Holocaust Survivor, Israeli Doctor and Former Zionist Speaks Out Against Palestinian Genocide (1)
Dr. Gabor Maté was interviewed in 2019 by his son, Aaron Maté, where he further elaborates on the very difficult and complicated issues regarding Israel and Palestine. This is the non-Zionist Jewish view, which represents more Jews today than most of the Zionist views.
It is interesting to find these alternative views that are mostly censored in the mass media. Do not look only for aspects you can agree or disagree with, but view this with the goal of understanding how people actually think, for the purpose of understanding them, rather than following the propaganda now being produced to divide the world with hatred and prejudice.
Transcript
Aaron Maté: My guest today is Gabor Maté. He is a physician and author, and also my father. Dad, welcome back to Push Back.
Gabor Maté: Aaron, nice to be here again.
A. M.: So, we are talking today about antisemitism, particularly posing it as a problem on the left. This is an issue that in some ways tracks with your entire life. You were born into Nazi-occupied Hungary, you barely survived, you’ve been an activist for a long time in your life, particularly around the Israel-Palestine conflict. When you look at the issue today and how it is being discussed, what is your impression, and how do you think we should be approaching the issue of antisemitism today?
G. M.: I think, first of all, we have to acknowledge that antisemitism exists. That it is just not somebody’s fantasy, and particularly there are powerful and very painful reasons why people should be concerned about it. I’m talking about our fellow Jews, but also others. Nobody has to be told that there’s a terrible, devastating history of it in the past century, particularly, but, you know, before then as well. So that issue needs to be taken seriously. And at the same time the seriousness that the issue merits has to be looked at in historical context, and that context today is largely framed by the Israel-Palestine situation, and very often the historical lessons and fears that people have absorbed around this issue get infused into the Palestinian question and very much confuse the question in the consciousness of a lot of people. So that’s the context in which we have to look at it.
A. M.: In your own experience, how long has that been going on for? Have you witnessed that dynamic, where basically antisemitism is weaponized to silence criticism of Israel and defense of Palestinian rights?
G. M.: Well, I think we need to take a look at a longer view of the context in which all this has occurred, and Zionism in its earliest stages was definitely a response to some very vicious antisemitism. So that the founder, or the theoretical founder of Israel, Theodor Herzl, who, like me, was a Hungarian Jew, was a journalist, and he wasn’t someone with a heavy Jewish consciousness at all, until he saw the antisemitism in France in the very infamous trial of Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in France, falsely accused of spying for the Austrians, and the antisemitic manifestations that took place around it. And then he wrote this book called The Jewish State, where he comes from the 19th century perspective that every people should have their own state, and he said, “Well, the only way we’re gonna protect ourselves is to have our own state.”
Now, interestingly enough, in the book The Jewish State, Palestine is never mentioned. Herzl didn’t care where the Jewish state would be. He would have been happy to have it in the Congo area or somewhere in Africa. And then what gave Zionism its real impetus was pogroms and antisemitic violence in Russia, particularly, and in Eastern Europe, and so that the bulk of the Zionist movement comes from Eastern Europe and people like David Ben-Gurion and others.
A. M.: David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister.
G. M.: First, and one of the leaders of Zionism, and Vladimir Jabotinsky who was the founder of the Revisionist movement, which is the ancestor of today’s Likud party. These are all Eastern European Jews who are horrified into a nationalistic defense by what’s going on, at the hands of antisemitism. So, antisemitism and Zionism have always been connected. What is interesting is that in the beginning, from the beginning there were Jews who said, “Yeah, okay, we need a state, maybe, and we have a right to seek protection.” But the reality is that in Palestine, specifically, there’s already another people and there’s no way to create a Jewish state in Palestine without doing violence to the local population. And, so, from that perspective Zionism becomes a colonial project. It can only be achieved at the expense of the local population and only by cooperating with the leading imperial power at the time, which is Britain, which controled Palestine after the First World War.
And, so, within the Zionist movement there’s this debate, there was a Zionist slogan, “a land without a people for a people without a land,” intimating that Palestine was an empty land. But the Zionists knew right from the beginning that there was no land without a people. And both Vladimir Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion, in almost identical words, said that when the Arabs fight against us, it’s not terrorism, it’s nationalism; they’re fighting for their own land, just as we would in their situation. So, they were clear about this. Then you get the horrors of the Second World War, and the worst and the most horrific imaginable expression of events of antisemitism and racism in history. And now you have the identification of the Jewish state with Jewish survival and the fight against antisemitism. So that when a lot of the Eastern European Jews who emigrated to Palestine then came up against the Arabs, the local Arabs who, for perfectly valid reasons as Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky pointed out, opposed the takeover of their land, but Jews just saw them as another bunch of antisemites. So, there’s been this confusion right from the beginning.
Now, it’s become much stronger in recent years as more and more people around the world have woken up to the reality of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that took place in 1948 and has really been taking place ever since. And so now the charge of antisemitism is being raised against just about any critic of Israeli policy. So it no longer matters that whether somebody actually is making a legitimate criticism or whether somebody’s coming from an antisemitic place, the two are confused, quite deliberately, I think, by propagandists who serve the interests of Israeli policy, and that means a lot of the mainstream Jewish leadership in North America.
A. M.: So, let’s talk personally for a second. Both you and I have been vocal about this issue for a long time. One of my first political memories is when you went to the Occupied Territories. I think I was 10 years old. This is during the First Intifada, and you volunteered, you went as medical observer to what was going on in the Territories as Palestinians were rising up against military occupation. I remember hearing you on the radio, breaking down crying and sobbing at what you saw, and that’s one of my first, sort of, political formative memories. Well, first of all, what was that experience like for you?
G. M.: So, I visited Palestine, the Occupied Territories in the West Bank and Gaza, in the second or third year of the First Intifada with a medical delegation organized by a Jewish woman from California. And our interest was just to see medical services and the challenges they faced under the occupation. But, you know, even then, and it’s much worse now, but even then, this is early 90s, I think, to visit the Occupied Territories was to witness horror. The humiliation that the Palestinians had to undergo daily, you had to see it to believe it. The oppression, the fear, the heavy presence and hand of the Israeli military, the destruction of the Arab homes, the deprivation of water rights, and just the sheer lack of humanity of it. I cried for two weeks. I cried every day, and personally I was, inappropriately, but feeling guilty that I’d ever been a Zionist. And I used to be a Zionist. But, of course, in retrospect my Zionism made every sense in the world, because coming out of antisemitic Eastern Europe, Zionism, when I was a teenager, gave me a totally different interpretation of history, in a sense of valuation and validation, and yes, we can fight back, and yes, we can assert ourselves in the face of all that horror and all that hatred. So, for me that was an act of self-affirmation to become a Zionist. But there I am in Palestine and I’m seeing what that cost the Palestinians. Now I’m full of grief and, so, particularly in the interview that you heard I was telling how Israel army or border troops massacred some Palestinians in the village, and I was talking about that on Canadian radio. This is when I was there, and I saw the aftermath.
A. M.: So that self-affirmation you felt as a younger man, as a Zionist, that sense of belonging, can that help you? And can you, based on the experience you had, can you help offer us some insight then in how then to deal with people who remain blinded by their attachment to Israel today, and blinded by any sort of unhealthy or unjust political attachment today?
G. M.: Well, I’ve had a series of disillusionments in my life. So, I grew up in communist Hungary and I bought into the regime’s propaganda about justice and freedom and, you know, what they called socialism, which is a very dictatorial, oppressive, brutal system. So, then Hungarian Revolution breaks out in 1956 and the Hungarians rise against this dictatorship—and the foreign-imposed dictatorship…….
A. M.: From the Soviet Union.
G. M.: From the Soviet Union. Also, I get disillusioned, I lose my illusions. Then I come to the West, now it’s capitalism and Western democracy and the United States that is the ideal and the protector of the free world and human dignity. And a few years later the Vietnam War occurs, and I see the Americans massacring these Asians relentlessly and brutally. Three million. So, I get disillusioned again. And then there’s my Zionism, which is fine, now we’re going to redeem ourselves through this Jewish state. And then the ‘67 war occurs and by that time I had this question in my consciousness: Why is it that the same media that supported the Vietnam War also supports Israel? Is there something going on here? And then I did the research and I learned that the war wasn’t the way it was portrayed, it was actually quite a deliberate act on the part of Israel. They knew what they were doing, and they did it to occupy territory and to destroy Arab nationalism—with the support of the West.
A. M.: Without even knowing the details of ’67, just on the face of it, the fact that the supposedly defensive war, where Israel avoids, you know, virtual elimination, they end up acquiring coveted territory in all their neighboring states……. You know, it’s quite the coincidence.
G. M.: Well, when you actually look at the history of it now—I researched it then as a student activist—but when you look at history now, no Israeli military leader ever thought for one millisecond that they were in any danger. They laugh about it, they planned it, they knew it and they launched the attack, so-called preemptively. I don’t have to go into the history of it, it’s too complicated, but it’s worth noting that everything we’re talking about has been documented. So, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, even before then, the ongoing occupation, the deprivation of land rights from the Palestinians, the continued ethnic cleansing. You know, the territory that Netanyahu recently said he would annex…….
A. M.: The Jordan Valley.
G. M.: The Jordan Valley in 1967 had 360,000 Arabs. Now it has 60,000 or something like that. What do you call that? You call that ethnic cleansing. I mean, this is all documented, and it’s been documented by Israeli historians and by Jewish historians from the United States. You don’t have to be an antisemite to recognize what is going on in Palestine. The larger issue is, of course, not just between Jews and Arabs, but also the imperial politics and the fact that Israel plays a certain role in the world domination that’s still exerted by the United States, and that’s why the media protects Israel.
But, personally, what I want to say is that I’ve been through a series of disillusionments, and you think that’s bad, but it’s good. Because would you rather be illusioned or disillusioned? Would you rather have illusions about the world, or would you rather see the way it really is? So, to get disillusioned, it’s actually good. The problem for a lot of people in this world, Jews included, is that they identify with something, and when that something then comes under scrutiny they feel personally attacked. Now, to identify with something comes from the Latin word “idem,” which means “the same,” and “facere,” to “make.” So, when you identify, you make yourself the same as something else. So, if I identify with Israel as the Jewish state, then when Israel is criticized, I’m criticized personally. Or if I identify with the United States as a state, or Canada, or, you know, the province of Alberta these days……. Alberta is in economic trouble, it’s got this oil sands, everybody in the world knows that oil sands are horrible for the climate and for the environment. But the Albertan government now talks about “anti-Alberta-ism,” on the part of those people that criticize their energy policies which are very much in favor of the oil companies and the oil sands. So that when you identify with something, whether for economic or emotional or political or any combination of reasons, and you make yourself the same as that, then when that’s criticized, you’re going to feel criticized. And so, what I’m saying to people is: Don’t be afraid to be disillusioned, face the facts.
A. M.: Don’t be afraid to be disillusioned.
G. M.: Don’t be afraid to be disillusioned. It’s better to be disillusioned than to be illusioned, and don’t be afraid to be disidentified, you know, don’t identify with something to the extent that you become uncritical and blind.
And you know these days I read a book by Albert Speer. Albert Speer was Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, I think. He spent 40 years in jail as a war criminal in Spandau, after the war. And in his biography, he talks about that “everyone was always asking me or my generation what we knew about what was going on, the crimes, the antisemitic and anti-people and the anti-human crimes of the Nazi regime”. And he said “the real question is not what we knew, but what we could have known, if we wanted to find out”. And he gives a couple of examples which I won’t detail now, where he had very strong clues that something horrible was going on in the east, i.e., the death camps, but he never pursued the clues. He didn’t want to find out. He didn’t actually know for a fact. I believe he didn’t know. But he could have known, and he didn’t want to know.
Now that’s the same dilemma for all of us, the difference being that these days you can read the Israeli histories of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. In fact, there’s a book called The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, who had to leave Israel, lives in Britain now, he came under such hostility. You can read the articles of Gideon Levy in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper that details it almost daily, the horrors of the occupation. You can go online and see any number of Israeli soldiers talk about what they had to do and how ashamed they are of what they did in the Occupied Territories. So that the question for a lot of people these days is not, What do you know?—because it’s true, if all you do is you read the mainstream media, you’re not going find out very much—but What could you find out, if you wanted to? So, don’t be afraid to be disillusioned, aim for the facts.
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yogaesoteric
December 3, 2023
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