Dave Rubin on Israel and Antisemitism

In 2018, Dave Rubin made a bold statement for free speech. When Patreon shunned Carl Benjamin for using ‘racist’ language on YouTube, the popular podcaster announced his departure from the crowdfunding platform in protest.

Controversy ensued and the story hit the headlines. Prominent fellow podcasters, including Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris, joined the protest departure, “taking a hit” for their ethics, as Peterson put it, and Patreon was faced with an exodus of disgruntled users.

“Your stand for freedom of expression struck a chord with millions at the time,” I tell Rubin, “it is poignantly moving for me to be interviewing you for Benjamin’s platform.”

Two eventful years after the Patreon saga, Rubin’s is one of the most successful platforms online, clocking over 1.6 million followers. His reach is global and his guests are some of the most thought-provoking names around, but it is mainly antisemitism and the Jewish state that the famously Jewish host is here to discuss.

Rubin has a personal connection with the only democracy in the Middle East. “My parents actually met in Israel during the 1970s after college while working on a kibbutz,” Rubin recently told The Jerusalem Post. He spent a semester at Ben-Gurion University and years later celebrated his sister’s wedding in the city of Jaffa. Just like PM Boris Johnson, Rubin considers Israel "a miracle - Jews did what all humans aspire to do” he told JP, “which is dream something and then create it.”

Here I ask Rubin about Jews’ against-all-odds survival, identity politics, the Squad, the world’s obsession with Israel and the left’s extremes waking up the Right’s demons. I start by asking Rubin for his thoughts on the recent spike.

What do you make of the alarming rise in antisemitic incidents? What is your take on this lingering derangement?

This is simply about whether Jews can exist or not, that’s it.

Look, there are dozens of Muslim-majority nations, there are dozens of Christian-majority nations, there’s one tiny Jewish-majority nation that’s the size of New Jersey, that’s a couple miles wide, that’s crazily small - the world is ravenously focused on whether this country can exist and whether Jews are allowed to live in the very same places where the story of Hanukkah took place, and that is the birthplace of Jesus. The mainstream left across the world does not want Jews to live in Bethlehem or the Judean hill but Jews have lived in these places for a long, long time.

The world’s obsession with Jews and Israel is unlike any other. I agree with broadcaster Melanie Phillips who calls antisemitism ‘a unique derangement’.

The obsession with Jews by the left is because minorities need to be oppressed in the intersectional calculator of the left, and Jews have extraordinarily survived for thousands of years. Jews have survived through tradition, culture, and belief, that is completely against what the left wants - the left wants monolithic thought and they need their minorities to be oppressed, as you can see, the Jews are the cog in the machine that doesn’t fit. When you add Israel to that - Israel is a bunch of Jews who can defend themselves and who are really not oppressed.

The simple truth of course is that if the Arab world wanted peace they’d have peace in a second. Israel wants peace, makes offers constantly, there’s nothing that Israel can do but fall over and die but the Jews just ain’t gonna do that.

Let me ask you this - if Israel were to sign a peace treaty with the Palestinians tomorrow, and there was even a joint statement released stating that all past trespasses are forgiven on both sides, would antisemitism vanish?

No, of course not, this is just an excuse. But if you have an obsessive hatred the way Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and AOC have, for this one tiny country, that is the only democracy in the Middle East, where the Arabs who live in Israel have more rights than they do in any other Arab nation, where there’s more religious plurality - you can go on a bus in Jerusalem and there’s Orthodox Jews, Muslims, women, it’s your obsessive hatred of that place and your obsessive focus of that place, that might have a little something to do with you not liking Jews.

You mentioned Ilhan Omar... One of the most prevalent antisemitic tropes is that of the Jews’ obsession with money. In a 2019 tweet, Omar explains politicians’ support for Israel with the statement “it’s all about the Benjamins, baby”.

I don’t use the cries of racism, antisemitism or homophobia very lightly, but she’s a true modern antisemite, she’s a Jew-hater, it’s as simple as that.

She has an obsessive hatred of Israel; that is a fact. Somebody tweeted out that Rashida Tlaib got the word ‘Israel’ more times in her tweets than the word ‘Michigan’, which is where she’s a congresswoman of - we basically have true racists, true race-obsessed, religion-obsessed people, and it’s also entirely consistent with their worldview and everything, they want to destroy history, they wanna destroy belief.

What’s really bad is that there’s a war on Christianity, but if you wanna go after Christianity, you gotta take out Judaism first. So they’re basically focused endlessly on Israel but then they’ll turn that on Christianity and of course you can see that, they wanna tear down monuments, they wanna destroy all of our institutions, and everything else. Ilhan Omar will put up every antisemitic trope out there, and the lefties, even the decent, whatever decent lefty remains, whatever decent Democrat remains, they have no defence against this - the liberals have all become just sort of pathetic, they don’t stand for anything; the only thing they stand for is that they’re not conservatives

I argue that antisemitism is different from other hatreds. It has been spreading its poisonous narrative within society for so long that it has become an entity in itself.

It’s whatever you want it to be - the reason it exists is because Jews, through an extremely brutal history, survived. Jews survived because they believe in plurality of thought, and Jews generally believe in argument, and that’s why if you hate capitalism, you can find a lot of Jews that were the leading thinkers in capitalist societies or in libertarian economics, so that you can say “Oh, it’s the Jews,” but if you hate socialism you can find a lot of Jews that were thought leaders in socialist ideology, so they can say “Oh, it’s the Jews,” and the reason for that is that Jews believe in arguing.

It’s probably, ultimately, an expression of what humanity is, that you argue all these points out and you’re constantly evolving and thinking, and that’s why Jews are still here. I mean, it doesn’t even make sense that Jews are here after all these years. 

It’s modern hatred from the left that is the problem, not the right - that’s not to say that the right doesn’t have some problem, obviously, but in a modern sense it’s the left, and it’s simply because Jews have succeeded and that does not compute in their calculation - that Jews, especially Jews with guns, don’t need their help, that’s what they hate most.

You mention the right - Jordan Peterson said that the extreme of the left will wake the right wing’s demons. The Charlottesville display of “Jews will not replace us” brings his remark to mind.

He is right - if you run around and tell white people and white Christian people and white straight people that they’re evil by their very existence, well then eventually they are going to get some bad ideas into their system, you’re feeding them bad ideas and then they’re going to get counter-bad ideas to fight your bad ideas with, so of course they’re going to breed actual racists.

You know, one of the things, the last five years throughout my own political evolution ... I’ve been actually been quite amazed [by is] how there is so little racism on the right, there is so little homophobia on the right, there’s an understanding of what they believe in, and an agreement to agree to disagree.

If you’re a young 16-year-old white kid, and you’re constantly being told that, “You’re a racist, you’re privileged,” meanwhile you live in a trailer, your mom’s addicted to opioids, you’re told you’re the worst thing in the world, you know you’re gonna have trouble getting a job because they’re gonna have to give it to a quote-unquote “oppressed” minority instead, well you might start becoming racist. Well it doesn’t mean becoming racist is the right thing to do, but people turn to bad ideas in bad times and you can understand why it would happen.

Antisemitism is the canary in society’s coalmine.

What we are living through is the result of the left’s dangerous game of identity politics where Jews don't fit the intersectional calculator. This is a minority with a brutal history that probably shouldn’t even exist. Through hard work, education, family, freedom and liberty, [they] have become a successful minority that is against the Marxist worldview, that is against now the modern Democratic Party worldview... The fact [is] that these people are specifically targeting Jews; they're not just targeting Israelis.

It is tragic that rather than halt the progress of antisemitism, the establishment of Israel has, in fact, fuelled the hatred.

There was antisemitism before Israel. I don’t think there will be an ‘after Israel’, but there’ll be antisemitism while Israel exists.

I wanted to commend you for having the courage to speak your mind, it can’t always be easy and must come at a cost.

Hey, I have nothing better to do than save the world, you know.