‘If Hamas would cease to exist, I don’t think Palestinian armed resistance would end’

Displaced Palestinians living in a school run by UNRWA, near Gaza City on 9 March 2025

Allison Kaplan Sommer interviews Peter Beinart for the Haaretz Podcast – the full transcript on 12 March 2025:

Explain why you deliberately decided to call your book “Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza” instead of the more obvious “Being Jewish after October 7.”

“Well, the subtitle of the book is ‘A Reckoning.’ And I think there has been, and there is, a reckoning with October 7 in the Jewish world, in the sense that people think about that day. They think about the horror of that day, the ongoing horror of the hostages, of Israelis who live without family members, of the Israeli soldiers who have died.

“In Israel, but even in the United States, if you’re connected to the Jewish community, it’s omnipresent. At my shul, the hostages are mentioned every single Shabbat. So this consumes our public discourse. And yet what has struck me again and again in Jewish spaces in the United States over the last 15 months is how the destruction of Gaza, the enormous loss of life in Gaza, is either not discussed, minimized or kind of at best discussed in very abstract terms – never with these people being humanized in the way that we humanize the Israelis who were killed on October 7 or were taken hostage.”

Here in Israel there’s a lot of self-censorship in the media, so Israelis don’t see all of the destruction of Gaza. But among the American-Jewish community, you can’t say that because it is on the nightly news.

“What my book is partly about is what I think of as a series of defense mechanisms that keep many American Jews, including people in my own life – people who I care about very deeply, people who in other aspects of their life are very empathetic and thoughtful, who I feel just essentially block out the images and block out the screams.

“This is just by not looking, or by being part of communal institutions that never discuss these things in a way that would make you actually feel something about what’s happening to these people. And it’s partly through a set of talking points that, to me, once one actually starts to investigate them, kind of crumble almost immediately, which to me function less as arguments than as defense mechanisms.”

You wrote: “The problem with the Jewish communal story is not that it acknowledges the crimes that we have suffered. The problem is that it ignores the crimes that we commit.” You continued that Jews are “forever abused, never the abuser,” that we “deny our own capacity for evil.” You said you believe you had “understood the dangers of this way of thinking. Turns out I had no idea.”

To put it mildly, you were no big fan of Israel’s policies before October 7. So can you discuss how the events of that day and the past year and a half took you even further to a different place?

“I had a fear before October 7, and before the assault on Gaza, that there really were no red lines. That Israel largely had impunity, because of its protection from the United States and in the American-Jewish community. Essentially, there was a system by which Israel would act, and then American-Jewish institutions would create a post-facto rationalization for whatever Israel did.

“I wrote in 2023 about my concerns regarding the possibility of ethnic cleansing on a large scale, as opposed to the small-scale ethnic cleansing that has been going on for years. But I really could not imagine what we’ve seen in Gaza. Basically, it is the destruction of an entire society. Most of the buildings destroyed, most of the hospitals, most of the schools, most of the universities, most of the agriculture. The necessities of life destroyed. And now we have this widespread embrace of mass expulsion, not just by people on the Israeli and American-Jewish right, but people in the center – people who were considered moderate, centrist, people who are considered reasonable, thoughtful people. That’s the catastrophe, the horror, I would even say; the evil that I could not imagine.”

And do you ask yourself why?

“Yes. It seems to me that there is no real conversation in the Israeli-Jewish political mainstream about giving Palestinians sovereignty in their own state. When there was a vote in the Knesset on two states, no member of a Jewish political party voted yes. So it’s largely off the table. There’s certainly no discussion in the Jewish mainstream in Israel about giving Palestinians equality in the state in which they live, which is the State of Israel.

“That’s considered even further off the derech, even more lunatic and unimaginable.”

What about the debate over the nation-state law?

“Yair Lapid explicitly said that a state for all its citizens is an epithet. There were people opposed to the nation-state law, but they didn’t support the idea of equality for Palestinians under Israeli control. They don’t want to give citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

“So to me, it seems what you have is a management system, a system in which Israel is managing the lives of millions of Palestinians who live under what even Israel’s own human rights organizations say is the system of apartheid: a system in which Palestinians lack basic human rights. That management system broke down on October 7, and it’s breaking down in the West Bank as the Palestinian Authority has less and less control. The Biden administration wanted to recreate it, to patch it up, to have a new management system with some very vague talk about a Palestinian state in a theoretical future. But I think that many Jewish Israelis think the management system cannot be rebuilt. They don’t trust the Palestinian Authority to run Gaza – certainly in much of this Israeli government. And so, in the absence of a management system, and the absence of any real, serious discourse about Palestinian freedom, I think then the answer is to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible.

“After all, this is in Israel’s political DNA. Israel was founded with an act of mass expulsion. And so, if you can’t live alongside Palestinians, and you won’t treat them equally, having fewer Palestinians becomes the answer.”

You wrote your book when President Biden was in office. Now we have President Trump. You’ve got the U.S. president basically endorsing a solution for Gaza that involves mass displacement and American ownership of a Gazan Riviera. What do you think of the Trump plan, and would you have framed your book differently if you’d known this is what would be happening when it was being published?

“I think the Trump plan makes a certain amount of sense when you think about Donald Trump’s understanding of America. He is among the Americans who are most fervently committed to supporting Israel – who are also the Americans who have the most idealized understanding of America’s own founding myths and history, and are most resistant to any criticism of it. That’s why they hate everything and anything that’s woke and DEI, right?

“And how was the United States created? I’m going to use a term that may be soon illegal on some college campuses: settler colonialism. The United States was founded by destroying the native population. In the 19th century, America had entities that looked a lot like Hamas. We pushed Native Americans into smaller and smaller enclaves, into reservations, essentially into concentration camps. And when they could break out, they would kill men, women and children. They did it in the American Midwest and in the American West. Then America would respond with even more brutality, until not every Native American was killed but until they couldn’t function as a political and military resistance anymore.

“Donald Trump has no qualms whatsoever about that story of America. So in some ways, it’s not that surprising that he would be open to Israel having a kind of American-style solution.

“America didn’t create a two-state solution along the Mississippi River. Once we got to the Mississippi River, we destroyed that population. And I think Trump is very open to Israel pursuing an American-style solution to the Palestinian problem.”

So what should American Jews or Israelis do when this is what the American president is proposing?

“Well, I think they should resist it because I think it’s a monstrosity. I think it’s a desecration of one of the most fundamental principles in Torah, which is that all human beings are created in the image of God. And that we were a people who were expelled from places in which we live, people who were dehumanized, people who were described as animals, people who were treated as if our lives were worthless. And so to me it’s a desecration of that history to do that to another group of human beings. So we should fight it.”

In the book, you devote much time writing about how the insistence on Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is not just un-American but that it’s un-Jewish. Can you explain?

“Yes. To be clear, I’m not saying it’s un-Jewish to support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. What I’m saying is that Jewish tradition doesn’t think in terms of the unconditional right of states.

“When people say Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, what they’re essentially saying is that this right is unconditional. It doesn’t matter what the state does. It is sacrosanct, no matter what it does. I’m very influenced by the Israeli social critic Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Leibowitz argues that states are only instruments for the protection and flourishing of human life – so states have conditional value.

“People have a right to exist. Palestinians are people. Palestinians have a right to exist. And you look at a state and you say: how good is it? How well is it functioning as an instrument that is supposed to protect the lives of the people who live within it? And if it’s doing a terrible job? If now we have a record number of child amputees in Gaza, then you have the right to think about a different kind of state.

“Americans do this all the time. No American thinks that Iran has the right to exist as an Islamic state. We think that one could imagine a state in Iran that treated its people more humanely. Apartheid South Africa had no right to exist as a white supremacist state. This is why I think this discourse about the right to exist as a Jewish state is fundamentally wrong, even from the perspective of Jewish tradition.”

This is all spelled out in your recent New York Times column, which was a condensed version of some of the themes of your book. The column was headlined: “States don’t have a right to exist: people do.”  Is the question, in your opinion, that if Israel as a Jewish state has not protected its individuals under its dominion, has it lost the right to exist as a Jewish state? Or is your argument that it did not have that right in the first place?

“I think from its very beginning, the notion of a state built on Jewish legal supremacy violates the fundamental principle of equality under the law, which to me is the political expression of the religious belief that all human beings are created in the image of God.

“So it’s not surprising that in a system in which Palestinians are legal inferiors, you had a system of tremendous violence against Palestinians from the very beginning – which started with the expulsion of at least half, if not more, of the Palestinian population at Israel’s founding. So no, I don’t believe in states that give legal supremacy to one ethnic, religious or racial group. And it’s funny because American Jews when it comes to the United States, or Australian Jews when it comes to Australia, or Canadian Jews – in our own countries, we’re actually quite devoted to that principle. We were horrified by the idea that we would be living in states that were defined as Christian states. And we stake our own safety on this principle of equality under the law. And yet so many of us find it unimaginable that that principle could be applied in Israel and Palestine.”

Are you unmoved by the argument: that’s not the kind of neighborhood Israel lives in? Look at the Middle East and look at the kind of states that exist there?

“You know, it’s so funny Allison, because I hear this argument so frequently from Jews, Israeli Jews, American Jews: ‘You don’t understand what kind of neighborhood we’re in. This is the Middle East.’ I’ve never heard it from a Palestinian. I’ve never heard that argument from a Palestinian, and it’s so resonant for me of my childhood. I can’t tell you how often as a child I was lectured to by white South Africans – including in my own family – that I didn’t understand what Africa was like. Because they looked north of the Limpopo River and they saw a whole series of dictatorships and civil wars. And I never heard it from a Black South African. And the reason is not because Palestinians don’t see that many of these governors in the Arab world are brutal, authoritarian and dysfunctional. They understand those things. It’s because they don’t have an essentially racist view of the reasons.

“They understand that these things are contingent, right? That the reason these countries are the way they are has to do with their colonial past, with the impact of the Cold War, with the fact the United States has never wanted the countries in the Middle East, Arab countries, to be democratic – because if they were democratic, they might be less compliant. And that’s why I think this discourse about ‘This is what it’s like in the Middle East,’ is frankly, if you scratch the surface, a racist discourse.”

The argument goes: This is how you survive in the Middle East, and if you don’t behave this way, you can’t make it.

“Right. But I think that in reality, what political science literature suggests is that in divided societies, when you give people a voice in government, violence goes down. When people are locked out of government, as Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem essentially are, because they live under the control of a state that they cannot influence through the political process. Then, taking up arms becomes more likely because that becomes your voice. Why is there less violence by Palestinian citizens – by ‘Arab Israelis’ – than there is from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? I think one big reason is that Palestinian citizens, even though they suffer structural discrimination, have some voice in government, which gives them some rights and some ability to live a more decent life.

“That’s why I think that it’s very typical of groups that are accustomed to legal supremacy to assume that legal equality would mean their death, or at least their subjugation. But in fact, I think you find that equality under the law ends up creating greater safety for everybody.”

Back to the conversation within the American-Jewish community. Last week, I had Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League as my guest. I asked him basically the same question I asked you: How did October 7 affect you and affect your views? Unsurprisingly, he saw October 7 through the lens of his ADL role. He told me that the events of October 7 were “the end result of antisemitism unchecked,” and that “dehumanizing Israelis or Zionists or Jews led to inhuman acts.” I asked him if it reinforced his belief that anti-Zionism was antisemitism. He corrected me. He said it was not his “belief.” It was a fact. I mention this because his answer seems to encompass precisely what you’re critiquing in American Jews and American-Jewish leaders in your book.

“I don’t know how much time Jonathan has spent in Williamsburg with the Satmar Hasidim, but they’re anti-Zionists but I don’t think they’re antisemites.

“There’s always been anti-Zionism among American Jews, and now on the left among young American Jews. You’ve got a sizable minority now of young American Jews who define themselves as anti-Zionist. We have polling regularly showing maybe close to a third or even 40 percent of younger American Jews will say Israel is an apartheid state.

“So when Jonathan Greenblatt says that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, what he’s essentially saying is that those people are not Jews. The definition of being a Jew stops being traditional halakhic definitions; the definition of being a Jew becomes whether you’re a Zionist.

“And this is how we get to this bizarre situation where, when Columbia University suspends the group Jewish Voice for Peace, the ADL thanked Columbia’s president for keeping Jewish students safe. These are Jewish students. Their group was just suspended. And Dartmouth College calls in the New Hampshire police, they slammed the former head of the Jewish Studies program to the ground. The ADL thanks Dartmouth for keeping Jews safe. Well, not that Jewish lady – they didn’t keep her safe, right?

“This is what happens when ethnonationalism swallows a religious tradition. You see this throughout the American-Jewish community, in many institutions, Hillels, synagogues. Your definition of whether you’re a legitimate member of that community, a legitimate Jew, is not whether you believe in the authority of Torah, not whether you keep Shabbat, not whether you keep kosher. It’s whether you essentially worship this state and support it unconditionally. This is idolatry, right? This is treating a state as a god. This is the implication of what Jonathan Greenblatt is saying.

“Also, it’s amazing that he would talk about dehumanization because if you say anti-Zionism is antisemitism, then you are calling all Palestinians antisemites. There are almost no Palestinians who are not anti-Zionists, because Zionism has not been a good experience for Palestinians. The early Zionists themselves recognized this. [Zeev] Jabotinsky understood that Palestinians would fight Zionism. He didn’t blame them for it. He thought that was the natural thing for them to do.

“But Jonathan Greenblatt is calling all Palestinians essentially antisemites. That is the dehumanization of Palestinians that leads to their silencing, their criminalization in the United States and sets the conditions for their mass killing.”

In the same interview, Greenblatt was praising non-Jewish Israelis who fought on October 7, and were not only victims but also took action. So he wasn’t completely negative about non-Jews.

“That’s fine, but it doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of Palestinians are going to be anti-Zionists. And so it’s worth asking someone like Jonathan Greenblatt: If your family was expelled in 1948 by the Israeli army or by the Irgun or the Haganah or you lived your life under military law in the West Bank, how would you feel about Zionism if that had been your experience?  “Are you really going to chalk that up to antisemitism? Isn’t it possible to imagine that a person would not like Zionism because of the harm that the Israeli state had done to their family in Zionism’s name?”

Who is your intended audience? Is your book aimed at American Jews? Are you engaging American Jews? Are you engaging Israelis? How much of what you write is for the internal Jewish conversation and how much are you speaking to the world outside?

“I’m very interested in the internal Jewish conversation. I am speaking to people in my life who I care about, who I want to try to understand my argument about why I think we as a community have gone so morally wrong.  And it may be that it doesn’t influence communal leaders, but maybe their children. There is a dramatic generational gap in which younger American Jews are more willing to rethink some of these things and more able to see Palestinian humanity.”

Are you equally disillusioned with all of the strands of Judaism when it comes to how they’ve reacted to Gaza? And their support for Donald Trump?

“Most American Jews voted against Donald Trump. So there’s a large category of American Jews who, I think, still unconditionally support Israel but oppose Donald Trump for reasons that have to do with his policies in the United States. They support abortion rights. They support LGBTQ rights. They believe in climate change. And I’m glad that they believe those things, and therefore are not supporting the Republican Party. They want American liberal democracy to survive.

“I would say the elements of the American-Jewish community that give me the greatest hope are the kind of communities that we see growing quite quickly among young American Jews. There’s actually a kind of religious renewal happening led by young American Jews who want to figure out how to live committed and meaningful Jewish lives that are not idolatrous: that don’t place the worship of a state at the center.

“In New York, there are a whole series of minyans that have emerged, which are non- or anti-Zionist. There’s a network called the Halachic Left: religiously observant Jews who want to think about what it means to live a life of Jewish observance outside of this ethnonationalist framework – and there’s a lot of talent there. There’s not a lot of money, because the Jewish institutions aren’t funding these people. But I actually think they’re going to produce institutions that will change the American-Jewish community.”

Let’s talk about Hamas. Something in your book that will surely raise hackles is the fact that you call the description of Hamas using the civilian population of Gaza as a human shield a “fallacy.” Can you defend that assertion?

“My argument is not that Hamas does not embed itself in civilian populations. It certainly does. In fact, almost all guerrilla groups embed themselves in civilian populations. No guerrilla force puts on a brightly colored uniform, goes out into an open field and says: ‘Here we are.’ That’s not how the Viet Cong fought in Vietnam. It’s not how any guerrilla group would fight.

“My point is not that Hamas is not embedded with the Palestinian civilian population. My point is that under international law, the fact that there are fighters embedded in the civilian population does not mean you don’t have an obligation under international law to respond proportionally in your military response.

“If you think there are some Hamas people in an apartment building, it doesn’t give you the right to destroy the apartment building or the hospital. I think about the reverse scenario. The Kirya, Israel’s military headquarters, is in downtown Tel Aviv. It’s not in a remote area. It’s surrounded by civilian infrastructure, including schools. God forbid someone would say that in order to attack the Kirya, you had the right to destroy those civilians nearby.

“Many apartment buildings in Israel have high-ranking generals who live there. God forbid someone would say you had the right to bomb the apartment building to kill those generals.

“So my point is not that Hamas is not embedded in civilian areas. My point is that the human shield argument has become a kind of all-purpose justification for destroying vast numbers of civilians in a way that no serious student of international law could defend.

“On the question of Hamas more generally: Hamas has an Islamist ideology that I profoundly oppose. As I said, I profoundly oppose the idea of legal supremacy: Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu supremacy. I believe that people should be treated equally under the law. Hamas also has a terrible history of targeting civilians. A friend of mine from college was killed in a Hamas bus bomb in the 1990s.

“They did it in the 1990s, they did it in the second intifada, and then they, along with other Palestinian groups, did it on an even more horrifying scale, obviously, on October 7. To me, this is morally corrupting to a liberation movement – to attempt to target civilians. It’s a war crime. I would like to see the Hamas leaders brought before the International Criminal Court.

“But where I think I differ from a lot of Jewish analysts is that if Hamas were to cease to exist, I don’t think Palestinian armed resistance would end. Remember that there was also a lot of Palestinian armed resistance in the 1970s. The massacre at the Munich Olympics, the hijackings – none of those were done by Hamas. Hamas wasn’t created until 1987. These were done by leftist and nationalist groups.

“In fact, one of the reasons that Israel basically supported Hamas in the late 1980s is because Israel couldn’t imagine any Palestinian group that was worse than Fatah: the PLO. So my fundamental point is that as long as Palestinians live without freedom, they’re going to resist. They’re going to fight for freedom. Because all people do that. The important question, I think we should ask, is how do we support Palestinian struggles for freedom that are ethical, that recognize the infinite value of all life, including Israeli and Jewish life – and try to weaken and marginalize groups that use violence against civilians.”

So in the book you point to BDS and the March of Return on the Gaza border in 2018 as examples of nonviolent protests that you feel should be not necessarily embraced but perhaps accepted by Israel and its advocates?

“The point that I’m making is, what happens if you shut down every Palestinian avenue, if you try to destroy the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice when Palestinians try to use those avenues, if you veto every resolution at the UN, if you criminalize boycotts and divestments and sanctions.

“When Palestinians marched largely nonviolently – not entirely, but largely nonviolently – in 2018 to the fence in Gaza, Israel basically put snipers there, shot them in the knees, and then Gaza creates its amputee soccer team because so many people are now amputees. And imagine what a living hell it is to be an amputee, given Gaza’s health-care system?

“You do that and what message are you sending? Even when the Palestinians collaborate, even when they try a strategy of appeasement in the West Bank, when Mahmoud Abbas – and for a period, Salam Fayyad – say to Israel: ‘You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to work with you to make sure there’s no armed resistance; to try to convince you to trust us with a state. When you listen to what Salam Fayyad said when he left politics – and Israelis liked Salam Fayyad – he said: ‘I was completely defeated by Israel. They didn’t stop settlement growth during my prime ministership for a single day.’

“So my point is, when you do all those things, you’re going to have an impact on the internal Palestinian political conversation. My friend Muhammad Shehada is from Gaza and he is profoundly critical of armed resistance against civilians. He thinks it’s morally wrong. But he’s told me about conversations he’s had with members of Hamas. They say to him, essentially: ‘Muhammad, how well have your efforts worked? Your efforts have gotten us nothing.’ To me, the shutting down and criminalizing of Palestinian ethical and nonviolent resistance puts Israeli lives in danger.”

You’re suddenly prime minister of Israel. Clearly, you would immediately make Israel a “state of all its citizens.” But what would you do about Gaza? What would you do about Hamas? And what would you do about Iran, its proxies and their attacks on Israel?

“That’s a big question. I think if I were the prime minister, I would let Marwan Barghouti out of jail, and I would allow Palestinians to have a functioning political process, to choose legitimate leaders. If you want Palestinians to be able to make political decisions, they have to have a democratic process to choose their leaders, just like Israeli Jews have a democratic process.

“Barghouti is not an Islamist, and has often talked about the impact of Nelson Mandela on his vision of the future – although he was involved in armed violence in the second intifada, and there’s no question about that. Of course, Mandela was also involved in armed resistance. Mandela was not a believer in nonviolence.

“You allow Palestinians to have elections, to recreate the PLO as a functioning entity, to have a legitimate political leadership that you can start talking to. For me, that would be a critical step. If you want to try to have two states – which I don’t think is possible anymore – but if that was your vision, then you could start to withdraw Israeli settlements from deep in the West Bank.

“Regarding Iran, I think that Iran uses the Palestinian question. Iran is a Shia Persian country that wants to be a great power in the Middle East – but the fact that it’s not Arab and not Sunni limits its impact, its influence and power. One of the ways it gains power and influence is by taking up the Palestinian question and trying to embarrass the Arab Sunni countries that really aren’t doing very much for the Palestinians. This depends on there being a Palestinian cause in which Palestinians are being oppressed. Once Palestinians say, ‘Actually, we have freedom, we have political equality,’ then the Palestinian cause is not nearly as valuable to Iran anymore, right? And I think then, Iran becomes less threatening to Israel already.

“It turns out that Iran is basically completely cowed by Israel, right? I mean, Israel keeps hitting Iran again and again and again, and Iran barely responds at all. Because there’s a massive power discrepancy. And I’m going to say something that people might find even crazier. Even if Iran got a nuclear weapon, Israel has a very, very strong nuclear deterrent. The United States lived throughout the Cold War with people like Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung having nuclear weapons, and we were able to deter them. I think that Israel’s fundamental problem comes from living alongside a whole group of people – Palestinians – who lack basic rights. I think the Iran threat is much, much less significant than that.”

You write in your book that suggesting that October 7 stands for anything but “Hamas is pure evil” is a ticket to excommunication in the Jewish community. I’m curious if you feel excommunicated, and I’m wondering if you feel welcomed in the pro-Palestine community. Since your book was published, I’ve seen you criticized there as being unable to let go of some form of Zionism. So where do you exactly feel at home these days?

“It’s true that the book has real criticisms of the Palestinian solidarity movement and a lot of criticisms of people who justify October 7, which I think should never be justified. I think it’s really important to make a distinction between understanding the context of what Gaza was like on October 6 – and never justifying the targeting and killing of civilians.

“There are spaces in the Jewish world where I’m not Mr. Popular, and I understand that sometimes that can be hard. But I also feel very, very grateful that I have very, very deep relationships – first with Palestinians who agree with me about the infinite kind of value of both Palestinian and Jewish life. And then in the Jewish world, I have relationships with people with whom we just overlook this question because we have other things that we really care about. We study Torah together. We study Jewish texts together. We celebrate Shabbat together. We have meals together. That’s a manifestation of how much bigger Judaism is than this debate over Israel and Palestine.

“And then there are other people with whom I’ve found a connection. Because there are many young American Jews who think Judaism’s best traditions are not being exemplified by our community and by the State of Israel. And so I am now in a community with many of those people, and I think they may create some of the Jewish institutions that I can be part of as I get into my old age.”

You argued in the New York Times column that Israel has no “right to exist as a Jewish state.” In a world where so many people say it shouldn’t exist at all, how do you believe readers are not going to interpret what you say as calling for the state’s dissolution or destruction? What do you say to those who criticize you for sitting alongside some people, as you have on your book tour now, who don’t believe in the right of Israel to exist at all?

“There’s a fundamental moral difference between attacking a state and destroying it through some kind of invasion – which, of course, I would oppose regardless of the character of the state – and the idea of a state being internally changed to be more democratic; to be closer to the principle of equality under the law. So my point about Israel having a right to exist is this: A political system that Israel’s leading human rights organizations call ‘Jewish supremacy’ does not have a right to exist.

“If you believe in the principle of equality under the law, you should believe the system should be made more equal, that people should be treated equally, irrespective of their ethnicity or their religion.

“So to me, no, Israel does not have the right to a supremacist political system. That does not have a right to exist, not in Israel, not anywhere. To me, it’s kind of strange that people find that principle so outlandish – even as many of those same people are fighting against supremacist, ethnonationalist politicians in Hungary, in the United States, in Germany, in France They recognize it was a good thing that apartheid was overthrown in South Africa.

“Why should we support a system based on ethnonationalist supremacy in Israel if we oppose it in other places?”

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