Hello friends,
This is the third and final 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 BDS (Border, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, the future of Israel’s occupation, and the meaning of work in the midst of personal tragedy. I strongly encourage you to check out parts 1 and 2 of our conversation if you haven’t already done so.
Mattan Berner-Kadish: I just turned 30. I would say I came into political consciousness around this issue in 2011. There was very little time in that 15-year span that wasn’t just Bibi. There was no peace process during that time. There was active Israeli belligerence towards the Obama presidency, and blatant disrespect. I’m not saying that other nations have to respect the United States, but at a certain point you had to ask, regarding the Bibi-Obama relationship: who’s the client state here? And now of course there’s been ass-kissing of Trump for twelve years. Something that’s been so frustrating for me is the inability or the unwillingness of so many Jewish institutions and leaders to look at what is happening on the ground and to look at what Israeli leaders are saying. These things can be translated! I happen to know Hebrew, and that’s great, but some of those guys do too, and anyone can get a translator and see: this is what they are saying! These are their intentions! This is what they believe and this is what the discourse sounds like in Hebrew when they are talking to each other! Treat them seriously because they mean it. There’s an analogy my mother used for a long time that I’d like to mention here. It was this: if the Israelis and the Palestinians are negotiating peace and it’s a pizza, and they’re talking about who gets how much of the pizza, and the whole time the Israelis are just eating the fucking pizza, the question, then, is why would you negotiate in seriousness with that person??
Isaiah Blum: (Laughs) That’s a good analogy.
MBB: Right? (Laughs). I mean it’s basic and it’s dumb, but like, the Israelis are just chomping down on the pizza in front of the Palestinians with one hand, and with the other hand they’re slapping them across the face or just punching them. The Israelis have no intention of seriously talking. And they haven’t for a long time.
IB: That’s why it really pissed me off when Biden would finger wag and say we’re going to sanction some of the West Bank settlements. It was such a charade. I want to ask you one more thing, and this is something I’ve been curious about lately. I want to know a little bit about your opinion on the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, and something that made me think about this was the movie No Other Land. You actually lived in co-director Basel Adra’s basement at the time of production. This was a very bracing, very urgent film, and I found it strange that some people on the left have said well, these are Israeli filmmakers, this is an Israeli co-production, so while it may have valuable things to say, we still have to boycott it because it’s an Israeli product. Your position seems complicated: you obviously can’t uncritically support such a boycott, but you’ve also said, numerous times, that economic sanctions and economic pressure are tools that have to be used in order to force Israel’s hand. So I’m wondering if you can clarify your stance on this issue and your feelings surrounding it.
MBK: I wish I could clarify anything, man! Here’s what I’ll say: the idea that it’s antisemitic to sanction or economically boycott anything related to Israel is obviously fucking stupid. On the other hand, I think there’s a lot of people who kind of want to pretend that Israel is fake or “doesn’t really exist” and therefore shouldn’t be engaged with. I have long said that it is not my right to tell Palestinians how to resist, or whether their actions are legitimate or not. I think we can all say that some things are probably more legitimate than others, but some things are legitimate and ineffective. Some things make a difference and some things don’t, and just because something is OK and cool and legitimate does not mean that it is working. I’m not saying that about the idea of BDS, but I take issue when its advocates pretend that Israel isn’t actually real, or that because it isn’t legitimate it can therefore be ignored. If that’s your real belief, if you want to prove that that’s true, it doesn’t matter: it’s there. It exists. Yuval Abraham is present, at the end of the day he goes home to an Israeli family and he pays Israeli taxes. Israel is a real entity, whether or not it is legitimate, whether or not you want to put quotation marks around the name. Ultimately, someone is committing genocide in Gaza, someone is occupying the Palestinian territories. Regarding No Other Land, we have to honestly ask: would this story reach a wide Western audience if it was just told by Palestinians? Maybe not. But I think it comes back to a kind of basic truth, which to me just feels obvious: nobody’s going anywhere. We have to figure something out, whether that’s a confederation, one state, two states, or something else entirely.
I personally have no desire to see Palestinians ethnically cleansed, but that’s what we’re actively moving toward right now. That’s the most likely conclusion if the status quo continues. Palestinians will be put into small parts of area A, and then they will be removed from all other parts of the land. I think we can agree that that’s bad. Now I also think that removing all the Israelis from the land is incredibly unrealistic, really just beyond unrealistic, and it also probably wouldn’t be a good solution to this problem of figuring out what happens to the land and the people living on it. The vast majority of people live where they’re form. I can certainly be convinced to evict hundreds of thousands of settlers from the West Bank. I’m not fighting on that one. But I think that the vast majority of people should probably stay where they are. I do not believe in uprooting tens of millions of people. I can be convinced to uproot 500,000 for the stability of the other 15,000,000. But just on a human level, I want as few people to have to die for this conflict as possible. I want as many people as possible to get to live their lives where they’re from, in peace, with the people around them, and to have self-determination and freedom and equality and everything that humans deserve that many of us take for granted. Because of that, I try to engage with people as they are. And that means that I engage with the Israeli population as they are. I engage with Palestinians as they are. I take into account the flaws, the good things, the frustrations, everything. I don’t glorify anyone, I don’t demonize anyone. I do this because I want to figure out what we need to do to minimize the pain that I have personally felt, that I’ve seen so many others deal with and feel in so many intense ways. I’ll end on this: after my friend Awdah [Hathahleen] was killed, there were some activists at the scene, but besides me there really weren’t many who’d had serious, long-term relationships with him. So many people came through in the days after. It was a shitshow obviously, it was an absolute nightmare. There was a closed military zone, they held his body for 11 days… but that time was, in many ways, like a community reunion. Because this guy really was the center of this community that had been built out there over the years. People flew in to support the community. There were so many folks asking how are you, are you OK. Obviously the immediate answer was no, but the ultimate answer that I gave was this: I’m going to deal with the pain when I get home. I have two weeks left here before I have to get back to the United States. I’m going to make a million trips to Yatta and pick up a million pounds of chicken and rice. I’m gonna get whatever toiletries are needed. I’m going to get this and I’m gonna drive someone here and I’m gonna take someone to the hospital. I’m just gonna keep going. Despite the intrusive thoughts, the anger, the frustration I’m feeling, I know this community needs me right now. I’ve been here all summer for them, they know me, they trust me, I’m going to do whatever they need me to do. I got home eventually and the question became ok, now what do I do? Am I ok? And the answer very clearly was this: there’s nothing I can do to make myself feel better, except work to make sure that nobody has to feel like this, or at least as few people as possible. I want as few people as possible to feel how I felt, or see what I saw, ever again. See their friend die in front of them. See injustice. See murderers get away with it and then help get innocent people beaten and tortured in prison. After watching all this happen, there’s nothing I can do other than work.
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.