Discussion on Zionism and Anti-Semitism

I thought Israel was sort of a nice thing.

It, it, you had the Holocaust and you have Israel, and

that seemed like a very neat

sequence. But in fact, when I read this book, I

was shocked by how

bonkers Herzl was. Um, for example, he has this fantasy only three

years before, uh, before he writes the Jewish State,

of bringing all the Jews in

the Austro-Hungarian Empire into the cathedral of Vienna

and having the Pope show

up and convert them all to Christianity.

This is somebody who wants to get rid of the Jews.

This is about destroying Judaism.

And I think what we're seeing now, this break, is y-

all these people warned about it. They've warned about it since the 19th

century.

The Jews in Britain were a small minority, and the Zionists were a small minority

within this, uh, minority.

Mm.

And Edwin Montagu, who was the only Jew in the British cabinet at

the time of the

adoption of the Balfour Declaration, said, "This is going to be a catastrophe.

This is anti-Semitic in intent," which it was,

because all the other British

government said, "This is a great way to clear out everybody from

the East End."

Mm-hmm.

They didn't like the Jews. They wanted them gone.

And it will have anti-Semitic effects.

And now with the rise in anti-Semitism, we see that in fact,

100 years later, uh, Zionism has not solved anything for the

Jews.

It's in fact made a lot worse for all of us. And I think that I would...

I don't accept that it's complex.

Mm.

I think it's not complex at all. I think that this was a foreign s-

European

settler movement that came into somebody else's country

and boycotted them,

discriminated against them, ethnically cleansed them,

and has now committed a

genocide against them. I think that's quite easy.

And when Israel says, "Well, this is our, our ancestral homeland"...

I mean, I'm from Houston.

Mm.

And it's my ancestral homeland according to the same thing.

My family are entirely 100% for at least 1,000 years from central and northern

Europe, and I have a right, I can walk into Tel Aviv

Airport and sign up to be an Israeli, and I can have rights, I can have

housing, I can have subsidies, I can have free Hebrew classes,

I can have all these

things that people who have actually lived there

for thousands of years-

Mm

... don't have, and that just seems to me absurd.

I mean, it's, it's a, it's a crazy argument

that you wouldn't accept in any other

country. I mean, if you walked into somebody's house

and said, "Excuse me, Piers, I

actually lived here 3,000 years ago,"

what's that going to mean? It's gonna mean you're gonna need an army,

and you're

going to kill people, and once you start killing people in the

name of Judaism,

you're overturning the very foundation of our tradition and our culture.

Things, first of all, they don't tell you why.

Jews aren't being killed in Britain, Jews aren't being killed in France, Jews

aren't being killed in America. I mean, of course, we have anti-Semitic incidents,

but not... Israel is by far the least safe place-

Mm

... in the world for Jews. Why is that?

And the other thing they don't tell you is who began this terrorism.

Nobody tells you about who started terrorism in Palestine.

It was the Zionists, and it was even before that,

and it affected Jews as well as

Palestinians. I was a liberal Zionist for my whole life.

I was a two-state guy.

I was a both sides guy. Um, I only became really an anti-Zionist,

which

is someone who says not only that Israel has problems, you know,

Britain has

problems-

Mm

... America has problems, everybody has problems.

Israel is not only

a country that has problems, Israel is a country that is a problem.

That felt very radical to me, and when I went back into this history after

October

7th trying to sort of find out who were these people that I had never heard

from-

Mm

... I never knew there were anti-Zionists my entire life.

I realized that there's this history of people who have warned and warned and

warned, and they've tried to find these other

paths, and I think now that we have

experienced this genocide, I think there may have been other paths

possible at

some point. Now, I just have to throw up my hands.

The settler colonial nature of this state, which is this

foreign settlement coming in and driving out the indigenous people,

by its

very nature and in comparison with other, uh, settler colonial entities from, from

Rhodesia to South Africa to Ireland to the United States,

it means that these places

get themselves into a state of perpetual warfare.

They can't just say, "Okay, here's your border,

here's our border," which is what

normal states do. They're inherently expansionist,

and this is what we've seen.

Israel has conquered areas of Syria, of Lebanon, of Palestine, and they're

saying that we wanna go from the Nile to the Euphrates.

I mean, this is a quite common thing to hear in

Israeli media now.

So I don't, I don't know. I, I can't see it ending in any way but a

catastrophe, but at the same time, for me, it's been a real consolation to have

the company of these people. Some of them are alive. A lot of them

are dead.

Mm. Mm-hmm.

But just to know that there's an alternative tradition,

there's a peaceful Jewish

tradition of living together with, with, on equal terms with everybody.

I do think it's black and white. I do think that it is a, a project that

was racist in inception, and, you know, talking about the Green Party and this

thing, I don't necessarily think Zionism

is racism-

Mm

... but I do think Zionism is racist, and it has been from the very beginning.

I think that there's a colonizer and there's a colonized.

There is a victim and there is a, a...

And that doesn't mean that every single person in Israel

is involved, although, you

know, it's a popular army.

Mm.

Hundreds of thousands of people have served in this army, and it's a-