Julian Casablancas, the frontman of The Strokes, one of the defining rock bands of the early 2000s, recently told a million YouTube subscribers on the popular web series SubwayTakes that American Zionists “get the benefits of white privileged people, but talk like they are black people during slavery.”
This week, Oxford University released a video of Casablancas expanding on it. Yes, that Oxford.
The Oxford Union, comfortably ensconced at the highbrow academic institution in England, invited him to speak, and he offered a clarification. He now says he meant “settler-style Zionist expansionists and maybe some good-hearted indoctrinated moderates.”
He added, “The true nerve point really comes down to one thing, and that is expansion.”
Let’s take Casablancas seriously for a moment, since Oxford did. He makes two claims: one about “privilege” and one about “expansion.”
First, privilege.
It matters who is delivering the lecture: Julian Casablancas is the son of John Casablancas, the founder of Elite Model Management, one of the most powerful modeling agencies in the world. His mother was Jeanette Christiansen, a former “Miss Denmark.” He attended the Lycée Français de New York and, at 13, was sent to Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland, a boarding school so exclusive it is known as “the school of kings.” He came home to the Dwight School in Manhattan, one of the most expensive private schools in America.
I say none of this to mock a childhood that Casablancas didn’t choose. I say it because this specific man, from this specific background, has decided that the people falsely claiming victimhood are the Jews. Including the ones who were recently stabbed in London. Including the ones screamed at in a kosher restaurant in New York. Including families like mine. He whispers the word that makes students cringe: “Zionism.”
I am the product of immigrants and of the atrocities of the 1930s and 1940s. I grew up in Queens, N.Y. Nobody sent me to Switzerland.
Second, expansion.
Casablancas says this is the “nerve point.” Fine. Let’s look at the record because it’s a record, not a vibe.
Israel is roughly the size of New Jersey. There is one Jewish state on earth. There are 22 members of the Arab League and 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
In his speech, the 47-year-old wants to “appeal to moderate friends,” those, he believes, who “are being deceived by expansionists.”
Here is what the “expansionist” Jewish state has actually done: In 1979, Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt and gave back the entire Sinai Peninsula, a territory roughly three times the size of Israel itself. The handover was completed in 1982. Israel dismantled its own settlements in Sinai to do it.
In 2000, Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon. In 2005, it withdrew every soldier and every one of more than 8,000 settlers from Gaza. At Camp David in 2000, at Taba in 2001 and again in 2008, Israeli governments offered the Palestinians a state on the overwhelming majority of the disputed territories. The answer, each time, was no, and often the answer came in the form of a bombing campaign.
You can criticize Israeli settlement policy in Judea and Samaria. Plenty of Israelis do, loudly, in a free press, which is more than can be said for any of its neighbors. That is a real debate, and I welcome it.
But a nation that has voluntarily relinquished more territory than it currently holds is a strange poster child for expansionism. Name another country in history that won defensive wars and then handed the land back just for a signature on a peace treaty.
I’ll wait.
That’s the thing about Casablanca’s Oxford speech: It is the statement of a man who has never had to know anything, explaining to a room full of university students who the Jews really are. He got the biography of his subject wrong because he never learned it. He got the map wrong because he never looked at it. Although he does note that some of his closest friends are Jewish.
The danger isn’t that a rock singer holds uninformed opinions and mumbles through them to an audience who knows even less. Everyone is entitled to those. The danger is the machinery around him: the host who says “100% agree” without a beat, the comment sections calling it brave, the prestigious institutions handing Casablancas a lectern, the total absence of anyone in the room asking a single factual question.
When ignorance gets a stage, applause and an Oxford invitation, while the people it targets get stabbed on a London street, we are not having a policy debate. We are watching a line move.
So, I’ll say it again: Say something. You don’t need a position on settlements to notice that the facts here are wrong and that the target, once again, is the Jews.
