The question of historical and present antisemitism is at the heart of Zionism, though not always in the ways supporters of Israel would believe. In the effort to shield Israel from criticism of occupation and apartheid, organizations such as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance have attempted to advance a broad, sweeping definition of antisemitism that includes all criticism of Israel. Rebecca Ruth Gould, author of Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom, joins The Marc Steiner Show for a discussion on this trend and its implications for Palestinians, the progressive Jewish diaspora, and the wider politics of identity and racism.
Studio / Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you with us. And welcome to another edition of Not in Our Name; Rebecca Ruth Gould is our guest today. She’s written a profoundly important book called Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom. This work weaves a deeply analytical tale of the contradictions and complexities of antisemitism intertwined with antisemitism at the root of Zionism, how the struggle against antisemitism was hijacked by xenophobia and Islamophobia, the battle surrounding free speech in our world, complicated and already complex reality. Through it all, she also talks about how great Marxist activists and thinkers like Isaac Deutscher and Leon Abram may offer a path of understanding that antisemitism’s demise is wrapped up in Palestinian liberation.
And Ruth Gould is also the author of numerous other books so let me tell you what some of them are. They are Writers and Rebels, The Persian Prisons Poem, and Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine. She’s written for numerous publications, London Review of Books, The Globe and Mail, and many others. And her work has been translated into 11 languages, which is really impressive.
I want to thank you for joining us today. It is really, really good to have you here.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: It’s a great pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Marc Steiner: I want to open with your poem, the piece of it you wrote, because I want to talk about how this all began with your sojourn to Israel and Palestine, what brought you there, and what you discovered, your rude awakening when you got there, and this poem you have on page two. “Workers greet the dawn behind the bars of Checkpoint 300, waiting to build settlers’ homes with stolen limestone.” Talk a bit about your sojourn and how this book actually began because of going to Israel Palestine to live and work.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Sure. This was 2011 and I had just received my PhD. I was actually living in Berlin at the time and not knowing what the future held. I did have a degree in Middle Eastern studies but that was mostly to do with Iran. So I’d never been to Israel or Palestine. I very much wanted to go and I was offered a fellowship at an Israeli research institute called the Van Leer Institute. That is very much to the extent that there is a left at all within Israel; It’s as far as one can get and survive. They do some good work. They have Palestinian academics, for example, but every institution has its limits.
Anyway, I accepted the offer after a little bit of internal struggle but I so desperately wanted to have the opportunity to live there, particularly to live in Palestine, even though, of course, the institute was in Jerusalem. So what happened was I found a place to live in Bethlehem and then I commuted through the checkpoint: that Checkpoint 300 that I mentioned. It does loom very large in my imagination and my memory and in the lives of countless Palestinians as well. It’s this industrial warehouse where people wait for, as I wrote, for five or six hours. The lines aren’t moving.
Anyway, that was the texture of my life. I was right by the wall and the time I had spent there, it definitely made a big impact. The thing that stood out most was this sense of two totally separate worlds that are right next to each other; Bethlehem is literally a very short walk from Jerusalem but it could be four hours waiting in line, the commutes. And half of that time you’re standing near these loaded guns facing you so it’s very toward a traumatic journey. It was so strange because these worlds are next to each other: They’re woven together historically, they have so much in common, and yet Israelis don’t cross the line. They never go to the West Bank. In fact, they’re technically forbidden and most Palestinians cannot leave either. So that’s the visual embodiment of the idea of apartheid, not in a legal sense, but in every aspect of life. And that was a bit overwhelming.
Marc Steiner: You get this sense from how you wrote at the beginning of the book that it was, even though you’re not a naive human being walking into where you were going, it was shocking nevertheless. The depth of it seemed to shock you a great deal.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Exactly. I personally couldn’t live certainly more than a year in that. It is total schizophrenia. I knew the general sense of the politics and so forth but the daily schizophrenia of it, I was not quite prepared for that.
Marc Steiner: So one of the things that I love in the beginning, is you have this great quote. You spend a lot of time throughout the book, and we’ll weave in and out of this, talking about Isaac Deutscher and a couple of other people. You made me go back and look at all my old Deutscher notes as I –
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Awesome. I love that. I love plugs for Deutscher. He’s forgotten these days so I’m happy to hear that.
Marc Steiner: – He has been forgotten in many ways. I remember seeing him at the Socialist Scholars Conference, I forget whether it was either in ’66 or ’67 in New York.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Amazing.
Marc Steiner: Yeah. Listening to him there and reading all of his books… But he wrote this, which is really profound, and it’s a good way to start this off. You quote him saying, “It is a tragic and macabre truth that the greatest ‘re-definer’ of the Jewish identity has been Hitler. Auschwitz was the terrible cradle of the new Jewish consciousness and of the new Jewish nation.” And from his essay, Who Is a Jew, which I thought was a profoundly important essay.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Yes.
Marc Steiner: So one of the things that strikes me about your book – And this is overarching to start with – Are these contradictions of how antisemitism, in many ways, was the root of the founding of Israel and how that pushed it.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Absolutely. Yeah.
Marc Steiner: Talk a bit about that and your discovery around that.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Sure. I could also tell the end of the story of what the introduction introduces why I wrote the book because I wrote an article called Beyond Antisemitism that got me in a lot of trouble.
Yeah. Well, simply, as you said, Israel was founded because of antisemitism at an industrial scale and that’s a trauma that is very much alive; It shapes Israeli life. I’m thinking of my conversations at the Van Leer Institute having dinners with people and how they would process the legacy of that history. A lot of the Israelis, I spoke with at least, were aware of who was a little bit on the left and critical of their society and so forth. But they themselves said that the state was using that trauma in a way to silence the discussion about the occupation.
And I want to make a plug for Amos Goldberg, who’s a professor at Hebrew University. The professor of Holocaust studies, actually. He’s shed so much light on this question. He has a very provocative, and perhaps to some very controversial, but very eye-opening article about the Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Museum in Israel and the way in which the memory is packaged and the traumas are not fully processed. A lot of these controversies that we’re having around defining antisemitism have to do with that.
Marc Steiner: One of the things that I thought about while I was reading the book, and especially when I finished it, was that – And you touched on this throughout the book but I’m very curious to probe it a bit more – Which is your own journey, your journey from being… When I read your name, it sounds like a Jewish name: Rebecca Gould. But your family’s losing who they were as Jews over a couple of generations and you’re rediscovering that through the eyes of Jewish Marxists and your time in Israel and exploring this world. So talk a bit about that because that… It’s not traumatic, but it begins to –
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Was transformational, perhaps.
Marc Steiner: – Yeah, transformational is the word. Yeah.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Yeah, absolutely. I would say that in a sense, I always knew these details of my family history but I had not really reflected on them in an in-depth way because I certainly wasn’t raised Jewish. But I –
Marc Steiner: You were raised Catholic, right?
Rebecca Ruth Gould: – Well, secular, yes. Secular.
Marc Steiner: Gotcha, gotcha. Right. I understand. Yeah, yeah.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: But it did come as quite a shock to be accused of antisemitism. That accusation has become very banal in pro-Palestinian circles because it’s often misused and abused and so forth. But I never thought that when I was writing Beyond Anti-Semitism, it was like the furthest thing… You know what I mean? I was filtering what Israelis were telling me, what was being said on Israeli media, the left wing, and so forth. I had to process that. Because even if I obviously did not consider myself antisemitic, the very thought that something I said could have been hurtful was a shock to me. It was like, oh my God, how could that possibly have happened? And that took me back into a journey of thinking about who am I. What am I? It was a very personal introspective journey. At some point, it did become a political struggle for free speech and that’s also very important. But the first reaction was amazement that it was offensive to British Jews who hadn’t been to Israel, hadn’t been to Palestine. So that’s important to say.
But yes. And it was great. It was fascinating to rediscover the Jewish sides of my family. Actually, this happened, while I was writing this book: My father passed away and it’s my father’s side of the family that is of Jewish heritage. I have to say, there were a lot of questions that came up that I wasn’t able to ask him, but at least I was able to dedicate the book to him. It definitely is a highly personal subject and it has been a way of… My family migrated from deep poverty in Łódź, Poland and they found a new life for themselves in America. But once they got to America, they changed their name; It was Goldstein. I guess they thought it didn’t sound very Jewish but maybe it does to many. They did everything they could to assimilate and erase that history.
Marc Steiner: Then as you alluded to a moment ago that you wrote about in the book, were accused of making antisemitic attacks in the work that you published.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Yes. The work that I published in 2011 when I was living in Bethlehem… In fact, I remember when I wrote it; I’d come back from Hebron, which is where some of the settler movement has in a sense been the most extreme. Many Palestinians live in fear of their lives and I was witnessing that. I was actually with a colleague from the Van Leer Institute and we were at a bus… We actually didn’t go outside but again, this dual-world phenomenon was really overwhelming to me so I wrote that article. It’s important to recognize that’s the context: I wrote it in the middle of that conflict.
And then I got to the University of Bristol five years later and a student who describes himself as Israeli, British, and a Zionist, came across the article. I never actually spoke to the student one-on-one. I still haven’t. There was never a one-on-one conversation between us. But he googled my name and found that article and then published an op-ed saying it was antisemitic and it needed to be investigated. And there was a slow trail of media controversy that had a big impact. The important thing to say about that is it’s not a personal story. This had never happened before in the UK in a sense because compared to the US – I actually went to Columbia University where Edward Said was a professor – And there were cases of tenure controversies around Palestinian activists and so forth. The UK didn’t have that history but what it did have is that at the end of 2016, a few months before this attack on me with my article was published, it had adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. It was the first government to do that in the world.
That marked a governmental interest in preventing criticism of Israel, which explains a lot about why this particularly short article of not much consequence, to be honest, it got a lot of notoriety very quickly.
Marc Steiner: So how much did that experience in you going there, and also reclaiming where some of your ancestry came from, influence you to write this book in the first place?
Rebecca Ruth Gould: As soon as it was happening to me, I realized at some point I was going to need to write it down, because it was, so far, this experience of surrealism. I didn’t believe that by coming to the UK, which is a country that doesn’t have a First Amendment, it’s a country that is thought of as being liberal, and democratic, and protects free speech. It has a concept of academic freedom. I didn’t think that an article I wrote five years earlier in a very different place would matter. But it did, a lot. In fact, a very prominent politician called me a ‘Holocaust denier’ and he said I should be fired. He said that in one of the mainstream conservative newspapers.
What was also interesting was that I got the sense that the university, ultimately, when it reviewed the article, said it was not antisemitic and so forth. So what was interesting was that there was a very sharp contrast between everyone around me who knew it wasn’t really antisemitic, including the university, from the beginning. But governmental pressure and governmental intrusion on this question were so intense that they were acting at the behest of the government.
In addition to making me much more interested in my Jewish roots, it also really awakened in me that free speech is actually something: It’s not just this value that right-wing politicians talk about. It’s actually something that I personally need to survive as a person because I’m being liable for things I never said and at that particular moment I wasn’t able to speak out because I had to not cause controversy.
The university, even though everyone internally reassured me, that this was not problematic, they said, don’t say anything. Be quiet. Shut up. Our media team is going to figure this out, and there are bigger issues. So that sense of being suppressed, having your voice silenced, and not my voice… What was interesting is I felt that they did this detailed review of the article, which was really wrong, from an ethical perspective. Because again, I wrote this five years ago, so it shouldn’t have been relevant, but they did it, and they used the IHRA definition point by point to figure out whether it was antisemitic.
But most importantly, they said that it was written from the US. They didn’t ask me. They totally got that wrong. So they erased the Palestinian and the Israeli context completely. They misread it and said, this was a casual thing; This was a formal inquiry that was supposed to be done at a very high level of professionalism with legal counsel involved and so forth. And it was so biased, even though it found in my favor, it was still incredibly biased, incredibly silencing. That experience of being silenced made me want to speak out, obviously. Yeah.
That and then seeing that happen to other people. At the same time – This is worth mentioning to bring home the point that it’s not just my experience or my story – It’s worth saying that the UK had been a place where Palestinian activism was not suppressed until 2017. But at the same time, the student wrote an article accusing my article of antisemitism and connecting it to the IHRA definition, the antisemitism charges, there was also a campaign – It’s a group that calls themselves a campaign against antisemitism – Had targeted a student at the University of Exeter, which is nearby, calling her antisemitic because of her tweets from five years earlier. She was a student from Gaza and this happened at the same time.
So something was organized and there were a lot of articles being withdrawn from the curriculum and people being silenced. It became clear. It was interesting to me that this definition was so useful in censoring. I’d never seen that happen before. That particular mechanism of censorship was totally new to me and it opened my eyes to the way bureaucracies work and the way governments work.
Marc Steiner: A couple of things struck me here in the book. A lot of things struck me in this book. It’s really well written. It’s a very intense read. The reality of antisemitism, the depth of antisemitism in this world that is in the DNA of Western society that you write about, and how you see that pain turning into oppression. You have these great quotes by Isaac Deutscher all over the place. And I’m a fan of Isaac Deutscher, so I really enjoyed you pulling him into this.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: As am I.
Marc Steiner: Yeah. Because when I was young when I was 15, I was a teenage Trot. That’s where I got introduced to Isaac Deutscher.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Wonderful.
Marc Steiner: At any rate, you have the quote, “Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I therefore a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated. I am a Jew because I feel the pulse of Jewish history; because I should like to do all I can to assure that the real, not spurious, security and self-respect of the Jews.”
So this is part of your journey as well. And when you look at both the death of antisemitism, how that created what became Israel, and how that created the oppression of Palestinians. Weave this tale around that before we get to free speech, which we’ll get to in a minute.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Sure, sure. Of course. Right. Yeah. It’s worth pointing out, that Isaac Deutscher is also a very big inspiration to me, but it’s also interesting that he speaks for a generation of a certain geographic space. I’m thinking of Polish Jews or Jews of their former Russian Empire from the shtetl. It’s astonishing how many of them turned towards radical leftism, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman, are anarchists who migrated to America. They didn’t talk so much about being Jewish but it doesn’t seem like a coincidence. There was definitely a demographic phenomenon of –
Marc Steiner: And Leon Abram, who I never heard of until I read your book.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Absolutely. Yes, yes, yes. I love him. I wasn’t very familiar with his work either and it hasn’t been given a lot of visibility. Absolutely. This is a similar demographic. They were all born – Everyone, all of these people I mentioned – In either Poland or the former Russian Empire. They experienced this forced segregation, and limited economic opportunities, and that pushed them and they all became very, on the left. They saw their struggle as one that had to do with workers across, internationally, anti-colonialism. Rosa Luxembourg would be another.
He speaks for a very broad sector of a certain world that a lot was annihilated by the Holocaust to some extent. Not entirely, but any chance I can get to talk about him. That’s actually a name that he assumed: Abram Leon. For some reason, I mix up the order of the names as well. But yes, this is a wonderful author of a book that is called in English, The Jewish Question. He wrote in French under a Nazi-occupied Belgium. And I am astonished. He had obviously very limited access to scholarship or scholarly resources, working under incredibly difficult constraints. But he produced this scholarly masterpiece about the history of antisemitism. He’s inspired by Max Weber so he looks at it through a very sociological lens.
But he also talks about colonialism. He connects the exploitation of the Jews throughout history to the way the colonies are exploited. That’s pretty astonishing, writing in the ’40s. That’s a tradition that we really need to explore and keep alive and be aware of, at least in the present.
Marc Steiner: But then you also go into the whole question of free speech and into the complexity of that. And –
Rebecca Ruth Gould: It is complex.
Marc Steiner: – Right? And so –
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Definitely complex.
Marc Steiner: – To defend everybody’s right to free speech while at the same time talking about the silencing of speech is taking place, especially if it has to do with Palestinian oppression. Talk a bit about that in terms of what you discovered.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Sure. Some of my shock about the whole thing that was happening to me is, as I mentioned already, this sense of being silenced, even when most people I was in conversation with – I’m talking about university administrators and so forth – Even when they didn’t necessarily disagree with me, I was still silenced. There’s a part of me that, I’m not generally very American in most of my ways but I was born in the US. And there was this unconscious First Amendment orientation in me that was really amazed by the way in which it was seen as being okay not to be allowed to express one’s views.
At the time, I was also reading about prisoners in Iran, because that’s an area that I wrote a book on. And there seemed to be unexpected parallels between the silencing that they were experiencing and what I was experiencing. I realized this because I’d always thought of free speech as something that, in liberal democracies, it’s something that the right-wing only talks about, whereas in maybe places like Iran, it’s something that the left is concerned with. But in my world, it’s not really a big issue. I don’t want to go out there preaching racism to anyone. So it’s not something that I personally have to struggle with. I’m okay with hideous views being silenced.
But antisemitism is a really interesting case because obviously I don’t think my article was antisemitic but if someone comes to me who was a Holocaust survivor, for example, and says, this article that you wrote makes me very uncomfortable; you’re too critical of Israel. You used the word dialectical, that was a very interesting word. There’s a part of me that thinks it’s important to acknowledge what people feel, right?
So it’s very difficult to argue about these questions of antisemitism. There is so much difference of perception with one person because I do think there is an objective way of figuring out what’s antisemitic and not. But I also think there’s a wide margin of emotions and traumas and everything else that goes into this question that we do need to find a way of respecting everyone’s right to feel what they feel and think what they think.
A Holocaust survivor, for example, is probably not going to be in danger walking down the streets of London, but perhaps they have this very, very traumatic memory somewhere back in their past that’s made them afraid. And I’m not going to be the person to say, okay, they’re idiots. You know what I mean? They have a right to feel like they feel. But this is the case though because they’re still not going to accept it. For them to see a Palestinian flag in London is an example of antisemitism, I don’t accept that, but I do want to respect where they’re coming from.
And so in other words, it means that as someone who believes in these different perspectives, the legitimacy of them, I have to acknowledge things that contradict each other in society. And there are different perspectives. And the question of defining antisemitism is an area where there’s never going to be a world in which everyone completely agrees; We’re not going to get there. And there are some things that are black and white, that have to do with hate crimes, but there are other much, much grayer areas. Usually, these are areas to do with speech, attitudes, and perceptions. And it’s more important to let people debate and let people voice their views rather than trying to outlaw them.
Marc Steiner: It’s also very difficult… One of the things in that chapter in your book that struck me was the difficulty to wrestle with, are there limits? And how do you even begin to talk about that; To protect everyone’s right to say what has to be said, even if you despise what they’re saying.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Yes.
Marc Steiner: Even if they are –
Rebecca Ruth Gould: It’s not a popular opinion.
Marc Steiner: – Right? In this day and age, it’s hard on many levels because to allow racist speech to take place in universities or antisemitic speech to take place in universities, has become a really controversial piece, left and right.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, definitely. People these days are much more in favor of banning books or trying other ways of getting the views that are problematic to disappear. But that hasn’t worked in the past, and I’m not sure it’s going to in the present. And one can look at it from a practical perspective. When has that worked? Usually, the views are still there. The people whose views are silenced tend to think that the fact that they’re being censored makes them feel more righteous and more justified.
Antisemitic points of view often can be disproven, empirically. And racism is empirically incorrect. Reason can be, I wouldn’t say completely but to some extent, it can be debated, maybe not out of existence, but dramatically reduced by using the tools that we have of critical thought and debate. And we have to have some faith in that.
Marc Steiner: I want to ask you about this one piece here. You have some great lines in here, “Like any other racism, antisemitism can exist in the absence of intent.” And it shows how deeply, how pervasive racism and antisemitism are.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Yes, it can completely. And there’s one comment I would like to make on that and then an additional point about free speech I didn’t quite make.
Marc Steiner: Go ahead.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: I want to say that one thing I often hear from well-intentioned people who wanted to support me, in terms of when I was accused of antisemitism, was that, oh, that’s a Jewish name. You have Jewish heritage, so you can’t be antisemitic. But I actually don’t agree with that. I don’t think I’m antisemitic but I don’t think that there’s a “get out of jail free card” from any identity. Anyone is vulnerable to any racism, any bad thinking, and personalizing in that way doesn’t help us. So that’s absolutely true. It goes well beyond intent; It’s structural and it’s material as well.
The other thing about free speech and what my actual experience of being accused of something and then defending myself against the accusation and the university taught me is that yes, I certainly would want to be part of the movement that challenges racist thought. I want to be part of the movement that challenges antisemitic thought. But the problem is that you have to think very, very carefully about what agencies and agents like institutions are you empowering. Not you personally but when we create regulations or laws, particularly like the IHRA definition, it’s not technically a law but it functions as a law sometimes. We create these regulations that are aimed to eradicate a certain way of thinking or a certain approach, a certain mental attitude by creating that law. By creating a bureaucracy for their implementation, we are empowering certain institutions to punish or marginalize.
For me, it’s not a question of the content of what’s right and what’s wrong; it’s about power. So if you’re creating a regulation, you’re giving an institution or you’re giving a government – Like the conservative government, in this case. The conservative government of the UK and its various apparatuses – You are empowering them to do certain things to silence certain points of view. That’s problematic entirely separate from the content of what’s being supported and not, it’s also about power. And that’s important to remember about speech.
Marc Steiner: So I wonder what conclusion you’ve come to. I could read 10 different passages here but we only have so much time. How you would see antisemitism and the role it played in forcing people to go to Palestine, as you quote Deutscher, creating this oppressive system with Palestinians. How do you see that changing? You have these great lines in here around how the antisemitism, the ending of it, is wrapped up in the liberation of Palestinians. It’s like it’s almost time for new definitions.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Yeah, absolutely. One way of responding to that is that historically, there have been intersections between the Jewish, Jewish people, Jewish experience, and Palestinian experience if you go back centuries. But at this particular moment, in the 21st century, their histories are becoming ever more intertwined. And there’s a great quote that Edward Said once used, that the Palestinians are the Jews of the Arab world.
Marc Steiner: Yes. He and I actually talked about that one day on my radio show. Yes, yes.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Oh, that’s amazing. That’s wonderful.
Yeah. So what I had in mind when I wrote that, is that at this point, the histories are not separable. And in a sense that’s a good thing. That’s where there’s a potential for violence but that’s also where there’s a potential for peace, the parallels they’ve intersected so closely. And there’s a role for understanding the Nakba and the Holocaust was also being intertwined.
Marc Steiner: So how do you think, given all you wrote and the people you wrote about, and the demise of, in some ways, the power of the left and the Jewish Marxist left that you write about, how that fits into all this? In terms of the future landscape. Because it does change things; It changes things drastically.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: One thing that this shows, potentially some of the most important thinkers in general, in terms of creating revolutionary change, have often been from the diaspora. Historically the American diaspora, for example, there’s a potential for the diaspora to change the conversation to some extent. A lot of Palestinians are leaving, Israelis are leaving their country, and it may be that they’ll find in migration some space for creating communities that are very difficult to create on the ground. I suppose that’s one. That’s a pattern that one sees also in the Polish Jews of the 19th century and the early 20th, that they created new worlds like Emma Goldman when they migrated.
Marc Steiner: And I also find that a lot of these Raelis on the left are now in Europe. They’re not there anymore. They’re gone.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: 100% that’s true.
Marc Steiner: The way you frame that, in terms of the Jewish Marxist tradition and what that really has to teach… And even when you write about Isaac Deutscher’s development and his change, what happened in 1967, how that really changed before he died, how that really changed his whole view of what was going on. Because as a Holocaust survivor, he was like, yes, we want Israel, but then what happened?
Rebecca Ruth Gould: Exactly. Yeah. If you look at the scholarship being produced by Israelis in Europe who are very critical of their country and of that history, it definitely gives us a new way of seeing that: The history, the legacy, and therefore a new way of seeing the future.
Marc Steiner: I want to thank you all for joining us today. I really do recommend getting this book, Erasing Palestine by Rebecca Ruth Gould. It’s engrossing and worth the read to wrestle with the ideas she puts forth. It’s an easy read about a complex subject. So thank you, Rebecca. Good to have you with us. I’m really happy you could join us today.
Rebecca Ruth Gould: It was a great pleasure. Thank you.
Marc Steiner: I want to thank Cameron Granadino on the other side of the glass for making his studio magic, Kayla Rivara for making the wheels turn here and allowing all this to happen, and everyone at The Real News for making the show possible.
Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Write to me at mss@therealnews.com. I’ll get right back to you. And while you’re there, please go to www.the real news.com/support, become a monthly donor, and become part of the future with us. So for Cameron Granadino, Kayla Rivara, the crew here at The Real News, and our guest, Rebecca Gould, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
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