Professor Haim Bresheeth is the son of Holocaust survivors, raised in Palestine and Israel, and a founder of the Jewish Network for Palestine. He served in the Israeli army during the Six-Day War in 1967—an event that transformed his life forever. On Nov. 1, 2024, Bresheeth was arrested in London after giving a speech at a pro-Palestine rally outside the home of Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom. In this installment of our ongoing series “Not In Our Name” on The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Professor Bresheeth about his path to becoming an Israeli Jewish scholar and activist fighting for Palestinian liberation and fighting against the horrors of Zionism, including Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Guest:
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 great to have you all with us. Our guest today is Professor Haim Bresheeth. He’s the son of Holocaust survivors, raised in Palestine and Israel, served in the Israeli army in the 67 War, an event that transformed him and then he founded the Jewish Network for Palestine. He stood up for a free Palestine and that hurt his career in many ways. He moved to Britain where he taught at the University of East London, and now teaches the school for Oriental African Studies. He’s a filmmaker, photographer, writer, film study scholar. His works include introduction to the Holocaust, the Gulf War, and the New World Order Cinema and Memory Dangerously Liaison and the Army like no other. The Israeli defense forces made a nation and his films include state of danger, and London is burning. The son of Holocaust survivors became a leading Jewish and Israeli voice to end the occupation and build a holy land for all. So Haim, welcome. It’s good to have you, and I appreciate you taking the time today to be with us here, The Real News.
Haim Bresheeth:
Thank you for having me on.
Marc Steiner:
So given all that you have been through and all Palestinians and Israelis have been through all these decades, it feels to me that we are in a moment that’s like on a precipice even more so than 67 or 48 or 56, or any other conflict we have experienced. Could you talk a bit about that and where you really think we are given the breadth of your experience?
Haim Bresheeth:
I totally agree that we are on a precipice and at the most dramatic moment in the history of Zionism, and that’s for a number of reasons. For the first few decades, Israel was run by so-called left wing coalition, and that left wing coalition has the Nakba. The apartheid system was built by it. It went to an imperial war with France and Britain, as you know, in 1956, it did the 1967 victory over most of the Arab world in a sense, not just Syria and Egypt. It started the great movement of colonizing the rest of Palestine. That was taken in 67 and it also failed almost dramatically in 1973 when the two countries attacked Israel in order to get it to leave the occupied territories. This of course didn’t work. Israel stayed in those parts of Jordan that were in Palestine and stayed in the Syrian Golan Heights, but it left Sinai staying in Gaza. Of course, in the end, they managed to leave government in 1977 without signing the peace agreement that they wanted to and the peace agreement was signed by be as you know.
So since then, a right-wing government for most of the period, I mean apart from few short years, a right-wing government of increasing intensity and brutality has dictated what happens to Israel. But I want to say that there is a straight line between 1948 and 2025. It’s not as if something has changed either in 1967 or 1977. What has changed is the style, but not the essence in my understanding. And the essence is simple. Israel is a settler colonial state. It used violence in order to take over more and more land. It used violence in order to limit and destroy such rights that Palestinians ever had. It started more military conflicts than any other country in the years that we are speaking of since 1948, and it has made adversity into great business. Israel now exists because of its industrial base in armaments, in high tech, in security. Call it what you like, ai. Now, Israel is making its main amount of money, its main riches is made in armaments and blood diamonds. That is Israel is not living off avocados or oranges as people
Sometimes wish to present it. So what has happened is that every generation that has passed became more right wing. Well, that’s a by design, but B, by the very simple fact that serving in the army is the machinery that shapes, I mean, this is what my book is about, the machinery that shapes Israeli identity. The machinery is common to all Israelis, not just men, but also women. The one institute that dictates not just reality, but how Israelis is thinking about that reality is the army or the combined security services beyond the army and Israel has thus become a society where the younger you are, the more of a fascist you are. This is the exact opposite, for example, in the United States and to a degree also in Europe, but in Israel it’s very accurate to say that the younger you are, the more inclined you are to continue the battles and the expansion of the Zionist project.
Israel is now involved with most countries in the Middle East in one form or another of military conflict even with Iran in the last year directly and before indirectly. So actually what they have done is in order to speed up the control of the whole of Palestine without Palestinians, Netanyahu started in 2023 before October the seventh, the intensification of the destruction of Palestine as a society. He didn’t start it, he intensified it. He removed limitations and he started what Israelis call the judicial revolution because it made it easier for him to do the things that he needed to do without any stops, legal stops and legal controls. So what we see is a society that by design removed all the niceties of liberal democracy, of international law, of its own legal systems. Israel was never a democracy, but that didn’t stop it talking about itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, a democracy with apartheid, with ethnic cleansing, with now genocide, with mass starvation.
And gradually, but very quickly after Netanyahu came back to power in 2023, Israel has become basically a major mafia society. I mean actually the Mafia looks like a charity organization in comparison to what Israel has become. It’s just that the language doesn’t offer us models to define Israel in other ways. Now, there is no way of stopping this process because what it is is the maturation of the Zionist project. It took a long, long time for it to mature to the point it controlled not just Palestine and those countries which are partly occupied by Israel, but to actually control the minds of the Western rulers and leaders. Actually what happened since 1967 is a gradual process of ionization of the West Israel managed to persuade and inculcate western power centers. Of course, most importantly Washington, that others Israel, that its agenda is their own agenda. Now this sounds like an antisemitic trope.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, I was about to say that. Yeah,
Haim Bresheeth:
But just look at the reality. President Trump and President Biden before him, and President Obama before them, and indeed even President Bush before that have followed the lead of Mosad and Israel in defining the foreign policy of the United States, as did other states. And I think the Germans have given it a very good definition when they called it raison data. This is the raison data of the German state, but it has become in many ways the raison data of the American state. I want to say that in order to be a good American, this is what we are told by the American system. You have to be a Zionist. Now, of course, tens of millions of Zionists live in the United States. They are Christians that they are very important. There are some problems with this, but I don’t know if we’ll have time to
Marc Steiner:
Discuss that. There are a lot of problems with this. Yeah,
Haim Bresheeth:
There are more problems with this than before, definitely, and I think you know what I’m talking about. But what we have is a society with more Zionists than in the whole of Israel. Of course there are Jewish Zionists in the United States and they run APAC and other bodies that help to, in a sense dictate, or at least if you want to present it, shape the foreign policy about the Middle East in Washington. Now, I know this sounds farfetched. If you think about a small country like Israel saying that it actually shapes the policy about the Middle East in Washington. But just look at the reality that President Trump has brought into the administration. He has removed a lot of the academics in the centers of design and planning in most of the ministries, definitely in defense and in foreign policy in the State Department and inside the White House, there are now a number of Mossad assets, as they are called, who actually have his ear and his brain.
And this is true also in other countries in Britain, the prime Minister Kier announced in 2022 before he became Prime Minister, that he is a Zionist without qualification. Of course, this is true about most American presidents, whether they put it that way or not. So Americans are told and others are told, that the interests of Israel are the interests of their own state. Now, I don’t think this is true. I cannot see how genocide in Gaza or other war crimes are in the interest of Americans or Brits or Germans. These are not real interests, but a American elite and the British elite that are in control believe so or want us to believe. So even if they don’t believe that themselves. And the reason for that are very complicated. But you asked me about how Israel is where it is, and without understanding the measure of control that it has on other societies, it couldn’t do what it’s doing.
It couldn’t actually kill hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and maim others and destroy the whole of life’s infrastructure in Gaza and not much less in the West Bank or bomb to Haran freely or take parts of Syria at will or do what it did in Lebanon and so on. I mean, it couldn’t do without the daily flights that replenish the armaments ammunition that they’re using all the time. The bombs that they are expanding, they would run out of ammunition in 10 days. So on the 17th of October, the war could be over unless the West continues replenishing daily the supplies for Israel. This has not developed since the 7th of October. This is a system that took decades to come to fruition, but now it has come to fruition. It has matured because Israel is presented as some kind of ideal society that does things in the right way.
And we must, we Americans, we Brits, we Germans, we French must support it in its endeavor because it is the only democracy. It’s the only western safe haven in the Middle East, et cetera. Now, none of these things are true, but the point is this is what we hear on our media. There are many studies that proved us that the BBC is like 60 times more likely to describe or to allow time for an Israeli to talk about their trauma experiences than a Palestinian. Think about the difference in trauma between those two societies, and yet the media is doing the opposite. Biden kept talking about the beheaded babies that he’s seen on television. I mean, which beheaded babies did he see on television? But he kept saying it and nobody from the New York Times and the other media organs that have proven with Israeli proof that there were no beheaded babies on the 7th of October.
Nobody stood up and said, president, there were no beheaded babies. He continued to do that all the time. So what we now have is a maturation, not just of the relationship between Israel and the West, and as the German chancellor said, Israel is doing our dirty work for us. And it would be good if somebody would ask him, what is the dirty work that Europe needs doing that Israel is doing? Because that’s what he said. And I think Trump is speaking like that as well. So what has happened is not just the maturation of the relationship, but the maturation of Zionism. Zionism understood that it does not need to wait anymore. That there is a window of opportunity in which it can and intends to clear Palestine of as many Palestinians as possible. We’re talking in the millions and the plan between Trump and Netanya talks about removing all the people of Gaza, but they’re not going to stop there.
If they manage to do that, they want to remove the West Bank Palestinians and they will not stop there because there are 22% of Israelis who are Palestinians. So I think what we are now seeing is the maturation of Zionism. Zionism always wanted to do that, but couldn’t do it. It could only do part of it. Now the plan is complete. It is judged as the right time to finish the job, so to speak. That’s how they speak and that’s what they mean. And I think that’s the main difference that October seven has brought. That’s where the precipice is. The precipice is that now we can push the lemmings over the precipice. We can push millions of Palestinians either by killing them, by starving them, bombing them, by not allowing them to live in their country and by sending them to other countries which Israel and the United States are negotiating with. This is not something I’m saying, this is something they’re saying.
Marc Steiner:
Lemme just start by talking about and asking about how the oppressed become the oppressor. Part of the reason these will even exist is because of the Holocaust. After World War ii, there was no place else to go. Your relatives who left ended up in Palestine because nobody else who left them in and they were not going back to where they came from. And in some ways I’ve always kind of maintained that we were set up to become the oppressor out of our own oppression. Now we’re in a space and place. I mean there are what, 1.5 million Israelis now or more that live in the United States and many of those not all made up. A lot of the left made up a lot of the people who might oppose what’s going on, and that some people also equate the madness of Israel with the destruction of Israel, with antisemitism, with the death of Jews. It’s a complex place we’re in is what I’m saying. That complexity does not justify anything that Israel is doing in terms of its oppression of Palestinians. But if we do not figure out a way politically to get through the complexity of what we face, the disaster inside of Israel, Palestine could affect the entire planet. When you talk
Haim Bresheeth:
About, I think it will,
Marc Steiner:
And I think when you talk about Zionists, the Christian Zionists support Israel because they think it’ll mean the end of the Jews and they can take over. That’s part of their philosophy, but they think and breathe. I think that the moment we’re in is a very complex and dangerous moment. I think most people don’t realize how complex and dangerous it is.
Haim Bresheeth:
I totally accept what you’re saying. It is a very complex and dangerous moment about just a sentence or two about the Christian Zionists and their relationship to Zionism. Christian Zionists think that they are using Zionism because it will bring the book of Revelation to life.
Marc Steiner:
The second coming,
Haim Bresheeth:
It’ll bring, yeah, the second coming, the end of days. So for Christian Zionism, Israel is a machinery of bringing back Jesus. What they don’t take into account that for Zionism, Christian Zionism is a machinery to actually clear Palestine of its indigenous population
Marc Steiner:
That as well
Haim Bresheeth:
And control the right wing of America in the direction that is required for Zionism to do that. So they’re both using each other. I don’t think we need to say who controls who. They’re working in a very strange relationship. Obviously Christian Zionists are ultimate anti-Semites. They want the destruction of the Jews because that’s what the Book of Revelation requires and that’s what the second coming requires.
And the Zionists Adam sell anti-Semites. They are the best friends of every anti-Semitic regime and ruler in Europe and elsewhere, including anti-Semites in the United States. So this is very complex and very contradictory, but there is no doubt about those two movements. What they want, they want the destruction of Palestine as it now stands, and each of them has a different Palestine or a different Israel that will emerge from this. But the main thing they share between them is the destruction of the Palestinians. And that’s not written in the Book of Revelations, but the Christian Zionists accept it because this is what the Israelis need in order to continue acting in the way that they do. So there is here indeed, the beginning of a new in antisemitism, not one that is written a lot in the New York Times about or discussed on NPR, yet one that we need to understand.
The other thing probably is important to say in a sentence or two is that there has never been a time where antisemitism was so missing. Like the beginning of the 21st century, antisemitism was missing in action in many ways because the Jewish population in the west is the strongest minority group in the United States, in Britain, in France, even in Germany, there are many Muslims in Germany, there are many Muslims in France. Well, they don’t carry the weight that the Jewish community does. So in terms of indicators of antisemitism, Jews have achieved an amazing level of social power and influence, similar only to German Jews before the first World War.
Marc Steiner:
So lemme ask you this question, though. What you’re describing now almost fuels antisemitism because it’s been this ancient trope that we Jews control the world, that our money controls the world. Indeed we control society. So I’m just going to be clear as your analysis saying this trope is reality or this is a trope that’s being used. What are you saying?
Haim Bresheeth:
What I’m saying is that Jews have in a sense through their power, social power, intellectual power, very importantly cultural power. Think about Hollywood, think about cultural machineries of the United States or Britain or France. Jews have achieved a very powerful place and have managed in a sense to defeat antisemitism soundly in those societies. And the defeat of antisemitism is very clear
Because otherwise they wouldn’t have achieved what they did and they defeated antisemitism and we all played a part in it. You and me included, and this was the right thing to do because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was an object lesson to society about what extreme racism can bring about human society worked out social machineries, legal machineries like the genocide Convention and human right law and the UN and all those positive and progressive changes made after the World War in great part because of the Holocaust. So Jews played an important part, which I think we should recognize and respect in liberalizing and making society more progressive. And they did that in many ways. Hollywood in the thirties, forties was a progressive machinery. It dictated what it is to be an American. And interestingly, this was done by companies under Jewish control. So I don’t think this is the old antisemitic trope played again.
No, it is very complex indeed. Jews after the second World War and indeed before the Second World War played a progressive part in the west and they done so in the end of the 19th century as well. Not Zionist Jews, I’m talking about your runoff de mill Jew that came from Eastern Europe to New York was a lefty, sometimes a communist, a lot of sometimes a socialist, and they actually help to make America what it is. There’s not much wrong with that. I think that’s very positive and I think Americans still recognize that that part of history, it’s not true about Britain in the same way. It’s not true about many other countries, but it’s true about the United States very clearly and it’s true about France and so on. So this is one part that they played since the setting up of Israel, and definitely since 1967, historian have proven that Zionism has replaced Judaism as the force of identity and the political force in the Jewish communities. So what was one or 2% before became like a 95%. That’s the change that has taken place in the West and that’s where Jews live. They mainly live in the West. What has happened is the progressive nature of the Jewish influx into the United States that helped the United States to coalesce, to become that society which called people from all over the world to come and build it. That allowed them that space of projection. As Americans now look at the Trump administration and what it now stands for, and obviously this is a very different society now.
Marc Steiner:
It is. This is
Haim Bresheeth:
A very different society.
Marc Steiner:
I don’t know if I would agree that antisemitism is dead at all.
Haim Bresheeth:
No, I’m not saying it’s dead. What I’m saying is that it was dead for a while after the second World war. It was as good as dead. Let’s put it like this. Now of course there is a residual antisemitism, but we need to think historically antisemitism was important when it created policies, when it dictated racist policies in Europe and elsewhere. It starts being important after the second World War,
Marc Steiner:
Maybe.
Haim Bresheeth:
I think now antisemitism is growing, but for the first time it’s growing because of Israel and what it is doing and what the West is doing to assist it. This is a very different type of antisemitism.
Marc Steiner:
I mean, I would agree that what’s happening now in Israel is fueling antisemitism. And for the first time in the history of the Jewish people, it’s something that part of us have done to fuel the antisemitism. There’s no question in my mind about that. But I think it’s also deeper. I mean, we’re about the same age, and I remember very well as a teenager and somebody in their twenties when people looked at me in the shower to see if I had a tail.
Haim Bresheeth:
Yeah, I mean obviously there is a residual racism in any western society.
Marc Steiner:
I think it’s more than residual. I think it’s deep. I think it runs deep inside of Christian worlds, especially even more than Muslim worlds. I think that the complexity that I’m talking about from all the things you posited is that there’s a danger in blaming ourselves for antisemitism at the same time,
Haim Bresheeth:
Not ourselves. I don’t do that.
Marc Steiner:
I
Haim Bresheeth:
Beg, pardon? I don’t you or me. I don’t blame you or me or any Jew who actually is Jewish. They’re not really responsible for antisemitism. I don’t think there’s anything Jewish about Israel. I don’t think there’s anything Jewish about what they’re doing or there ever was my father arriving in 1948 after six years under the Nazis from almost directly from the camps and he was in, he in AU refused to fight because he said these people that were fighting are actually the people. He didn’t use the word indigenous, but that’s what he meant. So he was a Jew like my and your grandfather. He wouldn’t actually fight and do genocide. So Jews lived for thousands of years in the Arab world, never on the wrong side of history. They lived in Europe for almost 2000 years, never on the wrong side of history. There was no reason in historical terms for antisemitism apart from the fact that you need the other to hate.
This is a social machinery that we are both aware of, that societies create their others and preserve them as objects of hate in order to have someone to blame. But there was no historical reasons for the hatred against the Jews. They were religious reasons. The new Christians actually tried to make sure that people forget that Jesus himself was born a Jew and died the Jew and was a good Jew. The new Christians did all they could to have clear water between them and Jews, and they created what later would be called antisemitism. They created judeophobia and Judeophobia did not exist before and did not exist in the Arab world. And there were no pogroms for almost this whole period of 2000 years that Jews lived in the Arab world in Alandus for 800 years almost for the whole period. Jewish Christians and Muslims lived in harmony. And that’s
Marc Steiner:
A story that most people do not know and do not realize that that golden period, I did a radio series on that golden period of Andalusia because of the people not realizing that happened. So you’ve said so much. I really can stay here for several hours kind of unpacking it and digging deeper. But let me just say this, that from the analysis that you’ve laid out, there is a confluence of events that created modern Israel, the Holocaust being one of them. I mean, one of the things that was very clear for my family is they were not allowed to come here. They were in the camps.
Haim Bresheeth:
No, there was my family. They were not allowed to come to the United States.
Marc Steiner:
And it was the imperial forces that wanted us to go to Palestine to colonize that place for the imperial powers. That’s just part of the story that is never told or never talked about. And so my Israeli cousins are the ones with the numbers on their arms. They always wanted to come here, but could never get here until later when my father and others helped bring them here. So
Haim Bresheeth:
I don’t think this is, I don’t think we disagree.
Marc Steiner:
No, no, no. But I’m saying we are. I’m not saying we’re just, so my question is, given that the reality of what actually created the of Israel, the reality, I still think and will maintain that antisemitism runs deep, that inside of Israel, the hatred of Palestinians by our people, by Jews is intense. I mean it’s intense. I remember in the theater company I was with working in Israel here, I’ll never forget the man I really liked a lot when I mentioned Palestinians, he was the center of German Jews in Israel. I’ll never forget this. He turned his head to the side spit on the ground. And that’s what I think of Palestinians. So it’s something that there’s a racism and hatred out of all that that was created inside of Israel. The question is how you get underneath that and how you begin to change that. I mean, I’ll just say one last thing here about that. I really want to hear your thoughts that I was in. I was in from the early seventies in every group you can imagine after the occupation to oppose it and it’s only gotten worse. How do you see it unfolding where that changes?
Haim Bresheeth:
I don’t think we have the time to do this, but I’ll try to do a short version of it. Well, history is complex. Yes,
Marc Steiner:
Yes.
Haim Bresheeth:
First of all, I just finished writing my third article this year about the racist basis in Judaic text. I come from a religious family. I had religious education.
Marc Steiner:
Me too.
Haim Bresheeth:
And it’s very important for Jews to understand and to accept and to admit and to change all those together. Every single racist bit in their Judaic text should be excised if you want.
Marc Steiner:
Could you give us an example?
Haim Bresheeth:
Well, I’ll give you an example. The book of Joshua, which most people never heard about
Marc Steiner:
And
Haim Bresheeth:
Definitely did not read, is a piece of racism, which George Steiner, you may be from his family line, I dunno, but Joel Steiner said that it is a terrible book that should not be in the Bible. He was totally right.
This is a book about settler colonialism of the worst kind settler colonialism that doesn’t exploit the population like the British did in India or others did in Africa and so on. But it works through genocide. It works like North America, sorry to say. In other words, it replaces the population in order to control the land. There are 26 chapters in the book of Joshua, and each of them is about one of 31 communities that the book tells us were wiped out, lock, stock and barrel or men, woman, child, dog, et cetera. Now this is a formulaic violence. Every chapter uses the same formula, repeating it. And we grew up on this stuff, not you, but I grew up on this stuff and all my generation grew up.
Marc Steiner:
I did as well. Right.
Haim Bresheeth:
Okay. So you know what I’m talking about, and this is not just a shameful but a terrible piece of text to teach children. And we were taught to it in Israel as the way that things have to happen. And I mean, let’s take a text, which is much nicer, Esther. This is an interesting book that is very nice for children to experience in Purim. But the children never get to the chapter at the end where the Jews kill 75,000 people in the streets of Susa.
So this is a little book about a festival. The children are in love with a festival of genocide. I could go on for a long time about examples like this. The good guy is the dead guy. So these things come from the Bible, come from the Torah, come from the Talmud, the Mishna, the aada. I know this stuff. I learned it as a young religious boy. I think that we need to face it like every Christian needs to face the much worse racism of Christianity and the history of colonialism. And to a lesser degree, Muslims have to face the racism within the Koran and Hadid and so on. So I’m speaking as a Marxist. I’m no longer
Marc Steiner:
Longer. I couldn’t tell.
Haim Bresheeth:
I know. But these things make a difference. They’re not just words. We don’t believe that what’s in the Old Testament or the New Testament or the Koran are just words and they don’t have a meaning beyond that. They actually shape histories,
Marc Steiner:
Right.
Haim Bresheeth:
So in a sense, there are some of them more influential than Hitler’s book that everyone is quoting. So we need to do some homework. Okay, there’s no time for this. I just wanted to point to an area of work that we need to do. Secondly, I think that why I’m interested in Convi Vescia, why I am interested Inus is that this is an exception in history, not just in Jewish history,
Marc Steiner:
In history.
Haim Bresheeth:
And you will understand it because you’ve studied it in researched it. This is an exception in the history of the human race and recent history in written history in the few thousand years that we know about quite a lot because a lot was written about for hundreds of years, for many hundreds of years. And their Muslim rule, by chance, Jews, Christians, and Muslims decided that life together is more important than the difference between them. We are actually using this as an argument for one democratic state in the future. Palestine. We are not talking about peace now. Yeah,
Marc Steiner:
No,
Haim Bresheeth:
This is not what we are talking about. We are talking about peace tomorrow, but the peace tomorrow is the peace of yesterday. This is a very complex argument, but I think it’s an argument supported by history. Let us now walk forward together to a history that will change the Middle East like Nan Deus changed Europe. The Renaissance would not be possible without alandus.
Marc Steiner:
Absolutely.
Haim Bresheeth:
We didn’t even have the plays of aristo. We didn’t have the plays of Ocli, we didn’t have Plato without that period. These books were burned by rabid Christianity as Satanic texts. Now, Muslim alandus or CIA and Alandus returned us and returned to us ideas that were very crucial in what we call Western culture. And now I think we are not limited to Western culture. We are living in a world of global cultures, which what we want to do, Israelis and Palestinians that believe in these ideas is to negate the negativity of our history. Without negating that negativity. We cannot build a future, which is, and every future will be better than what we have now. When people are saying, ah, well there will be a lot of tension in one state of Christian Muslims and Jews. Sure there will be a lot of, there was tension in all dalus.
That tension became creative. That tension became formative. It created the culture which we still are studying because it was so rich that everything that we stand on has grown there almost. So I think yes, tension, cultural tension, inter-religious tension, linguistic tension. Actually Hebrew was not spoken until Andous. That’s right. Hebrew, since the book of Teim was written, no poetry was written in Hebrew until about the year thousand. And it took the years of CIA to resuscitate Hebrew poetry to resuscitate Hebrew as a language. There are many ways in which we can look at that period and say, this is totally exceptional, but this is what we want to have. We have a right to have that. We have already owned it. We already developed it. We were part of that amazing point in history that created it. And this is not just against racism, this is against all types of hatred.
And it takes a lot to do it. It takes a huge effort to do it, but the prize of it is incredible. And if you want all the good things that Jesus and Moses, I’m not talking about them as people. Obviously Jesus was a person. Moses probably wasn’t, but Muhammad and so on. All these traditions that are so important, when people come to write the Declaration of Human Rights in 1946, that’s what they go to. They go to those texts, they go to the prophets. They don’t invent things. So all these traditions are there. How come that they are used against us instead of us using them to support us? I’m bridging your question. The problems are obvious, but the solutions are there. Also.
Marc Steiner:
Rashi, this has been an amazing conversation. I want to thank you for being here today for having this conversation with me. And I want to add that we want to stay in touch because I think there’s a lot to parse out here. There’s a lot here that I think that you delve into and think about and write about that can enhance the conversation I have.
Haim Bresheeth:
I think I could only have that conversation with you. I mean, this is a conversation with two people who are close in their mind and are close in their understanding. I can’t have that conversation with many people that I have very good conversations with, but not this type.
Marc Steiner:
And I think that it has to be expanded and made more public. I mean, I have a poster on my wall that I got in Cuba in 1968 from the Tricon little Congress. And the poster is a map of the entire holy land with an Israeli flag on one side and the Palestinian flag on the other side. And down across the map it reads one state, two people, three faiths.
Haim Bresheeth:
And that’s what we’re talking about.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah,
Haim Bresheeth:
One culture as well.
Marc Steiner:
Now
Haim Bresheeth:
We talk about conus, we talk about convi, CIA in Sicily, we talk about it in North Africa. But let’s not forget in Palestine itself, there was convi CIA for hundreds of years between the three religions. Until the Christians invent the crusades,
There is no violence. So whichever way you look at it, we have a future. I insist on that. We have a future and we have to make it. It won’t come because of the Americans, it won’t come because of the British. They have created the hatred. They have made us agents of hatred, especially the British. So we have to cleave out of this terrible reality. The reality that we need, the reality that we have a right for a historic right, a cultural right. We are able to do so. And I think most of the Palestinians I know who are my best friends, believe that.
Marc Steiner:
And I’ve had this similar conversations with my friends who are Palestinians, deep conversations. So what I like to do is we’ll stay in touch. And I think I
Haim Bresheeth:
Just wanted to say what really frightens me, what I am talking, this future I’m talking about may be lost forever. This is the moment. This is the moment of cleavage. This is the moment where either the Christian and Jewish Zionists win or history wins. There is no other way out of it this moment. And that’s why I hope I live longer than is likely because there is work to do. There is work for people like us to do as Jews, as Muslims, as atheist, Marxists. It doesn’t matter because we have to get out of this as human beings. And it’s very close call. It’s
Marc Steiner:
Very close. And I understand, just a little personal note, I was raised by two atheists who made me study with a Orthodox rabbi in my dining room for 12 years, twice a week.
Haim Bresheeth:
Well, I don’t think I lost anything by studying Jewish religion. I didn’t lose anything. And I think neither did you. I mean, this is something that is part of us and we are taking the best of it and we’re using it. And I think there is nothing Jewish about Zionism. Zionism is a hundred years old, more or less. And Judaism is, I think, much older. And I hope it prevails. That’s all I can say. Alright, so let’s stay in touch. We will,
Marc Steiner:
And once again, let me thank Haim for joining us today for doing the work that he does. We’ll be linking to his website so you can see the breadth of his work. And thank you to Cameron Granadino for running the program today. And our audio editor, Stephen Frank, for working his magic and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here through Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. But for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.
BREAKING
Break the blockade