Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Rabbi David Wolpe, a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School and the Inaugural Rabbinic Fellow at the Anti-Defamation League. Rabbi Wolpe has argued that “the reactions that occurred at Harvard in the wake of Oct. 7 considered Jews oppressors and, in some way, unworthy of human consideration.” He says the “overlap” between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is “striking.” I disagree. Since October 7, it’s become even more difficult to have civil disagreements about Israel-Palestine across ideological lines. But I still believe it’s important. Which is why I’m grateful that Rabbi Wolpe has agreed to join me this Friday.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Omar Barghouti, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, a founding member of the BDS movement, attacks Standing Together for “serving Apartheid Israel’s propaganda.”

Read these statements by Standing Together and its leaders and judge for yourself whether that charge is true.

Israeli Knesset Member Ayman Odeh on “ordinary people — Jewish and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli — who have stepped up in the face of unspeakable tragedy.”

Nelson Mandela on liberating the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

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!), Aparna Gopalan writes about the United Auto Workers’ endorsement of Joe Biden.

In The Guardian, I wrote about why liberal hawks can’t come to terms with Israel’s war in Gaza.

Yousef Munayyer, Mike Omer-Man, and Udi Ofer offer three different takes on what Biden’s sanctions against violent Israeli settlers could mean.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky on why the International Court of Justice case matters so much for South Africa.

Laila al-Arian on how it feels today to be Palestinian.

Geoffrey Levin on the hidden history of American Jewish dissent over Israel.

Here’s a video of a conversation I did recently at Harvard’s Kennedy School and an interview I conducted for the Foundation for Middle East Peace with Tareq Habash, who recently resigned from the Biden administration.

If you’re in Cambridge, Massachusetts on February 7, two people I greatly admire, Mikhael Manekin and Shaul Magid, will be speaking together about their new books.

On March 6, I’ll be speaking at the University of Texas at Austin.

Mitchell Plitnick, one of America’s smartest commentators on Israel-Palestine and much else, has launched a Substack.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, the most important issue of the day when it comes to Israel-Palestine is of course ending this horrifying war, and that’s what I talk about most weeks. But I want to talk about something else today, which is not as important, but I think is important in its own right. And it has to do with something in the Palestine solidarity movement—a particular action that really bothered me. And it’s tricky to talk about that for someone like me who’s not Palestinian but is Jewish. I think one of the things that Jews who kind of become critics of Israel, even critics of the idea of a Jewish state, we face the loss of our community that many of us have grown up in.

And so, I think what happens for some Jews is that they find a new community in the kind of Palestine solidarity world. And, in some ways, that can be really beautiful because I actually think it’s so important that the struggle for Palestinian freedom be an environment that brings together Jews and Palestinians and people of all different backgrounds. So, it’s not a tribal movement. It’s a movement about certain basic principles. But the challenge is that if you’ve kind of lost the community that you grew up in, which is I think the way some Jews feel who moved towards a kind of a politics that’s very critical of Israel, and then you join this new community, the prospect of losing that community is really, really frightening, right? Because you’ve already lost the one you grew up with. You don’t want to lose another one. And so, it becomes really, really hard to criticize that community.

I remember really being just so struck watching Norman Finkelstein years ago. Norman Finkelstein was, you know, a very, very harsh critic of Israel. Someone who, you know, many in the organized American Jewish community, you know, really reviled. And then he came out and criticized the BDS movement in really harsh ways. And I remember when I saw that, my first thought was, my gosh, is anybody gonna be left for this guy to hang out with? You know, and that might sound silly, but I actually think the truth is that a lot of people’s politics on any issue are built around a community. And it’s very, very hard to break with a community, especially if you’ve already lost one.

And so, I do think that’s what makes it hard for Jews who want to see themselves as in support of a movement for Palestinian liberation to criticize anything that people in that movement do. And, especially, it’s important if you, you know, given if you’re someone like me who has realized that, you know, there were a lot of things that I had to relearn and rethink, and things that Palestinians were saying for a long time that I didn’t recognize were true. And so, how do I maintain the humility to recognize that there still may be a lot of things that I’m wrong about, and need to listen to Palestinians about, without surrendering my right to follow my own conscience, you know, even though it may not always be right.

So, that’s a kind of long wind up to something that really bothered me, and it was a statement by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which is a founding member of the BDS movement. And it was attacking a group called Standing Together. Now, Standing Together is a group of Palestinian and Israeli citizens in Israel who are fighting for a very, very different kind of politics. And the reason the statement bothered me so much was first of all, I just felt that it seemed to me intellectually dishonest. You know, one of the things that I really notice—maybe it’s my journalism training—is the way in which you quote other people and whether it seems like you’re doing so in an honest way or not.

So, this statement, this attack on Standing Together, it accuses the group of ‘serving Apartheid Israel’s propaganda,’ and it says it ‘seeks to whitewash Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.’ And then it says that Standing Together, ‘By trying to paint Israel as a tolerant diverse and normal state, and focusing on hatred rather than oppression as the problem’ makes it ‘intellectually dishonest and outright complicit.’ So, when I look at a statement like this and read these things, the first thing I look at is where are the quotation marks? Like, where has this organization, Standing Together, said the things that they’re being accused of, right? And where are the links? Like, the best practice—intellectual, honest practices—when you accuse someone of something, you quote them, and you provide a link so the reader can actually go to the quote themselves and see if the quote is actually being portrayed honestly.

And this attack on Standing Together completely fails that principle. There’s no links in it to anything Standing Together has written, which just seems to me like Intellectual Dishonesty 101. And secondly, the quotes that it does have from Standing Together, the only thing it quotes from the organization that it’s attacking are that the organization at one point said that people should reject ‘hatred and choose empathy,’ and that they support ‘peace, equality, and social and climate justice.’ But then they go on to say in their own words—this attack—all these things about how they’re serving Israel’s apartheid propaganda, they’re whitewashing the genocide in Gaza, they’re portraying Israel as a tolerant, diverse, and normal state. There’s no evidence in this attack on Standing Together whatsoever. No quotations that suggest that they have said any of that, right?

So, that’s the first thing that really bothers me. I mean, whatever position you have, it’s as a matter of kind of ethics of discourse, it’s really, really important not to accuse people of things unless you can cite evidence of him having said that. And this attack on Standing Together doesn’t do that at all. In fact, if you actually look and go for yourself to the documents of what Standing Together has put together, it calls for ‘full equality of all Israeli citizens’—I’m quoting—‘a society in which everyone is free and equal between the river and the sea.’ This is what Standing Together, one of its leaders said about the International Court of Justice statement:  that ‘whatever the international court decided to call what’s happening to our people in Gaza—it should not, and it cannot change the facts of the unfathomable catastrophic de-humanization and massacres in the context of decades of systematic and violent oppression.’

So, this is just nothing remotely like serving Israel’s apartheid propaganda. If you say that you want to end the occupation, and you say that you want Palestinian citizens to be equal, that’s the opposite of Israel’s propaganda because Israel says that there isn’t an occupation and that Palestinian citizens are already equal. And to say that these people are whitewashing Israel’s ongoing genocide—Standing Together is actually one of the first Israeli groups to ever try to mobilize against the war, and call for a ceasefire, and did so in very, very, very difficult circumstances. Their efforts to hold rallies against the war in Israel were actually—the police prevented them from doing that when they tried to create protests against the war. The organization has suffered a great deal of oppression by Israel since October 7th in its efforts to organize against the war, and to bring Palestinians and Jews together for a very, very different kind of politics.

Now, it’s true that the language that Standing Together uses is really different than the language of the BDS movement. Standing Together leaders have used the term apartheid to describe Israel. But they don’t use the term apartheid as frequently as BDS leaders tend to. I haven’t seen them using the term settler colonialism. But it seems to me that Standing Together leaders—again, Palestinian citizens and Israeli Jewish citizens who are trying to fundamentally change Israeli politics—have an argument for why their language is a little bit different. And I’m going to quote from the statement made by some Palestinian members of Standing Together. They say: ‘as a movement operating within Israel, we took upon ourselves a specific role to shift Israeli public opinion away from supporting policy that maintains and deepens the subjugation of Palestinians. Our strategy is not to morally lecture or attempt to shock Jewish Israelis with the ugly truth of our reality to force them into liberating Palestinians’—and I’m skipping ahead here—‘Our role is to empower and develop joint leadership to shift public opinion and create a shared embodied struggle for liberation between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis.’

Now, I don’t think that alone will be enough to make change. I think it’s really, really fundamental that there is external pressure on Israel. And I believe that the boycotts and divestments and sanctions could play a really, really important role in all of this. But it seems to me Palestinian citizens are in a very particular position and a really difficult position, right? They’re under tremendous, tremendous strain and threat, especially since October 7th. In so many ways, their actions have been criminalized and they’ve been jailed. And they also are in a situation where they are trying to speak to Israeli Jews to create change from within. And it doesn’t seem to me one should be forced to choose between a strategy of pressure from outside, right, which involves boycotting, and strategies from inside, which involves bringing Israeli Jews in Palestinians together.

After all, think about all these Palestinian members of the Knesset, Palestinians who are sitting in Israel’s parliament, right—a parliament of a state that the BDS movement I think rightly considers an apartheid state. Should they be shunned because they’re doing normalization? No! It seems to me they’re acting from the position that they are in trying to make change from within even in really difficult circumstances. And that work is valuable as a kind of compliment to the pressure that the BDS movement brings. It just seems to me, if you take the stance that the BDS movement has taken against Standing Together, I don’t see how you wouldn’t also have to be denouncing a lot of Israeli Palestinian citizens in parliament because they also talk about bringing Israelis and Palestinians together.

Ayman Odeh, for instance, in his column in The New York Times, he writes, ‘I have also witnessed glimmers of the future we could have made real by ordinary people—Jewish and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli—who have stepped up in the face of unspeakable tragedy.’ Now, the BDS movement could say, well look here, he’s equating Jews and Palestinians, saying that they’re in the same position. I don’t think that’s what he’s saying. I don’t think that’s what Standing Together is saying. But what I do think they’re saying, which is really valuable, is they’re suggesting that their language has as its core idea that to liberate the oppressed is also to liberate the oppressor. And I think if you’re going to try to speak to Jewish Israelis—and to Jews around the world—that’s really, really important, right? And that’s something I see more in the language of Standing Together than I see in the BDS movement, which is a language about the way in which oppression dehumanizes the oppressor and the oppressed.

And it really disturbs me to see that people in the BDS movement are essentially equating that language with normalization, or with not recognizing the profound injustice of the situation. I don’t think those things are at odds at all. I mean, let me quote from, this is from Nelson Mandela. I don’t think many people would accuse Mandela of being someone who wasn’t serious about the struggle for justice. He’s writing about his time in Robben Island in prison. He says: ‘it was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed.’ And that language that Standing Together is using, I think, does have a capacity to reach Jews who need to be brought in to this movement.

And so, I know that there might be people who listen to this and think, you know, why is Peter Beinart criticizing the BDS movement, telling Palestinian solidarity activists what to do, you know? Who is he, you know? But the reason that I am really resistant to that kind of thinking is precisely because of my own experience in the Jewish community. I don’t like the idea that people, because of their identity position, don’t have the right to say openly what they believe. I see the way that leaders in the organized American Jewish community use that to silence others; to say that if you’re not Jewish, you don’t have a right to have an opinion about the definition of antisemitism. I reject that. I want all people of goodwill to be able to have opinions about what constitutes antisemitism. I want Germans, even despite their history, to be able to criticize a Jewish state and its Jewish leaders. I don’t like this claim that because you don’t occupy a certain identity position, you need to keep your mouth shut.

And one of the reasons I dislike it so much is because I think it sets up the idea that people in an identity group are a monolith, right? So that all Jews believe this. This is the way the organized American Jewish community often speaks: we speak for the Jewish community and if you’re against us, then you’re against the Jews. And if you’re a Jew who disagrees, you’re not a real Jew, you’re not a legitimate Jew, right? And so, I reject that principle when it comes to Palestinians as well. Sally Abed, who’s one of the leaders of Standing Together, is as far as I could tell just as Palestinian as the leaders of the Boycott Divestment Sanction movement. So, the idea that I should have to accept the idea that there are legitimate, real Palestinians and illegitimate, unreal Palestinians, or Uncle Tom or fake Palestinians, that is exactly what I see so often being done in the Jewish community.

I recognize that it’s really important to always have humility about what one doesn’t know, about how much one has to learn. That’s why I basically asked a whole bunch of Palestinians that I really admire off the record about what they thought about this BDS movement attack on Standing Together before I said any of this. I’m not quoting them because I asked them off the record. But I wanted to make sure that they didn’t think that I was completely off the wrong track, and I got a variety of responses but enough to reassure me that there was, I think, something to what I was saying. But I think it’s really important in any movement—no matter, you know, how good it’s fundamental impulses must be—that there is the right to open criticism regardless of one’s position. And that the way to have a healthy struggle for Palestinian liberation, it seems to me, is for people to have the right to offer those criticisms as long as they’re being made in good faith, and not for people to feel like they have to shut themselves down because they’re afraid of being shunned or because they’re afraid that they don’t have the right credentials. Again, I’ve just seen that too much in the organized American Jewish community, that dynamic. And I know how intellectually and morally dangerous it is.

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

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Fadi Quran, a Senior Campaigner at Avaaz, a Popular Struggle community organizer in the West Bank and one of the most eloquent voices I know about the moral principles undergirding the struggle for Palestinian freedom. Since October 7, his writing has been desperate and enraged, but never lost its ethical core. We’ll talk about what it’s like to be a Palestinian watching Western governments tolerate—if not assist—Gaza’s destruction.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Rashid Khalidi, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Israel’s charge that UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 massacre.

Israel’s longstanding effort to abolish UNRWA.

The Biden administration’s decision to suspend aid to UNRWA.

UNRWA’s role in combatting the humanitarian catastrophe 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!), three aid workers describe life in Gaza.

A few weeks ago, on one of our Friday zoom calls, I interviewed Musallam Abukhalil, a doctor in Gaza. After treating thousands of displaced people, he has now been forced to flee his own home and is living in a tent in Rafah. He’s desperately trying to leave Gaza, and a friend has established a Gofundme page to help. If you can, please do.

In 972Mag, an anonymous Palestinian journalist in Gaza asks hard questions about both Israel and Hamas.

Israeli intelligence believes the death counts reported by Gaza’s ministry of health are reliable.

For Holocaust Memorial Day, incredible photos of resistance.

Last week, I spoke at Trinity-St. Paul's United Church in Toronto (here’s a video excerpt of that talk) and talked to the Parallax podcast.

Some listeners asked for a list of the Palestinian writers that Rashid Khalidi recommended in a recent call. Here’s what he subsequently sent to me:

The play “Tennis in Nablus” in Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace, eds., Inside/Outside: 6 Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora.

Ghassan Kanafani's, Returning to Haifa, adapted for the stage by Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace.

He also recommends Mahmud Darwish, Fadwa Touqan, Sahar Khalifeh, Murid al-Barghouti, Elias Khouri, Raja Shehadeh, Adania Shibli, Ibtisam Azem, and Suad Amiri. 

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

So, this presidential campaign will be narrated as a struggle of good against evil—evil being of course Donald Trump and the prospect of the end of American democracy. And good is the Biden administration, Joe Biden—maybe not great, but good, at least in the very basic sense that Joe Biden is not trying to put an end to American democracy. I believe that. I will vote for Joe Biden for those reasons. But to me, what’s so painful and frankly surreal when I think about what’s happening in Gaza is that I have to admit that I see a certain amount of evil in the policies of the administration that we’re being asked to see as the good guy in this domestic narrative.

For me, the entire experience of October 7th has been most surreal in the way that I have seen people who I generally think of in many contexts as good people, as decent people, supporting things that for me seem so fundamentally, profoundly indecent. And I think about the people who lead Biden’s foreign policy. People who went to schools very much like mine, whose life experience in many ways has been very much like mine, and people that I think I generally describe as kind of fundamentally benign figures and may in their personal lives be very benign. And then I see the things that the US is doing, and I feel just a very profound cognitive dissonance. And particularly in the last couple of days given the Biden administration’s decision to suspend US funding for UNRWA, which is the UN agency that works with Palestinian refugees.

And let me back up and kind of tell the story here. So, the International Court of Justice, in its ruling, ruled that ‘Israel must take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance who address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.’ Now, that’s kind of antiseptic language. But what the International Court of Justice is getting at here is that 90% of people in Gaza, according to reports, have gone a day without eating in their last few days; that 600,000 Palestinians in Gaza face catastrophic hunger; that there are breakouts of cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis; a 300% rise in miscarriages. Alex DeWaal, who’s an expert on famine at Tufts University, has said that the speed of this human-made famine in Gaza is unlike anything the world has witnessed in 75 years.

So, one would think under that context, especially in the wake of the International Court of Justice’s ruling, the Biden administration would at the very least not be doing anything to make those catastrophic conditions worse. And yet, this weekend, it did exactly that, which is it suspended aid to UNRWA, which works with refugees in Gaza. Now, the reason it did that was because Israel has made allegations that there were UNRWA employees—the US I think is saying there were 12 of them—that have been alleged to have participated in the October 7th attack. This evidence seems to have come from interrogations that Israel did with Hamas militants that they captured after October 7th.

Now, it should go without saying, of course, UN employees should never be allowed to be involved in violent attacks against civilians. UNRWA has fired these people, and they’ve called for an independent investigation. There’s a UN body that does investigations within the UN system. If other, you know, independent organizations should be involved in that, I think, that would be fine too. Israel is not an independent actor in this. So, you need an independent investigation, right? And if there needs to be new vetting in place to make sure that this doesn’t happen again, that seems to me all of course makes sense, right? But UNRWA employs 13,000 people in the Gaza Strip—the vast majority of them Palestinians, right? Twelve people have been accused so far that we know of being involved in this attack. And the Biden administration’s response to this, and then a whole bunch of European countries followed on, is to suspend US support for UNRWA. US is the biggest donor to UNRWA.

What does that mean in the midst of this humanitarian cataclysm? UNRWA is currently sheltering 1.2 million displaced people in Gaza, as 90% of people in Gaza have been displaced from their homes. It’s providing health care services to roughly 1 million people in Gaza. It is the lead actor in providing the humanitarian assistance—what little humanitarian assistance there is—that gives people in Gaza the chance that they might eat a bite of food that day, that their children might not die of typhoid or cholera. Probably the single most important institution in standing between people in Gaza and death right now is UNRWA. And the Biden administration is gonna suspend aid to UNRWA at this moment?

What makes this even more awful is that while the Israeli allegations may very well be true, again, that it’s also true that Israel has had a campaign for many years now to try essentially to abolish UNRWA because UNRWA’s existence represents a kind of embodiment of the fact that there are all these Palestinian refugees. UNRWA considers them refugees. Many of them are the children, grandchildren of people that Israel expelled in 1948. Israel wants to abolish UNRWA because it wants to abolish the issue of Palestinian refugees and never have to deal with that question so it can permanently foreclose the possibility that any Palestinians could ever return, right? This, by the way, in a state that allows Jews to return after 2,000 years, which is an irony that I find remarkable, right?

And so, the US has basically now become complicit in this effort at really the worst possible time one could ever imagine in terms of the need for UNRWA to keep people alive in Gaza. And it seems pretty clear to me that there are at least some folks in the Israeli government whose strategy here is to make sure that Gaza never becomes livable; that Gaza never becomes a place that people could actually live in any way that we would consider an even moderately decent life, right? And, therefore, to create more and more pressure to push those people out, to create more and more pressure on Egypt to open its border so large numbers of people leave the Gaza Strip, at which point Israel would almost certainly not let them back.

And so, the irony is even as Israel is trying to deny the existence of the refugee problem today, there’s a lot of evidence that some people in this Israeli government want to create a whole new refugee problem. And the United States government, the Biden administration—the good guys—are complicit in this because they are now suspending aid to the single most important institution on the ground that would have a chance of keeping people in Gaza alive. Adam Serwer wrote this kind of very remarked upon essay during the Trump administration about its policies where he said cruelty is the point. I don’t know if cruelty is the point of this policy by the Biden administration, but cruelty is very, very deeply, very profoundly the effect.

And so, I look at these people in this administration that we are taught to see as the good guys in our domestic politics and think, how are the people who are considered benign in American politics, how can they take such a profoundly cruel measure? And even if we’re willing to support them in this election—and I am—I just don’t think I can ever buy into this narrative of good versus evil if the people that I am being called on to call good are complicit in the starvation of children in Gaza. And that is what the Biden administration is complicit in by suspending aid to UNRWA at this moment.

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

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guests will be two of America’s most insightful commentators on Israel-Palestine, and foreign policy more generally: Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah and Terrell Starr, author of the Black Diplomats newsletter on Substack. We’ll talk about the evolution of Black political discourse on Israel-Palestine and the way race structures debates over America’s role in the world.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Rashid Khalidi, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

My essay in Jewish Currents about Harvard’s old antisemitism task force.

Harvard’s new antisemitism task force, co-chaired by Professor Derek Penslar.

Penslar’s book, Zionism: An Emotional State.

Abe Foxman and Bill Ackman attack Penslar.

Alan Dershowitz calls for disbanding Jewish Studies departments (14 minutes into the video).

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 and Jonathan Shamir explain the dangers of a regional war in the Middle East.

Joe Biden admits that US strikes against the Houthis in Yemen aren’t working—then says they’ll continue.

A Breaking the Silence explainer answering the claim that Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2005.

I’ll be speaking about Israel, Gaza and the debate about the war on campus at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School on January 25.

The night before my event, Harvard Medical School is sponsoring a symposium on the public health crisis in Gaza.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

Hi. There’s been a lot of talk of course about antisemitism since October 7th. And there has been, I think, clearly a rise of antisemitism, and I’ve talked about that before. But I also think that underneath this discussion of antisemitism are also dynamics among American Jews inside the American Jewish community that are sometimes obscured from view that the media doesn’t quite pick up on. And these are a kind of, I would say, an intra-Jewish civil war. The civil war is partly generational with younger American Jews often expressing views about Israel that are deemed antisemitic by major American Jewish organizations, for instance, boycotting Israel and not supporting Israel as a Jewish state. But there’s another divide, I think, kind of hidden divide, inside the American Jewish community that is often overlooked, that gets described in the language of antisemitism. And that’s a kind of a divide around class between different elements in the Jewish community that have different views about Israel and that are in different positions in terms of class. And I want to try to give an example of how this is playing itself out.

So, after October 7th, the president of Harvard University, then-president Claudine Gay, came under pressure to appoint a kind of a committee to look into antisemitism at the campus. Now, almost nobody on the committee had any scholarly credentials in the study of antisemitism. What it did have was a whole group of people who had either said that they believed that anti-Zionism was antisemitism, which would be to say that a lot of the pro-Palestinian activism at Harvard was therefore antisemitic, and people who had ties to the Anti-Defamation League, which has said that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And that was a set of views that, although again none of these people really had scholarly credentials on this question, that made establishment American Jewish organizations happy, and made many of the donors who were upset at Harvard, it made them happy. And I wrote a column in Jewish Currents about the absurdity of the fact that Harvard and these other universities were creating committees to study antisemitism on their campuses, and often ignoring their own experts who studied antisemitism, and going to choose people instead for these committees whose qualifications that they had views that were similar to the views of donors who were upset by pro-Palestinian activism. So, for instance, the University of Pennsylvania, when they created an antisemitism commission, the person who they named to head the committee was the head of the dental school.

But interestingly, at Harvard, things have now taken a turn. So, Claudine Gay was essentially pushed out and now the interim president of Harvard has essentially scrapped that earlier antisemitism committee and created a new one. And its co-chair is a guy named Derek Penslar. Now, Derek Penslar runs Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. He’s a professor of Israel studies and he’s one of the world’s experts on both Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism. He recently wrote an acclaimed book called Zionism: an Emotional State, which actually has a whole chapter on the different motivations of people who have hated Zionism since its founding in the late 19th century, and the relationship between those different kinds of hostilities and antisemitism. So, essentially, he is kind of the perfect person, right, to co-chair a committee on antisemitism at Harvard because he’s a world’s expert not only on antisemitism but on the relationship between Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism.

So, what has happened? A furor has erupted in which big donors to Harvard like Bill Ackman and establishment Jewish organizations leaders like Abe Foxman who ran the Anti-Defamation League are furious that Penslar has been put in charge of this committee to study antisemitism because he’s a critic of Israel. His criticisms are not radical by any means. In fact, I think he’s very much in the mainstream of how scholars of antisemitism and scholars in Jewish studies tend to see Israel. Which is to say, it’s very, very mainstream for scholars of Jewish studies in the United States to be very critical of Israel and even to raise questions about Zionism itself. And the scholarly consensus among people who study antisemitism is generally that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. So, the American Jewish establishment organizations and the Israeli government support a definition of antisemitism called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which essentially does gesture towards the idea that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. But while this has a lot of mainstream institutional support in the Jewish community, it doesn’t have very much support among scholars who actually study antisemitism. There are a bunch of scholars who’ve signed it, but if you look carefully, you’ll find that actually it doesn’t have very much support among scholars who actually study antisemitism and who study Israel-Palestine.

A competing definition, which is the one that Penslar has supported, which is called the Jerusalem Declaration, which doesn’t claim that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism, has much more support among scholars of Jewish studies and scholars of antisemitism. But the problem is that those scholars have a view that is very different than many of the large Jewish donors that are pressuring these universities and views that are very different from the establishment Jewish organizations. So, when a university responds to the question of antisemitism by drawing on the expertise of its own scholars of antisemitism rather than assuaging Jewish organizations and donors, it infuriates them. And this is because there is a kind of a class divide, you could say, among American Jews between a group of scholars who study these things whose views are really quite different in the main from the Jewish organizations and the donors. And it’s important to remember that very often it is large donors that dictate the perspectives of American Jewish organizations. So, there’s a kind of a class divide, you could almost say, that exists among American Jews in addition to this generational divide. And I would say it is between the kind of donor class—the donors to universities and a donor class that wields tremendous influence in organized American Jewish organizations—that wants to define anti-Zionism as antisemitism, and a kind of scholarly class—an intellectual class that you’d find actually doing Jewish studies at universities—that actually doesn’t generally believe that anti-Zion is antisemitism. And that’s the conflict you have now over the appointment of Derek Penslar.

It’s kind of a hilarious little footnote that Alan Dershowitz recently called for universities to disband their Jewish studies departments. Now, why would Alan Dershowitz call for universities to disband their Jewish departments? Presumably, he thinks that studying Judaism and Jewish history and Jewish culture is a good thing? No! He says we need to disband the Jewish studies departments because he believes that they’ve become hotbeds of antisemitism, right? Which is just his own way of saying these scholars who study Jewish history, who study Jewish studies, who study antisemitism, don’t actually come to the political conclusions that we would like. And that’s the situation that we’re facing now in this new little controversy around Derek Penslar’s appointment. And it’s another test for these universities, right? Are they gonna stand up for their own scholarly mission? Or are they gonna bow to pressure from donors and from outside groups who, although they’re speaking in the name of what they claim is good for Jews, right, or is in the interest of Jews, they’re actually in active opposition to empowering the very people who have spent their lives devoted to the scholarly study of antisemitism, like Derek Penslar. I hope to see many of you on our call this Friday and the information is in the email about our guests.

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

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi, America’s most eminent historian of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian struggle. We’ll talk about this latest iteration of what he’s called “The Hundred Years' War on Palestine”— what’s new and what’s old since October 7. We’ll talk about where the Palestinian national movement goes from here, why Palestinian freedom has become a defining issue for progressive activists and what the crackdown on that activism means for America’s universities.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

This Friday’s call will also be open to Jewish Currents members. Currents members will gain access to my Friday Zoom calls roughly once a month.

Sources Cited in this Video

Mairav Zonszein on why some families of Israeli hostages support a cease-fire. In my video, I accidentally called her the ICG’s representative in Gaza. I meant to say Israel.

Former Mossad head Tamir Pardo, former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert call for releasing Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages.

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.)

A friend who disagrees with my views on Israel-Palestine says that despite the disclaimer above, I rarely share writing that defends Israel’s policies. Fair enough. Here’s an essay by Michael Walzer that argues that destroying Hamas is a moral necessity. 

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane talks to two Biden administration staffers organizing from the inside against Biden’s support for this war.

Why South Africans care so much about Palestinian freedom.

Nimer Sultany on how the genocide case at the International Court of Justice pitsthe global north against the global south.Nimer Sultany on how the genocide case at the International Court of Justice pits the global north against the global south.

Fadi Quran on why this war is destroying Israel’s image of military invincibility across the Middle East.

I’ll be speaking about Israel, Gaza and the US debate about the war at the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke on January 16 and at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School on January 25.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the Israeli hostages who are in Gaza because we’ve reached the 100-day mark of their captivity. And in Jewish communities there have been a series of events around that 100-day mark. And watching these events for the hostages, what strikes me is that the organizations that are organizing these events, and have been organizing throughout these 100 days to keep the focus on the hostages and to demand their release, are also generally organizations that support the war. And emotionally, that makes a lot of sense because I think in a period of agony and grief and pain like this, there’s a desire for Jewish solidarity, which I feel as well. I understand.

And so, the impetus for solidarity is to say: a) solidarity with the hostages, so demanding their release; and b) solidarity with the state of Israel itself, and therefore supporting its policies—in this case, the policies of war. Emotionally, I understand why these two things go together. But it seems to me that actually, analytically, it makes no sense whatsoever. Which is to say, if you actually care passionately about getting as many of the hostages as possible released alive, you should be adamantly opposed to this war because the imperatives of continuing the war and the imperatives of getting the hostages out—as many of them as possible alive—are in direct contradiction. And let me just try to explain why I think they are.

So, first of all, one of the things that I think has become clear over these several months is that Israel’s military force in Gaza is not leading to the rescue of Israeli hostages. There may have been one person who was rescued very early on, but Israel has not since then rescued any hostages despite having all of these soldiers there. So, that might have been considered to be one potential benefit from the point of view of saving hostages of this war. It’s not. Secondly, there was an argument that we used to hear a lot, which was that the military pressure that Israel was putting on Hamas was going to lead Hamas to kind of come to the table on better terms to release a lot more of the hostages. Well, that seems to me it’s pretty frankly disproven. We’ve now gone quite a long time since the hostage exchange earlier in the war. And Hamas’ terms are not getting better. They’re actually getting tougher. So, the military pressure is not actually making it easier to get these hostages released through negotiation.

And thirdly, and this is perhaps the most obvious, but I feel like it’s somehow not mentioned that much, is it that the bombs that Israel is dropping in Gaza—and the denial of food, water, fuel, the things that are leading to starvation and to public health catastrophe in Gaza—these don’t only endanger the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, they endanger the lives of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Mairav Zonszein, my friend who’s a very gifted journalist, who’s also the International Crisis Group representative in Gaza, has an op-ed in the New York Times recently making exactly this point that she notes that some of the hostages who have been released from Gaza have said that among the things that terrified them while they were there were the Israeli bombs that were dropping all around them. They were terrified. They were probably also terrified for good reason of their Hamas captors, but they were also terrified like everybody else in Gaza of being killed by this massive destruction that Israel was raining on Gaza. And so, that’s another very obvious way in which the prosecution of the war endangers the lives of the hostages.

And I think that’s why—this is the point that Mairav makes—in the United States that the focusing on the hostages and supporting the war seem to go hand in hand, [but] that actually in Israel to focus on the hostages is much more of an anti-war position. That many of the hostage families have now come forward and said we want the government to be willing to do whatever it takes to release our relatives, our family members, even if that means ending the war because Hamas does seem, from the reporting, like it said that one of the things it would demand for release of the hostages is a ceasefire.

Now, the argument against that, of course, is that Israel will then have had a ceasefire without destroying Hamas, so it will not have achieved its goals. But that really is only a concession if you believe that the goal was achievable to begin with—the goal of destroying Hamas. Now, I think Israel could probably have deposed Hamas from power in Gaza already. I think that it could do that even under, you know, even with a ceasefire that happened tomorrow. But the argument against stopping the war is that you will not have destroyed Hamas. But I want to quote a former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who makes this point very bluntly. He says, ‘the odds of achieving the complete elimination of Hamas were nil from the moment that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the chief goal of the war.’ Which is to say, yes, you’re giving up on the idea of destroying Hamas by negotiating a ceasefire that’s part of a hostage release, but that was not a realistic goal to begin with.

Another argument against this would be that releasing the hostages would require not only a ceasefire but very likely the release of a large number of Palestinian prisoners—Israel has 7,000 Palestinians in prison—maybe as many as all of them. And so, people will understandably say, well, look what happened when Israel released 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to get abducted soldier Gilad Shalit back a number of years ago. Many of those soldiers took up arms against Israel, and indeed some of them are key figures in the Hamas October 7th attack. So, how could Israel do that again?

But it seems to me, the critical point is that yes, if you do this deal and release all these prisoners, and then maintain an Israeli policy which is to deny Palestinians basic freedom in perpetuity, to maintain Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and control over Gaza as far as the eye can see, yes, then it’s very, very likely that many of these people will come back and pick up arms. But if you thought about this prisoner release, and this prisoner deal for the hostages, and a ceasefire, as part of the beginnings of a political strategy that gave Palestinians a horizon for freedom, then it might be less likely that some of those folks would take up arms because I think historically Palestinians have been less inclined to use armed resistance at times when they had a greater degree of hope that there was a horizon for Palestinian freedom and self-determination.

And this, I think, is what former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon has been talking about. He’s one of a number of former top Israeli officials now who are arguing for some kind of swap of Palestinian prisoners for hostages, among them former Mossad Head Tamir Pardo. But Ayalon makes the specific point that he would want Marwan Barghouti to be one of the prisoners that Israel released as part of such a deal. Marwan Barghouti is the most famous Palestinian prisoner. And what Ami Ayalon is getting at is not just a hostage-for-prisoner exchange, but doing so in the context of an effort to revive the Palestinian Liberation Organization as a legitimate and functional body, and potentially that becoming the basis for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

I think for such an effort to have any chance of success, Israel would have to take dramatic steps to show Palestinians that it is serious, as it has not been for a very, very long time, about negotiations with Palestinians towards the horizon for Palestinian freedom, whether that was in a separate Palestinian state or in some kind of integrated one state. So, for instance, one thing Israel could do would be to start to remove settlements deep in the West Bank, particularly those from which settler violence is terrorizing Palestinians. Another would be to declare publicly that there will be no normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, absent the blessing of a legitimate Palestinian leadership. These things, it seems to me, would change the political climate in such a way that the consequences of releasing Palestinian prisoners would be somewhat different. Now, I don’t think these things are very likely to happen at all. But I think this is the path that would be most likely to save as many of the hostages as possible.

And one of the terrible ironies, it seems to me, of the moment we’re in now is that the Israeli hostages in Gaza and the Palestinians in Gaza have something very fundamental in common: and that is that they’re not actually most of them from Gaza. The Israelis were abducted and taken to Gaza on October 7th. But most of the Palestinians in Gaza are not from Gaza either. Most of them come from families that were expelled or who fled in fear during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. And now, all of them are in terrible, terrible danger because of this war. And it seems to me that we should have a united desire for all of them to be safe, to end the war that is endangering all of their lives. And beyond that, to see the moral imperative of the right of all of them to return safely to the places from which they were forcibly taken or expelled. And so, that means that the Israeli hostages should be allowed to return safely to the places that they were from, but also in the longer term, in this political horizon that I hope could emerge, that the Palestinians from Gaza who are not from Gaza, they should also have the right to go back to the places that their families are from. That the right to be safe, and the right to live in the place that you were from, rather than being forcibly evicted from that place, that that’s a right that both Israeli Jews and Palestinians have. And that that’s something that we need to fight for for all of the people in Gaza: the Palestinians in Gaza and the Israelis in Gaza, all of whom today are in a form of captivity.

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

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown. Omer is one of the world’s most prominent scholars of the Holocaust. He’s also an Israeli who has warned about the genocidal rhetoric of some Israeli leaders since October 7. Now that South Africa has brought a case to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide for its actions since October 7, I want to ask Omer what he thinks of that legal argument. In the wake of the controversy over Masha Gessen’s declaration that in Gaza, “the ghetto is being liquidated,” I also want to ask him when, if ever, it’s appropriate to compare Israel’s actions to that of the Nazis. 

Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Mahmoud Mamdani’s book, Neither Settler nor Native.

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 analyzes the public health catastrophe that Israel’s war is causing in Gaza.

In the London Review of Books, Mahmoud Muna writes about selling books in Jerusalem after October 7.

In the Boston Review, Barnett Rubin probes the relationship between Zionism and colonialism.

Mairav Zonszein on why Israel faces the “most unstable and precarious situation it has ever been in, certainly in a generation.”

A Beinart Notebook subscriber, David Mandel, is running for Congress on a platform that includes a ceasefire in Gaza.

In The New York Times, I wrote about the Israeli government’s growing threats to expel people in Gaza.

I’ll be speaking about Israel, Gaza, and the US debate about the war at the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke on January 16 and at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School on January 25.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I want to say something about the firing of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, not because I’m so particularly interested in Harvard or Claudine Gay, but because I think it’s a window into a question that I think is really important. And the question is: why does pro-Palestine activism produce such a ferocious response in the United States? So, the straw that broke the camel’s back was these allegations of plagiarism. But really, what got this whole thing going was her response to October 7th, and the claim that she hadn’t responded aggressively enough to students who blamed the October 7th massacre on Israel, and then that she hadn’t condemned the phrase ‘intifada’ in her congressional testimony, which was claimed to represent a genocidal threat towards Jews. So, there were people who clearly didn’t like her to begin with because they identified her with diversity, equity, inclusion as the first Black president of Harvard. And they were hostile to her, but they didn’t have the political juice really to get rid of her until there was this added element of the debate over Israel, ‘antisemitism,’ and especially her response to pro-Palestine activism.

So, the question is: what makes that pro-Palestine activism so scary that it produces such a ferocious reaction? We’ve seen this for quite a few years now, right? Why is it that in many states in the United States you can’t work for state government unless you promise not to boycott Israel? Why is it that Students for Justice in Palestine chapters are now being banned on college campuses? I mean, they’re not banning the anti-abortion groups or the young Republicans groups even in the age of Trump. Why is it that they’re banning, or suspending, the Students for Justice in Palestine? Why is it that Rashida Tlaib gets censured? All of the different members of Congress with serious problems. Why is it that social media is banning pro-Palestine activists? My suggestion is there’s something particular about the nature of pro-Palestine activism that produces this really ferocious response in the United States.

Now, some might say, well, this is just because, you know, there are a lot of pro-Israel Jewish organizations out there that mobilize because they feel like this activism represents a threat to Israel. I don’t think that’s a sufficient answer. It is true, of course, that AIPAC and other kinds of American pro-Israel Jewish groups, you know, wield their influence. But especially when you’re talking about conservative white Americans, like a lot of those members of Congress, for instance, who were berating Claudine Gay and the other presidents, they don’t have a lot of Jewish constituents. And frankly, if AIPAC goes to them, and tells them that they should be against pro-Palestinian activism, I think AIPAC is walking into an open door. Ideologically, they are already have a strong proclivity, I think, to see pro-Palestine activism as a threat.

Remember, the biggest pro-Israel organization in the United States is Christians United for Israel. It’s not a Jewish organization. When the state legislature in Arkansas passes a law that basically makes it impossible to work for the state of Arkansas if you want to boycott Israel, I don’t think that’s only about Israel. I think it has, in a state like Arkansas where there are very few Jews, it has also to do with America. Now, people say, well, there’s a Christian tendency to want to support Israel. It’s not just about Christianity. Remember, Black Christians, Hispanic Christians don’t have the same view about Israel that many white evangelical Christians do. What I think is lurking beneath all of this is the deep association between Israel and the United States as kind of promised lands forged on a hostile frontier that only came into existence because they dispossessed the people who were there.

The suggestion that I want to make about the reason that pro-Palestine activism is so frightening to certain groups of Americans, particularly Americans who are the most deeply invested in America’s founding myths, the reason they find pro-Palestinian activism’s threat to Israel’s legitimacy so frightening is not just because they care so much about Israel. It’s because they see the assault on Israel’s legitimacy as an assault on America’s legitimacy because the foundations of the two countries have a tremendous amount in common. And I would even go so far as to say that there is a figure that is lurking behind the US-Israel-Palestine debate, lurking behind the Palestine solidarity activism, that makes it so terribly frightening to a whole cast of Americans, particularly white conservative Americans. And that figure is the American Indian.

So, because pro-Palestine activism offers a model that if applied to America would be profoundly threatening to many people in the United States. Why is it that Americans respond so many so viscerally to terms like ‘settler colonialism,’ ‘decolonization,’ ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’? I don’t think it’s only because people have an investment in Israel. I think because at some level, maybe only semi-conscious, people recognize that that same intellectual framework, that decolonization framework, would be profoundly destabilizing for the United States as we know it.

You know, it’s just one of these things about America that Americans in political discourse talk so rarely about Native Americans, and yet it’s there under the surface. And I want to read something from Mahmoud Mamdani’s, the Columbia professor, you know, really important book, Neither Settler nor Native, because the book is really all about these interconnections. And he writes about America. He writes, ‘our nation was born in genocide. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today, we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode.’

America’s settler colonial project has been much further along, much more successful than Israel’s, right? We don’t have the kind of hostile frontier anymore that Israel has with Gaza. But the United States did at one point. That is in the deep recesses of, I think, the American political consciousness. And there’s a way in which Palestine solidarity activism brings that to the fore. If you read the literature of pro-Palestine activism, in fact it often makes this explicit. So, if you look at Palestine solidarity discourse, often it doesn’t refer to the United States. It calls it ‘Turtle Island,’ right? Which is a term that essentially challenges the legitimacy of the United States by giving it an American Indian pre-colonial name. You hear the phrase ‘land back,’ right, a phrase from American Indians wanting land back, very often used in pro-Palestine activism.

And this is what I think it adds to the DEI conversation because when Americans think about DEI, they tend to think in terms of Black and white Americans and the threat of full Black equality, or historical justice, reparations, etc., for Americans. And there’s been a lot of conversation about the analogies between Israel and Palestine and the situation of Black Americans. But I think that’s not the really frightening analogy for Americans who are deeply invested in America’s founding myths. It’s not the analogy between Palestinians and Black Americans. That’s actually a more manageable one. It’s the analogy between Palestinians and American Indians.

And here, this is Mamdani again. Mamdani is talking about the different way in which Americans talk about Black people and talk about American Indians. He writes, ‘Blacks have been governed by a regime of white supremacy, the struggle against which has been incorporated into the American sense of self, a fact demonstrated by the comfort with which racists cite Martin Luther King and other icons of Civil Rights. Indians, by contrast, have been governed by colonialism, which, if recognized, would destroy the American sense of self.’ I think what he’s saying is a conversation even about full equality and historical justice for Black Americans would fundamentally change the United States in a way that many Americans don’t want it to be changed, but doesn’t actually fundamentally challenge the legitimacy of the United States because Black Americans in the main have been asking for full equality. They haven’t been asking for decolonization. The Black challenge does not necessarily represent a threat to the existence of the United States itself.

And you can think about just this in terms of the debate about monuments, right? So, there’s been a lot of debate about all of these Confederate monuments that people want to, you know, want to get rid of. That’s destabilizing to a lot of white Americans but doesn’t threaten the legitimacy of the project. Those people were, after all, rebels, right? But if you try to apply that same logic to all of the people that we celebrate in the United States who were Indian killers—just go into the United States West in particular. And you think about the celebration of people like generals like Sheridan and Sherman, or even presidents like Lincoln and Grant or Jackson who were profoundly implicated in the genocide of Native Americans. And you realize that for Americans to start to wrestle with the question, seriously wrestle with the demands of American Indians, is more destabilizing to the legitimacy of the American project than the challenges of Black Americans. And it’s precisely that, I think, that makes the pro-Palestine activist movement so frightening. Because whether Americans are fully conscious or not, there is at some level a recognition of the analogy between the demands that are made in the pro-Palestine activist world increasingly for decolonization and a sense of what that would mean if we were to go down that road at all in United States.

And this is why there’s a part of me that is somewhat pessimistic about the ability of changing US policy towards Israel because there’s a part of me that thinks that, at its deepest level, the reason that America has its policy is not just because of Joe Biden or because of AIPAC or because of that kind of stuff, that fundamentally perhaps the biggest obstacle to America having a fundamentally different attitude towards Israel-Palestine is the American willingness to actually grapple with ourselves as a settler colonial nation, and to think about what it would mean to actually think in any terms about undergoing a decolonization process in the United States. And because that question is so frightening. But that’s a big part of what makes pro-Palestine activism in the United States so frightening. Thanks very much. I hope to see many of you on our call on Friday.

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

Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Mikhael Manekin. For me, some of the most unsettling scenes from Gaza have been the images of Jewish worship— a soldier using a knife as his yad (pointer) as he reads Torah, a soldier reciting the Shema from the balcony of a mosque, soldiers singing to welcome Shabbat at the Islamic University of Gaza. It’s not the liturgy itself that unnerves me. It’s the images of religious conquest, which make me fear this war’s consequences not just for Palestinians and Israelis, but for Judaism. Mikhael is the perfect person to ask about this. He’s one of the leaders of Faithful Left, a new movement of religious Israelis fighting Occupation and ethnic superiority. He’s a former director of Breaking the Silence, the organization of former Israeli soldiers that works to expose the reality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And he’s the author of a new book about violence, morality and Judaism entitled, End of Days: Ethics, Tradition and Power in Israel.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Benjamin Netanyahu demands that Palestinians in Gaza be “deradicalized.”

The UN estimates that 85 percent of people in Gaza have been displaced their homes.

The Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza estimates that 40 percent of the Strip’s people risk starvation.

According to The Wall Street Journal, almost 70 percent of Gaza’s homes are destroyed or damaged.

Prof. Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, warns that in the coming year, 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza could die of disease.

Mairav Zonszein on the absence of Palestinians in Israeli media.

In a December poll, 83 percent of Israeli Jews said they support encouraging “voluntary migration” from Gaza.

Nikki Haley says Palestinians in Gaza should leave.

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!), I wrote about how Harvard’s new antisemitism task force is ignoring its own antisemitism scholars.

For Jewish Currents’ podcast, On the Nose, I interviewed Muhammad Shehada and Khalil Sayegh about growing up in Gaza under Hamas.  

In The New York Times, I wrote about how Israel might have responded differently to October 7

Bernie Steinberg, former executive director of Harvard Hillel, condemns the “McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare, which, in effect, turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine.”

Sara Roy on Israel’s long war on Gaza.

The New York Times on Hamas’ use of sexual violence on October 7.

Abdalhadi Alijla, Rajan Menon, and Daniel Byman on why Israel can’t destroy Hamas.

Mosab Abu Toha’s exit from Gaza.

I talked about Israel’s war in Gaza and the debate about it in the US on Democracy Now, the Majority Report with Sam Seder, Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith podcast and with Aaron Miller on WBUR.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. A few days ago, Benjamin Netanyahu published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, laying out Israel’s war aims in Gaza. And among them was that Gaza’s population would have to be ‘deradicalized.’ And what Netanyahu meant by that was that they could no longer support violence against Israeli civilians, essentially. It’s really important that Palestinians don’t support violence against Israeli civilians. I just happen to think that this is exactly the wrong way to go about it since the right way to convince Palestinians not to support violence against Israeli civilians is to show that ethical resistance actually works, not to hold Palestinians under permanent occupation and cause massive catastrophe in Gaza, as Israel has done.

But putting that aside, it made me start to think about this idea of radicalization. Because if we take Netanyahu’s definition, essentially, that radicalization means support of violence against civilians, then it seems to me that we should be reckoning with the radicalization of many Jews both in Israel, and the United States, and around the world—and indeed, the radicalization of many Americans. Just look, after all, at the scale of the violence against civilians that most Israeli Jews, and almost all establishment American Jewish organizations, support. The United Nations now estimates that 85% of Gaza’s people have been displaced from their homes. The UN estimates that 40% risk starvation, that 70% of the homes in Gaza have been damaged or totally destroyed. And I’m going to read a quote from Professor Devi Sridhar, who’s the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, who wrote this in The Guardian a few days ago: ‘unless something changes, the world faces the prospect of almost a quarter of Gaza’s 2 million population—close to half-a million human beings—dying within a year. These would be largely deaths from preventable health causes and the collapse of the medical system.’

So, this is the scale of the violence against civilians that has pretty significant Jewish support, both in Israel and around the world, and especially from the leading institutions of American Jewry. And not only from them, but from many American politicians—virtually the entire Republican Party. And it’s not only this massive destruction against civilians that enjoys widespread support, but indeed the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza enjoys widespread support. There was a poll that recently showed that 83% of Israeli Jews would support what they call ‘voluntary migration’ from Gaza, which seems to me not very voluntary at all, given that you’ve created a massive humanitarian catastrophe from which people are trying to flee in order to save their lives. And Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley endorsed ethnic cleansing of Gaza just a few days ago when she said that people in Gaza should go to ‘pro-Hamas countries.’

So, it seems to me that by Netanyahu’s own definition, we have a pretty serious problem of radicalization, in his words, in the American Jewish community and among American leaders. And people might say, no, no, no, it’s not the same because this Israeli violence against civilians is not purposeful. But I just don’t think after what we’ve seen over the past few months that’s sustainable at all. When you when you deny food and water and fuel to an entire population of 2 million, you can’t say it’s not purposeful when huge numbers of civilians die. Even Joe Biden, who has been a very stalwart supporter of Israel, has called Israel’s bombing in Gaza, ‘indiscriminate.’

So, the question it seems to me that we should be asking ourselves—those of us who are Jewish, and American, or both—is how did we get to this radicalization, this place where so many of us are willing to support this catastrophic destruction of human life in Gaza? And I don’t have a simple answer to that. I think this is something that I’m going to be thinking about and trying to write about for quite a long time to come. But I would just note this. Look at the publications that support this war: the publications in Israel, the publications in the United States. Look at the Jewish institutions that support this war. Look at the think tanks that support this war. And one of the things you will notice they have in common is they almost never platform Palestinians. If a publication does not publish Palestinians, you can be pretty certain it supports this war. Same with a television network. If a publication regularly publishes Palestinians, or a TV network regularly puts Palestinians on the air, or a think tank regularly hosts Palestinian speakers, or a Jewish institution regularly hosts Palestinian speakers, with almost exact certainty, you can be certain that they will not support this war. If people have exceptions, I’d be interested in hearing this, but I can’t off the top of my head think of a single exception. There is a very, very almost exact correlation between the willingness to listen to Palestinians and support for this war.

One of the things that I think Americans have not sufficiently appreciated about discourse in Israel, for instance, is the almost universal absence of Palestinian voices from Israeli mainstream media. This is a quote from Mairav Zonszein from the International Crisis Group’s representative in Israel. Mairav writes: ‘since this war began, there’s been almost no interviews in Israeli media with someone in Gaza or from Gaza. Even worse, I don’t think I’ve seen a single Palestinian politician, citizen, resident, anyone on any panel on Israeli TV since the war began.’ Where you have an absence of Palestinian voices, you have support for mass killing of Palestinians. You have radicalization. And I think that part of the reason for this, for this kind of close correlation between listening to Palestinians and not supporting this war, is simply that Palestinians will tell you—if you listen to them—that even putting morality aside, that this war is not going to work. I have literally not heard a single Palestinian commentator, journalist since October 7th—if there are examples, people are welcome to send them to me—tell me that they think that this war is going to be successful on its own terms, by which I mean making Israeli Jews more safe. Almost overwhelmingly, they’ve said they think it will make Israeli Jews less safe because it will create more Palestinian hatred and lead to more Palestinian desire for violence, perhaps even from groups that are more radical than Hamas.

So, partly I just think intellectually, if you listen to Palestinians, it’s likely to undermine the basic argument that people are making for this war. But I think at a more human level—maybe this is a really simplistic thing to say—I just think it’s very difficult to support massive violence against people that you can humanize, that you can see as fully human, that you listen to, and that you can identify with. And that’s why the almost total blackout on Palestinian voices in pro-war media is so important. And it’s why it’s such a moral disaster that for my entire adult lifetime there has been an almost total blackout on Palestinian voices in establishment American Jewish institutions, in schools, in camps, in synagogues, in Jewish community centers. It is that absence of voices that has created this radicalization, this profound dehumanization that allows people to look at these statistics about the number of Palestinians being killed, or perhaps just not even look at all because they’re not willing to take the time to do so, and basically be willing to support this. The radicalization is because of an unwillingness to see Palestinians as fully human. Now many people might not admit that they don’t see Palestinians as fully human, but my point is that their actions show that they don’t see Palestinians as fully human. Because when you see people as fully human, you give them the dignity of listening to them. And that is still not, still not the norm in establishment American Jewish life, in American Jewish communal life, and it’s not the norm in large parts of American public discourse, let alone Israeli public discourse. And that, it seems to me, is why we are where we are in this moment of utter human catastrophe, man-made human catastrophe in Gaza.

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

Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at 1 PM EST. There will be no zoom call on the week of Friday, December 22 or 29.

Our guest will be Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute and the author of three highly acclaimed books on the relationship between the United States, Iran, and Israel. We’ll talk about the response by Iran and its allies to October 7 and the risks that Israel’s Gaza war could convulse the entire Middle East.

As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

CSPAN video of the Congressional hearings on campus antisemitism.

Uprisings against Arab governments are called intifadas too.

Elise Stefanik’s flirtation with Great Replacement Theory.

Marwan Barghouti on the motivations for the second intifada.

How pro-Israel pundits and organizations use allegations of antisemitism to avoid talking about what Israel does to Palestinians.

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!) Mari Cohen examines the way liberal Zionist groups have responded to Israel’s war in Gaza.

John Judis on the value and limits of calling Israel a “settler-colonial” state.

Mouin Rabbani on Israel’s role in boosting Hamas.

Robert Pape and Tony Karon and Daniel Levy on why Israel is losing the war.

Most American scholars of Middle East studies censor themselves when talking about Israel-Palestine.

Last week, I spoke at a Chanukah-themed ceasefire rally in New York.

I also talked to Joy Reid on MSNBC about why Israel’s war won’t make Israelis safe.

See you on Thursday at 1 PM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I want to say something about the series of events that have now led to the resignation of the president of University of Pennsylvania and could perhaps lead to the resignation of other university presidents for allegedly not opposing calls for genocide of Jews on college campuses. And the key thing to understand about what’s happened here is this. This I think is the key context. If you look at the way establishment American Jewish organizations operate, going back a whole bunch of years, they continually make this particular move. They try to turn conversations away from what’s happening on the ground to Palestinians to questions about the alleged motivations and actions of Israel’s critics in the United States or in other places. This is the reason I think in recent years there’s been this entire kind of obsessive focus on equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism because it’s a way of focusing attention on the motivations of critics of Israel in a condition which has become harder and harder for people to defend what’s happening on the ground.

So, you’ve had over the past few years—as you’ve had Israeli governments really going back to Benjamin Netanyahu taking power in 2009 that have been essentially explicitly opposed to a Palestinian state and working hard to make one impossible—it’s become harder for people whose job it is to defend Israel to actually claim as they used to that Israel really wants to create a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians won’t take one. It’s been harder to deal with the fact that now you have human rights organizations calling Israel’s behavior apartheid. So, what do you do? You turn the conversation towards the alleged antisemitism of people who were calling for one equal state, i.e., anti-Zionists. And the more difficult it becomes to defend Israel’s actions on the ground, the harder one needs to work to again create a new conversation about what’s happening among Israel’s critics. And, certainly since October 7th, after the horrifying massacre of Israelis, what’s been happening in Gaza has been pretty terrible to Palestinians.

And so, from the point of view of establishment American Jewish organizations, any conversation about what’s happening in Gaza, essentially, or even the West Bank for that matter, you’re already losing if you’re engaged in that conversation. Much better to have a completely different conversation, not about what’s happening to Palestinians there, but about the actions of Israel’s critics here. Now, I don’t want to suggest this is like just some big conspiracy theory. I don’t think it’s that. I think there are organizations that have this mission. But I also just think frankly it’s a natural desire by a lot of people who support Israel to not focus on something which is really, really difficult and unpleasant, which is what’s happening in Gaza, and doesn’t allow Jews to be in the role of the victims, right? Whereas turning the conversation to discussions of antisemitism in the United States is a much more familiar position for American Jews to be in given that establishment-minded American Jews simply don’t accept the basic premise that Israel, or a Jewish state, could ever really be fundamentally oppressive. So, when you turn the conversation away from Gaza, you’re turning it from a conversation which is extremely uncomfortable for you because it requires you to really engage with these terrible things that Israel is doing to a conversation, which is a more comfortable conversation, because it’s about Jews in the role of victims, which is basically the role that have established American Jewish organizations have always been casting Jews, right?

Now, this is not to say that there is not antisemitism going on in the United States. They clearly is, right? As I said a few weeks ago, we know that antisemitism tends to go up when there’s more violence in Israel-Palestine. But the descriptions of the kind of antisemitism that is supposedly happening on college campuses, right, is completely divorced from actual reality. And this is kind of what you see in this congressional testimony. So, what happens in these congressional hearings is the Republicans keep on alleging that these universities are infested with massive amounts of antisemitism, and not just antisemitism, but genocidal antisemitism, right? There’s no discussion in the hearings whatsoever of any context about what’s happening in Gaza that might help to explain why anyone on a college campus might be upset at Israel right now. Literally, you could watch that entire hearing and you probably would not know that any Palestinians in Gaza had died. You certainly would not know that Israel is considered an apartheid state by its own leading human rights organizations. All you would know is that basically a bunch of rabid Jew haters woke up one morning on these college campuses and decided they were desperate to kill Jews, right?

And the Democrats don’t challenge this assumption really at all either. The Democrats are basically completely useless, right? They throw out a few references to Trump’s antisemitism, or a couple of stray references to Islamophobia, or the fact that Republicans want to defund the civil rights wing of the Justice Department, but they never actually say anything about what’s happening to Palestinians that might create any context for what’s happening. So, in this completely decontextualized conversation, the Republicans refer to certain kinds of phrases, right? In particular, in this hearing, they refer a lot to the phrase, ‘intifada,’ right? Which they define as a call for the for genocide against Jews, right? Now, this is not, I think, a good faith description of what intifada means, right? Intifada basically is an Arabic word, basically means ‘uprise,’ right? It doesn’t mean uprising against Jews. There have been intifadas against Arab governments. The bread intifada in Egypt many, many years ago, right?

There were two Palestinian intifadas against Israel. The first one starting in 1987, the second one starting in late 2000. The first one involved stone throwing and Molotov cocktails, and also a lot of non-violence like boycotts, refusal to pay Israeli taxes. The second one was more violent, including really horrifying suicide bombings, for instance. The first came after 20 years of Israeli oppression, right? Again, the notion from the hearing you would think is that basically Palestinians just woke up one morning with this lust to just kill Jews and any Jews they could find, right? The First Intifada breaks out after 20 years of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The Second Intifada breaks out after Israel responds very brutally to Palestinians stone throwing after Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. Israelis feel that it’s after a period where they’ve tried to create a Palestinian state, but Palestinians feel it’s based in the context in which Israel has basically just continued to build settlement growth and move Palestinians further and further away from a state.

And in order to understand kind of what Palestinians were saying during the Second Intifada, which was the more murderous one, right, the more violent one. Here’s Marwan Barghouti writing in at the time in 2002, probably the most famous kind of architect or person involved in that Second Intifada. He goes to jail for it. Marwan Barghouti writes, ‘the only way for Israelis to have security is quite simply to end the 35-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Israelis must abandon the myth that it is possible to have peace and occupation at the same time, that peaceful coexistence is possible between slave and master. The lack of Israeli security is born of the lack of Palestinian freedom,’ right? These are not calls for Jewish genocide, right? This is a violent uprising against Israeli oppression; I happen to think a counterproductive one, and one that involved some really, really immoral actions like these suicide bombings. But they’re not a call for the genocide of all Jews, right?

But this is the pretext that is laid out by the Republicans, and these Democrats don’t challenge it, and the university presidents don’t challenge it. The university presidents are so desperate basically just not to say anything their lawyers think will get them in trouble that they basically give these robotic, evasive kind of platitudinous answers again and again and again, right. So, then you get to, Elise Stefanik, right? She’s this Member of Congress from New York state. She’s supposedly a great defender of the Jews even though she’s a big Trump supporter and she’s endorsed the Great Replacement Theory. But whatever. We’re supposed to believe she’s a huge defender of the Jews, right? So, basically, she says, will you say, university presidents, that it is not acceptable to call for the genocide of Jews on your campus. Well, like, no one has actually presented any evidence that there have been calls for the genocide of Jews on these campuses, right? And so, the president of MIT, to her credit says, ‘I haven’t heard anyone calling for the genocide of Jews.’ And Stefanic says, ‘no, but you’ve heard the chants of intifada, right?’

And because these university presidents are too afraid to get into any substantive discussion of what intifada means and the context of Israel-Palestine, they basically accept this premise, this ridiculous premise, that intifada means a call for the genocide of all Jews, right? And then they’re screwed, right? Because basically like now, once they’ve accepted this premise, unless they basically say that calling for the intifada, that would be an offense that you have to suspend someone for or fire them or expel them for, right, which they don’t want to do because they know that’s a blatant violation of free speech, they can’t give a forthright answer which says, ‘yes, it’s not acceptable to call for the genocide of Jews.’ Whereas the honest thing to say would be, ‘of course, it’s not acceptable to call for the genocide of Jews, but these pro-Palestinian protesters are not saying that.’ Now, it doesn’t mean that one has to love all their all their slogans. I don’t love the slogan ‘intifada revolution’ or ‘globalize the intifada,’ which means some kind of globalized uprising against Israeli and presumably American oppression too because America is deeply behind this, right? And again, I don’t even love the phrase ‘Palestine from the river to the sea.’ I could think of various different phrases I would prefer. But none of these phrases are on their face anything like calls for Jewish genocide. And you can look at what Rashida Tlaib or Marc Lamont Hill have said about what they mean by the phrase ‘Palestine from the river to the sea.’ What they mean by it is equality between Palestinians and Jews. They’re very explicit about it, right?

But the presidents accept this this pretext and then basically, politically, they’re completely screwed. And so, what makes this even more surreal, right, is that what’s happening in Gaza, right, even if you don’t go as far as calling it a genocide, right, it has involved the displacement of 85% of the people of Gaza from their homes, more people in Gaza, more women and children killed in two months than were killed in 20 years in the US war in Afghanistan. So, in that context, right, if you’re worried about genocide or things that could potentially be genocide, right, to think that what you should be worried about is the chant of intifada on a college campus, right, when you have this magnitude of slaughter, I mean, it’s completely surreal. But the surreality is the point. This is exactly the point. It is to basically turn people’s attention away from what’s happening in Gaza and create an entirely different conversation based on the alleged motivations of critics in the United States. This is not to say that antisemitism isn’t a genuine concern in the United States. It is a genuine concern. It always has been. And there’s more antisemitism probably since October 7th again because tragically there always tends to be when there’s more violence, right? But to suggest that that’s the story of genocide, right, given what’s happening in Gaza, it’s completely Orwellian, right?

And even more kind of absurd, right, and kind of Orwellian is the fact that these Members of Congress, these Republicans, were basically out of one side of their mouth, they’re saying, ‘are you going to expel these students? Are you going to suspend them? Are you going to fire them? Who have you fired? Who have you expelled?’ In the next breath they say, ‘we don’t think you truly believe in free speech and academic freedom. We don’t believe you really oppose cancel culture because you haven’t given enough free speech to conservatives,’ right? I mean, on the one hand, they’re saying, ‘you don’t support free speech enough.’ On the other hand, they’re saying basically, ‘we demand that you ban and suspended fire and expel these pro-Palestinian students.’ Now, I actually do think there have been serious offenses against conservative free speech on college campuses. I’ve actually written about this. I wrote about why universities needed to allow people like Charles Murray and Milo Yiannopoulos, people whose views I very much dislike, to speak on college campuses. But you can’t have it both ways, right? You can’t say the problem with universities is they don’t really believe in free speech, and then demand that they crack down on free speech.

Some people who fancy themselves a little more sophisticated, right, have said—conservatives, I’m talking about kind of pro-Israel conservatives—said ‘no, we really do believe in free speech but we are against the double standards. We believe there’s been a double standard in which people get punished for saying things about Black people or LGBT people, but they don’t get punished for saying the same things about Jews.’ I also think that’s nonsense. It’s just not actually true, right? If it were the case that there were people who were saying ‘kill all the Jews,’ and they were getting away with it, then maybe you would have a case. But there’s actually been no evidence presented that that’s actually what’s happening, right? And in fact, you know, as far as I know, Penn, you know, Columbia, Brandeis, George Washington University have not banned their young Republicans clubs, right, even though those Republican clubs now represent a party led by Donald Trump that has called for banning all Muslims in the United States, basically have a kind of fundamentally racist agenda when it comes to the right of Black people to vote, right? Those Republican clubs are still there, right? And yet it’s the Students for Justice in Palestine clubs at these schools that have been suspended or banned, right? So, I don’t actually see a double standard in which people can say things about Jews that they can’t say about Black people or LGBT people.

It seems to me actually what’s happening since October 7th is a significant ratcheting up of the suppression of free speech beyond anything we saw beyond that, and especially because it’s now being pushed by politicians. It’s being pushed by the federal government and state governments. Ron DeSantis has demanded that Students for Justice in Palestine be banned on Florida campuses. We’re seeing all kinds of bills in state legislatures and Congress to basically federally mandate these, you know, the limitations on pro-Palestinian speech. And that is the agenda here, right? And we are in a moment that will go down as a kind of historic assault on freedom of speech. And one of the things that we’re seeing in this moment that’s becoming clear is this institutional infrastructure that is designed to give Israel impunity for whatever it wants to do, the worse what Israel does becomes the more that infrastructure needs to mobilize against the free speech rights of Americans because there are a lot of progressive Americans who are looking at what’s happening in Gaza, doing exactly the thing that the American Jewish establishment doesn’t want them to do. They’re looking at what’s happening, and they want to mobilize against it. And the more they mobilize against it—because of how things bad things are there—the more you have to make an effort to silence them. And therefore, this kind of infrastructure designed to give Israel impunity ends up being a really serious threat to freedom of speech on college campuses. And not just college campuses, as we’ve seen, for instance, the effort to criminalize people who support Boycott Divestment Sanction. So, the struggle, it seems to me to end Israeli impunity also is a struggle for academic freedom and free speech in the United States.

Our call this week for paid subscribers will be at Thursday at 1pm, not our normal Friday, Thursday at 1pm. We’ll be joined by Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. Trita has written three books—excellent books—about the relation between the United States, Israel, and Iran. And we’re going to talk about the kind of regional context of Israel’s Gaza war: how Iran has been behaving, what are the potential for some kind of regional war that could grow out of this. That’ll be Thursday at 1pm for paid subscribers.

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

Our Zoom call this week will be at the regular time: Friday at Noon EST. (I’ve decided to stop mentioning Friday’s guests at the beginning of these Monday videos.)

Our guests this week will be Diana Buttu and Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man. Diana is a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer and a former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Emily is a Jewish Israeli human rights lawyer. They’ll talk about the challenges and opportunities that this terrible war poses for Palestinians and Jews who want to work together on behalf of Palestinian freedom and mutual coexistence.

As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Eighty percent of Gaza’s people have been forced from their homes.

The Director-General of the World Health Organization calls conditions in Gaza’s hospitals “unimaginable.”

Biden officials warn Israel about its actions in Gaza.

Joe Biden’s longstanding opposition to conditioning military aid to Israel.

Congressional Democrats debate conditioning aid.

When Benjamin Netanyahu said “America can be easily moved.”

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!), Dan Berger examines the call from families of some Israeli hostages for an “all for all” swap of Israeli captives and Palestinian prisoners.

+972 Magazine’s blockbuster report on how the Israeli military loosened its rules to allow more killing of civilians in Gaza.

A Jewish Israeli teacher recounts being jailed for criticizing the Gaza war.

Iyad Baghdadi on how to think (and not think) about decolonization in Israel-Palestine.

Rabbi Shai Held on Jews and the left after October 7.

From Maha Nasser, the best discussion I’ve heard of the historical roots of the phrase, “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.”

Fadi Quran shares a personal story about Palestinian children in prison.

Haya Alyan on what it’s like to have to audition for people’s empathy.

I talked on Slate’s “What’s Next” podcast about the exchange of hostages and prisoners.

This Thursday, December 7, in Brooklyn I’ll be talking to Shaul Magid about his new book, The Necessity of Exile.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I’m recording this on Sunday, December 3rd, and it seems like we’re at a kind of critical turning point or juncture. The pause and release of hostages and prisoners has ended for the time being. And Israel, having cleared out the northern Gaza Strip, is now going into the southern Gaza Strip. And what that means is that the level of dislocation and death, which has already been extraordinary, will even grow higher. Remember, Israel has already forced everyone from the northern Gaza Strip out of the northern Gaza Strip, and largely reduced much of it to rubble. Eighty percent of the people of Gaza are displaced, which is just a staggering number. When you think about how shocked the world has been that 25% of the people in Ukraine were displaced from their homes, it’s now already at 80%. And now, Israel is telling people in parts of the southern Gaza Strip that they have to leave their homes. Many of them are people who only moved there because they were forced out of the northern Gaza Strip. It’s provided some kind of map of supposedly safe places. But since October 7th, the evidence has been that there really is no safe place for Palestinians in Gaza, and certainly there’s no infrastructure to really support human life in the places that they might go where they have no homes. There’s no infrastructure for food. The hospitals are in a circumstance that the head of the WHO said on Sunday that the condition was ‘unimaginable.’

So, we are witnessing, we are right in the middle of one of the—certainly present proportion—one of the largest acts of slaughter and dislocation as a percentage of the population that we’ve seen in the 21st century. And the Biden administration has responded to this by changing its rhetoric. So, right after Hamas’ massacre on October 7th, the Biden administration gave Israel full complete rhetorical support. Now what we’re seeing is that the rhetoric has changed, and the Biden administration is offering a series of kind of warnings. They’re saying: don’t kill so many civilians; leave open the possibility of a Palestinian state; be willing to bring back the Palestinian Authority; don’t expel Palestinians out of Gaza into Egypt. They’re saying all these things, and they’re clearly showing that there’s a difference of opinion between the United States and certainly elements of the Israeli government, if not the entire Israeli government.

But there’s something, I have to say, somewhat farcical and Kabuki-like about this, right? Because the Biden administration is making a series of statements about what it wants Israel to do and not do. And yet, Biden himself has been very clear since he was a candidate that American aid to Israel is unconditional, right? And American diplomatic support at the International Criminal Court at the UN is unconditional. So, under those circumstances, when you’re saying we really want you to do this, Israel doesn’t face that much pressure to do it because there are no consequences if they don’t. And this has been the way America has conducted its policy with Israel really since the early 1990s. That was the last time under George H. W. Bush that the US put any actual conditionality on its aid. In that case, it was saying that the US wouldn’t give Israel loan guarantees to receive Soviet Jewish immigrants unless it promised to stop settlement growth. But since then, no American president has really done that. So, American presidents again and again on issues like settlements have said, ‘we really don’t want you to do this.’ And Israel has just continued to do it, especially under Benjamin Netanyahu, who is something of kind of a master at basically blowing off American presidents of both parties. He famously said years ago, was caught on tape saying that ‘America is a very easy thing to move.’

So, there’s something farcical about the Biden administration saying our policy is that we must keep a horizon open for a two-state solution. Our policy is that Israel should not expel people in Gaza to Egypt. Our policy is that Israel must limit humanitarian casualties. That’s not really America’s policy, right? It would be like me saying my policy is that I’m gonna run the New York marathon. But if I’ve never done a lick of running, and all I do is sit on my couch eating chocolate cake, that’s not actually my policy, right? There’s something called revealed preference. Revealed preference is not what you say, but what you do. And the Biden administration’s revealed preference is Israel can do whatever it wants without consequence.

And it’s funny because there’s a group of people in Washington, kind of foreign policy types, who are very often very concerned about American credibility, meaning that America should never say it’s going to do something that it doesn’t follow through on. Those are the kind of people who got really upset when Barack Obama, you may remember, said that it would be a red line if the Syrians used chemical weapons, and then when they used chemical weapons America didn’t use take military action. So, they said Obama lost his credibility. Well, what does it do to American credibility, including Biden’s credibility, to be continually saying you want Israel to do things, and then when Israel doesn’t do them, you just basically shrug, right?

This is what I mean by I think that we are really at a critical junction, not just a critical juncture in the number of people in Gaza that are going to be killed and dislocated, but on the question, which is a really overdue debate, about the conditioning of US military aid. There are more Democrats now who are talking about this as a policy, and it’s really, really urgent that this conversation become front and center. And I would say that anyone who actually wants to claim that they’re concerned about civilian casualties; who genuinely says they oppose an act of mass expulsion of Palestinians out of Gaza, who says that they want to keep open the possibility of a two-state solution (if that’s not if that’s even possible at this point, about which I have my doubts), we should say—and people in the media should say—we will not take that position seriously unless you’re willing to condition US military aid on some of those things. And not just military, but there should also be the framework that dictates how America behaves in international institutions. If you don’t say that, then I think people in the media and others need to say very clearly that we should not take the Biden administration at its word when it makes these statements about civilian casualties, and the two states, and about expulsion. It can’t be you can take it at their word if they’re not willing to back it up in any meaningful way.

I would remind people these are, in many cases, our weapons that are being used. The United States is not a bystander in this. Palestinians know very, very well that many of the bombs and other weapons that are killing them are American weapons. And America has to decide if it wants to give that military aid without making any effort to actually prevent these weapons from being used in these horrifying ways or not. It’s a really, really critical juncture. And I think that if the Biden administration does not change its position on conditioning military aid, it—and United States in general—will be complicit in something that we’re going to be judged very, very harshly for for many, many years and even decades to come.

Our call this Friday is at noon Eastern time, our normal time for paid subscribers. We’re gonna be joined by Diana Buttu and Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man. Diana is a Canadian Palestinian human rights attorney and former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man is a Jewish Israeli human rights lawyer. They’ve been having a really interesting conversation about how Jews and Palestinians can work together for mutual liberation in the wake of the horrors that started on October 7th. And I think it’s an important conversation, so I hope many of you will join us.

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