Hey everybody. It's James Lindsay. You're listening to the New Discourses podcast.

And I want to talk today about something I call the Israel question. So nothing too controversial, right?

So is questioning Israel anti-Semitic? Is just asking questions anti-Semitic? Is anti-Zionism a form of anti-Semitism?

These are the kinds of questions we're going to get to.

I want to talk about this concept called the Israel question, which is, as you can kind of tell, by the way,

I formulated an extension of something that's well known called the Jewish question.

Okay, just to get it right out from the very beginning.

The Jewish question is, what do we do with the Jews?

Now there's a presumption underneath the Jewish question, which is we don't want them here, right?

We don't want them around, so we have to figure out something to do with them.

That's the Jewish question, and as you can hear, it is intrinsically anti-Semitic. The underlying assumption of not wanting them there is always present.

Why? Because if your answer to the Jewish question was, you know what, Jews are members of our

society. So we're going to work

productively with them, we're going to extend them religious liberty, we're going to treat

them like we would anybody else, and we're going to let them, you know, be Jewish. And okay,

if that was your answer to the what do we do with the Jews, like we're just going to let

them be themselves and extend them liberty,

then you wouldn't have the question.

You wouldn't ask it.

You already know the answer.

The answer, in fact, if that's your answer, is of the sort to where there's no question to ask, what do you do with the Jews?

You only ask, what do you do, what are we do with the Jews?

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