How Zionism went from protecting Jews to threatening them

On this final episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast hosted on KCRW but continuing on ScheerPost.com,  host Robert Scheer welcomes Larry Gross, author and Professor Emeritus of Communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. The two cover Zionism, specifically through the lens of Gross, who lived in Israel and personally witnessed the country’s evolution from its earlier claim to progressive idealism under its Labor party founders to the brutalizing occupation of Gaza and the West Bank Palestinians.

Although the term Zionism carries negative international weight today, Gross tells the story of his family, who came to Israel after his father left the United States in response to McCarthyism. Israel’s early labor connected and progressive politics represented a symbol of opportunity and hope for the Jewish diaspora community, such as Gross’ family. His father, who worked for, and was friends with then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, thought Israel was “realizing this dream of the Zionist left, which was the party that had governed Israel… and was purporting to be creating both a Jewish state [and] also a progressive state.”

As Gross aged, however, Zionism’s mask slowly began to peel and the ugliness would emerge. “As a teenager growing up in Israel, some of the contradictions were already becoming apparent, ones that today are all too unmistakable,” Gross tells Scheer.

Israel has sharply broken from its labor affiliated days after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish religious fanatic to the ascendancy of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far right Zionist government. Zionism turned on itself and now threatens the very Jews who initially looked upon it with hope. Gross’s family escaped McCarthyism, but now Jews like him in America working in groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, objecting to Israel’s uncontrolled militarism, face a more virulent repression from the Trump Administration inspired by Israel's right-wing militancy.

Gross cites the pro-Palestine campus protests and explains, “what is happening in universities today… they are performing anticipatory compliance. They are failing to stand up, just as universities unfortunately did in the 1950s in that era we call McCarthyism, in which they fired people, they refused to hire them, they rewrote policies.”

Gross remarks that there are many voices of reason, including many Jews, that speak out against Israel’s atrocities today. “The slogan ‘never again’ has to mean never again, including to Palestinians,” he says.

Scheer Intelligence features thoughtful and provocative conversations with "American Originals" -- people who, through a lifetime of engagement with political issues, offer unique and often surprising perspectives on the day's most important issues.