Getting Out of the Antizionist Matrix with Einat Wilf

Welcome back, listeners and viewers! After a summer of traveling in Israel and Australia, Naya Lekht returns with her first guest of the season, Dr. Einat Wilf, one of Israel’s leading public intellectuals and a prominent voice on Zionism, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.  The episode begins with a simple question: If you could teach people only a handful of things about Israel and the Middle East, what would they absolutely need to understand? The answer may not satisfy those longing for slogans! Next, Naya and Einat take on one of the most fashionable claims circulating today: that antizionism represents a rich and venerable Jewish tradition. Einat challenges the romanticization of Jews who once placed their hopes in Bolshevism, Bundism, socialism, and diaspora nationalism. History, she argues, has already rendered a devastating verdict on these alternatives. These movements did not secure the Jewish future, and many of the Jews who entrusted their fate to them were ultimately swallowed by the catastrophes of Nazi and Soviet rule. So why resurrect their failed political choices as models for Jewish life today? The answer leads directly into the uncomfortable role Jews themselves can play in contemporary antizionism. As Einat explains, Jewish participation is uniquely valuable to the antizionist project: a Jew willing to demonize Israel can be deployed as evidence that the demonization cannot possibly be anti-Jewish. The episode closes with another provocative question: Do Israelis actually understand antizionism? Jews living securely within a sovereign Jewish state encounter antizionism very differently from Jews confronting it in the diaspora. That gap may explain why Israelis and diaspora Jews sometimes seem to be speaking entirely different languages about the threat. A provocative conversation about Jewish participation in antizionism, historical memory, and the danger of rewriting failed political experiments as roads not taken. Take the red pill--see the truth. About Naya's guest: Einat Wilf served as a member of the Israeli Knesset from 2010 to 2013, where she chaired the Education Committee and served on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. She is the author of several books, including We Should All Be Zionists and, with Adi Schwartz, The War of Return, an examination of the Palestinian refugee question and the role of the demand for a “right of return” in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Most recently, Einat founded and now chairs Israel’s Oz Party. Clarifying the complex. Step into my classroom.