The Beinart Notebook (Peter Beinart)

Our Zoom call this week will be at the regular time: Friday at Noon EST. (I’ve decided to stop mentioning Friday’s guests at the beginning of these Monday videos.)

Our guests this week will be Diana Buttu and Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man. Diana is a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer and a former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Emily is a Jewish Israeli human rights lawyer. They’ll talk about the challenges and opportunities that this terrible war poses for Palestinians and Jews who want to work together on behalf of Palestinian freedom and mutual coexistence.

As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Eighty percent of Gaza’s people have been forced from their homes.

The Director-General of the World Health Organization calls conditions in Gaza’s hospitals “unimaginable.”

Biden officials warn Israel about its actions in Gaza.

Joe Biden’s longstanding opposition to conditioning military aid to Israel.

Congressional Democrats debate conditioning aid.

When Benjamin Netanyahu said “America can be easily moved.”

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Dan Berger examines the call from families of some Israeli hostages for an “all for all” swap of Israeli captives and Palestinian prisoners.

+972 Magazine’s blockbuster report on how the Israeli military loosened its rules to allow more killing of civilians in Gaza.

A Jewish Israeli teacher recounts being jailed for criticizing the Gaza war.

Iyad Baghdadi on how to think (and not think) about decolonization in Israel-Palestine.

Rabbi Shai Held on Jews and the left after October 7.

From Maha Nasser, the best discussion I’ve heard of the historical roots of the phrase, “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.”

Fadi Quran shares a personal story about Palestinian children in prison.

Haya Alyan on what it’s like to have to audition for people’s empathy.

I talked on Slate’s “What’s Next” podcast about the exchange of hostages and prisoners.

This Thursday, December 7, in Brooklyn I’ll be talking to Shaul Magid about his new book, The Necessity of Exile.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I’m recording this on Sunday, December 3rd, and it seems like we’re at a kind of critical turning point or juncture. The pause and release of hostages and prisoners has ended for the time being. And Israel, having cleared out the northern Gaza Strip, is now going into the southern Gaza Strip. And what that means is that the level of dislocation and death, which has already been extraordinary, will even grow higher. Remember, Israel has already forced everyone from the northern Gaza Strip out of the northern Gaza Strip, and largely reduced much of it to rubble. Eighty percent of the people of Gaza are displaced, which is just a staggering number. When you think about how shocked the world has been that 25% of the people in Ukraine were displaced from their homes, it’s now already at 80%. And now, Israel is telling people in parts of the southern Gaza Strip that they have to leave their homes. Many of them are people who only moved there because they were forced out of the northern Gaza Strip. It’s provided some kind of map of supposedly safe places. But since October 7th, the evidence has been that there really is no safe place for Palestinians in Gaza, and certainly there’s no infrastructure to really support human life in the places that they might go where they have no homes. There’s no infrastructure for food. The hospitals are in a circumstance that the head of the WHO said on Sunday that the condition was ‘unimaginable.’

So, we are witnessing, we are right in the middle of one of the—certainly present proportion—one of the largest acts of slaughter and dislocation as a percentage of the population that we’ve seen in the 21st century. And the Biden administration has responded to this by changing its rhetoric. So, right after Hamas’ massacre on October 7th, the Biden administration gave Israel full complete rhetorical support. Now what we’re seeing is that the rhetoric has changed, and the Biden administration is offering a series of kind of warnings. They’re saying: don’t kill so many civilians; leave open the possibility of a Palestinian state; be willing to bring back the Palestinian Authority; don’t expel Palestinians out of Gaza into Egypt. They’re saying all these things, and they’re clearly showing that there’s a difference of opinion between the United States and certainly elements of the Israeli government, if not the entire Israeli government.

But there’s something, I have to say, somewhat farcical and Kabuki-like about this, right? Because the Biden administration is making a series of statements about what it wants Israel to do and not do. And yet, Biden himself has been very clear since he was a candidate that American aid to Israel is unconditional, right? And American diplomatic support at the International Criminal Court at the UN is unconditional. So, under those circumstances, when you’re saying we really want you to do this, Israel doesn’t face that much pressure to do it because there are no consequences if they don’t. And this has been the way America has conducted its policy with Israel really since the early 1990s. That was the last time under George H. W. Bush that the US put any actual conditionality on its aid. In that case, it was saying that the US wouldn’t give Israel loan guarantees to receive Soviet Jewish immigrants unless it promised to stop settlement growth. But since then, no American president has really done that. So, American presidents again and again on issues like settlements have said, ‘we really don’t want you to do this.’ And Israel has just continued to do it, especially under Benjamin Netanyahu, who is something of kind of a master at basically blowing off American presidents of both parties. He famously said years ago, was caught on tape saying that ‘America is a very easy thing to move.’

So, there’s something farcical about the Biden administration saying our policy is that we must keep a horizon open for a two-state solution. Our policy is that Israel should not expel people in Gaza to Egypt. Our policy is that Israel must limit humanitarian casualties. That’s not really America’s policy, right? It would be like me saying my policy is that I’m gonna run the New York marathon. But if I’ve never done a lick of running, and all I do is sit on my couch eating chocolate cake, that’s not actually my policy, right? There’s something called revealed preference. Revealed preference is not what you say, but what you do. And the Biden administration’s revealed preference is Israel can do whatever it wants without consequence.

And it’s funny because there’s a group of people in Washington, kind of foreign policy types, who are very often very concerned about American credibility, meaning that America should never say it’s going to do something that it doesn’t follow through on. Those are the kind of people who got really upset when Barack Obama, you may remember, said that it would be a red line if the Syrians used chemical weapons, and then when they used chemical weapons America didn’t use take military action. So, they said Obama lost his credibility. Well, what does it do to American credibility, including Biden’s credibility, to be continually saying you want Israel to do things, and then when Israel doesn’t do them, you just basically shrug, right?

This is what I mean by I think that we are really at a critical junction, not just a critical juncture in the number of people in Gaza that are going to be killed and dislocated, but on the question, which is a really overdue debate, about the conditioning of US military aid. There are more Democrats now who are talking about this as a policy, and it’s really, really urgent that this conversation become front and center. And I would say that anyone who actually wants to claim that they’re concerned about civilian casualties; who genuinely says they oppose an act of mass expulsion of Palestinians out of Gaza, who says that they want to keep open the possibility of a two-state solution (if that’s not if that’s even possible at this point, about which I have my doubts), we should say—and people in the media should say—we will not take that position seriously unless you’re willing to condition US military aid on some of those things. And not just military, but there should also be the framework that dictates how America behaves in international institutions. If you don’t say that, then I think people in the media and others need to say very clearly that we should not take the Biden administration at its word when it makes these statements about civilian casualties, and the two states, and about expulsion. It can’t be you can take it at their word if they’re not willing to back it up in any meaningful way.

I would remind people these are, in many cases, our weapons that are being used. The United States is not a bystander in this. Palestinians know very, very well that many of the bombs and other weapons that are killing them are American weapons. And America has to decide if it wants to give that military aid without making any effort to actually prevent these weapons from being used in these horrifying ways or not. It’s a really, really critical juncture. And I think that if the Biden administration does not change its position on conditioning military aid, it—and United States in general—will be complicit in something that we’re going to be judged very, very harshly for for many, many years and even decades to come.

Our call this Friday is at noon Eastern time, our normal time for paid subscribers. We’re gonna be joined by Diana Buttu and Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man. Diana is a Canadian Palestinian human rights attorney and former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man is a Jewish Israeli human rights lawyer. They’ve been having a really interesting conversation about how Jews and Palestinians can work together for mutual liberation in the wake of the horrors that started on October 7th. And I think it’s an important conversation, so I hope many of you will join us.

Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at 1 PM EST. There will be no zoom call on the week of Friday, December 22 or 29.

Our guest will be Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute and the author of three highly acclaimed books on the relationship between the United States, Iran, and Israel. We’ll talk about the response by Iran and its allies to October 7 and the risks that Israel’s Gaza war could convulse the entire Middle East.

As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

CSPAN video of the Congressional hearings on campus antisemitism.

Uprisings against Arab governments are called intifadas too.

Elise Stefanik’s flirtation with Great Replacement Theory.

Marwan Barghouti on the motivations for the second intifada.

How pro-Israel pundits and organizations use allegations of antisemitism to avoid talking about what Israel does to Palestinians.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!) Mari Cohen examines the way liberal Zionist groups have responded to Israel’s war in Gaza.

John Judis on the value and limits of calling Israel a “settler-colonial” state.

Mouin Rabbani on Israel’s role in boosting Hamas.

Robert Pape and Tony Karon and Daniel Levy on why Israel is losing the war.

Most American scholars of Middle East studies censor themselves when talking about Israel-Palestine.

Last week, I spoke at a Chanukah-themed ceasefire rally in New York.

I also talked to Joy Reid on MSNBC about why Israel’s war won’t make Israelis safe.

See you on Thursday at 1 PM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I want to say something about the series of events that have now led to the resignation of the president of University of Pennsylvania and could perhaps lead to the resignation of other university presidents for allegedly not opposing calls for genocide of Jews on college campuses. And the key thing to understand about what’s happened here is this. This I think is the key context. If you look at the way establishment American Jewish organizations operate, going back a whole bunch of years, they continually make this particular move. They try to turn conversations away from what’s happening on the ground to Palestinians to questions about the alleged motivations and actions of Israel’s critics in the United States or in other places. This is the reason I think in recent years there’s been this entire kind of obsessive focus on equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism because it’s a way of focusing attention on the motivations of critics of Israel in a condition which has become harder and harder for people to defend what’s happening on the ground.

So, you’ve had over the past few years—as you’ve had Israeli governments really going back to Benjamin Netanyahu taking power in 2009 that have been essentially explicitly opposed to a Palestinian state and working hard to make one impossible—it’s become harder for people whose job it is to defend Israel to actually claim as they used to that Israel really wants to create a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians won’t take one. It’s been harder to deal with the fact that now you have human rights organizations calling Israel’s behavior apartheid. So, what do you do? You turn the conversation towards the alleged antisemitism of people who were calling for one equal state, i.e., anti-Zionists. And the more difficult it becomes to defend Israel’s actions on the ground, the harder one needs to work to again create a new conversation about what’s happening among Israel’s critics. And, certainly since October 7th, after the horrifying massacre of Israelis, what’s been happening in Gaza has been pretty terrible to Palestinians.

And so, from the point of view of establishment American Jewish organizations, any conversation about what’s happening in Gaza, essentially, or even the West Bank for that matter, you’re already losing if you’re engaged in that conversation. Much better to have a completely different conversation, not about what’s happening to Palestinians there, but about the actions of Israel’s critics here. Now, I don’t want to suggest this is like just some big conspiracy theory. I don’t think it’s that. I think there are organizations that have this mission. But I also just think frankly it’s a natural desire by a lot of people who support Israel to not focus on something which is really, really difficult and unpleasant, which is what’s happening in Gaza, and doesn’t allow Jews to be in the role of the victims, right? Whereas turning the conversation to discussions of antisemitism in the United States is a much more familiar position for American Jews to be in given that establishment-minded American Jews simply don’t accept the basic premise that Israel, or a Jewish state, could ever really be fundamentally oppressive. So, when you turn the conversation away from Gaza, you’re turning it from a conversation which is extremely uncomfortable for you because it requires you to really engage with these terrible things that Israel is doing to a conversation, which is a more comfortable conversation, because it’s about Jews in the role of victims, which is basically the role that have established American Jewish organizations have always been casting Jews, right?

Now, this is not to say that there is not antisemitism going on in the United States. They clearly is, right? As I said a few weeks ago, we know that antisemitism tends to go up when there’s more violence in Israel-Palestine. But the descriptions of the kind of antisemitism that is supposedly happening on college campuses, right, is completely divorced from actual reality. And this is kind of what you see in this congressional testimony. So, what happens in these congressional hearings is the Republicans keep on alleging that these universities are infested with massive amounts of antisemitism, and not just antisemitism, but genocidal antisemitism, right? There’s no discussion in the hearings whatsoever of any context about what’s happening in Gaza that might help to explain why anyone on a college campus might be upset at Israel right now. Literally, you could watch that entire hearing and you probably would not know that any Palestinians in Gaza had died. You certainly would not know that Israel is considered an apartheid state by its own leading human rights organizations. All you would know is that basically a bunch of rabid Jew haters woke up one morning on these college campuses and decided they were desperate to kill Jews, right?

And the Democrats don’t challenge this assumption really at all either. The Democrats are basically completely useless, right? They throw out a few references to Trump’s antisemitism, or a couple of stray references to Islamophobia, or the fact that Republicans want to defund the civil rights wing of the Justice Department, but they never actually say anything about what’s happening to Palestinians that might create any context for what’s happening. So, in this completely decontextualized conversation, the Republicans refer to certain kinds of phrases, right? In particular, in this hearing, they refer a lot to the phrase, ‘intifada,’ right? Which they define as a call for the for genocide against Jews, right? Now, this is not, I think, a good faith description of what intifada means, right? Intifada basically is an Arabic word, basically means ‘uprise,’ right? It doesn’t mean uprising against Jews. There have been intifadas against Arab governments. The bread intifada in Egypt many, many years ago, right?

There were two Palestinian intifadas against Israel. The first one starting in 1987, the second one starting in late 2000. The first one involved stone throwing and Molotov cocktails, and also a lot of non-violence like boycotts, refusal to pay Israeli taxes. The second one was more violent, including really horrifying suicide bombings, for instance. The first came after 20 years of Israeli oppression, right? Again, the notion from the hearing you would think is that basically Palestinians just woke up one morning with this lust to just kill Jews and any Jews they could find, right? The First Intifada breaks out after 20 years of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The Second Intifada breaks out after Israel responds very brutally to Palestinians stone throwing after Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. Israelis feel that it’s after a period where they’ve tried to create a Palestinian state, but Palestinians feel it’s based in the context in which Israel has basically just continued to build settlement growth and move Palestinians further and further away from a state.

And in order to understand kind of what Palestinians were saying during the Second Intifada, which was the more murderous one, right, the more violent one. Here’s Marwan Barghouti writing in at the time in 2002, probably the most famous kind of architect or person involved in that Second Intifada. He goes to jail for it. Marwan Barghouti writes, ‘the only way for Israelis to have security is quite simply to end the 35-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Israelis must abandon the myth that it is possible to have peace and occupation at the same time, that peaceful coexistence is possible between slave and master. The lack of Israeli security is born of the lack of Palestinian freedom,’ right? These are not calls for Jewish genocide, right? This is a violent uprising against Israeli oppression; I happen to think a counterproductive one, and one that involved some really, really immoral actions like these suicide bombings. But they’re not a call for the genocide of all Jews, right?

But this is the pretext that is laid out by the Republicans, and these Democrats don’t challenge it, and the university presidents don’t challenge it. The university presidents are so desperate basically just not to say anything their lawyers think will get them in trouble that they basically give these robotic, evasive kind of platitudinous answers again and again and again, right. So, then you get to, Elise Stefanik, right? She’s this Member of Congress from New York state. She’s supposedly a great defender of the Jews even though she’s a big Trump supporter and she’s endorsed the Great Replacement Theory. But whatever. We’re supposed to believe she’s a huge defender of the Jews, right? So, basically, she says, will you say, university presidents, that it is not acceptable to call for the genocide of Jews on your campus. Well, like, no one has actually presented any evidence that there have been calls for the genocide of Jews on these campuses, right? And so, the president of MIT, to her credit says, ‘I haven’t heard anyone calling for the genocide of Jews.’ And Stefanic says, ‘no, but you’ve heard the chants of intifada, right?’

And because these university presidents are too afraid to get into any substantive discussion of what intifada means and the context of Israel-Palestine, they basically accept this premise, this ridiculous premise, that intifada means a call for the genocide of all Jews, right? And then they’re screwed, right? Because basically like now, once they’ve accepted this premise, unless they basically say that calling for the intifada, that would be an offense that you have to suspend someone for or fire them or expel them for, right, which they don’t want to do because they know that’s a blatant violation of free speech, they can’t give a forthright answer which says, ‘yes, it’s not acceptable to call for the genocide of Jews.’ Whereas the honest thing to say would be, ‘of course, it’s not acceptable to call for the genocide of Jews, but these pro-Palestinian protesters are not saying that.’ Now, it doesn’t mean that one has to love all their all their slogans. I don’t love the slogan ‘intifada revolution’ or ‘globalize the intifada,’ which means some kind of globalized uprising against Israeli and presumably American oppression too because America is deeply behind this, right? And again, I don’t even love the phrase ‘Palestine from the river to the sea.’ I could think of various different phrases I would prefer. But none of these phrases are on their face anything like calls for Jewish genocide. And you can look at what Rashida Tlaib or Marc Lamont Hill have said about what they mean by the phrase ‘Palestine from the river to the sea.’ What they mean by it is equality between Palestinians and Jews. They’re very explicit about it, right?

But the presidents accept this this pretext and then basically, politically, they’re completely screwed. And so, what makes this even more surreal, right, is that what’s happening in Gaza, right, even if you don’t go as far as calling it a genocide, right, it has involved the displacement of 85% of the people of Gaza from their homes, more people in Gaza, more women and children killed in two months than were killed in 20 years in the US war in Afghanistan. So, in that context, right, if you’re worried about genocide or things that could potentially be genocide, right, to think that what you should be worried about is the chant of intifada on a college campus, right, when you have this magnitude of slaughter, I mean, it’s completely surreal. But the surreality is the point. This is exactly the point. It is to basically turn people’s attention away from what’s happening in Gaza and create an entirely different conversation based on the alleged motivations of critics in the United States. This is not to say that antisemitism isn’t a genuine concern in the United States. It is a genuine concern. It always has been. And there’s more antisemitism probably since October 7th again because tragically there always tends to be when there’s more violence, right? But to suggest that that’s the story of genocide, right, given what’s happening in Gaza, it’s completely Orwellian, right?

And even more kind of absurd, right, and kind of Orwellian is the fact that these Members of Congress, these Republicans, were basically out of one side of their mouth, they’re saying, ‘are you going to expel these students? Are you going to suspend them? Are you going to fire them? Who have you fired? Who have you expelled?’ In the next breath they say, ‘we don’t think you truly believe in free speech and academic freedom. We don’t believe you really oppose cancel culture because you haven’t given enough free speech to conservatives,’ right? I mean, on the one hand, they’re saying, ‘you don’t support free speech enough.’ On the other hand, they’re saying basically, ‘we demand that you ban and suspended fire and expel these pro-Palestinian students.’ Now, I actually do think there have been serious offenses against conservative free speech on college campuses. I’ve actually written about this. I wrote about why universities needed to allow people like Charles Murray and Milo Yiannopoulos, people whose views I very much dislike, to speak on college campuses. But you can’t have it both ways, right? You can’t say the problem with universities is they don’t really believe in free speech, and then demand that they crack down on free speech.

Some people who fancy themselves a little more sophisticated, right, have said—conservatives, I’m talking about kind of pro-Israel conservatives—said ‘no, we really do believe in free speech but we are against the double standards. We believe there’s been a double standard in which people get punished for saying things about Black people or LGBT people, but they don’t get punished for saying the same things about Jews.’ I also think that’s nonsense. It’s just not actually true, right? If it were the case that there were people who were saying ‘kill all the Jews,’ and they were getting away with it, then maybe you would have a case. But there’s actually been no evidence presented that that’s actually what’s happening, right? And in fact, you know, as far as I know, Penn, you know, Columbia, Brandeis, George Washington University have not banned their young Republicans clubs, right, even though those Republican clubs now represent a party led by Donald Trump that has called for banning all Muslims in the United States, basically have a kind of fundamentally racist agenda when it comes to the right of Black people to vote, right? Those Republican clubs are still there, right? And yet it’s the Students for Justice in Palestine clubs at these schools that have been suspended or banned, right? So, I don’t actually see a double standard in which people can say things about Jews that they can’t say about Black people or LGBT people.

It seems to me actually what’s happening since October 7th is a significant ratcheting up of the suppression of free speech beyond anything we saw beyond that, and especially because it’s now being pushed by politicians. It’s being pushed by the federal government and state governments. Ron DeSantis has demanded that Students for Justice in Palestine be banned on Florida campuses. We’re seeing all kinds of bills in state legislatures and Congress to basically federally mandate these, you know, the limitations on pro-Palestinian speech. And that is the agenda here, right? And we are in a moment that will go down as a kind of historic assault on freedom of speech. And one of the things that we’re seeing in this moment that’s becoming clear is this institutional infrastructure that is designed to give Israel impunity for whatever it wants to do, the worse what Israel does becomes the more that infrastructure needs to mobilize against the free speech rights of Americans because there are a lot of progressive Americans who are looking at what’s happening in Gaza, doing exactly the thing that the American Jewish establishment doesn’t want them to do. They’re looking at what’s happening, and they want to mobilize against it. And the more they mobilize against it—because of how things bad things are there—the more you have to make an effort to silence them. And therefore, this kind of infrastructure designed to give Israel impunity ends up being a really serious threat to freedom of speech on college campuses. And not just college campuses, as we’ve seen, for instance, the effort to criminalize people who support Boycott Divestment Sanction. So, the struggle, it seems to me to end Israeli impunity also is a struggle for academic freedom and free speech in the United States.

Our call this week for paid subscribers will be at Thursday at 1pm, not our normal Friday, Thursday at 1pm. We’ll be joined by Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. Trita has written three books—excellent books—about the relation between the United States, Israel, and Iran. And we’re going to talk about the kind of regional context of Israel’s Gaza war: how Iran has been behaving, what are the potential for some kind of regional war that could grow out of this. That’ll be Thursday at 1pm for paid subscribers.

Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Mikhael Manekin. For me, some of the most unsettling scenes from Gaza have been the images of Jewish worship— a soldier using a knife as his yad (pointer) as he reads Torah, a soldier reciting the Shema from the balcony of a mosque, soldiers singing to welcome Shabbat at the Islamic University of Gaza. It’s not the liturgy itself that unnerves me. It’s the images of religious conquest, which make me fear this war’s consequences not just for Palestinians and Israelis, but for Judaism. Mikhael is the perfect person to ask about this. He’s one of the leaders of Faithful Left, a new movement of religious Israelis fighting Occupation and ethnic superiority. He’s a former director of Breaking the Silence, the organization of former Israeli soldiers that works to expose the reality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And he’s the author of a new book about violence, morality and Judaism entitled, End of Days: Ethics, Tradition and Power in Israel.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Benjamin Netanyahu demands that Palestinians in Gaza be “deradicalized.”

The UN estimates that 85 percent of people in Gaza have been displaced their homes.

The Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza estimates that 40 percent of the Strip’s people risk starvation.

According to The Wall Street Journal, almost 70 percent of Gaza’s homes are destroyed or damaged.

Prof. Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, warns that in the coming year, 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza could die of disease.

Mairav Zonszein on the absence of Palestinians in Israeli media.

In a December poll, 83 percent of Israeli Jews said they support encouraging “voluntary migration” from Gaza.

Nikki Haley says Palestinians in Gaza should leave.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I wrote about how Harvard’s new antisemitism task force is ignoring its own antisemitism scholars.

For Jewish Currents’ podcast, On the Nose, I interviewed Muhammad Shehada and Khalil Sayegh about growing up in Gaza under Hamas.  

In The New York Times, I wrote about how Israel might have responded differently to October 7

Bernie Steinberg, former executive director of Harvard Hillel, condemns the “McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare, which, in effect, turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine.”

Sara Roy on Israel’s long war on Gaza.

The New York Times on Hamas’ use of sexual violence on October 7.

Abdalhadi Alijla, Rajan Menon, and Daniel Byman on why Israel can’t destroy Hamas.

Mosab Abu Toha’s exit from Gaza.

I talked about Israel’s war in Gaza and the debate about it in the US on Democracy Now, the Majority Report with Sam Seder, Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith podcast and with Aaron Miller on WBUR.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. A few days ago, Benjamin Netanyahu published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, laying out Israel’s war aims in Gaza. And among them was that Gaza’s population would have to be ‘deradicalized.’ And what Netanyahu meant by that was that they could no longer support violence against Israeli civilians, essentially. It’s really important that Palestinians don’t support violence against Israeli civilians. I just happen to think that this is exactly the wrong way to go about it since the right way to convince Palestinians not to support violence against Israeli civilians is to show that ethical resistance actually works, not to hold Palestinians under permanent occupation and cause massive catastrophe in Gaza, as Israel has done.

But putting that aside, it made me start to think about this idea of radicalization. Because if we take Netanyahu’s definition, essentially, that radicalization means support of violence against civilians, then it seems to me that we should be reckoning with the radicalization of many Jews both in Israel, and the United States, and around the world—and indeed, the radicalization of many Americans. Just look, after all, at the scale of the violence against civilians that most Israeli Jews, and almost all establishment American Jewish organizations, support. The United Nations now estimates that 85% of Gaza’s people have been displaced from their homes. The UN estimates that 40% risk starvation, that 70% of the homes in Gaza have been damaged or totally destroyed. And I’m going to read a quote from Professor Devi Sridhar, who’s the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, who wrote this in The Guardian a few days ago: ‘unless something changes, the world faces the prospect of almost a quarter of Gaza’s 2 million population—close to half-a million human beings—dying within a year. These would be largely deaths from preventable health causes and the collapse of the medical system.’

So, this is the scale of the violence against civilians that has pretty significant Jewish support, both in Israel and around the world, and especially from the leading institutions of American Jewry. And not only from them, but from many American politicians—virtually the entire Republican Party. And it’s not only this massive destruction against civilians that enjoys widespread support, but indeed the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza enjoys widespread support. There was a poll that recently showed that 83% of Israeli Jews would support what they call ‘voluntary migration’ from Gaza, which seems to me not very voluntary at all, given that you’ve created a massive humanitarian catastrophe from which people are trying to flee in order to save their lives. And Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley endorsed ethnic cleansing of Gaza just a few days ago when she said that people in Gaza should go to ‘pro-Hamas countries.’

So, it seems to me that by Netanyahu’s own definition, we have a pretty serious problem of radicalization, in his words, in the American Jewish community and among American leaders. And people might say, no, no, no, it’s not the same because this Israeli violence against civilians is not purposeful. But I just don’t think after what we’ve seen over the past few months that’s sustainable at all. When you when you deny food and water and fuel to an entire population of 2 million, you can’t say it’s not purposeful when huge numbers of civilians die. Even Joe Biden, who has been a very stalwart supporter of Israel, has called Israel’s bombing in Gaza, ‘indiscriminate.’

So, the question it seems to me that we should be asking ourselves—those of us who are Jewish, and American, or both—is how did we get to this radicalization, this place where so many of us are willing to support this catastrophic destruction of human life in Gaza? And I don’t have a simple answer to that. I think this is something that I’m going to be thinking about and trying to write about for quite a long time to come. But I would just note this. Look at the publications that support this war: the publications in Israel, the publications in the United States. Look at the Jewish institutions that support this war. Look at the think tanks that support this war. And one of the things you will notice they have in common is they almost never platform Palestinians. If a publication does not publish Palestinians, you can be pretty certain it supports this war. Same with a television network. If a publication regularly publishes Palestinians, or a TV network regularly puts Palestinians on the air, or a think tank regularly hosts Palestinian speakers, or a Jewish institution regularly hosts Palestinian speakers, with almost exact certainty, you can be certain that they will not support this war. If people have exceptions, I’d be interested in hearing this, but I can’t off the top of my head think of a single exception. There is a very, very almost exact correlation between the willingness to listen to Palestinians and support for this war.

One of the things that I think Americans have not sufficiently appreciated about discourse in Israel, for instance, is the almost universal absence of Palestinian voices from Israeli mainstream media. This is a quote from Mairav Zonszein from the International Crisis Group’s representative in Israel. Mairav writes: ‘since this war began, there’s been almost no interviews in Israeli media with someone in Gaza or from Gaza. Even worse, I don’t think I’ve seen a single Palestinian politician, citizen, resident, anyone on any panel on Israeli TV since the war began.’ Where you have an absence of Palestinian voices, you have support for mass killing of Palestinians. You have radicalization. And I think that part of the reason for this, for this kind of close correlation between listening to Palestinians and not supporting this war, is simply that Palestinians will tell you—if you listen to them—that even putting morality aside, that this war is not going to work. I have literally not heard a single Palestinian commentator, journalist since October 7th—if there are examples, people are welcome to send them to me—tell me that they think that this war is going to be successful on its own terms, by which I mean making Israeli Jews more safe. Almost overwhelmingly, they’ve said they think it will make Israeli Jews less safe because it will create more Palestinian hatred and lead to more Palestinian desire for violence, perhaps even from groups that are more radical than Hamas.

So, partly I just think intellectually, if you listen to Palestinians, it’s likely to undermine the basic argument that people are making for this war. But I think at a more human level—maybe this is a really simplistic thing to say—I just think it’s very difficult to support massive violence against people that you can humanize, that you can see as fully human, that you listen to, and that you can identify with. And that’s why the almost total blackout on Palestinian voices in pro-war media is so important. And it’s why it’s such a moral disaster that for my entire adult lifetime there has been an almost total blackout on Palestinian voices in establishment American Jewish institutions, in schools, in camps, in synagogues, in Jewish community centers. It is that absence of voices that has created this radicalization, this profound dehumanization that allows people to look at these statistics about the number of Palestinians being killed, or perhaps just not even look at all because they’re not willing to take the time to do so, and basically be willing to support this. The radicalization is because of an unwillingness to see Palestinians as fully human. Now many people might not admit that they don’t see Palestinians as fully human, but my point is that their actions show that they don’t see Palestinians as fully human. Because when you see people as fully human, you give them the dignity of listening to them. And that is still not, still not the norm in establishment American Jewish life, in American Jewish communal life, and it’s not the norm in large parts of American public discourse, let alone Israeli public discourse. And that, it seems to me, is why we are where we are in this moment of utter human catastrophe, man-made human catastrophe in Gaza.

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown. Omer is one of the world’s most prominent scholars of the Holocaust. He’s also an Israeli who has warned about the genocidal rhetoric of some Israeli leaders since October 7. Now that South Africa has brought a case to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide for its actions since October 7, I want to ask Omer what he thinks of that legal argument. In the wake of the controversy over Masha Gessen’s declaration that in Gaza, “the ghetto is being liquidated,” I also want to ask him when, if ever, it’s appropriate to compare Israel’s actions to that of the Nazis. 

Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Mahmoud Mamdani’s book, Neither Settler nor Native.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen analyzes the public health catastrophe that Israel’s war is causing in Gaza.

In the London Review of Books, Mahmoud Muna writes about selling books in Jerusalem after October 7.

In the Boston Review, Barnett Rubin probes the relationship between Zionism and colonialism.

Mairav Zonszein on why Israel faces the “most unstable and precarious situation it has ever been in, certainly in a generation.”

A Beinart Notebook subscriber, David Mandel, is running for Congress on a platform that includes a ceasefire in Gaza.

In The New York Times, I wrote about the Israeli government’s growing threats to expel people in Gaza.

I’ll be speaking about Israel, Gaza, and the US debate about the war at the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke on January 16 and at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School on January 25.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I want to say something about the firing of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, not because I’m so particularly interested in Harvard or Claudine Gay, but because I think it’s a window into a question that I think is really important. And the question is: why does pro-Palestine activism produce such a ferocious response in the United States? So, the straw that broke the camel’s back was these allegations of plagiarism. But really, what got this whole thing going was her response to October 7th, and the claim that she hadn’t responded aggressively enough to students who blamed the October 7th massacre on Israel, and then that she hadn’t condemned the phrase ‘intifada’ in her congressional testimony, which was claimed to represent a genocidal threat towards Jews. So, there were people who clearly didn’t like her to begin with because they identified her with diversity, equity, inclusion as the first Black president of Harvard. And they were hostile to her, but they didn’t have the political juice really to get rid of her until there was this added element of the debate over Israel, ‘antisemitism,’ and especially her response to pro-Palestine activism.

So, the question is: what makes that pro-Palestine activism so scary that it produces such a ferocious reaction? We’ve seen this for quite a few years now, right? Why is it that in many states in the United States you can’t work for state government unless you promise not to boycott Israel? Why is it that Students for Justice in Palestine chapters are now being banned on college campuses? I mean, they’re not banning the anti-abortion groups or the young Republicans groups even in the age of Trump. Why is it that they’re banning, or suspending, the Students for Justice in Palestine? Why is it that Rashida Tlaib gets censured? All of the different members of Congress with serious problems. Why is it that social media is banning pro-Palestine activists? My suggestion is there’s something particular about the nature of pro-Palestine activism that produces this really ferocious response in the United States.

Now, some might say, well, this is just because, you know, there are a lot of pro-Israel Jewish organizations out there that mobilize because they feel like this activism represents a threat to Israel. I don’t think that’s a sufficient answer. It is true, of course, that AIPAC and other kinds of American pro-Israel Jewish groups, you know, wield their influence. But especially when you’re talking about conservative white Americans, like a lot of those members of Congress, for instance, who were berating Claudine Gay and the other presidents, they don’t have a lot of Jewish constituents. And frankly, if AIPAC goes to them, and tells them that they should be against pro-Palestinian activism, I think AIPAC is walking into an open door. Ideologically, they are already have a strong proclivity, I think, to see pro-Palestine activism as a threat.

Remember, the biggest pro-Israel organization in the United States is Christians United for Israel. It’s not a Jewish organization. When the state legislature in Arkansas passes a law that basically makes it impossible to work for the state of Arkansas if you want to boycott Israel, I don’t think that’s only about Israel. I think it has, in a state like Arkansas where there are very few Jews, it has also to do with America. Now, people say, well, there’s a Christian tendency to want to support Israel. It’s not just about Christianity. Remember, Black Christians, Hispanic Christians don’t have the same view about Israel that many white evangelical Christians do. What I think is lurking beneath all of this is the deep association between Israel and the United States as kind of promised lands forged on a hostile frontier that only came into existence because they dispossessed the people who were there.

The suggestion that I want to make about the reason that pro-Palestine activism is so frightening to certain groups of Americans, particularly Americans who are the most deeply invested in America’s founding myths, the reason they find pro-Palestinian activism’s threat to Israel’s legitimacy so frightening is not just because they care so much about Israel. It’s because they see the assault on Israel’s legitimacy as an assault on America’s legitimacy because the foundations of the two countries have a tremendous amount in common. And I would even go so far as to say that there is a figure that is lurking behind the US-Israel-Palestine debate, lurking behind the Palestine solidarity activism, that makes it so terribly frightening to a whole cast of Americans, particularly white conservative Americans. And that figure is the American Indian.

So, because pro-Palestine activism offers a model that if applied to America would be profoundly threatening to many people in the United States. Why is it that Americans respond so many so viscerally to terms like ‘settler colonialism,’ ‘decolonization,’ ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’? I don’t think it’s only because people have an investment in Israel. I think because at some level, maybe only semi-conscious, people recognize that that same intellectual framework, that decolonization framework, would be profoundly destabilizing for the United States as we know it.

You know, it’s just one of these things about America that Americans in political discourse talk so rarely about Native Americans, and yet it’s there under the surface. And I want to read something from Mahmoud Mamdani’s, the Columbia professor, you know, really important book, Neither Settler nor Native, because the book is really all about these interconnections. And he writes about America. He writes, ‘our nation was born in genocide. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today, we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode.’

America’s settler colonial project has been much further along, much more successful than Israel’s, right? We don’t have the kind of hostile frontier anymore that Israel has with Gaza. But the United States did at one point. That is in the deep recesses of, I think, the American political consciousness. And there’s a way in which Palestine solidarity activism brings that to the fore. If you read the literature of pro-Palestine activism, in fact it often makes this explicit. So, if you look at Palestine solidarity discourse, often it doesn’t refer to the United States. It calls it ‘Turtle Island,’ right? Which is a term that essentially challenges the legitimacy of the United States by giving it an American Indian pre-colonial name. You hear the phrase ‘land back,’ right, a phrase from American Indians wanting land back, very often used in pro-Palestine activism.

And this is what I think it adds to the DEI conversation because when Americans think about DEI, they tend to think in terms of Black and white Americans and the threat of full Black equality, or historical justice, reparations, etc., for Americans. And there’s been a lot of conversation about the analogies between Israel and Palestine and the situation of Black Americans. But I think that’s not the really frightening analogy for Americans who are deeply invested in America’s founding myths. It’s not the analogy between Palestinians and Black Americans. That’s actually a more manageable one. It’s the analogy between Palestinians and American Indians.

And here, this is Mamdani again. Mamdani is talking about the different way in which Americans talk about Black people and talk about American Indians. He writes, ‘Blacks have been governed by a regime of white supremacy, the struggle against which has been incorporated into the American sense of self, a fact demonstrated by the comfort with which racists cite Martin Luther King and other icons of Civil Rights. Indians, by contrast, have been governed by colonialism, which, if recognized, would destroy the American sense of self.’ I think what he’s saying is a conversation even about full equality and historical justice for Black Americans would fundamentally change the United States in a way that many Americans don’t want it to be changed, but doesn’t actually fundamentally challenge the legitimacy of the United States because Black Americans in the main have been asking for full equality. They haven’t been asking for decolonization. The Black challenge does not necessarily represent a threat to the existence of the United States itself.

And you can think about just this in terms of the debate about monuments, right? So, there’s been a lot of debate about all of these Confederate monuments that people want to, you know, want to get rid of. That’s destabilizing to a lot of white Americans but doesn’t threaten the legitimacy of the project. Those people were, after all, rebels, right? But if you try to apply that same logic to all of the people that we celebrate in the United States who were Indian killers—just go into the United States West in particular. And you think about the celebration of people like generals like Sheridan and Sherman, or even presidents like Lincoln and Grant or Jackson who were profoundly implicated in the genocide of Native Americans. And you realize that for Americans to start to wrestle with the question, seriously wrestle with the demands of American Indians, is more destabilizing to the legitimacy of the American project than the challenges of Black Americans. And it’s precisely that, I think, that makes the pro-Palestine activist movement so frightening. Because whether Americans are fully conscious or not, there is at some level a recognition of the analogy between the demands that are made in the pro-Palestine activist world increasingly for decolonization and a sense of what that would mean if we were to go down that road at all in United States.

And this is why there’s a part of me that is somewhat pessimistic about the ability of changing US policy towards Israel because there’s a part of me that thinks that, at its deepest level, the reason that America has its policy is not just because of Joe Biden or because of AIPAC or because of that kind of stuff, that fundamentally perhaps the biggest obstacle to America having a fundamentally different attitude towards Israel-Palestine is the American willingness to actually grapple with ourselves as a settler colonial nation, and to think about what it would mean to actually think in any terms about undergoing a decolonization process in the United States. And because that question is so frightening. But that’s a big part of what makes pro-Palestine activism in the United States so frightening. Thanks very much. I hope to see many of you on our call on Friday.

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi, America’s most eminent historian of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian struggle. We’ll talk about this latest iteration of what he’s called “The Hundred Years' War on Palestine”— what’s new and what’s old since October 7. We’ll talk about where the Palestinian national movement goes from here, why Palestinian freedom has become a defining issue for progressive activists and what the crackdown on that activism means for America’s universities.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

This Friday’s call will also be open to Jewish Currents members. Currents members will gain access to my Friday Zoom calls roughly once a month.

Sources Cited in this Video

Mairav Zonszein on why some families of Israeli hostages support a cease-fire. In my video, I accidentally called her the ICG’s representative in Gaza. I meant to say Israel.

Former Mossad head Tamir Pardo, former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert call for releasing Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

A friend who disagrees with my views on Israel-Palestine says that despite the disclaimer above, I rarely share writing that defends Israel’s policies. Fair enough. Here’s an essay by Michael Walzer that argues that destroying Hamas is a moral necessity. 

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane talks to two Biden administration staffers organizing from the inside against Biden’s support for this war.

Why South Africans care so much about Palestinian freedom.

Nimer Sultany on how the genocide case at the International Court of Justice pitsthe global north against the global south.Nimer Sultany on how the genocide case at the International Court of Justice pits the global north against the global south.

Fadi Quran on why this war is destroying Israel’s image of military invincibility across the Middle East.

I’ll be speaking about Israel, Gaza and the US debate about the war at the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke on January 16 and at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School on January 25.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the Israeli hostages who are in Gaza because we’ve reached the 100-day mark of their captivity. And in Jewish communities there have been a series of events around that 100-day mark. And watching these events for the hostages, what strikes me is that the organizations that are organizing these events, and have been organizing throughout these 100 days to keep the focus on the hostages and to demand their release, are also generally organizations that support the war. And emotionally, that makes a lot of sense because I think in a period of agony and grief and pain like this, there’s a desire for Jewish solidarity, which I feel as well. I understand.

And so, the impetus for solidarity is to say: a) solidarity with the hostages, so demanding their release; and b) solidarity with the state of Israel itself, and therefore supporting its policies—in this case, the policies of war. Emotionally, I understand why these two things go together. But it seems to me that actually, analytically, it makes no sense whatsoever. Which is to say, if you actually care passionately about getting as many of the hostages as possible released alive, you should be adamantly opposed to this war because the imperatives of continuing the war and the imperatives of getting the hostages out—as many of them as possible alive—are in direct contradiction. And let me just try to explain why I think they are.

So, first of all, one of the things that I think has become clear over these several months is that Israel’s military force in Gaza is not leading to the rescue of Israeli hostages. There may have been one person who was rescued very early on, but Israel has not since then rescued any hostages despite having all of these soldiers there. So, that might have been considered to be one potential benefit from the point of view of saving hostages of this war. It’s not. Secondly, there was an argument that we used to hear a lot, which was that the military pressure that Israel was putting on Hamas was going to lead Hamas to kind of come to the table on better terms to release a lot more of the hostages. Well, that seems to me it’s pretty frankly disproven. We’ve now gone quite a long time since the hostage exchange earlier in the war. And Hamas’ terms are not getting better. They’re actually getting tougher. So, the military pressure is not actually making it easier to get these hostages released through negotiation.

And thirdly, and this is perhaps the most obvious, but I feel like it’s somehow not mentioned that much, is it that the bombs that Israel is dropping in Gaza—and the denial of food, water, fuel, the things that are leading to starvation and to public health catastrophe in Gaza—these don’t only endanger the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, they endanger the lives of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Mairav Zonszein, my friend who’s a very gifted journalist, who’s also the International Crisis Group representative in Gaza, has an op-ed in the New York Times recently making exactly this point that she notes that some of the hostages who have been released from Gaza have said that among the things that terrified them while they were there were the Israeli bombs that were dropping all around them. They were terrified. They were probably also terrified for good reason of their Hamas captors, but they were also terrified like everybody else in Gaza of being killed by this massive destruction that Israel was raining on Gaza. And so, that’s another very obvious way in which the prosecution of the war endangers the lives of the hostages.

And I think that’s why—this is the point that Mairav makes—in the United States that the focusing on the hostages and supporting the war seem to go hand in hand, [but] that actually in Israel to focus on the hostages is much more of an anti-war position. That many of the hostage families have now come forward and said we want the government to be willing to do whatever it takes to release our relatives, our family members, even if that means ending the war because Hamas does seem, from the reporting, like it said that one of the things it would demand for release of the hostages is a ceasefire.

Now, the argument against that, of course, is that Israel will then have had a ceasefire without destroying Hamas, so it will not have achieved its goals. But that really is only a concession if you believe that the goal was achievable to begin with—the goal of destroying Hamas. Now, I think Israel could probably have deposed Hamas from power in Gaza already. I think that it could do that even under, you know, even with a ceasefire that happened tomorrow. But the argument against stopping the war is that you will not have destroyed Hamas. But I want to quote a former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who makes this point very bluntly. He says, ‘the odds of achieving the complete elimination of Hamas were nil from the moment that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the chief goal of the war.’ Which is to say, yes, you’re giving up on the idea of destroying Hamas by negotiating a ceasefire that’s part of a hostage release, but that was not a realistic goal to begin with.

Another argument against this would be that releasing the hostages would require not only a ceasefire but very likely the release of a large number of Palestinian prisoners—Israel has 7,000 Palestinians in prison—maybe as many as all of them. And so, people will understandably say, well, look what happened when Israel released 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to get abducted soldier Gilad Shalit back a number of years ago. Many of those soldiers took up arms against Israel, and indeed some of them are key figures in the Hamas October 7th attack. So, how could Israel do that again?

But it seems to me, the critical point is that yes, if you do this deal and release all these prisoners, and then maintain an Israeli policy which is to deny Palestinians basic freedom in perpetuity, to maintain Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and control over Gaza as far as the eye can see, yes, then it’s very, very likely that many of these people will come back and pick up arms. But if you thought about this prisoner release, and this prisoner deal for the hostages, and a ceasefire, as part of the beginnings of a political strategy that gave Palestinians a horizon for freedom, then it might be less likely that some of those folks would take up arms because I think historically Palestinians have been less inclined to use armed resistance at times when they had a greater degree of hope that there was a horizon for Palestinian freedom and self-determination.

And this, I think, is what former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon has been talking about. He’s one of a number of former top Israeli officials now who are arguing for some kind of swap of Palestinian prisoners for hostages, among them former Mossad Head Tamir Pardo. But Ayalon makes the specific point that he would want Marwan Barghouti to be one of the prisoners that Israel released as part of such a deal. Marwan Barghouti is the most famous Palestinian prisoner. And what Ami Ayalon is getting at is not just a hostage-for-prisoner exchange, but doing so in the context of an effort to revive the Palestinian Liberation Organization as a legitimate and functional body, and potentially that becoming the basis for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

I think for such an effort to have any chance of success, Israel would have to take dramatic steps to show Palestinians that it is serious, as it has not been for a very, very long time, about negotiations with Palestinians towards the horizon for Palestinian freedom, whether that was in a separate Palestinian state or in some kind of integrated one state. So, for instance, one thing Israel could do would be to start to remove settlements deep in the West Bank, particularly those from which settler violence is terrorizing Palestinians. Another would be to declare publicly that there will be no normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, absent the blessing of a legitimate Palestinian leadership. These things, it seems to me, would change the political climate in such a way that the consequences of releasing Palestinian prisoners would be somewhat different. Now, I don’t think these things are very likely to happen at all. But I think this is the path that would be most likely to save as many of the hostages as possible.

And one of the terrible ironies, it seems to me, of the moment we’re in now is that the Israeli hostages in Gaza and the Palestinians in Gaza have something very fundamental in common: and that is that they’re not actually most of them from Gaza. The Israelis were abducted and taken to Gaza on October 7th. But most of the Palestinians in Gaza are not from Gaza either. Most of them come from families that were expelled or who fled in fear during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. And now, all of them are in terrible, terrible danger because of this war. And it seems to me that we should have a united desire for all of them to be safe, to end the war that is endangering all of their lives. And beyond that, to see the moral imperative of the right of all of them to return safely to the places from which they were forcibly taken or expelled. And so, that means that the Israeli hostages should be allowed to return safely to the places that they were from, but also in the longer term, in this political horizon that I hope could emerge, that the Palestinians from Gaza who are not from Gaza, they should also have the right to go back to the places that their families are from. That the right to be safe, and the right to live in the place that you were from, rather than being forcibly evicted from that place, that that’s a right that both Israeli Jews and Palestinians have. And that that’s something that we need to fight for for all of the people in Gaza: the Palestinians in Gaza and the Israelis in Gaza, all of whom today are in a form of captivity.

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guests will be two of America’s most insightful commentators on Israel-Palestine, and foreign policy more generally: Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah and Terrell Starr, author of the Black Diplomats newsletter on Substack. We’ll talk about the evolution of Black political discourse on Israel-Palestine and the way race structures debates over America’s role in the world.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Rashid Khalidi, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

My essay in Jewish Currents about Harvard’s old antisemitism task force.

Harvard’s new antisemitism task force, co-chaired by Professor Derek Penslar.

Penslar’s book, Zionism: An Emotional State.

Abe Foxman and Bill Ackman attack Penslar.

Alan Dershowitz calls for disbanding Jewish Studies departments (14 minutes into the video).

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane and Jonathan Shamir explain the dangers of a regional war in the Middle East.

Joe Biden admits that US strikes against the Houthis in Yemen aren’t working—then says they’ll continue.

A Breaking the Silence explainer answering the claim that Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2005.

I’ll be speaking about Israel, Gaza and the debate about the war on campus at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School on January 25.

The night before my event, Harvard Medical School is sponsoring a symposium on the public health crisis in Gaza.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

Hi. There’s been a lot of talk of course about antisemitism since October 7th. And there has been, I think, clearly a rise of antisemitism, and I’ve talked about that before. But I also think that underneath this discussion of antisemitism are also dynamics among American Jews inside the American Jewish community that are sometimes obscured from view that the media doesn’t quite pick up on. And these are a kind of, I would say, an intra-Jewish civil war. The civil war is partly generational with younger American Jews often expressing views about Israel that are deemed antisemitic by major American Jewish organizations, for instance, boycotting Israel and not supporting Israel as a Jewish state. But there’s another divide, I think, kind of hidden divide, inside the American Jewish community that is often overlooked, that gets described in the language of antisemitism. And that’s a kind of a divide around class between different elements in the Jewish community that have different views about Israel and that are in different positions in terms of class. And I want to try to give an example of how this is playing itself out.

So, after October 7th, the president of Harvard University, then-president Claudine Gay, came under pressure to appoint a kind of a committee to look into antisemitism at the campus. Now, almost nobody on the committee had any scholarly credentials in the study of antisemitism. What it did have was a whole group of people who had either said that they believed that anti-Zionism was antisemitism, which would be to say that a lot of the pro-Palestinian activism at Harvard was therefore antisemitic, and people who had ties to the Anti-Defamation League, which has said that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And that was a set of views that, although again none of these people really had scholarly credentials on this question, that made establishment American Jewish organizations happy, and made many of the donors who were upset at Harvard, it made them happy. And I wrote a column in Jewish Currents about the absurdity of the fact that Harvard and these other universities were creating committees to study antisemitism on their campuses, and often ignoring their own experts who studied antisemitism, and going to choose people instead for these committees whose qualifications that they had views that were similar to the views of donors who were upset by pro-Palestinian activism. So, for instance, the University of Pennsylvania, when they created an antisemitism commission, the person who they named to head the committee was the head of the dental school.

But interestingly, at Harvard, things have now taken a turn. So, Claudine Gay was essentially pushed out and now the interim president of Harvard has essentially scrapped that earlier antisemitism committee and created a new one. And its co-chair is a guy named Derek Penslar. Now, Derek Penslar runs Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. He’s a professor of Israel studies and he’s one of the world’s experts on both Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism. He recently wrote an acclaimed book called Zionism: an Emotional State, which actually has a whole chapter on the different motivations of people who have hated Zionism since its founding in the late 19th century, and the relationship between those different kinds of hostilities and antisemitism. So, essentially, he is kind of the perfect person, right, to co-chair a committee on antisemitism at Harvard because he’s a world’s expert not only on antisemitism but on the relationship between Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism.

So, what has happened? A furor has erupted in which big donors to Harvard like Bill Ackman and establishment Jewish organizations leaders like Abe Foxman who ran the Anti-Defamation League are furious that Penslar has been put in charge of this committee to study antisemitism because he’s a critic of Israel. His criticisms are not radical by any means. In fact, I think he’s very much in the mainstream of how scholars of antisemitism and scholars in Jewish studies tend to see Israel. Which is to say, it’s very, very mainstream for scholars of Jewish studies in the United States to be very critical of Israel and even to raise questions about Zionism itself. And the scholarly consensus among people who study antisemitism is generally that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. So, the American Jewish establishment organizations and the Israeli government support a definition of antisemitism called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which essentially does gesture towards the idea that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. But while this has a lot of mainstream institutional support in the Jewish community, it doesn’t have very much support among scholars who actually study antisemitism. There are a bunch of scholars who’ve signed it, but if you look carefully, you’ll find that actually it doesn’t have very much support among scholars who actually study antisemitism and who study Israel-Palestine.

A competing definition, which is the one that Penslar has supported, which is called the Jerusalem Declaration, which doesn’t claim that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism, has much more support among scholars of Jewish studies and scholars of antisemitism. But the problem is that those scholars have a view that is very different than many of the large Jewish donors that are pressuring these universities and views that are very different from the establishment Jewish organizations. So, when a university responds to the question of antisemitism by drawing on the expertise of its own scholars of antisemitism rather than assuaging Jewish organizations and donors, it infuriates them. And this is because there is a kind of a class divide, you could say, among American Jews between a group of scholars who study these things whose views are really quite different in the main from the Jewish organizations and the donors. And it’s important to remember that very often it is large donors that dictate the perspectives of American Jewish organizations. So, there’s a kind of a class divide, you could almost say, that exists among American Jews in addition to this generational divide. And I would say it is between the kind of donor class—the donors to universities and a donor class that wields tremendous influence in organized American Jewish organizations—that wants to define anti-Zionism as antisemitism, and a kind of scholarly class—an intellectual class that you’d find actually doing Jewish studies at universities—that actually doesn’t generally believe that anti-Zion is antisemitism. And that’s the conflict you have now over the appointment of Derek Penslar.

It’s kind of a hilarious little footnote that Alan Dershowitz recently called for universities to disband their Jewish studies departments. Now, why would Alan Dershowitz call for universities to disband their Jewish departments? Presumably, he thinks that studying Judaism and Jewish history and Jewish culture is a good thing? No! He says we need to disband the Jewish studies departments because he believes that they’ve become hotbeds of antisemitism, right? Which is just his own way of saying these scholars who study Jewish history, who study Jewish studies, who study antisemitism, don’t actually come to the political conclusions that we would like. And that’s the situation that we’re facing now in this new little controversy around Derek Penslar’s appointment. And it’s another test for these universities, right? Are they gonna stand up for their own scholarly mission? Or are they gonna bow to pressure from donors and from outside groups who, although they’re speaking in the name of what they claim is good for Jews, right, or is in the interest of Jews, they’re actually in active opposition to empowering the very people who have spent their lives devoted to the scholarly study of antisemitism, like Derek Penslar. I hope to see many of you on our call this Friday and the information is in the email about our guests.

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Fadi Quran, a Senior Campaigner at Avaaz, a Popular Struggle community organizer in the West Bank and one of the most eloquent voices I know about the moral principles undergirding the struggle for Palestinian freedom. Since October 7, his writing has been desperate and enraged, but never lost its ethical core. We’ll talk about what it’s like to be a Palestinian watching Western governments tolerate—if not assist—Gaza’s destruction.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Rashid Khalidi, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Israel’s charge that UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 massacre.

Israel’s longstanding effort to abolish UNRWA.

The Biden administration’s decision to suspend aid to UNRWA.

UNRWA’s role in combatting the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), three aid workers describe life in Gaza.

A few weeks ago, on one of our Friday zoom calls, I interviewed Musallam Abukhalil, a doctor in Gaza. After treating thousands of displaced people, he has now been forced to flee his own home and is living in a tent in Rafah. He’s desperately trying to leave Gaza, and a friend has established a Gofundme page to help. If you can, please do.

In 972Mag, an anonymous Palestinian journalist in Gaza asks hard questions about both Israel and Hamas.

Israeli intelligence believes the death counts reported by Gaza’s ministry of health are reliable.

For Holocaust Memorial Day, incredible photos of resistance.

Last week, I spoke at Trinity-St. Paul's United Church in Toronto (here’s a video excerpt of that talk) and talked to the Parallax podcast.

Some listeners asked for a list of the Palestinian writers that Rashid Khalidi recommended in a recent call. Here’s what he subsequently sent to me:

The play “Tennis in Nablus” in Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace, eds., Inside/Outside: 6 Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora.

Ghassan Kanafani's, Returning to Haifa, adapted for the stage by Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace.

He also recommends Mahmud Darwish, Fadwa Touqan, Sahar Khalifeh, Murid al-Barghouti, Elias Khouri, Raja Shehadeh, Adania Shibli, Ibtisam Azem, and Suad Amiri. 

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

So, this presidential campaign will be narrated as a struggle of good against evil—evil being of course Donald Trump and the prospect of the end of American democracy. And good is the Biden administration, Joe Biden—maybe not great, but good, at least in the very basic sense that Joe Biden is not trying to put an end to American democracy. I believe that. I will vote for Joe Biden for those reasons. But to me, what’s so painful and frankly surreal when I think about what’s happening in Gaza is that I have to admit that I see a certain amount of evil in the policies of the administration that we’re being asked to see as the good guy in this domestic narrative.

For me, the entire experience of October 7th has been most surreal in the way that I have seen people who I generally think of in many contexts as good people, as decent people, supporting things that for me seem so fundamentally, profoundly indecent. And I think about the people who lead Biden’s foreign policy. People who went to schools very much like mine, whose life experience in many ways has been very much like mine, and people that I think I generally describe as kind of fundamentally benign figures and may in their personal lives be very benign. And then I see the things that the US is doing, and I feel just a very profound cognitive dissonance. And particularly in the last couple of days given the Biden administration’s decision to suspend US funding for UNRWA, which is the UN agency that works with Palestinian refugees.

And let me back up and kind of tell the story here. So, the International Court of Justice, in its ruling, ruled that ‘Israel must take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance who address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.’ Now, that’s kind of antiseptic language. But what the International Court of Justice is getting at here is that 90% of people in Gaza, according to reports, have gone a day without eating in their last few days; that 600,000 Palestinians in Gaza face catastrophic hunger; that there are breakouts of cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis; a 300% rise in miscarriages. Alex DeWaal, who’s an expert on famine at Tufts University, has said that the speed of this human-made famine in Gaza is unlike anything the world has witnessed in 75 years.

So, one would think under that context, especially in the wake of the International Court of Justice’s ruling, the Biden administration would at the very least not be doing anything to make those catastrophic conditions worse. And yet, this weekend, it did exactly that, which is it suspended aid to UNRWA, which works with refugees in Gaza. Now, the reason it did that was because Israel has made allegations that there were UNRWA employees—the US I think is saying there were 12 of them—that have been alleged to have participated in the October 7th attack. This evidence seems to have come from interrogations that Israel did with Hamas militants that they captured after October 7th.

Now, it should go without saying, of course, UN employees should never be allowed to be involved in violent attacks against civilians. UNRWA has fired these people, and they’ve called for an independent investigation. There’s a UN body that does investigations within the UN system. If other, you know, independent organizations should be involved in that, I think, that would be fine too. Israel is not an independent actor in this. So, you need an independent investigation, right? And if there needs to be new vetting in place to make sure that this doesn’t happen again, that seems to me all of course makes sense, right? But UNRWA employs 13,000 people in the Gaza Strip—the vast majority of them Palestinians, right? Twelve people have been accused so far that we know of being involved in this attack. And the Biden administration’s response to this, and then a whole bunch of European countries followed on, is to suspend US support for UNRWA. US is the biggest donor to UNRWA.

What does that mean in the midst of this humanitarian cataclysm? UNRWA is currently sheltering 1.2 million displaced people in Gaza, as 90% of people in Gaza have been displaced from their homes. It’s providing health care services to roughly 1 million people in Gaza. It is the lead actor in providing the humanitarian assistance—what little humanitarian assistance there is—that gives people in Gaza the chance that they might eat a bite of food that day, that their children might not die of typhoid or cholera. Probably the single most important institution in standing between people in Gaza and death right now is UNRWA. And the Biden administration is gonna suspend aid to UNRWA at this moment?

What makes this even more awful is that while the Israeli allegations may very well be true, again, that it’s also true that Israel has had a campaign for many years now to try essentially to abolish UNRWA because UNRWA’s existence represents a kind of embodiment of the fact that there are all these Palestinian refugees. UNRWA considers them refugees. Many of them are the children, grandchildren of people that Israel expelled in 1948. Israel wants to abolish UNRWA because it wants to abolish the issue of Palestinian refugees and never have to deal with that question so it can permanently foreclose the possibility that any Palestinians could ever return, right? This, by the way, in a state that allows Jews to return after 2,000 years, which is an irony that I find remarkable, right?

And so, the US has basically now become complicit in this effort at really the worst possible time one could ever imagine in terms of the need for UNRWA to keep people alive in Gaza. And it seems pretty clear to me that there are at least some folks in the Israeli government whose strategy here is to make sure that Gaza never becomes livable; that Gaza never becomes a place that people could actually live in any way that we would consider an even moderately decent life, right? And, therefore, to create more and more pressure to push those people out, to create more and more pressure on Egypt to open its border so large numbers of people leave the Gaza Strip, at which point Israel would almost certainly not let them back.

And so, the irony is even as Israel is trying to deny the existence of the refugee problem today, there’s a lot of evidence that some people in this Israeli government want to create a whole new refugee problem. And the United States government, the Biden administration—the good guys—are complicit in this because they are now suspending aid to the single most important institution on the ground that would have a chance of keeping people in Gaza alive. Adam Serwer wrote this kind of very remarked upon essay during the Trump administration about its policies where he said cruelty is the point. I don’t know if cruelty is the point of this policy by the Biden administration, but cruelty is very, very deeply, very profoundly the effect.

And so, I look at these people in this administration that we are taught to see as the good guys in our domestic politics and think, how are the people who are considered benign in American politics, how can they take such a profoundly cruel measure? And even if we’re willing to support them in this election—and I am—I just don’t think I can ever buy into this narrative of good versus evil if the people that I am being called on to call good are complicit in the starvation of children in Gaza. And that is what the Biden administration is complicit in by suspending aid to UNRWA at this moment.

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Rabbi David Wolpe, a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School and the Inaugural Rabbinic Fellow at the Anti-Defamation League. Rabbi Wolpe has argued that “the reactions that occurred at Harvard in the wake of Oct. 7 considered Jews oppressors and, in some way, unworthy of human consideration.” He says the “overlap” between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is “striking.” I disagree. Since October 7, it’s become even more difficult to have civil disagreements about Israel-Palestine across ideological lines. But I still believe it’s important. Which is why I’m grateful that Rabbi Wolpe has agreed to join me this Friday.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Omar Barghouti, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, a founding member of the BDS movement, attacks Standing Together for “serving Apartheid Israel’s propaganda.”

Read these statements by Standing Together and its leaders and judge for yourself whether that charge is true.

Israeli Knesset Member Ayman Odeh on “ordinary people — Jewish and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli — who have stepped up in the face of unspeakable tragedy.”

Nelson Mandela on liberating the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Aparna Gopalan writes about the United Auto Workers’ endorsement of Joe Biden.

In The Guardian, I wrote about why liberal hawks can’t come to terms with Israel’s war in Gaza.

Yousef Munayyer, Mike Omer-Man, and Udi Ofer offer three different takes on what Biden’s sanctions against violent Israeli settlers could mean.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky on why the International Court of Justice case matters so much for South Africa.

Laila al-Arian on how it feels today to be Palestinian.

Geoffrey Levin on the hidden history of American Jewish dissent over Israel.

Here’s a video of a conversation I did recently at Harvard’s Kennedy School and an interview I conducted for the Foundation for Middle East Peace with Tareq Habash, who recently resigned from the Biden administration.

If you’re in Cambridge, Massachusetts on February 7, two people I greatly admire, Mikhael Manekin and Shaul Magid, will be speaking together about their new books.

On March 6, I’ll be speaking at the University of Texas at Austin.

Mitchell Plitnick, one of America’s smartest commentators on Israel-Palestine and much else, has launched a Substack.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, the most important issue of the day when it comes to Israel-Palestine is of course ending this horrifying war, and that’s what I talk about most weeks. But I want to talk about something else today, which is not as important, but I think is important in its own right. And it has to do with something in the Palestine solidarity movement—a particular action that really bothered me. And it’s tricky to talk about that for someone like me who’s not Palestinian but is Jewish. I think one of the things that Jews who kind of become critics of Israel, even critics of the idea of a Jewish state, we face the loss of our community that many of us have grown up in.

And so, I think what happens for some Jews is that they find a new community in the kind of Palestine solidarity world. And, in some ways, that can be really beautiful because I actually think it’s so important that the struggle for Palestinian freedom be an environment that brings together Jews and Palestinians and people of all different backgrounds. So, it’s not a tribal movement. It’s a movement about certain basic principles. But the challenge is that if you’ve kind of lost the community that you grew up in, which is I think the way some Jews feel who moved towards a kind of a politics that’s very critical of Israel, and then you join this new community, the prospect of losing that community is really, really frightening, right? Because you’ve already lost the one you grew up with. You don’t want to lose another one. And so, it becomes really, really hard to criticize that community.

I remember really being just so struck watching Norman Finkelstein years ago. Norman Finkelstein was, you know, a very, very harsh critic of Israel. Someone who, you know, many in the organized American Jewish community, you know, really reviled. And then he came out and criticized the BDS movement in really harsh ways. And I remember when I saw that, my first thought was, my gosh, is anybody gonna be left for this guy to hang out with? You know, and that might sound silly, but I actually think the truth is that a lot of people’s politics on any issue are built around a community. And it’s very, very hard to break with a community, especially if you’ve already lost one.

And so, I do think that’s what makes it hard for Jews who want to see themselves as in support of a movement for Palestinian liberation to criticize anything that people in that movement do. And, especially, it’s important if you, you know, given if you’re someone like me who has realized that, you know, there were a lot of things that I had to relearn and rethink, and things that Palestinians were saying for a long time that I didn’t recognize were true. And so, how do I maintain the humility to recognize that there still may be a lot of things that I’m wrong about, and need to listen to Palestinians about, without surrendering my right to follow my own conscience, you know, even though it may not always be right.

So, that’s a kind of long wind up to something that really bothered me, and it was a statement by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which is a founding member of the BDS movement. And it was attacking a group called Standing Together. Now, Standing Together is a group of Palestinian and Israeli citizens in Israel who are fighting for a very, very different kind of politics. And the reason the statement bothered me so much was first of all, I just felt that it seemed to me intellectually dishonest. You know, one of the things that I really notice—maybe it’s my journalism training—is the way in which you quote other people and whether it seems like you’re doing so in an honest way or not.

So, this statement, this attack on Standing Together, it accuses the group of ‘serving Apartheid Israel’s propaganda,’ and it says it ‘seeks to whitewash Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.’ And then it says that Standing Together, ‘By trying to paint Israel as a tolerant diverse and normal state, and focusing on hatred rather than oppression as the problem’ makes it ‘intellectually dishonest and outright complicit.’ So, when I look at a statement like this and read these things, the first thing I look at is where are the quotation marks? Like, where has this organization, Standing Together, said the things that they’re being accused of, right? And where are the links? Like, the best practice—intellectual, honest practices—when you accuse someone of something, you quote them, and you provide a link so the reader can actually go to the quote themselves and see if the quote is actually being portrayed honestly.

And this attack on Standing Together completely fails that principle. There’s no links in it to anything Standing Together has written, which just seems to me like Intellectual Dishonesty 101. And secondly, the quotes that it does have from Standing Together, the only thing it quotes from the organization that it’s attacking are that the organization at one point said that people should reject ‘hatred and choose empathy,’ and that they support ‘peace, equality, and social and climate justice.’ But then they go on to say in their own words—this attack—all these things about how they’re serving Israel’s apartheid propaganda, they’re whitewashing the genocide in Gaza, they’re portraying Israel as a tolerant, diverse, and normal state. There’s no evidence in this attack on Standing Together whatsoever. No quotations that suggest that they have said any of that, right?

So, that’s the first thing that really bothers me. I mean, whatever position you have, it’s as a matter of kind of ethics of discourse, it’s really, really important not to accuse people of things unless you can cite evidence of him having said that. And this attack on Standing Together doesn’t do that at all. In fact, if you actually look and go for yourself to the documents of what Standing Together has put together, it calls for ‘full equality of all Israeli citizens’—I’m quoting—‘a society in which everyone is free and equal between the river and the sea.’ This is what Standing Together, one of its leaders said about the International Court of Justice statement:  that ‘whatever the international court decided to call what’s happening to our people in Gaza—it should not, and it cannot change the facts of the unfathomable catastrophic de-humanization and massacres in the context of decades of systematic and violent oppression.’

So, this is just nothing remotely like serving Israel’s apartheid propaganda. If you say that you want to end the occupation, and you say that you want Palestinian citizens to be equal, that’s the opposite of Israel’s propaganda because Israel says that there isn’t an occupation and that Palestinian citizens are already equal. And to say that these people are whitewashing Israel’s ongoing genocide—Standing Together is actually one of the first Israeli groups to ever try to mobilize against the war, and call for a ceasefire, and did so in very, very, very difficult circumstances. Their efforts to hold rallies against the war in Israel were actually—the police prevented them from doing that when they tried to create protests against the war. The organization has suffered a great deal of oppression by Israel since October 7th in its efforts to organize against the war, and to bring Palestinians and Jews together for a very, very different kind of politics.

Now, it’s true that the language that Standing Together uses is really different than the language of the BDS movement. Standing Together leaders have used the term apartheid to describe Israel. But they don’t use the term apartheid as frequently as BDS leaders tend to. I haven’t seen them using the term settler colonialism. But it seems to me that Standing Together leaders—again, Palestinian citizens and Israeli Jewish citizens who are trying to fundamentally change Israeli politics—have an argument for why their language is a little bit different. And I’m going to quote from the statement made by some Palestinian members of Standing Together. They say: ‘as a movement operating within Israel, we took upon ourselves a specific role to shift Israeli public opinion away from supporting policy that maintains and deepens the subjugation of Palestinians. Our strategy is not to morally lecture or attempt to shock Jewish Israelis with the ugly truth of our reality to force them into liberating Palestinians’—and I’m skipping ahead here—‘Our role is to empower and develop joint leadership to shift public opinion and create a shared embodied struggle for liberation between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.’

Now, I don’t think that alone will be enough to make change. I think it’s really, really fundamental that there is external pressure on Israel. And I believe that the boycotts and divestments and sanctions could play a really, really important role in all of this. But it seems to me Palestinian citizens are in a very particular position and a really difficult position, right? They’re under tremendous, tremendous strain and threat, especially since October 7th. In so many ways, their actions have been criminalized and they’ve been jailed. And they also are in a situation where they are trying to speak to Israeli Jews to create change from within. And it doesn’t seem to me one should be forced to choose between a strategy of pressure from outside, right, which involves boycotting, and strategies from inside, which involves bringing Israeli Jews in Palestinians together.

After all, think about all these Palestinian members of the Knesset, Palestinians who are sitting in Israel’s parliament, right—a parliament of a state that the BDS movement I think rightly considers an apartheid state. Should they be shunned because they’re doing normalization? No! It seems to me they’re acting from the position that they are in trying to make change from within even in really difficult circumstances. And that work is valuable as a kind of compliment to the pressure that the BDS movement brings. It just seems to me, if you take the stance that the BDS movement has taken against Standing Together, I don’t see how you wouldn’t also have to be denouncing a lot of Israeli Palestinian citizens in parliament because they also talk about bringing Israelis and Palestinians together.

Ayman Odeh, for instance, in his column in The New York Times, he writes, ‘I have also witnessed glimmers of the future we could have made real by ordinary people—Jewish and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli—who have stepped up in the face of unspeakable tragedy.’ Now, the BDS movement could say, well look here, he’s equating Jews and Palestinians, saying that they’re in the same position. I don’t think that’s what he’s saying. I don’t think that’s what Standing Together is saying. But what I do think they’re saying, which is really valuable, is they’re suggesting that their language has as its core idea that to liberate the oppressed is also to liberate the oppressor. And I think if you’re going to try to speak to Jewish Israelis—and to Jews around the world—that’s really, really important, right? And that’s something I see more in the language of Standing Together than I see in the BDS movement, which is a language about the way in which oppression dehumanizes the oppressor and the oppressed.

And it really disturbs me to see that people in the BDS movement are essentially equating that language with normalization, or with not recognizing the profound injustice of the situation. I don’t think those things are at odds at all. I mean, let me quote from, this is from Nelson Mandela. I don’t think many people would accuse Mandela of being someone who wasn’t serious about the struggle for justice. He’s writing about his time in Robben Island in prison. He says: ‘it was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed.’ And that language that Standing Together is using, I think, does have a capacity to reach Jews who need to be brought in to this movement.

And so, I know that there might be people who listen to this and think, you know, why is Peter Beinart criticizing the BDS movement, telling Palestinian solidarity activists what to do, you know? Who is he, you know? But the reason that I am really resistant to that kind of thinking is precisely because of my own experience in the Jewish community. I don’t like the idea that people, because of their identity position, don’t have the right to say openly what they believe. I see the way that leaders in the organized American Jewish community use that to silence others; to say that if you’re not Jewish, you don’t have a right to have an opinion about the definition of antisemitism. I reject that. I want all people of goodwill to be able to have opinions about what constitutes antisemitism. I want Germans, even despite their history, to be able to criticize a Jewish state and its Jewish leaders. I don’t like this claim that because you don’t occupy a certain identity position, you need to keep your mouth shut.

And one of the reasons I dislike it so much is because I think it sets up the idea that people in an identity group are a monolith, right? So that all Jews believe this. This is the way the organized American Jewish community often speaks: we speak for the Jewish community and if you’re against us, then you’re against the Jews. And if you’re a Jew who disagrees, you’re not a real Jew, you’re not a legitimate Jew, right? And so, I reject that principle when it comes to Palestinians as well. Sally Abed, who’s one of the leaders of Standing Together, is as far as I could tell just as Palestinian as the leaders of the Boycott Divestment Sanction movement. So, the idea that I should have to accept the idea that there are legitimate, real Palestinians and illegitimate, unreal Palestinians, or Uncle Tom or fake Palestinians, that is exactly what I see so often being done in the Jewish community.

I recognize that it’s really important to always have humility about what one doesn’t know, about how much one has to learn. That’s why I basically asked a whole bunch of Palestinians that I really admire off the record about what they thought about this BDS movement attack on Standing Together before I said any of this. I’m not quoting them because I asked them off the record. But I wanted to make sure that they didn’t think that I was completely off the wrong track, and I got a variety of responses but enough to reassure me that there was, I think, something to what I was saying. But I think it’s really important in any movement—no matter, you know, how good it’s fundamental impulses must be—that there is the right to open criticism regardless of one’s position. And that the way to have a healthy struggle for Palestinian liberation, it seems to me, is for people to have the right to offer those criticisms as long as they’re being made in good faith, and not for people to feel like they have to shut themselves down because they’re afraid of being shunned or because they’re afraid that they don’t have the right credentials. Again, I’ve just seen that too much in the organized American Jewish community, that dynamic. And I know how intellectually and morally dangerous it is.

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guests will be James Zogby, President and Co-Founder of the Arab American Institute, and Abdelnasser Rashid, a Palestinian-American State Representative from Illinois. We’ll talk about how the war in Gaza is affecting Arab Americans and whether they will vote for Joe Biden this fall.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

There will be no newsletter on Monday, February 19 or Zoom interview on Friday, February 23.

Sources Cited in this Video

Benjamin Netanyahu orders the Israeli military to make plans to invade Rafah.

Life in Rafah.

Starvation in Gaza.

Edward Kaplan’s biography of Abraham Joshua Heschel, Spiritual Radical.

I searched the following X (Twitter) accounts (@AIPAC, @ADL, @AJCGlobal, @StandWithUs, @OrthodoxUnion, @OUAdvocacy, @RCArabbinical, @URJorg, @JTSVoice, @HUCJIR, @Conf_of_Pres, @jfederations, @HillelIntl, @RRC_edu, @YUNews, @HolocaustMuseum, @simonwiesenthal) of establishment American Jewish political and religious Jewish institutions to see if any of them had used any of the following words or phrases (“Rafah,” “famine,” “starvation,” “starve,” “amputate,” “amputee,” “rubble,” “disease,” “cholera,” “diarrhea,” “bread,” “water,” “humanitarian disaster”) since October 7, 2023. None had.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane writes about the buffer zone Israel is building inside the Gaza Strip.

Marshall Ganz recounts being investigated for antisemitism at Harvard.

A rabbinical student challenges American Jewish leaders for supporting the war.

The father of a Palestinian-American stabbing victim challenges Joe Biden.

On March 6, I’ll be speaking at the University of Texas at Austin.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly asked the Israeli military to begin planning its invasion of Rafah. Now, Rafah is this tiny little area of the Gaza Strip right up against the border with Egypt, which was already incredibly overcrowded before October 7th. It had 275,000 people in a very small area. It now has 1.4 million people— more than half of the population of the Gaza Strip—living there because people have been forced from the rest of the Gaza Strip. Many of those people are living in tents. They don’t have access to fresh water, many of them. They don’t have access to food. Many are eating one meal a day. There have been outbreaks of Hepatitis C, scabies, lice. There are very few showers or toilets; episodes of diarrhea and cholera. A hundred people are dying a day from Israeli attacks, according to reports. And Israel hasn’t even begun the real invasion yet. And this is what Alex DeWaal, who’s an expert on famine at Tufts University, recently said about living conditions in Gaza. He said, ‘there is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed.’

And so, now Netanyahu wants to send the Israeli military in there. And the people, he says, are going to be told to go somewhere else where they’ll supposedly be safe. But there is no safe place in Gaza. Israel is attacking everywhere. And these people have no homes to go to because most of the buildings have been destroyed. And there’s no food. And there are no hospitals, right? And Netanyahu says it’s necessary because they’re supposedly 4 Hamas battalions still in Rafah. What about the 400 Hamas battalions, or battalions of some future Palestinian army, that are going to be created because of the hatred and fury and revenge that is being created among Palestinians—particularly young Palestinians—seeing their people being slaughtered at this massive, massive pace, right?

So, a professor I know and admire emailed me and urged me to try to do something about this impending, you know, invasion of Rafah. And I thought, you know, what the f**k can I do? I feel totally powerless, you know, in many ways. But then I found myself—so kind of just in frustration, I picked up Edward Kaplan’s wonderful biography of Abraham Joshua Heschel, which is called Spiritual Radical, just looking for some kind of solace. And I want to be clear: I don’t know what Abraham Joshua Heschel would be doing if he were alive. He died in 1972. He was a lover and supporter of Israel, although his daughter Susannah Hashel has said that near the end of his life he did start to speak out on behalf of Palestinians, and with very strong criticism of what Israel was doing with him. I’m not making a claim about what Abraham Joshua Heschel would have done. What I would like to do is say something about what perhaps we might do in this moment of profound moral crisis inspired by his example.

Now, Heschel has been made into a saint like Martin Luther King. And people who are made into saints get sanitized, right? The hard edges get kind of sawed off. But in fact, if you look back at what Heschel did in his opposition to the Vietnam War, it was very raw and it was very controversial, including inside the Jewish community. The FBI were monitoring the protests he was involved in. They were claiming that they were going to arrest communists in those protests. And Heschel was involved in protests at which they were communists. Jewish leaders and the Israeli government itself asked him to stop his anti-Vietnam activism because they claimed they feared it might undermine American support for Israel. The majority of Heschel’s colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary, according to Kaplan, disassociated themselves from his anti-war activism. And yet, Heschel did it.

And in reading the relevant chapters of Kaplan’s book, one line particularly struck me. And it’s from an essay that Heschel wrote in 1966 called ‘The Moral Outrage of Vietnam.’ And he writes, ‘it is weird to wake up one morning and find that we have been placed in an insane asylum.’ And honestly, when I look at the organized American Jewish community—the community that in many ways I am very much a part of in my daily life—I think I’m living in an insane asylum. It’s not an insane asylum where people are screaming. It’s an insane asylum precisely because people are not screaming, because of the kind of the profound and utterly frightening silence that you see from so many Jewish institutions, if not active enthusiastic support for this horrifying, horrifying slaughter in which people are being reduced to literal starvation and death because of the actions of a Jewish state.

And Heschel was not a pacifist. And he certainly was not someone who romanticized communism. He did not romanticize the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, but he made a point again and again, which is very, very important for this time. Which is that although he could see evil in communism, and indeed in America’s enemies in Vietnam, as I’m sure he would have been able to see evil in Hamas and what it did on October 7th, he did not believe that evil was restricted to America’s enemies. He believed that evil was also something that was potentially always present in all human beings, including Americans. And so, he argues that if America could not defeat the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong without destroying Vietnamese society, then the war itself was evil, that no war was worth fighting at that cost.

And what was extraordinary about him was even though this was a man who was born as a Polish Hasid, who was as far culturally from Vietnamese people as you could possibly imagine, he had this capacity, this incredible moral imagination to identify with them, to see them in his mind’s eye, and to always insist that G-d was there with them in their agony. So, he said that ‘whenever I open the prayer book’—this is Heschel, the siddur—’I see before me images of children burning from napalm.’ He could not pray literally because he was tortured by these images of people that he had never met, whose language he did not speak. He said in the moral outrage of Vietnam, ‘G-d is present whenever a man is afflicted and humanity is embroiled in every agony wherever it may be.’ He was tortured by the suffering of people in Vietnam.

And beyond that, he was tortured by his fears of G-d’s judgment on Americans for what Americans were doing. I think because perhaps he had lost so many of his family in the Shoah, he was tortured by human beings’ ability to look away in the face of evil. And he said in an anti-war speech in Washington in 1967, ‘we are startled to discover how unmerciful, how beastly we ourselves can be. So we implore thee, our Father in heaven, help us to banish the beasts from our hearts. The beast of cruelty. The beast of callousness. In the sight of so many thousands of civilians and soldiers slain, injured, crippled, of bodies emaciated, a forest destroyed by fire, G-d confronts us with this question: where art thou?’ And he saw this callousness, this ability to look away, to live privileged lives where others were suffering so terribly at the hands of our government. He saw it as godlessness, as blasphemy. He said at an anti-war rally in 1968 that ‘G-d’s voice is shaking heaven and earth, and man does not hear the faintest sound. The Lord roars like a lion. His word is like fire, like a hammer breaking rocks to pieces. And people go about unmoved, undisturbed, unaware.’

And he did not spare Jews from these kinds of moral questions. Even though this was an atrocity, a war that was being committed by America, not by a Jewish state. He also spoke to his fellow Jews. In 1968, before that rally, he spoke to an audience of reform Jews, of rabbis, and he saw the hall was largely empty. And he said, ‘why are there so few of us here?’ And then he said, ‘where are our Jews? We cannot limit the religious conscience. Isn’t the word rachmones, which means compassion, isn’t the word rachmones Jewish?’ And he went on: ‘the Vietnamese are our Jews. And we as Americans are letting them die needlessly. Where are our Jews?’ I think that statement had, at that moment for Heschel, a double meaning. What it meant was that wherever people are in agony, and facing death, and facing indeed something that is close at least to genocide, that those people—in some sense for Heschel—those people are Jews. And secondly, he meant, ‘where are our Jews’ in that if our community is not fighting against that kind of horror, then our Jews are not there. Then Jewishness itself is not present in us. Then something Jewish has been lost in us.

I did a search on Twitter—you can do these things—where I put in the Twitter accounts of a large number of establishment American Jewish organizations, religious and political. And then I put in a whole series of terms. Terms that reflect the horror of what’s happening. Terms like ‘Rafah.’ Terms like ‘amputee.’ Terms like ‘starvation.’ Terms like ‘famine,’ ‘rubble,’ ‘disease,’ cholera’—I have a whole list in the email—to see if these institutions had even acknowledged on their Twitter feeds the horror that’s going on. There was not a single source that it brought up.

There are many individual rabbis and Jewish leaders that I’m thinking of as I record this video. I’m not going to say their names in public. But if you are one of those people, or you know those people or people who are in those positions, I would implore you to ask yourself about whether you are walking in the footsteps that Abraham Joshua Heschel treaded during the Vietnam War. There are American Jews, it seems to me, people like Rabbis4Ceasefire, who are doing exactly that. And people sometimes want to discount them. They don’t look, many of them, like Abraham Joshua Heschel. They don’t have long beards and an Eastern European accent. It doesn’t matter. I think Heschel would have been the first to say it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are tortured, they are tortured, by what a Jewish state is doing to human beings who were created in the image of G-d and they want to stop it. And so, for those in our community, those in leadership in our community who are not doing so because maybe they’re afraid for their jobs, and maybe they’re afraid for their social standing, or maybe they just are doing other things, I don’t know, I would just urge you to think about the question that Heschel asked when he saw that empty room of rabbis in 1968 on the eve of anti-war activist rally against Vietnam, and he said: ‘where are our Jews? Where are our Jews?’

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guests will Dr. Lina Qassem-Hassan, the Chairperson of the Board of Directors of Physicians for Human Rights Israel and Guy Shalev, the organization’s Executive Director. They’ll talk about the unfolding public health catastrophe in Gaza.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

US officials tell the New York Times that Israel can’t destroy Hamas’ military capacity.

Mouin Rabbani on why Israel can’t win the war.

Jean-Pierre Filiu on Israel’s attacks on Gaza in the 1950s.

David Shipler on Israel’s initial support for Hamas.

Hamas recruits from families of people Israel has killed.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to reduce the size of the Gaza Strip.

Israel announces it will build thousands more housing units in the West Bank.

Professor Heba Gowayed on Palestinian resistance.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I wrote about the campaign to abolish UNRWA.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I interviewed UNRWA’s former Spokesman and Director of Strategic Communications, Chris Gunness.

Given my last newsletter about Abraham Joshua Heschel’s moral fury during the Vietnam War, I thought it might be useful to highlight rabbis and other Jewish leaders who are taking similar stands about Gaza today. If you have anyone to suggest, let me know. Here is British Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, who declared on February 13 that an Israeli invasion of Rafah “may haunt us, and the good name of Israel and the Jewish People, for generations.”

Jon Stewart’s on Joe Biden’s rhetoric about Israeli’s war.

Zaid Jilani argues that Palestinian activists could draw broader support with different rhetoric.

Ayelet and Paul Waldman on their father’s liberal Zionism.

An Australian student’s Go Fund Me to evacuate her family from Gaza.

An online discussion on March 6 with Professor Geoffrey Levin about the history of American Jewish dissent over Israel.

I’ll be speaking virtually at Southern Connecticut State University on March 4 and in person on March 6 at the University of Texas at Austin.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, I would like to believe, I would really like to believe that drawing people’s attention to the horror in Gaza—the absolute horror in Gaza, what’s happening to ordinary people—could convince the leadership in my community, in the Jewish community, and most American politicians, to oppose this war. But the harsh reality is that for many of the most powerful people inside the American Jewish community, and for many in American politics as well, there is only one metric that matters. And that metric is the safety of Israeli Jews. Essentially, any number of Palestinian deaths are acceptable if it produces an increased safety for Israeli Jews. That’s essentially the equation that leads the American Jewish establishment to continue to support this war, even as the number of people who are dying and wounded and displaced goes up and up and up.

So, I want to accept that framework for the purpose of this video. It’s not my view, but I want to argue in those terms because, frankly, I think those are the only terms that for many people who matter will reach them. And the argument that I want to make is that this war will make Israel less safe—not more safe but less safe. And I want to start with a massive concession. I want to imagine that Israel in this war can destroy Hamas. Now, by the way, US officials say that’s not possible. Palestinian commentators say it’s not possible. Even some Israeli officials are saying it’s not possible within their lifetime. But I want to grant this for the sake of argument. I want to grant that Israel can destroy Hamas and eradicate it. And still, I want to argue that Israel is going to end this war less safe than it began.

And the first thing for people who find that hard to believe—what I would really encourage them to do is—look around at what Palestinians are saying. Listen to what Palestinians are saying. See if you can find a single credible Palestinian commentator on Palestinian politics and on this war who believes that destroying Hamas would make Israel safer. I suggest that you will have an extremely difficult time finding a single reputable Palestinian commentator who says that destroying Hamas, if that were even possible, would make Israel safer. Now, why is that? Because Palestinians recognize that Palestinians do not resist Israel because of Hamas. They began resisting Israel long before Hamas was even created and Palestinians resist Israel because Palestinians are not free.

And to illustrate this point, I want to go back to a period in time long before Hamas was created. This comes from an essay called “The Twelve Wars on Gaza” by a French academic name Jean-Pierre Filiu. And he writes about the early 1950s. So, most of the people in Gaza are from the families of refugees. Most of them were expelled from Israel during Israel’s war of independence. Many can actually see the lands from which their families were expelled or fled in fear. So, from the very, very beginning of Israel’s creation, Palestinian refugees, especially in Gaza where there’s such a high percentage of refugees, have been trying to return back to their homes. And since literally the first years of Israel’s creation, Israel has been going in and invading Gaza because it’s a problem. Again, 25 years before Hamas was created in the late 1980s—this is the early 1950s—Israel was going in militarily to Gaza because Gaza represented a threat to Israel. And the fundamental threat it represented was all of these refugees who wanted to return.

So, Filiu talks about an incident in 1953 when a young Ariel Sharon comes in with a group of commandos and kills 20 people in a refugee camp in Gaza. In 1953! Because the fundamental problem, then as now, was not the particular Palestinian resistance organization. There have been many. It was the fact that Palestinians were crowded—particularly in Gaza—crowded into this territory, this extremely overcrowded, extremely poor, burdened territory, and they wanted to return to their homes. And, so that’s why, if you look at the armed resistance in the 1970s by Palestinians—including terrible acts of violence against Israeli civilians, the Munich Olympics attack, the Ma’alot massacre on children in 1974, the airline hijackings—none of them were done by Hamas because Hamas didn’t exist. None of them were even done by Islamists. They were largely done by leftist and nationalist Palestinian factions. And that is part of the reason, indeed, that Israel in the late 1980s was actually sending money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas in Gaza, because they thought, given their experience with leftist and nationalist groups, that they could not imagine that a Palestinian Islamist group would be more radical. They assumed that it had to be more moderate because they had endured so much armed resistance from Palestinian leftist and nationalist factions. Because the reason for the resistance didn’t have to do with the particular ideology or name of the Palestinian resistance organizations. It was because Palestinians had been dispossessed and were fighting against their dispossession.

So, you destroy Hamas. Let’s imagine. And I’m talking to people who only care about Israeli Jewish safety here. You destroy Hamas. And what then? We know that Hamas recruits from the families of people that Israel has killed, right? So, some future Palestinian group—give it whatever name you want, think about whatever ideological predisposition it might have—it will almost certainly do the same thing. And think about how many potential recruits there are now. Not only do you have a population of people who are of refugees, who have been seeking to return to their homes since 1948, who have been repeatedly traumatized by Israeli attacks over the years, but now you have a population, 90% of whose homes have been destroyed. Every single person in Gaza will have family or close friends who have been killed in this war. People will see their homes, their entire neighborhoods destroyed. Just imagine—again, I’m talking to only you people who care about Israeli Jewish safety—think about the desire for revenge that will produce among Palestinians. You don’t think that Palestinians will create another organization based on trying to fight back, indeed using violence, given the extreme unimaginable violence that Palestinians have now suffered. Netanyahu says he wants to de-radicalize Gaza. I mean, it’s absolutely a sick joke to think that what you’re gonna get out of this horror is de-radicalization.

Now, maybe it would be possible to imagine that if Palestinians could be convinced that giving up armed resistance, indeed, working with Israel to prevent armed resistance, could bring them closer to freedom. Maybe not for refugee return, but at their own state, self-determination, human rights, the right to govern their own lives. If Palestinians believe that, perhaps even given this horror, you might be able to imagine that Palestinians would say, you know what, armed resistance is not the way to go.

But here’s the problem: that we’ve run this experiment. We’ve seen this movie. In the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority have been doing exactly that. They’ve been cooperating with Israel, collaborating with Israel to prevent armed resistance from the West Bank for almost 20 years. And you know what? They’ve been pretty darn successful at it. And what have Palestinians seen that they have gotten out of that cooperation, that collaboration that is skewing of armed resistance? More and more settlement growth that’s forced them into smaller and smaller little kind of ghettos in the West Bank, little cantons with Israel controlling all the territory in between, and more and more settler violence, right? You’d be very, very hard pressed to find any Palestinian who believes that strategy would work, right? Especially given what the Israeli government is now saying about what they want to do after this war, right? They’re not saying that if Palestinians did absolutely everything right, they might move towards statehood, right? In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel, for more than 15 years now, have had a government that is explicitly opposed to Palestinian statehood. And now, the Israeli government is saying it wants to actually create a buffer zone that makes the Gaza Strip smaller, that crowds people in Gaza into smaller and smaller territories, probably an even harsher blockade that will make any prospect of genuine reconstruction out of this absolute catastrophe impossible, right?

And, of course, Israel’s also just announced another big new increase in settlement growth in the West Bank. Given these circumstances, why would any reasonable person believe that what comes after Hamas—if there is an ‘after Hamas’—would be more moderate, would be less likely to use armed resistance against Palestinians? If you think of Palestinians as normal people who want their freedom and who, when they see their family members killed, many of them they’re gonna be inclined to want to take revenge, nothing about what we see would lead to the likelihood of a more moderate group post-Hamas.

And I want to end by quoting Heba Gowayed, who’s a sociology professor at CUNY, who I thought made this statement very effectively. She said, ‘Palestine is as diverse as its Palestinian resistance. It has been Arab socialists and Marxists. It has had Christian leadership. It has been secular and Islamist. Hamas does not begin Palestinian resistance, nor does the resistance end with them. It ends only with a free Palestine.’ And I would just add that since Palestinian resistance is inevitable because resistance to oppression is human, if you want Palestinians to resist that oppression in ways that are ethical, in ways that are in conformance with international law, which do not lead to the killing of Israeli civilians, you need to show Palestinians that that kind of ethical and legal resistance works. You need to support forms of boycott, and sanctions, and conditions of military aid, and efforts at the International Criminal Court, and efforts at the International Court of Justice, and things like the largely non-violent Great March of Return. The more you fear armed Palestinian resistance, the more you should be supporting nonviolent, ethical Palestinian resistance.

Israel, historically, has never been able to imagine that the Palestinian group it was fighting at that moment was not the worst enemy it could ever face. But it has a history of, by wreaking catastrophic devastation, it has created enemies that prove to be worse. In the early 1980s, it couldn’t imagine anything worse than in the PLO. It went into Lebanon, destroyed large parts of Lebanon, and laid the foundation for Hezbollah. It couldn’t imagine anything worse in Gaza than the PLO either. It supported the creation of, and helped the creation of, Hamas. And now it can’t think of anything worse than Hamas. But you want to know what frightens me? And I’m speaking here to those people who only care about Israeli Jewish lives. You know what frightens me more than Hamas? And Hamas frightens me. As someone who cares passionately about Israeli Jewish life, Hamas certainly frightens me. What frightens me more is what comes after Hamas, given the unimaginable violence and destruction that Israel has now committed in Gaza.

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will Ussama Makdisi, Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley, author most recently of Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World and co-host of the Makdisi Street Podcast. I want to ask Ussama, who is one of America’s leading historians of the Middle East and of the long encounter between Palestinians and Zionism, what makes this current moment distinct. I also want to ask how his scholarship into the history of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Arab world can help us think about a future of coexistence and equality in Israel-Palestine and across the Middle East.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Bill Clinton’s comments after first meeting Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House are recorded in books by both Aaron Miller and Dennis Ross.

When Netanyahu said “America is something that can be moved easily.”

The problem with dropping humanitarian aid from the air.

Why America’s military support for Israel’s war likely violates US law.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Dahlia Krutkovich and Jonathan Shamir write about the fight over Gaza inside Britain’s Labour Party.

Khalil Sayegh, a former guest on one of my Friday Zoom interviews and someone from whom I’ve learned a great deal, has launched a Go Fund Me page to evacuate his family from Gaza. It’s horrifying that so many people need to do this. I hope you’ll take a moment to imagine how you’d feel if your family were in such desperate straits and consider supporting him.

“I love Israel, but not more than Judaism itself. Not more than humanity.” Rabbi Kate Mizrahi on why she supports a ceasefire.

Jon Stewart on how US officials talk about war crimes in Ukraine versus Israel.    

I spoke with Rania Batrice about anti-war mobilization inside the Democratic Party for the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

I spoke with Ali Velshi on MSNBC about the political problems the war in Gaza is creating for Joe Biden.

I’ll be speaking virtually at Southern Connecticut State University on March 4 and in person on March 6 at the University of Texas at Austin, March 11 at the City University of New York, March 27 at Quinnipiac College, and March 28 at Hofstra University.

I sometimes get emails that strike me as deserving a wider audience. The following is from a professor at a prestigious liberal arts college. Although I’ve been highly critical of the way charges of antisemitism are wielded to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, this email—which I’ve edited for concision and clarity—captures something that worries me about the Israel-Palestine debate on at least some campuses.

“I have had two students recently ask me for letters of recommendation to transfer to other colleges on account of anti-Semitism…in asking one of the two students who wants to transfer what happened, it became clear that his fellow students had blocked him from phone chats and systematically blanked him in face-to-face interactions after he first expressed support for Israel's right to exist and then showed up on campus in a yarmulke after Temple, which was taken as a political declaration. It seems to me that there is a form of anti-Semitism that consists in treating Zionism per se (as opposed to support for Netanyahu or the settlers or whatever) as morally equivalent to Nazism, rather than being on a par with other mistaken ideologies like Hindutva - retrograde but not the kind of thing that ought to put one beyond the pale.”

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

There’s a famous story about the first time that Benjamin Netanyahu met Bill Clinton after Netanyahu had been elected in 1996. And Netanyahu started lecturing Clinton about the Middle East and about Israel Palestine, and then Netanyahu left the room. And, according to Aaron Miller’s book, Bill Clinton turns to his advisors and said, ‘who the f**k does he think he is? Who’s the f*****g superpower here?’ A similar version of this story shows up in Dennis Ross’s book.

I’ve been thinking about this line of Bill Clinton’s—who’s the f*****g superpower here—because the United States is now in a truly bizarre situation in which Israel is prosecuting a war that is starving the people of Gaza to death. They’re starving because very few trucks are getting through to provide the aid they need to live and the medicines they need to live. Now, this aid is not getting through because Israel has a very, very laborious inspection process that really reduces the number of trucks that can get through. Also, because Israel is still bombing in places, which makes it hard for the trucks to travel safely with that aid. And because, in the north of Gaza where Israel has largely decapitated Hamas, there is total lawlessness, so it’s not safe to deliver trucks. The trucks are getting stormed by starving people. We saw this tragically last week in this massacre that killed roughly a hundred people.

And these policies are being carried out with America’s deep participation, right? America is supplying Israel the weaponry that it is using to prosecute this war. And America is protecting Israel at the United Nations and other international forums from the consequences of its policies, right? So, the US is deeply involved in these policies that are starving the people of Gaza to death. And you might think that because the Biden administration is now publicly saying it’s very, very concerned about this famine that’s taking place, that it would say, ‘we will no longer participate in these policies that are people starving people in Gaza to death.’ But that’s not what the Biden administration is saying. The Biden administration is essentially saying, ‘well, we can’t do much about that. But here’s this brilliant workaround. We’ll drop the aid from the air,’ right?

It’s actually not such a brilliant workaround because, according to humanitarian experts, it’s very, very expensive and inefficient to deliver aid from the air. The aid can land very far away from where you want it to land. So, let’s say you have possible supplies. They may not land near the hospital. Also, there’ve been suggestions that some of this aid may land in the sea, and it may be dangerous for people in Gaza to retrieve it. The obvious answer is to start the delivery of aid by land. And yet the Biden administration still is kind of essentially shrugging its shoulders or saying, ‘pretty please, we’d really like you to let more of this aid in,’ as if the United States doesn’t have any leverage here, right? It is with US weapons that Israel is prosecuting this war.

And indeed, the US is probably violating its own law by participating in this starvation of Gaza because under the Foreign Assistance Act, it’s illegal for the US to provide arms to countries that are committing grave human rights violations. And remember the International Court of Justice has said that this could plausibly be a genocide. And it’s also under the Foreign Assistance Act illegal for the US to provide arms to countries that are impeding the delivery of US humanitarian assistance, which Israel is also doing, right?

So, rather than complying with US law, and saying that America will not be complicit in these policies, the Biden administration shrugs its shoulders and says, ‘well, we’ve got a creative workaround. Since we can’t do anything about that, let’s drop things from the air.’And you know, it’s funny, there’s a whole group of people in Washington who are really obsessed with this idea of credibility, right? Like America needs to look strong, right? So, when Obama said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria was a red line, but then he didn’t go to war, America lost credibility. When we pulled out of Afghanistan, we lost credibility. This was the argument made for Vietnam. Our credibility is on the line in Vietnam. You notice these credibility arguments almost always made to start wars or continue wars, right? But this seems to me a very obvious case in which America’s refusal to take actions to end the war actually seriously undermines our credibility. Because it’s not just like the world is looking at this and saying, this is profoundly immoral that all these people are starving to death. But it also makes America look totally impotent, right, when America won’t use the tools that are at our disposal to stop the war.

It seems to me that Biden could say to Netanyahu, ‘listen, you will not use any more American weaponry in this war. And we will not shield you from the consequences in international legal forum of this war because we believe in international law. We want to hold Hamas account accountable for its war crimes. And we want to hold Vladimir Putin accountable for his war crimes. And we can’t credibly do that unless you also go through a process in which these things are adjudicated at places like the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.’

‘And by the way,’ the US can say, ‘we also care very passionately about the hostages. And we know the only way to save the lives of these remaining hostages is by ending the war in a ceasefire because those hostages are also people in Gaza. So, if you’re starving Gaza and you’re bombing Gaza, you’re impairing the lives of the people in Gaza. And the only way to save their lives is by ending the war and having a ceasefire.’

And this, I think, would be the moral step for the US to take. And I think it would be in America’s self-interest, but it would also just be an act of self-respect by the Biden administration. This Biden administration, which for weeks and months now, has been basically tiptoeing around telling reporters they’re unhappy and saying, ‘pretty please we really hope that Netanyahu’—this is not how Benjamin Netanyahu works! Really? Are these people still so naive about this guy after all of those years since that meeting with Bill Clinton? This guy who in 2001 was caught on tape saying to Israeli settlers, ‘America is something that can be moved easily.’ That’s how Netanyahu thinks about American presidents. And you know what? The Biden administration is proving him right. As a matter of self-respect, if nothing else, the United States needs to say that it will not continue to be complicit in a war that it believes is morally wrong, and that it believes will undermine—not improve—the safety and security of Israelis. And this dropping of humanitarian aid from the air is a way of refusing to confront that fundamental need to assert America’ self respect.

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Norman Finkelstein, someone who has long fascinated me but whom I’ve never met. I want to ask about his upbringing as the child of Holocaust survivors, how his parents imparted the Holocaust’s moral lessons to him, and about how he understands the very different ways that many other children of Holocaust survivors interpret that horror. I want to ask how he first encountered Palestinians, how he decided to make their cause his life’s work, and what it was like to break with many Palestinian activists over the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Finally, I want to ask about his reaction to the October 7 massacre, and to the mass slaughter and starvation unfolding in Gaza.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

I discussed Bezalel Smotrich’s “Decisive Plan” last spring in a Jewish Currents essay entitled, “Could Israel Carry Out Another Nakba?”

I wrote about Israeli efforts at mass expulsion from Gaza earlier this year in The New York Times.

Israel’s plan to expand its “buffer zone” inside Gaza.

UN officials called Gaza “unlivable” in 2018.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on why he doesn’t agree with Barack Obama that “the arc of the moral universe bends to justice.”

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane examines the limits and possibilities of the Biden administration’s new sanctions against Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. This request is from Abir Elzowidi, who is trying to evacuate the family of his brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. Abir writes, “I've lost 33 of my family members in Gaza since the war started and I am very scared to lose Tamer and his family. I could never forgive myself for not trying to help them.” If you can help, please do.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I interviewed Steve Simon, a Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa in President Obama’s National Security Council, about how his experience making policy toward Israel-Palestine helps him interpret the Biden administration’s actions since October 7.

Tel Aviv University Professor Aeyal Gross on how people who deny Hamas’ atrocities replicate the tactics of Israeli hasbara.

Pankaj Mishra on “The Shoah after Gaza.”

I’ll be speaking on March 11 at the City University of New York, March 27 at Quinnipiac College, March 28 at Hofstra University and April 7 at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. Every now and then, someone says, ‘why are people paying so much attention to what’s happening in Gaza? After all, there are really, really terrible things that happen all over the world and don’t get very much attention.’ And there are certain standard answers to this. One answer for Americans is that the United States is very deeply complicit in the slaughter in Gaza in the way that it’s not in many other places where people are suffering a great deal. Another more general answer is that people tend to pay more attention to what’s happening in Israel-Palestine because it’s so central to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. But I want to suggest another answer. And it has to do with the way in which what Israel is doing, and maybe trying to do, in Gaza, and how the world reacts, is a kind of a referendum on the very notion of historical progress itself. The question of whether we are fundamentally in a different and better world today than we were in previous centuries.

So, let me try to explain what I mean. As I understand what Israel is doing in Gaza, this is the way I think about it. There’s a pretty overwhelming consensus in Israel today among Israeli Jews—there was even before October 7th but even more strongly since October 7th—that Israel cannot give the Palestinians their own state, certainly not any time in the foreseeable future, and certainly that Israel is not going to give Palestinians citizenship in the country in which they live, in Israel, right, and in this territory, which Israel controls. So, Israel is going to control these people, millions of people in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem in different ways who lack basic rights, the basic right of citizenship.

And I think until October 7th, Israeli leaders felt like they were managing that system pretty well. Things were pretty quiet in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority was working with Israel. Even Hamas, they felt like in a strange kind of way, was working with Israel to keep things relatively quiet. Israel had policies of kind of carrots and sticks. They would let more Palestinian workers come into Israel from the Occupied Territories, which they thought would give people an incentive to keep things kind of relatively calm because they didn’t want to lose that. Of course, there was the ever-present threat of his Israeli violence, greater violence if the Palestinians upset the apple cart. And Israel was moving on to bigger and better things in its view, you know, normalization with Saudi Arabia, you know, having relations with all kinds of important countries all over the world.

I think that’s where Israeli political leadership was on October 6th. October 7th showed actually this management process has really broken down because actually it’s really difficult to manage over a long period of time people who you deny basic rights to because those people are going to resist. And, of course, the way they resisted on October 7th was horrifying to me, right? I much prefer the many other ways of Palestinians have resisted in ways that are much more ethical. But the point is that people are likely to resist systems of oppression. You can’t pretend that they’re going to basically sit back and take it for a long time.

So, the Biden administration wants to recreate a kind of, I think, a system of managing this situation. I mean, they talk about two states. But I think what they really want to do is basically try to kind of put Humpty Dumpty back together again, put someone in charge in Gaza that will kind of keep things quiet, maybe refurbish the Palestinian authority a little bit, and basically move on to be able to talk about other things. But I think that’s gonna be extraordinarily difficult to do. The truth is that Gaza was unlivable before October 7th. According to the UN, it was unlivable in 2017. Now it is catastrophically unlivable, right? I mean, most of the hospitals are destroyed. Most of the housing is destroyed. Almost everyone displaced. The universities destroyed. And it’s extremely difficult for me to see how Gaza is ever rebuilt. Israel has already said that it wants to increase the buffer zones, which means that there will be less space for people in Gaza than there is today. This is already one of the most overcrowded places on earth. The blockade is likely to be tighter than it was before because Israel is gonna say we can’t allow Hamas to get the means to rearm or anyone else to get the means to rearm, right.

So, it doesn’t seem to me it’s remotely plausible that Gaza is really going to be able to rebuild. And I think that there are differences of opinions inside the Israeli government, but I think the people in the Israeli government who have the most coherent vision of what they want to do beyond just muddling through are the people on the right side of the Israeli government who want to create conditions in Gaza that create so much pressure that sooner or later Egypt opens its border and there’s a mass exodus from Gaza—because, again, because Gaza is unlivable—and then those people will not be allowed to return.

Egypt’s taken a very hard line against this. But Egypt is a quite vulnerable country. I think it’s $28 billion in debt. It’s very beholden to the Gulf countries. There have been reports that Egypt actually has already been building a wall inside Egypt, essentially to contain people that it imagines might get across from Gaza, particularly from Rafah, which is where this Palestinian population is so kind of centered now because Israel has moved through the rest of the Gaza Strip.

So, I think that the people—not everyone in the Israeli government, not everyone in Israeli politics—but the people with the clearest vision, who are on the right, have a vision of expulsion. And some of them have been very clear about this for a long time. And I’ve written about this. Bezalel Smotrich in 2017 essentially said if Palestinians don’t accept their lack of citizenship and they rise up, they’re gonna have to leave. And a whole series of other people in the Israeli government, from Tzachi Hengbi, the national security advisor, to Avi Dichter, the agricultural minister, to Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, over the years have made statements about the potential necessity of expulsion. And it polls pretty well in Israel.

So, what does this have to do with the course of history? It seems to me one of the reasons that people have difficulty imagining this as a possibility is it just doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that countries can get away with in this era of history. If we step back, and we think about it a little bit, we’re very aware actually that many countries did do this in the past. Indeed, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, these were how those countries were created, right, with acts of mass destruction of a native population, which cleared the way for a new country, a kind of a new society. Israel itself could not have been created as a Jewish state without the act of mass expulsion at Israel’s founding because there simply weren’t enough Jews there, even in the territory designated as a Jewish state by the UN to create a large Jewish majority, which was necessary for a Jewish state. The dirty little secret that people often don’t talk about about the UN partition plan is that even in the Jewish state that was allocated, there was only a bare Jewish majority in that territory. Again, only a third of the population at that time of the entire Mandatory Palestine was Jewish.

So, Israel itself was born through this kind of act of mass expulsion. But I think that the inclination towards believing that history has a trajectory towards progress makes people think that this is the kind of thing you could do in the 19th century. Maybe it was even the kind of thing you could do in the mid-20th century—and there were large population expulsions back in the mid-20th century—but you can’t do it today. We now, after World War II, we created a system of international norms, institutions, a kind of higher ethics that governs the way countries behave, and you simply can’t do that anymore. And so, it seems to me one of the things that’s really at stake in whether this mass expulsion of people from Gaza can occur is the question of whether in fact that’s true: whether we are in a different era of history, whether there has been some fundamental kind of progress that means that countries can’t do what they could do in the past. Which would mean that Israel cannot solve the Palestinian problem in the way that the United States solved its Native American problem in the 19th century, which is basically so reducing the population that it was no longer a threat.

And I think there is evidence, horrifyingly, that these ideas of progress that people had may not actually be accurate. It’s interesting. One of the things that Barack Obama—you know, Barack Obama was a kind of quintessential progressive in the sense that he was often quoting Martin Luther King saying, you know, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ And he and John Kerry were often saying to Benjamin Netanyahu at that point, ‘you know, you can’t really get away with this controlling all these Palestinians who lack basic rights. It's not the way the world works anymore. We’re no longer in a colonial age.’ And Netanyahu, who is the son of a historian, I think was in his own way saying, ‘why are you so sure that the history is moving in that particular direction?’

And I fear that events are in fact proving Netanyahu right. We had an act of mass expulsion, which didn’t get nearly the attention, I think, in the world that it should have last September when 100,000 Armenians were expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh. We have Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which now looks very likely, will not be regressed in the sense that, that Russia will ever be forced back, and Ukraine will regain all of the control over its sovereignty, you know, beginning with the invasion in 2014 by Russia and then continuing in 2020. We have a government in India that is moving India from a secular state into a very, very aggressive Hindu supremacist state, and really dramatically and very violently rolling back the rights that Muslims had in India. We have of course China as a kind of still-rising global power. And the United States, we have the possibility of a Trump presidency and the possibility of kind of Trump-like figures in various places in Europe.

So, under those conditions, it seems to me that we face the real prospect, in fact, that we are taking a historical turn in which the very fragile norms that we had about state behavior are actually really eroding, and that the kind of mass expulsions that we’ve seen in earlier periods of history that now are returning again and being thinkable again. And I think if Israel succeeds in doing what many in the Israeli government want to do in Gaza, I think that will open the door to Modi and others around the world, seeing it as a possibility to their restive minority populations that they don’t want to fully enfranchise. That seems to me what’s on the table in terms of what’s going on in Gaza. And one way of answering the question of why it matters so much, because it matters so much not only because of the fate of those individual people in Gaza, and because of what it says about the United States in the way it behaves around the world, and what it says about Israel, but because of what it says about the course of history. I think that’s one of the things that’s on the line in this moment.

Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Avner Gvaryahu, Executive Director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli military veterans who oppose the occupation. We’ll discuss his recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Myth of Israel’s ‘Moral Army’” as part of a broader discussion about the way Israel is fighting in Gaza and why it is wreaking such devastation there.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Chuck Schumer’s speech last week on the Senate floor.

When Harry Reid repudiated Barack Obama in 2011.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Emma Saltzberg talks to Professor Geoffrey Levin about the hidden history of American Jewish dissent about Israel.

Every few days I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are three requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I interviewed Gaza-born writer and activist Ahmed Moor about the consequences, human, moral and political, of this war.

I discussed American Jewish politics on the Makdisi Street Podcast.

Naomi Klein on the meaning of the film “Zone of Interest.”

I’ll be speaking on March 27 at Quinnipiac College, March 28 at Hofstra University, April 5 at City University of New York, and April 7 at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC.

See you on Thursday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer gave a speech last week that got a lot of attention. And I think it is actually a pretty big deal, but not really for the reasons that people are suggesting it is. I want to pick up on something that actually Norman Finkelstein said in our Zoom call on Friday for paid subscribers that I think was correct, and I want to try to elaborate on it in explaining why it matters. Now, the headline was that that Schumer called for new elections in Israel. I don’t know whether that will increase the likelihood of new elections in Israel. Certainly, Schumer’s speech was not, by my lights, a kind of commensurate moral response to the destruction of Gaza. He didn’t call for an end to military aid to Israel’s war. He didn’t call for an immediate ceasefire and hostage release. But he did say other things that I think suggest how much the discourse inside the Democratic Party, even in Washington now, has changed in a very short period of time.

To illustrate that, I want to go back to a speech that his predecessor, Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid, gave in 2011. In the spring of 2011, Barack Obama gave a speech calling for a Palestinian state near the 1967 lines with land swaps. And he had previously, over the past couple of years—Obama—pushed for a settlement freeze, which had put him in conflict with Netanyahu. And so, Harry Reid went to AIPAC, and he completely threw Obama under the bus. And he said, ‘no one’—this is Harry Reid—he said, ‘no one should set premature parameters about borders, about building, or about anything else.’ Building. That refers to settlements. Harry Reid was saying basically no US policy of restriction on settlement growth.

To fast forward to Schumer’s speech, two things about it that I think suggest how much the discourse has changed. The first is that he says in a slightly oblique way, but he says it, that if Netanyahu doesn’t begin to wind down the war and ‘continues to pursue dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing US standards for assistance, then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.’ Now, that’s a little euphemistic. But when he talks about ‘existing US standards for assistance,’ it seems to me he’s referenced something called the Leahy Law. The Leahy Law says the US cannot give military aid to units of foreign militaries that commit gross human rights violations. We do apply that to plenty of countries. We don’t apply it to Israel. It’s not enforced. We don’t even collect the data that would allow us to determine if certain units of the US military had committed gross human rights violations.

Schumer is referencing that. That’s a big deal. Prior to October 7th and the war in Gaza, there was, as far as I know, one US Senator, Bernie Sanders, who was open to the idea in a meaningful way of conditioning US aid. Now, Chuck Schumer is talking about it. And Chuck Schumer is not on the left edge of the Democratic Party in Congress. He’s on the center right edge when it comes to foreign policy. Let’s remember, this is the guy who opposed Barack Obama’s nuclear deal in 2015, and he’s putting the idea of conditioning military aid to Israel on the table. The US has not conditioned aid to Israel since the early 1990s under George H. W. Bush. The fact that Chuck Schumer is now talking about it suggests how dramatic a transformation there has been inside the Democratic Party in Congress in a relatively short time.

The second thing that Schumer said that I thought was quite remarkable is he refers to the debate between one equal state and two states. Now, two states is his position. But he says, ‘I can understand the idealism that inspires so many young people, in particular, to support a one-state solution. Why can’t we all live side by side and house by house in peace?’ Now, then Schumer goes on to say he disagrees with that. He doesn’t think Jews would be safe. Those are very familiar rebuttals. But the fact that Schumer has to engage this argument at all is really new. A Democratic leader in the Congress would not have had to even acknowledge this as a topic that he needed to discuss. And it’s worth remembering that the establishment Jewish organizations like the Anti-defamation League, which equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, view this position—the position that I hold, one equal binational democratic state—as antisemitism. And which is their way of saying it shouldn’t be discussed, as part of the policy debate. But Schumer is discussing it! He’s disagreeing with it, but he’s discussing it, and he’s acknowledged that he’s calling it an idealistic position that many young people share.

This would not have happened up until very recently. And it suggests that Schumer understands the transformation that’s underway at the grassroots of his party, especially along generational lines. He’s trying to forestall it in a way, but he’s recognizing it is essentially a legitimate part of the discourse, which is something that establishment American Jewish organizations have been trying to forestall, make sure that it can’t be a legitimate part of the discourse by equating it with antisemitism. And Schumer is actually doing something very different here. It suggests to me he’s someone who knows that things in his party are really shifting. He may not be so happy about it, but he recognizes that. That is a big deal. And so, while there’s so many reasons for despair in this nightmarish moment, I think Schumer’s speech is a kind of backhanded compliment to those people in the activist community at the base of the Democratic Party who have been organizing in these hellish last few months for a change. And it’s a sign that that change, although far too slow and fragmentary, that there is evidence that that change is coming.

Our Zoom call this week will be at our normal time: Friday at Noon EDT.

This Friday, I’ll be answering questions. Feel free to ask me anything during the Zoom call and I’ll do my best to answer. Since I just published an essay in the New York Times about the historic rupture between American Jewry’s two dominant creeds— liberalism and Zionism— I thought it might be a good moment to talk directly with you.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

The studies showing a correlation between Israel’s killings of Palestinians and reported antisemitic incidents in the US, Belgium, and Australia.

Why pro-Israel donors objected when Harvard and Stanford appointed Jewish scholars who study antisemitism to study antisemitism on campus.

A pro-Israel speaker’s talk is disrupted at Berkeley. (The speaker returned and was allowed to speak.)

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), on the occasion of Purim, which features Amalek’s supposed descendant, Haman, Maya Rosen writes about how to understand the Bible’s call for genocide during what the International Court of Justice has called a “plausible” genocide in Gaza.

Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are four requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza.

Almost every day brings new evidence that the debate about conditioning aid to Israel is shifting among Democrats in Congress. Here’s Representative Katie Porter making the case.

Josh Leifer on trying to understand Hamas.

How Joe Biden threw in his lot with Benjamin Netanyahu after October 7.

If you want to understand what the Israeli government is thinking right now, Dan Senor’s interview with Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer is quite instructive.

My New York Times essay on the rupture between Zionism and liberalism for American Jews.

I talked about the war in Gaza with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and Ali Velshi.

I’ll be speaking on March 27 at Quinnipiac College, March 28 at Hofstra University, April 5 with Rabbi David Wolpe at City University of New York, and April 7 with Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Michael Koplow at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I wanna say something about the debate in the US today over antisemitism. I was a little ambivalent about this because the most important story right now, I think it should go without saying, is the destruction of Gaza, the mass slaughter there. But adjacent to that is this conversation about antisemitism in the US. I engaged in that conversation myself to some degree with a piece that just came out in the New York Times. Franklin Foer, my old colleague at The New Republic, had a cover story in The Atlantic. And I think it’s important to engage that conversation partly because antisemitism is a genuine problem, but also because if we don’t talk about antisemitism in the right way, it seems to me, then the conversation about antisemitism becomes a way of not having to face what’s happening in Gaza. So, it seems to me to some degree one has to engage with this conversation of antisemitism to try to say how to talk about it and how not to talk about, precisely so it doesn’t become a way of evading the reality of the horror in Gaza.

So, I want to try to suggest kind of six ways that I think are important to think about and not to think about antisemitism. The first is, which might be obvious, but I think is in some ways not said clearly enough, is that the rise in Israel-related antisemitism that we’re seeing in the United States is related to this war. There are three academic studies—one in the US, one in Belgium, one in Australia—over the last 20 years all show a strong correlation between substantial Israeli military operations that kill a lot of Palestinians and rise in reported antisemitic incidents.

Now, this is not to say that Israel is responsible for people who take out their anger against Israel on Jews. It’s not. Israel is responsible for the Palestinians it kills, but it’s not responsible for people who take out their anger on Israel against ordinary Jews. Just like Hamas is responsible for the Israelis it killed on October 7th, but Hamas is not responsible for the violent actions that have been taken against Palestinians in the United States by people who might have been inflamed by what Hamas did. And for that matter, the Chinese government is responsible for many, many terrible things, but the Chinese government is not responsible for the fact that during COVID, some people took out their anger against the Chinese government on Asian Americans in the United States. But it is just worth saying that if the war were to end, and the Israeli military were to stop killing so many Palestinians, likely the number of reported incidents of antisemitism would go down. Again, we have academic evidence that shows a pretty strong correlation here.

The second point I want to make is that if we want to fight against this Israel-related antisemitism and make it clear that it’s unacceptable to take out your anger against Israel against Jews, we may need to make a distinction between the Israeli government—its actions and its character—and Jews. We need to make it clear they’re not the same thing, just as we would make it clear that Muslims are not responsible for the actions of Iran or Saudi Arabia or Hamas, and Chinese Americans are not responsible for what China does because to support a government is a political choice. And a religion or an ethnicity is something very different.

And so that distinction is really, really important to make. And it’s important to make to fight against Israel-related antisemitism. And we have the problem that many established American Jewish organizations don’t want to make that distinction. They don’t want to distinguish Jewishness or Judaism on the one hand from Israel, and Zionism on the other, because they want to suggest that being a Zionist or supporting Israel is inherent in being Jewish. Now, it is true that a majority of American Jews—a majority of Jews around the world—I think would identify as supporting Israel, identify as Zionists, although they might mean different things by that. And if you say it is an inherent part of what it means to be a Jew, you’re actually contributing to exactly the conflation, it seems to me, that makes Jews in the US and in other parts of the world less safe because it makes it harder to maintain the distinction between Israel and Jews and harder to tell people that it is unacceptable for them to take out their anger against Israel—its actions, even its state ideology—on Jews.

The third point I want to make is that not everything bad that happens, even everything bad that happens to Jews, is antisemitism. Which is to say there’s bad behavior that takes place, including against Jews, which is not antisemitic. So, let me give an example. There was a speaker a while back at Berkeley, a pro-Israel speaker, who was not allowed to speak. And there was a whole set of incidents around that. I won’t go into the details but basically protesters prevented that person from being able to speak. That, to me, is a problem. I really oppose that kind of thing. I think people have the right to protest, but they don’t have the right to disrupt the speeches of people that they disagree with. And I think this is a problem on American campuses: this tendency to sometimes disrupt speakers that you disagree with.

But was it antisemitism? Well, let’s ask ourselves this question. If that pro-Israel speaker had been Christian, even Muslim, and not Jewish, would the same thing have happened? Yes, I think the same thing would very likely have happened. That a Christian evangelical speaker defending Israel’s war in Gaza, I think it’s very likely that person also would have been disrupted. So, my point is that the disruption of that speech, the inability of that person to be able to speak, was wrong. It was illiberal. It was an attack on free speech. I think that the people who do that should be punished. But it wasn’t antisemitism.

And I think that’s particularly important because one of the things that we’re seeing on college campuses, in addition to some genuine antisemitism, is a kind of social exclusion that’s happening towards Zionist students. And the social exclusion against Zionist students, I think, is not fundamentally different from the kind of social exclusion that anti-abortion students or Republican students, students who have political views that are out of the mainstream in very progressive campuses, just like it’s not only pro-Israel speakers who get disrupted. We know that Charles Murray got disrupted when he tried to speak at Middlebury. Milo Yiannopoulos, that guy from Breitbart, who got disrupted a while ago. I’ve actually written criticizing both of those disruptions. But the point is there’s a kind of intolerance that exists on leftist campuses that can express itself in some ugly ways. And I think it should be treated as a concern. But it doesn’t mean it’s antisemitism. That’s not to say there isn’t also antisemitism, but I think it’s important to keep these two things separate.

A fourth: the fact that there is an increase in antisemitism does not mean that Jews in America are oppressed. This is a point that Shaul Magid makes in his in his wonderful book, The Necessity of Exile. And it’s an important thing to remember, which is to say there is a rise, I think, in antisemitism. What there is not is state sponsored oppression of Jews. Donald Trump has made some antisemitic remarks, but we don’t have politicians in either party suggesting that Jews should not be treated equally with other people. And that puts Jews in a different place, actually, than I think Palestinians or Muslims. Which is to say there’s rising antisemitism, and there’s also rising Islamophobia, and there’s rising anti-Palestinian racism. But the Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism are much more likely to be used by politicians to suggest that those people should not have equal rights.

So, for instance, Donald Trump said that Muslims should not be allowed in the United States. We have no equivalent of a politician saying something like that about Jews. Ron DeSantis, the governor of [Florida], banned all of the students for Justice in Palestine chapters at his state universities. We don’t have anything like a governor in the United States banning any Jewish, or for that matter pro-Israel, organizations. So, it’s important to distinguish, I think, conceptually between rising antisemitism, which is a concern, and state-sponsored oppression, especially because when Jews think about antisemitism, we often harken back to situations where the antisemitism was so dangerous precisely because it was actually being used by a coercive state that wanted to deny Jews basic equality.

[Fifth], the antisemitism debate is not like the debate about, let’s say, anti-Black racism. And that’s why when you often hear a establishment Jewish organizations say, ‘just like Black people get to define what anti-Black racism is, Jews should be able to define what antisemitism is.’ That’s a mistake because the two debates are very different. First of all, there is not a consensus among American Jews about how to define antisemitism. So, when the Anti-Defamation League or some organization says that you need to let us speak for the Jews and define antisemitism as including anti-Zionism, it’s not equivalent to the NAACP speaking on behalf of Black Americans because there’s much more of a consensus among Black Americans about what constitutes racism than there is among Jews on what constitutes antisemitism. Jews are very divided on this question of whether anti-Zionism equals antisemitism, if only because a significant number of Jews themselves would fall under that definition of antisemitism if it equals anti-Zionism. Again, almost 40% of young American Jews in 2021 in the Jewish Electoral Institute poll said they consider Israel to be an apartheid state, which is essentially defined as an antisemitic attitude by as America’s Jewish organizations. And indeed, the Jewish scholars who study antisemitism tend to not have the same definition as the establishment Jewish organizations. So, when you say, ‘you need to listen to the Jews,’ what these organizations are saying is, ‘listen to us.’ And often times, they’re saying ‘don’t listen to the actual Jewish experts who have made the study of antisemitism their field.’

One of the kind of comic things that’s been playing out on university campuses is that when the universities try to appoint Jewish scholars to these new antisemitism commissions they’re creating, when they try to appoint Jewish scholars who study antisemitism like Derek Penslar at Harvard or Ari Kelman at Stanford, it produces a huge furor from these Jewish organizations and from donors who have no scholarly background about antisemitism because the Jewish scholars don’t define antisemitism the same way that these Jewish organizations, or the Jewish donors who tend to be in line with those organizations, do.

And the last point to make is that anti-Black racism, the debate in the United States, is not being used to protect a particular government, right? We don’t have a situation in which the government of Nigeria or Senegal or Kenya is basically making a push to define criticisms of those governments as anti-Black racism. We do have that in the debate about antisemitism. The Israeli government is very, very involved in that debate. And that makes it fundamentally different, right? Or another way of thinking about this would be if you say that Jews get to define anti-Zionism and antisemitism because that’s how some Jews feel, then why don’t Palestinians get to define Zionism as anti-Palestinian bigotry, right? The point is you can’t allow a group of people to define what this bigotry means irrespective of the concerns of the other group of people who are actually part of this conflict in Israel-Palestine.

And the last point I would make—and this is something that Franklin Foer gets into in his piece for The Atlantic—but it’s also been a subject something that a bunch of other people have been writing about recently: this idea that we’re at the end of a Jewish golden age in the United States because of rising antisemitism. I think that that idea does capture something real, probably, which is that it may be that the kind of high point of Jewish cultural influence—let’s say, if you could measure that—has passed. And it’s also true, I think, that there is rising antisemitism. But I don’t think that the reason that the high point of Jewish cultural influence in America has passed is because primarily of antisemitism. I think it has more to do with the fact that as Jews have been in the United States longer, they are no longer, as in a certain kind of sense, culturally productive as they were before.

Or another way of putting it is, as Jews have moved further away from the immigrant experience, they lack the kind of hunger—professional and academic hunger—that leads them to excel in the way they did. And America is now a country with many, many people whose parents came in the post-1965 immigration, and many of those people who are closer to the immigrant experience from all parts of the world I think are behaving a little bit more like Jews did a generation or two ago, which is why their numbers at kind of very elite universities are going up and the Jewish numbers are going down a little bit. This, I think, is a kind of story of a kind of ethnic succession, which has happened before in American history. And I think that, more than anything else, is the reason that we may be entering an era in which Jews don’t have the same kind of cultural influence that they did maybe a few years ago. It’s also the case that the United States itself doesn’t have the kind of power in the world, and American liberal democracy is also more fragile than it was. But to suggest that the decline in Jewish influence in America is primarily because of a rise in antisemitism, I think misunderstands what’s actually going on.

I hope to return, you know, next week to talking about what’s actually happening in Gaza and America’s role there. But I thought it was worth throwing some of these things out there because I think the danger is that if we don’t talk about antisemitism in a thoughtful way, then the conversation of antisemitism and the fear about antisemitism—a genuine fear but I think a fear that’s sometimes inflamed—actually becomes a way of avoiding an honest conversation about America’s role in the horror in Gaza, and indeed about the organized American Jewish community’s complicity in the horror in Gaza.

Our Zoom call this week will be at our normal time: Friday at Noon EDT.

Our guest will be Abdalhadi Alijla, a Gaza-born political scientist who has done some intriguing writing about Gaza’s political future after this war. We’ll talk about Israel’s stated plans to empower Gaza’s families and tribes, the Biden administration’s effort to empower the Palestinian Authority, and what will become of Hamas.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane writes about the shifting politics inside the Democratic Party on the Gaza War.

Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are several requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Inessa Elaydi is trying to evacuate her family from an overcrowded refugee camp in Khan Younis. Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza. Please help if you can.

Annelle Sheline, who resigned from the State Department to protest US policy toward Gaza, talks about being impacted by Aaron Bushnell.

Ramy Youssef prays for the people of Palestine on Saturday Night Live.

I talked about the war in Gaza with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.

I’ll be speaking on April 5, with Rabbi David Wolpe, at City University of New York; and April 7, with Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Michael Koplow, at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC; and on April 10 at the Phoenix Committee for Foreign Relations.

Dr. Guy Shalev and Dr. Lina Qassem-Hassan, who recently joined me on one of our Friday zooms, will be speaking in Boston on March 31st at the Palestinian Cultural Center and April 1 at Temple Beth Zion, and in New York on April 4 at Judson Memorial Church.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

A lot of Democrats—starting with Chuck Schumer in his speech a couple weeks ago, but a lot of others as well, and some commentators—seem to feel like the sweet spot for them in responding to Israel’s war in Gaza is to attack Benjamin Netanyahu personally and say the problem with this war, and the reason that America and Israel not on the same page about it, is because of Netanyahu. That they love Israel, they support Israel, there is a good Israel that would be conducting this war in the way that America would like, but it’s been hijacked by Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government represents the bad Israel. Now, I can see why that’s a kind of politically appealing position for Democrats to be in because it tries to refute the argument that they’re anti-Israel and it tries to suggest that Americans and Israelis are actually really on the same page about this war.

Unfortunately, the evidence suggests this is really not the case. The war is very popular among Israeli Jews. Now, it’s true that there’s a deep division about whether to pause the war as part of a hostage deal. But even people who want to pause the war as part of a hostage deal don’t want to end it for good and certainly don’t question the legitimacy of the war—again, most Jewish Israelis. So, that puts them in a different place from the Biden administration. In fact, even though Netanyahu has become much more unpopular since October 7th, the Israeli political mood has moved to the right. It’s also not the case that there is a kind of majority of Israelis underneath Benjamin Netanyahu waiting to support a two-state solution if Netanyahu were to be gotten rid of. Again, Palestinian citizens of Israel may, but most Jewish Israelis even before October 7th weren’t wild about a Palestinian state if one meant a sovereign state that controlled the Jordan Valley, that had a capital in East Jerusalem—a genuine state. Netanyahu’s main rivals, Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, don’t really support that kind of state. And again, that the opposition to a two-states has even grown since October 7th.

So, this desire to suggest that the problem is Netanyahu is politically popular because Netanyahu is perceived in American circles as a right-wing or a Republican, someone who’s been personally obnoxious to American presidents. But it’s based on a kind of fiction about where Israeli politics are and what the kind of majority of Israelis actually believe. And also, I don’t think it’s going to be very effective in bringing down Netanyahu. A public fight with an American president—a rhetorical fight—isn’t necessarily undermining politically for Netanyahu. In many ways, he can actually use it to rally his base and to kind of call on nationalist sentiment. And it’s particularly not an effective tactic if you want to bring down Netanyahu because it’s only rhetorical. Netanyahu has a long history of embracing rhetorical battles with American presidents, going back to Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama over the Obama speech, for instance, calling for a Palestinian state near the ‘67 lines in 2011.

If you wanted to actually try to undermine Netanyahu politically, and increase the chances that Israel might shift course, you would actually have to condition or cut off military aid for the war and maybe change America’s positions in international institutions. The reason I think that would have a greater likelihood of success is that Netanyahu’s really entire political career at some level has been based on telling Israelis they can have their cake and eat it too. That they can do whatever they want vis-à-vis the Palestinians, essentially: destroy the possibility of a two-state solution, in particular, and Israel will remain deeply integrated into the rest of the world. It won’t face tangible consequences. Indeed, that it’ll actually become more integrated into the rest of the world, as it has been.

So, if you want to undermine that case that Netanyahu is making, you can’t do it effectively simply by saying we don’t like Benjamin Netanyahu. Israelis felt well aware that previous Democratic presidents also didn’t like Benjamin Netanyahu. But it doesn’t cost them anything. The way to undermine Netanyahu’s argument, at least with some sliver of maybe center or center-right Israelis, would be to show them that his policies are incurring tangible costs vis-à-vis Israel in terms of American weapons, in terms of America’s support in international institutions. Again, I don’t want to suggest that this would lead to some kind of left-wing peacenik Israeli government. There really isn’t the basis for that politically, especially given that most Palestinian political parties—which are the most peacenik, the most anti-war, the most pro-two-states—are not considered legitimate partners for an Israeli government. I’m talking about Balad and Hadash, in particular.

But it would, I think, change the calculus in Israel politically in a way that’s simply saying that you don’t want Netanyahu to be there doesn’t at all. And so, the Biden administration, I think, if it wants a change in government in Israel, the thing it has to do is take concrete actions to actually use the leverage it has vis-à-vis Israel and impose consequences. And if it doesn’t, its anti-Netanyahu rhetoric I think is actually completely counter-productive and won’t get the Biden administration what it wants, which is a different Israeli government.

Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Friday at 11 AM EDT.

Our guest will be Vali Nasr, Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, author of The Shia Revival, former official in the Obama administration and one of America’s leading experts on Iranian foreign policy. We’ll talk about the dangers of a full-scale war between Israel and Iran and what the Biden administration can do to avoid it. 

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Mouin Rabbani: “We are where we are because it never occurred to Biden to say ‘don't’ to Israel.”

How Israel grew more reckless in its attacks on Iran after October 7.

The UN Secretary General condemns Israel’s April 1 strike on Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus as a violation of international law.

The US, Britain, and France prevent a UN Security Council condemnation of Israel’s April 1 attack.

Israel’s April 1 attack employed US-made F-35s.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin complained that Israel had not warned the US of its April 1 attack, which put US troops at greater risk.

The Director of National Intelligence warns that Israel’s response to October 7 increases the risk of terrorism against the US.

Iran’s cautious behavior after October 7.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

For the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) Podcast, I spoke with Arielle Angel, Mari Cohen, and Daniel May about antisemitism on campus.

Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are several requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Inessa Elaydi is trying to evacuate her family from an overcrowded refugee camp in Khan Younis. Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza. Please help if you can.

Israel’s artificial intelligence war on Gaza.

Sigal Samuel on solidarity between Palestinians and Mizrachi Jews.

Goran Rosenberg on Israel at Road’s End.

Joe Scarborough versus Israel’s Minister of Economy and Industry.

A small act of kindness amidst the horror in Israel-Palestine.

I spoke last week about liberalism and Zionism at Washington DC’s Sixth and I Synagogue with Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Michael Koplow.

I’ll be speaking on April 16 at Sarah Lawrence, April 17 at Brown, April 18 at MIT, April 19 at Tufts, and April 26 at Georgetown.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I’m recording this on middle of the day Sunday in the US after Iran launched a large number of drones and rockets against Israel, which seemed to have been almost entirely shot down. And I think when one looks at this situation we’re in—the possibility of an Iran-Israel war, not a proxy war, but actually a real direct war—we can see the Biden administration having done some really valuable things in the last 24-48 hours. But I think we can also see that the decisions they made over the past six months actually put them in this very difficult situation that they’re now trying to get out of.

So, I give the Biden administration credit for helping to shoot down this large-scale Iranian attack. Thank goodness very, very few Israelis were killed. No one would want that, least of all me. And also, in addition to the importance of just saving Israeli life by shooting down these rockets, it also makes it easier for Israel not to respond. And the reports that the Biden administration has been pushing Israel not to respond, to say basically you got away with this very audacious attack in Damascus on the Iranian embassy. Now you’ve basically gotten away fairly unscathed because you shot down these Iranian rockets. Let’s leave it there. You’re lucky the way it’s turned out. So, I give the administration credit for that. There are lunatics like John Bolton, and even—I’ll say it—lunatics like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman who’ve basically been going around saying that the United States should support some Israeli response now in retaliation to the Iranian one. The Biden administration deserves credit for not taking that view.

But if you want to understand how we got to this very dangerous place in the first place, then I think the Biden administration deserves some real criticism. Mouin Rabbani wrote yesterday, ‘we are where we are because it never occurred to Biden to say ‘don’t’ to Israel.’ And that’s exactly right. That’s true for Iran as it’s true for Gaza. And to understand why it’s important to kind of rehearse the history of events here. Israel has been for quite a long time attacking military supplies that come from Iran through Syria into Lebanon to Hezbollah because they don’t want Hezbollah to have a more potent military arsenal that could threaten Israel.

But since October 7th, Israel has become much more reckless. You know, Benjamin Netanyahu actually has the reputation for not being militarily reckless, but what Israel has done vis-à-vis Iran since October 7th has indeed been reckless and gone far beyond what they did before. Israel, in December, assassinated a high-ranking Iranian general in Damascus. And then on April 1st, it attacked a building, which was part of the Iranian embassy consulate in Damascus, killing several high-ranking Iranian military officials. Now, this is a very serious escalation of what Israel had done in the past. And it’s really reckless. The Iranian embassy in Damascus is Iranian soil. And there’s a strong notion in international law that you don’t attack other people’s embassies. Indeed, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, said in response to Israel’s attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus that ‘it’s a violation of the inviolability of diplomatic and consular premises.’ And they did that with US F-35s and, according to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, without telling the Biden administration ahead of time.

Now that’s very, very reckless behavior. I think it reminds me of the recklessness of the ways the US responded after September 11th: the sense that the things that we had been doing before weren’t good enough; we needed to take it up several notches but without really thinking about what the consequences were. This act of attacking the Iranian embassy in Damascus puts American forces at risk. We already saw in January that three US soldiers were killed in Jordan because of Iraqi proxies of Iran that were responding to the Gaza attack. And then when you have US planes bombing what is under international legal terms Iranian soil, this also puts the Americans at risk. The US intelligence services have been saying—Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, testified to Congress that ‘it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism.’ So, already US unconditional support for Israel and Gaza is increasing the risk of terrorism.

And now, we saw that Israel’s attack on April 1st increases the risk of terrorism even further. They’re making the US complicit in an attack on what is Iranian soil. And this is in a context in which Iran has actually been acting in a pretty restrained way since October 7th. Remember: Hamas was reportedly hoping that Hezbollah with Iranian support would go into the war after its massacre on October 7th. Iran has not done that. The Washington Post reported in February that Iran had actually been cautioning its proxies against sparking a wider award. This is not because the Iranian regime is benign. It’s a horrifying regime. I would love nothing more than to see it overthrown in a democratic revolution and to see those Iranian leaders who have brutalized their own people go on trial in front of the Hague.

But because Iran is relatively weak compared to the United States and Israel, it doesn’t want a direct conflict. And yet, Israel’s actions have brought us to the brink of that direct conflict. And it has happened because the US has not been willing to tell Israel ‘no’; not been willing to condition American military support in a way that would prevent Israel from taking the reckless actions that it’s been taking vis-à-vis Iran, just as we have not been willing to do vis-a-vis the reckless and just massively catastrophic actions that Israel’s been taking in Gaza.

Again, I support US military aid to Israel that allows it to shoot down rockets that would kill Israelis with Iron Dome or the Arrow System, as happened just in the last 24 hours, but not unconditional US support for reckless offensive Israeli military actions that lead to the potential for regional war. What I hope is that the Biden administration is now learning its lesson just as it seems to be opening the door to conditioning US military aid on Israel’s reckless behavior in Gaza, that it will do the same vis-à-vis Israel’s behavior vis-à-vis Iran.

Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at Noon EDT.

Our guest will be Musallam Abu Khalil, a doctor in Gaza. Musallam works for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) running a primary care clinic in a makeshift school shelter in the Nusierat refugee camp in central Gaza, which houses thousands of internally displaced people. In his personal time, he runs the Dignity for Palestinians Campaign, which aims to preserve the dignity of Palestinians in Gaza through an emergency health and wellness assistance program. He will be speaking in his personal capacity and not as an UNRWA representative.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Monday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

A complete video of last Wednesday’s congressional hearings featuring Columbia University officials.

The number of children in Gaza injured or killed.

Genesis 16 and Genesis 21, which discuss the story of Hagar.

Rabbinic teachings about Hagar and Ishmael.

Rabbi Shai Held’s book, Judaism is About Love.

A statue of Hagar and Ishmael in Nazareth. As James Zogby notes, “Her skirt’s a tent, representing the refugees. She’s facing north to Lebanon,” to which many Palestinians were expelled in 1948.

In Genesis, Hagar and Ishmael are expelled into the desert of Beer Sheva. Today, the only school in Beer Sheva that teaches both Jewish and Palestinian children in both Arabic and Hebrew bears Hagar’s name.

If you’re looking for Haggadah supplements that speak to this moment, consider these.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen writes about the challenge of Palestinian and Jewish co-resistance in Gaza.

Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are several requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Inessa Elaydi is trying to evacuate her family from an overcrowded refugee camp in Khan Younis. Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza. Please help if you can.

A conversation between two remarkable men, Maoz Inon and Abu Aziz Sarah.

Chaim Levinson in Haaretz on why Israel has lost the Gaza War.

Students celebrate Kabbalat Shabbat at the Columbia Free Palestine encampment.

Is Columbia University cursed by God?

I spoke last week to Khalil Sayegh about Gaza’s present and future for the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts Podcast.

I’ll be speaking on April 26 at Georgetown University and May 8 at Whitman College.

See you on Thursday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I watched a good chunk of last week’s hearings with the president of Columbia, and the heads of the Board of Trustees, and one of the people leading their antisemitism commission in front of Congress. And there was one moment in particular that stuck out to me. A congressman named Congressman Banks got a hold of some kind of pamphlet that had been put out I think by students of the School the Social Work, which referenced the term, Ashkenormativity.

Ashkenormativity, I guess, is the idea that you kind of make Ashkenazi Judaism normative, and you kind of, you know, don’t pay attention to the fact that many Jews are not Ashkenazi and not from European heritage. Whatever. So, this Congressman was very upset that the term Askanormativity had showed up in some document that was given out to Columbia students and went around and asked the people on the panel what they thought. And one of the heads of the Board of Trustees said the phrase Ashkenormativity was ‘shockingly offensive.’

Now, I don’t really see what’s shockingly offensive about a term which tries to suggest that people tend to kind of assume that the culture of Ashkenazi Jews is the culture of all Jews. But what bothered me—and deeply, deeply depressed me—was this discourse of the use of a phrase, Askanormativity, in some pamphlet at Columbia University as being shockingly offensive when in this entire hearing—at least the long stretches that I watched—there was not a single reference to Palestinians being killed in Gaza that I heard. Not a single reference. You could watch that and literally not know that a single child in Gaza had died. Shockingly offensive? The term Askanormativity in a pamphlet is shockingly offensive? What about the fact that 26,000 children in Gaza, 2% of the children in Gaza, have either been killed or injured; that 1,000 children in Gaza have had one or both of their legs amputated; that all of the universities have been partially or entirely destroyed; that 30 of the 36 hospitals have been destroyed?

What pervaded that conversation about antisemitism was the assumption that Palestinian lives don’t matter at all, that Palestinian lives are worthless. And that’s what to me defiled the conversation. Of course, I care passionately about antisemitism. I care about antisemitism on campus. My kids will soon be Jewish students on campus. I recognize that antisemitism is rising on campus. I do not want a single Jewish student to have an experience in which they’re made to feel unwelcome, even if they have views that would be ones that I profoundly disagree with.

And yet, to me, when you have a conversation about antisemitism that treats Palestinian lives as worthless, Palestinian lives on those campuses—because there’s also no discussion that I heard whatsoever from the people of Columbia who were testifying about what’s happening to Palestinian students on campus. This is in a situation where we’ve had Palestinians killed and shot and doxxed since October 7th. That their lives are worthless and the lives of people in Gaza are worthless. And so, I feel like listening to one member after another basically talk about how they decry antisemitism, and they hate antisemitism, and what a huge problem is, and then even finding these kinds of absurd examples of what they claim is antisemitism, to me, I felt listening to it like I was revolted.

Again, not because I don’t care deeply about antisemitism, but because I hate a discourse of antisemitism, which makes it seem like our lives matter and Palestinian lives don’t matter. That’s not the fight against antisemitism that I want to be part of.  And it’s also not a fight against antisemitism that I think will be effective because it’s essentially a discourse led by Republicans who want to enlist Jews in a project of white Christian supremacism in the United States. Which treats Palestinian lives and the other lives of other kinds of people of color as worthless and invites American Jews to see our safety as part of that effort.

And I don’t trust them for one second as having our welfare at heart. I think that they’re using American Jews as part of their project of trying to establish, or re-establish, certain kinds of hierarchies in the United States about which lives matter and which lives don’t. And they’re inviting us to be on the dominant side, on the powerful side, a Judeo-Christian nation, i.e., not a Muslim nation, right? And I think we should reject it partly out of solidarity with the people who those Republican members of Congress don’t care about, and also because I don’t think that an ethno-nationalist project is ultimately safe for us. After all, those Republican members of Congress who talked about how upset they are about the antisemitism of Columbia, they are the same people who are gonna enthusiastically vote for Donald Trump, who hangs out with white nationalists all the time.

And we’re heading into Pesach and to Passover, and listening to this discourse in which Jews matter, and in which Jewish suffering matters, and in which bigotry against Jews matters, but bigotry against Palestinians and Palestinian suffering—even the overwhelming Palestinian suffering that we’ve seen—doesn’t matter, that it’s not important, it’s not even worth mentioning, made me think about how we could possibly have our seder in this moment. I think we have to fight against a discourse that exists in the United States and a discourse that exists in very many aspects of American Jewish establishment discourse, which treats Jewish victimhood as important, Jewish suffering is important, and Palestinian suffering as irrelevant or even something that Palestinians deserve. And the Passover Seder can, of course, be read in ways that play into that discourse, that it’s just a story about our victimhood, our bondage, and our liberation at G-d’s hands.

And yet, I think there are other ways to read the seder as well, to read the Passover story, which are more important than ever this year. And one of the things that I think we might think about doing is thinking during the seder about the story of Hagar. One of the points that Shai Held makes in his wonderful new book, Judaism is About Love—and I have to say Shai, who is someone I have known for a long time, is not someone who shares my view on Israel-Palestine at all. I don’t want to suggest that he does. But the book has many, many wonderful elements in it. And one of the points that he makes in the book is about the parallelism between the way that the oppression of the Israelites in Egypt is described, the language that’s used to describe the very word for oppression, ‘vate’anneha,’ and that it’s the same word used to describe the oppression of Hagar, the slave woman in the house of our patriarch and matriarch, Abraham and Sarah.

Hagar. The word means, ‘the stranger.’ The same word that is used for the Israelites in Egypt. Hagar, described in Genesis Rabbah by Shimon Ben Yochai as Pharaoh’s daughter; Hagar, cast out by Abraham and Sarah, who wanders in the desert without water just as the Israelites wander in the desert after they flee Egypt without water. And, and it seems to me, this parallelism cannot be entirely accidental. It is there to teach us something: that all these similarities between our bondage in Egypt by Pharaoh and our traditions imagining that our matriarch and patriarch themselves had an Egyptian slave, Pharaoh’s daughter, in their house and oppressed her—the same word for oppression that is used for our oppression; that we wander in the desert without water, that she wanders in the desert without water. And that G-d hears our cries in Egypt, and then again also in the wilderness, in the desert, and in bamidbar. And G-d hears her cries when she calls out. And the angel names her son Ishmael. G-d hears him. And Hagar herself gives G-d a name, and she names G-d, the G-d of Seeing.

So, perhaps one thing we might remember this Pesach, this Passover, as we hold our seders, is that we believe in a G-d who hears all people, a G-d who sees all people, who sees the cries and the pain of all people, and we do not believe that it is only Jewish pain that it’s only Jewish suffering, that it’s only Jewish oppression, that matters. There is a voice in our tradition, a very, very powerful voice, which says that G-d hears, that G-d sees the oppression of all people. And for goodness’ sake, in this moment, nowhere more than the suffering of the people in Gaza. And so, those members of Congress, those right-wing Republican members of Congress, they may not hear, they may not see the suffering in Gaza. And those leaders at Columbia who are just prostrating themselves to say whatever these members of Congress wanted, they may not hear, they may not see the suffering of people in Gaza. But G-d, our G-d, sees, and hears, and that seems to me something for us to say this Pesach.

Our Zoom call this week will be at our regular time: Noon on Friday.

Our guests will be two Columbia University undergraduates with differing views on the protests at their campus: Ilan Cohen, a senior who attends Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Gabi Frants, a senior who attends Barnard College. They’ll talk about the student movement that has swept Columbia, and the nation.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday night and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

In today’s video, I accidentally said Gaza has been under blockade since 2017. It’s 2007.

Scenes from the campus protests that give me hope.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Arielle Angel interviews Jewish student organizers at the Columbia Palestine solidarity encampment.

Last week’s guest, Dr. Musallam Abu Khalil, runs a charity that promotes the health and wellness of people in Gaza’s Nusierat Refugee Camp. Please consider supporting it.

What it’s like to be a Jewish Pro-Palestine organizer at Columbia.

Amira Hass on how people in Gaza feel about Hamas.

Ahmad Moor on why he can’t vote for Joe Biden.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts Podcast, I spoke to Seth Binder about what it means to condition US aid to Israel.

I’ll be speaking on May 8 at Whitman College.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

We’re witnessing something that I’m not sure I ever thought we would witness, which is that the struggle for Palestinian liberation has really captured the minds of kind of a whole generation of young Americans—and very quickly—and is convulsing America’s universities in a way that no foreign policy issue has in at least a generation. And I’m very keenly aware that, for many American Jews, including many American Jewish college students, this provokes tremendous fear. And I don’t want to belittle or minimize that. I have some understanding myself of where this fear comes from. I feel it even myself. We are a people that, I think, in our marrow as Jews, we have the sense that history can turn very quickly. And this is the really the story of many of our holidays, but also of our secular history that things can seem settled, and safe, and Jews can be okay, and even have some degree of influence. And then, quite quickly, things can turn, and we can become the scapegoats, that people can turn on us often in a kind of popular upsurge of something.

And so, seen through that lens, I can understand why this moment can provoke great fear in a lot of people. Because the truth is that the organized American Jewish community has for many decades now wielded a lot of influence over the terms of debate on Israel, been able to circumscribe those debates—circumscribe those debates in ways that I have been criticizing for much of my adult life. But still, for many American Jews, and even myself at certain moments, I must admit creates a sense of security, of safety, that we have a certain influence, even a certain kind of control that things are not getting out of hand, that we understand the terms of these debates. And now something that’s changing, something really radically new is being born in progressive circles, and I think increasingly inside the Democratic party, in which those debates will not be, you know, circumscribed by the American Jewish establishment in the way that they were.

And I also understand that people see in this movement things that frightened them, things that seem hostile and hateful, and indeed are hostile and hateful. But it’s worth remembering that all great social movements, all large social movements, attract different kinds of people and different kinds of voices. And so, you could have seen in the anti-war movement, people carrying North Vietnamese flags, people who were chanting for the victory of the North Vietnamese over American soldiers and a Marxist triumph. You could have seen people in the anti-apartheid movement chanting ‘one settler, one bullet,’ kind of a violent dehumanizing vision of how apartheid South Africa should should end.

There is a tendency in some parts of the media, and certainly online, to amplify and focus on the most hateful, disturbing things that you see from this movement. And I think that those things must be condemned. They must be criticized. And I’m not suggesting, not for a moment, that this movement or any movement should be worshiped, that people should abandon their critical faculties. Not at all. I don’t like this discourse that you sometimes hear on the left that to be an ally of a group means that you have to salute at whatever is done in its name. It’s important to always maintain the right to criticize any group of people, including a movement that speaks in the name of Palestinian freedom.

And so, yes, I don’t like it when I hear people say something like ‘all resistance is legitimate’ in the wake of the horrifying attack of October 7th. That seems to me to blur a critically important distinction between resistance to oppression that follows international law, and that recognizes that it is wrong to take civilian life, and what we saw on October 7th. So yes, criticize that. Criticize slogans like ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,’ which don’t acknowledge a place for Israeli Jews in that vision. Because I don’t think it’s realistic to imagine that there will be a country called Palestine, in which all people will be Palestinians. This is a bi-national country. A country of two collectives, both of whom’s identity need to be recognized in a political system that provides complete equality and indeed historical justice and freedom. So, yes, Jews should feel they have every right, every right to criticize things that they find are disturbing or that dehumanize us.

And yet, for all of that, I think this movement is a tremendous opportunity, a tremendous opportunity. And for the Jewish community to ally itself with the Elise Stephaniks and Mike Johnsons and Donald Trumps, who want to crush this movement because they want to crush America’s universities, because they fear universities as places that produce critical thinking, and as places that can be a challenge to white Christian supremacist authoritarianism, it would be a terrible, terrible mistake to join forces with those people as they try to crush freedom of speech and freedom of expression. This movement holds the possibility in a way that no movement in America has in my entire lifetime to end American institutional complicity with the oppression of the Palestinian people.

It’s important not to get distracted by one particular video you might see and to focus attention on the core demands of this movement. And so, much of the journalism that I see, frankly, frustrates me because it doesn’t actually take seriously the core demands of this movement, and instead wants to focus on one particular slogan, or one particular speech, or one particular video. What’s important about the anti-war movement in Vietnam was that it wanted to end the war. What was important about the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa was that wanted to end American complicity, complicity in South Africa. That was the core of the movement. The core of this movement is the demand to end university and American governmental complicity with Israel’s system of oppression, which is now culminated in this horrifying slaughter of people in Gaza.

This complicity must end. It must end because, among other things, it puts Jews in danger. We must see the lie that you can construct a system of Jewish safety on the destruction and brutalization of another people. We should recognize that October the 7th is just a taste of the horrors that will come to everybody if this system of oppression is deepened and entrenched. Because a system of violence breeds violence. That does not excuse Hamas from its moral responsibility for the horrors of October 7th, not for a second. That’s why I said it’s critical that we promote the idea, that we argue for a movement that makes the distinction between ethical and unethical resistance.

But the truth is that systems of violence ultimately endanger everybody. And this system of group oppression, a system that has held millions of Palestinians in the West Bank without the most basic of human rights for more than a half century, without the right to vote, without the right to be a citizen of the country in which you live, without free movement, which has held Palestinians since 2017 under a suffocating blockade that Human Rights Watch calls an open air prison, and the UN says is unlivable. And organized American Jewish organizations want to pretend that those things are untrue. But if the UN or Human Rights Watch said them about any other place in the world, they would recognize they are true. It’s only because we don’t want to face these things, and we want to believe that our safety can be bought at the expense of Palestinians. And that is a lie in the long term. This system endangers everybody between the river and the sea, and perhaps all of us whose fates are bound up with what happens there.

And that’s why the core demands of this movement seem to me to be just and create the possibility for a future in which Israeli Jews are truly safe because the only way they can be truly safe is if Palestinians are truly safe. And the only way that Palestinians can be truly safe is if Palestinians are free. And so, I would really urge people who find this movement frightening to not only look at those frightening videos, but to watch the videos that we saw from Columbia of students at that encampment: Muslims praying, and Jews praying; of Jews holding Kabbalat Shabbat and Passover Seders, being protected alongside people of every different background and race and religion. And see this as a vision of hope, the vision of hope that we desperately, desperately need.

Because this is what cannot exist right now in Israel-Palestine: true equality between Jews and Palestinians and of people of all different backgrounds living in equality, and supporting each other, and taking care of one another, and honoring one another. It can’t exist because of the system of oppression. And so, when we see this movement and what’s happening, it offers, it seems to me, the kernel of us being able to imagine a different future: a future of mutual respect, and mutual equality, and mutual safety, and mutual liberation. And we desperately, perhaps above all else in this moment of harm, we need that sense of hope.

So, that’s why I think this movement should not be worshiped. It should be criticized when it deserves criticism. Jews have the right to speak up for ourselves if we see anything that we genuinely believe is hateful towards Jews per se. But we should also recognize that, like nothing we have seen before in my lifetime, that this movement holds the possibility for ending Israeli impunity, and potentially, therefore—potentially—creating a different kind of conversation in Israel about what keeps Jews safe. The recognition that white South Africans came to finally: that only equality truly keeps people safe. And that that could be, from this movement, could come not just Palestinian liberation, but Jewish liberation as well.

Our Zoom call this week will be at a Special Time: 1 PM Eastern.

Our guests will be two professors— one Palestinian and Jewish— with deep insights into the protests on their campus: The first is Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia who gave this blistering speech about the university’s crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters. The second is David Myers, the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA, who was present during the attack on UCLA’s encampment, and wrote about his experience.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Monday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Correction: When comparing Zionist Jewish students on campus to Israel’s position in the Middle East, I mistakenly referred Israel being “popular” in its region. I meant to say “unpopular.”

The attacks on Pro-Palestine protesters at UCLA and Columbia.

Edward Said’s vision for Palestine and Israel: “There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such. This does not mean a diminishing of Jewish life as Jewish life or a surrendering of Palestinian Arab aspirations and political existence. On the contrary, it means self-determination for both peoples.”

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Adam Haber and Matylda Figlerowicz write about the “moral panic” fueling repression on campus.

A recent guest, Dr. Musallam Abu Khalil, runs a charity that promotes the health and wellness of people in Gaza’s Nusierat Refugee Camp. Please consider supporting it.

Norman Finkelstein’s address to the encampment at Columbia.

A Jewish student writes about the protests and antisemitism at Northeastern.

In April, I spoke about Zionism and American Jews at Brown University.

Last week, I spoke about the protests on Slate’s “What Next” podcast and with Ali Velshi and Nick Kristoff on MSNBC.

Check out Waleed Shahid’s new newsletter.

In the Ideas Letter, Daniel Levy, Mark Mazower, and Chris Ngwodo write about the global implications of the Gaza War.

On May 6 I’ll be moderating a panel entitled, “How to Report on Liars and Haters” at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism.

I’ll be speaking on May 8 at Whitman College.

See you on Friday at 1,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I wanted to talk about what’s happening on college campuses, and to make six different observations. And these come from my travels speaking at colleges this semester. I’ve probably spoken at at least a dozen, maybe fifteen, I’m not sure. And I also spent a lot of time at Columbia, in particular, several days before the encampment was taken down. Now, the colleges I’ve been to, I should say, are not representative. They’re more of the kind of elite kind of campuses that have been disproportionately in the news. So, it’s important to say that not everything I’m saying is gonna hold for all campuses in America. And probably the media should be paying a lot more attention to some of these campuses that don’t have such fancy names and to see what’s actually happening there. So, what I’m going to say is not necessarily representative of campuses as a whole, but they may be representative of the ones that have been in the news a lot.

The first is that the most important political dynamic is not happening among either Jewish or Palestinian students. It’s happening among non-Jewish progressive and non-Palestinian progressive students, and most of these students are progressive. And what’s happening is that for a lot of these students, the question of Palestinian liberation has become a central part of their political identity when it wasn’t before. It wasn’t that they were hostile to Palestinian freedom. If they thought about it, they probably would have been sympathetic, but it wasn’t one of their top burning issues. Now it’s become a central part of their political identity.

One way of thinking about this is that a large number of the progressive students on these campuses have moved from being non-Zionists to being anti-Zionists. They weren’t supporters of Israel before, but they weren’t involved in activism against Israel either, and now they are. And the reason this matters so much is that these campuses don’t have many conservative students, right? They don’t have, for instance, a lot of conservative Christian white evangelical students. So, the dynamics on the campus are very different than the dynamics in the country as a whole. In the country as a whole, most Zionists in America are not Jewish. You have huge numbers of Christian Zionists out there in Congress, out there in the country, in the Republican Party. But in these campuses, once the progressive students turn to being anti-Zionists, pretty much the only Zionist people around are the Jewish students. Yes, they could be joined by the college Republicans. But there are not many college Republicans. And I think this is what creates this dynamic of ideological isolation among the Zionist Jewish students, as they see the large bulk of their classmates who are not Palestinian but have turned towards a pro-Palestine politics.

It’s not that the Zionist Jewish students don’t have allies. They have powerful allies. But the allies are not on campus. Their allies are the politicians in Congress, the national Jewish organizations, to some degree you could even say big elements of the mainstream media, the donors. But those forces are very unpopular on the campus itself. And so, in some ways their de facto alliance with those off-campus powers also contributes, I think, to their social isolation. In some ways, the position of the Jewish Zionist students is a little bit like the situation that Israel used to be in the Middle East, where it was very unpopular in its local region, but had very powerful allies externally in the West. And that’s the kind of situation that I think Zionist Jewish students find themselves in, which is very uncomfortable.

The second point I want to make is that the media sometimes depicts these students who are protesting as these kinds of coddled, privileged students, and compares them to the coddled, privileged students who tried to get out of the draft during Vietnam. I think that really gets a lot wrong. In my experience, the students who are most likely to be involved in the pro-Palestine activism are among the least privileged students on campus. They are disproportionately students of color, and many of them are from immigrant families, and a significant number of them are actually foreign students. And these are students who, again, because they’re people of color, are disproportionately more likely to identify with the Palestinian cause because they see things in their own family histories that they connect to the Palestinian struggle and the lack of Palestinian freedom. But these are not particularly privileged students. In fact, they’re often very vulnerable students, some of the most vulnerable students on campus. I was talking at Columbia to a young woman—a foreign student—who was saying that her parents were desperately asking her not to be involved in the protest because if you are a foreign student, and you get arrested, you can be deported. And she told me that she told her parents, I’m sorry I’m gonna take that risk because I’m following in your footsteps, and you were doing this kind of activism back in South Asia.

This is very different than the anti-Vietnam war protest. The campuses were much more white and male. And remember, one of the big reasons for the protests were the students’ fear of getting drafted and having to fight. So, their activism was a form of material self-interest: we want to end the war so we won’t get drafted. The war continuing was a threat to them. In this case, it’s quite the reverse. It’s actually the war itself doesn’t create a material threat to these students, but they are taking actions anyway—you could in some ways say against their material self-interest, putting themselves at some degree of risk because of their ideological connection to the Palestinian cause. I also think this is one reason you may not see as much backlash as you did during the Vietnam War. Remember, during the Vietnam War, the policemen who were arresting these students were from working-class families, and they had brothers who were fighting in Vietnam, which gave them a particular antipathy to these white male, more privileged college students who were avoiding the draft. You don’t have that dynamic here, which I think may explain why there’s less of a political backlash against this protest.

Thirdly, in terms of what’s happening with the Jewish students, mainstream American Jewish organizations don’t want to acknowledge this, and even the media doesn’t often acknowledge it, but there is on a lot of these campuses a kind of intra-Jewish ideological civil war. A very, very large percentage of the majority of Jews around the world are Zionists, support a Jewish state. And even in the United States as a whole, probably 80% of American Jews support the Jewish state. But there’s of such a sharp generational divide that when you look at young people, especially on these progressive campuses, it’s not 80% that would consider themselves Zionist. It may be more like 60%, or 65%, maybe 70. But, certainly, a lower percentage. So, you have a minority of Jews who were anti-Zionist or questioning Zionism. It’s a minority, but it’s a significant minority. It’s not a tiny minority. I was told at two campuses that while a majority of the people in the protest movement are people of color—and of course there are Jews of color as well—that the majority of the white people in the protest movement were themselves Jews. And so, it’s interesting to think about how this intra-Jewish ideological civil war that’s going to define this debate of American Jews, I think, for the next half century, how it plays that out. Who are the Jews who are more likely to be anti-Zionists? The young Jews. And who are the ones who are most likely to be Zionists?

The Zionist Jewish students, I think, in my mind, come in three buckets. The first is they’re much more likely to be Orthodox because the Orthodox community is much more pro-Israel and it’s also mostly voting Republican now. So, those students are very likely to be disproportionately in the pro-Israel camp. The second group are Jewish students whose parents were not born in the United States. It’s not surprising to me that two of the activists who are becoming more prominent, for instance, at Columbia and Yale are both the children of Persian Jewish immigrants. Jewish kids whose parents are Russian or Brazilian or Persian—I met a couple of Brazilian very Zionist Jewish students—these are more Zionist communities, and these are families that have more of a sense of the fragility of diaspora Jewish life than an American Jewish family that’s been in America for a hundred years. And so, those students are also likely to be disproportionately pro-Israel and even pro-Israel activists.

The third bulk is Jewish students who are in fraternities and sororities. Now, that might seem a little strange. But I think one of the things about politics in this younger generation is that gender identity plays a very important role that’s different than in older generations. Remember, the percentage of kids on these campuses who identify themselves as LGBTQ could be double the percentage that you see in older generations. And so, the kids who are in fraternities and sororities are often the ones who most identify with traditional gender roles, whereas the students who are LGBTQ are much more likely to be found in all manner of leftist movements, including the pro-Palestine movements. And that plays out among Jews as well, which is why I think you tend to find a more pro-Israel sentiment in these Jewish fraternities and sororities.

So, this is a real struggle between Jewish students. And I think one of the first things that frustrates me a lot is that there’s this language often about keep keeping Jewish students safe. And, in the name of keeping Jewish students safe, you know, the ADL and others call for, you know, suspending pro-Palestine groups, or shutting down encampments, or whatever. But very frequently among the people that they want to penalize are Jewish students itself. So, they’re not really looking out for the safety of all Jewish students. They’re really looking out for the safety of Zionist students. And they don’t really care very much about the safety of the anti-Zionist students because they’re often the ones who get suspended, and arrested, and have their groups shut down.

Connected to that is that the language of safety is applied so radically differently when it comes to Zionist Jewish students and when it comes to Palestinian or Arab or Muslim students. So, first of all, in terms of the kind of the idea that you were made uncomfortable or threatened by speech, we’re always being told to imagine what it feels like for a Jewish student to hear a phrase like ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,’ which they may interpret as saying the Jews need to leave. And it could be that that’s meant that way. And again, it’s open to interpretation. Or that they may be threatened by the phrase ‘globalize the intifada,’ which they could interpret as a call for an attack or violence even against them.

But we’re rarely asked to imagine what it’s like for a Palestinian student, for instance, to hear a phrase like, ‘Israel has the right to defend itself,’ ‘I stand with the IDF,’ right? If you are a Palestinian student who has had family killed in Gaza, and you hear an endorsement of that war, that could be at least as threatening a kind of language to you as the phrase ‘Palestine will be from the river to sea’ is for a Jewish student. And yet, I find so rarely we are asked to put ourselves in the place of those Palestinians students. To be clear, I think all of that speech should be permitted. But if we’re going to talk about the way that the words can harm people, or make people uncomfortable, we should try to be even handed about it. And when we talk about actual violence, which of course should never be allowed on a college campus, what’s odd to me about that is that it seems to me that the clearest acts of violence, most egregious acts of violence that we’re seeing are mostly coming against Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students. For instance, there was this attack on the pro-Palestine encampment at UCLA by people who seem to come from the local Jewish community. And there was this skunk water attack by Jewish students at Columbia on these pro-Palestine students, which sent some of them to the hospital.

Now, just imagine for a moment what the media coverage would have been like if you would have had people from a local Arab, Palestinian, or Muslim community who would have come on campus and physically attacked a group of Zionist Jewish students. Or if you had a Palestinian or Arab or Muslim student who would use skunk water and sent a whole bunch of Zionists Jewish students to the hospital. I think those cases would be much, much bigger news than they are now. And I think the reason they’re not has to do with the way in which we take violence more seriously when it comes against Jewish students than we do when it comes against Palestinian or pro-Palestinian students. And we kind of tend to often filter out the kind of even physical threats that pro-Palestinian or Palestinian students face. Again, this of course is not to suggest that violence should be tolerated against anybody, or harassment. Of course not. But the point is, again, we should try, it seems to me, to have a high bar for the physical safety of all students, and often times I feel like that’s lacking.

The fourth point I wanted to make is that I think there is a struggle in these universities between the liberal arts parts of the universities, the kind of college, and some of the professional schools. If you look at the letters that were signed, the kind of pro-Palestine and pro-Israel letters signed by faculty, what you notice is the pro-Palestine letters are overwhelmingly coming from people in the undergraduate departments, especially the humanities departments. And the people who are signing the pro-Israel letters are much more likely to come from professional schools: medical school, business school, in particular, along with some scientists. And I think that’s because the ideological climate in the professional schools can be quite different than it is in the liberal arts colleges. This is one of the reasons that the most, I think, left-wing universities on the question of Israel-Palestine tend to be liberal arts colleges that have no graduate schools. Also, because those schools tend to have almost no Orthodox Jewish students because Orthodox students don’t really go to liberal arts colleges because there’s not enough of an infrastructure for the religious needs that they have.

But the most combustible campuses—I think, Columbia, Penn, UCLA—they have a particular thing in common. Which is they have a left-leaning undergrad, kind of liberal arts campus culture, plus powerful professional schools, and a significant number of Orthodox Jewish students who tend to lean very pro-Israel. And you see a kind of clash between the undergraduate part, which leans to the left, and the business schools in particular, which tend to be the only parts of campus that are really right-leaning in the sense that they’re very pro-capitalist. So, at Penn, I think it’s not a coincidence that Marc Rowan, who was the key figure in helping to push out Penn’s president, was the chair of the board of Wharton, of the business school; that the most high-profile pro-Israel professor at Columbia right now, Shai Davidai, is a professor at Columbia Business School; that you have a kind of cultural clash, ideological clash between different aspects of the universities that have very different kinds of faculty.

The last point I wanted to make has to do with a particular kind of discourse that I’ve heard among the protesters. And I was at Columbia for many, many, many hours. And I had this kind of really disorienting experience. And the experience was I had a long conversation with a Jewish student, very impressive Jewish student who had been involved in the encampment, and really talked about how wonderful it was, and how completely embraced he felt. And also, on our last week’s call, I had one of the people we interviewed was Ilan Cohen, who’s another Jewish student at Columbia, also very involved in the encampments, also felt completely fully embraced. The Columbia encampment had a seder, as people may know, it had Shabbat services. So, these Jewish students who were intimately involved in it felt no antisemitism whatsoever, quite the opposite.

And yet, after the conversation I had with this Jewish student, I saw the students from the encampment, some of them, come to the gates of Columbia and Amsterdam. So, these were the students in the encampment. These were not outside people. And they started doing a series of chants. Many, many chants. But one of those chants was, ‘settlers, settlers go home, Palestine is ours alone.’ And if you understand the context of these chants, the many, many chants, it’s clear this is not a reference to West Bank settlers. This is a reference to settlers as just Israeli Jews, as settlers in general. And I was really struggling to understand how I could have both heard from the Jewish students that they felt so at home there, and then hearing a chant, which seemed to me, you know, to basically be calling for Israeli Jews to leave. I mean, what’s amazing about that is it’s actually more radical than what Hamas has said. And if you look at Hamas’ 2017 charter, it’s most recent charter, Hamas does not say in that charter the Israeli Jews need to leave, right? So, these students are actually taking a position which is more radical even than the ideological position of the current Hamas charter. And yet, these Jewish students were saying they didn’t feel any antisemitism.

And so, I guess my way of trying to understand this is that I think antisemitism in some ways isn’t the right word to understand what’s going on. I genuinely think that these protest movements are totally willing to embrace Jews who embrace the anti-Zionist cause. But alongside that, I think there is a kind of dehumanizing language when it comes to Israeli Jews, a kind of Manichean worldview that basically sees the world as oppressors and oppressed, and sees Israeli Jews—all of them—as the oppressors, as colonists, and therefore just doesn’t have any space for their humanity, for their dignity, for their lives. And you also see this in the real difficulty that these student protesters so often have in condemning what happened on October 7th. There are, by the way, very honorable exceptions. Northeastern, for instance. Their protest move did make a clear statement about the opposition to targeting civilians. But I think many others in these activist movements have not.

And so, what was so saddening to me about this was that this was happening on the campus of Edward Said. And now the campus of Rashid Khalidi. These are some of the most important Palestinian intellectuals that have existed in the United States. And that rhetoric about ‘Israeli Jews go home, Palestine is ours alone,’ is so far from Said’s vision, and so far from Khalidi’s vision, which really were about mutual liberation, about full equality and coexistence. Said was strongly anti-Zionist, of course. And yet, he always had a kind of generosity of spirit towards the idea that this should be a place that Israeli Jews could continue to live, again, not under a Jewish supremacy but under conditions of equality. And I so wish that I heard more of that spirit from at least the protesters that I was listening to at Columbia.

Again, I’m not saying this because I want those students, their speech to be suppressed or want them to be arrested. Not at all. And indeed, as I said in last week’s video, I think that there are really, really important things that are coming out of this protest movement. They are putting debates on the table about university complicity with the oppression of Palestinians that are really, really important. All next fall, we’re going to start having debates over divestment because some of these universities have been forced to have these debates in their boards of trustees. That’s a tremendous accomplishment by this movement. And yet, I just wish it were not paired with a discourse that, whether you call it antisemitic or not, seems to me just not to hold a lot of space in its heart for the humanity of Israeli Jews—regardless of the system of oppression that they benefit from, and I consider it a system of profound oppression—are still human beings who seem to me whose lives should be cared about, and should be invited and welcomed to live in this place in equality and safety alongside Palestinians.

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be moving to a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest this week is someone I admire greatly, Tel Aviv University History Professor Yael Sternhell. We’ll talk about repression in Israeli academia following the arrest of Palestinian legal scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who teaches at Hebrew University. We’ll also talk about Israeli discourse about the Gaza War and the response in Israel to protests in the US. As an Israeli who is also a historian of the United States, Sternhell is uniquely positioned to discuss the way each country understands the other at this terrible and historic moment.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Monday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Israel returns to fight in places where it claimed Hamas was defeated.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Zvi Ben-Dor Benite talks to Avi Shlaim about his family’s journey from Iraq and what it means to be an Arab Jew.

Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do.

Last week’s link to the latest edition of The Ideas Letter, which includes essays on Gaza and its reverberations by Mark Mazower, Chris Ngwodo, and Daniel Levy, didn’t work. Here’s the correct one.

Rick Perlstein on how the current campus protests—and the repression they elicit—aren’t like the protests of the 1960s.

The mother of Hind Rajab talks about students naming a building at Columbia University after her daughter.

Hard to believe this appeared on Fox News.

Hadas Thier in The Nation on whether the encampments threaten Jewish students.

In last week’s video, while rebutting the claim that today’s protesters are privileged and narcissistic, I incorrectly suggested that anti-Vietnam protesters were motivated by self-interest because they were trying to avoid the draft. A number of protesters from that era registered their displeasure. I’m reprinting part of an email from subscriber Merrill Goozner, who rightly takes me to task.

“The earliest protests led by SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] in 1965 called attention to the horrific slaughter of innocent civilians (pro-Viet Cong, perhaps, but non-combatants nonetheless). That’s the direct correlation to today’s situation in Gaza, which has sparked similar protests. By the most conservative estimates, non-combatants totaled more than a half million of the 1.3 million who died during the war. As someone who came of age during that era and participated in the antiwar movement, I can assure you that moral outrage of what was being done ‘in our name,’ and the betrayal of the nation’s ideals that the war represented, played a much larger role in motivating the era’s antiwar students than fear of the draft.

Moreover, there was a widespread recognition among antiwar activists that the draft and its student deferment were egregiously unfair, represented by the slogan, ‘Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight.’ The draft resistance movement (I have a close friend who refused to register and went to jail) consistently called attention to this inequity.

I know plenty of people who found a doctor to write up a phony excuse to get out of the draft during that era. This was especially prevalent after the Tet offensive when public opinion turned against the war. But I would argue that even this behavior, for most, was because they believed that participation in the war was immoral and senseless.”

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

This will come out on Monday, which is Yom HaZikaron in Israel. It’s Israel’s Memorial Day. It’s always a very painful day in Israel when Israelis mourn their dead from war. But it will be immensely painful this year because Israelis will be thinking about the people killed on October 7th, and indeed the Israelis who are still held hostage. And I think it will be even worse because it seems increasingly clear to me that this war in Gaza is nowhere near an end, and that tragically Israeli soldiers are going to continue to die in Gaza and be mourned on future Yom HaZikarons. And that this was very predictable.

And I wanna read something from The New York Times from yesterday. They write, ‘close-quarters ground combat between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops raged in parts of northern Gaza over the weekend. The fighting fit into a now-familiar scenario. Israeli forces returning to an area where they had defeated Hamas earlier in the war, only to see the group reconstitute in the power vacuum left behind.’ This kind of thing will be very familiar to Americans who remember our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed in Vietnam, where Americans were told that the United States had cleared out entire swaths of territory where it defeated the enemy, only to find that the enemy was still there, and the United States needed to return again and again.

So, we were told also that Israel had defeated Hamas everywhere in Gaza except for this little corner in the south, in Rafah, and it just needed to go in there and defeat the last few Hamas units, and then Hamas would be defeated. And we now see that that’s a lie. And it’s a lie for the same reason it was a lie in Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam because countries with powerful armies like Israel and United States can topple governments, but they cannot defeat insurgencies unless they offer a solution to the underlying fundamental political grievance of the population. And this Israeli government has not even tried to pretend that it is offering a solution to the fundamental grievance of the Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond, which is their lack of freedom. And so, absent that, Israel can’t marginalize Hamas. And even if it could somehow miraculously marginalize or even defeat Hamas, it would simply face another resistance force that was just as dangerous.

Of course, what Hamas did on October 7th was horrifying. But Palestinians had been fighting Israel in a whole range of ways, including violence against Israeli civilians, since long before Hamas existed. And so, saying that you are going to make Israel safe by defeating Hamas without dealing with the underlying problem of Palestinian lack of freedom is a little bit like when Israel thought that it could solve its problem in the early 1980s by kicking the PLO out of southern Lebanon. And it did expel the PLO from southern Lebanon, and it laid waste to much of Lebanon, and it laid the foundation for Hezbollah, which is an even more formidable foe. We know that Hamas recruits its fighters from the families of people Israel has killed. Presumably, any other Palestinian resistance group would do the same thing.

And so, now that Israel has killed 40,000 or so Palestinians, forced 90% of Palestinians in Gaza from their homes, the population of people that will be easy recruits for future attacks against Israel is that much greater than it was before. And so, Israel is less safe. And this war, it seems to me, is likely to drag on for a very, very long time, leaving more and more Palestinians devastated in the more Israelis endangered and dead. And what’s so depressing to me is that this was predictable. Indeed, this was predicted. And the people who predicted it most clearly, not coincidentally, were Palestinians who have been saying from the very beginning that Israel’s fundamental problem is not with Hamas, it’s with the Palestinian people, and that Israel has to offer a solution to that fundamental problem.

And yet, their voices have been—as so often has been the case in the United States—marginalized in American politics and in American media, certainly marginalized in Israel, where it’s rare to hear Palestinian voices on Israeli TV; where Israel’s own Palestinian citizens who oppose this war—if you look at public opinion, who could have been the wisest counsel for Israeli political leaders—have been basically terrified into silence because of Israeli repression. And so, this kind of blind fury that you’ve had in Israel after October 7th—abetted by the United States, which so resembles the mood in the United States after 9/11—has marginalized the voices that could have offered the wisest counsel about how to respond.

So, what do we see in the United States? We see that many, many people who supported the Iraq War have very high-profile positions and platforms in discussions about the war in Gaza. But Palestinians who know Gaza and Palestinian politics the best don’t have a voice. It reminds me so much of the debate in the United States after September 11th when there were so few people who really knew Iraq and Afghanistan well who were part of that public discussion, who could have warned Americans about the likely impact of those wars on those societies and the inability of America to win those wars.

And to me, it sometimes feels like when I listen to American Jewish and Israeli Jewish discourse, that like I’m part of this family. And our family is doing immensely destructive things to other people. Of course, we’ve been very badly wounded ourselves, but we’re responding by doing these immensely destructive things to other people. But those things are also self-destructive to us as well. And that there are voices that we could listen to that could help perhaps get us out of this downward spiral. In this case, particularly to listen to Palestinians because Palestinians know better than anybody else what it will take to get Palestinians to stop fighting against Israel. And Palestinians have been saying again and again and again that Israeli Jews will not be safe if the Palestinians are not safe. And Palestinians can’t be safe unless they’re free.

And those voices, I believe, could get us out of this terrible downward spiral. And yet, they are systematically excluded from our discourse. And I listen again and again and again to very, very smart people in my community who have public platforms in politics, in media discussing this issue. And I think: these people are very, very smart. Why hasn’t it occurred to them to bring in Palestinian voices onto their platforms, and ask Palestinians what they think the solution to Israeli safety is? And because Palestinians are not part of that conversation, I feel like we are in this downward spiral, not only in terms of the horrors that we commit and that Israel commits against Palestinians, but indeed the way that contributes to less and less safety for Israeli Jews.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan left America in so much worse shape in so many ways. And when you think about what this war in Gaza will mean for Israel, given that Israel is not half a world away from the territories that it is devastating, and in which it’s producing all of these enraged people who want to fight back, but that it actually lives cheek by jowl with those people, it really terrifies me the consequences of this war, and frustrates me a great deal that the voices who might have warned, indeed did warn against this path, were not listened to.

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest this week will be Lily Greenberg Call, former Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff at the Department of Interior, who last week resigned to protest US policy in Gaza. She is the first Jewish Biden administration staffer to resign over the war. For ten years, until 2022, she was a youth activist for AIPAC. Her resignation constitutes perhaps the most remarkable illustration yet of the speed with which many young American Jews are abandoning previously held views about Israel and joining the struggle for Palestinian freedom.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) impact on Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Senator J.D. Vance proposes Viktor Orban’s takeover of Hungary’s universities as a model for the US.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, I talked with Arielle Angel, Mari Cohen, and Daniel May about Zionism and anti-Zionism.

Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.

What Israeli leaders mean when they talk about Gaza’s future.

How American universities are purging pro-Palestinian faculty.

A child of Holocaust survivors speaks about why he’s protesting the war.

An Israeli risks her life to try to stop Israelis from preventing aid from entering Gaza.

Rick Perlstein on why the current crackdown on campus protest is worse than the 1960s.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I want to say a couple more things about the campus protests that have really roiled universities this spring. There’s always the danger, of course, that attention to this distracts us from what’s happening in Gaza, which is much, much more significant. But this is really, I think, a movement whose impact will kind of resound in terms of American politics and American life for a long time to come. And so, I think that thinking about a couple of more of its dynamics might be useful. And I want to make three points based on some other campuses that I visited since a video I did a couple weeks ago.

The first is, I think, one of the things the media has not sufficiently emphasized is the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on this movement. That it is not a coincidence that we had this huge upswell in protesting around the George Floyd incident several years ago. Now we have this. I was at Whitman College in Washington and talked to a number of students who were involved in the encampment there. This is, you know, a fairly small college. And what struck me again and again was how many of them had been introduced to protest by the George Floyd moment back when they were still in high school, and that often around the edges of that movement was when they got connected to issues about Palestinian organizing, that someone handed them a pamphlet or there was someone who was Palestinian in that movement or someone who was connected to that.

And it was essentially through that movement of Black Lives Matter that they came aware of this issue that has now become so central to them. And I think if you look at American history, this is the way things often work, which is that you have clusters of different movements that cross-fertilize. So, if you think about the early 1960s, and you think about Students for a Democratic Society, which became this crucial element of the kind of the new left organizing against Vietnam, some of its key members like Tom Hayden and Alan Haber had been influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s against segregation by Black students in the South.

And so, there you see the way in which one protest movement feeds into another at a time of broader protest. And again, we know that there were veterans of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements who then influenced the feminist movement and the LGBT movement. And so, I think what we’re seeing in this moment is that we are in an era again of youth-led—not only youth but with a large youth participation—grassroots activism, and people move from one subject to another. I also heard people who have been involved in climate protest, which has obviously been a huge issue for young people. And it was through climate that they became interested in the question of Palestinian freedom. We can see that Greta Thunberg, who was kind of like the icon of young climate activism, has been involved in this question of Palestinian liberation. So, I think that’s one thing to keep in mind about how this seemed to come out of nowhere. It really wasn’t coming out of nowhere. It was partly coming out of people who have been involved in other movements that had the Palestinian cause kind of adjacent to it.

The second thing that has struck me going to many, many campuses is the way in which among Jewish students who were involved in this pro-Palestine organizing, it is awakening a kind of much greater interest that they had in what it means to be Jewish, and even a greater level of commitment to Jewish religious practice. This runs so counter kind of to the mainstream narrative, which is essentially that, you know, this is a movement against Jews, or maybe if there are a few Jews in this pro-Palestine movement then they are somehow self-hating or kind of completely deluded or tokenized. But what I actually find is, what’s fascinating to me is the way in which, for a lot of these young people, it seems to me that becoming interested in protesting against what Israel is doing has made them much more interested in Judaism than it was before. I mean, I met a student at Whitman College who, because they were interested in this question of land in Israel-Palestine, had decided they wanted to start studying about Shmita and Yovel. Shmita is this is the Jewish law that says that land has to remain fallow every seven years. Yovel is that after 49 years the land has to go back to his original owner. So, her interest in the question of land and Palestinian right of return had led her to want to study these things. I was told by some students at another campus that they were very proud that at their Shabbats—they had this Jews for a ceasefire group—that the Shabbats at their campus were attracting, they claim, more people to their Shabbat for a ceasefire than we’re going to Shabbat services at Hillel.

I was told by someone else that at the GW encampment—again, this is second hand so I haven’t verified it—that they said that at the encampment, three Jewish students had B’nai Mitzvah, which is a Bar or Bat Mitzvah that they evidently didn’t have when they were 12 or 13. They had it at the encampment as, you know, as college students. So, what’s fascinating to me about this is that you did not see this, I think, among Jews who were involved in the Civil Rights movement, at least not that I’m aware of. Again, if people know more, but I’ve never heard really about—I mean, yes, you have people like, Rabbi Heschel and some other rabbis, but among the young Jewish kids who were going from northern universities to be involved in Freedom Summer and these kind of things, I’ve really never heard of them particularly wanting to hold a lot of Shabbat services and even Passover Seders, which have become a kind of feature of this. Certainly, I know that in the anti-apartheid movement where there were a lot of Jews who were involved in prominent positions in ANC, these folks were not involved in Jewish religious practice as part of this movement.

And I think it’s interesting to think about why that is. I think part of it is clearly because these Jewish kids feel that people are challenging their Jewishness, and they’re seeing that an element of what composes other people’s Jewishness, which is their support for Israel, that they no longer feel connected to. So, they’re trying to answer the question: what actually makes me Jewish after all? And they want to almost assert that they do have a strong connection to being Jewish in the face of people who are denying that. But I also think that it is a moment in which questions of identity are just more legitimate and more interesting to people—ethnic, religious, racial, you know—than they were, you know, generations ago.

And I wonder how much of that has to do with the decline of communism. Again, when I think about the Jews who were involved in the ANC in South Africa, they were mostly communists. And so, their view about questions about religious identity, religious practice was seen through a communist lens. They were thinking like, what is this opiate of the masses kind of stuff? I wonder whether it’s because we’re in a post-Cold War moment, in which communism doesn’t have the power that it did to Jews on the left, that communism as a Jewish identity, which was very strong in the 20th century for Jews who were involved in progressive struggles, isn’t there in the same way. And so, people look for religious identity in a way that they didn’t before. Well, I know we’re also seeing Muslim prayer in these encampments, and I’m also really interested in the way among Arab and Palestinian and Muslim students that this movement is shaping their set of identities and their question about what it means to be a Palestinian or Arab or Muslim American. I’ll be curious for folks who’ve had some experiences with that.

The last point I want to make has to do with now that these protests will probably, you know, ebb as universities go on hiatus, the question of what have these accomplished. I think they’ve actually accomplished a lot. And I think that one of the critical things they have accomplished is that the question of divestment, which was a demand I think in almost all of these, is now really much more on the public agenda. At a number of universities, they have said that there’s going to be a discussion or even a vote among the Board of Trustees. This is going to be true at Brown. But I think what’s going to happen when we come back in the fall is that there’s gonna be a much bigger public debate about the question of universities’ involvement financially in the oppression of Palestinians than we’ve ever seen before. And I think that, especially tied with the growing attention in the Democratic Party to conditioning military aid, really represents a kind of a sea change. And I think these college protests have put that on the table. Now, I think it’s very unlikely we’re going to see much investment in the short term. But this is really not a debate, if you’re a defender of the Israeli government, you want to be having at all. I think one of the reasons people have focused so much on the question of antisemitism on campuses, the question of various chants because they don’t want to actually have a debate about divestment. From a pro-Israel perspective, once you start having that debate as a legitimate American public debate, you’ve already lost a lot of ground, right? And so, I think in that way the encampments and the protests have achieved a lot.

My fear is that the more powerful they grow, the more the repression we will see. We’ve already seen a lot of oppression this fall, but what I fear we will see is that, as this becomes more of a live possibility of some form of divestment, we will see, first of all, a greater kind of capital strike, which is to say that big donors to the universities—many of whom are Jewish—will start to pull out. And also, that we will see that the US government at the state and federal level will start to punish these universities even more severely. We already have in a lot of states laws that basically punish companies or individuals from boycotting Israel. So, some of these laws may get triggered. And what I fear is that Jews have played a very, very important disproportionate role in a lot of American universities in sustaining them and supporting them. And in some ways, these universities are, to some degree reflect, a kind of what American Jewish institutional identity is. Which is kind of like what some people have called ‘progressive without Palestine,’ a general kind of moderate liberal orientation, but certainly not a human rights orientation vis-à-vis Palestinians.

And what I worry is that as Jewish institutions see campuses as more of a threat, essentially, people in the Jewish community, the organized American Jewish community will essentially abandon the liberalism of these university projects altogether essentially by starting to divest from them in terms of their dollars, and also by bringing in the force of people in government, especially authoritarian Republicans. And again, remember, we could be dealing with President Donald Trump to basically crack down on these universities because those Republicans had their own reason to want to try to cripple and maim these universities because they feel like these universities are producing people who challenge the founding myths about America that these Republicans are invested into. That seems to me a really frightening dynamic. So, on the one hand, these protest movements have accomplished a lot, and yet I think that the backlash against them may be much more ferocious than anything we’ve even seen so far.

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest this week will be Jamil Dakwar, a human rights lawyer, adjunct professor at New York University, and former senior attorney with Adalah, which advocates for the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. He’ll be speaking in his personal capacity. We’ll talk about the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and the case against Israeli and Hamas leaders at the International Criminal Court.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Raphael Magarik talks with Maya Wind about her book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom.

Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Sapir Sluzker Amran about being a queer, feminist, Mizrachi activist in Israel—and about her decision to go to the border with Gaza to challenge people preventing the delivery of aid.

Muhammad Shehada on the danger of selective empathy.

Michael Sfard on the failure of the Israeli media.

Mehdi Hasan vs Jonathan Schanzer on the ICC’s warrants against Israeli leaders. 

Former Israeli combat soldier Ariel Bernstein on how Israel is fighting in Gaza.

Imagine if US leaders talked like Irish leaders about Gaza.

M.J. Rosenberg has renamed his Substack (and subscribers must resubscribe).

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, I’ve been thinking about why the Biden administration has made the decisions that it’s made on this war. Decisions that seem to me to have been disastrous and catastrophic, not just for the people in Gaza though that’s obviously the most important thing—all the people who’ve died and been injured and who’ve been forced from their homes—but also has been politically disastrous, and I think actually potentially disastrous also for the careers of top Biden administration officials themselves. Politically disastrous because Joe Biden now is in a situation, as we enter into the kind of the meat of the presidential campaign, in which he literally can’t go speak to his own party’s base. He can’t go speak at a university. He can’t go speak at a Black church. He can’t even go speak at a union event without the very real prospect of his speech being protested, even interrupted, because there’s so much anger at his policy on Gaza.

It’s one thing not to have a hugely enthusiastic voter base, as Biden, you know, never really had a hugely enthusiastic support from his party’s base. But to have people be so angry at you in your own party’s base that you can’t go to the institutions of your own party’s base without literally having people protest you, that’s a huge warning sign for a presidential campaign. Yes, it would have been very challenging for Biden to take a different line on the Gaza War as well. But it doesn’t seem to me that they recognized early on how bad, politically, how dangerous this path they were on was.

And secondly, I don’t get the sense that people in the Biden administration, the foreign policy team, understand the potential ramifications for their careers over this. I mean, there has been a pattern that, if you leave an administration, you can go to work on Wall Street, you can be a consultant. But often times, people also go to universities. They become deans of colleges, universities. They teach at universities. This is a kind of an enjoyable thing for folks to do in the few years while they wait for their party to regain power. This is what people did after the Clinton administration, after the Obama administration.

I think we’re in a very different world now. I think if you are a top Biden foreign policy official, and think that you can go for a couple of pleasant years to some leafy university campus, and teach a couple classes, and hang out for a while, I think you’re sorely mistaken. I think the experience of a Biden official who was involved in this war going to a university in the coming years would be not that different than the experience of people like McGeorge Bundy and and Walt Rostow experienced when they tried to go back to the universities that they had been in before the Vietnam War. These people are gonna be treated with a lot of anger for what they’ve done.

And so, I think about why was it that the administration took this path. And this is my theory. My theory is that if you work in Washington foreign policy for a long period of time, you become more and more divorced from how ordinary progressive minded people think about the world, especially on Israel-Palestine. And the reason you become divorced from them is that when people in Washington talk and work in Washington foreign policy, they always have to think in terms of constraints of what’s politically possible.

I used to work at Washington think tanks. I used to spend a lot of time with people who came in and out of Democratic foreign policy jobs. And one of the things that always struck me was that, even in relatively private settings, when people would talk about policy, they would always adopt the framework of what is politically possible; what was politically salable, could be sold in their view, politically. And they just were not generally interested in thinking outside of those terms. Because if you talk in terms of policy ideas or moral perspectives that are outside of the bounds of what’s considered politically possible, you kind of make yourself irrelevant. I think that’s the kind of the idea in Washington. You become someone who’s not really useful, who’s actually a kind of pain in the neck to have around, right? Because the last thing that a policymaker or politician wants is to be told to do something that basically, politically, they don’t feel like they can do. So, people adopt these really narrowing constraints in terms of how they talk about policy in general, but especially on Israel-Palestine, because that’s the foreign policy issue on which the political pressures are the greatest.

And so, what I noticed was that even to make moral arguments about what Israel was doing to the Palestinians, and to suggest that there should be consequences for those moral decisions, was often essentially to speak outside of the political constraints that people were interested in talking about. That essentially people almost like shut off that entire conversation, almost like shut off that entire part of their brain. I think these were people who, had they gone in a different course in life, would have understood that what America was helping Israel do towards Palestinians was deeply immoral. But they recognize that if they were to adopt that perspective, let alone vocalize it within Washington, it would be very injurious to their careers.

I mean, imagine you are a junior or mid-level foreign policy official in a Democratic administration, and you go on record, or you’re heard to say that, you know, five years ago that you think America should condition military aid, or there should be international legal consequences for what Israel is doing. That would be a good way of basically ending your career in government. And so, I think what happens is that people, essentially over time, they shut that part of their brain off—the part of their brain that might have a kind of a moral revulsion at what Israel is doing to Palestinians, and what America is helping Israel do to Palestinians.

And if you do that long enough, I think you can come to forget the ordinary people out there in the country, ordinary progressive minded people, who are seeing these horrifying images day after day of what’s happening to people in Gaza, that they don’t do that. They don’t kind of sublimate these instincts. They just respond in a much more kind of natural, intuitive way, like, why are we doing this? This is completely contrary to my values. Why are my taxpayer dollars being used to fund this? I think what’s happened in Washington is that Democrats, over time—Democrats in the foreign policy kind of establishment—basically turn off that part of their brain in order to succeed and make their way up the ranks in foreign policy in Washington.

And if you do that long enough, I think it makes it harder for you to predict that that’s how ordinary progressive Americans would respond to the war in Gaza. So, I think that may be why people in the Biden administration were slow to recognize that this issue of Gaza was becoming really, really important to progressives in America—that progressive people in America would be revolted by what they were seeing. Because I think the people in the Biden administration themselves had, over time, undergone a process in which they didn’t allow themselves to have those same human responses because they were within a political environment in which it would have been very counterproductive for them to do that. And that helps to explain this disconnect between the Biden administration and the progressive base of the Democratic Party that I think now represents a threat to Biden’s re-election campaign. And I also think it is something that will dog people in the Biden administration for years to come.

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest this week will be Congressman Ro Khanna, who represents the 17th district of California and is a leading progressive voice in Democratic foreign policy. He has called on Israel to immediately halt its attack on Rafah and also tried to convince protesters against the war to support Joe Biden’s reelection. We’ll talk about US policy toward the war, whether Biden can win back progressives who feel betrayed by it, and about the relationship between progressivism and Zionism more generally.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

The Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast discusses the end of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Shraddha Joshi and Asmer Safi, Harvard students whose degrees are being withheld because of their activism for Palestinian rights.

An open letter from academics in Gaza. 

The descendants of Nazis march for Israel.

Viewer Response:

After my last video, David Lelyveld questioned my suggestion that the war would dog Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan after they leave government. He wrote, “McGeorge Bundy went from the Johnson administration to the presidency of the Ford Foundation for some 15 years. Walt Rostow had a comfortable, well-endowed chair at the University of Texas for 30. As we say in New York, not chopped liver. I wouldn't weep for Biden's subordinates.”

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

America’s relationship with Israel is a little bit like imagine there’s a person in a house, two groups of people in a house, but one is vastly more powerful. And they’re fighting with one another. And the vastly more powerful side, as you might imagine, is doing a tremendous amount of violence to the weaker side. The weaker side is doing some violence as well, but it’s very disproportionate. And this being Israel and the Palestinians. And the United States is giving weapons to the side that’s stronger and allowing it to kind of pummel the weaker side more and more. And the United States is continuing to do that, and then kind of making suggestions from the side.

So, a while back, Chuck Schumer said that it would be good if Benjamin Netanyahu were not Israel’s prime minister anymore. So, it’s kind of the equivalent of saying to that stronger side in the house, you know, we think that you should have someone else from your group actually be in charge of this conflict. Or now, we have Joe Biden basically laying out this plan for a ceasefire over multiple stages, again basically giving his advice to both sides about how maybe this conflict could end, but all the while continuing to give the weapons that continue to fuel the conflict and allow the stronger side to continue to inflict all this violence on the weaker side.

And it’s just really bizarre. Because America’s primary responsibility is not actually to choose Israel’s leaders. And America’s primary responsibility is not even actually to end this war. America’s primary responsibility is to figure out what it does with its money and its weapons. That’s what America has direct control over. America doesn’t have actual direct control over how this war in Gaza ends. From a moral perspective, its primary responsibility is its own role. And there’s this weird way in which, in establishment American discourse, we essentially ignore our own role in this and suggest that we are some kind of neutral arbiter, and then throw out various proposals for how the situation may be solved as if we are not an active participant in it, right? And then we seem disappointed when Israel, or sometimes the Palestinians, basically reject these proposals—but often Israel—because they know that we’re not a neutral observer, that we are a participant, but we are on their side, and that that participation will continue irrespective of what they say about our proposal. So, there’s not very much cost for them in rejecting the proposal.

It seems to me this is exactly the wrong way to think about it. It’s a cliché. But it’s true that in the long run, ultimately, this war and this conflict in this situation will have to be solved by Israelis and Palestinians, not by America. So, America’s fundamental moral responsibility is not to solve to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, not even to end the Gaza war. It’s to act ethically with the power that we have. And the power that we have is our power to give weapons and other forms of diplomatic support to one side that continues this.

So, what Joe Biden should be saying is not, ‘here’s our 11-point plan for ending the war.’ It should be, simply: ‘it’s not ethical for the United States to continue to arm and diplomatically protect Israel as it inflicts this horrible violence against Palestinians. I’m the American president. I’m in charge of how we spend our money and who we send our weapons to, and I’m not going to do that.’ Now that might have—or could have—a real impact on Israeli politics, on whether Netanyahu stays prime minister, on how Israel prosecutes this war, or even whether it does. We don’t know what the consequences of that would be.

But in some ways, the consequences are not America’s primary responsibility. America’s primary responsibility is our involvement in the conflict. And yet so often it’s that question, which essentially recedes. And because the Biden administration doesn’t want to have to deal with that central question, with the political fallout of actually addressing America’s role, it tries to sidestep that by suggesting America continue to be this active participant, but also be this supposedly neutral umpire that can basically come out with a way of solving the conflict. And that doesn’t work. It’s not America’s fundamental job.

The president’s job is to be able to say to the American people: ‘I am ethically and wisely using your money in the way we interact with other countries.’ That’s the question that Joe Biden should have addressed when he spoke to the nation a few days ago. Instead, he continues to evade that question and ends up in these kinds of cul-de-sacs that make him look weak, make him look impotent, and ultimately don’t respond to his fundamental moral responsibility as the president of the United States.

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest this week will be Raef Zreik, associate professor of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College in Israel, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, and a former member of the executive committee of Balad, one of Israel’s predominantly Palestinian parties. He’s one of the most brilliant theorists of Palestine and Israel, and I want to ask him to step back from the nightmarish events of the moment to talk about their long-term consequences for relations between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Elliott Abrams’ essay in Foreign Affairs.

The Pew Research Center on Israeli opinion.

George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

The Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast discusses secularism and the Jewish left.

Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.

A Holocaust survivor’s talk is cancelled in Detroit because he protested the Gaza war.

Mexico, El Salvador and their ironic relationship to Israel-Palestine.

The importance of the halakhic left.

Adam Shatz on Israel then and now.

A message about Noam Chomsky.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I’d encourage you to do an experiment. Go on Google or some other search engine, and type in the phrase, ‘Israelis feel’ or ‘Israelis believe.’ I suspect that what you’ll find is that many of the things that you turn up about how Israelis feel, or Israelis believe, are not actually statements about how all of Israel’s citizens feel, or what they believe, but are using essentially Israelis as a synonym for Jewish Israeli.

So, for instance, here’s one example in Foreign Affairs in April, Elliott Abrams, the former Bush and Trump administration official, wrote, ‘Israelis across the ideological spectrum agree that Hamas must be crushed.’ Now, he’s clearly using Israelis here as a synonym for Jewish Israelis. And it’s true that for Jewish Israelis that statement is probably true. A Pew research center poll in May found that only 4% of Jewish Israelis think that Israel’s war in Gaza has gone too far. But if you use Israelis to mean all of Israel’s citizens, then his statement is completely wrong because according to Pew, 74% of Israel’s Palestinian citizens or Arab Israelis, as they’re sometimes called, think that Israel’s war has gone too far.

So, what’s happening here is it that Americans in our public discourse are very often embracing the kind of ethno-nationalist language that comes from Israel. So, because Israel defines itself as a Jewish state, indeed the word Israeli itself, right, Israel is another name for the Jewish people. It’s the name that Jacob is given when he wrestles with the angel and becomes a name for the Jewish people. So, because the very name of Israel, and Israeli, is essentially a synonym for Jew, what happens is the fact that 20% of the Israeli citizens who are not Jewish gets erased from our public discourse, and we essentially adopt the terms of the ethno-nationalist terms of debate. And so, what we end up doing is we basically use Jewish Israeli as a synonym for Israeli, even though I think in the United States where Black Americans are only 10% of the population—significantly less than Palestinian citizens are of the Israeli citizenry—we would really object if someone used American and white American as synonyms. But essentially, we do a version of that when we talk about Israelis all the time.

And it’s an even bigger problem, right, when you realize that Israel controls millions and millions of Palestinians who don’t have any citizenship at all. That 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control, those in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, have lived under Israeli control, in many cases their entire lives, but can’t become citizens. So, we would never call them Israelis. And the problem here, I think, is that when we talk about other groups of people—let’s say Americans, right—we’d mean citizens, but we also mean perhaps a little more vaguely, just kind of long-term residents, people who are spending their lives here, people who are not tourists, right, even if they don’t have citizenship.

But in the United States, there’s more of a close alignment between those two categories. It’s true we have long-term undocumented people, but for the most part most of the people who are going to be here their entire lives are citizens. And so, we essentially talk as if the same thing is true in Israel. But in Israel, it’s really not true at all because Israel has controlled since 1967 these very large populations of Palestinians that can’t become citizens, and therefore would never be described as Israelis, right? And yet, in a certain sense, one should describe them as Israeli, again because they have lived their entire lives under the control of this state.

So, we would never say something like, you know, 50% of the Israelis oppose a Jewish state or oppose Zionism. But if we were to actually refer to all the people under Israeli control, 50% of whom were Palestinian, that would be a reasonably accurate statement. Again, it’s just that we would never think to call them Israelis, but the reason we wouldn’t call them Israelis is because Israel doesn’t extend them citizenship, and more deeply, because the very term Israeli itself has an ethno-nationalist connotation, which essentially erases Palestinians, the non-citizens, and even the citizens, right?

And I think the reason this is important is that one of the points that George Orwell makes in his famous essay, ‘Politics and the English language,’ is that if you want to critique the actions of a state, or the actions of people in power, you have to challenge the language that people in power create. That if you essentially replicate that language in your own usage, then even if you think you were in opposition to those policies, you were actually complicit with that power structure because you are using its language and accepting its terms of debate. And that’s why I think if we want to question the idea of an ethno-nationalist project, the idea of Jewish supremacy, the idea of a state that has a different legal regime for Jews and Palestinians—most blatantly among those Palestinians who don’t have citizenship, but even in significant ways for that minority of Palestinians who do have citizenship because they are not equal citizens in a state that has a special set of responsibilities to members of one ethno-national group—we have to be explicit in the language we use and not simply erase Palestinians from our discourse when we use the term Israeli.

And so, I think this is something for us to think about as we go forward, and we try to have a better American public debate about what genuine liberal democracy and equality under the law might mean for people in Palestine and Israel.

Our call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest this week will be Geoffrey Levin, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University and author of the new book, Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978, which explores a largely unknown history of American Jewish criticism of Israel in the first decades of its existence, and how it was quashed. It’s a particularly relevant history today given the rise of Jewish organizing against the war in Gaza. 

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

The Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast discusses the challenges of being part of an American synagogue community during this war.

Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.

A beautiful statement by the Deputy Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the United Nations, Majed Bamya, about Noa Argamani’s release from captivity.

Is the global outcry over Israel’s actions starting to hit its high-tech sector?

What happens to Palestinian Gandhi’s?

Masculinity and the New York Jewish Intellectuals.

Wajahat Ali’s new newsletter, Left Hook.

See you on Thursday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. As I’ve been following the news of the increased escalation between Israel and Hezbollah, which is really terrifying, my mind has kept going back to a conversation I had with an Israeli friend soon after October 7th. And my friend said, ‘you don’t understand, Peter. If we don’t destroy Hamas, people will never feel safe living in the south of Israel again. And we will have lost that part of our country.’ And what he was saying made a huge amount of sense, it seems to me, in terms of Israeli political culture, Israeli political psychology given the trauma of what had happened after October 7th. And so, he was saying because that is non-negotiable, we have to defeat Hamas. And what I was thinking was: but I don’t think you can defeat Hamas. I think that’s non-negotiable. So, we were essentially at loggerheads because he was saying that, for a political reason, Israel had to do something militarily that I didn’t think could be done. And now, more than eight months later, I think it seems clear to me that it cannot be done.

And so, now I feel like there’s a version of this playing out in terms of Israel’s debate in its north vis-a-vis Hezbollah, but in some ways with even more frightening stakes. Which the argument is: Israelis cannot return to the north because all of these people have been displaced from their homes unless we push Hezbollah away from that border. And that beyond that, Israel can no longer accept the kind of situation that it accepted before October 7th, which is to say the precariousness, the uncertainty, the unsatisfactory nature of the fact that Hezbollah was always there with this huge arsenal. That was acceptable before October 7th. We can no longer accept these things now because we have a greater sense of threat and also perhaps because we have lost our deterrent, and it needs to be re-established.

This reminds me a lot of the debate in the United States around Iraq after September 11th where people were saying maybe we could muddle through with Saddam Hussein, who we thought was kind of rearming and, you know, eluding the sanctions regime. Maybe that was okay before September 11th. But now, given that we’ve seen the potential peril—and given that we look weak—we need a decisive answer. Again, but like my friend in Israel, it all assumes that a decisive answer is possible, right? It’s as if to say, militarily, this has to become possible because politically we need it to be possible.

And yet, I have not heard—just as I did not hear as Israel was going into Gaza—anyone offering a convincing explanation of how Israel was going to defeat and destroy Hamas. I haven’t heard anyone say that about how Israel is going to destroy Hezbollah, force Hezbollah off of Israel’s borders. Again, it seems to me more like this situation of kind of you start from a political necessity, and then you assume that there’s a military solution. And to me, what this suggests is that the way in which Israeli Jewish leaders, and Israeli Jewish political discourse—and much Jewish discourse in the diaspora because it tends to often kind of follow along—has a sense of the political terms of discussion that can’t imagine political solutions that don’t require these military solutions.

Again, military solutions seem to me fantastical, which are not actually possible. That in reality, Israel going to war against Hezbollah, Israel might be able to destroy a lot of southern Lebanon and a lot of Lebanon period, and destroy a lot of Hezbollah’s weaponry, but at a massive cost to Israel. I mean, right now, it’s just the North is unlivable. I mean, Hezbollah could kind of make Tel Aviv unlivable, at least for a while, right? And in terms of what this would do in terms of Israel’s international isolation given what’s already happened, it just seems to me strategically really, really disastrous for Israel. If you want to kind of move Israel closer to a point where people can really imagine the country no longer being able to exist, it seems to me going to war in Lebanon would be a really good way of doing that in terms of ramping up even more international isolation, just making larger sections of the country unlivable. And yet, to be able to avoid that you have to imagine political responses, again, just like you would have vis-à-vis Gaza, which would have been political responses, which are not really within the Jewish Israeli terms of mainstream debate. Which would involve substantial compromise and kind of reimagining of the whole question of what brings security fundamentally from a political lens, not from a military lens. Which in the Palestinian Gaza case would mean that basically there is no solution problem that Hamas represents unless you offer Palestinians a clear pathway towards basic human rights and freedom. That’s the central problem you have to answer if you want to deal with the military problem that Hamas faces.

And similarly with Hezbollah, there is no answer vis-a-vis Hezbollah unless you change the dynamic with Palestinians since Hezbollah is fundamentally doing this as a kind of an ally, almost as kind of an adjunct to the Palestinian case. And beyond that, that you need a different relationship with Iran, that you need some kind of thaw and detente in this cold war with Iran given the influence that Iran has over Hezbollah. And it seems to me, what frightens me so much is that those political ways of thinking—that it seems to me could be an alternative to the military answer and could offer a vision of Israelis returning to the north as returning to the south that did not involve a second, even more potentially catastrophic war—are just not really on the table in terms of the debate.

And I don’t feel like when I look at American discourse, American political discourse, American Jewish discourse, I don’t see an effort to really or push Israelis, to challenge Jewish Israelis, to ask them to think outside of their own political terms—again, in an Israel right now where basically the terms of political debate run from the very far right to essentially the center right, right, in which people who genuinely see Palestinian freedom as the essence of trying to provide Israeli security, those voices among Jewish Israelis are basically off the table. And that’s part of what frightens me so much about this moment.

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guests will be Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson, co-authors of the book, The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other. Since October 7, dialogue between Palestinians and Jews has become even more difficult, and there are those in both communities—and on the left and right—who question its value. I’m excited to ask Raja and Jeffrey to respond to those criticisms, and to explain how they believe that greater dialogue between Palestinians and Jews can contribute to the struggle for equality, freedom, and safety for everyone.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Mehdi Hasan’s interview with Representative Dean Phillips.

The New York Times’ investigation of Israel’s Sde Teiman detention center. Hasan’s reference to a prisoner who reportedly died by rape comes from an UNRWA interview with a 41-year-old detainee who gave an account similar to the one that Younis al-Hamlawi gave The New York Times about being forced to sit on a hot metal stick. That prisoner claimed another detainee subjected to the procedure had died as a result.

Why the history of Israel’s restrictions on movement from Gaza dates back to 1991.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Shane Burley and Jonah Ben Avraham explain the flawed methodology that the ADL uses to measure antisemitism.

Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.

Aziz Abu Sarah on the absurdity of pro-Palestinian demonstrators protesting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The deputy assistant secretary for Israeli-Palestinian affairs resigns after opposing Biden’s policies on the war.

Israel’s military spokesman says “anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.”

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I wanted to say something about an extraordinary interview that Mehdi Hassan did last week with Congressman Dean Phillips from Minnesota, who had been a candidate for president against Biden this year. This was for Mehdi’s new platform, Zeteo. What makes the interview so remarkable, I think, is that it kind of offers a glimpse of what American public and media discourse about this war, and about Israel and Palestine more generally, might be like if Palestinian lives were considered equal to Israeli lives.

So, Mehdi Hassan starts by asking Dean Phillips: was it okay in your view for Israel to kill all of these Palestinians, including many children in the military operation that freed for Israeli hostages? And Philip says, ‘it’s an unacceptable price, but I think it’s a price that has to be paid.’ So, he says, basically, it was really awful, but it was necessary. And then, Mehdi Hasan takes the question in a direction that I really don’t think Dean Phillips was expecting because it’s so rarely asked. And he says, ‘if you’re saying that to free people from the clutches of horrible captivity’—this is Mehdi Hasan speaking—‘hostages, people possibly being abused in captivity to free them, you have to pay a price, a horrible price. Does that ratio work the other way?’

And then, Medhi Hasan continues: ‘how many Israelis can Palestinians kill to free Palestinian detainees who are currently being tortured in Israeli captivity, some of them being raped to death according to the New York Times last week. Can they kill 200 Israelis to free four Palestinians who are being tortured in an Israeli prison?’ And Phillips’ response is kind of remarkable. And by the way, I don’t think Phillips is a dumb guy. I actually think if you listen to the interview, he’s probably more thoughtful on these issues than your average member of Congress, although that may be a low bar. And to give him credit, he’s also appearing on an interview with Mehdi Hasan, which he probably knew was going to be a really challenging interview.

But so, here’s what Dean Phillips says. He’s quite startled. You can listen in the interview. He’s clearly surprised by the allegation. He says—Philips says—‘you said Palestinian prisoners are being raped to death by Israeli soldiers? I don’t believe that to be true,’ right. Hasan has just quoted The New York Times, which is about as respectable a media outlet as you can have. And then Philips said, ‘I don’t believe that to be true.’ And then Mehdi Hasan goes into detail about the allegations that he’s talking about. And if you read The New York Times report that they did on this military base called Sde Teiman, where Israel has been holding a lot of Palestinian prisoners, first there was an UNRWA report that was done where they interviewed Palestinians who had been released from Sde Teiman.

I know people will say, oh, you can’t believe anything UNRWA says. But then actually The New York Times kind of went and did a lot of these interviews itself. It found, for instance, that eight former detainees had said they had been punched, kicked, and beaten with batons, rifle bats, and a hand metal detector while in custody. One said his ribs were broken when he was kneed in the chest. A second detainee said his ribs were broken after he was kicked and beaten with a rifle. Seven said they been forced to wear only a diaper while being interrogated. Three said they had received electric shocks during interrogations. Three said they had lost more than 40 pounds during their interrogation. The IDF denied abuse, but an Israeli soldier who the Times talked to said that he and several fellow soldiers had regularly boasted of beating detainees. And a general named Younis al-Hamlawi, who was a nurse who was arrested when Israel was raiding the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, said that a female officer had ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground. Mr. al-Hamlawi said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him with unbearable pain. He also recalled being forced to sit in a chair wired with electricity. He said he was shocked so often that after initially urinating uncontrollably, he then stopped urinating for several days.

And, by the way, I know some people’s immediate response to this is: how on earth could you compare these people to the Israeli hostages? These were Hamas fighters. The people that The New York Times was interviewing were the people who were released from Sde Teimon. They were about 1,200 people. They had about 4,000 people there, according to the Times. They released 1,200 because the Israeli military didn’t think they were Hamas fighters. If the Israeli military thought they were Hamas fighters, they would still be there. The Times was only talking to people who the IDF had basically said, sorry, we picked you up, but actually we don’t think you did anything, right? So, those are the people who were making these allegations.

Now again, there are obviously lots of differences between Israeli prisons in general and the hostage situation. And I don’t, by any means, am not saying this to undermine in any way the severity of what Israeli hostages have been through, which is horrifying. But the point is that, according to The New York Times, which is a pretty credible source, right, that Dean Phillips would probably believe The New York Times if The New York Times did a report about the abuse of Israelis by Hamas, right? They’re saying the terrible things are happening to these people who the Israeli military ultimately admits basically didn’t do anything, right?

And so, Mehdi Hasan turns the question around and says: would it be okay for Hamas or some of the Palestinian faction to go and free such people if it led to a lot of Israelis being killed? And Dean Philips doesn’t answer the question. And I think the reason he can’t answer the question is because if you genuinely believe, speaking as an American—I’m not speaking about an Israeli who might have a natural sense of affinity for Israeli lives, or even let’s say a Jewish person or a Palestinian person who might have a particular loyalty, you’re talking about as an American here, right, whose stated view is that, as Phillips actually said in another part of the interview, he believes that Israeli Jewish and Palestinian are equal—that can you actually apply that framework to American policy? Can you actually follow it through to its conclusion as Mehdi Hasan asked him to do? And he can’t. He can’t answer the question, right? Because he can’t say ‘yes’ because he doesn’t actually operate within a framework in which Palestinian lives are considered equal to Jewish Israeli lives. That almost nobody, very few people in American public discourse, actually operate within that framework. It’s completely baked into American public discourse that they are not, right?

So, to give another example, right, we are a very frequently asked to imagine what it would be like for Israelis—what it was like for Israelis—when they were attacked brutally on October 7th, and how we would feel as Americans, and what we would do if that happened to us, right? That’s almost a cliche at this point, right? But when was the last time you heard a prominent person in the American media, or an American politician asked how you would feel as a Palestinian, right, if your family had been forcibly expelled from their homes in 1948 into this very, very overcrowded territory called Gaza, which has been—long before actually Hamas took over, even going back to the early 1990s— where movement in and out of Gaza has been very, very severely restricted by Israel, again, going back even long before Hamas took over. And since 2006, the legislative elections that Hamas won, you know, have a place which is called ‘unlivable’ by the United Nations, called an ‘open air prison’ by Human Rights Watch, which has been repeatedly bombed and not been able to rebuild its infrastructure, right?

So, nobody says, well, what would you do if you were a Palestinian under those circumstances, right? Because there is a natural kind of tendency to think that Israel’s Jews are fully human, and therefore like us, and therefore we should ask how we would respond in their position, which is a very legitimate question, right. But if you believe that Jewish and Palestinian lives are equal, you should also be asking the other question, which is: how would you react as a Palestinian given those things, and ask people to imagine how Americans would react were we in the situation the Palestinians are in? And yet, that doesn’t happen. And you see that when Mehdi Hasan does do that, does something extraordinary in American public discourse, which shouldn’t be extraordinary but is, you see how Dean Phillips—who’s not a stupid guy, right—simply can’t answer that question. He can’t respond to it, right, because there is such a huge gap between the stated belief, at least among Democrats, that human lives are equal, and the actual guiding assumptions that guide how they make policy on this question. And I think the more that is exposed in interviews like this, the more people can start to see that the basic fundamental principles that many Americans espouse are not being put into practice by our government, and that that represents a problem.

I made a second video this week because I wanted to say something about Jamaal Bowman, who lost his primary race for Congress last night. He lost because he had the courage to visit the West Bank and speak about what he saw. He lost because he’s an unusual politician. He has moral courage.

Sources Cited in This Video:

A Politico article about Bowman’s trip to the West Bank.

A Jewish Currents article I wrote about how Pro-Israel groups keep US foreign policy white.

Our guests this Friday at 11 AM will be Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson, co-authors of the book, The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other. Since October 7, dialogue between Palestinians and Jews has become even more difficult, and there are those in both communities—and on the left and right—who question its value. I’m excited to ask Raja and Jeffrey to respond to those criticisms, and to explain how they believe that greater dialogue between Palestinians and Jews can contribute to the struggle for equality, freedom, and safety for everyone.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, last night, Jamaal Bowman lost his race for re-election to Congress. And I wanted to say something about him and that race. Now, it’s important not to be willing to overlook the flaws of people just because you profoundly agree with them on really important policy issues. So, I don’t want to suggest that Jamaal Bowman didn’t make any mistakes in this race. I think it was unfortunate when he said that Jews in Westchester segregate themselves. If you look at the context, I think you can understand what he was trying to say, which was essentially that people would understand him better if people live together more, and that would actually break down antisemitism. But still, I think it was probably a territory that he shouldn’t have ventured into. But that said, again, even though we need to be willing to be critical of people we disagree with, it’s also important that we not be naive.

And that comment had nothing to do with the onslaught that Jamaal Bowman faced from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. That onslaught was fundamentally about one thing. It was about the fact that Jamaal Bowman was a passionate supporter of Palestinian freedom. When members of Congress are staunch supporters of Israel, they can say things that are far, far more problematic vis-à-vis Jews than anything that Jamaal Bowman ever said, and get a complete pass. The reason that Jamaal Bowman had a target on his back was really simple. It’s because he went to see what life was like for Palestinians in the West Bank. Now, that might not seem like a big deal, but it actually is because the vast majority of members of Congress avert their eyes. They make a conscious choice to go to Israel on AIPAC junkets that don’t show them the reality of what it’s like for Palestinians to live their entire lives without the most basic of human rights. I suspect perhaps they just don’t want to know because they know that if they did see, it would only cause problems for them. But Jamaal Bowman went to see. He even went to Hebron, which is perhaps the most brutal of all the places in the West Bank, a place where Palestinians can’t even walk on certain streets in their own city. And he had the courage to see. And he had the courage to talk about it. And that’s unusual for a member of Congress.

And the thing you always need to remember about these people, you know, who spent untold amounts of money, unprecedented amounts of money, on trying to defeat him—the people who gave all this money to AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups to defeat him—is that, overwhelmingly, they have not seen the things that Jamaal Bowman has seen. I have lived in proximity to those people my entire life. I’m telling you they may have been to Israel 40 times. But those kind of AIPAC donors, they don’t go to see what life is like for Palestinians who have lived their entire lives in the West Bank without the right to vote for the government that has life and death power over their lives under a different legal system, a military legal system, while they’re Jewish neighbors enjoy free movement, and due process, and the right to vote, and citizenship. If they had gone to see those things, I think many of them would not be AIPAC donors because it would shake them to their core. But one of the reasons I think they find the kind of things that Jamaal Bowman says so frightening is because they haven’t had the courage to go and actually face these realities for themselves. But Jamaal Bowman did go to face these realities and then he took it upon himself to talk about what he had seen. And he paid a political price.

The second thing I want to say about Jamaal Bowman and this race is that you can’t disentangle the attack that he came under because of his views about Israel from the opposition to him simply because he was a courageous and passionate progressive on a whole range of issues. The thing that’s important to remember about people who give a lot of money to AIPAC is it’s not just that they’re pro-Israel, or that they’re generally Jewish. They’re also extremely wealthy. And it’s often difficult to disentangle their pro-Israel politics from their class perspectives. But things fuse together, right? They don’t want supporters of Palestinian rights in Congress. But they also don’t want people who are going to raise their taxes or try to fundamentally change the American economic system.

And so, when you defeat Jamaal Bowman, it’s kind of a twofer because you get rid of a critic of Israel, but you also get rid of someone who potentially could threaten your own bottom line. And one of the dirty little secrets, I think, about kind of American Jewish organizational life is that people find it often easier to say that they oppose progressives because those progressives are anti-Israel or supposedly ‘antisemitic’ than to admit that partly they’re doing it for economic self-interest because they’re just really rich people who don’t want progressives like Jamaal Bowman because those people might threaten their bottom line. So, that’s another reason I think that progressives like Jamaal Bowman come under such fierce assault. It’s much nicer if you’re one of the very, very wealthy people who gave all this money to AIPAC to have a kind of milquetoast moderate like George Latimer who won’t rock the boat on Israel. And he won’t really rock the boat by challenging corporate interests on anything.

The third point I want to make about Jamaal Bowman has to do with race. Now, it’s not true that AIPAC opposes Black members of Congress simply because they’re Black. Which is to say if there’s a really, really pro-Israel Black member of congress, like Ritchie Torres, they’re thrilled about that, right. But it’s also not coincidental that so many of the people that AIPAC tries to destroy politically are Black or other people of color. And that’s because people who have a family history of oppression in the United States are more likely—not always, by any means—but, on average, are more likely to identify with the Palestinians because of their own experience. They’re more likely to feel, as Jamaal Bowman did, a kind of moral obligation to themselves and their own ancestors to go and see what’s actually going on to Palestinians who lack basic rights in the West Bank.

And so, when you go to politically destroy people who care about Palestinians, you’re going to end up destroying a disproportionate number of those people who will be Black or other people of color. And there’s a whole history to this. It didn’t start with Jamaal Bowman. You can think about Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter’s Ambassador to the United Nations, who, coming out of the Civil Rights movement, felt he had an obligation to have a concern for Palestinians, and met a PLO representative in the late 1970s, and there was a big pro-Israel outcry, and he was forced out of his job. Or Jesse Jackson, who came under assault in the 1980s when he ran for president, or a congressman like Walter Fauntroy or Barack Obama or Raphael Warnock. You may remember that Raphael Warnock went on a trip of Black pastors to see Palestinian life for himself, wrote a very passionate, eloquent letter talking about the parallels between the oppression of Palestinians and the oppression of Black Americans. And Raphael Warnock came under fierce assault and had to walk that back. And if he hadn’t walked that back, he probably wouldn’t be a senator right now.

Jamaal Bowman is a different kind of person. He’s a very unusual politician in that he is a man of genuine moral conviction, of genuine moral courage, and he was willing to put his political life at risk. And he did so perhaps partly because we are in this extraordinarily horrifying moment—a moment when people are being tested, when people are doing things that I think we will remember for a very long time. I saw yesterday that Save the Children was reporting that, by their estimates, as many as 20,000 children in Gaza are either detained, missing, lying in mass graves, or dead under the rubble. Twenty thousand. I think perhaps Jamaal Bowman knew that this was a moment on which he was willing to be judged and he was willing to risk his political career for that. And I really, really hope that I live long enough to live in an America in which Palestinian lives are considered equal to Jewish lives. And in that America, I believe, that people will look back with shame at what was done to Jamaal Bowman, and maybe even some of those AIPAC donors or their children or grandchildren will feel shame, and we will look back at Jamaal Bowman in this race as a hero.

It says in Pirkei Avot in the Mishnah—and forgive the gendered language, it was written a long time ago—it says, ‘in the place where there is no man, be a man.’ Or we might retranslate it as, ‘in the place where there is no humanity, bring humanity.’ Jamaal Bowman was in a place in Congress in Washington where there are very, very few people who are willing to risk anything politically for the cause of Palestinian lives, for the cause of Palestinian freedom. And he did. In a place where there was no man, he was a man. And for that reason, I believe we will one day look back on him as a hero.

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest will be Rami Khouri, Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the American University of Beirut, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC, and a regular columnist for Al Jazeera online. Rami lived in Beirut for 17 years and has for many years written about relations between Israel and Lebanon. We’ll talk about the terrifying reports that a full-scale war may break out between Israel and Hezbollah.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat, and Michelle Cottle on whether Biden can not only win, but govern.

Jonathan Sacks on the fear of freedom.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane explains why ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas are stuck.

Although overshadowed by the horror in Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank have grown desperate economically as Israel has further restricted their right to travel and work since October 7. Please consider supporting this crowdfunding campaign for two West Bank families in dire need.

Al Jazeera’s chilling new documentary, “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza.”

An extraordinary essay by Ayelet Waldman about her family’s history and the delusions of liberal Zionism.

A Pennsylvania voter pledges to vote Biden even if he’s dead.

A fascinating thread on the scholarship of Raz Segal, the Israeli-born genocide scholar whose appointment at the University of Minnesota is now in doubt.

Former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon says the occupation puts Israelis in danger.

Last week, I talked to MSNBC’s Joy Reid about Jamaal Bowman’s congressional primary.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I interviewed Hebrew University Professor Yael Berda about Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s de facto annexation of the West Bank.

John Judis, one of the writers I admire most, has launched a Substack. Please check it out.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I’m beginning to fear that when we look back at this moment in history, people will look at Democrats, influential people in the Democratic Party, and ask the question of why it was that they lacked courage? Why it was indeed that their lack of courage was perhaps their essential defining characteristic, and it had disastrous and historic consequences? It’s interesting because, throughout the Trump era, so many of us have talked about the lack of courage of Republicans. That there was, you know, again and again reporters would say, you know, that privately Republican politicians would laugh about Trump, denounce Trump, that many of the same people who had even publicly earlier on when Trump wasn’t so formidable said that he was an autocrat, a dictator, then became these obsequious fawning supporters of him. So, we got used to—as people who were more progressive kind of denounced these people for their lack of courage.

But I actually think, at this point, Democrats are actually showing even less courage than Republicans. Because, in a way, the Republican Party has transformed itself, certainly among people in Congress. I think there are fewer actually of those people who snicker about Trump privately because this has become a Republican party, more a party of true believers. I think, actually among Republican voters, there is a genuine tremendous amount of support for Trump. Now that’s horrifying. It’s incredibly frightening, but it’s not actually cowardice. It’s a kind of psychosis to me. It’s an embrace of white Christian nationalism, authoritarianism. But it’s not exactly cowardice because I actually think that in the Republican Party today, compared to the Republican Party let’s say five years ago, there’s actually more a broader sense of true belief for Trump. Many of the members of Congress who really didn’t like Trump, most are no longer in Congress.

Whereas among Democrats, I think you actually have a situation where people genuinely don’t believe that Biden should be the nominee. But they’re too afraid to do anything about it. And it’s not just with Biden. I think there is a kind of parallel between the party’s response to Gaza and the party’s treatment of Trump. Which is, on Gaza too, I think if you put a lot of Democratic members of Congress to a lie detector test—and a lot of people in the Biden administration to a lie detector test—and they said, is American policy on this war in Gaza, is it ethical? Is it ethical? They would say: no! And yet, they shrug their shoulders and they go through their day because they want to preserve their political support. They don’t want to end up like Jamaal Bowman. They don’t want to end up without a job if they’ve spent their lives working their way up through the foreign policy establishment.

And now we see, basically, a version of the same thing when it comes to Biden’s re-election. I’m not going to rehearse all the arguments that everyone’s making, but just suffice to say, to remember, that Biden is behind in this race. He’s significantly behind. And remember, Trump has over-performed his polls both in 2016 and in 2020 when he was behind. Now, Trump is clearly ahead; not just in polls, but in the electoral college, which favors him even more. And Biden’s advisors themselves basically took the view that they needed an early bait to try to change the dynamic. They’ve made this dynamic worse. And it’s not clear that there would be a second debate. And there’s certainly no particular reason to believe that Biden would perform any better even if there was.

And yet, Democrats are too afraid—many of them—of taking the risk of trying something different. Yes, it is very risky for a whole bunch of reasons that people are talking about. But I don’t see how anyone in their right mind could not say that any potential replacement for Biden would not have been better on that stage than Joe Biden was against Donald Trump. It’s inconceivable to me that any of them, including Kamala Harris, could be worse. And yet, despite the fact that all of these people in the media, and ordinary voters, are saying they want somebody else, the Democratic politicians are not willing to say that. And when they do say it, they say it off the record.

I was talking to someone who’s on the Democratic National Committee about this. And he said, ‘Peter, it’s like the Bulgarian Communist Party in the 1950s. In the hallways, privately, they whisper to each other what a catastrophe this is. But when they actually get in a room and they have to act publicly or in some official capacity, they won’t do it because they’re too scared.’ Why is this generation of Democratic politicians and foreign policy people, why is it so fearful? Why is it not able to put the country’s interest, the moral interest, both in in terms of Biden and in terms of Gaza, ahead of their own personal interests? I don’t know. I think it’s something that we’re going to have to try to understand, and maybe we will be having to wrestle with for many, many years. It’s important also, I think, to remember that Biden’s failure is not only a failure to be able to beat Donald Trump. I think Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat have been making this point and they’re exactly right. It’s false to make a clear distinction between your ability to run effectively and your ability to govern because to govern as president has to do with your ability to communicate to the public, and also to communicate in private forcefully.

And I want to bring, again, bring this back to Gaza. Any president who wanted to try to do anything but supporting Israel unconditionally in this war would have faced enormous, enormous political challenges given how strong the pro-Israel lobby is in Washington, given how formidable an opponent Benjamin Netanyahu is, all of these reasons. Now, we don’t know that Joe Biden ever really even wanted to do that. But if he had wanted to do that—if he had wanted to say much earlier that America would not support this war because it’s catastrophic for the people of Gaza and it’s actually going to make Israel less safe—that would have been an enormous, enormous task of communication: going to the American people, going to members of Congress, to making the case, to pushing them, to convincing them, to inspire them to do something that’s very hard in America’s political system, which is to challenge Israel and to publicly care about the lives of Palestinians.

And even if Joe Biden had wanted to do that—I don’t know that he did—he does not have the capacity to do that. He does not have the capacity to go to the country, to go to Democratic members of Congress, to take on Benjamin Netanyahu, both privately and publicly. Bill Clinton could have done it. Barack Obama could have done it. Joe Biden can’t do it. So, in some ways I think his options in terms of taking a different path on Gaza were limited by his political infirmity.

And the question of why it is that Democrats facing the enormity of the threat to the existence of American liberal democracy, and the enormity of what’s happening in Gaza, where I saw a statistic that said that 5% of the population is either missing, injured, or killed—five percent, right—a level of destruction and horror that will haunt the entire world for generations and lay down a precedent for what other leaders will feel emboldened to do that is frankly terrifying, why is it in the face of these two enormous challenges that more people have not been able to actually rise to this challenge? And I do wonder whether we’re gonna have to go back and look at some of the writing that was done in the 1930s and 40s in the face of the rise of fascism and look at writers who questioned whether in fact people wanted freedom that much. Faced with the inability of people to fight for it, was there an unwillingness to actually want freedom, or at least want it enough?

This was the Parshah that Jews read over last Shabbat, which was Parashat Sh’lach, which has to do with the question of the spies and why they’re not willing to urge B’nai Israel to enter into the land. And there are a lot of debates about this question. And I recognize that it’s also in some ways problematic to make this idea of conquering Canaan into a test of moral courage, given of course that it meant that the destruction of those people. But still, if you kind of take it in a more metaphorical sense, not thinking about the conquering of the land itself, but just the larger question of what it takes to do something that’s really hard, right? What it takes to overcome your fears and take an action that’s risky, but if you know that the consequences of not action acting are really disastrous?

One of the points that the Lubavitcher Rebbe makes about this is that he suggests that perhaps B’nai Israel didn’t want to enter into the land, not because they feared defeat, but because they feared victory. Which is to say they feared the consequences of actually truly having freedom. And one of the points that Jonathan Sacks makes about this point is he relates it to the question of what happens, according to the Torah, if a Jewish servant, a Jewish slave, decides that they don’t want to be free, even after the requisite period of time when they are allowed to be free? And he notes that what happens is that there’s a ceremony in which their ear is pierced if they willingly give up their freedom. And then he quotes Rabbi Yochanan Ben Yochai in the Palestinian Talmud as saying, “the ear that heard God saying at Sinai, ‘the Israelites are my slaves. They are my slaves because I have brought them out of Egypt. I am the Lord your G-d.’ But, nevertheless, preferred subjection to men rather than to G-d deserves to be pierced.” The point they’re making is there is a stigma, a shame, in when you have the opportunity to fight for freedom, to voluntarily relinquish it.

And it seems to me that is what this class of Democratic leaders is doing. There is an opportunity to fight for freedom in the United States by taking the best possible shot at defeating Donald Trump. Yes, it’s uncertain. But at least it gives you a better shot—a real shot—at defeating Donald Trump in a way that you don’t have with Joe Biden. And there is a fight—again, uncertain—but a political fight to be waged for the principle of human rights, the principle of international law, the principle that Palestinians deserve to live and be free. And that would also be enormously difficult. But the question is: are you willing to actually take on that fight? And the answer we’re getting from leading Democrats is: no. And that there is a shame to that. There’s a deep shame to that and we’re going to be living with the consequences I fear for a very long time.

Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson are co-authors of the book, The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other. Since October 7, dialogue between Palestinians and Jews has become even more difficult, and there are those in both communities—and on the left and right—who question its value. I’m excited to ask Raja and Jeffrey to respond to those criticisms, and to explain how they believe that greater dialogue between Palestinians and Jews can contribute to the struggle for equality, freedom, and safety for everyone.

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest will be James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute, and a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee. Last week he offered a proposal for how to replace President Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee. We’ll talk about the pressure inside the party on Biden to bow out, and what might happen if he does.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

The transcript of Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Rabea Eghbariah talks about why the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews tried to censor his article on the Nakba as a legal concept.

Although overshadowed by the horror in Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank have grown desperate economically as Israel has further restricted their right to travel and work since October 7. Please consider supporting this crowdfunding campaign for two West Bank families in dire need.

A long and fascinating interview with Rashid Khalidi in The New Left Review.

Olivia Nuzzi on the conspiracy of silence to conceal Biden’s decline.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

It seems pretty clear at this point, to me, that Joe Biden is probably not going to be the Democratic nominee, that there’s been a kind of a tipping point that’s gonna play out in the days to come. And I almost—almost—feel a little bad for Biden because he wasn’t that bad in the George Stephanopoulos interview on Friday compared to the debate. He was, actually, I think significantly better. But people now realize they’re judging him on such a low bar and have so little faith that he can come back and defeat Donald Trump.

And I think the media is in a kind of remorse because they didn’t actually put more pressure on this question earlier in the reporting, has now swung into in a direction where they’re basically just nitpicking every single phrase, looking for some signs of mental decline that I just don’t see how this is sustainable. And I think that’s a good thing. I think the Democrats are a lot better off rolling the dice, and at least giving themselves a chance of beating Donald Trump since I just don’t see how Joe Biden could change the dynamics of this race and make it a race about Trump because it is now really a race about his fitness to serve. And even many of the people who tend to agree with him ideologically just don’t think he is.

But what I thought was interesting about the Stephanopoulos interview that’s gotten less attention was less what it revealed about Biden’s mental decline in the kind of how old he is, but more just about the way his thinking is very old. And I think this is a problem that still hasn’t gotten enough attention. This is a man who, I think, when he thinks about America’s relationship with the world, is really in a Cold War paradigm that I’ve always thought was very, very dangerous, and since the war in Gaza just seems to me even more so.

So, in that interview, when he was trying to tell George Stephanopoulos why he had been a good president and why Americans needed to reelect him, if you notice the thing that Biden kept coming back to again and again—he mentioned it six times—is NATO. He says, ‘I was the guy that expanded NATO.’ He talked about what he’s doing in Europe with regard to expansion of NATO. ‘I’m the guy that put NATO together,’ he says. ‘I’m doing a hell of a lot of other things, like wars around the world, like keeping NATO together. Who’s gonna be able to hold NATO together like me?’

He talks about NATO again and again and again. And it seems to me somewhat disconnected from reality. Where is the chorus of people in America who want to be expanding NATO? I think, morally, the case for defending Ukraine was a very strong case. But it’s really clear at this point that that policy on Ukraine has not really been a success. Maybe it was a success initially in preventing the Russians from taking Kyiv. But the sanctions have not basically been able to get Russia to stop this war. And Ukraine is closer to losing than it is to winning. And there’s gonna have to be some peace agreement that’s probably gonna leave Ukraine worse off than it was before this war.

And so, I think that this notion that what he’s falling back on again is the fact that they kept pushing NATO forward rather than, in retrospect, thinking that maybe actually some kind of negotiation with the Russians—at least in retrospect—might have been a better deal just to me suggests a disconnection from reality, and a way in which this Cold War kind of great power competition really dominates Biden’s way of thinking about what his purpose is as president.

And he also talks that way about China. He talks about the South Pacific Initiative with AUKUS. This is with, you know, the United Kingdom and Australia to get them these better nuclear submarines. And he says, ‘we’re checkmating China now.’ He never mentions climate change. He is a Democratic president. When he’s talking about the most important issues, and he actually does have some accomplishments on climate change, he never mentions that. He never mentions the word Gaza. He does say he has a peace agreement that’s coming with the Middle East. But this, again, seems to me like completely delusional, right? This notion that there’s gonna be some peace agreement that’s gonna bring us towards a Palestinian state when the Israeli government is vehemently opposed to it, and when the Biden administration is not willing to hear any pressure to make it happen, right.

So, to me what struck me about this interview that made me even more, you know, relieved that I think we may be headed toward a new nominee is that a new nominee could rethink this paradigm that Joe Biden is not just old in terms of, you know, his age, and is not just experiencing mental decline, but his paradigm for America’s role in the world is so much a kind of repeat of the Cold War with this kind of moral Manicheanism between America and its enemies, in which the world is just automatically a better place when America has more power.  And it’s just assumed that America is standing for these values like, you know, the rule of the international liberal order and these kind of things, even when the war in Gaza that America’s support of has made a complete mockery of that now in the eyes of so many people, and in which it’s more and more obvious that climate change, not geopolitical competition, is the existential threat to the world, and that that needs stronger international cooperation and international institutions.

Now, this is not what Trump is saying, of course. But Trump, in a way at least, is recognizing and responding to—even, you know, in his kind of horrific and disastrous ways—the sense that Americans have that actually they don’t want to be fighting another cold war, right? That they want a less-costly form of intervention around the world, even though, again, he has no moral code, and though he doesn’t recognize climate change and all these things. But there is at least a possibility, I think, that a new nominee—a younger nominee, less formed by the set of experiences that Biden has been formed by, perhaps with a different set of advisors—might think anew a little bit about America’s role in the world, about the war, about the relationship with Israel, about the war in Gaza, and with a less Cold War-driven view of foreign policy. And that would be a kind of change that would mean not only that we’re getting someone who is younger and had more energy and who is mentally sharper, but I think someone who is more in touch with the genuine threats and the genuine realities that America faces in the world today.

Rami Khouri is a Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the American University of Beirut, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC, and a regular columnist for Al Jazeera Online. Rami lived in Beirut for 17 years and has for many years written about relations between Israel and Lebanon.

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest will be Laila Al-Arian, an investigative journalist and executive producer of Fault Lines, an Emmy and Peabody award-winning show on Al Jazeera English. She’s also the executive producer of “The Night Won’t End,” an extraordinarily powerful documentary about three families in Gaza during this war. We’re going to talk about how the documentary was made, what it reveals about how Israeli is waging this war, and about how the media is covering it. 

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s response to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump versus Trump’s response to the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

J.D. Vance and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise claim that Democrats are inciting violence by calling Trump a threat to democracy.

Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen reports on the rise of October 7 tourism.

Although overshadowed by the horror in Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank have grown desperate economically as Israel has further restricted their right to travel and work since October 7. Please consider supporting this crowdfunding campaign for two West Bank families in dire need.

Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq on burning books for fuel in Gaza.

For the Foundation for Middle Peace, I talked to Professor Rashid Khalidi about the threat to his family’s library in Jerusalem.

A new podcast about Palestinian citizens of Israel.

In the Jewish News of Northern California, Ben Linder writes about the bulldozing of the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair.

Professor Alon Confino died last month. I got to know him when I began writing about the Nakba and how it is—or isn’t—remembered by Israeli Jews. I was struck not only by the depth of his knowledge but by the quality of his spirit. Here is a memory of him by a colleague. And here is a lecture he gave about antisemitism and Zionism in Italy, the country of his grandparents’ birth. May his memory be a blessing.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, every time it seems like things can’t get worse in American politics and American society, they do. And now we have the attack, the assassination attempt, on Donald Trump, which is just a catastrophe for a variety of reasons.

First of all, it’s a catastrophe because political violence is simply wrong. Period. It doesn’t matter who it’s against. It’s very, very dangerous for this to be kind of re-injected into American politics. So, that’s the most important thing. No matter how one feels about Donald Trump, it’s just appalling that someone tried to murder him. Secondly, it’s a disaster because this will help Trump, I think, who was already clearly ahead, maybe even heading towards a landslide victory, and now defeating him will be that much harder. And thirdly, because I think everything we know about Donald Trump, and the entire Republican party at this point, suggests that they will use this as an excuse for further authoritarian crackdowns on their enemies.

And so, it’s really I think important to kind of be clear about the political environment in which this actually took place, right? That this is not a political environment in which the two parties have equal relationships to the question of violence and the question of conspiracy theories, right? So, Joe Biden, you know, responded to this as any decent politician would. He said, ‘there’s no place in America for this kind of violence. Everybody must condemn it.’ He took down his television ads. Barack Obama said, ‘there’s absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,’ right?

It is worth contrasting that with Donald Trump’s reaction when a man attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer in his home. And Trump said, ‘it’s weird things going on in that household. The glass it seems broken from the inside to the out. So, it wasn’t a break in. It was a break out,’ playing into various conspiracy theories that were floating around in the Republican party at that time, right? So, it’s just important to remember that there is a difference between the way the leaders of the two political parties respond to acts of violence.

And it’s also extremely important that people reject this line, which is now coming out from Republicans, which is to say that because Democrats were saying they were worried about Trump as a threat to democracy, that that emboldened or is responsible for this shooter right? So, you had J. D. Vance—I mean, gosh, J. D. Vance. I mean, there’s so many people who one can look at—I don’t know if anyone is familiar with this book, Czesław Miłosz’s book, The Captive Mind, which is an extraordinary book about basically how people’s characters are transformed, or things inside their characters are brought out, as a society is overtaken by totalitarianism. But I think, you know, you could do a study, a chapter in a book like that, on Lindsey Graham, on Marco Rubio, on all of them, but especially on J. D. Vance. I mean what a horrifying person he’s turned out to be.

So, J. D. Vance says, ‘today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.’ I mean, that’s just a complete bald-faced lie. It is true that the central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Trump is an authoritarian fascist who should be stopped, but not at all costs. They want to stop him by defeating him in the election, and they also believe that he should be subject to the rule of law when he commits crimes. There’s nothing that President Biden has said, or come close to suggesting, that he wants to stop by trump at all costs, meaning by shooting him or having people shoot him. It’s just it’s an utter lie!

And yet, you see, the Republicans repeating this. This is their line, right. House majority leader Steve Scalise: ‘for weeks, Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning reelection would be the end of democracy in America. Clearly, we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.’ Sorry, it is not incendiary rhetoric to say that Donald Trump represents a threat to democracy when he tried to overturn the last election and has said he won’t respect the result of this election unless he wins, right. And to suggest that by saying that somebody is a threat to democracy is an incitement to violence is so perverse because the whole reason that you need to protect liberal democracy is that liberal democracy puts constraints on the violence that the state can enact. States are violent entities. But liberal democracy checks and balances some popular will. Those things can be some restraint on the violence of the state. And when you eliminate those, or strip those away as Donald Trump tried to do and clearly will try to do again, you are actually creating environment of much greater state violence.

So, it’s just Orwellian to say that you’re emboldening violence by trying to stop someone from overthrowing liberal democracy and turn the country into an authoritarian state. And yet that is what the Republicans are saying in this terrible, terrible frightening moment. I don’t know that I can remember another moment in my adult life where I felt things were this bleak. But here we are.

James Zogby is founder of the Arab American Institute, and a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee. He recently offered a proposal for how to replace President Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee. We’ll talk about the pressure inside the party on Biden to bow out, and what might happen if he does.

Interview co-sponsored with Jewish Currents.

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

In light of Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race, we’re going to talk to two Democratic strategists about what happens now, and what impact it could have on US policy towards the Gaza War. Rania Batrice is a Palestinian-American political consultant. She served as deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and this year has been the media consultant for the Uncommitted campaign. Matt Duss is executive vice-president of the Center for International Policy and served as foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders from 2017-2022. I’m excited to talk to them both.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Jonathan Shamir interviews Hana Morgenstern, Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud, and Moshe Behar about Arab-Jewish identity.

Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.

Last week, the Knesset voted to reject the two state solution. Not a single Knesset member from a Jewish party opposed the resolution.

Pete Buttigieg on J.D. Vance.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, I’m recording this on Sunday. Just heard the news that President Biden is gonna drop out of the presidential race. And obviously there’ll be just a tremendous amount of commentary and all this. I would just say, for me, this is the first thing that’s happened in a while that kind of reminds me why—with all its flaws—the Democratic Party is still the party that I associate with. And it’s because both of these parties faced a situation in which they were under pressure to deny basic reality. In the case of the Republican Party, the denial of reality is the idea that Donald Trump is not what he palpably is, which is: an authoritarian racist, misogynist, pathological liar. And the Republican Party has really coalesced around denial of those really obvious truths.

And the Democratic Party was headed down a path of doing something which was in some ways similar, which was that the leadership of the party was going to coalesce around the denial of the reality that Joe Biden is no longer fit to be a presidential candidate, in the sense that he cannot vigorously make a case for himself to the American people, and I think cannot be, certainly for years going forward, an effective president. Because part of the job of being present is making a case to the public to rally them in support of what you want to do—sometimes rallying the entire world behind a certain policy—and being forceful in private, whether it’s foreign leaders, or members of Congress.

And we were entering this situation, and what was so profoundly depressing was to see the Democratic Party, which I thought is the more benign of the two parties and the more in touch with reality of the two parties, essentially going down that same road of denial of reality that the Republican Party was. And what we saw was because of the different constituency groups in the Democratic Party, because of its different relationship with the media, because of its different relationships with members of Congress, for variety of reasons, that Democrats were able to force Joe Biden to face this reality in a way that Republicans have never been able to do vis-à-vis Donald Trump. And so, that to me is just a sense of tremendous relief. Of course, there are very, very, very major concerns about Kamala Harris—assuming she is the nominee—above all, for those of us who care about Israel-Palestine, the fact that she was still implicated in this administration’s just horrific policy towards the Gaza War.

But I at least think that there is the hope that this recognition of reality in the party could perhaps be the beginnings of a reckoning with other kinds of reality. The reality that just as the party cannot continue to deny the reality of the fact that Joe Biden is no longer fit to be a presidential candidate, he’s not fit to serve as president for the next four years, that it will move towards—under pressure again from the from the party, from members of the party coalition—that it could move towards the recognition that this claim that this war is just and necessary is a denial of reality as well. And so, it shows that there is just some possibility that the Democratic Party can be moved to the place where it faces things as they actually are, as opposed to the Republican Party, which is living in a very, very dangerous fantasy about who Donald Trump is, and indeed what America is.

And so, it’s for that reason that I would say this is the first time that I felt hopeful about this presidential campaign in at least a month, probably more than a month. And it’s the first time that I haven’t felt just utterly demoralized thinking about this presidential campaign. It’s not that Kamala Harris would have been my chosen, you know, Democratic nominee, if I was given a list of, you know, a dozen or a hundred people, but there is at least the chance for movement, for change, for energy, for making a case, and perhaps ultimately for coming to reckon with some of the really, really important moral truths that Joe Biden was not able to reckon with.

Paid subscribers will get the link to Friday Zoom calls on Tuesdays and the video and podcast the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Senator Josh Hawley’s speech at the National Conservativism Conference.

Suzanne Schneider discusses Israel’s model for the nationalist right.

Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Dr. Mohammed Al-Hindi, the deputy leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the International Court of Justice.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Jonathan Shamir interviews Hana Morgenstern, Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud, and Moshe Behar about Arab-Jewish identity.

Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.

Last week the Knesset voted to reject the two state solution. Not a single Knesset member from a Jewish party opposed the resolution.

Pete Buttigieg on J.D. Vance.

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. You’ll notice that if you listen to defenders of the Israeli government, one of the things—in the United States in particular—one of the things they hate the most is when people make analogies between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and basically any other place in the world, whether it’s apartheid South Africa or, you know, Black Americans. They hate these analogies. And I think it’s because the defense of what Israel is doing requires a kind of an exceptionalization of Israel. That if you step back, and you actually just try to apply kind of broad basic principles—you know the idea of equality under the law irrespective of race, religion, ethnicity, etc.—if you see Israel and the Palestinians in that light, according to some kind of universal criteria that you apply to all places, you’re going to have a big problem with what Israel’s doing.

So, this exceptionalization of what Israel does is really, really important to defending what Israel does because it’s a way of saying, basically, you have to check those universal principles at the door because this is so complicated, sui generis, whatever, basically that you have to look at it in a completely different light. But I think it’s really important to de-exceptionalize this conversation and see the things that it has in common with many other struggles in the world today. Of course, every place is different in its own way, but the idea that there are common universal principles that one applies in all circumstances, I think, is really important.

And in this regard, I want to try to draw an analogy between Benjamin Netanyahu and the things that he believes, and that he’s going to speak about in Congress on Wednesday, and two other figures that one might not immediately think of as having a lot in common with him. And those two other figures are: Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, and Mohammad Al-Hindi, who’s the deputy leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And I want to give three quotes: one from Hawley, one from Al-Hindi, the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and then one from Netanyahu to illustrate this common point. All three of these people basically believe that countries should be dominated by members of a particular ethnic, religious, racial group. And those people can be trusted to treat everybody else fairly, even though those other people will not have equality under the law. And this is a huge central struggle in our time across the world, between the idea of equality under the law, and the idea that basically countries are properties of one particular tribe, whether they’re defined racially, religiously, ethnically, or some combination of both. And those tribes can be trusted—because they are somehow benign—to treat everybody else well, even those other people who are not equal members of the nation.

So, let’s start with Josh Hawley. This is Josh Hawley from the National Conservatism Conference, which, not coincidentally, who’s guiding spirit, Yoram Hazony, is actually an Israeli who’s taken a lot of the ways he thinks about Israel and is exporting them to the United States, but also Hungary, India, many other places. There is a great podcast discussion of this, which I’ve linked to with Suzanne Schneider. And so, this is Hawley. Hawley says: ‘I’m calling America a Christian nation. Some will say I’m advocating Christian nationalism. And so I am.’ And then he goes on: ‘Religion unites Americans. Most Americans share broad and basic religious convictions: theistic, biblical, Christian. Working people believe in God. They read the Bible. They go to church, some often, some not. But they consider themselves, in all events, members of a Christian nation.’ And he goes on to say that other people are gonna be treated fine who are not Christians. But they have to recognize that they live in a Christian nation. But because Christianity is so benign and such a unique special tradition, that they have nothing to worry about. Because in this Christian nation run by Christians, they’re gonna be treated fine.

And then this is Mohammed Al-Hindi, who’s the deputy leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And he’s being interviewed by Jeremy Scahill. Now, I think it’s good that Jeremy Scahill, who’s formerly The Intercept now has this new site called Drop Site News. He went out and interviewed a whole bunch of Palestinian Islamist leaders. And I think that’s good. It’s good to hear from these folks because often times one doesn’t hear from them in the Western media. And this is what Mohammed Al-Hindi says about the principles of Islamic Jihad, and he also speaking about Hamas. He says: ‘in terms of the founding principles, Islam constitutes the faith, culture, and history of our Palestinian people. It is a faith for Muslims and a culture for Christians. Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad use the faith of our people and their culture in the creation of Christians as a point of departure.’

Now, of course, there are lots of lots of differences between Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Josh Hawley. Palestinian Islamic Jihad represents Palestinians who are being oppressed. It’s also done terrible, terrible things in terms of purposely targeting Israeli civilians. Josh Hawley has a whole different set of things that he should be held responsible for that he’s done. But you notice the similarity. Islamic Jihad, even though they’re representing a group that doesn’t have a country, when it talks about its vision of a country it’s actually not so different than Hawley’s. The idea is Islam will be the defining culture. And Christians will accommodate themselves to an Islamic culture because Islam is benign, and we don’t need to define this territory that we imagine to be in kind of secular, equal terms. But basically, Muslims will treat everybody in a benign way, even though they have a special superior status, which is exactly what Josh Hawley is saying about his vision of a Christian nation. That Hawley and Al-Hindi are both, in a certain sense, kind of right-wing figures in this global struggle, alongside Victor Orban and Narendra Modi and Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, right. It’s obscured by the fact that, again, that that Al-Hindi’s group, Palestinians, are on the bottom and don’t have their own country now. But when he thinks about the vision he wants, it actually quite fits quite well into this global right-wing vision of basically every country being controlled by a particular religious or racial or ethnic tribe.

And then here’s Netanyahu, who again is going to speak on Wednesday. This is Netanyahu responding to the International Court of Justice, saying that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza is illegal. And Netanyahu says: ‘the Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land. Not in our eternal capital Jerusalem. Not in the land of our ancestors in Judea and Samaria.’ You notice what’s missing there, right? Any recognition that this is not only the land of Jews but also the land of Palestinians, right? That it’s not the property, this land, this country, of one ethno-religious group, one tribe, but that it actually should be shared by people across religious ethnic differences, all of whom should be equal in the eyes of the law. That is what Netanyahu rejects, just as Hawley rejects, just as Al-Hindi rejects.

And so, this is why it’s such a moral and intellectual disaster for the Biden administration and the Democrats to allow Benjamin Netanyahu to come and speak. Because it’s not just morally reprehensible in terms of what Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinians and what he’s done to Gaza. It guts the central logic that Biden has been talking about since he came in, which is that his struggle against Trumpism is part of a global struggle for liberal democracy, which means equality under the law. And this is a point that Sam Adler makes in that podcast with Susan Schneider: you can’t coherently say that when you’re basically feting Benjamin Netanyahu who holds exactly that same ideology—basically tribal supremacy—and you trust people of that tribe to be benign, because somehow that’s just the way they are, rather than believing that all people have equal rights under the law, irrespective of who they are.

Laila Al-Arian is an investigative journalist and executive producer of Fault Lines, an Emmy and Peabody award-winning show on Al Jazeera English. She’s also the executive producer of “The Night Won’t End,” an extraordinarily powerful documentary about three families in Gaza during this war. We talk about how the documentary was made, what it reveals about how Israel is waging this war and about how the media is covering it. 

If you know anyone who might enjoy these conversations, please encourage them to subscribe. (Or buy them a gift subscription.)

Audio Podcasts unlock after six weeks for free subscribers. To get them right away and support my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

After Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race, we talked to two Democratic strategists about what happens now, and what impact it could have on US policy towards the Gaza War. Rania Batrice is a Palestinian-American political consultant. She served as deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and this year has been the media consultant for the Uncommitted campaign. Matt Duss is executive vice-president of the Center for International Policy and served as foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders from 2017-2022.

Audio Podcasts unlock after six weeks for free subscribers. To get them right away and support my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Given the growing chance of a regional war in the Middle East, our guest will be one of the best analysts of Palestinian and Middle Eastern politics, Mouin Rabbani, Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, a publication of the Arab Studies Institute, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. We’ll talk about the attack in Majdal Shams, the spate of recent Israeli assassinations, and the potential for a conflict that envelopes the entire region.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Israeli columnist Nadav Eyal on Israel’s lack of preparedness for a Hezbollah assault. (His comments are near the end of the podcast. In my video, I’ve slightly compressed his remarks, but the substance is the same.)

Even Israeli security officials admit that Israel can’t destroy Hamas.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon discuss Israel’s use of “human shields” as a justification for the Gaza war.

Why Iran may not want a regional war.

The problem with Josh Shapiro.

Joe Biden’s long relationship with AIPAC.

Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I’m recording this on Sunday. So, by the time people see it on Monday or later, there may have been more serious retaliation by Hezbollah and/or Iran for Israel’s recent spate of assassinations of a Hezbollah operative in Lebanon, of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in Iran, and perhaps even for the Hamas leader Mohammed Deif in Gaza. This whole trajectory is not only so frightening, but I find it so deeply depressing for so many reasons. One of which is just that, for me, as someone who cares about the safety of Israelis, worries about that a lot, I think that what Benjamin Netanyahu is doing just from the perspective of the safety of Israelis is incredibly, incredibly reckless, a kind of Trump-level action of just complete disregard for the safety of your own people.

And I just want to give a quote. This is from Nadav Eyal, who’s a columnist at the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. Not a leftist by any means. Someone with very, I think, generally establishment views. Very close to the Israeli security apparatus. And he’s talking about the question of whether Israel is prepared for the kind of attack that Hezbollah is capable of. Remember, Hezbollah has a much stronger arsenal, a more formidable arsenal than Hamas, one that could really overwhelm the Iron Dome system, devastate Tel Aviv.

And this is what Nadav Eyal is saying about whether the Israeli security officials believe that Israel is prepared for what Hezbollah might do in response, or Iran. And Nadav Eyal says—and this is from Dan Senor’s podcast, Call Me Back—Eyal says, we have numerous reports by the defense community that the home front isn’t ready. I didn’t see any report saying that the home front is to any extent ready. And by ready, I mean, I’m talking about electricity. I’m talking about infrastructure. The Israeli administration is saying to itself that they’re not ready. That Israelis are not prepared from the perspective of civil defense for the kind of retaliation that Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu would have had to know was very likely after this spate of assassinations, which followed the attack of the Druze town of Majdal Shams earlier.

But it’s part of this larger cycle that’s been going on since October 7th. And I’ve been worried about this for a few months now because if you listen to Israeli officials and kind of commentators who are close to the Israeli government, the dynamic of their conversation in the past few months, if you notice, has really changed. If you listen to Israeli discourse and kind of pro-Israel discourse in the US in, you know, in the winter, even into, let’s say, the early spring of this year, you heard people saying, we have to destroy Hamas, right? That of course was the Israeli government line. We are gonna go into Gaza. We’re going to destroy Hamas.

But I started to notice over the last few months a real shift. And some of this even came from official Israeli spokespeople. Like Daniel Hagari, the spokesperson, said, ‘we can’t destroy Hamas.’ And you notice that people started to kind of acknowledge, or at least implicitly stop saying we’re going to destroy Hamas because it’s becoming more and more obvious that Israel cannot destroy Hamas. It may ultimately end up with a situation where Hamas is no longer in charge of picking up the garbage in Gaza. But there’s lots of reporting that Hamas doesn’t actually particularly want to be doing that anyway. But in terms of whether Hamas still is a rebel force that can be attacking Israel, there’s no question now that that will remain after this war. And, in some ways, Hamas will be more formidable because it’s more popular in the West Bank. It has a huge new group of potential recruits.

And so, Israel, in some ways, has kind of given up on that goal in Gaza, the central goal of the war as stated by the Netanyahu administration. And as it has moved away from that goal, we’ve seen more and more of this conversation of kind of turning towards this focus on the north, right? It’s almost as if, kind of, well, you can’t win this war. But this war, now, it turns out is not the most important war anyway. That Hezbollah is much more dangerous. And so, let’s go and focus on the war in the north. It’s a deeply distressing, to me, and an incoherent kind of line of argument, right? If you can’t defeat Hamas, which is a much weaker force in terms of military arsenal than Hezbollah, why on earth would you think you can defeat Hezbollah, right?

But you see this, kind of, in some ways, I feel like, almost like a compensating for the failure of this war in Gaza. Instead of asking some really fundamental questions about the limitations of military force as a strategy in general, you basically up the ante and say, okay, maybe we haven’t won this war, but we’re going to win an even bigger war, right? And the logic one often hears is, well, Israel has to go to war against Hezbollah, and maybe even Iran, because it has all of these people who had to evacuate the north of Israel because of Hezbollah rocket fire. Which again also reminds me very much of the things that I heard right after October 7th, which is that people said, we have to destroy Hamas because otherwise people will never feel safe living in the south of Israel again in all these communities, in what was called the Gaza Envelope, that people had to flee or be evacuated from after the massacre on October 7th, right?

But there’s a fundamental flaw in this logic, right, which is to say, we have to go and do something that we’re not actually able to do because that’s the only way of returning these people to these areas from which they’ve been evacuated, right? It’s all well and good to say, we have to go and defeat Hezbollah, because that’s the only way we can convince people to return to the north of Israel. But it only makes sense if you can actually do it, right, if you can actually defeat Hezbollah. And I haven’t heard anyone explain how Israel could do that. I mean it could do massive, massive damage to Lebanon, to Beirut, as it’s done massive, massive damage to Gaza. But there’s no reason to believe that that actually will destroy Hezbollah. Israelis talk in terms of restoring deterrence, right, by basically just bombing the crap out of everything. But whatever you buy, it seems to me, in terms of buying deterrence has to be balanced against, right, the intense hatred that you produce, which is a driver of new recruits for the organizations you’re fighting against, right?

So, I am sympathetic, of course, to those Israelis who say, we want people to go back and live in the north of the country, just as you wanted people to live in the south of the country. But what’s not considered in this whole mainstream discourse that dominates Israeli discourse, and I think dominates so much American discourse too, is the basic idea that the only way to solve these problems is political. It’s not military. That the best way—probably the only way—to be sure you could stop Hezbollah rocket fire would be a ceasefire in Gaza, right? That Hezbollah has said this again and again, right, that they will stop firing rockets once there is a ceasefire in Gaza.  Israel has now done exactly the opposite. It’s torpedoed the possibility of a ceasefire in Gaza by assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, the very guy who was doing the negotiation, right?

Another thing you could do if you wanted to make it less likely that Hezbollah was going to send rockets into the north of Israel, which makes it impossible for many Israelis to live in the north of Israel, would be to stop bombing Lebanon, right? And Syria, right? Because, often times in the media discussion, you would think that Hezbollah is just launching these rockets, and Israel’s not doing anything on the other side. Israel has been for years and years and years basically been bombing Lebanon, bombing Syria, in the name of reducing Hezbollah’s arsenal, right? And maybe they have reduced Hezbollah’s arsenal to some degree. But it’s not realistic to be continually bombing a place and not expect that people are gonna shoot back, right?

So, there are political decisions—and not to mention the more fundamental question of which is that Hezbollah’s fight against Israel is very much interconnected with the Palestinian struggle against Israel, right? And if you create a situation where Palestinians have absolutely no hope that they are going to have basic freedoms, right, that’s also a context in which it’s going to be much less likely to have an enduring kind of ceasefire, even a political agreement, that’s gonna make the north of Israel safe again vis-à-vis Hezbollah.

So, it just seems to me, again and again, Israel reminds me a little bit of America, especially in the post-9/11 era. I think things have changed a little bit in America now because we’ve seen how disastrous this has been. But Israel has this idea that basically every problem must be a nail because what you have is the hammer of military force, right, and a complete unwillingness to try to solve some of these problems through a political lens, which takes seriously, right, the needs and concerns of the people on the other side of this conflict—Palestinians above all. And because we don’t have that, it seems to me, we’re potentially headed, and could even be by the time you’re watching this, into an enormously frightening regional war, something that could even dwarf the horrors that we’ve seen so far.

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest will Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, the largest city with an Arab-American majority in the United States. We’ll talk about how residents of Dearborn have reacted to the war in Gaza and whether Kamala Harris is doing enough to win their votes.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

We’re slightly increasing the prices of paid subscriptions. It’s the first time I’ve done this since I launched the newsletter a few years ago. Starting September 1, subscriptions will be $79 per year (up from $72) and $7.99 per month (up from $7). This will apply to all new subscriptions and to everyone whose subscription renews. If this increase creates a hardship for you, email me and we’ll figure it out.

We’ve also added a new category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Friday calls, Premium Members will get access to a monthly “ask me anything” zoom call, which will start later this month. If that interests you, or you’d just like to do more to support the newsletter, please consider signing up. Whatever you decide, I appreciate it.

Sources Cited in this Video

Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1982 interview with Pat Robertson.

Merriam-Webster’s definition of “proxy.”

When Hamas broke with Iran over Syria.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Raphael Magarik spoke to Rania Batrice about what Jewish texts can teach us about whether to vote for the lesser of two evils.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I spoke to Harrison Mann, who resigned from the Defense Intelligence Agency to protest his office’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

In The New Yorker, David Remnick writes about Yahya Sinwar.

Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I recently came across an interview that Benjamin Netanyahu did all the way back in 1982. So, this was before his political career, before his diplomatic career at the United Nations, and at the Israeli embassy in the United States. Back then, he was really known in 1982 fundamentally as the brother of Yoni Netanyahu, who famously died in the Entebbe raid. And Bibi had kind of fashioned himself as an expert on international terrorism. And so, he’s doing this interview with the evangelical broadcaster, Pat Robertson. And Robertson asks, ‘what is the source of terrorism?’ And Netanyahu replies, ‘the more we look, the more we found that terrorist incidents are not just isolated. There is a major force behind most of these groups that is the Soviet Union. If you take away the Soviet Union, it’s chief proxy, the PLO, international terrorism would collapse.’

So, of course, as it turned out, within a decade of that interview, the Soviet Union itself had collapsed. But the PLO had not collapsed. And international terrorism—whatever exactly Benjamin Netanyahu meant by that, presumably he meant armed actions against Israel or against the West—had not collapsed either, right? Because, in fact, the PLO was not a proxy of the Soviet Union. It wasn’t being controlled by the Soviet Union. It was getting weapons from the Soviet Union. But the PLO was fundamentally an organization that emerged out of Palestinian opposition to Israel and Zionism, which went back a very, very long time, and grew out of the Palestinian experience, and indeed existed before the Soviet Union was supporting that resistance and continued after the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

So, why bring this up now? It’s because when one hears about the relationship between Iran and Hamas, one very frequently in the American media—if you listen to American politicians, or Israeli politicians, or kind of American Jewish communal discourse—you will hear again and again this word: proxy. The same word that Netanyahu used to describe the PLO’s relationship with the Soviet Union. Now, a proxy, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is ‘a person authorized to act for another.’ Some of the synonyms are: agent, surrogate, representative, stand- in. So, the idea is there is a person or an entity that has the authority. It makes the decisions. And it authorizes, it delegates some other entity to do a certain action for it, right? So, when you say that Hamas is a proxy for Iran, what you’re saying is that Iran is making the decisions. Iran is the fundamental actor here. And Hamas is basically doing its bidding and acting as an agent, a surrogate, a delegate, a proxy, right?

In fact, I think this completely misunderstands the relationship between Hamas and Iran. It’s true that Hamas gets weaponry from Iran, and that’s very valuable for it. And if Iran were to stop that support, that would be a significant problem for Hamas. But Hamas is not an agent or a proxy of Iran in the sense that it exists because Iran wants there to be an organization like Hamas around. Hamas exists because the Palestinians have been fighting against Israel for a very, very long time, and because one of the branches of that Palestinian resistance against Israel is an Islamist branch. And that for various reasons Hamas has become a very, very important actor in Palestinian politics, kind of fusing this desire to resist against Israel with its own, I think, quite problematic and deeply illiberal kind of Islamist ideology.

And so, if Iran were to cease to exist, Hamas would still very much exist because it is embodying this Palestinian resistance—not embodying it in ways that I would like, certainly, but embodying it, along with a range of other organizations. And it would look for other external entities to support it. And indeed, so Hamas has gotten support from forces in Turkey, from people in the Gulf. And it would try to rely on those more if it didn’t have Iran as a supporter. But Iran is not the reason that Hamas exists. And Palestinians have been fighting against Israel since long before the Islamic Republic revolution in 1979 meant that Iran suddenly became interested in supporting various different Palestinian groups.

This tendency to not want to face the reality that your problem is the people amongst you who you’re denying basic rights, who are resisting that oppression, is not unique to Israel. So, in South Africa, for instance, under apartheid, it was very common to hear the idea that the African National Congress was simply a proxy for the Soviet Union because it was more convenient to imagine that the real problem was far away, rather than recognizing that your fundamental problem was to deal with the people amongst you who were resisting their lack of freedom.  

And it’s worth remembering, in fact, that Hamas actually broke with Iran just to show that it’s an independent actor, broke with Iran over the Syrian Civil War around decade or so ago, a little more, because Iran supported the Assad regime and Hamas supported the Sunni resistance in Syria. So, this idea that Hamas is a is a proxy for Iran is fundamentally a kind of another way that people used to not take Palestinians seriously, right, to not recognizing that the central problem that Israel has, the thing that makes it unsafe in Israel, is the lack of safety of the Palestinians that Israelis are living amongst.

And I think one of the reasons that Americans tend to kind of find it quite plausible to imagine this as the way the world works is this language of Hamas as a proxy for Iran mirrors the way Americans talked during the Cold War, right? Whereas Americans often, for our own reasons, didn’t want to face the fact that the movements that we were having trouble with—whether it was the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, or the Sandinistas, or various other groups—we didn’t want to face the fact that these were national anti-colonial, anti-imperial, often leftist organizations that were getting support from the Soviet Union, but that fundamentally were fighting us because they didn’t want the United States to be kind of controlling their country. And it was easier for Americans to, instead of taking them seriously on their own terms, think that they were basically kind of being puppeteered by the Soviet Union. If you could just basically deal with the Soviet Union, then you wouldn’t have a problem with Vietnam, for instance. That always turned out to be fundamentally wrong. And it’s fundamentally wrong in this case as well.

Now, it’s true Iran has more influence with some of these different groups than with others. So, Hezbollah, for instance, is more closely militarily integrated in with Iran than Hamas. It’s a Shia organization like Iran. It shares a kind of more similar perversion of Islamist ideology. But even Hezbollah, which of all of these groups is the one that’s most closely tied into Iran, even Hezbollah is still a group that emerges in response to Lebanese political realities and plays a certain role in internal Lebanese politics and in the Lebanese conflict with Israel and hostility and resistance to Israel that goes all the way back to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

And so, I think that one of the real dangers of this moment is precisely because Israel doesn’t have a way of dealing with Hamas on its own terms because it’s invasion of Gaza, which was supposed to destroy Hamas has manifestly failed, that this language of proxy becomes particularly appealing. Then you can locate the problem externally in Iran and say, we’re going to turn and focus our attention there. I think this is a disastrously delusional way of thinking, first of all, because it wouldn’t solve the problem. Even if by some miracle, you could destroy Iran or change the regime, or basically get rid of all of their weaponry, you would still not be dealing with the root of the problem, which is Palestinians. And Palestinians are resourceful enough that if Iran doesn’t support them in their fight, they will find somebody else who will.

But beyond that, the other tremendous danger is that in this desire to find a solution to Israel’s problem outside of the Palestinians, you literally then are leading yourself towards a really cataclysmic regional war that doesn’t address the root of the problem you have, and potentially creates enormous, enormous dangers. And so, George Orwell said, if you wanna critique the actions of people in power, you have to critique their language. And so, unless we critique words like ‘proxy,’ it seems to me we can’t actually do the political criticism that’s necessary in this moment to try to avoid war, and to try to ultimately move towards greater justice and greater peace.

Given the growing chance of a regional war in the Middle East, our guest will be one of the best analysts of Palestinian and Middle Eastern politics, Mouin Rabbani, Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, a publication of the Arab Studies Institute, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. We’ll talk about the attack in Majdal Shams, the spate of recent Israeli assassinations and the potential for a conflict that envelopes the entire region.

If you know anyone who might enjoy these conversations, please encourage them to subscribe. (Or buy them a gift subscription.)

Audio Podcasts unlock after six weeks for free subscribers. To get them right away and support my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest will Joshua Leifer, author of the new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life. It’s the best history of American Jewish politics I’ve read and offers a provocative analysis of the American Jewish future.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky and Bret Stephens.

We’ve added a new membership category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Friday calls, Premium Members will get access to a monthly “ask me anything” zoom call.

Our first one will be on Thursday, August 29 at 11 AM Eastern.

We’re also slightly increasing the prices of regular paid subscriptions. It’s the first time I’ve done this since I launched the newsletter a few years ago. Starting September 1, regular subscriptions will be $79 per year (up from $72) and $7.99 per month (up from $7). This will apply to all new subscriptions and to everyone whose subscription renews. If this increase creates a hardship for you, email me and we’ll figure it out.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with).

In the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane profiles Florida State Representative Randy Fine, one of a new breed of MAGA Jewish Republicans.

In The New York Times, I argued that Kamala Harris could radically change Joe Biden’s policy on Gaza by simply enforcing US law.

Israeli-born Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov on how Jewish Israelis justify what he now considers a genocide.

An Uncommitted delegate who grew up being bombed by Israel on what it’s like to watch the destruction of Gaza.

Please consider supporting a scholarship fund for displaced students in Gaza who want to study in the US.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

TRANSCRIPT

So Monday night at the first night of the Democratic Convention. It's going to be devoted to Joe Biden, and I think to say it will be a love fest is probably an understatement. There will be raucous applause and tears, and the whole thing will be devoted to the heroism, the courage, the magnanimity of Joe Biden, what he's achieved, particularly the fact that he was willing to abandon his own ambition to step aside and give the Democrats a better chance of defeating Donald Trump. And, to be clear, I do think it's a very good thing that he did that. But I don't think he should be celebrated. Certainly not in that unambiguous way.

And it really bothers me that so many people in the US center, even center-left people, will be doing that tomorrow night. They'll be saying, "Joe Biden is that rarest of person in American politics, someone who really puts country above himself as an individual." I just don't think when you're analyzing a Presidency or a person, you sequester what's happened in Gaza. I mean, if you're a liberal-minded person, you believe that genocide is just about the worst thing that a country can do, and it's just about the worst thing that your country can do if your country is arming a genocide. 

And it's really not that controversial anymore that this qualifies as a genocide. I read the academic writing on this. I don't see any genuine scholars of human rights international law who are saying it's not indeed there. People like Omer Bartov, holocaust scholar at Brown, who initially were reluctant to say that, and now, indeed, have said that they consider it a genocide. So if you believe that a genocide is just about the worst thing that America can do in terms of its foreign policy, arming and funding at genocide, how can you simply say that you're gonna put that aside even for a night, and focus entirely on the fact that Democrats now have a better chance of beating Donald Trump? 

I see so many people in media who somehow feel like they get to define their work as focused on the election, focused on the mechanics of the election, and those domestic issues. And somehow Gaza is not their beat. They don't focus on that. They don't write on foreign policy. That's difficult. That's controversial. And they're making these moral judgments as if they don't have to take a position on this. And I just don't think it makes any sense. I really don't. 

If you're gonna say something about Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, you have to factor in what Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, has done, vis-a-vis Gaza. It's central to his legacy. It's central to his character. And if you don't, then you're saying that Palestinian lives just don't matter, or at least they don't matter this particular day, and I think that's inhumane. I don't think we can ever say that some group of people's lives simply don't matter, because it's inconvenient for us to talk about them at a particular moment.

And so I really would hope that people who want to say something nice about Joe Biden on Monday, because he stepped aside, put that in the larger moral context, because I really do think, or at least I desperately hope, that historians certainly will, when they look back on this horrifying and shameful moment in the history of our country.

Abdullah Hammoud is the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, the largest city with an Arab-American majority in the United States. We talked about how residents of Dearborn have reacted to the war in Gaza and whether Kamala Harris is doing enough to win their votes.

Audio Podcasts unlock automatically after six weeks for free subscribers. To get them right away and support my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Our call this week will be at a special time: Wednesday at 11 AM Eastern

Our guest will be Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute and one of the most thoughtful and best-informed observers in Washington about the relationship between Israel, Hezbollah and Iran. We’ll discuss Israel’s recent attack, US policy and the danger of a regional war.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

We’ve added a new membership category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Zoom interviews, Premium Members will get access to a monthly “ask me anything” zoom call.

Our first “ask me anything” will be this Thursday, August 29 at 11 AM Eastern. Premium Subscribers will get a Tuesday email that includes links to both our Wednesday call with Trita and the “ask me anything” on Thursday. (If you have any questions, email me).

If you’re interested in becoming a premium or regular member, hit the button below.

We’re also slightly increasing the prices of regular paid subscriptions. It’s the first time I’ve done this since I launched the newsletter a few years ago. Starting September 1, regular subscriptions will be $79 per year (up from $72) and $7.99 per month (up from $7). This will apply to all new subscriptions and to everyone whose subscription renews. If this increase creates a hardship for you, email me and we’ll figure it out.

Sources Cited in this Video

The cancellation of Joshua Leifer’s book launch event.

A poster calls for “Zionists” to leave a London neighborhood.

Mira Sucharov’s study of what American Jews mean by the word “Zionist.”

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen investigates the Israelis who want to settle southern Lebanon.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jon Stewart on the exclusion of Palestinian speakers at the DNC.

A Black and Palestinian Mississippian reflects on the Democratic conventions of 1964 and 2024.

Benjamin Netanyahu never pays the bill.

Please consider supporting a scholarship fund for displaced students in Gaza who want to study in the US.

See you on Wednesday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. There was a fair amount of attention last week to the experience of my friend, Josh Leifer, who’s launch event for his excellent new book, Tablets Shattered, was closed because the bookstore wouldn’t permit him to be speaking alongside a moderator who was a ‘Zionist’ rabbi. It produced a lot of commentary. And I do think this is something which is growing as a tendency, this tendency to say that if you are a Zionist, then you are kind of excluded from conversations. There was even a thing that happened in the UK where there was a march, which said that Zionists had to leave a certain neighborhood in London.

I wanna explain why I think this is self-defeating and unwise. The first reason is that Palestinians, and Jews who support Palestinian freedom, have been excluded from a very, very long time, and still are, sometimes even by force of law. And the argument against that is that these are restrictions on free speech, and that people should have the right to be heard, and to make their case. So, this is what many of us have argued about: the rights of, you know, Jews who don’t support a Jewish state to speak at Hillel, for instance, or the rights of Palestinians to express their point of view and not be called antisemites just because they don’t support a Jewish state.

And I do think you undermine the clarity of that argument when people on the Left turn around and then basically say, Zionists are not allowed to have a platform in our spaces, right? I think it undermines the effort, the really important effort to say that in other spaces, whether they’re establishment Jewish spaces or kind of more mainstream American political spaces, that Palestinians—the vast majority of whom, of course, don’t support the idea of a Jewish state, or other people who don’t support a Jewish state—should have the right to speak, right. That was something that tragically didn’t happen at the Democratic National Convention. But I think it makes it harder to make that case if you’re excluding people on your own turf.

Secondly, I of course understand the logic, which would say, well, Zionism is the ideology of the state. This state is classified as an apartheid state by a lot of human rights organizations. It’s therefore racist ideology, and we wouldn’t have, you know, white supremacists come and speak in our bookstores, or whatever. But I think there are some important differences, and some problems with that logic.

The first is that for many Jews, Zionism has an intimate, and often somewhat vague, meaning, which does not actually line up with supporting the actions of the state, and sometimes doesn’t even actually line up with supporting Jewish statehood at all. There is a tradition of cultural Zionism, which opposed the Jewish state. And, even among people who have never heard of cultural Zionism, what Mira Sucharov’s polling has found, which is really fascinating, is that American Jews define themselves as Zionists under certain definitions. But if you tell American Jews that Zionism means a state in which Palestinians are not treated equally to Jews, then they actually say they’re not Zionists.

So, the point is that the discourse in the Jewish community about what Zionism means can often be quite different than I think what it is on the Left. And I’m not saying that the Jewish one is right. It’s understandable that people on the Left would say, Zionism is what Israel does. But I think when you close down conversations with Jews for whom Zionism means essentially a kind of an affinity, a connection with that place, with those people, but who haven’t actually necessarily grappled that much with the contradictions of the principles of equality and liberal democracy, those are in some ways, I think, the very people that you want to be in conversation with if you’re trying to change the American debate, trying to change the American Jewish debate.

Because what Mira Sucharov’s polling shows is that when you confront people who call themselves Zionists with the reality that Israel is fundamentally unequal under law towards Palestinians, that actually many of them rethink their perspective and may even rethink the term Zionist and whether it applies to them. So, do you really want to not give the opportunity to have those conversations? I think that we are in a moment—it’s been true for quite a long time, but especially now—in which people who are making a critique of the idea of Jewish statehood based on the idea of equality under the law, based on the idea that ethnonationalism, tribal supremacy, is wrong in Israel-Palestine, and just like it’s wrong in the United States, like it’s wrong in France, like it’s wrong in Hungary, like it’s wrong in India, those people have a very powerful argument.

And the more they can get into those discussions with people who have been raised to believe in the idea of a Jewish state, but have not necessarily thought a lot about what a Jewish state means from—as Edward Said famously said—from the standpoint of its victims, those conversations, I actually think, can be extremely productive in terms of changing debate inside the American Jewish community and changing debate inside the United States as well. And when you basically say, no Zionists are allowed in that conversation, I actually think you’re forfeiting a chance to make change. And what you end up doing is basically just making people become very alienated and very angry. And that exclusion doesn’t, I think, actually move one towards a shift in the public conversation at all.

Joshua Leifer is author of the new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life. It’s the best history of American Jewish politics I’ve read and offers a provocative analysis of the American Jewish future. Josh’s launch event was cancelled the week of this discussion, when the bookstore that was hosting it objected because the moderator, Rabbi Andy Bachman, is a “Zionist.” We discussed that, and much more.

Audio Podcasts unlock after six weeks for free subscribers. To get them right away, and support my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Our guest will be Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute and one of the most thoughtful and best-informed observers in Washington about the relationship between Israel, Hezbollah and Iran. We’ll discuss Israel’s recent attack, US policy and the danger of a regional war.

Shouldn’t the US Care as Much about Americans Killed by the IDF as it Cares about Americans Killed by Hamas?

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest will be Simon Fitzgerald, a trauma surgeon in Brooklyn who has worked in telemedicine in Gaza, particularly at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis with Dr. Khaled Alser. According to colleagues, Dr. Alser has been abducted by Israeli forces and tortured at Ofer Prison and at the notorious Sde Teiman prison camp in the Negev Desert. Dr. Fitzgerald will talk about his experience doing telemedicine in Gaza and about the fate of Dr. Alser.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

LIVE DEBATE CHAT

I’ll be hosting a live chat during this Tuesday night’s presidential debate for paid subscribers. I’ll be participating along with all of you. Just click the “Join chat” button below:

PREMIUM MEMBERSHIP - ASK ME ANYTHING

We’ve also added a new membership category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Zoom interviews, Premium Members will get access to a monthly live “ask me anything” zoom call and video of that call the following week.

Our next “ask me anything” will be on Thursday, Sept 17 at 11 AM Eastern.

If you’re interested in becoming a premium or regular member, hit the subscriber button below or email us with any questions.

Sources Cited in this Video

The Americans injured or killed by Israeli troops in the West Bank.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Arielle Angel talks with Ben Lorber and Shane Burley, authors of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, about antisemitism and the left.

The Biden administration’s double standard on “river to the sea.”

Israel’s Radio Rwanda.

Orly Noy on the death of Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

Remembering Rabbi Michael Lerner.

On September 25, I’ll be speaking at Vanderbilt University.

Please consider supporting a scholarship fund for displaced students in Gaza who want to study in the US.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, last week, my video was about Hersh Goldberg-Polin and the other Israeli hostages that were killed by Hamas. And Hersh Goldberg-Polin got a particular a lot of attention in the United States because he was American. His parents spoke of the Democratic National Convention, and he became someone who many, many Americans knew. And many Americans mourned his murder by Hamas, which is as it should be. I mean, we should care about all human lives. And we have, as Americans, a particular right to be concerned about the fate of other Americans.

And now we found that an American has been shot and killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces. On Friday, an American activist named Aysenur Eygi was shot while she was protesting at an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. And this has been happening fairly frequently in recent years. Several weeks earlier, another American, Amado Sison, was struck by live ammunition in the back of the leg by Israeli forces. Earlier this year, two 17-year-old Palestinian Americans were killed in the West Bank: Tawfic Abdel Jabbar from Louisiana and Mohammad Khdour from Florida. In 2020, a 78-year-old Palestinian American, Omar Assad, was dragged from his car by Israeli forces bound and blindfolded, and then had a heart attack, while in Israeli custody after he’d been left under those conditions for like an hour so by Israeli forces. In 2021, a prominent Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed by an Israeli sniper while she was wearing a press vest, covering an Israeli Defense Forces raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.

There is, I think, by any honest assessment, a tremendous difference between the way in the United States in public conversation, and indeed the American government, respond when American Jews are killed in Israel versus what happens when Palestinian Americans, or in the case of this young woman, Aysenur Eygi, a Turkish American, were killed in the West Bank. The US government does not respond in the same way. There’s not the same level of public outcry, and there’s not the same level of demand by the US government that the people who committed these killings be held responsible.

And what disturbs me about this so much, and I think makes this so important beyond the preciousness of the individual lives at stake, is that the Biden administration—and remember, all of these deaths have been happening, these killings by Israelis of Americans, have been happening under the Biden administration. The Biden administration is engaged in a fight against Donald Trump—Kamala Harris and Joe Biden—essentially about the idea of ethnonationalism, about the idea of whether America is a country in which all of its citizens are considered equal under the law, that their lives are equally valuable, irrespective of what their race, religion, and ethnicity is.

That, of course, is not the principle that governs Israel as a Jewish state, which elevates the rights and the lives of Jews over Palestinians. But what you see in the way that even a Democratic administration responds to the deaths of Americans in Israel is that they essentially adopt the ethnonationalist prism, in which certain lives are more valuable than others that exists in Israel, and they essentially therefore end up taking the position that the Trump campaign is arguing about what kind of country America should be, right. This is Donald Trump’s vision of America. An America in which there are hierarchies between different citizens based on religion, ethnicity, race, etc.

And the Democratic party is ostensibly fighting in a desperate fight to make sure we are not that kind of a country. And yet, when it comes to the Americans who are killed in Israel, either by Hamas or by the Israeli Defense Forces, we essentially adopt that very hierarchy, and the American lives matter more if they’re Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a American Jew, then they are if they are Shireen Abu Akleh, an American Palestinian, or Omar Assad, an American Palestinian, or indeed I center as Aysenur Eygi, a Turkish American. And so, it seems to me, as a fundamental matter of principle in terms of what the Biden Administration and what the Harris campaign says they want to stand for, that this represents a portrayal of their of the vision of America that they are fighting for. And on that basis alone, it seems to me, they should be that that there is every bit as much justice for the Palestinian and other Americans who are killed by Israel, as there are for the American Jews like Hersh Goldberg-Polin who were killed by Hamas.

Our guests are Efrat Machikawa and Boaz Atzili. Efrat’s uncle, Gadi Mozes, was abducted on October 7. Boaz's cousin, Aviv Atzili, was killed on October 7th in Kibbutz Nir Oz and his body was taken to Gaza. Aviv's wife, Liat Atzili, was released in the ceasefire and hostages deal in November. Both Efrat and Boaz are activists for a ceasefire. I’m grateful to them for taking the time to talk to me in this agonizing and critical moment.

Her Own Life Story Disproves Trump and Vance’s Lies

Kamala Harris never spoke to the camera and said, you know what, my parents are immigrants. And they contributed a lot to this country. And we have something to thank them for, and immigrants actually make this country better.

Among Other Things, Israel’s War in Lebanon Could Help Elect Trump

I know why Israelis are happy Nasrallah is dead, but this war will make everyone less safe.

Our call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at a special time: Thursday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest will be the award-winning author and journalist, Ta-Nehisi Coates. His new book, The Message, chronicles his trip to Palestine and Israel (alongside trips to Senegal and South Carolina) and meditates on why some people’s stories are told and others are erased. We’ll talk about how he came to write about Israel-Palestine, about how victims become victimizers, about the backlash he’s experienced since the book came out, and about the forces that keep Black writers from shaping public debate about America’s role in the world.

This conversation will be cosponsored with Jewish Currents and the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Premium Membership

We’ve added a new membership category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Zoom interviews, Premium Members get access to a monthly live “ask me anything” zoom call and the video of that call the following week.

Our next “ask me anything” will be this Wednesday, October 9 at 11 AM Eastern.

If you’re interested in becoming a premium or regular member, hit the subscriber button below or email us with any questions.

My New Book

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. I’ve been deeply moved by Fida Jiryis’ Stranger in My Own Land, which charts her family’s painful and surreal journey, from Mandatory Palestine to Lebanon to Israel. It’s a book I wish I could make required reading in all the places, in America, Israel and beyond, where Palestinians are routinely dehumanized.

I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medical Aid to Palestinians. If you have other suggestions, please send them.

Sources Cited in this Video

Noam Chomsky’s American Power and the New Mandarins.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Seth Anziska reflects on the lessons of past Israeli invasions of Lebanon for the one unfolding now.

Al Jazeera’s powerful new documentary, Starving Gaza.

Shane Burley details the purge of anti-Zionist staffers from American Jewish institutions since October 7.

An October 7 reading list.

Upcoming Talks

On October 29, I’ll be speaking at the University of Victoria.

See you on Thursday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, as it happens, the anniversary of October 7th falls in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in this period of time when Jews are expected to look inward and ask other people for forgiveness for the sins they’ve committed; and then, after doing that, then turn to G-d, and ask G-d for forgiveness for the sins that we’ve committed against G-d. And, famously in the al chet prayer, which appears ten times in the Yom Kippur liturgy, the confession of our sins is in the plural. So, for instance: for the sin which we have committed before you, openly or secretly; for the sin which we have committed before you, under duress or willingly. And I think there’s a tremendous power in the idea of a communal confession, that we are all responsible for each other’s misdeeds. But if you are a kind of critic of the American Jewish establishment and the Israeli government like me, there’s always also a danger, I think, that in the sense that you focus so much on the critiques of the community writ large, and its established leaders, and it’s easier to do that sometimes than to focus on one’s own misdeeds, one’s own sins.

And as I look back on this October 7th for the past year, I feel both a sense of a need to repent and ask for forgiveness in very, very different, and sometimes, I feel like, dichotomous ways. On the one hand, I feel a tremendous sense of guilt that I did not reach out more regularly, and with deeper concern and deeper urgency, to Israelis that I knew immediately after October 7th. I think that one of the things that this year has done is that it has created, I would say, a kind of a chasm between Israeli Jews and American Jews, or a kind of a greater degree of hierarchy than I think I’ve ever felt before. Because I think that the degree to which American Jews are just much safer than Israeli Jews, notwithstanding all of the stuff about how antisemitism makes American Jews unsafe—in reality, American Jews are far, far safer than Israeli Jews. And I’ve never felt that dichotomy as powerfully as I did after October 7th.

And I think there’s one Israeli friend, in particular, who I did not reach out to after October 7th because, honestly, I was too afraid of how angry they would be at me for my political position of opposing the war. And so, in a kind of a cowardly action, I didn’t reach out to them because I was afraid of the political conversation we would have. And that was a real, tremendous failure, and has really haunted me since then. And, at various points, I felt that I have simply not done enough to be in solidarity with Israeli Jews, in their period of terrible fear and agony, have been too caught up in things happening in the United States.

And I’ve also felt that I haven’t done enough for the hostages. I mean, obviously not that there’s that much I could do, but just I, you know, I decided not to wear a dog tag with their name on them because I felt like maybe I was afraid that people would think I was pro-war. Or maybe I was afraid people would think I was a poser because since I was against the war, you know, no one would believe me that I actually cared enough about the hostages that I was wanting to remind myself of them every day. But, you know, there were many, many events for the hostages. Some of them I did go, and I spoke at a few. But there were many, many more that I could have gone to that I didn’t because I was just going about my life, you know, and I wasn’t living daily with their sense of agony. And I know there were people here in New York who were—daily—living and reminding themselves daily of the agony of the hostages, bringing it to their attention every single day. And I feel a sense of shame that I didn’t do that more.

And yet, strangely, I also feel another kind of shame. You know, this first kind of shame maybe suggests that I don’t feel like I fully lived up to this famous injunction, you know, Talmudic injunction, kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, that all Jews are responsible for one another. And yet, that’s only one part of Judaism’s voice. Another part of the Judaism’s voice comes for me very powerfully in this notion, also in the Talmud, that G-d created Adam, who is not of any race or religion. Judaism does not believe that Adam and Eve were Jews. They were universal human beings before G-d creates a covenant with Abraham. And the Talmud says that one of the reasons that there was one singular person created by G-d was that so nobody could say that my father is greater than your father, which is to say that my lineage, my tribe, my race, whatever, is greater; that we are all descended from fundamentally the same people, and that it is a grave sin to create a hierarchy among human beings.

And yet I also feel that so much of the discourse over the last year has been saturated with a sense of the hierarchy of human lives, that Israeli Jewish lives, or, for that matter, American lives, or Western lives, really matter. And Palestinian lives just don’t matter as much, or Lebanese lives matter. Maybe they have some value, but just they’re not as important, right. And so, that when Palestinians die, they don’t get the same individualized attention. We don’t know their names in the way that we might know the names of Israelis who have died as hostages. Their parents don’t speak at the Democratic Convention. Again, I say this not to say that I was not very happy and moved by what Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s parents did. That was wonderful, but always the very sharp disjunction between who is humanized and who is not, who gets spoken up as a kind of faceless mass.

And I feel that I was very complicit in that in various ways. I still, first of all, feel that just as I didn’t go to enough events for the hostages, I also didn’t go to enough anti-war rallies. I was never arrested. I know tons of people who were arrested, who had a lot more to lose than me. And yet, I was just, you know, going about my life, and didn’t want to have that burden. But beyond that, I felt often times that even as I was making anti-war arguments about why I thought Israel’s military actions wouldn’t work well, wouldn’t succeed, or why I thought certain points were wrong, that being engaged in the conversation itself—the very premises of the conversation that I was engaging in themselves—were premised on the idea that a certain number of Palestinian lives were okay to take, just not beyond this number. Or a certain amount of Palestinian denial of freedom was okay, just not beyond this number. Or if Israel really would succeed in this military effort, then it would be okay to kill and maim and injure a certain number of people. But it’s only wrong if they don’t succeed.

All of these things, to me, I feel a certain kind of shame for being engaged in those arguments themselves that were premised on Palestinians as lesser human beings. And it really struck me as I was reading over the recent Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat, the series of essays by Noam Chomsky that he wrote during Vietnam. And I want to just quote from something because I think he captures this idea very well. He talks about in his anti-war speeches and essays, he writes, ‘increasingly, I have had a certain feeling of falseness in these lectures and discussions. This feeling does not have to do with the intellectual issues, but the entire performance is emotionally and morally false in a disturbing way.’ And then he goes on: ‘by entering into the arena of argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and citations. By accepting the presumption of legitimacy, of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one’s humanity.’

And that is, in many ways, a year after this the way I feel. That so much of the debating points that I have been going back and forth on so many times has already been premised on the idea that there are things that justify the denial of Palestinian freedom; that there are things that justify the killing and wounding and maiming and starving of Palestinian children. And that’s simply wrong. Just as I do not believe that anything would justify the denial of freedom to Israeli Jews, nothing justifies the denial of the killing of an Israeli civilian, let alone, G-d forbid, an Israeli child. Nothing justifies the killing of a Palestinian civilian, of an innocent Palestinian, or injuring them, or denying them food, or denying them their basic humanity, their freedom, which is a gift from G-d. It’s not a gift from the Israeli state or from Joe Biden. It’s their right because they are human beings. And that’s true for the people in Lebanon as well.

And I feel like it’s so hard sometimes to remember that when one is engaged in mainstream American political conversation because so often the very assumptions are built in the notion of a lesser humanity. And so, I feel like that’s something that I need to atone for and repent for. And when I saw Chomsky, who I consider such a great man, and who I have had the great, great honor to pray for every morning in a mi sheberach for his health, which is a great kind of honor that he bestowed on me, to allow me to do that, those words have really been ringing in my ear in this moment of repentance and atonement; that there’s something wrong about ever engaging in a conversation which is premised on the idea that certain human beings are lesser than other human beings. And I hope somehow—I don’t know how, but somehow—that in this year to come, that we will move to a world in which that is no longer the norm of the way we think and talk in the United States, and in the West, and in the Jewish community. Because I think, fundamentally, it’s an affront—in my view—it’s an affront to G-d and to our tradition.

Our call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at a special time: Wednesday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest will be the Gaza-born journalist Muhammad Shehada, whose writing has been indispensable over the last year. I cited him in a recent essay in The Guardian, which noted that some of the most prescient predictions about what would happen if Israel invaded Gaza came from Palestinian commentators whose views were almost totally ignored in the US media. Here’s a fascinating piece Muhammad wrote recently about the way people in Gaza think about October 7. And his thoughts on the toll the last year has taken on him personally.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

There will be no zoom call on the week of Monday, October 21.

My New Book

Click image to preorder now.

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. I’ve been deeply moved by Fida Jiryis, Stranger in My Own Land, which charts her family’s painful and surreal journey, from Mandatory Palestine to Lebanon to Israel. It’s a book I wish I could make required reading in all the places, in America, Israel, and beyond, where Palestinians are routinely dehumanized.

I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medical Aid to Palestinians. If you have other suggestions, please send them.

Sources Cited in this Video

The Atlantic’s review of The Message.

A transcript of Ezra Klein’s interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Jordan’s Foreign Minister refutes the claim that the Arab governments won’t accept Israel.

The Arab Peace Initiative, which was endorsed by the 57 members of states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and amended in 2013 to include land swaps.

The legislation calling for equality proposed in 2018 by Palestinian members of the Knesset.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Noura Erakat, Fadi Quran, Dana El Kurd, Amjad Iraqi, and Ahmed Moor discuss the Palestinian liberation struggle.

What American doctors, nurses, and paramedics saw in Gaza.

Laura Kraftowitz on learning Arabic in Gaza.

After years covering his native Gaza, Mohammed Mhawish has launched a newsletter. Check it out.

I spoke recently to The Jewish Council of Australia, New York One and Slate.

Upcoming Talks

On October 29, I’ll be speaking at the University of Victoria.

See you on Thursday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I want to say a couple last things about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, The Message, and all of the controversy that’s been associated with it in the book tour that he’s been on, a couple of things that I think have not gotten the attention they deserve. The first is that one of the things that Coates has been saying as he’s been promoting the book is a very clear affirmation of the value of international law and the value of nonviolence and, particularly, the importance of not using violence that violates international law against civilians, including in reference to what Hamas did on October 7th.

And he’s making a point that I think is really crucially important. This is from his interview with Ezra Klein. He says that he’s come to the feeling that ‘violence is corrupting, that the first thing you end up doing is folks end up killing each other,’ talking about people whose movements become accustomed to using violence against civilians, that that undermines the moral character of a liberation struggle and ultimately can lead to violence even against people on your own side. And he goes on to say ‘there was just no part of my politics at this point in my life that allows me to see a thousand people massacred and say, I don’t know, whatever the excuses are, I don’t have that. And I’m not saying that I really want to drill down on this. I feel like if you lose sight of the value of individual human life, you have lost something.’

I think this is really important. Again, so much of the way his book is being discussed is this kind of like people on the left love him and pro-Israel folks are attacking him. But this message is a bit different than some of what you’re hearing on the kind of pro-Palestine left, or on the student left. Again, I want to be careful because often times people tend to kind of caricature the Palestine solidarity movement. But I think this clear repudiation of violence against civilians, and the statement that violence against civilians is corrupting of a liberation movement itself, is something that Coates is saying clearly that you don’t often hear as clearly from some of the voices in the Palestine solidarity movement and the protests and the rallies and the slogans and all those things that you’ve been seeing over the last year. And I think it’s really, really valuable. And I think it fits with his general humanism, his belief, as he said, in the preciousness of all life and his ability to center that even amidst even when it comes to a struggle that he deeply, deeply identifies with, as he should, which is the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

The second point I want to make about Coates in the debate is that if you look at his critics, famously in that CBS interview, but you just see it all over the place if you look at criticisms of his book. Again and again, people come down to the idea that he doesn’t recognize the complexity of the problem. So, for instance, this is from The Atlantic’s review about the book. It says, ‘his habitual unwillingness just to recognize conflicting perspectives and evidence, even if only to subject them to counterarguments undermines his case. Might it have been worth noting that Israel is surrounded by Arab states and populations committed to its annihilation. That to a great degree, Palestinian leadership, as well as many Palestinian people, share this eliminationist view, which might help explain the forbidding roads and onerous checkpoints.’

So, you see the move here in this Atlantic review, but you see all the time in response to Coates’ view, which is essentially a set of assertions, which basically are designed to say, yes, what Coates saw was bad, but Israel was justified in doing it because the Palestinians and the Arabs have acted so badly, or Iran has acted so badly, and they’re so menacing. And it’s true that Coates doesn’t respond in his book to these set of counterarguments. But what is crucial to remember is that in these set of statements about Coates’ lack of complexity, they very often themselves betray a real lack of understanding of the scholarly evidence and historical record themselves, right. In the guise of complexity, they’re actually offering very frequently a set of kind of propaganda points that actually aren’t very sophisticated and complex at all, right.

So, the claim that Israel is surrounded by Arab states and populations committed to its annihilation, right. This author in The Atlantic just kind of throws that out as if it’s a settled fact. Why doesn’t Coates respond to that? Well, actually, because it’s mostly really not true. First of all, the entire Arab League, endorsed by the Islamic Conference, for decades now has offered to accept Israel’s existence if Israel returns to the 1967 lines. They even later adapted that to include land swaps, and if there’s a ‘just an agreed upon solution to the refugee problem,’ right. The Jordanian foreign minister recently just reiterated this very passionately. So, it’s simply not factually true to say that all of the Arab countries or even any of the Arab countries really are dedicated to Israel’s annihilation when they’ve said, very explicitly, they will accept Israel; they just won’t accept its occupation, and they require that there be some just and agreed upon—by the way, agreed upon presumably involving Israel too, right—agreed upon solution to the refugee question, which is as required by international law, right. So, this supposedly complex critique of Coates’s lack of complexity actually just ignores that altogether, right.

And then, you see, he goes on. He says, ‘to a great degree, Palestinian leadership, as well as many Palestinian people, share this eliminationist view,’ right. You notice, again, the words ‘annihilation’ and ‘eliminationist,’ right, which is, again, so much a feature of the kind of mainstream pro-Israel rhetoric that we may not notice it. What about if a Palestinian wants legal equality, right? In 2018, a bunch of Palestinian members of the Knesset tried to put forward a basic law, which is a law of constitutional level and weight in Israel, saying that this should be a country in which there’s no discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race, that it would be a state for all its citizens rather than a state based on Jewish supremacy over Palestinians.

By this definition, that is an eliminationist view, right. You see, again, that in this attempt to suggest that Coates is not dealing with complexity, you find a very superficial and, I would say, misleading kind of set of discourse around what’s actually happening, such that if a Palestinian says that I want legal equality with Israeli Jews, that makes them an eliminationist or an annihilationist. And the implication clearly is that they just want to kill all of the Israeli Jews, right. So, legal equality is equated with the death or expulsion of Jews, right. And this is kind of the complex perspective that Coates is not grappling with.

Now, again, one can argue back and forth whether Coates should have written a book in which he had talked to settlers, and in which he had tried to grapple with the reasons for their perspective, or the reasons that other Israelis might hold the perspectives they had, and whether it would have been worth him kind of responding in some of the ways that I’m responding here. But the point I want to make is that a lot of the people who were lording their supposed sophistication and complexity over Coates in their responses are actually showing at the very time that they actually don’t have a very sophisticated or deep understanding of this. And in some ways, that is actually part of what Coates is saying, which is that the mainstream establishment conversation about this in the American press, because Palestinians are so absent, actually just isn’t often very well informed at all. And so, the people who claim that Coates doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about actually betray often in their criticisms that they don’t really necessarily understand what they’re talking about all that well themselves.

Our guest is the award-winning author and journalist, Ta-Nehisi Coates. His new book, The Message, chronicles his trip to Palestine and Israel (alongside trips to Senegal and South Carolina) and meditates on why some people’s stories are told and others are erased. We’ll talk about how he came to write about Israel-Palestine, about how victims become victimizers, about the backlash he’s experienced since the book came out, and about the forces that keep Black writers from shaping public debate about America’s role in the world.

The event was cosponsored by Jewish Currents and the Foundation for Middle East Peace, so it’s free for all subscribers. To get conversations like this every week, and support my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Edited by Jesse Brenneman

Intro/outro music by Nathan Salsburg

There will be no zoom call this week. We’ll resume on Friday, November 1 at 11 AM with Seth Anziska discussing Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.

My New Book

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. I’ve been deeply moved by Fida Jiryis, Stranger in My Own Land, which charts her family’s painful and surreal journey, from Mandatory Palestine to Lebanon to Israel. It’s a book I wish I could make required reading in all the places, in America, Israel and beyond, where Palestinians are routinely dehumanized.

I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medglobal. I’m grateful to people who have sent suggestions. Please keep sending them.

Sources Cited in this Video

A list of the Palestinian and Arab leaders Israel has assassinated since the 1950s.

The Book of Ecclesiastes.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane talks to Daniel Levy about US policy and Israel’s military escalation.

Adam Shatz on the Middle East after Hassan Nasrallah.

Some listeners took issue with my praise for Ta-Nehisi Coates book, The Message, and sent me two essays critical of it. The first, in The Forward, criticizes Coates’ book for analogizing America’s treatment of Blacks to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The second, in The New Yorker, suggests that Coates’ has abandoned the commitment to reporting that characterized his prior work. They didn’t convince me but read them for yourself.

Upcoming Talks

I’m headed to Canada. On October 22, I’ll be speaking at the University of Alberta and on October 29 I’ll be speaking at the University of Victoria.

See you a week from Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, one of the things about observing Jewish holidays, especially this time of year when there’s a ton of Jewish holidays, is that it takes you offline. And so, big events happen in the world, and you kind of hear about them through the grapevine, but you don’t really fully experience them in the way that you would when you’re online. But you also have a little bit of distance from events and some time to think. And, sometimes, even the Jewish texts that you end up reading when you’re in synagogue can put those events in some kind of perspective.

And this happened for me this Shabbat. This Shabbat, which is the Shabbat during the holiday of Sukkot, Jews read the book of Ecclesiastes, which is called in Hebrew, Kohelet. It’s a really fascinating text. There are a lot of famous kind of aphorisms that come from the book of Ecclesiastes, one of which is there’s nothing new under the sun. And early in Kohelet, in Ecclesiastes, there’s this line in which the author says, ‘sometimes there is a phenomenon of which they say, look, this one is new. But it occurred long ago, in ages that went by before us. Ergo, there is nothing new under the sun.’

And that seemed to me pretty fitting to read a couple of days after the news that Israel had assassinated Yahya Sinwar, and then of course before that, Hassan Nasrallah. I don’t think many Americans today know who Abbas Al-Musawi was, or Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, or Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Well, al-Musawi was Nasrallah’s predecessor as the head of Hezbollah. He was assassinated by Israel in 1982. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was the first chairman of Hamas’ Shura Council. He was assassinated by Israel in 2004. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi was the second chairman of Hamas’ Shura Council. Israel assassinated him also in 2004, according to a tally by the Jewish Virtual Library. I don’t exactly know how they assembled this. Israel has assassinated 337 Palestinian and Arab kind of high-level leaders in a list that they have going back to 1956. For instance, in 1972, Israel famously—or infamously—assassinated Ghassan Kanafani, who was then a central command member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Israel has been doing this a really, really long time.

And so, when you hear people in Israel, and Israel supporters, and folks in the American Jewish community saying what a huge victory this was, what an enormous accomplishment this was, and everyone kind of beating their chests about this and the military prowess and all of this stuff, just ask yourself a simple question: how did all those other assassinations going back years and decades and decades, how did they work out for Israel? Have they made Israel safer? Again and again, Israel assassinates folks, right. And then these organizations promote new leaders. Now, maybe the new leaders are less capable than the old leaders. Maybe they’re more moderate. Often, they’re not, right? Israel had no idea when it assassinated Abbas al-Musawi that they would get Hassan Nasrallah, who was actually a lot better, a more effective leader than Musawi. Maybe the next guy won’t be as good.

But the problem is you’re not actually dealing in any sense with the underlying problem, right. Maybe when you are dealing with wars where you’re not occupying a people, right, maybe as in America’s wars against al-Qaeda or ISIS, these assassinations could be more effective because you are working hand-in-hand with states, with sovereign states that are your allies, in the case of the fight against ISIS, the Iraqi government and the Kurds, for instance, that you can work with and they can potentially take control of this area, and kind of decimate an insurgent organization.

But the Palestinian issue is fundamentally—again, and it’s extraordinary that one would even need to say this, right—but it’s fundamentally not about Hamas. Because Hamas was only created in 1987, right. When Israel killed Kanafani in 1972, it wasn’t thinking about Hamas. Hamas didn’t exist. And it wasn’t thinking about Islamists because the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was a leftist group that was involved with armed resistance, including against civilians, against Israel. And at that point, Israel was thinking about this threat more in terms of groups like the PFLP that were leftist groups. But it wasn’t about the PFLP, just as it’s fundamentally not about Hamas. And it’s not about Sinwar, which is not a way of apologizing for Sinwar. Sinwar has did terrible, terrible things. Of course he did. Many leaders have done terrible, terrible things.

But the point is that Sinwar will pass. Even Hamas may pass. The Palestinian people will remain. The Palestinian problem for Israel will remain in that you are holding millions of people without the most basic rights. And so, at best, maybe you create some disarray in an organization. Even the organization gets supplanted by some other organization, and for a while people are licking their wounds, and they haven’t organized yet. But they will. Sooner or later, they will. Another organization, another leader, because it is human to fight against your oppression, for your freedom.

Now, there are ethical ways of fighting. There are unethical ways. October 7th was an unethical way. There are effective ways and there are ineffective ways. Those things are really important. But what is sure is that you will not break a people’s will to fight for their freedom by killing one particular leader, right. And it is astonishing to me, and deeply depressing, that we still get sucked into this. We in the Jewish community get sucked into this frankly absurd idea, right, which is so insulting to Palestinians and so ignorant of this history, right. That you’re going to solve some kind of problem by killing one particular leader, even if he was a particularly effective leader, and even if he was a particularly brutal and nasty leader, right. You’re not going to solve anything ultimately.

And all of this military power and technological wizardry is a substitute for a political strategy. And it’s not just a substitute for a political strategy because a political strategy would have to take seriously the Palestinian desire to live as something other than an oppressed people. It’s a substitute for a human recognition of the Palestinian people, right? So, you focus everything on Sinwar and on Hamas, and on Hezbollah and Nasrallah, as these epitomes of evil, right? And these groups have done terrible things. These leaders have done terrible things.

But what you avert your eyes from in doing that is the fact that you have a very large number of people—just people, the same cross-section of good, bad, in the middle, human people with human desires that you are crushing, right, by not recognizing that they have the same right to freedom that you have. And that if you don’t have that basic human recognition, you are simply going to be like Groundhog Day. As it says in Ecclesiastes, you think this is new, you’ve done it before. You did it before that. You did it before that. You will be doing it again and again and again. And more and more people will die and suffer and live in misery, and it won’t be only on the Palestinian and Lebanese side. It will be also among Israeli Jews.

And that to me is the tragedy of this war, of this moment. It’s why I’m not going to celebrate these assassinations, even though obviously I would have liked to see Yahya Sinwar in front of the International Court of Justice, it’s not going to solve any problems. And people who think it is are simply reflecting their lack of understanding of the long history of this tool, which is ultimately proved ineffective for Israeli Jews and Jews in general in creating the security and safety and peace that they—that we—deserve.

The Consequences of a Trump Presidency Are Simply Too Dire

This Week’s Call: Palestinian-American political strategist Rania Batrice

Our guest this week will be Rania Batrice, former deputy campaign manager for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, and an advisor on paid media for the Uncommitted campaign. I don’t know if Rania agrees with my arguments for supporting Harris, but she’s one of the smartest and most ethical people in Democratic politics, and I’m keen to hear how she sees the election in its final days.

Our call, for paid subscribers, will be at our normal time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Thursday to join the call live, as well as the video, which will go up later in the day. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

My New Book

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. One of the books that helped me understand the Nakba better is Raja Shehada’s Strangers in the House, a beautiful portrait of a relationship between a father and his son in a political environment made impossible by expulsion and oppression.

I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medical Aid to Palestinians. If you have other suggestions, please send them.

Sources Cited in this Video

Eric Levitz on why a Harris loss will push Democrats to the right.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on how she decides who to support for president.  

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), four Palestinians describe how they left Gaza.

Natasha Gill on how Jews are abandoning their children to face a moral reckoning alone.

A Palestinian and Israeli psychoanalyst talk about home.

Upcoming Talks

On October 29, I’ll be speaking at the University of Victoria. The event is online.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, I’ve kind of been putting this off because I’ve been really struggling with it at a number of levels but I want to explain why, if I lived in a swing state, I would vote for Kamala Harris. And I say this as somebody who thinks that Joe Biden and some of his top advisors should be brought before international courts as war criminals for their role in the utter destruction of the Gaza Strip. Surely, if I support the international proceedings that I hope will one day begin against the leaders of Hamas and against Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Golant, how could I not also support such proceedings against the top Biden administration officials who gave Israel the weapons that Israel has used to utterly destroy human life in the Gaza Strip.

So, I say that as someone who feels that way about Biden’s policies, and also someone who’s found that Harris’s response during the campaign on this question of Palestinian humanity has been worse than I could have imagined, utterly depressing and infuriating. The fact that they could not do the bare minimum—by which I mean have a Palestinian American state representative who had endorsed Harris come to give a speech at the Democratic Convention in which she simply spoke about Palestinian suffering and about Palestinian humanity, about principles like equality and peace, principles that supposedly Democratic Party believes in—the fact that even that could not be done, showed to me a level of just kind of moral cowardice and political idiocy that still I find staggering.

And I also want to say that I’m obviously saying this as a person with the good luck that my family is safe, you know. There’s no reason I deserve to be safe any more than the people whose families are in Gaza, or other parts of Israel and Palestine, and in Lebanon, whose families are being destroyed and living with daily terror of being killed. And, for those people, it is not my place to judge or lecture those folks. I can’t possibly imagine how I would be thinking and feeling were I in those circumstances. And I also want to say that I think that folks who are not in swing states and in safe blue states, I do think there is a case for registering a protest vote for president and voting Democratic for the other races.

But I do think there are some arguments to be made for why, if I were in a swing state, I would vote—with a heavy heart—I would vote for Kamala Harris. Some of these are going to be obvious, but I think that they’re worth going through. The first is that even though there is not nearly as big a difference on the question of Palestinian freedom between Harris and Trump as I would like, there is a really big difference on other issues that are also profoundly, profoundly important. Starting with climate, right, can we really even begin to come to terms with the consequences for all of our lives of four more years of a president Donald Trump, who essentially does not believe in climate change as a problem, and who would be moving aggressively with all of his kind of corporate industry allies to rolling back whatever the Biden administration was able to put in to place to try to move towards a kind of greener economy? The consequences of that are just incalculable.

Secondly, on abortion. How many women and other people who have abortions are going to die if Trump is allowed to appoint all these judges who will uphold these incredibly draconian, strict abortion laws that basically put women’s lives at risk because they basically say that you can’t get reproductive medical care because they prioritize the fetus over the life and well-being of the person who’s carrying that fetus?

And thirdly—and again, these things are obvious, but they’re worth saying—is we simply don’t know what kind of state American liberal democracy would be left in after four years of Donald Trump. We know that American liberal democracy is profoundly flawed as it is, but we do have some separation of powers. We do have some ability to have free elections. We simply don’t know how much of that will be left standing after four years of Donald Trump. We learned in his first term that many of these foundational things that keep us a somewhat moderately free society are based on custom. They’re much more fragile than we realize. That they really exist because people respect certain kinds of norms. We learned that when you have a president who simply does not respect those norms—and he’s worse than he was four years ago—that those things can really start to buckle, especially when you have a Republican Party just completely dominated by cowards who will support whatever he wants. And potentially those Republicans could control the House and the Senate. And they already control the Supreme Court. This is really existential for the future and standing of American liberal democracy.

And on those issues—climate, abortion, liberal democracy—there is an important difference between Harris and Trump, a very, very important difference. And I think one has to keep that in mind. Secondly, even on the question of Israel and Palestine, I think there is a difference between Trump and Harris. Not as big a difference, of course, as I would like, but there is a difference. And there would be a difference I think for this reason: because the political realities that they face are very different. Harris comes into the presidency facing some pressure from the Democratic base and even from some Democrats in Congress to end unconditional US military and diplomatic support for Israel. We don’t know what the outcome of that will be, but we know that she will face some pressure to do that from within our party. Trump would face no pressure from within the Republican Party at all. To the contrary, the pressure would be entirely from folks in Congress who want to maintain unconditional US support for Israel no matter what.

And I’ve heard some people say that, you know, Trump doesn’t like Netanyahu, and he doesn’t like wars, and maybe he wouldn’t be worse than Biden. But I actually think if you look at the record of the Trump presidency, and I actually read the kind of memoirs of Jason Greenblatt and Jared Kushner and David Friedman—for my sins—you know, the kind of three architects of Trump’s Israel policy, what you see from those books is that Trump is saying all kinds of things and he’s got all kinds of ideas. But the truth is he doesn’t really make policy because he doesn’t have the discipline to really focus in on anything. And so, those guys were really making policy. And they were pushing very much in the direction of letting Israel do whatever they want. Remember, they proposed a peace plan that created basically the most absurd of kind of Palestinian Bantustans. I think they were open to the idea of Israel annexing the West Bank legally, even though it didn’t come to fruition because of the Abraham Accords. I think they would be open to a legal annexation of the West Bank beyond the de facto annexation that we have now. I think that they would be more open to America entering a full-scale war with Iran. Remember the incredibly reckless decision they took to assassinate Soleimani in Trump’s first term.

And I also think they would be more supportive of mass ethnic cleansing in Gaza, right. There clearly are people in the Israeli government who would like not just a kind of moderate level of ethnic cleansing we’ve seen in Gaza now, where basically because life is impossible kind of getting across the border into Egypt. But to push Egypt to open the border so that you would have a mass exodus out of Gaza, and from which people would not be allowed to return, there are clearly people in the Israeli government who want that. There’s been a lot of reporting about this. And the Biden administration, while it didn’t do that much to stop it, when Egypt said early on, we’re not going to open our border and allow this to happen, the Biden administration does not appear, from the reporting I’ve read, to have turned the screws on Egypt to try to force them to do that. I think it’s quite possible that a Trump administration would do that using America’s economic leverage, maybe the leverage of Gulf countries over Egypt, to try to force Egypt to basically open its borders and basically have a situation where you don’t have tens of thousands of Palestinians leaving Gaza, but you have millions of Palestinians leaving Gaza without the ability to return. So, I think that’s a difference.

And beyond that, there is a difference, I think, in that the conditions for pro-Palestinian organizing would be different under Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris. This is a point that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a while back, which I think is really important. Which is to say the level of oppression—although it’s significant now on people who want to organize for Palestinian rights, quite significant—I think would be substantially worse under Donald Trump than it would be under Kamala Harris. I mean, I think you could really imagine a situation under Donald Trump, first in which the police brutality would make everything we’ve seen so far look absolutely like child’s play. But beyond that, in which the administration could really put real financial pressure on universities, threatening to defund American universities unless they basically ban pro-Palestinian activism, fire pro-Palestinian professors. I think that’s really imaginable under a Trump presidency. I think it’s less imaginable under a Harris presidency.

And the last point—and this is a point made by Eric Levitz—is I don’t think that defeating Kamala Harris will move the Democratic Party to the left and make it more progressive and more sympathetic to Palestinian rights. It may be on a trajectory of becoming more progressive to Palestinian rights on its own for reasons of generational change. But I actually think that the kind of establishment mainstream media discourse that will dominate the discussion after a Trump victory will be that the Democrats mistake was to nominate someone who was a progressive from the Bay Area who ran to the left of when she ran for president in 2020, and that they should have nominated a swing state moderate, and that they need to get back to doing that again—a kind of a reprise of the kind of Bill Clinton kind of strategy of when the Democrats nominated him in 1992. I just don’t think it’s the case that defeating Kamala Harris produces a Democratic Party that is more progressive on anything, including on this issue, than it would be if she were elected.

So, it’s for those reasons that I—I don’t live in a swing state—that if I were in a swing state, I would, with a very heavy heart, vote for Kamala Harris, and then do everything I could to try to influence and pressure her presidency so that it’s far, far better than her campaign has been. But even if it isn’t far better, I still think it will be better than a Trump presidency because one thing we have learned to our horror over the last year is that as terrible as things are, they can get worse. They can get much worse. They can get worse there in Palestine and Israel, and they can certainly get much worse here.

Our guest is Gaza-born journalist, Muhammad Shehada, whose writing has been indispensable over the last year. While we usually reserve audio of our Friday zoom calls for paid subscribers, Muhammad’s description of life in Gaza, and life outside of Gaza when your family is there, was so eloquent and haunting that I felt it needed as wide a distribution as possible.

Our call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday at 1 PM Eastern. That will be our new regular time. (West Coast subscribers, we’ve heard you.)

Our guest will be Yale Philosophy Professor Jason Stanley, a world-renowned scholar of fascism and author of the new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. We’ll talk about what happened in Tuesday’s election and the fate of the struggle between liberal democracy and fascism in the United States.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

My New Book

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. One of the books that helped me understand the Nakba better is Raja Shehadeh’s Strangers in the House, a beautiful portrait of a relationship between a father and his son in a political environment made impossible by expulsion and oppression.

I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medical Aid to Palestinians. If you have other suggestions, please send them.

Responses to My Last Video

The unnamed newsletter subscriber I cited in this week’s video about the interconnectedness between American liberal democracy and the movement for Palestinian rights is David Goldstein. Here’s how he made the case in an email to me:

“We know that the trendlines among Democrats and independents are bending inexorably towards Palestinian support and away from blind Israel fealty. If those trendlines continue - and there’s every reason to believe they will – it’s only a matter of time before a democratic America stops financing Israel’s immoral/objectiveless wars and, in turn, conditions military support on reasonable behavior. It's inevitable. There’d be no way for a candidate to emerge from a Democratic primary without professing a saner and more humane stance on the issue. That's just where the party is.

But if Trump is elected and America ceases to be a functioning democracy, this burgeoning groundswell of Palestinian support won’t have any influence on American foreign policy. A democratic regime, even a benighted spineless one, will have no choice but to respond to the political pressure an increasingly pro-Palestinian constituency exerts on it if it wishes to remain in power. A Trump-led totalitarian regime that doesn't have to worry about getting voted out of office will not only ignore this pressure, but likely criminalize it, unleash violence to suppress it. 

Put another way, the choice isn't just between the two candidates on the ballot; it's a choice between 1) voting to preserve a democratic political system in which pro-Palestinian support will inevitably change the fundamentals of the conflict and 2) voting to burn this system to the ground, thus rendering this political trend irrelevant and dooming future generations of Palestinians to the status quo or worse.

So, a vote for Harris isn’t a tacit endorsement of her disappointing stance on the conflict; nor is it a willingness to countenance America’s financial support of war crimes; it’s a vote to allow an increasingly Pro-Palestinian sentiment to matter in the future. It’s about fighting for the greater long-term Palestinian (and, ultimately, Israeli) good. It’s not holding one’s nose and sacrificing principles; it’s about providing the groundwork and infrastructure to continue the fight, flawed as the vehicle to do so may be.”  

Another reader, Omar Khan, emailed to argue the opposite point:

“I happen to disagree with you in a most profound way regarding your logic around voting for VP Harris for the presidential ticket. We have no argument that Trump is the far worse candidate by a long shot. The only trouble is that relativism is fairly useless here: both candidates are essentially pro genocide, which already takes up the entire moral discussion. *After* being complicit with genocide, whether one is then better on reproductive rights, immigrant issues, tax policy, and so forth – while not exactly a moot point, becomes morally much less relevant.

Many years ago, I was privileged to be taught introduction to psychology at Penn by the professor who wrote the book – Dr. Gleitman. He had as a guest professor, Dr. Marty Seligman (the originator of the theory of learned helplessness). To my 17-year-old self, it was the first time of being presented with the famous ethical dilemma of ‘the trolley problem.’ In this case, he asked, ‘you’re driving and there’s a fork in the road; on the one side is a mother with two children, and on the other side are three old people crossing the road. Whom do you hit?’ And after the class had given its view on the matter, he said – ‘you hit…The brakes.’ It didn’t quite sidestep the dilemma as much as point out that sometimes we put ourselves in moral conundrums which are completely unnecessary – by assuming that they are created by ossified, unyielding conditions and people, when in fact we need to change the question.

Before then, I was the product of a Quaker high school education and some things were clear: first, let’s not define ‘evil’ that easily; it’s a pretty high bar for something to be called that. Second, once you have called something evil, then you know what you call the lesser of two evils? Evil.”

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen reads Parsha Bereishit against the backdrop of Gaza’s destruction.

My Beinart Notebook colleague Daniel Kaufman (pen name “cooper lit”) pens a comic about the people we love who defend the indefensible. 

The best debate on voting for Harris I’ve heard. Between Mehdi Hasan and the Makdisi brothers on their podcast. (Starts at 43 min, 45 seconds.)

Donald Trump meets the New Yorker’s cartoon page.

Haaretz accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

For a special Pod Save the World series about the election, I talked to Ben Rhodes about Harris, Trump, and Gaza.

Last month, I was interviewed about Zionism, antisemitism, and Gaza at the University of Alberta.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I completely understand why people are struggling to support Kamala Harris, given what the Biden administration has done and its responsibility for the destruction of Gaza, and now the destruction of significant parts of Lebanon as well. But I think that there are arguments for Harris even on the question of Palestinian rights that are worth thinking about. And there are a couple that I want to mention that are really not mine. They’re ideas that I’ve heard from other people who I really respect.

And one of them is made by the Palestinian American Democratic strategist Rania Batrice. Rania makes the point that this movement for Palestinian freedom, which has grown so much over the last year, will struggle to continue to grow under a Trump presidency in the same way, in part because the Trump presidency will put such tremendous pressure on people of progressive values, on so many issues. There will be so many crises. The crisis of mass deportation. The crisis of a government that doesn’t care about climate change. The crisis of a government that supports massive police brutality. The crisis of a government that’s appointing judges that basically put women’s lives in danger, and the lives in danger of anyone who’s having an abortion.

That all of that pressure will mean that there is less time for people to organize and work on this question of ending the war in Gaza, ending the war in Lebanon, and moving towards ending apartheid in Israel, and giving Palestinians basic human rights. And that under a Harris campaign, even though Harris herself hasn’t shown a lot of evidence that she would be better, at least it means that there won’t be much of a crisis on these other fronts, and people will afford to have more time to focus on this issue.

Somebody else who has thought about this, and I think in a real interesting way, is a subscriber to my newsletter, the Beinart Notebook, who made the point to me that I thought was a really interesting point recently that the future of the movement for Palestinian rights depends on America remaining a liberal democracy. That if we hope to see these shifts in public mood, especially in the democratic party, transform itself into a shift in government policy, that is much more likely to take place if the United States still has relatively free elections, right.

The more successful Donald Trump is in moving America towards an authoritarian system, the harder it is to translate these kinds of shifts in public opinion—especially among young people—into the political process. Trump’s threat to American liberal democracy is also a threat to the folks who want to change US policy because liberal democracy is the mechanism through which you would change US policy on Israel and Palestine. And a more authoritarian political system, one more dominated by political elites who are less accountable, is likely to be one that keeps the status quo when it comes to Palestine and Israel.

Our guest is Yale Philosophy Professor Jason Stanley, a world-renowned scholar of fascism and author of the new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. We talk about Donald Trump’s victory and what it means for liberal democracy in the United States.

Just Because People Vote For Something Doesn’t Make It Right

These monthly conversations are usually reserved for Premium members, but given the gravity of this moment, we decided to make this one available to everybody.

Our guest is New York Magazine Editor-at-Large Rebecca Traister, among the best writers on gender and politics (and many other things) in America. This essay she wrote after Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 still captures many painful truths about the brutal burden facing not only women presidential candidates, but American women as a whole. They talked…

Our call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday at 1 PM Eastern, our new regular time.

Our guest will be The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, author of one of the most famous essays of the first Trump presidency, which he turned into a book: The Cruelty is the Point. We’ll talk about what is similar, and different, as Trump returns, and how Americans should respond to our country’s enormous capacity for cruelty, both at home and abroad.

Paid subscribers will get an email with the Zoom link, and then once it airs, they’ll get the video. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Rebecca Traister, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

My New Book

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader recently recommended Naomi Shihab Nye’s young adult novel, Habibi, about Liyana, a Palestinian-American girl from St. Louis whose family returns to West Bank, a place she struggles to make home.

Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.

Sources Cited in This Video

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Parshat Vayera.

Parshat Vayera and the Pittsburgh shooting.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane details the Trump administration’s coming crackdown on campus speech.

Progressive New York State Representative Zohran Mamdani interviews Trump voters in Brooklyn and Queens.

Israeli reporter Barak Ravid tells the Jewish Federations of North America that “we are much closer to Israeli settlements being built in Gaza than hostages coming home from Gaza.”

Upcoming Talks

On Tuesday, November 19, I’ll be speaking at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst about “Protest, Zionism and Gaza.”

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, Rabbi Jonathan Sachs tells this story about the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe. And the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe tells his students: ‘you must live according to the times.’ And the students are a little puzzled by what exactly that means. And the Sith Libavitcher Rebbe explains, and I’m paraphrasing here, essentially that what ‘live by the times’ means is that you should use the weekly Torah portion as a lens through which to understand your time. You should see it as a reflection of the events that are happening around you in the world. And I think that’s a very powerful concept right now.

Yesterday, many Jews read in shul Parshat Vayera, and I want to read a little snippet from that week’s Torah portion. It goes: ‘G-d appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. He lifted his eyes and looked, and lo, three men were standing over against him; and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent entrance and bowed down to the earth.’

And Sachs makes the point that, as this passage is interpreted in Jewish tradition, the way it’s interpreted is that G-d comes to Abraham to speak to Abraham. And then Abraham sees these three men, these three strangers who are coming towards him, and he essentially tells G-d to pause. Says G-d, sorry, I can’t talk to you right now. There is a greater imperative that I have, which is to welcome these strangers. And then Abraham feeds them and bathes them.

And from this passage, the rabbis in tractate Shabbat in the Babylonian Talmud take the principle that greater is hospitality than receiving the divine presence. And then as the story continues, those three men, who turn out to be angels after giving Abraham and Sarah the news that Sarah will have a child, they go on to Sodom, the city of Sodom, where Abraham’s relative Lot lives. And Lot also welcomes them into his home, but because the city of Sodom is ferociously hostile to strangers, to outsiders, the people of Sedon come and demand that Lot hand over these strangers to them so they can do violence, indeed sexual violence, to these strangers. And when Lot refuses, they threaten him, and then the angels take Lot and his immediate family out and the city is destroyed.

I think to go back to the point of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, to read these Parsha according to the times, it seems to me really hard not to read this Parsha against the backdrop of the impending mass deportation of potentially millions of extremely vulnerable Americans by the Trump administration. And, you know, what happens in the wake of elections is that people want to be politically savvy. And so, they feel like, well, people have voted for a tough on immigration policy, so there must be some merit in this. There might be some wisdom in this. No, it’s certainly true that our immigration system is deeply, deeply problematic, that we need many, many, many more judges and officers to handle asylum claims, that our asylum system doesn’t work very well, that we need a much, much higher levels of legal immigration, that the whole system absolutely is very, very dysfunctional.

But the answer to that dysfunction, again, is to have an asylum process that works, and to have an immigration process that actually responds to the needs of the United States to bring a lot of people into the country, because actually our economy needs that, even though it also needs to redistribute the economic benefits better of that immigration. But the fact that many Americans voted for Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan doesn’t change the fact that it is a brutal, cruel policy that if implemented, even partially, will be a tremendous stain on this country. People need to remember that oftentimes things that are done in America that we feel most shameful about enjoyed widespread support from both the populace and many elites at the time.

And I think what Parshat Vayera, the point it makes, is you can’t actually have an authentic, genuine relationship with G-d if you don’t also care about vulnerable people in your midst. And in this case, the vulnerable people being the stranger, the outsider. Many of these undocumented immigrants, and again, this will also affect many, many legal immigrants as well, including people who’ve risked their lives for the United States, like people who were brought from Afghanistan, who fought alongside the United States in America’s long war there. These are many of the hardest working, most vulnerable, most decent people in the United States who are contributing the most and getting the least from our country. And to watch them be treated in this kind of brutal, dehumanizing, vicious way that we’re seeing is exactly the opposite of the message from this week’s Parsha.

And I think there’s something else to say about this week’s Parsha that should be particularly important for Jews to remember. Interestingly, again, in this spirit of living according to the times, it was also during Parshat Vayera that the Pittsburgh shooting massacre in the synagogue took place. And if you think about Lot as representing the role of the Jew, what does Lot do? He extends sympathy to the stranger and then is turned upon for having extended sympathy to the stranger himself. The Torah tells us 36 times that you should remember the heart of the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt. In a way, that’s what Lot does. And that makes him vulnerable to people who, because they hate the stranger, they then decide that he is also a stranger, that he is also an outsider.

And this is what happened in the Pittsburgh massacre in a way that the shooter initially was obsessed with the supposed threat of an immigrant invasion from Central America. But then because he saw that there was a synagogue nearby that was partnering with a Hebrew immigrant aid society to support the rights of immigrants and asylum seekers in the United States, he decided that Jews were complicit in this ‘invasion,’ that they were a danger. And so, he turned on them, just as the people of Sodom turned on Lot because Lot had welcomed the strangers in his midst.

And so, I think there is a very, very important message from our tradition here for Jews as well, and for the forces in the Jewish community that either support Trump outright or are going to accommodate to Trump in various ways, that this brutal nativist xenophobia that is going to blight and destroy the lives of so many undocumented immigrants mostly from the Global South is unlikely to end there. That this kind of cruelty, this kind of dehumanization doesn’t usually end with one group of people. And precisely because Jews have it in our tradition to stand up for the stranger and will disproportionately oppose what Trump wants to do, that will increase the risk that people turn on Jews just as the Pittsburgh shooter did and just as happened in the story with Lot in Sodom. And it’s why we need to not fall into the trap of thinking that because most Jews in America today are not immigrants, are not undocumented, have a relative degree of privilege that we can stand back from our gated kind of, you know, kind of worlds and look at this and say it doesn’t really affect us. I think the message of Parshat Vayera is that when you violate the stranger, you make everybody unsafe. And you disconnect yourself from G-d.

Our guest is The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, author of one of the most famous essays of the first Trump presidency, which he turned into a book: The Cruelty is the Point. We’ll talk about what is similar, and different, as Trump returns, and how Americans should respond to our country’s capacity for cruelty, both at home and abroad.

It’s a Test of Whether International Law Applies to the West

Our guest is the renowned, Israeli-born, Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, who teaches at Brown University. In August, he described returning to Israel and encountering students whose “rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history.” This month he concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. We’ll discuss the genocid…

When Even Billionaires Are Afraid to Criticize Trump, What Does That Mean for the Rest of US?

Our guest is Muzaffar Chishti, Senior Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, and one of America’s foremost experts on immigration policy. We’ll talk about Donald Trump’s plans for the mass deportation of undocumented—and perhaps even legal— immigrants. We’ll talk about the human cost of such a roundup and what it might do to the United States.

I talked with my extraordinary CUNY colleague, the Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek, author of The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria.

It’s Wonderful Assad is Gone. But Neither He, Nor Iran, Was Ever Israel’s Real Problem.

There will be no Zoom call this Friday. We’ll resume on Friday, December 20 at 1 PM with a conversation with Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller, author of the new anthology, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture.

But I’ve recorded a Zoom interview (without a live audience) with my extraordinary CUNY colleague, the Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek, author of The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria. Paid subscribers will get it today. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Rebecca Traister, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky and Bret Stephens.

My New Book

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader recently recommended Naomi Shihab Nye’s young adult novel, Habibi, about Liyana, a Palestinian-American girl from St. Louis whose family returns to West Bank, a place she struggles to make home.

Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.

Sources Cited in this Video

Discussing Israel’s enemies in 1982, Benjamin Netanyahu said, “There is a major force behind most of these groups that is the Soviet Union. If you take away the Soviet Union, it’s chief proxy, the PLO, international terrorism would collapse.”

The Nkomati Accords between South Africa and Mozambique.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Gary Monroe chronicles the end of Jewish Miami Beach and the rise of Little Haiti.

If you’re in New York, you can still catch the end of the always-excellent Other Israel film festival.

I talked to The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill about the debate over Gaza.

Housekeeping

We’re using a new system to share transcripts from Zoom interviews. They’ll no longer appear in emails but are still available for anyone who wants them by opening this post in your web browser (not the Substack app) and clicking the “transcript” button just below the video.

See you a week from Friday,

Peter

I talked with the Palestinian-Norwegian writer Iyad el-Baghdadi about the regional implications of the Assad regime’s fall in Syria and Israel’s military intervention there.

It’s not about the legal definition. It’s about Western and Jewish exceptionalism.

Our guests are Mahmoud Muna, Matthew Teller, and Juliette Touma, editors of the new anthology, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture, which includes close to a hundred stories about the lives of people in Gaza, both before and after its recent destruction. This interview is co-sponsored with Jewish Currents.

Our Communal Leaders Keep Conflating Discomfort with Unsafety

Something happened earlier this month in December that might seem like—given the scale of all the magnitude of the horrors that are happening around Palestine and Israel—might not seem so significant, but I think really is emblematic of something that’s gone terribly, terribly wrong in the organized American Jewish community.

Carter’s Break with the White South Over Civil Rights Offers a Model for Jews

Our guest for the Zoom call this Friday, January 3rd, at 1 Eastern, for paid subscribers, will be Paul O’Brien, Executive Director at Amnesty International USA. We’ll discuss Amnesty’s new report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.

My New Book

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28, 2025. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: first, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”

Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.

Sources Cited in this Video

Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman’s claim that Carter was “engaging in antisemitism.”

Deborah Lipstadt’s 2007 Washington Post column, “Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem.”

The attacks on Carter by Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton.

The attacks on Carter’s book in The New York Times and Slate.

“Great is repentance, which hastens redemption” from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yoma (86b).

Kenneth E. Morris’ biography, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist.

Carter’s inaugural addresses as Georgia governor and president.

Carter’s 1977 speech at Notre Dame questioning the Cold War.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Will Alden details how, since October 7, foundations have withdrawn funding from groups that support Palestinian rights.

Alan Dershowitz vs Norman Finkelstein, the musical.

Doris Bittar on Christmas in Lebanon.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I interviewed two young Israelis who refused their country’s draft.

I’ve written about Jehad Abusalim, a Gaza-born scholar currently based in Washington who is completing a PhD in history, Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University. The warnings he issued about Israel’s response to October 7 have proven prescient and were tragically ignored by American media. He has now launched a newsletter on Substack. Please consider subscribing.

See you on Friday, January 3,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, Jimmy Carter has died. It’s worth going back to the moment in 2006 when he published his book, Peace Not Apartheid, to remember what happened there. Abe Foxman, then the head of the Anti-Defamation League, said that Carter was ‘engaging in antisemitism.’ Deborah Lipstadt, who went on to be appointed by a Democratic president to be the antisemitism czar wrote a column in the Washington Post entitled ‘Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem.’ Carter was attacked by Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton. His book was attacked in reviews in the New York Times and Slate in large measure for using the term apartheid, a term which is now been endorsed by Israel’s own leading human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Yesh Din, and by the most prominent human rights organizations in the world, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

A couple of years ago, I did a newsletter actually suggesting that leaders of the organized American Jewish community like Foxman, but also American politicians like Clinton and Pelosi, should offer a public apology to Jimmy Carter. I quoted at that time a line from Tractate Yoma and the Babylonian Talmud, ‘Great is repentance which hastens redemption.’ But I think there are a great number of people who need to do Teshuva, who need to ask for forgiveness for their attacks on Carter for saying things that have been deeply vindicated by the course of events in the years since then, and in fact, if you look back at them, seem extremely tame. Because it’s worth remembering that Carter wasn’t actually accusing Israel of being an apartheid state in 2006. All he was saying was that it risked becoming one, which is also, by the way, something that Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak and numerous Israeli security officials have been saying around that time. And yet, the man was viciously pilloried by people who I think at this point should have the decency to offer their apologies.

But I think there is also something really important to say about Carter and the roots of his position on Palestinian freedom. He was, of all of the American presidents, the one who I think felt the strongest sense of identification with the Palestinian plight. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think there’s a lot to learn from Carter’s own life that can instruct us as we think about Israel and Palestine and that particularly Israelis and other Jews can learn from.

So, Carter’s family story is really remarkable. He grew up not just in the South, but in the deep, deep South. I’m quoting here from a biography of his by Kenneth E. Morris called Jimmy Carter: American Moralist. Morris writes that Carter grew up in rural southwest Georgia, in a place where people spoke a rural dialect that was so thick that many outsiders thought of it as a foreign language altogether. There was a very large Black population. It was a profoundly, viciously racist environment. Morris suggests that Carter’s father, Earl, may indeed have participated in a lynching. He also tells the story that although Carter grew up playing with Black children all the time, that Carter’s father actually ordered the Black children to lose all of the games they played with little Jimmy so he could always come out on top.

And to understand the fact that Carter was the president who took this position on Palestinian freedom—and not a perfect position, but much more progressive than most of the other presidents—you have to understand that it’s an outgrowth of his experience as a White Southerner turning against his own community, his own people to support Civil Rights. In 1953, when Carter was a young businessman, he refused to join the racist Citizens’ Councils that led to a boycott by Whites in the town of his business. He supported school consolidation, which would bring Black and White students together. Also, in the 1950s, which led to a rift with his own cousin, Hugh, that the two men did not speak for more than a decade. You know, some Jews who support Palestinian freedom may identify with these kinds of stories. After a vote on this question of school integration, opponents of desegregation nailed a sign to Carter’s warehouse door saying, ‘Coons and Carters go together.’

Carter’s key political moment in his political career in Georgia was in January 1971, when in his gubernatorial inaugural speech, he denounced segregation. That was when Time magazine put him on the cover and this completely obscure governor began to launch the political career that would allow him to this upset victory in the 1976 presidential campaign. Morris argues it’s impossible to understand Carter’s view of foreign policy without understanding the way it springs from the moralism that came out of the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, his Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, was one of the key Civil Rights leaders in Georgia. That Carter was the only president of the Cold War who explicitly came out against the Cold War framing, very famously in a speech that he gave at Notre Dame, arguing in fact for a kind of an idea of a global community based on cooperation that was very clearly modeled, Morris argues, on Martin Luther King’s notion of the beloved community.

And Carter, in his inaugural address as president, who kind of harkened back to the gubernatorial address he gave as governor of Georgia, spent one third of that address speaking about human rights, which was for him very clearly the kind of international extension of the principle of civil rights that he had fought for, that he indeed had suffered for, that he had alienated himself from his own community for supporting. And then you may know that Young was ultimately forced to be fired under tremendous criticism by the organized American Jewish community. Carter did not stick up for him because Young had committed the sin of meeting with members of the PLO.

It is impossible to understand Carter’s sympathy for Palestinians, Carter’s kind of moral framework, in which he put Israel’s domination of Palestinians, without seeing that connection to his support as a White Southerner for civil rights. And I think one of the things that we should think about as we mourn Jimmy Carter is him as a model for Israeli and other Jews. Carter risked something. He risked the opprobrium of his own community, his own people, to come out for civil rights. And that became the basis of his entire political worldview.

So, it’s not just that Carter has been proven right in his criticism of Israel’s policies for the Palestinians. It’s also that in Carter’s own life, in his own moral courage, we see a model for the moral courage that is necessary by Jews today to be willing to take positions that will alienate us from our community because we believe in the central moral principle to which Carter devoted much of his life: the principle of human equality, the principle of human dignity of all people, irrespective of their religion, their ethnicity, or their race.

The Outgoing Secretary of State’s Astonishing Interview with the New York Times

Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 10, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.

Our guest will be the Israeli-born British journalist Rachel Shabi, author of the new book, Off-White: The Truth about Antisemitism. Last week, she published a column on the subject in The Guardian. She’s particularly knowledge about antisemitism, and its weaponization, in Britain, a subject of ferocious contention since Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader. We’ll discuss all that on Friday.

I’ve also recorded an interview with the Israeli religious thinker and activist Mikhael Manekin, one of the founders of smol emuni, the faithful left. We discussed Mikhael’s new book, so far available only in Hebrew, entitled, Sermons from the Abyss, which uses the five Megillot that Jews read during the year in synagogue to reflect on the horrors of the last several years. I don’t know of any Jewish thinker who is grappling more deeply than Mikhael with the theological ramifications of Israel’s destruction of Gaza. This call, which I’ll post this Wednesday, is for paid subscribers too.

My New Book

On January 28, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”

Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.

Sources Cited in this Video

The New York Times’ interview with Antony Blinken.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Theia Chatelle details the Yale police department’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters.

An extraordinary interview with Muhammad Shehada about realities in Gaza.

A song about living in a society that is committing genocide.

I talked to the CBC about why Jimmy Carter deserves an apology.

See you on Friday, January 10,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken did a big interview with the New York Times this weekend about his legacy, the Biden administration’s legacy. And a big part of that interview was about Gaza. And I think it’s worth noting a number of things he said because I think they show the way in which people like Blinken live inside kind of intellectual and moral prison, in which basic truths are things that they cannot bring themselves to see or will not bring themselves to see. And they end up saying these things which are completely, utterly incoherent, and I think just morally inexcusable.

And so, the first thing that’s striking if you listen to Blinken’s comments on Gaza is that for him, the problem of Gaza and Palestinians in Gaza is a problem that begins on October 7th. He says, ‘since October 7th,’ this is Blinken, ‘we’ve had some core goals in mind. And what are those goals,’ he says, ‘make sure October 7th can’t happen again, prevent a wider war, and protect Palestinian civilians.’ Now, what he means by make sure October 7th can’t happen again, and he says it explicitly, is destroying Hamas’s military capacity, right. There’s no recognition that October 7th doesn’t just happen because Hamas has a bunch of weapons. October 7th happens because Palestinians are living in what Human Rights Watch calls an open-air prison, what the UN has said is a place that’s unlivable. This is before October 7th. That Palestinians are living in what all the world’s major human rights organizations call an apartheid state, right. All of that is completely absent.

So, Blinken thinks that the problem that he’s trying to solve begins on October 7th. And then he says astonishingly, he says, ‘when it comes to making sure that October 7th can’t happen again, I think we’re in a good place.’ No, you’re not in a good place. Not only because Gaza has been utterly destroyed, but you’re not in a good place in terms of making sure that things like October 7th can’t happen again because the fundamental reason behind the horror of October 7th isn’t just because Hamas has a bunch of weapons, it’s because Palestinians don’t have freedom, and because their ethical and legal paths towards fighting for freedom—whether it’s boycotts, efforts at international institutions, all of these things, peaceful marches like happened in 2018—that they have all been blocked. That’s the context if you really want to make sure that future October 7ths don’t happen, you have to address that. But that’s basically completely absent from Blinken’s framework.

And what’s really striking is it’s so striking how Blinken is able to empathize with Jewish Israelis in a way that he can’t empathize with Palestinians. So, he says, this is Blinken, he says, ‘you had in Israel in the days after October 7th a totally traumatized society. This wasn’t just the Prime Minister or a given leader in Israel. This was an entire society that didn’t want any assistance getting to a single Palestinian in Gaza.’ He says Israelis didn’t want any assistance to go to Gaza after October 7th. And he says you have to kind of understand that given the trauma in that society.

First of all, you notice the way in which he buys completely into the ethno-nationalist frame, right? What does he mean by society? Twenty percent of Israel’s own citizens are Palestinians—Palestinian citizens of Israel, sometimes called Arab Israelis. They wanted assistance to go into Gaza. So, you notice that when Blinken talks about Israeli society, he’s actually only talking about Jews, as if even the Palestinian citizens in Israel don’t actually matter, are not actually real Israelis. He’s completely bought into this ethno-nationalist framework. And then he says, yes, it’s unfortunate that they didn’t want any aid to go into Gaza. But after all, you have to understand they were really traumatized, right.

But there’s no recognition, right, that in understanding October 7th, and the horror of what Hamas and others did on October 7th, that it might be worth understanding that Palestinians were also totally traumatized, and that we should factor that in in understanding their actions—again, not excusing their action, but in understanding their action, right. So, Blinken can see Israelis through this kind of empathetic humanizing frame in a way he can’t vis-a-vis Palestinians.

The second point is the way Blinken talks about America’s leverage vis-a-vis Israel. He essentially talks about the US relationship with Israel as if America doesn’t give Israel weapons, or as if the notion that we would actually question whether we give Israel these weapons simply cannot be discussed, right. It’s completely outside of his mental framework, right. So, he says, ‘no one needs to remind me of the sufferings’—this is Palestinians—‘because it’s something that drives me every single day.’ Okay, so first of all, let’s just be honest. That’s b******t. It’s a bold-faced lie. Antony Blinken might say that to make him fall asleep at night, but nothing in his actual actions suggests that he’s driven every single day by Palestinians suffering in Gaza because he keeps supporting the sending of those weapons, right.

And when he says, ‘we’ve done everything in our power to find a way to get to the end of the conflict,’ that statement only makes sense if somehow the question of US arms sales to Israel, right, is kind of an exogenous question, as if that doesn’t bear on American behavior, right. But it’s the single most important factor, right. That America is literally giving Israel the weapons it’s using to kill the people that Antony Blinken says he’s so concerned about.

And then Blinken tells this remarkable story. What’s remarkable about it is that he thinks it makes him look good. He says, ‘the very first trip that I made to Israel five days after October 7th, I spent with my team nine hours in the IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, six stories underground, with the Israeli government, including the Prime Minister, including arguing for hours on end about the basic proposition that the humanitarian assistance needs to get to Palestinians in Gaza,’ right. So, he’s proud of this, right. He’s proud of the fact that he was arguing for hours and hours and hours just about the idea that there should be any aid getting in, right. But why should Antony Blinken have had to argue for hours and hours and hours and hours, right. He only had to argue for hours and hours and hours because he wasn’t actually using the obvious leverage that was at America’s disposal. He would have not had to argue for hours and hours and hours if he simply said, no, we’re not going to provide you the weapons to destroy this society and to starve people to death. Then he wouldn’t have needed to argue for hours and hours and hours. But because he had taken the most important point of U.S. leverage off the table, he’s proud of himself for trying to convince the Israelis, acting like a supplicant, right, instead of the Secretary of State of the superpower that provides Israel the weapons that it needs to prosecute this devastating war.

And then when he’s explicitly asked by the interviewer of the New York Times about American weapon sales, he says ‘that support’—meaning the US arms—‘is vital to make sure Israel has an adequate defense. And in turn, that means we’re not going to have an even broader wider conflict that results in more death and more destruction.’ Sorry!? I mean, like, again, I understand in the nature of these interviews with the Times, the Times reporter has to be respectful, there’s a certain kind of way in which you’re supposed to address a Secretary of State, but what the f**k? I mean, the US, we give unconditional weapons to prevent a wider war and Blinken is saying that this strategy has worked. Has he not been noticing the utter destruction of Lebanon that’s taken place? And also, now Israel’s bombing of Syria? I mean, it’s just, again, this is like a man speaking in some kind of closed room in which he’s hermetically sealed off from reality.

And then to me, the most astonishingly pathetic and arrogant moment in the conversation is when the New York Times reporter says, ‘do you worry you’ve been presiding over what the world sees as a genocide?’ And Antony Blinken simply says, ‘no, it’s not.’ No, it’s not. That’s it. No suggestion that he might have read the Amnesty or United Nations reports. No suggestion that he needs to rebut these claims. No suggestion that the fact that Israel has destroyed most of the hospitals, most of the universities, most of the agriculture, that 90% of the people are dislocated from their homes, right, that there’s been report after report of mass starvation that even some of Israel’s former security officials like Moshe Bogie Ya’alon are calling this an ethnic cleansing, right.

None of this makes Antony Blinken feel like he has to give any justification for why he doesn’t think it is a genocide. He doesn’t feel the need to make the argument. He simply says, ex cathedra categorically no it’s not, and then moves on. This is what William Fulbright famously called during Vietnam the arrogance of power. The arrogance of power. The arrogance and, frankly, the intellectual idiocy of power. We need to create an environment in this country, in the media, and in whatever institutions that people like Antony Blinken are going to be spending their time in when they leave the Biden administration, that will not accept those answers, in which you simply can’t say, no, it’s not, and then walk away.

If Antony Blinken thinks he’s going to become a professor at American University, or go to some think tank, or give interviews, or write op-eds in the New York Times, or show up on TV, or do whatever he’s going to do, it is critical for us as a country, as a society, to have the kind of accountability that means that he cannot get away with that. He does not have the right to simply say, no, it’s not end of conversation, right. He must be forced actually answer these charges because they are ultimately charges in part against him, right.

And I think the New York Times didn’t do enough in this interview to force him. We have to go outside of our comfort zones in some ways in these elite institutions to be a little bit less polite and be willing to make a little bit more uncomfortable when it comes to these situations, right. Given the magnitude of the horror that is happening, it’s simply not good enough to allow Antony Blinken to say, no, it’s not a genocide, next question. Because if we do let him do those kinds of things, then we’re laying the conditions, laying the seeds for this kind of thing to happen again. And it simply can’t happen again. The elite institutions in America have to change to ensure that there is never again a president like Joe Biden and never again a secretary of state like Antony Blinken who do this. It can never be allowed to happen again.

Israeli religious thinker and activist Mikhael Manekin is one of the founders of smol emuni, the faithful left. We discuss Mikhael’s new book, so far available only in Hebrew, entitled, Sermons from the Abyss, which uses the five Megillot that Jews read during the year in synagogue to reflect on the horrors of the last several years. I don’t know of any…

Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. He has long written a weekly column for Haaretz. In our conversation, Gideon tells about his younger days, how he evolved away from racism, and how he now lives in a society he regularly accuses of grave crimes. I was struck by his openness and intimacy and expect you will be too.

The Outgoing National Security Advisor’s Orwellian Interview at the 92nd Street Y

Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 17, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.

Our guest will be Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program and a former senior attorney at Adalah, which defends the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. We’ll talk about the Trump administration’s coming crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and activism.

I’ve also recorded another Zoom video, without a live audience, with the longtime Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy. I have long wanted to ask Gideon what it’s like to be one of Israel’s most hated men. And how he lives in a society that he regularly accuses of committing grave crimes. I was struck by the openness and intimacy of his answers. He told me, among many other things, that every morning when he goes for a jog in the park, he sees the same woman jogging alongside him. And that every morning she greets him with the same phrase: “traitor.”

This video is for paid subscribers too.

My New Book

On January 28, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”

Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.

Sources Cited in this Video

Jake Sullivan’s interview at the 92nd St Y.

The new Lancet study on the number of dead in Gaza.

Oxfam’s comparison of deaths in Gaza to those in Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen chronicles the movement to establish Jewish settlements in southern Lebanon.

Former Representative Cori Bush explains why it was worth losing her seat to defend Palestinian rights.

Vivian Silver’s son denounces Israel’s president for exploiting his mother’s memory.

See you on Friday, January 17,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, we’re in this interesting moment where top Biden administration foreign policy officials are kind of going out into the country, trying to craft a public narrative about what they did in office as they prepare to leave office. There was Antony Blinken’s interview with the New York Times a week ago or so, which I commented on last week. And then, recently I just came across the video that was put out of a public conversation that Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, did at the 92nd Street Y with Ian Bremmer.

And these are really remarkable documents because they are really exercises in what George Orwell wrote about so famously, which is, the creation of a kind of dishonest and euphemistic language to try to defend things that if stated in kind of clear concrete ways, would clearly be too brutal for most people to accept. And so, I think they’re worth looking at at the level of language, which is what Orwell urged political writers to do to challenge the dishonesty of language as a way of getting at the brutality of government and the action of people in power who act brutally.

So, I want to quote something from what Sullivan says at the 92nd Street Y. He’s asked about Israel’s policies vis-a-vis the people of Gaza. And he says: ‘We believe Israel has a responsibility as a democracy. As a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law, that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.’

So, the formulation is really fascinating, right. He’s being asked about what Israel’s doing, but he starts by just stipulating a set of assumptions, right, which don’t need to be proved, right, because these are the assumptions that he begins with, right. And they’re never challenged by the interviewer. The first is that Israel is a democracy. Again, something one hears constantly, but if you think about it, it’s not a democracy for Palestinians, right?

About 70% of the Palestinians who live under the control of the Israeli government, those in the West Bank and in Gaza and in East Jerusalem. And nobody who knows anything about the reality of how Israel operates in Palestinian life could deny that the Israeli government has power—indeed life and death power—over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem. And yet, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza cannot become citizens of the state of Israel. They can’t vote for its government. The vast majority of Palestinians in East Jerusalem are not citizens either, right. And that’s about 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control. About 30% are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are sometimes called Arab Israelis, who have a kind of second-class citizenship, but do enjoy citizenship and the right to vote.

So, if 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control are not citizens and can’t vote, it’s not a democracy for Palestinians. It’s a democracy for Israeli Jews. In many ways, quite a robust one. But it is about as democratic, one might say, for Palestinians as the United States was under Jim Crow for Black Americans, right, when a minority of Black Americans—those in the North—had the right to vote. But the majority of Black Americans who lived in the South did not have the right to vote. These are not esoteric or complicated things, right? They’re very basic things, right?

But you just notice how they’re basically shoved completely aside in the assumption that Sullivan starts with—that Israel is a democracy—which is simply to say that there’s a basic benevolence that he’s kind of assuming here, right. Which makes his conversation about Israeli behavior completely different than he would if he were talking about Russia or some other some other adversary because he’s essentially putting it in the camp of democracies. But, in fact, when it comes to Palestinians, it really should not be considered to be in the camp of democracies. And that’s not challenged, right. That’s an assumption that doesn’t even need to be defended.

And then he continues. He called Israel ‘a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life.’ It’s such a strange statement. He’s being asked about what’s happening in Gaza, right. Oh, the evidence in Gaza is not hard to find. It’s plentiful, right. The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal just came out with a report just recently suggesting that by the end of June, the death toll in Gaza was over 64,000 people, with almost 60% of those being women, children, and people over the age of 65. And it’s worth noting, by the way, that even men under the age of 65, most of them are not Hamas fighters. So, we’re talking about a very large majority of these people killed who are not fighters, right.

And just by kind of comparison, according to Oxfam, Israel has been killing 250 people per day in Gaza. By comparison, Ukraine, where the United States has literally imposed sanctions and sent weapons to fight against what Russia is doing, that’s more than five times the number of people who’ve been dying since the escalation of the war in Ukraine in 2022. It’s also about five times as many people dying per day as in Sudan, which the United States has now declared a genocide, right.

But what Sullivan does is he simply stipulates that Israel is committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, even though there’s literally no humanitarian aid agency, no United Nations investigative group, no journalist who’s actually really investigated what’s happening with Gaza who would suggest that Israel is committed to the basic principle of innocent life when it comes to Gaza. But Sullivan doesn’t think that’s something that actually needs to be justified. He simply stipulates it as an assumption.

Again, I use this phrase, kind of ‘mental prison,’ when I was talking about Antony Blinken. Like this is a kind of discourse that exists in Washington and could also exist at a place like the 92nd Street Y, which simply bears no reality whatsoever to the lived experience of people in Gaza, as reported by basically every humanitarian and journalist organization that has actually delved deeply into what’s happening there, right. But this is what Sullivan says before he even starts to make the argument, right. This is his kind of stated assumptions. And then he goes on to say, ‘We believe too many civilians have died in Gaza over the course of this conflict. And at too many moments, we felt we’ve had to step up publicly and privately and push on the humanitarian front to get more trucks, more aid, more life-saving assistance,’ right.

So, you know, it’s fascinating. He starts by saying Israel is a democracy. Israel is committed to the principle of human life. And then, later on, he basically says: ‘We think too many people have died.’ You know, this famously, as so many people notice, this goes all of a sudden turns into the passive tense. So, all of a sudden, Israel as a subject, as an actor, disappears from the conversation, right. Too many people have died, right. Why have too many people died? Is it because perhaps because Israel is dropping all these bombs on them, perhaps because Israel is not allowing the aid to go in, right. But it’s as if somehow there was a kind of Israel’s committed to the protection of human life. But, unfortunately, there was a kind of natural disaster, which led too many people in Gaza to die. All of a sudden Israel as the subject basically disappears from the sentence. And he says, ‘we’ve had to step up publicly and privately and push on the humanitarian front,’ never saying even who the United States has had to push, right?

And also, again, the implication, what does it mean to say you’re pushing, right, when the United States is still protecting Israel in all these international forums and continuing to send virtually unconditioned military aid? Pushing, right, in any other context in American foreign policy means using America’s diplomatic leverage in terms of our military and other kind of assistance to get countries to do what we want. If you’re not doing any of those things, you’re not actually pushing. A better verb would be you’re asking, you’re pleading, you’re begging, you’re cajoling, right. You’re not actually pushing if you’re not willing to use the leverage that the United States uses routinely when it comes to other countries.

As I said last week, we have to change the public discourse in the United States, such that if people like Jake Sullivan or Tony Blinken are going to go out and tell these lies, right, in this kind of Orwellian discourse of dishonesty, that they receive pushback, right. Obviously, we need a public discourse in which there is a cost, right. The cost is not that, you know, these people should be endangered in any way, G-d forbid. It’s simply that they should have to feel the experience of being forced to answer really hard questions by people in public forums who will not accept this dishonest language.

And we don’t have a public culture in the United States nearly enough—we have some exceptions like the interviews that Mehdi Hassan does, for instance—but in general, we don’t have a public culture which holds people like Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken to account. There are too many institutions, whether it’s the 92nd Street Y or the Council on Foreign Relations, where they can go and know that basically they can peddle this—for lack of a better word—b******t, right, and basically never really have to be taken to task for it. And that I think, is part of what’s produced this tremendous alienation and cynicism that exists in so much of the American public about the fact that ordinary Americans face consequences for the things they do in their professional lives, and people at the very apex of the American government, like Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, don’t face those consequences.

Israeli-born British journalist Rachel Shabi is the author of the new book, Off-White: The Truth about Antisemitism. Last week, she published a column on the subject in The Guardian. She’s particularly knowledge about antisemitism, and its weaponization, in Britain, a subject of ferocious contention since Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader.

Mairav Zonszein is Senior Israel-Palestine Analyst for the International Crisis Group. She kindly agreed to talk with me about this breaking news.

Jamil Dakwar is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program and a former senior attorney at Adalah, which defends the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. We talk about the Trump administration’s coming crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and activism.

Romi, Emily, and Doron Are Home

Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 24, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.

Our guest will be Jamaal Bowman, who lost his seat in Congress last year after his support for Palestinian rights prompted a ferocious attack by AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations.

I’ve met many politicians. Very few risk their careers on questions of moral principle. I want to ask Jamaal why he did, and what it would take to convince other Democrats to do the same.

I’ve also recorded another Zoom video, without a live audience, with my friend, the brilliant Gaza-born political analyst Muhammad Shehada. He explained why this agreement shows that Israel never really had a strategy against Hamas. He argued that the ceasefire just might endure. And when he described conditions in Gaza, I put my head in my hands. As much as I try to understand the horror there, I’m reminded again and again that its worse than I even imagine. We will send out my conversation with Muhammad to paid subscribers on Wednesday.

Ask Me Anything

Our next “Ask Me Anything,” for premium subscribers, will be on Monday, January 27, at 1 PM Eastern. I’ll answer questions about the ceasefire, the Trump administration, and anything else on your mind. We’ll do another “Ask Me Anything,” in February, about my new book.

Book Tour

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28, in just over a week. I’ll be honored if readers buy it. But I hope you’ll also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author given that Palestinian writers still get much less exposure in the US media. (Here are some suggestions). And that you’ll also consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be doing many book-related events. We’ll be adding them as they go online. Here’s what we have so far:

On Wednesday, January 29, I’ll be speaking with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The event is being sponsored by Jewish Currents and the registration link is here. Paid subscribers can view a code at the very bottom of this page (after video transcript) to receive a free ticket or a discounted price on the ticket plus the book.

On Tuesday, February 18, I’ll be speaking with UCLA historian David Myers at the Lumiere Music Hall in Los Angeles.

On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.

On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.

On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.

Sources Cited in this Week’s Video

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book, The Prophets.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Ussama Makdisi revisits Edward Said to understand Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

Dave Chappelle talks about Gaza.

Tamer Nafar asks where God was during Gaza’s destruction.

A new poll suggests that anger over Gaza may have dissuaded people from voting in 2024.

The farewell tour continues. Antony Blinken speaks to David Remnick and Jake Sullivan speaks to Ezra Klein.

See you on Friday, January 24 and Monday, January 27,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there’s a lot to say about the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, whether it will continue, whether Israel has achieved the goals of this catastrophic war, all of these things. But I don’t think that’s the conversation for today. At least it’s not where my heart is. I’m just thinking about the three Israeli hostages that have been released: Romi and Emily and Doron.

And I want to suggest that I think that for this particular day, for those of us who are Jews, that that’s okay. It’s okay to have one day where we put aside our very, very harsh criticisms of the Israeli government, and of the horrifying things that it does. And even, we put aside for a moment our anger and fury about the destruction of Gaza. And we just participate in the relief and solidarity and joy of the Jewish people as we see three people being relieved from captivity, knowing that the release of hostages is among the most sacred principle in Judaism, and is meant to unite Jews across whatever divides we face.

I think that if the danger of the mainstream public discourse about Israel is that it loses sight of the humanity of Palestinians, which happens again and again and again, there is another danger that can exist on the Left that people on the Left lose sight of the humanity of Israelis. And this is a moment to make sure that that does not happen.

It’s also, I think, important to remember that if in the mainstream kind of establishment Jewish discourse, that a sense of love and solidarity for the Jewish people can often blind Jewish leaders and Jewish organizations to the necessity of judgment, the necessity of moral judgment for the things that Israel does, there is the danger that Jewish critics on the Left can have the reverse problem. Which is to say that the constant focus on judgment, on moral judgment—as crucial as it is, it’s never been more crucial than in these horrifying last 15 months—that that can blind us to the necessity of solidarity and love. And that it’s important to remember that we can have these different feelings, but we don’t have to have them in the same proportions every day.

It famously says in Ecclesiastes that ‘a season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven.’ So, this can be a time, a day, to just delight in the release of these three young women. And there can be another day, another season. There will have to be tragically again and again and again to return to our anguish and our fury about what Israel has done in Gaza.

As I was thinking about this, I was thinking a little bit about re-reading a little part of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous legendary book about the prophets. Of course, neither I nor I think anyone who’s listening to this is a prophet. But there are lessons to be taken from the lives of the prophets. And the point that Heschel makes is that the prophets were trying to imitate what he called ‘God’s divine pathos,’ which is to say the emotions that God felt towards humanity, but also, according to Torah and the Hebrew Bible, God’s feelings, special feelings towards the Jewish people, towards the people of Israel. And so, the prophets then are trying to emulate in a way this combination of God’s anger, righteous anger, which very, very present, but also God’s love.

And I think one of the points that Heschel makes is that the prophets were furious, furious, brutal critics of the Jewish people. Ferocious, ferocious critics. And yet, they tried not to forget that although anger was one attribute of God’s relationship with humanity, and indeed particularly God’s relationship with the Jewish people, it was not the paramount emotion. The paramount emotion was love, and that therefore the profits should also try to have—even amidst their moral fury at the corruption, the barbarism, the degradation that they were seeing around them—they should always try to remember that the supreme element of God’s pathos is actually, the more enduring one, is love.

And Heschel writes, ‘as a mode of pathos, it may be accurate to characterize the anger of the Lord as suspended love, as mercy withheld, as mercy in concealment. Anger prompted by love is an interlude. It is as if compassion were waiting to resume.’ So, the point he’s making is that even when God is most angry, that it is always temporary, and there was always the love underneath it. And this is what the prophets were striving to emulate. And this is what we, perhaps as critics of Israel, even though we’re far from prophets, should also try to emulate: the notion that underneath the fury and anger and profound disappointment must always be this love that can return whenever there is a moment of opportunity for it to return.

Heschel goes on: ‘the pathos of anger is further a transient state. What is often proclaimed about love’—and then he quotes from the book of Jeremiah—‘for the Lord is good for his steadfast love endures forever is not said about anger. The normal and original pathos is love or mercy, not anger.’ And I think that, just as it was a model for the prophets, should be a model for all of us. That despite what has happened over the last 15 months, that I think is increasingly being recognized as a genocide, really just about the worst thing that we could imagine a state ever doing. And even though that calls us to resist, to oppose, to fight against this profound, profound form of injustice again and again and again, that the love and solidarity that we have—not just for all human beings, but that we are allowed to have as Jews for our own people, for the Jewish people, imagined throughout Jewish text as an extended family—that that should never be lost.

And whenever there is a moment for it to return, for it to come back to the surface, even if it’s only temporary, for us to join with other Jews in sense of solidarity and grief and, indeed, in joy when there is a moment of suspension of the fighting, and a moment of seeing Jews come back from the hell of captivity in Gaza, to see them come back alive. It seems to me that’s what we’re called to do in this moment: just to put aside for a moment the anger, the condemnation, the fury, the pain, and to share in that love.

Surely, if the prophets could do that—given their acute sense of human injustice in the world that those of us who are so much lesser than them—that we can try to do that as well. And we can take just this moment to delight, along with other Jews, in the fact that Romi and Doron and Emily, and hopefully many, many, many more other hostages, will come back safe to be with their family—indeed to be with our family, the family of the Jewish people.

For Beinart Notebook paid subscribers, register here, and you can use the code “NOTEBOOK2025” to receive a free ticket or a discounted price on the ticket plus the book.

I spoke with my friend, the brilliant, Gaza-born, political analyst Muhammad Shehada, about the ceasefire agreement, the horrific conditions in Gaza, and what might come next.

Gaza is What Happens When You Treat a State Like a god

This Tuesday, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.

You’ll find a list of book-related events, interviews and reviews below.

Jamaal Bowman lost his seat in Congress last year after his support for Palestinian rights prompted a ferocious attack by AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations. Very few politicians risk their careers on questions of moral principle. I ask Jamaal why he did, and what it would take to convince other Democrats to do the same.

Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi discusses my new book and the state of the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

The Bible Doesn’t Grant Jews Unconditional Sovereignty Over the West Bank

What Greenland and Gaza Have in Common

The New American Imperialism

Daniel Immerwahr is a professor of history at Northwestern University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of How to Hide an Empire. We spoke about Trump’s shocking announcement on Gaza and what it might mean.

Deborah Dash Moore is a Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She’s been studying a number of surveys of American Jewish opinion which suggest that the American Jewish establishment’s claims that an overwhelming percentage of American Jews support the concept of a Jewish state—even if it denies Palestinians’ basic rights—is wrong.

The Israeli and American Jewish establishments embrace mass ethnic cleansing.

Palestinian legal scholar Raef Zreik is a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Sometimes the most penetrating analysts of a society are those who see it from below because they are members of an oppressed caste. I’ve often found that Raef, as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has striking insights about Israeli Jewish society. So, in this horrifying moment, in which so many Israeli politicians and pundits have embraced mass ethnic cleansing, I wanted to hear his views.

My new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, is (still) on The New York Times Bestseller List.

You’ll find a list of book-related events, interviews and reviews below.

I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, the latest work by the essayist Raja Shehada, What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?

I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.

Friday Zoom Call

This Friday’s zoom call, for all paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guest will the Guardian columnist and novelist Jonathan Freedland. I’ve been looking for opportunities to discuss my book publicly with Jews who disagree with my criticisms of Israel, and it’s been hard. Almost everyone I’ve asked has said no. I’m grateful that Jonathan is an exception. He’s critical of Israel himself but still disagrees with aspects of my book. I’m looking forward to hearing those criticisms this Friday.

Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.

Book Tour

(We’ll update this every week.)

On Monday, February 17, I’ll be speaking at San Diego State University.

On Tuesday, February 18, I’ll be speaking with UCLA historian David Myers at the Lumiere Music Hall in Los Angeles. (The venue was changed after the Skirball Cultural Center cancelled the event).

On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.

On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.

On Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be speaking at T’chiyah synagogue in metro Detroit.

On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.

On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.

On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.

On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Book Interviews

Last week, I spoke about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza with The New Yorker, The Forward and Rumble. And in a public conversation sponsored by Jewish Currents with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The book was reviewed in The Financial Times, Jacobin, the Sydney Morning Herald and Good Faith Media.

Sources Cited in this Week’s Video

Dan Senor’s podcast conversation with Israeli journalists Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal.

Amos Harel in Haaretz on Israel’s new war plan.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says “Preparations have begun with the Americans for implementing voluntary migration. I estimate that migration will begin within weeks.״

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I reviewed the antisemitism reports recently issued by task forces at Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and the University of Washington.

David Brooks on Trump and Musk’s reign of terror and incompetence inside America’s government.

In The New Yorker, Mosab Abu Toha outlines a plan for Gaza’s reconstruction.

In the London Review of Books, Alex de Waal discusses Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war.

See you on Friday, February 21,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

When things are already really horrible, it’s often hard for people to imagine that they could get even worse. Perhaps it’s especially hard for people to imagine that if those people, like many White Americans, have kind of grown up in relatively comfortable and secure environments. But I think we need to face the very real possibility that, in the weeks to come, Israel will renew its military assault on Gaza, that the ceasefire will end, and not just that Israel will renew its military assault, but that that military assault would be more ferocious, more savage than anything we have seen so far. And I want to suggest why I think there’s a real possibility of that terrible prospect.

One of the podcasts that I listen to is a podcast by a guy named Dan Senor called Call Me Back. Now, Dan and I kind of morally operate in really, I would say, fundamentally different kind of universes. I mean, we see Israel-Palestine in just fundamentally different ways. But I get a lot from listening to his podcast because Dan is very, very plugged in in Israeli political and national security circles. And he has guests on who are very, very plugged in.

And I think it’s really important for anybody, regardless of your political views, to not just listen to people who agree with you, but to listen to people who disagree with you because they often are part of a discourse that you might be inclined to overlook or not take seriously, but that actually is really, really important. And especially, given that this is a discourse that Dan is engaged in, which is operating off in a kind of near the highest echelons of the Israeli government and, especially under Trump, also the US government.

And so, in a recent episode, Dan was having a conversation with two very, very plugged in Israeli journalists, Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal. And one of the points they make is that they think it’s very unlikely that Benjamin Netanyahu would go to a second round of the ceasefire deal because his government is now down to 63 seats and an Israeli government needs 61 to stay in power. And Bezalel Smotrich, who was still in the government, the far-right finance minister, said he will leave the government if Israel doesn’t resume the war. He will leave the government if Israel goes to the second phase of the ceasefire. And that Netanyahu’s government could fall, in particular, because they have to pass a budget by early March, which would be very, very difficult to pass if there’s a rebellion inside their coalition. And beyond that, Netanyahu, if he went to an election this spring, would have to go into election having failed to deliver on his core promise of the war, which was to destroy Hamas. So, Segal and Eyal’s kind of view is that Netanyahu will look for an opportunity to not go to a second round of a ceasefire deal.

The second point that Nadav Eyal makes, which I think is really, really significant to understand, is the political impact of Donald Trump’s proposal for mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, the political impact in Israel. That Eyal makes the point, which I think is a very reasonable point, that the only entity that actually could force Palestinians out of Gaza is Israel. The United States is not going to do it on its own. The United States is not going to send its own troops into Gaza to put Palestinians on buses and force them out. If Trump’s plan is going to go into effect, it will have to be that Israel does that work.

And in a sense, what I think Nadav Eyal suggests on Senor’s podcast is that what Trump has done by saying that he wants the outcome of this war not to be the Palestinian Authority coming in, not to be a negotiated solution, but indeed to be the mass expulsion of Palestinians is essentially given a green light to Israel to wage a war in Gaza, which would be even more than the last war, a war aimed at mass expulsion. And this seems to fit what some people in the Israeli government are now saying.

So, Amos Harel, the longtime Haaretz writer, reported a couple of days ago that Israel’s defense minister, Yisrael Katz, had said that Israel would launch a new war in Gaza ‘exactly as the president promised.’ What does it mean to launch a new war exactly as the president promised? So, Harel quotes an Israeli Brigadier General Eival Gilady, who was head of the IDF Strategic Division, that he believes that Netanyahu has gotten a green light from Trump ‘for a very aggressive plan in Gaza. A focused Israeli offensive will cause large-scale death and destruction, along with curtailing humanitarian aid and will lead to Palestinians leaving the Strip.’ He goes on to talk about a plan that would lay siege to parts of the Strip, prevent the supply of humanitarian aid, and lead to ‘considerable destruction, if not total devastation of the areas in which the IDF will operate. Such tactics reek of ethnic cleansing.’

It is hard for a lot of people to imagine that Israel could fight a war in a more destructive fashion than it did for the first 15 months of this war. But remember it was then dealing with Joe Biden. Not that Joe Biden imposed costs on Israel. But that at least his administration was saying behind closed doors, we want you to try to be a little bit more restrained in your actions. The Trump administration, in a certain sense, has now said exactly the opposite. Not that we want you to be more restrained, but that we want you to create conditions for mass expulsion, which Trump has now said he believes in the interests of the United States, right.

And so, that seems to me a green light for Israel to resume the war in a way that is explicitly aimed at trying to create so much destruction in Gaza and permit so little humanitarian aid in as to try to force the population out. Of course, there’s still the question of whether you can force Egypt to go along with that, right. But that’s the other part of this element, given that Netanyahu has a political interest, it seems, in returning to military operations because otherwise his government would likely fall. And given that the Israeli assessment, understandably in a way, is that the only way you could implement Trump’s plan is if Israel created the expulsionary force from inside Gaza, and then you were able to get Egypt or Jordan or various other countries to agree to take some of these people. That I think, in a sense, what Trump’s musings may have really done is offered Israel a green light for an even more destructive, even more genocidal war than what we have seen before.

I hope I’m wrong. But listening to the Israeli journalists who follow and are very close to the Israeli political and national security establishment, that seems to be the way that Trump’s statements are being interpreted in Israel. And so, my fear is that we could be headed for something, God forbid, which is even worse than what we’ve seen before, unless there are forces around the world, and in the United States, that can somehow protest and try to stand in the way and block this. Because, on their own, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, I think, will have no compunction about not just doing what Israel has already done in Gaza, but doing something even worse.

On Sunday, February 9th, Israeli police raided both branches of the East Jerusalem Educational Bookstore and arrested its owners, Mahmoud and Ahmed Muna. They were released on bail after two days in jail, but are banned from entering their stores for the next two weeks. During this difficult time, Mahmoud graciously agreed to talk with me about his experience.

Palestinian legal scholar Raef Zreik is a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Sometimes the most penetrating analysts of a society are those who see it from below because they are members of an oppressed caste. I’ve often found that Raef, as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has striking insights about Israeli Jewish society. So, in this horrifying moment, in which so many Israeli politicians and pundits have embraced mass ethnic cleansing, I wanted to hear his views.

I’ll be on book tour for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza for the next few months. You’ll find a list of book-related events and reviews below.

I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture, edited by Mahmoud Muha and Matthew Teller with Juliette Touma and Jayyab Abusafia.

I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.

Here is a message about Hossam’s condition from his sister, Abir:

“Hossam reached out to the passport office to inquire about the resumption of services. In a glimmer of hope, he learned that officials are anticipating the start of the second phase of the armistice agreement, which could lead to the reopening of travel offices and border crossings as early as the beginning of March. This news brings a sense of relief to many who have been waiting for this opportunity.

However, Hossam is also facing another daunting task. He is diligently working to recover the medical reports that were tragically lost during the raid on the displacement camp, which was completely devastated. These documents are crucial for their medical journey to Egypt.

Through all of this, Hossam and his family are holding on to the hope that your kindness has instilled in them. Your support means the world to them and plays an essential role in their journey toward healing.”

Friday Zoom Call

This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guests will be two important progressive American rabbis who disagree on some fundamental questions regarding Palestine and Israel. Rabbi Alissa Wise, Lead Organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, former Co-Deputy Director at Jewish Voice for Peace and co-author of Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing, is anti-Zionist. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, supports partitioning Israel-Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. Despite these differences, they both signed a recent letter in The New York Times titled “Jewish People Say No to Ethnic Cleansing.” We’ll talk about the ideological differences that separate “anti-Zionist” and “progressive Zionist” Jews—I’m using quotation marks because even the terms are contested— and whether, despite them, there are opportunities for cooperation in the age of Netanyahu and Trump.

Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.

Book Tour

(We’ll update this every week.)

On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.

On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.

On Monday, March 10 and Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be giving four talks in Michigan. On March 10 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at St David’s Episcopal Church, and on March 11 at St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church and at T’chiyah synagogue.

On Monday, March 17, I’ll be speaking at Mishkan Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia.

On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.

On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.

On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.

On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Book Interviews

Last week, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza was reviewed critically from the right in Quillette and from the left in Middle East Eye and Religion Dispatches.

Here’s a video of my discussion last week at San Diego State University with Professors Jonathan Graubart and Manal Swarjo and in Los Angeles with Professor David Myers.

NPR chose Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza as its book of the day.

Sources Cited in this Week’s Video

Muhammad Shehada on Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family.

Khalil Sayegh on Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family and other Israeli hostages.

Khalil Sayegh on his late father.

“Don’t call for revenge-call for peace,” retweeted by We Are All Hostages.

Commentary editor John Podhoretz on the people of Gaza (27 minutes in).

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Parshat Mishpatim.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Nora Caplan-Bricker reviews Rachel Kushner’s No Exit.

Matt Duss and Jeffrey Sachs debate Ukraine.

For the Foundation of Middle East Peace, I interviewed Palestine Legal’s Dima Khalidi about repression in the Trump era.

Check out Liz Shulman’s new book, Good Jewish Girl: A Jerusalem Love Story Gone Bad.

Reader Responses

In response to my interview with Educational Bookshop co-owner Mahmoud Muna, subscriber Therese Mughannam wrote:

“I was born in the hospital in the Russian Compound in 1947, (now a prison Mahmoud was taken to) months before the partition of Palestine. I’ve tried to visit the compound during past trips, but the courtyard was as far as I once was allowed ‘for security reasons’ and only for ‘5 minutes and no pictures!’ Unfortunately, my American passport revealed to them that I was born in Jerusalem. But once in there, sitting on a cold stone bench, time stood still for me and I prayed for them all, Israeli soldiers, Palestinian prisoners, the whole lot of them. Sigh. ‘How long O, Lord…’”

See you on Friday, February 28,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, as I’ve been on my book tour now, people sometimes ask me, you know, is it hard to be a Jew, particularly maybe an observant Jew who’s critical of Israel? And I always feel embarrassed a bit by the question because the truth is my life is so privileged and safe compared to Palestinians in Gaza, or Palestinians in the West Bank and other places, and even compared to Israeli Jews who are dying, or suffering, or whose family members are at risk or injured. And so, my problems are just minuscule. It is true that I have lost some friends, as I document in the book, but I still have a beautiful place to daven, to pray, with people who are willing to study Jewish texts with me despite our political differences.

And if I’ve lost some members, people in the Jewish community who are not interested in being my friends anymore, I also feel like I’ve gained a kind of a moral community that I could not have imagined, which includes many, many Palestinians and people from all different backgrounds. And what I mean by a moral community is people who simply believe in the preciousness of all life—all Palestinian life, all Israeli Jewish life—and refuse to be drawn into a politics of inhumanity, a politics of cruelty regardless of what happens and regardless of what is done to their side. And those people are my heroes. And I feel like that’s what I think of as my moral community.

I want to give a couple of examples of that. In the last few days, in the wake of the terrible news about the Bibas family there, the terrible way in which they were returned kind of paraded around, and the news that the person who was initially said to be their mother, Shiri Bibas, was not her. And the first person I want to quote is my friend Muhammad Shehada, who wrote after that, ‘our principles,’ he’s talking about the Palestinian freedom struggle. He says, ‘our principles should never be contingent on the behavior of our oppressor.’ This is from Muhammad, someone who, as I document in my book, lost his best friend in a terrible, terrible way during this war, who has lost so many relatives, whose family has suffered so much in Gaza. And yet, he condemns what Hamas has done. He’s done it consistently. He did it again in terms of their treatment of the Bibas family and the dead Bibas children because he says that the Palestinian struggle must hold itself to a higher moral standard.

The second is my friend Khalil Sayegh, also from Gaza. Khalil wrote about the way the Bibas family’s dead children and family were paraded. He wrote, ‘I opened my Facebook account where my friends who live in Gaza are and found many condemning Hamas’s parade of kids’ coffins. Most of these friends have endured the horror of the genocide and lost family members. I turned to X and find warriors from the West doing whataboutism.’ So, Khalil is himself from Gaza and he has it within him, despite everything, to condemn Hamas even though some leftists in the West who haven’t suffered in that personal way at all are making excuses for what Hamas has done.

And just to understand the significance of what Khalil is able to say here. It’s not only others in Gaza who have lost their closest family members, but himself as well. His father, Jeries Sayegh, died because of medical neglect and lack of access to medicine and hospital when the Holy Family Catholic Church, where he was taking refuge, was besieged. And I want to quote what Khalil wrote after his father’s death, about his father, Jeries Sayegh. He wrote, ‘my father always taught me to love everyone, forgive, and never give desire for revenge space in my life. He always looked up to Christ as his model and told me I should too. As hard and painful as it is, I promise you, Dad, to stay true to those principles.’ That’s what I mean by sharing a moral community. And this was also, by the way, a sentiment reflected by the group We Are All Hostages, the hostage group in its Twitter account, which tweeted out in response after this a quote from a tweet from a Palestinian who wrote named Ehad Hassan, who wrote, ‘Don’t call for revenge-call for peace.’

And it’s really striking to me that this came on the same week as Parshat Mishpatim. You know, Khalil is a devout Christian. I try, as best as I can, to be an observant Jew. And in this week’s Parshat, in this week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim, there is this line, which says, ‘if you see an enemy’s donkey sagging under its burden, you shall not pass by. You shall surely release it with him.’ And Jonathan Sachs notes that the Aramaic translation, which is called the Targum, has a very interesting different translation of this phrase. On the phrase, ‘you shall surely release it,’ it interprets this phrase as not, you shall surely release ‘it’ referring to the donkey, that you shall release the donkey from the burden it’s facing, but you shall let go of your own burden. You shall release the hatred in you. That by acting to do something, an act of humanity towards your enemy, you are releasing the hatred inside of you. That’s what it means by you shall surely release ‘it.’

Maimonides goes on to write as a general principle, ‘you shall blot any offenses against you out of your mind and not bear a grudge. For as long as one nurses a grievance and keeps it in mind, one may come to take vengeance. The Torah therefore emphatically warns us not to bear a grudge, so that the impression of the wrong should be completely obliterated and no longer remembered. This is the right principle. It alone makes civilized life and social interaction possible.’ This is such a precious and important and fragile message now with the possibility that Israel seems poised to not go further to a second round of a hostage deal, despite the fact that that’s what the hostage organizations want, but to launch a more aggressive war, a war that is more explicitly aimed at the mass expulsion of Palestinians in Gaza. And it has filled me with horror to see the way in which people with great prestige and credibility in Israel and the United States—people who are not associated with the far marginal right, but people in the center of our community, people who can walk into Jewish institutions and be respected and dignified—have in recent weeks jumped on board this idea of mass expulsion.

And I want to just quote one. I usually don’t quote people by name, but I just want to quote this. And you can think about this in contrast to Khalil Sayegh and Muhammad Shehada. This is from John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary Magazine, one of the most venerable Jewish magazines for many, many decades, the editor. And he’s talking about the way the Israeli public is now responding with fury to what they’ve seen of the Bibas family being paraded, but he’s also endorsing this view. This is what he says. This is what he says. This is from the Commentary podcast, and I’ll link to it. ‘The hell with Gaza. To hell with everybody who lives in Gaza. The hell with it. We don’t care. Stop talking to me about humanitarian aid. Stop talking to me about the suffering Gazan people.’

The message of Mishpatim is a profound rejection of this kind of inhumanity. Khalil Sayegh’s life, Muhammad Shehada’s life, even though they have endured, and their families have endured, a thousand, a million times more than what John Podhoretz has living on the Upper West Side of New York. They can bring themselves to reject cruelty, to recognize that all human beings, all Israeli Jews, all Palestinians, the Bibas family, Khalil Sayegh’s father, they’re all created in the image of God. Their lives are infinitely precious. It’s people who believe that who are my moral community. That’s the moral community that I take faith in that will bring us to a better place.

I spoke with my friend, political analyst, and president of The Agora Initiative, Khalil Sayegh, about why he condemned Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family and other Israeli civilians, and why that angers some on the global left.

Our guests are two important progressive American rabbis who disagree on some fundamental questions regarding Palestine and Israel. Rabbi Alissa Wise, Lead Organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, former Co-Deputy Director at Jewish Voice for Peace and co-author of Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing, is anti-Zionist. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, supports partitioning Israel-Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. Despite these differences, they both signed a recent letter in The New York Times titled “Jewish People Say No to Ethnic Cleansing.” We talk about the ideological differences that separate “anti-Zionist” and “progressive Zionist” Jews, and whether, despite them, there are opportunities for cooperation in the age of Netanyahu and Trump.

I’ll be on book tour for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza for the next few months. You’ll find a list of book-related events below.

I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, Rashid Khalid’s classic exploration of the roots of Palestinian nationalism, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness.

I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.

Here is a new message about Hossam’s condition from his sister, Abir:

“Hossam has been diligently reaching out to various offices, holding on to hope for the progress of his passport application. Recently, he visited the hospital where he and his son, Moayad, spent a challenging four months undergoing treatment. The hospital staff informed him that the archives and reception department would be reopening next week, which filled him with optimism. Hossam has scheduled an appointment to discuss Moayad's case and to collect the essential reports needed for his treatment in Egypt.

Additionally, Hossam has requested the latest reports on his son Momen and his daughter Malak's hearing aids, as he wishes to consult with specialists in Egypt. During this challenging journey, please continue to support Hossam and his family as they seek a brighter, more peaceful future filled with dignity and relief from their struggles. Your compassion truly makes a difference in their lives.”

Friday Zoom Call

This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guest will be Jordan Elgrably, Editor in Chief of The Markaz Review and co-editor with Malu Halasa of the new anthology, Sumud: A New Palestinian Reader. We’ll talk about themes in contemporary Palestinian writing and how that writing can help us better understand the horrors in Gaza and across Palestine and Israel.

Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.

Book Tour

(We’ll update this every week.)

On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.

On Monday, March 10 and Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be giving four talks in Michigan. On March 10 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at St David’s Episcopal Church, and on March 11 at St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church and at T’chiyah synagogue.

On Monday, March 17, I’ll be speaking at Mishkan Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia.

On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.

On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.

On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.

On Monday, April 7, I’ll be speaking at the Harvard Divinity School.

On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane details a progressive nonprofit’s refusal to grapple with the assault on Gaza.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Harvard Medical School Professors Eman Ansari and Aaron Shakow about censorship on campus.

In Haaretz, Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard suggests that “Israel Is losing the justification for its existence,” a statement that could be considered an example of antisemitism under the IHRA definition recently adopted by Harvard University.

Juan Cole on the way Trump’s treatment of Zelensky resembles US treatment of the Palestinians.

Joy Reid speaks after the cancellation of her show on MSNBC.

Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham’s comments upon winning an Oscar.

See you on Friday, March 7,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s kind of public humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Oval Office was the kind of most extreme version of the way Donald Trump treats a lot of foreign leaders, a lot of foreign countries. Which is, he basically says were being ripped off by you and we’re going to extort you, right? Basically, if you want America’s continued help or if you frankly just don’t want us to destroy your economy through tariffs, or you don’t want us to take over your land in the case of Greenland or Panama, basically you just have to start giving us stuff. In the case of Ukraine, your mineral resources. Or with, you know, in the case of Colombia, you have to take our migrants. Or with Canada and Mexico, it seems to change, but basically the claim is we’re getting ripped off and then that’s the pretext for basically these frankly kind of thuggish imperialist kind of claims that basically you’re just going to have to start paying us if you don’t want us to really kind of wreck you.

And so, the question that I think is interesting to ask is why doesn’t Trump treat Israel that way? Right? I mean, you could imagine a world where Trump makes a version of these same arguments vis-a-vis Israel, right. Where he says, you know, why are we giving you all these weapons? Why are we protecting you from Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas? What are we getting in return? We’re being played for suckers. You should pay us twice as much money or you should give us some of your natural resources or you should basically just hand over some of your high-tech companies to us or something. I mean, it wouldn’t be really entirely logical, but it never is logical with Trump.

But you could see how this impulse, right, could be applied to Israel just as easily as it could be applied to Ukraine, you know, again, because America gives Israel a lot of a lot of military assistance. Now, it’s true that military assistance is mostly in the form of a credit card that America gives Israel to buy American weaponry. Trump probably doesn’t even know that, right. And I’m sure he could still spin some way in which America is being ripped off. And yet, he doesn’t, right? I mean, the contrast between his meeting with Zelensky on the one hand, and his meeting with Netanyahu at the Oval Office couldn’t be more extreme, right. He didn’t humiliate Netanyahu. To the contrary, Netanyahu was beaming as Trump basically gave him a series of policies that Netanyahu was thrilled about, most of all, America’s support now for mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in Gaza.

So, why the difference? I mean, one answer would be that simply the domestic politics are very different, right. That even a country like Ukraine, which had a lot of support in Washington, doesn’t have a kind of permanent infrastructure of lobbying organizations like that Israel has, like, you know, pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC, for instance, and the Christians United for Israel, this kind of evangelical group. So, that sustains a level of domestic political support. And now, especially in the Republican Party, right, that has an impact on Trump’s behavior, that the blowback to Trump would be greater if he did this to Netanyahu than if he did this to Zelensky or any other government, right.

But I think that in a way only begs the further question itself, right. Well, then why do we have this infrastructure, right? Why is Israel unusual in that way? And partly, it has to do with the role of the American Jewish community as an unusually politically articulate community that really, since the 1970s, has kind of reoriented its institutional life around kind of unconditional defense of Israel. But that’s not the entire story, right, because Christians United for Israel, an evangelical organization is not a Jewish organization. And even though the American Jewish organizations wield influence, especially when it comes to the Republican Party, they’re really pushing against an open door, right. I mean, which is to say that there’s a lot of a lot of Republicans who are predisposed to support Israel, whether there was an AIPAC or not.

And I think this gets at part of the answer, which is the deeper answer, which is that Israel really doesn’t function in American politics really quite like a foreign policy issue. It really functions as a culture war issue. That Israel has kind of integrated into the culture war. You can see this in the way in which antisemitism and the fight against antisemitism—or I maybe should say ‘antisemitism,’ I think a lot of it’s not antisemitism—but the way in which the right organizes to fight what it calls antisemitism as part of its attack on DEI. And it’s part of its attack on wokeism, as if the left’s antisemitism from the perspective of pro-Israel folks is kind of connected in with the left’s, you know, calling America a racist country or wanting to put in gender pronouns. It’s all kind of part of the same basket. I don’t think there’s another country which functions that way, right, in which to be anti-Israel is to be on the opposite side of the culture war struggle that Donald Trump is on.

And I think that really has to do with the fact that Israel is seen in large chunks of America, and certainly in large chunks of the Republican Party, as not exactly a foreign country, but more like an image of what they would like America to be: a country that is openly ethno-nationalist in that it has clear legal hierarchies between different groups—in this case, ethno-religious groups, Jews and Palestinians. It has an immigration policy that essentially only allows a path to citizenship for people who are of the dominant group. That it’s very militaristic. It’s very nationalistic. It’s very sovereignty oriented. It’s openly dismissive of international law. It’s quite religious. These are all things that I think offer a kind of vision of what for Donald Trump and many Republicans were like America to be.

And so, in some ways, Israel functions as a kind of not exactly a mirror, but almost like an aspiration for America. The only other country that I could think off the top of my head functions at all that way is Hungary, which I think has also become really because it’s been so frankly anti-Muslim and also anti-LGBT and whatever serves also as a kind of a model. And that’s why I think that it would be very unlikely that Donald Trump would treat Viktor Orban that way. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe Narendra Modi or I suppose Jair Bolsonaro when they were in power in Brazil also. Because I think these are countries where Donald Trump is not likely to think about the relationship so much in transactional terms because he thinks of these countries as kind of countries that embody what he would like America to be.

And I think Israel above all, because it’s the country in which ethno-nationalism is the most firmly entrenched, and it’s also because it’s also so technologically and economically dynamic, and militarily strong, that it really represents a kind of almost a fantasy of what America could be. And I think that’s why you have this dramatic dissonance between how Trump treats Zelensky and many, many other sometimes longtime US allies and the way he treats Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.

The NYU Professor wrote a negative review of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. She joined me to discuss her criticisms.