The Shared Mythological History of Israel and the US (w/ Joan Scott) | The Chris Hedges Report

Chris Hedges talks to Professor Joan Scott about the late Amy Kaplan's cultural analysis of the US and Israel's mythological shared history and how it has manufactured consent for Israel's atrocities.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The narratives surrounding Israel and their genocidal campaign against the Palestinians took decades to create and embed into the West’s psyche. The Holocaust, decades after its end, became a central part of the Jewish and Israeli identity. Enemies of the Israeli state were conflated with Nazis. The physical location of Israel became essential to Christian evangelicals who believe the second coming of Jesus Christ was to take place there.

The late Amy Kaplan, in her book, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance, explored how these narratives developed through popular culture and the media’s reporting on the Israeli government’s actions throughout the 20th century, particularly in the United States. Professor Joan Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and adjunct professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss Kaplan’s book and how prevalent it is in the face of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

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“Part of the invincible victim story is that Jews have to always be alert about defending themselves against any sign that the Holocaust is about to reappear and then attribute it to Palestinians, the possibility that they will bring another Holocaust,” Scott says. “So the whole defense industry of Israel, the whole occupation of Gaza and the West Bank become a way of arguing against the possibility of another Holocaust.”

When it comes to Christian Zionism, Scott explains that cynicism in the Israeli government tolerates the antisemites within these groups “because they're bringing a large sector of the American population, a powerfully politically influential sector of the American population, certainly now with Trump, to support the activities that Israel is engaging in.”

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Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance dissects Israel’s symbiotic relationship with the United States. She tells the story of how a Jewish settler -colonial project captured the imagination of the American public, intertwining Israel’s national myth with our own. American exceptionalism mirrors Israeli exceptionalism. The belief that America, ordained by God to lead the world, replicates Israel’s messianic vision of itself. The two countries, because of their similar national myths, insist they are exempt from international and humanitarian law.

They share an open disdain for the “lesser breeds of the earth,” each tracing their roots to European colonialism. Israeli Jews, Kaplan writes, are at once eternal victims and lionized for their military prowess. Palestinians, in the process, have been at best rendered invisible and often demonized as subhumans, representations of the barbarians the United States and Israel seek to suppress in their clash of civilizations.

What makes Kaplan’s book unique is that she is a cultural critic, seeing in the myths and stories disseminated by writers, filmmakers and journalists the enforcement of the peculiar beliefs that sustain the bond between the Zionist state and Washington. She opens the book with a dissection of Leon Uris’s novel Exodus, as well as its film adaptation, which shaped a generation’s understanding of Israel and the Middle East. She probes Joan Peters’s 1984 book From Time Immemorial, which was the template used by historians to argue, falsely, that the Palestinians never existed as a distinct people.

Israel’s myth, she notes, is protean, depending on shifting historical realities. The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinians refugee camps, the Palestinian uprisings or intifadas, required new narratives to buttress the Israeli-American ties. Suddenly, the Holocaust, which was a footnote in the popular narrative, assumed central importance. Israel, especially with the establishment of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, was intertwined with the Shoah. The genocide became central to Jewish identity. And, playing the card that it could happen again, Israel was given license to engage in savage repression of Palestinians, dismissed by Israeli leaders as the new Nazis.

Kaplan ends the book by chronicling the rise of Christian Zionism which has emerged as a bulwark of support for the apartheid state of Israel. Kaplan, who died in 2020, was the Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book has recently been reissued By Harvard University Press. Joining me to discuss Kaplan’s book is Professor Joan Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and adjunct professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Her many books include the classic Gender and the Politics of History, The Politics of the Veil, and Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom. Let's begin with Kaplan. I've read many, many, many books on the Middle East. I've spent seven years [there]. I did find this book unique in the way that it approached the subject matter. As I mentioned to you when we spoke, it reminded me of [Antonio] Gramsci’s understanding of cultural hegemony, how culture essentially creates a narrative that buttresses policy. And just talk a little bit about her, and then we'll go into the book.

Joan Scott

Well, I met her… I just have to say, Chris, your summary of the book was just terrific, enviable, because it could be a kind of review that should be everywhere so that people would know what is in this book. I thought you summarized it really, really well. She was, as you said, a professor of English and American Studies at [the University of Pennsylvania].

She was here at the Institute. You know, people come to the Institute to do research and writing for a year. She had a fellowship at the Institute in 2011-12 when she started this book. And she was just digging around to kind of, as an American Studies person, she was interested in just what you put your finger on, in the cultural stuff that produced this special relationship, the untouchable special relationship between the United States and Israel.

And she worked away at it. She gave a seminar here, which was that first chapter of the book on Exodus. And those of us who grew up in the 50s and early 60s, I think the novel was ‘57 and the film was ‘60.

Chris Hedges

With Paul Newman, blonde and blue-eyed, as the archetypal Jew.

Joan Scott

Blonded, blue-eyed as the embodiment of Jewish… and she did it. She did it as a seminar here and her reading of it was just terrific. I mean, people were just astonished. And those of us, as I said, who had sort of grown up knowing how popular that film had been were really taken aback at how astute she was in her readings of the ways in which a certain stereotypical image of the feeble, victimized Jew is replaced by the Paul Newman figure who was a heroic fighter for the future of Israel and the future of the Jewish people.

So she worked hard on that and it took her a while. So the book was published finally in 2018. I remember reading many chapters of it as she was producing them. And then she was tragically diagnosed with brain cancer and died two years later in 2020. So that she never got to publicize the book the way one usually does, giving talks all over the place, having discussion sessions of a kind where she would respond to critics and so on.

And then a year or so ago, her daughter, her adult daughter now, in the wake of all of the discussion going on about Gaza and the genocidal war in Gaza, thought that this would be a time when this book would weigh in in a way that no other book does on the question of Israel-Palestine. And she started a campaign with Harvard University Press and convinced them to publish it, to issue it in paperback. It was already published.

So they issued the paperback as of March 1st, I think, and many of us who were committed to Amy's memory and to the book decided that we would go to our local bookstores and promote it and talk about it, which is how you and I first discussed the book at Labyrinth Bookstore in Princeton. So that's the story of it. And I think rereading it for our discussions, I was struck once again with how much insight it provides into this so-called special relationship.

Chris Hedges

We should say, first of all, Rashid Khalidi, the great Palestinian scholar, gave it a glowing review in The Nation when it came out. And she herself, I know this only from you, had come out of a Zionist background.

Joan Scott

Right, right. And that was part of what this was about, I think, was exploring where she had come from and what this indoctrination had been as she was growing up herself. In fact, in the acknowledgments, she mentions the fact, I think her father died before the book was published, but she says he would have disagreed with everything I was doing here. But he would have acknowledged my right to do it, something like that.

So you get even in that small acknowledgement a sense that she's coming from a place which she had to interrogate critically in a very deep way, and she did. She would come in at lunch, we all have lunch together, the people who are fellows at the institute, and she'd come in and she'd say, I can't believe it, I.F. Stone, and The Nation were great supporters of Israel in the 40s.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, this was very depressing. [Laughing].

Joan Scott

Well, for those of us for whom I.F. Stone was the hero, the journalist hero during the Vietnam War, this was like, how could this be? He recanted, he in fact changed his mind quite significantly on this question. But in the 40s, he was absolutely on board for the land with no people for a people with no land.

Chris Hedges

That was Joan Peters, who she takes down. I mean, one has to admire her deep, obvious, what comes through with the book, intellectual, not just profundity, but integrity, clearly. So just broadly, there are two templates that are used to bond Israel and the United States. The first is the mythic version of the settling of the West, and the second is the Bible.

Just broadly, can you talk about that?

Joan Scott

Sure, she has a quote in the title of the book, Our American Israel, comes from a 1799 sermon preached in a New England church, which says something like, America is the realization of the biblical Israel. We're here. I think it's on page, as I remember, it's page five. The phrase, “Our American Israel,” comes from a Puritan expression of colonial American exceptionalism.

And his quote was this sermon, “traits of the resemblance in the people of the United States of America to ancient Israel. It has often been remarked,” the guy says, “that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with ancient Israel than any other nation upon the globe. Hence our American Israel, a term frequently used and common consent allows it apt and proper.”

So the biblical Israel is there from the 18th century on and gets recovered again in new form by the evangelicals you mentioned, the last couple of chapters or the next to last chapter of the book deals with the way in which American evangelicals pick up this notion this time that the second coming of Christ will come in Israel somehow and at that moment those Jews who convert will be raptured up along with the Christians and everyone else will be destroyed in another apocalyptic moment of biblical transformation.

So the biblical theme runs through from the beginning when America is the realization of the dream of Israel to the 20th century or even the 21st century when Israel is the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Bible.

Chris Hedges

And the same biblical passages, the Puritans were using the stories of the Amalekites, which Netanyahu has repeated about decimating, destroying, I think even their children and animals and everything else, they were using exactly the same biblical passage to justify the genocide against Native Americans.

Joan Scott

Yeah, yeah. She develops that really nicely too, the Native American parallel and the Palestinian parallels, which in fact echo that theme of a land with no people for a people with no land. It's the same argument made here. There's no one here when the Americans came and they wipe out or tried to wipe out the Native Americans similarly with Palestinians in Israel.

Chris Hedges

Well, and this was pushed by the 1984 book by Joan Peters, which was taken down when he was a graduate student by Norman Finkelstein, which argued that they had no national identity. The Palestinians had no national identity, that those Palestinians who were there had actually migrated because the Jewish colonists were reinvigorating. I mean, all of which was false.

And she deals with the importance of the Peters book because it was used by pro-Israeli historians for a long time to justify this very false narrative. I want to start with, as she does. You mentioned I.F. Stone, his book, Underground to Palestine. But I found that this, on the one hand, you had the left, I.F. Stone being part of the counterculture, but this identification of the counterculture with this settler colonial state.

And as you said, I.F. Stone recants. I'm just going to read that little passage. This is his book, Underground to Palestine, his first book.

“Stone's book included the major tropes of the narrative that progressive Americans told about Zionism in the years following World War II. His personal discovery of kinship with the Jews of Europe added poignancy. He realized that if his parents hadn't emigrated from Russia to America, he might have gone to the gas chambers or ended up a ragged quote unquote and homeless refugee. As he drew closer to his Jewish brothers, he recorded their plaintive Yiddish songs, which expressed longing for a world lost to catastrophic violence. At the same time, he narrated their journey in resolutely American tones. That's a fundamental theme of the book, as a story of rebirth in the transformative voyage from the old world to the new in contrast to the defeatist spirit hovering over a shattered Europe, he was amazed by the tremendous vitality of the refugees and by their determination to build a new life in a new land. In his book, Stone focused on the journey, not the arrival, chronicling the dream of a Jewish homeland, uncluttered by Arab realities that disrupted these dreams, realities that he had noted in his earlier reports from Palestine.”

Let's talk about that link between the left and Stone was himself persecuted, blacklisted. He couldn't even get a job at The Nation. He ends up printing I.F. Stone's Weekly in his basement, as you said, not only about the Vietnam War, but about the Korean War, exposing many atrocities in the Korean War. But there was this marriage. And then we'll go in and talk about Exodus, the book, and the movie. And I find that coupling kind of fascinating.

Joan Scott

Well, one of the things I think was the attraction on the left to the socialist vision of Israel, the kibbutz, which how many books were written about that? This was the future possibility, not only for leftists, but for feminists. You had collective child rearing, collective meal preparation, all of the kind of domestic tasks that were thought to be oppressive for women are shared in a different kind of arrangement.

So I think that was one thing and certainly that attracted him as well as Freda Kirchwey at The Nation and others. This was a kind of socialist experiment that was very attractive and very possible. The other was the notion, and she uses this term several times in the course of the book, of the invincible victims.

That is, on the one hand, Jews had been victims of horrific treatment in Europe and historically victims of antisemitisms of all kinds. But here, they were invincible. That is, they were going to prevail. There was a kind of resilience that could be admired rather than the kind of awful notion of victimization. The notion of resistance is important to the left as well.

The Warsaw Ghetto becomes a kind of proof, the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto, becomes a proof of the fact that Jews are resistant. They're not just pathetic victims. They're, as she calls them again, invincible victims. That is, whatever happens, there's a kind of resilience and resistance that prevails and that Israel then becomes the embodiment for many people on the left as a result of that, I think.

Chris Hedges

Well, she talks later about the importance of the Holocaust, but it's important to note that initially with the establishment of the state of Israel, those refugees from Europe, victims of the Holocaust, were considered somewhat shameful for not having resisted. And it was only later that the Holocaust became part of Jewish identity and a trope but not initially, not at first.

And of course, as you well know, the irony of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, is that the only commander, deputy commander of the uprising, Marek Edelman, condemned the apartheid state, the settler colonial state, recognized Palestinians' right to self-determination and resistance, even armed resistance, drawing analogies between his resistance, the resistance he and the ghetto fighters carried out in Warsaw, and the resistance in Palestine.

And so on the one hand, yes, they use the Warsaw ghetto uprising but the only major historical figure was an anathema, was a pariah in Israel itself.

Joan Scott

Well, you're mentioning that, one of the things she tracks really nicely is the way in which there is always a dissenting voice like his, like others, even when she talks about the history of the founding of the state of Israel. There were many people, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, who thought that the idea of a Jewish homeland, a Jewish state, was a dangerous ethno-national way of thinking about a place, a homeland or a place where Jews could come.

But what she shows so clearly is how carefully and ruthlessly those positions were eclipsed. Those voices were, if not silenced, were just so muted that they couldn't be heard. Your notion of Gramsci, I think is right, this hegemonic vision, cultural sort of appreciation of the importance of Israel for America prevails every time.

There are places in chapters where you think, good, there's some criticism being articulated here and she goes into it at some length and then you just watch it being slapped down by the major forces of the media, by politicians and by what becomes defined as the Israel lobby or the lobbyists who are gonna…the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and what becomes AIPAC, those groups acquire a predominance that manages to silence any kind of criticism.

Chris Hedges

Well, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, we should mention, another, the great Israeli philosopher who saw it all coming, where we are. I also want to talk about journalists because she, boy, she got it. I mean, the way journalists, there's two things, having spent 20 years overseas, I found with people, especially people who parachuted in, because they really didn't understand the situation around them.

They immediately deformed the situation to make it palatable for an American audience, but to Americanize it. And so she talks immediately after, of course, 750,000 Palestinians are dispossessed. Jaffa was largely a Palestinian city, completely emptied, and ethnic cleansing, thousands were killed, the Deir Yassin massacre. And then you have the journalists who come from the United States and they report about it.

And they can't even see what's in front of their eyes. There's this passage she's writing about Freda Kirchwey, who visited “the silent and deserted city of Jaffa” to address the question, why did the Arabs run? She registered the momentousness of more than 50,000 people fleeing from Palestine's largest Arab city.

And she briefly noted the attack and siege by the combined forces of the Irgun, this was an underground terrorist group by led by [Menachem] Begin, right, and the Haganah, which was the more established Israeli militia army at the end of April. Yet she did not mention the impact of this attack on the population, instead she claimed that the mass flight from Jaffa and from other Palestinian cities and villages seemed to have little to do with the fighting itself.

At stake, this is going on at bottom of the paragraph, at stake for Kirchwey in the image of the humane soldier was her investment in the Jewish refugee as a universal symbol of noble suffering and the creation of the Jewish state as a moral triumph for civilization over fascism. I saw that every war, every place I ever covered, I fought it, but I had to fight not only the mythic narrative that was being peddled to the American public, but my own colleagues in the press.

Because I was with the New York Times, I didn't come and go. I lived there. I mean, I was six years in Latin America, seven years in the Middle East. But these people who parachuted in, who didn't have any linguistic facility and didn't have really any historical knowledge, immediately fed the kind of tropes that Americans can understand and that allowed them to make sense of what they didn't understand. She gets that really, really well in the book.

Joan Scott

Yeah. Well, I also think that it comes also from the notion that some of these journalists think they have to feed, what you said a minute ago, they have to feed the information in terms that their readers can already understand rather than understanding their role as producing knowledge that people then have to deal with.

And that, you see that now dramatically in journalism covering the Gaza war. The fear that they will offend readers is far greater than the notion that their job is to communicate to readers information that might not be comfortable, but that they need to really know.

And I think you're right. She shows you very, with very fine tuned analysis, how that operates.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, well, very clear examples.

Joan Scott

Yeah, and how that operates. But I think that's what we're living with now. Doesn't the New York Times have a list of words you're not allowed to use?

Chris Hedges

Yeah, well, and when they talk about the student encampments, they’re characterized as they harassed Jewish students. Jewish students may have been harassed, but the bulk of the repression was carried out against the protesters, a hundred of whom were arrested on the campus of Columbia, people who've been deported, people who've been suspended. Ruha Benjamin at Princeton is teaching under probation. That goes unmentioned. And so, yes, you do see it now.

And of course, we should also note the fact that, and this is something I and other international journalists went to Egypt to protest, Israel is locked out. There's no foreign press in Gaza for obvious reasons. And over 120, I think, Palestinian journalists have been killed, many of them targeted.

Let's talk about Exodus. Okay, we'll talk about a trashy novel and a trashy writer, Leon Uris. [Laughing].

You know the other book that was like that was O Jerusalem! That was another one Israelis were… remember that history of the war? I think it was the founding of Israel.

Joan Scott

You know, I was probably in high school just beginning college when the novel came out. And I just remember everybody was reading it. You ride the subway in New York and people sitting there reading it in the subway.

Chris Hedges

I'll just read this. “It had been compared in epic scope and massive sales to Gone with the Wind.” Well, there's another piece of propaganda on behalf of slaveholders, which transformed the history of the Civil War into a shared national past. “But Exodus is different in that it is not a story told by Israelis about their own country. That's very important. But one told by an American author for American readers.” And then she writes later, “One cannot overestimate the influence of Exodus in Americanizing the Zionist narrative of Israel's origins.” 20 million copies were sold in 20 years. Now, you and I need those kinds of sales, then we can all go to Bermuda forever.

So, I mean, it is just remarkable. I mean, she rips it to pieces. mean, just the main characters in the film, which also was very... The main characters in the film, because of their whiteness, are easily seen as Euro-Americans. Meanwhile, when this film appeared in 1960, the majority of Jewish immigrants come into Israel from Arab and North African countries, although not well treated by the European Netanyahu, Ashkenazi and Avi Shlaim writes a very good book on this. I think it's called Three Worlds, it's very good, his memoir.

And then, just one more passage and I’ll let you talk. so they, so they have, of course they have the Christian protagonist Kitty, who represents the American, who discovers in Zionism the mystical qualities of the Holy Land that she heard about in Sunday school. Kitty speaks the language of the recently invented Judeo-Christian tradition which embraced Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in a shared American identity, and during the Cold War, united them in faith against godless communism. In Exodus, it also unites them against Arabs.

Joan Scott

Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing in that, and she develops it in the book all along, is the European-ness of these Jews who have been murdered in Europe, who are not admitted in large numbers into the United States. I mean everybody's really happy about Israel because it can take the Jews they don't want, the Anglo-American European countries do not want Jews in their midst.

Chris Hedges

And let me just interrupt you on the 1952 McCarran[-Walter] Act, which was authored by Senator McCarran, a rabid antisemite, which is now being used against Palestinian activists who have green cards and student visas and everything else, was designed to keep out victims of the Holocaust and not let them into the United States. That's why he wrote it.

Joan Scott

Yeah, no, so, but what you have in that film, and she describes it really well, is the Europeanization, the whitening of the Jew. No longer this sort of stereotypical dark, pathetic, feminized masculinity, but this Paul Newman character who fights to the death and who is bringing civilization to the Middle East, because that becomes another of the tropes that get associated with Israel, that it is the only democratic, only force for enlightenment and democracy and European values in the Middle East. So the film enables that kind of new representation of who Jews are and what they represent.

Chris Hedges

She writes, “Exodus reenacted the primal myth of the American frontier as a tale of regeneration through violence.” She's quoting Richard Slotkin, of course, his great book. “The hero in a Western ventures across the border of the civilized world to the wilderness in order to colonize dark chaotic regions and learn the way of the Indians, thereby ridding himself and the society it represents, of darkness. It is the barbarism of the other, whether Indian or Arab, that forces the hero to become violent. He adopts their methods in order to defeat them and to establish a border between legitimate and illegitimate violence.”

So when she talks about the Bible and the West, the story of Israel is tailored or created to parallel precisely our own mythology about the settling of the West by Europeans and Euro-Americans.

Joan Scott

So Chris, I wondered what you thought about the violence theme as well. I thought that was, it was really interesting the way she maps the justification of violence from the very beginning. But then when you get to the war on terror, Israel becomes the model for how to deal with terrorists in your midst, how to deal with any kind of uprisings or protests.

They provide some of the technology and the advice, not only to the national government, but to local police forces about how to contain or find, track terrorism and contain it in their cities. I mean, I thought that the way in which the story becomes the idyllic socialist utopia in the 1940s and 50s becomes this arms supplier or tech that provides the technology of war for the war on terror in the United States and becomes the model for how to resist it, I thought was another fascinating aspect of the book.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, so she talks about how particular mythologies like this one don't hold up, especially after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. I think 17,000 Lebanese were killed. They bombed West Beirut, saturated bombing of southern Lebanon. The war was a disaster for Israel. You had, as she notes, you had foreign correspondence. That was also a very important and good part of the book. You had foreign correspondence based in Beirut who were watching it, John Chancellor, for instance, and were appalled at the savagery.

So suddenly there had to be a new narrative, and that's when the Holocaust took off. And maybe we should talk about that. Just before we go, just in terms of the way Exodus and the narratives portrayed Arabs, they were accused, like Blacks in Antebellum South, or even during Jim Crow, as sexual predators.

She exaggerated Arab cowardice. So, you know, there was a characterization of Arabs that very closely paralleled our own defaming of the character in particular of African Americans in the United States. But let's talk about the Holocaust. And Finkelstein wrote his book, The Holocaust Industry.

So the Holocaust is not, as we mentioned earlier, a huge part of the narrative. And then after Lebanon, things change. So there's a savagery, and the Holocaust takes preeminence in the narrative. There was a mini-series. I've never watched it. Maybe you watched it, but she writes about it in the book called The Holocaust. You have the Holocaust Museum, which she writes about, raising the question of why is there a Holocaust Museum on American soil.

It's a pretty good question. But let's talk about the use of the Holocaust because that's very much part, and after 9/11 this is all turbocharged as you said, but ideologically it's justified by the near annihilation of the Jews. And just as a caveat in defense of Jewish refugees, the ones who survived World War II, they were locked out of everywhere, number one. And when they did try to go home to places like Poland, there were pogroms.

I mean, we're talking about after World War II. So they really, I mean, that's the part of the tragedy. They had nowhere to go. was that book Neighbors, which is very good on people trying to, Jewish families after surviving the death camps, trying to go back to their farms or their homes and being killed. So, I mean, that is I think the tragedy for all of us who have covered Israel extensively.

But let's talk about the Holocaust because the Holocaust becomes weaponized and boy she takes down Elie Wiesel, of course, who becomes Mr. Holocaust, who I knew actually. But let's talk about the Holocaust and its uses and what she writes about it.

Joan Scott

Well, it's Peter Novick, also, who writes about the Holocaust industry. And I think he dates it even to 1967, after the Six-Day War. It becomes more and more of a justification for the kinds of things that Israel is doing. And then in the 80s, it comes into its own as an attempt to justify what can't be justified in terms of the war in Lebanon.

But I think that the point she makes about it is that it becomes, again, it's tied to that invincible victim thing. There's always the threat, the Holocaust happened, but it's never gonna go away. That is it happened, but it always exists as a possibility for happening again. And so part of the invincible victim story is that Jews have to always be alert about defending themselves against any sign that the Holocaust is about to reappear and then attribute it to Palestinians, the possibility that they will bring another Holocaust.

So the whole defense industry of Israel, the whole occupation of Gaza and the West Bank become a way of arguing against the possibility of another Holocaust. What does she call that chapter? The Holocaust anticipated or “the apocalypse soon,” she calls it. The two chapters, the future Holocaust and apocalypse soon, are the arguments about we can never rest because once it's happened, it always will happen again.

And the existence of Jews by definition somehow suggests the possibility always of a Holocaust. And that makes them, you can't criticize anything that's being done in the name of not only repairing the damage of the first Holocaust, but of preventing the next one.

Chris Hedges

And this is [Former Deputy Prime Minister of Israel] Abba Eban, who I also knew, very charming. Another factor that worked against the image of Palestinians in America was the overt effort by Israeli spokesmen and sympathetic journalists to undermine the revolutionary appeal of Palestinian resistance. Abba Eban protested that the guerrillas were not, quote, fighting for freedom, but were in fact fighters against freedom. He explained that, quote, the image that world opinion should have of them is not the image of the Marquis or resistance fighters, but the image of the SS, the image of the guards at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

We've seen that during the genocide where now, you know, was it Begin who equated, yeah, Begin who told Reagan that when he was bombing West Beirut, he was attacking Hitler. I mean, he attacking Arafat, but he drew that analogy. That has not gone away. That now becomes the raison d'etre for the subjugation of the Palestinians and the decimation of Gaza.

Joan Scott

And Hamas is the new Nazi force. She has a thing where it's interesting where she talks about this further. She says,

“Terrorist violence by non-state actors no matter how heinous, lacks the powerful state organization behind the systematic industrialized violence that characterized the Nazi slaughter of millions.Nonetheless, the repeated analogy between terrorism and the Holocaust had the powerful effect of tarring the entire Palestinian cause as a hateful reincarnation of the Nazi project to exterminate the Jews. At a time when the Carter and Reagan administrations continued Kissinger's pledge to Israel not to speak directly to the PLO, the conflation of Palestinians with terrorism and Nazism contributed to the public perception of the illegitimacy of the PLO and the cause it represented.”

And that goes on now. I mean, I don't know how many people I've had that, fortunately they're not friends, they're just people I know who I've had conversations with who say, but Hamas is just like the Nazis. They want to exterminate Jews, they want to destroy the state of Israel, and you say to them, well, it's not the same thing. And the Nazi image attached now to the Palestinian cause is really hard to argue against.

Chris Hedges

That's a very important point. C.L.R. James makes the same point that she made in Black Jacobins, where he acknowledges that there were atrocities carried out during the only successful slave revolt in human history, but that it didn't have the state apparatus behind it. It didn't have the imperial power, but it's a very, very, very important point. I don't want to sugarcoat Hamas. I spent a lot of time with them, but that point is key.

And she writes about Christian Zionism at the end of the book. Israel becomes more and more unpalatable to a younger generation of Jews. Of course, a significant percentage of those protesting the genocide were Jewish. We have Jewish Voice for Peace. We had students in Columbia just chain themselves to a fence in protest at the deportation order against Mahmoud Khalil, held in a Louisiana detention center.

And so they have turned more and more to, and she writes about this, these Christian Zionists, [John] Hagee and these figures, and it's fascinating because they themselves have expressed very open antisemitic tropes but they become key and then there's organizing all these course of tours of the biblical holy land.

I would argue as well that as Israel has become more and more despotic that has also built these relations with figures like Viktor Orban because it's the model of how figures like Netanyahu seek to run the Israeli state. They're all heirs of Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Mussolini called a good fascist, Meir Kahane. I covered Kahane, I knew him. But let's talk about that, which he does at the end of book about Christian Zionism.

Joan Scott

Well, I think we talked about it a little at the beginning. It's the notion that somehow or another the biblical prophecy has the end times happen in Israel when the second coming of Christ will bring about a new world order and in which converted Jews will be raptured up with the Christians and the rest of us will burn in hell or just burn.

But the power of that and you're right of these antisemites who are endorsing the Israeli cause and sometimes even, she has moments where Netanyahu and others realize that, that they're dealing with antisemites, but it doesn't matter because they're bringing a large sector of the American population, a powerfully politically influential sector of the American population, certainly now with Trump, to support the activities that Israel is engaging in.

I mean, when Trump moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, it was a fulfillment of the demand that these Christian Zionists had been making to prepare us for the eventual second coming. I mean, it's tied really tightly to their notion of history, if we want to call it history.

Chris Hedges

But it's also tied to their mythic version of America, of a white, patriarchal America, of battling against the subhuman elements. And of course, the Ashkenazi European elite like Netanyahu, his family comes from Poland, Netanyahu was raised in Philadelphia and went to MIT, that also correlates with the very demented vision of Christian Zionism.

Joan Scott

Well, in fact, there's a part, as you're saying, it's “Identification with Israel did not mean identification with actual Jews, however, either in America or Israel. [inaudible] warned that Jews as a group have often yielded to secularistic, even atheistic spirit. Brilliant minds have all too frequently been dedicated to philosophies harmful. Once Jews have been restored to Zion, they would have a second chance to redeem themselves from the sin of choosing Jesus.”

But then she says, and this is the part that I think you're pointing at, “Just as Israel enabled God to fulfill his promise to the Jews, so could America become the promised land for Christians.” And this is a quote from Jimmy Swaggart: “America is tied by a spiritual umbilical cord to Israel,” he writes. “The Judeo-Christian concept goes all the way back to Abraham and God's promise to Abraham. The Jewish people represent Judaism, the American people represent Christianity. Swaggart viewed the American people as white evangelical Christians, while Israel alone represented Jews and Judaism.”

I mean, there's the link that you're talking about, just absolutely.

Chris Hedges

Because as she points out, America is not in the Bible. I mean, there is no direct biblical passage that can be used to call Americans the chosen people. And so that identification with Israel becomes a way to essentially bridge that gap.

Joan Scott

Yeah.

Chris Hedges

I just want to end with… She does a masterful job of taking down Thomas Friedman. I find great joy in this.

Joan Scott

Yes, I actually loved that part.

Chris Hedges

And [David K.] Shipler’s books, Shipler's book, Arab [and] Jew, Friedman's book, From Beirut to Jerusalem. And she calls them out for the false narrative of equivalence. I'm just going read this paragraph.

“This narrative of equivalence relies on potent analogies with America that kept Palestinians from capturing the moral high ground in the battle for representation. At the beginning of the uprising when the Israeli army,” this is the Intifada,” when the Israeli army faced criticism for firing live ammunition at protesters,” I was there, “Friedman instructed television viewers on how to view the violence. They were not watching the equivalent of Birmingham in 1960 or Berkeley in 1968, he wrote, but the equivalent of Bull Run in 1861. It would no more occur to them, quote, to use rubber bullets against the Palestinians than it would have occurred to the North to use rubber bullets against the South in the Civil War. The civil rights analogy compares Palestinians to black Americans fighting for equal rights against violent police powers. The civil war analogy, in contrast, conveys the impression of two matched military forces capable of doing equal harm to each other.”

That's really, really important. And Shipler does it, Friedman does it, just about even most of our quote unquote, liberal commentators on Israel-Palestine, Friedman's no friend of Netanyahu, of course, do it. And she's not buying it. And let's just close by talking about that false equivalency.

Joan Scott

Well, and she says in that section that you were reading, she ends by saying the Civil War analogy conveys the impression of two matched military forces, capable of doing equal harm to each other, which is now how the Gaza war is presented. It's as if Hamas and Israel were the same or the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and domination were, it was the North versus the South. On the one hand, you have a nuclear armed military giant against a Palestinian resistance that is nowhere near, has nowhere near the force.

Chris Hedges

Well, they're just an asymmetrical insurgence with small arms. The other thing she points out is how the way these writers like Friedman will justify Israeli atrocities is they will always search out David Hartman. Rabbi David Hartman used to be the figure they'd all, he was quoted every week in the New York Times about their angst, about, you know, we wish we didn't have to shoot them kind of thing.

Joan Scott

Yeah. Well, he says again, and that he recognizes, this is Friedman, the brutal record of Israeli rage in the x-rays, hundreds of Palestinians who had their arms or legs or ribs broken by Israeli soldiers. Yet he wants his readers to understand, quote, the real fear behind the Israeli clubs, the fear of never feeling truly at home in a land claimed by others, the land that they have taken from the others.

Chris Hedges

She also writes, by seeking symmetry in the human equivalence of two sides unstructured by political power relations. That's key. Liberals like Shipler and Friedman implicitly rejected the perspective Edward Said called Zionism from the standpoint of its victims.

Instead, they expanded the Zionist standpoint to incorporate Palestinian perspectives, but these perspectives were dependent on Israeli-identified narratives. And that has never, unfortunately, changed.

Joan Scott

Yeah, yeah. So it's a book for now.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, no, it's a very smart book. And as I said, it's well written. I didn't mean to dump on all academics, I know some academics make an effort. I wish more did, but it is. It's really smart, really lucid. I really enjoyed it. I've read so many books on the Middle East, and I found it refreshing because there was just a lot in here that made me think. And I'm not sure I'd ever read, I don't think I've ever read a book that approached the conflict as a part of cultural studies, which was really, really smart.

Joan Scott

Yeah, yeah. Well, the nice thing about that is that you could say that our books live on after we don't. This is a case, it's a real tribute to Amy Kaplan, that she has given us something that we can still use even though she's not here anymore to talk about it with.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, no, it's a really, really good book. Thank you, Joan. We're talking about Our American Israel by Amy Kaplan. I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Thomas [Hedges], Sofia [Menemenlis], and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

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