This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com

Trita Parsi is an expert on Iran, author, and executive vice president of The Quincy Institute. I asked him to help make sense of the current situation in Iran.

Note: Apologies for the poor video quality here. I’m making do with spotty WiFi.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

There will be no Zoom call this week. We’ll return next week.

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 reports on efforts by Israeli universities to lure American Jewish students alienated by pro-Palestinian activism on American campuses.

Last week, I spoke on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun Synagogue in New York.

On January 19, I’ll be speaking at the Free University of Brussels.

On January 26, I’ll be speaking with Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina.

On January 27, I’ll be hosting a fundraiser near Asheville for the Gaza Soup Kitchen, a grassroots initiative, led by the people of Gaza, which serves hot meals to thousands daily across ten kitchen sites. Ninety-nine percent of funds raised go directly to feeding and supporting the people of Gaza. Register here: https://givebutter.com/FairviewNC (donation amount is $100 and address to be provided after registration).

See you next week,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there are really remarkable protests taking place in Iran, and I think the first thing to say about them is that they deserve the support of progressives because progressives should care about human rights.

And there are pro-American regimes that can commit horrific violations of human rights, and there are anti-American regimes that can commit horrific violations of human rights. This is not a new story. You can go back to Joseph Stalin to realize that’s the case, and also to see that there have been times historically, where some progressives have forgotten that, and judged regimes less on the way they treat their people than how they treat the United States. And that seems to me, it’s as wrong to give countries a pass when they brutally violate human rights because they’re anti-American, as it is to give them a pass when they brutally violate human rights, because they’re pro-American, if you’re someone who cares and believes in the universality of human rights.

But saying that the Iranian protesters were protesting against this really, really autocratic and brutal regime deserve the support of progressives around the world—all people around the world—doesn’t answer the question of what the United States should do. It’s really important to remember that just because people hate their regime doesn’t mean they want a foreign country to attack their regime, let alone occupy their regime.

You know, many Iraqis—probably most Iraqis—loathed Saddam Hussein. It didn’t mean that they wanted the United States to occupy Iraq. And the United States learned the hard way—or those Americans who didn’t know beforehand learned the hard way—that Iraqis could both loathe Saddam Hussein and also loathe and fight against an American occupation.

And it’s also just important to remember that even if you could establish—and I don’t know how one could establish—the fact that Iranians might want some kind of American military intervention in their country, that there are questions of international law here that have global repercussions, right? Which is to say, even if you could establish that people in a certain country wanted, you know, wanted an attack by another country—and again, I don’t know how you would do that—one of the things we’ve clearly learned in the last 20-25 years is the way in which when one country, when the United States gives itself the right to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of another country, that emboldens other powers, you know, China and Russia in particular, to do exactly the same thing.

It’s different when you have the support of the United Nations, right, because support of the United Nations suggests that you have, essentially, some kind of consensus among many countries around the world. Then that is a check on the inclination of various powers—the U.S. in Iraq, or, you know, Russia in Georgia, Ukraine—to basically come up with some spurious claim to justify its imperial interests, right? So, it would be one thing if there was some kind of international UN support for some kind of intervention in Iraq. But I think that’s fundamentally different than the United States doing it on its own.

And the other thing I think is worth thinking about when we think about what we would want if we were Iranians, what kind of support we might want from countries around the world, is to imagine ourselves in their shoes. And I actually think that’s a little bit easier for many Americans than it was before Donald Trump. Now, obviously, the United States remains a much, much freer country than Iran does. But it doesn’t take that much imagination to imagine that if Donald Trump got his way, he could move the United States towards being the kind of really brutal dictatorship that Iran is today—a country that would literally not just kill the occasional person in ICE raids in Minneapolis, but actually might kill hundreds and hundreds of people on the streets. I think anyone who thinks Donald Trump is incapable of that is completely delusional, right?

So, I think one of the questions that Americans should ask ourselves is: were we in the desperate circumstances that people are in Iran in today, in open revolt on the streets against our government, what would we want other governments to do? How would we want them to respond? I suspect that most Americans would welcome statements of support, and might even welcome certain kinds of targeted sanctions, if they were aimed at the regime and not the population at large. But even in those extreme circumstances, Americans would be very, very reluctant. Even the Americans who hate Donald Trump the most would be very, very reluctant to support foreign military intervention in the United States.

And in a way, I think this thinking about this, thinking about Americans in the situation of Iranians, is a way of kind of countering some of the American exceptionalism that has done so much damage to American foreign policy in recent decades, and to American domestic policy: the thinking that Americans are somehow immune from what happens in other countries. And thinking about what we would want were we in the position of Iranians, I think can help us sort through this challenging question of how we emphatically endorse the cause that Iranians are fighting for, but also show wisdom and humility, and don’t succumb to lawlessness when we think about how the United States can support those efforts.

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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com

Our guest is one of the foremost scholars of US policy towards Latin America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian, Greg Grandin, author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and America, América: A New History of the New World.

We talked about how the Trump administration’s abduction of Nicolás Maduro fits into the long-history of US imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the world.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This week’s zoom call will be at a special time, Wednesday at 1pm ET. Our guest will be one of the foremost scholars of US policy towards Latin America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian Greg Grandin, author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and America, América: A New History of the New World. We’ll talk about how the Trump administration’s abduction of Nicolas Maduro fits into the long-history of US imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the world.

Cited in Today’s Video

The attacks on Zohran Mamdani for repealing two orders by Eric Adams related to antisemitism and Israel.

The texts of the Israel-related orders Mamdani repealed.

A Philosopher for All Seasons, a film about Yeshayahu Leibowitz.

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!), Aron Wander and Nathan Goldman discuss Jewish sources about rebuking other Jews.

Israel bans Doctors without Borders and other NGOs from operating in Gaza.

On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan and on January 26 with Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina.

On January 27, I’ll be hosting a fundraiser near Asheville for the Gaza Soup Kitchen, a grassroots initiative, led by the people of Gaza, that serves hot meals to thousands daily across ten kitchen sites. Born from a vow to ensure no neighbor grows hungry, their mission continues in honor of founder Mahmoud Almadhoun, guided by his word, Mostamreen, “we will continue,” said right before he was killed by a drone strike. 99% of funds raised go directly to feeding and supporting the people of Gaza. Register here: https://givebutter.com/FairviewNC (donation amount is $100 and address to be provided after registration).

See you on Wednesday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, Zohran Mamdani has just been inaugurated as mayor of New York and, unsurprisingly, he’s already under attack from establishment Jewish organizations. And these attacks are really predictable and, honestly, they’re really brain-dead, and, in a way, just engaging with them at all is kind of depressing because I think they serve, in a lot of ways, not as good faith arguments, but just basically as a way to, you know, create a political headache and a kind of cloud over Mamdani, and basically make it harder for him to focus on the work that he actually wants to do. But I still think, despite that, it’s worth explaining why these arguments just don’t make any sense. And they’re all basically based on this fundamental incorrect conflation of Jews as a group of people with the state of Israel.

So, the first thing that Mamdani did was he repealed an order by his predecessor, Eric Adams, to kind of make the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, kind of encoded in New York City policy and law. And the IHRE definition of antisemitism has very little support from actual scholars of antisemitism, especially scholars who work on antisemitism and Israel-Palestine. Its major supporters are the Israeli government and its kind of allied pro-Israel organizations around the world. And you can see why it has so little scholarly support when you actually look at it, right? You can see why it makes so much sense that actually Mamdani would have repealed it, right?

So, it has these examples of antisemitism. So, basically, if you do these things, this is like prima facie evidence that you are antisemitic. One of them is denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination—I’m quoting—e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor. But the State of Israel is explicitly premised on the idea that, basically, that Jews should rule, right? That this is a state for Jews, in which Jews have superior rights to Palestinians.

This is not a secret, right? David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel, said, this country has to have an 80% Jewish majority, because otherwise Jews couldn’t be sure that Jews would rule. And it was because of this, in large measure, that for more than half of the Palestinians who lived in Palestine under the British Mandate were expelled when Israel was created in 1948 in order to create this large Jewish majority. Many of them were expelled before the Arab armies even attacked Israel in May 1948.

And then Israel created a very different set of laws for the Palestinians that remained vis-à-vis, versus those of Jews, right? So Palestinian citizens were under military law from 1948 to 1966. When Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it took control of millions of Palestinians who didn’t have the right of citizenship and the right to vote. It’s for all these reasons that Israel has now been declared an apartheid state by the world’s leading human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and its own leading human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Yesh Din, right?

So, it’s not antisemitic to say that Israel has a racist character, that it treats non-Jews—Palestinians in particular—in a fundamentally different way any more than it would be, say, it was an anti-Afrikaner bigotry to say the South African government is based on racist principles. Or if you were to say that the Chinese state, as under the Communist Party, is fundamentally racist because it treats non-Han Chinese people, for instance, in Xinjiang—Uyghurs—in a fundamentally different way. Or if you said that the state of Iran is fundamentally racist because it treats non-Muslims differently than it treats Muslims.

Now, one might disagree with these claims, but there’s nothing bigoted about them. You’re not an anti-Chinese bigot if you say the Chinese state under the Communist Party is racist, or you’re not anti-Muslim if you say that the Islamic regime in Iran is bigoted in the way it treats non-Muslims, right? Attacks on the nature of a state are fundamentally different than bigotry towards a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group.

A second example in the IHRA definition is, quote, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, right? But again, why is there something antisemitic about comparing Israel to the Nazis? Why is it that we can compare the Trump administration all day and night to the Nazis, and lots of other governments that we think are doing bad things, right, but we can’t compare Israel to the Nazis? Again, the examples may be good, or they may not be, depending on the specific analogy you’re drawing, just as it could be with Trump or not. But why is it an act of anti-Jewish bigotry, right?

In fact, there’s a long, long history of Israelis invoking these very analogies. One of my heroes, Yeshayahu Leibowitz—I just watched this wonderful film about him a couple of nights ago—one of Israel’s most important kind of social critics and philosophers and theologians over many, many, many decades, literally was associated with the term, with using the term Judeo-Nazi to describe Israel’s behavior towards Palestinians. He used it all the time, right, as a way of trying to suggest, not that he said that Israel was setting up gas chambers, right, but that there were things that Israel was doing that had something in common with the way the Nazis behaved, just like fascist or authoritarian or racist governments often have certain things in common, right? Yeshayahu Leibowitz, to state the obvious, was not an antisemite, and the fact that he used the term Judeo-Nazi was not evidence that he was practicing antisemitism.

The other thing that Mamdani’s under attack for doing is by repealing this order that basically said that New York could not divest from or in any way sanction the state of Israel. And again, but you see in this order that Mamdani has now repealed exactly the same conflation of saying that there’s something anti-Jewish about basically taking policies that would divest city money from the state of Israel. So, the Adams administration order starts by saying: Whereas it is unlawful for an agency to deny our contract because of the actual or perceived race, creed, color, national origin, age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or alien or citizenship status of the owners of the bidder or proposer. And then it goes on to say: whereas that, you can’t divest city funds from Israel.

But again, this makes no sense, right? If the state of New York were to say, we’re not going to invest anymore our pension funds in Sudan because they’re committing terrible human rights abuses, right? Would anyone say this was an anti-Black bigotry? Or if New York imposed sanctions and divested from China? From all I know, New York may be doing that already. Certainly, the U.S. government has lots of sanctions against countries like Sudan, China, many other countries that accuses of human rights abuses. Would anyone say this was an anti- act of Chinese bigotry? And if the Chinese organizations in New York said, this is anti-Chinese bigotry because you were divesting funds to protest and oppose what China was doing in Xinjiang or Hong Kong, or wherever, would anyone take that claim seriously? No, I don’t think they would make that claim because it’s so ridiculous. And in fact, it would put themselves at risk to associate themselves as an ethnic, racial group in New York City with the actions of this state.

Now, the idea of divesting from Israel is based on the idea that Israel is committing grave human rights violations against the Palestinians, and that this would be a tactic, a strategy, in order to try to get to stop doing that. Now, you can debate whether you think Israel is committing those human rights abuses, and whether you think this would be a good strategy to get it to stop. But it has nothing to do with your attitude towards Jewish people because Jews and Israel are not the same thing, right? This is why these debates are so painful, because this should be obvious, right? But the entire attack on Mamdani is based on this constant conflation of the two.

So, you know, the Anti-Defamation League, and the New York Board of Rabbis, and the UJA, they all basically attacked Mamdani and said, quote, singling Israel out for sanction, parenthetical—Mamdani’s not singling Israel out. Adams singled Israel out by basically saying that this was one country, as far as I know, the only country that under New York City law now you were not allowed to boycott, right? So, he was singling Israel out for an exemption against the idea that there could be any kind of boycott based on human rights concerns, right? So, Mamdani is just basically saying that no state should have an exemption. So, he’s not singling Israel out.

Anyway, they go on to say, singling Israel out for sanction is not the way to make Jewish New Yorkers feel included and safe. But again, the State of Israel is one thing. Jewish New Yorkers are another. There are a lot of Jewish New Yorkers. I’m one of them. Some of them hate Mamdani and really support Israel, and will be very angry at what he’s done, and will think this is antisemitism. But there are a lot of other Jewish New Yorkers who, like Mamdani, supported him, and actually agree with his views about Israel, right? So, it’s just nonsensical to equate Jewish New Yorkers as a group of people with the state of Israel.

And in fact, doing that again and again and again actually undermines Jewish safety because it sends the message that people who have a problem with the state of Israel, therefore, also should have a problem with Jewish New Yorkers because, essentially, they are one and the same. And then if someone actually, God forbid, does take out their hostility towards the state of Israel against Jewish New Yorkers, we rightly accuse them of bigotry because Jewish New Yorkers are not responsible for what the state of Israel does. And yet, it is exactly that conflation that you see in these attacks on Mamdani, which is the reason that they’re so nonsensical and so harmful, actually, not only to the effort to basically deal with Israel’s abuses of Palestinian human rights, but also to the effort to keep Jews in New York safe.

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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com

Our guest is Philip Gordon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. We talked about the Biden-Harris administration’s actions regarding Israel and Gaza, Kamala Harris’s statements about Gaza during the campaign, and what policies Democrats should pursue toward Israel-Palestine in the future.

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

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This week’s zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Philip Gordon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. We’ll talk about the Biden-Harris administration’s actions regarding Israel and Gaza, Kamala Harris’s statements about Gaza during the campaign, how she might have governed as president and what policies Democrats should pursue toward Israel-Palestine in the future.

Cited in Today’s Video

Bari Weiss pulls a 60 Minutes report on Trump administration deportations to El Salvador.

Donald Trump has reportedly said he expects better treatment by CBS now that David Ellenson and Weiss are in charge.

Weiss’ Free Press co-hosted a Trump administration inauguration party with Elon Musk’s X.

Weiss’ resignation letter from The New York Times.

The ACLU denounced Weiss’ efforts to punish pro-Palestinian professors when she was a student at Columbia.

The Trump administration leaked the news that it was withholding funds from Columbia to Weiss’ Free Press.

Weiss’ support for Israel is reportedly one of the reasons Ellison hired her at CBS.

Things to Read

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

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane talks to immigration expert Samah Sisay about how Trump’s new travel ban targets Palestinians.

Tareq Baconi on how the genocide in Gaza radicalized the world.

On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan.

Reader Response

Benjamin Langer responded to last week’s video about banning the phrase “globalize the intifada.” He writes:

The word in the phrase that troubles me is not “intifada,” but “globalize.” If, as you say, “intifada” can mean a call for either violent or non-violent uprising, then globalizing the intifada could mean bringing civil disobedience and political pressure to international spaces, or could mean bringing violence to international Israel-associated targets. It’s not a stretch for many people to consider a synagogue with a JNF billboard outside, or a demonstration like Toronto’s 50,000-strong (roughly 1/4 of Toronto’s Jews) Walk For Israel as Israel-associated enough. To your Ukraine example, if people were using a phrase in Ukrainian solidarity protests that left open for interpretation that Russian-Canadian or Russian-American people or political and cultural institutions, were legitimate targets for violence, I think there would also be significant concern.

I don’t think that “globalize the intifada” should be banned, and I think that people saying it contributes a vanishingly small fraction of the added risk to Jews compared to the now innumerable and extensively documented Israeli war crimes paired with overwhelming diaspora Jewish institutional support for their necessity. The phrase is the voice of the rage, not its source! But I wonder how the movement could do better to be more surgical in its approach. A phrase that opens it up to culpability for those who take violence into their own hands provides easy ammunition for the well-organized forces of censure and suppression.

A Holiday Giveaway

Over the years I’ve had some requests to make certain interviews to be free and shareable for all in their entirety. So, I’m going to permanently remove the paywall for 8 posts from 2025. The first is my recent conversation with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove as there have already been many requests for that one. For the rest, we’ll go with your most popular choices in the comments to this post. (Please look at other comments and if your preference has already been nominated, you can have your vote counted by just tapping like on that comment.)

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about CBS News, which is now under the control of Bari Weiss, and in particular about this segment that was done by 60 Minutes, which is the kind of flagship CBS News program about people who were deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador—Venezuelans who were deported and then who were treated really, really terribly there. And that this was all ready to go, this segment, and Bari Weiss stepped in, and, reportedly, she said that they shouldn’t air it unless they had an interview with Stephen Miller.

And it produced a big furor, I think in part because it’s one of a number of series of things that have happened since this guy, David Ellison, who runs Paramount Skydance became the owner of CBS, and then brought in Bari Weiss as head of CBS News, which suggests that—although CBS isn’t full-on Fox, in the sense that it’s just doing pure propaganda sycophancy for Trump—it is really trying not to offend the Trump administration in various different ways. In fact, it has been reported that Trump has privately said that he believed David Ellison and his father, Larry Ellison, would make CBS more sympathetic to him, and that he thought under Bari Weiss, that CBS would be more sympathetic. CBS announced after the Homeland Secretary, Kristi Noem, complained that they would now not kind of cut interviews with administration officials, but air them in full.

And this is also part of a larger dynamic we’ve seen among Bari Weiss, even before she took over CBS News, when she was still just running The Free Press, this outlet she created, of kind of moving into someone who’s kind of, I would say, having a cozier relationship with the Trump administration and the people around Trump. So, for instance, The Free Press actually co-hosted an inauguration party for Trump’s second inaugural that was co-hosted with Elon Musk’s X.

And there is, on its face, something really deeply ironic about this, right? You have Bari Weiss running CBS News as CBS News is becoming kind of part of this authoritarian oligarchy that Donald Trump is trying to create, of kind of sympathetic oligarchs who will control media enterprises in ways that will basically to a large degree, do his bidding. And Bari Weiss seems to be playing a role in that.

And yet, Bari Weiss, in an earlier part of her career, kind of really made her name as someone who spoke out very, very forcibly about free speech, and about not being cowed, journalists not being cowed from taking unpopular opinions. She kind of famously, or infamously, depending on how you looked at it, kind of resigned from the New York Times. And when she left the New York Times, she wrote that it was no longer upholding ‘the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society’; that ‘self-censorship has become the norm’; and that ‘stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences.’

And so, now you have this very ironic situation, right, where CBS News seems to be really choosing stories to satisfy the most narrow—and most dangerously narrow—of audiences in an authoritarian president, right, to make him not upset because the Ellison family still has these business interests that they want Donald Trump to be taking care of.

It seems to me that one way of understanding what’s happened over the arc of Bari Weiss’s career is that Bari Weiss always made an exception on the question of free speech for the question of Palestinian rights. She was really a kind of almost a paradigmatic case of what people would call the kind of Palestine exception, of people who speak very, very vocally about the need to have a wide range of opinions, to not be cowed by powerful interests when it comes to voicing controversial views, but—when it comes to Palestinian rights—take a very, very different view.

And, it seems to me, the lesson that we’ve seen, that we can trace with the arc of Bari Weiss’s career is that this Palestine exception doesn’t remain with Palestine. That when you make that exception to the principles, to beliefs about free speech and censorship, ultimately what you end up doing is becoming actually a supporter of a much broader form of censorship and an assault on free speech. And I think we can see that in the arc of Bari Weiss’s career.

So, Bari Weiss, when Bari Weiss was literally just a student, she was involved in this effort that was funded by this pro-Israel group called the David Project to essentially try to get pro-Palestinian professors disciplined or fired. So, it was a kind of early indication of the kind of much larger assault on pro-Palestinian speech on campus that we’ve now seen in such dramatic ways in the last couple of years. And Bari Weiss was literally, and her efforts were denounced by the American Civil Liberties Union as a threat to free speech.

And it seems to me that one of the legacies of this, if you look at her career, is that her whole way of thinking about what threatens free speech has been very influenced by this experience of making an exception for Israel, which is that Bari Weiss has very generally tended to describe threats to free speech as coming from below and not from above. That her career has been involved in suggesting that the threats from free speech come not from powerful corporations and government, but from the kind of the woke mob, right?

And I think that’s partly her orientation, is that way because, in fact, the places that you find the most pro-Palestinian sentiment have been coming from below, right, from activist organizations on university campuses in general. And you have more support from Israel in kind of positions of greater power in American society. So, Weiss’s entire, I think, orientation around the question of free speech, which is to be much more concerned about the way in which free speech is menaced by campus activists or people who are beholden to woke ‘mobs’ rather than being concerned about the way free speech is menaced by the government or by large corporations, is precisely because, actually, she has such a blind spot on the question of Palestinian free speech that she’s been much more attuned to the way in which free speech can be threatened from below than from above.

And I think this has been exacerbated in recent years because the days in which, I think, if you’re a very, very zealous supporter of Israel—as she is—that you could believe that you were going to win the argument for Israel in the marketplace of ideas, I think that’s become much harder to sustain in the last few years. As we’ve seen, American public opinion has moved quite sharply in both parties, among the masses of both parties, in an anti-Israel direction.

And so, if your primary focus is—and Bari Weiss has been very open about this is one of the defining elements of her career—is maintaining American support for Israel. If that’s your primary focus, in a situation in which American public opinion is moving sharply away from Israel, essentially, the only way that you’re going to be able to maintain this unconditional support, to do that work, is to move closer into relationship with oligarchic power, corporate leaders like the Ellisons, who themselves have been very, very explicit about how they’re motivated by their support for Israel. Larry Ellison, David Ellison’s father, gave the largest donation ever to the Friends of the IDF. It was reported that that was one of the reasons he chose Bari Weiss to head CBS News, was precisely because of her support for Israel. And, of course, to be now in alliance with the Trump administration itself, which has used these really extraordinarily repressive tactics to try to shut down pro-Palestinian speech.

So, the point that I’m making is that this Palestine exception—I think we can see in Bari Weiss’s career a really good illustration of how the pro-Palestine exception doesn’t remain just in Palestine. Because when you make an exception for the free speech of people who care about Palestinian rights, and your desire is to keep them from gaining a foothold in American politics, especially in this moment, you end up thinking about free speech, and you end up cultivating a set of alliances with people who are interested in shutting down free speech—not only on the question of Palestinian freedom, but interested in shutting it down much more generally because they are part of an authoritarian effort.

And so, now you see Bari Weiss essentially in a kind of de facto alliance or coalition with the Trump administration in its efforts not only to stifle pro-Palestinian protests, but to stifle criticism of the Trump administration in general. And I think we can see a clear line of how you get from this exception made for Palestinian free speech to a larger opposition to free speech in general, and someone who used to speak very, very, you know, boldly about freedom of speech, about a liberal society, about heterodox views, now at this point in her career, essentially becoming part of this oligarchic, authoritarian media system.

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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com

Our guests this week are two remarkable people, Musya Herzog and Meyer Labin. Musya is a neuropsychologist who grew up in the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Meyer is a Yiddish-language journalist and writer from the Satmar community. They talk about the discourse about Israel and Zionism in ultra-Orthodox communities, and what it might take to make them more sympathetic to Palestinian rights.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank

A way to directly help victims of the massacre in Sydney

This week’s zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM. Our guests will be two remarkable people, Musya Herzog and Meyer Labin. Musya is a neuropsychologist who grew up in the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Meyer is a Yiddish-language journalist and writer from the Satmar community. Both are now active in Smol Emuni, the religious left. They’ll talk about the discourse about Israel and Zionism in ultra-Orthodox communities, and what it might take to make them more sympathetic to Palestinian rights.

Cited in Today’s Video

The premier of New South Wales calls for banning “globalize the intifada.”

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

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!), Samuel Stein reports on Zohran Mamdani’s looming struggle with the real estate industry.

Gaza no longer faces famine. But its people are still hungry.

Israel is preparing for a permanent presence in Gaza.

On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan.

A Holiday Giveaway

We’ve had many requests to open up certain interviews, so they are free and shareable for all. So, this holiday season, I’m going to permanently remove the paywall for 8 posts from 2025. The first is my recent conversation with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove. For the rest, we’ll go with your most popular choices in the comments to this post. (Please look at other comments and if your preference has already been nominated, you can have your vote counted by liking that comment.) If this goes well we’ll make it an annual tradition.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So now, a week or so after the terrible massacre in Sydney, Australia, the Australian government is considering doing some sensible things, like limiting the number of guns that any person in Australia can own, but also considering doing some things that would be really fundamental violations of people’s rights to free speech. Among them, the Premier of New South Wales, the Australian state that encompasses Sydney, said that he wants to ban the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

Now, this is really stupid and dangerous at a number of levels. First of all, does anyone really think that banning the phrase “globalize the intifada” would have stopped this father and son, who were evidently connected to ISIS, from having committed this terrible attack? If these people had an ISIS ideology, banning the phrase “globalize the intifada” would do absolutely nothing to prevent them from committing this heinous terrorist attack.

On its face, it’s just ridiculous to think that banning this phrase would have done anything to prevent the terrible violence that occurred. But beyond that, it’s simply a grave violation of people’s basic, fundamental rights to say that you can’t use the phrase “globalize the intifada.” Intifada is an Arabic word that means uprising. It doesn’t mean uprising against Israel or Jews. It means uprising in general. The Arab Spring was often referred to as an intifada. An intifada, like any uprising, or any revolutionary political movement, can be violent or nonviolent. The first Palestinian intifada, in the late 1980s, was largely nonviolent. The second one, in the early 2000s, was much more violent. It can be violent or non-violent.

So, yes, “globalize the intifada” could be interpreted as a call for violence. It could also be interpreted as a call for an uprising that’s not violent. But even if “globalize the intifada” is interpreted, or meant by the speaker, as a call for violence, we allow people to call for violence on the streets all the time. Threatening violence against one individual person is one thing, but saying you support violence in general in some kind of political context is not at all. If people protest in defense of Ukraine’s right to fight against Russia, and protest for their government to give arms to Ukraine. They’re protesting in support of Ukrainians using violence in that cause.

The fact that it’s a call for violence doesn’t mean that it should be banned. Similarly, if someone goes out in a protest and says Israel has the right to defend itself; I stand with the IDF. In the wake of what Israel’s been doing in Gaza, those are endorsements of violence. People have the right to say those things. People have the right to participate in political speech, and in political speech around a whole range of different things. People often endorse violence of various forms that they believe will serve their political ends. Sometimes those calls for violence are odious, sometimes those calls for violence, as—let’s say in the case of Ukraine—might be ones that are widely supported. But the point is that people have the right to make that kind of political speech.

You know, I still remember when it was conservatives—including many Jewish conservatives— who would say, in response to what they felt like were the excesses of the ‘woke left’ who were trying to restrict speech on college campuses that would say again and again that speech is not violence. And that’s actually true. At least, speech that endorses violence in a broad sense, right? Again, I’m not talking about violence directed at a particular individual in a particular moment, but people who endorse the idea of violence in some broader sense, that speech is not in and of itself violence, right? If you say, I supported the Iraq War, right, that was a call for violence. It was not violence in and of itself. And this distinction is completely being collapsed in this case. Again, this is even if you assume the harshest interpretation of the phrase, which is that it is a call for violence, which some people who will use that phrase would strongly contest.

I think a lot of this reminds me of this now-famous book that Naomi Klein wrote called The Shock Doctrine, in which in the wake of a shock, in which people are traumatized and angry and afraid, you take advantage of that to push through things that you’ve been wanting to push through for ages, but you now have the political opportunity to do so in a time when reason often goes out the window, and you can appeal to people’s emotions and fears.

We saw this, of course, in the United States after September 11th with the passage of the Patriot Act. To a different degree, we saw this after October 7th in the United States, with a massive crackdown on free speech, of rights of people to protest on university campuses and elsewhere, that I think historians will look back—as they do in the post-911 era—as a period of very serious infractions of people’s rights to free speech, the firing of professors, the deportation of students on foreign visas because they had made politically controversial statements.

All of this stuff is now what is being attempted to be reenacted in Australia by Australian politicians and by pro-Israel organizations. None of this will do anything to make Australian Jews safer. What it will do is exactly what it did in the United States after September 11th, what it did in the 1950s in the hysteria and the wake in the McCarthy era during the Korean War, and what it has done since October 7th. It will do in Australia what it has done in America, which is not to make anyone safer, but to make the country less free.

And when you start to violate people’s basic rights to free speech for one political purpose, you open the door to people to start doing that in many, many arenas. So, if you can ban the phrase “globalize the intifada” because people find that phrase threatening, and they say that speech that could support violence is in itself violence, you are opening the door to lots and lots of other people going around and trying to restrict your speech on the same grounds.

And that’s the way in which countries become less free. That is what has happened in the United States over the last 25 years, and I think Australians should think long and hard about whether they want to go down our path now in the wake of this terrible massacre in Sydney.

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Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer who grew up in Sydney, is the founding executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, a Jewish community organization founded to fight against antisemitism and all forms of racism, and to support Palestinian freedom and justice.