The Beinart Notebook

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I was honored to speak with the Hungarian-Canadian physician Gabor Maté. We’ve never talked before, but I’ve long been struck by the psychological insight he brings to discussions of Israel-Palestine and the Jewish experience.

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Our guest is children’s educator and entertainer Rachel Griffin-Accurso, better known as Ms. Rachel, who is often described as this generation’s Mr. Rogers. She has been outspoken on behalf of children in Gaza.

A new way to donate to people in Gaza.

Friday Zoom Call

This Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be the children’s educator and entertainer Rachel Griffin-Accurso, better known as Ms. Rachel, who is often described as this generation’s Mr. Rogers. We’ll talk about her decision— despite outside pressure— to denounce the killing and starving of children in Gaza. This conversation will be cosponsored with Jewish Currents.

Cited in Today’s Video

Richie Torres’ tweet about aid to Gaza.

Some of the voices who were right after October 7.

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!), Arielle Angel calls for new Jewish institutions in the wake of the genocide in Gaza.

Rashid Khalidi on why he cancelled his class at Columbia.

I talked to NPR’s The World about antisemitism, to B’Tselem’s Yuli Novak for the Foundation for Middle East Peace about their report accusing Israel of genocide and on CNN about US policy toward Gaza.

What the data actually says about antisemitism at Columbia.

Krystal Ball and Saager Engeti challenge Senator Elisa Slotkin on US policy toward Gaza.

Rajan Menon on the genocide debate.

David Polsky and Barnett Rubin on Tisha b’av in a time of genocide.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So last week, Richie Torres, who’s one of the most kind of well-known defenders of the Israeli government, tweeted something somewhat surprising. He tweeted, ‘the free world has a moral responsibility to Palestinians in distress. Flood Gaza with food.’ And I think it was just one illustration of this sense over the last week or so that a kind of dam has broken in American public discourse. It hasn’t yet changed U.S. policy, tragically, but that in mainstream media discourse and public discourse more generally, that people are much more willing to say things that they were reluctant to say in the past, that there is starvation in Gaza, that it is Israel’s fault, and that beyond that, that this slaughter and starvation, this assault on the people of Gaza, has to end, and that it’s immoral.

And I think this kind of dam breaking raises some really interesting questions for people who care about ending the starvation and slaughter, and more generally, who care about Palestinian freedom. And I’m not saying that Richie Torres is about to become part of a Palestinian movement for freedom, but the broader issue of people who come to these things late I think is something that now is very much on the table.

And I would say I have a few thoughts about the right way to respond to this. The first is that I think it’s worth being generous to people who come to realizations that one believes are morally correct, even if they come painfully late, and much, much later than one would like. And I take this vision partly because I feel like I have to, because I myself feel like I have been very painfully late to a lot of things that I now believe are true and didn’t just hold views that I now think are wrong and perhaps immoral, but actually championed them. And so, who am I basically to stand in judgment of someone who evolves slowly, more slowly than I would like, on a set of issues when I myself have done so and have needed the kind of forgiveness and understanding and grace of other people.

The second point is that I think pragmatically, if you look at moral movements that try to change U.S. policy, that to succeed, to gain the power to change policy, they have to swell beyond the initial group of activists and bring in people who may not be as morally pure as those people. But you need those growing numbers. You need these kinds of concentric circles, right?

If you think about the movement to end the war in Vietnam and the people who, by 1974, the Democrats in Congress who cut off military aid, I don’t think most of those people held that view a decade earlier in 1964 and 1965 when you started to see the first real protests against U.S. ground troops in Vietnam. They weren’t as morally pure. They weren’t as radical in their critique. But it was their entrance into this movement that ultimately gave it the political heft to make change. And so, I just think it’s counterproductive to say to people who come late to these things, sorry, basically, you know, you’re not welcome because you didn’t realize this earlier.

And beyond that, I think when you’re talking about politicians in particular, most politicians respond to political incentives. And so, the role of activists, of people of conscience, is to act to try to change the political incentives. And then you can’t really blame politicians for responding and shifting in terms of political incentives. I mean, it would be great if they were truly morally driven, but most will not be. And if you can change the political incentive so a politician who’s fundamentally concerned about winning reelection therefore does the right thing, then that’s a success. That’s what you’re supposed to do. And I don’t think it really makes a huge amount of sense to basically dwell on the fact that they came to this too late or that their motives were not pure.

But even as one, I think, kind of really welcomes people who are now kind of in more mainstream positions into recognizing things that people who were kind of in the pro-Palestine solidarity circles or kind of leftist circles recognized, you know, a year or two years ago, it’s also really, really important to remember and kind of elevate the voices of people who were correct initially, who said things early on that I think have turned out to be factually and morally correct. Because the danger is, if you don’t do that, then you kind of end up, you just replicate, you don’t change the kind of structure of discourse that exists in a lot of American foreign policy conversations, which is kind of radically unmeritocratic, right?

I mean, think about Iraq and Afghanistan. How many times have we seen on a debate about Iran or China or Russia or whatever, you see an interview with someone like John Bolton or someone like Lindsey Graham, and you think, surely there should be some consequence for these folks for having been wrong on these things. And it would make sense when you have another foreign policy question, especially a question about war and peace, that you might look to interview people who actually have a track record of being correct in their views about wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than recycling the same people who have a worldview that has turned out to be really, really disastrous.

And so, I think even as one welcomes people who are kind of more mainstream credentials, it’s really, really important to remember and honor and elevate those people who are more politically radical and whose political radicalism actually allowed them to say things very early on that I think have turned out to be absolutely morally and empirically correct, even though they were often not just marginalized, but kind of slandered and attacked for doing so, right.

So, I remember when rabbis for ceasefire started doing the first protest calling for a ceasefire and how harshly the calls for ceasefire were attacked not just on the right, but in mainstream Jewish circles and by the Biden administration and by most Democrats and many, many people in the mainstream media. Those people were right. You know, the student protesters who started protesting for a ceasefire and who said that you can’t fully understand the horror of the massacre of October 7th without understanding the structure of oppression and violence in which it took place, those people were right, and I think they’ve been validated by events since.

And I hate this line where people say, you know, they started protesting after October 7th, therefore they’re illegitimate. No, they were protesting right at the beginning because they could see, right, what…

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Our guest is New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg. We talk about the Democratic Party, the media, and the politics of Israel-Palestine in the age of Gaza and Trump.

Please consider supporting Medical Aid for Palestinians, which is trying to help Palestinians in Gaza and beyond.

Friday Zoom Call

This Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg. We’ll talk about Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party, and the politics of Israel-Palestine in the age of Gaza and Trump. Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

USAID, Cindy McCain of the World Food Program, and even Israel’s own officials refute the claim that Israel had to shut off aid to Gaza—and shut down the UN food distribution system— because Hamas was systematically stealing aid.

Nir Hasson’s report in Haaretz on Israel’s starvation of Gaza.

Gideon Shimoni’s Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa.

Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai’s blessing to his students in Tractate Berakhot of the Babylonian Talmud.

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!), Elisheva Goldberg writes about the Knesset’s effort to impeach Israel’s most prominent Palestinian legislator, Ayman Odeh.

I spoke to Public Radio’s “The World” about antisemitism and on CNN about the starvation in Gaza.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I talked to University of California at Berkeley historian Ussama Makdisi about being targeted by Congressional Republicans.

Alonso Gurmendi on the claim that Israel isn’t committing genocide because it could be killing more people.

When American Jewish groups called out a genocide, in Myanmar.

Correction

In last week’s video I said that Kishinev (now called Chishinau), site of the infamous 1903 pogrom, was in Ukraine. That was wrong. As my friend, the political scientist Rajan Menon explained to me: “In 1903, it was part of the Bessarabia Governorate of the Romanov Empire but not part of the Empire’s Ukrainian territories. From 1940 onward, having been part of Romania from the end of World War II, it became part of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic within the USSR.” It is now the capital of the Republic of Moldova. My apologies.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, this is the time of year when many rabbis begin to think about what they are going to say in their Divrei Torah, in their sermons on the yamim nora’im, the high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which come in the fall when they have their largest audiences, and what do they want to say about what Judaism calls us to do? And as I think about those rabbis thinking about what they’re gonna say in their most important words of the year. The question that occurs to me is: do our rabbis believe in God? Because it seems to me, if you believe in God, and you believe that human beings—all human beings, Palestinians included—are created equal, b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God, and you see what Israel is doing to Palestinians, you have no choice but to speak out as forcefully as you can against this.

I would encourage the rabbis, any rabbi who’s thinking about what they’re going to say, to just spend a couple of minutes—it really only takes a couple of minutes—watching a video, or listening to a doctor who has worked in Gaza, or listening to some of the reporters who’ve been in Gaza. Within less than a minute, I think, when I do this, I’m just rendered utterly speechless by the horror that is now before us and is not hidden. This is not the Shoah. This is not a time when technology meant that we could not see these things. We can see them very easily if we want to.

Just a couple of quotations from an essay in Haaretz by Nir Hasson. He talks about a doctor in Gaza who says that tens of thousands of people, mostly children, are what he calls moving skeletons, whose organs are collapsing, and have already entered the final stage of hunger. He quotes from a video of a man, a starving man, his pants held up by a rope, who is kneeling in the sand, trying to gather flour that was spilled in the sand. And the man is saying in the video, ‘I have 10 children, and they haven’t eaten anything for a week. I’m trying to sift the flour from the sand.’

So, I think the question for our rabbis to ask in the face of this is whether they believe in God. If the rabbis genuinely want to claim that this is Hamas’s fault, then they’re simply lying. They’re lying. Because we now have claims from both USAID, and from the United Nations, and Cindy McCain of the World Food Program, and from Israel’s own officials that there certainly might have been incidents of Hamas or other people, you know, stealing aid. Because, after all, when people are starving, people will try to get that aid and take it for themselves. That in fact, the claim that Israel had to deny aid for 3 months, and had to shut down the UN system of distributing aid at 400 distribution centers, and move to this Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has only 4 distribution centers. The claim that Israel had to do that because Hamas was systematically stealing aid is just a lie. It’s a lie that is now being refuted even by people inside the Israeli government, according to the New York Times.

So, if we dispense with that, and rabbis ask themselves, what is God asking for me in this moment? It seems to me the question is one has to speak. And the reason I ask whether these rabbis believe in God is that when I hear from rabbis, and I hear from people who have talked to rabbis about what they don’t speak, what I hear again and again is they are afraid of their response from their congregants, that they’re afraid that there will be people in their communities who get very angry at them, and perhaps who even imperil their jobs. And it seems to me this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a rabbi is supposed to do. That, yes, of course a rabbi needs to be concerned about what their congregants, what Jews feel. But their fundamental, their higher obligation, is to try to wrestle with the question of what God wants for them.

In the Talmud and Masechet Brachot, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai, who is dying, speaks to his students, and the students say, ‘bless us.’ And the blessing he gives is: ‘may it be God’s will that the fear of heaven should be as important to you as the fear of human beings.’ And the students say, ‘is that all? That’s the blessing?’ And he says, ‘would that you were able to attain this level of spirituality, you can see how difficult it is, because when someone wants to commit a sin, they say, I hope no one will see me, placing his fear of human beings above the fear of God, who sees all.’ The fear of God who sees all. Rabbis, it seems to me, are far too afraid of what their congregants will say about them, and not nearly afraid enough of what Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai encouraged his students to be fearful of, which is their encounter with God.

You know, I often think about these things because of my own family background against the background of apartheid South Africa when so many South African rabbis used the excuse of not wanting to be out of touch with their congregants, to keep silent in the face of horror. And there’s one particular story that stuck with me. This is from a book called Community and Conscience about Jews in apartheid South Africa by Gideon Shimoni. And he tells the story of a Reform rabbi named Andre Unger, a 25-year-old young Reform rabbi in the city of Port Elizabeth, actually, the city where part of my family comes from.

And in 1955, Andre Unger said publicly that race hatred is an atrocity. And he spoke out about something called the Group Areas Act, which was the deportation of large numbers of Black South Africans from urban areas into remote areas so that these urban areas could become white-only areas. And Andre Unger said the Group Areas Act is a despicable atrocity. And what happened after Andre Unger said this? The Eastern Providence Board of Jewi…

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Our guest is Aharon Dardik, a Columbia University undergraduate with a remarkable story. The son of an orthodox rabbi, he spent part of his childhood in a religious settlement in the West Bank. After studying in yeshiva in Israel, he went to prison rather than serve in the Israeli military, and then enrolled at Columbia, where after October 7 he founded Columbia Jews for Ceasefire. Earlier this year, he was among the Jewish students who chained themselves to a gate to protest the university’s complicity in the detention of Mahmoud Khalil.

Every week I link to the GoFundMe page for Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who live in Gaza with their four children and have been injured by Israeli bombs and displaced ten times since October 7, and are trying to leave. I know putting up a Go Fund Me for one family is totally inadequate given the scale of the horror in Gaza, and the millions of people there who need our help— and most of all, need an end to this monstrous slaughter. Still, it’s something.

Please considering helping.

Friday Zoom Call

This Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Aharon Dardik, a Columbia University undergraduate with a remarkable story. The son of an orthodox rabbi, he spent part of his childhood in a religious settlement in the West Bank. After studying in yeshiva in Israel, he went to prison rather than serve in the Israeli military, and then enrolled at Columbia, where after October 7 he founded Columbia Jews for Ceasefire. Earlier this year, he was among the Jewish students who chained themselves to a gate to protest the university’s complicity in the detention of Mahmoud Khalil. How does someone so young challenge so much of what he has been taught and then endure the consequences of that rupture? We’ll talk about that this Friday.

Ask Me Anything

Last week’s Ask Me Anything session, for premium subscribers, was rescheduled for technical reasons. We will meet this Wednesday, July 23, from 3-4 PM Eastern time.

Cited in Today’s Video

Haaretz on Michael Spagat and Khalil Shikaki’s estimate that 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza.

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!), Kim Phillips-Fein writes about Fiorello LaGuardia’s lessons for Zohran Mamdani.

Omer Bartov on why he believes Israel is committing genocide.

Adam Shatz on the 12 Day war.

An interviewer challenges former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren about Israel’s plan for a “humanitarian city” in Gaza.

Hannah Habtu on the assault on the people of Tigray.

For The Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked with Iyad El-Baghdadi about Israel’s vision of the Middle East.

Imagine if every Democrat spoke this way about Israel and Palestine.

Shaul Magid reflects on a “Nero moment” for Jews.　

See you on Wednesday and Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, one of the most difficult and depressing things about this moment is that the slaughter in Gaza goes on and on and on. And yet, it’s been relegated, you know, to the back pages of the newspaper. Americans are now more consumed by our own catastrophes. And so, there’s this way in which we’ve normalized, you know, in Western media discussion in the U.S, there’s been a kind of normalization of just that is kind of routine, that every day Palestinians are dying more and more and more. And it doesn’t even really provoke that much conversation anymore. And I’ve been thinking about how you can respond to that. And obviously the people who have tried the most are the Palestinians in Gaza themselves, journalists and others who are desperately kind of recording what’s happening to them and trying to speak to the outside world. And I think one of the things that people have done very powerfully is to highlight individual stories of individuals who’ve died. Um, uh, in order to kind of humanize the people and remind us of them.

But I also think there perhaps is a value in just trying to step back and look at the scale of this, and think about how desensitized we’ve become compared to other moments and places in history. So, there’s a British academic named Michael Spagat—I actually quote him in my book—at the University of London, and he basically counts death in wars. That’s his academic specialty. He did this very, very large study with the Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shakaki where they surveyed 2,000 households in Gaza in order to try to get a more accurate count of the death toll. Because the irony is that although people were constantly, especially early on after October 7th, claiming that the quote-unquote ‘Hamas’ health ministry could not be trusted, it was massively inflating the numbers, that I think overwhelmingly, the scholarly consensus is that the numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry are way too low. And it’s not hard to understand why, because they’re basically counting bodies that come to hospital morgues. But anyone who just looks at a picture of Gaza can understand that many, many people will have died and not made it to hospital morgues.

So, Spagat and Shikaki do this very, very large survey, and they come to the conclusion that as of January 2025, that the number of people who were directly killed in a violent death was about 75,000, the vast majority of them killed by Israeli arms. But then people who study deaths in wars also recognize that there are going to be another group of people who die from disease, from hunger, and there are kind of various ratios that people tend to look at in terms of the numbers who die from direct attack versus the numbers who die from disease or lack of medicine.

And obviously, in Gaza, where many of the hospitals have been destroyed, and there’s been many, many reports of widespread starvation that there would be considerable deaths from that as well. And so, of the overall death toll that Spagat comes to the number of about 100,000, which, as Haaretz reported in a piece about his research, is actually not very different from some other researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who’ve come to a roughly similar number.

So, if one uses that figure of 100,000, that would mean that more than 150 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed per day since October 7th. More than 150 per day. And just if we step back, and think about those numbers, and try to put them in some context, in 1960, there was a very, very famous episode in the history of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa called the Sharpeville Massacre. A township called Sharpeville, where Black South Africans were protesting these past laws that denied them the right to move freely throughout the country. The police opened fire. And this was a turning point in South African history. It was actually the Sharpeville Massacre that produced so much outrage around the world that South Africa was kicked out of the Commonwealth of Nations. This massacre led the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela to move away from nonviolence and to turn towards armed resistance.

This was one of the most famous episodes in the history of South African apartheid brutality. There were 69 people killed by the South African police in Sharpeville in 1960. Sixty-nine. One hundred fifty in Gaza are dying per day. If you think about the history of Northern Ireland, perhaps the most famous date in what’s known as the Troubles, the kind of modern history of Northern Ireland, is a day in 1972 called Bloody Sunday where Catholic civil rights marchers who were protesting detention without trial, marched through the town of Derry, where they were attacked by Protestant mobs with the complicity of the police. This is a very, very famous, kind of considered a turning point in the history of Northern Ireland. It was after Bloody Sunday, it was declared a National Day of Mourning in Ireland. The British Chancellery in Dublin was burned to the ground. John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and later U2, all wrote songs that referenced Bloody Sunday.

As with Sharpeville, this also led to a turn to violent resistance, so it was a huge spike in support for the provisional IRA and their armed resistance campaign after Bloody Sunday in 1972. Twenty-six people were killed by Protestants and by British military forces and Protestant forces in 1972. Twenty-six people in that moment. That is, again, one of the most signature moments of the violence of Protestant forces…

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Our guest is former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. He has recently called Israel’s assault on Gaza a “war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel” but denies that Israel is committing genocide and believes its actions were legitimate until the spring of 2024.

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I spoke with Avey Rips and Seph Mozes, two members of Jewish Voice for Peace Chicago, who recently participated in a hunger strike to protest the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.

We talked about…

Why they took this extreme step

The responses they got

How historic victimization of Jews leads some to compassion and others to tribalism

Aspects of Jewish tradition that informed their decision

What 18 days of hunger taught them about what Gazans are going through

What they feel was achieved

Every week I link to the GoFundMe page for Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who live in Gaza with their four children and have been injured by Israeli bombs and displaced ten times since October 7, and are trying to leave. I know putting up a Go Fund Me for one family is totally inadequate given the scale of the horror in Gaza, and the millions of people there who need our help— and most of all, need an end to this monstrous slaughter. Still, it’s something.

Please considering helping.

Friday Zoom Call: Special Time

This Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at a special time: 11 AM Eastern. Our guest will be former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. He has recently called Israel’s assault on Gaza a “war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel” but denies that Israel is committing genocide and believes its actions were legitimate until the spring of 2024. He’s also argued that Israel’s current operation is fundamentally different from prior ones. I’ll ask what he would have done differently after October 7 and how he understands the fundamental nature of Zionism and the Israeli state.

Ask Me Anything

Our next Ask Me Anything session, for premium subscribers, will be this Wednesday, July 16, from 11-Noon Eastern time.

Cited in Today’s Video

The New York Times on Zohran Mamdani’s application to Columbia University.

Despite being expelled, Zohran Mamdani’s grandparents never stopped longing for Uganda.

Mahmoud Mamdani’s fight for a multi-racial Uganda.

Thabo Mbeki’s speech “I am an African.”

A letter by my father, Julian Beinart z’’ll, in the 1967 issue of Transition.

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!), Emily Wilder reports on the group giving antisemitism trainings at Harvard.

I spoke to Democracy Now about Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington.

I talked on Bill Kalmenson’s podcast about a Jewish reckoning on Gaza.

The Trump administration used Canary Mission to find students to detain.

See you on Friday at 11 AM Eastern,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, I want to say something about this story that appeared in the New York Times based on hacked emails from Columbia University, that when Zoran Mamdani, who’s now the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, that when he applied to Columbia University, he listed himself as not only Asian, but also as Black or African American. And so, this has been depicted, you know, this has been discussed in a lot of political circles as, oh, this guy was trying to game the system to get advantage of affirmative action by pretending he’s Black when he’s not Black.

I think it fundamentally misunderstands who Zoran Mamdani is, who his family is. And part of the reason for this misunderstanding is there’s just such a profound ignorance in American political and media discussion, including in elite media and political discussion, of anything having to do with Africa, and in this case, Uganda. To understand why Mamdani checked off Black or African American, and then wrote—critically, wrote under it—Ugandan, you have to understand his family and the belief system of his family. His family were, on his father’s side, were South Asians who moved to East Africa, like many did, particularly from a part of India called Gujarat. And in his father’s family’s case, they didn’t just happen to be Asians who ended up in Uganda, they very much believed in the nation of Uganda as their identity.

What happened was that when the dictator Idi Amin took power, he expelled the South Asians from Uganda in a kind of racist action, because of a basically political-economic power play, in which he was aligned with a group of economic interests from the tribe of Baganda that saw an opportunity if they pushed out the South Asian economic interests that were in Uganda, and basically took their industry and their wealth. And they allied with Idi Amin to expel the South Asians from Uganda. Interestingly, another person whose family was also expelled, but from a radically different political perspective, is the family of Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI director.

But what’s critical to understand about the way this action was experienced by Mamdani’s family is that they saw themselves as having been expelled from their country, from their continent, even though, of course, they were not Black. That Zohran Mamdani talks about how his grandparents, once they had been expelled from Uganda to Britain, used to go every Sunday to Gatwick Airport in London and watch the planes taking off to Uganda, because they missed this place so much. It was their home. His father, Mahmoud Mamdani, the political scientist at Columbia, is one of the world’s great students of African politics, named Zohran Mamdani Kwame, right? He gave him the middle name of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of a decolonized independent African country in sub-Saharan Africa. This was part of Mahmoud Mamdani’s commitment to Africa, to being Ugandan. And indeed, Mahmoud Mamdani moved back to Uganda once the new president, Yowari Museveni, allowed South Asians to return. And he went to work at Makerere University, a great university in Uganda.

And Mahmoud Mamdani has written, he writes in the London Review of Books, he writes about a group called the Asian African Association of Uganda, which was formed in the 1990s, that he was an admirer of and part of. And this group, in its founding document, right, quotes ‘we are not South Asians, for South Asians live in South Asia and are committed to making a future there. Nor are we overseas South Asians, who are part of a South Asian diaspora whose members aim to return home to South Asia after a temporary sojourn overseas. True, our origin is South Asia, but our present is African. Many of us hope to make a future in Africa. We are Africans of Asian origin.’

Asian Africans. This is the way in which Zohran Mamdani was raised. This is what he was trying to say, articulate, but in trying to do through this using these crude American categories that link the idea of being someone who is of African descent with the idea of being Black. But Zoran Mandani’s entire family identity, politics, history, is about saying that that’s not true, that being an African does not require you to be Black, it requires you to be living in Africa, or have roots in Africa, and have a commitment to the development of Africa—in this case, Uganda—as a place that is multiracial, multi-ethnic.

And one of the people that, um, that, uh, Mahmoud Ramdani quotes as one of the South Asians in Uganda who believed this most fervently was a man named Rajat Neogy, who edited a magazine called Transition. It was based at this great university, Makarere University, in Uganda that he edited along with Black Ugandans and South Asian Ugandans and whites and people from across the continent. And that was very important to me because we used to have copies of Transition, of this magazine in my home. I used to, you know, flip through them when I was in my father’s study growing up.

My father was born in Africa. My father was born in Cape Town. And although my father left, and although I do not call myself an African American, I was lucky enough to see some of that as well, this idea that there were Jews, and there were South Asians who were in South Africa who had a profound and deep commitment to being South African, which meant also being African, even though, of course, they were not Black. That some of the most important figures in the African National Congress, who devoted their lives, who went to jail for decades, who were assassinated, were of Indian origin, or of Jewish origin. The head of the ANC’s military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe, the ‘Spear of the Nation,’ arguably the guy who was the second most powerful figure in the African National Congress, Joe Slovo, grew up in Lithuania speaking Yiddish. And yet, he led the ANC’s armed struggle against apar…

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