At the 2025 National Membership Meeting of Jewish Voice for Peace in Baltimore, thousands of anti-Zionist Jews gathered to reaffirm their opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and to reject the antisemitic notion that the political ideology of Zionism represents all Jews. In this vital and wide-ranging discussion recorded during the JVP gathering in Baltimore, TRNN’s Marc Steiner sits down with self-identified Palestinian Jews Esther Farmer and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay to discuss the complexities of Jewish identity and belonging today, the historical origins of Israel, and “the way that Zionism destroyed both Palestine and the diverse modes of Jewish life” that predate and reject the Zionist project.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is a Palestinian Jew of African origins, film essayist, curator, and professor of modern culture and comparative literature at Brown University. She is the author of numerous books, including: Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism; The Civil Contract of Photography; and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950. Esther Farmer is a Palestinian Jew and native Brooklynite passionate about using theater as a tool for community development. She is former Ombudsman and Manager for the New York City Housing Authority, former United Nations representative for the International Association for Community Development and was an original founder of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. She is also a Jewish Voice for Peace NYC chapter leader and the director and playwright of “Wrestling with Zionism.”
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
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 in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you all with this. Jewish Voice for Peace is having their national convention right here in Baltimore, and the real news is there to bring you the story. Two of the leading participants in JVP are joining me in studio here at The Real News, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of modern culture and media and comparative literature, and a film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. Her books include Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism; Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography; The Civil Contract of Photography; and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950. Among her films: Un-Documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder, and Civil Alliance: Palestine 47-48. Among her exhibitions: “Errata” in Barcelona and HKW in Berlin; “Enough! The Natural Violence of the New World Order” that was done in Leipzig.
And we’re also joined by Esther Farmer, who is a Palestinian Jew, a native Brooklynite whose passion is using theater as a tool for community development. She’s the director of “Wrestling with Zionism,” a reader’s theater project in New York City, as well as the author of several published articles on theater and community development. Esther is an active member and part of the leadership team of Jewish Voice for Peace in New York City. And they join us here in studio. So welcome both of you. It’s good to have you here. I’m really happy you could take the time from the conference to join us here for a little bit. One of the things that fascinated me about the two of you as I was going through all of your work, not all of it, but going through your work, is that you both identify as Palestinian Jews. Can we talk about what that means? That’s a word You never hear that maybe in certain circles you do, but in the rest of the world you don’t hear that notion idea of Palestinian Jew and what that means and why. That’s the way you identify.
Esther Farmer:
So my father was born in Hebron, Palestine. My grandfather was a Turkish Jew who went to Palestine pretty much to avoid the draft from World War I. He was a draft dodger,
Marc Steiner:
Didn’t want to fight for the Turkish army.
Esther Farmer:
He was a progressive Jew, didn’t believe in war. I found out much later that the penalty for avoiding the draft was to be hung. So several Jews actually left, but he did not realize that since Palestine was a Turkish protector, he was drafted anyway, and that’s why they came to the United States. They came to New York. So this was way before the Nakba and way before 1948, my family was, they lived on the Lower East Side. They were very poor and they were very anti-Zionist. So my family’s existence gives the lie to all Jews loved Israel, and certainly Ariella’s work really ties into that, that before the Holocaust, most Jews were not Zionists. So what does it mean to be a Palestinian Jew is that there was a country called Palestine, and it was Muslim, Christian, and Jewish. It was very diverse, and the vast majority at that time, 80% were not Jewish. They were Muslim. So Israel was a creation of people who did not live there for their own interest.
Marc Steiner:
I want to get to that point because that’s really a critical point. People don’t get about it, what Israel is and why it is. Ariella?
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:
Yeah. So I think that first of all, we have to be reminded that the category of identity is a colonial category. And I was born into the Zionist colony in Palestine, and an identity was imposed on me at birth called Israeli identity. And this identity was fabricated in 14 years since, I mean 14 years before I was born, which means synthetic identity that was meant to cultivate or to create a factory of Israeli babies, that their identity is predicated on their opposition to other who lived in this country, who lived in this place, which were defined Palestinians. So when I’m speaking about these kind of human factories in the Zionist colony in Palestine, I’m speaking about the way that Zionism destroyed both Palestine and the diverse modes of Jewish life. Part of them took place in Palestine. My family moved to Palestine, my maternal from maternal side, they were expelled together with Muslims when the first white Christian state was created in Spain, when Jews and Muslims were expelled from Spain. So they moved from Spain to Portugal, France, Austria, Bulgaria, and then Palestine, way before the Zionist movement started to colonize or to aspire to colonize Palestine. So they were Palestinian Jews in the very factual way. They were part of Palestine. And this is not a colonial identity, this is a form of belonging. And when I’m saying that I’m a Palestinian Jew, it is a way of undoing, first of all, the identity that was imposed on me at birth, that I’m not recognizing myself in it, and all the other colonial identities that await for me like American or like French. So claiming that I am a Palestinian Jew is claiming a form of belonging. That was the form of belonging of my maternal ancestors. From my paternal side, we were Algerian Jews and both identities were destroyed. Both forms of belonging, sorry, not identities were destroyed through two colonial project, the French colonization of Algeria on the one hand and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. So being an Algerian Jew, a Palestinian Jew, a Muslim Jew is a mode of reclaiming my ancestral modes of belonging.
Marc Steiner:
I love that. Both of you really interesting stories, very powerful stories, and I want to dive back into that. But I was thinking as you were talking that, and I’ve wrestled this a lot and I’ve written about this, which is that if there had been no Holocaust there, there’d be no Israel. I mean, that’s the fundamental, most Jews were not interested in being Zionists. They were in this socialist movements here. They were doing whatever they were doing, whatever we were.
Esther Farmer:
I don’t know about that.
Marc Steiner:
Okay, please go ahead.
Esther Farmer:
I mean, I don’t know how we could know that, but there’s an assumption there that the imperialist powers at that time wouldn’t have. I mean, they certainly used the Holocaust and the sympathy of the world, or the Zionist claimed that they absolutely had to have Israel to, and it was seen as some kind of reparation or something. But as my father used to say, also, I love Avila’s work because it kind of puts a context to things that my family would say is that the Zionists love Israel and they hate Jews. And I think that says a lot. So I don’t know that the imperialists wouldn’t have created Israel one way or another. I don’t know. I just think it’s an assumption.
Marc Steiner:
Good.
Esther Farmer:
Yeah,
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:
Maybe I can complete it from a different perspective. Yeah, please. I think that we cannot say that if there will not, Holocaust won’t be the state of Israel. We have to ask ourself what is the continuity between the Holocaust and the state of Israel in order to reply that we have to go back in time because the Holocaust didn’t arrive from nowhere.
Okay, if it didn’t arrive from nowhere, we have to ask ourself what did Europe wanted from the Jews in order to have the Holocaust and then to force on the Jews all over the world to be represented by the Zionists that destroyed Palestine and created the state of Israel as the destiny of the Jewish people. For that, I invite in my book, the Jewelers of the Umai, have it here with me, a potential history of the Jewish Muslim world. What I invite people to look at is in the wake of the French Revolution, when the modern citizenship was invented, Jews who lived in France were not part of the citizenship they were given with this citizenship a few years after the French Revolution. But what interests me is not the fact that the Jews were naturalized in the wake of the French Revolution. What interests me is the price that they had to pay in order to become citizens.
They had to forget that they were Jews and forgetting that they were Jews. This was a European project. So eliminating the Jews either by assimilating them into the Christian world or assimilating them into what the Euro-American powers invented in the wake of World War II as the Judeo-Christian tradition, or eliminating the Jews through extermination. All these are part of the same project, what to do with the Jews. Europe invented the Jews as a question, as a problem. And at the same time that Europe invented the Jews as a problem, they also invented the solution with quotation mark to make out of diverse Jewish communities, a Jewish people with a destiny. This brings us to the beginning of the 19th century, the beginning of the 19th century. They invent Palestine as a question, and they invent the Jews as a question, and they merge both questions. Napoleon, Napoleonic Wars already saw the possibility of transferring the Jews to Palestine.
So this connection between Palestine and the Jews is something that Europe invented way before the Nakba. And the last point in time that I would like to bring to our conversation is in the wake of World War ii, after the Holocaust, Euro-American powers imposed what they called New World Order. They created the UN as the organ to facilitate their solutions to different people. The Jews were in displaced person camps in Europe from 45 to 48. The Zionist movement was a marginal movement in the life of Jews, worldwide marginalized movement. In the Jewish Muslim world, it has almost no presence. And Europe that was responsible for the extermination of the Jews add to innocent itself, making Europe innocent, making Europe, one of the liberating powers add to what was relied on the exceptional of the Nazi, which legitimized all the European colonies and the exceptional of the Jewish suffering, this double exceptional and the recognition of the Zionist as representative of the Jews, which means those who were mandated to destroy Jewish, a diverse Jewish life all over the world in Asia, in North Africa, in many other places. And the Zionists were mandated to destroy Palestine. This was part of Europe and your American powers part of their response, what to do with the Jews. So if we speak about the final solution by the Nazi as an extermination, the final, final solution or the post final solution was to impose on the Jews a state that will be for them at the price of Palestine, at the price of the destruction of diverse Jewish communities,
Esther Farmer:
Which is fascinating to me because it’s like it’s the way that Zionism is so deeply antisemitic. It is antisemitic, obviously by
Marc Steiner:
Homogenizing. Jump to that. Please go ahead.
Esther Farmer:
Well, just by homogenizing, and now it’s being used tangible form of Jewish life except the Zionist one, right? And it’s like this way of Jews being used. I mean, that was something that my family taught me very deeply in my DNA, that Jews are used by the imperialists for their own interests. And the creation of Israel was so much about that. And yet, we’re all supposed to say that as Jews, we all love Israel, which is the most antisemitic thing possible. And of course for me, as someone who comes from a very strong leftist Jewish background, what Israel is doing is a travesty. And back to that question of the Jews love the Zionists, love Israel and hate Jews. That incident that happened when it was a boatload of refugees and they were coming to the United States and they were turned away.
They weren’t interested in going to Israel. They wanted to come to the United States. And the United States turned them away, and the Zionists were fine with that as long as the United States supported Israel. So it’s just a perfect example in your face of how Jews in Israel is not the same thing, but we have been inundated with propaganda to make our identities. And I mean, Ella’s work is so fascinating to me because they’ve literally erased our memories and have just changed the narrative and the dialogue to the point where it’s unrecognizable as to who people are. And now Christian nationalists are telling us what it is to be a Jew, which the IRA definition says that you’re only a Jew if you support Zionism. So they’re literally erasing our memories and history.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:
Yeah, no, this goes back to Napoleonic Wars Napoleon, who codified what is Judaism, who invented the Jewish consi story, who created Jewish life as a pyramidal modes of being who are entangled being Jew with the state in a way that the state, the states, different states can tell us today, what does it mean to be Jew? And there are bad Jews, and good Jews and the anti-Zionists are being considered the bad Jews. And those are Christians who never reckoned with their antisemitism or anti Judaism with their racism toward many groups that are telling us what does it mean to be Jew? And I would like just to add that Europe, in order to innocent itself from its crimes against the Jews, first of all, imposed the state of Israel or imposed the Zionist as representative of the Jews, but also exchanged with the enemy of the Jews and created Palestinians, Arab and Muslims as the enemies of the Jews.
And these were never our enemies. If the Jews added systematic enemy, this was Europe. For centuries, Jews were expelled from one place to another in Europe. And it ended up with a project that is being called as a euphemistic term to describe. It was called the emancipation of the Jews in the 18th century, in the 19th century. What is this emancipation? This emancipation meant to kill the Jew within the Jew. I think that here in the us, we have to think about it as similar to the project of killing the indigenous within the indigenous, right? It’s like the boarding schools. So on a global scale, Europe killed the Jew within the Jew, and many of the members of what is being called here in a way that always surprise me, American Jewry, many of the members of this community don’t even remember that they belong to other communities that were destroyed by Europe, right? American Jewry is an invention, is an amalgamation, is another amalgamation that is built on the European amalgamation of the Jewish people in the 19th century. So we have to be reminded also that Zionism started as a Christian movement. The colonization of Palestine was a Christian ideology before it became a Zionist, a Jewish Zionist ideology.
Esther Farmer:
It’s interesting that I remember when Biden said, if we didn’t have Israel, we would have to invent
Marc Steiner:
It,
Esther Farmer:
Which is again, the most antisemitic thing in the world telling are you saying that Jews are not safe where they are? So we’re not safe here. So we have to create Israel. And you support that. I mean, you can’t get more antisemitic than that, but where are the Zionists? Where’s the outrage from the Zionist around that statement?
Marc Steiner:
You both have just said so much that we can stay here for hours, just pulling it all apart and really taking a deep dive here into all of it that you’ve said. I mean, what both of you have pointed out on one level, a number of levels you have on one level is how antisemitism drove Zionism in many ways to create Israel for the power of the West, as I put it once a long time ago, is to force refugees, to create refugees. And what you’ve all described, how do you take that and make it understood both politically and socially in this country? So some of the Zionist leaders will immediately call you and me self hating Jews. That’s the first thing they’ll say. But how do you take what you’ve just described and get people to really understand and put their hands around what it really means, how Israel, Israel created, what it stands for and what it’s done to us?
Esther Farmer:
Well, we are doing this conference now where we have 2000 anti-Zionist Jews in a womb 15 years ago. Be lucky if you got 15 anti-Zionist Jews in the room. So this is happening right now because the impact of what Zionism has done is war militarism and imperialism. And that’s being seen now throughout the whole world. So our job in JVP is to move Jews and everyone away from Zionism, and that’s happening. The issue is that the narrative, I mean, I’ve been doing this work for 50 years, and I have never seen the narrative the way it is right now. It has substantially changed, and that took a tremendous amount of work, and we’re proud of that work. So that’s happening. And yet the policies of the United States are still the same. So that says a lot about what so-called democracy is, when the majority of the country is with us pole after pole is saying they are not supporting what Israel is doing, but yet that’s still the policy. So I think these issues of identity and the relentless propaganda that has gone on since this Zionist, I dunno what you want to call it, experiment, has been both so destructive to Palestinians and to Jews, really, really destructive. And that’s why it’s so important for us to have this as Naomi Klein says it, Exodus away from Zionism.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah,
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:
No, I think that just maybe we have to remind ourselves that there is genocide going on. It’s almost two years, and there are some common ways to understand what is genocide, which is related to what was done by Lemkin and the convention against genocide. But I think that we have to maybe ask other questions about genocide rather than defining what is genocide. Understanding that settler colonial regimes are genocidal regimes, and the state of Israel is a genocidal regime that serve the west, serve the West to solve with quotation mark the Jewish question another time in its history and serve the West to have its mercenaries in the form of Israelis. And I think that it became very clear that since October, 2023, without the arms and the money and the propaganda machine all over the world, in the western world in what you called policies in state apparatuses, the persecution of voices that are denouncing the genocide without all these western power,
The genocide will not last more than 1, 2, 3 weeks. Israel does not have the power to have a genocide. Israel itself would not survive in 48 without the destruction of Jewish diverse communities without forcing the Jews in Europe, the survivors to go to Palestine rather than to rebuild their communities in Europe without inciting violence in the Jewish Muslim world and making the life of Jews in the Jewish Muslim world impossible in a way that they slowly, slowly, this world was dismantled and Jews had to leave. Most of them did not want to go to Palestine. The case of Algeria in 62, at the moment of the end of the War of Independence
Marc Steiner:
For Algeria
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:
Only 20% in Algeria, only 20% of the Jews were forced to leave Algeria because two colonial projects forced them to leave Algeria, only 20% went to the Zionist colony in Palestine. The rest of them went to Canada and France. So they were not Zionists. So we have to understand that the state of Israel was sustained with Western power. It was not an expression of a Jewish liberation project. It was a European project, Euro-American project to reorganize the entire world to create what they called the Jewish Judo Christian tradition, which never existed to remove the Jews from the Jewish Muslim world,
Marc Steiner:
Which did exist
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:
To create Palestine as allegedly a state for the Jews and to turn Palestinians into exterminate group. So when I relate to the term genocide, when I wrote several texts during the beginning of the genocide, I put aside the legal definition of genocide. And I am trying to reconstruct how the genocide against Palestinians started. And it started in the wake of World War ii when Western power through the mediation of the UN, decided that Palestinians are experiment for the sake of Zionist, for the sake of creating a Zionist state. So rather than speaking about genocide as an event, I speak about genocidal regime, I speak about genocidal technologies, and when you understand the genocidal regime, you understand that already the nakba was the beginning of the genocide because Palestinians were exter amenable. They had to pay the price, they could be exterminated because their presence, there was an obstacle for the imposition of the new world order with quota mark, which was a Euro-American project of enting Europe of its crimes against the Jews and of its crimes against other colonies. We have to be reminded that in 45 European powers, and we’re speaking about the British, the French, Spanish, they still had colonies in different places in the world. So by exceptionalizing, the Nazi, by exceptionalizing the suffering of the Jews, they actually continue to run the world and not to reckon with their crimes against the Jews and against other racialized communities.
Esther Farmer:
One of the things that gets me always is when people say, well, Israel has a right to exist as if the country was established by God. I mean countries are created by the that be for their own interests. When I was growing up, there was no Bosnia.
This was created generally not created by the people that live in these places. It’s created as Ariela was saying, by the western world for their imperialist interest. So I don’t know why this country of Israel has any more right to exist than anybody else. And I think there’s a difference between these countries and the people that live in them, but this idea that countries, that Israel has a right to exist, it’s just so interesting. It’s an example of how the assumptions and how we’ve been trained to think in these ways around nation states and the creation of these things that just has nothing to do with our actual lived experience and history.
Marc Steiner:
So you both have said so much and given such deep analysis about where this is in some ways, I think that is not heard very often and really original. I mean, it’s not the way people describe what is being faced at this moment. And as you were speaking, 10 things were going through my head. One was, how do you take the analytical description that you both have given us and popularize that message so people understand it so people can grasp it? Because the way you describe, it’s very simple, very clear about what created this, I’m sorry, go ahead.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:
No, no. It just occurred to me to think about it not as we would do this work. JVP does an incredible work, but it is not only about people doing this work, the genocide made it clear to millions
That this is a genocide and Israel is a genocidal regime. I can write this book and this book and you can do your work, et cetera. But people are not stupid. And there is a moment when people understand they cannot do an accelerated lessons that you take with someone who already did the work, but with the beginning of the genocide, millions went to the street, right, took it to the street to say, this is a genocide and they’re being persecuted constantly. All these draconian laws, all these draconian policies of the Trump administration is because there are millions who are saying that this is a genocidal regime. So the question is not how you bring these ideas. The question is maybe how we exit, as Nole said Zionism, but how we exit the structures that imperial powers created as benign structures. Museums, archives, nation, states, borders, naturalization, all these structures are against people.
So the questions are much bigger than how you transmit the lies of Zionism to other people. For me, the main question is outcome. That all the crimes that were committed against the Jews as if they never existed because the Jews were received with quota state or the Jews received a citizenship. The question is how to bring the Jews to participate in the anti-colonial, general global anti-colonial struggle to decolonize this world. So it’s not only how you convince your parents or your siblings, it’s about how we exit from those institutions that were normalized as benign institutions, but actually they are reproducing the destruction of the world.
Marc Steiner:
So one of the things I think about as you all describe where we are and why we’re here, I think about historically here in this country that 70% of all the civil rights workers in the South when I was a civil rights worker in the South as a young man were Jews. 70% of all the whites civil rights workers, civil rights workers in the south were Jews. And that we were the heart of the labor movement. We were the heart of the revolutionary movements. In Europe, there’s a different spirit I think that has to be grasped and put out there a different heritage and tradition of who we are as opposed to having it being defined by this kind of Zionist domination that was pushed and created by the imperial powers as you were talking about. So they have a beachhead in the Middle East and they figured out what to do with the Jews.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:
But the example that you bring is very interesting because Jews participated in the civil rights movement. They were in solidarity with the black.
They didn’t fight their own struggle as part of it. And I think that what JVP maybe today offer is how to think about the liberation aspirations of the Jews together with the liberation aspirations of other groups. And I think that what happened with the us, what happened with this kind of erasure of what Europe did to us, what Euro-American did to us is the removal of the Jews from the history of colonization in a way that the Jews from a long time did not have a project of decolonization while they were still colonized. To act only as a blank American citizen in the movement for the civil rights movement means not understanding how much Jews were still colonized. So they could act as blank citizens, but not as Jews who are affirming this as their own struggle. They struggle for black Americans. And I think that here there is a very interesting things for Jews to do in the US is to reclaim their histories outcome that they became American Jews outcome, that their history is a very short history, the history of their life in America.
Where is their history in Europe, what was taken from them? There are traditions, there are beliefs, there are many things were taken from them. There are possibility to live their life there. So I’m not speaking about in terms of returning to Europe, but I’m speaking about reclaiming their histories. If the Jews will reclaim their histories, they will not be blank citizens in empire only joining others struggles. And I think the JVPs that maybe the first time that there is a kind of broad Jewish movement in the US where Jews are speaking about what was taken from them and cementing Zionism as their identity is part of what was taken from them. But there is much more to that.
Esther Farmer:
I mean, I feel very personally angry at Zionism from my experience as a leftist Jew. My father was a union organizer, and I grew up with that history of, as you say, in the labor movement. And Jews and I have always felt, and I have seen this with my own eyes, how this Zionist project has moved Jews to the right in the way that you are describing has moved Jews in the direction where it’s unrecognizable. To me, that’s the other way in which I see Zionism as so antisemitic. The whole history of Jews being for justice, even in the biblical text and stuff, it’s just completely thrown away by only us only. My mother used to say, we are Jews for justice, not just us.
Marc Steiner:
And
Esther Farmer:
That was the history, what it meant to me to be a Jew. So I feel like Zionism was, and in Ella’s work, it’s like a deliberate attempt to erase an understanding of Jews as standing with the oppressed in the world. That’s interesting what you said about from my family, I did experience that connection between what happened to the Jews and other people, that solidarity. I did feel that, and I think that there were other people who did feel that, but I also think that there was a deliberate attempt to break that memory in some ways though I think that’s what’s so interesting about what we’re talking about.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, I think the reason, I’m not usually at a loss for words how I make my living, but one of the things that really struck me about this conversation we’ve had so far is that it’s one that doesn’t take place in very many places where there’s an introspection about Jewish history and Jewish life and what it means in what we face today and how we’ve become sucked into this imperial world oppressing Palestinians. And when I was a kid, it was the fight against Jewish store owners in inner city neighborhoods that we used to boycott and go after because of what they were doing. But now that becomes, it becomes a prominent aspect of American jewelry at this moment. And I think the way you two describe this, the depth of which you describe, this is something I think that people need to wrestle with. Beyond JVP.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:
There are many initiatives. If we see millions in the street protesting against the genocide, many of them are organized in different collectives. Strike MoMA, making, munches, kohenet, so many collectives, smalls middle size that are reclaiming, they are Jewish heritage and reclaiming. They are Jewish heritage is saying, we are not white try to whiten us. This is what they’re saying. But Jews were never white. So while accepting as part of the Jewish identity in the us, it’s something that always strike me accepting this category that the Jews are white is accepting to erase their history. They were first racialized, their histories were destroyed in order to tell them, we give you the passage to passage white, but Jews are not white. So I think that we cannot see the millions in the street protesting against the genocide and believe that there is only JVP. JVP is very powerful, very broad because you have branches in different cities, but there are many, many initiatives all over to reclaim what was taken from the Jews and what was taken from the Jews.
Part of it is major part of it today. There are history as victims of genocide, and now the Zionists are perpetrating genocide that implicate the entire Jewish community because of a long history of conflating between Zionists and Jews. Because when the West recognized the Zionist as representing the Jewish people with no reason to recognize them, but it served the interest of the West, it created a kind of conflation. And this conflation took from the Jews many things that people are struggling to today to introduce a distance from them and from this identification or this false mode of being represented by the state of Israel and the Zionist without announcing the responsibility to continue the struggle against the genocidal regime.
Marc Steiner:
So as we conclude here, I was thinking about this kind of neofascist regime that exists in Israel and this neofascist regime that’s taking over the country that we live in here, and all the experience the two of you have had and the creative work you’ve done and the political work you’ve done, and where you see the hope and where we’re going, where you see the struggle going and what we face right now. I mean, seeing JVP grow as it has is amazing, and other groups are there, but the right is really on the rise. And in many ways, as almost as you were alluding to the right, often uses Jews and people get sucked into the right. So where do you both think this takes us all, after all your years of struggle and being parts of movements in your work,
Esther Farmer:
I mean, hits the horror and the hope every second.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah,
Esther Farmer:
Right. I mean, across the street you’ve got 2000 anti-Zionist. That’s the hope. And we have this fascistic things. Is this really happening right now? Again, I think it’s a really interesting moment when the majority of the country is with us, and yet we still have these policies now that contradiction is only going to grow. I think there’s so much grassroots organizing going on, not just from JVP in so many areas, and it’s really important. I think this concept of intersectionality and solidarity is extremely important. And that’s the hope is the solidarity and the intersectionality of our movements. And as Ariella was saying, it’s a worldwide thing. It’s not only about Israel, it’s not only about Palestine. It’s this whole way of understanding even how nation states are organized. I struggle with that myself because I come from a time when national liberation struggles were a very progressive thing and people wanted independence. And then there are these states that exist and have they helped the world? Have they not helped the world? What does that mean to have the world organized by these nation states? Is there a difference between anti-colonial and decolonial? These are interesting questions that are coming up right now for me anyway. So yeah, I think there is hope. There is organizing going on. People are moving and both sides are moving very fast. They are,
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:
Yeah. So if I may just pick on something that you said right now, I don’t think that these were a national liberation movement. These were anti-colonial movements that were intercepted by the colonizers to become national liberation movements. All the process of decolonization of Africa was intercepted by the West through the creation of the un. We have to be reminded that in 45 there were several 40, 45 states in the world. Today we have 200 states, which means that the decolonization of Africa, decolonization of Asia, rather than being decolonized from the imperial powers, the imperial powers created international organization that imposed that the only way to decolonize a place would be to create a nation state.
Esther Farmer:
That’s very interesting.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:
So I don’t think that these were national liberation struggles. These were anticolonial liberation struggle that were intercepted by the West in Algeria. It’s very typical. It was an anticolonial struggle and it ended up with an independent state from where the Jews, Algerian Jews had to live because this was the model that is built on the purification of the body politic from elements that do not fit there. So the Jews didn’t fit here, and the Jews didn’t fit there, and the Jews didn’t fit there and others didn’t fit there. And we got the new World order. One comment about what you said, I don’t think that in Israel it is a neo fascist regime. Israel is, as I said earlier, a genocidal regime to begin with. The fact that Netanya ran this genocide cannot make us forget that the genocide against Palestinians started in 48. The destruction of Palestine, the destruction of the Palestinian society didn’t start with Netanya.
And this phase of the genocide is horrible and is the highest in terms of casualties, but it is not the highest in terms of the destruction of the Palestinian society. And when you ask about hope, if there is hope is in a global decolonial transformation of the world, because all these structures that enabled in 45 to impose another settler colonial state as a liberation project for the Jews, while it was a project of liberation of Europe from its crimes to appear in the world as the liberator. So I think that the fact that those organs continue to exist as benign organs, museums, for example, that looted so much of ancestral worlds of black, of Jews, of Muslims, and impose themselves as the guardians of this culture while they participated in the decimation of the material culture of so many people. So I think that there is a lot of work to be done in order to undo imperial planter, to undo the imperial organization of the world, and not only to speak about throwing away this or that government, it’s about stopping the genocidal regimes that are still being recognized as benign democratic regime with an accident with side project that should be reformed.
Israel cannot be reformed. Israel is a genocidal regime and Israeli state apparatuses should be dismantled in order to allow the return of Palestine in which Jews will also be part of it as one of the minority groups and not as the governor, the masters of the land.
Marc Steiner:
I want to say that this has been one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time, and mostly because I didn’t do much talking at all, but which is great. I think you both brought a very profound and different analysis to this conversation that’s not often heard, and I wish we could sit here for the next three hours, but we can’t. And I just want to say thank you to Ariel Zuli and to you both farmer for being here today and being part of this conversation.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:
Thank you for inviting us. It was a pleasure. Yes. Thank you so much for having us to share the flow with you.
Marc Steiner:
I deeply appreciate it. Really the joke from my friends that were listening, mark, you didn’t say anything. It’s okay. Because what came out of this, I think was something that people have to really wrestle with about where our future is going, not just as Jews, not just as Israel Palestine, but in terms of where the world is going and why this is so central to all of that.
Esther Farmer:
And there’s something very liberating about thinking about the world without nation states or thinking about the world without borders. Can we have those imaginations? Can we think beyond what they’ve given us, that we have to think that way? Can we think beyond that? And now maybe is a moment the horror and the hope where we can think in different ways.
Marc Steiner:
We have to thank you both so much for taking all this time.
Esther Farmer:
Thank you. Thank you.
Marc Steiner:
See you back at the JVP conference. Once again, thank you to Ariella, Aisha Azule and Esther Farmer for joining us today. And thanks to David Hebdon and Cameron Grino for running the program and audio editor, Alida Nek and producer for always working for Magic behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Ella Aisha Azule and Esther Farmer for being our guest today here on the Mark Steiner Show on the Real News. And remember, we can’t do this without you, so please share, join our community by clicking on the subscribe button right below here and support the Real News Network. Do it now. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Mark Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.