'I was an anti-Zionist. Then I actually started researching.'
This is one man’s journey from parroting anti-Israel slogans to confronting propaganda, groupthink, and the uncomfortable power of facts.
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This is an interview by Neil Turitz, an author and essayist.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
A couple weeks ago, I had an exchange with Kile B. Jones, who writes the newsletter “The Inverted World.”
He is a recovering “anti-Zionist.”
Kile agreed to let me interview him, and what ensued was a fun and engaging conversation that offered genuine insight into, among other things, what makes an “anti-Zionist,” how a person can change their stripes, and what an ally looks like.
Neil: I’m fascinated by your journey. You say you started out as an ardent anti-Zionist, and now you’re a total advocate for Jews and Israel. What happened?
I spent a good 12 to 14 years in higher education. I ended up at Boston University, which has the largest amount of Jewish students of any college in the world.
So basically, I studied under Jewish professors. I had Jewish friends. I took a couple courses at Hebrew College down the road in Newton. I knew Jews from studying religion and just in general, and the interesting thing is that the Jews that I studied with, especially the professors, were antizionists themselves, which is its own separate thing.
What do you think it is about Jews in academia who choose to follow those beliefs?
I think it goes in line with the culture of higher education and their general leftist and liberal leanings. That subset of ideas. It’s the academic culture. Inherent within academia and higher education and the intelligentsia is the basic critical stance towards Israel and questioning whether it should exist or not. Noam Chomsky is a good example.
Don’t even get me started on that guy.
(Laughs)
I know. It pisses off every Jewish person I know now. It’s hilarious because you all hate him. I have a blog for The Times of Israel, and I did a post on my experience with him. I was a huge fan. I wasn’t even a liberal. I was a leftist. I oscillated between communism, anarchism, and socialism. I was just very leftist. Reading Karl Marx, reading Friedrich Engels, Che Guevara, real revolutionary and anarchist works. So I randomly emailed Chomsky and he responded.
Really?
Yeah! He said come on by, and since the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is right down the road from Boston University, I went down there and we had a 30-minute conversation. He was super sweet to me. Very warm, very charming. It was really disappointing to see the picture of him with Jeffrey Epstein on the jet, because I looked up to Chomsky. I mean, even if you hate him, you have to acknowledge his intelligence.
I don’t think anybody has ever said Noam Chomsky is an idiot. Misinformed, perhaps. A quisling, for sure. But not dumb.
I think he’s a good example of the ideological blinders that leftism can give you. I honestly don’t think he had evil intent, just from my humble experience with him. But, I have to say, the “anti-Zionist Jew” is not something I feel comfortable speaking to because I’m not Jewish. I’ve also come to realize that statistically, they’re anomalies. Something like seven percent, which is not even the size of a slice of pizza.
Well, maybe one of those pizzas where they cut it 37 times.
A really small slice. Not a New York slice, though. (Both laugh)
That’s a really good analogy, but at the same time, they’re a vocal and very dangerous minority. They’re tokenized by the Zohran Mamdani’s of the world. They think that they’re doing something noble, but really what they’re doing is endangering the rest of us, because they are allowing the anti-Zionists to point at us and say, “See? This Jew gets it! Why don’t you be like this Jew, who understands that I’m right and you’re wrong?”
Yep. And you know what? We Gentiles, boy, we eat that up. We totally believe it. Especially if you don’t know any better and you don’t know the Jewish tradition, or you don’t know a lot of Jews. Because, let’s face it, your numbers are small. People talk about Jews like they’re legion. But it’s teeny, population-wise.
Zero-point-two percent of the global population. Eight billion people, not quite 18 million Jews. We’re not the reason your life sucks.
Ha! Yeah, my Jewish friends keep saying, “No Jews, no news.”
I was actually going back and forth with someone the other day, and the guy was trying to talk about genocide in Gaza, and I showed him a population chart since 1980, and it’s hockey stick growth. The guy then tried to say, “Well, you can probably say the same about the Jewish population since World War II.”
It was fun to point out that the global Jewish population in the 1930s was between 16 and 18 million people, and now, 80 years after the end of World War II, we’re not even back to 16 million. The population still hasn’t recovered fully.
Meanwhile, we Jews are conducting the most inept genocide in history, with the targeted population showing unbroken growth over the course of decades. Even since October 7, the population in Gaza has risen.
They can never answer that. They can never answer the most basic questions. This is how absurd the genocide accusation is, okay? First of all, especially in the liberal world and among the Goyim, it’s not a discursive process where you say, “Okay, let’s look at the evidence. Let’s look at the population.” Honestly, people believe it from it being spread word of mouth, from these post-October 7th protests, and the slogans.
And the Qatar- and Iran-financed propaganda war, and from Al Jazeera and the New York Times and the BBC, they eat this stuff up, and they spread it over and over and again. It becomes an echo chamber and proliferates. It’s not believed based on an evaluation of the evidence, so that’s number one.
Second, the language is loaded. So if they yell, “Stop the genocide in Gaza!” it’s, “Well, wait. Can we rewind? Can we first challenge that conclusion you’ve already made?” But if you do that, you look like a piece of sh*t, and you’re cornered. Now you’re “justifying a genocide.” “Look at this genocide promoter!” Right? This is how blinding it is.
But then, why does Israel allow electricity and water into Gaza? They can literally turn it off. They also allow aid. People then say, “Well, they control the borders and it’s an open air prison.” Okay, so if they can control them so tightly, why would anyone give food to those they’re genociding?
This is the only war in recorded history where one side was required to feed the side it was fighting.
I did a study. I haven’t published it, but I looked up every single genocide that we have accurate data for, and there is not one where the the party enacting the genocide has provided or allowed any aid. They do the opposite: They blocked it.
When you bring this up, the arguments are always circular. The answers are always, “Israel’s doing it because they don’t want to get a bad look.” What are you talking about? They already have a horrible look. How does this help anything? And the other is, “No, they’re doing it slowly. It’s just a slow Holocaust.”
Because nothing says genocide like doing it in dribs and drabs over 80 years. It’s the longest “genocide” ever, one that allows for unbridled growth. We Jews supposedly control everything, right? We control the media, entertainment, banks, governments, we control everything. And yet we can’t get this right?
I know. I made a post that Israel sucks at genocide. Because they do. I could do it way better. I mean, these are such simple kindergarten facts that cannot be acknowledged. You do not provide things for those you want to kill. They cannot answer that. Back in the day, I thought it was possible that Israel was slowly killing off Palestinians. It’s in the air. It’s water to a fish.
You just sort of assume it, because everyone talks about it as if it’s fact, when all it is is a series of subjective judgments made by people who are hopelessly biased.
The problem is absolutely bias, big time. I noticed this after October 7th. Even if you say that there’s a massive propaganda and information war, that’s actually partly what got me out of it.
Well, that was actually my next question. How did you find sanity and make the switch from one side to the other?
There’s two things. We don’t reason in vacuums. We’re not just rational computers. We reason within relationships. My best friend for the last 10 to 15 years is Jewish, and I saw what he went through after October 7th. He’s a liberal, very progressive, and he was basically disowned. I witnessed it online. I saw the comments about, “You’re enabling genocide” — the collective guilt stuff.
Meanwhile, he hasn’t even been to Israel, and wasn’t even this big Zionist. I mean, he was pro-Israel, he believed that the State of Israel should exist, but he never really connected with it that much until October 7th.
After that, he basically just held his ground and didn’t worry about losing friends. And basically all of these liberals who were all about, “Let’s be allies to the minority,” all the people that were sharing the “Inglourious Basterds” memes and saying “Punch Nazis!” were now basically abandoning the minority and doing the exact opposite.
It was pretty remarkable, though hardly surprising, if I’m being honest.
Yeah, I saw that happen in real time, and I remember being filled with anger and righteous indignation, because this is a good man. The worst part about it is they know him. It’s not just some Facebook friend; he was a real-life friend. They know he’s a good person, and that pissed me off. October 7th took a while to kick in for me, because I didn’t have to face what he had to face, and there’s a privilege to that that we are blinded by.
But then, slowly but surely, I started reading, and asked myself, “Where do I really stand on Israel?” Because there was something wrong in the air. Every time I looked around, it was Israel this, Israel that, and it’s always negative. I do not know how anyone in their right mind can think that there’s propaganda for Israel. If there is, they suck, too.
You know when you can tell when someone’s lying, because they over-exaggerate? I’m not conspiratorial at all, but I knew there had to be something behind this. It makes you think that Israel is this demonic, almost metaphysical, malignant, nefarious entity, and what are we really talking about? So I started researching and went down rabbit holes I had never been through.
As someone who spent as much time in academia as you did, having gone through the PhD process, I would imagine you’re really good at research.
That is one thing I can do. I’m spectacular at research. It’s one of those things where grad school teaches you how to do good research, but this is what I don’t understand. You have to be able to sort through other research that is blind, double blind, peer-reviewed with controls whose interpretation they tend to use against Israel. It’s always about facts. They ask for context when it’s being reasonable towards Israel, and they don’t when they’re considered unreasonable.
The double standards abound everywhere in this, and they don’t take into account Hamas. They downplay Hamas, and how they’re embedded in schools, hospitals, mosques; how they wear plain clothes, use human shields, spent all this money on tunnels. I mean, come on, the tunnels! They don’t use the tunnels to evacuate people?
I’ve read Palestinian textbooks that teach 5, 6, 7-year-olds that martyrdom is the true goal, and to praise the martyrs. You learn mathematics through the IDF killing people in their textbooks, you learn Newtonian physics through the story of the IDF blinding a child.
So if you’re raised in schools of the UN agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) and that’s your curriculum, and everything around you is telling you this. And Hamas is pressuring you; that’s the context. But that gets downplayed. They just say, “Well, this is Israel killing 70,000 people.” But never acknowledge that, oh, the Gaza Ministry of Health is run by who?
That was the point I always made: They don’t differentiate between combatants and civilians. And when you try to say to someone, well, the ratio is actually the lowest in the history of recorded warfare, roughly one-to-one, they blow past it. I mean, there were something like eight or nine German civilians for every soldier killed in World War Two. Was that a genocide? No. Was Nagasaki or Hiroshima? No.
But then they come back and say, “That’s still 30,000 women and children and it’s too many!” Okay, no argument. But if you’re not going to acknowledge the context of the numbers and talk about the humanity of the way the war was waged, then you are actually moving the goal posts about what we’re discussing. You then have to examine why you are sticking to this bias, regardless of the context of the numbers and the actual facts and the reality on the ground.
They won’t, though. It’s extremely frustrating to see, especially when you’ve been there. I had those blinders on. I had the post-colonial, Marxist, leftist lenses through which you interpret history and data and your information; it’s confirming your bias. It is really easy to confirm your bias about this stuff, because …
Because the mainstream media reports this stuff as if it’s fact, without actually differentiating anything.
Yes, and I knew that there was something wrong with the world when I had to go to Fox News to find better reporting about this than anywhere else. I hate Fox News. I’m a liberal dude.
But Fox News is willing to actually call a terrorist a terrorist, or willing to critique Islam, or willing to view Hamas for what they are. So I had the epiphany slowly, but I saw what happened to my friend, I saw what was happening to other Jews, and then all of a sudden it was an awakening, where I saw it everywhere. You stub your toe, and it’s “Damn it, Israel!”
Then what I would do is read these reports from the New York Times, from some of the “best journalistic minds with the highest standards,” and then trace them back to one Palestinian reporting something, and that’s it. No corroboration, no other fact, just using Reuters or Associated Press news, and it ends up being just a Palestinian quoting something. Who is, by the way, working for or part of Hamas, and you’re disillusioned.
Whatever faith I had left in some media went out the window.
What is it about you, Kile Jones, that allows you to acknowledge that you are misinformed about something and change your opinion about it and how you think? And why can’t others have the same epiphany?
Let’s set aside the systemic antisemitism baked into society and the inherent bias so many people bring with them. You had a form of that, and yet here you are. Why are you different?
It may be pretty vulnerable here, but I want to answer it honestly. I value evidence and being critical. And I value reason. Not in some dry, overly analytic way. I just value truth. Life is complicated and gray and multifaceted and there’s lots of chaos, and it’s not black and white, but I value that. I absolutely value critical thinking.
Also I was abused as a kid, so I can’t handle bullies.
You and me both, I was bullied horribly as a kid, some of it was virulently antisemitic, and so I have a very intense and visceral reaction to bullies.
Okay, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. I was looking around and I was seeing Jews being bullied. It wasn’t even about having a Jewish friend, it’s just inside of me. What clicked was this thing where I no longer cared what anyone thinks about me at that point. I don’t care if my friends disown me, or if my family relationships strain. I can’t watch something unjust happen in front of me and not say something. I don’t have that ability.
As to the second part of your question, why people don’t do it more? I think they stay in the closet because they’re terrified of being ostracized.
I’m certainly down a few friends since all this started.
Right, and I’ve heard innumerable stories, Jewish person after Jewish person, of losing their whole social group and close friends. You go to college as a freshman and you’re not going to be in the cool circles if you’re a “genocide promoter.” I think that’s part of it.
I also think that the way this is set up, the propaganda wars, the disinformation campaigns, Qatar and Iran, just the vast network, and the ways the West drank the Kool-Aid, academia was prone to this. It’s a revival of the new antisemitism of the 1960s, connecting Zionism with the Global South, and saying that they’re racist and apartheid and all this stuff. Now it’s back again.
Most of these new anti-Zionists don’t even realize that they’re parroting 1950s Soviet propaganda and Arab nationalist garbage from the 1940s to the 1970s. They don’t know that they’re literally quoting the Palestine Liberation Organization or the KGB. They don’t understand that these ideological currents already existed.
It’s the language, the verbiage, the ideas that back the academic environment already teaching post-colonial stuff. Academia is very into this anti-colonial idea, so it becomes a perfect storm where, if you say the right tagline, it’s gonna spread like wildfire. And it did.
Can I ask you a delicate question? Do you think that maybe you brought some of your own bias against Jews to this, to so readily latch onto the anti-Zionism movement?
I didn’t really preach it from the mountaintops. I think I had a little bit of tension in me with the Jewish people that I’d met who were Zionists. But it’s hard to love and have relationships with people you think are believing a lie about who they are, and their whole history.
Imagine, if you take the genocide, apartheid, all the libels, if you take them seriously, it means that Jews are either willfully ignorant, they’re dumb, or they’re malicious. It’s one of those three things. I call it “Cult, Monster, Idiot.” Jews are either in a cult, they’re monsters, or idiots, and that’s the only way that you can genuinely view them. They don’t ever want to bring that logical conclusion up to their views, because it means they have to question them.
Ultimately, they don’t want to face the reality of their own bias, because then they become the very monsters they claim to hate. They are doing exactly what they accuse not only Israel of doing, but also people on the Right: grouping people into something, prejudging them, even though this has become a primary weapon of the progressive left.
This notion that, “We are totally open to everything you could possibly be, unless you disagree with us on a single thing.” You want to talk about a cult? I mean, that’s what that is.
It’s totalitarian, for sure. But I want to address your question. I didn’t know many Jews growing up. I never had a particular animosity towards Jews, but still, the atmosphere was there. People would make Jewish jokes, and you hear the conspiracy stuff. It’s “Jews running Hollywood,” or “being greedy.”
The atmosphere lent itself towards antisemitism, absolutely, and I think I absorbed a bit of it. I am definitely not above admitting that. I never consciously had an issue with Jews in general, but I think it’s just sort of the air people breathe.
I was going to say, it’s about being part of a “community.”
It’s being part of something that’s bigger than you, so you don’t feel so damn lonely. It’s the same reason anyone’s in a cult. It’s the same reason you have diehard nationalists. It’s the same reason you have groups of racists. It gives them a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose and a sense of their identity.
So what I hope, honestly, is that people start listening to Jewish people, and not the small little slice of pizza. I think they need to listen to the whole damn pizza. I hope people change their mind about Israel being this huge metaphysical demon. I hope they start realizing that the news media flopped and failed. I hope they learn to not say stuff that ends up harming Jews.
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I had the same journey in my thinking.
Great to see someone questioning how they think about Israel and turning their thinking around.