Transcript

Arielle Angel 00:00

Hello, and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m your host, Arielle Angel. So, in 2021, famed Irish author Sally Rooney declined to publish her book in Israel because there was no BDS-compliant publisher. And at the time, she said she would be, quote, “pleased and proud” to have her books translated into Hebrew as long as it was done in a way that respected the principles of the boycott. Last week, Rooney announced that she was publishing a Hebrew translation of her latest book, Intermezzo, with November Books, with a kind of vague assist from +972 magazine. I’m not quite sure what they did, but we can talk about it. The publishers had been vetted by PACBI, the academic and cultural boycott of the BDS movement, and deemed BDS compliant. This means that November Books does not operate in illegal Israeli settlements, receives no state funding, and explicitly recognizes the Palestinian right of return. In the Guardian, Rooney said that she, quote, “kept in touch with PACBI along the way to try to ensure that I was upholding both the letter and the spirit of the institutional boycott.”

AA 01:15

Immediately, there was a lot of backlash. Palestinian writers like Mohammed El-Kurd, and Susan Abulhawa, and others questioned the decision to use this quote-unquote “loophole” in BDS guidelines to bring the book to Israeli audiences. Why now, and why this, was the main question. Even if it adheres to the letter of the boycott, does it capture the spirit, as Rooney says? So, to discuss this today, I have three guests. Ahmed Moor is a writer and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, making his debut on the On the Nose podcast. Ahmed, thank you for joining us.

Ahmed Moor 01:49

Big pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

AA 01:51

Maya Rosen is the assistant editor at Jewish Currents and a solidarity activist in Jerusalem. Maya, thanks for joining.

Maya Rosen 01:58

Great to be here with all of you.

AA 01:59

And Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer from Gaza and a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Welcome, Muhammad.

Muhammad Shehada 02:07

Thanks. Good to be back.

AA 02:09

So, I think that the most cogent argument about the problems with this move was articulated by the Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa. So, I want to start by reading some of that, and then we can respond. So, she starts out basically by saying the question really isn’t whether this technically fits within the BDS guidelines. We know that it does. But the question of, quote, “Why did anyone working in the sphere of Palestinian liberation consider this a priority in the first place? Why now? Why this book and this author, and who is served by it?” She argues that it would have mattered also what book it was—that maybe it would have even been okay to break the boycott for a book that was more important for the Israeli public to read, but that as prestige literary fiction, the whole point of this is just for Israelis to feel included in the global conversation, and that delivering this book preserves a sense of normalcy for the Israeli reading public in the middle of a genocide. 

AA 03:10

And you know, this is the main point, so I’ll read it in full: “The Hebrew Intermezzo, it argues, reassures Israeli readers that the Palestinian boycott is not against Jews; that the movement is principled rather than punitive. In other words, the point is to center Jewish Israeli feelings and the need for Palestinians to assuage their fears. The animating concern is not Palestinians hanging onto life by a thread, gasping for air for the whole world to see. In practice, it is a move that defangs the boycott and turns liberation politics into a form of pastoral care for the perpetrator. It allows a sector of the Israeli reading public to feel that the boycott is reasonable, that it understands them, that it sees them as individuals rather than as participants in a colonial project. It allows the international solidarity ecosystem—the magazines, the literary agents, the publishing intermediaries, the NGO professionals—to feel that they are doing something difficult and principled by negotiating these arrangements, and it allows the publisher, the author’s agents, and the broader literary marketplace to claim a moral coherence they have not earned. 

AA 04:13

Basically, she says that the people who are benefiting here are the Israeli public, +972 as a broker, and it helps liberal Western audiences understand BDS, but that it’s not serving Palestinians or the boycott. So, there’s a lot of arguments in there. One is about, basically, that this book is not an important book to do this, and that this isn’t the right time. Those are two arguments, and then the third is basically that it actually serves kind of Western and also Israeli public rather than Palestinians, or the spirit of the boycott. So, Ahmed, I wanted to start with you. I know you resonated with Susan’s piece, and I wanted to hear a little bit about what you hear in that and why you resonated with it.

AM 05:01

Sure, yeah. I mean, to start, Susan nailed it. I think everybody should read the essay. Susan begins her essay, and I agree with this, by arguing that we can acknowledge that people are trying, that Sally Rooney probably had good intentions, that the editors at +972—again, I don’t know exactly what their involvement was—are trying. I know those people. This isn’t an indictment of anybody’s best effort. So, set that aside. The urgency of a genocide means that to the extent that we have a single unit of energy, it ought to be focused on alleviating conditions on the ground. And so, then it begs the question: What is the theory of change here? How is somebody reading Nabokov or Sally Rooney on the beach in Tel Aviv going to achieve a positive outcome for a child who’s contending with men eating rats in a tent in Gaza? I don’t see that theory of change. I don’t see how one decision by Sally Rooney to publish her book in Hebrew—which, of course, relates not at all to the reality of Palestinians who are living under Jewish supremacist rule—is going to yield Palestinian liberation. So, there’s a disjuncture between goals and action, and the theory of change just doesn’t cohere here.

MS 06:12

I fully agree about your point that the world is different before or after the genocide. We’re in a totally different reality. There’s also the very good point that Susan made brilliantly. Her argument, I think, can be summarized in three main points. Number one is: You should not give Israelis nice things as some sort of a bribe, like giving them a nice piece of literature. Number two is: It would have made much more sense to give Israelis a book that challenges the Israeli narrative, challenges Zionism, and translate it into Hebrew. And number three is about some sort of loophole in BDS, or expanding the boundaries, or centering white people—liberals, Europeans, Americans, or Israelis—as the heroes of the story. 

MS 07:00

I agree to a huge extent with her remarks. The area where I would differ is if you talk about books that challenge the Israeli narrative being translated to Hebrew. Even if you take the most brilliant, the most persuasive, the most compelling, evidence-based argument that dismantles the Israeli narrative altogether—the closest thing that comes to mind might be The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé —if you bring that book translated to Hebrew, make it mandatory education in every Israeli school, in every café, every workspace, and make Israelis read it, I don’t think it would make any difference. None whatsoever. It is something that Yuval Harari was making, I think, in the New York Times recently, that when you go to the Israelis and say Palestinians are suffering, on an intellectual level, they know that they’re suffering. On a personal level, they refuse to take it in, no matter how much you make them see. If you bring a video of the baby in Gaza whose leg was amputated by Israeli bombs, they would say: It’s Hamas’s fault. They voted for Hamas; they rejected Camp David; they rejected partition. Israelis have wrapped their minds with so many layers of propaganda in order to exist with the atrocious reality that they inflict on Palestinians that it is near-impossible to penetrate this through moral persuasion. 

MS 08:21

But the strategy here is not talking to the Israelis. It is basically talking to the world. It is, basically: You have a reality in which 28 US states have criminalized BDS. You have a reality in which so many people I know are afraid to say the word BDS publicly because of how smeared, how demonized, how blacklisted it has become—that they consider that saying it would tarnish them as antisemites, or get them fired, or get them canceled. And in a successful movement, you don’t have the right, the entitlement to ask people to get canceled or else consider them traitors. You’re supposed to make it easier for people to be in the movement with less pain, with less suffering inflicted on them, in order to attract more people. Not everyone is ready to sacrifice everything they have for Palestine if they’re in the US, in New York, Brooklyn, etc. That is one element. 

MS 09:18

Another element is when you talk about centering Palestinian experience and that we should not center Israeli or Jewish experience in this discourse, or the narrative of perfect victims—that Palestinians don’t need to be perfect in order to be deserving of sympathy—I fully agree with that thesis. But the world we live in is a very unjust, oppressive reality. The rules of the game are rigged from the start. So, until the day in which you can change those rules or change the game, you are supposed to play within the existing system, as much as possible, while challenging it at the same time. 

MS 09:54

So, I’ll give you an example. South Africa, when you had Nelson Mandela going out of his way to acknowledge the suffering of white Afrikaners and saying that: You suffered long enough in concentration camps in the Boer Wars—South Afrikaners had a very  identical narrative to Israel. They believed that they were survivors of genocide. They believed that they were survivors of concentration camps. They believed that they were given a God-given right to South Africa. And basically, when you had Mandela making such a speech, or when you had Mandela making alliances with people like Helen Suzman, a member of the apartheid parliament that was white Jewish, Afrikaner—the point here (that South Africans themselves would highlight to us) is, in a successful movement, your job is to unite the many against the few, not the few against the many, without compromising on principle.

MR 10:47

So, I think I fully agree that Intermezzo, and this book, and publishing Sally Rooney into Hebrew does nothing in the face of the enormity of the genocide. I think that’s the hard thing about doing anything now. I think, though, that part of the power of BDS and the boycott movement is in actually setting strategic, high-impact targets. And I think part of what I worry about in this debate is that having this kind of brouhaha over a Sally Rooney novel, in some ways, weakens the movement when it comes to actually things that matter more. What matters more is Caterpillar, and Israeli academic institutions that are developing weapons being used in Gaza, and things like that. Part of me worries that just caring too much about the translation question—I believe in the importance of cultural work, but it somewhat distracts from that and from the real work that we need BDS to be doing.

AA 11:46

Maya, you mean that more in the sense of: Getting angry over this almost tarnishes the other work of BDS? Or that this kind of work trivializes it? I just want to be clear that I’m understanding you.

MR 12:00

I think a bit of both. I think it both tarnishes some of the power of the broader, more strategic work, and it’s a little bit using our fight in a place where it matters less. The other thing I was gonna say about BDS is: I think that sometimes people think about BDS as a severing of relationship, and that’s true to some extent. But I think also, something that BDS does is set the terms for a right relationship of how people can actually engage in these things within the correct context, within a way of doing it right—as part of supporting the right of return of Palestinian refugees, of opposing the ongoing Nakba, all of that. And I think we need to actually uphold those guidelines of actually being able to say: Yes, there is a way to be in relationship, and this is the way to do it. I think there’s something very powerful in that. I’ll say something also about Israeli society because I think I share with all of you a very pessimistic view of Israeli society. It’s an extreme, radicalized society, and I don’t have a tremendous amount of hope for its transformation. And still, I think we need to have off-ramps for Israelis. And if we have off-ramps, we also need to have on-ramps onto something else. And if something like November Books can’t be okay, then I don’t know what we have to offer them. Now that’s not necessarily a political program that I think is going to be realized anytime soon, but I do think it’s actually important to have that vision.

AA 13:31

I want to pick up on a few things that you’ve said, Maya. This question of “Why now?” to me feels kind of irrelevant on some level, because everything that we’re doing is not equal to this moment, and people fight in the arenas that they’re in. We just saw an enormous amount of effort poured into the Park Slope Food Co Op. Enormous amount, and they were successful, and that’s really, really great. But we’re talking about five products stocked at the Park Slope Food Co Op, and everybody is really excited. It feels like a big symbolic win, but also a material win. But again, this is a very small playing field, and nobody’s saying, “This distracts us,” even though people’s full organizing time was going into this. I just feel like we can walk and chew gum. We’re moving forward on all of the fronts that we’re moving. None of it is equal to what’s happening, and we go on, on some level. If we didn’t, then we would do nothing at all. 

AA 14:26

So, I feel less convinced by the “why now?” of it all, particularly because, as Jewish Currents, we do Jewish work. We’re often the recipient of: You’re talking about building new institutions right now; that’s not our main goal in the movement writ large. And it’s like, well, we have different roles in this. But I also think that question of building new institutions that we talk about so much on this podcast is very relevant in this case. Because +972 and November Books were using a platform called Head Start to crowdfund and buy the book, preorder the book, and Head Start, when they found out that they weren’t planning to sell the book in the settlements, basically removed their listing. And I think people were looking at that and saying: Look at this. You can’t even do the thing that they’re trying to do because the society itself is so complicit. And, of course, Head Start has fundraising campaigns for all kinds of terrible military stuff. And I think that’s a fine way to look at what happened there. But I also think there’s a way of looking at it where you say: Okay, now they’re going to have to find another way through this. They’re going to have to figure out how to crowdfund from within Israel in a way that isn’t complicit. 

AA 15:46

And that creates, I think, new routes through this problem. It creates new connections. It strengthens that muscle. I think Haggai Mata, in his +972 piece announcing what they were doing, quotes Naomi Klein. She published The Shock Doctrine in Hebrew in 2007 with a publishing house called Andalus that no longer exists, and she said: Our modest publishing plan required dozens of calls, emails, and instant messages stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto, and Gaza City. My point is this: As soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. And I think some people may be looking at that and saying, “Why this? Why now? Why this energy?” On the other hand, you can look at it as creating alternative tracks for things that are not complicit. And that seems like a good thing. It demonstrates how to do that sort of thing and allows for that kind of work to happen. 

AA 16:45

And I think you’re totally right, Maya, that the idea of modeling right relation feels like an important thing to do. Because ostensibly, we’re moving toward a future where you do have rival institutions that are not complicit, that allow for a kind of boycott from within strategy. Now, are we close to that? No. Is that still a worthwhile thing to do? If you think that there is going to be something there that includes Jews on the day after, then we would need those institutions to act as a bridge organization. And that feels more valuable than any one book of any kind.

AM 17:29

I think the rejoinder to “Why Now?” is “Who cares?” If somebody wants to while away their time translating a book, which has nothing to do with Palestinian liberation, for Jewish Israelis, go for it.

AA 17:41

But somebody’s going to translate that book anyway because somebody is a translator. And the question is whether they do that in a context of complicity or not.

AM 17:49

And I’m saying I’m indifferent to the context. I really am. I think the urgency of now demands a different kind of solidarity work. The question of on-ramps: In 80 years of Jewish Israeli repression of Palestinian life—again, Israel’s only been a democracy for six months, from December 1966 to June 1967—we’ve never seen a native Jewish Israeli effort to rid Palestinians of the yoke of Jewish Israeli fascism. What that tells me—it’s not that Jewish Israelis are pacific when presented with fascism or presented with a political program they don’t like. It’s just that Palestinian life as such, Palestinian freedom, doesn’t meet the urgency required to push that kind of act of resistance to fascism. So, to say that Israeli Jewish Israelis don’t have an on-ramp—burn your draft card, if that exists. There are a handful of anti-Zionist Jewish Israelis I know who’ve taken direct action: Put their bodies on the line in the West Bank, refused to serve in the Israeli army. Those are direct ways in which you can demonstrate solidarity and meaningfully contribute to Palestinian liberation. There are other ways in which you can behave morally, in a deeply immoral context, that are consistent with the urgency of the moment.

MS 19:00

So, in terms of the triviality of publishing a literature book in Hebrew, I agree: Who cares? The point is not giving Israelis a piece of literature from a famous author that is well-written and they can read on a beach. The point is making headlines. The point is publicity. Sally Rooney—she is uniquely positioned in a place where mainstream media has fixated its gaze on her. She gains a lot of publicity for anything that she does, and she has used that publicity to support BDS, support Palestinians, and even support Palestine Action, despite the British proscription of the group, which means that she can end up in prison. And she still supported them vocally anyways. So, the idea for the people behind this project, as far as I understand from speaking to some of them, is to use her status, her momentum, her publicity to make that kind of news flash. And it worked immediately. You had BBC, you had the Guardian, you had the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, you even had the Jerusalem Post—all of them talking about this in a favorable light. Of course, if the Jerusalem Post covers something favorably, you’re doing something wrong, but I think they were just copy-pasting it from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 

MS 20:15

In Haaretz, for example—so, Haaretz is the most left-wing Zionist Israeli outlet, and the oldest. Haaretz would usually discuss BDS from the eyes of Israelis that have been impacted by it. But after that stunt, you had Haaretz giving more space to rationalizing, understanding the political, philosophical dimensions of BDS. Now, is this a milestone? Is this a huge momentum? No, but you do what you can. It’s like baby steps when it comes to this. And it ties to a point that you mentioned, Arielle, that you need to do everything together, simultaneously. If it’s small, if it’s large, whatever—it needs to be done. 

MS 20:54

In South Africa, they incorporated all of the different strategies the liberation movement needed, including armed resistance, nonviolent resistance, public rhetorics, public messaging, unionizing, even military interventions. And they incorporated all of their messages, all of their desires, demands, ambitions, dreams into this document, the Freedom Charter, in the early 1950s. One dimension in the Freedom Charter that made it monumental was not just articulating the narrative of what South Africans want, Black South Africans. It also articulated a clear position on what would happen to white Afrikaners after apartheid collapsed. The idea there is not just to win some hearts and minds of a small minority of your oppressors; the idea is to make it more difficult for any rivals or enemies to discredit your movement. Some people in our movement might say: No, it doesn’t make a difference. No matter what you do, they will still demonize you either way. But it is your job to make it more difficult. It is also your job to knock on every door possible.

AA 22:02

Well, I wanted to point out—I don’t think I’m incorrect about this—that South Africa was a total boycott, that they basically said: Boycott everything from South Africa. There’s no way to distinguish between complicity or non-complicity. And like I said, I tend to agree with you that in this case, that would be not a great move because of the way that the antisemitism narrative is so a part of the conversation, in a way that with South Africa, it wasn’t. But again, I think what I hear Ahmed saying is that we don’t have a large enough percentage of Israelis to actually claim a divided society. What we have is a mostly genocidal society, and so why are we splitting hairs around the edges? I mean, we get these questions—accusatorily, basically—like: Why don’t we support the Israeli left? Why doesn’t Jewish Currents support the Israeli left? My response to that usually is that there isn’t enough of an Israeli left to support. Most of them are not actually left, and the strategy for us is more outside pressure than trying to prop up these small groups. But I feel a little bit different when we’re talking about people who are actually on the left, or like—people in +972 have done and are doing the things that you’re talking about. They don’t serve, they do protective presence in the West Bank, etc., etc. Maya, I was wondering if you had thoughts about this, particularly because you do solidarity work. You have a sense of what exists and what doesn’t exist.

MR 23:36

Yeah, I think like the Israeli left is a hard thing to describe because on the one hand, it’s incredibly small, to the point of almost nonexistent. On the other hand, there exist Israelis who are doing heroic work in different fields. It’s not nearly enough. It’s not a mass movement. I wouldn’t say it’s a divided society. I think those things are true at the same time. I think that I’d say also that in general, I think on the left, we’ve ceded the conversation about the future of Israelis to the right, and I think that that’s important to discuss also from a strategic perspective. There are millions of people for whom Hebrew is really their primary language, and we need a vision for what that future looks like. I think, in some ways, part of what is really underlying the conversation about Hebrew and the conversation that we’re having about this book is that it’s a bit of a proxy for a bigger conversation about the future of Jews in the land, the future of Israeliness, like what happens to Hebrew, and what happens to Israelis, and what happens to Israeliness after Zionism, after the state?

AA 24:43

Well, let me just bring some of that to the table. I saw an Instagram video by Salma Shawa, and the main point is that Hebrew is an invented language revived for the purpose of state-building. 

Salma Shawa 24:58

For thousands of years, Jews were speaking the languages of the places they inhabited, whether it was Arabic, whether it was German, whether it was whatever. Yiddish. There was not Hebrew. It was revived for the purpose of state-building.

AA 25:16

Of course, for 9 million people, that is their primary language. They speak it. So, the question of whether it’s a real language or not feels moot. People are speaking it; that makes it a real language, in my opinion. But I was curious, Maya, how you related to this question of the revival of Hebrew, the future of Hebrew, or the role that the Hebrew language plays in this?

MR 25:36

Yeah. I guess I’ll start by saying that Hebrew existed before the state of Israel, and I also believe, with my full being, that Hebrew will exist after the state of Israel. It changed and adapted before the state in Zionism, and it’s going to continue to change and adapt after, and it’s certainly been impacted by the state. I think that’s one of the things to talk about. But also, Hebrew is already a diasporic language. It contains hybridity. It has different influences within it. And the idea that Hebrew and even Hebrew literature is attached to the State of Israel is relatively a short and modern idea. So, I think that there’s two different main Zionist myths that operate around Hebrew. And what’s interesting is that they kind of conflict with each other, but they both serve, I think, separate political goals. And both of them, I think, are wrong in important ways. 

MR 26:21

The first myth is that there’s just kind of this fluid progression from biblical Hebrew to modern Hebrew. This serves a very clear ideological goal of linking contemporary Jewish government in the land with the ancient Judean kingdoms and giving a historical foothold to Jewish presence in the land, and there’s all kinds of reasons why that’s wrong. There’s different studies that show it’s not really clear, actually, how much biblical Hebrew your average Israeli understands when they don’t already know the context, because the language has changed so much. There’s even linguists—there’s a linguist named Ghil‘ad Zuckerman who studies Hebrew, who refuses to call modern Hebrew “Hebrew” and calls it “Israeli” to highlight the discontinuity. And the hard form of this argument is that modern Hebrew is not even a Semitic language because its syntax and other key features of its core building blocks are so heavily influenced by Yiddish, and German, and other European languages that were spoken by the people who revived Hebrew. A linguist named Paul Wexler has this book called The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past. I think that the hard form of that argument is not right, but there is something that’s useful, I think, in recognizing the discontinuity and the outside influences on Hebrew, like on all languages. 

MR 26:21

So, that’s one myth. I would say, then, that the second myth is that Hebrew was a dead language for 2,000 years, and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the creator of modern Hebrew, came, and he revived it, and there’s never been that kind of linguistic revival from the dead ever before. And what’s wrong about that myth, I think, is that it really downplays the way that Hebrew existed and changed over the course of the thousands of years between the Bible and the advent of political Zionism. Because even though Hebrew was largely no longer a spoken language, for much of the last 2,000 years, it continued to be the language of letters. It’s how religious texts were written, and it’s how Jews from different communities across the world communicated with each other. If you read 18th or 19th century intellectual Hebrew, it’s much closer to modern Hebrew than biblical Hebrew. It’s not like Hebrew was frozen in time and Eliezer Ben Yehuda came and revived it. It had a thriving literary life. I think there’s a question here, but I think that if you asked your average 18th-century rabbi to read a novel by Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist. I think that probably, the rabbi would understand it, living before the advent of political Zionism. And so, that’s complicated. I think the kinds of different things I said cut both ways in different directions about the question of how to understand Hebrew in the nationalist context.

MS 28:49

Sure. I mean, the question of Hebrew as such is really not the focus for me. It’s neither here nor there when we’re talking about boycotts, and Palestinian liberation, and the urgency of now. But on Hebrew itself, I mean, I admit I still have an allergic reaction to hearing Hebrew. And many Palestinians are fluent in Hebrew. My father grew up as a child laborer picking oranges in Israel, and he’s fluent in Hebrew. A lot of Hebrew words have wended their way into Palestinian speech—machsom, checkpoints—but also, it’s a language that causes many people, including me, a lot of discomfort if it’s not clearly disclaimed at the outset that I’m an anti-Zionist.

AA 29:26

Yeah, that makes sense. I think what we’re pointing to by even raising this argument is the fact that the way that this event—the way that this decision to translate Sally Rooney into Hebrew—has become, in some ways, as Maya was saying, a proxy for the question of: What happens next with Israelis? I think that the question of what happens to Hebrew—should it be thrown out, basically, or is there a future for a Hebrew that is kind of decommissioned from a Zionist purpose or something—is part of that question.

MS 30:04

There was an Israeli writer in Haaretz—I’m not sure if she’s still writing there, Sari Bashi, and she’s married to a Palestinian man from Ramallah and lives in Ramallah with her husband, and they have kids together—and she wrote one of the articles about how, despite them being married for so many years, and having kids together, and being in love, etc., her husband, until today, whenever he hears her yelling at their kids, he can only think of one thing: Israeli soldiers at checkpoints or Israeli soldiers in jail. As soon as he hears Hebrew, his subconscious translates it into violence. That is not something that you can blame him for. I would imagine people in South Africa still being triggered by Afrikaner dialect.

AA 30:48

Or German. 

MS 30:4o

Precisely. The question is: Where do you go from here? So, the idea of translating the book—what the people involved in this project had in mind was one thing. We need to show the world that you can still talk to Israelis with full compliance with BDS guidelines. So, it was for them a way to promote or market BDS. BDS is not an ideology, or it’s not some sort of radical movement. It is a tactic that people on the street, average people, should eventually adopt. Your hope is that it would become intuitive for people in Europe or the US to look at a box of dates in a supermarket, see Israel on the back of it, and then choose not to buy it, as simple as this. Your job is: How do you make it palatable? How do you make a persuasive argument, a good sales pitch for average people? Not just your comrades, not allies, but for people on the street? Because the point of BDS is impact. It’s not principle-led satisfaction; it is the ability to impact change.

AA 31:50

I mean, I do think it’s kind of curious. On the one hand, like I said, everybody is behaving as they said they would behave. Sally Rooney said that she would publish in Hebrew if she found a BDS-compliant publisher. The BDS National Committee has its guidelines, and they were not traversed here. They say, basically, complicity, not identity. If you can do these things, then you are not complicit, and you’re BDS compliant. So, nobody is acting out of character here. But at the same time, we have, for example, the BDS National Committee’s last decision to kind of—I don’t even know how to describe it, because technically it wasn’t to call for boycott, but it was a chastisement of No Other Land, for example, which seemed to have almost like an opposite message here. At the time, I felt like the message that was being sent was that there wasn’t anything that was going to be enough. That here was, in my opinion, with No Other Land, a huge PR win built on real solidarity, and the BDS National Committee made people feel like this expression was not enough, in an environment where there is a lot of not enough, but this was one of the best things that we had going. I do wonder if this was a way of countering some of the perception that came from that situation. I’m not sure.

AM 33:09

Yeah, I’m glad you brought up No Other Land. For me, No Other Land showcased the brutality of the occupation. Yuval put himself at risk. It was clear that Basel and Yuval had a clear relationship, and the limits of that relationship were also illustrated through the film. I view that, again, as one more example in which, if we’re independent-thinking, and we’re trying to focus on the need for Palestinian liberation and the need to arrest the occupation and end the genocide, is this cultural product coherent, consistent with that need? I don’t see it here, but I see it with No Other Land.

AA 33:43

I mean, worth pointing out that Susan was very against No Other Land as well. No Other Land was not enough to cross that threshold for her.

AM 33:52

Right. And it also underlines the value of conversations like this. But there’s an implicit assumption, which has underpinned our entire conversation, which is that the Sally Rooney book is an object of marketing for BDS. I think the marketing work has been completed by the Israeli army in the form of 20,000 dead children. Nobody who matters today needs to be convinced of the need to boycott Zionism, undermine Zionism in Palestine/Israel. When we talk about the many, not the few, the many is really 7 billion people—7 and a half billion people—and the few is Jewish Israelis who, as the political scientist Brendan O’Leary said to me, will never relinquish privilege—and I’m paraphrasing—just because you endear yourself to them or make a moral argument.

AA 34:37

But it’s not about who needs to be convinced that there’s a genocide. It’s about who needs to be convinced that they can participate in BDS, from an institutional perspective, with the knowledge that they can answer questions about whether it targets identity or complicity. The question of whether it’s a blanket boycott of Israeli Jews, so to speak—regardless of who they are, and what they’re working on, and whatever—or whether it’s a boycott of the Hebrew language.

AM 35:04

So, Gideon Levy said it best. You, you must have seen the interview that Peter Beinart conducted with Omer Bartov and Gideon Levy. Gideon Levy is one of the giants of the moral movement, I’d say, within Palestine/Israel, and he has been consistent for decades. Identifies as an anti-Zionist, and he talks about his own loneliness in that context. And it’s heartbreaking to watch, because here’s somebody who I’ve admired for a long time, and he’s looking at his twilight years in total moral isolation, but actually, also practical isolation. And he said unequivocally: Boycott me. And that statement meets, again, the moral urgency of the moment. This is not a luxury or an indulgence. This isn’t a point in which we can take our time and think through the moral implications of our actions, and when we get around to it, Palestinian liberation will emerge somehow. No. Boycott me because the urgency is there, because the conditions on the ground are there. And so, the idea that we’ve got to illustrate to people that we’re talking about institutions and structures—I’m not convinced by that. The marketing is in the genocide. The Israelis have successfully marketed why they need to be boycotted.

MS 36:12

I was once invited to an event in Brussels by Belgian Civil Society. I think a few months before October 7th. They managed to persuade the deputy prime minister to attend. And they had some sort of public protest or small demonstration to raise awareness about settlements, boycotting settlement products, banning it, etc. And they started to chant different slogans: No to settlements, no to apartheid, no to occupation. And all of them would repeat the slogans, until one person chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and then nobody repeated that. Zero, none. They started to even giggle and laugh at it. People are like: I’ve got a job to keep. You have, in Germany and France, legislation that is being pushed through to criminalize anyone that says “river to the sea” or “globalize the Intifada,” or BDS in that regard. There’s legislation that is being drafted to demonize it, to characterize it as antisemitic, across Europe. Some of that legislation already passed. Your job in that case is to show more clarity, to make it more difficult for people to demonize you over these slogans. There is a different level of sacrifice and motivation amongst people. Some people, Rosa Luxemburg, are willing to be imprisoned for life for a cause they believe in. Others might not be willing to do this. If you are a father or a mother with a baby, a one-year-old or a two-year-old, and somebody comes to you and says, “In order to prove your genuine solidarity with Palestinians, you need to put yourself on the line and go to prison,” I don’t think the overwhelming majority of mothers would agree to this. So, the idea is not to make it impossible for people to be part of your camp. To make it easier, again, without compromising on principle.

AA 37:56

So, we’re basically out of time. I just want to go back. I feel like there’s a topic that we started talking about and didn’t finish, so I want to go back to it. And the question for me goes back to the question of the Israeli left. So, Susan issues a provocation at the end of her piece that basically, this move by the BNC, by Sally Rooney, by November Books and +972, it doesn’t serve the Palestinian cause or boycott, but it does serve these actors themselves. Israeli actors, and particularly +972, who gets to position themselves as a sophisticated manager of this. I guess like my question—and maybe I want to relate this directly to the things that Ahmed was saying—about like: How do we engage with a society where the overwhelming majority are not doing anything to ameliorate the situation but are actually on the side of making it worse? What do we owe the tiny minority within that society who’s trying to make it better? 

AA 38:56

So, in other words, I guess my provocative question is: So what if it aids +972? Is that something we care about doing in this movement or not? Until conditions change, I don’t believe, necessarily, that the existence of +972 or the existence of this small bloc is actually the seed of something. It feels like world-historical change and pressure would have to happen to shift things, and I’m not sure that it will come from this small group of people necessarily, even though I think they might provide a necessary bridge. But what do we owe those people in the meantime? Is it a bad impulse to try to strengthen those people in the meantime? Or does that feel, quote, unquote, normalizing?

AM 39:39

Yeah, I mean, look, let’s do everything we can to nurture and support our anti-Zionist friends, wherever they may be. I don’t want to claim that there’s nothing Jewish Israelis, who are prepared to jettison their privilege, can do. Let’s provide succor and support to those guys. I just don’t see how, how the Sally Rooney book does that. The on-ramp for Jewish Israeli anti-Zionists is direct action, which corresponds directly to goals, in particular, Palestine liberation. Anything other than that is kind of an indulgence and a sideshow.

MR 40:16

I mean, I don’t think that change is going to come solely from Jewish Israelis by any means. I think that the kind of transformation that has to happen here is going to largely come through international pressure and a total reordering of the global world order. That being said, I still think that there’s a role for Jewish Israelis to play in that. Part of it, I think, is as a bridge, like you’re talking about, and part of it is in doing everything that we can until that moment of global world change happens. And so, when we talk about protective presence, of being in Palestinian villages that are requesting the presence of Jewish or Israeli or international activists—now, that’s not a tactic that is going to end the occupation, is going to bring down apartheid. By all indications, we’re still losing with that tactic by so much. But I do think that the villages where there are more activists involved are less likely to be ethnically cleansed. And so, until the world order changes, our goal is to have as few communities as possible ethnically cleansed, because it’s so much harder to bring them back after. And so, I think that being on the ground—and Israelis who are willing to jettison their privilege and do that work—I think there’s actually a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done.

MS 41:34

I would say, briefly two, things here. Number one, the Israeli government, the Israel lobby, pro-Israeli groups, have consistently echoed one message to dissenting voices in Israel or in the Jewish community: The Arabs will never like you, no matter what you do. They reject your existence. You’re only a useful idiot to them. Our job is to do whatever it takes to prove the exact opposite of this. For any Israeli that dissents, that denounces the genocide in Gaza, that refuses to take part in the army, it takes a great deal of sacrifice, and I have to acknowledge this. That is number one. It takes a huge deal of sacrifice for an Israeli like Gideon Levy to dissent in that way and be hated by every other Israeli on the streets. Or for an 18-year-old kid to refuse to serve in the military, and then go to prison, and then never have a job in Israel again. In Israel, the way to enter the labor market, you need some military service. If you haven’t served in the military, it’s taken as a stigma. A lot of companies, a lot of employers, will not take you in. We have to acknowledge the depth of that sacrifice, and our job is to make that life a little less terrible, or at least to not make it more horrible. 

MS 42:48

We need more Israeli allies because the way the world works—again, Mohammed El-Kurd’s thesis, brilliant thesis about perfect victims—that if a Palestinian comes and says something, nobody believes them until an Israeli says it word for word, and everybody resonates with the message, everybody repeats it. That is, of course, the way the world works. We can choose to continue with saying: I refuse to platform any Israeli voices. I will only platform Palestinian voices. Whoever wants to believe us, good. Whoever doesn’t, they’re traitors. But you need Israelis to implicate themselves in order to make it untenable for people to support them. And making it untenable would not come from Palestinians pointing at a crime. It would take Israelis confessing to the crime. If I would try to debunk Israel’s foundational myths, I can bring Palestinian historians, authors, victims, survivors, as Mamdani did, and that resonates with a huge amount of people. If I want to seal the case conclusively, I would bring Ben Gurion admitting: I gave explicit orders to kill women and children. I gave explicit orders to kick people out. I gave explicit orders to rape women and obliterate entire villages. It gives this additional depth to the argument that makes it impossible to deny.

AA 44:06

I mean, it sounds like you’re saying that there has been a movement within the Palestinian movement to essentially recognize that the politics of appeal and address are completely unfair and then to repudiate them. But also, there should be a way of thinking about using the tools that are on the table and recognizing the world in which we live.

MS 44:29

It’s the same as what Israel or early Zionists did. Do you think that they were very particularly fond of Britain, or France, or any of those countries that supported them? Israel is, until today—and I learned that from multiple American officials—they look at the US with enormous contempt. Whenever American officials try to challenge the occupation, the masks would fall in the room, and the Israelis in the room would start saying: You did horrible atrocities as well. You are undercivilized. You’re simple-minded. They would start cursing them very aggressively. The contempt is there, but they understand the need for the politics of appeal.

AA 45:03

All right, I think we are so out of time. Thank you guys for letting me run over. This has been another episode of On the Nose. Thank you to our editor, Jesse Brenneman. Thank you to our guests. If you like this episode, share it, rate it, leave us a review, and as always, subscribe to Jewish Currents: JewishCurrents.org. Thanks, everyone.