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In episode 145, Daniel and Elia host a conversation between two Arab Jewish activists Hadar Cohen and Dahab Kashi, exploring the radical power of Arab Jewish perspectives. Often seen as mutually exclusive identities, the existence and experience of Arab Jews transcends the narrow, and violent, confines of both Zionism and Arab Nationalism. The artist Yossi Zabari spoke about the power of the ‘hyphen connecting Arab and Jew’, and in this episode we explore the potential that acknowledging that hyphen has in our current critical moment.

The Fire These Times is a proud member of ⁠From The Periphery (FTP) Media Collective⁠. Check out other projects in our media ecosystem: the Mutual Aid Podcast, Politically Depressed, Obscuristan, and Antidote Zine.

Recommendations

• Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew – Avi Shlaim
• Hadar Cohen’s Website
• Yossi Zabari & Anat Fort – To See or Not to See

Where to listen

This episode is available on all podcast apps: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Anchor, Breaker, Amazon Music, Audible, Stitcher, Radio Public, Pocket Casts, Castro and RSS. Just type in ‘The Fire These Times’ and you can subscribe directly there.

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• You can follow Elia on: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Mastodon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
• You can follow Daniel on: Website⁠ | ⁠Twitter⁠ | ⁠Instagram
• You can follow Hadar on: Website⁠ | ⁠Instagram
• You can follow Dahab on: ⁠Instagram

Episode Credits

Host: Elia Ayoub
Producer: Ayman Makarem
Music: Rap and Revenge
Main theme design: Wenyi Geng
Sound editor: Ayman Makarem
Episode design: Elia Ayoub

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

I feel both struggles really deeply. I do identify with Arab struggle, and I can see the insane dehumanization of the Western world and it makes you want to scream and rage. And I also feel Jewish pain around safety and belonging and misunderstanding. I find myself, even somatically, oscillating between the two. I can’t actually choose, because these pains feel intertwined. Feeling this, I’m like, what is the justice movement that can hold me in that?

Daniel Voskoboynik: Hello everyone, welcome to The Fire These Times. My name is Daniel Voskoboynik, and I’ll be your host today, together with Elia Ayoub. We’ll be joined by two wonderful guests, Hadar Cohen and Dahab Kashi. Thanks so much for being with us.

Hadar Cohen is an Arab-Jewish scholar, mystic, and artist. She is the founder of Malchut, a spiritual skill-building school teaching Jewish mysticism and direct experience of God. She’s a tenth-generation Jerusalemite with lineage roots also in Syria, Kurdistan, Iraq, and Iran. Hadar weaves the spiritual with the political through performance art, writing, music, and ritual. Her podast, Hadar’s Web, features community conversations on spirituality, healing, justice, and art.

We also have with us the wonderful Dahab Kashi, an Israeli-American human rights activist who grew up in New York City and Tel Aviv.

Thank you so much to both of you for joining us today.

We’ll start the way that we’ve been starting conversations in the last weeks—also we thought that the easiest way of putting it was taking the first question that you ask, Hadar, which is: how is your heart? How are you showing up to the space today? How is your spirit doing in the midst of these weeks?

Dahab Kashi: It’s a great question. It’s been a whirlwind of despair and sadness and anger, essentially a cocktail of those three emotions, swapping in and out as this constant feed of travesty and atrocity is being fed directly into our veins. Feelings of frustration arise as well when you realize how much access we have to this unfolding genocide right in front of our eyes, and how certain people choose to willfully ignore that readily available feed of information.

The parallel universe in which Israeli society finds itself now, more than ever, is quite astounding. Having family—my parents are still there, my close extended family is still there—gives me a bit of a peek into what’s happening right at this very moment and how they’re perceiving events. I frankly struggle to understand how one can willfully ignore information. The control of information, the manufacturing of consent, and the shaping of public opinion there is pretty direct and overt. I asked my mom, who is a human rights activist as well: Mom, how can people believe some of this propaganda that’s being done so sloppily?

They’re grasping at straws with some of these attempts. I saw yesterday they went into Shifa hospital; they went into the basement, and the commander is there officially with his helmet on, and he’s like, We found it! We found the list of Hamas fighters on the wall here. And they zoom in with the video, and very quickly it was dispelled then—it was a weekly calendar of shifts at the hospital. It’s as though they don’t think anyone speaks Arabic. It’s as though we’re in 1960, 1950, where they can throw anything up and expect people to believe it.

But people are believing these things in Israeli society, and outside of Israeli society as well where there’s a heavy Zionist influence. That’s just one example out of a number that I have. It’s a bit difficult for me to even comprehend, in spite of having grown up there and understanding the context of the Israeli psyche and the propaganda that we’ve been fed from day zero in school, in the media, and society as a whole.

Hadar Cohen: Thanks for that. I resonate with some of what you were saying. For me, my heart feels a lot of heartbreak and a lot of grief. It’s interesting, just personally, because usually my response is anger. I get very angry. This time I am more sad. There’s just so much grief and so much sadness. I have people who I know who have been killed, both Palestinians in Gaza and Israelis. Death seems to be all around us. There’s the personal loss and grief and sadness, and also the collective. I know historically how we got to this moment, and there’s still something so painful about just being here and this question that keeps coming up: How did we get here? Even though I know the history and the politics and all of that. Still there’s this element of not being able to believe—perhaps it’s just me personally who feels this. I’ve been an educator and an activist in this space for a long time. But there’s just a feeling of failure. Complete failure, that whatever we did wasn’t enough. And just sadness.

I’m sure we’ll get into all of it; I assume we’ll talk about Arab-Jewish identity. But just to talk about the Jewish part for a moment: it’s really an intense situation. I had a dear Palestinian friend say this to me: I don’t understand, so many of the scholars who radicalized me into justice were Jewish, from the twentieth century. How is it that so many Jewish people across the world are supporting fascism right now? Wasn’t there a time when we were antifascist? Hannah Arendt wrote the book about the origins of totalitarianism. She was Jewish, right?

It’s a really strange moment for me, personally. I feel like I come from a Jewish lineage that is antifascist, and now it’s like seeing Jewish fascism. It’s really intense. I’ve been trying to read more in the last month on what the tools and strategies are to fight fascism, because it’s gotten to the point that it’s so extreme. So my heart is just bleeding alongside so much of my community.

Elia Ayoub: I mentioned this in the last episode we did together. Now it’s four weeks and two days since my daughter was born. She’s a micro-preemie, extremely premature. She’s doing okay, things are fine. But that ongoing experience has given me and my partner a lot of tools to understand—we have had to understand a bunch of data and how certain machines work. She’s in an incubator and all of that. We live next to the hospital. It’s a very good hospital. It has all the things one would expect in such a hospital. So obviously when I hear news from Gaza of the hospitals specifically, it feels very intimate.

A certain sentence: They have two hours of incubators. They have two hours of life, it’s that simple. That makes it very heavy, obviously. I’ve been going through this weird, confusing amount of emotion. She was born a week after October 7, on October 15. Her life as of now has been that. Obviously she doesn’t know it, thankfully. But that’s going to be part of her lineage in one way or another. We’re Lebanese and Palestinian. That’s going to be there. I think of the people who are now twenty-two, born around 9/11, and how much the world has changed after that. There is a bit of that element. It feels like so much has already changed that it’s a bit dizzying to imagine how much will have changed by the time she’s eighteen.

My heart has been heavy, confused, angry, numb at times. The first two weeks, I was numb. The first time I allowed myself to feel emotions of anger was roughly around the time we recorded that episode with Daniel, Yair Wallach, Orly Noy, and Dana El Kurd. I’m kind of still there now. It’s a mix of anger at not just the horrors of the ongoing genocidal campaign, the online dis- and misinformation, the bad faith arguments—all of that stuff—but also feeling sad at the despair that I see in a lot of my circles right now. Especially Palestinians, obviously, but lots of Lebanese as well. We don’t know what’s the point, we don’t know what to do, we’re just posting but we cannot feel, it doesn’t matter, that sort of thing.

To finish that off—I will preface this by saying it’s a very heavy episode to listen to. I listened to the episode on Popular Front with Refaat, the Palestinian academic in Gaza. He’s in Gaza City right now. The episode was recorded three or four days ago. It’s a very intense episode to listen to, just because you can hear the bombing all around him. His kids are screaming in the background. I made the mistake of listening to it on my way to the hospital.

I live in a very “stable” city, Geneva—seen as boring, even, where nothing really happens. I’m very grateful, to be honest, that nothing is happening. I know that the hospital is fine and the hospital will be fine, and I have twenty-four hours access to it, and I can walk to it. All of these privileges. It shouldn’t be a privilege to have a kid at the hospital not being threatened. Obviously. That’s a very low bar. But this is where we are right now.

And the consequences in Europe—we don’t have to get into it. There will be episodes dedicated to that. But I have worried for some time now that what’s happening there is not going to stay there, and we’re already seeing it in terms of the reactions by lots of politicians.

DV: There are so many places this conversation could go. The stakes of everything, and things rippling in Germany and Europe and the States—it’s moving sands all over. I’m curious to go back to something you were mentioning, Hadar. As a Jewish person I think the thing I’m struggling with the most is the normalization of fascism, and Jewish fascism—a particular kind of Jewish fascism which is hard to name, and incredibly painful to name and incredibly painful to see how that’s come about.

I’m curious how you understand the stakes of this for the community, and also, for the audience that might not be familiar with people like Ben Gvir or with what’s happened over past decades in terms of the normalization of certain ideologies, I’m wondering also how you see this in terms of the stakes that we have in these different dimensions, and at least from a Jewish perspective how you are understanding the moment that we’re in.

HC: My understanding of fascism is when there’s a singular ideology and a singular narrative that no one is allowed to challenge, and that becomes the dominant narrative and ideology that is imposed on society, and people positioning themselves as having that ideology not really realizing that that wasn’t really a choice, that they were controlled into it.

I also like to view the situation not just from a political landscape but also from a spiritual, somatic, psychological one. It’s important to understand that the vision that the Zionist movement had for Jewish people was to completely segregate from the world. Jews were scattered all over the world, and the Zionist project was to get all the Jews to come to Palestine. That was part of its understanding; This is how we fight antisemitism.

One of the the things that’s been going around on Israeli media about this moment: right after the Hamas attack, there were politicians who were saying, Either we go back to Auschwitz or we militarize and conquer Gaza. Those were the only two options: go back to Aushwitz or endless brutality on Gaza! That highlights a bit of the psyche there, right? There has never really been a contending with Jewish pain, Jewish trauma—Zionism just took all of that and said, We never have to talk to anyone in the world about our pain, all we have to do is get a really strong military, and this is how we will be safe.

Zionism, in the beginning of the movement, was very much a secular ideology coming from Europe that was actually very fringe. Even Jews in Europe were very against it. But the reason it gained in popularity was because there was Jewish suffering. Even though Zionism wasn’t necessarily started as a Jewish trauma response, it did start as mirroring the nation-state ideology and European colonialism. The reason it became so center-stage in so many Jewish communities was because of the trauma—the trauma of the Holocaust, but not just: the trauma of Jews who were living in the Middle East who all of the sudden were experiencing attacks on them as Jewish people. That history—this is what I see in the Jewish world at least. People didn’t really want to unpack it because it was too painful. So it was easier, in some ways, to just say, Okay, let’s just all get guns. Which is Ben Gvir’s policy.

I brought up Hannah Arendt. I love Hannah Arendt. She predicted this moment in some ways. She said the founding of the Zionist state can actually only lead to a full-on totalitarian regime. She wrote that maybe in the forties, before it was even established. There was a political understanding that this is the direction that we were going for a long time, and now we have gotten to a moment where it’s been the most extreme that we’ve ever seen it. With politicians like Ben Gvir.

Much of Israeli society, and even American Jewish society, believes that that is just “fringe.” Not a central part of Zionism, but, Oh, these are just extremists on the side. But we can’t really afford to look at it that way. All these people are in power right now, seemingly democratically elected, you could say. But also it’s where that ideology that’s been embedded since ’48 has been leading to.

We see this now also with all the mass arrests that are happening—both of Palestinians as well as Israelis who are trying to say, Stop bombing Gaza. There’s actually no space in Israeli society to challenge the current regime. There’s not a space to challenge the current government. That is actual fascism.

I’ll just say that thriving societies—a lot of my research has been looking at Andalucia and what made that so special. Part of it, from what I found, sounds so simple: the power of diversity. It was multi-faith. People were allowed to express different philosophies and challenge each other. Through that challenge is how we grow into a thriving society. When we see complete silencing of anyone—certainly Palestinians; Palestinians are being completely erased and also silenced. But also any Jewish critic who is in any way critical of the state of Israel is denied—in Israeli society but not just: they even say that in the American Jewish community. It’s been personally really disappointing to see a lot of rabbis—I was just listening to one of the congresspeople yesterday and they were talking about how they got a letter from like forty rabbis who were telling them not to sign on to a ceasefire. Even calling for a ceasefire is controversial in the American Jewish community.

It’s something we have to question. That fascist ideology is not just in Israel right now. It’s actually also impacting the whole globe. One thing that I will say that’s been really interesting for me to watch in this moment is how nobody gets a pass, anywhere in this world, around what’s happening in Palestine right now. Almost every organization, every celeb, every anyone has been challenged to say something. So there’s something quite global about this moment.

DK: I’m happy to expand as well. That’s a very intriguing perspective, so thank you, I learned a lot. From a personal perspective, I wanted to share that for the first time in my life—and you can take this with a grain of salt because it can mean a lot of things, but I have never felt more Jewish. I’ve never felt more Arab. Many different identities that comprise my overarching fleet of identities—for all intents and purposes I’ve never felt more Jewish. The reason is, I’ve just started connecting the dots around my aversion to my Jewish identity. I’ve always intellectually understood the historical context and the difference between Zionism and Judaism; I’ve never conflated the two and I’ve been arguing for that separation. We’re seeing so many necessary social media posts explaining the difference and intellectualizing it, and I do that as well.

However, my mom sent me this photo the other week of myself and my grandfather. I’m probably about four years old and I have a kippah on my head—and I had a shofar, which is the horn that you blow on Rosh Hashanah, if I’m not mistaken. I’m like, Holy shit! I’ve always been an atheist, it hasn’t really changed. It’s not something that intrigued me from a spiritual perspective at that young age, even though I’ve grown more spiritual in other ways as I’ve gotten older. But it was always something that I can look forward to with my grandfather, or my family, and it resembled this tradition of family, and it was part of my identity. I had a fascination with clothing and self-expression. I had a fascination with kippahs when I was a kid, even though I was an atheist. I had long hair and a kippah on, because I thought it looked cool.

That photo coupled with one other event: when I was in DC with Jewish Voice for Peace during the first week demanding a ceasefire, I was crying the entire time. It was five thousand Jewish people talking about liberation for Palestinians, and singing Jewish songs, antiwar songs that were traditionally Jewish. I wasn’t very familiar with a lot of these traditions, but that experience essentially, physically, severed the tie between Zionism and Jewishness for me. I say Jewishness, not Judaism.

Up until that moment, yes I understood it intellectually, but deep down inside, as I grew older, did everything in my power to be as far away from being Jewish as possible. Thankfully with my mom being an activist and growing up in a very specific and not ordinary household in Israel, I was always taught that what was being done to the Palestinians was wrong, obviously. And I’ve expanded my intellectual understanding of the whole thing of course, but I always knew, from a very base level, that it’s wrong. That it’s a human rights issue.

But as I got older, I started seeing that many Jews—as you guys have pointed out—in the world were associating themselves with this Zionist idea, and in turn I always saw the link between Zionism and Palestinian oppression. I felt it so deeply that I pushed that identity away because I associated that identity with Zionism inherently.

This is a really important point, because a lot of these talking points against what we represent, as Jews who do support Palestinian liberation wholeheartedly—we’re actually helping sever those ties between perception of Jews as a contingent that will always support and back the Zionist project blindly. What I’m seeing, being in the streets, is that yes, we have many people supporting Israel, but the leaders of many of these movements, especially in the United States, the ones that are on the forefront, as they should be (because we have a privilege that isn’t afforded to many of our Arab and Palestinian brothers and sisters in the West), the ones getting arrested, the ones doing the public disobedience, they’re leading the movements, they are organizing—we are organizing.

They’re actually physically embodying the difference between the Jewish identity and Zionism. I felt, on a personal level, a pretty big release when I physically was in those spaces and saw this beautiful depiction, or manifestation, of Jewishness in support of a staunchly antiwar, anti-oppression, anti-colonial opposition to the occupation of the Palestinian people.

HC: Thank you. I’ll just add a point, you helped me remember where I was going with my thread. About how the Zionist response to Jewish pain and Jewish trauma was militarization and segregation—you can’t talk to anyone who’s not Jewish, let alone a Palestinian; we have to put a wall up. For me as a Jewish person, actually the way that I want to feel safe in the world is through relationship.

I see this a lot, because I also work in a lot of Jewish communities, and am hearing their perspective: part of what we’re also witnessing in this moment is what the segregation has led to, where Jewish people—you can see this all over: that Jewish people are no longer mostly in the Middle East; in Europe the communities are a lot smaller depending on certain cities; in America of course there’s a big Jewish community in a lot of ways, but there is sometimes this insular perspective to the community. Especially in Israeli society, the narratives that a lot of Israelis are saying to themselves is Why does the world hate us? Why does the world hate us? They are showing the marches that are happening all over the world for Palestine as marches that are geared towards hating Jews. That’s part of the psychology that is happening. Then they freak out even more: Oh my god, all these people want to kill us? No, all these people are seeing what’s happening in Gaza and are pushed to take a stand and to say something.

I think there’s something there to examine about what has been the cost of segregating the Jewish community from the world in this way by holding on to Zionism. What can the future be, through actual relationships? Coming back to the psychological understanding: if I want the world to understand my pain, but I’m not willing to listen to anyone else’s pain, it’s not going to go well for me. We see this even just in one-on-one relationships. If I’m coming to a friend and I’m like, Here’s all my pain and trauma, and I make no space for her, then it’s not going to work.

There’s a deep Jewish desire to be seen and understood in our pain and trauma, but it’s not really realizing the circumstances and the context of this moment, which is about the mass mobilization for a ceasefire, and the urgency of that to protect Palestinian lives. So it’s a bit of a mess. I guess I’m just offering that because I work both with Palestinian and Jewish community, and it’s been really intense.

I believe that Jewish safety and Palestinian safety go hand-in-hand, that our liberation is tied. And in this moment, it’s sometimes been really hard, because if I say something pro-Palestinian, sometimes people in the Jewish community feel betrayed, or if I say something about antisemitism, then Palestinians feel betrayed, like Why are you focusing on that? It feels like this impossible moment. But for the long term vision, I like what you said about strategy. We do have to articulate multi-faith, thriving, liberatory analysis of how we all get free.

DV: That’s an exciting thing to talk more about: how do we envision this, how do we strategize this, how do we dream it? I wanted to ask you both very specifically, because you’ve been very powerful in framing the way in which Zionism has been tied to segregation.

One of my coping mechanisms these days has been listening to Yossi Zabari, the spoken word artist and activist. There’s an incredible collaboration with Tamer Nafar, called “Ana Mish Politi,” or “I’m not political.”It’s an incredible spoken word where he talks about Israeli society ignoring and fearing the hyphen that connects Arab and Jew. And there’s something about that hyphen that I wanted to bring into this space. Both of you have spoken very powerfully about the way in which Zionism has created a separation wall, literally, between Jews and their Arab identity, especially for Mizrahim.

Dahab, you mentioned how in this moment you feel more Jewish than ever. Especially for many people who might be deeply unaware, partly because of how much the Israeli government and Jewish communities have ignored Mizrahi history and Mizrahi lived experience, I’m curious what rebuilding that hyphen looks like—the hyphen that connects Arab and Jew. And how can we dream from that space in the urgency of the now?

HC: I have a lot to say. I also work with a lot of Mizrahi community, all over the world. I work particularly with one person who is coming into their understanding—I posed this question to him (this was a few months ago): Don’t you think it’s strange that the people who are our enemy (Arabs, as we’re taught in Israeli society)—don’t you think it’s strange that that’s actually where we come from? My lineage is from Syria, and all of the sudden Syria is the enemy. But I’m Syrian. What does that do to my psyche, and my consciousness, and why would I be more allied with Israel and not Syria?

And he sent me a TikTok of some Mizrahi comedian who was like, Okay look, I just came home from the grocery store, and look, all of our enemies are in the bag. Look, we have hummus from Lebanon, and we have ful from Syria, and we have jahnun from Yemen! We’re so enmeshed with “the enemy” already! I just thought that was this fascinating thing to unpack.

There was another Mizrahi activist who was talking about unlearning Zionism, and how you realize that the enemy looks a lot like your grandma, and it’s like, This is really strange! It’s my family. Mizrahim have this big identity crisis about who we are and where we belong. We never fully belong in Israeli society, but we also don’t really belong in our original homelands where we come from. So we’re in this in-between space.

Going back to how I was framing fascism as this singular ideology: there’s nothing more threatening to fascism than things that kind of stop making sense in its framework, this in-between space. So much of the conversation has become Jews versus Arabs, or sometimes Jews versus Muslims even, the whole holy war theory. The Arab-Jewish identity really breaks down the narrative.

When we break down the narrative—it’s not just the narrative. Narrative is creating reality, from a spiritual perspective. To shift the reality we also have to shift the narrative. I find that really important. I’ve been doing a lot of educational work in Arab communities around Arab-Jewish identity, and many of them grow up not knowing much: Wait, what? There were Jews in Egypt? Why is there a synagogue? A lot of these questions have been unanswered, especially for the young generation. There’s been a blatant erasure of our histories, for a purpose.

In order to go forward, we also have to examine the past, and we can’t just do that—fascism wants us to hold on to one narrative and look at everything through that lens. We can’t just do that. We have to be honest about how we got to this moment. Personally this is some of what I see, especially from the more Western narrative that’s now coming up about Palestine and settler-colonialism, especially in the US, trying to frame a lot of things: Oh, Israelis are white, Palestinians are POC. Okay, there’s a racial paradigm of Jewish supremacy. That’s a thing. But we’re in a very different state than we were in ’48, when the Zionist project was mostly Ashkenazi. Actually a lot of the people who are the most racist in Israeli society are Mizrahi! Ben Gvir is Mizrahi.

It doesn’t help us to not understand this psychology. I see this back-and-forth. It happens in Israeli society: They’re saying I’m white, but we came from Iraq! We came from Egypt! We have to actually acknowledge—it’s going to be uncomfortable for all of us to position Arab Jews as a part of this. I was on a global call last week about Arab Jews and one of the questions that was posed was: What is our role and where do we fit in, in this moment? And does that even matter? (Because perhaps this doesn’t matter and it’s just, All eyes on Gaza). But in order for long-term unpacking to happen, there is a way that it does need to be re-understood, our role and our identity.

DK: I knew Hadar would have a lot more interesting and smart things to say about this! I agree with everything you said. But I can add a few points.

In Israeli society, the understanding of sociology and anthropology as a social phenomenon across the board is next to zero. That work is pretty advanced in American society, with the different social justice movements and the reading that a lot of the younger generation has been doing around the social justice movements. A big part of the reason why there’s such a big awakening around Palestine is because of the books that people are reading during the social justice movement around George Floyd and everything that happened there. You start reading Angela Davis and you start realizing that Black liberation is connected with Palestinian liberation. That’s a very intellectual understanding of global solidarity that most people do not have a good grasp of—especially Israeli society.

So yes, in that paradigm—Black, white, Mizrahi, whatever it means—you are white in that paradigm. It is that. It isn’t a mistake to classify Israelis as “white” in the global paradigm of power versus people. You don’t have to be white to be a white supremacist. This is how these systems of oppression work, and “whiteness” doesn’t actually mean the skin color that you have, but whiteness is a system of oppression globally that Zionism plays a very important role in, especially in modern times—only then can you understand Zionism as a “white” idea. It’s not literal, necessarily.

I agree with what you’re saying; I think it’s important to understand the nuance. Trying to explain this to an Israeli person who doesn’t understand social justice dynamics—it’s honestly impossible. It’s a losing battle. Yes, an Ethiopian Jew won’t understand how they’re “white” in comparison to the Palestinians in the country. I think the world does understand that, though. I’m seeing global solidarity. I’m seeing lots of queer solidarity with Palestine. They’re not falling for the tropes of Israelis waving the pride flag in Gaza. They see that as disgusting. And they totally understand that liberation for all marginalized groups is linked. You can go step-by-step and liberate, and your specific experience doesn’t trump the fact that there’s a travesty and atrocity that’s unjust that’s happening to Palestinians, specifically right now in Gaza.

That’s what is heartening to me. People are pretty aware of the links, and Zionism is there to cloud that perception and understanding, and flip things on its head. But when you put your head down and have a good understanding, you do understand the links and the solidarity. How do we show everyone in the world that the plight of the Palestinian people represents their own plight within oppressed societies? To varying extents, everyone experiences the wrath of the system. No one is thriving right now. So the second we can show that the plight of the Palestinian represents all these different systems of oppression is when we show every individual in the world how they can see themselves in that scenario. That way we create a truly global movement against the system itself.

DV: I’d like you also to reflect, Elia, from a Palestinian perspective, from a Lebanese-Palestinian perspective, on this hyphen, the radical possibility of breaking through fascism by showing what’s possible beyond segregation. How do you approach it? How do you understand it?

EA: I describe myself as Lebanese-Palestinian, but in Lebanon that’s not really an accepted thing. You can be both if you’re in the diaspora. It’s a more open space. But in Lebanon, especially since the civil war of the seventies and eighties, the identity of a Palestinian is inherently political. Many Lebanese don’t see Palestinian refugees as refugees, for example. They don’t use that term—the government uses terms like migrants or guests.

I’m not going to get into it too much, but growing up I didn’t know I was Palestinian until a certain point. It’s not seen as—I was otherwise a Lebanese Christian, middle class, from Mount Lebanon. In terms of categories, historically this meant very likely sympathetic to rightwing Christian nationalists. Those guys were overwhelmingly anti-Palestinian. To be both a Lebanese Christian and also a Palestinian was not, and still is not, conceived as a possibility. It’s not even opposed, there’s just no space for it. There is space for other hyphenated identities in Lebanon—Lebanese-Armenian, for example—for various historical reasons. But Lebanese-Palestinian is a very different thing. In the sectarian system, there would theoretically be Palestinian seats in Parliament just as there are Armenian seats. But that doesn’t exist.

My relationship to both identities has been one of unease my entire life. There has never been a point, as far as I can remember, where I felt comfortable being just one or the other. When I discovered that I was actually two and not just one, it made a lot more sense why I felt uncomfortable being just the one in the first place, if that makes sense.

The other thing, maybe more related to this conversation, is that I did my masters on the politics of language and I focused on Yiddish and Hebrew. My godfather described that as me being provocative. Maybe he’s right, I don’t know. But there was clearly a desire—this was a few years ago now—to understand “the enemy.” That’s how it’s described. Even in polite society within Lebanon, the terms Jewish and Zionist are used interchangeably. This is obviously very problematic.

My grandmother would use that term not necessarily thinking that this is wrong, and if she meets a Jewish person—there is a disconnect in one’s mind, that because the only Jewish state in the world happens to be our neighbor, which has obviously also occupied Lebanon in the past, and then the war in 2006, not to mention what’s happening now as well. For many people, especially of a certain generation (and I think for the younger it’s similar now), they don’t know any Jewish person who is not the state of Israel. They don’t know Israelis in the first place—obviously you don’t meet them because of the current state of affairs in the Middle East. But if you do hear of one, it’s Netanyahu, or his spokesperson. Maybe some general in the army who’s been quoted on Al-Jazeera. You don’t have an intimate or personal relationship, or knowledge of Lebanese-Jewish history, which is actually pretty old. 

Most people genuinely have no idea that there were Jews in Lebanon up until basically the seventies. There still are today, but it’s a very tiny community. In the seventies, the Lebanese Jewish population was the only post-’48 population of Jews to have actually increased in numbers, and that’s largely because Jews from Syria especially, and Iraq if I’m not mistaken, went to Lebanon because it was culturally easier for them at the time, rather than move to Israel. Which is what happened later on, obviously, or they went to the West when that was possible.

Once I learned a bit of that history, a lot of my knowledge of what Israel is—I’m not talking about the state, necessarily, I’m talking about people in general—became more nuanced. So many of my friends, to this day—I had this conversation literally half an hour before we started chatting today—have no idea that there are so many Mizrahi Jews in Israel. It’s just a white thing. It’s a white project. Whiteness, whiteness, whiteness. It’s like there’s something that doesn’t fit if you also have to include that actually you can be an IDF member and be Druze, or Ethiopian, or Yemeni, and you’re still part of an oppressive structure, but maybe your personal relationship with that structure is actually more confusing and complicated, and you hold a lot of internal contradictions that don’t have to make sense, but you still hold them. It doesn’t have to be logical. Actually it doesn’t make any sense!

Once I get more into the details of it with friends of mine whose entire relationship towards Israel, towards Zionism—and I’m not talking about Palestinians, I’m talking about Lebanese. I have found that Palestinians overall are easier to talk to about Israel and Zionism than many Lebanese. That’s probably an entire podcast on its own. But it’s been an interesting journey. I’ve been sending them videos of the Israelis who oppose what’s happening, in Hebrew. We know in this space that it’s not a huge number of people. But even a small number of people honestly blows their minds. It doesn’t fit in a certain understanding of the world, or the region especially. My argument is, understanding it does not mean you like what’s happening. You just understand better how complicated that thing you don’t like is, and that makes you more effective in tackling it.

The last thing I’ll say on the hyphenated question—I think this was in the subtext of your question: the separation of Arab and Jewish into two identities that supposedly can’t mix with one another has been beneficial for all the worst actors possible. It’s been amazing. You can list all of them. From the German state today to the various authoritarian Arab regimes, obviously to the state of Israel. It’s been beneficial for all of them! I think of the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser—at some point a bunch of his people in government were saying You can either be Arab or Jewish. You cannot be both. Sometimes in those explicit terms. And Israel was like, Perfect! That’s exactly what we want! You can be this or that, so come and be this. That benefited a lot of the worst authoritarian tendencies, because plurality is inherently opposed to, or at least doesn’t work in the same way as, the homogeneous nationalism that we saw and still see to this day in our region—and frankly around the world.

That’s what I would add. My personal identity, because I allowed it to grow in a certain way, and explored it in a certain way, has allowed me to be more comfortable in contexts that are inherently uncomfortable. Maybe comfortable is not the term. More appreciative of how complicated things are, and something being complicated does not mean that you like it. You can hold both at the same time, it’s actually easier than insisting on one thing.

HC: Thank you so much, Elia. I really appreciate you sharing that. Coming back to psychology, one of the things I’ve just witnessed with so many of my friends and so many community members is that especially when you’re a child, when someone tells you This is the enemy, you’re actually going to develop a healthy curiosity towards that. I was ten when the wall was being built. I remember I was like, Why is there a wall? This notion that both Palestinians and Israelis have of who the enemy is—I certainly know a lot of Lebanese people who also question it: We’re taught that Israel and Jews are the enemy; what does it look like to talk to a Jew? As children and as we grow, people have a healthy instinct to be like, Wait, why are they the enemy? That’s part of what makes us humans, is that we have a natural curiosity and will to understand the world and to understand ourselves. When we’re children we’re more open to that; the more we grow, certain narratives end up solidifying.

But that is why I feel like these enemy narratives are not really going to work. People are going to consistently challenge that through relationships, and they’re going to be curious. The reason why they’re going to be curious is because they feel like a part of them is missing. I certainly felt this growing up in Israeli society. My family has been in Jerusalem for so many generations, and I felt incomplete without Palestinian community and Palestinian friends. This is part of my history, this is part of my lineage. That was a motivator. And I see that happening with a lot of Arabs who are not Palestinian, who are also sometimes like, Wait, what happened to the Arab Jews here? How can we reconnect? I think there’s a desire there, even if it doesn’t always appear that way on social media.

I also do a lot of education around antisemitism, which I think is really important, and sometimes when I say that I do education with Arabs around antisemitism, people just assume that Palestinians under occupation don’t have time to learn about antisemitism. To which I say yes, of course. I’m not here educating people in Gaza, who are suffering bombs right now, on antisemitism. Or even people in the West Bank who have to deal with arrests and home demolitions and all of that. I’m more talking to the non-Palestinian Arab world. Elia you said this, and I think this is sometimes shocking for people to really understand: there’s a lot more antisemitism in the non-Palestinian Arab community than there is in the actual Palestinian community.

We’re not fully acknowledging or addressing that. Part of it comes from what I was talking about earlier: Jews are mostly no longer there, so they never know Jews. Like you said, the image is just Netanyahu. One time I was teaching a class on Jewish mysticism in Europe, and I had someone ask me: Kabbalah is so beautiful, why doesn’t Netanyahu also learn Kabbalah? It’s a hysterical question, right? But for a lot of people, Netanyahu is The Jew, because that’s what they see. That’s the Jewish state and this is the Jewish leader. That has been the cost of Jewish communities no longer belonging, all over the Arab region: we have this empty void there. When there’s an empty void, it’s usually filled with more nationalism, sadly. What else can we fill the void with?

The perspective that I’ve chosen in some of this work is to start with the question of what I envision—and not just for Palestine but for the whole region. There are a lot of things that are so interconnected, around borders and segregation. So many people are struggling with identity because identity has become this purified thing. Even if you’re Arab Muslim, it means this way. There is a certain rhetoric around identity that completely misaligns with the history of our region. For me, the vision is a multi-faith, multicultural returnto what we were. Again, the whole region.

That’s how I’ve chosen to position my work. If that’s the vision, what do I need to do now to help create that path? It feels like that is very important.

DK: Hadar, I’m all in on that vision. I keep joking, but hopefully soon we can have a coffee in Baghdad and do a big return to Iraq as well, where my grandparents are from. I mean that wholeheartedly. That is something that I feel.

That socio-geographic void that you described around the absence of Jews in the Middle East is something I started feeling on a personal level over the past few years. I had always felt a deep-seated identity crisis, for as long as I can remember. This didn’t happen to me after my twenties like it happened to some. It happened to me very early on. I was in Palestine a couple months ago, in the West Bank visiting some friends there, and I always say—of course, I’ve lived in New York most of my life. New York is the most beautiful experiment in diversity and multiculturalism that we have available to us in the modern world. And New York always felt like home to me. But I always realized that New York is home to anyone who can hack it in New York. So it’s not a home just to me or my identity—and that’s what’s beautiful about it. But the other month when I was in the West Bank—it was the first time that I spent more than a day trip; I got to experience the people and culture. It was the first time in my life that I felt at home. I called my mother the first night. I told her that, and she completed my sentence. She also felt that deep disconnect between her Arab identity for a good amount of her adult life and what was available to her in Israel.

It was such a profound experience for me, because I had never, ever felt at home anywhere. I’ve felt comfortable, I’ve felt happy. I’m a pretty dynamic and social person. But I never felt a deep connection. Just to expand: in one example, I saw these three older men sitting on their stoop and just chatting, and they looked really cool, and I asked to take a photo of them. Then I went back to my hotel, and a few hours later I came back outside and I saw one of the old men sitting with a group of older ladies, and they called me over. And they asked me my name, and I said Dahab—and the warmth she expressed, and all her jewelry, reminded me of my grandparents. They all really reminded me of my grandparents. My grandparents spoke Arabic at home; they listened to all the Arabic music at home. I grew up, in my early childhood, on that.

It really showed me an experience of an Arab—say what you may about the occupation, but in the West Bank at least they are allowed to be Arab and in their Arab identity, something that I’d never experienced personally, and also something my grandparents couldn’t do wholeheartedly in Israeli society.

EA: Going back a bit to the hyphen: I do appreciate the way you framed it, Daniel. It surprises a lot of folks when I tell them that right now in Lebanon there is no such thing as a pro-Palestinian party. It doesn’t exist. People usually ask about the obvious one, Hezbollah, given everything that’s happening. Well, they’re anti-Israel. They’re pro-Iran, that’s for sure. In terms of pro-Palestine, it’s under a very specific vision of what they consider to be Palestine. They air their dirty laundry when their audience is not the international audience but just the local audience. So only we get to see it.

The other thing I would say is that before Netanyahu, the most famous Jewish person, as far as the Lebanese were concerned, was Ariel Sharon. That’s just a fact, unfortunately. That reality continues to this day, and that’s why when I was doing my undergrad at the AUB, the American University of Beirut, whenever they would have a prominent Jewish person come to talk about how problematic Israel is or things like that—Chomsky came once, and Finkelstein came another time; the individuals don’t matter, because what mattered was Oh, a Jewish person! That was the excitement about it. Nothing to do with those specific individuals. You could see the rooms being filled, because there was genuinely a sense of Where are the Jewish people? Again, Israel is down south. It’s not that far away. But there is a very strong disconnect that has been created, fomented by the Israelis, by the Israeli state and also—sometimes actively and sometimes passively—by various Arab regimes as well.

This has caused a lot of harm to the plurality of Lebanese society, in terms of Lebanon’s Jewish community and Jewish heritage, which as I said is pretty old.

HC: Thank you. I’ve definitely experienced being the only Jewish person in multiple spaces, or the first one Arabs are meeting, and they’re like, You’re human? They almost can’t understand that I’m also a human. This work of breaking the bounds of our mind—this is why I also come from a spiritual perspective. Because our mental narratives rigidify our understanding of reality, but the truth is that our bones know so much more. This is true of all Middle Eastern people. I also do a lot of solidarity work not just with Arabs but with Kurdish and Armenian and all minority groups. Embedded in our literal body, in our DNA, is our whole history.

One of the things that’s really uncomfortable for me sometimes in the West is this positioning of “ancient conflicts”—the issues that we’re facing are very modern issues that are very much an extension of World War Two, that have been imposed and restructured into what we’re now seeing, which perhaps is World War Three. So there’s been a continuation of that in the Middle East frame. But our bodies have this deeper understanding of our connectivity and relationship to one another. From my experience, the longing is so strong to return to that.

Sometimes people don’t have the words, but that longing is strong. That’s part of the flame that I’m trying to steward more. How do we remember our past? Not just as something that was in the past but as something that is in our present because it’s alive in our bodies still. How do we bring that forward?

One of the things in the last month that I’ve been personally wrestling with in regard to this identity of being both Arab and Jewish—it’s really intense, because in my body I feel both struggles really deeply. I do identify with Arab struggle, and I can see the insane dehumanization of the Western world and it makes you want to scream and rage. And then they capture you on video and they’re like, See? This person is angry! I see it, and I feel it clearly. And I also feel Jewish pain around safety and belonging and misunderstanding, and all these different things. I find myself, even somatically, oscillating between the two. I can’t actually choose, because these pains feel intertwined. Maybe this is part of my own personal struggle. Feeling this, I’m like, what is the justice movement that can hold me in that?

Ultimately I feel like this is the path forward: our shared belonging. It is in some ways the overthrowing of fascism and nationalism from all of our midst. And it doesn’t actually mean overthrowing The Jews. We have to distinguish that. The dream isn’t to kill Jews. That’s not the thing. It’s to overthrow fascism, it’s to dismantle apartheid, it’s to understand how this is harming Jewish people as well.

It’s important to clarify that frame. We’re working against fascism. We’re working against apartheid. We’re working against segregation. We’re working against global militarization. All of those things. And we are recovering our relational heritage of Jews, Muslims, Christians, all of that belonging to the region.

DK: This vision-first strategy of what “Jewish-Arab” can mean is something that I definitely can get behind. I sometimes get caught in these dreams of returning to a time, like you mentioned, Hadar, before Zionism and Western imperialism started taking over the Arab world and sowing the disconnection and the different conflicts throughout the region, not only among Jews but different ethnic groups as well. It was a very concerted effort to do so in the effort to colonize and exploit the local populations, for various reasons.

On a personal level, over the past month I’ve been pretty vocal on social media, and it’s been an array of different content related to what’s happening. I’ve seen that entering into the space as one who considers himself an Arab Jew has really resonated with many of the Arabs, actually, who have been contacting me and feeling a very deep connection to this vision that I’ve also been, in bits and pieces, sharing on social media. I know that Baghdad was basically a Jewish city in Iraq up until the forties, and among many Iraqis, there is a lot of lore around how the Jews were a big and integral part of the Arab world. Zionism came in and really erased our identity.

To your question, Daniel, does the “Arab Jew” exist: yeah, it exists in my identity and Hadar’s identity. Avi Shlaim is a big proponent of this identity. But it’s not a very popular opinion, and most people wouldn’t even understand what we mean when we say it. They don’t even understand it because the Zionist narrative is that there’s Arab and there’s Jew. The Arab world adopted the Zionist narrative: there’s Arab and there’s Jew. So when you say you’re an Arab Jew, it’s like, Who is this freak? What is he talking about?

I always felt it in my bones. I never really understood it. I told my grandfather—he’s a darker guy, he spoke with a heavy Arabic accent but he knew Hebrew fluently, and integrated well into society and did well, and he used to say, I am not an Arab. And I used to say to him, “You are an Arab,” as a twelve-year-old thinking about these things and of course not communicating it in the best of ways to my grandfather, but he would say No, I’m not an Arab, with this face of disgust. But it didn’t feel like it was disgust at being an Arab—it was disgust at his own identity crisis in Israeli society. It was a deep-seated pain that he felt. He wasn’t a scholar of Arab world history, Sykes-Picot, and all the different geopolitical factors that led to the expulsion of Jews. Of course Zionism played a really important role in manufacturing an atmosphere that made it very uncomfortable for Arab Jewish people to live in Arab countries, for the purpose of bringing them and displacing the local Arab population, the Palestinian population. The average person didn’t know what those macro factors are. So at the end of the day, they felt: We were kicked out.

The scholars who do the work and know the history, they know that it’s not as cut-and-dried as that. But they felt they were kicked out and at the end of the day brought into a situation that didn’t want them either to begin with! So there is this self-hatred that’s being inflicted upon you through this new conception where you’re checking your Arab heritage while you also hang on to it. They were listening to Arabic radio and Arabic music until they were ninety years old, and he said he’s not an Arab. That’s the contradiction that they have to uphold in order to be accepted at all in Israeli society.

So what Hadar mentioned earlier, these conflicts and these multiple emotions that are going through our minds—that is the result of colonialism for minority populations in a colonial society. A lot of the time because there’s no place for your identity, and because you may resemble an oppressed population or you were in an oppressed population in another paradigm, when you enter into this new paradigm you take whatever privilege you have. You’re being stepped on, so you want to step on someone else.

That’s the case for the Druze population—no one is blaming the minorities, but at the end of the day, this notion of Arab Jew does not exist in Israel. But I have been getting a lot of messages from other Arab Jews around the world, saying, Hey, I identify as an Arab Jew too! and I’ve just entered into this arena, so I’m sure Hadar has been getting a lot of these messages for years. That’s a pretty heartening way to anchor this vision for the future, in a sense. There are people who do understand this, have been going through this identity crisis internally. If we put a stake in the ground and say, Hey, this is how we envision the future, I think there can be a beacon of hope for what could be in the Arab world.

I think it is very important to look at the past and understand what can be in the future in the Arab world as an alternative to this growing fascism both in Israel as well as in other Arab countries. It is definitely apparent that the will of the people hasn’t been reflected in the legislative decisions that Arab leaders are making. We all know that key Arab states blocked a proposal for a ceasefire just yesterday, in spite of the overwhelming support that their people have had for Palestine.

DV: We could go on for many hours, there are so many strands. Thank you so much, both of you, for your time. We’ll leave with that vision. We’ll leave with the fire, the fury of the moment, the urgency of the now, towards a vision of reunification, of tikkun, of healing and justice for all.

Very quick question that we ask all our guests on The Fire These Times: if you have one recommendation to fire listeners towards—it could be sound, music, a book, a practice—what would you recommend?

DK: This aligns with the conversation—this is someone that Hadar had on her podcast. I recommend the book Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew by Avi Shlaim.

HC: Beautiful. Wow, crazy that my mind is just blank. There are so many things depending on who is listening! If it’s a Jewish or an Arab person I would recommend different things! Gosh, I’m going to say something perhaps listeners aren’t going to like. But I think in this moment there’s a really important element of faith, and returning to spirituality. For me that is the essence of life. I’m not going to recommend one thing in particular, but whatever your faith tradition is, or whatever analysis of spirituality you have, I would recommend grounding in that, in some way, in this moment.

DV: Thank you so much. And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of The Fire These Times. It’s been a beautiful conversation, and we look forward to speaking more.