Infinite Jaz

Inside a “Greater Israel” Real Estate Expo at an NYC Synagogue

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.infinitejaz.com [https://www.infinitejaz.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Yesterday, I spoke with Noah Hurowitz [https://www.google.com/search?q=noah+hurowitz+twitter&oq=noah+hurowitz+twitter&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyCQgAEEUYORigATIHCAEQIRigAdIBCDQwNzVqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#:~:text=Noah%20Hurowitz%20(%40NoahHurowitz,17K%2B%20followers], a reporter for The Intercept [https://theintercept.com/staff/noah-hurowitz/], about the Great Israeli Real Estate Expo held Tuesday at Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which promoted real estate in both Israel and the occupied West Bank. Noah was able to attend the event—helped, he believes, by his conspicuously Jewish name—and in our conversation, he describes the scene inside, including one attendee assuring him that international law doesn’t actually matter, another openly marketing Israel’s apartheid policies as a security benefit, and maps in which the Green Line had disappeared altogether.

Hasan, what do they want from you?

The media and political world has been utterly, bizarrely fixated on the streamer Hasan Piker over the past six weeks. He’s been leading coverage on both left- and right-wing outlets, turned into a kind of litmus test for Democratic politicians, and has become the subject of seemingly endless think pieces. Hasan is, to be sure, an influential and charismatic figure in our politics—and his worldview is “radical” as far as the mainstream goes—but the scale and intensity of this obsession has been genuinely bewildering to me. So I wanted to talk to him directly and ask: Hasan, why is this happening? What do these people actually want from you? What does it feel like to suddenly be treated as a political issue on par with healthcare or affordability? What did you do in a past life to deserve this? Are you okay? We get into the mechanics of the smear campaign against him, including a breakdown of Olivia Reingold’s now-infamous fabrication in [https://www.infinitejaz.com/p/he-retorted-narrowing-his-eyes]The Free Press [https://www.infinitejaz.com/p/he-retorted-narrowing-his-eyes], before widening out to other questions: coalition politics vs. leftist purity; whether there’s a place for “recovering liberal Zionists” in the pro-Palestine movement; what actual antisemitism looks like right now; and what to make of figures like Tucker Carlson positioning themselves as anti-Israel voices. Finally, we turn to the West Bank, where the violence is constant and largely invisible—including a school shooting this past week—and discuss what it would take to make people here actually pay attention. Infinite Jaz exists because I believe reporting on Israel-Palestine, and the systems of power that shape it, should not be filtered through the priorities of billionaires and politically biased, risk-averse institutions. But all of my reporting is self-funded, and it cannot continue without your support. If you believe in the importance of independent journalism, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—you’ll gain access to the full archive of subscriber-only reporting and help cover my upcoming reporting trips to the West Bank. A one-year subscription comes out to just over a dollar a week. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.infinitejaz.com/subscribe [https://www.infinitejaz.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

How the Iran War Exposed the Israelization of America

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.infinitejaz.com [https://www.infinitejaz.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Upgrade to a paid subscription for the full, 90-minute interview. I sat down with my friend Séamus Malekafzali [https://www.seamus-malekafzali.com/]—co-host of the Turbulence [https://turbulencepod.substack.com/] podcast and one of the sharpest analysts I know on the Middle East—to make sense of the war on Iran and what it reveals about the U.S.-Israel relationship. We recorded this on April 9th, at the start of a “ceasefire” that didn’t seem to exist on paper and a bombardment of Beirut that was still ongoing. In addition to providing a sweeping overview of the state of things, Séamus offers a crucial intervention in the debate over whether the “tail is wagging the dog” or the “dog is wagging the tail,” laying out, instead, a feedback loop between the U.S. and Israel that generates a “collaborative impunity,” decades in the making. We also get into the psychoanalytic dimension of Zionist expansionism and what it means that America seems to be importing the same ideological structure without any of the scaffolding holding it up. Finally, Séamus reveals what comes after American hegemony…

A "Peace Process" Insider Reckons With Decades of Failure

I sat down with Rob Malley—one of the chief American negotiators on Israel-Palestine over three decades—to discuss his book, Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel-Palestine [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374617127/tomorrowisyesterday/], co-authored with Hussein Agha, who sat on the opposite side of the table, advising the PLO. The book is, in large part, a reckoning with failure. Malley and Agha describe a process that continually reinforced a terrible status quo, never imposed meaningful consequences on Israel, and ultimately set the stage for October 7 and the genocide that followed. The last 2.5 years have not been a rupture, they argue, but a return to the conflict’s more “primitive form,” now stripped of “the pretense of a hollow peace process.” The interview is long, but we cover a tremendous amount of ground. I highly recommend listening in full if you want to cut through the myths and false narratives that pervade the discourse and hear from someone who was actually in the room. Infinite Jaz exists because I believe reporting on Israel-Palestine, and the systems of power that shape it, should not be filtered through the priorities of billionaires and politically biased, risk-averse institutions. But all of my reporting is self-funded, and it cannot continue without your support. If you believe in the importance of independent journalism, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—you’ll gain access to the full archive of subscriber-only reporting and help cover my upcoming reporting trips to the West Bank. A one-year subscription comes out to just over a dollar a week. We start with the foundational mismatch between the political objectives of the peace process and actual Palestinian aspirations, unpacking how it benefited elites on all sides, regardless of the outcome. We deconstruct the two-state solution—a foreign concept with little connection to realities on the ground—and how it became a convenient shield for American politicians to feign concern for Palestinians without ever acting on their behalf. We talk about the U.S.’s role more broadly, of which he writes: “Far from improving the situation, its involvement in Israeli-Palestinian affairs and stranglehold on the peace process often made things worse… It is worth pondering where things would stand if the United States had not bothered with the conflict at all.” Malley provides a firsthand account of the Oslo Accords, whose failure “may be the least surprising thing about it, given the deceit on which it was built.” We go deep on Camp David and how the summit has been mythologized, including by both Bill and Hillary Clinton in viral clips over the last several years, claiming the Palestinians squandered a once-in-a-lifetime peace opportunity. We examine the Palestinian Authority as a mechanism for depoliticizing Palestinian nationalism—transforming the PA into a security subcontractor for Israel and a “giant ATM” for a class of functionaries dependent on Western money. We discuss the fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement and the 2006 election of Hamas, which many have used to assign collective blame to Palestinians for October 7, and imagine the alternate history in which Hamas is diplomatically engaged. We cover the déjà vu of the Biden administration’s post-October 7 failures—“criticizing with one hand Israeli policies it enabled with the other”—as well as his sudden invocation of the two-state solution, as though the conditions for it had somehow emerged from genocidal violence. We discuss Trump—hopelessly ignorant, corrupt, and cruel, but at least a relief from “America’s moral vanity, feckless expressions of empathy, and convictions devoid of courage. If you are not going to lift a finger for the Palestinians, have the decency not to pretend to care.” And we close on what new frameworks might actually be useful for thinking about what comes next: “The days that lie ahead will be more instinctive and raw than cerebral or logical. They will be inhospitable to ready-made grand solutions. This is not a world built by or for Americans. They will be at sea.” PS — I reached 1,000 paid subscribers last week, which means I was granted a little orange checkmark, and the Substack algorithm will now recommend Infinite Jaz to a wider audience. Thank you to everyone who believes in my work. It is the honor of my life to do it! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.infinitejaz.com/subscribe [https://www.infinitejaz.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Ro Khanna: “The U.S. Should Treat Israel as an Occupying Nation Violating Human Rights.”

Congressman Ro Khanna has been making a lot of noise lately—pushing for the release of the Epstein files, challenging the administration over war powers in the escalating conflict with Iran, and positioning himself on the front lines of the Democratic Party’s internal debate over Israel and Palestine. Plenty of people suspect he’s trying to carve out a lane for a presidential run. On Israel-Palestine, that lane is clearly to the left of most national Democrats: sharply critical of Israel, willing to call Gaza a genocide, and increasingly explicit about the occupation. In January, his team reached out to me for input as they worked on a House resolution on the West Bank, and I agreed to share what I considered the most urgent issues. I was clear with them that the core problem was not just a few bad ministers or a temporary policy deviation, but a Zionist project with ever-expanding territorial aims and virtually no meaningful internal resistance within the Israeli political system—and that any real change would require a much more radical rethinking of the U.S.-Israel relationship than most Democrats have been willing to entertain. That same week, with the distinction between rhetoric and action—and between band-aids and cures—very much in mind, I noticed Khanna had voted for a spending bill that included billions more for Israeli security and cut UNRWA funding. I called him out publicly [https://www.infinitejaz.com/p/the-end-of-liberal-zionism?utm_source=publication-search], and he responded quickly, saying the Israel provisions had been folded into a broader appropriations bill and had been “snuck in” by Republicans; when I asked directly whether he had known those provisions were in the bill when he voted for it, he replied, “I genuinely did not.” When the bill later came back amended, he reached out privately to tell me he’d be voting no. It was clear that he wanted to prove his mettle on the issue, and he agreed to an interview once the House resolution came out. Khanna introduced House Resolution 1092 [https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hres1092/BILLS-119hres1092ih.pdf] this week, condemning Israeli settlement expansion, settler violence, and human rights abuses in the West Bank while calling for accountability and specific U.S. policy responses. In our conversation, he was quick to admit that it will not produce immediate material change; rather, it is meant to establish a clear Democratic policy framework and build pressure for future administrations to act. With that in mind, I wanted to use my conversation with Khanna to press him on the harder questions—the ones Democratic presidential hopefuls will increasingly have to answer if they want to occupy the left flank of this issue. In other words, the places where the rubber actually meets the road. Questions like: * Would he continue supporting Iron Dome funding even as Israel wages relentless aggression across the region with the knowledge that it is largely insulated from retaliation? * What does a “two-state solution” actually mean at this point, beyond ritual incantation, given the geography of the West Bank and the sheer scale of the settlement project? * How does one reconcile support for a “Jewish democratic state” with the reality that maintaining a Jewish-majority state in all likelihood requires the permanent subordination of non-Jews under its control? * Given that decades of American pressure and diplomacy have failed to restrain Israel’s expansion, occupation, and aggression, what new, harsher measures would he actually be willing to try? * At what point do we stop treating Israel as an ally in the normal sense of the term? Khanna’s answers were revealing. At one point, he said plainly that the United States should view Israel first and foremost as “an occupying nation violating human rights,” and that this lens should guide policy. That is stronger language than you hear from almost any major Democratic figure with national ambitions. He said he no longer supports renewing the existing Memorandum of Understanding on military aid when it comes up in 2028, and took a shot at fellow ambitious California Democrat Gavin Newsom, whose recent comments on Israeli apartheid generated headlines but, in Khanna’s view, remain too vague to mean much. He also made clear that, in his view, Congress is not where this will ultimately be decided: real change would have to come from a president, State Department, and national security apparatus willing to treat Israel as a state carrying out occupation and systematic rights abuses. Still, Khanna stopped short of the more fundamental break that many people, myself included, now believe the situation requires. From my vantage point, it seems that he is trying to define a Democratic position that is much harsher on Israel than the party establishment has been, but still recognizably inside the boundaries of mainstream electoral politics. In any case, I think the conversation was quite revealing about where the debate is headed, and I’d love to hear what you think in the comments. All of my reporting is self-funded. If you want to help me keep doing this work, consider upgrading to a paid subscription—you’ll also get access to exclusive interviews, reporting, and essays. For a limited time, I’m offering 20% off all annual subscriptions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.infinitejaz.com/subscribe [https://www.infinitejaz.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]