News Brief: Why US Media Has Evoked Israel's "Right to Exist" 1,001 Times vs Only 6 For Palestine

**Nima Shirazi** (0:04)
Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.

**Adam Johnson** (0:07)
I'm Adam Johnson.

**Nima Shirazi** (0:08)
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All your support is so appreciated on Patreon as we are 100% listener funded. We have no ads, no sponsors, no grant money. We are able to continue doing the show because of the generous support of listeners like you. And we do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled, full-length episodes of Citations Needed. And today, Adam, we want to talk about a bit of Zionist discourse that is ubiquitous and has been for decades and decades. But we wanted to dissect it a bit in relation to the current media and Democratic Party pylon of Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. And this has to do with the media always asking candidates and others about Israel's quote-unquote right to exist. And so we've been tracking this a bit as it relates to the El-Sayed candidacy in Michigan. But obviously, there are much wider implications as we see this all over our political discourse and have for many decades.

**Adam Johnson** (1:19)
Yeah, it's this question that's asked, like you said, ubiquitously, which is, do you believe Israel's a right to exist? With an implied as a Jewish supremacist state or a Jewish ethno-supremacist state, or they'll say it explicitly, do you believe it has a right to exist as a Jewish state? Now, other candidates who are, I think, very clearly anti-Zionist, like, for example, Zoran Mamdani have said, I believe Israel's a right to exist as a state with equal rights, which some have found a little too clever by half. I actually think it's kind of fine because it does a Steven Seagal jujitsu thing where it uses liberalism against itself by saying, yeah, I support a state between the river and the sea with equal rights, call it Israel, call it whatever you want, which forces people to sort of argue against liberalism, to argue against equality, to defend Israel as such because again, it can't by definition be a state with equal rights and an ethno-supremacist state at the same time. It cannot be an apartheid state and a state of equality at the same time.

**Nima Shirazi** (2:13)
Right. And like liberalism has a hard time basically convincing itself that it's not in favor of one person, one vote. And so the gymnastics you have to go through to then support an apartheid state, an ethno-supremacist like ethnic cleansing state that does not have equal rights for everyone.

**Adam Johnson** (2:31)
Because there's an inconvenient people there.

**Nima Shirazi** (2:33)
Yeah, there's an inconvenient native population.

**Adam Johnson** (2:35)
So it heightens contradictions, I think pretty decently. Some people think it's a dodge and I guess that's fair to an extent, but I think it actually is a useful way to frame it. And so other anti-Israel or Israel critical politicians who've emerged are repeatedly asked this question as typically their first or second question for when they go on CNN and MSNBC and when they were interviewed by the New York Times. It is a mantra of sorts to kind of ante up for seriousness, because if you say, my heart bleeds for Palestinians, we need to be more critical of Israel, you kind of front load that, but then you affirm this alleged right to exist as a Jewish state, as it were. You kind of do all the work for, you've done all the necessary anteing up for capital S, capital P, serious policy. As long as you sort of accept the axioms of Zionism, which is to say an ethno-supremacist state in the Levant, the details we can kind of work out later, and they're mostly academic anyway, since Israel, you know, again, exists, and Israel is an apartheid state as it exists. And so you're kind of welcome as in the kind of Ro Khanna, Brad Lander vein to support some abstract two state solution, but everybody knows that's never going to happen as a total fig leaf to buy time for the extermination.

**Nima Shirazi** (3:43)
I mean, there's already only one state.

**Adam Johnson** (3:46)
Right, there exists actually one state, so you either oppose it or you don't oppose it. And so when El-Sayed, who is now in the polling lead for the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat in Michigan, he was, of course, asked this question, as he has been asked many times before, recently in an interview with CNN, and he gave, I thought, a pretty solid and clever response to that question, which is where he began by flipping it on its head and asking why he's never asked if Palestine has a right to exist as a way of exposing a double standard. It's a bit of a throwaway line. He sort of moves on, but I thought it was actually a really, from a media criticism standpoint, a very salient thing to bring up and something that is indeed quantifiable. So let's listen to that clip right now and address the substance of his response.