In this conversation…
Who could’ve foreseen when we started this podcast nearly one year ago to discuss the Times of London Ballerina Farm profile1 that today we’d be publishing a two-hour episode about the most stereotypically “controversial” geopolitical “dispute” in modern history?
There’s one thing you’ll hear repeatedly in conversations about what’s happening in Gaza: It’s complicated.2
Or, you might hear that “Israel is the only democracy3 in the Middle East,” or that it’s the only country in the region that “shares our values.” (No objection there; Israel certainly shares American values, though probably not the values you think.)
Unfortunately, the story of Israel and Palestine is a deeply American story—and it’s only through confronting it that we’ll be able to understand not just the past of American right-wing extremism, but its present and future.
Even though we want this episode to be free for all to access, we want to extend a heartfelt “thank you” to the paid subscribers who make conversations like this one possible. $35,000 of the $66,000 in subscription payments we’ve donated so far this year have gone to food aid in Gaza. As Caro said, this episode is for—and exists because of—you, Dirty Little Liars: Thank you, and let’s fucking go.
References in This Episode
I know what you’re thinking: How are Caro & Katie going to make an episode about genocide bearable, let alone entertaining? Come, join us as we swing-dance along the knife’s edge of cancelation!
Today’s show notes are going to be a little different than usual, beginning—rather than ending—with the background reading that helped inform this episode:
📚 Background Reading
The majority of the historical quotes in this episode come from these four books.
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance by Rashid Khalidi
Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk, particularly chapters 11–13
Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance by Amy Kaplan
📰 For ongoing news about Gaza, I recommend subscribing to
, particularly the reporting and commentary from and .Special shout-out to my old drinking buddy-turned-fellow-disillusioned-radical, Kiefer Eubank, for his help researching and fact-checking this outline.
Citations in this Episode
We begin our story at the most popular starting point in modern mainstream coverage—October 7—with a high-level rundown of the horrors visited upon the population of Gaza4 since then, thanks to Suzy Hansen’s neatly summarized timeline in her New York Magazine feature story, “War Crimes in Plain Sight.”
One of the most bewildering things about the coverage in American media is the feigned confusion over Israel’s intentions and tactics. Meanwhile, let’s do a quick cut to the former Israeli Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant:
“We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” Then he declared a “complete siege” on Gaza, saying: “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed.”
Oh! Interesting. Seeking comment from *checks notes* every American newspaper that’s ever been like, “Noooo, bro, Israel isn’t blocking aid, bro, we swear, bro.” …Bueller?
But I don’t know—maybe the current Minister of Defense, Israel Katz, feels differently. Katz, care to weigh in?
“Humanitarian aid to Gaza? Not a switch will be flicked on, not a valve will be opened, not a fuel truck will enter until the Israeli hostages come home. Humanitarian for humanitarian. Let no one lecture us about morality.”
It’s hard to decide what’s worse: that, or the unquestioning, reflexive credulity American media lends to whatever the Israeli government says. One of the claims most insulting to our collective intelligence was made in January 20245, when Israeli officials said that a dozen (yes, literally 12) of the 30,000 UNRWA6 employees who provide necessary public services to Gazans had “links” to Hamas, a baseless claim that US newspapers duly repeated, manufacturing consent for the Biden administration to cut off funding to the vital organization.
Hm. I don’t know. I think the benefit of the doubt is in order, don’t you? It’s about the hostages—holds index finger to earpiece—what’s that? Sorry, this just in:
Wait, Hamas doesn’t even govern the West Bank! I’m beginning to think this was never about Hamas…
*time machine whirs…*
Nearly a year before this vote occurred, The Lancet, a medical journal, published a harrowing report which estimated the true death toll in Gaza as of July 2024 was—conservatively—closer to 186,000 than the official reported “40,000” or “60,000,” which has been suspiciously consistent for months, despite ongoing bombing, shooting, and starvation.
And in one of the most dystopian twists yet, motherfucking Boston Consulting Group was brought in to management-consult a Final Solution-style “aid distribution” cosplay,7 the horrors of which have been described by whistleblower and retired US Special Forces officer, Anthony Aguilar, hired by the Gaza “Humanitarian” Fund’s security subcontractor:
This video is a hard watch, but you know the soulless ghouls at the Heritage Foundation8 are currently Always Sunny murder-boarding Aguilar’s connection to the HAMAS TERRORIST SUPPORT NETWORK™️. (The framing of this interview is frustrating and, in the back half, Aguilar regrettably characterizes the IDF’s position as “precarious” and “tactically bad,” as though they are not directly responsible and behaving exactly as intended—still, this testimony being featured in mainstream media that Good Centrist Liberals will see is valuable regardless.)
Speaking of the Hamas Terrorist Support Network, let’s check back in with Zohran Mamdani and his ViOlEnT rHeToRiC9—in the month of June alone, the five largest US newspapers published no fewer than 15 stories that discussed the “dangerous” phrase “Globalize the Intifada” and pontificated about whether it “calls for” violence “against Israel.”
Don’t worry, I’m sure they’ve shifted their focus amid the barrage of starvation reports and come to their senses that handwringing over “violent language” is a little silly while actual violence is being perpetrated against—oh, wait:
Using the same search terms in ProQuest for the month of June (the five largest newspapers, but with the search terms “Israel” and “violence” rather than “Globalize the Intifada”), I was able to deduce, over the same time period, how many articles covered the aforementioned actual violence, perpetrated by Israel, with “Israel” in the headline as the subject of the sentence. I’ll let you guess.
Answer:
Here’s a sampling of the rest:
“Three Palestinians killed in West Bank clash with Israelis” (Washington Post)
“Gazans Face Lethal Risk Getting Food From New Aid Hubs” (New York Times)
“8 dead in shooting near Gaza aid sites backed by US” (LA Times)
Man, what a weird way to write, “The IDF keeps shooting people.”
Why, you might be wondering, does the US seem so hellbent on protecting Israel’s image?
The problem with American media coverage of Israel is that settler-colonial violence is a cherished American pastime, and we’ve sort of done the whole, Hey, maybe if we just never talk about it, acknowledge it, or apologize, everyone will forget that our country was also a genocidal free-for-all for about 400 years, the likes of which a modern management consulting firm could only dream?
“Hey, hey, hey,” you might be thinking, “That’s not totally fair—it was the illnesses. It’s not like there was a top-down legislative policy of extermination of natives.” *phone rings*
Wait, Thomas Jefferson? How did you get this number?
“This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate.” —Thomas Jefferson, 1813
Okay, but that was one president. An outlier! Except, shit, hold on—someone’s on the other line:
“[The Natives] have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race…they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and [before] long, disappear.” —Andrew Jackson, 1833
Throughout the twentieth century, Native American children were forced into boarding “schools” designed to “culturally assimilate” them. (These were schools in the same sense that the Gaza Humanitarian Fund is a legitimate aid organization—Native American children were abused and died in large numbers.)
But let’s head back to the 21st century, where we’ve totally stopped Doing Genocide and instead have committed ourselves to Fighting Terrorism.10 As Robert Fisk writes, the concept of “terrorism” must be “dangerously present but comfortably isolated from reason, cause or history” to be an effective rhetorical tool.
The problem, you see, is that those countries over there are filled with brown people religious fundamentalists and fanatic extremists who cannot be trusted to adequately deploy our western liberal democratic values like freedom and the rule of law.
For no reason at all, let’s check in from the past month in the United States:
Anyway, the linguistic trappings of the “terrorism” lexicon is where the thought-terminating power of language is on full display. I’ll quote Fisk in full here, because as Caro said, this passage is remarkable:
“Terrorism” is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence—our violence—which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report. The soap opera of the devil served up on prime-time or distilled and wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing “commentators” of the American East Coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against terror. Victory over Terror. War on terror. Everlasting war on terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks. In August 1914, the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas. Today, we are fighting forever. The war is eternal. The enemy is eternal, his face changing on our screens.
Bear in mind this was written in 2005, before we had triggered the deaths of millions of Iraqis for the Bush family’s11 generational grudge12 against Saddam Hussein.
As you’ll see, terrorism is not something you do, but something you are. (This is, I’m told, the unofficial Heritage Foundation motto.)
In a twist that will surprise approximately no one, there’s one group in American history that has always seen this liberation struggle clearly: the Black radical tradition, and thinkers like Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Angela Davis have written compellingly about the amount of mythologizing necessary to uphold a fragile arrangement that clearly flies in the face of the post-WWII “decolonial consensus.”
Or, as this paper puts it:
*taps mic slowly* Sound…familiar?
Recently, perhaps nobody has written more incisively on this topic than the late Amy Kaplan, whose book is discussed in this recent episode of The Chris Hedges Report.
Since America wasn’t in the Bible, early settlers often drew parallels between the land over which they were Manifest Destiny-ing their faces off and “ancient Israel”:
The phrase “our American Israel” comes from a Puritan expression of colonial American exceptionalism. In 1799, Abiel Abbot, a Massachusetts minister, preached a Thanksgiving sermon titled ‘Traits of Resemblance in the People of the United States of America to Ancient Israel.’ The sermon starts by noting common usage at the time: ‘It has often been remarked that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel, than any other nation upon the globe.”
The point is, it’s bizarrely easy to forget—while stewing in the frothy jingoist broth of American Chicken Soup for the Imperialist Soul—that Israel’s continued occupation and settlement in Palestine since at least 1967 is illegal under international law, as defined by the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and most legal scholars not on the payroll of the Anti-Defamation League.13
jump cut to Americans, including me until like a month ago when I realized the law never really meant shit, being like:
Kinda shines a different light on…things…
The reality is, there are a lot of core values we don’t live up to—not the least of which being freedom itself:
“The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on earth—worse, every single state incarcerates more people per capita than most nations.”
The point is, it’s long past time we drop the bullshit and stare ourselves squarely in the face—and maybe this revelation, that the IDF trains American police and ICE agents, will help sketch the connection a little more clearly:
This is partially what made Francesca Albanese’s recent UN report on the Economy of Genocide so unnerving, because it made clear the extent to which American tech companies (among others) are using Palestinian mass murder to not just juice revenue, but refine these technologies.
[Microsoft’s] technologies are embedded in the prison service, police, universities and schools—including in colonies. Microsoft has been integrating its systems and civilian tech across the Israeli military since 2003, while acquiring Israeli cybersecurity and surveillance start-ups.
Did someone say “surveillance state”? I’m so glad you asked. Would it surprise you to know that surveillance technology is developed, tested, and perfected on Palestinians before being brought home to surveil Americans? Atlanta, Georgia is one of the most surveilled cities on Earth, second only to cities in China, with 448 cameras per square mile.
TL;DR:
As we watch in disbelief as our government dismantles our rights, establishes a concentration camp in Florida called “Alligator Alcatraz,” and detains people for writing op-eds, then despondently exclaim, This isn’t America, we must remember: The past six months have been remarkably on-brand for the United States.
Our national desire for a certain story to be true about Israel is, at bottom, a desire for a certain story about ourselves to be true. The fate of Palestinian liberation is a mirror for our own—and it tells us everything we need to know about the future of right-wing extremism at home.
shout-out AgriCulture Wars, the O.G. Diabolical Lies conversation, published on Notes app, a dream, and Caro’s Garageband editing skills with nary a clear editorial format in sight
spoiler alert: it isn’t
spoiler alert pt. 2: it isn’t
and the quietly-annexed-in-July-while-nobody-was-watching West Bank
the podcast citations needed recently pointed out that this accusation was made on the same day the International Court of Justice called Israel’s attacks on Gaza “plausible genocide,” coincidence I’m sure
yes i know i pronounced this wrong in the episode go away
reporting that dropped after we recorded found that part of BCG’s involvement in the project was scoping out countries to “relocate” Palestinians to
hell isn’t hot enough <3333
or, sorry, wait, we mean he wouldn’t denounce or rebuke violent rhetoric
you know what, I take it back—maybe the moment this show officially went off the rails was when caro clocked in as osama bin laden for the first but what would, somehow, not be the only time
before you ask, yes: this episode was brought to you by my second grade poem, The War in IRAQ
their jeans are blue militant
ADL intern, if you’ve made it this far, please note that I did in fact make at least one (1) homophobic joke in this episode for your listening pleasure
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