Discussion on Anti-Zionism and Identity

And this comes from Shaya Ben Ephraim, who's been on our show, who's

made quite a journey from-

He- does he define himself anti-Zionist now,

or-

Yes, yes. Very much

... yes.

He gets accused of still- of still being a closet Zionist,

and so on and

so forth.

See-

And, you know, I'm not gonna adjudicate the various

Twitter disputes between Shaya

and his detractors or the people he detracts. I,

I find it sad to see.

Um-

Mm.

You know, I can understand people not wanting to

trust an Israeli who up until,

you know, the middle of 2025 was saying it's not a genocide.

But-

Yeah

... in term- I, I always talk about the function of

people, and Shaya plays

a key, crucial, and very useful function.

I believe his heart is actually in the right place.

I don't believe he's some kind of op. I just don't believe that.

Mm.

Um, but-

Because people say he's some kind of an op or something is this?

Yeah. Exactly.

Okay.

I don't... I, I, I believe that, like,

1% of the people

claim to be ops are actually ops. I think people are just weird- ...

and themselves. You know and, like, hard-

And some people-

... hard to figure out.

Yeah. And some people do go through some

journey, you know?

They do.

Yeah.

And some people go through a journey, and they stop cl- for, uh, closer

than I would want them to. Like-

Yeah

... Shaya will still talk about, you know, Israel and Hamas are both terrible.

Well, you know, in my world, there's just no usefulness to speaking

that way, and

there's an implication to speaking that way, and it's-

Yeah

... it's, there's a... You're compromising your moral position

when you equate-

Yeah

... those two things. But whatever.

Shaya's ... No, he's explicitly, uh, anti-Zionist,

wants, claims to want to see Israel,

uh, you know, dissolve and become

a one-state river to sea with equal rights.

Good to know. I first heard him on the

Owen Jones interview when he first came out and said that he,

that he recognizes, uh, genocide.

You know what tipped him over the edge-

Mm

... out of Zionism?

Mm-hmm.

Or even out of, like, Zionist agnosticism?

No.

This podcast.

Really?

It was a week, it was a week after we controversially had

him on that he came out

and unequivocally with his full chest said it.

Really?

And he's, he hasn't looked back. And he's, he's DM'd me to thank me from the bottom

of his heart for

waking him up out of his dream and doing it with some kindness.