A Chat with Mattan Berner-Kadish, Part 1

Last month I sat down for a long chat with Mattan Berner-Kadish, and I’m happy to finally publish our conversation as a three (3) part series.

Mattan recently founded a nonprofit organization, From Here Forward, which describes him as “an Israeli-American who has spent much of his life between the United States and Israel/Palestine. Since 2021, Mattan has been regularly present in the occupied West Bank, building deep relationships with residents of Umm Al-Khair in Masafer Yatta, and bearing witness to extreme Israeli settler and military violence, including the killings of Haj Suleiman Hathaleen and Awdah Hathahleen.” Mattan’s incisive coverage and analysis of Israeli settler terrorism, apartheid, and genocide have earned him a large and growing audience on social media. I’m also pleased to say I knew him when we were kids going to summer camp together in eastern Pennsylvania. I hope you find as much value in this conversation as I did.

In part 1 of this series, Mattan reflects on his dual Israeli-American identity and upbringing, his formative experiences with occupation and settler terrorism in the West Bank, and his disillusionment with Israel’s supremacist culture and political landscape. He also discusses how these experiences led to deeper involvement in US politics, as well as the critical importance of the 2028 Democratic primary for the future of Israel-Palestine.

Isaiah Blum: You’ve cultivated a very impressive following on Instagram and elsewhere, and you’ve spoken and written a lot of about your experiences in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank, you’ve got a lot of firsthand experience working with the Palestinian communities there, and of course you’ve witnessed firsthand settler violence, or settler terrorism, really, and you’ve written and talked about it in quite powerful and bracing ways. At the same time you’ve got Israeli heritage and you’ve got a very strong American identity and personality as well, and I wonder if you could tell those of us who don’t know a little bit about your experiences and maybe how different aspects of your identity informed those experiences.

Mattan Berner-Kadish: I was born in Oakland, California in 1996 not long after Yitzhak Rabin was killed. As long as I can remember I’ve had dual citizenship. I’ve been both Israeli and American. When I was between the ages of 2 and 4 my family and I lived in Jerusalem. I have two mothers, and they sued the state of Israel so that my non-birth mother would be legally recognized as my parent. It’s actually kind of the first LGBTQ family rights case in Israel that went to the Supreme Court, and it was decided in their favor, and it was very much a big deal: I like to say that long before I had any sort of choice in the matter, I was part of the story of that place. Primarily, however, I grew up in incredibly diverse parts of the United States. I would spend a lot of time in the Bay Area, but I was primarily raised in the suburbs of Washington DC, in Montgomery County, Maryland. My high school truly felt like there was someone from everywhere. It was large, it was very diverse and exciting. Of course there was self-segregation, and you know, honors and AP and things like that, but a huge part of me and my experience growing up was being surrounded by people from all over the world and hearing their stories, sharing their culture, learning from them.

At the same time, my family and I would spend a lot of time in Israel with our extended family there. I spent the summer of 2006 there during the war with Hezbollah. I remember not being able to see my cousins who lived in the north. I did a year in eighth grade there, me and my three brothers all went to Israeli public school. I relearned Hebrew and was totally just immersed within Israel society, which was a very eye-opening experience. Then I did a gap program in between high school and college where I was one of two Americans in a program of Israelis who were about to go to the army, and that was a really intense and meaningful experience in a lot of ways. This program was, as far as these pre-army programs go, like the second most left-wing one that exists. The leader of our program voted for the Arab parties, and then I believe the Communist party when they split up. We did a seminar in the West Bank and one of the places that we went was the village of Susya, where I later ended up spending quite a bit of time. In college I led two NFTY in Israel trips, so I was one of the counselors on trips that were bringing high school Americans to Israel. And my role, as I described it, was to ask these kids: “what do you think you guys aren’t seeing on this trip?” I very much ensured that the students heard the words occupation, heard the words Palestinian, not just once the whole trip, but multiple times. Then Covid happened and I took a break from being over there. For a while I did intend to go back, actually intended to go back and serve in the army, because I thought that would allow me to be treated more seriously within Israeli society. I thought, ‘OK, if I serve and I do this then people will listen to what I have to say.’ And as I got older and saw some of my friends complete their army service, and as I saw these conflicts unfolding throughout 2021 and 2022, I started realizing there’s nothing I can do that would legitimize what I have to say: They just don’t wanna hear it. I saw plenty of other people in Israeli society who held the same views as me, and had served in the highest levels of the military, generals and commanders, who were totally delegitimized. And it wasn’t because they didn’t know what they were talking about: it was that the vast majority of Israelis did not want to hear it.

Around 2020, I came to the conclusion: nothing is going to change on the ground over there unless the US forces it to change. I am not one of the people who believe that Israelis and Palestinians need to come together and make peace on their own accord. I believe the Israelis will be forced to the table or they will not be sitting down. The next time I returned was with a desire to continue learning Arabic. I’d studied abroad in Morocco and I reached out to my cousin whose Arabic is magnificent. She had been putting together this program that was bringing Israelis to the West Bank in Masafer Yatta, to learn Arabic and do protective presence work and immerse themselves in the community. I’d been going over there (to Israel) my whole life and I’d never really spent that much time on that side of the Green Line, so I went and it was certainly a very eye-opening experience, community-forming and identity-shaping. Going there both created an entirely new community for me and also began the process of my losing a previous community. This is pre-October 7, and for instance, I would start the day at a house demolition or some sort of incident with the army or settlers, and an hour and a half later I’d be on the beach in Tel Aviv and hanging out with friends of mine, who just didn’t care. It wasn’t that they thought what I was seeing was OK: they just didn’t care about it. And I think at a certain point that apathy and that disinterestedness felt so present that it began this process where the Israeli identity that I carried became one that I felt less connected to. I actually felt more American pride, pride in participating in this interesting, exciting and dynamic experiment of people from all over the world trying to figure out what multiracial democracy looks like - built on top of sins on sins on sins on sins, without a doubt - but in my life, I happen to have two citizenships and there was a decision-making process of what project I want to participate in. And it became very clear to me that the one that excited me and the one that that I wanted to raise children in, and the one that I wanted to participate in, was the one where I was part of something bigger than me, as opposed to one that only I could participate in, while a lot of other people that I knew were prevented from ever joining.

IB: You brought up this point earlier that I’m kind of curious about. You said the Israelis are not interested in making peace unless they’re forced to the table by the United States, since we are the only ones with the leverage to make that happen. I think you wrote earlier that the most important political event that will determine the outcome of all this is the Democratic primary for the 2028 election. I think there’s a lot of truth to that, but I sometimes worry that even if a progressive on this issue gets through - and we know they don’t want that to happen, we saw what they did to Bernie twice - even if a progressive gets through, like someone with the politics of a Mandani, we know how powerful the Israel lobby is in this country. Mamdani took a firm stance on the Palestine issue, and his victory really indicated how far left the Democratic electorate had moved on that issue. But the lobby and the institutional forces are so powerful that he has to make concessions like keeping Jessica Tisch on as chief of the NYPD. I think Norman Finkelstein said that if Netanyahu were to visit the UN this year, the chances of Tisch arresting him would be less than one in a million. So I’m wondering, if we get someone who is reasonably progressive on this issue, are you worried that that still couldn’t meaningfully tip the scales?

MBK: Well that’s the question. In terms of the Israel lobby on this specific issue, I think there was what existed and what is coming into existence, and I think those are very, very different things. I woke up this morning to the news that Gavin Newsom described Israel as an apartheid state. I mean, I doubt you thought a year ago or two years ago, or certainly five years ago, that something like that was ever going to happen. Essentially, I think that that is fundamentally shifting in a way that it’s hard to say exactly what that will mean right now. I think the reason that I say that the 2028 Democratic primary is “the big one” in many ways is because the last 20 years of US foreign policy have shown us that nobody gives a shit about Congress. They don’t matter. Like, if the US president says “we’re doing something”, it generally tends to happen. Not in the sense of raising or lowering taxes, but in the sense of like, we’re bombing or we’re not bombing, or we’re sending bombs or we’re not sending bombs. I don’t think this is a good thing. I don’t think it should just be one person‘s decision or one cabinet’s decision, but the reality existing is the one that I need to engage with, and I don’t see that changing dramatically within the next few years. With that being said, we can win every single primary over the next two years, the J Street or JVP or If Not Now-aligned candidate can beat the AIPAC candidate in every single one, and if we do not elect the right president, it will not matter. If Josh Shapiro wins that primary, or Cory Booker wins, even if we have Senate Majority Leader Chris van Hollen and House Majority Leader Pramila Jayapal, it still won’t matter, because Josh Shapiro will keep sending those bombs.

If the House and the Senate are taken over by people who are incredibly critical of this relationship and are interested in reevaluating it in a serious way, stopping the bombs and stopping any sort of support until, at minimum, all construction of West Bank settlements is stopped, until the settler terrorists are actually arrested and put in jail – and we’re still talking minimums here – nothing will change without the right president in office. I will be invested in every single one of those primaries because I dork out over this stuff and it matters to me. It’s important for messaging and it is important for putting pressure on the levers of power, but on the large scale of truly, truly shifting the reality on the ground, that 2028 primary is the one. I do not think that Israel can function as it does without the support of the United States and I think that a United States government policy that fundamentally reevaluates the support that it gives to Israel at the United Nations and in terms of military aid does change the reality on the ground incredibly rapidly.

This concludes part 1 of this 3-part series. Join us next week as Mattan and I discuss the waning influence of AIPAC, Zionism’s role in shaping Reform Jewish culture, and Israel’s lurch towards fascism.

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Isaiah Blum is Graduate of the New School, teacher and contributor with Democracy @ Work. he writes about economics, politics, history, culture and more. Follow him on Instagram @blumbergznews