The question of historical and present antisemitism is at the heart of Zionism, though not always in the ways supporters of Israel would believe. In the effort to shield Israel from criticism of occupation and apartheid, organizations such as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance have attempted to advance a broad, sweeping definition of antisemitism that includes all criticism of Israel. Rebecca Ruth Gould, author of Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom, joins The Marc Steiner Show for a discussion on this trend and its implications for Palestinians, the progressive Jewish diaspora, and the wider politics of identity and racism.
Studio / Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you with us. And welcome to another edition of Not in Our name, Rebecca Ruth Gould is our guest today. She’s written a profoundly important book called Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom. This work weaves a deeply analytical tale of the contradictions and complexities of antisemitism intertwined with antisemitism at the root of Zionism, how the struggle against antisemitism was hijacked by xenophobia and Islamophobia, the battle surrounding free speech in our world, complicated and already complex reality. And through it all, she also talks about how great Marxist activists and thinkers like Isaac Deutscher and Leon Abram may offer a path of understanding that antisemitism’s demise is wrapped up in Palestinian liberation.
And Ruth Gould is also the author of numerous other books so let me tell you what some of them are. They are Writers and Rebels, The Persian Prisons Poem, Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine. And she’s written for numerous publications, London Review of Books, Globe and Mail, and many others. And her work has been translated into 11 languages, which is really impressive. So I want to thank you for joining us today. This is really, really good to have you here.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
It’s a great pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Marc Steiner:
And I want to open with your poem, the piece of it you wrote, because I want to talk about how this all began with your sojourn to Israel and Palestine and what brought you there and what you discovered, your rude awakening of sorts when you got there and this poem you have on page two, “Workers greet the dawn behind the bars of Checkpoint 300, waiting to build settlers’ homes with stolen limestone.” So, talk a bit about your soldier and how this book actually began because of going to Israel Palestine to live and work.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Sure. So this was 2011, and I had just received my PhD. I was actually living in Berlin at the time and sort of not knowing what the future held. I did have a degree in Middle Eastern studies, but that was mostly to do with Iran. So I’d never been to Israel or Palestine. I very much wanted to go and I was offered a fellowship at an Israeli research institute called the Van Leer Institute. That is sort of on the very much to the extent that there is a left at all within Israel, it’s as far as one can get and survive. And so they do do some good work. They have Palestinian academics, for example, but every institution has its limits.
Anyway, I accepted the offer after a little bit of internal struggle, but I just so desperately wanted to have the opportunity to live there, particularly to live in Palestine, even though, of course the institute was in Jerusalem. So what happened was I found a place to live in Bethlehem, and then I just commuted through the checkpoint, that Checkpoint 300 that I mentioned, that does kind of very loom very large in my imagination and my memory, and I think in the lives of countless Palestinians as well. It’s this sort of industrial warehouse where people wait for, as I wrote, I mean, for just five or six hours. The lines aren’t moving.
Anyway, so that was the texture of my life. I was right by the wall and the time I had spent there, it definitely made a big impact. The thing that stood out most was just this sense of two totally separate worlds that are right next to each other, because Bethlehem is literally just a walk, a very short walk from Jerusalem, but it’s about four. It could be four hours just waiting in line, the commutes. And half of that time is you’re standing near these loaded guns being, facing. So it’s very sort of toward traumatic journey. And it was just so strange because these worlds are next to each other. They’re woven together historically, they have so much in common, and yet Israelis don’t cross the line. They never go to the West Bank. In fact, they’re technically forbidden and most Palestinians cannot leave either.
So yeah, so that’s kind of visual embodiment of the idea of apartheid, but not just in a legal sense, but just every aspect of life. And yeah, I think that was a bit overwhelming.
Marc Steiner:
I mean, you get this sense from how you wrote in the beginning of the book, that it was, even though you not a naive human being walking into where you were going, it was shocking nevertheless, the depth of it seemed to shock you a great deal.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Exactly. Because it’s the kind of thing that I personally couldn’t live certainly more than a year in that. I mean, it is just that total schizophrenia. So I knew the general sense of the politics and so forth, but just the daily schizophrenia of it, I was not quite prepared for that.
Marc Steiner:
So one of the things that I love in the beginning, you have this great quote. I think you spend a lot of time throughout the book, and we’ll weave in and out of this, talking about Isaac Deutscher and a couple of other people. You made me go back and look at all my old Deutscher notes as I-
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Awesome.
I love that. I love plugs for Deutscher. He’s kind of forgotten these days so happy to hear that.
Marc Steiner:
He has been forgotten in many ways. But I remember seeing him at the Socialist Scholars Conference, I forget whether it was either in 66 or 67 in New York.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Amazing.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, And listening to him there and reading all of his books. But he wrote this, which I think is really profound, and it’s a good way to start this off. He says, you quote him saying, “It’s a tragic and macabre truth the greatest redefiner of the Jewish identity has been Hitler. Auschwitz was the terrible cradle of the new Jewish consciousness and the new Jewish nation,” and from his essay, Who Is a Jew, which I thought was a profoundly important essay.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
So one of the things that strikes me about your book, and this is overarching to start with, is that contradiction, these contradictions of how antisemitism in many ways was the root of the founding of Israel and how that pushed it.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Marc Steiner:
Talk a bit about that and your discovery around that.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Sure. And I think I could also sort of tell the end of the story of what the introduction introduces why I wrote the book because I wrote an article called Beyond Antisemitism that got me in a lot of trouble.
Yeah. Well, it’s just simply, as you said, Israel was founded because of antisemitism at a sort of industrial scale. And that’s a trauma that I think is very much alive. I mean, it shapes very Israeli sort of life. I mean, based on, I’m thinking of my conversations at the Van Leer Institute having dinners with people and just how they would process the legacy of that history. I think a lot of the Israelis I spoke with at least were aware who was sort of a little bit maybe on the left critical of their society and so forth. But they themselves said that the state was using that trauma in a way to silence the discussion about the occupation.
And actually, there’s a really wonderful, I really want to make a plug for Amos Goldberg, who’s a professor at Hebrew University, professor of Holocaust studies, actually. He’s shed so much light on this question. He has a very provocative, and perhaps to some very controversial, but a very eye-opening article about the Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Museum in Israel and the way in which that the memory is kind of packaged and the traumas, I mean, yeah, it’s still, I guess, suppose not fully processed. And I think a lot of these controversies that we’re having around defining antisemitism has to do with that.
Marc Steiner:
So one of the things that I thought about was sort reading the book, and especially when I finished it, was that, and you touched on this throughout the book, but I’m very curious to probe it a bit more, which is your own journey, your journey from being, I mean, when I read your name, it sounds like a Jewish name, Rebecca Gould, but your family’s losing who they were as Jews over a couple of generations, and your rediscovering that through the eyes of Jewish Marxists and your time in Israel and exploring this world. So talk a bit about that because I think that really, it’s not traumatic, but it begins to-
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Was transformational, perhaps.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, transformational is the word. Yeah.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Yeah, absolutely. I would say that in a sense, I kind of always knew these details of my family history, but I had not really reflected on them in a kind of in-depth way, because I certainly wasn’t raised Jewish. But I-
Marc Steiner:
You were raised Catholic, right?
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Well, secular, yes. Secular.
Marc Steiner:
Gotcha, gotcha. Right [inaudible 00:09:07] I understand. Yeah, yeah.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
But it did come as quite a shock to be accused of antisemitism. I mean, I think that accusation has become very banal in kind of pro-Palestinian circles because it’s often misused and abused and so forth. But I just never thought that when I was writing the Beyond Anti-Semitism, it was like the furthest thing, you know what I mean? I was just kind of filtering what Israelis were telling me what was being said on Israeli media, left wing and so forth.
And so it was like I just had to process that because even if I obviously did not consider myself antisemitic, but the very thought that something I said could have been hurtful was a shock to me. It was just like, oh my God, how could that possibly have happened? And I think that took me back into a journey of just thinking about who am I? What am I, a very personal introspective journey. At some point, it did become a kind of political struggle for free speech, and that’s also very important. But the first reaction was just amazement that it could have been offensive to, well, it was offensive to British Jews who hadn’t been to Israel, hadn’t been to Palestine. And so I think that’s important to say.
But yes, and it was great. It was fascinating to rediscover the Jewish sides of my family. Actually, this happened, while I was writing this book, my father passed away too, and it’s my father’s side of the family that is of Jewish heritage. Actually, I have to say, there are a lot of questions that came up that I wasn’t able to ask him, but at least I was able to dedicate the book to him. So, it definitely is a highly personal subject, and it has been a way of, my family migrated from deep poverty in [inaudible 00:10:56] in Poland, and they found a new life for themselves in America. But once they got to America, they changed their name. It was Goldstein. I guess they thought it didn’t sound very Jewish, but maybe it does to many. And yeah, I think they just did everything they could to assimilate and erase that history.
Marc Steiner:
And then as you just alluded to a moment ago that you wrote about in the book, were accused of making antisemitic attacks in the work that you published.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Yes. So it’s worth saying, right, so the work that I published in 2011 when I was living in Bethlehem, in fact, I remember when I wrote it, I’d just come back from Hebron, which is where some of the settler movement has in a sense been the most extreme. I mean, many Palestinians live in fear of their lives and I was witnessing that. I was actually with a colleague from the Van Leer Institute, and we were sort of at a bus. I mean, we actually didn’t go outside, but just again, this sort of dual world phenomenon was really overwhelming to me and so I wrote that article. I just think it’s important to recognize that’s the context I wrote it in the middle of that conflict.
And then I got to the University of Bristol five years later, and a student who describes himself as Israeli British and a Zionist came across the article. I never actually spoke to the student one-on-one. I still haven’t, I mean, there was never a one-on-one conversation between us. But he, I guess googled my name and found that article and then published a op-ed a saying it was antisemitic and it needed to be sort of investigated. And there was a sort of slow trail of media controversy that had a big impact.
I think the important thing to say about that is it’s not just a personal story. This had never happened before in the UK in a sense, because compared to the US I actually went to Columbia University where Edward Said was a professor, and there were cases of tenure controversies around Palestinian activists and so forth. The UK didn’t have that history, but what it did have is that in the end of 2016, just a few months before this attack on me with my article was published, it had adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. It was the first government to do that in the world.
And so that marked a kind of governmental interest in preventing criticism of Israel, which I think explains a lot about why this particularly short article of not much consequence, to be honest, it got a lot of notoriety very quickly.
Marc Steiner:
So how much did that experience, obviously, that experience in you going there and also kind of reclaiming where some of your ancestry came from influence you to write this book in the first place?
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Well, I think as soon as it was happening to me, I realized at some point I was going to need to write it down, because it was just so far, again, this kind of experience of surrealism. I didn’t believe that by coming to the UK, which is a country, doesn’t have a First Amendment, but it’s a country that is thought of as being liberal, democratic, protecting free speech. It has a concept of academic freedom. I just didn’t think that an article I wrote five years earlier in very [inaudible 00:14:14] would matter. But it did a lot. I mean, in fact, a very prominent politician called me a Holocaust denier and he said, I should be fired. He said that in one of the mainstream conservative newspapers.
And what was also interesting was that I got the sense that the university, ultimately, when it reviewed the article, they said it was not antisemitic and so forth. So what was interesting was that there was a very sharp contrast between everyone around me sort of knew it wasn’t really antisemitic, including the university, I think from the beginning. But governmental pressure, governmental intrusion on this question was so intense that they were just acting at basically the behest of the government.
So the free speech, I mean, in addition to making me much more interested in my Jewish roots, it also just really awakened me that free speech is actually something, it’s not just this value that right-wing politicians talk about. It’s actually something that I personally need to survive as a person because I’m being libeled for things I never said, and at that particular moment, I wasn’t able to speak out because I had to not cause controversy.
The university, even though, again, everyone internally reassured me, this is not problematic, but they said, don’t say anything. Be quiet. Shut up. Our media team is going to figure this out, and they’re bigger issues. So that sense of being suppressed, having your voice silenced and not just my voice. I mean, what was interesting is I felt that they did do this kind of detailed review of the article, which was really, I mean, it was wrong, I think from a kind of ethical perspective, because again, I wrote this five years ago, so it shouldn’t have been relevant, but they did it, and they used the IHRA definition point by point to figure out whether it was antisemitic.
But most importantly, they said that it was written from the United States. They didn’t ask me. I mean, they just totally got that wrong. So they erased the Palestinian and the Israeli context completely. They misread it and said, this was just a casual thing. This was a formal inquiry that was supposed to be done at a very high level of professionalism with legal counsel involved and so forth. And it was just so biased, even though it found in my favorite, it was still just incredibly biased, incredibly silencing. And so I think that experience of being silenced made me want to speak out, obviously. Yeah, and so that.
And then seeing that happen to other people. And again, actually at the same time, this is again worth mentioning to bring home the point that it’s not just my experience or my story. Again, it’s worth saying that UK had been a place where Palestinian activism was not suppressed until 2017. But at the same time that the student wrote an article accusing my article of antisemitism and connecting it to the IHRA definition, the antisemitism charges, there was also a campaign, really, it’s a group that calls themselves a campaign against antisemitism, had targeted a student at the University of Exeter, which is nearby, calling her antisemitic because of her tweets from five years earlier. She was a student from Gaza. And yeah, said that this happened at the same time.
Anyway, so something was organized and there’s just a lot of sense of articles being withdrawn from curriculum, people being silenced. And it became clear, it was interesting to me that this kind of definition was being so useful. I mean, it was so useful in censoring. I’d never seen that happen before, that particular kind of mechanism of censorship was totally new to me. And so it just opened my eyes to, I guess, the way bureaucracies work and the way governments work.
Marc Steiner:
Let’s talk a bit about, one of the things that, a couple of things struck me here in the book. A lot of things struck me in this book. It’s really well written. It’s a very intense read, which is the reality of antisemitism, the depth of antisemitism in this world that is just kind of in the DNA of Western society that you write about, and how you see that kind of pain turning into oppression. You have these great quotes by Isaac Deutscher all over the place. And I’m a fan of Isaac Deutscher, so I really enjoyed you pulling him into this.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
As am I, right?
Marc Steiner:
Yeah. Because when I was young, when I was 15, I was a teenage Trot. That’s where I got introduced to Isaac Deutscher.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Wonderful.
Marc Steiner:
At any rate. He said, you have the quote, “Religion, I’m an atheist, Jewish nationalism, I’m an internationalist. In neither sense am I, therefore a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity where the persecuted and they exterminated. I’m a Jew, I feel the pulse of Jewish history as I should like to do all I can to assure that the real not spurious security is of respect of the Jews.”
So this is part of your journey as well. And when you look at both the death of antisemitism, how that created what became Israel, how that created the oppression of Palestinians, and you weave this tail around that before we get to free speech, which we’ll get to in a minute.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Sure, sure. Of course. Right. Yeah. And I think it’s worth pointing out, so Isaac Deutscher is also a very big inspiration to me, but it’s also interesting that he speaks for a generation, I think, a generation of a certain kind of certainly geographic space. I’m thinking of Polish Jews or Jews of their former Russian Empire from the shtetl. It’s just astonishing how many of them turned towards radical leftism, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, these are anarchists who migrated to America. I think they didn’t talk so much about being Jewish, but it doesn’t seem like a coincidence. There was definitely a kind of demographic phenomena of-
Marc Steiner:
And let me just say, and Leon Abram, who I never heard of until I read your book.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Absolutely. Yes, yes, yes. I love him. I mean, wasn’t very familiar with this work either, and it hasn’t been given a lot of visibility. So I think, yeah, absolutely. This is a similar demographic. I mean, they were all born, I think everyone, all of these people I just mentioned, either Poland or the former Russian Empire. And so they experienced this forced segregation, limited economic opportunities, and that pushed them. And they all became very, on the left. They saw themselves as their struggle as one that had to do with workers across internationally, anti-colonialism. Rosa Luxembourg would be another.
And so yeah, I think he speaks for a very broad sector of a certain world that is not, a lot of that was annihilated by the Holocaust to some extent. Not entirely, but any chance I can get to talk about, so I think that’s actually a name that he assumed, Abram Leon. I often, for some reason I mix up the order of the names as well. But yes, this is a wonderful author of a book that is called in English, The Jewish Question. He wrote in French under a Nazi occupied Belgium. And I am just astonished. So he had obviously very limited access to scholarship or scholarly resources, but he working under incredibly difficult constraints. But he produces this kind of scholarly masterpiece about the history of antisemitism incorporating, he’s inspired by Max Weber so he looks at it through a very sociological lens.
But he also talks about colonialism. He connects the exploitation of the Jews throughout history to the way the colonies are exploited. I think that’s pretty astonishing. I mean, writing in the forties. And so that’s a tradition that we really need to explore and keep alive and be aware of, at least in the present.
Marc Steiner:
But then you also kind of go into the whole question of free speech and into the complexity of that. And-
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
It is complex.
Marc Steiner:
Right? And so-
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Definitely complex.
Marc Steiner:
To defending everybody’s right to free speech at the same time talking about the silencing of speech is taking place, especially if it has to do with Palestinian oppression. Talk a bit about that in terms of what you discovered.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Sure. So I think some of my kind of shock about the whole thing that was happening to me is, as I mentioned already, this sense of being silenced, even when most people I was in conversation with, I’m talking about university administrators and so forth, even when they didn’t necessarily disagree with me, but I was still silenced. I think there’s a part of me that, I’m not generally sort of very American in most of my ways, but I am of American. I was born in the United States, and I think there was this kind of unconscious First Amendment, just orientation in me that was really amazed by the way in which it was seen as just being okay not to be allowed to express one’s views.
And that was my personal, at the time, I was also reading about prisoners in Iran, because that’s a book area that I wrote a book on. And there just seemed to be a kind of unexpected parallels between the silencing that they were experiencing and what I was experiencing. And I realized, because I think I’d always thought of free speech as something that either in the liberal democracies, it’s something that the right wing only talks about, whereas in maybe places like Iran, it’s something that the left is concerned with but in my world, it’s not really a big issue. I don’t want to go out there preaching racism to anyone. So it’s not something that I personally have to struggle with. I’m okay with hideous views being silenced.
But I think antisemitism is a really interesting case because obviously I don’t think my article was antisemitic, but if someone comes to me who was a Holocaust survivor, for example, and says, this article that you wrote makes me very uncomfortable. I think you’re too critical of Israel. I guess there’s a part of me, maybe I’m a little bit more, you used the word dialectical. I think that was a very interesting word. There’s a part of me, I think it’s important just to acknowledge what people feel, right?
So I feel like it’s very difficult to argue about these questions of antisemitism. There is so much difference of perception with one person because I do think there is an objective way of figuring out what’s antisemitic and not. But I also think there’s just a wide margin of emotions and traumas and everything else that goes into this question that we kind of do need to find a way of just respecting everyone’s right to feel what they feel and think what they think, right?
So if say, a Holocaust survivor, for example, is probably not going to be in danger walking down the streets of London, but perhaps they have this very, very traumatic memory somewhere back in their past that’s made them afraid. And I’m not going to be the person to say, okay, they’re idiots. Let’s just, you know what I mean? They don’t have a right to feel like they feel. So I guess what I’m saying is I feel that people, but this is the case though, because still not going to accept, therefore that for them to see a Palestinian flag in London is an example of antisemitism, I don’t accept that, but I do kind of want to respect where they’re coming from.
And so in other words, it means that as someone who believes in these different perspectives, the legitimacy of them, I have to acknowledge things that contradict each other in society. And there are different perspectives. And I think the question of defining antisemitism is an area where there’s never going to be a world in which everyone completely agrees, we’re not going to get there. And there are some things are black and white, right, when to do with hate crimes, but there are other much, much grayer areas. Usually these are areas to do with speech and attitudes and perceptions. And I think it’s more important to just let people debate, let people voice their views rather than trying to outlaw them.
Marc Steiner:
It’s also very difficult. I mean, one of the things in that chapter in your book that struck me was the difficulty to wrestle with are there limits and how you even begin to talk about that. I mean, to protect everyone’s right to say what has to be said, even if you despise what they’re saying.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
Even if they are-
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
It’s not a [inaudible 00:27:12].
Marc Steiner:
Right? And in this day and age, it’s hard on many levels because to allow racist speech to take place in universities or antisemitic speech to take place in universities, it’s become a really controversial piece, left and right.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, definitely. There’s much people, I think these days are much more in favor of banning books or trying other ways of getting the views that are problematic to kind of disappear. But that hasn’t worked in the past, and I’m not sure it’s [inaudible 00:27:47] to the present. And yeah, I think one can look at it from a kind of just a practical perspective, when has that worked? Usually the views are still there. The people whose views are silenced tend to think that the fact that they’re being censored makes them feel more righteous and more justified.
I think personally, antisemitic points of view often can be disproven, I mean, empirically. And racism is empirically incorrect. It can be, reason can, I don’t say completely, but to some extent it can be debated, maybe not out of existence, but dramatically reduced just by using the tools that we have of critical thought, debate. And yeah, I think we have to have some faith in that.
Marc Steiner:
So, I want to ask you this one piece here. You have some great lines in here, “Like any other racism, antisemitism can exist in the absence of intent.” And it shows how deeply, how pervasive racism and antisemitism are.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Yes, it can completely. And there’s one comment I would like to make on that, and then an additional point about free speech I didn’t quite make.
Marc Steiner:
Go ahead.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
I also just want to say that one thing I often hear by well-intentioned people who want to support me, who wanted to support me in terms of when I was accused of antisemitism, was that, oh, that’s a Jewish name. You have Jewish heritage, so you can’t be antisemitic. But I actually don’t agree with that. I mean, I don’t think I’m antisemitic, but I don’t think that there’s no get out of jail free card from any identity. Anyone is vulnerable to any kind of racism, any kind of bad thinking, and personalizing in that way doesn’t help us. So yeah, so I think that’s absolutely true. It goes well beyond intent. It’s structural and it’s material as well.
And the other thing about free speech and what my actual experience of being accused of something and then defending myself against the accusation and the university taught me is that yes, I certainly would want to be part of the movement that challenges racist thought. I want to be part of the movement that challenges antisemitic thought. But the problem is that you have to think very, very carefully about what kind of agencies and agents like institutions are you empowering, not you personally, obviously, but when we create regulations or laws, but particularly this kind of like the IHRA definition, it’s not technically a law, but it kind of functions as a law sometimes. We create these regulations that are aimed to eradicate a certain way of thinking or a certain approach, a certain mental attitude just by creating that law, by basically creating a bureaucracy for their implementation we are empowering certain kinds of institutions to punish or to marginalize.
And so for me, it’s not just a question of the content of what’s right and what’s wrong, it’s about power. So if you’re creating a regulation, you’re giving an institution, you’re giving a government, like the conservative government, in this case, the conservative government of the UK and their various apparatuses, you are empowering them to do certain things to silence certain points of view. So I think that that’s problematic entirely separate of the content of what’s being supported and not, it’s also about power. And I think that’s important to remember about speech.
Marc Steiner:
So I wonder what conclusion you come to. Let’s talk, I could read 10 different passages here, but we only have so much time. How you would see antisemitism, the role it played in forcing people to go to Palestine, as you quote Deutscher, creating this oppressive system with Palestinians. And how do you see that changing? I mean, you have these great lines in here about around how the antisemitism ending of it is wrapped up in the liberation of Palestinians. I mean, it’s like it’s almost time for new definitions.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Yeah, absolutely. I guess one way of responding to that is that historically, there have been intersections between the Jewish, Jewish people, Jewish experience, and Palestinian experience, if you go back [inaudible 00:32:26] centuries. But I think at this particular moment, 21st century, their histories are becoming ever more intertwined. And there’s a great quote that Edward Said once used, that the Palestinians are the Jews of the Arab world. I think that kind of [inaudible 00:32:45].
Marc Steiner:
Yes, he and I actually talked about that one day on my radio show. Yes, yes.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Oh, that’s amazing. That’s wonderful.
Yeah. So I think what I had in mind when I wrote that, that at this point, the histories are not separable. And in a sense that’s a good thing. That’s where there’s a kind of potential for violence, but that’s also where there’s a potential for peace, the parallels they’ve intersected so closely. And I think there’s a role for understanding the [inaudible 00:33:16] on the Holocaust was also being intertwined.
Marc Steiner:
So how do you think, given all you wrote and the people you wrote about, and the kind of demise of, in some ways of the power of the left and the Jewish Marxist left [inaudible 00:33:32] that you write about how that fits into all this in terms of the future landscape, because it does change things. I mean, it changes things drastically.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Sure. Well, I think one thing that this shows, I mean, potentially some of the most important thinkers on this issue have often, or the important thinkers in general in terms of creating revolutionary change have often been from the diaspora. And it may be, I mean, I think historically the American diaspora, for example, has, yeah, I think there’s a potential for the diaspora to change the conversation to some extent. I mean, a lot of Palestinians are leaving, Israelis are leaving their country, and it may be that they’ll find in migration some kind of space for creating communities that are very difficult to create in the ground. I suppose that’s one. I mean, I’m thinking that that’s a pattern that one sees also in the Polish Jews of the 19th century and the early 20th, that they created new worlds like Emma Goldman when they migrated.
Marc Steiner:
And I also find that a lot of these Raelis on the left are now in Europe. They’re not there anymore. They’re gone.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
A hundred percent. That’s true.
Marc Steiner:
And I think the way you frame that in terms of the Jewish Marxist tradition and what that really has to teach, and even when you write about Isaac Deutscher’s development and his change, what happened in 1967, how that really changed just before he died, how that really kind of changed his whole view of what was going on. Because as a Holocaust survivor, he was like, yes, we want Israel, but then what just happened?
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
Exactly. Yeah. I think if you look at the scholarship being produced by Israeli, Israelis in Europe who are very critical of their country and of that history, it definitely gives us a new way of seeing that the history and the legacy, and then therefore a new way of seeing the future.
Marc Steiner:
I want to thank you all for joining us today. I really do recommend getting this book, Erasing Palestine by Rebecca Ruth Gould. It’s engrossing, and worth the read to wrestle with the ideas she puts forth. It’s an easy read about a complex subject. So thank you, Rebecca. Good to have you with us. I’m really happy you could join us today.
Rebecca Ruth Gould:
It was a great pleasure. Thank you.
Marc Steiner:
And I want to thank Cameron Granadino on the other side of the glass making his studio magic and Kayla Rivara for making the wheels turn here and allowing all this to happen and everyone at Real News making the show possible.
Please [inaudible 00:36:14] us your thought about what you heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com. I’ll get right back to you. And while you’re there, please go to www.the real news.com/support, become a monthly donor, become part of the future with us. So for Cameron Granadino, Kayla Rivara, the crew here at The Real News and our guest, Rebecca Gould, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
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