How To Answer zionist hasbarist Questions
A simple how-to guide
It doesn’t matter how exactly you ended up in a situation where people are demanding to know what you think about Israel. Maybe you took a wrong turn. Maybe you took several, over the course of many long years. All you know is that you are here, now, being poised with questions about the zionist entity, with implied demands for immediate satisfaction. And who are you? You’re a columnist getting interviewed, or a politician, running for office. Or maybe you’re a streamer, or at the very least just a random online poster.
It shouldn’t be a hard or particularly challenging thing to do. If you are a good person, with a good heart, and you answer from that good place, then the answers should come as naturally as breathing. Yet for want of words, of intelligence, of even basic morality, many yet still falter and underwhelm.
The answers herein are not the sole, indivisible truth. You may divine and devise your own schema, your own answers. But these answers are designed to be the plain truth, delivered as concisely and directly as possible, to an audience beyond your immediate interrogator. The point isn’t to convince your interrogator of anything, the point is to convince any potential audience consuming this information. If you offend the person asking you questions, that matters little, so long as you can convince everyone else.
Questions, Answered
Q: Does Israel have a right to exist? (other variations: “…a right to exist as a Jewish state?” / “do Jewish people have a right to a nation-state?”)
A: No state under international law has a ‘right to exist’. That’s never been the case in all of human history. States exist, right now, to this day, because they have armies, allies, and economies to back up their claims to sovereignty. What states do have is an obligation to follow international law, and the states that fail in that central obligation demand multilateral corrective action from every other law-abiding state.
Q: Do you condemn Hamas? (other variations: “…Hezbollah, [other non-state enemies of Israel]”)
A: Israel’s enemies are not America’s enemies, and to the extent that they are recognized as such in American national security law is a mistake. Hamas is not Al Qaeda. They have no interest in global Jihad; they are a national liberation movement wholly concentrated on securing Palestinian sovereignty. The same could be said for Hezbollah, with Lebanon. To the extent that they have harmed Americans, it is because we have picked the wrong horse in this fight. It’s not Hamas or Hezbollah that diverts billions of our tax dollars annually into their pockets. We aren’t paying for Hamas or Hezbollah’s healthcare, or the bombs they use to kill women and children in a girl’s school. Our politicians aren’t getting bribed by them daily. We aren’t waging a war of aggression on their behalf in Iran.
The enemies of America are those who work against America’s genuine interests. And there is no greater enemy in that case than Israel, which has barreled the world into war and collapsed the global market supply chains, all for its genocidal, ethnocidal fantasies of Alexandrian conquest.
Q: Do you condemn Iran?
A: No. They should be condemned as much as Poland in 1939, or as Ukraine in 2022. They are victims of an imperialist war of aggression, one as violent as Hitler’s or Putin’s bloody crusades.
Q: If Iran gets access to nuclear warheads, they might attack Israel or the United States directly with nuclear weapons. Shouldn’t we stop that?
A: No nuclear power save the United States has ever used a nuclear weapon, and there is no reason to believe Iran will ever use one save if they were directly attacked by one. To stop Iran from nuking anyone else, the response is simple: don’t nuke Iran and Iran won’t nuke you.
Q: Do you support Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions against Israel?
A: At the very minimum. We must also consider a full diplomatic and economic break with Israel, to the extent of using our national security laws to sanction their entire economy, and to go after their individuals and groups as terrorist entities. If Israel does not change its behavior, we have an obligation under international law to force it to change its behavior, up to and including breaking it apart as a governable entity.
Q: Is Israel committing Apartheid?
A: Yes.
Q: Is Israel committing genocide?
A: Yes, and has been since 1947.
Q: What is to be done about rising antisemitism in America?
A: Hatred of Jewish people because of their birth, culture, or faith is wrong, and should be combated by the whole of society. But Israel is not semitism; being anti-Israel is not antisemitic, despite the efforts by the zionist lobby to make it so.
Q: Did the Arab states commit ethnic cleansing of their own Jews post-1948?
A: The end of WW2 was a traumatic time for many peoples, with tens of millions being force-migrated across the continents, including in the Arab states, and especially in Palestine, where Israel committed the Nakba. What happened to those people of all stripes and religions was wrong, and should not have happened. However, in the aftermath of WW2, the crime of forced migration was effectively excused by the Great Powers, and done by all of them in their own territories. Forced migrations should not happen again in human history, same with genocide.
Q: Did the Holocaust happen?
A: Yes, the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, along with 11 million other non-Jews, and also helped kickstart a war that ultimately claimed between 50-100 million lives.
Q: Because of the Holocaust, don’t you feel bad for the Jewish people? Don’t you think they deserve a state? Doesn’t a Jewish state make the Jewish people safe?
A: It’s possible to feel pity without demanding as a policy the invention of a nuclear-armed genocidal state. There are many victims of genocide who don’t have a state. The Roma people and transgender people are just two examples of Holocaust victims who were not given a state. And, given how often Israel is at war, and how much intense hatred Israel collects for its vile actions, it’s hard to see how a state makes any ethnic group safer, save those states that are multicultural and multiethnic, such as the United States.
Q: Israel has been a strong ally of the United States. How can we break up such a long-standing alliance?
A: People change. States change. A so-called ally which drags us into a ruinous war of economic calamity should not be our ally, especially if that so-called ally is committing a genocide and threatening Hitler-like expansionist dreams.
Q: Did Hamas commit mass rapes during October 7?
A: I’m against mass rape of any kind and I’m condemn Israel for immediately burning and burying all the evidence that could’ve led to investigations and arrests.
Q: Do you condemn what Hamas did on October 7?
A: I condemn that they felt military action was necessary. I condemn Israel for not seeking a peaceful settlement with the various Palestinian movements before October 7th, and I condemn them for doubling, tripling down on genocide in the aftermath of October 7, instead of realizing how wrong they were for keeping Palestinians caged like zoo animals. The right thing for Israel to have done would’ve been to remember their obligations under international law, not Amalek.
Q: Do you hate Jews?
A: I don’t hate anyone, I literally love everyone.
Q: But you don’t love zionists.
A: Correct. I love everyone but zionists and racists of all kinds should abandon their ideological priors, lest they find themselves beyond human sympathy.
Q: Do you condemn the phrase ‘globalize the Intifada’?
A: Palestinian liberation should’ve never gotten to the point where the struggle for liberation became a disparate, desperate call for action from the unorganized masses of the billions of people on Earth. To the extent that it has, I condemn the international community, with all their arms, armies, and economic power, in failing the Palestinian people for decades on end.
Q: Do you condemn the phrase “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”, which is a call to ethnically cleanse Israel of Jews?
A: It sounds like you confusing Israel with Palestine and Jews with Palestinians, for the call of Israel’s governing coalition, inside their very party charters, is a call to do exactly that: “From the River to the Sea, Israel is all you’re going to see.” To the extent Palestinians and worldwide protests chant the former phrase, it is chanted as an express denial and rejection of Israel’s thirst for conquest and blood.
Q: Do you support a two-state solution? Or a one-state solution?
A: Israel must be denuclearized and disarmed so that the Palestinian people living in the West Bank and in Gaza and in Israel “proper” can live in peace. The tail-end of how many states will be present in that territory will be a day-after problem, once the denuclearization and disarmament process is completed. It will likely be a multilateral negotiation between the Great Powers, with the United States taking the lead. Much of it will depend on Israel. If they determine, in their final days, to execute the Samson option, then Israel very likely will be blotted out from the human record. Otherwise, who knows? States are fickle, ever-changing things. What matters is that the people are able to exercise their collective right to live freely and in dignity, free from terror bombs or mass executions. If that’s two states or one state or three states doesn’t really matter, so long as the inalienable human rights of the people are respected.
Coda
They may ask you other questions, or to ask you to condemn some other, far more minor and irrelevant abuse. Stick to your principles and what you know to be right, and you will not falter. Never give them an inch, never concede to their framing, for they will use your own words in that case to hang you. And if they condemn you for your answers, then you will have known you have won.