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I spoke with my friend, the brilliant, Gaza-born, political analyst Muhammad Shehada, about the ceasefire agreement, the horrific conditions in Gaza, and what might come next.
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Romi, Emily, and Doron Are Home
Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 24, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.
Our guest will be Jamaal Bowman, who lost his seat in Congress last year after his support for Palestinian rights prompted a ferocious attack by AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations.
I’ve met many politicians. Very few risk their careers on questions of moral principle. I want to ask Jamaal why he did, and what it would take to convince other Democrats to do the same.
I’ve also recorded another Zoom video, without a live audience, with my friend, the brilliant Gaza-born political analyst Muhammad Shehada. He explained why this agreement shows that Israel never really had a strategy against Hamas. He argued that the ceasefire just might endure. And when he described conditions in Gaza, I put my head in my hands. As much as I try to understand the horror there, I’m reminded again and again that its worse than I even imagine. We will send out my conversation with Muhammad to paid subscribers on Wednesday.
Ask Me Anything
Our next “Ask Me Anything,” for premium subscribers, will be on Monday, January 27, at 1 PM Eastern. I’ll answer questions about the ceasefire, the Trump administration, and anything else on your mind. We’ll do another “Ask Me Anything,” in February, about my new book.
Book Tour
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28, in just over a week. I’ll be honored if readers buy it. But I hope you’ll also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author given that Palestinian writers still get much less exposure in the US media. (Here are some suggestions). And that you’ll also consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be doing many book-related events. We’ll be adding them as they go online. Here’s what we have so far:
On Wednesday, January 29, I’ll be speaking with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The event is being sponsored by Jewish Currents and the registration link is here. Paid subscribers can view a code at the very bottom of this page (after video transcript) to receive a free ticket or a discounted price on the ticket plus the book.
On Tuesday, February 18, I’ll be speaking with UCLA historian David Myers at the Lumiere Music Hall in Los Angeles.
On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.
On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.
On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.
Sources Cited in this Week’s Video
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book, The Prophets.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Ussama Makdisi revisits Edward Said to understand Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
Dave Chappelle talks about Gaza.
Tamer Nafar asks where God was during Gaza’s destruction.
A new poll suggests that anger over Gaza may have dissuaded people from voting in 2024.
The farewell tour continues. Antony Blinken speaks to David Remnick and Jake Sullivan speaks to Ezra Klein.
See you on Friday, January 24 and Monday, January 27,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, there’s a lot to say about the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, whether it will continue, whether Israel has achieved the goals of this catastrophic war, all of these things. But I don’t think that’s the conversation for today. At least it’s not where my heart is. I’m just thinking about the three Israeli hostages that have been released: Romi and Emily and Doron.
And I want to suggest that I think that for this particular day, for those of us who are Jews, that that’s okay. It’s okay to have one day where we put aside our very, very harsh criticisms of the Israeli government, and of the horrifying things that it does. And even, we put aside for a moment our anger and fury about the destruction of Gaza. And we just participate in the relief and solidarity and joy of the Jewish people as we see three people being relieved from captivity, knowing that the release of hostages is among the most sacred principle in Judaism, and is meant to unite Jews across whatever divides we face.
I think that if the danger of the mainstream public discourse about Israel is that it loses sight of the humanity of Palestinians, which happens again and again and again, there is another danger that can exist on the Left that people on the Left lose sight of the humanity of Israelis. And this is a moment to make sure that that does not happen.
It’s also, I think, important to remember that if in the mainstream kind of establishment Jewish discourse, that a sense of love and solidarity for the Jewish people can often blind Jewish leaders and Jewish organizations to the necessity of judgment, the necessity of moral judgment for the things that Israel does, there is the danger that Jewish critics on the Left can have the reverse problem. Which is to say that the constant focus on judgment, on moral judgment—as crucial as it is, it’s never been more crucial than in these horrifying last 15 months—that that can blind us to the necessity of solidarity and love. And that it’s important to remember that we can have these different feelings, but we don’t have to have them in the same proportions every day.
It famously says in Ecclesiastes that ‘a season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven.’ So, this can be a time, a day, to just delight in the release of these three young women. And there can be another day, another season. There will have to be tragically again and again and again to return to our anguish and our fury about what Israel has done in Gaza.
As I was thinking about this, I was thinking a little bit about re-reading a little part of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous legendary book about the prophets. Of course, neither I nor I think anyone who’s listening to this is a prophet. But there are lessons to be taken from the lives of the prophets. And the point that Heschel makes is that the prophets were trying to imitate what he called ‘God’s divine pathos,’ which is to say the emotions that God felt towards humanity, but also, according to Torah and the Hebrew Bible, God’s feelings, special feelings towards the Jewish people, towards the people of Israel. And so, the prophets then are trying to emulate in a way this combination of God’s anger, righteous anger, which very, very present, but also God’s love.
And I think one of the points that Heschel makes is that the prophets were furious, furious, brutal critics of the Jewish people. Ferocious, ferocious critics. And yet, they tried not to forget that although anger was one attribute of God’s relationship with humanity, and indeed particularly God’s relationship with the Jewish people, it was not the paramount emotion. The paramount emotion was love, and that therefore the profits should also try to have—even amidst their moral fury at the corruption, the barbarism, the degradation that they were seeing around them—they should always try to remember that the supreme element of God’s pathos is actually, the more enduring one, is love.
And Heschel writes, ‘as a mode of pathos, it may be accurate to characterize the anger of the Lord as suspended love, as mercy withheld, as mercy in concealment. Anger prompted by love is an interlude. It is as if compassion were waiting to resume.’ So, the point he’s making is that even when God is most angry, that it is always temporary, and there was always the love underneath it. And this is what the prophets were striving to emulate. And this is what we, perhaps as critics of Israel, even though we’re far from prophets, should also try to emulate: the notion that underneath the fury and anger and profound disappointment must always be this love that can return whenever there is a moment of opportunity for it to return.
Heschel goes on: ‘the pathos of anger is further a transient state. What is often proclaimed about love’—and then he quotes from the book of Jeremiah—‘for the Lord is good for his steadfast love endures forever is not said about anger. The normal and original pathos is love or mercy, not anger.’ And I think that, just as it was a model for the prophets, should be a model for all of us. That despite what has happened over the last 15 months, that I think is increasingly being recognized as a genocide, really just about the worst thing that we could imagine a state ever doing. And even though that calls us to resist, to oppose, to fight against this profound, profound form of injustice again and again and again, that the love and solidarity that we have—not just for all human beings, but that we are allowed to have as Jews for our own people, for the Jewish people, imagined throughout Jewish text as an extended family—that that should never be lost.
And whenever there is a moment for it to return, for it to come back to the surface, even if it’s only temporary, for us to join with other Jews in sense of solidarity and grief and, indeed, in joy when there is a moment of suspension of the fighting, and a moment of seeing Jews come back from the hell of captivity in Gaza, to see them come back alive. It seems to me that’s what we’re called to do in this moment: just to put aside for a moment the anger, the condemnation, the fury, the pain, and to share in that love.
Surely, if the prophets could do that—given their acute sense of human injustice in the world that those of us who are so much lesser than them—that we can try to do that as well. And we can take just this moment to delight, along with other Jews, in the fact that Romi and Doron and Emily, and hopefully many, many, many more other hostages, will come back safe to be with their family—indeed to be with our family, the family of the Jewish people.
For Beinart Notebook paid subscribers, register here, and you can use the code “NOTEBOOK2025” to receive a free ticket or a discounted price on the ticket plus the book.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com
Jamil Dakwar is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program and a former senior attorney at Adalah, which defends the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. We talk about the Trump administration’s coming crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and activism.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com
Mairav Zonszein is Senior Israel-Palestine Analyst for the International Crisis Group. She kindly agreed to talk with me about this breaking news.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com
Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. He has long written a weekly column for Haaretz. In our conversation, Gideon tells about his younger days, how he evolved away from racism, and how he now lives in a society he regularly accuses of grave crimes. I was struck by his openness and intimacy and expect you will be too.
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The Outgoing National Security Advisor’s Orwellian Interview at the 92nd Street Y
Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 17, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.
Our guest will be Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program and a former senior attorney at Adalah, which defends the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. We’ll talk about the Trump administration’s coming crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and activism.
I’ve also recorded another Zoom video, without a live audience, with the longtime Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy. I have long wanted to ask Gideon what it’s like to be one of Israel’s most hated men. And how he lives in a society that he regularly accuses of committing grave crimes. I was struck by the openness and intimacy of his answers. He told me, among many other things, that every morning when he goes for a jog in the park, he sees the same woman jogging alongside him. And that every morning she greets him with the same phrase: “traitor.”
This video is for paid subscribers too.
My New Book
On January 28, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”
Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.
Sources Cited in this Video
Jake Sullivan’s interview at the 92nd St Y.
The new Lancet study on the number of dead in Gaza.
Oxfam’s comparison of deaths in Gaza to those in Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen chronicles the movement to establish Jewish settlements in southern Lebanon.
Former Representative Cori Bush explains why it was worth losing her seat to defend Palestinian rights.
Vivian Silver’s son denounces Israel’s president for exploiting his mother’s memory.
See you on Friday, January 17,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, we’re in this interesting moment where top Biden administration foreign policy officials are kind of going out into the country, trying to craft a public narrative about what they did in office as they prepare to leave office. There was Antony Blinken’s interview with the New York Times a week ago or so, which I commented on last week. And then, recently I just came across the video that was put out of a public conversation that Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, did at the 92nd Street Y with Ian Bremmer.
And these are really remarkable documents because they are really exercises in what George Orwell wrote about so famously, which is, the creation of a kind of dishonest and euphemistic language to try to defend things that if stated in kind of clear concrete ways, would clearly be too brutal for most people to accept. And so, I think they’re worth looking at at the level of language, which is what Orwell urged political writers to do to challenge the dishonesty of language as a way of getting at the brutality of government and the action of people in power who act brutally.
So, I want to quote something from what Sullivan says at the 92nd Street Y. He’s asked about Israel’s policies vis-a-vis the people of Gaza. And he says: ‘We believe Israel has a responsibility as a democracy. As a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law, that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.’
So, the formulation is really fascinating, right. He’s being asked about what Israel’s doing, but he starts by just stipulating a set of assumptions, right, which don’t need to be proved, right, because these are the assumptions that he begins with, right. And they’re never challenged by the interviewer. The first is that Israel is a democracy. Again, something one hears constantly, but if you think about it, it’s not a democracy for Palestinians, right?
About 70% of the Palestinians who live under the control of the Israeli government, those in the West Bank and in Gaza and in East Jerusalem. And nobody who knows anything about the reality of how Israel operates in Palestinian life could deny that the Israeli government has power—indeed life and death power—over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem. And yet, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza cannot become citizens of the state of Israel. They can’t vote for its government. The vast majority of Palestinians in East Jerusalem are not citizens either, right. And that’s about 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control. About 30% are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are sometimes called Arab Israelis, who have a kind of second-class citizenship, but do enjoy citizenship and the right to vote.
So, if 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control are not citizens and can’t vote, it’s not a democracy for Palestinians. It’s a democracy for Israeli Jews. In many ways, quite a robust one. But it is about as democratic, one might say, for Palestinians as the United States was under Jim Crow for Black Americans, right, when a minority of Black Americans—those in the North—had the right to vote. But the majority of Black Americans who lived in the South did not have the right to vote. These are not esoteric or complicated things, right? They’re very basic things, right?
But you just notice how they’re basically shoved completely aside in the assumption that Sullivan starts with—that Israel is a democracy—which is simply to say that there’s a basic benevolence that he’s kind of assuming here, right. Which makes his conversation about Israeli behavior completely different than he would if he were talking about Russia or some other some other adversary because he’s essentially putting it in the camp of democracies. But, in fact, when it comes to Palestinians, it really should not be considered to be in the camp of democracies. And that’s not challenged, right. That’s an assumption that doesn’t even need to be defended.
And then he continues. He called Israel ‘a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life.’ It’s such a strange statement. He’s being asked about what’s happening in Gaza, right. Oh, the evidence in Gaza is not hard to find. It’s plentiful, right. The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal just came out with a report just recently suggesting that by the end of June, the death toll in Gaza was over 64,000 people, with almost 60% of those being women, children, and people over the age of 65. And it’s worth noting, by the way, that even men under the age of 65, most of them are not Hamas fighters. So, we’re talking about a very large majority of these people killed who are not fighters, right.
And just by kind of comparison, according to Oxfam, Israel has been killing 250 people per day in Gaza. By comparison, Ukraine, where the United States has literally imposed sanctions and sent weapons to fight against what Russia is doing, that’s more than five times the number of people who’ve been dying since the escalation of the war in Ukraine in 2022. It’s also about five times as many people dying per day as in Sudan, which the United States has now declared a genocide, right.
But what Sullivan does is he simply stipulates that Israel is committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, even though there’s literally no humanitarian aid agency, no United Nations investigative group, no journalist who’s actually really investigated what’s happening with Gaza who would suggest that Israel is committed to the basic principle of innocent life when it comes to Gaza. But Sullivan doesn’t think that’s something that actually needs to be justified. He simply stipulates it as an assumption.
Again, I use this phrase, kind of ‘mental prison,’ when I was talking about Antony Blinken. Like this is a kind of discourse that exists in Washington and could also exist at a place like the 92nd Street Y, which simply bears no reality whatsoever to the lived experience of people in Gaza, as reported by basically every humanitarian and journalist organization that has actually delved deeply into what’s happening there, right. But this is what Sullivan says before he even starts to make the argument, right. This is his kind of stated assumptions. And then he goes on to say, ‘We believe too many civilians have died in Gaza over the course of this conflict. And at too many moments, we felt we’ve had to step up publicly and privately and push on the humanitarian front to get more trucks, more aid, more life-saving assistance,’ right.
So, you know, it’s fascinating. He starts by saying Israel is a democracy. Israel is committed to the principle of human life. And then, later on, he basically says: ‘We think too many people have died.’ You know, this famously, as so many people notice, this goes all of a sudden turns into the passive tense. So, all of a sudden, Israel as a subject, as an actor, disappears from the conversation, right. Too many people have died, right. Why have too many people died? Is it because perhaps because Israel is dropping all these bombs on them, perhaps because Israel is not allowing the aid to go in, right. But it’s as if somehow there was a kind of Israel’s committed to the protection of human life. But, unfortunately, there was a kind of natural disaster, which led too many people in Gaza to die. All of a sudden Israel as the subject basically disappears from the sentence. And he says, ‘we’ve had to step up publicly and privately and push on the humanitarian front,’ never saying even who the United States has had to push, right?
And also, again, the implication, what does it mean to say you’re pushing, right, when the United States is still protecting Israel in all these international forums and continuing to send virtually unconditioned military aid? Pushing, right, in any other context in American foreign policy means using America’s diplomatic leverage in terms of our military and other kind of assistance to get countries to do what we want. If you’re not doing any of those things, you’re not actually pushing. A better verb would be you’re asking, you’re pleading, you’re begging, you’re cajoling, right. You’re not actually pushing if you’re not willing to use the leverage that the United States uses routinely when it comes to other countries.
As I said last week, we have to change the public discourse in the United States, such that if people like Jake Sullivan or Tony Blinken are going to go out and tell these lies, right, in this kind of Orwellian discourse of dishonesty, that they receive pushback, right. Obviously, we need a public discourse in which there is a cost, right. The cost is not that, you know, these people should be endangered in any way, G-d forbid. It’s simply that they should have to feel the experience of being forced to answer really hard questions by people in public forums who will not accept this dishonest language.
And we don’t have a public culture in the United States nearly enough—we have some exceptions like the interviews that Mehdi Hassan does, for instance—but in general, we don’t have a public culture which holds people like Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken to account. There are too many institutions, whether it’s the 92nd Street Y or the Council on Foreign Relations, where they can go and know that basically they can peddle this—for lack of a better word—b******t, right, and basically never really have to be taken to task for it. And that I think, is part of what’s produced this tremendous alienation and cynicism that exists in so much of the American public about the fact that ordinary Americans face consequences for the things they do in their professional lives, and people at the very apex of the American government, like Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, don’t face those consequences.
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Israeli-born British journalist Rachel Shabi is the author of the new book, Off-White: The Truth about Antisemitism. Last week, she published a column on the subject in The Guardian. She’s particularly knowledge about antisemitism, and its weaponization, in Britain, a subject of ferocious contention since Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com
Israeli religious thinker and activist Mikhael Manekin is one of the founders of smol emuni, the faithful left. We discuss Mikhael’s new book, so far available only in Hebrew, entitled, Sermons from the Abyss, which uses the five Megillot that Jews read during the year in synagogue to reflect on the horrors of the last several years. I don’t know of any…
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The Outgoing Secretary of State’s Astonishing Interview with the New York Times
Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 10, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.
Our guest will be the Israeli-born British journalist Rachel Shabi, author of the new book, Off-White: The Truth about Antisemitism. Last week, she published a column on the subject in The Guardian. She’s particularly knowledge about antisemitism, and its weaponization, in Britain, a subject of ferocious contention since Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader. We’ll discuss all that on Friday.
I’ve also recorded an interview with the Israeli religious thinker and activist Mikhael Manekin, one of the founders of smol emuni, the faithful left. We discussed Mikhael’s new book, so far available only in Hebrew, entitled, Sermons from the Abyss, which uses the five Megillot that Jews read during the year in synagogue to reflect on the horrors of the last several years. I don’t know of any Jewish thinker who is grappling more deeply than Mikhael with the theological ramifications of Israel’s destruction of Gaza. This call, which I’ll post this Wednesday, is for paid subscribers too.
My New Book
On January 28, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”
Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.
Sources Cited in this Video
The New York Times’ interview with Antony Blinken.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Theia Chatelle details the Yale police department’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters.
An extraordinary interview with Muhammad Shehada about realities in Gaza.
A song about living in a society that is committing genocide.
I talked to the CBC about why Jimmy Carter deserves an apology.
See you on Friday, January 10,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken did a big interview with the New York Times this weekend about his legacy, the Biden administration’s legacy. And a big part of that interview was about Gaza. And I think it’s worth noting a number of things he said because I think they show the way in which people like Blinken live inside kind of intellectual and moral prison, in which basic truths are things that they cannot bring themselves to see or will not bring themselves to see. And they end up saying these things which are completely, utterly incoherent, and I think just morally inexcusable.
And so, the first thing that’s striking if you listen to Blinken’s comments on Gaza is that for him, the problem of Gaza and Palestinians in Gaza is a problem that begins on October 7th. He says, ‘since October 7th,’ this is Blinken, ‘we’ve had some core goals in mind. And what are those goals,’ he says, ‘make sure October 7th can’t happen again, prevent a wider war, and protect Palestinian civilians.’ Now, what he means by make sure October 7th can’t happen again, and he says it explicitly, is destroying Hamas’s military capacity, right. There’s no recognition that October 7th doesn’t just happen because Hamas has a bunch of weapons. October 7th happens because Palestinians are living in what Human Rights Watch calls an open-air prison, what the UN has said is a place that’s unlivable. This is before October 7th. That Palestinians are living in what all the world’s major human rights organizations call an apartheid state, right. All of that is completely absent.
So, Blinken thinks that the problem that he’s trying to solve begins on October 7th. And then he says astonishingly, he says, ‘when it comes to making sure that October 7th can’t happen again, I think we’re in a good place.’ No, you’re not in a good place. Not only because Gaza has been utterly destroyed, but you’re not in a good place in terms of making sure that things like October 7th can’t happen again because the fundamental reason behind the horror of October 7th isn’t just because Hamas has a bunch of weapons, it’s because Palestinians don’t have freedom, and because their ethical and legal paths towards fighting for freedom—whether it’s boycotts, efforts at international institutions, all of these things, peaceful marches like happened in 2018—that they have all been blocked. That’s the context if you really want to make sure that future October 7ths don’t happen, you have to address that. But that’s basically completely absent from Blinken’s framework.
And what’s really striking is it’s so striking how Blinken is able to empathize with Jewish Israelis in a way that he can’t empathize with Palestinians. So, he says, this is Blinken, he says, ‘you had in Israel in the days after October 7th a totally traumatized society. This wasn’t just the Prime Minister or a given leader in Israel. This was an entire society that didn’t want any assistance getting to a single Palestinian in Gaza.’ He says Israelis didn’t want any assistance to go to Gaza after October 7th. And he says you have to kind of understand that given the trauma in that society.
First of all, you notice the way in which he buys completely into the ethno-nationalist frame, right? What does he mean by society? Twenty percent of Israel’s own citizens are Palestinians—Palestinian citizens of Israel, sometimes called Arab Israelis. They wanted assistance to go into Gaza. So, you notice that when Blinken talks about Israeli society, he’s actually only talking about Jews, as if even the Palestinian citizens in Israel don’t actually matter, are not actually real Israelis. He’s completely bought into this ethno-nationalist framework. And then he says, yes, it’s unfortunate that they didn’t want any aid to go into Gaza. But after all, you have to understand they were really traumatized, right.
But there’s no recognition, right, that in understanding October 7th, and the horror of what Hamas and others did on October 7th, that it might be worth understanding that Palestinians were also totally traumatized, and that we should factor that in in understanding their actions—again, not excusing their action, but in understanding their action, right. So, Blinken can see Israelis through this kind of empathetic humanizing frame in a way he can’t vis-a-vis Palestinians.
The second point is the way Blinken talks about America’s leverage vis-a-vis Israel. He essentially talks about the US relationship with Israel as if America doesn’t give Israel weapons, or as if the notion that we would actually question whether we give Israel these weapons simply cannot be discussed, right. It’s completely outside of his mental framework, right. So, he says, ‘no one needs to remind me of the sufferings’—this is Palestinians—‘because it’s something that drives me every single day.’ Okay, so first of all, let’s just be honest. That’s b******t. It’s a bold-faced lie. Antony Blinken might say that to make him fall asleep at night, but nothing in his actual actions suggests that he’s driven every single day by Palestinians suffering in Gaza because he keeps supporting the sending of those weapons, right.
And when he says, ‘we’ve done everything in our power to find a way to get to the end of the conflict,’ that statement only makes sense if somehow the question of US arms sales to Israel, right, is kind of an exogenous question, as if that doesn’t bear on American behavior, right. But it’s the single most important factor, right. That America is literally giving Israel the weapons it’s using to kill the people that Antony Blinken says he’s so concerned about.
And then Blinken tells this remarkable story. What’s remarkable about it is that he thinks it makes him look good. He says, ‘the very first trip that I made to Israel five days after October 7th, I spent with my team nine hours in the IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, six stories underground, with the Israeli government, including the Prime Minister, including arguing for hours on end about the basic proposition that the humanitarian assistance needs to get to Palestinians in Gaza,’ right. So, he’s proud of this, right. He’s proud of the fact that he was arguing for hours and hours and hours just about the idea that there should be any aid getting in, right. But why should Antony Blinken have had to argue for hours and hours and hours and hours, right. He only had to argue for hours and hours and hours because he wasn’t actually using the obvious leverage that was at America’s disposal. He would have not had to argue for hours and hours and hours if he simply said, no, we’re not going to provide you the weapons to destroy this society and to starve people to death. Then he wouldn’t have needed to argue for hours and hours and hours. But because he had taken the most important point of U.S. leverage off the table, he’s proud of himself for trying to convince the Israelis, acting like a supplicant, right, instead of the Secretary of State of the superpower that provides Israel the weapons that it needs to prosecute this devastating war.
And then when he’s explicitly asked by the interviewer of the New York Times about American weapon sales, he says ‘that support’—meaning the US arms—‘is vital to make sure Israel has an adequate defense. And in turn, that means we’re not going to have an even broader wider conflict that results in more death and more destruction.’ Sorry!? I mean, like, again, I understand in the nature of these interviews with the Times, the Times reporter has to be respectful, there’s a certain kind of way in which you’re supposed to address a Secretary of State, but what the f**k? I mean, the US, we give unconditional weapons to prevent a wider war and Blinken is saying that this strategy has worked. Has he not been noticing the utter destruction of Lebanon that’s taken place? And also, now Israel’s bombing of Syria? I mean, it’s just, again, this is like a man speaking in some kind of closed room in which he’s hermetically sealed off from reality.
And then to me, the most astonishingly pathetic and arrogant moment in the conversation is when the New York Times reporter says, ‘do you worry you’ve been presiding over what the world sees as a genocide?’ And Antony Blinken simply says, ‘no, it’s not.’ No, it’s not. That’s it. No suggestion that he might have read the Amnesty or United Nations reports. No suggestion that he needs to rebut these claims. No suggestion that the fact that Israel has destroyed most of the hospitals, most of the universities, most of the agriculture, that 90% of the people are dislocated from their homes, right, that there’s been report after report of mass starvation that even some of Israel’s former security officials like Moshe Bogie Ya’alon are calling this an ethnic cleansing, right.
None of this makes Antony Blinken feel like he has to give any justification for why he doesn’t think it is a genocide. He doesn’t feel the need to make the argument. He simply says, ex cathedra categorically no it’s not, and then moves on. This is what William Fulbright famously called during Vietnam the arrogance of power. The arrogance of power. The arrogance and, frankly, the intellectual idiocy of power. We need to create an environment in this country, in the media, and in whatever institutions that people like Antony Blinken are going to be spending their time in when they leave the Biden administration, that will not accept those answers, in which you simply can’t say, no, it’s not, and then walk away.
If Antony Blinken thinks he’s going to become a professor at American University, or go to some think tank, or give interviews, or write op-eds in the New York Times, or show up on TV, or do whatever he’s going to do, it is critical for us as a country, as a society, to have the kind of accountability that means that he cannot get away with that. He does not have the right to simply say, no, it’s not end of conversation, right. He must be forced actually answer these charges because they are ultimately charges in part against him, right.
And I think the New York Times didn’t do enough in this interview to force him. We have to go outside of our comfort zones in some ways in these elite institutions to be a little bit less polite and be willing to make a little bit more uncomfortable when it comes to these situations, right. Given the magnitude of the horror that is happening, it’s simply not good enough to allow Antony Blinken to say, no, it’s not a genocide, next question. Because if we do let him do those kinds of things, then we’re laying the conditions, laying the seeds for this kind of thing to happen again. And it simply can’t happen again. The elite institutions in America have to change to ensure that there is never again a president like Joe Biden and never again a secretary of state like Antony Blinken who do this. It can never be allowed to happen again.
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Carter’s Break with the White South Over Civil Rights Offers a Model for Jews
Our guest for the Zoom call this Friday, January 3rd, at 1 Eastern, for paid subscribers, will be Paul O’Brien, Executive Director at Amnesty International USA. We’ll discuss Amnesty’s new report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28, 2025. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: first, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”
Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.
Sources Cited in this Video
Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman’s claim that Carter was “engaging in antisemitism.”
Deborah Lipstadt’s 2007 Washington Post column, “Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem.”
The attacks on Carter by Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton.
The attacks on Carter’s book in The New York Times and Slate.
“Great is repentance, which hastens redemption” from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yoma (86b).
Kenneth E. Morris’ biography, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist.
Carter’s inaugural addresses as Georgia governor and president.
Carter’s 1977 speech at Notre Dame questioning the Cold War.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Will Alden details how, since October 7, foundations have withdrawn funding from groups that support Palestinian rights.
Alan Dershowitz vs Norman Finkelstein, the musical.
Doris Bittar on Christmas in Lebanon.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I interviewed two young Israelis who refused their country’s draft.
I’ve written about Jehad Abusalim, a Gaza-born scholar currently based in Washington who is completing a PhD in history, Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University. The warnings he issued about Israel’s response to October 7 have proven prescient and were tragically ignored by American media. He has now launched a newsletter on Substack. Please consider subscribing.
See you on Friday, January 3,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, Jimmy Carter has died. It’s worth going back to the moment in 2006 when he published his book, Peace Not Apartheid, to remember what happened there. Abe Foxman, then the head of the Anti-Defamation League, said that Carter was ‘engaging in antisemitism.’ Deborah Lipstadt, who went on to be appointed by a Democratic president to be the antisemitism czar wrote a column in the Washington Post entitled ‘Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem.’ Carter was attacked by Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton. His book was attacked in reviews in the New York Times and Slate in large measure for using the term apartheid, a term which is now been endorsed by Israel’s own leading human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Yesh Din, and by the most prominent human rights organizations in the world, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
A couple of years ago, I did a newsletter actually suggesting that leaders of the organized American Jewish community like Foxman, but also American politicians like Clinton and Pelosi, should offer a public apology to Jimmy Carter. I quoted at that time a line from Tractate Yoma and the Babylonian Talmud, ‘Great is repentance which hastens redemption.’ But I think there are a great number of people who need to do Teshuva, who need to ask for forgiveness for their attacks on Carter for saying things that have been deeply vindicated by the course of events in the years since then, and in fact, if you look back at them, seem extremely tame. Because it’s worth remembering that Carter wasn’t actually accusing Israel of being an apartheid state in 2006. All he was saying was that it risked becoming one, which is also, by the way, something that Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak and numerous Israeli security officials have been saying around that time. And yet, the man was viciously pilloried by people who I think at this point should have the decency to offer their apologies.
But I think there is also something really important to say about Carter and the roots of his position on Palestinian freedom. He was, of all of the American presidents, the one who I think felt the strongest sense of identification with the Palestinian plight. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think there’s a lot to learn from Carter’s own life that can instruct us as we think about Israel and Palestine and that particularly Israelis and other Jews can learn from.
So, Carter’s family story is really remarkable. He grew up not just in the South, but in the deep, deep South. I’m quoting here from a biography of his by Kenneth E. Morris called Jimmy Carter: American Moralist. Morris writes that Carter grew up in rural southwest Georgia, in a place where people spoke a rural dialect that was so thick that many outsiders thought of it as a foreign language altogether. There was a very large Black population. It was a profoundly, viciously racist environment. Morris suggests that Carter’s father, Earl, may indeed have participated in a lynching. He also tells the story that although Carter grew up playing with Black children all the time, that Carter’s father actually ordered the Black children to lose all of the games they played with little Jimmy so he could always come out on top.
And to understand the fact that Carter was the president who took this position on Palestinian freedom—and not a perfect position, but much more progressive than most of the other presidents—you have to understand that it’s an outgrowth of his experience as a White Southerner turning against his own community, his own people to support Civil Rights. In 1953, when Carter was a young businessman, he refused to join the racist Citizens’ Councils that led to a boycott by Whites in the town of his business. He supported school consolidation, which would bring Black and White students together. Also, in the 1950s, which led to a rift with his own cousin, Hugh, that the two men did not speak for more than a decade. You know, some Jews who support Palestinian freedom may identify with these kinds of stories. After a vote on this question of school integration, opponents of desegregation nailed a sign to Carter’s warehouse door saying, ‘Coons and Carters go together.’
Carter’s key political moment in his political career in Georgia was in January 1971, when in his gubernatorial inaugural speech, he denounced segregation. That was when Time magazine put him on the cover and this completely obscure governor began to launch the political career that would allow him to this upset victory in the 1976 presidential campaign. Morris argues it’s impossible to understand Carter’s view of foreign policy without understanding the way it springs from the moralism that came out of the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, his Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, was one of the key Civil Rights leaders in Georgia. That Carter was the only president of the Cold War who explicitly came out against the Cold War framing, very famously in a speech that he gave at Notre Dame, arguing in fact for a kind of an idea of a global community based on cooperation that was very clearly modeled, Morris argues, on Martin Luther King’s notion of the beloved community.
And Carter, in his inaugural address as president, who kind of harkened back to the gubernatorial address he gave as governor of Georgia, spent one third of that address speaking about human rights, which was for him very clearly the kind of international extension of the principle of civil rights that he had fought for, that he indeed had suffered for, that he had alienated himself from his own community for supporting. And then you may know that Young was ultimately forced to be fired under tremendous criticism by the organized American Jewish community. Carter did not stick up for him because Young had committed the sin of meeting with members of the PLO.
It is impossible to understand Carter’s sympathy for Palestinians, Carter’s kind of moral framework, in which he put Israel’s domination of Palestinians, without seeing that connection to his support as a White Southerner for civil rights. And I think one of the things that we should think about as we mourn Jimmy Carter is him as a model for Israeli and other Jews. Carter risked something. He risked the opprobrium of his own community, his own people, to come out for civil rights. And that became the basis of his entire political worldview.
So, it’s not just that Carter has been proven right in his criticism of Israel’s policies for the Palestinians. It’s also that in Carter’s own life, in his own moral courage, we see a model for the moral courage that is necessary by Jews today to be willing to take positions that will alienate us from our community because we believe in the central moral principle to which Carter devoted much of his life: the principle of human equality, the principle of human dignity of all people, irrespective of their religion, their ethnicity, or their race.
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Our Communal Leaders Keep Conflating Discomfort with Unsafety
Something happened earlier this month in December that might seem like—given the scale of all the magnitude of the horrors that are happening around Palestine and Israel—might not seem so significant, but I think really is emblematic of something that’s gone terribly, terribly wrong in the organized American Jewish community.
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Our guests are Mahmoud Muna, Matthew Teller, and Juliette Touma, editors of the new anthology, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture, which includes close to a hundred stories about the lives of people in Gaza, both before and after its recent destruction. This interview is co-sponsored with Jewish Currents.
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I talked with the Palestinian-Norwegian writer Iyad el-Baghdadi about the regional implications of the Assad regime’s fall in Syria and Israel’s military intervention there.
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It’s not about the legal definition. It’s about Western and Jewish exceptionalism.
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I talked with my extraordinary CUNY colleague, the Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek, author of The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria.
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It’s Wonderful Assad is Gone. But Neither He, Nor Iran, Was Ever Israel’s Real Problem.
There will be no Zoom call this Friday. We’ll resume on Friday, December 20 at 1 PM with a conversation with Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller, author of the new anthology, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture.
But I’ve recorded a Zoom interview (without a live audience) with my extraordinary CUNY colleague, the Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek, author of The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria. Paid subscribers will get it today. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Rebecca Traister, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky and Bret Stephens.
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader recently recommended Naomi Shihab Nye’s young adult novel, Habibi, about Liyana, a Palestinian-American girl from St. Louis whose family returns to West Bank, a place she struggles to make home.
Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.
Sources Cited in this Video
Discussing Israel’s enemies in 1982, Benjamin Netanyahu said, “There is a major force behind most of these groups that is the Soviet Union. If you take away the Soviet Union, it’s chief proxy, the PLO, international terrorism would collapse.”
The Nkomati Accords between South Africa and Mozambique.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Gary Monroe chronicles the end of Jewish Miami Beach and the rise of Little Haiti.
If you’re in New York, you can still catch the end of the always-excellent Other Israel film festival.
I talked to The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill about the debate over Gaza.
Housekeeping
We’re using a new system to share transcripts from Zoom interviews. They’ll no longer appear in emails but are still available for anyone who wants them by opening this post in your web browser (not the Substack app) and clicking the “transcript” button just below the video.
See you a week from Friday,
Peter
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Our guest is Muzaffar Chishti, Senior Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, and one of America’s foremost experts on immigration policy. We’ll talk about Donald Trump’s plans for the mass deportation of undocumented—and perhaps even legal— immigrants. We’ll talk about the human cost of such a roundup and what it might do to the United States.
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When Even Billionaires Are Afraid to Criticize Trump, What Does That Mean for the Rest of US?
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Our guest is the renowned, Israeli-born, Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, who teaches at Brown University. In August, he described returning to Israel and encountering students whose “rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history.” This month he concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. We’ll discuss the genocid…
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It’s a Test of Whether International Law Applies to the West
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 - Visa fler
