Current Affairs

Today, we see children killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes, but anyone who gets their understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict from news reports lacks the context necessary to make sense of the horrors they are seeing. To understand why there is an Israel-Palestine conflict today, we have to go back a hundred years to see what Palestine was like before the state of Israel was established and how things changed. 

Joining us to explain the background of the conflict is one of the leading historians on the region, Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University. He is the author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, edits the Journal of Palestine Studies, and in the 90s served as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. Prof. Khalidi's book is essential reading for anyone who wants to know where modern-day Israel and Palestine came from in the first place. 

Among topics discussed:

• What Palestine was like in the early 1900s, when the Arab population of Palestine was about 95% and political Zionism was a long way from achieving its objective of establishing a state
• How 19th and early 20th century Zionist leaders understood that establishing a Jewish state in Palestine would necessarily involve a project of ethnic cleansing, because of the region's overwhelming Arab majority
• How Prof. Khalidi's own Palestinian great-great-great uncle, who served as mayor of Jerusalem, personally pleaded with Theodor Herzl (father of political Zionism) in the early 1900s to "leave Palestine alone" rather than establishing the Jewish state there
• How Palestinian resistance to the original establishment of Israel is misunderstood to this day: it wasn't a product of irrational anti-Semitism, but a response to being dispossessed and not granted the right of self-determination
• The myth that Palestinians have rejected fair offers of statehood and are the architects of their own misfortune
• Golda Meir's infamous statement that there "was no such thing as Palestinians," and the argument that Palestinian national identity is a contemporary construct. In fact, both Palestinian and Israeli national identities are recent, as is the nation-state form itself
• The project of "memoricide": Israel's deliberate efforts to erase the memory of what Palestine was like in the years prior to Zionist colonization and frame the Palestinian resistance to dispossession as aggressive and terroristic
• Why the establishment of Israel was similar to (and different from) other kinds of colonialism, and the way colonial projects always treat indigenous populations as irrational, violent, backward, and in need of removal
• How changes in U.S. political opinion are essential if Palestinians are ever going to receive the right to self-determination

The Israel-Palestine conflict is often treated as complicated. In fact, Prof. Khalidi argues, it is not very complicated at all: it is precisely the kind of conflict that can be expected to arise when a colonial project tries to displace a country's native inhabitants and denies them equal rights. 

Prof. Khalidi mentions Nathan's experience at the Guardian, which is discussed here. Discussion of the shooting of peaceful Palestinian protesters in 2018 can be found here.  

Map of Palestine before the project of expelling, dispossessing, and occupying Palestinians had succeeded, taken from Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876-1948

Current Affairs editor at large Yasmin Nair and editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson have both written articles that deal with the country of Afghanistan. Yasmin's Evergreen Review piece, "Sharbat Gula Is Not Lost" is about the woman pictured in the iconic "Afghan Girl" photo that appeared on the cover of National Geographic. Nathan's essay "What Do We Owe Afghanistan?" (co-authored with Noam Chomsky) appears in Current Affairs and is a history of the American war from 2001 to 2021, looking at the hideous consequences of U.S. actions for the Afghan people.

In this conversation, we talk about how stories and photos shape Western perceptions of Afghanistan and how Americans came to believe that they were part of a noble endeavor to help Afghan people even as their actions actually severely damaged the country. The "Afghan Girl" of National Geographic is Sharbat Gula, who didn't want her photo taken and tried to cover her face. We discuss the photographer, Steve McCurry, whose work exoticizes (and sometimes even fabricates) the lives of non-Western people. We discuss how the aspirations and wishes of Afghans themselves are left out of Western depictions of the country.

Laura Bush's speech using Afghan women's rights as a justification for the war is here. A critique of the way Afghan women were cynically invoked to justify U.S. geopolitical goals is here. A scathing New York Times review of McCurry's "astonishingly boring" pictures is here. The photo of Gula covering her face is here. The photo of the adult Gula holding the magazine is here. 

Photographer Steve McCurry with the portrait that changed his life (although not the life of the anonymous child depicted, who did not wish to be photographed). 

David Hemenway is a professor of public health at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is the author of Private Guns, Public Health which argues that there are many practical ways to significantly reduce the epidemic of American gun deaths. In his book While We Were Sleeping Success Stories in Injury and Violence Prevention, David provides case studies of previous efforts at reducing injuries and deaths, showing 60 different success stories that have made us all safer.

David previously worked for Ralph Nader and compares the situation with guns to the situation before auto safety measures came about. He has produced a great deal of research on what interventions would actually work to stop people from getting shot. Today he joins to discuss what we know (and don't know) about firearm deaths and how to stop them.

Current Affairs is proud to be a publication that takes animal rights seriously. From our lighthearted looks at manatees, ants, and cats, to our more serious pieces on the Orwellian language of the factory farming industry, the reason animal communication shouldn't be the justification for animal rights, and the need for "Veticare For All," we have always believed that left politics and animal welfare go together.

Today on the podcast we are joined by Marina Bolotnikova, a freelance journalist who covers factory farming and animal liberation activism. Marina has written for Current Affairs about the importance of direct action to the animal liberation movement and how the factory farming industry has gone from openly admitting that they view animals as profit-maximizing machines to pretending to care about being "humane."  In this episode we discuss why the treatment of animals is such a morally important issue, how the industry uses lies and euphemisms to conceal its barbarism, how phony industry-supported research is used to paper over atrocities, and why leftists and environmentalists shouldn't view animal rights as secondary.

Marina's Intercept article on the cruel method used to boil and suffocate chickens to death is here. The episode of the Green Pill podcast featuring Matt Johnson is here. John Sanbonmatsu's Critical Theory and Animal Liberation is here. The thumbnail is the illustration by Nick Sirotich that appears alongside Marina's latest article in the May-June print issue of Current Affairs. 

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has also served as the chair of the COVID-19 commission for leading medical journal The Lancet. Through his investigations as the head of the COVID-19 commission, Prof. Sachs has come to the conclusion that there is extremely dangerous biotechnology research being kept from public view, that the United States was supporting much of this research, and that it is very possible that COVID-19 originated through dangerous virus research gone awry. He recently said:

"I chaired the commission for the Lancet for two years on COVID. I'm pretty convinced it came out of US lab biotechnology. Not out of nature... [That's] out of two years of intensive work on this. So it's a blunder, in my view, of biotech not an accident of a natural spillover. We don't know for sure, I should be absolutely clear. But there's enough evidence that it should be looked into. And it's not being investigated. Not in the United States. Not anywhere. And I think for real reasons, that they don't want to look underneath the rug."

Prof. Sachs also believes that there is clear proof that the National Institutes of Health and many members of the scientific community have been impeding a serious investigation of the origins of COVID-19 and deflecting attention away from the hypothesis that risky U.S.-supported research may have led to millions of deaths. If that hypothesis is true, the implications would be earth-shaking, because it might mean that esteemed members of the scientific community bore responsibility for a global calamity.

In this interview, Prof. Sachs explains how he, as the head of the COVID-19 commission for a leading medical journal, came to the conclusion that powerful actors were preventing a real investigation from taking place. He also explains why it is so important to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID: because, he says, there is extremely dangerous research taking place with little accountability, and the public has a right to know since we are the ones whose lives are being put at risk without our consent.  

Prof. Sachs' recent article on the subject in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences can be found here. A Current Affairs article from last year about the questions over the origins of COVID-19 can be found here. 

In this episode, we discuss the strange creatures known as children. Scott Hershovitz is a professor of philosophy and law at the University of Michigan and the author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy With My Kids, which chronicles (hilariously) his philosophical conversations with his sons Rex and Hank. The book is a great primer on some basic philosophical questions for adult readers, but it also shows that children are more profound philosophers than they are often assumed to be. Because the world is unfamiliar to them, every child is a little Socrates, asking authority figures to justify their beliefs. The child's relentless query of "Why?" is a demand that knowledge be justified, and Hershovitz encourages us to take children's philosophical questions seriously. He also believes that philosophy ought to be taught much earlier than college, because it helps cultivate useful critical thinking skills. Today, we discuss how the "chaos muppets" that are children can actually be uncommonly profound. 

Here is Scott's New York Times article "How To Pray To A God You Don't Believe In," which discusses his son's unique perspective on how God is both "pretend" and "real."

The image above is from a video of a child solving the "trolley problem." 

Janet Biehl is one of the leading libertarian socialist writers in the country. For several decades, she was the partner and collaborator of the late political theorist Murray Bookchin, who stood, in the words of the Village Voice, "at the pinnacle of the genre of utopian social criticism." In bracing works like "Listen, Marxist!" and The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin laid out the basis for an anti-capitalist, ecologically-oriented, and anti-authoritarian left. Bookchin's analysis was often provocative, and in works like "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism" and "Re-Enchanting Humanity" (which includes a satisfying takedown of Richard Dawkins) he challenged what he felt were the dangerous currents of anti-rationalist and primitivist thinking emerging on the left. Bookchin tried to forge a philosophy that was pro-technology while sensitive to ecological destruction, and which salvaged insights from Marx while avoiding the rigidities of 21st century Marxism. He was one of the first thinkers to warn that capitalism itself was causing catastrophic global warming.

Biehl is the author of Ecology or Catastrophe The Life of Murray Bookchin, the editor of The Murray Bookchin Reader, and the author of The Politics of Social Ecology, a primer on Bookchin's ideas.

In addition to her work on Bookchin, Janet Biehl is an artist and journalist who has documented the social revolution that has taken place among the Kurds of Rojava. Her latest book is the graphic novel Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS.

In Part I of this interview, we discuss the social theories of Murray Bookchin. In the second part, we move to Biehl's recent work on the Kurdish struggle, more information about which can be found at the Rojava Information Center. There is a connection between Biehl's work on both topics, because the "democratic confederalist" philosophy developed by Kurdistan Workers' Party leader Abdullah Öcalan was directly inspired in part by the writings of Bookchin. Bookchin did not in his lifetime get to see a movement that took his ideas seriously, and one of the more poignant parts of Biehl's work is her reflections on how delighted and gratified Bookchin would have been to see his theories expanded upon, developed further, and put into practice by courageous revolutionaries. 

In our last episode, we took a break from the depressing facts of the ecological crisis to simply marvel at the immense variety of experiences and sensations in the animal kingdom. Today we return to the tough stuff, although we begin with 30 seconds of whalesong to relax our spirits. 

Nathan's guest is Adrienne Buller of the progressive UK think tank Common Wealth, whose book The Value of a Whale: On The Illusions of Green Capitalism (Manchester University Press) is a thorough, devastating critique of market-based approaches to solving the climate crisis. The Value of a Whale is an essential primer for those who want to learn how to see through fraud and fakery in proposed climate policies. Buller shows how bad economic thinking has allowed corporations and governments to embrace pseudo-solutions that appear to address climate change but in fact do almost nothing. 

In this interview we discuss the futile (and dangerous) attempt to assign financial values to parts of the natural world (including whales), the harm done by using "cost-benefit analysis" and models of climate change that focus on its impact on GDP, and how we can tell real solutions to climate change from fake ones that are designed to avoid doing anything that would require sacrifices from rich Westerners. 

Adrienne's other book, Owning the Future (co-authored with Mat Lawrence), is available from Verso. 

Ed Yong of The Atlantic is the author of the new bestselling book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which is about all of the fascinating ways in which animal senses differ from our own, and how they show the immense amount of information in the universe that is inaccessible to human beings. Ed's book gives us a glimpse of what the subjective experiences of other species are like, and they are incredible. Today we discuss how mind-expanding it is to empathize with creatures very different from ourselves. 

Ed's Atlantic writings are here and his book on microbes is here. The writings of Ed's colleague Marina Koren about space and the James Webb telescope are here. A recording of Carl Sagan talking about the "pale blue dot" is here.

WARNING: THIS EPISODE BEGINS WITH TWO FULL MINUTES OF ANIMAL NOISES TO HELP US APPRECIATE THE MAJESTY AND VARIETY OF OTHER SPECIES

Bill McKibben is a legendary activist and writer whose 1989 book The End of Nature introduced the problem of global warming to a general audience. Since then, he has been one of the world's leading environmental activists, taking major roles in the fossil fuel divestment movement and the campaign against the Keystone pipeline. In his latest book, The Flag, The Cross, and The Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened, McKibben looks at the Middle America he grew up in and how, beneath its image of cheery prosperity, it was accumulating moral debts that have yet to be paid. McKibben grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he proudly told tales of the American Revolution as a tour guide on the town common. But he came to understand that Lexington was a far more complicated place than its mythology told him. While the town is a bastion of liberalism, and in his youth the residents came out to support Vietnam war protesters, at the same time it was deliberately keeping out affordable housing and making sure only the existing white residents saw the benefit of its skyrocketing property values. McKibben's book retells the history of his suburb and wrestles with its role in creating present crises. 

Today Bill McKibben joins us to discuss:

• The peaceful suburb of his childhood and how he came to discover its dark side
• The morally complicated role of the church in American history
• The debts that U.S. suburbanites have accrued through destructive carbon emissions
• The very disturbing sight on Paul Revere's famous "midnight ride" that is never mentioned
• Why Jimmy Carter is underrated and the terrible path that America set itself on by electing Ronald Reagan in 1980
• Why Baby Boomers aren't all terrible and why we should involve older people in political activism

Nathan's article discussing Sam Walton's memoir is here. Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" speech is here. More on "where Mark hung in chains" can be read here. 

Find more about Third Act, McKibben's organization for older Americans looking to get involved in activism, here.