This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guests will be Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon, co-authors of the new book, The Future is Peace. Aziz, a Palestinian born in the West Bank, saw his brother die from injuries sustained while held in an Israeli prison. Maoz, a Jewish Israeli born on a kibbutz near Gaza, lost both of his parents on October 7, 2023. Somehow, both men have turned their suffering into activism for justice and peace. We’ll talk about their personal journeys, about the challenges of joint Jewish and Palestinian struggle and about how they maintain their faith in a better future in Palestine and Israel despite the horrors occurring there every day.

Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

Dan Shapiro’s comments on the Iran 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!), Tanvi Misra writes about the relationship between the denial of the right of asylum and the rise of authoritarianism.

In The Nation, Ahmad Ibsais argues that under international law, Israel may be committing genocide not only in Gaza but in the West Bank as well.

Gavin Newsom endorses Donald Trump’s blockade of Cuba.

Appearances

On April 20, I’ll be speaking at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.

On April 23, I’ll be interviewing Mohammed R. Mhawish, the award-winning Palestinian journalist and writer from Gaza City, at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism.

On April 26, I’ll be speaking at Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland.

On May 6, I’ll be speaking to the Joint Christian Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

There’s been a fair amount of attention recently to the way the Democratic politicians are shifting in their attitudes towards Israel vote on weapons sales in Congress, and also a number of statements by Democratic presidential candidates on the subject of weapon sales.

But one of the things that I think doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves is the attitudes of the kinds of people who would be advising the next Democratic president, the foreign policy class that exists inside the Democratic Party, because it’s quite common for politicians to say one thing while they’re campaigning—presidential candidates in particular—and then to do other things in office. And part of the reason is because of the people they surround themselves with.

And in the Democratic Party in particular, there’s a history of presidential candidates sounding more dovish when they run but then being more hawkish in office. So, Jimmy Carter, for instance, questioned the whole paradigm of the Cold War, and yet, when he was elected in 1976, he chose as his national security advisor, a kind of Cold War hawk, as a visionary of Brzezinski.

Barack Obama, in 2008, was elected in part because he had opposed the Iraq War. That’s one of the reasons he defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. But then Obama turned around and chose Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, and she was more hawkish than he was, as were a number of his advisors.

So, I think it’s important to look at the kinds of people who would be advising the next Democratic president if we actually want to see a real shift in U.S. policy. And in that regard, I think it’s worth looking at a recent podcast interview done with a guy named Dan Shapiro.

Now, I say this not because I want to single out Dan Shapiro as a bad guy or anything like that. I’m sure he’s not a bad guy. I don’t like to kind of attack people in any ad hominem way. I’m sure he’s sincere in his views. But I think what Dan Shapiro says in this podcast interview just illustrates how, for a lot of the kinds of people who would likely go into the next Democratic administration and help to shape policy on Israel, that they have a set of views on Israel policy that actually are radically different from where the Democratic Party base is, and really actually would continue overwhelmingly the same kinds of policies of virtual unconditional support for Israel that I think have been so destructive.

And if the Democratic Party doesn’t actually face that and really try to cultivate people with a different view, I think the next Democratic Party president’s policies won’t be very different. Now, Dan Shapiro was on Barack Obama’s National Security Council. Then he was Obama’s ambassador to Israel for quite a number of years. Then Biden appointed him as the kind of special envoy to Israel dealing with the Iran issue.

Now, Dan Shapiro did a recent conversation with Mark Dubowitz. Mark, on a podcast that a guy named Dan Senior has called Call Me Back. Mark Dubowitz is probably, like, the most high-profile person who’s been pushing for maximum pressure, and indeed war, from any think tank in Washington in recent years. What’s really remarkable to listen to this guy, Dubowitz, who is kind of like, in some ways, like, perhaps the most prominent hawkish think tanker in Washington.

And Dan Shapiro, who’s a Democrat, it’s not about how much they disagree about, but it’s really the extraordinary amount on which they agree. They do disagree about the war—this current war. Shapiro says he thinks that it didn’t have a strategy, and that Trump didn’t explain to the American people, and he didn’t get support from America’s allies. But what’s striking about listening to this conversation between someone, again, who’s on the most hardline, hawkish edge of the Washington debate, you know, someone who would be on the right wing of the Trump administration, and a very prominent Democrat, the kind of person who could get a very prominent job making Israel policy, is that they agree so much more than they disagree, that Shapiro doesn’t question any of the fundamental legal or moral assumptions that underline this war.

So, for instance, when Dubowitz and Shapiro talk about this question of Trump’s decision to blockade Iranian ports, that Shapiro says, to do—I’m quoting—to do that properly is a massive naval force project that will take time, right? So, he’s saying, basically, this would be really difficult to do, right? There’s no discussion of whether it’s morally or legally acceptable for the United States to basically impose collective punishment on the entire population of Iran.

That Shapiro says that he opposes this war, but he says that he supported the 12-day War against Iran, and he says that there are other times when I think military force by the United States against Iran was and could be appropriate. Indeed, in talking about Israel’s military attacks on Iran, and also against the Palestinians, Shapiro says, Israel has a long-standing practice. It’s sometimes derided, but I think it has some value called mowing the grass. When a threat is present, you can’t necessarily be able to prevent it from periodically reconstituting, but you hit it as you need to hit it.

This is a Democrat, someone who was in the Obama and Biden administrations; the kind of person who could have a prominent position in the next Democratic administration, who is speaking about this collective punishment of the entire population, about mowing the grass, the most dehumanizing language that you can use; no conversation whatsoever about the humanitarian cost this imposes on ordinary Iranians, about the horror of what this policy of mowing the grass has meant for people in Lebanon, and Israel has attacked again and again and again over the years, or what it’s meant for people in Gaza, right? Where, again, just to rehearse the obvious, you have the International Association of Genocide Scholars saying that Israel committed genocide.

It’s just striking and deeply, deeply worrying to see that there are very prominent people who could likely populate the next Democratic administration whose disagreements with the most hawkish people in Washington is really comparatively at the margins. There are differences of tactics, but there’s no raising of fundamental questions, right? It seems to me the thing that we should be asking of anybody who wants to be involved in U.S. policy towards Iran or Israel in the next democratic administration is, first of all, that you never, ever talk about these military actions without centering the question of the cost to human beings, right? If you think that there is some value to military action, you always have to face it and look straight in the eye, the human lives that will be lost, right, which get no discussion in this conversation.

Secondly, that you should never discuss something like U.S. military or Israeli military action against Iran or Lebanon or anyone else without centering questions of international law. It is a profound and fundamental violation of international law to attack a country that does not pose an imminent threat. I actually think Iran poses no threat at all to the United States, let alone an imminent threat, and no actual genuine threat to Israel, which is vastly more powerful.

To have these conversations without centering international law, and indeed U.S. law, in which presidents don’t have the right to launch wars without Congressional support, it seems to me is to fundamentally buy into the set of assumptions that have cost the United States and cost the people in the Middle East so, so deeply.

And thirdly, that anyone who wants to be considered seriously for a position in a Democratic administration in the future should, if they’re going to talk about the question of Iran’s nuclear program, they should also talk about Israel’s nuclear program. It’s just nonsensical to talk about the danger of Iran having nuclear weapons, when it has no nuclear weapons, and not mention the fact that Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons and is not even a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The only justifiable kind of foundation for that would be to suggest that somehow Iran is uniquely aggressive in a way that Israel is not. But again, how can anyone possibly seriously argue that Iran is somehow uniquely aggressive in the Middle East, when, again, Israel has been now accused of genocide by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, when it’s displaced a million people from its homes in Lebanon. So, it seems to me these should be the foundations, I think, for this kind of conversation that we should expect from Democratic foreign policy figures: that the centering of the human lives that are lost when the United States goes to war, a centering of questions of international U.S. law, and no conversation about the nuclear issue without also a discussion of the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons as well.

All of this is so completely absent from this conversation that Dan Shapiro has with Mark Dubas that it seems to me a kind of a case study in what we need to make sure is avoided in terms of the kinds of people who enter into the next Democratic administration and make policy towards the Middle East.

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