Rabbi Arik Ascherman speaks frankly on Jewish settlers’ assault on the West Bank, and how extreme the dehumanization of Palestinians has become in Israel.
Rabbi Arik Ascherman speaks frankly on Jewish settlers’ assault on the West Bank, and how extreme the dehumanization of Palestinians has become in Israel.
It’s no secret that Israel has sought to annex the West Bank for decades—and now, many believe the time may be near. For Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the struggle to defend Palestinians in the West Bank from settler attacks has become his life’s work. But it’s a task that is only becoming more difficult with time, as the extreme dehumanization of Palestinians becomes all-the-more normalized by the genocide in Gaza. Ascherman returns to the Marc Steiner Show to discuss the brutal violence unfolding in the West Bank, and what, if anything, can be done to address Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. Good to have you with us. And this is another episode of Not In Our Name, as we continue to look at what’s happening in Israel-Palestine and the devastation taking place in Gaza, and what we do about it.
And the person I’m talking to today is somebody I’ve known for a while, I’ve interviewed before. Rabbi Arik Ascherman first came on my radio program in public radio on April 5, 2002, and we’ve been in touch ever since. He is an American Israeli, a Reform rabbi who puts his life on the line to defend Palestinian rights, to end the occupation, to stop settlers from destroying people’s homes and villages and taking their sheep.
He has been executive director of the Israeli Human Rights Association called Torat Tzedek (Torah of Justice) for 29 years. He served as co-director and executive director and director of special projects, and president and senior rabbi for Rabbis for Human Rights. He’s been beaten, arrested, threatened with death for defending Palestinian farmers, for working to find a way for Israelis and Palestinians, for Christians, Jews, and Muslims to live in the Holy Land together and share that space.
He’s back here in the United States to raise funds for his work and the work going on in Israel-Palestine and to talk about the reality of what’s going on there now in the Gaza War, where 45,000 Palestinians have been killed, along with over 1,700 Israelis.
He joins us in studio now, and Arik, welcome back. Good to see you.
Arik Ascherman: Okay, thank you. Thank you for having me again.
Marc Steiner: So let me ask you, I want you to describe, for people listening to us, what it’s like for you and the Palestinians you stand with when you’re attacked. When you go in there to defend Palestinian shepherds, defend them on their land, that right-wing Israeli settlers want to take from them with the backing of the government and the army. Talk a bit about that, about what you experience, and what that’s like, and what actually happens.
Arik Ascherman: It could be anything. I mean, you can Google “Ascherman knife” and see me being attacked by a masked knife-wielding settler. If I’d —
Marc Steiner: Well, you have been beaten, you’ve been stabbed, you’ve been thrown in jail.
Arik Ascherman: I’ve been all that, and of course, what I’ve suffered is so minuscule compared to what Palestinians suffer. But the fact is that sometimes I just look these settlers in the eyes and I stare them down and they back down, and sometimes we get beat up or worse. But of course, it’s not just the settlers.
One of the greatest successes we’ve had in my career was the Morar High Court decision, which mandates how Israeli security forces must protect Palestinian farmers. And at least until Oct. 7, you really literally could see Israeli soldiers protecting Palestinian farmers to harvest their olives — We’re right now toward the end of the olive harvest season — Next to settlements or inside settlements.
But one of the other… We just had a harvest, for example, in a place called Deyr Jarir —
Marc Steiner: Palestinian olive harvest.
Arik Ascherman: …And the settlers came and attacked us, and the Palestinians, of course. The army came and they did what the High Court decision explicitly said they cannot do. It says explicitly, the Israeli High Court — And the Israeli High Court is often the flak jacket for the occupation, but sometimes they do the right thing — They said, if Israelis attack Palestinians, the army must not close the area without an order, and throw everybody out to protect the Palestinians. You must do everything possible, all the means at your disposal, to let the Palestinians continue their harvest, unless there really and truly is no other way of preventing bloodshed. And that certainly was not the case, but that’s what they did. They issued an order, and I explained to the officer on the ground what he was doing was illegal. Of course, it wasn’t his decision either. It was made by the brigade commander.
And then I spoke with the legal advisor for the occupied territories, or one of his officers, and once he agreed that he would start looking into this, I asked all of our human rights defenders that were there accompanying for the harvest, I said, we will move out of this area for now even though this was an illegal order. And I’m on tape saying, and the soldiers and the police are not our enemies. But I soon realized, if I hadn’t realized it previously, that if I don’t see them as our enemies, they see us, and me in particular, as their enemies.
Marc Steiner: Right.
Arik Ascherman: So, we go outside, and then after an hour of waiting, they arrest me and two others for having taken too much time to leave the closed area. And then what I often do — The point is to give us a ban, to give us a 15… Because they want us out of the picture. Just as we’ve got a high court case coming up in another week for one of the most violently expelled, separated communities, Wadi al-Siq, where literally at gunpoint they would say, you’re out of here in an hour or you die. And again, I was in jail because I was accused of having, two days earlier in Wadi al-Siq, attacking soldiers.
But I refuse to agree to the ban, and then you spend a night in jail, you go before the judge. And in the past the judges would cancel these requirements. No longer. And the words that came out of the mouth of the police officer that was there to defend the police decision were anarchists — I don’t even think they know what anarchists are — We are provocateurs. To work for justice, for work for decency, for work for Jewish values, as I see it, for basic human rights, is a provocation in their eyes.
A couple days later, the same thing. We’re with a farmer who I’ve worked with for 20 years, and after trying to go through all the rules and regulations to be able to get to his… We just went to his trees, and you hear the soldiers: [inaudible] the provocateurs are here. And again, I have some reticence to talk about what happens to us when it’s so minuscule, as I said, compared to what happens to Palestinians, but it’s indicative. It’s indicative of what’s happening to our society that anybody today who tries in any way to stand for Palestinian human rights is a traitor, a fifth golem, as I’ve been called, and a provocateur.
Marc Steiner: And even though you could be killed in the process of defending Palestinian rights in Palestine at this moment, they, if they wanted to, could just throw you in jail for 20 years, if they wanted to. And you are, in many ways, isolated inside of Israel. The group of Israelis, as a friend of mine said, who now lives in Vietnam, who’s Israeli: we’re all gone, the left in Israel. The Jews who are on the left in Israel left. They’re here, they’re in Vietnam. They’re in France, they’re in Britain, they’re somewhere else. But you continue to do it, put your life on the line to say, no, this is not what we should do, knows who we are.
A, the question is, how long can you do that? And B, this could also end up in the complete destruction of the Jewish people inside of Israel, and Palestinians as well.
Arik Ascherman: There’s all real possibilities. Once, even when I was only 60, and now I’m 65, my partner says to me, as I’m getting up at 4:00 in the morning to go wherever I was going, you know, you’re not that young anymore. Why do you do this [Steiner laughs]? And I say, I will continue to do it as long as I’m able and as long as it’s necessary. Unfortunately it’s still necessary, and thank God I’m still able.
But already, before Oct. 7, back just when this government was elected in January of 2023, when they took office, I wrote in the Haaretz newspaper what our [inaudible] has to be, and I said, part of it may be our blood. People have become so desensitized to Palestinian blood, but there are still some Israelis who maybe are shocked a bit by Israeli blood. And it’s not that I have a death wish, and again, it’s to make something of our risks, which are so, again, minuscule compared to what Palestinians go through, but the fact is that one of the few tools we have left in the toolbox is to put ourselves on the line and put ourselves in danger.
I was thinking, an outrageous situation: a family from the village of Deyr Dibwan, an outpost, on June 18, was set up 200 meters from their home. And they fled also with soldiers coming and firing guns in the air. And then the soldiers, who maybe realized at some level, said, well, come back and live in your home, and call us if there’s a problem. Really? Before they’re injured or dead?
And we got a court order that they couldn’t touch the home. The home’s been destroyed by the settlers. Part of the family are US citizens. We begged that the United States would do something to defend their citizens. Nada.
And sometimes I think, well, maybe we have to go and put up some tents where that demolished home was, if the court won’t agree to order that outpost removed. And what might happen to us if we do that? I’m not sure it would be very pretty. But sometimes I don’t see what else we have left to do.
And again, we’re going to have to weather the storm, do whatever we can to protect whoever we can protect, at least that Palestinians should know that they are not alone. Find ways of getting out of our echo chamber to try to really understand what makes our fellow Israelis tick, the ones that you keep on saying, how can they do these things? And also be in courts as one of our last best hopes. Try to educate. But it really is just doing whatever little we can do until this too shall pass.
Marc Steiner: In all the years we’ve been talking together now, it’s been longer than I realized, 22 years of conversations.
Arik Ascherman: Yes, it’s been a while.
Marc Steiner: There was a time when, in our early years of talking together, that you actually thought, we actually thought, we could see maybe a peace blooming. There was a possibility of Palestinians and Israelis coming together. We could build a future somehow, whether it was two states or one state or some cooperative arrangement, that there was hope. But it seems to have gone in the other direction. Give us your analysis. All these years, you’ve been fighting for this. Where you think we’re going, and why are we here?
Arik Ascherman: I think you’re absolutely right. I think, for so many years, there was some kind of feeling that we were moving in the right direction, and that’s gone, certainly since our current government was elected, certainly after Oct. 7, certainly with the election results here.
But you know, just before leaving home in Jerusalem, last Shabbat that I was in synagogue, and we had a d’var Torah, a sermon, and then breakout groups talking about how we deal with the trauma of the situation that we’re in. And everybody, no matter what your political beliefs, is traumatized. There’s no way of overestimating the depth of the fear, anger, fury, trauma that Israelis are feeling after Oct. 7, which is one of the reasons that Israelis are just so incapable right now, for the most part, of having any empathy for what we’ve been doing to Palestinians.
But the theme was particularly i vadaut, uncertainty, and the trauma caused by uncertainty. In the breakout groups, I said, I embrace uncertainty right now, because if I think of what is certain, it’s awful, it’s terrible. And the one thing that gives me some hope is that there’s that joker in the deck of uncertainty. Maybe Trump’s unpredictability, all these things, what the late Rabbi Michael Lerner spoke about, the God of The Exodus as the God that makes possible what seems impossible. But you are absolutely right, that hopefulness.
And people used to laugh at me for being one of the last optimists standing, and I don’t like to say it about myself. I’m still an optimist in the long run as a person of faith, but in the short term, I
‘m not. I’m not really optimistic right now, and I think right now we are heading into darkness.
We’ve just started the Jewish month of Kislev, at the end of which we’ll celebrate Hanukkah. We need that Hanukkah light, we need that Hanukkah miracle, but we’re also taught in the Jewish tradition le somchim al hans, you don’t count on miracles.
And when we look honestly at our situation, whether we talk about our government in Israel, the fact that for so many Israelis that maybe in the past had some kind of sympathy for Palestinian human rights, today, West Bank Palestinians are like Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Nobody is standing with them. The international courts have no teeth. Certainly, we can’t expect very much from the international community right now. And that means that Palestinians are simply unprotected.
And things aren’t great either for the Israeli Jews and other Israelis living in poverty whom we also try to protect. We had a meeting just before I left our coalition to work on public housing for Israelis, and nobody has any bandwidth to think about people living in poverty who are also the hardest hit by the realities of war.
Marc Steiner: There’s so much in what you said that raises so many questions. And I understand the pain Israelis are going through, the attack on Oct. 7, and the kibbutzim attack, Mefalsim, Kissufim were kibbutzim where my family lived, and relatives I didn’t even know were killed in those attacks. And some I know that I’ve been in communication with from Uruguay and Mexico City, which is where many of them came from, were on the left in Israel, so I understand that pain completely.
But why do you think there’s such a detachment, then, from the mass murder of Palestinians by Israelis now? At least 45,000 people have been killed. More have been injured and wounded, entire communities leveled, people under the rubble, we don’t know how many. And how do you read that as somebody who’s been so active in trying to stem Israeli violence and to protect Palestinian lives and to build a different world, how do you begin to address what you just described?
Arik Ascherman: Well, first of all, again, I say you cannot overestimate the depth of the trauma that people… And I would hope that what we’ve suffered should sensitize us to the suffering of others. But today, even Israelis who were, in the past, more progressive simply see Palestinians as demons, as Amalek, as people that there’s no way of making peace for. There is simply a total collapse.
And it’s also, Israelis could surf the net and see what you see, but they usually don’t. They don’t see the exploded body parts. They don’t see the hand of the child sticking out of the rubble in Gaza. What we hear 24/7 is about our pain. We hear the radio waves and television are filled day after day, hour after hour with the stories of the murdered and raped Israelis, the fallen soldiers, the kidnapped, the people who have had to have been evacuated from their homes because they’re on the border. And it’s just like never the twain shall meet. We are simply living in different realities, and there may be some other factors as well, but let’s start with those.
Marc Steiner: In all the years — I’m going to come back to exactly what you said, let me start here — That in all the years that I’ve been covering this with some intensity, since 1993, in all the years that I’ve been involved in Israel and in Palestinian affairs, which has been since 1968, and before that when I was younger, I’ve never experienced a darker time that I can remember in my life. I understand the pain of what occurred on Oct. 7. In my mind, you can’t question that. As I just said, part of my family was gone in that attack.
At the same time, one of my closest friends here in Baltimore, who’s Palestinian, his nephew was shot and killed by rampaging settlers in Ramallah. 14 years old, doing nothing. Maybe threw a stone.
And one of the things that you know from the history of Jewish people is that beneath much of the work, secular and religious, is a humanitarianism, is a kind of wanting to reach out to the person who is being persecuted like you’ve been persecuted. So, how does that turn around? I mean, you live there. You’re in it.
Arik Ascherman: Well, first of all, as you alluded to, and I think we’ve spoken about in the past, Israelis or Jews are arguably strong candidates for the dubious title of most oppressed people in human history, and that leaves scars on our souls. Again, I would hope… When I speak with Palestinians or when I speak with anybody, I think about the fact that we, who, for centuries, so much wished that somebody was standing with us, was in some form of solidarity when the knock came on our doors in the middle of the night, our homes, our doors were burst open in the middle of the night.
And often when I’m speaking with the Palestinians, where given the dire situation and the very limited ability that we have right now to do much other than batten down the hatches, [Hebrew] until there will be better times, to protect, to preserve whatever we can in any ways that we can, I say to people, I can’t promise much except for that you won’t be alone. You will not be alone.
But for you and I and so many others for whom the lesson of Jewish history is that never again means never again for anybody. And I remember back when I was an undergraduate, and the issue was Apartheid in South Africa, and bringing my rabbi to speak at one of the rallies, the late Ben-Zion Gold, zchrono levarka, and he said, when I left the gates of Auschwitz and left my family in the ashes, I made two promises to myself: one to dedicate my life to the well-being of the Jewish people, and that’s why I’m a rabbi today; and that this should never happen again to anybody, and that’s why I’m here at this rally today. And that just seems so obvious to you and I, but for many people, they go the opposite direction.
And we’ve talked before about Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, who back several decades before Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, said the Torah is saying that to’ava shel metzrim, the abomination of Egypt, is simply this: that they believe that might makes right, and therefore they had absolute power over us. They could do with us what they want, enslave us, embitter our lives. And he predicted, several decades before Herzl, someday we’re going to have a state, and the Torah’s warning us, when you have the power, as you will, do not use it as Egyptians use it against us. Even though that’s maybe the natural human thing to do, to repeat learned behaviors, but we do.
And so many Israelis are motivated by the weight of Jewish oppression over the centuries, the feeling that there’s an antisemitic world out there who is looking for any way possible to destroy us. And your incredulity is just an indicator of how we are in such different worlds from so many of these people. But I think, whether it’s the same way that so many of us maybe are incredulous about what motivated people to vote for Donald Trump. And I think at some point we’re going to have to get out of our echo chambers and into theirs, which isn’t an easy thing to do, and somehow really listen to what some of these people are saying. But I know I’m repeating myself, but it’s the reality.
Marc Steiner: So look, you spend your time in Israel-Palestine defending Palestinian farmers and Palestinians, standing between them and settlers and them and the army, who want to evict them from their lands, push their sheep and them off their lands, and you’re sitting with part of the minority now, a small minority of Israelis, who are saying, not in our name. This shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
Arik Ascherman: I never felt marginalized for all the over 29 years I’ve been doing this, and now I feel so marginalized. We are such a small group.
Marc Steiner: Yeah. So, I want to talk about what you think the future holds. When Ruwaida Amer was on our program here the other week, a Palestinian woman in Gaza who lost her family, her home destroyed, blown up, people under the rubble, people she loves, what do Israelis think if they’re going to go in and destroy people’s lives like this, that’s the end of it? They’re just going to give up and go away? If people talk about the pain of Oct. 7, or the pain of the Holocaust — Which is painful. I grew up with people with numbers on their arms in my home. I know what antisemitism is. I know how deep it runs. But if we think that destroying Palestinian lives is somehow going to bring us peace, is going to create something… We’re destroying an entire world.
Arik Ascherman: That’s the ultimate tragedy, because even if you don’t give a fig about Palestinian human rights, even if you don’t see them as human beings, even if you can’t see a foot from the Jewish people, what we are doing, in addition to the abominable injustice that we are doing to other human beings, is not going to bring us the peace and security that we deserve. Our sages taught us [Hebrew] the sword comes into the world because of justice delayed and justice denied and the improper teaching of Torah. And our sages were not in favor of the sword, but they were realists. They knew the world they were living in.
And with all the caution I have to take not to justify the unjustifiable, you can’t justify what was done. As someone who’s fought all my working career against the occupation, you can’t justify it in the name of the evils of the occupation what was done on Oct. 7. But if you really want to understand it, injustice brings about the sword.
There are hardcore Hamas leadership that, even if we were to have a just peace tomorrow, they would still be dedicated to destroying Israel. But what drives the masses into their arms is what we’re doing to Palestinians. And even if we were to entirely destroy Hamas tomorrow, there’d be something more, because you can’t kill the desire of a people. There’s been a few cases in human history where brute force has quashed entirely resistance, but generally that’s not what happens.
And it’s like there’s another image in the Talmud in Ta’anit of someone who has become ritually impure because they’ve touched a dead lizard, and they go into the ritual bath, the mikvah, to purify themselves, but they can’t purify themselves because they’re still holding onto the lizard. And the reality is, which, sadly, again, even if you don’t care about other human beings other than Jews, as long as they’re holding on to the lizard of the occupation, as long as we are oppressing Palestinians, as long as we are taking their land and acting with violence and uprooting their trees and everything else, we’re not going to have, as Israelis, any kind of peace and security.
And when I talked before about the moral imperative that I feel not to leave people alone, to at least stand with them, and probably stand maybe between people and the people that are coming to burst down their door, frankly, there’s also some self-interest there as well, because that’s what you said: What do we think… Let’s say that someday this will end, as, you know, King Solomon’s ring, the round ring that said, “This too shall pass.” When we come out of that ark and see all the destruction surrounding us, but now we’re ready to make peace, will Palestinians who have seen all their loved ones wiped out, will they have any interest in making peace with us? Again…
Marc Steiner: So, let me, in the time we have here, there’s two kind of final thoughts. One’s political and one’s about the future, which is also political, I suppose, and it comes also down to your personal work is what I want to get to. But very quickly, before I get there, do you see a difference between the Ben-Gvirs and Hamas?
Arik Ascherman: Sometimes I think they all get together at night to plan how to just make the rest of our lives miserable with the sick idea that they benefit from ongoing conflict and bloodshed. And of course, it is… People reminded me that when the racist Rabbi Kahane, Meir Kahane, who was the one person whose party was ever banned from the Knesset because of racism, when he would walk into the Knesset to speak, everybody would leave, including the Likud, including the other right-wing politicians.
Marc Steiner: The right wing, right.
Arik Ascherman: And today, Ben-Gvir, a Kahane supporter all his life, now he tries to paper that over a bit, who until he realized it wasn’t going to help him get elected, had a picture of the murderer Baruch Goldstein, who went in and shot people up and murdered people in the Hebron mosques, Tomb of the Patriarchs and mosques —
Marc Steiner: When the right-wing Israelis attacked the mosque and killed all those people, yeah.
Arik Ascherman: And he’s in the Knesset and now a minister. I mean, you really do have to ask, what has happened to us that that could be acceptable?
Marc Steiner: Arik Ascherman, let me first say, thank you for coming to the studio today and being here, but I also thank you for putting your life on the line for Palestinians and for an equitable Holy Land that very few were willing to do, especially fewer and fewer people are willing to do. And I think that’s one of the things that maybe we should work on in the future conversations here is to bring you and others and Palestinians we’ve had on together to talk about what the future might be and how to get there. Because right now, to me, it’s a very dark future and a very frightening place.
Arik Ascherman: Very dark.
Marc Steiner: Talking to Palestinians —
Arik Ascherman: And maybe there’ll be some Hanukkah lights.
Marc Steiner: It’s very scary.
Arik Ascherman: Yeah.
Marc Steiner: Their lives are on the line, just like your life’s on the line for saying no to what’s happening to them. So again, Arik Ascherman, thanks so much for the work you do. I appreciate you joining us in studio, and we will link to all the work you’re doing so people can see exactly what takes place, and we will stay in touch. Thank you so much for being here.
Arik Ascherman: Thank you.
Marc Steiner: Once again, let me thank Rabbi Arik Arscherman for joining us today, and we’ll link to his work and videos about his work on our website. And thanks to Cameron Granadino for running the program today, audio editor Alina Nehlich for working her magic, Rosette Sewali for producing The Marc Steiner Show, and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making the show possible.
Once again, let me thank Rabbi Arik Ascherman for being here today, and more importantly for putting his life on the line for fighting for ending the oppression of Palestinians and working for an Israel-Palestine where all can live together in peace.
Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you, Rabbi Ascherman, for joining us today. Take care.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
