there’s no Jewish ayatollah. There are rabbis, and many of them have very large followings. In fact, in one famous case, the Hasidim, the Satmar Hasidim, they consider one of their now late rabbis, Menachem Schneerson, to have been the Messiah. And even though he died and wasn’t resurrected, his grave is still a pilgrimage site for people who consider him to be holy.

But there are lots of different views and lots of different positions and just as a side light on that, one of the current complications in the last year or so is that the Israeli government has been constructed of the coalition that constitutes the Israeli government at this point includes members of a far more right wing religious nationalist presence than has been previously included in the Israeli Israeli government. So that is the religious aspect, there is a factor, but there is no uniform Jewish orthodoxy that everybody is expected to adhere to. They’re just factions and fractions and collections. The other point which to respond to your question is that since the founding of the state of Israel or even since the period leading up to the founding, the defense or arguments for supporting the emerging state of Israel were very much tied to the growing realization of the horrors of the Holocaust and the increasing sort of—the word challenging doesn’t do justice to the position that Jews faced in much of Europe up through and through the Holocaust and a kind of, you might argue, collective guilt, or at least regret or concern on the part of other countries as to the fate of the Jews and the lack of an intervention to do anything about it was one of the grounds on which the arguments for the establishment of the State of Israel were made in the United States, in the United Nations and in other countries, and for over the 75 roughly years that the state of Israel has existed, they, and it’s not a singular they because it’s different people, different groups, different political parties over time, but there has been a consistent use of what might be called and has been called playing the Holocaust card that whenever the subject of Israel’s behavior externally or internally, particularly internally, comes up, the sort of importance of Israel: because Holocaust, because we need this because of the Holocaust, etc. is is played.

And there are a number of problems with that. One of which is that at least half of the citizens of Israel come from communities and/or countries of origin that had nothing to do with the Holocaust, that were never in Europe, that were basically Middle Eastern Muslim countries all the way from Morocco in the West to Iran, Persia in the east with very large communities in North Africa, in Egypt in particular. And in Iraq in particular to the east. So these are what are often called Mizrahi, which is certainly Hebrew for Eastern Jews, sometimes called Sephardic, which is a little more complicated, Jews do not have a history that connects with the Holocaust, in fact, have a very different experience of living under Muslim dominated rule in these countries. So Israel is not a collection of Holocaust survivors, as sometimes is implied. And it’s also the case that the Israeli government, particularly in the early years, immediately after the founding of the state and the war that that followed, the Israeli government was actively engaged in sort of creating conditions that made the life of of Jewish populations in Arab countries more uncomfortable in order to encourage them to migrate to Israel and also encourage those governments to let them migrate to Israel, which they did. But the key point today is that, to put it bluntly and crudely, the Holocaust card doesn’t work anymore, particularly for young people. And it’s been obvious to me, and I think to many, many people in the last decade or so that the Israeli public relations industry, what in Israel, in Hebrew, is called hasbara, which means explanation, that’s the term they use for their sort of national public relations efforts, that that enterprise has continued to play from the same, to read from the same playbook, Holocaust-centered playbook long after its expiration date for people born much more recently for whom it’s not their parents generation, it’s not their grandparents and maybe their great grandparents. And they’ve heard about it.

But when they hear about the behavior of the Germans say, or others in the Holocaust period, they are reminded not so much of stories they heard from their grandparents or in a movie or TV show, but of what they see on the news of the way the Israeli forces of occupation are treating Palestinians in the West Bank and repeatedly in Gaza. And when they hear about oppression, systematic oppression of ethnic and religious minorities, the image they hear is that of the Israeli occupiers, not of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. So, I think the the Israeli effort to portray itself as needing to be militant and aggressive in the way that it has been, has run out of, you know, sort of moral authority and in fact, ceded the the role of victim, no longer held by the Jews, but held by the Palestinians whose lives they are constraining and controlling in ways that very much resemble the apartheid system in South Africa. As you know very well, this is something that former President Jimmy Carter, rather uniquely among the American statesman, was willing to say that if you look at it objectively, it looks a lot like apartheid. And it should, because that’s exactly how it’s been working. 

Scheer Well, first of all, you say that the Holocaust card has lost its passion and feeling. No, it’s being used right now.

Gross They keep on using it. It’s just not working. 

Scheer Well, it’s working to get the former head of the university that you were an assistant dean at, the University of Pennsylvania, it’s working to intimidate Harvard, Which hopeless. 

Gross Absolutely. When I say it’s not working, I mean, among younger generations. If you look at today’s New York Times, there is a very detailed account of the generation gap in attitudes towards Israel. And the biggest difference now, there are two big differences that they report in American public opinion. One is between Democrats and Republicans, with the Republicans much more supporting Israel and the Democrats not so much. And age, and the younger cohorts, not only are they not so much in support of Israel, but they are more likely to support the Palestinians. If you if you operate on a rhetoric of victimhood, the victims that we can see today are not Jews. Now, it’s true, unquestionably, that the Hamas forces that broke through the fences and attacked southern Israel on October 7th engaged in what everybody would consider war crimes, the killing civilians, the sort of rampant and indiscriminate killing and rape. I mean, leaving aside the fake claims of hanging babies from clotheslines or whatever, beheading babies, we don’t need the fake ones. The real ones were were bad enough. But yes, so 1,200, let’s say Israelis were slaughtered in an obscene war crime by Hamas fighters on October 7th. But by now, the Israelis have killed, I don’t know, upward of 15, maybe by now, 20,000. 

Scheer 19,000 is the figure today. But they only let me… 

Gross You know, using the kind of carpet bombing that just a year or so ago, we were decrying, condemning Russia for using in the Ukraine, except worse. 

Scheer Let me cut to the chase here, because the fact of the matter is, what you’re saying right now in this interview could get a professor fired at a major university. 

Gross I do not think so, I don’t think fired would be likely. Certainly constrained in some ways.

Scheer A university president fired…

Gross A professor at the University of Southern California, where you teach and I am in there for two more weeks, a professor was suspended from teaching and briefly banned from campus, not for condemning Israel, but for saying that all Hamas members should be killed, which was caught on video like everything is these days and went viral and John Strauss, who is an economist… So the most the most specific penalty that I’ve seen imposed on, certainly USC, was somebody who was going overboard… 

Scheer Right and that’s to be criticized. Obviously, we believe in academic freedom and we believe in full debate, including for people on on opposite sides. But let me cut to the chase here, because we’re in a… maybe you don’t feel it’s as dangerous a situation as I do. And but I feel now that particularly and I’m talking in the context of your background and my own, I think that it’s ironic. You can have people who actually deep down have very hostile views about the Jewish religion, but as long as they support Israel and that’s true of some of the Republicans who are on record of this, they’re encouraged. And on the other hand, people who criticize and this is what the heart of the discussion is, right? Is it anti-Semitic to criticize Zionism in whatever form? 

Gross No, of course not. 

Scheer And I know you feel that way, but you’re somebody who studied in Israel during a period in which Zionism was much more appealing. It was before the Six-Day War, you were there from when you were 10 to 18. You know the Hebraic language, you know the tradition. You grew up basically your formative years in Israeli schools. And it was possible then, I know because I went to Israel at the end of the Six-Day War, right as the war was ending and I was there. And you could have intelligent discussions with people like Moshe Dayan and Allon, and a lot of the old Labor Party people were still the government about what would happen if you occupy millions of non-Jews and what was their traditional land after all they had left. And now you can’t. Now to dare suggest, let’s say, to use the word of genocide or to suggest war crimes, they will hurl the anti-Semitic card. 

Gross That’s a that’s a political ploy or a attempt to silence people. But, I mean, you were making the reference to McCarthyism, which is, I would agree, is unfortunately, rings true today. That kind of an attempt to intimidate and silence and the phrase communism and soft and pink and fellow traveler and all these terms that were used in the forties and the fifties are similar. It’s an attempt to silence opposition through a kind of rhetorical intimidation, and nobody should accept it. And it is shameful and wrong and I would say it’s embarrassingly ignorant when the U.S. Congress votes for a resolution that defines criticism of Zionism as anti-Semitic. I mean, I would say it’s shamefully ignorant on the part of Congress if shameful ignorance wasn’t so commonplace in Congress these days. I mean, it’s kind of the standard you expect of congressional discussion these days. But no, this has been a long standing attempt on the part of the Israeli PR apparatus, which is a very extensive and ferocious effort that’s been going on for a long time.

Well, just incidentally, one of the best examples, one of the biggest successes of the Israeli efforts to undermine political opposition through bogus claims of anti-Semitism is their collusion with politicians in Britain to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn. To undermine an actual leftist who was the head of the Labor Party and who was undermined by the centrist members of the Labor Party with the active support and participation and help of the Israelis in mounting bogus claims that Corbyn was anti-Semitic despite his entire record of support for causes. I mean, it was a completely ridiculous thing, which they did against a whole number of leftist labor members as they recaptured the Labor Party for the Blairite neoliberal wing, which now dominates under Starmer. So it’s not only in the United States, they’ve done it in every country and they do it in many ways. And incidentally, as long as we’re on the subject of, you know, sort of Israeli backstage political maneuvering, it is by now documented that Israel was supporting Hamas for years. Israel was allowing Qatar to funnel billions of dollars to Hamas. And Netanyahu is recorded on tape talking about how we support Hamas to to counter the Palestinian Authority.

The Israelis have deluded themselves that they can play a game of masterful 3D chess in which they are constantly making these incredible errors. And what happens on October 7th is as dramatic a demonstration as you can have of the utter stupidity and moral corruption of politicians like Netanyahu who think they can control these forces in a complicated way. Every bit as stupid as the U.S. government, which helped create the Taliban and Al Qaida, originally as forces against the Russians in Afghanistan. This kind of latter day Metternich, Kissinger-ian, perhaps, politics invariably fails. This is both morally corrupt and stupid. And the Israelis have been playing this game consistently and they do it in a bullying fashion. They pull out their their victim card and accuse anybody who criticizes them of anti-Semitism. And as you know, if you’re Jewish, then you’re a, what do they call it, self-hating Jew? That’s the kind of trick psychoanalysts play, which is you can’t win no matter what you say. You’re either resisting or denying or whatever, it doesn’t work. And the point I made earlier is that they are continually displaying from a script that simply doesn’t work with younger cohorts of generations and who look at what’s happening, not at these claims. What happened in Congress, the sort of political drama that knocked off the president of the [University of] Pennsylvania is classic political theater, very much of the McCarthyite variety, absolutely. It’s members of Congress bringing people in to harangue them or try and trick them with debate trick questions.

And they fell for it. Those three presidents who were inappropriately prepped by lawyers who were training them or encouraging them to split hairs when that’s absolutely the wrong way to respond there to those questions. Those were leading questions based on false premises. And they should have challenged the premises, not decided to split hairs like Clinton saying, it depends what the meaning of “is” is. They fell right into Elise Stefanik’s trap. 

Scheer Chris Hedges, I notice you sent out Chris Hedges’ column this week, and we have it on ScheerPost that I edit. No, I don’t actually edit, I publish. My wife, Narda Zacchino, is the editor, I want to be careful here. But Chris Hedges, who covered the Mideast for the New York Times for years and was involved in their Pulitzer team dealing with 9/11 and is Arabic speaking and wrote a very tough column today. And when I talked to you the other day and one reason I wanted to do this, you had some doubts about the use of the word genocide, which he does use. And your argument was that, oh, come on, maybe a majority of people who live in now, what is Israel are people who were part of the area. And so in some sense, it’s not settler colonialism, I guess, was the phrase you most strongly objected to. But the irony here, the deep irony is that we never really came to grips with the actual Holocaust, meaning the elimination, the death, the destruction of 6 million Jews. And that was at the hands of primarily a Christian Europe. As you point out, this was not a Muslim crime and it did not happen in the Mideast. And I know as someone, we’re both pretty old guys here, and I remember very well because I was a young kid then, the indifference of official America to anti-Semitism in Europe as it was emerging, even anti-Semitism in the United States.

We had very prominent anti-Semites even having access to mass radio, and there were plenty of people who defended what was going on in Germany and elsewhere. And the deep irony here is that the, and I guess this is the point of Chris’s column, the deep irony is that in the effort to presumably prevent another Holocaust, we are visiting such a, I don’t want to say of the same order, I don’t want to get in a big false argument about that, but certainly what’s going on now is the elimination of a Palestinian people in all functional terms, who happen to have been living there for the longest time. And really maybe the end of a certain kind of Jewishness or certainly a fundamental assault, because, as Gabor Maté, whose own father and grandfather were victims of the Holocaust points out, there really were two Jewish traditions. One is, and I want to get into this a bit, one is the religious tradition, which Jews, to one degree or another, identify with or defined differently. And in fact, most American Jews follow a reformist or conservative Judaism, which isn’t even officially fully recognized in Israel. And part of Netanyahu’s coalition are people want to tighten that orthodox religious control. And then there’s even another branch of Orthodox Judaism who says not for secular people, to create the new Israel is supposed to come from the Messiah, it’s a whole nother argument.

But the terrible thing here is for those of us who come out of a secular or liberal or reformed Jewish tradition, this is a denial of the universalist human rights values. And that’s why young people are rebelling against this, because they accept that human rights are universal, whether it applies to Ukrainians or applies to anybody in the world, Black victims of police violence in the United States. And here really is the incredible irony, historical irony is that the survival of the Jews has been used as an argument to basically defend an attack on this incredible Jewish international tradition of tolerance and progress.

Gross Yes, I think part of the problem is there’s a built in contradiction. Between the idea that Israel is a Jewish state, the Jewish state, and as you often hear people say the Arabs have whatever, 12, 14 states, Jews only have one, or Jews need to have a state because Holocaust, etc. And the defense, which you also hear all the time, which is that Israel is a democracy and the only democracy in the Middle East. And one of the arguments used consistently for the extraordinary support that Israel has received from from the United States over the decades is because Israel is the democracy in the Middle East, it’s the only democracy in the Middle East. Well, you can’t have a democracy by any, I think, reasonable interpretation of it, particularly, as you say, in light of sort of notions of universal notions of human rights and have it be defined in terms of a particular religion. There are state churches, there’s the Church of England. There’s the Swedish, Sweden has a state church. There are many of them. But those are not theocratic states, religions. There are at least two, that I can think of, theocratic, explicitly theocratic states. There’s Iran, where the supreme religious leader, the Ayatollah, not elected by the people, has more power than the elected leaders. And Saudi Arabia, which claims also to be a religious state where power, resides in the monarch, because the British designated one of the clans, bin Salman’s clan, to take over. But Israel has compromised its democratic status from the beginning, from the beginning, even back in the fifties, when under labor governments, because the Israeli governing coalitions have always included religious parties.

And the religious parties have always succeeded in controlling important aspects of Israeli life, public and private, in terms dictated by religion, not by secular law. In particular, in Israel, over the decades, from the beginning, rabbinical courts have been in control of marriage, divorce and other domestic policy issues. It is not possible for Jews and non-Jews to marry in Israel. They have to leave the country to marry and then they can come back and have their marriage recognized. But Israeli domestic law for things like marriage, divorce, child custody, all of these kinds of critical issues, these are really important issues in people’s lives, are governed by religious authorities because as part of the compromises to create coalitions, even the labor governments gave them that power. Now, what’s happened in the last round with this current group, which is, as we both said, includes far more extreme religious parties, new ones, than existed in previous coalitions. They have been steadily trying to increase the extent of theocratic law and religious law into aspects of Israeli life. They are arguing for separate, for gender segregated public transportation. They’ve argued for gender separated schooling. I mean, they’re much bigger on keeping men and women separate. They’ve made it very difficult for women to pray at the temple wall, the Wailing Wall as it’s called, the Western wall in Jerusalem.

I mean, the extreme religious orthodoxies in Israel have become much more militant in a non-democratic fashion. And this is one of the reasons that the Israeli public has been protesting long before October 7th and since then but for more than a year or so since there have been demonstrations against this anti-democratic, religious parties. Now, there’s a critical fact that many Americans, I suspect, are not familiar with. You alluded to just now to the fact that there is a long standing anti-Zionist sentiment among Orthodox Jews, the extreme Orthodox Jews, as you might say in American terms, there’s there’s reform or reconstructionist, even reconstructionist reform, conservative orthodox. It sort of goes to the spectrum. And then there’s what you might call the ultra-Orthodox, which is some of the Hasidic sects and some others who were explicitly anti-Zionist and they were anti-Zionist on the argument that for us, mere humans, to try and create the state of Israel is implying that God is delayed, is like the God is not saving his people by establishing the return of the Messiah or the coming of the Messiah and the establishment of a new Zion. The Zionism was impertinent, that Zionism was insulting God by saying we’ll do it, we’re tired of waiting for you. And this group was anti-Zionist and some of them in Israel, particularly that neighborhood Neturei Karta.

These were the anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews in Israel and in Brooklyn there are plenty of them. And there was, you know, definitely a contradiction there. What happened, and this is really important to understand, is that the ’67 war, in which Israel captured the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Sinai, the Gaza Strip in a blitzkrieg was taken by some of these ultra-Orthodox leaders as a sign that actually God was ready for Zionism. And this was the proof, that the success of the Israeli army in the ’67 War showed that Zionism was in fact God’s plan. And one of them in particular with the somewhat odd name of Rabbi Kook, Abraham Kook essentially said, oh, okay, God wants this. And what we suddenly had from ’67 on and with accelerating force was ultra orthodox Zionism, ethno-nationalist Orthodox Zionism. And they’re the ones who were pushing the eradication of the Palestinian communities on the West Bank. They care much more at the West Bank than they do about Gaza. You know, Gaza was never of great interest to the Jews. In fact, it’s where the Palestinians lived, that was Palestinian territory back in biblical days. The West Bank is what they want. And places like Hebron, where they’ve essentially made life impossible for the Arab Palestinian inhabitants with the army controlling everything or other parts of the West Bank there. They’re engaged there in apartheid chopping up of the land and various forms of what I think could appropriately be called ethnic cleansing, trying to kick people out, to appropriate their land, to push them out on religious grounds. And incidentally, this is again, important because Israel and its allies in their P.R. are very dishonest about this.

The slogan from the River to the Sea was a Zionist slogan. In fact, the Zionist slogan when I arrived in Israel in the fifties, the slogan of the political party that is the one that Netanyahu now leads, it’s called Likud now. The original party there was called Herut, which means freedom. And the Herut party joined with some other right wing parties in an alliance, which is what Likud means, it means alliance and that party. So its original slogan was both sides of the Jordan. And they had a little drawing I remember seeing on the wall or graffiti across from the Knesset, which I couldn’t quite figure out what this your drawing was until I realized it was a drawing of Israel plus Jordan as one country, because they would say if you find it in Genesis that God promised the Jews that they would have the land from the Nile to the Euphrates, which is not only both sides of the Jordan, that’s Egypt and Jordan and Iraq, you could get pretty imperialist there. But the Israeli, particularly the religious nationalist, ultra orthodox, have been pushing since the, particularly, eighties nineties for more and more control and for eradicating, removing this population. Now, I don’t know whether genocide is quite the word, but ethnic cleansing is certainly appropriate because that’s what they’re doing.

They’re trying to carve the land into smaller and smaller pieces. There are roads. There are highways that run through the West Bank that only Israelis can drive on. And Palestinians trying to move around the West Bank are constantly being held up at checkpoints where they are inconvenienced is the luckiest, humiliated by the treatment they receive from these young soldiers who are put in charge of screening young people, old people moving through. It’s a form of ritual, continual humiliation. And then they put a wall up so it’s not even ambiguous in this way. So, yes, there is ethnic cleansing. Genocide is a word I would be more careful with. I mean, I’ve certainly seen online, as many people have, various Israelis making statements, including some public officials, that could be interpreted as genocidal. I’ve seen the other kind of statements from from the other side. But ethnic cleansing and apartheid, it’s not even ambiguous, that’s what’s going on. 

Scheer Well, you know, just to footnote that. And we’re going to take a little more time. I’m going to go to full hour here because you know so much about this. But just on the genocide thing, I did a podcast with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who worked for two years, she’s a former professor at San Francisco State, I actually forget which one, but one of the Northern California universities and has written very important books on this subject. And she worked on the genocide issue at the UN for almost two years. And there are five characteristics, one of which is the physical elimination of a people, as was done to 6 million Jews and others by the Germans professing belief in a Christian God, actually in a Catholic or a Protestant version of it, rather than Muhammad. But nonetheless, the word genocide really has a lot to do with the elimination of a people. And clearly, whether Gaza is important as a piece of real estate, the fact is there’s just over 2 million people, 2.4 million people whose very existence at this moment is there, at risk. And their health, I mean just every kind of destruction, deny them food, kill them. And we have this example of three Israeli hostages who had gotten away from their kidnapers and now the Israelis killed them and the argument, well, that’s policy they have everybody. So it’s been turned into a killing field.

And whether we use the word genocide or not, we know it’s horrendous. And so the argument, again, this is where the Holocaust card comes in, it somehow gets you a free out of jail card. And there is such irony to it because the fact of the matter is and this, as somebody who actually visited it was in Gaza and the West Bank after the war, that the Palestinians did not attack Israel. That is, we talk about misinformation, the general reporting, you would think that from the very beginning and this goes back before the Six-Day War, the very beginning of the founding of Israel, somehow there was this Palestinian population that prevented these people from living there. Well, the fact of the matter is that Palestinian that population never had a navy, never had an air force, never had the basis of any kind of modern army. And the fact is, the threat and the eyes then of Israel when you were going to school was the larger Egypt, which had an army, was Saudi Arabia, which had wealth and so forth, was Syria and what have you. And the big lie here, because we have a law we teach about misinformation, disinformation is all consciousness, one of the biggest lies in modern history or the telling of modern history, is that the Palestinians represented an existential threat to Jews. I mean, this is the most absurd idea. And the irony is of the Six-Day War, that that’s where Israel came in possession of the West Bank and Gaza. Gaza, it was administered by Egypt, the West Bank, by Jordan. Israel had no trouble coming to peace with Egypt, with Jordan, and now they’re even have trouble with Saudi Arabia. So it’s like the old blaming the Jews for everything.

You get to blame the Palestinians. And I want to ask you, as a professor, as somebody who comes out of the university, you look at what’s going on now, people are afraid to speak up. That’s my experience. I teach at the same place where you’ve had a much more important position. But nonetheless, I don’t find that much discussion about this. And it occurred to me just before I was doing this, I thought, wait a minute, on what right did all of the members of the U.S. Congress except 13 tell me—whose mother came over escaping anti-Semitism, every one of my relatives in Lithuania were killed by mostly Christian nations and everything—tell me that I can’t speak up, criticizing what’s being done in the name of the Jew. We don’t have a right to criticize Zionism. How do you feel about that? And I want to ask you a particular issue and. You know, it’s not I’m not dragging it in. But I remember growing up, I would be… There was a virulent anti-Semitism in the Bronx. And I remember the first time, I think I was all of seven or something, some kid punched me in the nose and said I killed his Lord and that I somehow killed Christ. And there was a virulent anti-Semitism. And I remember because I went to work for a Roman Catholic literary quarterly, Ramparts magazine. I was the first, as has been said, the first Jew in the door in one of the books on it. And the fact is, it was only at that time when Pope John said, no, this was wrong. And so I wanted to ask you this idea that the U.S. Congress could tell even Jewish people that if you dare criticize this political movement of Zionism, that you’re anti-Semitic, this is one of the greatest distortions of want of thought. Is it not? 

Gross No, I agree. I said that earlier. It makes no sense. What it is and this is partially what I was saying before, it is abysmally ignorant, but it’s ignorant, as I also said before, in a way that isn’t exactly surprising out of Congress these days. But it’s not only Congress. This particular attempt to define criticism of Israeli government policy as anti-Semitic, which is really what’s at heart here. When they say anti-Zionism, you can conflate them. So you have Zionism, you have the Israeli government, which aren’t exactly the same thing, and you have Judaism. So, yes, there have been plenty of Jewish, of devoutly Jewish thinkers, and activists and others who have not been Zionists or have been Zionists in very different ways than the Israeli government. You know, famously, for people who actually know the history, instead of accepting the sort of press releases from the Israeli PR machine, famously in the 1940s, there was a letter published by, among others, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, warning that some of the leading Zionist forces they were specifically referring to Begin, Menachem Begin, who was later prime minister, had fascistic tendencies. They were not in fact democratic.

And there were plenty of Zionist views that were across various spectrums of how they should understand or the goals of Zionism, binational state, one state, the other versions of this. Some of the most eloquent perspectives were not reflected in the dominant view of the establishment of the state of Israel. It is a political ploy and effort to try and silence opposition. That’s why I said it’s very much like the anti-communist rhetoric in the… For instance, of the sort of Cold War rhetoric in the 1940s, I learned this from Margaret Mead, who was one of my teachers back at Columbia in the 1940s, American social scientists, as we would call them today, got together and came up with the term behavioral science. And introduced it. And among other things, a Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. There’s a journal called Behavioral Science. They invented the term behavioral science in the 1940s because the U.S. government would not fund social science because it sounded like socialism. And it was a proposal through, say, the National Science Foundation to support social science, they knew that some members of Congress would stand up on in Congress and attack them for supporting socialism. It’s that kind of ignorant rhetorical maneuvering that’s going on here with the claim that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic. It is ludicrous and ignorant, but it can be effective. And as you said yourself, many of the devout Christian supporters of Israel are hardly pro-Semitic as it’s known by anybody who actually knows the complex theology of evangelical Christianity. Israel is important because it’s part of the of the road to Armageddon and the second coming. I mean, they’re not supporting Israel because they love the Jews.

They’re supporting Israel because they’re trying to bring forth the return of the Antichrist and the Armageddon and the rapture and the second Coming and all of these things. And incidentally, just for the edification of some of our listeners, a lot of these very right wing evangelical Christians who are such devout supporters of Israel, are having some trouble now because the new Israeli government, that includes far more radical right wing Orthodox Jews are not at all friendly to the evangelical Christians. And they’ve been trying to clamp down on the presence and institutions run by evangelical Christians in Israel. The previous governments were perfectly happy to be supported by American evangelicals. But this new group are much more radically ultra-Orthodox, and they don’t want, Jews are very hostile to attempts to convert them. And evangelicals are out there to convert. So there’s a real crisis there were it not for October 7th and now this war in Gaza, this might have become more more visible. It’s one of the strains in the Israeli situation. But it is ludicrous. It is, I would say, intellectually bankrupt, morally reprehensible and politically opportunistic. And for members of Congress to vote for it is, that’s not all that unusual to make these empty rhetorical gestures that then can be used and that shameful act of political theater by Elise Stefanik and her colleagues to humiliate some ill-prepared and ill-advised university presidents, that is very much like McCarthyism. Absolutely. 

Scheer Oh, it’s worse than McCarthyism. For the U.S. government to take an official, and yes, there was a large number of Democrats who abstained. I think a somewhat larger group voted for it, while all the Republicans, I think, voted for it. But the idea that in a nation that has enshrined freedom of thought and expression and religion and so forth. 

Gross This is a situation where a very large portion of the members of Congress and certainly of the leading Republican contenders for the presidency are not at all clear about the separation of church and state. 

Scheer Okay we’re going to run out of time and I want to be very clear about something here. What we’re talking about and this is where Chris Hedges’ column was sobering. There is something thrilling, brilliant, exciting, necessary about the Jewish tradition. And that is seems to be lost in the whole discussion. It is certainly not adherence to a very narrow, strict, fundamentalist view of the religion. That’s why most American Jews don’t ascribe to such a view. What is precious in the Jewish experience was a notion of of universal freedom and values, respect for learning, respect for ideas, as you point out. Debate was built into it, and it was a diaspora experience of people who had suffered from journey and therefore came out of it like your own father and mother, I suspect, who were afraid of totalitarian control, were against any restrictions because they knew that they would be victimized by this. And the horrible historical irony, in my view, is this tradition that I grew up in and I suspect you grew up in, which led so many Jewish people to be key to the civil rights movement and every other, the labor movement, every other progressive movement in America has now been taken over by…  and you say they’re ignorant, I think they’re malicious. The people who want to turn this experience of the Jews and this history into a weapon for oppressing other people.

I just, I know I was going to ask you, this is my last historical question, and I have two questions and then that will end it. We have 6 minutes at most. Okay. Two questions. One, I want to know what you make of the religion, because as a we mentioned it before, as a gay man, you wrote the most important book, I think, on the gay movement in America, “Up from Invisibility,” I teach out of that book and so forth. And yet the people who are the great bigots are quoting constantly from the original Testament to the Old Testament and Leviticus and so forth. And ironically or not ironically, but I hope positively, the pope in Rome this week, as we’re talking, has said that gay relationships, what you call marriage, I don’t know, there’s a lot lost in the details, are to be blessed. That is a development at the same time is a very narrow view of the Jewish religion, which by the way, would embrace that in view of Leviticus. So what was it like growing up as a young person in Israel who when you discovered that you were a gay male, and how did you feel about this religion that you belong to? How do you feel about the events this week?

Gross But let me just say the fifties in Israel were much like the fifties in the United States. Gay people were invisible. They were not discussed. The topic was not discussed even less in Israel than here. And it was clear to me as a teenager in Israel that this was not something that one could talk about any more than it would have been in the United States at that time of the ’50s something, that was, if you were gay, depending on which institution you looked at, you were either a sinner or a criminal or a mental patient. There there was no other alternative. And it took the efforts of a movement that began in the fifties, continued for decades to remove the stigma of mental illness, to remove the stigma of sin and immorality, at least in some contexts, and to remove the legal stigma. There are still struggles, and I would say very much consistent in some ways with what we’ve been talking about today, that just like anti-Semitism, which, in some way you think about, it is always available to pull out of the toolkit of oppression. Anti-gay bigotry and anti-gay policies are equally available, as demonstrated in the current efforts of the Trump and Trump wannabes like Ron DeSantis, to gain traction in right wing politics in the United States.

And they are pulling out anti-gay in this case with a particular focus on trans people and trans, younger trans people. But the anti-gay policies, DeSantis’ “don’t say gay” law in Florida. So just like anti-Semitism and in that way, they’re very similar. These sort of antique prejudices and biases, even after decades of social change, are still available to pull out and dangle in front of the people to try and distract them from the real challenges that we face as a people, as a nation, as a world. The real challenges, and particularly with an accelerating climate crisis, an incredibly accelerating crisis of capitalist profiteering that is destroying whole sectors of the economy. So we really need to focus on whether there’s a book in the library that might expose children to the reality of sexual variation. This is classic distraction, bigotry, policies and anti-Semitism is famous as a ploy used to distract and divide and manipulate people politically and some anti-gay bigotry.

Scheer It’s the fuel of fascism. Last question, a quick one. I was of the illusion that the Labor Party was committed to peace, at the time I visited Israel, and I believe that they would accept a two state solution. And you’re shaking your head so… I’m coming to my own professor, even though I think I’m older than you, I’m not sure. But anyway, you were there. You were there. And the irony is, at least Yitzhak Rabin, when he was the leader of the Jewish state, he gave his life for peace. He was killed by a Jewish assassin, never mentioned anywhere, but at least and his wife had said the very people that are backing Netanyahu are the people who celebrated the person who killed Yitzhak Rabin. So let’s end on that. Is there a chance of peace here or is Chris Hedges right, that the image of an enlightened, open, democratic Israel, open to the people so it’s not a theocratic state, is that over? 

Gross I am not optimistic. I think it will take a long time. I think that the October 7th explosion, it destroyed the bubble that was allowing so many Israelis to live as if the horrors of the apartheid occupation was not happening. Just over the hill in Gaza, just over the border, just over the green line in the West Bank, Israelis were allowed to live as if their government was not behaving in this oppressive fashion. That bubble was was burst on October 7th and the response of the Israeli government, in part because of Netanyahu’s need to deflect blame for the failures, the incredible failures of his government has been this unleashed calamity in Gaza. They are making Gaza unlivable on purpose. In the delusion, illusory notion that somehow all of those Palestinians will leave and go somewhere else. The Arab governments don’t want them. Egypt has been locking Gaza from the south for decades. Egypt could have opened the border to Gaza at any time in the last few decades. They don’t want them. They don’t want Muslim extremists. Jordan is afraid, they have a small population and a very large portion of Palestinians. Syria, what we know what Syria is. Syria successfully stomped on its people and got away with it, Assad’s still in power. He was behave this badly towards his own people as the ten year old was behaving towards the Palestinians or Putin towards the Ukrainians, and he got away with it. So nobody wants the Palestinians in that sense. They are very much like the Jews, an irritant that people wish would just go away.

Scheer It might be a good point to end on, when I went into the West Bank and I was in Gaza and so forth, right at the end of the Six-Day War, I had two mixed feelings. First, I landed, I was in Tel Aviv and I felt, well, I’m in a New York without the ethnic religious tensions that had defined my life. Am I in a Jewish neighborhood, am I in an Irish neighborhood, am I in an Italian neighborhood? I’m in a big Jewish neighborhood, which was exciting, and then I went over to the West Bank and I went to Gaza. I said, my goodness, these are the Jewish refugees. They’re called Palestinians. These are the Jews like my mother who came from, were denied a land, were denied legitimacy, had no rights from from day one, and didn’t have them under Egypt, didn’t have them under Jordan. I don’t like your characterization in one respect. I think the Palestinians are worthy of the same kind of respect that the Jewish population is worthy of. They have their history, they have their ideals. They have their, for the very reason you just mentioned, they feel they have to have agency, they have to have power. They can’t run to Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Yemen or anybody else or Jordan to take care of them. Jordan killed a lot of them. So I think that’s an important point on which to end and it goes back to the universalism of Jewish values of an oppressed people. The Palestinians are the Jews of the modern world, that probably can get you fired. You’ll have to come to my defense as a famous, what are you now? You’ll be what do they call it? Emeritus, so maybe you’ll defend me. But to my mind, I mean, I know it felt right. 

Gross And that’s what I said. I agree. I agree. I think the Palestinians are now very much in the situation that the Jews have been of a people who are being denied the possibility of self-determination. And partially it’s because you have these religious nationalists fighting over the same small piece of land. Tthe ones who are getting really pushed around in a lot of these areas now where the Christians, neither the Jews nor the Muslims are being very, very happy about all the Christians who think it’s their territory. 

Scheer So on that note, I want to thank you again, Larry, and I’m going to come back to you again. I’m not going to be embarrassed by having you more than once because you obviously, from my point of view, know more and have more of a sense of this history as a lived person as well as a major academic thinker. You have to be somebody we refer to. So thanks for doing this. I want to thank Laura Kondourajian and Christopher Ho at KCRW that keeps posting these podcasts. I’m sure there are some people out there who think that they shouldn’t be posted. But I want to thank KCRW, which, you know, there’s been a very strong NPR station in Santa Monica. I want to thank Joshua Scheer, our producer, who occasionally steers me to these great podcasts. And I want to thank two Annenberg graduates where Larry was the chairman of our department. One, Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction, the other Max Jones, who does the video. And I want to thank the J.K.W. Foundation, which in the memory of Jean Stein, a great writer, journalist, public figure, for giving some support for these shows. And Jean Stein is somebody who supported Edward Said, a leading professor at Columbia, a Palestinian intellectual writer. And she was criticized much for that so on this particular occasion, I do want to say a lot of my own strength on this issue and knowledge comes from Jean Stein. On that note, see you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence. 

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