The Bad Hasbara Podcast – aka the world’s most moral podcast – is hosted by anti-Zionist Jews Matt Lieb and Daniel Maté.
One of their guests was Maté’s father, renowned Canadian psychotherapist Gabor Maté. At one point Gabor gives several illuminating insights into the origins of Israel’s national Anthem, Dance, and Food (edited for clarity and can be heard in full in the video above):
“The Israelis stole the land from the Palestinians, the national anthem from the Czechs—because the tune comes from Smetana’s Moldau—and the national dance from the Romanians, which is the hora. And the food—from the Arabs.”
Shortly after, Daniel offers a fuller, more rounded picture of Israel:
“I have never seen a society so ugly and reprehensible, so downright toxic, in my lifetime. An entire society. It’s a tiny country that’s completely rotted. Its culture—its genocide—is mainstream.
Norman Finkelstein talks about how genocide is no longer a state project. It’s a national project. And that is true.
It’s a completely toxic national culture. A failed state. A lunatic state. And part of its ugliness is the aggressiveness, the zeal, the vim and vigour, the total conviction and lack of self-awareness—and just the aesthetic tackiness—with which it sells its crimes to the world. Or obfuscates them. And with massive resources.
And part of that self-image is young Israelis dancing to techno music—soldiers posting TikToks of themselves jumping up and down in the desert. That’s part of the branding. There are hundreds of these. Techno, clubs, DJs—it’s a huge part of the self-image.
Right on the border of the concentration camp that Israel has created and maintains with murderous intensity and vigilance in Gaza, there happened to be a literal desert techno festival [the Nova music festival]. That’s what made the October 7th breach such a dark historical irony. The breach itself was heroic. Never mind what happened afterward. There’s something absolutely and undeniably heroic about the breach.
Israel puts its own hostages—its entire citizenry—in that position. That indefensible position. It even throws the question of so-called “innocence” into question. I’m not saying every Israeli deserves to be massacred. But in a citizen-army country… the line gets blurred.”
There’s more. Worth a watch.
Such strong and clear language is not only morally justified; it is a moral imperative. The genocidal impunity of the Zionist state has reached such an extreme that no other phrasing can adequately capture the horror.