 Hey mate, Luke Ford here. My guest today is philosopher Nathan Kaftness. Nathan, in the United States, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Israeli versus Hamas conflict is just dominating the news since October 7. Is it the same way in the United Kingdom? I don't know. I rarely leave my apartment. But I believe so. And I've heard of protests in London and elsewhere. But I assume people are talking about it. Why do you think there's so much interest in this war? It doesn't seem to be immediate rational empirical reasons for people in the United Kingdom or the United States to have this as their number one story. Why do you think things that Israel does when Israel go to war so dominate the news? Well, the existence of Israel is regarded as a tremendous insult to much of the Muslim world. I mean, when Muslims kill each other frequently on a much, much, much larger scale than anything Israel has even allegedly done to the Palestinians, it really trigger people's tribal instincts in the same way as when the Jew, you know, stops somebody at a checkpoint and inconveniences them or worse. So, and Israel, the Jews and Israel have come to represent among the left non-Muslims, Israel, the epitome of whiteness and privilege and ongoing colonialism. So from an ideological perspective, it makes sense that there'll be a focus on this conflict. And objectively, this has the potential to affect the world in a way that other conflicts don't. And if this, theoretically, in a worst case scenario, it can draw in Lebanon and Iran, and for whatever it's worth, Russia would be supporting with Iran and the Palestinians. Theoretically, China could not, I'm sure they're not going to want, they're not going to seek out a direct conflict, but they could be somehow involved. You can see in how this could become basically a world war. So from that perspective, people have a reason to be concerned about what's happening. And why has this conflict seized your public attention over the last three weeks? Well, for those reasons. And also Israel serves a similar psychological function that anti-Semitism used to serve. I'm not saying that anti-Semitism is as simple as this. There are many other reasons for anti-Semitism, but one of them is people need scapegoats. That's what unites people. That's a way for political figures to rally support, get everybody behind a cause. And now, at least in the West, for the time being, it's politically correct to use Jews, to use Quey Jews for that function. So you need a substitute. And the substitute, in many ways, is Israel. I pointed out recently that the number two-thirds of the resolutions condemning countries and the General Assembly in the United Nations are targeting Israel. I mean, that just doesn't make any sense. Even if you said Israel is guilty of everything that has been accused of, which it's not. But even if you would say that, it still doesn't make any sense. Israel would be the subject of such intense focus by much of the world. And I think the large part of the explanation for that is Israel is the Jew among the nations. And so would you regard this fascination with Jews and the Jewish state, and often widespread antipathy to Jews and the Jewish state? Would you regard this as primarily springing out a conflict of interest? Would you regard this as primarily something that's irrational? How would you understand the basis for this fascination and antipathy? Well, how to define interests is a difficult problem because acting, I mean, is it in my interest to act on my irrational impulses? Well, all of our desires are ultimately irrational. There's no rational basis for any ultimate end that we have. So if somebody has a desire to kill all the Jews because that makes them feel good, then we disagree. Most of us disagree with that. But our disagreement is also, in a sense, irrational. We want Jews to live. They want Jews to die. And we prefer our way of seeing things and we oppose people on the other side. But classifying their goals as irrational is maybe questionable. You can be irrational with respect to your means to achieve the goals. So if you think that you're going to make yourself richer or more organized or more successful by killing Jews or getting rid of Israel, then yeah, that's wrong. That's objectively wrong. Even if you kill all the Jews in the world and all the Israelis, that's not going to benefit very many. Many of the people who would wish for that to happen will not actually experience the benefits that they expect. So in that sense, they're objectively irrational and could be criticized. But those who just want to win in the tribal war, then that's just their feelings. Is there anything about this conflict and reactions to it, Israel versus Hamas, Israel going to war in Gaza, Hamas carrying out a brutal attack, killing over 1400 Israelis on October 7. Anything about this conflict and the discussion of it that has most surprised you, most taken you aback? I was surprised by the support that Israel has received in the Democrat establishment, although this is obviously being driven by the octogenarian class or sub-degenerate class. If the Democratic establishment were under the control of Zoomers, then it would not be like this. But I think somebody like Biden probably sincerely cares about Jews and has a memory of the Holocaust, which doesn't really exist among the Zoomer liberal generation. You know, they, like, look at the video of Jews cowering in the library of that school in New York. NYU. New York University. No, it was the performing arts school, the Cooper Union or something. Okay. I thought it was, anyway, whatever it was. Now to a lot of, to the boomers, that's shocking, like, oh, Jews, hiding in a room while a mob bangs on the door, because they remember they have some memory of vagrants and the Holocaust. But to young liberals, it doesn't, they don't have those associations, it's just white people who cares. But those same boomers who care that it's Jews who are hiding in the room from the mob, they wouldn't care if they were white people, even if they were Jews, but they were being identified as white. They wouldn't bother them. So the young generation of liberals sees Jews the same way that boomers see all white people. And there's a shocking but not, but not for the new levels. Now, would you say that universities either in America or United Kingdom to the best of your knowledge are they particularly dangerous places for Jews. No, I'm not by historical standards. I mean, if danger is defined as micro aggressions. Then yeah, but if you, if you walk through a pro Hamas rally, and without making it clear that you're, you're in favor of Hamas, then maybe you could get shoved on a campus it's as far as physical threats go I think it's not likely to go beyond that for in the immediate future. But there will the pro Palestinian faction will try to reiterate the purge of Jews from institutions like universities. So there'll be more discrimination against Jews, although we do have this example, who are generally of older generations, who are trying to push back against the anti Israel Israelism, and which often borders on anti Semitism, but they are not the future of the party. So, I don't think that their influence is going to last for very much longer. So discrimination against Jews in academia. How, how, how's severe or how intense is this. So Eric Kaufman published some data on this recently in surveys of faculty at elite universities used to be, I think, 20% Jewish. Right, it's 20% Jewish among faculty who are older than 60 years old. And now it's around 5% Jewish for faculty under 30. So, part of that is the fact that we're competing against Asians who are very high performers, obviously, so that's not all discrimination. And they're probably a lot fewer full blooded Jews. There definitely are a lot fewer full blooded Jews than there used to be. But the drop seems to have occurred much faster can then could be explained by those factors. So, I mean, it's clearly applying for jobs as a Jewish academic in 2023 is very different from doing it in 1983. Your white, white being white is bad and being Jewish is just makes it slightly worse. Now, what about being, you know, highly self identifying as a Jew, there's like an ethnic and a religious element to that, I would think that that would largely go against university norms, at least for certain groups, it's, it's kind of frowned upon to have an intense in group identity, particularly on university campuses, anything to that. Well, if it's presented as a religious identity. I don't think people will have a have a problem with that per se. And there are very few people who are like there used to be Jews, especially German Jews who thought German Jews are the best, and it was very much a racial thing. No one would get away with that. Nowadays, or if somebody were said that Jews are proud to be ethnically Jewish. I don't, I don't think that would go down very well at universities. Now, Israel is in part an ethnicity based state, not, not in the sense of many fevered imaginations that are some kind of pure ethno state, but anyone who's Jewish has the right to move there it is the Jewish state. I would think that this would just inherently rub leftists the wrong way because to be on the left. Does that not mean to have disdain for ethnic based communities and states. Well, the attitude toward Israel or in any particular situation is informed by many conflicting principles and interpretations of history and that influence how they should apply those principles. And if there were a white gentile group that had been a beleaguered minority for centuries and have been subject to persecutions, culminating an attempted extermination and that they then tried to go back to their historic homeland that they had left a long time ago. That would be perceived like very differently by the left than if, you know, the British just tried to set up a new colony in South America or Africa. What happens that there's only one example of people doing something like what the Jews what the Jews did and who have that kind of experience. So it's not from a liberal perspective. I don't think it's immediately obvious what their position should or shouldn't be. But the idea that there should be a place of refuge for this population I think could be squared with the mainstream liberal world view. Now as a matter of fact, Israel is a multi-ethnic country as people who have been there know. You can come if you're just a quarter Jewish and you can bring your family who is not Jewish at all. You're completely non-Jewish spouse. There are ways of immigrating even if you're not Jewish at all. They've given Jewish status to large groups of people who whose halachic status as Jews is somewhat debatable and who have no genetic connection to other Jewish populations. So, you know, if Israel said we're only letting in full-blooded Jews of certain ethnicities, then I don't think that would be accepted by the left. But the current policy I think from a leftist perspective could be considered defensible. Would it be fair to say that the creation of the modern state of Israel was carried out with a substantial amount of ethnic cleansing that the founders of the modern state of Israel did not see it as in their best interest to have plenty of Arab Muslims in their midst? So would that be a fair description of much of what happened in 1947-48? Certainly that occurred. There were people who created incentives or moved Arabs around. So, yeah, I guess you could consider that ethnic cleansing, although I would... It's interesting that people only care about... There are many people who are moved around before and immediately after World War II, including hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries. And many of the people who talk a lot about the Palestinians being expelled from land that was claimed for the Jewish state don't seem to know about or care about any of the other examples of something similar happening, including to Jews. So that would be a kind of curious phenomenon that should be explained. There are many Jewish groups and much public Jewish discussion about what's in the best interest of Jews, very hard-headed discussion of birth rates and the relative ratio of Jews to non-Jews in the Jewish state. This would be considered, I mean, highly problematic if it was conducted by Europeans discussing, say, birth rates of Europeans versus non-Europeans in various European states. Is that fair? Well, yeah, of course. So there's a double standard, but there's also a reason for the double standard. Having consistent principles doesn't mean that you deliver the same judgment with respect to every case. You look at each case and see how the principles apply. The Jewish experience has been very different from the experience of, say, the British. And that is one of the reasons that Israel is viewed differently from the UK, where Jews, when Jews say we need a country in order to prevent people from killing us, there's a reason people take that argument more seriously than when the British National Party said, because people don't have experience with British people being a minority being killed. So people don't have the imagination to think that maybe the same protections that Jews are asking for, in which they recognize are required by Jews, could at some point be necessary for Brits. So maybe we would argue that that's a failure of imagination on their part, but there is a logic to that view. We know that Jews need it. We have no evidence that Brits need it. So therefore we allow Jews to take these measures, but we don't allow Brits to. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with that. I'm just saying that's the logic which I think has a certain kind of kind of coherence to it. And extending that logic would be perhaps to say that you can only understand the massacre carried out October 7th by understanding the historical experience of people living in Gaza that it's akin to living in an open air prison and with a hostile foreign nation controlling much of what goes on in Gaza. Therefore, while it's universally revolting, considered revolting to massacre civilians the way that Hamas did on October 7th, this occurred in a particular context of an oppressed people lashing out at their oppressors. Would that be a legitimate and fair extrapolation on what you were just talking about? So that explains the logic of that position. This is just an application of the general anti-white position, which is that the bad circumstances of non-white or people who are perceived as non-white is due to some white oppressor. And therefore, they always have a right to lash out at whatever whites that are in the vicinity because they're by definition the oppressors and they have to decolonize them. So, yeah, that's the, but I think a more reasonable story about the context would include how we got to this situation in the first place, the total unwillingness of Arabs to accept a Jewish state leading to wars in which Israel acquired territory and then faced continued Arab refusal to accept their existence and Arabs electing Hamas, although that was, whatever it was, 2006, 2007, and there haven't been elections since. But still, that's part of the context is that they elected Hamas, although this was always Hamas's position that they would refuse to recognize Israel and that they also had many opportunities to improve their condition. I saw Alan Dershowitz recently suggested that Gaza could have become like Singapore, which I think is an exaggeration. But there are Arab countries that are doing fine. And I think that if the Gazans have decided to give up on terrorism and reign in those who insisted on fighting Israel to the death, they would have been flooded with donations and many countries establishing relations with them. Israel would cooperate with them. I think it's not impossible that they could have become something like Dubai, but they didn't choose that. They chose, if you look at surveys of Gazans, it's arguably a minority that support terrorism. There's a huge percentage of Gazans who say that they want war with Israel right now. So you can't have the inevitable consequence of that is that Israel will respond and make life miserable for everybody. So that's just, it's their responsibility to collectively figure out if that's the route they want to take or if they want to take a different route and then they have to get that under control and stop forcing Israel to respond to them in a way that then they complain about. So at Harvard University, a coalition of more than 30 student groups posted an open letter on the night of the Hamas attack saying that Israel was entirely responsible for the violence that ended up killing more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians. What's your reaction to this? I saw some commentators were saying, oh, look at what people are learning in college. Look what we teach our college students. But this has nothing to do with what's taught in college. This is about college and graduate school admissions. This is who they admit. There are people who would not have signed those letters who are more qualified than the people who did sign the letters and the median person who signed the letters. And a lot of the signatories come from groups that benefit strongly from affirmative action. So they've rejected conservative whites and Jews who would have been on the other side of this issue. And they accepted people who are pro Hamas. So people like Larry Summers who are confused, why did this happen? Why did Harvard end up in this place nobody expected? Because you brought all these people on campus. I couldn't go to Harvard. I was rejected from Harvard over and over again. When Larry Summers could have accepted me, they could have accepted someone like me. A lot of people with my views, then there would be, they wouldn't have this monoculture that they are now surprised about and complain about. So I had a different reaction to this story. And I looked at my own heart. I have never lost sleep over Palestinian suffering. And Palestinians have suffered terribly. It's just that because my group is in an intense ongoing conflict with Palestinians, I tend to just save most of my emotional energy for my group. But there's nothing in me that denies the large amount of Palestinian suffering. So I kind of expect people just to side with their own team. So I don't think these student groups really were celebrating the murder of innocent people. I think they were just instinctively siding with their team. So is instinctively siding with your team, isn't this pretty much the rule in the human condition? And we all tend to have either hero systems or ethnic or religious national loyalties. And we don't, you know, we're not even capable of looking at them objectively. And we just instinctively side with a team. And isn't this 30-student groups at Harvard siding a petition blaming the violence entirely on Israel? Isn't this just an inherent and normal part of the human condition, which on the one hand sounds absolutely barbaric? On the other hand, there's probably some evolutionary advantage in just instinctively siding with your group. Well, people choose what group to identify with. This isn't just along racial lines. And why does the LGBT group at Harvard, why would they side with Hamas? They would literally get thrown off a building. How is that their team, their group? I think the Nepali Student Association, I think maybe their representatives said they signed it without meeting it, which is whatever. But why would they be on Hamas s side or the Arab side? I think that this, and even Jewish groups, there are Jewish groups at Harvard that have also signed it, although who knows? I mean, so many Jews now are a quarter Jewish. And even in my memory, when I was a kid, there were a lot of Jews who were half Jews. Their father was Jewish. They identified as Jews. Now it's a quarter Jewish and they're still identifying as Jewish. I don't know if it's going to last even another generation, the one eighth Jews. I think a lot of them, I think a big issue is stereotyping Israel is white. So it's white versus slightly less white. Therefore, white is wrong. And then combined with that, Israel serves this function of being the country that everyone can agree is bad. Everyone can blame for their, for various problems. So the coalition of the unhappy people kind of find it natural to be against Israel, even if they would be much better off in Tel Aviv than much more welcome if they went to Tel Aviv than Gaza City. And what do you think of these billionaires who want to know the names of these students so that they never hire them? And also there's been a truck that's been circling around Harvard with the names and photos of students who signed the petition. This is called doxing, but they're not putting the students' addresses. So I don't think it's really a matter of doxing. But the retaliation for signing on to this kind of statement, is this cancel culture? What do you think? So the billionaires who are behind the complaints, and they're mostly, as far as I know, all of them are boomers. So again, it suggests that the resistance is coming from that generation. And pretty soon there's going to be a large shift away from any kind of pro-Israel attitudes on the left. But is it cancel culture? I don't know. I think cancel culture is not really precisely defined. My feeling about it is, the left has used their power to expel basically everybody that they don't like from elite institutions, while denying that there's any discrimination in any cancel culture. And now one time, a few liberals are criticized or even lost one Harvard student lost a job and then Michael Eisen was removed from his position as editor of a journal, which isn't a real job anyway. And now they're crying about the new McCarthyism. And how devastated should I be about this possible infringement of free speech, given that the left has just, has just purged all conservatives. There are basically no conservatives that can be hired now at many institutions unless they're willing to lie and completely misrepresent their views. Yeah, I don't see that as the main issue. And say, how would you compare what happened to Michael Eisen being removed as the editor of a journal to what happened to Noah Carl, who I believe lost his Cambridge scholarship over politically incorrect, perhaps somewhat race-based essays that he'd published? So Noah Carl lost an actual job. Like he was employed by St. Edmunds College, Cambridge. And they told him, like, your card doesn't work anymore. You have to be. Michael Eisen is a tenured professor at Berkeley. There's no suggestion that is his job. There's no suggestion whatsoever that that job is in jeopardy. So his position was editor of the journal. Now, jobs, all jobs come with restrictions on your free speech. That's all jobs. It's my first amendment right to go right on Twitter that my students, bad things about my students and called them names and whatever. But I'm not allowed to do that. And I shouldn't be allowed to do that because my job is to respect my students. So the job of journal editor also comes with restrictions on speech. We have to, the job of the journal editor is to be impartial and make people feel confident that he's going to treat them fairly. And that may not be consistent with all social media activity that would otherwise be protected by the first amendment. So this is a, this is a very much a gray area. And it's also important to note that the right-wing version of Michael Eisen would never have been a journal editor in the first place. He would never be out. Maybe he could have been hired 30, 40 years ago, but certainly not in the last 10, 20 years at Berkeley. And as I pointed out yesterday, in 2019, there was a search for a professor, assistant professor in the life sciences at Berkeley, which is where Michael Eisen works. And the first round of cuts to the applicants, applicant pool was made based on their diversity statement. And the university published, human resources published the, the guidelines for scoring diversity statements. So if you say that you treat everyone equally or whatever, then you fail. You get the lowest mark possible on the diversity statement. And in order to get a sufficiently high mark, you have to go all out about how diverse your whole life is and your research and everything is all about diversity and equity. So just a loyalty oath to woke is, and that's far more extreme than the infamous loyalty oaths in the McCarthy era where you said that you're not a member of any organization that seeks to violently overthrow the US government, including the Communist Party, which they want to violently overthrow the US government. So those were the terrible McCarthy era oaths that we're always hearing about how bad that was. But now it's much, much worse. Now 76% of the applicants for that job were automatically disqualified because of their political views on wokeism. They failed the diversity statement. Michael Eisen didn't say anything about that. None of his free speech defenders said anything about that. Nobody cared. Now, in that case, that was clearly a violation of free speech and academic freedom. And your views on equity and diversity have absolutely nothing to do with your research in life sciences. And they're not relevant to doing your job, which is to treat people equally, which is exactly what they said would be a failing answer for the diversity statement. So that's just a way of weeding out people with political views that they don't like. Now, if you're a journal editor, should you go around insulting large groups of people and being very politically inflammatory, saying using profanity with regard to certain countries where many authors that would submit to your journal live? Should you be doing that? That's very questionable. And the statement released by the journal, the journal's publisher said that they were firing Michael Eisen because of a series of a pattern of behavior on social media. So it wasn't just one tweet where he retweeted the onion article. But he's generally been very unprofessional on social media. And I can understand why that would be an issue for his ability to perform his duties associated with that job. Now the main petition that objects to the firing of Michael Eisen says that it would be appropriate to file the journal editor if he was racist, if he engaged in hate speech. So these are Michael Eisen's defenders. In other words, you could fire Michael Eisen if he were a conservative because mainstream conservative conservatism is associated with views that liberals consider hate speech. So basically all conservatives will be considered purveyors of hate speech by Michael Eisen's defenders so that they want to keep their guy and fire everybody else. From their perspective, this has nothing to do with free speech at all. So these are shocking events beginning on October 7. And now we're getting close to 10,000 Palestinians dead. And yet my worldview hasn't changed one millimeter. These shocking events just confirm my worldview. I assume that these shocking events just confirm your worldview. And it sure seems when I look around and watch and listen and read pundits that these shocking events just confirm everybody's worldview. Am I right that these events have only confirmed your worldview? And why is it that we have shocking events and they don't seem to change many people's worldview? Well, as I mentioned, I was surprised by some of the support that Israel has received. So I did have to make some adjustments too. And I was also like everybody. I was surprised by the performance of Shin Bet and Mossad and the IDF. And that was really confusing. I'm still not sure what to, how to interpret that. That failure and understand what it means. And I started some of these events have made me rethink some things. But we already knew that the left was on the side of the Palestinians and that they were in principle open to violence against, in the service of decolonization. So as far as that goes, I don't think there was much to be surprised about. Are you a Zionist? I mean, my understanding of Zionism is that it's the ideology that calls for Jews, all of the world to, to gather in Israel. And I, I live in Cambridge and Seoul. So it seems to me that that disqualifies me from being a Zionist. And I married a non Jewish woman. I think Jewish continuity and contributing to Jewish continuity is an element of Zionism, as I understand it. So, so it would be very strange for me to call myself a Zionist. I should, I support the Jewish state in principle. I support the idea of Jews having a state and specifically in their historic home land. And I think that they have a moral claim, according to commonly accepted moral principles to that, that land. So if that's what Zionism means, then I guess so. Do you think that do you think the Jews have any more moral claim to that land than the Arabs who, let's say, we'll talk about the Arabs who live there for say hundreds of years in that geographic area that's now the Jewish state of Israel. I think that, according to common sense or commonly accepted moral principles, Jews have a very strong claim to that land. They were forced out. They never gave up their claim to ownership for 1800 years. They pray three times a day facing that piece of land wherever they are. They pray every day to return to the to the land. So, and there is an idea in certain legal systems that if you give up some property and somebody else requires it or piece of land that they that the new owner the new occupant has rights over the land. But that doesn't apply if you continually protest. So if they forcibly take something from you and you protest and you protest and you protest you protest. As far as I know there's no legal or moral system which says that they, they acquired no matter how much time passes that they would be able to acquire if they're forcibly occupying it against your protest. And I don't think that it would be a reasonable principle to say that people are allowed to steal anything they want. And then, even though you, you continue protesting if enough time passes then they would be able to be the rightful legal owner. This is a bit complicated in the case of Jews versus Arabs. Because in terms of genetic similarity to the ancient Israelites. It's quite likely that the Palestinians share more genetic code than say Ashkenazim with the, and even possibly by descent as well. Many Arabs in that region are presumably descended from from Jews, but Jews who gave up being Jewish and who only survived by adopting different religion and essentially giving up the claim that their ancestors had made to the land. So that is kind of a, I think that that does introduce an element of complexity into the moral analysis. But I think the Jews have a strong claim. I don't deny that Arabs also have a claim. I'm not saying that there's no claim whatsoever to having lived somewhere for centuries. They're not the ones who stole the land. They're not the Romans who who kicked the Jews out in the second century. So that's not their fault and now they're being punished for this. If they're, if the Arabs are now expelled, they're being punished for a crime committed a long time ago by different people. So that also is something that would have to be considered. So I don't think that common sense morality would dictate that Jews should just come in and kick everyone out. But I think the claim that Jews have needs to be weighed against the claims of others. And do the claims of Arabs whose ancestors lived in the land that is now the Jewish state of Israel and whose parents and grandparents were let's just to make the example more dramatic was a forcibly expelled from what is now Israel. Do they not have a very strong claim to the land as well? So they have a claim. Jews have a claim. So then Jews collectively may also have a claim to a Jewish state. That claim then could be violated by bringing in large numbers of non-Jews. So, you know, there's no objective answer to how these questions should be decided or which claim you judge to be stronger. Right. The vast majority of Israelis are willing to accept living on a small fraction of what was their original homeland in exchange for peace. Now, there are obviously Zionists who want everything. And if there were a real prospect of peace, Israelis would definitely get those people under control. And they would not be sitting at the border with the Arab countries, you know, firing rockets at them and trying to massacre their civilians. So the compromise that would respect the claims of everyone to some degree would be would include a Jewish state that is smaller than much smaller than the original mandate for Palestine and their original homeland of Israel. Do you have a more intense Jewish identity now as a result of the October 7 attacks? No, I don't think so. I because it's not I always have cared about the existence of Israel. I think it's a good thing to have the Jewish state and I have some connection with that being Jewish myself. So I'm paying more attention to it now that we're the Jewish state is under threat in a way that it hasn't been for a long time. And I think the prospect of another extermination of Jews well, not likely is at least conceivable in a way that it wasn't just a few weeks ago and I would be interested in preventing that. So the idea of a possessive is very common put down used against people who have more interest in a particular topic than the descriptor thinks is appropriate. What's an adaptive and appropriate level of interest in Jews and the Jewish state for say non-Jews? Depends what their goal is. If their goal is to start a kind of fringe dissident movement than being openly anti-Semitic is a very good idea because that would advance the goal. If they want to get status among the mainstream left then they can focus on Israel and why Israel is bad. But then for the average person, will the average person's life become better by killing Jews or killing all the Jews in Israel or getting rid of Israel? No, clearly not at all. The world will become a worse place for the vast majority of people. Possibly even for many of the Palestinians themselves if Hamas or something like Hamas is allowed to establish a state on the ashes of Israel the lot of the average Palestinian could well become much worse. Although maybe they would prefer to be terrorized by someone who looks like them rather than somebody who looks slightly different than who is Jewish because that's human nature. A lot of this stuff I think is irrational to the extent that it's motivated by either false beliefs about Israel or false beliefs about the wonderful benefits that would come from getting rid of Israel. We hear a lot about anti-Semitism. Is there such a thing as anti- Gentileism among Jews? Yeah, sure. Why not? In this respect, I don't think there's a big difference between Jews and Gentiles. There are many Jews who quit being Jewish and then joined the pogromists. And there are many Jews who support the most vicious and genocidal anti-Israelism. And within the Jewish community I mean Gentiles have a there can be anti- Gentile attitudes that are just rooted in bigotry and the same reason that Gentiles look for other people to blame Jews would blame Gentiles and it feels some people they're going to feel good when they hate others. So they're certainly Jews like that. So you have a tweet that Jews have some responsibility for the diversity golem that is beginning to turn on them. Is there any significant difference between Jewish attitudes to diversity and political correctness or wasp attitudes towards diversity? I mean, I think when you account for levels of secular education and or IQ, there don't seem to be many differences in political attitudes between wasps and Jews. Yeah, there was wasp. Wasp self-hatred was very much a thing that developed wasps. There was a generation of wasp intellectuals who decided that wasps are boring. Everybody else is more exciting and we need more non-wasps and it's embarrassing to be wasp. Then Jews also kind of jumped on this bandwagon and they helped promote these ideas, obviously. But a lot of the Jewish support for diversity was rooted in a similar kind of self-hatred as it was in wasps. This is against the McDonald narrative that it was a plan to advance Jewish interests. Obviously, there were some Jews who thought that one of the benefits of this movement would be that there wouldn't be less anti-Semitism. But for the most part Jews have identified as white and Jewish liberals see themselves as among the bad guys. But they didn't anticipate and they just didn't take non-whites seriously. I think they thought that they would always be under the control of the white liberal intellectual class and they could have some black panther kind of groups, but that was just kind of cute acting out. Not something that they took really seriously. And yes, this is the goal that now it's turning on them. So, supporters of Israel have often decried Palestinians not trying to achieve their means through peaceful means. And then Palestinians and their supporters developed BDS, Boycott, Divest and Sanction, which is a nonviolent way of promoting the Palestinian agenda. So, do you see BDS as a legitimate tool or do you think BDS is something that needs to be opposed? So, I disagree with the end obviously and engaging in if we're going to have norms of political discourse and negotiation, having people put up on the group that you don't like to deprive them of basic material needs is very questionable that we want to live in a world where people act like that. So, generally we agree not to do that kind of thing. It's like we're taking away the credit cards of the bank accounts of racist even though in many cases I probably disagree with the people whose bank accounts were taken away. I don't agree with that tactic because we should try to create conditions where we can resolve things in a peaceful, rational way and BDS basically an act of war so then I guess we're not if it's a war then there's no more negotiation and we just fight all the means available and it's not really desirable. Doesn't that then reveal that that was just empty posturing when supporters of Israel asked for Palestinians to develop nonviolent means of pursuing their cause then Palestinians do exactly that and you couldn't overstate the opposition to BDS from pro-Israel sources so does that not show that the call by pro-Israel supporters for Palestinians to develop nonviolent means of pursuing their goals that was just empty posturing? I'm not familiar with those calls for Palestinians to adopt nonviolent means so if the Palestinian goal is the destruction of the state of Israel and you say adopt nonviolent means to achieve your goal because the goal could only be achieved through violence so why would you say to adopt means that could never work to achieve your goal? If somebody said that then yes that would be just posturing. And what about a one-state solution where Arabs, Palestinians Israelis, Jews live together in one state and it will be demographically tipping Arab do you think that would be a humanitarian disaster or do you think that would be a moral improvement on the current situation? Well, there would just be 15 million people murdering each other I don't see how anyone could think that's desirable I guess Jews would probably be the losers in that scenario I think the Arabs would kill more Jews in hand-to-hand combat there would be more Arabs coming in and a lot of Jewish peaceniks wouldn't last that long so that would just be giving everything to the Arabs including the lives of all the Jews living in Israel is the most likely outcome Are there any critics of the Jewish state of Israel who you accord respect? I don't know if you suggest some names maybe I could comment on them I'm not that interested in the day-to-day commentary about why did Israel confiscate this well and what was the principle and the well was dug illegally but did they have some reason why they dug the well and that's a lot of Israel commentaries about that kind of thing which I see is not very closely related to the core moral issue which is what I'm interested in which is who has a claim to the land and in principle should you have a right to defend yourself against the kind of aggression that we've seen so I think the most interesting challenge to Israel is the idea that the Palestinians really are the indigenous people of this land that they're descended they have a closer connection by descent to the Israelites than Jewish populations people who identify as Jewish maybe that would be the only one of the few critiques of the Israeli position that I think deserves to be thought about but most of the stuff go ahead finish your point but most of the stuff that people say about Israel turns out to be very questionable or just made up by my experience so do you have history with Israel, have you visited have you spent much time there I spent about a year in Israel I studied at the Yeshiva in Jerusalem and how did that affect you and how does that continue to affect you if at all I well I learned about Judaism I was motivated to sign up for my first philosophy course due to the influence of one of the rabbis there who had been a tenured professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University specializing in the philosophy of mathematics but then became a Boston or Hassid and then a rabbi he quit academia now teaches in the Yeshiva very smart guy and I guess it was you know I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan so I hadn't really met anyone with radically different views from everybody I knew and everybody was basically some kind of liberal atheist a lot of people went to Hebrew school and of course that was just a joke even the rabbis were atheists at the reform temples now I when I went to to Israel my understanding of Judaism was based largely on personal study I was I was very influenced by Ecclesiastes and Proverbs that was my understanding of Judaism when I arrived in Israel and then it was really a shock to discover how different authentic Judaism was from my my understanding and the fact that people actually believed these things that are so different from I believed in anyone I knew believed and that was a learning experience I think a lot of liberals who spent their whole life in a liberal environment they think deep down everybody's liberal everybody is like them and they don't have the imagination to understand that some people really are different and they really have different and totally incompatible beliefs and I was like that when I was 17 and then when I was 18 I went to Israel and I I was able to recognize that bias is valuable to what extent if at all does your Jewish identity blind you to objective reality of the Arab-Israeli conflict when it comes to objective facts I don't think I have any I don't see what the biases are if somebody shows me evidence that Palestinians are more closely descended from related to Israelites than I am or other Jewish groups there's no resistance that's very bad news for the Zionist position that creates complexities unwelcome complexities for the Zionist position I have no problem accepting those things as soon as somebody suggests them when Israel has expelled Palestinians the fact that Palestinians were expelled from Israel which is an inconvenient fact doesn't no problem for me to acknowledge that I don't know what I'm biased I just don't see it I don't have any reason to feel that I'm biased I think the American news media and America is a nation and American discussions about Israel tend to lean much more in a pro-Israel direction than what happens in Europe have you noticed a difference for example I believe that Zionist is largely considered a dirty word in the United States yeah I do sometimes watch clips of the BBC and Channel 4 and yeah they're definitely anti-Israel Muslims have a lot more influence in the UK and I assume in Europe as well than Jews too so I suspect that Muslims have the kind of influence in the UK that Jews have in America that would be my impression would you agree that the American news media presents a pro-Israel slant more often than not and that American politics is somewhat influenced by the Israel lobby do you agree that there is an Israel lobby in the US? Yeah I'm not an expert on the mechanics of the Israel lobby I mean there are a lot of so I can't comment on the details of that but I know there are a lot of interest groups that are pro-Israel in the United States for various reasons Christian support for Israel is certainly important and my impression is that this level of pro-Israelism would not exist if it weren't for the Christian evangelical attitudes toward Israel but of course politics is influenced by by lobbying groups on both sides so yeah So it was surprising to me after 9-11 that there wasn't an upswell in anti-Israel sentiment given that Osama bin Laden said one of the reasons he attacked the US on 9-11 was because of American support for Israel Plenty of people like John Mearsheimer have made the case that American support for Israel is not good for America certainly seems to have played a role in precipitating 9-11 attacks now we've got President Joe Biden flying to Israel in a time of war which is unprecedented I can't imagine any other major American politician doing something we've got two major aircraft carriers moving through the Mediterranean closer to Israel Do you have any concerns that the pro-Israel lobby has been so effective that it has steered American policy against America's best interests? Well first I would question what America's interests are, what does that mean? I mean as far as I can tell the interests of America just refers to the