Ori Goldberg on Israel's "Consensus for Genocide"

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Ori Goldberg, an Israeli Middle Eastern Studies scholar with a focus on Iran, got my attention with his eloquent protests against the Gaza genocide. I emailed him, opening with “Your country may have lost its humanity but I’m glad you haven’t.” Below is a transcript of the beginning of our conversation.

Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Audiovisual. I'm Kevin Barrett, looking all over the world for people with something important to say that the mainstream isn't attending to. I've been doing that now for, what, two decades plus. And now I am going to Israel, of all places, to talk to Ori Goldberg. I've been looking for an Israeli I can relate to. And most of the Israelis I can relate to have left—people like Gilad Atzmon and Miko Peled. But Ori is still there, and I've been following his X/tweets for a week or so. And they are really eloquent and beautiful. And so I saw his background is actually similar to mine, former academician and Middle East Studies PhD. And we both are kind of disgusted with our own countries and outside of academia now. So I found somebody I can relate to. Hey, welcome, Ori. It's good to have you.

Ori Goldberg: It's just great to be here, Kevin. It's very kind of you to think of me and thank you for all those kind words. Yeah, I know just as well as you do that good conversation is often hard to find and these days much, much more difficult than it was a while ago. So I'm very, very grateful for the opportunity.

Well, I'm grateful for what you've been saying. People can get arrested these days for saying uncomplimentary things about the genocidal Zionist entity. Even just that phrase, maybe it'll get me stopped at the next European airport I go through. And there you are in the belly of the beast, putting out this very, very eloquent…you're not pulling any punches.

Thank you but in a sense it's easier for me than it might be for you because in the belly of the beast, as you say, I am not even a negligible minority. Of course there are people in Israel who think like me and write and talk and try to protest and do all sorts of things, but we really have absolutely no popular sway. And in that sense, it's better to let us spout off than to arrest us, especially since we're Jewish, right? If I was a Palestinian, I would most likely have already been arrested.

Because I'm Jewish, I serve two purposes. I let it be seen that Israel is capable of hearing criticism and dealing with it, not having a tantrum when faced with criticism from Israelis. And also, I demonstrate the resilience of Israeli democracy. We've got freedom of speech here. Anybody can say whatever they want. And it's a cost-benefit analysis, ultimately. I was actually told this by organs of state security that they don't care. They read me. They know what I'm saying. They don't care. They're all for my right to express myself freely.

So it’s easier for me than it is for somebody in Germany, for example, or maybe even in the United States or Australia. Nobody pays any attention to me in Israel. I tweet in English, but that's not the reason. The reason is that... I don't think most of the stuff that I and people like me are saying is something Israelis are capable of even hearing, let alone processing.

I can relate to what you're saying. My background is that I was teaching Intro to Islam etc.—I'd finished my Phd in 2004 Just as I was finishing that I discovered problems with the official account of 9/11. And I started investigating that and writing about it. And the hammer came down in 2006. And I was dragged on to Fox News and CNN, and I spent six months having my 15 minutes of fame as a 9/11 dissident in the United States. And that was a similar situation (to Israel today) in that for a while after 9/11, there was this mass hysteria and very few Americans were speaking out critically. But by the time I was attacked by the media in 2006, it had gotten bigger.

So anyway, I ended up becoming sort of a professional dissident after that because I could no longer teach in the West. And whenever I lectured in Muslim countries—Turkey and Malaysia and Morocco and Iran and so on—the first thing that people would always ask me, was: How can they let you say this stuff? If what you're saying is true, how could they possibly let you talk? And then I explained that I actually talked to former members of state security in the United States who told me things like, hey, that article you just wrote, Kevin, was so good that as many people as it takes would be killed to prevent that article from showing up in The New York Times. But because you're publishing it over here (in alternative media) it actually doesn't matter that much. And the cost-benefit calculation is to let you say it.

These are efficient operations and they know the principles of knowledge control—let's call it that—very effectively. They wrote the book and they know what they're doing and they are very much aware of risks, which is why I can say pretty much whatever I want. I'm off the Israeli radar. Occasionally, I get in trouble, but only if I hit upon a particular exposed nerve. Most of the times I can say whatever, and I've already been written off. I'm (viewed as) not a serious academic. Politically, I am at best naive or a bleeding heart, and at worst, treasonous to the core. But I am what I am, at least at this point.

I don't really understand why we are such a minority. It's just so much easier to tell the truth. It's so much easier to bargain with people in good faith, to find win-win solutions. I don't understand why the powers that be pursue these seemingly bizarre and self-destructive not to mention evil policies.

Yeah. Often, I think it's because the more powerful you get, the greater the illusion you have of being able to control life and death for more people, the dumber you get. In a way, you're effective, you know how to do things, you know how to maintain your operation in tip-top condition, but what happens when you maintain that sort of operation is that more and more of your resources are necessary for the simple maintenance. Because at heart these—I'll call them operations for lack of a better word—they're founded on deceit and oblivion: lies and nothing. And if you don't invest a lot of effort in extolling and defending the structural integrity of the edifice that you built on top of lies and nothing, then ultimately it collapses because it's founded on lies and nothing. So you have to devote a great deal of effort to simply perpetuating, and if possible, expanding, but simply perpetuating that structural integrity, which is bogus to begin with. And if you do that, you get to be very, very efficient at doing it, but you gradually lose sight of not just of the truth, but of the world, of basic human standards, not even in terms of morals, but just how humans behave.

Let me just say something about things that are happening as we speak. A lot of Israelis, a lot of my friends on the Israeli left, were really certain that Israel will not allow the displaced, ethnically cleansed, potentially, Gazans, to return to the ruins of their homes in the northern Gaza Strip. They were absolutely sure that Israeli fighter planes will simply bomb these people or that Israeli snipers will open fire and that they will simply go back where they came from.

It was very obvious to me that as soon as Israel will be faced with a critical mass of Palestinians, Israel will be able to do nothing. It may be able to kill a few. It may be able to try and disrupt. It may even keep them at bay for two days as it negotiates with Hamas. But if these people are there, these people will return, because there's nothing Israel can do that can stop them. Why? Because that's the dynamics of human behavior. It has nothing to do with morality. If you are operating with a heavily armed military and the entire raison d'etre of your operation is that you have the power, and if you are faced with people who say, “well, okay, do your worst. We've got nothing to lose. We've got nothing to return to anyway.” And if they congregate in large enough numbers, that army is paralyzed.

And again, not because we can talk for days about how this is a good thing and how life defeats death. I've written about that. But in this case, it's just simple human behavior. The thing is, when you're used to seeing the world through the sights of an assault rifle, or you're used to planning strategic operations, or simply maintaining a repressive occupation that for decades and decades does not let people live, lift their heads, that's how you see the world. You see it all in terms of a very distorted power balance, and you simply don't have a clue about the way human beings behave in human situations.

And that's exactly why what's happening now is happening. That's Israel's failure. It's not clever negotiations on the part of the Palestinians. Hamas is not necessarily a very clever organization. It's just a human situation to which Israel was completely oblivious because we have been in the business of dehumanization for so long that we've gone and dehumanized ourselves. Sorry, I was ranting, but it's just a very, very clear demonstration of what you were saying.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And again, it sort of does puzzle me how that dehumanization can reach that level. I've been calling attention to polls of Israeli public opinion showing 90%-plus Jewish Israelis approve of all of these completely genocidal, self-destructive policies, and trying to figure that out. In America, most people don't realize that. They think there's this Israeli left, and (Israeli public opinion) is evenly split between the liberal Israelis who are really just like us, and the other half of them who are crazy settlers. (Americans think) the (liberal) half are basically normal. But no, they're not, are they?

Not in that sense, no. The consensus about the genocide is probably the broadest, most sweeping Israeli consensus I've ever seen. But even there, before we can definitely talk about reasons or how this happened, it's really important to note the very immediate human aspects of the situation. The great majority of Israelis did not support the genocide because they are sworn to bringing about as many Palestinian deaths as possible. The great majority of Israeli citizens supported the genocide because they really thought that it might work: It might remove the Palestinian problem. They were willing to—and I say this, of course, tongue in cheek—they were willing to suffer the indignities of being genocidaires. If it works. Because they knew—and I think, by the way, that they were not wrong—that if it worked, the world would just give Israel carte blanche.

I think that's one of the reasons why the international community basically supported this genocide, because they thought we could pull it off. And had we been able to pull it off, I don't know that much would have been done. But at some point...

What would “pull it off” mean? Like getting Egypt to accept them or what?

Yeah, driving them off the land, basically. Or forcing them to stay with a clear understanding of their status, which is a subject of the Israeli empire.

Well, good luck with that.

As you can see, obviously, abject failure. And I think at some point, we've been living a life that is defined by a broad variety of cognitive dissonances here. Those Israelis who your Western friends assumed, or your American friends assumed, were liberals just like them—they really see themselves as liberals. They protest against Netanyahu. They want a country that is less overtly religious. They want to curb settler influences. They call them messianics and fanatics and see themselves as standing on the other side of the barricade as a fight for Israel's soul. They think of the Netanyahu government as crazy and not even crazy, befuddled. Settlers are crazy, but the government is befuddled. They're just not up to it.

That's on the one hand. But on the other hand, they all support Netanyahu's policies with regard to the war. Nobody comes out and says—for months and months and months—nobody comes out and says the war has to end. The public even struggles about the hostages. They've only been saying that for like a month and a half now, two months maybe at most. Until then, nobody said those words because Israelis think that this is the most justified war Israel has ever fought. And it's not a genocide, and even if it is, so what? We have to do it. We're just resolving the problem.

So as long as you can hold that dissonance, as long as it seems coherent, then it works just fine. Repression, inner repression, is the most effective defense mechanism known to man. The problem is that once it fails, it fails completely and absolutely. Once you can no longer believe your own lies, then you just see the world differently. You can't accept it anymore. And I think that shift is what has been occurring in Israel. I think our prime minister, who's not an ideologue by any means, understands this. I think he wants to leverage this to his own political benefit. He wants to be the leader who fought the necessary war, but also brought the necessary peace. And I think this is all very much a political thing for Israelis now about Israel.

Because see,—the really big point here, as far as I'm concerned, is that we really don't acknowledge the existence of anyone else except Israelis. We are the only real people in the world. Palestinians, of course, more than most (are not human) because they tried to kill us. But it starts with Israel and it ends with Israel.

What extent is that a settler colonial thing and to what extent is that a Jewish thing?

I think it's more of a Jewish thing historically and politically than it is a settler colonial thing. It's settler colonial in the sense that our sense of self is constructed on a very, very deep-seated sense of supremacy. The whole notion of the Jewish state just for Jews, which obviously means that people who live here who are not Jews must be inferior to Jews to provide Jews with the proper status for maintaining a Jewish state. So in that sense, very much a settler colonial project. Even if I will get in trouble with some of my friends who will explain why Zionism is not settler colonialism, it doesn't matter. That part of it is part of the colonialist heritage.

But the very radical collapse of the supremacy that occurred on October 7th, 2023, brought about shift. It's no longer about supremacy. It's about solipsism. Our supremacy failed. There's no way we can restore it. That's obvious. This wasn't just the defeat in the war. This was the resurgence of all of our demons. Our id kind of traded places with our superego. And the only way we could come to terms with that was by replacing the supremacy with solipsism. It's not just about a hierarchy now. It's about what's real and what isn't real. And the only real thing is that “they are animals who are trying to kill us. Not all of them. Or let's say some of them are wolves, even if most of them are sheep.”

I remember encountering that in some Israeli literature. I remember being told Amos Oz was supposedly some liberal Israeli writer and then reading his fiction. His jackals and desert reptiles are obviously stand-ins for Palestinians.

He is the Ulfata of Israeli liberalism, Zionist liberalism. The animal metaphor is there, very easy to evoke. And the Hamas attack massacre of October 7, 2023, made the animal metaphor very accessible. “Because they're animals. Who does this if not animals? We're not animals because we bombed from above. We've got fighter planes, assault rifles and tanks and bulldozers. We do it, you know, war is unfortunate. We have to do this, but at least we have the grace to admit that it is unfortunate. We don't do it with the glee that they do it.”

People who are not exposed to Israeli discourse would be, I think, surprised by how much of it is inundated with talk about intent, even more so than the actual actions, intent that reflects the true inner nature of Hamas and by proxy of Gazans generally and by proxy of all Palestinians. But the point is that “once this happened, they are beyond the pale. There's no talking to them. They're not people. So we don't want to kill them. We want to kill the bad ones. We don't want to kill everybody. But if they're there, if the bad ones are hiding amongst them, they're using them as human shields, what are we to do?”

And that raises a question of that reaction that you're describing, which does remind me a lot of the American reaction after 9/11, although that reaction did dissipate fairly quickly. But it raises the question of to what extent is that reaction built on anything from discernible reality? And to what extent is it built actually on lies that are at some level known to be lies? Rene Girard had developed this whole theory, an anthropological view of human nature, that all human societies are based on sacrifice, which is ultimately lynching a scapegoat and then lying about it. And the actual lies create the myth that is the foundational myth for the human community. And truth wouldn't work. It has to be lies.

So in this case, I wonder, just as with 9/11, where we had just a blatantly obvious lie. It's obvious to anyone with eyes that those buildings are coming down in explosive demolitions. They're not randomly falling down from building fires, jet fuel kindled office fires. At some level, everyone knows this. So I'm wondering if in Israel, is there some level where people realize that the IDF appears to have killed probably the majority of civilians who died on October 7th? And that the behavior of Hamas soldiers was, as far as we can tell, exemplary, based on Israel's inability to find any evidence of war crimes from the hundreds and hundreds of cameras that the Hamas fighters all wore. (And were recovered from dead or wounded Hamas fighters.) And that indeed atrocities committed that day were presumably committed by angry non-Hamas people who streamed out of Gaza and opportunistically committed crimes, although there don't appear to have been all that many of those either.

So based on what I've seen, it looks like the whole narrative of the horrible Hamas atrocities of October 7th is a complete lie. And I wonder if the fact that it's a complete lie actually is the reason that it's been so effective.

Well, I think I disagree with you there, Kevin. 9/11, I don't know. I know you learned the research, and it seems logical. But I don't know. About what happened on October 7, I've heard it's the word atrocity that is so laden with baggage, exactly because of the need to push those who committed it beyond the pale to make them not eligible for negotiation or interaction or communication. That's the point. As far as I know, both Hamas and Gazan civilians committed horrible crimes. To the best of my knowledge, the behavior of Hamas soldiers was not exemplary.

It didn't just end with killing Jews. To the best of my knowledge, Hamas committed war crimes and crimes against humanity that day. But I have to tell you the truth. I don't need to absolve Hamas of having done that. I don't need to accuse Israel of having orchestrated October 7 to talk about what's happening in Gaza right now. The whole notion of the balance of what lets you do these things or get off the hook or gives you validation…I find it redundant to the discussion. I think that sort of puts it into a context that many people find off-putting and best, not that I care that they do, and also a context that may have a powerful effect on revealing the most factual of truths but is rarely conducive, I think, to political action.

So what's the best way then to bust through that myth of Hamas and Palestinians as vicious animals?

Just for me, and I'm only speaking personally, okay? For me, it's the convictions, based on my reading, knowledge of psychology, of Palestinians, of such accusations in past contexts, that human animals—let's call them that without insulting the animals—are exceedingly rare everywhere you look. Human beings are human beings. That's not to say that they're good necessarily or kind. It's to say that they are capable of exhibiting a whole host of behaviors, including rage, lethal violence, abuse and negation of their victims. That doesn't make them inhuman as far as I'm concerned. That's part of being a human being.

Isn't there a place to talk about the empirical reality? Honestly, I don't understand how anybody who studies intensively the available material on October 7th could ever conclude that this was a particularly heinous kind of operation and that the behavior of the Hamas soldiers was particularly heinous compared to other military situations.

As you talk about the particularity of it, I think that's the part where I…I don't think it's particularly heinous. I think it's heinous and I find it horrible. And I was traumatized just like all of my compatriots on October 7th. But as Israel began bombing Gaza, having lifted all existing defenses for civilians as part of his bombing campaign, it was very clear to me that Israel was committing a crime, okay? And that is what I'm interested in. That is the point around which my moral and political compass revolves. I think you can't resolve crimes with crimes. And once that happens, I'd like to stop the crimes from being committed.

Now, I do think Hamas committed severe crimes on October 7th. I think Israel was responsible for a lot of civilian death there. But I do think Hamas committed severe crimes. Having said that, Hamas committed those crimes on October 7th, Israel has been committing them for 15 months in really unbelievable, ungraspable dimensions. And the moment where my countrymen begin to say, well, you know, they…I'm not even talking about the lies. The lies are certainly there, and we all know them, about the “beheaded children,” a lot of lies.

But I'm not even talking about the lies. I'm talking about the truth. Kidnapping as though a kidnapping mother with two young children is worse than pulverizing a house that is home to a family of 11 and leaving those 11 bodies buried in the rubble until somebody comes and salvages them, which most likely will not happen. That is the part where I lose it, where Israel claims moral superiority because what they did was so much worse. I think what they did was horrible. I think what we're doing is horrible. I'd like to apply, I won't call them objective standards, but basic standards like the passage of time, like repetitiveness, like the existence of a pattern. For me, it's obvious that if you do something for 15 months, then you don't do it by accident. You don't do it through chance. I don't know that we can talk about that if there's a plan in place, but it is criminal behavior that is not just worthy of sanctions and punishment and must be stopped. It's criminal behavior that is so all-pervasive that it shapes Israeli society.

We do it, and then it shapes us right back in its own image. After 15 months of a genocide, we are not the same society we were. The genocide is not simply an expression of the evil that is Israel. Of course, we are changed. It is like Yeats' Easter 1916. Changed utterly, not just changed. That is where I am. That's where my sense of morality, but also my strategic understanding and my political will, that is their rallying point. I want to fight that and I want to stop these crimes and I want to criticize them as vocally and as consciously as I can.

Because part of what genocide does is it dumbs you down. It subjugates your entire being. It demands that you fully devote yourself not to killing Palestinians with your bare hands or with an assault rifle, although a lot of Israelis have done that with a fighter plane, but to allowing it, to enabling it, to staying silent about it, to saying it's unfortunate, but what else are you going to do? That takes...a remarkable amount of energy and that energy could have been invested in first of all stopping it, and also in ending the evils that we do and have been perpetrating every day for decades: ending the occupation and reaching a settled solution. So I am less concerned with what you call empirical truth. I am satisfied with the knowledge not that there was symmetry, but that there was an almost unlimited amount of horror.

And I can't have it stop at October 7th, which is another zany aspect of Israeliness over the past 15 months. It's as though everything stopped on October 7th. The passage of time stopped. That is something that infuriates me, I think, as a person.

And that actually points at what I was getting at about the Girard sacrificial myth template. The experts in the construction and maintenance of public myths like Philip Zelikow, who ran the 9-11 commission investigation, know that societies tend to be based on these sacrificial events that split time into a before and an after, as Zelikow wrote in 1998 when he wrote about what would happen if the World Trade Center were destroyed. And he said that time would be split into a before and an after, and nobody would remember what life had been like before it happened. And of course, that happened on September 11th 2001.

And likewise, with October 7th, we see the same pattern. There's a sacrificial event. There is…I would argue that the gross falsification of the reality of the event is critically important—you don't have to agree with that—but but then it splits time into a before and an after. And the myth, the lie about that event, then becomes the foundation for the new society that emerges…

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