Daniel Maté is tumbling around his mid-morning New York apartment, grinding coffee, apologising for being a tad late, filling me in on the past six months of his life. It’s quite a tale. His apartment, filled with artworks, records, guitars and a piano, is suggestive of who he is – a composer, lyricist and playwright for musical theatre.

And a rather brilliant one at that – he is the possessor of a slew of prestigious gongs that include the Edward Kleban Prize for Most Promising Lyricist in American Musical Theatre, a Jonathan Larson Foundation Grant, and the ASCAP Foundation’s Cole Porter Award for Excellence in Music and Lyrics. He is also an educator. With his father, the renowned physician Gabor Maté, Daniel co-authored The Myth Of Normal: Trauma, Illness And Healing In A Toxic Culture, a critique of how society breeds disease, and a provider of a pathway to health and healing.

In addition to being Canadian, and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Robert Downey Jr., he also runs the world’s only ‘mental chiropractic’ service, ‘Take A Walk With Daniel’. He is also a former Zionist youth camp leader.

That might seem like a tidy summation of the man. However, in October of last year, the day after Hamas launched a brutal assault on Israel, infiltrating communities near the Gaza Strip, resulting in approximately 1,200 deaths and 250 hostages being taken to Gaza, Daniel released an Instagram Live video of him walking in Brooklyn with the opening line – “So I wanna say some things”. Over the course of half-an-hour, Daniel eloquently detailed his reaction to that cataclysmic event – which has since resulted in the annihilation by Israel of over 33,000 Palestinian people.

His message impressed a sizeable number of people who praised his humanity, courage, sanity, compassion and knowledge of the subject – all conveyed in an erudite, eloquent manner. Daniel has continued to post his thoughts on the war in Gaza, which reverberate with an ever larger audience. Recently, he spoke at the ‘Irish Artists in support of Palestine’ event at Whelan’s in Dublin.

I ask Daniel about his journey over the past six months.

“I feel silly talking about it,” he responds, “because who cares about the journey of an unwitting social media influencer in the face of a genocide. The focus on my personality and my journey – there’s a part of me that wants to talk about it, but there’s another part that’s tired of talking about it. It feels like it’s a little bit of bad taste.”

Seán Mulrooney, Daniel Maté and Laura Murphy at RISING in Whelans. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

Of course, what he says makes sense. In the face of the gargantuan, utterly diabolical man-made hell that our fellow human beings in Gaza are suffering every day, the concerns of our own lives are obviously paltry and inconsequential. Still, it is beneficial to understand why the thoughts of this musician and writer on the war in Gaza are resonating with so many people.

“The journey has been, basically, going from having a platform associated with my work with my father,” continues, Daniel, “which was not tiny, but it was modest. I wrote a book with him and I would promote our work, and sometimes I would also promote my own mental chiropractic work. And all of a sudden, I had something to say about what was going on in the world and it connected. I did it on a hunch that I would have a perspective that other people wouldn’t, and it would be helpful to people and that has proved to be true.

“It’s the first time in my life that my voice has really stood on its own and served a kind of purpose. So, on one level that’s very fulfilling. It has come with a lot of strange and unfamiliar attention that part of me welcomes and part of me repels. That’s something for my own personality and ego to navigate, which I just think comes with the territory. I don’t want that to obscure the issue.”

Was Daniel surprised at the reaction to his live video on October 8?

“Yes and no,” he replies. “I was surprised at the scale of it and the speed with which it accelerated. Seeing people sharing my stuff and saying that it’s crucial for their understanding of the thing was surprising, but I am not overly modest either. I know that I have an ability to communicate in a way that’s passionate, but also dispassionate, that’s analytical but not purely cerebral, that brings my skills as a mental chiropractor and an understanding of how the mind works and also my candour, my willingness to just say things very, very plainly. The whole thing on October 8, of me stepping out and speaking into my phone was coming from the intuition that it would be of some kind of unique value.”

THE REAL GODFATHER

Reading and listening to his work on the subject, it is apparent that Daniel – whose Jewish great-grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz – is incredibly well-versed in the issues that he is addressing. Is he surprised at how little so many people who claim to speak authoritatively seem to know?

“No, I wasn’t surprised by it,” he answers simply. “Because, having grown up around Zionism, I’m pretty conversant in the inherent shallowness of its premises. The things it has to ignore, the things it has to make up and fabricate. The racism and colonial justifications are always brittle because they’re based on a lie, even if that lie is erasing the reality of another people and the humanity of another people. There’s an inherent shallowness at the core of the Zionist argument in my view, or at least I see through it.

“Now, I’ve recently encountered new mutations and variations of the Zionist argument that I’ve never seen before. Like being told it’s a de-colonial project: that’s new, or at least putting it in those terms is. And that of course is a reaction to – and an attempt to ride the coattails of – the social justice movement and identity politics, which I have my own criticisms of, partly because they can be co-opted by anybody.

“I’m always surprised in some ways by the creativity of it. Just because it’s shallow, doesn’t mean it’s not creative, because the heuristic is protecting the illusion at all cost. The entire Zionist argument is – don’t trust the evidence of your senses and your moral faculties, remember that there’s a justification for all this. And so, if you’re feeling a kind of natural automatic human revulsion or outrage, you need to remember what we’re telling you and that will disable it.”

It is an argument that convinces many people. Why?

“The real godfather of making legitimate justifications for unjustifiable behaviour and getting away with it is the United States,” Daniel replies. “They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. So, it’s not new that a country (like Israel) with some immunity in the power structure, which includes the protection and support of the United States, would get away with a lot of things. The veto power in the United Nations Security Council is just one mechanism by which atrocities get erased or laundered.

“But then there’s this added factor in the case of Israel, and it’s an uncomfortable thing to say, but it’s the Holocaust card. It’s by virtue of the world’s sense of guilt over what happened to my great-grandparents and the Jews of Europe, and the way that Israel has exploited that and created a certain mythos out of the Holocaust. I’m not saying the Holocaust is a myth. It’s a real historical event. But Israel has consciously used it, cynically used it. And when I say Israel, I mean Israel and its network of propagandists, who shamefully represent or are represented in the mainstream organisations of many western Jewish communities outside of Israel.

“But I don’t think that, in and of itself, is enough to explain it. It goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Israel serves as a crucial geo-strategic function for the West, as it always intended to. Theodor Herzl said, we’re going to be an outpost of European Western civilisation against the Arab barbarian hordes, basically, almost in those words. Well, that’s a pretty key function when that region is such a linchpin in the world economy.”

And obviously the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism muddies the waters.

“It does”, Daniel says, “and that’s Israel’s doing. The early Zionists bought into a lot of antisemitic ideas – that the Jews don’t belong anywhere. That it’s in some way shameful to be a people who are dispersed. You can understand them believing it’s dangerous or we should have the right to self-determination, but it went deeper than that, it was a kind of a rejection. And you can read in the writings of many of these early Zionists, a kind of hatred of our own victimhood, shame and disgust, self-hatred really. And of course, that creates the profound irony that the go-to slur used against people like me is that we are self-hating Jews.

“So, it’s complicated, but for me, the first movement a person has to make inside themselves is to just explicitly and outright reject that equation – that Zionism is Judaism. And the idea that to oppose Zionism is to be against Jews? It’s just patently false. It’s a lie. It’s deeply shallow, it’s wrong in of itself and the uses to which it is put are morally indefensible and ultimately genocidal and I think suicidal. I think there’s a death drive in Zionism that wants to take nationalism to such an extreme that the world turns against us and Israel’s achieving that right now.

“And actually, antisemitism has gone up since October 7. The Zionists are not wrong about that, it’s just that they’re the ones who are creating it in large part. Antisemitism has always been under the surface of many Western European-derived communities and traditions. The Jews are easy to blame, really hard to understand. And we’re kind of always there, but never quite part of the core of the society. And I’m not sure how you get rid of it. You certainly don’t get rid of it with billboards saying ‘Stop Hating Jews’.

“But you can inflate it, and you couldn’t design a greater irritant that inflames antisemitism and spreads it, than a country that hides behind the mantle of Jewish self-defence and Jewish pride, and festoons itself in Jewish symbols and mythology to justify some of the most horrific crimes we’ve seen since World War 2.”

DESCENT INTO MADNESS

A couple of days before myself and Daniel spoke, President Biden urged Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to call a cease-fire in Gaza. I ask Daniel does he possess any optimism?

“I’m not optimistic, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see the bright spots,” he replies. “I don’t think that’s optimism. That’s realism. What’s required is an ability to see possibility in the moment, which means not falling into cynicism, which is itself another ideology. You just impose a gloomy, Eeyore view on the world and there’s all sorts of understandable reasons to do that. But I don’t see a negotiated solution fundamentally to this problem any time soon. The people who are yelling ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they’re not going to give up, nor should they on basic ideas of freedom of justice, and in some ways, vindication for the Palestinian people.

“Biden, I don’t give a shit what he says, his Zionism goes all the way down to the root. Throughout this horror, there’s been leaks from White House sources – Biden’s getting tired or he thinks Netanyahu is a prick. Who cares? As long as the aid keeps flowing, nothing changes; as long as a permanent ceasefire isn’t imposed, nothing changes. But Netanyahu embarrassed him and the US doesn’t like being embarrassed. I’ll believe it when I see it, in terms of a fundamental change in US policy.

“But that’s Biden. If Trump gets in, it’s a wild card, because Trump will say anything. He’ll talk genocidal Zionist talk points and then he’ll say you’ve gone too far, you’ve got to stop and he’s got a much shorter attention span than Biden. But he’s got a base that includes some ‘America first’ people who might be reasonably incensed and exasperated with the policy of supporting this foreign regime. Then there’s Chuck Schumer, who gave that speech a couple of weeks ago: he’s a hardcore Zionist, but he sounded reasonable. Obviously, I think he stopped short of seeing the full truth, but he was pretty even-handed in terms of assigning blame.”

US President Joe Biden

Daniel teases out the issue further.

“Now, it’s an election year,” he continues. “The Democrats might be starting to realise they’re gonna have to at least pander to the electorate, but that’s more than they’ve been willing to do in the past. That’s cause for optimism and Israel’s descent into madness, morbidly enough, is a cause for optimism. But it’s also a cause for real dread, at the exact same time, because what it leads to may be the dissolution of that regime. But along the way, it’s going to mean bloodshed, suffering and a lot of horrors, both inflicted by Israel but possibly even within Israel.

“For all of their sins and insanity, as human beings and as fellow Jews, I care about Israel. Of course they need to stop. I think they need to be stopped and slapped straight, that’s the only way you stop a regime like this. You have to wake the people up. I don’t know what that’s going to take. It’s horrific to think of what’ll it take. But there’s reason to think we’re turning the corner and even someone like Ilan Pappé, the Israeli historian, is saying the Zionist project is entering its final phase. If nothing else, that’s cause for some sense of hope.”