Deprogramming Hasbara¹ with Jonathan Kadmon

Macro N Cheese

Deprogramming Hasbara with Jonathan Kadmon

(https://realprogressives.substack.com/p/deprogramming-hasbara-with-jonathan)

Jonathan talks to Steve about genocide in Gaza, and his background as a college student trained by AIPAC, who realized the weight of the evidence no longer allowed him to support Zionism.

Real Progressives

Aug 10, 2024

“I was still a true believer, but doubts were starting to creep in at a certain point when you saw a large segment of our coalition cheering the brutal death of Rachel Corrie under a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer. And then, you know, a month later, cheering for the death of Tom Hurndall who was killed protecting a Palestinian child from Israeli snipers and was shot in the head by an expert marksman looking through a scope.” 

Jonathan Kadmon is on the leadership team of Real Progressives and writes for the website. He also helps put out this podcast. Today, however, he is talking to Steve about his vast knowledge of Zionism, Palestine, and US support for Israel.  

Jonathan was raised in a Republican household and became a passionate supporter of Israel during his college years, when he was given training and taken on trips by powerful players in the Israel lobby. After growing up a Jew in the South, he now became part of a powerful community and embraced it with pride.  

He talks of his experiences and describes his increasing discomfort as discrepancies between fact and propaganda became too great to ignore. 

Steve, a vocal critic of the administration’s role in the current genocide in Gaza, is regularly attacked for his views. Jonathan, having studied in Israel and been trained by AIPAC, says:  

“That stuff bounces off me like I was wearing body armor… I’m like, oh yeah, you’re going to tell me I’m a self-hating Jew? Are you kidding me? My resume and my credentials here probably outstrip anything you have. And the fact of the matter is, I do this because I am a Jew and I’m proud of being a Jew. And I’m proud of my history and my heritage. I learned the lessons of my history and my heritage.” 

The discussion goes into historical and political manipulation by Zionist organizations to blur the lines between Jewish identity and support for Israel, the erasure of Palestinian history, and the media and political complicity in perpetuating the Zionist narrative. 

The episode includes profound insights into Holocaust education, which is intentionally designed to emphasize the trauma and neglect the political economy.  

Jonathan Kadmon is on the leadership team at Real Progressives, where he is a writer and a co-host of the weekly discussion group, Macro ‘n Chill. 

FULL TRANSCRIPT

 

[00:00:42] Steve Grumbine: All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro and Cheese. I am going in-house for this discussion today. As many of you all know, I have had a laser focus on the genocide in Gaza, for quite a while now. I mean, months and months and months has been almost the most important singular topic that has been on my mind.

And in talking about it internally at our organization, Real Progressives, and most of us are just absolutely devastated. The day in day out deluge of not only videos, but just hearing the personal stories of people, regular people, civilians, suffering from the bombs that are being dropped all over as they are forced to move from one place to the next place and simultaneously bombed when they get to the next safe zone. It has really had a horrific impact on me. Just absolutely devastating.

And so I started asking some questions. And one of them was, how in the world do we have a Congress inviting Bibi Netanyahu to come speak to them when the world has weighed in and calls him a criminal; a war criminal? And then I ask myself, how in the world are they giving this man a standing ovation when we know, at a minimum, 15, 000 children, minimum folks, I’m sure this is way under, but a minimum of 15, 000 children slaughtered. Dismembered. Just sniped. Blown up. Torn to shreds.

These thoughts ring through my head at night when I try to sleep. Through all the activism that I do during the day. In every interaction I have with my friends. With the people that follow us at Real Progressives and the people that follow my individual work when I’ve gone on with [podcast] Status Coup, etc. And, internally, I had a resource, a good friend, and a member of the Real Progressives leadership team, Jonathan Kadmon. 

And Jonathan is going to be joining us today because Jonathan has an incredibly important story to tell. Starting from when he was a young man being trained in a Zionist world; in his time that he went to Israel to be trained to be part of [American – Israel Public Affairs Committee] AIPAC; what his life has been like and what he discovered. it’s incredibly powerful. I’m looking forward to hearing it in more detail as we do this interview. And so without further ado, let me bring on my guest and friend, jonathan Kadmon. Welcome to the show, sir.

[00:03:27] Jonathan Kadmon: Thank you, Steve. It’s good to be working on this side of the podcast for a change.

This podcast is what drew me to this organization in the first place. So . . .

[00:03:35] Steve Grumbine: Well, we’re certainly moving out of just a pure MMT framework because understanding MMT is really powerful. But without understanding the geopolitical nature of the world around us and the influences that control our government. And the reason why we never seem to get anywhere with any of the things we push for; not just in our own organization, but as people.

Like, there are no victories because there’s always someone there with more connections. The world itself doesn’t hear anything that we’re saying. It is bought and paid for, quite frankly, by well networked groups that have deep pockets. And you, sir, have been a part of that world. I am very, very interested in hearing your story.

So I don’t know where to kick it off. I’m going to have to let you take your shot. But why don’t you tell us your story of how you got involved in AIPAC. And how you got yourself out.

[00:04:37] Jonathan Kadmon: Well, certainly, I gotta say, learning about the validity of dialectical materialism, uh, all of these things are connected. I would not have gotten where I am today without these kind of formative experiences. And you know, I grew up in a Republican family, but by the time I finished high school, I wasn’t even Republican anymore. I would say I was kind of progressive except on Palestine. But I did not grow up part of the apparatus of a lot of these Jewish community organizations.

I was not raised, indoctrinated, you know, with, a lot of the same kinds of things that other kids were. I had kind of a tenuous attachment to Israel. And my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to take a year off before I started at Tulane and study at Ben Gurion University for a year. And that was in Be’er Sheva in southern Israel.

I did and it was a life-changing experience for me. Because growing up Jewish, but without a strong identity anchor in the United States, especially in the Southern United States where you’re frequently the only Jew in the room, it’s kind of an icky experience, in a lot of ways.

And when I went there, I kind of got hit full blast with, a lot of the kind of narrative of who Israelis believe they are. And it changed my life in a lot of ways. It was a coming of age experience. It was my first time living away from home. You know, I befriended all of these older Israelis.

And this was a time of relative peace. It was 2000. Okay. It was just before the Second Intifada kicked off. This is when the Oslo process was still in full bloom. Ehud Barak was [Israeli] prime minister. Negotiations were taking place with [Palestinian Libreration Organization (PLO) Chairman] Yasser Arafat, and even with old [Syrian President] Hafez Assad, to talk about returning parts of the [disputed territory] Golan Heights, briefly.

This was a time when the Israelis were kind of free without a whole lot of interference to show the best of what they were. I didn’t realize it at the time, but they manage it so easily so that, you know, no Israeli really ever has any good reason to go into the Palestinian towns and villages of the West Bank and Gaza. And, I came back with a great deal of . . . I drank all the Kool Aid.

I was very strongly Zionist. I felt in my bones and, had that great sense of pride in who I was. Bought the whole thing of the new Jew. That was what I came back to the United States with. And pretty much as soon as I started as a freshman at Tulane, you started having, the Second Intifada. Of course, I have to defend these people in this place that I love. There was really nobody supporting us back at that time.

So I kind of had to train myself and, you know, the other people that were working with me on the kind of pro-Israel side. And I did a very, deep but very selective reading from the Israeli perspective of Israeli society, politics, and culture, so that I had answers for every talking point. And we handled our business in that first year; kind of training ourselves.

And, typical of a lot of these Jewish organizations that I had a, already a distrust of — you know, the Anti Defamation League [ADL] and the Jewish Federation and [Jewish Campus organization] Hillel — the cavalry came after the battle had already more or less been won in like 2002 or 2003. Before, they were shaking the money tree by, uh, scaremongering about anti-Semitism around every corner in the nineties and so on. But this second Intifada was a fundraising godsend to a lot of these organizations like the ADL.

They were really more Zionist than a Jewish community. And they essentially got a lot of these donors to say, oh, we’ve got a crisis of anti-Semitism on campus. And this was the very beginning of the whole new anti-Semitism push that they were, I mean, I’m sure they had done it before; but they started calling it the new anti-Semitism around 2002, 2003, and started getting these people to donate loads of money specifically to, educating student activists on campuses. They created umbrella organizations, like the Hillel and Schusterman Foundation created the Israel On Campus Coalition, so they could all channel their efforts under one umbrella group. They started taking a lot of us, sending us over to Washington D.C. for Haim Saban sponsored training. You know, they call it the Saban Center for Middle East Studies. Haim Saban, for those that don’t know, is the billionaire behind Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I think he owns a controlling stake in Univision. A major donor to uh the Israel community and the Democratic party.

And to the Democratic party he says he’s a single issue donor. And that’s the drill. They sent us up there for a lot of very intensive training on lobbying, PR, organizing, rhetoric, marketing. It was very high quality training and they had some of the big muckety mucks come up and talk to us, lead seminars, lead trainings, for us to take back to our campuses.

They had a winter and they had a summer Saban. They had specialized sessions for us at the AIPAC policy conference. And, they had, at one point, an expenses paid trip to Jerusalem for what they called Hasbara fellowships, which was, I think, a 10 day training seminar. And over there we met Israeli politicians, including then finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

And, very intensive, high quality PR training for that. So I became kind of, a part of that apparatus for a time, and obviously didn’t stick with it. I started having some problems and a falling out and I was removed from the board of my organization by Washington AIPAC, their campus division in 2005, I think it was. But I got pretty deep into it. And, as a true believer at the time, very good at what I did.

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[00:11:06] Steve Grumbine: Well, what is it that you did?

[00:11:08] Jonathan Kadmon: Um, a lot of advocacy work. A lot of fledgling social media work. I wrote articles, much as I do for Real Progressives. I engaged in debates. I organized events on campus. And pushed for things like the reinstatement of, and beefing up of Israel study abroad programs. You know, we had cultural PR. We did a lot and we were trained to do a lot.

And, you know, we even did a little bit of lobbying under the auspices of a lot of these AIPAC groups. Uh, we met with local politicians, at local AIPAC functions. Um, we were a PR tool ourselves. Like they definitely, once they had us trained, loved to show us off both to donors and to politicians because they felt that those politicians would be moved by the young people who were so politically active.

[00:12:02] Steve Grumbine: What was it about the training that gave you such a deep sense of satisfaction and fulfillment, if you will? What was the techniques? What was it that they used to secure your heart?

[00:12:17] Jonathan Kadmon: Well, I think they preselected for people that clearly already had their heart in it to some degree. But like, they have a method, frequently used by lobbying groups and other kinds of advocacy groups in the Washington, D. C. blob. It’s seductive when, for instance, you know, they have you meeting these very important people that you really only see on TV.

And, you know, important policy makers and decision makers. You know that you’re interacting with security officials; Israeli and Americans. You know, they had me, at the, 2004 AIPAC policy conference at a table where, you know, Israeli member of Knesset, Matan Vilnai, , was sitting on my left and Paul Begala from CNN at the time was sitting on my right.

These kinds of things for a young guy with, you know, their whole future ahead of them and not knowing what the future holds, but looking for opportunities, it’s extraordinarily seductive. They roll that out for you. Again, making all these introductions and getting you seen in these important places and, having these important trainings on your resume. Like, these things are very, very seductive to a young person that’s looking to secure their future.

[00:13:35] Steve Grumbine: So, okay, so when we’re looking at what’s happening today, do you see traces of what you were trained showing up?

[00:13:45] Jonathan Kadmon: Oh, very much, very much so.

[00:13:47] Steve Grumbine: Tell me about that.

[00:13:48] Jonathan Kadmon: It’s almost as though a lot of their PR, like their fundamental narrative and talking points, have not evolved one iota in the 20 years since I was doing it. To a large degree, this narrative, which, you know, we now have all kinds of resources, documents and everything else available to us to easily poke holes in and say, that’s clearly not true.

They’re still using the same talking points from 20 years ago. I mean, I noticed it when RFK was repeating, I’m like, where have I heard those exact lines before? And, you know, you go back to, uh, Mitchell Bard’s Myths and Facts Guide to the Middle East Conflict that I was using 20 years ago to train myself. It’s the exact same lines and the exact same arguments and debunked historical narratives. Things that you can easily Google: Hey, that’s actually not true.

These kinds of things, they’ve not evolved much in terms of the narrative. But I think they have evolved a great deal in terms of conditioning the people that follow those narratives not to look at any of the alternatives. You know, that anybody who says the opposite of that is biased, or misled, or a terrorist supporter, or supporting terrorist talking points. And that heavy conditioning keeps these people on the straight and narrow, and from seeing certain realities that are right in front of their face. Looking back on it, and realizing just how deep into that I was at the time, is both scary and sobering.

[00:15:25] Steve Grumbine: Let’s go back to your time in Israel. Can you describe more about the affect, if you will, of just being there and what it did to you as a person’s formative years, obviously, and so forth? What that effect was for you?

Well, the narrative that, Zionism has always had, which I now know is deeply, deeply problematic — but at the time resonated with me because of my experience growing up as a Diaspora Jew without a lot of cultural anchor and not a lot of connection to who I was as a Jew — this narrative as, you know, the new Jew, this is who Jews really are at their essence, in their native habitat.

And they have all of these narratives about, you know, making the desert bloom, and being socialist. Like that was my first introduction to the notion that everything I had been told about socialism, you know, the basics of socialism, was a lie. There was a sense of egalitarianism and communitarianism. This was of course, before finance minister, Netanyahu got his hands on the last of the communal institutions.

It didn’t occur to me at the time to ask what it means that these socialist communitarian institutions were Jews only. But, you know, in any case you got a feeling that you had a sense of this is really what Jews are in their native habitat and it’s something that you should be proud of. That we’re inventive, we’re innovative, we’re daring, we’re think outside the box. I wanted to be part of that.

I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself and to understand what my identity was as a Jew. And they provide that very well to people that are looking for it. that helps condition you not to look at any disconfirming evidence because it’s so very seductive. And it’s so, like, it made me feel at the time, complete in a way that I wasn’t before.

And I felt that I had an understanding of who I was in a way that I didn’t before. That stuck with me for a good long while. Even though I, as a pro-Israel advocate in the United States, and a Diaspora Jew, had my doubts or skepticism, or a more heterodox view on a lot of things. Like that narrative that I picked up as a student there really had a big impact on me at the time.

How did you get selected for it to begin with? Did you apply for it? Did someone recommend you for it?

[00:18:08] Jonathan Kadmon: Basically in the very beginning their options were limited because they didn’t have a big apparatus of people that were already active in this space. I started with Tulane Israel Public Affairs Committee, which I didn’t realize at the time because we had never heard from anybody from AIPAC, but technically is a franchise of AIPAC’s campus division and was supposed to be technically answerable to AIPAC’s campus division in Washington, DC.

But we had never, like nobody in this organization in living memory had ever heard from anybody from AIPAC. So we joined this organization and we’re like, we’re the people that are coming together to stick up for Israel. To fight this narrative that’s being circulated by the campus leftists.

And remember, I, like I said, I grew up in a right-wing family. And even though I had broken from them and rebelled against them and was like, Democrat, card-carrying ACLU member, liberal at the time. I still was conditioned with that hatred and fear of, the quote unquote “far left” and far left narratives. We got together to kind of fight against a lot of that stuff. Most of us were progressive except Palestine, but there were definitely quite a few Republican neocon types in there too, as students.

And we all came together and we’re like, this is what we’re going to do. And, we taught ourselves again, talking points, event, organizing, what limited resources were available to us. A lot of them were very old material. We worked with as best we could. I read a lot in the library so that I would have good answers or persuasive arguments to make, drawing on knowledge.

And we were doing it ourselves for, you know, a good year, year and a half before these institutions started kicking in a lot of money; and a lot of organizing skills; and a set training regimen. We were doing this ourselves. So they were pulling from the people that were already doing it. And that was on campuses around the country.

documentaries come out around this time period, you know, even in Canadian universities like Concordia. They made a lot of these very scary documentaries about what was going on on campuses that prompted this major investment in campus advocates.

[00:20:27] Steve Grumbine: And that started after a couple of years of us already doing it. And being out there and being self trained advocates. But with some basic know how, but not a lot of high level understanding. That was when they came in with a lot of these, resources and started sending people from Washington to liaise with these campus organizations and say, Hey, we’re going to fly you out to Washington, D.C. Interesting. You know, I go back, you know, I was raised without any kind of religion in my life whatsoever. But I was a born again Reagan guy. Raised as a Reagan family. And you know, when I became a Christian later in life, I went to a church called National Community Church on Capitol Hill. It was very, very political, activist Christian organization that was led by a Messianic Jew named Rob Schenck. He and his brother Paul had started this up, and this was very right-wing.

I mean, you had Randall Terry, who was the guy that held up the, uh, fetus to Bill Clinton. Paul Schenck was part of that. You had all the Johnny Hunter and a ton of other pro life folks that were wrapped up in this kind of messianic Judaism, through Christianity. And so I got to experience Jews for Jesus. I got to experience all of these different, uh, rituals, if you will, like the Passover Seder and some of the other things that tie Christianity to Judaism.

And, you know, a lot of people making their Mecca to go to Israel. They were doing their, long trip back to the motherland, so to speak. And I’m not talking about Jews, I’m talking about Christians that felt this kinship through this tie-in here. And, you know, I, I didn’t know anything about it. So, I never had an anti Jewish perspective. I still don’t, but I, you know, I never had an anti-anything.

I didn’t know anything. I just knew that these are the people I was worshiping with. I liked them. They were nice people. They treated me nice, etc.. But as I, kind of, broke away from, some of that because of other purposes in terms of, evolving from being a right-wing Republican to where I am today. I left some of that behind. And, um, I still have fond memories of the people, even if they do things today that I would be repulsed by.

It, kind of, brought me to this understanding. At least I thought I had an understanding. I mean, I defended against all the tropes about the Rothschilds and the Federal Reserve; on and on, you know, the tropes. They’re out there in just massive amounts. And some don’t even hide it. And so I always thought, Oh my gosh, that’s antisemitic. I got to fight back. And I fought it.

With all my heart, because all I had in the back of my head was 8 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. And that was my life was, oh my God, these people have been horrifically treated over the years. They’ve been abused. It’s been horrible. and so that was the beginning and the ending, really, truly, of my Jewish experience. Other than going to a couple of bar mitzvahs, getting drunk off of Manischewitz when I was a kid. You know, you name it.

But here we are today; learning some new things and realizing that there is something beyond Judaism, and that is Zionism. And they are not one in the same. That split, that difference really has been put on display as I watch Jews, Orthodox Jews, Jews that are in general against what the Zionist state of Israel has done to their Palestinian brothers and sisters. And there’s a huge push, and they’re being chastised and treated horribly and being called fake Jews, not real Jews.

They’re being beaten and spit on and, the people that are doing the beating and spitting are treated like the victim while the Jews that are standing up for the Palestinians are being treated like the bad guys. This dynamic created a schism in my brain that I couldn’t repair. I guess my question to you is, is how did this Zionism element take over so much of what it means to be Jewish? Or, at least, the way they try to portray what it means to be Jewish? Because it wasn’t always that way. Was it?

[00:25:09] Jonathan Kadmon: No, not at all. And in fact, it used to be, you know, in the early 20th century, even as late as that, that the majority of Diaspora Jews were anti-Zionist or non-Zionist. Didn’t know, didn’t care. Zionism was a minoritarian position. And that dichotomy, was blurred deliberately. This was the technique of Zionist organizations, really from the founding. But , they started to become very successful at pushing this in major American Jewish organizations in the early 20th century, where they deliberately blurred that line. And that process and that core part of their idea of who they are and their message to the world, is to blur those lines.

And you can even see that in the Israeli flag, which borrows the symbol of the star of David and is deliberately designed with the blue and white lines to look like the tallit or prayer shawls. . They call it Israel and they frequently cite the passage in the Bible, you know, those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will receive curses, and so on and so forth. When their bible is talking about Israel it’s talking about people like me, the Jewish people, okay, when there was no such thing as the idea of a secular state in biblical times.

But the Israeli government and the zionists before them have deliberately blurred that line. And they have had a process, over more than a century, of making sure that this infiltrates into every community organization; into every synagogue and temple other than a few kind of fringe ultra Orthodox and, some newer liberal reform synagogues. Almost all of them over the years have become Zionist. I think the last major American-Jewish organization to hold out gave in in the 70s.

And I think that was the American Jewish Committee, AJC, but, they’re almost all kind of officially or unofficially Zionist at this point. And that was a product of organizing. That was a product of people with deep pockets being willing to commit, a heavy financial commitment to making this happen. It’s not completely AstroTurf, there was definitely large groups of people that were working hard to make it happen as well.

But, a lot of it did, very much, have to do with the deep pockets that were able to create organizations, holding companies, and various other groups to channel this money in an organized way. And to disseminate this point of view and to exert pressure by the same way any lobbyist or, or major donor, does these days when we see money in politics. They make themselves essential by being a big donor and then saying, if you don’t do what I say, I’m going to withdraw this funding and you’re going to have to make do without.

And you know, in a situation where it’s a gigantic money rat race and typically whoever fundraises the most wins. You know, by and large, this provides a great deal of leverage. And so, even a synagogue that has some large Zionist donor and, you know, has used it to say, build a new wing or, buy a new Torah or, build a new preschool, and it’s halfway through construction, having them say, well, if you disseminate or even give a platform to this anti-Zionist message, we’re going to withdraw our funding and I’m going to get a whole bunch of other people to as well.

Well, after a while that takes its toll. And after a certain period of time of having this be the case, a generation comes up where that’s just the way it is and it’s always been. And this sort of thing is something that, that made a difference in terms of blurring that line in the minds of a lot of American Jews that were raised that way. And, the fact of the matter is, I had to untangle all of that when I started exploring my doubts more deeply after I left this organization and started trying to sort out what was what.

Because one of the things that got me kicked out in the first place was, that I noticed, at the time, you know, even after going to policy conference, that AIPAC was heavily skewing Republican. And they had always told me as I was coming up and training that their whole thing was, they’re going to have a big tent and there’s room for left-wing Jews and there’s room for right-wing Jews, and so on and so forth.

But you can see very well and very clearly that the right-wing Jewish narratives and the ones that wanted to kick all the Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza, and have “Greater Israel” and that sort of thing was absolutely dominant. You could see even liberal Zionist organizations like Americans for Peace Now tables being harassed by large groups of right-wingers and looking all shell shocked, and that sort of thing.

I had made a suggestion to my organization that we should reach out to International Solidarity Movement people because they sent their people over there and put their money where their mouth is. And as long as you didn’t gaslight them and say you didn’t see what you actually saw with your own eyes, we could have a conversation with those people in ways that we couldn’t have with more extreme people. And we could work together to marginalize the extremes.

That was my naive thinking at the time. And they looked at me as though I was mad or possibly dangerous because International Solidarity Movement, the group that sponsored people like Rachel Corrie to actually go over there and volunteer to build houses for Palestinians. Or prevent home demolitions. Or protect children, as the young British man, Tom Hurndall who was shot by an Israeli sniper a month after Rachel Corrie was killed.

Like, I was deep in the movement at this time, and could see things around me. I was still a true believer, but doubts were starting to creep in at a certain point when you saw a large segment of our coalition cheering the brutal death of Rachel Corrie under a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer. And then, you know, a month later, cheering for the death of Tom Hurndall who was killed protecting a Palestinian child from Israeli snipers and was shot in the head by an expert marksman looking through a scope. Like they know who this guy was. So these sorts of things were kind of starting to creep in there.

I had to sort these things out. I know for a fact that having come up as a youngster obsessed with learning how the Holocaust happened, that was something that I had been studying since I was a kid, I started to make connections in my brain that I didn’t allow to be made when I was neck deep in it, when I was really thinking about these things. YoUStarted to see these two things separating back out. The Zionism and the Judaism, two very different things.

And, especially when you know the history of the Jewish people and, not just the Holocaust, but everything that came before and who we are, how we got to be who we are, you start to realize that this idea that they have of the new Jew was basically, it was taken from the [Frederich] Nietzschean idea of the Ubermensch. The very same idea that the Nazis used for the new German. And the rejection of the diaspora identity is the rejection of thousands of years of accumulated culture and knowledge and wisdom and goodness and inventiveness and literature and philosophy and history.

And, it was a rejection of my experience living outside of Israel as a Jew. And a suggestion that I was somehow inferior for not having been born and raised in this martial very militaristic, uber machoistic culture. And things started to work backwards from there. But it was a process and it took many years to get where I got. But the fact is, what you mentioned toward the end of your question, which was, the Jews who spoke out against it.

What I started to realize, probably around the time that I was, seeing what was done to [British politician] Jeremy Corbyn, was that just not wanting to have anything to do with it wasn’t good enough. That because I came up trained in this way, because I was part of it; and because I was so good at what I did, and I had the kind of resume that I did. You know, the Hasbara fellowships, the Saban training through AIPAC, and being part of all that, all these old articles to my name. I had a responsibility because I had a unique immunity to most of those attacks.

And, even up to and including having gone back a second time to, you know, in the post Katrina evacuation year, the Hebrew universities honors program in Middle East studies. So I happened to have lived there for basically two years, non consecutively. I had studied there and I had done the AIPAC training. And so they were going to have a lot harder time saying I was a kapo, or a self-hating Jew, or any of that other stuff with the kind of resume that I had and the background that I had.

That stuff bounces off me like I was wearing body armor. And, you know, it’s, I’m like, oh yeah, you’re going to tell me I’m a self-hating Jew? Are you kidding me? My resume and my credentials here probably outstrip anything you have. And the fact of the matter is, I do this because I am a Jew and I’m proud of being a Jew. And I’m proud of my history and my heritage. And I learned the lessons of my history and my heritage.

And, the fact that so many of us have had our sense of our history tampered with in this way, is really, it’s alarming to me. And it’s kind of a microcosm in many ways, connected directly to what we see even in the economic sphere. The way that, the Orwellian sense, you know, there’s that George Orwell quote in the Ministry of Truth, “all history was a palimpsest” to be erased and re-inscribed as often as necessary. We have always been at war with East Asia, type of thing.

 And that’s exactly what they have successfully done with Jewish history in an organized fashion going back all of this time. And it took me some time — like this information is out there and it’s much more accessible now than it was 20 years ago. But it took me a lot of time to even be willing to look at it and to try and take the time to understand. That, I think, accounts for a lot of people doing things and saying things. People that I know on a personal level to be fundamentally decent, caring people, um, to say things and repeat things and advocate for things that they, I promise you, are going to be ashamed to tell their grandchildren about.

[00:36:55] Steve Grumbine: What is the differentiator between a proud Jew, as you called yourself and a proud Zionist Jew?

[00:37:08] Jonathan Kadmon: I would say if you’re truly proud of being a Jew, you should not be afraid to dive into and confront your history and you should not be rejecting any part of your history as not you. And one of the fundamental bases of Zionism is the rejection of the Diaspora Jewish experience, you know, going back to, uh, 270 AD. , you know, the Jewish expulsion from Palestine.

The arguments on, who is directly genetically connected to that tradition, notwithstanding. I don’t even want to weigh in on that because that stuff is messier than people make it out to be. But the fact of the matter is, who we are as Jews is informed primarily by 2000 years of being scattered, but sharing these traditions, the Pharisaic oral tradition all across the world.

And, you know, the fact that, Jews are Jews, they celebrate the same holidays and have the same traditions, whether they’re from Spain or from Turkey or from Romania or you know, any of these other places. You have scholars, great scholars and intellectuals who have come from all over the world and have been exiled, and migrated and spread their ideas to all these different parts of the world.

This stuff is important. How we evolved after, you know, say the Jewish emancipation after the Napoleonic Wars. And started to integrate with mainstream European society, that matters. That’s who we are. That’s part of who we are. And the Zionists would have us Jews reject that part of us as a tainted or diluted form of Judaism, a degenerate, that was their word in the 19th century literature, a form of Judaism.

And that they needed to come back to Israel and experience this ubermensch idea. Reinvent themselves. You know, a reboot, you know, in Marvel cinematic-universe-speak, to be who they truly are, the strong Jew. Well, the Diaspora Jews have a legacy of being incredibly strong. But I think that, also, became part of the Zionist idea because one of the many ways in which Diaspora Jews have left their lasting legacy on the world is so many revolutionary leftist movements; for emancipation of the working class and of the underclass and of the disenfranchised around the world.

Jews were at the core of all of those movements. Karl Marx himself was not religiously, but, you know, in terms of heritage and culture, and his life experience, was a true Jew. And you have the Rosa Luxemburgs and so many of these very famous advocates for true democracy. And for you know, ordinary people in the working class and anti oligarchy, that sort of thing. Like these were intimately tied to the Diaspora Jewish experience.

You know, the Bund, which David Fields mentioned on a previous episode, was a global Yiddish-speaking Jewish organization that was, um, labor unionist and revolutionary left. That’s a huge chunk of who Diaspora Jews are, and what they have to be proud of, and what makes them strong, and what makes them wonderful. That is a part of the legacy that Zionism would repudiate, and that the state of Israel would repudiate.

They were very, very militantly anti communist. And, you know, even in as much as they had an Israeli Communist Party, anytime these people got too strong, they were, essentially repressed and purged. So this sort of thing is a huge part of, if you are proud of being a Jew, you have an understanding of your history first, and you have an appreciation for what that history means to who we are today. You don’t repudiate a part of it. You don’t try to reinvent any of it or erase any of it.

If you’re trying to erase a part of who you are, that makes you as anti Jewish as any far right Nazi, as far as I’m concerned.

[00:42:15] Steve Grumbine: You know, they say history is written by the victors. Who keeps the historical record of this Jewish experience that you’re speaking of? I mean, ultimately, there’s been a lot of death and destruction. I mean, I’m no holocaust denier. That was a horrible, horrible thing. And it happened before I was born, obviously. But it doesn’t change the fact that it has shaped a great many of my beliefs and fears. I mean, striking the name Adolf Hitler. Striking the name of the horrible concentration camp, Auschwitz.

Um, bringing up various things from World War II that, you know, Josef Mengele and Joseph Goebbels and all the other things. The final solution. These are things that really, really had a heavy impact on me and still do, quite frankly. I still feel a tremendous protection, if you will. I’m looking back at this stuff and I’m saying, how do you maintain that history? Who records it? Because you can clearly see there are people that will get in front of a camera. Stare straight into that camera. Cry crocodile tears and tell you a story that you can verify is false.

And yet, there is this true story. There is this true struggle. There is this true, you know, quite frankly a brutal, existence. Help me understand how that history is understood and recorded and what history is deemed good history and what history is deemed, you know, oh, we can’t have that history?

[00:43:52] Jonathan Kadmon: Well, it’s one of the biggest efforts that have been, made by that segment of the Jewish community. The biggest organized campaigns was in the area of particularly Holocaust education. And that, I think, plays a key role in like the dissonance that you see today. And that’s because the education— I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D. C. — one of the things that didn’t hit me until later in life, when I really started to go through the nitty-gritty of Holocaust history, was the fact that it’s not really designed to educate people on what happened there.

 It’s designed to retraumatize people. Okay? You are meant to experience firsthand the horrors, but there’s not a lot of stuff that entails deep understanding. And what really made me realize this was a class that I had the privilege of taking at Tulane, by an ex World War II OSS agent named Henry Mason, who was also the former chief of the political science department there. And I had the privilege of being in the last class he ever taught as he was dying of leukemia. And that class changed my life.

It was called Holocaust Systems. It was taught not under the history department, but under the political science department. And it was essentially a course on comparative genocide systems. Right? And that systems approach was what I had been looking for for years, because I had an inkling that this was a problem in most of what I had read, or what was discussed about the Holocaust.

But I didn’t know how to articulate it until that point when he took kind of a thousand feet in the air view and looked at the structures and how these things were done step by step. Only then can you really start to answer the question, how can an entire people, how can entire country be made to go insane and go along with the kinds of horrors that traumatized me in the Holocaust Museum? Like these are, you know, so undeniably evil.

Like, how can an entire country be brainwashed into going along with this sort of thing? And that course really taught me to look at some of the scholarship on exactly how that sort of thing happened. And it was a very, like, I had not seen it anywhere else before then, but he managed to turn me onto some of the scholars who, studied these sorts of things.

You know, the [Polish-American scholar] Raul Hilbergs, the [UNC historian] Christopher Brownings and people like that, who actually looked into these questions of how did the Holocaust happen and what were the structural mechanics of it? What were the propaganda mechanics of it? And that, in particular, even though it took many years for me to really connect that to what I was seeing in Israel, it helped over the years that, since those days, Israel has dropped the mask in a lot of ways, and the country, itself, has drifted right.

It helped me to put those two and two together, and to see the same kind of process in motion. You know, the dehumanization; starting with the casual and escalating. And, you know, these sorts of, uh, apartheid conditions. The, uh, not looking at what you don’t want to see. And the ability to avoid confronting the cognitive dissonance that would occur if you were watching this sort of thing in process. Like all of the mechanics of that, you started seeing the similarities and the parallels.

But these things are kept out of the way most people are taught about the Holocaust. If all you know about the Holocaust is Schindler’s List, yeah, you can make some connection because you can, you know, there’s that scene with Ray Fiennes taking a sniper rifle and randomly taking pot shots at innocent civilians and prisoners walking back and forth. You can see that happening in Gaza, if you know to look for it.

But, by and large, you’re not going to get an idea of what the structures were that are parallel. Or how somebody gets to the point in their brain where they think so little of the humanity of the other, that they’re going to hunt human beings for sport. And that’s the important thing that has been deliberately excised, I think, from Holocaust education. It’s been deliberately excised from, you know, the greater history of the Jewish people. And the, the trials and tribulations of integration post emancipation.

And, you know, a lot of the pogroms, and so on and so forth. The experience of these Diaspora Jews that so eerily parallels the experience of many Palestinian families that have gone in and gotten themselves extremely well-educated, have been extremely resourceful and, you know, just in the course of trying to survive and adapt and be part of this modern world that we’re living in.

You see so many parallels to the Jewish experience in those Palestinians that you’re attempted to say, those Israelis, they’re not the Jews anymore. The Palestinians are. They’re us. And, as a Diaspora Jew, we have a duty as somebody who has this experience as part of our collective history, to ensure that it never happens again. And to understand that saying “never again” only for Jews is part of how it happened in the first place.

Okay, like it’s this kind of ethnocentrism is what led, you know, the German people to go along with this sort of thing. Or to be able to dehumanize people that were undeniably German. That they’d come up with, and gone to school with, as somehow this alien force that didn’t belong with us. Okay, so this sort of understanding that they are us. This sort of solidarity, okay, to use a leftist notion that many Jews helped to make real in the various cultures in which they lived as part of.

This solidarity, this empathy, this understanding that these people may look different or speak a different language, but they’re us. And when you hurt them, you hurt us. When you destroy them, you destroy all of us.

[00:50:33] Steve Grumbine: When you go back, you had mentioned that this Zionist approach to the Palestinian question, I hate to say it like that, but you had said that there was the taking of houses and that people were standing in front of bulldozers to stop them from knocking down their homes.

Help me understand what you’re talking about in that space. I mean, what exactly goes on in the colonial part of the Zionist project?

[00:51:02] Jonathan Kadmon: That is, again, part of, uh, the Orwellian stuff. There’s so much of what I Saw you know in that year of being seduced at Ben Gurion University that I came to realize later were built on top of the ash and ruin of the people that lived there before. And even, you know, the [Jewish National Fund] JNF forest, okay, was built on top of the ruins of a thriving Palestinian olive groves and farms, that had been there for centuries and replaced with imported, evergreens from Europe, which are now not exactly thriving, I’m told.

This process of creating facts on the ground is what the Israelis call it. But to me, it’s that Orwellian process of all history was a palimpsest. We have always been at war with East Asia. Like, they demolished these places, these Palestinian places, and build something else on top so that the Palestinians of course can never rebuild on that site. And they call it something else. And there is never any discussion of what was there before.

So, many people have grown up living all their lives never knowing there was something else there before. Or what it was or who it was. And it’s very, very easy for ordinary people, who consider themselves good people, to go through life and to be beneficiaries of this apartheid, colonialist, genocidal system. Those words sound cliche. But they are the best words to describe what this process entails that are available in the English language.

And, you know, even as much as they become loaded with political meaning, we certainly try very hard not to overuse or misuse any of these words. This is used in this context because it’s accurate. And again, when I took that Holocaust systems class, a huge part of how so many of these Germans that seemed otherwise decent people were convinced to go along with it.

It’s the whole knowing but not knowing. If you can create a situation where people may, somewhere at the back of their brain, realize that if they ask too many questions about this they’re going to get answers they don’t like. Subconsciously, their brains and their behavior will naturally do the rest and they will not ask those questions.

And if you can go through life and it’s easier incentive-wise, effort-wise, mental-energy-wise, to just go through your life; do your normal thing; and never think about it; you’re never going to think about it. And that is a huge part of why that whole system works. You know, they bring in new immigrants to some settlement that they just expanded on the West Bank with all kinds of foreign money coming in to construct a brand new university and a brand new hospital, and top of the line, state-of-the art, living units.

You’re not going to ask what had to be demolished to have those things there. You are going there, in many cases, all expenses paid. You’re getting set up. You’re getting a stipend. You’re getting a free education, a job, health care, like, if people are taught growing up, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

And most people will not. They will not look a gift horse in the mouth. The people that were willing to look at that sort of thing, that were seeing what was happening, um, you know, the were empathizing with ordinary people just trying to, to exist in this world, uh, having everything taken from them, and being thrown God knows where with no place to go, nothing to eat, nothing to fall back on, saying that’s obviously wrong and it has to be stopped.

I think a lot of these kind of sadistic sounding, you know, far-right-wingers that were celebrating her death while she deserved it for getting in the way, were, in a sense, lashing out at somebody who was forcing them to look at what they didn’t want to see.

It was forcing them to put in front of their conscious focus, a thing that was happening that they couldn’t reconcile with their understanding of who they were. That is what I think about that.

[00:55:23] Steve Grumbine: You know, I, I’m very, very poorly educated. I mean, to the degree that I have read books and, and seen things. You know, read about the history. You know, I understand that things changed in 1948 and going up to present, you can see the makeup of Israel. And you can see that it was mostly Palestinian owned. And then, little by little, the Palestinian side diminished. Was gone. Vanished. Vamoose. And, you know, since I started really taking notice of this, I’ve noticed that there are some people that are quite outspoken about the systematic erasure of the Palestinian people.

And you’re one of those people. You’re somebody who has been a strong advocate, who’s not been afraid to stand up for the people of Gaza, the Palestinians as a whole. And you’ve also not been afraid to call it a genocide. Obviously this runs counter to the Zionist narrative. I’m curious, what is it that makes you feel the need to stand up for the people of Gaza?

[00:56:41] Jonathan Kadmon: Well, I mean, there’s a lot, including what I had just recently said that the understanding, and the identification with the people of Gaza as going through a very similar experience to what Diaspora Jews went through in Europe. And they’ve been going through that really since 1948, certainly. But, in particular, the recent thing is much more of a parallel to the actual Nazi Holocaust.

And to the degree that it’s deeply chilling, and like, it breaks me that the parallels can be so close to the point of being, you know, in many ways and in many situations, identical.

And Jews of all people say this is a good thing to do. That, like, just absolutely breaks my brain. And that’s part of it. But the other part of it has to do with my experience in the early 2000s. And, my understanding, you know, this, of course, everything is connected to everything else. That experience certainly spurred my jumping down the rabbit hole of all of the psychology I studied. All of the communications theory. Persuasion. All of that stuff.

And understanding, having been a part of it, how this was made to be the culturally hegemonic, if you will, because I, I use that, particular Gramscian metaphor in, uh, an article I wrote not too long ago for, uh, the Real Progressives website, The Scam of Pragmatism², something along those lines. I don’t remember the exact title.

But, in any case, how this got to be the way it was. I was trained in how to do it. And I know that these things got to be this way because it wasn’t magic. It wasn’t anything inherent in the way things are. Like, this was manufactured. This did not come about by magic. Okay?

You go in there and these, by and large, like one of the first seminars I did at the Saban Center, or whatever, was taught by these former student activists, themselves, who punctured a lot of the myths that I had, by the way, uh, explain the method of making themselves essential; of sending people to volunteer on these Congresspeople’s campaigns; and, making clear their connection to the Israel lobby; and of making themselves indispensable; then getting hired on as congressional staffer.

And, training people in the etiquette of how a professional lobbyist makes a call to a congressman’s office; of connecting to the actual paid lobbyists; providing things to fill in a vacuum to people that have very little expertise in this area; and saying, here’s something you don’t have to worry about. We’re going to develop your Israel policy for you. You don’t even have to think about it. We’ll show you the initiative. We’ll train you in the talking points. You just go out there and do it and we’ll make sure you win your next election.

That sort of thing, the whole process that I was trained in, was a real eye opener. And I used to buy into the line that AIPAC gave out that, um, you know, okay, AIPAC doesn’t rate or endorse candidates. But these guys in that first seminar said, well, that’s not entirely true. Their local and state affiliates absolutely can and, you know, there’s a whole bunch of satellite organizations that coordinate that absolutely can. And so, these sorts of things can be brought to bear, in the ways that I described toward the beginning.

and, you know, it’s a process. But, by and large, before you know it, you have a significant chunk of Congress with former AIPAC student volunteers. Or young, twenty-something, volunteers that had explicitly come up through AIPAC to be part of AIPAC. And that had, you know, these Congressmen now owed for their seats. And that was a way in which those relationships got built and solidified and continued.

And there are thousands and thousands of those, just in Washington D. C. alone. Of, people that have not just, you know, elected officials, but also security officials that got introduced to this one and that one; and people in private sector think tanks; you know, a whole network and the Blob. But that was not built by magic. It was not built all of a sudden just by having a lot of money. It was built by organization of processing of systematic work over the course of many years.

And that was an understanding that I bring towards dealing with it because so many people are so intimidated. But these things, they’re human constructions, you know, if they can be built, they can be taken down. If it can be done, it can be undone. And yes, it’s a lot of hard work and it’s an uphill slog and there’s a lot arrayed against you because they’ve been building it up for a very long time. But I take inspiration from, you know, the leftist Jews in days of old who understood the basic strategic concept behind guerrilla warfare.

A much more established enemy, however much larger and more powerful in a way, has certain vulnerabilities. They don’t adapt as quickly. When they are wrong-footed or derailed in some way, it takes them a long time to get their stuff together and get back on track. And if you can keep them on the back foot. If you can catch them unawares. If you can hit them hard before they can get back up, you can all of a sudden break through the fortress they have, like, you know, that’s trying to keep this narrative out of the public eye.

And people are starting to see. Like, you know, you have a level of social media and of live stream video and of photographs getting out there in ways that wouldn’t have been possible twenty years ago. They had such tight control over the corporate media gateways, to the point where, you know, some of the major media organizations are actually run by people that came up through, some of these pro Israel media organizations like Cameron. Okay. You got people on the board at, various major media outlets that came up through there.

The fact that these are not the sole gatekeepers of information anymore, and the Israelis were completely unprepared to handle that, their big apparatus. This narrative is breaking through to people. People can see, ordinary people can see, that, hey, what that Israeli spokesman is saying is an obvious lie. And why are all the media organizations getting behind this obvious lie? We can see on video that’s not true. And that’s an important thing that I think needs to be pushed and exploited. And, all of a sudden there’s a vantage point that we can fight back with, that we can defend.

And that we have to. And we have to be willing to take the slings and arrows of the disingenuous accusations of anti-Semitism that people, like, that boy has cried wolf too many times now. People don’t believe it anymore. Uh, but they’re still using it to try and repress people. But you have to be willing to stand up to that. You have to be willing to say you’re not going to do that anymore. Again, like, I feel a double duty to do that, given my background and the unique insulation I have against those kinds of disingenuous misuse of the term anti-Semitism.

I have a duty to speak up and to do what I can to, A, put a stop to it happening again, the Holocaust. You know, the thing that we all swore never again. And number two, to having my identity hijacked by people that not only don’t value it, but want to destroy it and replace it with something else.

[01:04:56] Steve Grumbine: Wow, powerful. You took some of the thunder out of the next question I have, but we can build upon it. And that is, I’m looking and I see a kind of monolithic storyline in all the mainstream media. And you can see there’s only four or five mainstream Titans out there that control the narrative of all this stuff..

And you can see clearly, like when there’s someone that is killed in Ukraine, it’s always framed that the Russians did it. But when a child is killed in Gaza, it’s, and in other news, a child was killed or, you know, whatever, and they, they never attribute who did it. They never attribute any of those facts.

And so you’ve got that angle, the media narrative, then you’ve got the political narrative, which you described at great length, how AIPAC works to position people in the institutions and the government that are there deeply embedded to control that narrative as well.

And then, as if that’s not enough, I mean, someone like Jamal Bowman, who I’m, you know, no big fan of one way or the other, but he was brought up as like a rising squad member one minute, only the next minute to have gone to Israel, seen the apartheid state come back and be disillusioned to it.

It still wasn’t my cup of tea, but nonetheless, he was destroyed by operatives and the political sphere, through AIPAC and others. Help me understand US relationship with Israel and how the people of Palestine aren’t even treated as human beings here. I mean, they’re not even seen as human.

They’re seen as sub human. They’re seen as animals called animals. I mean, the things I’ve read, the things I’ve listened to are so aberrant, so shocking, that you keep looking for like a hidden camera to see if you’re being punked. To see if this is like, you know, some theatrical performance. And it clearly has some theatrics to it because people are lying.

But help me understand this dynamic here. I mean, is this just all from the placement of people through AIPAC and other adjacent organizations, training people up, working together, and infiltrating various aspects of government, media, education, et cetera, with the Zionist viewpoint? Or is that way too convenient for the conspiracy peddlers out there who truly are anti-Semitic?

[01:07:39] Jonathan Kadmon: I mean it’s a little of everything. You know it’s certainly worth saying, um, brainwashing is a hell of a drug. And, that Orwellian method of, uh, you know, all history is a palimpsest of basically erasing the competing narratives from the popular discourse is, it’s not something that’s restricted to the pro-Israel movement. I mean, hell, you know better than anybody what we’ve been dealing with in just resurrecting all of this economic history that had been erased from the mainstream narrative.

This is a core part of how the powerful, once they have basically gotten to the top of the mountain and knocked the other guy off, consolidate their power and make sure that the other guy can never get back up and come back to the top of the mountain and knock them off. This is how they do it. They erase the competing narratives so that you never know any other kind of way.

Uh, you remember during the, uh, Iraq war, the, uh, the broadcast by, uh, the Iraqi Minister of Information? I can’t remember his name now, but everybody called him Baghdad Bob. You that?  I mean, it sounded so ridiculous and over the top and obviously false because we had a completely televised war, okay? And we can see, obviously, the tanks rolling down the streets of Baghdad while this guy is saying, uh, the glorious Republican Guard is kicking the crap out of the Americans and sending them running, and so on and so forth.

But again, like at the end of the war when the last of the Iraqi military finally fell, after you know, three weeks, or whatever, you know people in various places were like wandering the streets in shock They couldn’t believe that the Iraqi Minister of Information had lied to them. It never occurred to them to ask whether he lied to them or whether the American narrative might be true, because they were so conditioned to think that the Americans always lie, which we often do to be fair to them.

But if you have no countervailing narrative. No frame of reference to, to know that you should be asking questions, of whether that’s actually true. None of us really has the cognitive capacity to apply discernment to everything. We have to outsource discernment by trust. We have to trust certain things and certain people.

That’s how we go through life. It’s the way our brains are wired. And there are certain things we have to assume are true. If you had to question every single thing, throughout the day that you heard, you’d exhaust yourself. So, creating this sort of situation where, again, the incentive is not to ask questions and you have no reason to think that you should, to just assume that this is the way it is.

That’s the method that the powerful use to keep their narratives where they are and keep them unchallenged. I think the fact that it’s getting challenged now, in so many spaces, is sending them into a panic. And it’s why they’re responding in such a heavy handed way. It’s why they’re, you know, putting snipers on the roof of University of Indiana Bloomington, you know, with, you know, former Macro N Cheese guest , Bryce Green, in the crosshairs, okay. These are college students!

You’re sending SWAT teams and snipers and you’re putting in the crosshairs a college kid, you know, working on his PhD? Are you kidding? Why? Because he said “Free Palestine?” Are you kidding me? Like, that’s nuts. But the fact is, this is how they keep their power. And when it’s threatened, they start to freak out. That is what we’re seeing right now. That’s why you’re starting to see these kind of Red Scare, Cold War era repression tactics coming up. The blacklisting. Okay. The labeling is anti-Semitic. The deplatforming. Everything that’s being done to Roger Waters.

You know, they’re trying to get every concert of his canceled. They’re trying to dox people and get them fired from their jobs. This is like, they’re pulling from the old Red Scare and Second Red Scare playbooks, because that’s all they know in terms of heavy handed ways to defend what’s most important to them. And that’s keeping the narrative so that people don’t start demanding better.

[01:11:59] Steve Grumbine: So I guess we’ll go out on this note, Jonathan. First of all, thank you for telling your story and informing us on, I, a lot of this stuff I I’ve never heard before. If I’ve heard, I’ve heard it in clips and phrases and I really appreciate you taking the time to answer them. But I guess, as we descend into this thing, the last bit of this is, how do you survive this world? In a world where you’ve got every possible avenue willing to shout you down.

I mean, literally crack skulls. We see it in all the protests that they’re more focused on spray paint on a statue than a genocide in Gaza. Let’s be fair. I mean, when you look at, uh, the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, her response to the Gaza folks, you know, protesting Bibi’s visit. I’ll read her statement, you know, and I’ll let you weigh in on this, but she says, and this is July 25th, “Yesterday at Union Station in Washington, D C., we saw despicable acts by unpatriotic protesters and dangerous hate fueled rhetoric.

I condemn any individual associating with the brutal terrorist organization Hamas, which has vowed to annihilate the State of Israel and kill Jews. Pro Hamas graffiti and rhetoric is aberrant and we must not tolerate it in our nation, I condemn the burning of the American flag. That flag is a symbol of our highest ideals as a nation and represent the promise of America. It should never be desecrated in that way. I support the right to peacefully protest, but let’s be clear, anti-Semitism, hate and violence of any kind have no place in our nation.”

Now aside from so much hypocrisy in that, what are your thoughts on that? Because that sounds like it was crafted straight out of AIPAC. Like, cause there’s no way in the world that people fighting against a genocide should be seen as terrorists. The American Indians, native First Nation folks that we, the colonial project known as the United States, displaced. They had every right to defend themselves as the colonial project just steamrolled them into, you know, reservations and broke treaties and, and literally annihilated them, wiped out their way of life, et cetera.

Help me understand. What candidate Harris, Vice President Harris, was saying in her letter to the people protesting.

[01:15:03] Jonathan Kadmon: That is one of those things that, reminds me of why my studies of you know, the Cold War history and the uh, Red Scare political repression were so important. It’s the realization that in any kind of time of crisis, this notion that you have rights, like a First Amendment right, to free speech and freedom of assembly, all that stuff, it means nothing. You can wipe your backside with it if the wrong kinds of powerful people adopt a consensus that it’s okay to disregard it. And that has been done in the past and could be done in the future.

But I think one of the ways that you have to, if you’re going to exist in this world and fight for a better one, is you have to be willing to stand for what’s right. You have to be willing to look at that statement and be like, those are all lies. That’s ridiculous. This is Orwellian BS and hold on to that indignation. Like how dare she insult our intelligence by putting a statement like that out there? Okay, and you know, as though this is an extension of Israel somehow, where supposedly we respect free speech and freedom of the press and freedom of assembly in ways that, by the way, Israel does not.

Okay. Like there’s no constitutional right to anything in Israel because there’s no constitution. And free speech is very liberally interpreted over there. It basically is a police state. People are being arrested over there for their social media status. All right. This is not Israel. And the notion that you can repeat the demands of people like Benjamin Netanyahu, that these protesting students be arrested or prosecuted somehow in the same way they would be if they were in Israel is incredibly outrageous. And it should provoke the kind of indignation that says, as it has with a lot of these students and other protesters.

You know, Jewish Voices For Peace and all those people that have been showing up, saying, “Do to us whatever you want. Like, we know what the right side of history is and we’re gonna stand on it and there’s nothing you can do to change that because we know enough about our own history and what happens in the holocaust to know that we’d rather be dead than have to explain to our grandchildren why we were on the wrong side of history when it happened again. “

And holding on to that, and being willing to push for , and being willing to suffer the slings and arrows of whatever comes your way. And trust in solidarity and community with other people that are on the right side of history to carry you through it. And to be part of something larger than yourself and to have made a great contribution to that larger something is 10 times more intoxicating than the fake narrative that these kinds of people put out.

You know, that this whole Zionist idea of the macho strong new Jew, like this solidarity, this being part of a true struggle to make the world what it should be, a better and more just place. That’s worth fighting for. And that’s worth standing up to whatever inconvenience we suffer, which is certainly nothing compared to what the people of Gaza, we see every day, are dealing with— starvation, disease, explosions, snipers. Okay.

And if you believe you have a duty to make the world a better place, this is where you have to be.

[01:18:40] Steve Grumbine: Amen. Uh, Jonathan, I want to thank you for this time and, as someone who is not a Jew, but who definitely wants to understand everything, no matter where the truth and facts take me, I want to thank you for adding so much information to my understanding of the world around me as well.

Especially in this case, because to me, I see dead people and it bothers me. And I don’t want to see dead people. And it really is stealing my joy to know that my nation is fully funding this genocide. And many people who support the administration have stayed remarkably silent or just taken a very, very passive, you know, Hamas should just surrender and everything will be okay or, or whatever.

And, it has caused me to question some of the friendships that I have to see them silent and to, to see them talk about Biden’s sticking the landing. Or to see the, uh, various, mainstream leaders of thought, you know, taking a very passive, Oh, well, you know, maybe Hamas should just surrender, kind of things. And I’m not here to say one way or the other. I just know that I’m seeing dead children and I don’t see them speaking up for them and that bothers me beyond anything that I could ever imagine. I would like to give you the final word, being that you, as a Jew, have taken such a courageous step in talking to us today. Talking to me in particular. Uh, you know, I come in here with ideas, with thoughts. You’re coming in with lived experience. Your final thoughts.

[01:20:18] Jonathan Kadmon: The thing that hits me is there was a recent documentary released called Israelism and, one of the things that kind of came out there was that the number one antidote for the brainwashing that the Zionist organizational infrastructure puts in people’s heads is going and seeing these things firsthand. Okay. You know, talking to Palestinians who have lived through these things. Hearing their anecdotes. Seeing the evidence of how they live and what they’re going through every day.

The number one antidote is being forced to confront what actually happened. What I used to say even back in the day is the day that Israel can’t win the argument on, if you’ll forgive the metaphor, the open market of ideas, okay, is the day it doesn’t deserve to win. And apparently that day, if you really know the facts, came about in probably, you know, the 1940s. But given what we see today, like, confront the truth, okay?

And if you’re listening out there and you’re still all in for Israel, or even partway in for Israel, consider yourself a liberal Zionist, but you know, are still like, Israel’s basically salvageable; I urge you to put those views to the test. To go out and, you know, if you can, go to parts of the West Bank, okay, and see for yourself what’s going on there. Or, at very least, talk to expats, watch videos, read accounts of what these people went through and judge for yourself, the credibility.

And if the credibility is good, then hold that up against what you think is the case, and really make those two reconcile. Like don’t, don’t let that dissonance just sit there. Just put it together. Come to a conclusion. And I think that’s the number one antidote to just being stuck in that doom loop of believing what, I promise you, like once your eyes are open, you’ll see is, Oh God, that’s so smooth brain. How did I ever believe that?

That’s my parting message to people: just confront the truth and the truth will make you free. As they say.

[01:22:36] Steve Grumbine: I appreciate that. Folks, we’re all about standing against hate, whether it be anti-Semitism, whether it be anti-Muslim, uh, whether it be anti- whoever. At the end of the day, we’re here to bring about a better society. And we hope that by educating you and giving you the stories of different people, that you can take that information and build on it for yourself. And take that and learn something new. Got a lot of friends out there who knew something 30 years ago and haven’t changed a bit in 30 years.

And there’s a lot of new information out there, so there’s no excuse to stay stuck. It’s time to unwed some of them strongholds and become your best version of yourself. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me today . You know what, we should have done it a long time ago. I’m glad we did it. That’s the best way I can say it. I’m super glad we did this.

I am Steve Grumbine I’m the host of Macro N Cheese, I’m also the founder of Real Progressives, and Real Progress in Action.

We survive by your donations. Please, come to our Patreon at Real Progressives forward slash patreon dot com. Become a monthly donor. If you can, check out our Substack, real progressives dot substack dot com. Obviously check us out on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, all sorts of different media platforms. And this podcast, which comes out every Saturday morning at 8 AM.

You’ll notice that we have transcripts. We have extras that give you links to learn more about the things that we brought up during each episode. And on Tuesday nights, we have something that Jonathan here actually is one of the co hosts for, and that is called Macro N Chill, which is the follow up to the podcast, Macro N Cheese. We sit around, we talk about the episode together on Tuesday nights, 8 PM, Eastern standard time, 5 PM Pacific. And it’s a piece of cake.

Please consider joining us so that we can have your feedback and we can make you part of the community. And without further ado, I’m going to say, on behalf of myself and my guest, Jonathan Kadmon, Macro N Cheese, we are outta here.

ooo

EPISODE EXTRAS

[02:40] Status Coup podcast –

[06:19] Intifada – First & Second,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intifada 

[06:22] Oslo Peace process (Oslo Accords) – Oslo Accords – Wikipedia 

[08:32] Zionism (v. Judaism) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism  

[09:25] Haim Saban sponsored training – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haim_Saban Jonathan was trained at the Saban Center, a part of the Brookings Institution, described by Wikipedia:

Center for Middle East Policy 

In 2002, the Brookings Institution established the Center for Middle East Policy (“CMEP”, formerly the Saban Center for Middle East Policy) “to promote a better understanding of the policy choices facing American decision-makers in the Middle East”. The center was launched in May 2002 “with a special address by His Majesty King Abdullah II bin al-Hussein of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to a select audience of policymakers in Washington, D.C.”

Funding 

The center was originally named after American-Israeli film and television producer Haim Saban. Saban, according to the center and its parent organization, “made a generous initial grant and pledged additional funds to endow the Center.” According to a press release from Saban’s charitable foundation, Saban “donated $13 million for the establishment of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.” Saban, according to the center, ascribed his involvement to his “abiding interest in promoting Arab-Israeli peace and preserving American interests in the Middle East” that led him to fund the center.

[15:59] Diaspora Jew – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora  

[21:56] Jews for Jesus – https://jewsforjesus.org/

[26:17] Genesis 12:2-3, “those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will receive curses” 

[30:35] International Solidarity Movement – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Solidarity_Movement  

[31:07] Rachel Corrie – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Corrie  

[31:19] Tom Hurndall – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hurndall  

[32:57] Frederich Nietzsche and his concept of the Ubermensch, a foundation for Nazi Aryan supremacy.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche and  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch  

[34:00] Jeremy Corbyn, a British Labour leader who was accused of anti-Semitism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Corbyn  

[36:00] Quote from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, https://www.george-orwell.org/1984/3.html  

[40:29] The Bund, an international left labor organization, organized largely by Jews. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundism  

[40:29] Macro N Cheese Episode, March 11, 2023  – Policial economist David Fields https://realprogressives.substack.com/p/the-misery-of-austerity-with-david-fields 

[45:00] Tulane University political science professor, Henry Mason, https://obits.nola.com/us/obituaries/nola/name/henry-mason-obituary?id=16220000  

[46:33] Raul Hilberg – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raul_Hilberg  

[46:35] Christopher Browning – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_R._Browning  

[51:24] Jewish National Forest project – https://www.nationaljewishmemorialwall.com/plant-a-tree/  

[58:21] Jonathan Kadmon, “The Scam of Pragmatism” – https://open.substack.com/pub/realprogressives/p/the-scam-of-pragmatism-an-origin  

[01:10:58] Macro N Cheese Episode, Bryce Greene – May 25, 2024 https://realprogressives.substack.com/p/radicalizing-the-youth-the-significance  

[01:11:52] Red Scare – The first Red Scare was in 1919, the second in the 40’s a 50’s, commonly known as McCarthyism.  Red Scare – Wikipedia 

[01:17:11] Jewish Voice for Peace – https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/

[01:20:30] Israelism film – https://www.israelismfilm.com/

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