The Beinart Notebook

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The Israeli elections were yesterday.

To discuss the results, our first guest is Sami Abu Shehada, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and former Knesset member who led the Balad Party until he withdrew from this year’s elections after having been disqualified by Israel’s Central Elections Committee.

Our second guest is Avrum Burg, a former Knesset speaker who has undergone a remarkable ideological journey and now questions Jewish statehood itself. We discuss the results of the Israeli elections and the nature of the Israeli political system.

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Our guest is Aharon Dardik. Aharon is an Israeli-American ex-settler, and conscientious objector to the Israeli military. He was a nonviolent activist at Columbia University. He was recently detained by the Israeli forces while doing protective presence for West Bank Palestinians during olive harvest.

We discussed:

Dardik’s experience attempting protective presence

Trying to converse with soldiers

Dardik’s childhood on a settlement and how he outgrew it

Interacting with loved ones who still support Israel

Whether Israeli settlers should leave or remain, but as equals

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 Assal Rad, author of Don’t Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide. We talked about how American media has covered Israel-Palestine, about recent efforts by Israel’s supporters to gain ownership of key institutions in American media, and about alternative media and how it is shaping the American foreign policy debate.

We discuss:

How the problem is not limited to Fox News

The methods employed by media that support Israel

How the internet has changed our access and relationship to information

The use and avoidance of terms like “genocide” and “Palestine”

Contextualizing Oct 7th

Our guest today is Swedish journalist, Göran Rosenberg. He’s the author of A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, Israel, a Personal History, and Another Zionism, Another Judaism.

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 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 today are UC-Berkeley History Professor Ussama Makdisi and UCLA English Professor Saree Makdisi talking about their new book, Anti-Palestinianism.

We discuss:

How the charge of antisemitism is used to stifle pro-Palestinianism

Academic suppression of the pro-Palestinian movement

Permission to narrate

How can there be reconciliation with a society that largely supported genocide?

The potential impact on Palestinians of China’s ascendancy and America’s decline

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 are two of the most sophisticated and fearless internal critics of Israeli politics and society: Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst for Israel at the International Crisis Group and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, and Raef Zreik, a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.

We discuss:

Israel’s attempt to ban Palestinian candidates in the upcoming election

The absence of a true left in Israel

The attempt to bring West Bank apartheid to all of Israel

How NAZA finally broke through the Israeli bubble

Living post-10/7 as a Palestinian citizen of Israel