The genocide in Gaza has brought the issue of Israel — and what it represents for Jewish people — into the forefront of Jewish communities worldwide. The powerful influence of the Israel lobby on Israel’s image in the United States makes this issue highly contentious and deeply complex.
In this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast, host Robert Scheer and Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP), a nonprofit dedicated to fostering peace between Israel and Palestine, explain — as two Jewish individuals — how they navigate these complex issues, both in their professional work and personal lives.
Drawing on her experience working with the U.S. Foreign Service in Jerusalem around the time of the Oslo Accords, Friedman offers a complex view of the politics of the situation. Friedman discusses not only the evolving Jewish relationship to Israel but also the plight of the Palestinians who are often subjected to displacement, violence and death.
Friedman highlights a critical distinction when discussing the Oslo Accords: unlike most treaties, which are based on a balance of interests, the Israel-Palestine agreement is rooted in a balance of power. This dynamic, which heavily favors Israel, was recognized by Friedman: “I think that became very clear as the underlying dynamic of Oslo very, very quickly.”
When it comes to interpreting Israel, Friedman points out the difficulty in engaging with its defenders. “The entirety of Israel’s existence has been grounded in a series of narratives, and it’s almost a pick a long menu for which narrative best suits you at what moment,” she tells Scheer.
The narrative turning Hamas’ recent attack on Israel into a justification of the genocidal attack on Gaza has made it very difficult for anti-Zionist or non-Zionist Jews to express themselves. Friedman conveys her frustration:
“I’m now living in a world where it doesn’t matter what your level of faith is, it doesn’t matter what your genealogy is, it doesn’t matter your self identification. If you’re not deeply Zionist in your political outlook, then you’re not really a Jew.”
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This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.
Robert Scheer
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where I hasten to add the intelligence comes to my guests, and we’re going to have a discussion with Lara Friedman. And what the reason I want to do this is somebody who was, you know, taking a position on what’s going on between Israel and Gaza, but she does it from a really informed perspective. Worked in the US government — I’ll let her lay it out — has an academic training and background, and has grown up as a Jewish person trying to figure out her relation to Israel, which is really the point of this discussion. I can’t stand the stereotyping which basically marginalize or rejects any Jewish person who raises any questions about the Jewish lobby of AIPAC or about what Israel is doing, and it seems to me basically a denial of what the Jewish experience is all about, particularly diaspora Jews, which is, of course, but also Talmudic Jews, questioning everything and dialogue. So I am trying to have a dialogue here. So take it away. Lara Freeman, tell me about your connection with this issue and also your views. So what’s going on?
Lara Friedman
Sure. I mean, that’s a huge opening question. First of all, thank you for having me. I think you and I come from very similar sort of intellectual backgrounds. On all this, I feel like I want to listen to your thoughts as much as I want to share my own. But yes, I’m Lara Friedman. I am a Jewish American. I grew up in Arizona, I think in a fairly typical Jewish American family, Israel was not central to our identity or our Judaism. Judaism was central to our identity. We were very active in our community. My parents were founding members of a reformed synagogue in Tucson. That was one of the key, key elements of my upbringing. My grandfather, I will say, was a very proud and active Zionist. He was from a generation that saw the creation of Israel as a miracle and the Savior the Jewish people. He and my grandmother traveled to Israel in 1967 right after the war. This all was sort of like in the backdrop of my life, but it was never Central. And I’ve got to say that, you know, I think I had the baseline sort of Zionism of most Jewish Americans, taking for granted that Israel is good and what Israel does is right, and that criticism of Israel is almost always illegitimate. It is almost always anti semitic, and should be basically just ignored, and Israel should be defended. That started to get more complicated for me as I as I grew up, and, you know, I was raised in a Jewish community, in a family that prized intellectual discourse and interrogating the world around you and interrogating the assumptions around you, and there’s never a great deal of interrogation of assumptions about Israel, which is something I became really aware of in high school, learning about the world, and then particularly in college, when I actually started meeting people from the Middle East, I joke that my entry point into Middle East politics and diplomacy was playing pool at the University of Arizona. I love to play pool, and most of the students who hung around playing pool at the University of Arizona were from the Middle East, overwhelmingly from Lebanon. At the time they were there because of the Lebanon Civil War, there was a huge group of scholarship students the University of Arizona, and we got into arguments about Israel, and I tried to defend what I thought I knew and my beliefs, and discovered pretty quickly that I didn’t know enough to defend what my opinions, my sort of not well thought out opinions, were, and that led me on a journey of taking classes. And once you start opening the door to studying and questioning and challenging, I think, when it comes to Israel, and this was, you know, in the 80s and into the early 90s, you sort of have a choice as you’re studying, you can come in and say, I’m going to look for information that validates everything I was taught to believe, and I’m going to find intellectual past pathways that let me dismiss the things that I don’t, that don’t support those beliefs. Or I’m going to actually learn and take on all the information and come up, possibly with a whole new set of views, informed by what I now have come to know. So I entered college sort of a passive Zionist. I exited college a deeply questioning person who still had a felt I had a strong connection to Israel, but didn’t really think about it very much. And then I joined the Foreign Service, and just almost by chance, in my first position in the Foreign Service, I was sent to Jerusalem. So I was in Jerusalem from 92 to 94 so for the Oslo process, and, you know, the Hebron massacre and other things, and I was thrown into the deep end of the complicated aspects. Years of caring about Israel, which started with, my main job was being the settlements officer in Jerusalem for a year and a half. So I spent the better part of two years driving around the West Bank, meeting with settlers and visiting settlements and looking at what was being done in the West Bank at that time in terms of taking land, building Jewish only roads, building plans for expanding and taking over all of the area, really, all the plans that have come to fruition in the 2030, years since then. And I lived in East Jerusalem, and I had Palestinian neighbors, and I learned from them. And you know, coming out of all that, I’m a very different person. You can’t you can’t unknow what you know. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen. And I think that this is one of the reason I think that people who are very orthodox, black and white in their world views, prefer that their children not meet other people and not have experiences that challenge those views, because living and meeting other people will challenge your views. And today, I don’t come to this. I don’t come to the issue of Palestine and Israel, as a Jewish American, or as a Jewish person who’s trying to constantly figure out my views on Israel. I come to this as a human being and as a foreign policy subject matter expert who has now spent decades immersed in the field, learning Arabic, spending time on the ground. And you know, my views are my views, and that is very difficult.
Robert Scheer
Actually, I think three/four languages, don’t you?
Laura Friedman
I come from a family that has, we have a lot of linguists in my family, so my, my best language is English, and then French and Spanish and Arabic, and my Hebrew, I joke, I can muddle through. And I thought I had decent Italian, till I went to Italy and realized that I don’t have great Italian.
Robert Scheer
And you have abyssal Yiddish also?
Lara Friedman
Abyssal, yes.
Robert Scheer
So, but I was impressed with your background, and I didn’t mention you’re currently the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, and we’ll talk about that, but you were actually, and people should know, don’t know about the Foreign Service. It’s an incredibly honorable tradition in American politics, right? You’re supposed to be the people who really know something. And, right?
Lara Friedman
And absolutely, I was very, very proud to serve in the Foreign Service.
Robert Scheer
Yeah, and doesn’t get mentioned enough, but you know, well, I mean, Graham Greene, who I think is one of the great writers about world affairs was in the British equivalent, I think, of the Foreign Service, and wrote the best books, really, about what was happening in the post World War, post World War Two, world but you were there at a particularly interesting point when you were in the Foreign Service. So you were reporting at the embassy, right?
Lara Friedman
I was at the consulate at the time we, you know, the US for years going back, you know, 100 years before the birth of the State of Israel, had a consulate in Jerusalem, which, after ’48 and then after ’67 was the interface to the Palestinians, as well as to Israelis living within the catchment area of the consulate. And it was a consulate general, so it reported directly to the State Department. It didn’t report normally. In other places, a consulate is subsidiary to an embassy, so all political reporting will go through that embassy with the Consulate General in Jerusalem, up until Trump, when Trump closed that mission, up until the Trump era, you had direct reporting from the consulate to Washington.
Robert Scheer
Okay, but this was also when Bill Clinton was President, right?
Lara Friedman
So I joined right at the end of the Clinton administration, yeah. Towards the end, not right at the end.
Robert Scheer
Yeah. Why am I missing something here? You said ’92…
Lara Friedman
Yes, ’92 to ’94 Yes. I’m thinking about who signed my first consular commission, yeah, yeah. I was in. I went to, I went to, I was in Jerusalem, ’92 to ’94.
Robert Scheer
And you mentioned the Oslo Accords, yes, Clinton’s initiative, yes, of course, yeah. So for people who are not familiar with this, this was a particularly optimistic moment or time for priests breaking out, and Bill Clinton actually played a leading role in taking risks and so forth to make this happen. And you are a witness to that, right? And this is where, yeah, I mean, and Arafat shook hands. And so why don’t you tell people who don’t know that? Because that you know here Kamala Harris, in her debate with Donald Trump, mentioned she still favors a two state solution. Nowadays, people think, Wait a minute, so much of the settlers have taken over so much land would be a parody of a South African, you know, apartheid, but at that. Time there was real optimism. And I don’t know if you’re familiar, I always try to get people listening to this to watch a movie called the gatekeepers. And the gatekeepers movie, which is an Israeli film, and the only people who speak in it are people who led Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency that controlled the West Bank and Gaza and so And before that, still were responsible for domestic security. And that movie really explodes the myth that Israel was a United Nation that wanted peace, and the only thing that disrupted it was these Palestinians who couldn’t live peaceably because they’re basically flawed and violent and crazy, and that movie makes it very clear that the contradiction in Israel between people who actually cared about peace, or at least talked as if they did. I was there at the time of the Six Day War, and then the Labor Party people and all that who were in charge talked a good game about peace, even said things to me. I remember I talked to Alon and briefly to Rabin and these people. They said, If you come back in 10 years and we’re still occupying, you won’t be in Israel. I want to live in. We have to find a way, and so forth. So whether they really believe that or not, I don’t know. I wasn’t an expert on the area. But it was certainly the conventional thought that if you occupy a people for any length of time, you are going to destroy the very idea of, you know, a Jewish, predominantly Jewish, state of tolerance and understanding and so forth. So you are actually a witness to how that came apart, no?
Lara Friedman
I mean, I think a lot of people witnessed it over time, but I mean the when the Oslo process broke, and I think it’s important to emphasize the US was not the mover…
Robert Scheer
Give us dates here, to help people follow this. So you arrived, you said in…
Lara Friedman
I arrived in November 1992 and I left in November 1994 Yeah.
Robert Scheer
So what was going on when you hit the ground there, you’re in Jerusalem, and there’s this whole kind of diplomacy, right?
Lara Friedman
So look, when I, when I arrived, it was, it was the last sort of dregs of the First Intifada. It wasn’t, it wasn’t Oslo. Oslo didn’t happen gradually. Oslo appeared overnight for people on the ground. And that’s one of the criticisms of Oslo since then, is that it was this top down, this top down process that came from the outside and was sort of just announced. I mean, when I got there, we were still sort of tracking post into thought of violence, and there was still a framing in Israel that saw Palestinians as the, you know, the great enemy, and Arafat was framed as a Nazi. The process that led to Oslo was a private process between Palestinians and Israelis. It was sponsored by, obviously, the Norwegians. That’s why it’s called the Oslo process. The US had nothing to do with it, and I think, was largely kept out of it, because, I think the assumption was that if the US had been involved in that process behind the scenes, it would have somehow wrecked it. The US had a way of going in, and, you know, being being more demanding than the Israelis, when it came to the demands that it made of Palestinians. When the Oslo process broke, the US embraced it and took on the role of the steward of this process, the leader of the process. But it really did basically happen overnight. We went to bed one night, and it was this, this sense of, you know, just this, this friction and constant, constant concern of things bubbling up again along lines the First Intifada. And then we woke up the next morning, and there had been this exchange of letters, and then, and then we eventually had the handshake in Washington. And it was sort of like there’s suddenly this new era of, you know, Palestinians, you know, sort of, I went with Palestinian friends of mine to West Jerusalem. They hadn’t ever been there. And we met Israelis who said, Never said the word Palestinian before. It was hard for them to even you saw them kind of tasting the word for the first time. And I think that there was a moment of people sort of holding their breath and suspending disbelief to see if this could actually turn into something that both sides could live with. I think that was, that was, there was a real moment of possibility there, but the Oslo agreement, and I remember, you know, sitting in the consulate when it when we actually got the text of the Oslo agreement, going through it with my little, those little stickies that you put on to mark pages. And I was going through it with a highlighter and stickies marking all the pages where I saw what wouldn’t diploma in diplomatic speak, we call constructive ambiguity language, which had been deliberately left ambiguous in order to allow both sides to read it the way they wanted to, in order to allow them to sign something without having to get nitty gritty of whether they agreed on what it meant. And I remember saying to a colleague at the time, there’s enough constructive ambiguity in this document to drive all the settlements in the West Bank through these holes and to keep expanding settlements forever, which is exactly what happened. I mean, we had a surge in settlement construction. After Oslo, we had people don’t realize that before Oslo was announced again, I lived in East Jerusalem, we would travel freely to the West Bank. There were no checkpoints between the West Bank and Jerusalem. Immediately after Oslo, checkpoints sprung up, and those checkpoints kept moving further and further out to expand the boundaries of Jerusalem and to keep Palestinians out there was in a ratcheting up of pressure on Palestinians that came immediately after the outbreak of the peace process. And, you know, I’m sort of taking the 10,000 foot view of this. You know, years later, I was in Washington at a meeting with the then ambassador to the US from Egypt, Nabil famil, who went on to be the foreign minister from Egypt. And he was talking about, he was speaking quite hopefully about Israel/Palestine, saying he didn’t think that the progress that had been made up till that point, which at that point was the early oughts, could be rolled back easily. But he was talking about, you know, the Egypt Israel Peace Treaty and the Jordan Israel peace treaty, and really how it differed from the peace talks with Palace, with the Palestinians. And he described Egypt and Jordan peace treaties as having been negotiated based on a balance of interests, as opposed to the Israel-Palestine Peace Treaty, which was always negotiated based on a balance of power. Now, a balance of interest, no matter how tough things get, both sides have an interest in continuing. A balance of power, one side may have an interest in saying, I can get more by not continuing either side because the power dynamic is not is not equalized. And I think that became very clear as the underlying dynamic of Oslo very, very quickly.
Robert Scheer
You know, you’ve touched on what is to my mind, the profound immorality of the treatment of the Palestinians. Because, first of all, this, people don’t realize that Israel came to control the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and part of Jerusalem, as a result of a war. That was a war, I would argue, and I think most of the evidence would support it was a war of choice. It was a preemptive war. There was a massing of troops in the Sinai and so forth and so on. But that part I quite familiar with because I was there at the end and I interviewed lots and lots of people and but the fact is, it wasn’t a war with the Palestinians. Nobody claimed that the Palestinians in the West Bank or in Gaza, let alone in Israel. Palestinians in Israel, some of them even gave blood for the Israeli army because they thought the country is something sack and so forth. They were had some kind of, you know, relationship to citizenry and so forth. But the Palestinians living in the West Bank and in Gaza and and in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, in fact, were under the administration in control and the West Bank by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt, the Golan ice by Syria. And the irony is that Israel managed to make peace because of what you’re saying, the relation of power. I never heard it put quite the way you did. But they wanted something also the United States, which was kind of involved in negotiating this and other foreign powers had to respect Egypt because it had power. Jordan had power and a position in the area, and obviously Syria. And so the people who were alleged to be threatening Israel, or actually were a military threat, it would be primarily Egypt under Nasser. It was no problem making peace with them. You know, like you say, Oh, you have something. We have. We have to get along. The only people that Israel didn’t have to get along with were the Palestinians and and because I had no power. But they also were not the people who started the war. So from a legal and moral point of view, I never could understand how, with a straight face anyone and when I was there at the end of the 61 nobody defended permanent occupation that I talked to, because most of the people I talked to seemed to have the same politics I had. They were, you know, kind of liberal left Zionist or what have you. None of them defended at that time settlements or a permanent occupation or denying these people their basic human rights. And what the UN is now investigating in different courts, and what really is basic to the source question is, does it was ever a shred of moral support that one could respect for Israel’s occupation of these people, the Palestinians, and denying them their fundamental human rights. I don’t even understand how this got reported all these years and discussed all these years. Is what out with denying something that our American civil rights movement was so critical, but also every struggle for freedom, one person, one vote right, the idea of agency, and we’ve accepted as normal, somehow, in this part of the world, people who never attacked Israel, who were farming their land, working there, living a life going back centuries, you know, and somehow you could take away all of their rights. And now, if you’re at a university and you say, Well, you know, I can understand why there might be some anger on the other side. I can understand why a group like Hamas might have some support. Because, after all, no one else was helping these people. You will probably be fired, you know, maybe the show could be canceled right now, just even for saying that, you know. And yet, if you think of the logic of it from a human rights point of view, right, it wasn’t even, you’re not even allowed to when you occupy people in war like we Germany, right? We moved very quickly to German so we’ve given us the greatest crime of human history. Somehow, they were normal within months, oh, we’re going to build back West Germany, you know, and get it going again. And there, these people have full rights and right. And no one questioned that. They should have, even though a number of them had voted for Hitler, you know, but with the case of the Palestinians, it’s totally left out of discussion, the instant denial of their right to control anything about their life.
Lara Friedman
Yeah, I I agree. I mean, the entirety of Israel’s existence has been grounded in a series of narratives, and it’s almost a pick along a menu for which narrative best suits you at what moment. There is a narrative of manifest destiny. This land is ours. We’re returning to the land we are the legitimate indigenous people, which in effect, treats the Palestinians who are there as, at best, well and not their fault, but they are usurpers, and at worst, they are active usurpers who have taken what is rightfully belonging to the Jewish people. So you’ve got the Manifest Destiny piece of it. You have the post world war two Nazi piece of it, which basically says Israel is the only place in the world where Jews can can exercise their right to self determination, and after World War Two, that means it’s the only place in the world where Jews can be safe, and anyone standing in the way of that is akin to Nazis. This is a security issue. This isn’t about anything else. Then you’ve got the truly messianic part, which says this isn’t about what part of the Land of Israel the Jewish people reclaim. It’s about reclaiming all of it. And that’s why, you know, after you know, 48 there were always intentions by some people in Israel and some supporters of Israel, we need to expand the borders. And you can make the argument, yes, we’re doing it for security, or you’re doing it because, as the settlers will have told me for years, Tel Aviv is not the precious place in the Bible for the Jewish people, Hebron is right. That’s where the cradle of our Judaism is found. You know, Shilo and Elie, the settlements out in the northern West Bank, those are the places named in the Bible. It’s not Jaffa and Haifa, right? You have these parallel universes of arguments, and along the way, I mean, I’m saying this as someone who’s raised in the United States, when you have effectively framed any Palestinian who resists essentially being labeled as a usurper, a non legitimate party, there someone who doesn’t have any rights, And you frame any resistance to that narrative as either support for terrorism, anti semitism, or actual terrorism itself. At that point, you’ve eliminated you’ve imposed upon the entirety of the Palestinian nation, globally, a label of illegitimacy and dehumanization. And essentially, if you look in the years of the peace process, which really became a process for how to not grant the Palestinians self determination. I mean, you can redefine peace to me, whatever you mean, wherever you want, but But along the way, you’ve effectively said Palestinians have no rights. They don’t have political rights, they don’t have human rights, they don’t have legal rights. What they have are potential benefits that they may be allowed to enjoy if they meet the demands of Israeli international community along the way. And these rights are also rev they’re not irrevocable, right. So like Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, they do not have rights as citizens. They they enjoy benefits that are given to them magnanimously by Israel, that can be taken away by Israel for any technical reason, for a political reason, as as my colleague in Jerusalem, Danny Seidman, said, the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, who’ve been there for generations, their very existence hangs by a thread. Their existence as Jerusalem is treated by Israel as a revocable privilege, not a right, whereas you or I as Jewish Americans could basically claim a right of return tomorrow, get an Israeli passport and move anywhere we want inside the Land of Israel, which, by Israeli law and regulation, lets us move almost anywhere in the West Bank at this point too. So we’ve created a those of us who work on Israel/Palestine talk a lot about the need to de exceptionalize the conflict. We exist in a universe where Israel has become my mom would call terminally unique. It’s been exceptionalized. International law cannot be allowed to apply, because if it applies what Israel does, the Palestinians cannot be justified, cannot be tolerated. Therefore, international law, international organizations, the UN the ICC, iCj, must all be termed to be illegitimate and antiSemitic, because if you apply the same rules to Israel as everybody else, that Israel comes on the wrong side. So the problem can’t be Israel has to be the rules.
Robert Scheer
Right, but what I’m trying to call your attention to is what I think is, and I may be wrong. I don’t have your expertise, and certainly your on the ground experience and your language. But just as I say, as somebody who reported from the area at the time of the Six Day War, the description you offer, yes, there you could find that in Zionist literature. You could find… the people I talked to and they were running the country, then most Yeah, you know that I talked to didn’t talk the way you were just talking. They did not defend their right to just grab this territory. On the contrary, everyone I talked to said, We Are you come back and you’ll see. I remember so clearly, we will treat these people better than the Jordanians or the Egyptians. That was their argument. I went into Gaza, and the people who took me around said, See, this was not a great life for these people. We’re going to show them. Now, you know, this is not going to be an occupation. We’re going to show them we are tolerant. We’re going to… so now…
Lara Friedman
That may be true, but if you I mean, I would encourage you to look at some of the some of the work by Gershon Gorenberg. For example, the first act, the first activity, is to settle the West Bank started immediately. They started during the 67 war. The the activities to to change the status of Jerusalem and to expand Jerusalem’s borders to include a massive part of the West Bank. That was days after the 67 war. I mean, there may have been, and, I mean, I know my left wing friends in Israel, there’s certainly an element in Israel that, from day one said, this is going to be the bone in the throat, right? This is, this is the great philosophers of Israel saying, Don’t do this. But there was always a part of the Israeli body politic, religious or security, that said, no, no, this is an opportunity to finally do what we wanted all along, which is keep all the land.
Robert Scheer
Right and this is why I am deferring to you, because and I understand this other view, and I do think I let me be full confession here, I feel I was naive at the time. I was criticized actually, because I wrote this for ramparts magazine and everything put us into bankruptcy. So some people thought I was actually very critical of Israel, but in terms of what the people from the old Labor Party told me who were then in power, I believed them. Okay, I’m sorry, they didn’t tell me…
Lara Friedman
I don’t think it’s a matter of not believing them, but I think it’s worth paying attention to. You know, when we look at the history of the settlement movement, which is really the, you know, the you want to talk about, you know, don’t listen to what people say. Watch what they do. The concrete steps that that basically from right after 67 made it pretty clear that the intent was not to give the land back to Palestinian anything else. I mean, it was under Labor governments that the settlement movement got its start, not Likud governments.
Robert Scheer
Right, but I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just talking about my own naivete, which, over the years, I saw was naive, and I think I was spun that this was the line right now, you know? And yes, I had a lot of friends who were in Hashem, the left wing kibbutz movement, and were also active in the army, and some of them were high officers. I think more officers came from the kibbutz movement and even the leftist kibbutz movement and from the rest of the society, even though it was only 3% of the country, at some point, they had like 80% of the officers and so forth. What I’m getting at, and the reason I brought up the gatekeepers, which I think, for anybody who wants to pursue this topic, supports your point of view, because the gatekeepers, I think it’s five former leaders of Shin Bet who were interviewed and. And they all in the interview. And it was amazing that they consented to these interviews done by Israeli film crew and so forth, and none of them said they were misquoted, as far as I could see. You know, I was nominated for an Academy Award. Didn’t get it, but what I’ve I’ve shown it many times as a teacher and so forth. What impressed me is they knew the people administering the West Bank, even though they came out of a more idealistic and also not just idealistic, they knew if you try to control people with torture and brutality and so forth, that you will transform yourself and you will create an enemy that would be difficult to deal with, much larger than just in that community, which we’re seeing now in the world. And the movie really explores their self examination. The reason they were going through this self examination all of them, and the reason they think the movie got made was because of the assassination of Rabin and the disruption of this what was the one time when they may have come close to actually solving this problem? That’s what I’d like you as a witness of that time to analyze, because, I think, because they all say in the movie, this is a disaster. What’s happening? They do say it, yet, you’re right. They look the other way. They presided over it. They enabled settlements to happen, and the lack of freedom for the Palestinians. And so that’s what I want you to talk about now, put on the the scholarly hat, or, you know, write the in depth report back to Washington. But that’s, that is the moment of of truth for the whole Israeli experiment. You know, was anybody ever serious about coexistence, tolerance, a Switzerland in the area where everyone would feel secure. Did never again mean never again for everybody in the world, any group, or was it only for one religious group?
Lara Friedman
Yeah. I mean, I’m not quite sure to answer that. That’s a lot of questions packed in there. I’m hesitant to, or I’m not going to generalize for the entirety of the population of Israel. I have dear friends who have spent their entire lives fighting for peace, fighting for Palestinian rights. I don’t think this is about, you know, was there ever a genuine commitment? I think there absolutely were Israelis who are committed to Oslo, or even committed to going beyond Oslo who, you know, I’ve got friends who’ve been talking about, you know, secular, binational state for decades. That’s there. The reality, though, is that those who have accumulated power successfully in Israel over the years, part of the accumulating of power has come from adopting an anti Palestinian, what I would call Jewish supremacy outlook, and that that goes way back out. You know, in addition to the gatekeepers, I would encourage people to watch the movie called a law in these parts, which has direct interviews with the different with different people in Israeli government and Israeli military. It’s called a law in these parts, and it tracks the the legislation and the regulations that essentially pave the way for for what is, you know, apartheid across the West Bank. This didn’t happen by accident. This happened by a series of systematic laws and regulations which have only continued. You know, long past, long past that, you know, whether or not there are Israelis who are who still, today, would like to see peace and security and all of that. I mean increasingly, as I think about this, I think about this as being less about do people want peace and peace can mean all different things, and more about whether Israelis have come to believe, and have come to be taught over the years that you know there they don’t need peace, right? If, under Perez, the argument was, you got with Oslo Shimon Peres, basically, his argument was, you have to make peace. Because if you make peace, you’ll get all these benefits from the Arab world. And if you don’t make peace, you won’t you’ll give things up. And the argument of people like Netanyahu, even in that era, was you’re wrong. We can pocket all of those wonderful things and not have to give up anything. And only a sucker would give up things they don’t have to give up. And I think they that argument has been proven largely correct, another argument that was used for years. I mean, I worked with the Peace camp for years. I worked with peace now the American arm of the Israeli peace movement. And the main arguments that we used in terms of trying to convince people that it was important to have a two state solution. Argument number one was, if you don’t have a two state solution, you’re going to have to choose between Israel being a Jewish state and a democratic state. Right, because the hordes of Arabs having babies, it won’t be a Jewish state anymore. So you’ll have to say we are not Jewish, and we stay in control with Jewish people, or we have real democracy and it’s not Jewish. And you know what? That turned out not to be a good argument. That turned out to be an argument that the right actually embraced. They said, Absolutely. And given that choice, we say Jewish state democracy means something else, right? We don’t. We’re not interested in western style democracy. We live in the Middle East, and Jewish is more important. And I mean, the left gave permission for that argument by using this incredibly racist demographic argument as the main hook. We gave permission for it, and here we are today. And you know, Israelis look at this and they say, I don’t want to give up my privileges. I live in a successful, wealthy Western economy. I don’t want to have to deal with this, and I don’t have to.
Robert Scheer
Let me just stop you, because what you’re saying is really quite alarming. You’re saying that one of the great traditions in the human experience involving the Jewish people, largely out of adversity, largely out of being an oppressed people, largely out of being experiencing the intolerance of others. After all, this is what most Jewish people experienced throughout the world, certainly the European experience. And out of that came these values that I myself was raised and to this day, respect of the great Jewish writers and thinkers and so forth. I mean, many of whom were very critical of the Zionist experiment to begin with, and so forth. But nonetheless, I think most American Jews, and I would remind people, most of us were from a working class background, and, you know, had to endure and we and there was anti semitism in the United States that people had to deal with, as well as in other parts of the world. And out of that came, I think, an admirable tradition. That’s why there was so many Jewish people in the American Civil Rights Movement and disproportion to their presence in the population, that’s why they still vote more progressive than the most population. You’re basically saying that all of that is dead in relation to Israel, and because if it’s in debt in relation to Israel, it’s in dead from the experience of most Jewish people since Jewish lobbying organizations, and you know, in Israel itself, are very intimidating to say to any Jewish person, if you don’t agree with us, and you don’t see that we represent 100% of what Judaism is. You are self hating. You are an enemy. You are an anti Semite, right? You’re really talking about the end of a Jewish experience that many Jews identify with as the essence of Judaism, okay, including religious Jews. By the way, we thought it was up to an almighty to decide where land gets distributed, rather than for secular people. That were quite suspicious of this movement for most of its history.
Lara Friedman
Yeah. I mean, there are people who’ve written about this and who are much more scholarly than I am. I mean, I am…
Robert Scheer
People have discussed, much more scholarly than I am, but it bothers me, is why…
Lara Friedman
I mean, it should bother you. Look, I am called a self hating Jew. I’m called an anti semitic Jew. I’m called the Jew in name only. I mean, I grew up basically, you know, I remember when I was very young, it was talking about the writer. The Law of Return in Israel is explained to me that anyone who was Jewish enough to be killed by Hitler was Jewish enough to make aliyah to Israel, and suddenly I’m now living in a world where it doesn’t matter what your level of faith is, it doesn’t matter what your genealogy is, it doesn’t matter your self identification. If you’re not deeply Zionist in your political outlook, then you’re not really a Jew. That’s the Jew in name only, or the unju or the as a Jew. I mean, it’s like every day there’s a new name to call us. You know, I learned a term recently, the the the invisibilizing of the the non Zionist and anti Zionist Jews, where you have starting with the Trump era, with the the Philo Semitism with the Ilan cars and people in the Trump administration who basically framed it as pro Israel, is the opposite of anti of anti semitism. So it doesn’t matter if they pretty much actually hate Jews, as long as they’re pro Israel. They can’t be anti semitic to the current day, where you have basically, you know, the ADL and other. People claiming that every campus protest against Israel is by definition anti semitic, notwithstanding the fact that maybe half the people there are Jewish, that they’re holding Shabbat services in in the encampments, they claim, no, it’s anti semitic. Because by calling it anti semitic, you can say, ah, hate crimes. Title six, title 10, shut it down. And in the process, you you literally invisibilize those Jewish people who do not align with a Jewish identity that puts Israel at the center of that identity. And just to add, I mean, this is, this is a point I make as often as I can. You know, one of the things that I’ve always agreed with the ADL on, and there’s many things I’ve never agreed with them on. I’ve always agreed with the ADL that if you conflate Israel and Jews, you’re an anti Semite, right? So if you don’t like Israel and you you put you show that by going to the house of someone with a mezuzah and, you know, painting Free Palestine on their on their door, just simply because you saw mezzo, you assume they’re pro Israel. That’s anti semitic, right? All Jews don’t equal Israel. Israel doesn’t equal all Jews. That has always been the position of the ADL and of the Jewish community, except now our position as a community also is support for Israel is intrinsic to Jewish identity, and therefore criticism of Israel and Zionism is anti semitism. So they want to have it both ways. If you conflate, you’re an anti Semite, and if you don’t conflate, you’re an anti Semite, which really leaves place only for one thing, which is supporting Israel. And that’s where we are today.
Robert Scheer
So I hope we’re not the other day. But, I mean, there seems to be, you point out how many Jewish people have spoken up. I mean, there is a possibility the truth will set us free. There’s a possibility maybe this has gone too far, and people are shocked, because I must say, I haven’t seen any polling on this, but, you know, I so, you know, I meet a lot of Jewish people. I haven’t met one who’s really happy with the situation. I don’t think I’ve met a single one. I noticed on the campus where I teach, when people were speaking out and challenging the administration at USC, for University of Southern California for changing the graduation so the person was supposed to get the biggest Student Honor. Suddenly, we didn’t have a graduate. And I went to the faculty meeting, and it seemed to me a majority of people are certainly large number of people either identified themselves as Jewish or were Jewish. So I wonder if, and let me ask you, and I was going to ask you about your work, we’ll close this by asking you about your workers with the Foundation for Middle East Peace. And again, this is not based on any polling, and polling about Jews is very difficult. I know I I ran one at the LA Times when I was working there. And it’s hard because it’s a small population scattered. But at that time, you know, there, this was 30 years ago, 20 years ago, whatever the sentiment in the polling was, yes, Israel should be defended, but then you say, but by peace or by war? It was peace and and I have not. I’ve seen more support or more concern about where Israel is going now among Jewish people, again, totally on scientific observation. I wonder if there isn’t a source of optimism here, that the journey that you have followed might be one that others will take, because there is something, I mean, you seem to make light. I don’t know light of it, but I’m thinking of Hannah Arendt. That happened that when I came back for the sixth day where I spoke at Hebrew y in New York, and it was a whole big discussion, and I was on a panel, and, yeah, I got criticized and everything, but this old lady at that point came up to me, I didn’t even recognize her, and said, You have to keep doing this and saying, because you’re right about this. It was an RN, I didn’t, wow, make the connection and and so I just wonder whether this has gone too far, that basically Jewish people are committed to decent values and understand that intolerance is what anti semitism is really about intolerance affects in Germany, case, a lot of people, Slavic people, gay people, people who had medical issues and so forth. And that is supposed to be the fountain of the tolerance and the enlightenment that Jews bring to the world. No, I. Uh, that’s, that’s, and that’s supposed to have a biblical base. I don’t want to spin it too fine or claim great authority, but you’re acting as if it’s game over.
Lara Friedman
I’m not acting, I don’t mean to act like it’s game over. I think that dealing with the I’ve spent the past, much like most every Palestinian I know, I have spent every day since October 7 looking what’s happening on the ground, which leaves you sort of moving wildly between rage and despondency and total loss of faith in humanity. You know, I agree there’s reason to be hopeful in terms of a new generation that’s coming out and standing up, and that includes a large number of Jewish youth who are speaking with unbelievable clarity that I think puts previous generations to shame. That is That is wonderful, and it is a source of hope for me. You know, it’s not there’s the that’s great, and I encourage it. And at the same time, you know, I’m just like, you probably talk to people every day who will say, it’s not genocide. I say, Well, if I stop calling it genocide, will you do something to stop it? I mean, this is, this is not a hypothetical situation of, you know, zero sum outcomes on the horizon. And I take very I am very hopeful that a new generation cares more about the values that are my values as a human being, as a Jew, as an American, as all those things, and living the courage of their convictions. I’m watching them in a race with Congress and AIPAC and the ADL as they try to legislate a new definition of anti semitism, which says all of this is anti semitic and can be punished. I think they’re in a race with the efforts the number of universities that came back to school year this year in order to shut down or contain protests related to Israel, have adopted policies that basically contain and shut down protests on anything and this is being praised by the people who supposedly represent Jewish Americans. It’s absurd to me, I don’t know where the tipping point is, where the broader Jewish American population gets up and says, you know, this is not about our safety. This is illiberalism that is, that is not aligned with anything we believe in. And we’re not going to say, for the sake of an Israel exception, we’re going to support illiberalism. But that’s where the community, much of the community and the legacy organizations that are still viewed as representing and leading the community are so I think in the longer term, there are reasons to hope about a shift in the population. Right now, I’ve got to be honest, as we go into, you know, a year of genocide, and it was expanding ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, that’s what I’m really consumed by. And how do the forces on campus and elsewhere, how do they accumulate enough power that somebody listens to them? Because it’s a good effort that’s going on right now, but it’s not preventing, you know, almost daily massacres in Gaza that are being done in the name of Israel, they’re done by Israel, which insists it’s doing it in the name of the Jewish people and democracy and freedom and liberty and all these things. Well, really, it’s just genocide.
Robert Scheer
I don’t disagree with that, and I don’t want to end this right now, because I’ll feel like a fool for trying to see a brighter side of this. I’m embarrassed, actually…
Lara Friedman
No you’re not. There is a brighter side. You’re absolutely right. And I try to it is something that in my own writing, you know, and I’m talking about the all the all the the things that are aligned against Palestinian rights. For the first time in my lifetime, there is a significant movement aligned with Palestinian rights. For those of us born after 67 this is the first time in our lifetime that we’ve ever seen this. It’s extraordinary. And you know, if you were to talk to people organizing activism, I think you get people who are a lot more energized and excited to talk about it. For me, the looking at the US political scene, and looking at the statements coming out of the organized leadership, and the insistence from right wing, illiberal members of Congress that in order to support Jewish safety, they have to demonize anyone who criticizes Israel in Zionism, I’m much more focused right now in the short term and and figuring out what any of us can do. You know, I’ve had conversations with Israeli left wing friends of mine since October 7. Where they talk about, and this, particularly early on, when they were talking about, we have to focus on the allegations of mass rape, and we have to talk about the betrayal that the Jewish left in Israel felt because the Palestinian, you know, their Palestinian counterparts, were either not sufficiently upset or about what happened to Jews on October 7, whatever. And I had these conversations with people where I said, you know, I get it. Can we put a pin in that and come back to it? And first stop genocide, and then we’ll come back to all of this, I promise. And the answer I got over and over was No, our hurt feelings, our justification, our demand to be dealt with, everything is more important than stopping genocide, and I still don’t know how to, how to contend with that. It’s, it’s so far outside of the value system that I hold and was taught.
Robert Scheer
Well, I’ll tell you what Hannah Arendt told me that time, and it’s a very, it wasn’t a lengthy conversation. She said, You have to keep pushing this. Yes, that’s what she said. And, you know, she certainly did that. I but I think we should put on record here what is really at stake. Because if, if you can accept, and we haven’t discussed, the horror of what’s going on, and you are somebody who knows the area and so forth. But if, if Jewish people come as a group in particular in the diasporas, well, to accept this is legitimate, or whatever word you use, it’s what? It’s mass violence. It’s terrorism. There’s no question. And I’m not big on the internet, I mean, on social media, but by the way, I have had very little influence with students. I was actually quiet about this issue when it started. You know, I’ve spent a lot of time my life dealing with it. Every time I get near it. It’s a Third World issue. And what have you I found students coming up to me, including Jewish students, and asked me why I was not speaking about it, why I wasn’t bringing it more into the class, you know. So this was a coming from below. This was not as far as I could see, manipulative faculty or anything. Faculty generally has been cautious, because you know about this issue. They know what it can do to careers and and so forth. And as I understand it, on social media, I remember just a little connection. I remember during the Vietnam War at ramparts, we did something that people question whether it was in good taste or not. We showed what napalm was doing to children in Vietnam, and we ran pictures and so forth, and people said, well, that’s in bad taste or so forth. But happened that Martin Luther King bought a ramparts at the Airport station where he was waiting for a plane. He looked at those pictures, and then he said, after looking at that, I have to speak out against the war. I’m told now by people that I run into students who came up in a conversation just yesterday that on social media, because I was saying, why aren’t we showing in on my own website? They say you don’t have to. It’s all over social media. You can’t, you can’t ignore it. So maybe that’s one of the really positive things about the Internet, whether you choose to define it as genocide or no, it is of that order. And and clearly, the evidence is out there. And so finally, because in your article on AIPAC, you raised really the question, and we’re talking about the leading lobbying organization, and maybe this is the illusion of Netanyahu and others around them, that they can spin anything, they can create the solution. But the main thing Israel had going for it in all of my life of observing this was the argument that we are victims of a historic injustices that have been perpetrated, and as a result, we are the standard bearer of the torture freedom and decency, and that’s Why our values are modern and what have you. But it’s really, I just it’s, it couldn’t be a more basic question about the human condition. I mean, what does it mean that people who have suffered as much as you look my mother lost her whole family, are my. Whole family. You know, my father was not Jewish. My father’s family killed my mother’s family, they were German. So I’ve lived with this issue my whole life. I mean, they didn’t set out to kill him, but, you know, his lunchmen, that’s what they did. And my mother’s family in Lithuania, every one of them died. So I was raised in an environment. Yeah, some people were more Zionist. Some were not. Some were leftist. It was always, you know, the old joke, you could have 1000 different views from five different Jews and all that. And what you’re really painting is really the end of, the end of what was most vital, exciting, morally significant about the entire Jewish experience, whether in the religious realm or in the secular. That’s really what, what you’re saying is happening.
Lara Friedman
I mean, I don’t know about I mean, the end, I would say that it’s certainly a new era. If my generation, our era, was defined by 67 and 73 and this idea of Jewish righteousness and Jewish victimhood. And before that, it was a Holocaust in 48 I don’t know how the future of the Jewish people because of the absolute conflation of Judaism with Zionism in Israel, I don’t know how the future of the Jewish people going forward is not some somewhat different now that it is defined as defined by the experience of committing genocide and committing genocide that is live streamed to the entire world.
Robert Scheer
I’m going to leave it there. I hope you’re wrong, but we haven’t talked about the tragedy that’s involved now, and it doesn’t get swept away, nor should it. And alright, I want to thank you for doing this work, for enlightening us, and hopefully it’ll change attitudes.
Lara Friedman
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Robert Scheer
I want to thank Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian at KCRW, the NPR station in Santa Monica, for putting this on. Joshua Scheer, who booked you for this, who’s our producer. Diego Ramos, who writes the introduction, Max Jones, who does the video, I want to thank the JKW Foundation in memory of Jean Stein, a great American public intellectual and writer who actually was early on in criticizing what was going on in the occupation of West Bank, and was a close ally and supporter of Edward Said, maybe the most important person who criticized all this in real time and Integrity Media Foundation, which in the interest of having diverse points of view with human rights concern, for supporting the show. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
