Why Are So Many Against Israel? | Naftali Bennett

In the US, there's been widespread protests, especially on university campuses, but also spilling through the cities. You see that in London, for example; you see it in France. It's a worldwide campaign. So, first of all, what's your sense of how those campaigns were organized and who's lurking behind the scenes there?

Then, I guess the next thing I'd like to know is what you have an opportunity—many opportunities, but this is one of them at least—to say something to people who believe that they're on the side of the good when they're protesting Israel's actions in the Middle East after October 7th.

Let's start with those protests. They emerged very rapidly, and they're very, very, very well organized. I mean, I've seen the plans, for example, for the protesters and their community at UCLA. I mean, it's a multi-pronged strategy. So it's at hand, right? I believe they pulled in the Antifa types and the professional protesters, and they more or less know what they're doing. But it works—clearly, it's working.

I see here a merge of two different strands that are almost opposite of each other, but in a peculiar way, they merge. The first one is radical Islam. We're not going to change any of their minds, and I believe that there's significant money, you know, Qatari money, Iranian money being funneled towards this. Qatar, by the way, is, in my eyes, a terrible regime whose hands are soaked in blood. They have a facade of a World Cup and this and Olympics and stuff like that. But they play a two-sided game; they ferment support, fund terror as we speak, and they pretend to be Western, you know, progressive folks, and like Iran, everyone at least knows that Iran is a terrible regime.

So that's one strand. The other strand is radical, progressive, woke idiots, for the lack of a better term—naive people who view the world in a neo-Marxist frame where there's always a victim and a victimizer. Israel, you know, look, I've got white skin here, so I'm the bad guy by definition. Forget the fact that the land of Israel has been my homeland for 3,800 years. Forget the fact that much of those 3,800 years we had a state in Israel, and when we weren't in that state, we were praying three times a day. I pray every morning— we will return to Jerusalem. Now we are in Jerusalem, and it's incredibly difficult to pull someone out of that frame because basically, if you're the aggressor and he's the victim, he's allowed to do anything; he's allowed to murder people because he's the victim. And factually, that just is not true.

The Arabs have huge areas of land, I think hundreds of times the size of Israel. I'd let your viewers know; they probably don't know Israel in its entirety is the size of New Jersey. That's how big we are. It's a tiny, tiny country. You know, before they came back home beginning in the late 1800s, it was a desolate, barren, miserable land, infested with mosquitoes and malaria.

There was always a Jewish presence, but it wasn't under Jewish governance. But as Jews came from around the world and began to flourish this desolate land, Arabs began coming from Iraq, from Egypt, in their names—Palestinian names. Many of them are called El-Masri, which means Egypt; Masri is Egypt; El-Bagdadi—all this.

See that, which is fine—that's okay—but, you know, go—go get a life. Stop being victims. Go, go build your future. It seems to me that their core ideology is to prevent us from having a state rather than them having their own future.

The victim-victimizer narrative is very muddled, you know, because I hear you. Tell me, why are so many people against Israel, and what can we do about it? I'm—I’m—you’re the psychiatrist here.

Well, I think part of it is the politics of envy. You know, the Jews are the perennially successful minority. Even in the story of Exodus, the reason that the Pharaoh rises up against the Jews is because they're disproportionately successful in Egypt, even though the Egyptians were beholden to them not long before that. They’re disproportionately successful.

Okay, so Joseph helped Egypt thrive. I mean, right—absolutely—which so part of that narrative is that the influx of Jews was actually of great utility to the Egyptian population, but then the Jews became disproportionately successful, and that always happens. It always happens. And so then the issue is, well, what do you do with the disproportionately successful?

The response to that is twofold. You can be happy for the fact of their productivity and their success because they share their knowledge and their abilities with everyone around them, and the rising tide lifts all boats. Or you can decide that anybody who has more took it and is a thief and a crook, and there's always corruption in every enterprise, so there's always things you can point to.

What I see is that the Jews are also the perennial canary in the coal mine. When societies take a turn against those who are successful and start to define them as criminals, the Jews are the first people to be targeted. All that indicates is that—well, that’s more in socialist-type societies or communist societies.

But, you know, anti-Semitism also thrived when Jews were miserable and unsuccessful. We weren't always—not in every pocket were we successful, and yet it's everywhere. Um, well, there's also, there’s also, you know, the mere fact that ethnic differences can easily be inflamed and that people are radically, you know, we're— we're relatively insular by our psychology. You know, it's me, and then it's me and my family, and then it's me and my family and my community, right?

It's harder for us to extend that ethos of concern as people get more distal, which makes sense, by the way. Well, of course, it does, because something has to mediate in-group identity or we wouldn't be social, right? So, obviously, I care more about my child than a stranger, right?

I mean, right, right; and you might say, well, you shouldn't because there's no logical reason, and the right rejoinder to that is, well, I don't have infinite resources. That's right; I can't care for every child in the world with the same intensity as I would for my own child because there's too many of them and too little of me.

So, I'm going to be local. What do you think we can do? Because, you know, sometimes I'm flabbergasted. I'm always interviewing at CNN, BBC, and all that, and I feel sometimes I'm barely moving the needle. And, you know, the reality is so different than what we're portrayed. What do you think we can do about it?

Well, I think going after the victim-victimizer narrative is a good long-term strategy because it's extremely pathological. So, to the degree that we've been messaging around this, that's—in various enterprises that I'm involved in, that's been one of our primary targets of concern. There's something wrong with the politics of envy. If you divide the world up into oppressor and oppressed, and now you’re good merely because you are on the side of the oppressed or are an ally—like, that's just too simple a moral equation.

It's and, and there's every bit of reason for skepticism in relationship to that; but it's also very bad for you to regard yourself as a victim. Horrible, because you lose agency and you lose hope, and you're subject to someone else's whim.

It's so funny, you know, my dad, may he rest in peace, Jim Bennett—he was raised not far from here in San Francisco, and I guess the biggest thing I took from him was he never whined, he never complained, and it was self-reliance. That's the—he always faced whatever situation and took responsibility. He didn't talk about it; he just did it.

Well, one of the things you see that so deeply ingrained in me, and that's why when I see, you know, whiners—and not to say that there isn't discrimination, suffering. There is suffering, and there's discrimination, and people don't have the same starting point. But it's such a—how will it be able to sustain itself, this ultra-progressive movement, if they manufacture people who are designed to not take responsibility?

So, it ought to collapse ultimately. Well, historically, movements like that do collapse. Envious resentful movements collapse—they won't work.