On Q&A, I have talked with Bret Stephens. Here is that podcast. Bret, an old friend and colleague, is a columnist at the New York Times. Before that, he worked at the Wall Street Journal. He won the Pulitzer prize for commentary in 2013. Earlier in his life, he was the editor of the Jerusalem Post. I wanted to talk with Bret about Russia, Ukraine, and America; about Israel and antisemitism; and about the U.S. media. I have, and I’m glad I did.
In my post here, I will provide a few excerpts — in paraphrase, but close paraphrase. About Russia, in the wake of Navalny’s death, or murder, Stephens says,
A totalitarian system is a system that needs to know, that needs to monitor, your inner life. Putin began as an authoritarian who was not interested in your inner life; he was interested only in your outer one. But as these things tend to progress, he has become more of a dictator not just in the Soviet mold but really in the Stalinist mold — not killing on the same scale, obviously, but having the same contempt for, and indifference to, human life.
Many people on the American right are indifferent to the Ukrainians’ cause, if not outright hostile to it. Also, many have a sneering contempt for Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president. Why? Stephens says the following, among other things:
To me, it’s almost not a political question but a psychological one: How did those of us who grew up in the time of Reagan and Thatcher, and who were taught and believed in the values of the West, the values of freedom, the values of the open society — how is it that a large part of this party has given itself over to the kind of politics we used to decry on the other side? The kind of politics that had nicer things to say about tyrants than about flawed democrats, with a small “d”?
Stephens cites what President Trump said when Bill O’Reilly said to him, “Putin is a killer.” Trump: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
Comments Stephens,
This was out of some left-wing screed published in Ramparts magazine, in the 1960s or ’70s.
Yes, indeed. Bret goes on to say,
Someone once pointed out to me that every few generations the parties weirdly switch. Today, it’s odd to hear Democrats defend the FBI and the CIA, and propose arms packages for our embattled friends in Ukraine. But actually, if you go back to World War II, it was Democrats who argued for Britain in Lend-Lease, and Republicans who were opposed.
Bret then says,
The problem is, the Democrats have yet to switch in certain areas. They are not promoting free markets, defending free speech, opposing cancel culture . . .
On Israel: What would it mean for Israel to “finish the job”? Obviously, you can’t destroy Hamas-associated beliefs. Beliefs exist in the minds of men. What can Israel do?
You can’t destroy beliefs, true, but you can destroy the belief among a critical mass of Palestinians that Hamas’s strategy is, in the long term, a good strategy. With denazification, the Allies could not hope to succeed, at least on their own, in removing Nazi beliefs from Germany. But they so thoroughly destroyed Germany that Germans, whether they were dyed-in-the-wool Nazis or not, knew that Nazism was a dead-end.
(Very few people are actually dyed-in-the-wool anything. People’s views are malleable, and tied to their interests.)
So, you can destroy the belief that adopting Hamas’s strategy is anything other than a fool’s gambit. This is why Israel has to win so conclusively.
I don’t think defeat in the ’73 war made Egyptians less anti-Israel or antisemitic. But Sadat did conclude that he was never going to destroy Israel.
Until Palestinians are convinced that the strategy of October 7th, and future October 7ths, is never going to work, Hamas will never be truly defeated. Hamas’s ideology stands for a number of things, but it ultimately stands for the belief that if you kill enough Jews, you will force them out of the land; that Israel is no different from the Crusader kingdoms of the Middle Ages, which lasted about 200 years. Those kingdoms were far from the mothership of Europe, and they went away through kind of a relentless pressure.
And that is Hamas’s strategy now.
Israel has to make it unmistakably clear: We are here and we’re going to outlast our enemies. We are here to stay. That’s how you defeat Hamas.
It’s not a matter of getting them to start reading the Talmud and tasting the joys of chicken soup and other Jewish food. It’s going to be that inexorable sense that fighting is a loser’s game.
In this Q&A, Bret Stephens and I talk about antisemitism on American campuses. Eloquently, he makes the point that some people are genuinely antisemitic but others are simply ignorant, going with the flow. The ignorant can be reached — through education.
On antisemitism in general, Stephens says this:
Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory that holds the following: Jews are uniquely prone to use devious means to achieve malevolent ends and must therefore be opposed by all means necessary, including violence. That, to me, is what antisemitism is, and the important part is that it’s a conspiracy theory. Why it has taken that form is a good question.
Part of the answer, I think, is that people are inclined to believe conspiracy theories. People are inclined to believe that dark powers account for the things that go wrong in their lives or in the lives of their countries. This also helps explain why anti-Zionism is essentially the direct descendant of antisemitism, or the nearest relative to it.
What the antisemite in late–19th-century Europe believed was that those Jews who called themselves patriotic Germans or patriotic Frenchmen — you know, the Dreyfuses of the world — were not actually French or German. They were Semites. They were people from another place. They were from the Middle East. And what were they trying to do? They were trying to swindle honest, real Germans out of their patrimony, out of their culture, out of their money.
What does the anti-Zionist say? He says, “Well, those Jews, those Israelis, who claim to be natives of this land, who claim to have returned to their ancestral homeland: They’re not really natives of this land. Who are they? They’re Europeans. They are people from Poland and Ukraine. And the United States. They’re white people who have no connection to the land. And what are they trying to do? They’re trying to swindle honest, good Palestinians out of their olive groves, out of their land, out of their patrimony.”
So, the conspiracy is exactly the same. The only difference is the geography. To the antisemite, the Jew is from the Middle East; to the anti-Zionist, the Jew is from Europe.
Antisemitism persists because, as I said earlier, conspiracy thinking is a very appealing way of accounting for the universe, right? It’s tough to say, for instance, “Things are going wrong for me because I don’t get out of bed. I don’t like to work.” It’s much easier to say, “Things are going wrong for me because the system is rigged. The globalists have fixed things against me.”
The chant at Charlottesville — “The Jews will not replace us” — was another conspiracy theory. What were they saying? They were saying, “Those rich Jews in hedge funds in New York are trying to replace white American labor with cheap Hispanic labor.”
Wherever there is antisemitism, there is conspiracy theory. “The Jews are poisoning the wells.” “The Jews are murdering Christian children and using their blood to bake matzah.” “The Jews are behind the plague.” “The Jews are behind the World War.” “The Jews are behind colonialism and imperialism.” “The Jews are rootless cosmopolitans, who defy the will of the nation-state.” And now it’s “The Jews are mindless nationalists who are imposing Zionism on the world.”
It has always been a conspiracy theory.
Again, to hear this Q&A with Bret Stephens, go here.