When MSNBC host Joy Reid asked her guest for an explanation of the Israeli-Gaza conflict, the Palestinian expert replied, “Jewish supremacy.” Yet Reid offered no pushback during the closing segment of Friday’s edition of “The ReidOut.”
Reid introduced her guest as “my friend Rula Jebreal, who is a foreign policy analyst and visiting professor at the University of Miami.”
Jebreal’s comments came after Mohammed El-Kurd, who was evicted from his home in Jerusalem’s Sheikh-Jarrah neighborhood, called the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) the “Israeli terrorist forces” and likened them to “fascists.”
“Rula, can you just sort us give us a bigger picture explanation of what’s happening here?” asked Reid, noting that the term evictions “doesn’t feel like it’s the right word for it.”
“Jewish supremacy is the main goal of Israel [sic] apartheid government,” Jebreal replied. “We are already living a project of ethno-religious exclusion and purity.”
“The occupation is metastasized everywhere,” she continued, later adding: “And the most heartbreaking thing, Joy, [is] that the United States subsidized this ethno-nationalist project of exclusion and purity. We subsidized the atrocities that are taking place.”
She also claimed that current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “incited against” former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated. “He was killed by Jewish extremists. Today, these Jewish extremists are in parliament. They’re legislating,” Jebreal said. “Now we have this supremacist movement everywhere spreading, in the judiciary and everywhere.”
Jebreal also seemingly tried to equate Israeli government policy with white supremacy, the U.S. Border Patrol, and the Capitol riot of January 6.
“What you are seeing, Joy, is what [we’ve seen] here in America with these white supremacists under Jim Crow,” Jebreal said, later adding: “We’ve seen this force, whether in January 6. We’ve seen this kind of politics when they put kids in cages in the United States.”
Her attempt to tie her political opponents to white supremacists seems ironic since her words echo the most widely exposed white nationalist in modern U.S. history, David Duke.
The former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan literally wrote a book titled Jewish Supremacism; chapter nine is titled, “Israel: A supremacist state.” In it, Duke wrote:
My assertion that there exists a powerful, cohesive, world-wide Jewish Supremacism finds confirmation in evidence mostly provided by the Jewish Supremacists themselves. Their supremacist ideology finds clear enunciation in the foundation, structure and conduct of Israel, a nation unabashedly based on an ethnic supremacism. It is a state that has dispossessed, terrorized and grossly violated the human and civil rights of the Palestinian people.
Duke has been a longtime critic of Israel and a supporter of the Palestinian cause. He said on his podcast Wednesday that “for [Israel] to get away with this, kind of shows, truly, the Jewish supremacy that exists in the media.”
Jebreal concluded by erroneously linking Benjamin Netanyahu with the January 6 “insurrection.”
“The radicalization in Israel, it’s actually coming here,” she warned Reid and her MSNBC audience. “The main newspaper editor-in-chief, Israel Hayom, he was Bibi Netanyahu’s — somehow surrogate. Guess what? He was at [the] January 6 insurrection.”
It’s unclear what she means: Israel has an influential newspaper called Israel Hayom, but this author was unable to find any reference to any staffer being present at the riot. Jebreal appears to be referring to Elliot Resnick, the Brooklyn-based chief editor of The Jewish Press, who attended the event. (He has not been charged with any crime.) But this author has found no evidence that Resnick ever served as a spokesman for Prime Minister Netanyahu.
MSNBC posted a portion of the segment (which followed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s interview earlier in the hour) on YouTube — but they ended the clip just before Jebreal’s incendiary comments.
A partial transcript of their exchange follows:
Joy Reid: Rula, can you just sort us give us a bigger picture explanation of what’s happening here? Because what are being called evictions, it doesn’t feel like it’s the right word for it. What is happening in terms of the homes that people like Mohammed El-Kurd have in East Jerusalem?
Rula Jebreal: So, Jewish supremacy is the main goal of Israel apartheid government. And I say the word apartheid because [the] former prime minister of Israel — two of them — Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, security services, [the] head of the Mossad, and many others use this word, saying, in absence of any political solution, we will be entering apartheid. We are already living a project of ethno-religious exclusion and purity. This is what happened after years of Bibi Netanyahu incitement, weaponization of religion, and weaponization of race, where it doesn’t matter — democracy for even Palestinian who live inside. What matter is their ethnicity, what matter is their race, their religion. And it’s basically this stage where the occupation is metastasized everywhere, not only in Gaza or in the West Bank or East Jerusalem, but also inside Israel. What you are seeing, Joy, is what [we’ve seen] here in America with these white supremacists under Jim Crow. … We’ve seen this force, whether in January 6. We’ve seen this kind of politics when they put kids in cages in the United States. We’ve seen this before. And the most heartbreaking thing, Joy, [is] that the United States subsidized this ethno-nationalist project of exclusion and purity. We subsidized the atrocities that are taking place.
Reid: Let me ask you this, because it feels like this is sort of the endless, never-ending conflict. … There’s been this talk of a two-state solution forever and ever and ever and ever. It doesn’t feel like it’s going that way. Bigger picture, Rula, is that dead?… Is that dead as an idea?
Jebreal: Netanyahu killed it. … [Netanyahu] incited against [Rabin, and] he was killed by Jewish extremists. Today, these Jewish extremists are in parliament. They’re legislating. Now we have this supremacist movement everywhere spreading, in the judiciary and everywhere. Not only it’s dead, it’s buried. The reality on the ground [is] that we have a one-state reality. And what you’re seeing is the consequence of a lack, an absence of any political solution. Netanyahu doesn’t want a political solution. Not only that, he wants not only to wage a war on democracy and exterminate Palestinians, he wants to come back and tell Joe Biden, “Don’t interfere in my business.” But he’s willing to come here and lobby Congress against any signature policy. And he’s willing — and one of the things we didn’t pay attention to: The radicalization in Israel, it’s actually coming here. The main newspaper editor-in-chief, Israel Hayom, he was Bibi Netanyahu’s somehow surrogate. Guess what? He was at [the] January 6 insurrection. What happened there, the authoritarianism and what Mohammed [El-Kurd] called “fascist,” it’s coming back here. So, if we stand for democracy, it’s not only in the United States. We need to uphold democracy everywhere.