So for a non-Jewish person like myself, the issue of Zionism can seem fairly simple. To me, it seems like a species of nationalism that, when carried out in the territory of historic Palestine, was destined to lead to a catastrophe. Because Palestine was a non-Jewish, a vastly non-Jewish majority, and so to try and implement an ethnic supremacist state there is a recipe for perpetual conflict.

I mean, I know you’ve come to appreciate that as obvious. But before we get to the people in your book who appreciated this obvious fact, I think what we first have to understand is why what seems obvious to you at this point in your life, and to the people who are dissidents that you profile in this book, was not obvious to so many people, who were captivated by the Zionist dream, the fairy tale as you call it. People like your own grandfather, who carried his copy of Theodore Herzl’s writings. So before we deconstruct, let us build, and let us try to understand what it was that made the seemingly obvious facts about this ideology kind of disappear.

...Herzl says in his book that we will form a part of the wall of civilization against Asiatic barbarism, and that was sort of taken as a natural state of things. And I think that it’s really important to say when I’m talking about the people in my book, the people who reached the opposite conclusion, the conclusion that you reached and I reached, that it’s really important to say that this wasn’t just the 19th century or long, long ago. A lot of people thought this was racist. They thought this was bad, even at the time that it was being built up. And so those are the people whose voices got shoved out of the conversation to the point where I could grow up not even knowing that people had ever been anti-Zionist Jews. I had no idea that Jews had been anti-Zionist. We did talk about some of these very orthodox people, and the way that was described was, well, they’re waiting for the Messiah to come back. I’m from Houston. We weren’t really waiting for the Messiah among Jewish middle-class Houston. That wasn’t really something that we were. This was kind of weird, and it seemed a little ridiculous. And the fact that Israel had come into being, and that it did exist, and that it was a source of pride to a lot of Jewish people, made all these voices sound just kind of eccentric, if we had heard about them at all.

...

To this day, you know, I’m out there doing a lot of media and stuff for this book because I think it’s really important that people know that, like I’m allowed to speak because I’m Jewish. And believe me, I’m not allowed to speak everywhere. I mean, I’m certainly not invited to anything Jewish. But I am actually out there speaking in a place and in a time where a lot of Palestinians are still not allowed to tell their story. And so, when you get one side of a story, and it’s heavily propagandized, it’s heavily related to emotional feelings about Judaism, about the Holocaust. It’s heavily tied into the patriotism that people naturally feel about their own country.

In my case, I’m American, but this was deeply connected to the French Jews and to the British Jews and to the South African Jews and to the Brazilian Jews, and all these other people. It’s quite hard to smell the bullshit until you smell it. As you said, once you smell it, you think, “Oh, well, yeah.” So I think everybody in my book kind of goes through this process as well, because the Zionist story is extremely compelling. It sounds really good. It has lots of good advertising people, good illustrators, good writers.

You know, the end of my book, with the chapter about Nan Goldin, I talk about this book that she sees in 1968 that makes her into an anti-Zionist when she’s quite young. I think she’s still a teenager, and it’s a book that I found actually, and I was really amazed by it, because it was printed in Damascus by this Palestinian organization, and it’s pictures of the pogroms in Palestine. It’s pictures of the massacres, of the ethnic cleansing, of children with no limbs. I mean, exactly what we’re seeing now. And it’s put together almost on a kitchen table. Like it’s not even spell checked. Of course, you didn’t have spell-check in 1968, but they didn’t even know how to spell English and French properly. You turn the pages, and they kind of fall out. It’s a very cheap and very humble kind of artisanal book. If you compare that to the books that I saw in my grandmother’s house, like The Jews in Their Land [by David Ben-Gurion], which had the best photographers in the world, all the best writers, this extremely emotive appeal that it’s making. The book is called The Jews in Their Land, and you think, yeah, it’s our land. And if you look at those two books, just for example, you see that this was never an equal struggle.