This is a hard time of year for many of us, and this year, it’s even harder. In addition to our usual woes, such as seasonal depression, or the grief the holidays may rekindle for us, we are now witnessing a genocide in real time. We watch as Palestinian neighborhoods are leveled, as premature babies are left to die and decompose in their ICU beds, while doctors and parents are forced out under fire. We watch as parents cradle their lifeless children and as soldiers mock the families they slaughter. We listen as people of conscience are demonized and blamed for the loss of an election that will occur late next year because we are objecting to our country’s participation in atrocities that should be unthinkable. We are vilified for rejecting genocide while knowing that, years from now, many of the people who are wagging their fingers at us today will lie and claim they opposed these evils. We are haunted by the realities of the moment and also by the knowledge that our pain is but a flicker of suffering compared to the inferno of anguish and mass death that millions of Palestinians cannot escape.
In December, I often think about what I want to leave behind in a year that’s becoming the stuff of history and what I want to carry with me into the next. It’s difficult to do that right now. So, in an effort to organize my thoughts, I thought I would have a conversation with an old friend about authoritarianism, genocide, the demonization of children and dissent, and what the political trends of this moment portend.
Some of you have heard me talk with Sarah Kendzior on my podcast, Movement Memos. Sarah is a journalist, an anthropologist, a researcher, and a scholar. She is the author of the books The View from Flyover Country, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, and They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent. She is also the former co-host of the podcast Gaslit Nation.
In her recent essay, “The Mourning Moon,” Sarah wrote, “There is power in grief, even though when you feel it, you feel powerless. There has to be power in it, or people would not try so hard to prohibit its expression.” I needed those words, and as I read them, I knew I needed to talk to Sarah. That conversation took the shape of this interview and I hope you will find it as helpful as I did.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kelly Hayes: While the U.S. is offering Israel unconditional support, Israel, which was already an apartheid state, is escalating its authoritarian norms and policies. It seems like some of the authoritarian developments within Israel have been overlooked by the media outside Israel because people either don’t want to criticize Israel or because they are rightly focused on the genocide in Gaza. Palestinians in Israel have been arrested for social media posts expressing concern for or solidarity with the people of Gaza. Far-right mobs attacked journalist Israel Frey for praying for the children of Palestine. IDF-backed settlers are committing mob attacks, emptying entire communities in the West Bank, and Israeli officials have continually deployed dehumanizing language about Palestinians to justify genocidal acts and policies in a manner that is symptomatic of fascism. Given your expertise in authoritarianism, I wanted to ask how should we understand these escalations. What do the patterns and trends we are seeing mean for Israel and for the world, given that Netanyahu has positioned Israel as a model for world governments in unstable times?
Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, that’s a great question. And it’s very unfortunate that Israel is a model for world governments, and you can see its influence in places like Hungary, Russia, the Brexit UK, the United States, or any other country that has descended into mafia state autocracy, often directly in conjunction with Netanyahu, who’s largely been in control of Israel since 2009, with occasional departures.
But also, with the backing of a lot of the same donors and plutocrats and supporters. And Israel has, in this time, become a far-right autocratic state. It was always an apartheid state. It was never a true democracy. You cannot be a true democracy when you are colonizing and abusing a population that is living in subjugation, right beside you – which has historically been the case with Palestinians. But even for Israelis themselves, it has become an autocratic state with protests suppressed, with journalists, as you mentioned, threatened. And also, major outlets, like Haaretz, that have done a lot of brave investigative reporting. They are being threatened and the situation is dire. And I think that Israel should be listed when people put together lists of authoritarian states. It should be there. People will mention Russia, China, Turkey, and others, but they’ll neglect to list Israel because Americans have always been taught that Israel is the lone democracy in the Middle East. And that is simply not the case.
The other factor that I wish people would pay much more attention to is the Kahanists and the fact that they represent a substantial part of the Israeli parliament. This is a party, originally the Kach Party that used to be banned. It was banned by Israel as an extremist, right-wing supremacist party. It was also banned by the United States because Meir Kahane, the leader of this, was a terrorist.
He was a terrorist who collaborated with the FBI, who collaborated with the John Birch Society. He was a racist. Just a monstrous but very influential individual. But because of his terrorism, he and his party were banned until 2022, when the Biden administration removed Kach from that list and the Israeli government embraced the Kahanists. And I want to be very clear here and say there’s a distinction between the Israeli people and the government. You see that distinction every time they have a mass protest, and you see it in the 4% approval rating for Netanyahu. And you see it in the wariness, the fear honestly, of the Kahanists expressed by Israelis of all sorts of different backgrounds and political persuasions.
But yes, Israel is a very dangerous state. They’re committing genocide. I think the Israeli government has the intention of waging a broader regional war, in particular with Iran. I feel like I’m reliving the time after 9/11, in that a horrific attack by Hamas is being used to justify atrocities, the scope of which far surpasses the initial attack. Israel is murdering innocent people, in particular children. And the United States has gotten on board with that. Biden, Blinken, and others have supported it unconditionally.
American citizens who have been pushing back and who do not approve of what Israel is doing are having an impact. But I worry that the impact has been more rhetorical in terms of what the Biden administration and what Congress is doing, than in the way it matters, which is that we should be withholding weapons and financial aid as well.
There has been a lot of talk about whether it makes sense to attack Biden for his support of Israel’s violence. Some people say that calling Biden out for supporting genocide is dangerous, given that an electoral showdown with Donald Trump is less than a year away. To me, this seems ridiculous, on a number of levels. Because, for one thing, Biden, like Clinton before him, seems to want a showdown with Donald Trump, as Biden seems unlikely to defeat any other Republican candidate. Trump’s boogeyman status has been leveraged as a hall pass for bad governance and as a basis for demanding fealty when an election is within any mentionable distance. At the same time, Trump does pose a major threat to us all, and Biden is such a lousy, lukewarm figure that he might just manage to lose in a head-to-head matchup with Trump. As someone who was raising the alarm about Trump long before most people took him seriously, what are your thoughts around this?
Thank you for this question. This has been a deeply frustrating time because, as you noted, I warned about Trump back in 2015 and 2016. I warned that he was likely to win and that when he wins, the Constitution and checks and balances will not contain him and that he will rule the United States as an aspiring autocrat, and certainly as a kleptocrat, and that he would not leave office voluntarily and all of that.
So, yes, Trump is immensely dangerous, which is why it’s immensely dangerous that Joe Biden and his administration and his DOJ have made minimal effort to contain him. Trump is an active threat. That is not an exaggeration. But there’s this incredible paradox for Biden to go around proclaiming that while at the same time bragging about his ability to reach across the aisle to the Republicans, which includes the very people who have been protecting not just Trump but his extended mafia network.
So I don’t think that Joe Biden’s objection to Trump is sincere at all. I think we’re watching a WWE kayfabe election. And it’s not just deeply disappointing to me. It’s alarming. We have seen for nearly four years, Biden continuing the policies of Trump. This includes building the Trump wall. It includes a “let it spread” attitude toward COVID and the suppression of public health data that people need to make decisions about their lives. Biden’s proclamation that the pandemic is over, the treatment of migrants at the border, the Willow Project, a general lack of concern about climate change, and an embrace of dictators like MBS [Mohammed bin Salman] and Netanyahu. I mean, really the only major distinction between Trump and Biden, in terms of foreign........