Traversing the Tensions: Mason Herson-Hord on Second Nakba and Worse

Uncover the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with me and esteemed guest Mason Herson-Hord, director of the Institute for Social Ecology. Together, we'll navigate the often misunderstood narratives and ideologies that have shaped this historical struggle. From the deep-seated roots of Zionism to the rise of grassroots resistance movements, this discussion offers an enlightening perspective on the events and figures that have influenced the region's political evolution.

In a series of candid conversations, we trace the contours of power and politics, dissecting the Six-Day War's transformative impact, the emergence of local Palestinian councils during the First Intifada, and the fusion of extremist ideologies within Israeli mainstream politics. It's a journey through the decades, examining the interplay of socio-economic factors, the fracturing of Zionist unity, and the rise of new voices challenging established narratives. Our dialogue scrutinizes the influence of figures like Meir Kahane and Yitzhak Rabin, as well as the implications of the second Intifada on current political stances.

Our exploration culminates with a present-day analysis of the strategies employed by groups like Hamas, the concerning trends among Israeli youth, and the shifting attitudes within the American Jewish community towards Zionism. As we grapple with the international complexities of this conflict, the importance of grassroot movements and the power of community action are emphasized. Join us for a thought-provoking episode that not only sheds light on a deeply entrenched conflict but also inspires active participation in the pursuit of a just and lasting peace.

We discuss this article: https://strangematters.coop/israel-gaza-war-genocide/

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 1:35

Hello, welcome to VarmVlog. And today I am here in a co-produced episode with Drinks Matters Magazine with Mason Herson-Hord, director of the Institute for Social Ecology, organizer, communal gardener, doer of stuff. We're talking today about the history of the Nakba and up to the current situation in the Israeli Gaza War and we are talking in the middle of what seems to be an uneasy extended truce. Who knows how long it will last. Everything seems very vague coming out of Israel these days. But we are specifically talking about a piece you published at Strange Matters, the second Nakba in the Road to Genocide, and I really liked your piece in specific.

C. Derick Varn: 2:53

I don't do a whole lot on Israeli Palestine because I think often it ends up being kind of moral stances that I might support but don't necessarily explain how we got to the situation that we got, and I found that your extensive article and it is fairly extensive goes into a good deal of the history of the situation, the different ideologies of zionisms that play into this and the evidence that we have that this current situation, which I think is safe I think we can't call it the second catastrophe, the second Nakba may have had at least a significant backing by people who wanted to use it as a way to if not genocide completely ethnically cleanse Gaza. So to get into your article and ask the first question for people who don't follow this and I think hopefully more people know about the first Nakba now but can we talk about what the Nakba is?

Mason Herson-Hord: 4:26

Sure. So at the end of World War II, the British government, which was occupying what was then called the mandate of Palestine, realized that their ability to hold together their global empire was rapidly waning and basically driven by both Zionists in Palestine as well as Palestinians to withdraw from the country. And the lead up to this, the UN passed a resolution saying that this new entity, the United Nations, supports the idea of partitioning this territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state, which was rejected by the vast majority of people already living there. And so, in the months and the lead up to the British withdrawal in 1948, zionist militias began carrying out massacres and expulsions of Palestinian villages throughout the territory that would become Israel. Then, in May, there's the official withdrawal, british forces, and the following day this Zionist leadership declares independence of what they call the state of Israel, and then a number of surrounding Arab countries declare war on that new state and in the process of kind of like, under the cover of this fighting between those two forces, the majority of Palestinians living in the territory that would become Israel were violently expelled, about three quarters of a million people, who were turned into refugees.

Mason Herson-Hord: 6:33

Most of these folks believed that they were leaving temporarily. So many of them took very little. They kept their keys to their homes with the expectation that when things quieted down they'd be able to come back home. And so there's really two pieces to the Nakba first of the expulsion itself, but second is the ongoing violence required to prevent people from being able to return to their homes. So in the years shortly following the end of hostilities in 1949, there were all these refugee families who attempted to go back to their home villages, and the order to Israeli forces was to shoot anyone who tried to walk across back across the border. So those people have lived in multiple generations of refugee hood, many of whom continue to pass down the keys to the homes that they left behind in the hope they were able to return.

C. Derick Varn: 7:45

When I was reading your piece I was struck when you dealing with the various different forms of Zionist ideology that were used to compete, justify and deal with, both leading up to and beyond the first ethnic cleansing. Basically it's beyond the scope of your article but I do think it is interesting to look at, for example, the faction of Zionism kind of built up by Jakobsininsky and the Jewish Defense League, which justified itself after the early 1920s as a counter force in setting up the revisionist movement. Can you explain the various early factions of Zionism for people who just don't really understand that it was not a unified movement?

Mason Herson-Hord: 9:00

Sure. So there are a few fissures or, I guess I would say, open questions that were contested within the movement in its early years. The first is the question of are we building a state or is there some kind of cultural movement? And for some people the idea of return was about culturally and or religiously rejuvenating Jewish life and didn't have political motivations beyond acceptance within the Ottoman Empire. This is definitely like a minority current and one that was eclipsed after the First World.

C. Derick Varn: 10:08

War. This is mainly like Martin Buber and people like that who were, you know if they had any interest in a state at all. It was a binational state, originally with the Ottoman rule, and later on Buber supported a binational, independent Palestine. But it's interesting because he did call himself a Zionist and that throws people off today.

Mason Herson-Hord: 10:39

Yeah, and that's because you know, today the word Zionist pretty much exclusively refers to the majority faction that we or I guess, umbrella of factions that we historically refer to as political Zionism, that being those who are attempting to establish a, an independent Jewish state. There are also most the key fissures or breakdowns within Zionism are really internal to political Zionism, the kind of the where and the how and what sort of state we want to establish. I think it's also worth noting when people talk about Buber. Quite a bit is kind of the leading thinker of that anti nationalist Zionism. I think the person we don't bring up enough in this is the much more famous Albert Einstein, who was less central to this movement but was also a proponent of that same vision, unlike Martin Buber, who accepted living in a supremacist Jewish state after Israel achieved independence. They actually offered the presidency to Albert Einstein and he rejected it on anti racist grounds but, you know, had been a supporter of this cultural, binational or anti national Jewish movement under the umbrella of Zionism up until that point.

Mason Herson-Hord: 12:35

Within political Zionism you primarily have a left and right split, and the left wing is what is referred to now as labor Zionism, as the largely dominant one. These are people who identified as socialists, who saw Zionism as their own workers movement, as a national movement, and were the ones who were the primary architects of the expulsion of Palestinians, who built the Israeli state apparatus, organized its militia units, and, you know, I think there's sort of a revisionism that happens, kind of imagining the problems of the Israeli state as tied to its right wing, the particular heinous variety of Israeli nationalism embodied by Nanyahu and his faction. But I think it's important to remember that all the big pieces of Palestinian dispossession, the Nakba, the occupation, these were things carried out by, by socialists who were the main architects of the Zionist project. The right, though, is also important because there's clear political organizational continuities between some of these forces assembling the 1920s around Jabotinsky, as you mentioned, different kinds of militia entities like the Irgun and Mahi Pre-fersers to the JDL in one way.

Mason Herson-Hord: 14:36

Well, most directly they lead to the Likud party. So, like Monofam Begin, the first right wing prime minister and, you know, the first leaders of Likud, had himself been part of the Irgun, which was a terrorist organization that was mainly targeting the the British in Palestine, but also carried out massacres during the the war in 1948.

Mason Herson-Hord: 15:06

So these were people who were, at the time, a minority of the Zionist movement and more extreme in in lots of ways, but then ended up ascending into political leadership as part of you know, kind of a global right wing turn in in the 1970s. And you know they're not simply more right wing on grounds of ethno-nationalism, but but also on the economic front. You know these were the, the parties that dismantled the socialistic aspects of Israeli society in the in the 1980s. You know there was neoliberalism happened in Israel as well, and so the Likud and the various descendants of revisionist Zionism were the folks mainly carrying that out.

C. Derick Varn: 16:01

So the revisionists take a long time to really gain the upper hand in Israeli politics and I think it is important to remind people that the initial knock by was perpetuated by socialists, hidden by socialists. They had been during government, you know, covered it up but it it did seem like until 1967 that it was sort of considered like it's a done deal. You know we're not giving this land back, but we don't need to go any further either and we can maybe start talking about honoring the quote two-state solution. Why does 67 change that? I mean, there's the obvious reasons, but you know let's go into detail here.

Mason Herson-Hord: 16:57

Well, I think it's worth keeping in mind that the Israeli acceptance, at least on paper, of a two-state solution does not come in 1967. It's much later. And so there are, there are a number of big systemic changes that reshape the political nature of Palestinian resistance in 1967 and really the whole geopolitical context of the conflict. So, by anyone who's not that familiar, basically what happens in 1967 is that a coalition of some of the same Arab states, several which have new so-called revolutionary leadership, basically gang up to say we're going to attempt to attack Israel again, we'll try 1948 a second time, and basically the Israeli intelligence catches wind of this and they launch a preemptive attack on these countries and it's just an absolute embarrassing and devastating defeat for particularly Nasser in, who's the president of Egypt and his allies. And in the process the Israeli military captures significant territory from these folks. This is when the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, become militarily occupied but also capture the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and they frighten all the others into giving up. And with these land seizures they were able to, over the following decade, extract peace agreements from their hostile neighbors, and so many in the Palestinian movement up until that point had kind of seen the other Arab states, especially those swept up in the Pan-Arabist or Arab nationalist movement, of which Nasser was the leading figure. They saw those states as the political vehicles for carrying out their struggle.

Mason Herson-Hord: 19:32

But 1967 both brings large numbers of Palestinians in the territories under Israeli political and military control and knocked their political allies in the region really out of the game, at least in any substantive way.

Mason Herson-Hord: 19:58

There was a follow-up to this in 1973, but for all intents and purposes 1967 is the real turning point.

Mason Herson-Hord: 20:10

And so at the same time the Palestinian national movement is kind of reorienting itself in the context of the global decolonization national liberation struggles. So when organizations like the Palestinian Liberation Organization were formed in exile and there's a radicalized and Palestinian consciousness among refugees in Jordan and Lebanon, and the course of the 1960s basically clarifies for most Palestinians that all they've got is themselves for trying to lift the occupation and be able to return to their homes, and over the course of the late 60s, 70s and 80s, israel operates under the assumption that the occupation is permanent. There is attempt to settle these territories, treat them as internal colonies with captive markets and exploitable labor. There's not even the facade that we're going to eventually move towards Palestinian independence. It's really only in the aftermath of the first intifada where their hand was forced to, and that's the beginning of the peace process, as it's been called, and that's the only context where anyone other than the PLO is talking about a two-state solution with any serious issues.

C. Derick Varn: 21:57

Well, let's talk about the first intifada and the Israeli reaction to it, because it seems pretty clear that that both gets the Israel on paper admit to a two-state solution. But it also is when you start seeing the long, slow decline of labor. Zionism and the revisionist Zionists become increasingly dominant after this point. But also there begins to be factions, both religious and not, more extreme than them, and that's a new development. What really happens in the 70s? It's a big question, but In Israeli politics.

C. Derick Varn: 22:53

Yeah, in Israeli politics, and then maybe we'll switch over to the Palestinian side too.

Mason Herson-Hord: 23:01

Yeah Well, this is the late 70s is the first real defeat for labor Zionism since the founding of the state of Israel. They had continuous political control over the Knesset, the Israeli parliament and the prime minister's seat. Up to that point there were some political reshufflings of the left in Israel. In the late 60s the old Ma'ai party dissolved, slash fused with other ones, but there was, I think, similar structural forces that skewed the terrain towards right wing insurgent parties in the late 70s all over the world. This is the beginning of factorism, reaganism, and I don't think there was at that time very much disagreement about how we relate to the Palestinians and the Palestinian question between the parties at that time. I mean, they had different views, but it was not the crux of their political differences and I think that can be sometimes hard for people who they rep their heads around, given that that's the main thing that we think about, where Israeli left wants peace, israeli right wants settlements. But I don't think that was the real axis of political divide in Israeli society at that time. Everyone was pretty much on board with the settlement project, with basically integrating the territories while keeping Palestinian subjects at arms length.

Mason Herson-Hord: 25:06

In terms of political civil rights For Palestinians, the 1970s was a period of both escalating political repression as well as a blossoming of a number of parts of the national movement. In the 1970s is when the Palestinian women's movement is born, which ends up becoming one of the most well-organized forces in Palestinian civil society. It's when some of the resistance parties like FATA, the PFLP, they start to build mass bases within Palestinian civil society, not just as guerrilla units operating out of the Lebanese refugee camps, but there's something that could mobilize people within the occupied territories. This is the. It was in these years that the Palestinian labor movement within the occupied territories is born as well, and so these different forces are the ones that kind of assemble the power behind what will become the first of FATA a decade later.

C. Derick Varn: 26:32

So we have to lead up to the Antifata. Let's remind people what actually sets that off.

Mason Herson-Hord: 26:49

So it is disputed what counts as the beginning of the Antifata. There's one Palestinian scholar named Masam Kounsia Kounsia, who I learned a lot from, who has argued that it kicks off about a month and a half earlier than you'll see on Wikipedia. But generally a story he's told is that there's a Israeli truck in the Gaza Strip that runs over a group of Palestinian workers, kills four of them and the funeral for them becomes a mass protest, and these spread throughout Al-Afghaza and the West Bank over the course of December 1987. And suddenly there's unprecedented massive civil disorder in the Palestinian territories. And in those first two months it's not totally clear what sort of the organizational form or the leadership structure of this movement is like. And beginning in January we started seeing the first communiques of a body calling itself the unified national leadership of the uprising, the UNLU, and at least on paper, this is made up of the main parties of Palestinian resistance FATA, the Popular Front for Liberation Palestine, the Democratic Front for Liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian Communist Party. And so that's sort of what is reported in the Israeli press, that this is a movement that is orchestrated by the PLO leadership in exile. And if we could find and arrest, deport whoever their key agents are in the territories, then the uprising would stop, because that's who the streets are taking leadership from. Turns out this is a fantasy, and when it wasn't really. The extent to which that was untrue was not really made clear to people outside the struggle until a number of years later.

Mason Herson-Hord: 29:44

But in essence, what took place was, over those first five, six weeks of the struggle, ordinary people in villages and neighborhoods, all of the territories, organized local councils out of the women's committees and labor unions and the local party offices, where basically everyone in the neighborhood gets together, and that council is the forum in which we decide things like who's gonna maintain the barricades to keep out the Israeli military, how are we gonna get food? How are we gonna make sure our kids have school to go to? They closed out all the schools in response to this, and then each of those councils are popular committees is there referred to in Palestinian parlance? But then send a delegate to a council of their region or their whole city. And so it was a federated structure from these directly democratic community institutions at the grassroots level on up to this secretive body called the UNLU, which was operating on a national scale and its function really was just to coordinate political action to make sure that the general strike days and the days of protests were happening on the same day throughout all the territories. But all the initiative of how to carry out the struggle was on a local basis and so it was never known to anyone who was at the highest levels of this structure. And they'd have to rotate people at the time because folks would get arrested and hardly to go underground things like that.

Mason Herson-Hord: 31:58

But you knew that you kind of put forward an idea with your delegate to the next scale of the council. Sometimes it would end up in the communique with plans of action for basically the whole society. That would be distributed as leaflets all over the place.

C. Derick Varn: 32:22

So we have the intifada really pushing back. This happened under largely the labor government in the 80s. Yitzhak Rabin, famously, is the defense minister at the time and you see, you start seeing a real rightward shift in Israeli politics. I mean it'll culminate, I think, probably in a bunch of events and the development of just before this. I mean you had the beginnings of the Qa'hanist movement. So let's get into the Qa'hanist movement. A weird claim to my own family history is I am a distant relative of Mir Qa'han, which is a very weird thing.

Mason Herson-Hord: 33:20

How distant.

C. Derick Varn: 33:21

About fourth cousin. I'm not even Ashkenazi myself, I'm Sephardic. But yeah, it's a strange, strange relationship there. But we should talk about the beginnings of the JDL and the Qa'hanist movement. And you know, because that's really you know, that's the beginning to happen, I think almost simultaneously to the Intifada. So trying to figure out a way to address this in the chronology is a little bit difficult. But what does this new far right start developing? And you know what role did Mir Qa'han play in that?

Mason Herson-Hord: 34:10

Well, so you know, he himself comes to the United States. It's not the same way in outgrowth of Likud or revisionist Zionism and his main interventions Israeli politics actually come in the years in the lead up to the First Intifada. He's elected to the Knesset in 1984 and then is barred from reelection in 1988, which is the. You know we're well into the thick of the Intifada at that point. And so I think there's, I think we need to think of Qa'hanism and the Israeli right as things that have only fused together in more recent years. For you know, Likud voters in the 1980s, a person like Mir Qa'han, was a terrifying extremist who was gonna blow up Israeli society, help make a theocracy, and you know, even when he would speak in the Knesset, even all the right wing members would get up and leave, and so I think it's illustrative of how extreme, even for the Israeli hard right, he was. And you know, in over the course of Intifada, I think he starts building his movement, starts building more connections with other parts of the Israeli right that are obsessed about, particularly about the willingness of the labor government to engage in peace talks with the PLO, and I think that's the thing that radicalizes them against the Israeli government not just advocating for it to, you know, carry out policies of ethnic cleansing, but, you know, made it clear to them that in lots of ways, their most immediate enemy is those who are in power in the Israeli state currently.

Mason Herson-Hord: 37:06

And so Yitzhak Rabin, who you mentioned previously, is the defense minister during Intifada, someone who was the architect of just horrific brutality and repression. When they ran out of jail space to be locking up kids for throwing rocks at tanks, you know, Rabin was the one who gave the order to just go break their arms and legs, and that's what he's known for in Palestinian society. What he's known for in Israeli society is being the peacemaker, because it's in sort of a only Nixon could go to China, in a sort of way. He's the one who has the standing in Israeli politics to not be seen as a push over for Arafat and the PLO, but who could communicate the reality that Israel's standing internationally requires it to negotiate a political solution to a crisis or a problem that they thus far been trying to resolve with bullets and clubs. And so that gives us the Oslo Accords, which were a framework for moving towards passing independence, towards a two-state solution, and in the aftermath of this, Rabin himself is assassinated by a member of the Israeli far right who I do not believe was himself a member of the JDL, the Jews Defense League, or of Kach, the, that's Kahana's movement organization.

Mason Herson-Hord: 39:05

But they all these folks knew each other. They were in the same political circles and same currents, and so this extremist wing of the Israeli right is a lot of ways of reaction to the peace talks, and I think the sort of souring of the broader Israeli right on the peace talks is part of what was able to let them look back and think, oh, maybe those crazy genocidal extremists weren't wrong about everything. If they were right about this.

C. Derick Varn: 39:48

Well, I mean this merger, I think, does you know? Take a while. One of the things that I always find interesting about it is that there is, to some degree this is not in your article so much but there's also an inter-Jewish ethnic representation thing here, because the, despite what a lot of people would think, a lot of the Israeli far right is not Hasidic. I mean, it's not well, it's not Hasidic either, but it's not Ashkenazi, it's religious Zionist and a lot of it is also Mizrahi and Sephardic, which I think throws some people off. And how much Do you think that matters? Is there any significance to that? What do you think drives that?

Mason Herson-Hord: 41:13

Well, there's a lot of significance to that and I think it would be hard to assign rankings of you know how much causal power each of the different factors we might attribute that to, but I think some of the key ones are in sort of the ethnic class society of Israel.

Mason Herson-Hord: 41:51

Those of those Israelis of European descent are wealthier, they're more well educated and they identify more directly with a longer term left wing Zionist project on the whole, and you know they're also considerably more secular, which is what was not as important of a fissure in previous decades, but it's very important now, and I think there are some parallels to, for example, in the US, where those who are socially liberal in this country are oftentimes more likely to be college educated, have you know, belong to professional strata. So that's one dimension to it. Another dimension is the relationship to Arabs and Arab society. So for lots of Ashkenazi Israelis, the sort of like horrible things that can be attributed that they would attribute to Arab states or people are a bit more abstract, and so their context for this is the conflict with the Palestinians and then any military conflicts with Syria and Egypt and whatnot, many of which are more distant memory. And for those who came from other parts of the Middle East and North Africa, many of them were themselves literally ethnically cleansed and driven out of their homes in Iraq or Syria or Algeria before coming to Israel, and so have a bit more of a noxious relationship politically, socially, culturally with basically non Jewish Arabs. And you know we're much more willing to get on board with an extremist, nationalist agenda in relation to this.

Mason Herson-Hord: 44:39

And then you know, then there's I guess I looked to before. There's the religious element, the Israeli right to not used to be particularly religious but in over the course of the last 20 years the religious component to the settler project and you know the broader right wing term intensified and a lot more, a lot more Mizrahi Israelis are practicing. And then there are secular European cousins and I think a part of it is also just the bit of a underdog dynamic where Mizrahi is a marginalized minority in Israeli society or kind of a contested constituency among the more radical socialists left through organizations like Israeli Black Panthers as well as resurgent right wing, and I think that's a dynamic that happens all over the world, that there's not necessary. There's no inherent left wing political content to social marginalization and lots of, lots of ethnic minorities have been sort of gobbled up politically by different kinds of different strains of the right and Israel's Well, I mean you get a little me or the.

C. Derick Varn: 46:42

You know, the assassin of ravine is famously a Mizrahi from Yemeni family. Ben Gravere is.

Mason Herson-Hord: 46:54

He's Kurdish.

C. Derick Varn: 46:56

He's a Kurdish Jew. So yeah, you know, when I think about, like, of the, of the different far right factions and and one of the things that's so hard to talk about today is how many different far away factions there are, there's quite a bit like outdoor leavemen now, who's actually in opposition to the current government but is a different far right faction, but leaveman's, one of the few people I think is actually one of. The leader of one of these groups is actually a An Ashkenazi. Now I find interesting to kind of simultaneously, as we have this build up of the, of the, of the JDL and the and the Connist, we also have a kind of new wing of the Israeli left, which you get in Pepe and Benny Morris, I think. You know. I think Morris's book comes out in 88, actually right, who are you kind of come out of a Labor Zionist background but break from it and you start, start, you know, talking about the end of Israeli innocence and maybe calling for something like what Boober wanted way back, you know, in the 20s. What comes?

Mason Herson-Hord: 48:32

this, you know well for that group of academic historians, it was the simple fact of the opening of the classified archives from there was this prevailing official story about what had happened in 1948 that you know, this is what the government told us was taught in schools. But when this these folks are, when historians first started to look at primary source material, it became pretty obvious that most of the main components of that narrative were nonsense. One of the key ones is this sort of David and Goliath version of events, where a beleaguered Israeli movement is surrounded by all sides by enemies but despite incredible odds, manages to defeat them and survive. But when these historians are digging into the actual Israeli military documents from then it's, it becomes pretty clear that they were, they were definitely always going to win in terms of the military armaments they had from the Soviets, from Czechoslovakia. There was their, their relative military organization and numbers. That David and Goliath story was pure mythology For the purposes of the Palestinian question. And then one has to do with the knock off itself. Why happened? And you know the previously the narrative had been that Palestinians left because Arab military leadership told them to leave so they'd be out of the way, so that they could kill all the Jews.

Mason Herson-Hord: 50:45

People like Morris and pop a were uncovering clear evidence that the leadership of the Haganah and basically the whole Zionist project, in the person of Ben Gurion, was ordering systematic expulsion. But this was a state building project rooted in, dependent on ethnic cleansing, and so it's it. It force a reframing of the expulsions is not an unfortunate side effect that was the fault of somebody else anyway but functionally a sort of original sin for for the Israeli state. Now, elon pop a was one of these historians, is on the radical left and anti-statist socialist left advocates a single democratic state for all people as the only only political solution that can sort of undo these historic harms. But many Morris, who's the most central of these historians, is pretty different politics. I think of him as sort of like a politically a moral figure who thinks on the long term, where individual atrocities don't register as much, and you know he's more he's more on the side of. Expulsions were necessary, we had to do them and maybe we'll have to do them again.

C. Derick Varn: 52:48

I mean, you know, I've read in the heart, you know, some interesting criticisms of Morris's position that basically claimed that his political advocacy, particularly after 2000, is really hard to square with his, with his historical research, particularly before 2000. So it's, I think our vis-à-vis is our has said a lot about that, but that's you know. I find that I find that interesting to sort of sit with. I know Morris is also been critical of, like Norma Finklestein, and he's also criticized Pippet more than once, I believe. So it's, it's an interesting scenario where you know, the key figure is only, is only a key figure of scholarly, but his politics seem to be, you're right, they seem totally a moral like, are just like you know, these things happen, atrocities happen, we're not different. But what you got to do, this is what states do. Basically it's what I kind of, kind of the just I get from him.

Mason Herson-Hord: 54:17

He has a it was us or them mentality.

C. Derick Varn: 54:23

Yeah, I mean you do bring up some interesting things. One I don't think people really know this, but until Truman forces forces the US to recognize Israel, when the, when the, the, the Joint Chiefs didn't want to, and I don't think usually that well known or that the Soviets played a pretty big role in in the establishment of the state of Israel and were actually in some ways more and the Stalin was probably more influential than the US was, um, which I think confuses people, because I think most people kind of come to this between you know the 1967 war and the 1987 and the photo where the Soviets are clearly on the side of Palestinians, but largely for kind of real politic reasons, honestly, and also by 1987, they're barely relevant anyway. And so these are all I think you know. One of the things I really liked about your article is you contextualize on that. That gets us to what.

C. Derick Varn: 55:52

Let's get to the 2000s, because, as I don't know how old you are, that's when I became a follower of Israeli politics. So I remember feeling like, well, wow, labor, you know labor, zionism is dead, the Cubisms are dead and Likud has split into old you know old Likud, which is Kadima, which doesn't really matter anymore, and and new Likud, which is all over the place politically, and but and I also remember thinking in the 2000s we're not going to get any worse than Ariel Sharon. What could possibly go worse than that? And you know, unfortunately we've have to like widely smile at the naivete of that time can always get worse.

C. Derick Varn: 56:55

Definitely can get worse. So in the 2000s you have really the beginning of a Kahana revival. You have, I mean, labor is decimated, you know. I mean we're after the second and the photos that like what, what goes wrong for everybody. I mean I guess we kind of, you know, the main event of the 90s for me is, I think we have to talk about the beginning of the shift that the assassination of the US war being indicates. But and the like the, the, the, the Knesset being so worried about someone actually, for example, pardoning Yagala Mir, that like they make it illegal to do so, Like you just, and that's got to be a very bad sign, that like there's literally political parties talking about pardoning and the assassin of a prime minister. So I guess we probably, before we get to that, I guess we should mention the Ahubarraq almost settlement that goes south and you know why it goes south. I guess we have to cover that. But what happened between Yasha Irifat and Ahubarraq, before we get to how bad things go in the past?

Mason Herson-Hord: 58:41

Well, I mean, those are obviously hotly contested events. I think personally that you know both of these negotiating parties are not just negotiating with the person across the table but with their own civil societies, what they can kind of marshal democratic support for, and you know the short versions. At no point has actual Palestinian independence ever been on offer. You know there's been various deals put forward that would entail setting up the Palestinian territories as a demilitarized, self managing political entity that lacks all of the key pieces of political sovereignty that define international relations for modern states, and I think that the fact that those are the best things that the American negotiators and Israeli leadership will come up with is itself pretty damning. It's damning of the process itself.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:00:32

Rashid Khalidi wrote a really good book. What is it called? It's called Brokers of Deceit. That is about the American involvement in the peace process, and I think he makes a very persuasive case that the US was functionally a bad faith actor through the whole process, that their sole diplomatic function in the course of this was to provide political cover for indefinite Israeli rule, and that's some of these unswallowable deals that were made on offer were strategic ones to put forward, something that no Palestinian leader would ever be able to accept and nor should they ever accept in order to be able to turn around and say, oh, like we can't can actually negotiate with these people. What are you supposed to do?

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:01:45

And you know, I think, I think there is like there were structural problems baked into the Oslo Accords from the get go. You know, having having no, no timelines, no means of enforcing Israeli withdrawal except when the Israeli state wanted to, and you know just like accepting the Israeli presence as a status quo that no other military occupation is, you know, would not be part of the equation. And so you know this was, this was a major conflict in Palestinian society at the time. You know what? How do we relate to this offer of peace talks? And there were a lot of people at the time who argued that this was a poison to offer that was not going to bring independence. And I think a painful conclusion from all this is that those folks were right, that the national appeal got played to the process.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:11

Yeah, I guess the other key event we have to remember from the 1990s is the blue gold saying massacre at he brought, which more or less criminalizes the, the conness movement. But, as we mentioned, to go back to the odds, I mean you know who Barack kind of unceremoniously loses in the seeming even more. I mean we talked about the right which shifted the 70s, when you have the even more right word shift of the early odds and Ariel Sharon comes to power and you have this very right seeming Israeli. You know Israeli government and we also have, you know, the events between 2001 and 2006 and in Israel and Palestine. It's unbelievably important for where things are now. It seems to me, but I don't know how you feel about that.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:04:41

So well, I think in a lot of ways it was the second in the father that that killed labor and sort of undermined the peace camp in Israel politically. And you know, the whole point of the second, if you follow, was attempt to be that enforcement on the on Oslo. That was not baked into from the get go and it was obvious to Palestinians that that independence was not actually around the corner and we need to force the issue. But what? What they got was the exact opposite. And I think, differently from the first Sintifado, which was more spontaneous and you know a mass movement where events proceed but it's not always clear who is responsible for them, the second Sintifado was much more politically centralized. As an armed struggle it was necessarily carried out by a much smaller slice of the Palestinian society and so the decision-making behind it was a more select group of Palestinian resistance leaders.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:06:20

And I think the hindsight from that is that there was a grave miscalculation of what the response would be politically from Israelis. And you know I honestly don't see how any solution, any outcome other than a hard right turn in, you know, under the banner of security, could have come about from that. So I think that was a backslide in both directions. It also meant the political ascendancy of the religious right on the Palestinian side should not previously been the case. We've not talked about Hamas at all, but yeah, but you know, the first Sintifada, palestinian Islam which he had did play a role, but they were marginal and in those years Hamas was still holding to a line of political quietism, like was broadly the position of chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood and basically just like did not participate at all. Their position was, you know, we sort of morally demonstrates a kind of like the righteousness of Islam and Palestinian identity and that the path rather than political struggle. But in the second Sintifada they were, they played like leading roles in the in arms struggle.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:20

I mean in Gaza, they basically set up a dual power regime. Honestly which I think is you know I always tell people like, yeah, they've been building. I mean they've been doing it partly with ironically, with Israeli money, but like going all the way back to the 70s.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:08:39

But Hamas. Hamas was formed in the late 80s, I think there's right there they're.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:45

The pre course organization is a charity. It's kind of from the 60s, but, but yes, the formerly Hamas political movement does not start to the 80s, but they're. You know, the relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is actually quite, quite interesting because they in some ways adopt the same tactics but are actually in many ways more successful, faster, than the Brotherhood was in Egypt. So, you know, by the early onset, they they seem like a real counter power, you know, particularly after the second Sintifada, and I think it's important for people like you said to notice that there's a very secular nature to the first and to follow to the second Sintifada. It's a much more mixed movement.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:52

Then you have, you know, in some ways, the last gas to what's going to turn out to be a dying right wing, which is the, the, the, the Sharon ring of Likud, which would eventually become Kadima and and that was somewhat conciliatory, to labor, I mean, at least early on, sharon also had a couple issues, seems like for a second. He might, you know, try to Nixon, to China, things with the Palestinians, but it talks about unilateral disengagement and, in 2003, endorses a roadmap for peace which was agreed upon by the EU, the United States and Russia. He, he nominally opens dialogue with my mother boss, but you know this, this doesn't really. I mean, this actually creates, in some ways, the beginnings of a real political ascendancy of Benjamin Netanyahu. So you know, what do you think is going on there? You know?

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:24

within the Likud can within the Likud, like you have, also like we, you have this proliferation of right wing parties, like you start having, like these various I mean there's multiple religious Zionist parties now and that's sometimes hard to explain, but I'm like, yeah, there's a Sephardic one and there's a Maserati one, and there's you know, they're both ethnic and religious markers being tied into this and these groups were tiny, tiny, tiny, before the odds.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:11:57

So you know, I think, when you have political coalitions break or lose substantial chunks of their constituencies, you you basically creating lots of political opportunity for organizations and parties that want to step into that electoral space. And one of the really interesting things about you know parliamentary systems that this country we have no experience of is that it creates lots of space for small parties to make make real moves. And so you know if they're proportional representation in Israel and when there's kind of blood in the water politically, new factions are going to put forward their platforms and see what happens and then they can assemble the coalitions after the votes are in. And I think the expansion of right wing parties in Israel is a symptom of their political fractiousness and differences. There's also a symptom of their march forward and the kind of like seizure of political space, as things were in such shifting turmoil in in the 2000s.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:48

I mean, you have the nominal leader of a party resigned from his own party and start. You wouldn't like that that. Those kinds of events usually are an indication of pretty strong political instability. But I mean, what Kadima seems to have ultimately done is finished killing labor. Ironically, so you know, and you did have some.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:23

I mean, even even in the Kadima government, back when he who the Walmart was running things for the brief little bit that he did, you used, you had, like the Shahs which, for the people who don't know, that's that's a Sephardic religious party in your coalition with government. So, starting with the rise of Netanyahu, it really does seem like the only movement is to the right and, honestly, that a lot of younger, more left minded individuals start leaving the country. So there was I was I sometimes think this is overstated, but there was a fair number of young secular Israelis going back to Germany and the United States. So this happens as well. And now a lot of people, I think over blame the rise of the right on all the Russian immigration. I think that's probably strongly overstated, but I don't know what your opinion is on that.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:15:43

Well, the other generational piece that is really crucial is that for the young people coming of age in the second Fada or this right wing turn afterwards, they're more right wing than their parents. That was the, that was the feature of Israeli politics. That was can be really clear in the like the early 20 teens, when that was the window when I was most politically active in an ongoing way and passing solidarity, and that was a piece that looked like riding on the wall for me that everywhere else, at least in the Western world, they have sort of this progressive slash, reactionary split on generational lines where the old people on their way out or the most right wing and there's some prospect for a left wing future, at least a liberal future, to down the road, but for for Israelis, you know, the under 30s are basically turning fascist and I think that kind of has been a key indicator for where things are at now.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:20

Well, I think this is a I mean it's you know. I mean, la Hava has a lot of youth members and I was in Egypt from 2015 to 2017 and actually to me, the whole of art seems more right, seems more right wing than it probably was. And, of course, when I was so, being nearby, and I knew a whole lot of people who were going back and forth between Palestine and Egypt, usually waiting in the in the Egyptian airport for the one or two days a year that they could get into Gaza, because there's specific, you know specific times and people would just be waiting. You just meet people waiting in the in the Cairo airport when you just talk to them, it did seem like things were incredible. We're going incredibly right wing in in amongst Israeli youth and if, if, if you were a left wing Israeli youth, you were getting out of the country and so that's been. That definitely seems to be be the trend. I mean one of the things that you're you know, to kind of get it to get up to the current. I think a lot of people with you know when Nantia, who lost for a little while, a lot of people were were maybe hopeful, but recent polling is like 60% of Israel, israelis believe that ethnic segregation is needed. So, like it's, it's a majority position now and it seems to be even more popular amongst young than the old.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:45

So you know, how do you think this happened? We haven't really talked about what happened in 2006 and the kind of mini civil war in Palestine, so I guess we do have to cover that. But I mean, we're going through a whole lot of history very fast here, but what do you think happened in both countries? I mean, to me, to understand what's happened on the Palestinian side is in some ways easier for me than to understand what's happened on the Israeli side.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:23

Even though I'm a Jew and so you know I kind of get why Hamas was able to, particularly in Gaza, gain legitimacy because they successfully offered health care and schooling, and I laugh. But I mean it's true, and they got that from the Brotherhood. That's a Brotherhood strategy and I actually even as early as 2014, I was arguing that, ironically, the best people who have done dual power strategy since the Bolsheviks are like Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. But so I get how they became more popular and particularly how the PLO and Fatah seemed particularly unpopular in Gaza, and it is kind of hard for me to entirely understand how outright Jewish fascist movements like L'Hava became really predominant amongst the young.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:21:42

That's, I don't know. I mean that's the million dollar question. I think part of it is things they did right and part of it is things their opponents did wrong, or didn't do.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:22:01

And you know when these, especially the street movements, started getting organized in the early 20 teens.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:22:14

My read is that there was a period where their presence, like their ability to be out in the open on the streets, is something that could have been contested. And I think it's like actually a really important case study for anti-fascism of what can build steam, especially in that kind of political climate, if the most dangerous actors are not physically confronted when they come out in the open and harass and attack people who are part of their target populations. But there's just like lots of shitty aspects for teen culture all over the place that can be strategically funneled into these kinds of political projects, and I think the organizers of groups like L'Hava sort of had their finger on that pulse really well and were able to manipulate that. But I mean, these things are also just part of those organizations, are also symptomatic of these bigger picture right wing shifts, which is not something you can sort of lay at the feet of any particular people.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:24:05

But what's really frightening is how some of these players were able to exploit those broader reactionary turns to inject an extremist politics into the mainstream, and that's the kind of thing that I think needed to be snuffed out in the cradle. That was allowed to gather momentum, and now, if you try to do a counter demonstration against fascists in Israel, you're playing with your life. I think that's just going to get more dangerous with every passing week. Yeah, I don't know, it's a dismal slide.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:08

Yeah, it's interesting to me to think about how, for example, nenyeh, who is not popular at this particular very second, I mean, who knows how this will play out ultimately? But when people ask me, but what does that mean about the future in the left in Israel? And I'm like I have no idea, because some of the people who may be opposing him may be well to the right of being gravure, and it's hard for me to know. You know, there's all of like one left-wing Knesset member left. I mean it's hard for me to know where this is going to go, for the same reasons that you indicate. There's Kahana-style politics in multiple parties and multiple groups. On the Israeli right, the Haradi are for those of you who are familiar with Jewish stuff, the ultra-Orphodox are increasingly politicized and a larger function of society, but so is the secular right. When people talk about this shift, yes, there's a religious right-wing movement in Israel. There's also a secular right-wing movement in Israel, and even in the opposition to the weird coalition that briefly dethroned Nenyeh, those were also right leaders, which is different ones. So it seems very hard to see, even if current Likud falls out of favor, what's going to replace it, and it could easily be worse.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:26

Similarly, to flip back specifically to the Gaza side here, gaza hasn't I have pointed out one of the reasons why I'm so worried about at minimum ethnic cleansing, at maximum genocide, and Gaza has also been even forced out of labor, which means that how do you say this? I mean the capitalism. The only thing worse than being exploited is not being Because they have been kind of. Gaza's been rendered almost an entirely suppressed population, especially when that happens historically speaking in these kinds of situations. Part of that removal of even from the labor pool is so that you can't integrate into society, form bonds and thus turn people to your side. That's part of the aim of that, and so Gaza's been cut off from Israeli society now, for Since 2007,.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:47

Really, there hasn't been an election. Getting in and out of Gaza's just harder and harder and harder, due particularly after 2014, after the Salah, linn and Tefa'at. It's basically like what there's one road, there's two roads in and that's it, or maybe even run right in, can't remember, but there's not a lot of ways in the Gaza right now. So it seems almost set up to encourage Hamas to take a desperate measure and then trigger what now seems to have happened, although I do find it interesting that the boots on the ground war have been seemingly delayed, but it also looks like Netanyahu is going to start claiming sections of northern Gaza for suburbs. So it's hard to see how any good's going to come, even if this truce. I know we skipped 10 years effectively, but the Netanyahu years are all bad.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:30:01

They are all bad, it's just all bad. Well, the thing that he did that I think was most politically poisonous for all this is recognizing that his political fortunes rested with coalition, with those various crops of new far-right wing parties that you were talking about before.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:33

Yeah, I mean back when Abdoor Liebman was in government and we were talking about yeah, he's in opposition right now, but he's terrible. I saw him like OK, so we have some right wingers who are terrifying in opposition, but you got Vim Gravir, who's just in the different kind of far-rightist. So I can pick between my brown shirts and my black shirts. Am I supposed to feel good about that, that the brown shirts are now in opposition to the black shirts? I don't know. You know, it would make a very depressing analogy.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:31:19

You know as far as how this is going to play out.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:31:24

Niyahu is a he's a slippery bastard.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:31:33

He's the most successful Israeli politician ever.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:31:38

No one's been able to weather what he has for as long as he has, and I think he knows that the sort of the broad the Israeli public in terms of basic political questions are going to be in his camp, even if he himself screwed up big time and is deeply unpopular.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:32:11

And so I think he needs to try to navigate the crisis such that the party and the broader political project remains tied to him personally, such that it sort of rises and falls with him. And that's the only that's also the only scenario that I could see that would entail his unpopularity, politically damaging his coalition and it's kind of like the future of his project. That's maybe the scenario where yeah, your LaPiedre someone else might be able to displace him in favor of a more center right, center left coalition of some sorts, but that just seems so unlikely. I think a much more plausible scenario is either he's able to stay on top or he's shunted aside by his coalition trying to preserve what they have going on in favor of some other far right figure, and that could get into super dangerous territory really quickly.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:39

Yeah, we don't want Abor, even in being on the same side, I guess this brings us to. Things have shifted a little bit since you published this article, and one of the reasons why I've been so hesitant to talk about Palestinian and Israeli stuff recently is also I've been very careful to limit myself to things that I can say are true at a given day, and like lately I'm like tomorrow we may be back at war, we may not be flip a coin, I have no idea. Like this truce is temporary, clearly, but how it's temporarily is unclear, and I'm not even sure that I entirely understand the Israeli government's logic right now, except that maybe they really weren't ready to go and boots on the ground in Tegazza. Or maybe that Russia and China have been frankly somewhat hands off on Israel because of Nenyeh's ability to play the great powers off of each other he's actually very good at that but that the international pressure is too high and there are too many other Russian and Chinese allies who. But then again, it's hard for me to even say that, because if you look at the current coalitions right now, and Saudi Arabia sitting it out and Qatar's on the side of peace, it's like Qatar and Egypt being aligned on. Anything almost never happens, so like for those of you who don't understand is Middle Eastern politics. It's complicated, so it's hard for me to say what's going to happen there.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:57

And it also seems to me that the one thing that you can say and this is actually somewhat astounding, even though there are more Christian Zionists in the United States and there are Jews on the planet, which is something I don't think a lot of people fully comprehend like 56% of Republicans are beginning to become slightly sympathetic to Palestinians in response to what Israel's done. And that's despite the fact that in the immediate aftermath of October 5th that someone was saying to me that this was like a post 9-11 moment, and I was like, yeah, and yet somehow Israel seems to have, in the eyes of the international community, squandered it faster than the United States did after 9-11, which is actually somewhat impressive considering. What do you make of that? I mean the fact that I am not saying that everyone on the GOP side who's questioning the Israel narratives necessarily a good person are doing it for noble reasons. I'm sure a couple of them are anti-Semites, but I don't think most of them are.

C. Derick Varn: 1:37:43

And seeing Norm Finkelstein going on Candice's Owen's show since your article came out was like what world am I in? Something has definitely changed. In the United States Also, the largest Jewish community in the world is generationally divided on this and for those of you who don't know, the largest Jewish community in the world actually is, it's in the US. There's more Jews in America than there are even in Israel. So while I think you could probably say a slim majority of US Jews are Zionists, it's an increasingly slim majority. How does this change the situation? Does it seem hopeless? From the internal to Israel itself, it does seem hopeless, and yet it's hard for me to imagine that even the Jewish community in the United States is going to be as forgiving of Israeli actions in the future if this current political trajectory is headed where it's headed. And does that matter? That's what I currently. I mean that last bit, I don't know. Does it matter what the US Jewish community thinks?

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:39:13

Yeah, I don't know. I feel like, in some ways, this has been the sort of same thing as previous Israeli campaigns in Gaza have achieved, which is, they induce major shifts in American public opinion on this question.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:39

But they don't do the change anything in the Levant.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:39:43

But yeah, it's not clear what the relationship between that and anything about the future situation that can be affected. I think we have to try to make it matter. I think that's kind of like the function of the solidarity movement is to try to channel and turn that kind of sea change in public opinion into some kind of political result. But I'm increasingly convinced that we need to think of solutions to the conflict being externally imposed on Israel. I don't think there's going to be a peace camp coalition that wins any elections ever again in Israeli society. Outside the United States there have been a number of other interesting political steps taken. Multiple countries Latin America, I think we remember currently South Africa as well expelling Israel's ambassadors from their country, withdrawing their own.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:18

Bolivia, south Africa, maybe a few more since then, but I think, conversely, the allegiance actually near to Israel, such as Saudi Arabia, the situation with China and Russia seem a little harder to navigate because Israel has. I mean, one of the reasons why Nenya, who has been so slippery and successful, is he's been able to play Russia, china and the US off each other in regards to how they deal with Palestinian interest. And even today, that seems, you know, nominally, nominally, russia and China are friendly to Palestinian interest, but they're not doing that much.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:42:27

I mean, china's position is, on paper, the same as the US's and in practice you know. Not that different than the US, not that different either.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:39

Right and Russia's position is, I think, on paper, better than China, are the US's, but Putin and Nenya, who do have a lot of agreements, yeah, so it's, there are hopeful signs that another thing that you mentioned in your article was the Modi trying to basically Sim migrant workers to Israel, and the and all the major trade unions stopped that from happening.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:31

So or declared they'd fight it Right. So they've stopped it. So far it has not yet happened. Let me rephrase that I shouldn't say stopped it from happening, because who knows? But do we think we see a lot more stuff like this? I want? I mean there seems to be a lot of. Even in the United States there's been somewhat successful direct action against, like arms providers and whatnot.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:44:06

Well, there was the one I'm saying a week ago now in Massachusetts. It's not clear to me they ever were able to shut anything down. You mean, either those three are facing serious criminal sentences which result I mean in the other pieces like we send Israel plenty of weaponry but they're also significant arms and arms technology exporters themselves and for, like lots of international relationships, the arms dealing is run the other way. China has significant arms trade deals with Israel, but it's not because China's sending Israel weapons. They're buying the stuff that Israelis are testing out on Gaza, proven that it works.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:45:12

And so there's I guess there's two, there's just two directions that we need to throttle as a movement. The most obvious one is preventing anything from being sent over there to be deployed against Palestinians. But I think we need to have sort of strategic targeting of the kind of industries that are flowing from Israel and that's sort of like the fusion of VDS type work with more direct struggle against the state apparatus in this country. So, like lots of people taking, we've taken action a few years against, like their police departments training with the IDF, or against surveillance technologies being imported from Israel by their local governments and things of that nature. So I feel like it might also be sort of a site of new solidarities, proliferating new kinds of anti-state struggles in this country that will have ripple effects that constrain things politically for Israel. But it's hard to see any of that being enough without major state actors internationally taking creative actions too.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:00

So, on one hand, it seems clear to me that when the UN Security Council encouraged the temporary ceasefire against the wishes of the IDF, that maybe things even in the United States, even under someone as stodgy and loyal as this Biden, have shifted slightly. At the same time, I'm glad you bring that up about the Israeli arms industry, because one of my criticisms of prior iterations of BDS was like well, the entire world's security apparatus wasn't tied in the South Africa. It's an apartheid the way that a lot of the world's security apparatus, and even with powers who are nominally opposing each other but the United States and Russia are tied into the Israeli security establishment. And, yes, there's a real sense in which Israel is still seen by US farm policy as it's outpost in the region. But there are costs to that and it's gonna be very interesting to see where that all goes. I don't know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:32

I've talked about this topic.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:40

I talked about it in 2020, right after the events in 2019.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:47

I've talked about it a little bit after the situation in 2021, but it seems to me that the most depressing thing about this is internationally things I can't well, hamas is probably not the most popular group in the world right now, so the general sentiment backing a free Palestine is probably bigger than it's been ever, ever right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:34

And yet the facts on the ground feel more depressing than they've ever been and that for lack of a better term dialectic concerns me. But maybe it is what's constraining the IDF right now and why this truce has been extended. I just don't know. I feel like I have so little understanding of what's going on in the ground on either the Gaza or the Israeli side right now, and I know Palestinians and people from Israel and I still can't figure it out and it's hard for me to say if, like, maybe, this will reverse the right wing march of Israel, but I doubt it and I, like you, kind of think it will have to be externally imposed somehow. But yeah, I'm with you on I think it has gotten people to see the extent to which popular opinion and state actors are decoupled in the world.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:50:50

Like. I mean, it's indicative of how geriatric our democracy is, but it's also kind of like an indicator of how the bourgeois dictatorship is not cut and dry either. They need to manage that gap in a way that doesn't expose them too much, and that's kind of the space that we have to push, push the foreign policy apparatus. It's not a lot of wiggle room, but I think this is also something that's been a wake-up call for a lot of people about how undemocratic the US state is, how insulated it is from popular opinion Particularly on.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:58

I mean, ironically, even given the whole founding fathers cult that's in this country, people missing that, since even things like the Police Powers Act, which was actually supposed to limit the executive's ability to use to do war policy without doing war policy, it's become pretty clear that our legislature system is completely nonresponsive and broken down and our legislative system actually is the part of our democracy that's kind of not really democratic. So it kind of puts the. It exposes a lot of people to how little power they have over the foreign policy apparatus and I, like you, actually think that's a good thing for people to realize. Like you do need to understand that this is not something that you really control by voting. You can control it, I mean, you can. I'm not saying you can't have an effect by voting, but if 80% of Democrats are, you know, take relatively pro-Palestinian stances and yet it doesn't matter to the leadership of the Democratic Party, that does tell you something.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:53:35

So I think they also feel a little within the Democratic Party leadership. They feel politically invincible in relation to the party base because of the threat of Trump that none of these voters are going to count. And I think they know that most Democrats are going to suck it up and vote for Biden and it's not going to be a primary, but I don't know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:54:09

It's been interesting to see as much as I would love for us to have a Lyndon Johnson moment with Joe Biden, I don't think it's going to happen. Yeah, I agree with you, although it is interesting for me to think about, like, what are people in Dearborn, michigan, going to do? And they probably won't vote for Trump, but I could see a whole lot of them not voting at all.

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:54:35

Yeah, I mean, there was a big rally a couple of weeks ago by not just like random Palisthenics activists, but Democratic elected officials in Michigan saying look, biden, you got to pull the plug on this or none of us are supporting you next year, and that is something that could absolutely make a difference in him winning and losing, depending on how things shake it out.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:03

And I think there's a cultural cold war in the Jewish world, honestly, over this stuff and it might not be that cold for that long, particularly with you know the amount of the amount of like right wing counseling actually to use the appropriate words that they complain about so much of different student groups or whatever, and I never try. I don't focus on what college students do. I don't focus on if some 22 year olds are in our in diplomatic, are silly in the way they express solidarity. I'm not going to lose sleep over it, that's just me, you know, but I think a lot of the for example, what happened? You know this bill had a backlash on college campuses from from law firms and people power which they haven't seen on other things, and I think it has been kind of a wake up call about a generational difference in all this. All that said, I like I the last time I talked about the Israeli Palestinian conflict that I kind of had a similar responses. I feel better about the world, but as far as how I actually feel like things are going to go for the Palestinians, I don't have a whole lot of hope. I wish I did. Thank you so much.

C. Derick Varn: 1:57:02

I've had you for on for two hours, mason, we didn't go into all of your article. I mean, we went through an enormous amount of history, but you actually go into a lot of the more recent history in more detail and I think people would do well to read the article. It's going to be linked in the show notes Normally. Well, just leave it at that. So people should definitely check out your work at strange matters and read it. And it's one of I want to say it's one of the more thorough pieces I've seen on this shift in Israeli politics and I haven't seen a whole lot that goes into the shift from both Israeli and Palestinian side other than your piece. There's been a lot of. Finally, I mean even Vox, of all places, has been doing decent explainers on how we got to like to the current situation and Palestinian politics, which again just tells you when I am like what a name and, cater, if I'm giving Vox credit for doing anything, you know what popular opinion has shifted.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:28

But I did like your, your contextualization. There's stuff I learned about specific things in and marginal right wing Israeli politics that I was not even that aware of and I actually do keep up with Israeli politics. So it's, although I admit in the last since about, since about 2018, I like dread opening up her arts in English, or he, because it's just, it's just like more bad news. So well, I'm going to start missing Ariel Sharon. That's not a good thing. That's just not a good thing. All right, so check out your article. Is there anything else you'd like to plug?

Mason Herson-Hord: 1:59:21

Well, I just I think they're pretty much everywhere, at least in this country. Things are popping off locally every week and you know, you're not sure what you're doing or why. It can't hurt to drop in. A lot of these are just relatively small groups of committed people trying to do what they can. Horrible times. It means a lot to have another warm body at the front of them. So just first folks to figure out what's what's being planned in your community and try to show up, and I think that's the only thing that's going to make us feel less hopeless is kind of making clear each other that that we're in it together.

C. Derick Varn: 2:00:14

Yeah, absolutely, and my, my only, my only addition to that would be make sure you keep your eye on what's important, which is ending ending this war and then ending apartheid and and the lot. That's, to me, what we need to keep our eye on, the prize on, and not be distracted by other things, and I think we should end on that. Thank you so much. Great talking to you All, right.