Wallace Shawn has had a prolific career, starring in dozens of films and writing plays and films and essays. He's also a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and has been outspoken against the Israeli assault on Gaza. Shawn recently appeared in an interview with Katie Halper, filmmaker and host of the Katie Halper Show podcast and YouTube show. Katie has also been outspoken on the issue of Israel-Palestine and was fired from The Hill in 2022 over a video in which she called Israel an "apartheid state." She’s currently directing a documentary about Jewish Holocaust survivors speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The exchange that follows is based on the transcript of the conversation, which was edited and condensed for clarity. You can find a video of the interview here, and you can find clips from the interview here.

Katie Halper

What's happening now in Gaza, in some ways, is pretty straightforward.

Wallace Shawn

Yes, it is. It's true. It's pretty straightforward.

Halper 

I know that you consider yourself a recovering liberal, and I know you've been radicalized. Could you talk about that political evolution?

Shawn

Up to about the age of 40, I would say I considered myself a fairly typical American liberal centrist. Basically, I believed in the good intentions of Americans, and I believed in the American democratic constitutional system, and I thought many of the Democrats were good people. I was against the Vietnam War, but I thought it was basically a terrible mistake, that well-meaning people got into it by mistake. And I didn't want to believe that there was any particular reason why such evil things went on.

In the years when I was around 40, I really changed in my thoughts. I'm not saying in my behavior. I did stop wearing a tweed jacket—I changed more in my thoughts than in my behavior—but I did come to recognize that I was, myself, a character in the drama that was unfolding. I was one of the privileged people who benefited from the status quo, and when the United States tried to suppress movements for greater liberty in other countries in the world, the goal of that was to benefit the privileged class of my own country, and I was a member of that class. So I actually turned very much against myself and people like me, and I certainly went through a period of extreme nausea and self-hate.

My view of the way the world works is pretty much the same as it was when I first had those thoughts. But I don't really hate anybody any more. I don't actually blame anybody but me. I think I'm sort of a determinist, except in regard to myself, personally. It’s sort of hard to think of yourself as the victim of forces beyond your control. That's just too lazy and horrible, but I do sort of think that about other people. So I don't actually feel hatred for the rich or the powerful or demonically evil people. But yes, I would probably have the same list of people who are involved in demonically evil acts.

I've become maybe even more extreme in recent years in understanding how arbitrary it is that people are born into different classes and how they actually believe themselves to be in the class they've been assigned to. Of course there's very little possibility for the poor to get out of it. But the rich can get out of it anytime they want. Privileged people can give up their privileges anytime they feel like it. I tend to believe that everybody who is born could be a Beethoven or an Einstein, but they're not allowed to be.

Halper

I'm just curious about the personal dimension of this. As you have said, you come from privilege. Can you tell people about who your parents were?

Shawn

Well, I grew up in an unusual household, I suppose, because my father was the editor of The New Yorker magazine from, I think, 1952 to 1987. At that time, The New Yorker had a significance in the culture that, in a way, no one publication has today. It actually had a remarkable influence on the bourgeois class, and it was a combination of things, some of which I still believe in and feel very nostalgic about. I'm an aesthete, and I think everybody ought to be, really. I think they had very high standards for the fiction and poetry that they published, and very smart people wrote that stuff. And I really believe everybody should read fiction and poetry. I think the people who think “that's not for me” are people who've been fooled by those who have molded them and, in a way, stunted them.

The New Yorker also was a representative of the middle class. But it also, in my father's person, was a representative of some changes in the middle class, including the fact that he, in a way, traveled a bigger distance than I did and became quite angry at the American government and turned very much against the Vietnam War and published some great pieces which exposed some of the truths about the Vietnam War, some of them written by my best friend, Jonathan Schell, who worked closely with my father. They published James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, which was very important for my father, and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which was an early outraged declaration about the environmental crisis, way, way back.

But on the other hand, the New Yorker was an organ of the privileged class. If you read James Baldwin, and then you turned back to some of the other pages in the magazine, there were representations of extremely complacent attitudes about life, all in the same magazine and all sort of encapsulated in my own father. And yes, I did grow up knowing literary people and smart people and privileged people. But my father and my mother would never have dreamed of thinking they were privileged. People didn't exult in that at that time. And in a way, they lived humbly even though they had a big apartment. I don't think my mother ever had a cappuccino. They didn't have bread that had been made by a baker. They had Wonder Bread—commercially produced bread. They didn't know about French bread or Italian bread.

Halper

And when you were 40 and had this change of heart or became radicalized, were your parents alive?

Shawn

Yes.

Halper

And did it change the way you saw your parents?

Shawn 

Well, I was, I would say, slightly irked because my father didn't really see the economic system as the foundation of everything. He wasn't a Marxist, and I took that extra step to the left in a way. I came to see that there was a system and that things were kind of predictable, and he didn't really see it that way. On the other hand, I had to admire him because he had traveled so far in the right direction. He didn't hate the bourgeoisie, or he didn't feel the guilt of the American privileged class, but he saw an awful lot. So I would say I never really had a quarrel with him. They were much older than me, and they were a different generation. My anger and revulsion was much more against people my own age. And, of course, this was a period when—well, it was in the '80s. I was born in '43, so this was in the Reagan era. And this was when Reagan was actually saying, greed is good. I think he said that.

Halper 

Or at least Gordon Gekko [the main character in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street] said it.

Shawn  

Yes, that's right. 

Halper

Channeling Reagan. 

Shawn

Reagan just said that there was no shame in being rich. I was also very focused on foreign policy. I've been quite influenced by—I would say, enormously influenced by—my girlfriend Deborah Eisenberg, with whom I traveled to Central America. And we actually saw people who were fighting against the status quo. And I felt that people at home didn't know what was happening. I felt it was my responsibility to get people to read Noam Chomsky's books, to get people to understand that people were being tortured [in Central America], etc., which most of my contemporaries, most of the bourgeois people of my age at that time, didn't quite know. And I was under the illusion that if they ever learned that stuff, they'd be very upset.

Halper

Was Deborah raised by radicals? So just to share a little about myself, I come from the Upper West Side. My grandmother, my mother, and uncle all worked at and went to this camp called Camp Kinderland, which was basically founded in the '20s by Yiddish-speaking secular Jewish socialists and communists. [But] I also grew up on Riverside Drive, and I went to Dalton, then I went to Wesleyan, where, by the way, I met Phoebe Schell, Jonathan Schell's daughter. I would love to catch up with her and find out what she's doing.

 Shawn

Interview her. It'll be interesting. And I, too, went to Dalton, but go on. 

Halper

Wait, you did? 

Shawn

Yes.

Halper

I don't think I knew that.  [I knew] you went to prep school in Vermont.

Shawn

[Dalton] was a very progressive school in my day.

Halper

I think it's still progressive pedagogically [at least]. So I came to my politics very easily. In other words, I didn't have to discover anything. I inherited my parents' politics [and had them reinforced at Kinderland]. It seems like you were converted by Deborah. Did Deborah come from that political background? Or did she also have an epiphany?

Shawn

It's not for me to really say, but in my opinion, she was radicalized as a child—a small child. Her parents were liberals, like mine, but she knew from the age of, I would say, six or so, from what I gather—I didn't know her then, but she realized that the world was fucked up and all wrong. She was, you could say, a rebel. And so, of course, she was a leftist. But when she got together with me, she didn't use that type of language. It was a different kind of conversation. But she was, of course, a leftist, and she had gone to the New School at that time, which was a graduate school dominated by the Frankfurt School of Marxists.

Halper

What was the conversation like? People who are listening or watching this may want to know in case they want to have interventions with their loved ones and move them from being liberal to radical and liberal to leftist. Any tips that you can share for what works and what doesn't?

Shawn

She didn't say, You're a centrist, what's wrong with you? You should be on the left. She did give me Noam Chomsky’s books. 

Halper

A good gateway. 

Shawn

Of course, when I read them, I just thought, wow, this guy thinks like me, because I was already on that road. 

Halper

And what did you observe in Central America when you were traveling there that contributed to your radicalization?

Shawn

It was more [that] I became radicalized, and then we went there. I've always been physically very cowardly—well, in every way, but physically in particular. I've always been very small and frightened of everything, and my parents were quite neurotic and overprotective. But I became so angry at that time that  for a period of three or four years, I lost my physical fearfulness. So I  dared to go to Nicaragua, even if it was dangerous, because I wanted to  see if maybe there was a better way of organizing a society. And then we went to El Salvador and Guatemala and Honduras.

Deborah Eisenberg wrote some great fiction. She wrote a whole book of stories called Under the 82nd Airborne. The American army was fighting there, but secretly in a way, and teaching people how to torture. [But probably letting others do the actual torturing.] And we met people on the other side, people who were in El Salvador, people who were taking a risk to speak to us because we could have been CIA—we could have turned them in. We met people who'd been tortured, and we met young children who could have a political conversation that our New York friends couldn't have—kids who had seen things and knew about things.

Halper

That inspired [your play] The Fever?

Shawn

Well, as I say, I sort of had already become quite a committed leftist before we made the trip. But in the story of The Fever, the character is converted by the trip. It's my only autobiographical play. The things that happen in the play aren’t autobiographical, but The Fever accurately shows what I went through intellectually and emotionally during that period.

Halper 

I actually hadn't seen the film before, but I just watched it last night. 

Shawn

No joke.

Halper

It was great, and it was fun to see Michael Moore, who plays a journalist, act. And, of course, the amazing Vanessa Redgrave. 

Shawn

She is amazing. 

Halper

She was very outspoken on the issue of Palestine and paid a price for that.

Can you talk about your evolution on that issue? I heard an interview you did with Chris Hedges, and you said that there were two types of stories that you would avoid in the New York Times, the stories about Israel and about Latin America. And, of course, you became very outspoken on both of those issues.

Shawn

Yes, during my earlier years of New York Times reading. I think I just couldn't face those areas. I didn't have much of an evolution as far as Israel went. As soon as I started reading about it, I got the idea. You can't say anything today without saying a few more things to clarify what you're saying, because everything is a life and death issue. I almost can't answer the question without saying everything. Should I do that?

Halper

Yes. 

Shawn

Concisely, I hope. But I think I have to start at the end, which is that I really am—I can't help it. I've become more and more of a pacifist as time passes. I don't actually hate other people.

Halper  

You did at a certain point, though, I'm guessing from what you're saying?

Shawn

Yes.

Halper

I do hate. I have a lot of hate in my heart. Not to sound corny, but it is based, I think, on the flip side of love. The reason I hate the people I hate is because I love the people that they are killing, oppressing, maiming, torturing. And then, of course, there's anger, which can be very energizing and inspiring. It can [also] be depleting. I always think of Bernie Sanders and how his anger also comes from a sense of love. So you used to hate, and then you stopped hating. Did you have an “aha” moment? Or what changed it?

Shawn 

No, it's just—well, thinking more intensely about myself and what I could bring myself to do, what I would be willing to do. Where I am today, I don't think I could kill anybody or torture them, and I don't want to. I'm trying to get past hating the people who hurt the people I love. I don't believe in killing the innocent. That's terrorism. I don't believe in it, and I wouldn’t be able to participate in it. And then I'm afraid I keep dragging more and more people into the category of “the innocent,” because I don't really think that some 19-year-old kid who's drafted into an army deserves to be killed.

So I'm becoming more and more of a pacifist. Now that being said, I don't think the State of Israel should ever have been set up. And yet, I don't think the Israelis should be killed or even thrown out of the territory. I do think there should be some different arrangement. I don't believe in a Jewish state. But  I wouldn't kill the people who are now there or make them leave the territory. Leave and go where? To Europe, or to Madagascar, where the Nazis, I think, at one time, thought of sending the Jews?

Halper

In one of your essays [“Up to Our Necks in War”], you say—I'm paraphrasing, and it will not have your craft, obviously—Why is it okay to kill soldiers but not civilians?

And I remember in my mind I immediately went to Gaza. Now this doesn't mean you like this, but under international law, you have the right to fight combatants who are occupying you in a way that you don't have the right to kill civilians. But then you go on, and you make it very clear, in this context, at least, that you're talking about soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And as soon as that became clear to me, I was like, yes, I'm with him. So it was funny because I started disagreeing with you when the context was Gaza. Once I realized what you were talking about, I just saw it in a very different context, which doesn't really change the way I see Gaza, but it does make me aware of my relationship to certain principles. 

Shawn 

I have no standing or no right to tell a Palestinian  in Gaza that they shouldn't kill the Israeli soldier who's just killed their family. I don't have any standing or right to judge them.  But I'll be frank, and you can think what you will of me: I respect Gandhi, I respect Martin Luther King, and I have to admit, I do respect Jesus, at least the better side of Jesus. I do believe that it's a beautiful thing to love your enemy and not to kill them. I can't help it. But I'm in no position to  judge the Palestinians.

The Israelis invaded somebody else's territory, they took people's homes, and they did many of the things that the Nazis did to the Jews.  You can't be more evil than what they're doing.  Killing the innocent is killing the innocent. They are doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did. And in some ways, it's worse because they kind of boast about it. Hitler had the decency to try to keep it secret. For some reason, Hitler didn't want people to know he was doing these things to the Jews. It was a secret. The Israelis are almost proud of it and don't keep it a secret. And it's demonically evil. You can't be more evil than bombing ambulances and then bombing the mourners at the funeral of the people you’ve killed. And anybody who doesn't recognize that these acts are evil, I can't probably communicate with that person. 

It might be temporary insanity on the part of some Israelis. I can imagine that some Israelis who are today in support of what their country is doing in Gaza or in the West Bank might in 10 years wake up and say, Why did I justify that? I shouldn't have. I don't know. If you don't see that it's evil to do those things to other human beings, then you're in a different universe from me. I don't know how to communicate with you. Of course, it would be easier for the Israelis if all the people who hate them were dead. That'd be easier for them, and I think that's what a lot of them are thinking. But of course, they must consciously or unconsciously know that every single day they are making the hatred of the Palestinians increase, and the hatred level is something we can't imagine, probably. What a Palestinian feels is something you and I can barely imagine. 

Halper 

And [Israel] pretend[s] [the hatred] is because of antisemitism, as opposed to what they are doing to the Palestinians.

Shawn

I think that myth is going to fade away, because the whole world knows that this is evil. The whole world knows that they are starving people, preventing children from getting medicine on purpose, and bombing hospitals. You can't do worse. And I think the whole world, unfortunately [for Israel], knows it. And it's crazy what they're doing. Of course, it's crazy because if they don't kill every single Palestinian, imagine the rage that any Palestinian would feel.

And I do think it's absurd in a way, even in talking about the horrible attack on October 7 on the Israelis, it's a little absurd to pretend that that came out of nowhere. Obviously, the Palestinians have been horribly, horribly treated. From 1948 they've been horribly mistreated through no fault of their own. They have made some gestures towards fighting back, small gestures. And yes, I'm sure if I were Israeli and I had lost someone—a family member, someone I loved—in a terrorist attack, I would feel maybe a desire for revenge, although, amazingly, some of those October 7 family members have spoken in favor of mercy and compassion.

Halper  

But what I think doesn't make any sense is what Netanyahu is doing. Even people who totally dehumanize Palestinians think that there needs to be negotiation. Many of the hostage families may not see Palestinians as human, but they want Netanyahu to be negotiating with the people holding their loved ones.

Shawn

Yes. And when I was a child, people used the phrase, is something or other bad for the Jews.

Halper 

Bad for the Jews. Yes, exactly.

Shawn

It's almost unimaginable. Every school child in Europe, in Africa, everywhere in the world, knows that the Israelis have been committing a horrible genocide. What Netanyahu has done is unimaginably horrible for Jews, and let's hope that nobody associates Israelis or Netanyahu with Jews, with you and me. [...] I hope nobody blames me for what they're doing. But gee.

Halper

Well, that's the irony. Some people will say to me, ‘Katie, why are you speaking out against Israel? You're contributing to antisemitism.’ What I'm motivated by, mostly, is a sense of justice and the idea that Palestinians should not be slaughtered. On top of that, I feel it's particularly disgusting that Israel is saying that they're doing this in my name, in our name. But this is the first time that I actually feel a real self-interest, not just an issue of principle. I think that Jews speaking out against Israel are not contributing to antisemitism—if anything, [we're] contributing to lessening antisemitism or, hopefully, preventing some antisemitism. The more we challenge the idea that Israel represents all Jews, the harder it is for Israel to claim to represent all Jews. And, of course, if people believe that [Israel represents all Jews], then how could that not lead to antisemitism? It’s kind of a no-brainer.

Shawn

Sure. I tend to be incredibly skeptical about the idea that there is antisemitism on college campuses. Is that true? 

Halper

The evidence I've seen has been of criticism of Israel.

And suggesting that anti-Zionism is antisemitism is actually antisemitic because it is perpetuating the myth that all Jews are Zionists and the dual loyalty trope. And the people who use Jewish and Zionists interchangeably are raging antisemites who talk about the Zionist this and the Jew that, and then Israel, AIPAC, and the ADL.

Shawn

Yes. I think the kids on the college campuses who actively support the Israeli actions, well, they deserve to be yelled at or whatever. They deserve to see a sign saying “Zionism is Nazism” or whatever. Originally, the people who thought Zionism up didn't even know where ”Zion” ought to be. They had a whole other idea about “Zionism.” And so it's not the most helpful word because it has a lot of meanings.

Halper

It’s very charged, yes. There's an amazing book that I really recommend by Tony Greenstein, Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation. It's a tome, basically, but it's fascinating, and it talks about the way that Zionists and Nazis collaborated. He has a nuanced analysis of what collaboration means. But they did collaborate. And the Zionists prioritized only accepting Jews that would be good for Israel. They opposed the boycott of Germany because Zionists and Nazis overlapped in [some of] their goals.

Shawn 

And they approached Himmler and tried to make a deal.

Halper

Yes, exactly right. It's interesting because you just said that you live in a different universe from people who don't see the evil of what Israel is doing. Gabor Maté, [a Holocaust survivor] we are interviewing for this documentary I'm working on about Holocaust survivors and their descendants who are speaking out against what Israel is doing to Gaza, is amazing on this issue. And of course, he's an expert in trauma and addiction.

Shawn

I've seen him on Democracy Now!

Halper

His latest book is The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. But it's funny you said that about being in a different universe because he was giving a talk, and he told a woman in the audience [who repeated the debunked claims that Palestinians burned babies and engaged in mass systemic rape], ‘You and I don’t live in the same world.’

But speaking of being in a different universe, there obviously are a lot of people in your industry—you're a writer, a playwright, an essayist so you're in many industries, but you also act in Hollywood. And there are a lot of people who are very vocal in their support of Israel.  Does that ever cause conflicts for you? 

Shawn

What do you mean conflicts?

Halper

Do you ever feel like you'll lose a job or won't get offered a job [because of] being outspoken on this? 

Shawn

If somebody was a very passionate supporter of Israel and they happened to know that I had spoken against what was happening, I could imagine such a person saying to himself or herself, I don't really want to act with that guy or I don't want to direct him or have him on my show. They might not even mention it. They would just quietly think it. But there aren't that many people thinking of me for a job in the first place. So it would be kind of a coincidence if one of them was a passionate Zionist. But anyway, if it happened, I wouldn’t know about it.

I know what it is to have a painful conversation on the topic. I've read a certain amount about Palestine written from a Palestinian point of view. I don't know if all the people who are wildly supportive of Israel in Hollywood are experts on what's happened to the Palestinians—I don't think so. 

Zionists say, “We’re surrounded by enemies.  How can we stop or control them?” Well, if you're going to have a Jewish state placed in the middle of the Middle East, surrounded by Arab countries, and then you do  terrible things to the Palestinians who used to live where you live, then yes, it's true that you will be surrounded by enemies.

I think Woodrow Wilson—now we know he was a terrible racist, and people didn't know that when I was growing up—was wrong to say that each people should have their own state. That hasn't turned out to be that great, this idea that each ethnic group should have its own state. A state has got a tug toward militarism; states can very easily become militaristic, and Israel obviously was militaristic from day one.

Halper

Were your parents Zionists?

Shawn

No. My parents’ relationship to their Judaism was complicated. They'd grown up in Chicago with a Jewish background, both of them, but when they moved to New York, they were only 21. They started life again, and the Jewish tradition was not important to them, to be honest. If you want to go so far as to say that they wanted to get away from it, that's possible.

I once found in my father's library, in a sort of backwater of the library, a big book of maps of Israel. I said to him, What in the world is this? And he considered, in the year 1948, leaving  The New Yorker. And so he casually said that he, at that time, thought briefly about moving to Israel. Why not? Maybe that would be something good to do.  I don't think he ever got very deeply into it. I can't picture him working on a kibbutz. I don't think he ever physically dealt with a plant. I don't think he could have coped. My mother would certainly not have gone along. No taxis. But I think he considered it. It crossed his mind.

Halper

When was this that you came across it?

Shawn

Oh, that was—I don't know. When I was an adult.

Halper

And speaking of your mom, she was the one who first got a job at the New Yorker.

Shawn

Yes. My father was pathologically shy and very neurotic, the opposite of a go-getter, and really not the kind of person who could have gotten a job of any kind, and certainly not in the Depression when jobs were scarce. My mother had been a very successful young journalist at the Chicago Daily News in her early 20s—I think even as a teenager. And she got a job at The New Yorker as a reporter, and then she said, Do you mind if my husband helps me in my reporting? And they said, Well, we don't care who helps you, go ahead. And then she sort of disappeared from the job and let him do it.

Now, according to her, she'd always planned it that way. I don't know if that's true, but I believe it. I think he wanted a job, and that was the only job that he ever had. He went to work there in '33, and he was there until '87. He never had any other job. He worked as a reporter first and worked his way up in a way. But even there, I'm sure he didn't ask anybody to  promote him. They just recognized that he was talented.

Halper 

I didn't know that you were a Latin teacher.

Shawn 

I was a Latin teacher, but not on a very advanced level, let’s say. It was my own idea to teach Latin. It wasn't like they sought over the world to find a great Latin teacher.

Halper 

You're a translator. You do a lot of translation. How many foreign languages do you speak?

Shawn

Well, I'm not very good with languages. I went to Dalton, where they built up your self-esteem. At that time, there were no grades, and there was very little criticism. They weren't trying to get people into a good college but to raise their self-esteem. So for some of us, it really worked. I don’t know languages, but I have very high self-esteem. So I've translated from the German and the Italian, even, but if you got into a conversation with me in those languages, you wouldn't be impressed.

Halper  

And you've translated Brecht? 

Shawn

I did.

Halper

But you also have done a different kind of translation. This is an ADL ad that is from another Israeli assault on Gaza from 2014. The ADL took out this ad in The Hollywood Reporter, and it says, “As talk turns to the future of Gaza, these haunting words of Golda Meir are as current as today's headlines. She could have been talking about Hamas.” And then the quote is, “We can forgive”—in brackets—“[them].” They don't put it in, the fact that she was saying “the Arabs.” 

So what she really said was, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.” Golda Meir in 1957. 

And then [the ADL ad] says, “Join us in calling upon world leaders and decent people everywhere to ensure that Hamas terrorists cannot be rearmed so the people of Gaza and Israel can move towards a more peaceful future.” 

And then there are a bunch of Hollywood people, none of whom I've heard of, except for Mayim Bialik of Blossom fame, and also Haim Saban, a huge contributor to the Democrats [who signed the ad]. And so you did your own translation of this. Do you want to read what it says instead of me, since you wrote it? 

Shawn

Well, I suppose I could read that.

Halper

I'll read the Editor's Note, just so people know what happens. 

Editor's Note: “Playwright and actor Wallace Shawn is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace, which condemns Israeli attacks in Gaza. Shawn recently translated Henrik Ibsen’s A Master Builder, a film by Jonathan Demme. Shawn submitted to The Hollywood Reporter this open letter to the Hollywood community.” 

Okay, now you can read what you wrote. 

Shawn 

“Over the decades. I've done quite a bit of work as a translator from various languages, and sometimes when I get home from work, I just can't stop. Yesterday, for example, I saw an ad in The Hollywood Reporter. It was in English, but its meaning was not immediately obvious at all, so I felt an overwhelming impulse to translate it. The ad featured a statement that former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had made in the 1950s about ‘the Arabs.’ But the ad, which leaves out the words ‘the Arabs,’ suggests that ‘her haunting words’ are ‘as current as today's headlines. She could have been talking about Hamas.’ The quotation, as it appears in the ad, is as follows, and I'm going to say ‘the Arabs’ instead of ‘them.’ 

‘We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them from forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.’

My quick personal translation of this would be, when we kill the children of Arabs, the Arabs made us do it. They hate us so much, they're so angry that they do things that enrage us and make us kill children. If they were decent people who love their children, they would set aside their hatred and stop provoking us, and we would then stop killing the children. Sometimes a translator feels compelled to argue with the text he's just translated, particularly when, as in the case of this ad, one is confronted by a photograph of the author that makes one vividly feel her presence. In this case, I can only say that despite her wise and thoughtful and grandmotherly face, Golda Meir can be interpreted as saying here that she plans to kill the children of Arabs up until the moment when, in her sole judgment, the Arabs stop feeling hate and become sufficiently unprovoking and pacified.

Applying her remarks to the present day, as the signers of the ad suggest we should do, the ad seems fundamentally to be saying that it ought to be up to the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to decide when the current killing ought to stop. I have to say I feel that this ad directed to members of the show business community, perhaps especially to Jewish members of the show business community, such as myself, takes as its premise a false view both of history and of the present situation. 

The broad outlines of the terrible history of the Jewish people over the centuries is relatively well known to many of us, but unfortunately, many members of the show business community are not very aware of the tragic history of the Palestinian people. And yet, the fact is that in my own lifetime—I was born in 1943—the Palestinian people have been expelled from their land and subjected to unceasing and unjustifiable torment, including a brutal occupation, and, in Gaza, a regime in which an entire population has been placed on a starvation diet. Anyone who learns more about what has happened can't help but realize that the anger of the Palestinians cannot be ended by killing their children. That is a fantasy. Human beings simply aren't made that way.”

Halper 

That's a great master translation.

Shawn 

I hope you will remind people this is from—

Halper

Yes, 2014. But as they said about her words, it could be now.

Shawn

Well, it would be more extreme now, because what's happening is so extreme.

Halper 

Yes, of course, but I always find that quote particularly disgusting. Going back to what you said about how the Nazis at least tried to hide their crimes, you have “the banality of evil” that [Hannah] Arendt introduced. But with Israel, you have this celebration of sadism, almost. It's all allowed because it has the premise of righteousness. It's just such a sick thing to pretend that this is a moral war, and it's so undermined by the actual documentary evidence.

Shawn

And of course, the horrors would not have gone on if the Americans were not paying for it and supplying these weapons. We're really involved. But of course, any Israeli is within his or her rights to say, Well, what would you do? What would you have done on October 7? Would you have just let Hamas continue killing people—how many people would you think would be appropriate? “What would you do?” is a very real question.  “What solution do you suggest?”  There has to be a solution to the problem of the Jews and the Arabs living in the same place, and very few people are coming up with ideas.  I think there has to be an international solution imposed. Someone on the planet has to have some vision and wisdom to try to solve the issue.

Halper 

It's the United States [that can do something]. As you know, Ronald Reagan—no great liberal, no great humanist—got on the phone and told [Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister] to stop bombing Lebanon and actually used the word holocaust. He said, This is a holocaust, and it stopped.

And as we speak right now, in addition to the thousands of bodies under the rubble, there is a doctor, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who's being tortured in a prison, and the international community could do something about it. The ones that care about the “rules-based order”—obviously a joke. There's this really haunting image of him walking in the wreckage, in the rubble, towards an Israeli tank.

Shawn

Oh, yes. I’ve seen it. 

Halper

This is a doctor who risked his life and wouldn't leave his patients. He's actually a dual citizen, and he still stayed in Gaza. His son was killed in an Israeli strike. His mother died of a heart attack after he was detained. He was detained [and Israel still won’t release him.] His family says he's in terrible shape.  Speaking of what could be done. Biden could [have gotten] on the phone and demanded that they free this doctor. [Trump could do this now.] Israel also has been raping its prisoners, including a doctor, Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, who was essentially raped to death.

You can only imagine if there were Israeli doctors who were being raped and tortured, what the United States government would do about it, but because they're Palestinian—

Shawn 

Incredible.

Halper

Well, I don't want to end on such a dark note, but it's hard not to when talking about this. What are you working on right now?

Shawn 

I've written a new play, and so I've been quietly rehearsing that for a while with André Gregory.

Halper  

Oh, wow. When is that going to be released?

Shawn  

If all goes very, very well, it would probably be in the winter of 2026.

Halper 

Great. By the way, have you seen Waiting for Guffman? 

Shawn

Yes. 

Halper

It's one of my favorite movies ever, and I love when, at the end, Corky shows off his My Dinner With Andre action figures. 

Shawn [laughs] 

Halper

Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate this. 

Shawn

Well, thank you. I'm amazed that we finally did it.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.