On Sunday evening, MSNBC weekend host Mehdi Hasan pushed to portray Israel as an “apartheid state” and complained about American Democrat leaderss for supporting the Jewish nation as he spoke with Jeremy Ben-Ami of the lobbying group J Street, which frequently criticizes Israel from the far left. Hasan first came to America from England as a host for Al-Jazeera, and that anti-Israel tilt is still obvious on his show.
Previewing the segment with a commentary, he lamented that critics of Israel are often called anti-Semitic if they accuse Israel of being an “apartheid state,” and then added “far right” and “openly racist” to the mix:
And yet now with a government in Israel that is demonstrably far right and openly racist, increasing numbers of Israelis and American Jews are starting to use the ‘A’ word. A new open letter signed by over 1,000 high-profile academics and activists from Israel and the United States says there cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid.
Hasan then invoked comparisons to Nazi Germany:
This morning, a top former Israeli general went on national radio in Israel to say there has been absolute apartheid in the occupied West Bank for the past 57 years, and even compared the situation there with Nazi Germany.
He soon took aim at leading Democrats like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn for allying with those awful conservatives to support Israel:
We have liberal Democrats from the United States, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, turning up in Israel this week with the right-wing lobby group AIPAC to reaffirm our special relationship — to praise Israeli democracy while ignoring the protesters on the streets and to do fawning photo ops with Benjamin Netanyahu. I suspect in years to come we will say these Democrats were on the wrong side of history.
After a commercial break, Hasan brought aboard Ben-Ami as a guest to further complain that the right-leaning pro-Israel group AIPAC has too much over Democrats. At one point, Hasan provocatively posed:
How much damage, in your view, has AIPAC done to our ability as a country to try and push back against Israeli expansionism, colonialism, and to support Palestinians under occupation? And why are House Democrats like Jeffries still so closely allied with right-wing groups like AIPAC?
Needless to say, the two left-wingers did not mention that the Israeli military already pulled out of the West Bank back in the 1990s as part of a plan to eventually offer Palestinian Arabs an independent state, but Arab leaders launched a deadly terrorist campaign into Israeli, so the Israeli military was sent back into the West Bank once again to prevent the attacks.
PS: In one of their many articles on Hasan, the pro-Israel media watchdog CAMERA recently denounced Hasan’s defense of an anti-Semitic graduation speech in New York.
This episode of The Mehdi Hasan Show was sponsored in part by Dr. Scholl’s, The Farmer’s Dog, and Sleep Number.
Transcript follows:
MSNBC’s The Mehdi Hasan Show
August 13, 2023
8:40 p.m. Eastern
MEHDI HASAN: Let’s talk about the ‘A’ word. For years now, anyone accusing the state of Israel of being guilty of apartheid in its treatment of the Palestinians has immediately been condemned as an anti-Semite, an Israel hater, someone who doesn’t understand what apartheid even is. Just this week, Germany’s anti-Semitism czar said calling Israel an apartheid state is anti-Semitic. Here in America, the Anti-Defamation League says the apartheid label is inaccurate and offensive.
And yet now with a government in Israel that is demonstrably far right and openly racist, increasing numbers of Israelis and American Jews are starting to use the ‘A’ word. A new open letter signed by over 1,000 high-profile academics and activists from Israel and the United States says there cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid.
This morning, a top former Israeli general went on national radio in Israel to say there has been absolute apartheid in the occupied West Bank for the past 57 years, and even compared the situation there with Nazi Germany. And writing in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz this week, South African-born Jewish journalist Benjamin Pogron said that he had spent years “arguing with all my might” against the accusation that Israel is an apartheid state. “However, the accusation is becoming fact” as “every day sees government ministers and their allies venting racism and following up with discriminatory actions.
The tragedy, however, is that while former Israeli generals and liberal Israeli journalists finally come around to seeing how badly the Palestinians have been mistreated and how that mistreatment meets the definition of apartheid under international law according to a plethora of leading human rights groups. We have liberal Democrats from the United States, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, turning up in Israel this week with the right-wing lobby group AIPAC to reaffirm our special relationship — to praise Israeli democracy while ignoring the protesters on the streets and to do fawning photo ops with Benjamin Netanyahu. I suspect in years to come we will say these Democrats were on the wrong side of history. MSNBC has reached out to Hakeem Jeffries for comment and has not yet heard back. After the break, I’ll discuss this and more with Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy group J Street.
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8:47 p.m. Eastern
HASAN: Joining me now is Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, which describes itself as a movement of pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy Americans. Jeremy, thanks for coming back on the show. This intervention by over 1,000 academics and activists — Israeli Jews, American Jews, and more — not just referring to the “apartheid regime,” quote, unquote, the Palestinians have to endure, but also saying that Israel’s pro-Israel protesters — pro-democracy protesters — need to include ending the occupation as part of their struggle for democracy. That is a major intervention, is it not?
JEREMY BEN-AMI, J STREET: It’s a very major intervention, and it’s really true. How can you possibly talk about democracy if you are not talking about the rights of millions of Palestinians who are living under Israeli control without the right to vote, the right to water, the right to build in their own communities, property rights, all the essentials of having the equal rights of your neighbor who’s of a different racial and ethnic background. And that’s what’s missing on the West Bank, and you can’t fight for democracy if you aren’t fighting against occupation.
HASAN: So you have hundreds of thousands of Israelis this week and week after week, taking to the streets to protest Benjamin Netanyahu’s power grab — to protest the assault on democracy from neofascist and racist parties in Netanyahu’s coalition government. And then you have Hakeem Jeffries — the top Democrat in the House — with a bunch of fellow House Democrats making a visit to Israel this week to praise Netanyahu, to say he trusts Netanyahu, to praise Israel’s democracy, to do photo ops, and actually ignoring the protesters — not meeting with them. That’s not just a bad look for congressional Democrats, that’s actually indefensible, is it not?
BEN-AMI: Well, there’s a willful blindness, and congressional Democrats are one piece of it, you know. Let’s be fair here — Republicans don’t go to the West Bank either, and the overwhelming majority of Americans who visit Israel spend their time in Jerusalem — in Tel Aviv. They visit the Galilee. They enjoy the good food and the beaches, and they ignore the reality of what is happening just a mere matter of miles away. And so this trip that AIPAC sponsored for Democrats in the House — it’s part of a much broader problem that we have, which is that we ignore the realities of what’s happening on the West Bank, and it is a reality for Palestinians that is aided and abetted by American policy. And that’s where it comes back to the House of Representatives into the whole political structure. This problem on the West Bank and for Palestinians in Gaza as well — this is aided and abetted and facilitated by American politics and American policy.
HASAN: So, Jeremy, you mentioned that AIPAC, the lobby group, sponsored the Hakeem Jeffries — the congressional Democratic visit this week to Israel. It’s a group, AIPAC, which I know your group, J Street, doesn’t get along with. You’ve pointed out before how AIPAC has funded GOP members who tried to overturn the last election — how they’ve used GOP donor money to try to unseat progressive Democrats in primaries.
How much damage, in your view, has AIPAC done to our ability as a country to try and push back against Israeli expansionism, colonialism, and to support Palestinians under occupation? And why are House Democrats like Jeffries still so closely allied with right-wing groups like AIPAC?
BEN-AMI: Well, the, you know, the problem is really deep in our political system, Mehdi. It goes to the issue of, “Why do 90 percent of Americans want sensible gun control, but somehow the NRA manages to pursue an agenda that allows the conditions we live in with kids getting killed in our schools?” You have policy being driven by politics and often by a very limited number of people with a great deal of money and a great deal of power. And as long as our political system is driven by that money, it’s not about just AIPAC, it is about the entirety of our political system being warped and our policies being warped by the influence of money in our politics.
And AIPAC represents a small percentage of Jewish America that at this point is, you know, not able to see what is going on inside of Israel and not able to support democracy and that somehow thinks that it’s okay to endorse insurrectionists who voted to overturn the 2020 election because somehow they support Israel. And that is a small percentage of the American Jewish community, but they hold a great deal of power because our politics are still dominated by large, influential heavily funded groups that are warping the policies we should be following.
HASAN: It’s a great analogy you make there because whenever we talk about AIPAC or any kind of lobby groups, there’s a danger of kind of slipping into anti-Semitic discourse about the Jews controlling Congress, but really, as you point out, it’s about our entire political system being in (inaudible) to lobby groups. And we see it with the NRA and with gun control, but we don’t see it when it comes to the Middle East, to Israel, to Saudi Arabia and to other areas of life. Jeremy Ben-Ami, we’ll have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Appreciate it.