PREVIEW: "Two Jews Debate Israel" with Antony Loewenstein

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Self-improvement, Society & Culture, Education, Comedy

4.6 • 863 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How should moderate, secular Jews feel about Israel? How brutalising must Israel’s Gaza policy be before more Jews denounce it? Is Israel a well-intentioned country hijacked by right-wing leaders from its true purpose of peace? Or is it intrinsically committed to destroying Palestinians? Was a Jewish ethno-state a mistake from the start? Or is Israel an island of democracy in a sea of Islamist dysfunction?

No group debates these questions more vehemently than Jews themselves. After the October 7th Hamas attack, one book in particular shot up the bestseller list in the West. "The Palestine Laboratory" detailed how the technologies which Israel developed to control Palestinian populations have been exported for ugly purposes to regimes all the world. The book won Australia's most prestigious journalism award, a Walkley.

Its author, Antony Lowenstein, is an anti-Zionist Jew. He lived in East Jerusalem from 2016 to 2020 and has been published in The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times.

Josh felt it's time to invite Antony back for another argument, as Jews are wont to have, about the state of the Jewish state.

You’re missing out on tons of exceptional content if you haven’t hit up the Uncomfy Convos Substack page at https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/subscribe

http://youtube.com/@JoshSzeps_

http://twitter.com/joshzepps

http://instagram.com/joshszeps/

http://tiktok.com/@uncomfyconversations

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Gide humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's an idea that is no longer
0:07.7	quite as dangerous as it used to be. The idea is that the state of Israel is fundamentally a
0:15.2	genocidal project, that it was a misbegotten venture from the start has never made any real attempt at accommodating
0:23.3	Palestinian interests, and Jews around the world should distance themselves from it and reject it
0:30.6	as a Jewish state. Since the October 7th Hamas attacks and the brutal war in Gaza, this conversation has been taking
0:39.8	place in its most brutalizing, simplistic, rudimentary form on social media and mostly among
0:46.0	non-Jews. There is a very clean, clear, simplistic anti-Zionist principle that you can see
0:51.9	on social media all over the place, which articulates
0:55.2	the point of view that I just stated. And there is a countervailing, equally simplistic
0:59.3	point of view that's put forward by, for example, the Israeli government and Israeli defense
1:04.0	forces, which says that Israel has always sought peace and just wants the best for everybody
1:09.3	in the region, but it has to respond to
1:11.2	terrorists and it has never had a partner for peace. Of course, the reality is complex. And nowhere
1:18.3	is this conversation undertaken in as robust a spirit of vehement disagreement and intellectual
1:26.2	curiosity than within the Jewish community itself.
1:30.8	Jews all over the world since October 7th have been wrestling with these questions.
1:35.8	What should their relationship to a state that proclaims to be their homeland be
1:40.5	when that homeland behaves in ways that they regard as unconscionable.
1:46.4	Anthony Lowenstein has become something of a persona non-grata to Jews who are in lockstep with
1:51.1	Israel because he is an anti-Zionist. He is a ferocious critic of Israel. He is an independent
1:55.6	journalist who has lived in East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020.
2:08.2	And he had, I suppose, the accidental good fortune to, in 2023, just six months before the October 7th attacks, publish a book.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Josh Szeps, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Josh Szeps and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.