Hello friends,
This is the second part of my chat with Mattan-Berner Kadish. 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.
In this part Mattan and I discuss the waning influence of AIPAC, Zionism’s role in shaping Reform Jewish culture, and Israel’s lurch towards fascism. I strongly encourage you to check out part 1 of our conversation if you haven’t already done so.
Isaiah Blum: I agree with what you said about the 2028 Democratic primary, and God knows that the UN has been made into a husk pretty rapidly, but I do think that in the hands of someone willing to use it, the UN veto would at least show the world how isolated Israel really is, which could signal a turning point. And as for Newsom, I really don’t trust him. I think he’s just taking the temperature. He knows that 75+ percent of his party think that it’s a genocide. I hope someone comes into the field of primary candidates who is maybe OK on this issue and would actually keep their word, but the outlook is bleak.
Mattan Berner-Kadish: Here’s what I’ll say about Gavin Newsom: I don’t think he’s Joe Biden. I don’t think Gavin has a 40-50 year commitment to a project that is a defining characteristic of his and something that he strongly stands by. Does that mean that he still could be shitty on this issue if he becomes president? Absolutely, 100%, and I would probably bet on it right now. I don’t think that a change in the last week is definitive for the policies he decides to enact. I don’t think we’ve ever had a president who said it’s an apartheid state before. Jimmy Carter post-presidency, maybe. Something that I say a lot in the project that I’m building, and really in general, is that you have a lot of politicians in the United States who did not get elected on, nor did they care that much about Israel-Palestine, certainly not before October 7th. That was not something that was particularly important to them. But they want to get reelected. Their goal is to keep holding power, and the best way to do that for many years was to not piss AIPAC off.. In the last few years, AIPAC was spending millions of dollars per primary to prevent certain people from holding power and to get other people into power. And we’re watching that happen right now. There’s no shortage of stories already where AIPAC now isn’t even talking about Israel in the ads they’re running. But they’re still spending millions of dollars targeting and supporting certain candidates. And we are actively moving towards a place right now where AIPAC is not terribly far from being the new NRA within Democratic primaries. Politicians are talking about giving back AIPAC money, they don’t want to be associated with it, they recognize that this is now an electoral issue for them and they need to be seen on the right side. Now AIPAC can still spend to win a race that’s 52-48 or 53-47, but if the issue is just so clearly polarized that it’s a 60-40 race, AIPAC can spend $500,000,000 and they still won’t make up the difference. I don’t think this is the primary issue that people are voting on, but it’s certainly a big one. I wouldn’t underestimate how large it is. I think that with all else equal, if you’ve got two candidates who are largely the same, and then they have this one big difference, we are moving to the point where standing on the right side of that issue can be the deciding factor in specific races.
The race this brings to my mind is Brad Lander vs Dan Goldman. Those are the sort of races where you need Brad Lander to win, because we are trying to build a coalition in Congress of people who would be willing to hold Israel accountable. I personally don’t believe that Dan Goldman, push comes to shove, is going to take hard steps in a direction that would make him uncomfortable and certainly make his wife, who just this morning is once again being investigated for incredibly Islamophobic and racist tweets, uncomfortable. I don’t think he’s part of that coalition, but I think Brad Lander is. So now that coalition is made up of some J Street people, some people who would align with If Not Now or JVP or some Palestinian organizations, or it might be Thomas Massie or even Marjorie Taylor Greene. That is a broad, wide coalition, but getting to that point requires winning these primaries and winning these races and delegitimizing AIPAC. Part of that is happening because Israel is doing it to themselves. There is an autopsy that was done by the DNC on the 2024 election, they’re not releasing it and there is a reason for that: because it shows what most of us already know, that a huge percentage of young people that could have swung the election in a different direction did not come out to vote because the Democratic Party refused to budge from its policy on Israel-Palestine and in particular Gaza, and the donors don’t want to hear that. And we are conscious of that, we know that is true, and there are plenty of people within the party, even people who are in power who I’ve spoken to, they want this to come out but there are others in the party who are worried about the blowback, and there are people in charge of the party who are beholden to donors and beholden to their own specific interests, you know, I think of Chuck Schumer…
IB: He’s beholden to his donors, yeah, but I think Schumer’s support for Israel is very ideological. He’s really like a religious fanatic. I could go on about this but I kind of want to throw it back a little to some more personal topics. You talked about your experiences as a Jewish educator, leader, mentor, ensuring that younger Jews heard the word occupation, heard the words Palestinian, that they weren’t just hearing hasbara. Now, you and I have this shared experience: we both went to the same liberal Zionist summer camp. And I think you’ll agree that at camp, there was, on the one hand, a feeling of inclusion and diversity and tolerance and all that, but speaking just for myself now, it wasn’t until I got to college, when I was 18, that I even thought of questioning the narrative I’d been fed. I didn’t know what a Nakba was until I was 18. I didn’t know that there was this thing called an occupation that was considered illegal under international law. And the way that Bibi was talked about in my Reform Jewish community, at home, at summer camp, it was kind of the way a lot of liberals and centrists like to talk about Trump. They desperately want to believe that all the problems with American or Israeli society are just the result of this guy’s personal malice and corruption, and everything would basically be OK if they were just gone. So I wonder how you would categorize those experiences, how you processed them, what effect they played on your development, and now that you’re older, how do you view them?
MBK: So I can say that my parents were very open with me from the jump, and that is the defining reason why I am who I am. I think that from the very earliest stages of my life, I have memories as early as 6th, 7th grade of arguing with counselors at camp and arguing with my classmates in 8th grade in Israel and my friends from camp - many of whom are now maybe even further left than me on this issue - saying the words occupation, saying the words Nakba, acknowledging what was going on. I have these very vivid memories from 8th grade when we were living there. Me and my mothers and my brothers would take these trips. We would drive and my brothers and I would say, “wow, that’s a beautiful forest” and our mothers would respond, “yes, and that was planted on top of this village.” They were not going to pretend that these things didn’t exist. The occupation exists, the Nakba happened, this is all part of the story. It is there. There was no lying, and that really shifted my experience in a lot of these institutions, because I already knew what I thought when I entered them. I was confident in what I knew. I don’t feel as though my experiences in Reform Jewish spaces shaped my beliefs on this, because I was already so shaped by my own personal experiences with my family and the time that I spent in Israel and what I was taught at home.
I’ll go back even further. It’s 2006, I’m in 3rd grade and we’re talking in Sunday school. We have an Israeli teacher, she’s having us read these articles about the disengagement from Gaza and how sad it is that we’re leaving Gaza. My parents see that article and they pull me from that class. I move up to the 4th grade and I never worked with that teacher again. With all that being said, when I went on NFTY in Israel as a counselor, I was very conscious at that point of what wasn’t being talked about and what was being talked about. When I was a senior in college I had a fellowship with the Reform Movement where we were all supposed to do different projects. For my project, I wanted to ensure that people who went through Jewish summer camp in the United States, like you, heard certain words. Nakba. Occupation. And there were plenty of people who would try to be helpful, but I was still shut down in a lot of different ways by camp. I was really shut down over and over and over. In the last few years I’ve watched as things have progressed in certain ways, but they’re still just so far behind the curve. I remember having a conversation with the rabbi who was in charge of a lot of the Jewish education that was happening at camp, and she said: “look, we should have made these changes 15 years ago. We didn’t, now we’re here and we’re behind.” And now they’re talking about changes that would have been relevant five years ago, but by the time they put them into action it’s going to be ten years behind. It’s tragic how they were unwilling to engage with the reality of how Israel was changing.
I also have a very specific memory of when I led your sister’s trip to Israel. This would be summer of 2018, I believe. I’m sitting with one of the security guards and a few of the campers and we’re about to enter the Old City of Jerusalem, and we’ve gotten into this debate and I’m like: “look, this country is rapidly moving towards fascism.” I believe I was saying this is as the Nation-State Law is being discussed, perhaps it had already passed the Knesset. And the security guard and the campers are like “no man, that’s not gonna happen, you know, it’s democratic…” I have met with some of those campers since then, and they told me how misled they felt by their parents or their communities. I may have been older than them when we were in Israel, but I was looking at the reality as it was right there in front of me, openly and honesty, and that reality was very clear to anyone who was just willing to engage with what existed, with what was being said in Hebrew, and it was everywhere in the discourse about where that country was headed at the time. I think so much of my frustration with American Jewish institutions, and so much of what I’m trying to do in this project, stems from people’s unwillingness to engage with that reality.
This concludes part 2 of this 3-part series. Join us next week as Mattan and I discuss BDS, personal tragedy, and the future of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and dignity.
Isaiah Blum is a 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
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