Israel and its lobby today try to conflate the state with Jews around the world, that it speaks for Jews and encompasses the entire diaspora. Richard Silverstein, author and journalist of the Tikun Olam blog, says that this couldn’t be further from the truth. As the genocide in Gaza rages on, along with the killing of Israeli citizens and the mass torture of Palestinians, the support for Israel among Jews, particularly the younger generation, will continue to falter as the state itself plunges deeper into despair.

 

Richard Silverstein: Israel, ‘The Far Right Extremist State That I Can No Longer Identify With’

 

Silverstein speaks to host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast to detail his relationship with Israel and Zionism and how his views have evolved over time, ultimately leading to a complete disconnection from the state, especially in light of the ongoing genocide, and now calling himself an anti-Zionist.

Being raised Jewish and earning degrees from Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University, as well as studying Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University in Israel, Silverstein makes clear: “[F]or you and for me and for most American Jews, Judaism is not genocide in Gaza, is not $20 billion or $80 billion in arms being sent by the US to Israel to kill Palestinians. That’s not the kind of Judaism that I represent.”

Not only is the genocide a driving force behind the alienation of the Israel state but also the way it treats its own citizens, looking at them as expendable in its objective to kill Hamas operators. Silverstein refers to the Hannibal Directive, a procedure used by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to prevent the capture of soldiers by killing them and their captors. “[Y]ou now have a code that is expanded to also killing your own civilians. And that’s, I think, what is even more profoundly upsetting, disturbing about the way in which Hannibal is being used right now,” Silverstein tells Scheer.

Torture and rape of Palestinian prisoners is also something that has emerged from Israel’s onslaught on Gaza and the West Bank, according to Silverstein. “We have Palestinians in Gaza who were swept up in detention raids and brought to concentration camps, really, in Israel, and there they’re tortured,” he states.

Silverstein insists that what is happening in Gaza does not represent Judaism worldwide like Israel claims, and that “American Judaism needs to stand on its own.” American Jews, Silverstein says, “really have to separate [themselves] from the hostility, the anger, the violence that Israel represents.”

CreditsHost:

Robert Scheer

Producer:

Joshua Scheer

Introduction:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

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 the intelligence comes from my guest, in this case, Richard Silverstein. And we’re going to be talking about controversial stuff here, about Israel and all that. And he’s somebody who has really quite a record of covering events in Israel, writing about it in his blog, Tikun Olam. And I always wonder, where did he get this knowledge? He’s fluent in Hebrew. He seems to know quite a bit of Yiddish, at least from my exploring it with him. And so I asked him about his background, and how do you get to be an independent journalist? Well, he didn’t just invent himself, and he didn’t just start this blog which is quite provocative and what it reveals about the failings of media coverage, and also introduce Israel, Gaza war going way back. But he actually prepared for this academically. He was a joint scholar of both Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He was an early believer in his life in the State of Israel, and what could, I guess, be considered liberal Zionism. And he also studied at Hebrew University, and studied Hebrew literature and Judaism. And he has a master’s from our rival school in Los Angeles, from UCLA in Hebrew literature. And fortunately, he has a wife who’s helped support him. I always wonder, how do people get to be independent journalists? And so he married well, not to somebody who had great wealth, but who actually works. I was in the same position for many years. My wife outranked me at the LA Times, so I’m familiar but we’re going to talk about heavy subjects. I don’t want to… Try to make it a little light, you know, introduce ourselves, but I know I’ve talked to you before and done a podcast with you before, and I know that you are troubled about what’s being done, let me put it very bluntly, in the name of the Jewish people. I’ve always felt a personal connection whatever I think about, you know, Israel’s policies. My mother’s Jewish, and my brother suffered antisemitism in Lithuania. That’s why she came to the United States. She also suffered when she was opposed to the Bolsheviks at the end. So she was a political person who fled, like many Jewish people, she was on the left, but very independent and so forth, and became a union organizer United States, as well as a garment worker. And I grew up in a tradition of progressive Jews and poor Jews. And that was the reality. And my feeling is, you know, I’ve always been very, you know, particularly because I visited my German relatives and tried to understand World War II. And so I’ve always been protective of a great not only secular, but some people interpret the religion in a very progressive way. And basically, let me use a word that seems to stand in contradiction to the very idea of Zionism, which is cosmopolitanism. Jews were always accused of being cosmopolitan, not loyal to France when they were there the Dreyfus Affair, not loyal to Germany, where they were quite well accepted on a high level. In Germany, as opposed to Eastern Europe, I was always very proud of Jewish cosmopolitanism. Jews sophistication. Knew a lot of languages, had traveled because of the Diaspora in so many different countries. My mother was fluent in Russian and [inaudible] came from a long line of rabbis. So let me first of all ask you, because you’ve become kind of a pariah in certain quarters for having devoted a lot of time the last couple of decades to actually raising some serious questions about, what is Israel all about? And and I want to begin with two aspects of the current situation that you’ve written about. One is about the Hannibal code, and you started writing about that back in 2014, which is something that people don’t imagine that the Jewish state, in the form of its intelligence agencies or its army might actually kill captured Jewish prisoners and so forth. I’m not going to ruin, distort this by oversimplifying. I’ll let you do it. And the other is the question that’s come up recently in the news, but also the question about torture. Now in the United States, we can’t say torture you have to say enhanced interrogation, but the whole world knows it means the same, whether the US does it, or Russia or anybody else, and certainly in Israel, but it’s come up in. A really uncomfortable way of what’s going on the West Bank and Gaza, in addition to all the other uncomfortable things. So take it away. Introduces these subjects, and also, what does that have to do Jewish values?

Richard Silverstein  

Well, in terms of my background, Bob, I grew up in the same kind of house you did. My father and his family were New Deal Democrats going way back and in 1967 when we there were rallies at UN Plaza for Israel during the Six Day War,  I was there, and that was my first rally protest that I ever attended, that I remember. And ever since, I’ve been doing that sort of activism. But gradually, I turn from being a liberal Zionist and supporting Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. And we could talk about whether it is, what kind of Jewish state it is, and whether it is a democracy, but that’s another subject. And gradually I came to see that Israel was no longer a democracy, and that the version of Judaism that Israel represented was was intolerant, was racist, and really it picked and chose the worst aspects of Jewish traditions in the Bible. And, you know, for an example, Israeli settlers now want to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque and build a Third Temple there. And they used to be considered totally fringe, weird. People like Meir Kahane was considered to be an extremist that wasn’t taken seriously, and now they’re actually preying on the grounds of the temple, and of course, that erupts into Palestinian outrage, and that’s what Israel has become. It’s become a state that is a theocratic state in which the worst aspects of Judaism are imposed upon the state by settlers and people of that ilk, and now people who are ministers in the government as well. So that’s why my view of Israel has become so critical, and why I now consider myself an anti Zionist, because I no longer find anything in the ideology that Israel represents, that I can identify with or I can support, and I’m really embarrassed that the American Jewish community, and especially the leaders of the community and the groups like The ADL and the American Jewish Committee are really totally behind Israel and everything it does, and they are just part and parcel of Israel lobby, political machine that promotes Israel, promotes in Congress, the arms sales that Congress approves for Israel and also tries to suppress speech that’s critical of Israel on campuses, and all of the things that happened last year on campuses where at UCLA, they called in the police and there were violent attacks by pro-Israel thugs. I mean, all of that comes from Israel becoming this far right extremist state that I can no longer identify with. And if you want to now go into the Hannibal directive…

Robert Scheer  

Before I go to the Hannibal directive, let me… I understand how difficult it’s been ever since the founding of Israel, to be critical of it, but nonetheless, for the longest time, you had a Labor government. And I know because I went there at the time of the Six Day War, I went into Egypt, and then went over to Israel and so forth. And the people that I talked to and I interviewed, I think we’ve talked about this the past. I interviewed some famous people, Moshe Dayan, Allon and so forth, others and all of them, I felt at home with as a sort of American lefty kind of guy. And I stayed on a left wing kibbutz, you know, by [inaudible], I think was probably very similar to the kibbutz that was attacked on October 7, and the political outlook, [inaudible] type situation, left wing Zionists. But even the people in the government and the people I talked to, I just didn’t feel estranged from, and they said things openly. They said, If you come back in 10 years and we’re still occupying this land, you know, we’ll have failed, and I would not be here and so forth. And what everybody was cognizant about is the Palestinians had not attacked Israel, since you brought up the Six Day War. I mean something left out of every discussion. How did Israel get to control Gaza, the West Bank, Golan Heights and so forth. And everybody assumes that somehow they either got it originally, aside from a gift from God as some claim, but that it was part of the original Israel in ’47 or they assumed the Palestinians attacked Israel. And my memory from being there at that end of the war. First of all, the person who took me in, maybe you met him. I think his name was Ibraham Shabbat or something. He was a mayor of one of the towns in Israel. He had given blood to the Israeli army. You know, he was a Palestinian Arab, but he had given blood. He was a part of Israeli society. And then he took me in, and we have to go under the curfew or something to get in there. And, you know, the Palestinian that I met in Israel, you know, they were not against the State of Israel in a fundamental way. So you right now have described in Israel that is diametrically, I think, opposite, to what Israel was at the time of the Six Day War. Is it too simplistic to say the Six Day War and conquest was the midwife to this transformation?

Richard Silverstein  

I think you’re absolutely right, because after the Six Day War, that’s when the settler enterprise began. That’s when the movement called the Greater Israel movement, the Land of Israel movement started, which was a movement to not just settle the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, which they considered the West Bank to be, but an exit to Israel and to make it part of Israel itself. Even though there were Palestinians who were indigenous to the West Bank, they ignored that. In fact, 300,000 Palestinians on the West Bank were expelled during the Six Day War. But that’s another story, and so they started in 1970 and they founded the first settlement in the West Bank, and they did it with the support of the Labor government, which is important to note. So this morphing of Israel into what has become now did start with the ’67 war. There was this messianic euphoria when they captured the the Temple Mount and when they captured Jerusalem from the Jordanian army, and people started to believe, even secular Jews started to believe, that we’re on a messianic mission. You know, there’s a prayer you say and sometimes for the State of Israel, which talked about the beginning of our messianic redemption. So the even American Jews believed this about Israel, and it was on a mission, somehow a messianic mission, and that has become a extreme distortion. And you know, if you compare the Israeli leaders that you interviewed in 1967 and their views, and their social democratic sort of views of what Israel was then, now we have a state that is totally captured by Kahanism. Meir Kahane, if he had lived, would have become the Prime Minister of Israel. I’m convinced of it, because the ministers in the current government are Kahanists, and they support all of the mass violence in the West Bank. They support the genocide in Gaza, and that’s what Israel has become. It’s been captured by this extreme, violent, you know, movement that is in favor of expelling all the Arabs, the Palestinians from the West Bank, from Gaza, and annexing them to Israel. And it has this viscerally hostile view to the entire Arab world.

Robert Scheer  

Okay, but I have to jump in now and say, this is not, well, I can’t speak about Israel. I read, you know, the left wing press there, to degree, it’s translated in English and Haaretz and others. But I gather they don’t represent much of the population anymore. Haaretz is a real old paper, though, isn’ it?

Richard Silverstein  

Oh yeah. It goes back to the 1920s and it was founded by a German Jew, by the way. Schocken family, which published Schocken Press, you might remember that, and yeah, they were German Jews. They were liberal German Jews. And Haaretz has been the, almost an only liberal newspaper, certainly in the last 20-30, years, it’s become the only one. Before then, there was some left wing papers associated with the left wing.

Robert Scheer  

It cost me quite a bit of money, I think it’s over 100 bucks or something, but it’s worth it. I mean, they actually do what a paper should do. You know, obviously Zionists. They obviously support the state. What happened, when I was there during the Six Day War, they had a statistic that some very large percentage of the officers in the Israeli army were from the kibbutz movement, even though the kibbutz movement, which mostly was left, I think, or secular and so forth, was only like three and a half percent of the population, but they had something like 70% of the officers in the military. And, you know, it’s just so odd. Look, at one point, I wrote a series for the LA Times about the Jewish life in Los Angeles, and we did a poll, and we did actually a national poll. It’s very hard to poll the Jewish population because it’s such a small percentage. But the LA Times put quite a bit of money into it, and I found then, and this was after the Six Day War, maybe 10 years after. Nonetheless, the people we polled, the poll was done professionally, showed that they were quite liberal, and they, you know, they all said, yes, they defend, obviously, Israel’s right to exist, something Kamala Harris stresses all the time. But on the other hand, they said, you know, they want peace, and they don’t want to keep the land. You know, peace is the main thing. And they didn’t have this messianic view that you have, that this was American Jews. Now has, I don’t know the polling data now, I don’t know how much of it is reliable, but I still get the sense from my conversations with people who are Jewish, you know, some of my best friends, the old joke, but the fact of the matter is they still hold to that, you know, just about as, certainly as strong, if not stronger than non Jewish people. Is this not your sense? Do you think public opinion among Jews has changed in the way you described Israel?

Richard Silverstein  

I think that it has. I don’t think it has changed to the degree that, for example, that people support my views, but I think that they’re extremely critical of Netanyahu. But that’s true also in Israel itself. I think that they’re critical of the occupation on the West Bank, and they oppose the Israeli policy, which is not formally to annex the West Bank yet, but that’s the direction they want to go in Israel. I think American Jews oppose that as well. I think American Jews are quite open to the idea of withholding arms to Israel, as long as there isn’t the war doesn’t end. So and there’s a generational divide, Bob, between Jews. So the older generation has the kind of views you’re talking about, because they were raised with the [inaudible], with raising money for Jewish National Fund and supporting Israel, right or wrong. Going back to what I talked about, about the Six Day War, in your experience there, but the younger the polling, the Pew polling, Pew Research polling shows that the younger generation is totally alienated from Israel and and it’s not that alienated from Israel the young Jews. The young Jews, yeah, up to, say, 15 to 34 demographic, the feeling about Israel is quite hostile, but mostly is that they’re alienated from it, and they don’t care about it like the older generation did, because they realized that if they cared, in other words, if they had my kind of views, they would have to be committed to rebut and to disagree and to argue with people about the these sorts of views, and they just don’t want it. There’s so many other important things that young Jews want to do and want to be involved with, and they’re just totally distant from Israel, and that’s just really a bad outcome for Israel, and it weakens the Israel lobby as well, which has always been one of the strongest lobby in the United States.

Robert Scheer  

You know, it’s an interesting question, because I don’t want to give up being Jewish. I do, first of all, you know, even though my mother was Jewish, we were in a Jewish neighborhood. My Jewish part of my family was all killed and so forth. I went to Lithuania to try to find them. I also went to try to find my German relatives, to find out why they got caught up in this, the greatest madness in modern times, in this slaughter, genocide. And, you know, raised a lot of questions there. I actually had books published in Germany, and did lectures and so forth. But I don’t want to give up the Jewish because I think if you give up the Jewish connection, you’re giving up one of the great progressive traditions that humanity has had. I mean, if you look in country after country, if you look at the artists, you know, the books written, and so forth, a good I mean, certainly compared to the percentage of the population as Jewish. The [inaudible], you know, even though I think he converted at the end. But the [inaudible] and everything were amazing. And they were all over the place, you know, well, plenty of bad things happen in the old Soviet Union. But [inaudible], my mother would quote to me. And you know, all these people, [inaudible] and so forth, and so there is an incredible In fact, you know, Jewish progressive writing, enlightened Jewish writing by the Hannah Arendts of this world, and the Albert Einsteins of this world. And Einstein wrote on social issues and so forth, including defining himself as a socialist, I think it was 1946, The Monthly Review. So that is an incredibly rich, wonderful tradition. And I remember as a kid, I got very conscious of being Jewish because I was accused on more than one occasion of having killed someone’s Lord. At first, I didn’t know what they were talking about. Punched the nose or pushed on a street, or something, you know, you killed our Lord, and so forth. I asked people about, oh, well, the Jews supposed to have killed Christ. Well, everybody forgets that was a view endorsed in some very respectable quarters. So the fight against that kind of parochial hate, informed hate, you know, when you had it with Father Coughlin in the United States, I had plenty people, forced the Jewish people be become major advocates of tolerance, concern for the other. So it’s no accident you had Goodman [inaudible] in the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi, no accident that there, in fact, the rubric became, and this was true throughout the world, when you wanted to attack progressives, you said the Jews were all behind it, or were involved. So that’s why I like talking to you, because you are kind of, I hope it’s not a relic, of that tradition, right? It’s the attempt to have respect for universal human rights so that never again applies to everybody. Albanians, you know, right? Armenians everywhere. Never again. What has happened now, it’s now associated with an illegitimate, hate filled crusade against people who don’t have an army. You know, it’s bizarre, is it not? You’re a scholar. I’m trying to appeal to you as a scholar seriously, rather than making rhetorical points or anything. It’s a Shonda, is that strong enough? Is that a scandal? Yeah, you know. So let’s talk about where let’s take a little extra time, it’s interesting, and then I’ll get to the two subjects I want to end with. So let’s try to do it in the next few minutes. But I just would like your summary of that point. It’s not just that people have been swept. We’re losing a major source of sanity and decency in this world by by eliminating that Jewish consciousness universal application of human rights.

Richard Silverstein  

Well, I think everything that you said, I totally agree with. I want to add a point, though, that is, I think what we need to move towards as Jews, as American Jews, is we need to create, not only distance from Israel, but I think we need to divide, divide us in a sense. We need to be American Jews with our own American Jewish religion. And we need to, if we have any association with Israel, we have to make it clear that we are not the same as Israel. I think what the Israel lobby tries to do is say that there’s no difference between Israel and Jews. Israel encompasses a whole entire Jewish Diaspora. Israel speaks for Jews, etc, etc. I think that we have to sort of kill that idea, and we have to separate ourselves and say that we don’t speak for Israel, and Israel doesn’t speak to us. And that’s, I think, one of the big problems with American Jewry is that we are still wedded to Israel. Israel is our religion in to a certain extent, and we have so tired

Robert Scheer  

It’s sacrilegious in the most profound way, because the religion certainly denied that idea that you could make the decision as a human being to define the whole aspirations. The meaning, it’s quite bizarre, is it not?

Richard Silverstein  

Well, I think that what’s bizarre is the way that Israel has co-opted all of those sources and used the worst of the most aggressive, the most violent aspects of Jewish sources, and said, this is what Judaism is. And for you and for me and for most American Jews, Judaism is not genocide in Gaza, is not $20 billion or $80 billion in arms being sent by the US to Israel to kill Palestinians. That’s not the kind of Judaism that I represent. That’s the settlers and their attempt to annex and displace millions of Palestinians and just physically expel them. I can’t see that as a Jewish value. So I feel the need to say American Judaism needs to stand on its own. We don’t need to completely disconnect ourselves from Israel, and from those sources would talk about Israel, but we really have to separate from the hostility, the anger, the violence that Israel represents.

Robert Scheer  

But we don’t need you to say that often, certainly I have no standing here. Isn’t that what the religion was all about, which was, that’s why you study the Talmud. That’s why, I mean, my mother used to be very angry with all of her male relatives who were studying all the time, and my mother and her sisters were working all the time, you know, and so forth, including my mother’s case, making drapes for the [inaudible] family that the Kennedys got married into later in life. You know, they weren’t Jewish. You went there and you made the drapes sewing all winter. But the fact of matter is that was a tension. Actually, I remember my Catholic friends growing up New York. They had the Pope in Rome, and the Pope was an intermediary. The Jews didn’t have that a pope. I know sometimes I was told we’re related to the [inaudible], and therefore you’re related to something of a Jewish Pope. And everybody denied that there is such a thing as a Jewish Pope. How did Israel get to be the Vatican? That is what I don’t understand. It is such a fundamental I think you’re the scholar on this, I’m not, but doesn’t it kind of just on, on the surface even suggest a contradiction with the religion? Well, I don’t feel is a contradiction. I mean, if you look at the biblical prophets, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, and people like that. Their values are my values and your values. Their values are not the settlers. Their values are not for killing. I not asking you to disagree with the Prophets, what I’m asking and of course, and I have very limited education here, I’ve talked to my share of rabbis over the years, most of whom in LA and other people like [inaudible] and Rabbi Beerman and so forth, were incredibly brilliant and enlightened and wonderful people, but I thought there was a thread running through the whole Jewish experience that people study Talmud and you know, I guess you could find this in Jesuits in the Catholic Church, to try to figure out what is divine truth, so what is to be honored? And yes, you have your commandments, but they’re subject to interpretation, and there’s just something bizarre, I think, about identifying all that with a state, with a political movement. I don’t want to take our time on this, but I do want to get to the two topics that I want to discuss because I think they represent a serious concern for anybody who respects Jewish tradition, whether from a secular or religious point of view. And there are two stories I should have gotten to this much earlier. I’ll take 5-10 minutes to finish this up. One has to do with this Hannibal code that you first encountered in 2014 tell us about that and that’s the question of killing your own to prevent them from falling into hands of other people can use to harm you. And the other is torture, torture, which, again, I think, violates any conception of human rights by coming from any of our major religions. So let’s take one and then the other, and I’ll shut up so that you have the full remaining whatever time we have.

Richard Silverstein  

Thank you. The Hannibal Directive was a code that the IDF developed during one of the wars in Lebanon, in which Israeli troops were captured by Hezbollah and later the Israeli troops were captured by Hamas in Gaza. And the IDF did not want the captured troops to fall into the hands of the enemy, and the reason for that was that any Israelis who would be captured, there would have to be a prisoner exchange, and they would have to release in Israel, members of Hamas, members of Hezbollah, in exchange for the Israelis, and they did not want to release what they called terrorists back to their home countries. In Gaza, what happened in 2014 was that several Israeli soldiers were captured and being in being dragged into tunnels in Gaza and being with whisked away so that they could be used in prisoner exchanges. In order to stop it, the IDF not only fired on the Israeli soldiers, It also completely obliterated the neighborhood in Gaza where these soldiers were being taken to. It was a massive Dresden-like attack on this neighborhood, and everything in it was obliterated. So the difference now after October 7 is that Hannibal was also invoked on October 7. So when the Hamas fighters took over the kibbutz that you mentioned, an Israeli general ordered a tank to fire into a house that contained Hamas fighters and Israelis, and the tank shell destroyed the home and killed the family. Also, Hamas was taking Israeli hostages and driving back to Gaza in various vehicles and jeeps and Israeli helicopter gunships, IDF gunships, fired directly on those jeeps, knowing that there were Israelis inside and killing them because, again, they did not want Israelis to fall into the hands of Hamas. And the difference between 2014 and 10/7 is that these were is really civilians that they were firing on. So not only do you have a military code, which calls for killing your own soldiers, but you now have a code that is expanded to also killing your own civilians. And that’s, I think, what is even more profoundly upsetting, disturbing about the way in which Hannibal is being used right now. So that’s pretty much a summary of Hannibal. And I want to add that on October 9, I wrote in my blog that because hostages and Hamas were being mixed in the tunnels, and they were holding the hostages with the  Hamas fighters, that Israel would have to invoke the Hannibal directive, because it would have to kill its own hostages in order to attack the Hamas fighters. So that’s very early, when I understood that that would happen even before anybody was reporting. And by the way, the stories that I just told you about the Israeli hostages being killed in jeeps and the helicopter gunships that was reported by Israeli TV news, so you have officers of the IDF who ordered the attack or knew about the Hannibal Directive, actually telling Israelis on their own media that this is what happened. And unfortunately, in the world media, this story has been reported, but not widely known, not reported, I don’t think in New York Times, in the Washington Post, but it’s a story that really, really is important that it be told. Now, if you want to go back and talk about torture…

Robert Scheer  

Just to summarize that, so you’re saying this affects the number of casualties that occurred and so forth. You’re saying…

Richard Silverstein  

Of the 1,200 Israelis who were killed, we don’t know how many were killed by Israel. I’ve called for autopsies to be done on all of the 1,200 people, so that you’d be able to tell what killed each person, and you’d be able to tell Hamas killed such and such a percentage, and the IDF killed such and such percentage. But they for no account, do they want the public Israeli or otherwise, to know how many Israelis were killed by the IDF, but my guess is it would be in the hundreds. I don’t know what percentage it would be, but it would be a significant percentage, because you’ve got helicopter gunships firing on these vehicles, and you’ve got the tanks firing the shells. So had to be a lot of Israelis killed by the IDF. What you’re saying, then, if people want to question or challenge, so, what you’re saying is basically accepted now in the Israeli media? Even Haaretz, which you mentioned, is reporting that the Hannibal Directive was activated. And it doesn’t want to say that Israelis were killed in the Hannibal Directive, I mean, on 10/7, well, actually, I think they have reported on the news reports that I mentioned to you, so they are acknowledging and I don’t think that the right wing Israeli media, which is most of Israeli media, I don’t think that they are reporting on this very much, because it really it reflects really poorly on Israel and its reputation. If the whole world were to know what the Hannibal Directive means on the ground in Gaza.

Robert Scheer  

Okay, and subject number two, the question of enhanced interrogation, or otherwise known as torture, propping up and this, again, we’re not denying that other governments, movements, terrorist organizations, and maybe Hamas itself, I don’t know the degree to which they are accused or found guilty of torture. Maybe you could comment on that, but there are these disquieting reports of captured Palestinians, including in the West Bank, being tortured, and they do show up on Haaretz as well, and Israel IDF personnel conceding or exposing it.

Richard Silverstein  

Well, I think that Israel has been torturing Palestinians and others for quite a long time. They torture them if they suspect that they’re terrorists. They torture many just because they’re activists, political activists and Palestinian nationalists. So that has existed, but now we have it, almost on an industrial scale. We have Palestinians in Gaza who were swept up in detention raids and brought to concentration camps, really, in Israel, and there they’re tortured. There’s one video, where is the IDF soldiers who are torturing his Palestinian, raping him, essentially, tried to shield themselves from the camera. They knew there was a camera, and they tried to shield themselves so you couldn’t see what was happening. But the victim himself has described the torture. So you have the video showing the soldiers, and then you have the victim himself after he was released. These suspects that are being swept up in Gaza are not terrorists. They aren’t they aren’t armed. There’s no proof that they including the guy, that fella who was tortured. And by the way, this raping, this is a mass act that the IDF is committing just incredible brutality, and you have some of the victims, who survived, talking about detainees that actually died in custody. So this is torture on a mass scale. And some people, you know, this is controversial, but some people are comparing this to what happened to Jews during the Holocaust, the sort of level of brutality and violence on a mass scale and in the West Bank…

Robert Scheer  

We’ve got to stop right with that sentence. Okay, already, we’re violating every code of decorum, decency, logic and so forth. My God, you know this is a blood libel, right, to compare to anything that happened in the Holocaust. So defend yourself. What is the evidence?

Richard Silverstein  

Well, I want to say that in the Lancet and various other global public health experts have talked about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza, and instead of the 41,000 which are now confirmed dead. The Lancet is one of the most prominent medical journals in the world, and two experts wrote that probably the total number of Palestinians who have been killed and not just killed in combat. We’re talking about killed by disease, killed by starvation, malnutrition, and all different forms of death of Palestinians in Gaza now is 186,000 you have another global health experts who said, by the end of this year, she believes that the number could be over 350,000 so now you’re really talking about killing on the scale of the Holocaust. It’s not 6 million, of course, but it’s killing on such a massive, almost incomprehensible scale that I think you have to look at previous mass genocides in history, and not just the Holocaust, but you could talk about the Armenian Genocide, of course, you could talk about the Rwanda genocide. So I think it’s in those, it now is entering history as one of those maybe 10 or 15 worst genocides in our you know, recent, in less 100 years or so.

Robert Scheer  

And not to minimize that, but you were making a specific claim about torture, rape and so forth, and you compared that to what had happened to Jewish prisoners of the Nazis. And so what is the evidence for that?

Richard Silverstein  

Well, I don’t think that this is, this is not like, I didn’t invent this charge. I think it’s been used and leveled by many people, many experts, many scholars, many international lawyers, specialists and human human rights and even genocide scholars are now talking about Gaza being a genocide and comparing it to Nazi Germany. And so I wanted to also talk about the Nuremberg laws. I hope we’re not getting too too deep in the weeds here, but if you look at the 18 different aspects of the Nuremberg laws and then compare them to laws in Israel, there is really alarming matching of the content of the Nuremberg laws with Israel. And if you look at Meir Kahane, who I said, by the way, Kahanism now rules Israel politically. Meir Kahane was an avowed fascist. You even have someone like Adolf Eichmann saying in 1938 if he was a Jew, he would be a Zionist. These are very disturbing things to know about about history. So I think I don’t make that accusation lightly, Bob, I know how fraught the Holocaust is for Jews throughout the world, but I also know how the Holocaust is abused by Israel, by Israel saying we are the natural outcome of the Holocaust, and we will never have the kind of suffering that that happened to the Jews of Europe. But the fact of the matter is that Jews in Israel are in more danger than you or I in in the United States, and they’re in danger because they’ve fallen prey to the Kahanist ideology. So I think that it’s important that we look Israel in the face and look what it’s doing, and say the kinds of things that may be controversial about it, but say them, because the world, I think needs to know and needs to grapple with it, including Jews. I think we have to grapple with what Israel is and what it’s become. It’s done to the Palestinians, what was done two Jewish victims of the Holocaust. It’s the same suffering on the same level, my opinion.

Robert Scheer  

So back it up.

Richard Silverstein  

Well I just did in terms of the Nuremberg laws.

Robert Scheer  

No, I’m not baiting you now. I’m saying, yeah, one does not level a charge like that without the vote. I’m not asking you to back it up in the next five minutes when we finish here, but I think yes, it’s such a serious claim, it ought not to, in any way, be swept aside, but it ought not to be just used as a rhetoric. It’s very serious, and by the way, a claim that to me as being an older person. I was born in ’36 I never expected as a Jewish person, to find myself in this position. It is so unthinkable that the people that I associated with, the people swept up in the camps and killed in the camps and so forth, who I think is a group, I’m sure they not, who are not all the same and so forth, but they were probably as decent and idealistic a group of people because of their experience, because of their having been persecuted because they having trouble as probably ever existed. You know, the way I think of my mother, for example. I mean, she suffered, you know, she came over and steered, she had a brass candle thing to prevent somebody from she and her sister, prevent people from attacking him. They’ve been attacked by the Kazakhs their whole life had been threatened, and it turned them in yet, dare I say it, superior human beings, they sacrificed for others. It’s a showstopper for me to consider this that you become… There are studies that show that the victims of extreme regimes, then can become the Gestapo of a new thing. But this is exactly what I meant. Taking it back to the beginning when I talked and it wasn’t just at the time of Six Day War, I talked to Rabin and [inaudible], and something… [inaudible] was there, not at great lengths, but I would meet these people to talk to and you know what? Okay, I’ll let I’ll actually end on this by recommending that people watch “The Gatekeepers” I’ve said this before, because this really gets to the point where maybe what you’re calling kahanism took over with the deaths of Rabin. Let’s end, let’s discuss that, because up to that point, peace was a really an important option. Rabin, the old general, had embraced it. He then gets killed by a Jewish fanatic, and while he’s not a leader of that movement, he’s certainly emblematic of it. Let’s discuss that, because that is the critical juncture between Jewish idealism and what you are now alluding to is as a Jewish fascist movement.

Richard Silverstein  

Yeah, so the assassin of Rabin that happened, I think, in ’95 was Yigal Amir, and Yigal Amir was small potatoes. You know, he wasn’t a leader of anything, by the way, right now we have two ministers in the Israeli government who are followers of the movement that Yigal Amir was part of, which is this settler extremist movement willing to engage in mass violence. But Yigal Amir got the approval of rabbis to commit the assassination. And the rabbis, these are called settler rabbis, had this ceremony, this Jewish ceremony, in which they said it’s permitted for a Jew to kill another Jew, because that Jew they will kill is responsible for getting a number, a large number of Jews killed. So they were saying, in effect, Yitzhak Rabin is killing or putting Jews in danger, therefore it is permissible to murder him. And that was what spurred Yigal Amir to commit the crime that he did, and that now, that ideology rules Israel, and that’s what’s so disturbing to me as a Jew, that’s what’s so disturbing to me. And I think you as a member of a family where, I had scores of my family killed in the Holocaust as well, I am disgusted that this ideology represented by Amir, now, has taken over Israel, and what you can do now is they don’t need to assassinate prime ministers, because the Prime Minister is one of them. And now Kahanism, you really need to understand Meir Kahane and maybe read his work to understand his links to Nazism and a Jewish form of Nazism, which I would call him, and how that has captured the entire state of Israel, even though you have secular Jews, which you talked about in the beginning, who perhaps disagree, but they don’t oppose it in enough strength. They don’t have enough votes to prevent these fascist Judeo fascists, they call them, from controlling the government, controlling the funds, controlling the building of settlements, controlling and funding the army which is engaged in this genocide in Gaza. So that’s what’s so disturbing to me as a Jew, and I think probably disturbing to you as well. And that’s why I’m prepared to say that this is, I call it a genocide. But to me, the Holocaust is genocide, so I think we’re got to talk about them in the same context, even though they’re different historical context. But I think you have to do that.

Robert Scheer  

Well, that’s a career ender, isn’t it?

Richard Silverstein  

That’s why my wife, it supports us. I don’t get a lot of income out of it.

Robert Scheer  

If it’s important, that is the oldest Jewish tradition, it has to be raised, right if it’s important and but the burden is really to make the case, to be if it’s true, and to examine it. So I do want to end this, but I want to applaud your applying,I’ll get back to the fact that you actually studied this culture, this religion, and you have devoted your life to really trying to figure out what it means to be a Jew, right? And so this is the beginning, I hope, for people listening to it, of an investigation, of a study, which is what Jews should always be doing when it comes to deep moral questions. On that note, I want to thank you, Richard Silverstein, you can read his blog, Tikun Olam. And want to thank the folks at KCRW, Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian for posting these shows. KCRW, the NPR station in Santa Monica. Joshua Scheer, our overall producer, who was, by the way, bar mitzvah’d by Rabbi Beerman in a ceremony that very much moved me. I want to thank Diego Ramos for writing the intro to these podcasts. Max Jones, who does the video. I want to thank the JKW Foundation in memory of a terrific independent American writer and public intellectual who was one of the first prominent Jews, came from a very prominent Jewish family, and who, in her memory, they give us some funding for these shows and Integrity Media which supports dissent in the world of journalism and ideas for also helping. See you next week with another edition of Scheer intelligence.

Richard Silverstein  

Thank you. Bob.

 

https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/13/richard-silverstein-israel-the-far-right-extremist-state-that-i-can-no-longer-identify-with/

 

 

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