This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. We will talk about how progressives should respond to the anti-Israel right. Our first guest will be Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American State Representative from Georgia, who in a recent comment on X about former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote, “I’m tired of Palestine being used to erase every other misdeed once someone with a platform says anything for us.” Our second guest will be Ben Lorber, co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, and a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, who writes frequently about the American right. Join us.

Ask Me Anything

This Tuesday, May 26, at 1 PM Eastern, we will hold an Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.

Cited in Today’s Video

B’Tselem’s report, Settler Violence = State Violence.

Things to Read

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

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Mari Cohen reflects on the legacy of former ADL head Abe Foxman.

In Current Affairs, Andrew Ancheta examines the similarities between defenses of apartheid South Africa and today’s defenses of Israel.

In Equator, Eva Menasse discusses Germany’s warped debate about antisemitism.

Reader Comment

In response to my recent video criticizing Tucker Carlson, Mujahid Sarsur, author of the forthcoming book, Palestinians at the Holocaust Museum, writes:

I believe the efforts of pro-Palestinian human rights liberal Jews (including you, Michelle Goldberg, and Naomi Klein) to contribute to the Democratic/Republican establishment goal of dismissing Carlson as a bigot are extremely harmful to the Palestinian cause, and I believe such efforts, although primarily justified by focusing on Carlson’s statements that may be perceived as bigoted, partly stem from a need to defend a construct of a “Jewish peoplehood”—a construct which has been substantially shaped not by traditional Jewish ethics, but by the Zionist movement’s ethnocentric influence on the Jewish community.

My deeper point is illuminated by coining the term “anti-Zionist Zionist Jews”: a person who does not believe in the need for a Jewish state but still embraces the ideological structures underlying Zionism, wanting to defend and be part of a “Jewish peoplehood,” and unwilling to look at the link between that construct and the extermination of Palestinians.

The Palestine issue cannot be understood without a deep exploration of Jewish identity; few questions are more relevant to the Palestinians than “Who is a Jew?” In my upcoming book, I rely on the writings of Jewish and Israeli authors who illustrate how Zionism is ideologically dependent on the construct of “Jewish peoplehood” and who argue that Jews are no more than a faith group, to show how this construct is existentially linked to the future of Palestinians:

The concept of the Jewish people has been at the center of Zionist ideology and what it did to the Palestinians. Israeli intellectual Boaz Evron argues that “the problematic situation in which modern Israel finds itself is derived, inter alia, from assumptions and ideologies about the nature of the Jewish people and the Jewish state that have largely been refuted by historical developments.” Israeli historian Shlomo Sand writes that Israel’s attachment to an “unbridled ethnocracy that grossly discriminates against certain of its citizens, rests on the active myth of an eternal nation that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land.” Professor of Jewish history, Yakov Rabkin, writes that what “underlies Zionist ideology” is “the concept of the Jewish people.” Israeli government policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians have always been about how to defend this “Jewish peoplehood” and whatever the definition of that peoplehood encompasses.

Indeed, Jewish identity does not only concern the Palestinians, but it is also existentially relevant to them. The Nakba—the destruction of over 500 Palestinian towns and villages and the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinian refugees—was a direct result of this vision of Jewish peoplehood that needs to be preserved and protected. The Gaza genocide was rationalized and justified by Israel and its supporters by the need to protect the “Jewish people.” When Israel commenced its genocide, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken came to Israel and explicitly cited his Jewishness to explain why he feels personally required to support Israel and its military.

By equating genocide with Jewishness, as the American Jewish establishment wants him to do, Carlson is challenging the essence of why Antony Blinken may not be a practicing Jew but feels part of a “Jewish peoplehood.” By extension, Carlson is also challenging you, Peter, and Goldberg and Klein to reflect on the essence of contemporary Jewishness. You are confronted with a choice: the easy route of dismissing him as a bigot or asking tough questions. What does it mean that the majority of synagogues and Jewish community centers have Israeli flags? What does the removal of these flags entail? How much of contemporary Jewishness is left without Zionism? Why do many American Jews insist on Jewishness as an “ethnicity” even though ample books have collapsed that idea? Why would 540 Columbia students feel a need to call themselves Zionists and defend Israel in the midst of the genocide?

Many in the Palestinian community view the Carlson phenomenon as miraculous because, for the first time, they see in Carlson the possibility that the structures that have been leading to the expulsion and extermination of Palestinians are being fundamentally challenged. Carlson is holding a sledgehammer and is destroying these structures. Dismissing him as a bigot helps stop this sledgehammer and, from the vantage point of many Palestinians, feels like a deeply Zionist act.

This is, of course, not to accept Carlson’s other views, but to focus on his impact on the Palestine issue.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Now and then, there’s an episode of settler violence in the West Bank that’s so grotesque that it kind of breaks through a little bit in American media. I mean, settler violence—again, especially under this government, especially since October 7th—is so pervasive that generally, it’s just kind of noise for the American media. It doesn’t really get picked up very much, or in the American Jewish community. But occasionally something is so terrible that it breaks through, and it’s interesting to watch the way that Israel’s defenders in the United States tend to respond to this.

Generally, you find that there’s a kind of condemnation of settler violence, and people say this is really terrible. And this is not, you know, this is not who Israel is, this is not who Israel should be. That kind of thing. It’s a little bit similar sometimes to the way those same people talk about Itamar Ben-Gvir. When they have to talk about Itamar Ben-Gvir, they’ll say, Itamar Ben-Gvir is an extremist, he’s a radical, you know, he’s not a good guy, he’s not like those other mainstream Israeli politicians.

I want to suggest that there’s something fundamentally incoherent about this response. That just as Itamar Ben-Gavir can’t be disassociated from Israeli politics as a whole, given that his rise was facilitated by Benjamin Netanyahu, who needed to help broker the deal with him and the other national religious parties in order to bring him into the government to create a coalition. So, he’s not a rogue actor. He’s actually a very critical ally, someone who’s been very critical to Benjamin Netanyahu’s continuing in power.

Settler violence is also not a rogue activity. It’s not something that happens separate from the Israeli state, or the Israeli mainstream. And I want to quote from a report that B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, did, which was called, Settler Violence = State Violence. And they write: ‘the state takes over land openly.’ They’re talking about Israeli state taking over land in the West Bank from Palestinian land. They’re saying:

‘The state takes over land openly using official methods sanctioned by legal advisors and judges, while the settlers, who are also interested in taking over land to further their agenda, initiate violence against Palestinians for their own reasons. Yet in truth, there is only one track. Settler violence against Palestinians is part of the strategy employed by Israel’s apartheid regime, which seeks to take over more and more West Bank land. The state fully supports and assists these acts of violence, and its agents sometimes participate in them directly. As such, settler violence is a form of government policy aided and abetted by official state authorities with their active participation.’

Now, that’s not to say there aren’t Israeli officials who might be genuinely upset or even appalled by things that settlers do. They may think it’s terrible PR. They may even think that they’re morally wrong.

Again, to use a kind of crude analogy, we can imagine a situation in the Jim Crow South where there were things that the Ku Klux Klan did that segregationist leaders wished they hadn’t done. It was a bad reputation. It just wasn’t the way they wanted to do business. But the general thrust of the policy, right, in the Jim Crow South was to keep Black people down, to deny them their basic rights, their basic freedom, through a whole mechanism of violence, some state-sanctioned and some outside of the state, but which could not take place—the Ku Klux Klan could not have operated without the fact that the white-controlled judicial system gave them, you know, almost total impunity.

Similarly, settlers can only do what they do, the settlements require government support to exist in the first place, and the settlers could not continue to act this way against Palestinians without the base large-scale impunity that they exist in a political system in which the people who they are victimizing don’t have citizenship, don’t have the right to vote, are not truly represented by the state, and therefore can’t take meaningful legal action against them, except in the rarest of circumstances.

So, Israel’s defenders who say, this settler violence is terrible. I’m opposed to it. They may genuinely think it’s terrible. They may genuinely think they are opposed to it. But they’re not really opposed to it unless they’re willing to do something that would make it stop. And the thing that would make it stop would be to change U.S. policy towards Israel, right? The only thing that would make it stop would be if there were severe consequences for the Israeli government for allowing it to continue, right?

And so, the question I think one should ask any defender of Israel, whether it’s a, you know, Jewish official, or a politician, or a kind of someone in the media who says, I’m against settler violence, is, would you be willing to condition American military aid—all of it, or even some of American military aid on Israel stopping this settler violence? Would you be willing to support a process in international legal institutions to punish Israel for allowing the settler violence that terrorizes Palestinians?

Overwhelmingly, the answer to that question will be, no, we are not willing to support that. Because although we say we oppose settler violence, our most fundamental commitment is unconditional U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support for Israel. And so, because of that, we will say we oppose settler violence, but we’re not actually willing to support any of the tangible consequences by which the U.S. could use its substantial leverage over Israel to actually end the status of impunity that allows Israel to do this.

And that’s why I think the claim by supporters of Israel and the United States that they oppose settler violence is fundamentally hollow. Again, they may believe they oppose settler violence, but there’s often a difference between what people believe and what their actions actually do, right? We can tell what people’s truest belief systems are by the actions they pursue, right? And if the actions you pursue is unconditional U.S. support for Israel period, then you’re not actually opposed to settler violence, because you don’t want your government, the United States government, to do the things that might actually stop settler violence.

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