- Criticize Israeli politicians, Israeli policies, whatever, there's no problem there.

But where it used to be, let's just rid the world of the Jew and everything's gonna be fine.

Nobody says that in a polite society today, but what they do say is let's just rid the world of the Jewish state and then everything will be fine.

[gentle bright music] - Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are charting the startling rise in antisemitism, both in the U.S. and globally.

From chants of blood and soil at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 to the horrific murder of 11 worshipers at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, there's been a marked uptick in antisemitic sentiment and violence in recent years.

Antisemitism is of course, nothing new, but why is it making a comeback?

Here to help me wade through these difficult questions is Israeli actress and activist Noa Tishby, who's served in Israel's government as its Antisemitism Envoy.

That was before Prime Minister Netanyahu dismissed her for speaking out against his controversial judicial reform agenda.

And later, an early look at a new film about one of Israel's most controversial leaders, present Prime Minister excluded.

- I'm not that little girl hiding in the cellar.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis... - [Narrator] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by... Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [upbeat music] [screen whooshing] [gentle intense music] - The only constants in life, death, taxes, and social media trolls.

And I love my trolls, don't get me wrong.

In fact, for years I've featured a troll of the week every Friday afternoon on my Twitter page, and some of them can be quite hurtful.

But there are trolls and then there are trolls.

And here are some recent tweets I got.

[gentle intense music] Just another day in our great social media cesspool, right?

I do, however, have a minor quibble.

I'm not actually Jewish.

But if I'm receiving this kind of bile, just imagine what an average date is like for a Jewish person, especially with a decent Twitter following.

Blame social media all you want, but antisemitism is as old as civilization.

An ancient Greek historian in the second century BCE railed against, and I quote, "The ridiculous practices of the Jews "and the absurdity of their law."

Shakespeare's Shylock once asked, "If you prick us, do we not bleed?"

But lately it feels like this particularly ugly trend is back in fashion, and the numbers back that up.

The Anti-Defamation League found 3,700 instances of antisemitic harassment, vandalism, or assault around the country last year alone.

It's the highest number in 43 years.

The FBI has also marked an uptick in hate crimes, with nearly 2/3 of all hate crimes targeting Jews.

- [Group] Jews will not replace us!

Jews will not replace us!

- [Ian] Do you remember the sight of tiki torch-bearing white supremacists marching on Charlottesville back in 2017's Unite the Right rally?

Then on October 27 in 2018, a gunman killed 11 worshipers in Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.

In January of 2022, a British citizen radicalized by Islamic extremists walked into a Texas synagogue, took a rabbi and several others hostage.

Thanks to the heroism of the rabbi, who had received training for such an event, the congregants managed to escape unharmed.

- I threw a chair at the gunman, and I headed for the door, and all three of us were able to get out without even a shot being fired.

- So how did we get here?

Or has the United States always had this ugly undercurrent beneath its surface, waiting for the right moment to erupt?

To help me wade through these very difficult questions is the Israeli actress, writer, and activist, Noa Tishby.

And she joins me now.

Noa Tishby, great to see you.

- Great to see you as well.

- So, not an easy topic that we're talking about today.

I mean, I remember the Tree of Life synagogue attack, the most violent antisemitic attack in U.S. history.

And then Anti-Defamation League comes out and says more antisemitic attacks in the last year than at any point since they- - Since they started measuring.

- Okay, so, I mean, you're very familiar with those stats.

Why?

What accounts for it?

- That's a great question.

So first of all, the thing to remember is that antisemitism is the oldest form of hate and discrimination that is still being practiced today.

You and I were talking off camera for a second before, and you said that you've never got a chance to talk to anybody about antisemitism.

And that's what's happening.

What's happening is that it's so prevalent, it's so pervasive, it's everywhere in our society, but for some reason people don't give it as much attention.

Comes from three different areas.

Antisemitism is on the far right, which is the one that we can identify very easily, it's the Charlottesville.

It comes from the far left, which is a little bit more insidious and hard to decipher, which we'll talk about a little bit more, which is equating Israel to Hamas and to terrorist organizations.

And it comes from radical Islam.

The answer as to why?

I can't give you this answer, because it's been around for so long, it is so ingrained in our society.

What I'm doing in my position in my life, as a part of my life's work is shedding a light on it so people can actually get present to what it is that they're doing.

Because a lot of it comes from unconscious biases about the Jewish people.

It really does.

- But I was taught about the Holocaust when I was a kid.

I was, I mean, look, I didn't have any Jewish friends because- - You did not have any Jewish friends?

- I didn't know any.

I didn't- - Until what age?

- Probably would've been in high school.

I went to a Jewish summer camp of all things.

- Oh!

- Camp Menorah.

- Really?

- I was the one non-Jewish kid.

But no, the point was I was certainly aware that there was such a thing- - As antisemitism?

- As antisemitism.

- Because of Holocaust studies?

- Of course, yeah.

- Yeah.

- But it wasn't something that was discussed particularly in the family.

It wasn't something... And then suddenly, not only are we becoming more aware of it because we're seeing the attacks, but we're also becoming more aware of it because it just seems more ever present in the discourse.

- Yes.

- It's the attacks on Soros.

- Uh-huh.

- It's the- - Soros, code word for Jew.

- Code word for- - [Noa] Absolutely.

- And I've been...

Frankly, I see a lot of the social media trolls against me.

I'm not Jewish, but people that are using, "You're a Jew as a- - Do they think you're Jewish?

- Yeah, I guess, I don't know.

I mean, I'm kind of intellectual and kind of a white guy.

[Noa laughing] Maybe that's another way to go after you.

I don't know.

So the point is I wanna know where you think...

It's clearly becoming a bigger problem today.

- Absolutely, bigger.

- So why do you think that is?

- Again, I'm not entirely sure where this is coming from, because every single person has a bias around the other, right?

We've learned this throughout the George Floyd demonstrations.

We walk around, you see somebody of a different ethnicity, and you're like, yeah, all right, you immediately have this kind of relationship to that other.

And people have the same thing about the Jewish people.

So if it's the Jews have all the power, the Jews have all the money, the Jews in Hollywood, they control this.

All of that is affecting what people think about the Jews.

And with everything that's happening online, I do believe that to some extent the Jews and Israel are kind of patient zero with this.

It's coming from something that's very deep in our society.

This is not something that I can be like, all right, it's coming from this particular person or that particular person.

I wrote a book about Israel, which as a part of the research, I get obsessed with various historical figures.

One of them is Josephus, who was a historian that lived around the days of the first Jewish-Roman War in 70 AD.

And he moved to Rome after the fall of Jerusalem, and he wrote this book called "The Antiquity of the Jews".

It was an epic 10-volume book that he wrote as a historian in order to fight pagan antisemitism in 74 AD.

And when I read that, I'm like, wait, pagan antisemitism was so bad in 74 AD that this Jew in Rome felt the need to write about it.

And this is what we're dealing with.

It has been shape-shifting throughout the generations.

And this is where we're at right now.

It's the Soros, it's the Rothschild, it's the colonialism, it's all of this rhetoric that we hear, and it's spreading out online like never before.

And here's the other thing, antisemitism is not a simple form of racism.

So antisemitism is anti-Jewish racism, but it's not as simple as any other racism, because when you're racist about any other ethnicity, you think they're less than you, right?

You're kinda like, well, they're not as great as me, I'm better than them.

Antisemitism is a shape-shifting conspiracy theory.

So it's not just punching down, it's also punching up.

- Well, I mean there's a fair amount of that.

Why is the Supreme Court removing affirmative action quotas?

In part, that's Harvard and other universities that aren't allowing in as many Asians- Asians, yeah.

- As there would be, right?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- So I mean, there's some of that.

- There is.

- I mean, I wouldn't say it's unique the way you just described it only to Jews.

- That's true, and that's one of the bonds that we're finding between the Asian community.

We're number one and number two in hate crimes in America.

Because now there's- - Not something that you wanna celebrate.

- Not something.... Let's celebrate it if it's here, may as well.

So my whole thing, and this is something that I've borrowed from my friend Eric Weinstein, who's a brilliant man, and he said, "The Jews are not overrepresented, "they're over contributing."

So yeah, all right, we're over contributing, but it doesn't mean anything, doesn't have anything to do with control or with overpower.

- Do you think it's easier to be openly antisemitic in the United States today?

- Yes, yeah, I do.

- And what do you think the consequences for that need to be?

- It breaks my heart that it is easier to be openly antisemitic.

It's easy to be antisemitic on the right, which is more of the good old classic antisemitism of Jews are the controlling, the this, all of that.

And it's also very easy to be antisemitic on the left.

And this is something that not a lot of people feel comfortable discussing, especially from the liberal, and I consider myself on the liberal side of the political map, even though I'm a registered independent.

When it comes to antisemitism on the left, the majority of it is coming from this disproportionate obsession about the state of Israel.

Disproportionate obsession.

Now, I am the first person to criticize Israeli government when need be.

Obviously I lost a position because of that.

- [Ian] In the Netanyahu government.

- In the Netanyahu government.

This is totally fine to criticize Israeli politicians, Israeli policies, whatever, there's no problem there.

But there's a strong sense in the political left right now, in the fringe, and it's becoming more accepted than it used to be, of denying Israel's right to exist.

And this is something, where it used to be, let's just rid the world of the Jew and everything's gonna be fine.

Nobody says that in a polite society today.

But what they do say is let's just rid the world of the Jewish state and then everything would be fine.

So there's literally, in terms of polite societies in America, there's one bastion of colonialism that needs to be eradicated and everything would be okay.

And it just happens to be the Jewish state.

This is not for nothing that this is happening, and this country just happens to be, happens to be Jewish, and people are saying that it doesn't have the right to exist as other countries do.

- I obviously see the rise of antisemitism in the United States.

I also see Israel as getting more military support from the United States than any other country in the world, and by a long margin.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Israel is being by far the most steadfast ally of the United States- - It absolutely is, and should be, it will always continue to be.

- Whether it's on the left or on the right.

- Absolutely.

- Democrats, Republicans.

- People that actually work with Israel, they know this.

- So, I mean, I'm having a hard time.

I mean, yeah, I see Marjorie Taylor Greene talk about space lasers.

- [Noa] That's the Jewish, that's the right wing.

- I know, and I see Rashida Tlaib certainly supporting the BDS Movement, for example.

- Bless her heart, as we say.

- But that's very different from people that are saying that Israel should not exist as a country.

I have not seen much of that.

Do you really see that?

How is that expressed?

- Go to every college campus in America, talk to college students, and see their experience.

This is something...

Almost every college has apartheid week in which it's full on a week of slandering the state of Israel with rhetoric that sounds, if you just change the word Zionist to the word Jew, it sounds like 1936 Germany.

So the Zionists are killing babies.

The Jews are drinking Christian blood.

And every college student in America is actually experiencing this.

Over 50% of college students in America feel the need to hide their Jewish identity.

That's not coming from Marjorie Taylor Green.

That's coming from anti-Israel rhetoric.

- 50% of Jewish students- - Over 50% of Jewish college- - Feel the need to- - Yes.

- [Both] To hide their Jewish identity.

- They will not walk around wearing a Star of David, like I do.

They just kinda go, we don't wanna deal with that.

- If you are- - By the way, I'm glad that it's nowhere near Congress yet.

I'm glad that it's not- - It's nowhere.

It is nowhere near congress.

- It's nowhere near congress, because again, once people get into positions of power, once they get educated, once they go to Israel, if you are in any kind of financial sector, any kind of tech sector, if you're a gay LGBTQ+, member of the LGBTQ+ community all over the world, you know that Israel is not the big bad wolf.

But if you're on college campus, you have a completely different experience.

- So what do you consider to be legitimate expressions of distaste with the politics of the Israeli government?

I mean, there have been many millions of people demonstrating on the ground in Israel about concerns that they are- - Millions.

- [Ian] Losing their democracy.

Those are mostly Jews.

- Yes.

- There are Palestinians who feel like their rights have been taken away.

What's the line that needs to be drawn that isn't being drawn in your view?

- Right to exist.

That's the line.

So on college campus, when people talk about the Zionist entity, which is usually, I mean, it's literally the Ayatollah of Iran's rhetoric.

It's the same language, right?

They talk about dismantling the Jewish state.

So the conversation moved from policies, West Bank, Bibi, yes or no to, yeah, but is Israel really a state?

Or is it a colonialist endeavor that needs to be dismantled?

And that is actually the reality of Jewish students on campus.

This is where the line is drawn.

If you have a problem with Israeli policies or politics, there's no problem there whatsoever.

But if you actually look at the Jewish people and say they don't have the right for self-determination and self-governance in some parts of their ancestral land, that's where you've crossed the line.

- And I mean, that clearly comes from, I suspect, a bunch of people that are saying, well, the Palestinians are not being allowed or provided that, then why should we support that for Jews in Israel?

- Right, but they usually say the Jews are not allowed and the Palestinians are allowed.

That's number one.

Number two, as a liberal, it's very challenging to...

The question needs to be asked, what do the Palestinian want as a political movement?

What is it that they're after?

Because if they're after a state, then the question is why is there no state?

And this has been kinda put in the forefront and the doorstep of Israel only, and it also needs to be asked of the Palestinians, why is there no Palestine yet?

That's number one.

Number two, if they are willing to have a two-state solution eventually, I'm sure there are gonna be people on the Israeli side that are going to be willing to have that conversation again.

However, if they're gonna continue to chant like a lotta people on college campuses do, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," we're gonna keep having this issue.

But at the end of the day, Israel wants peace.

There's no question there.

And if Israel stops fighting, there would be no more Israel.

If the Arab world would stop fighting, there'll be peace everywhere.

- Noa Tishby.

- Yeah.

- Thanks for joining us.

- Thank you for having me.

[gentle techno music] - In 1973, a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights, sparking the Yom Kippur War.

Israel's prime minister at the time was Golda Meir.

Her controversial handling of the war is the subject of a new Hollywood film, and GZERO's Alex Kliment, he has the story.

[bomb exploding] [guns blasting] - [Alex] It's hard to imagine today, but for a tense few hours in October 1973, Israel faced the prospect of a resounding military defeat.

A joint attack by Syria and Egypt had nearly overpowered Israel's badly unprepared troops.

Prime Minister, Golda Meir, the country's first, and still only female leader, took charge over a group of bickering generals and turned the tide.

But the existential shock of those initial hours remained.

Six months after the war, Meir resigned.

- Today the Egyptian and Syrian armies launched an offensive against Israel.

- Half a century later, Israeli American filmmaker, Guy Nattiv, has made a new film about Meir and those fateful few days during the Yom Kippur War.

He joins us now from Los Angeles.

Guy, thank you for being with us.

- Thank you for having me.

- It seems to me that whenever a filmmaker makes a film about a well-known historical figure, the point is to try to change or challenge an existing narrative about that person.

For you, what is the story of Golda Meir that you wanted to reframe or challenge or rewrite?

- So Golda Meir was the scapegoat of the Yom Kippur War.

Everybody thought that she was to blame, and she's the only one who's responsible for what happened.

But reports that came out 15 years ago made sure that we know that she's not the only one, that the intelligence was responsible for the debacle of the war, and they screw up.

So she took the blame, and she had to resign a year later.

It was very easy to blame a woman, especially an older woman, for the failure and not have those commanders around her, especially Dayan, Moshe Dayan, to take the blame.

She was humble enough and straight enough and honest enough to say, "It's on me."

But for me, I wanted to bring the new narrative into the cinema.

- What aspect of that portrait do you think or hope viewers will find most surprising?

- Well, I think there's a lot of stuff that no one knew about Golda.

A, that she had cancer and she had those secret treatments at night in the hospital.

So she, in front of her commander, she was the grownup in charge.

- Well, I'm not going to get under the table, but don't let me stop you.

- But in secret rooms and behind the scenes, she almost collapsed.

So I think that it's a view that no one really saw Golda in, the fragile Golda, the humorous Golda, the Golda in front of Kissinger, how she's manipulating him, the relationship with Kissinger in her kitchen.

- Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the Kissinger scene.

It's one of the most extraordinary scenes in the film.

When Kissinger goes to Israel to meet with Golda Meir, she has him over to her kitchen.

She forces him to eat borscht, and she wrangles these concessions out of him on U.S. support for Israel.

- I think it's important that you remember that I am first an American; second, I'm Secretary of State; and third, I am a Jew.

- You forget that in Israel we read from right to left.

- The dialogue in that scene is amazing.

Was it based on actual recollections from Kissinger and Meir, or was it just the work of well-informed imagination in the script writing?

- It's a great question.

I think it's a mix.

It's a mix of kind of a process.

And the funny thing is that Liev Schreiber, that plays Kissinger, met with Kissinger, who's 101, in New York, his New York apartment, two days before the shooting.

And he came to the screenwriter, Nicholas, and told him, "Listen, he told me so many cool things that we gotta put it in the script."

So that's a line that Kissinger told him, actually.

- What was it like to work with Helen Mirren?

- It's one thing to work with one of the best actress of our time, she's the ultimate GOAT, but she's beyond nice.

She's on time.

She woke up at 3 a.m. to make the 4 until 7 makeup process for three hours, and it's like she's the most dedicated, nicest person that I could work with, but also one of the best actors of our time.

She's a dear friend and amazing person to work with.

- As you and I are sitting here speaking, Israel itself is undergoing one of the most profound moments of domestic upheaval, really, in its history.

The Netanyahu government is, by far, the most right-wing government in its history.

There have been huge protests against Netanyahu's moves to reduce the power of the Israeli judiciary.

In your view, are there lines that can be drawn between the Golda Meir period and the Israel that we see today?

- I think it's the polar opposite.

I think that if you look at leaders like Golda Meir, Shimon Peres, all those leaders put their trust into the judicial system.

So they believed in the high court in Israel.

What Benjamin Netanyahu is doing is devastating.

I went to demonstrate with my dad, who's a Yom Kippur War veteran, and we met a lot of war veterans, and they all said, "This is the Yom Kippur of democracy."

This is something that is devastating.

I can't sleep at night thinking about what would Golda say.

It's like a destruction of everything we build in Israel, and it's terrible, just terrible.

- If there's one thing that you want viewers to take away from your film, on that note, not about Golda Meir or herself, but about Israel in general, what is that one thing?

- I think it's the pride, the Israeli pride from the Six-Day War that got slapped, got a big giant slap.

And this hubris, these commanders that walked like superheroes after the Six-Day War.

We controlled the Middle East, and suddenly were devastated by the reality of what's going on in Israel.

Before Yom Kippur, Israel thought that they are the biggest in the Middle East and no one can hurt us, but we saw what happened.

- Guy Nattiv, director of the new film, "Golda", thank you so much for joining us, and good luck with the film.

- Thank you, appreciate it.

[gentle techno music] - That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see, check us out gzeromedia.com.

[upbeat music] [upbeat music] [upbeat music] [gentle music] - [Announcer] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by... Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerry and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [bright music] [bright music]