Avsnitt
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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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
Saknas det avsnitt?
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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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
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.
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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?’
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