Adam Howard
speaker
179 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 7 Jul
Adam Howard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The New Yorker Radio Hour · From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar · 18 Dec 2024
podcast
Hi, Kim. Hello. Good. So this is sort of like open mic night.
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Adam Howard, and we have a special treat for you this week, an episode on movie musicals from our friends at Critics At Large. That's the New Yorker's weekly culture podcast. Please enjoy.
Yeah, that's not the right question.
Music
They were trying to get attention. They were even trying to get sanctions. They were never trying to get refugee status. And now that they have it, that domestically is a really big problem for them.
It's a way of thinking about the history of countries started by European colonization, in particular, Australia, the United States, and Canada, which are sort of the classic examples. And then also, by extension, Israel, which is probably the most controversial case or the one that is talked about the most, certainly in the last year or so. Why do you object to the term?
I think that settler colonial theory is usually studied by people who are not historians. They're looking at a historical phenomenon through a very simple lens. The lens is you're either a settler or you're indigenous.
In the United States, that means anyone who's not Native American is a settler, and that has some surprising applications, including descendants of slaves can also be settlers, or very recent immigrants can be settlers.
I think that he's exceptional in that regard. I talk about his work in the book with respect and acknowledgment that he does make those distinctions. It's very common in settler colonial discourse about Israel to say, Jews are white European colonizers and Palestinian Arabs are indigenous people.
The only peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and I think this is something that Khalidi says in his book, The Hundred Years We're in Palestine, is one that does not involve the expulsion of either people. What I'm saying about settler colonialism is that is a zero-sum way of looking at the conflict.
It says Jews are colonizers and that the goal is decolonization, which means getting rid of them. And you saw that in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th attack. Why was it that on October 7th, as soon as the news of the massacre of Israelis came, you had a lot of people on the American left saying,
progressive movements or on university campuses celebrating this and saying, as one person tweeted, who I quote in the book, Israelis are not civilians, they're settlers. And therefore, all Israelis are valid military targets. There's no such thing as a civilian versus a soldier.
I don't dispute that at all. Obviously, the reason why these protests exist is because of the war. The way that this idea is used when people say that Israel is a settler colonial country, they mean this country should not exist. It has no right to exist. And many of those people would say the same thing about the United States.
But of course, the United States is not an imminent danger of destruction. There's no one who's making war on it. But there are countries and groups that have been making war on Israel since it was created. It's not a matter of do I sympathize with victims. It's really a recipe for creating more victims on both sides. Because it says to Israelis, we will never accept the existence of your state.
This is a fight to the death. And if it's a fight to the death, that means more death. The greatest evil is settler colonialism. Israel is settler colonialist. Therefore, people who fight Israel are virtuous. And it leads to some very strange political bedfellows where people who claim to be progressives are waving the flags of groups that are, you know, religious fundamentalist.
Khalidi shows that from the point of view of Palestinian Arabs, Zionism was a colonial enterprise. It came to their land and created a state there without their consent.
Right. He was often attacked at the time in the 1920s and 30s as an extreme right-winger and even a fascist by other Zionists. But I think that he was prescient about one thing. The Arabs will not welcome us here. The only way that we're going to create a Jewish country here is by fighting for it. In creating Zionism and creating a Jewish state, the Zionist movement did oppose Arab aspirations.
It opposed Arab desires for the future of that land. The reason why I think settler colonialism is not the right model for understanding this— How is that justifiable in your mind? I think it's justifiable by—well, let's say the reasons why Zionism justified it were the historic claims of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, that this was the land where Jews had originated.
It was the land that their religion was focused on, the biblical homeland. And European anti-Semitism. Right. And the other was existential necessity. And I think that those two reasons are probably better than the reasons that 99% of states on the map were created. So if you ask, you know, why is Palestine an Arab country?
The reason is that, you know, in the 7th century, Islamic Arab armies conquered it and spread that religion across North Africa and the Middle East. Before that, it was mainly a Christian country under the Roman Empire.
Showing 141–160 of 179 · page 8 of 9
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