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
I think that it's recent and it is unresolved. I think that's actually one of the main reasons why settler colonialism is not a good model for thinking about this conflict. Settler colonialism involves, in the classic examples, it involves the destruction of one people by another and their replacement over a large territory, really a continent-wide territory.
And that's not at all the history of Israel and Palestine. The history of Israel and Palestine is that now there are about equal numbers of Jews and Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, about seven and a half million of each. So the question is, what future can be created for those 15 million people that is better than the current situation, which involves constant war and occupation?
Yeah.
No, I agree with you. And I say in the book that right now it's much easier to imagine one of the disastrous outcomes of the conflict than a better outcome, the disastrous outcome being expulsion or massacre. What I come to in the end is saying that if your goal is to undo the past, then you have guaranteed perpetual conflict.
The reason conflicts come to an end is when the parties to the conflict agree to stop trying to undo the past and say a peaceful future is better. We will give up what we most want in order to have peace now, right? Which in your view is? A two-state solution. I mean, I think that that's an answer that has little credibility whatsoever.
right now because no one actually involved in the conflict is for it. It's the solution that I think is the only one that I can imagine happening in a morally supportable way. Any other solution is going to involve great violence and suffering. Including a binational state? I think a binational state would almost immediately turn into the kind of situation you have in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq.
Yugoslavia. You know, binational states don't work. The first thing that happened after the fall of communism was all the binational states in Eastern Europe broke up. Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia. You might think the Czechs and the Slovaks should be able to get along, right? But no, they want their own countries.
I think it's very unrealistic to say these groups of people who have hated each other for such a long time and inflicted so much damage on each other when living under separate regimes are now going to live together in peace under the same regime. That's simply not a realistic option. And I think that as a Jew, it's very important for the Jewish people for there to be a Jewish state.
I think it's necessary. It remains true today as it was true in the early days of Zionism. Because I think that otherwise Jews would be completely powerless. And we've seen in the 20th century what the cost of being completely powerless is. It means that when you're persecuted, you have nowhere to go. No one will take you in.
I think pluralism is something that's achieved In rare occasions, it's a great blessing. When it is achieved, it's achieved in rare occasions. It doesn't look like it's in very robust health, even here in the United States.
And I think that for Jews, it's been such a successful home, such a welcoming home, that there is definitely a cognitive dissonance involved in saying, here, pluralism, there, stay based on religious identity or ethnic identity. And I think that that contradiction, especially for young people, is leading people to reject the idea of Zionism.
Yes. I think that that's one of the best arguments for a two-state solution is that it's bad for – obviously bad for Palestinians but also bad for Israelis to be in the position of occupying other people and holding them down. Trevor Burrus, Jr. : Jabotinsky said that a Jewish state has to have a Jewish majority.
And in fact, what you have now there is not a Jewish majority in the whole land, a Jewish majority only in the part that's the state of Israel.
: Right. So it's sort of an artificially maintained Jewish majority. But I do think that there's no other country in the world for whom their politics and their conduct of war leads to the judgment, this country should be wiped off the map. This country should not exist. It would be hard to have worse politics and worse conduct of war than Russia, right, over the last two years.
And no one has said, this shows that Russians shouldn't have a state. This shows that Russians can't handle or shouldn't be allowed to have a Russian country. It's only the Jewish state that people say that about.
And I think that it has to do with the very unique role that Jews and Judaism play in Western civilization and also the recency and precariousness of the country of Israel, that it's a country where you can imagine it not existing in a generation. I think that that would be an unacceptable price to pay.
Not only would it forfeit the Jewish state as it is now, it would forfeit any kind of Jewish state that might emerge in the future that one might like better. And it returns the Jews to, as I said earlier, to complete powerlessness. And I think that that is something that people today find hard to remember because they don't study the history of what Jewish powerlessness meant before 1948.
Adam Kirsch, thank you. Thank you.
It's pretty simple. It sucks.
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