Podcast #251: Tracing the Rise of Radicalised Anti-Zionism on American Campuses

Jonathan Kay: Welcome to the Quillette podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at Quillette. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary. If you’d like to support the podcast, you can do so by going to Quillette.com and becoming a paid subscriber. This subscription will also give you access to all our articles and early access to Quillette social events.

And today, we’re going to be talking about anti-Zionism with a very special guest, Paul Berman, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Terror and Liberalism, as well as The Flight of the Intellectuals, A Tale of Two Utopias, and Power and the Idealists.

He is also the author of a widely read Liberties article, recently published by Quillette, entitled, A Stupid Cartoon and the University Ideology: Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, and the Roots of the Uproar over Zionism.

Okay, so I often cover a lot of ground in these podcasts, but this episode is particularly wide ranging, so I’m going to do my best to set the stage properly in this introduction.

A Stupid Cartoon and the University Ideology

Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, and the roots of the uproar over Zionism.

QuillettePaul Berman

And the best place to start is with that aforementioned cartoon referenced in the title to Berman’s Quillette article. That cartoon was contained in an infographic published on Instagram back in February by two student organisations at Harvard University—the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the African and African-American Resistance Organization with the support of a third organisation called Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine

The cartoon was supposed to show and acclaim the historical origins of African-American political solidarity with the Palestinian cause. But instead, it attracted accusations of antisemitism. And when I describe the cartoon, you will understand why. The image showed Blacks and Arabs being jointly oppressed by their common enemy, the Jew—specifically, a Black man and an Arab man with nooses draped around their necks. Holding the nooses and ready to give those ropes a yank was a hand bearing a Star of David tattoo encasing a dollar sign.

There were also other artistic details, such as an outstretched arm brandishing a machete, with the arm and machete labeled, “Third World Liberation Movement,” ready to slice the ropes. As Berman notes in his article, the cartoon was a “lurid melodrama of victimhood,” one that channelled some fairly obvious antisemitic imagery.

I will spare you the denouement of this Harvard scandal, which featured some half-hearted apologies from the groups that had posted this offensive image on Instagram. What’s of more interest to Berman is the source of this idea that Jews—or Zionists, if you prefer—are not only persecuting Palestinian Arabs, but also black people, in America and everywhere else.

Why, exactly, are the interests of these two groups interconnected, except by generalised rhetorical flourishes of the type associated with the so-called Third World Liberation Movement? As we will see, Berman answers that question by discussing three main figures, including Frantz Fanon, the French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist whose famous books, including Black Skin, White Masks, followed a decade later by Wretched of the Earth, became central to the emergence of the anticolonial and pan-African movements.

Berman also discusses famed French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work greatly influenced Fanon’s thinking, and who wrote an infamously inflammatory introduction to Wretched of the Earth. Most importantly, Berman discusses Stokely Carmichael, a key leader in the growth of the Black Power movement in the 1960s, as well as a chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, sometimes called SNCC.

This is a subject Berman knows well, as he himself was once, by his own description, a student radical and protester with SNCC during his college years at Columbia University. As Berman relates, it was Carmichael who turned SNCC into an ardently anti-Zionist organisation, and who once infamously said, “the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist”—words that have an unsettling echo to some of the rhetoric we’ve heard on US college campuses over the last year.

Paul Berman spoke to me last week from his home in New York City. Here’s a recording of our interview.

Paul, thank you so much for joining the Quillette podcast. There’s a line in your article that really jumps out at me, where you talk about anti-Zionism as “the supreme moral prestige of the moment.” Could you explain what you mean by that phrase?

Paul Berman: The people who claim an anti-Zionist position claim it with an astonishing and dismaying degree of self-assurance, and the absurdity or meretricious quality of anybody who argues against it.

Jonathan Kay: You emphasise that this isn’t an ordinary anti-colonialist movement. It’s presented as the defining anti-colonialist movement. And there’s almost a certain apocalyptic quality to it… that somehow, if we win this struggle, then all anti-colonial struggles will be won. There’s something overarching, almost messianic about it.

Paul Berman: It is absolutely different in kind. It claims to be the supreme anti-colonialist argument, which is already a very strange argument to make. Zionism is not colonialism. So we’re dealing with an error, which is transformed into a supreme error, as you say, because the anti-Zionist position is regarded as the key to all of the sufferings around the world. So this is very bizarre.  

Jonathan Kay: The idea that Israel, at least in part, has a colonial character… I guess I’m not quite as comfortable as you just dismissing it out of hand. I consider myself something of a Zionist… certainly my ideological enemies have used that term to describe me. But I’ve been to Israel many times. And when you’re in the West Bank and you’re in a wealthy settlement, which is surrounded by Palestinian farming villages… you can see how that claim sticks. Rashid Khalidi, who’s a professor at Columbia, he once wrote a book called The Iron Cage, which gave the Palestinian perspective. I mean, it certainly didn’t convince me that Israel is this super-evil colonial state, but he talked about how you had a land that was basically a lot of farms run by, I guess you’d call them Palestinian peasants. Often you had Ottoman absentee landlords. And then in the space of a few years, you had a lot of Ashkenazi Jews who arrived. They didn’t necessarily steal the land; they purchased the land. But is it fair to say that from the point of view of a local Palestinian farmer in the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, it isn’t completely unfair to say this might appear to be a colonial enterprise?

Paul Berman: I can certainly see that from the standpoint of an ordinary Palestinian. You’re living there and suddenly…

Jonathan Kay: …your world changes and people who speak languages you don’t understand…

Paul Berman: So, that response is completely understandable from the point of view of a peasant. But from another point of view, this was the ancient Jewish state.

So we’re [talking about] the West Bank. Let’s go to everyone’s favourite catastrophic-looking area, which is the town of Hebron. So Hebron is, by all accounts, an absolutely grotesque scene. Jewish settlements in the centre of it, protected by the IDF. But really, to understand this scene, you have to know something of the history of Hebron.

So in 1834, the Jews of Hebron were massacred by the Egyptians. You know, I came across a marvellous book by a French writer, a 19^th-century writer, who went on a sort of pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the 1890s, and wrote a book about it. I found this book at a second-hand bookstore in Paris. There’s a fantastic description of Hebron. In the 1890s, there were Jews there. There were a lot of Jews who were persecuted, who were the persecuted victim group, and they were persecuted by people who [the writer] described as fanatical Muslims… They were also persecuting the Christians, who were his concern chiefly.

And then, of course, in 1921, another massacre of Jews in Hebron. So after the 1967 [Six-Day] War, when Israel conquered and occupied Hebron along with everything else [in the West Bank], Jews returned. Now they were “fanatical” Jews. Now the fanatics were the Jews, but they returned, and discovered that they were surrounded by an extremely hostile town.

And so [we get to] this ugly scene of the fanatical Jewish settlers protected by the IDF. But this is not a new phenomenon. It’s not a “colonialist” phenomenon. It’s an ancient phenomenon.

Jonathan Kay: It’s a cyclical phenomenon.

Paul Berman: So everyone who says, “Oh, this is an example of colonialism,” or “this is an example of apartheid.” Everyone who [says] that is ignoring the actual history.

It’s a lamentable scene. I mean, it’s not something that one wants to see persist forever. But to call it a “colonialist” scene is mistaken and unhelpful. And it’s just a way of saying that these different populations can be arranged according to the good people and the bad people. One population is good. The other is bad. One population should be eliminated. The other population should triumph. That’s just a horrible view.

Jonathan Kay: You have another great line—well, you admit that you didn’t make this phrase up—Manicheaen delirium. Ironically, it’s attributed to Frantz Fanon, who doesn’t come in for sympathetic treatment otherwise in your article. But this idea that this delirium takes over when you perceive or want to perceive a geopolitical conflict, or any conflict, in strictly Manichaean terms of good versus evil.

And one of the rhetorical advantages of Manichaeism in denouncing colonialism is that you have in mind a good side and a bad side—a sort of Edenic indigenous society, on one hand, which is invaded by outsiders, typically Europeans who come in and destroy everything. And as you say, that paradigm doesn’t really fit Israel, where for thousands of years, there’s been not just Jews and Arabs, but Phoenicians and Hittites and Persians and dozens of other empires.

However, a lot of the ideas in progressive thought attacking Zionism crystallised in the aftermath of France’s war in Algeria, which really was a colonial enterprise. As you also say, until 1967, even in the 1967 war, I think Sartre himself was on Israel’s side, albeit begrudgingly.

Paul Berman: The first point you raised had to do with Fanon. And you said that otherwise I give him a hard time. And I do, but my view on Fanon is actually quite mixed. There are aspects of Fanon that I admire, and there’s something about him that seems to me attractive.

Jonathan Kay: Am I correct that you found him more attractive based on his first book that you discuss, as opposed to the second book?

Paul Berman: Yes. When he wrote the second book, he’d fallen into a Manicheaen delirium himself. By the way, in my essay, I mentioned that I read this book in a class with Edward Said.

Jonathan Kay: And that’s the one with the infamous introduction by Sartre.

Paul Berman: I kept it because I said to myself all along, “I’m going to have to go back and look at this book again.”

Jonathan Kay: As indeed you did!

Paul Berman: His first book is calmer, but also in the first book, he spends a significant amount of time discussing the Jews. And his discussion of the Jews does not touch on Israel or Zionism, but touches on the Jews whom he was seeing, I’m sure, in Algeria, and whom he’d seen in France.

Jonathan Kay: And he’s sympathetic…

Paul Berman: …And he was very sympathetic [to the Jews]. He was authentically, angrily hostile to antisemitism. And he could see the psychological problems of the Jews, and the chief psychological problem was the Jewish tendency to side with the antisemites, which is something, by the way, we’re seeing right now. And he had a term from the psychotherapeutic or psychiatric literature to discuss that, too…

Jonathan Kay: Like a Stockholm Syndrome type thing?

Paul Berman: Yes, sort of.

Jonathan Kay: I’m sure it sounds better in French. These things usually do.

Paul Berman: Or the German… Zionism and Israel do come up, I think, in The Wretched of the Earth, just in passing, very briefly. It’s not his topic, but the implication is that he’s still sympathetic. What was Israel? He understood that Israel was a refugee society, that Jews, insofar as they weren’t living there already, the mass of the Jewish population had arrived as refugees.

He says that the Jews arrived there because they were forced to leave the countries in which they had previously lived. So this is a very sympathetic view. I think it’s striking that Fanon had a sympathetic view of this. I’m sorry he didn’t write about it more.

Jonathan Kay: There’s this historical what if at play. Had he not died—I think he died at age 36—had he survived and taken real moral leadership of the avant-garde left, would things have gone in a different direction in regard to this hostility toward Israel?

Paul Berman: So you mentioned Sartre, who was pretty thoroughly hostile to Zionism and to Israel, yet, who in 1967… So, the 1967 war broke out, it was a frightening moment, and Sartre knew that it was incumbent on him to take some kind of position. And with a lot of difficulty, he had to be pushed. There’s a description of him getting pushed by his friend Claude Lanzmann, the filmmaker who eventually made the extraordinary nine-hour movie, Shoah, about the Holocaust.

This is really at the heart of Sartre’s philosophy. Sartre himself didn’t live up to his philosophy very well, but the philosophy itself is clear in favour of honesty, of being ruthless with oneself about one’s feelings and thoughts.

So Fanon died in 1961, the same year that Wretched of the Earth came out. If he lived until 1967, you know, he would have been a man in his early forties. What position would he have taken [on the Six-Day War]? Now he was living in Algeria and the pressure on him to side with the Arabs against the Israelis would have been… the word immense is insufficient. It would have been total. And if he had taken a position at all sympathetic to Israel, it would have been catastrophic for his life circumstances.

Jonathan Kay: He would have gotten cancelled. He would have been a victim of cancel culture [laughs]…

Paul Berman: Cancel culture in the extreme. On the other hand, he was serious in his Sartrianism, and the fact that Sartre took this position would certainly have been a cause for serious thought on Fanon’s part.

And there were a lot of things to give thought to, and one of them has to do with this great Sartrian theme, which Fanon writes about, which is bad faith…

Jonathan Kay: …when you know what the truth is, but the truth displeases you, so you act in an intellectual manner as if that truth didn’t exist…

Paul Berman: Yes, but a little more: You act as if the truth doesn’t exist, and yet you know in some part of you that it does exist. So you lie about the truth. But you also lie to yourself.

Jonathan Kay: It’s a state of cognitive dissonance.

Paul Berman: And we have to remember that Fanon’s chief concern was his worry about his fellow blacks. He was from Martinique in the French Antilles, but he had a concern for the black position internationally, worldwide, [including in] Africa, especially West Africa.

He had a concern in some degree for the blacks of America, and a concern for the blacks of France. And now the turn toward anti-Zionism, and the belief that Israel is the worst of all things, has a very peculiar meaning or resonance from the kind of black position that I can imagine Fanon would have taken.

I mean, why believe that Israel and Zionism are the worst of all things—the racism of racisms? If you were black, there are many other things to worry about.

Jonathan Kay: Just in the last year or so, if your primary concern was the welfare of black people, your eyes would be on Sudan…

Paul Berman: Yes, the welfare of black people being persecuted and murdered by Arabs. So if your prime concern actually is the horrors within the larger Arab world, that’s in Sudan. And the attacks on the Masalit people by marauding militias, that is the principal horror of our moment.

Jonathan Kay: Sometimes conservatives talk about this stuff as identity politics, but in a way it kind of erases identity. I mean, Fanon talked about a “transnational” black consciousness, and even in the modern rhetoric, there is this idea of, well, the black struggle is the queer struggle, which is also the anti-Zionist struggle. Like, everything is collapsed into one single struggle against oppression. In a way, it actually denudes individual groups and tribes and even whole nations of their identity, because [you’re looking] through this cosmic lens where everything is reduced to oppressor and oppressed. You’re almost willfully ignoring the actual local history.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that the actual history of places like Hebron and Gaza are ignored—because those aren’t really material [to this philosophy]. It’s a distraction from this all-encompassing struggle against oppression.

Paul Berman: I agree with the gist of what you say. My view is: identity politics is a drag. But it’s not totally a drag. There’s something about identity politics which is true and correct. Separate groups of people do have problems of their own. And do have reasons to examine their own problems and present those problems to the world. And they should. But what you’re describing is a kind of intersectionalism gone mad, which blends all oppressions.

And then, of course, the single oppressor turns out to be… we’ll get to it. Fanon is mixed on this. He’s not completely a coherent thinker, which is okay. You know, he’s a cross between a philosopher and a journalist. So, like a journalist, he’s writing things quickly, but he thinks philosophically about his journalistic themes.

Fanon raises the question of black consciousness, which is his ultimate concern. And he notes all the impediments that stand in the way of a black consciousness. And the principal impediment is other people who are not black, imposing their own ideas. So I think, to go back to 1967, when he was already gone, and Sartre, from that perspective… Fanon might have had additional reason to question the hostility to Israel and to have seen that the Arab and Muslim argument against the existence of a Jewish state was really something that didn’t bear on the actual problems of black people and of black Africans.

Jonathan Kay: Well, kind of the opposite. Like in the last couple of decades, there’s been a migration of impoverished Ethiopian Jews, [to whom] Israel became a haven.

Paul Berman: Yes, in the 1980s, the Ethiopian Jews fled en masse to Israel and now constitute maybe two percent of Israeli society…

Jonathan Kay: Their presence, I think it’s fair to say, presents a kind of puzzle for intersectional analysis… especially given that many of their children and grandchildren are in the army and some are serving in Gaza.

Paul Berman: It’s not just the Ethiopian Jews. I mean, the Jewish population of Israel as a whole is 50 percent, or more than 50 percent, third world. Sephardic, Mizrahim, you know, there are different terms. And some from Central Asia. A lot of different Jewish populations. They constitute half or a little more than half of the Jewish population of Israel. So Israel ought to be considered 50 percent a third world country.

Jonathan Kay: I don’t think we’re allowed to say “third world” anymore. I think the term is “racialised.”

Paul Berman: Okay, racialised. This is another reason why the notion that Israel is a settler colonialist state really doesn’t make sense. And when you go to Israel, you know, I invite anybody who’s listening to us talk… the next time you’re in Israel, ask the first 10 Jews you meet, beginning with the taxi driver, “where did they come from?” And you’ll hear every possible answer.

Jonathan Kay: …Including a lot of Arab countries. I mean, Baghdad used to be a third Jewish, right? A lot of those families, they had their own “Nakba,” so to speak, and a lot of them ended up in Israel.

Paul Berman: So people say Israel should be eliminated and the Jews, if they survive, should go back to wherever their grandparents came from. So presumably, these people are saying the Jews should go back to Baghdad. They could reclaim their property…

Jonathan Kay: You see this thing where Palestinians in refugee camps or whatnot will wear a key around their neck, which purports to be the key to the house that—in many cases, it’s true—they were dispossessed from. But you don’t see that among Jews in Israel who are kicked out of Tripoli, or kicked out of Baghdad, or kicked out of Damascus, because they know that the arrow of history moves forward, and they know they’re not going to go and kick some family out of their house in Baghdad.

Paul Berman: Palestinians retaining a key to the house… that is actually also a Jewish thing. The Spanish Jews who fled Spain after 1492 sometimes kept their keys. And then there’s a way in which Judaism as a whole is a keeping of a key…

Jonathan Kay: It’s explicitly embedded in the Passover Seder. Why are we doing this? We’re doing this to remember…

Paul Berman: Right. So the memory of where your ancestors lived is not at all a contemptible thing. It’s a profound thing.

Jonathan Kay: But it’s sentimental to imagine it as a basis for a realistic kind of geopolitical vision for the future.

Paul Berman: Yes.

Jonathan Kay: I mean, this goes to the apocalyptic themes that you identify, where it is imagined that anti-Zionism is a kind of microcosm of this larger movement to return the world to its morally more pure state that existed before Europeans contaminated the earth with their presence. A fantasy of reversion, a fantasy of cleansing, a fantasy that violence will serve to purify the world of these evils… And who doesn’t want to imagine that people will be returned to their grandmothers’ houses? It is superficially a nice vision.

Paul Berman: Yes, but then you have to remember that all over the world, all populations have gone through these catastrophic events. If we reflect that the English are the most terrible settler colonial imperialists of all, who’ve done the most to take away ancestral lands from indigenous peoples, we should ask ourselves, who are the English?

Jonathan Kay: It’s a bunch of Germans [laughing].

Paul Berman: Who are the English? I mean, the English are Celts who were conquered by Italians, who were conquered by Germans, who were conquered by Norse, who themselves were Russians who conquered Scandinavia.

Jonathan Kay: This is important because one of the favoured rebukes in social-justice circles is, “Well, what do you know? You know, your ancestors were never colonised.” But if you came from England, you might’ve been colonised during the Anglo Saxon and the Jute migrations. Then again by the Normans. If you live in Northeast England, it would have also been the Vikings. Oh, and the Romans. That’s the history of the world.

Paul Berman: The Arabs in Palestine, by the way… where do they come from? We know where they came from. They came from Arabia. And we know when they came, which is the 7th century. Which, from a certain point of view, is not that long ago. Everybody’s history is the same. The whole purpose of the modern democratic revolution is to bring that sort of thing to an end and to say, no one should be thrown out of their land. So how do we bring it to an end in Israel and Palestine? With a two-state solution, obviously. And that’s the goal. But the protesters we’re seeing now aren’t calling for a two-state solution.

Jonathan Kay: My role as a podcast host here is to clean up the mess I’ve been making by jumping around. And in particular, I need to stitch together… the protests at Harvard and elsewhere in 2023 and 2024 with Fanon. And the person who acts as that bridge in your article is Stokely Carmichael.

Carmichael seems to be a kind of intellectual linchpin joining together some of the transnational black consciousness stuff that Fanon was talking about… with an explicitly anti-Zionist agenda, and with the conceit that by opposing Zionism, you’re also advancing every other liberation struggle in the world… including, and perhaps especially, the revolutionary struggle in favour of the liberation of blacks. Could you talk a little bit about Stokely Carmichael? Maybe starting with his youth, because, as you know, he knew tons of Jews when he was in the Bronx.

Paul Berman: Yes. I mean, Stokely Carmichael, to me, is a tragic figure. He was a charismatic man and a man capable of great insights who managed to follow a trajectory of intellectual collapse. We’re to speak about the greatness of the political left, but also the moral collapse of the political left, which I think we’re seeing right now. Stokely Carmichael is an emblematic figure of that.

So Stokely Carmichael was a West Indian whose family came to the Bronx in New York. He attended the Bronx High School of Science, one of the elite schools in New York City, where a great many of the students in his period in the 60s were Jewish and he had many Jewish friends. And then he became active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the SNCC, which was the student wing of the American civil rights movement.

And SNCC was an absolutely glorious movement, which sent its members… its members were the foot soldiers, in many cases, of the larger civil rights movement. The founder of SNCC and its first leader was the great John Lewis, who went on to a brilliant career as a congressman.

Carmichael took over the organisation and expelled the whites, which tended to mean the Jews. And he sent SNCC into a new course, which was anti-Zionist. And the anti-Zionism was insane. It was anti Zionism completely compatible with the worst kind of right-wing lunacies about the Jews.

Jonathan Kay: Which, spoiler alert, that’s how we get to this cartoon that’s at the centre of your article: Jews as the puppet master and the deadly oppressor, literally lynching Arab people and black people together with the same rope.

Paul Berman: Yes, and so Stokely Carmichael managed to be in charge of that and his greatest slogan was “black power.” But his second most famous slogan was “the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.”

Which is not remembered by a lot of people, except by the people who were threatened with death, who do tend to remember that sort of thing. And in this way, he led a real degeneration on the part of a large segment of the American left. Fortunately for us Americans, he left the United States and went on to a new career in a couple of countries in West Africa.

Jonathan Kay: There’s this unsettling echo… You mentioned that at one point, when Colombia was still essentially being held hostage by these protesters who had taken over their campus, you had the university negotiating with some protester who I think said something to the effect of, “You’re lucky I don’t go out and kill all the Zionists.” Directly echoing this horrible thing that Stokely Carmichael said, right?

Paul Berman: From my standpoint, Stokely Carmichael had two phases in his career, and the first phase was magnificent. And the second phase was completely deplorable. And the misfortune is that the early career, which was magnificent, it gave him a glory and a reputation that has served to perpetuate the dreadful ideas that he came up with a little later on. We see the antisemitism cropping up all the time. That’s his legacy.

Jonathan Kay: When we talk about Martin Heidegger, we talk a lot about his later apologism for the Nazis and then maybe dwell too little on his contributions to mainstream philosophy… Or you talk about Mel Gibson. I guess I’m going downmarket here with my references, but most references to Mel Gibson are like his crazy, weird, Catholic, quasi-antisemitic latter years, as opposed to the Lethal Weapon movies, which were pretty good. But with this guy, with Carmichael, it’s the opposite, where I guess in some circles he’s still lionised… Or do some people explicitly… That is, do mainstream progressives, do some of them explicitly endorse his latter hyper-militant stances against Zionism? You don’t have to comment on the Lethal Weapon movies, which I’m presuming an esteemed intellectual like you has never seen…

Paul Berman: [Pauses] I won’t confess to not having seen them, because if I do, you’ll accuse me of being a snob.

Jonathan Kay: Please go on about Heidegger…

Paul Berman: So I don’t know that there’s a good Heidegger versus a bad Heidegger. In my eyes, the bad Heidegger reflects on the good Heidegger and the bad Heidegger is already buried within the good Heidegger. And in fact, Heidegger’s notebooks are just shocking… with references to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion…

Jonathan Kay: Really? I did not know that. That’s new information.

Paul Berman: So Mel Gibson—the antisemitism of someone like Mel Gibson is something that I don’t care about. Not because I’m a snob, but because he’s not a political leader. He’s just an actor. And if he screws up his acting career by getting involved in all kinds of other stupidities, that’s just unfortunate…

Jonathan Kay: So it’s like listening to Wagner’s opera.

Paul Berman: I love your analogies.

Jonathan Kay: Sorry. I’m jumping around a little. But, you know, Wagner recently was [set to be] performed in Israel because they were like, “Hey, the guy was an antisemite, but he wrote great music.”

Paul Berman: Yes, although there’s more to be said about Wagner, too. So, you’ve got so many balls in the air now…

Jonathan Kay: Okay, so before I lapsed into non sequiturs, there was the good Stokely and the terrible, evil Stokely. My question was: Are his hyper-militant and very unsettling and sometimes morbid rhetoric about Israel—and perhaps indirectly Jews ... is he still somebody in progressive circles who you can name drop?

Paul Berman: They invoke the bad Stokely Carmichael in the belief that the bad Stokely Carmichael is the good Stokely Carmichael. And that’s what we saw at Harvard when the Harvard students, endorsed by their professors, published their antisemitic cartoon.

Jonathan Kay: But then they apologised for it. But they apologised in the passive voice… It was like, “We regret if anyone suffered negative feelings because of the publication of such and such…” There was a quasi climbdown from that, no?

Paul Berman: Quasi isn’t the word. A pseudo climbdown is the word. You see the same pseudo climbdown in the arguments of various anti-Zionists who will say, “Well, it’s not that we want to harm the Jews, it’s that we just don’t want to have a Jewish state per se, because why should there be a Jewish state, and we’ll have a single state…”

And all this is what makes me think that Fanon was right to put some emphasis on Sartre’s concept of bad faith. So this is the bad faith where you say, “I’m not against the Jews. I’m against antisemitism. The reason I want to make 50 percent of the world’s Jewish population stateless is because I like the Jews and the Jews will be fine.”

Jonathan Kay: Their state discredits them!

Paul Berman: Yes. If they didn’t have a state and they weren’t able to defend themselves, they wouldn’t have to defend themselves. And so the reason I’m an anti-Zionist is because I’m a benign and kindly person who wishes only well for the Jews. So this is Sartrean bad faith. This is someone who, so I’m mimicking, someone who says something that isn’t true and this person knows it isn’t true and tells himself that it is true. It’s bad faith. And to have to argue against this kind of thing is insulting. It’s like having to argue against people who defend Robert E. Lee statues: Oh, I’m not a racist. I’m not a Confederate. I’m for honour. I’m for Southern heritage. And they don’t want to say which southern heritage in particular are you for? They won’t say, and so it’s bad faith. What we’re seeing right now is just a tide, a sea tide, a sludge of bad faith in regard to Israel and Zionism and the Jews. And we see this, of course, in regard to the appalling slogans—from the river to the sea and globalise the intifada.

From the river to the sea means let’s take half the Jewish population of the world and render it stateless. And a global intifada means let’s have random massacres of the Jews all over the world. And of course, if you say this, people, they’ll say, Oh, that isn’t what we mean at all. We mean only kindly things and things worthy of Mahatma Gandhi, even when obviously they’re murderous antisemites.

Jonathan Kay: Yeah, I’m conflicted about that because my experience on a university campus as a journalist, and as a student… When people say things like “from the river to the sea,” 80 percent of the people saying it have no idea what sea and what river… they’re just saying it because it’s something they saw on social media.

Paul Berman: Yes, I agree with that. So that’s a defence. The defence is stupidity…

Jonathan Kay: Well, ignorance. I mean, if you’re at Harvard or Columbia, then you’re probably not stupid.

Paul Berman: No, and I understand this completely. I mean, I was a student leftist.

Jonathan Kay: You were starstruck! You talk about being in Edward Said’s class and being quite starstruck by all this stuff.

Paul Berman: There was something called Students for a Democratic Society, and I was a militant of SDS. And my friends and I chanted all kinds of slogans. I myself chanted slogans that I was not in favour of.

Jonathan Kay: You can’t just leave us hanging. Like, for instance, what did you chant?

Paul Berman: We were participating in Vietnam anti-war marches, and my faction would sooner or later break out into a slogan of Ho ho ho Chi Minh. The NLF is going to win. The NLF were the National Liberation Front, who were ultimately the communists. So this was a call for communist victory.

Jonathan Kay: And did you believe…

Paul Berman: I didn’t. I didn’t think that communism was good. I was not for communism. I was for the United States getting out of Vietnam and letting the Vietnamese settle their own problems. I thought the United States was just only doing harm, but I ended up chanting these slogans. So yes, some people actually meant the slogan, but even some of the ones who actually meant the slogans didn’t actually mean it because they didn’t necessarily go on to… Well, some of them went on to a career as communist militants, but most of them did not. It was just a wild slogan and it was an exciting slogan to chant because it had a faintly, you know, treasonous ring to it.

Ultra radicalism has an appeal, and the appeal is that it is transgressive. So the appeal of chanting that was that we were chanting the most horrible thing you could say in the face of the foreign policy at that moment of the United States.

So today, the students who chant From the river to the sea or globalise the intifada are also chanting the most horrible things that you could say. The actual meaning is: worldwide attacks on the Jews. If they didn’t know [what it meant], they wouldn’t find the chants exciting. If you want to chant “human rights for Palestinians,” chant it.

Jonathan Kay: So let’s get back to this Manicheaen delirium. You talk about how being a radical means never backing down. It means never admitting you’re wrong. It means always assuming the most extreme position. Saying things like, Can’t we all get along? Let’s have a compromise that gives each side 50 percent of what they’re asking for… that’s not compatible with a radical posture. I was once a teenager. I was once on campus. You want to assume a radical posture. It’s fun! You get women! It’s part of being that age and being excited about politics and thinking you have all the answers, and that society is screwed up and we need to throw everything out.

[That’s why you] sometimes see white people donning headscarves and keffiyehs and cultural artefacts which plainly are at variance with everything else they’re supposed to believe, like feminism and gay rights. And they’re pledging allegiance to societies where gay people are killed and women are treated as chattel. But that cognitive dissonance is just overwhelmed by this desire to assume a romantic, totalising [solidarity] with the group you’ve decided is the world’s most oppressed minority. And that’s like an immature emotional spasm. I mean, I know it’s horrible for Jews on campus hearing this crap, but I guess my jaded [belief] is: give these people six months, they’ll latch onto something else.

Paul Berman: Your idea of young men joining radical movements in order to get women…

Jonathan Kay: That doesn’t change.

Paul Berman: I remind you that that’s some of the greatest passages in Sartre’s discussion of radicalism… the things that men say to women in order to seduce them, where they say all kinds of things that they know aren’t true, but they say them and they tell themselves that they mean them, and it’s bad faith. So it’s all connected.

So radicalism has a virtue sometimes, and it has a drawback or a flaw. So we go back to SNCC in the 1960s. SNCC was a great thing. It was a radical student movement in the sense that people had identified a terrible social wrong, which was American racism, and were going out to challenge it and do so boldly and at tremendous risk to themselves.

But the first phase of SNCC was able to maintain the balance between the excitement of radicalism and also retaining your sense of judgment and your intelligence. And SNCC in its second phase, where it veered into anti-Zionism and antisemitism, lost that. What you need in any movement, in any radical movement of the left, is an ability to retain the fiery passion in regard to what is actually true, with a sense of judgment and an ability to analyse things as they are.

And to avoid lying… to other people and avoid lying to yourself. And this current wave of protests has just failed abysmally to do that. So if someone says that, Oh no, the students are just getting carried away, but it shouldn’t be taken seriously… It’s just not the case. They’ve just fallen into an old pattern, which in this case is an exceptionally ugly pattern.

Jonathan Kay: By the way, you’re just reminding me why I’ve never been comfortable at protests—even protests in favour of things I believe in, because within an hour, as the slogans become more militant, I’m just like, What am I doing here? I just collapse into a state of self-awareness, where everything that I don’t believe and seems overdramatic and maudlin and performative just starts to irk me. And I don’t want to be involved. And I get hungry. You really have to inhabit this rhetoric to get swept up in it.

But it’s interesting that it happened to you. I mean, if it happened to you, it can happen to anybody.

Paul Berman: But I don’t come away saying that the student movements of 50 and 60 years ago were on balance terrible things. I think they were mixed things and that a lot of what the student radicals of that era did was great, and then the movement lost its sense of balance.

Jonathan Kay: Will that be history’s judgment? I think I know your answer. Well, what you just said, will that be history’s judgment in regard to the militantly anti-Israel protests that erupted on western campuses in late 2023 and early 2024?

Paul Berman: No. History’s judgment will be different. History’s judgment will be that those movements were demagogic and dangerous from the start.

The very first impulses of those movements was to be pro-Hamas. This is a current wave of protests that has been a moral disaster from the start. A disaster for the Jews is a disaster for the Palestinians. But it’s not a disaster for the privileged students who are engaged in it. But it’s certainly a disaster for anyone who would like to see a healthy and intelligent political left.

Jonathan Kay: By the way, there was a little nugget here in your article, which, before you leave, I want to ask you about. The Hamas charter is a bizarre and highly offensive document for all sorts of reasons. This is their founding charter. They cite the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as if it were a legitimate historical document instead of an antisemitic farce created by czarist agents in the late 19th century.

But is it true that the Hamas charter actually endorses slavery? That seems off message with the 1619 Project and everything we’ve heard about for the last 200 years or so.

Paul Berman: I don’t have the charter in front of me. But yes, the Hamas charter is in favour of slavery—because Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, it’s an Islamist organisation.

It adheres to Islamist ideology—a certain interpretation of Islamic fundamentalism. So, it looks back with uncritical, totally admiring eyes on the centuries of the Islamic Caliphate that was founded by the Prophet Muhammad. And of course, the Islamic Caliphate in those centuries conformed to the ideas and practices of that era, which included slavery. And the Arab slave raids against black Africa got underway after a while, and that was part of the golden age of the Islamic empire, so the Islamists look back on that…

Jonathan Kay: So the Islamist utopia that Hamas wants to construct in Gaza will have slave markets and stuff? Or I guess they haven’t thought that through maybe…

Paul Berman: Well, they don’t spell out slave markets, but yes, it would incorporate slavery, just like it would incorporate corporal punishment.

Jonathan Kay: To me, that seems like a deal breaker for progressives. It’s so weird that this is a movement that they’re going to bat for.

Paul Berman: Hamas is the most reactionary movement conceivable. I mean, the Islamic State is the same thing. It’s just insane that we have a lot of people running around right now in favour of it, and have found many arguments that they persuade themselves are sophisticated for explaining why Hamas is actually a progressive movement. We are right now at an extremely low moment…

Jonathan Kay: It’s like the last movie in the Lethal Weapon series, right? You know…

Paul Berman: You’re trying to humiliate me! But I’ve never seen this movie. Not one of them… barely know who the guy [Mel Gibson] is…

Jonathan Kay: Esteemed intellectual Paul Berman is the author of the recently published Quillette article, A Stupid Cartoon and the University Ideology, originally published in the summer issue of Liberties magazine. Thank you so much for being on the Quillette podcast.