Kevin Barrett – The Unz Review March 13, 2024

Do more than 90% of Israeli Jews support the genocide of Gaza, i.e. the current “military operation”? Richie Allen doesn’t think so. During my appearance on his show yesterday he challenged me to cite polling data.

Unfortunately, no pollster in Israel will ever ask flat-out: “Do you support the genocide of Gaza?” Nor have any asked a more polite version of the same question: “Do you support or oppose Israel’s current military campaign in Gaza?” (I argue that well over 90% would say they support it, while less than 10% would say they oppose it.)

So we are going to have to extrapolate. Fortunately (though unfortunately for the Palestinians) this is an easy extrapolation. Time’s “What Do Israelis Think of the War with Hamas?” includes the following paragraph:

Poll results were also hawkish when it came to the use of force in Gaza: 57.5% of Israeli Jews said that they believed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were using too little firepower in Gaza, 36.6% said the IDF was using an appropriate amount of firepower, while just 1.8% said they believed the IDF was using too much fire power, while 4.2% said they weren’t sure

Let me repeat that. Fewer than 2% of Israeli Jews think the IDF is “using too much fire power” in Gaza.

Richie Allen might argue that those numbers may have changed since the poll was taken in November. But he would be grasping at straws. There is no evidence whatsoever of any significant change. Essentially nobody, I repeat nobody, in Israel is protesting against the IDF’s wholesale massacre of Palestinians. The “left-wing” Israelis are protesting Netanyahu’s failure to get the Israeli hostages returned. But they are completely indifferent to the genocide of Gazans. In fact, “indifferent” is probably the wrong word. To the extent that any Israeli Jews are saying anything about Palestinian suffering and death, they are wildly celebrating it

This poll wasn’t an outlier. During a previous massacre of thousands of Gazan civilians, 2008’s Operation Cast Lead, “a poll taken the day after the start of the operation showed 81 percent of the Israeli public supporting the operation, with only 12 percent opposed.” Since 20 percent of Israel’s population are non-Jewish Arabs who disproportionately opposed the massacre, that means that virtually the entire Israeli Jewish population supported it. Polls during subsequent “mowing the lawn” operations gave similar results.So if fewer than 2% of Israeli Jews think the IDF is “using too much fire power” in Gaza, does that mean that Israeli Jews, as a group, are raving genocidal lunatics that need to be dealt with in the same way that mad dogs are dealt with?

That comparison is unfair—to mad dogs. It is also unfair to some of the 140,000 or fewer Jewish Israelis (out of a total population of around 7 million) who, by way of thinking that Israel is “using too much fire power,” may actually oppose the genocide that is being perpetrated in their name. God bless that minuscule minority of non-genocidal Israelis. As for the other 98%…maybe the Jewish Autonomous Oblast would make a good re-education facility.

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Extract from my conversation with Richie Allen

Going back to the days I was on radio in Spain, it is morally and it is wrong on every level to take hostages, regardless of who you are. We know what the IDF and the Israeli police have done to the people of Gaza for decades and decades: Reprehensible things, disgusting things, crimes against humanity. But two wrongs don’t make a right. And keeping people for months, you know, in terror, because they must be terrified, the hostages. And never knowing when they’re going to go home. That’s wrong, Kevin. And I can’t support that. I support the people of Palestine and their rights to their land, the right of return, all of that, pre-67. I know my history. I know Israel should not exist. Not legally. It has no legal basis, of course. It has no legitimacy in law internationally.

But don’t keep hostages. Don’t do that. It’s terribly wrong. I hear what you’re saying, you know, that it’s leverage, but you’re describing human beings with loves, with families, with cares, with ambitions. You’re describing them as leverage. They’re not. They’re human beings, Kevin.

Well, yeah, that’s a good point, Richie. But remember that Israel is holding 10,000 Palestinians hostages and it systematically practices torture on them and sexual abuse. Before October 7th, Israel was holding, at that point, 6,000 or however many thousands of Palestinian hostages. Now it’s 10,000. So, if the Palestinians try to grab a few hundred hostages in order to get their own 10,000 plus hostages released..

It’s true that in war, people have to do terrible things. And so the onus is on whoever starts the war. In this case, it was these genocidal lunatics who crossed the seas because they believe that their god gave them this land thousands of years ago. They have a many-thousand-year-old real estate deed, and it has apparently no statute of limitations on it. So they have the right to come over and massacre and expel the people who live there.

So it’s obvious who started this. And when a war is started, when they attack you, when somebody commits that gross of an evil, you have the right to fight back. You know, Richie, if some gangsters came and massacred members of your family, God forbid, and expelled you from your house, set up shop in your house, would you have the right to use force to get your house back? Family members are dead and others they’re holding and torturing. Do you have the right to pick up a gun and go after them to get your house back?

I say you do. I say if you don’t pick up a gun and get your house back, you’re committing a grave moral wrong. And anybody who isn’t fighting Zionism with a gun right now is committing a grave moral wrong. And obviously that’s the case for the direct victims of this, the Palestinians.

Well, I don’t have any fight with Zionism, and I don’t feel that I should be compelled to pick up a gun against an ideology. I’ll use my my voice and my my journalism to…

They’re Antichrist, they’re not just an ideology.

Well, we could be here all night discussing that. I don’t agree with that characterisation of people. You know, like I said, I used to interview Zionists about these things. And while they were very extreme, ideologically extreme, there were still human beings raising children, you know, who believed.

I interviewed Norman Finkelstein many times over the years, Kevin. For some reason, he doesn’t return my emails these days, but that’s fair enough. He might have a good reason as far as he’s concerned. But Norman said to me once, he said, Richie, you see a lot of the children of Israel, not all of them, but see a lot of them as victims because from the moment they can talk and the moment they can understand what they’re being told, they are told, you know, that the Arabs are evil and that God has given you, as you said, the right to be here. And that terrifies these kids effectively.

So you’re calling people, you know, the Antichrist. These are people, many of them, who’ve been brought up within a cult, really, you could argue, a sect. And they’re victims in some way, aren’t they? That’s a legitimate area of research, I think. What say you?

Yes, I agree completely. I translated and published Laurent Guyénot’s book From Yahweh to Zion, which is probably the best critical book ever written on Jewish identity politics and its connection to religious tradition. And the conclusion of that book is that the leaders of Judaism, even long before Zionism, some of those leaders abused their people and told them that the other groups of people around them were evil. “So go and smash their gods and steal their stuff and give it to Yahweh,” meaning give it to the high priests of Yahweh, which are the people who organized the whole racket.

The Jews are traumatized from a very early age. And we could get into what Sigmund Freud would say about the circumcision of newborns, but that certainly does leave a—

Hang on there now. I was circumcised.

So was I. And in any case, you know, the various kinds of psychological abuse and torture that are meted out in that tradition to make them a people (who shall dwell) apart, brainwashing children into believing that the goyim, all the other tribes, all the non-Jews, are out to get them.—that creates a kind of mentality that ultimately leads perfectly nice individual people to become part of a group that is a tribal psychopath. That is, it’s a tribe that treats other tribes or nations the way that a psychopathic individual treats other human beings.

And so that’s the problem we have. Yes, the vast majority of Zionists are basically decent people, but their group mentality is psychopathic.

I remember talking about this over the years, me being a history graduate. There are no moral grounds for Israel to exist. We could talk about Sykes-Picot, the Ottoman Empire, what the British and French did. Obviously the Balfour Declaration. But it’s only this biblical thing that is their case, really. Golda Meir once said, this country exists as the accomplishment of a promise made by God himself. It would be absurd to call its legitimacy into account. And he’s channeling God’s alleged, what did God say? “Unto thy seed have I given this land from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the Euphrates.”

But let me read you this from Fred: “Kevin is exaggerating about the number of Israelis wanting to rid the world of the Palestinians. I lived there in 1981 as a kibbutz volunteer. And yes, there are a lot who want to get rid of the Palestinians, but I wouldn’t say even 50%. You know, he’s wrong. He’s exaggerating,” says Fred. And then Fred says “Kevin is right that the massacres will only get worse once the hostages are freed because the IDF won’t have to worry about killing them.”

Fred spent time in a kibbutz He said, no way is every Israeli or is most of them or are most of them wanting to kill the Palestinians. That’s his opinion.

Well, I think he’s right about the 1980s. But there’s been a real change in Israel since then. Israel’s been taken over by these ultra extremist lunatics. Now, I think the governments in the 80s and before were really nearly as evil as the current government. But they were much better at hiding it. And they talked a different talk. And so public opinion in Israel was very, very different then than it is today.

And part of the issue has been demographics. The liberal elites in Israel are having very few children, very small families, while the more radical elements are having the larger families. And that’s one of the factors that’s driven the rise of Likud. They’re the heirs of Jabotinsky, the ultra-terrorist lunatic. Basically the whole world considered this guy one of the worst terrorists of all time.

But now the party that’s been ruling Israel for decades is the party of Jabotinsky. And now even crazier people are in the coalition with that party. And that has conditioned public opinion in Israel.

And I think the other thing that he misses is that — since October 7th, you know, it rhymes with September 11th, and, as you know, shortly after September 11th, if you took a poll in America: “Should we go, kill all the Arabs or kill all the Muslims?” you would have gotten a surprising number of people saying yes. Because there is this kind of shock effect when the country is attacked that could lead people to kind of get into that kind of mentality.

Do you remember the Howard Stern show on the morning of September the 11th? I remember it well. I was working in radio in Waterford in Ireland and some of the lads who worked there were fond of Stern. So they would get in the mail, they would receive tapes of Stern’s shows, because the internet wasn’t such a big thing. You couldn’t download radio. So about a week or so after we got the tapes from Stern’s show, Stern was basically advocating going in and wiping everybody out on the day.

So you’re right. It does tend to stimulate that sort of talk. “Yeah, let’s kill them all.” You’re right, Kevin. I’ll give you that. Yeah. Okay.

And the current government has encouraged that and stoked it and kept it at that kind of level. So I do think that Fred really should take a look at the polls. I’ll find some and send them to you, Richie. And I will eat my proverbial hat if fewer than 90% of Israeli Jews don’t support this genocide and if the majority don’t want to make it worse.

I’m not being stubborn when I say I don’t believe it. I’m not calling you a liar. I know you’re not a liar. I’ve known you for years. When you claim that you’ve seen or read something, you’ve never left me down. So I’m not calling you a liar. I do not believe in their hearts that they want to get rid of the Palestinians. Not so many of them. I’d be a fool to think that none of them do. I think they obviously do. But look, I won’t…I’ll give you the final word on that.

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