Dinner Guest: Jonathan M Katz talks about Israel/Palestine.

Last Thursday, I had an hour-and-forty-minute conversation with the journalist and author Jonathan M. Katz – mostly about Israel/Palestine, but also about historical Zionism, cactus fruit, and the food of the oppressed. Katz worked for the AP for a decade and famously broke the story of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, when he ran barefoot out from his apartment and borrowed a cell phone from someone off the street to call his editor. 

We have been chatting here and there on Twitter and TikTok over the past few years as we got caught up in the tides of interminable social media discourse, arguing with the same pseudo-scholarly racists or lab-leak freakazoids. I wanted to speak with him initially because he wrote a phenomenal essay on his newsletter after the October 7 attacks, describing his journey out of the Zionism that he’d grown up with. He has been active in his role as a public historian during the crisis, being a talking head on the “Chinese dance app,” “picking fights with Zionists and Nazis alike”  –  he’s made a whopping 69 videos on TikTok over the last six weeks answering questions from his followers, explaining why a two-state solution is impossible, and how George Bush II played a role in permanently installing Hamas in Gaza by funding an ill-fated coup against them. 

I strongly recommend subscribing to his newsletter The Racket, and getting a copy of his book Gangsters of Capitalism, which is now out in paperback. It’s about the history of American empire through the window of Smedley Butler, the famous US Marine who came to understand his military career as “a racketeer for capitalism.” Katz visits all the places that Butler was stationed to see how American intervention in the 20th century still affects the places it touched. I read it last year – it’s just excellent. 

The following interview is a very, very edited version of our conversation. I wanted to leave everything in there but the full transcript was 14,000 words, and you all have other things to do. We did not literally have dinner together, but I did make something based off his recommendation, which is at the end of the interview.

You were in Jerusalem during the Second Intifada?

Second intifada, yeah. I was there in 2003 as a young cub reporter essentially. I was in Haiti during periods of major social unrest. I was in Mexico during the drug war, which is still continuing. I'm talking about these things as if they're past tense. 

I did read your Foreign Policy article that you just put out, and that situation also sounds like a frightening mess.

It is the situation that I have been in that reminds me most of Israel-Palestine.

Really? The DR and Haiti?

I mean, the piece of it that often reminds me the most of Israel-Palestine is the relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in which Dominicans basically are in the position of Israelis. When you write about Dominican racism against Haitians and Dominican ethnic cleansing against Haitians –  that's a story I've been covering forever from my point of view. It just feels like forever, since 2006, since I was in the DR. 

Before I moved to Haiti and I did an article, in 2015, there was this threatened mass deportation of people who were deemed Haitians under Dominican law. A lot of them have been in the Dominican Republic for multiple generations, but they're made stateless under the most recent revision of the Dominican Constitution. Under that revision, they were basically going to deport all of these people who are of Haitian descent as possible. This got a huge amount of world attention. People were really galvanized on Facebook, especially in 2015. And this, it kind of didn't end up materializing in the official sense, but within this freelance mass deportation happened where basically Dominican vigilantes lynched Haitians and forced a lot of people to flee.

And that would be sort of analogous to the West Bank settler situation is what you're saying.

Very much.

I had no idea.

The Dominicans are even building a border wall. The way Dominican nationalists come at, if you report on this situation and are in any way critical of it, is so fucking the same as Israelis. They have an official narrative, and it has some very important dates in it. And if you don't name check those dates in the way in which they want you to name check them, and you don't give the imagined history of this relationship the way that Dominicans give it, you are a Haitian sympathizer and you are anti-Dominican, and you are a useful idiot who is supporting the eventual genocide of the Dominicans.

Wow.

It is so crazily similar. One example, so back to Israel-Palestine, right? You have to say, in 1947, the United Nations offered a partition plan and the Jews accepted it and the Arabs rejected.

And that's what you have to say in the Israel discourse. 

You have to say that the Palestinians, the Arabs, the Palestinians don't really exist. Obviously, I don’t really believe this.

No no, I get it, you’re taking on the POV. 

I do this. Sometimes I get really into the point of view of the people that I'm explaining, and I don't put all the caveats in. Although in the case of Israel, that is a thing that I did believe for many years. I grew up in a Zionist family, and this is how I understood this conflict for many, many years.

So in this case you're rewinding back to a former perspective of your own.

The Jews accepted peace, and the Arabs rejected it because they're greedy and they hate Jews. And then they tried to destroy the nascent little tiny state of Israel. If you don't say that, you are today, the way that you would put it is you're a Hamas sympathizer and you essentially Holocaust denier. 

And in the Dominican Republic, one big example of this is it's similar also in that it's a really complicated history. And to even have any idea of what I’m talking about, I would to at least give you a 20 minute explanation about the history of the DR. Suffice it to say Haiti gets its independence in 1804, and there's nothing on the eastern half of the island. There is no modern nation-state. The Spanish speaking part of the island is at that moment controlled by France. 

The Dominican story is in 1805, Jean Jacque Dessalines crowns himself emperor of Haiti and invades the eastern part of the island and tries to commit a genocide. And there is one massacre in particular that if you don't talk about this, then you are a tool of the Haitians and you don't know your history. It is a massacre at a place called Moca where the Haitian army killed civilians. The term in Spanish is Degüello de Moca – the throat-slitting of Moca. 

To be clear, there's no Dominican Republic in 1805, it was former Spanish land that was at that point occupied by France. The reason why Jean Jacque Dessalines “invades,” is because they have just finished a war against France. They have just liberated themselves and permanently ended slavery on the western part of the island. But the French, same fucking French led by same fucking Napoleon Bonaparte are still on the eastern half – they're still practicing slavery. And so they come across the “border,” which does not get defined until the United States occupies both Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the 20th century and draws the line itself.

There's no border. 

They just basically continue across the eastern part of the island to be like, we don't feel safe with French people still practicing slavery on the same side of the island.

And even there, if I talk about this without talking about the fact that Jean Jacques Dessalines oversaw a massacre of white French people on the western part of the island, then I'm still a tool of Hamas. I mean a tool of the Hatians. 

Anyway, all that's to say the story is bullshit. It is based on something that actually happened, but it is weaponized and has been historically weaponized by Dominicans really since the dictatorship of Raphael Trujillo in the mid 20th century. Trujillo came to power through the US occupation as well. So anyway, this the proof to Dominicans that Haitians are born with genocidal intent and that they want to kill everybody in the Dominican Republic,

Just like in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The 1947 thing is the Arabs are guilty because they turned down peace.

Exactly, exactly. And you can find it's even a little more deep cut for most people in Israel Palestine, but the Arab riots in 1936 and 1939, Zionists don't tend to talk about that really, because they don't really like to talk about anything that happened in Mandatory Palestine.

It makes things too messy.

It gets messy and things get very uncomfortable very, very fast. It also implies, correctly, that Zionism predates and is actually fully formed before the Holocaust. That Zionism is not a response to the Holocaust, and that Zionism actually kind of hates the Holocaust and doesn't really know what to do with the Holocaust as it's happening.

Wait really?

Yeah, I mean, the Holocaust is very inconvenient in the Zionist narrative until they figure out really what to do with it. And that really isn't until after the 1967 war. It's really not until the concept of a “holocaust” exists as a word and as an explanation of the Nazi extermination program. It's really the 1970s miniseries of the Holocaust with Meryl Streep. Is Meryl Streep in that, or am I confusing her with Sophie's choice? I think she's in both.

I’ve just looked it up: It’s Meryl Streep. 

Anyway, there's a TV series called Holocaust, which is about the experiences of a German Jewish family in Hitler's rise to power. And it really isn't until then that the word Holocaust really gets cemented in people's mind as a way to explain this actually fairly inchoate extermination program. [pause] I want to be very, very clear.

Go ahead.

The Nazis killed 6 million or so Jews.

I don't think anybody's going to try and paint you as a Holocaust denier here. 

Just, people. They could. I want to be absolutely clear. When I say that it's inchoate, it’s because Europe under the Nazis, it was not univocal. There was not only one method of killing Jews. There were many methods. There was a so-called Holocaust of Bullets, the Einsatzgruppen that basically shot people. You had the vans where they would pour in gas or sometimes just pour in van exhaust. Early on, you had Nazi client armies and paramilitaries that carried out a lot of the killing in Serbia or in Croatia, in the Balkans, in parts of Southern and central Europe. And then you had the death camps like the organized industrial death camps like Auschwitz and Kinal, et cetera. But there were a whole bunch of different things. And as it's going on, no one really knows everything that's happening. Even the Nazis aren't necessarily keeping track of everything that is happening at any given point. And it's only sort of in retrospect that you can look at all of these different things because they're all linked. 

And of course, all of the oppression and dispossession started before that as well, the dehumanization anyways.

And most Jews who were killed in the Holocaust were not German Jews. They were mostly from the Pale Settlement, from the places that my family came from, almost my entire family that didn't come to the, so I'm descended, fortunately, and also sort of by necessity, from people who fled the Russian pogroms in the late 19th and early 20th century. But a lot of their families, my great grandparents' families stayed, and almost all of them were killed.

Another misconception about the Holocaust is that Zionism, the Zionists – and I'm using that as a historical term, because before the declaration even of the state of Israel, before they came up with the name Israel, which they basically came up with on the fly in May 1948 by default. Some people suggested Zion, but that was problematic because Har Siyyon [Mount Zion in Jerusalem], was not in the state of Israel that they were declaring. 

I didn't know that there was any debate over the name.

Yeah, they didn't pick it. Actually, I forget how you say sabra fruit in Hebrew , but somebody suggested Sabra fruit. [AKA the prickly pear cactus fruit. I had no idea what this was called in English. Hebrew it’s צבר - “tzabar”] A lot of Israelis still refer to themselves as “sabras” because it's hard on the outside and sweet on the inside. This is seriously a thing which would've made life a lot easier for Jews outside of Israel to be like, when you call yourself Israel, you are sort of by default identifying yourself with the entire Jewish people.

Yeah, it’s a spiritual concept as well. 

Yeah. We're the children of Israel in Jewish prayers, like the Prayer for Peace, which is something that people have been saying a lot lately. It’s for the people who are saying the prayer at that moment, the congregation and for all Israel, which is so it's like a more universal concept. 

But back to the Holocaust. 

During the Holocaust, the Zionists weren't exactly sure what to do with this thing. And for decades after, if you read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, she talks about this big moment of Eichmann’s trial. It's only really after that a lot of Israelis, because Israelis, the original Zionist settlers and the founders of the state of Israel, David Ben Gurion, people who were alive until fairly recently – They were already in Palestine, and they referred to it themselves as Palestine at the time. They were already there when the Holocaust happened.

And you still see traces of this in Israeli rhetoric today, like, the Jews of Europe died because they were weak. The phrase that they often use is “they went like sheep to the slaughter.” This is another misconception that a lot of people have, including a lot of Americans.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

You see this in Second Amendment discourse when people are like, oh, well, Hitler took away their guns, and so the Jews couldn't fight back. And if they had all been individually armed – it's just insane! It misses a lot. Like the fact that the people who were in a position to see this coming were Jews in Germany, many of whom were able to get out. It was Jews in Poland, in Ukraine, in Romania, in Hungary, in the Pale Settlement who were like, well, what do the Nazis have to do with us? We’re in Russia, the Soviet Union, Poland. 

“We’re in another country.”

By the time the Nazi war machine came, there wasn't a whole lot that they could do. But there was a lot of resistance, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising being the most famous example. So it is actually a very insulting thing for anybody to think, including whether they're Israeli or a Second Amendment guy in Montana. 

Those two people have a lot in common as well, just to be more explicit about it. They're both settler-colonial. It comes out of a frontier mindset where people are always trying to kill you, so you have to kill them first. You have to arm yourself to the teeth and fight people off your land. And might makes right. It’s the same attitude in Israel. It's like, this is our land because we came and claimed it. And the fact that we killed off people who were contesting our claim just makes it more our land, and they still want to kill us, and we will kill them.

From that mindset, the idea that people could be overwhelmed, could be duped, could go into ghettos with some resistance, but also that resistance was often crushed. And sometimes people, they were making decisions that seemed rational in the moment. It's like, well, the Nazis killed all the people who wouldn't get on the train. They're just saying, we're moving to another part of town, or whatever. There's always been antisemitism. We've always survived it. I guess we'll go. That was what some people said, other people didn't. But anyway, this idea that the Holocaust, anybody who went into the gas chamber in some ways was complicit in their own death. They didn't take up arms and take on the Nazi war machine themselves.

Yeah. You still see people repeating that same idea in America when it comes to justifying colonialism. The indians lost, etc. 

And that was really in a lot of ways, the dominant Israeli view of the Holocaust for many years.

Until they realized they could be like, no, this is useful for us to justify the existence of the state, is to protect Jews, be a homing beacon for Jews all over the world.

Rashid Khalidi writes about this in the Hundred Years War of Palestine, the relationship between Zionism and antisemitism, it has always been, is obviously an inherently antagonistic relationship, but has also been mutually beneficial.  A lot of antisemites in America respect Israel as an ethnostate and are just like, all the Jews should go there.

There's a lot of these white nationalists who are like, “we have America. That's our white nationalist state. All the Jews go over there. That's the Jewish nationalist state. We like that idea.”

Yes, exactly. And they actively cultivated this. I mean, the Yishuv, or the Jewish Agency, negotiated a deal with Hitler – This happened! –  to permit the immigration, really the forced deportation of Jews from Germany, with a substantial amount of their wealth so that they could bring it to Palestine. 

Thus getting the Jews out of Germany so the Germans can be like, we got our ethnostate. We're happy.

So Hitler – 

[Mr Katz pauses and blows a raspberry] 

I'm sorry. You can quote that at this point, “Jonathan put his fingers up to his mouth and” - I’m not sure how to spell it. 

It's “thbbbbbbbbb,” I think.

“At this point, Jonathan turned into an old Jewish man and started spitting wildly between his fingers.” I come by my Judaism honestly. Ultimately, at the end of the day, the only thing to say about Hitler is that the guy fucking sucks.

Guy sucks.

He was obsessed with the idea of there was a Jewish boycott against Germany, and there was, and – good, I mean, there should have been. He was absolutely obsessed with the idea that this was aimed at destroying the German state, the German people. And to him, much like Donald Trump, whenever he would campaign and he would talk about the Jews, he would talk about Benjamin Netanyahu as if “I talked to your leader.”

He said that kind of casual identification of Jews with the Israeli government all the time. A lot of people at the time were totally fine with it. Like, “look, he's going to put the capital in Jerusalem. We're all good. It's fine. He can talk that way.”

And Hitler had, he had sort of a similar idea of that, he was like, well, they're a bunch of Jews. They're trying to colonize this area, and they must have a lot of influence. So I'll let some Jews with some money leave and go to Palestine, and in exchange for that, they will end the boycott against me. 

I actually don't know the extent to which the boycott ended at that point. You’d have to consult an expert on that, but I do know that those were the terms of the agreement that is sometimes used. 

Ok, a question. As a journalist and a historian, you've spent an enormous amount of time trying to understand all of this stuff that is commonly just either not known or misunderstood or actively weaponized to justify war crimes. I think a lot of Americans don't necessarily have much context and they don't really know how to talk about Israel-Palestine. Jon Stewart made the joke on the Daily Show ten years ago where you can't talk about Israel or Palestine without a zillion people shouting at you. 

“Why didn't you mention this? Why didn't you mention that?” And sometimes those things are real, and sometimes they’re mythological. 

During the pandemic I covered a lot of the rising antisemitism in conspiracy spaces, watching those COVID-denialist narratives get connected to larger antisemitic tropes. And after the October 7th attack, I watched this huge explosion in antisemitism using anti-Zionism as a pretext. 

There are actual antisemites out there. They're not vampires and witches that just sort of only exist in the imagination.

And it's not just on the right, and it's not just on the left. So the question is: how do you talk about it? 

I really try hard, and to some extent this is unavoidable, but I really try hard not to just be reactive. I really try hard to not to come up with a position that is just the negation of all other positions. It is really difficult, but you can find yourself in a situation where you're just like, the most basic form is just to just do what you believe is the opposite or the only alternative. So for a lot of Jews right now in America –  you see antisemitism, right? And somebody shares with you the original Hamas charter, the 1988 charter, which is a very antisemitic document.

There's no getting around that.

I mean, it literally is quoting the parts of the Quran that are like, “Kill the Jews. Like, “If a Jew was hiding behind a rock, the rock will say, there's a Jew behind me,” which comes from the context of Mohammad's personal beef with the Jews of Medina. It's a very disturbing thing to read. If you want to claim that there are no antisemites in the Middle East in general, in the Palestinian national movement in particular, and especially in Gaza and Hamas, you're going to have a really hard time making that argument. 

Yeah. It's not a coherent argument.

And so, you’re an American Jew and you see that, right? You’re like, this guy, this person you’re reacting to is saying, “I want to kill the Jews.” And then you're like, well, I'm the opposite of that. The most primal human reaction to that is, “well, fuck you, buddy. I'm going to kill you.”

This is sort of riffing off of Mel Brooks, but he talks about this in the 2000 year old man. “Let em all go to hell, except for cave 76!” 

That's really fucking basic. And then you can also be the Israelis and the Israeli state in particular. It's an apartheid state. It is an extremely oppressive state. They're doing things that we have been taught as Americans are just so far out of the Overton window that trying to express, if you tried to run for office in the US right now and be like, I'm running on a platform that there should be streets in American cities that white people can use and black people can't, right?

You'd be run out of town!

Even the free speech absolutist with the flavor of the New York Times editorial board, they would be like, you can't say this, man. You can't literally be like, we should have white and colored water fountains. But I know that they have streets that Israelis can go down, and people who carry foreign passports can go down, and Palestinians can't use them in the West Bank. This is a real fucking thing that exists in 2023. There have been videos going around of former IDF soldiers talking about practice detentions where they would detain people in the West Bank – Palestinians that they knew hadn't committed a crime – just to practice arresting people. 

So suffice it to say, not to mention collective punishment bombing the hell out out of Gaza – which is not a thing that just started happening in 2023. It happened in 2021. In 2014. It happened in 2012. 

And like you said that's the second amendment mentality right there. It's just like, this is my land. We killed them. Now that they're trying to kill us again, it makes it more my land.

Exactly. So from the point of view of somebody who looks at that and is like, I think that's bad. I think segregation is bad. I think racism is bad. I think bombing civilians – 

Is top-tier bad.

So then you're like, “okay, well, I'm not that I'm going to look for anybody who's not that. And the more not that you are, the more with you I am."

One of the things that happened in this particular case of the October 7th massacre, and I saw this happening in real time on social media – so 2021 was the last time that people took their little rhetorical stances off of the shelf. That was when Israeli police stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque, and there was this stuff going on in Shaikh Jarrah and with the housing, and then Hamas fires a bunch of rockets, and then Israel bombs the shit out of the Gaza Strip and destroys thousands of homes, kills hundreds of people. And that was the last time a lot of people thought about this stuff. In that case, the asymmetry was just so “out of pocket,” as the kids say. 

Anyway, so in that instance, I don't want to minimize it entirely. I think three Israelis, civilians,

Yeah, three did. Hamas launched something like a couple of thousand rockets at Israel. 

The response that at that time to people defending Hamas at that time was like, well, it's not our fault that their rockets suck. But because they were killing so few Israelis, it was very easy for people, critics of Israel, people on the left to sort of go into a position that was like, “Hamas' resistance is legitimate.” 

And I hate to say it, but I think the sort of anti-cancel culture, reactionary centrists do have a point. The left picked that up from the Black Lives Matter protest discourse. 

If you're talking about leftist politics over the course of the 20th and early 21st century, a lot of leftist politics are built around the ideas of liberation. I mean, in my politics, I also strive for liberatory politics. And not all liberation can be peaceful.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising is a perfect example of that, right? Who in God's name, other than a Nazi, would condemn the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, right? Sometimes violent resistance is, to use a phrase, necessary. These are very, very complicated conversations. If you actually sit down and read Franz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, even Hannah Arendt – who came to these things from a very different point of view and was not a leftist in a lot of ways – Fanon in particular has a lot to say about the ways in which oppression breeds violence. It brutalizes the colonizer, as Cesaire says, and it also brutalizes the people who are being oppressed and being treated as broods. As often said, violence is the language of the oppressor, and sometimes is the only language in which the oppressed can speak and be heard.

Palestine is an example of this, because nonviolent movements in Palestine, think about just the BDS – Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions– Those things get criminalized. They get called terrorist movements.

And in the States, too.

A couple weeks before October 7th, there was a literary festival at the University of Pennsylvania that everybody was losing their minds about in much of the Jewish community and the pro-Israel community, because they were like, you're having a terrorist antisemitic conference at the University of Pennsylvania. It was nothing of the kind! My response after October 7th was, if you cut off all areas of nonviolent resistance – even just having a literary festival to assert a national identity and a pride of a people and opposition to oppression – what response is possible?

What else is left?

What’s left other than violence? But then the response came on the Zionist side, which was, well, this is what BDS leads to. If you support BDS – 

You support Hamas. 

Then you’re pro-Hamas. Which I disagree with. And I think that if you actually read Fanon in particular, you'll find that they are often saying, the phrase that got thrown around a lot in 2020 was the King quote – 

“Riots are the language of the unheard.”

Yeah, these things are really complicated. I wasn't saying this, but you could understand where people kind of felt safe being like, well, “qassam rockets are the voice of the oppressed. They're the language of the unheard. They're not really killing that many people anyway. And Israel is killing a lot more than that.” 

You could see people using that rhetorical position on October 7th in real time, I think a lot of the people who were saying, who were using words like exhilarating, who were kind of cheering it on, it was when sort of the first reports were coming through the first videos on social media with people breaking through the fences. 

I was at a politics festival in Liverpool when it happened, and I went to a panel on Palestine. It was a very complicated atmosphere because people were clearly exuberant, they were like, “We feel closer to liberation than we ever have.” But at the same time, they started the panel with a moment of silence because a lot of innocent Israeli and Jewish people have been killed that day. 

I think part of what happened is, this is just sort of the flow of the news. Initially, the death toll of October 7th was not clear. It was like dozens reportedly killed, dozens killed in clashes, dozens killed in the attack and reprisal. It was really when the thing that really started making clear, and by the way, to be clear, I was not because I knew enough. The minute that this happened, I was like, okay, let's wait and see what this turns into.

I'm not saying that I am immune to putting my foot in my mouth, but especially with something like this, it's like, let's see where this goes. The first thing that I remember where it really hit me was a headline in Rolling Stone. I think that estimated the death toll at the music festival. It was at that point, it was in the two hundreds. It was at that point that I was like, I don't think anyone is prepared for what this is and what this is going to be. 

Because the people on the left who were sort of looking at these videos of people breaking through the fence and hearing about the deaths of Israeli soldiers, so who on the left are correctly often referred to as occupation forces. There was a misunderstanding, there was a misapprehension. I saw a lot of references on the first day, the first couple of days to the Israelis who were killed as being settlers, which in a philosophical sense is true I guess. 

Right, but they're not on the West Bank. They're not the people on the West Bank who are bulldozing houses.

They're settlers in the same way that I'm a settler living in the United States. I mean, they are living on colonized land that was colonized a little more recently. But the term “settlers” in this particular circus brings to mind a religious fanatic on a hilltop in the West Bank who sees it as his divine right to shoot Palestinians on site.

That is not the people who were killed in the South, People in the South tend to be more left wing. Weirdly enough, the closer you get to Gaza, the more you're going to find people who are sort of frontier mindset. But you're also going to find a lot of people who are activists, members of Peace Now, like the activist Vivian Silver as an example of somebody, who I think is still believed to be taken hostage. [She has since been reported as killed in the October 7 attacks.] She would ferry Palestinians from Gaza to medical appointments in Israel. But right off the bat, it was like, oh, just soldiers died and settlers died.

I got into this very early conversation with one guy on the social media platform BlueSky. All I did was I put up that death toll. I was like, I don't think anyone is prepared for what this is anywhere in this conversation. I don't think Israelis are prepared. I don't think Israel's defenders are prepared for what Israel is about to do.I don't think the people who are celebrating this are prepared for what they are about to get tied to.

But this guy was defending the murder of people at this music festival. And the way he described it was he was like, Gaza is a concentration camp. Which, I think that is a historically valid way to describe it, if you go back to the original Reconcentración in Cuba. But he was imagining people having a music festival outside of Auschwitz. 

Yeah, I remember people making that comparison, and I was like, I don't really think that's quite right. 

Two things here. One, bad comparison. That is not accurate. These were not prison guards. Most were Israeli trance kids.

They just want to listen to dance music and just party in the desert. 

The other thing was, don't defend the murder of civilians. That's just a good rule of thumb. It's also, to be very cynical about it, it's good politics. It's so fucking simple. Don't root for the death of children. Don't root for the death of people at fucking music festivals. 

One thing that I'm encountering being on TikTok with the youth is a lack of political instinct on both sides of the equation from people who were too young to remember 9/11 And I am a little bit taken aback by how quickly we jumped back into post 9/11 style discourse.

I think that's the thing that has really blown my mind. I'm seeing the exact same conversations just to tie this all the way back to the Bush years that were happening and sometimes specific references. People will say, “well, nobody was out protesting the afghan and iraq war 9/11 when that happened.” Like, what are you talking about? There were huge protests. 

I was in a very small minority of people who thought the Afghanistan war was a bad idea when it started. I was a senior in college and I remember getting into fights about it with my roommates, and I was like, “guys, I'm reading about this ‘Afghanistan’, and it says here that they have defeated the British, they defeated the Russian Empire, they make excellent use of their high ground, their mountains. I don't know that invading them is going to be a good idea.” 

And my friends were like, first of all, fuck those people. Second of all, drop nukes on, just bomb 'em back to the stone age. We're so powerful. We're the United States of America. You think that a bunch of Afghans are going to defeat the mighty United States? This war will be over in two weeks.

People said that all the time. It was maddening.

Yes. It was the same shit we’re seeing now. “Drop a nuke on Gaza.” 

The other thing that was said in post 9/11 and now is “so what should they do? Nothing?” And it's like, no, they should be smart. Don't be fucking stupid. Don't invade Iraq. Don't invade the wrong country after 9/11, and don't engage in a genocidal campaign of mass murder that could very easily end up in a direct war between Israel and Iran, which is a war that you don't want.

So last question. I do need a food opinion from you. I guess it could either be about Haiti and the Dominican Republic or Israel and Palestine. I'll leave that one up to you.

To get myself in trouble on a whole new front: The other thing that both of those situations have in common is that the more oppressed people have better food. Haitian food is much better than Dominican food.

I actually have not had Haitian food – What’s your favorite dish?

So I'm Jewish, so I don't eat pork. So a lot of people's favorite Haitian food is Griot, which is pork. I would say I like Poulet en sauce – chicken in sauce. 

The best meals that I had in Haiti were poisson sel gros. You go to Jacmel, a place on the southern coast of Haiti. it's a whole fish. They pulled it just out the water and it’s barbecued – that word actually comes from Haiti. The Tainos, who were the natives who were wiped out by the Spanish on the island of Hispaniola , as the Spanish called it. They would pile sticks over a fire, and they would cook the food using indirect heat, known as Bukan in Taino. The pirates off Hispaniola on the isle of Tortuga, the unofficial men of the sea who would raid merchant fleets and navies, they would cook using this Taino method of Bukan. And so they became known in Spanish as Buccaneros – 

OMG. 

Which is where we get the word buccaneer. So you get the fish, you put it on the Bucan, They do the sauce, the rice's amazing. [chef’s kiss.] And also, similarly, I do want to say “I stand with Israel” on the fact that there is really good Israeli food. I mean, you can get really good food in Israel. But the best food, whether inside or outside the 1949 armistice line, is almost always cooked by Palestinians. It’s my staple cookbook, but you know Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem cookbook?

Yeah, of course. 

It's very famous, right? His partner is Palestinian, and he makes no bones in that book either, about the fact that Palestinian food, it's the real thing. You really want to get in trouble in the Middle East: talk about who invented hummus and whose humus is better. But I mean, there were Palestinian Jews who lived in Palestine throughout, and I'm sure they make very good hummus. But even in Jerusalem, the best hummus, when I was living there, you'd go up to Abu Bush, which is a Palestinian settlement inside of Israel. So basically, generally speaking, if you are in an area and you've got an oppressed people at an oppressive people,

The food is going to be good with the oppressed.

Go to the oppressed. 

I do not have access to the sea and a bukan to make poisson sel gros, so I found a recipe for poule en sauce instead, and made it last friday. The Haitians have an utterly unique way of cleaning meat – you remove the skin, trim the fat, cut it down to the bone and pick out all the tendony yuck bits, and then rub limes all over it. And then give it a bath in vinegar and hot water for a minute or so. 

I marinated the cleaned chicken overnight in a mixture of garlic, herbs, lime and chilis and way more cloves than I’d ever used in anything before. (This is Hatian Epis.) The next day I built the stew the standard sort of way – brown the chicken and take it out, cook the veg in the chicken bits, add the marinade and the chicken back in plus some stock, and simmer until falling apart. Served it with red beans and rice and a salad that I pretended to eat.

It was way, way lighter than I ever would have expected. The meat-cleaning thing absolutely works. Herby, zingy stew that looked heavy, like a coq au vin, but tasted fresh and tropical. My friend Jess also assembled an impromptu tiramisu as dessert at my house. One thousand out of ten.