What was missing in Ezra Klein’s conversation with Hassan Piker
We can usually depend upon Ezra Klein to ask the tough questions of the people he interviews, and he did so on many topics in his long conversation this past week with Hassan Piker, the anti-Zionist and anti-Israel Democratic Socialist podcast host. In their discussion on Israel and Zionism, Ezra challenged Piker’s provocative characterization of Israel as a fascist state and as equivalent to the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. Ezra said that such characterizations are not only historically inaccurate but particularly offensive to Israelis, American Jews, and to him personally.
I listened attentively to the conversation. It soon became clear to me that Piker does not understand the Jewish experience or our long history, or our collective Jewish peoplehood identification with the Land of Israel as our ancestral Homeland. His anti-Zionist and anti-Israel critique denies the right of the Jewish people to self-definition. Like many anti-Zionists, it is not for them to tell Jews what authentic Judaism is.
The founding of Israel only three years after the greatest tragedy ever to befall the Jewish people in the Holocaust transformed who we were to become in this era. Though the Zionist movement began in the mid-to-late 19th century as a response to assimilation in Europe and antisemitism, the Jewish state returned us to our ancient Homeland and to history, though Jews have lived in the Land of Israel continuously since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E.
The establishment of the State of Israel gave the Jewish people a new kind of self-confidence, pride, and agency. It offered us protection from antisemitic hatred, persecution, and violence, and it became an ongoing laboratory in which our people’s long ethical tradition could be tested in the context of our attaining power and sovereignty.
Every people has the right of self-definition, and we liberal American Jews and liberal Zionists who support and love the State of Israel have that right as well. One of the things that it seems Mr. Piker lacks understanding about is that Judaism is far more than a religious community of faith. Judaism and Jewish peoplehood include history, law, theologies, philosophies, and ethics, holidays and life cycle celebrations, music, literature, and art, a homeland, several language(s) – Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Aramaic – and the building of a nation unlike any in the post-Enlightenment era. The State of Israel and its government certainly have their weaknesses and limitations, just as does the United States, but Israel’s strengths and accomplishments on behalf of the betterment of the world are considerable and often not acknowledged, especially by those who are anti-Zionist and anti-Israel advocates.
Here is what I would have said had I been in discussion with Mr. Piker:
First, it’s important for you to know that I am a proud liberal American Jew, a liberal Zionist, and a lover of the people and State of Israel, and I advocate for the rights of all peoples, including the Palestinians. As such, I believe that your critique of Zionism and Israel is reductionist of what I know to be true about Judaism, Jewish values, Zionism, and the modern State of Israel.
As a liberal American Jew, I believe in the right of the Jewish people to a state of our own in our historic Homeland and in the right of Israel’s military to defend the state whenever it is attacked by terrorists and hostile states set on its destruction, as has happened over and over again, and most recently on 7 October 2023 and the months that followed. But I also believe in the principles stated in Israel’s Declaration of Independence that Israel
“…will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
Israeli government policies, like those in the United States, does not always live up to its own established ideals, but it remains a parliamentary democracy as demonstrated a week ago in free and fair elections that repudiated the most extremist right-wing racist and messianic government in Israel’s history.
Anyone familiar with the history of the Palestinian Israeli struggle knows that multiple efforts were made by Israel’s leaders to resolve that conflict in 1947, 1993-5, 2000, 2007-8, and 2013-14, but Palestinian leadership, each and every time, refused to make necessary compromises that would assure the Palestinians’ sovereignty and national dignity in a fair resolution to the conflict.
The Israeli historian and writer Fania Oz-Salzberger put it exactly right when she wrote more than a year ago in which she reminded the maximalists on both sides of the Israel and Palestinian conflict and their respective allies:
“Here’s a truth to reckon with: neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going to disappear any time soon. No one can destroy their respective claims to a sovereign state in their ancestral homeland, which happens to be the same land. Barring a cataclysmic event, there will be no river-to-sea Palestine and no Greater Israel. This is a conflict that can only be solved by territorial and political compromise.”
Anti-Zionists and anti-Israel activists, most often take the maximalist view of the conflict, that a Jewish state must either be destroyed or replaced by a one-state solution. No one in Israel, however, will accept such a result of the conflict. Both Israelis and Palestinians have suffered far too much. And so, the anti-Zionist and anti-Israel critique of Hassan Piker is not helpful in addressing fairly the Israel Palestinian conflict or in lowering the temperature that has fed increasing antisemitism in the United States and around the world.
I regret that Ezra Klein did not probe more deeply into Hassan Piker’s reductionist assumptions about the nature of the Jewish people, Judaism, Jewish tradition, and the State of Israel. Perhaps in future conversations such as this one, Ezra will do so.
