The Beinart Notebook

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The NYU Professor wrote a negative review of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. She joined me to discuss her criticisms.

I’ll be on book tour for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza for the next few months. You’ll find a list of book-related events below.

I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, Rashid Khalid’s classic exploration of the roots of Palestinian nationalism, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness.

I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.

Here is a new message about Hossam’s condition from his sister, Abir:

“Hossam has been diligently reaching out to various offices, holding on to hope for the progress of his passport application. Recently, he visited the hospital where he and his son, Moayad, spent a challenging four months undergoing treatment. The hospital staff informed him that the archives and reception department would be reopening next week, which filled him with optimism. Hossam has scheduled an appointment to discuss Moayad's case and to collect the essential reports needed for his treatment in Egypt.

Additionally, Hossam has requested the latest reports on his son Momen and his daughter Malak's hearing aids, as he wishes to consult with specialists in Egypt. During this challenging journey, please continue to support Hossam and his family as they seek a brighter, more peaceful future filled with dignity and relief from their struggles. Your compassion truly makes a difference in their lives.”

Friday Zoom Call

This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guest will be Jordan Elgrably, Editor in Chief of The Markaz Review and co-editor with Malu Halasa of the new anthology, Sumud: A New Palestinian Reader. We’ll talk about themes in contemporary Palestinian writing and how that writing can help us better understand the horrors in Gaza and across Palestine and Israel.

Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.

Book Tour

(We’ll update this every week.)

On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.

On Monday, March 10 and Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be giving four talks in Michigan. On March 10 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at St David’s Episcopal Church, and on March 11 at St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church and at T’chiyah synagogue.

On Monday, March 17, I’ll be speaking at Mishkan Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia.

On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.

On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.

On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.

On Monday, April 7, I’ll be speaking at the Harvard Divinity School.

On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.

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 details a progressive nonprofit’s refusal to grapple with the assault on Gaza.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Harvard Medical School Professors Eman Ansari and Aaron Shakow about censorship on campus.

In Haaretz, Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard suggests that “Israel Is losing the justification for its existence,” a statement that could be considered an example of antisemitism under the IHRA definition recently adopted by Harvard University.

Juan Cole on the way Trump’s treatment of Zelensky resembles US treatment of the Palestinians.

Joy Reid speaks after the cancellation of her show on MSNBC.

Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham’s comments upon winning an Oscar.

See you on Friday, March 7,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s kind of public humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Oval Office was the kind of most extreme version of the way Donald Trump treats a lot of foreign leaders, a lot of foreign countries. Which is, he basically says were being ripped off by you and we’re going to extort you, right? Basically, if you want America’s continued help or if you frankly just don’t want us to destroy your economy through tariffs, or you don’t want us to take over your land in the case of Greenland or Panama, basically you just have to start giving us stuff. In the case of Ukraine, your mineral resources. Or with, you know, in the case of Colombia, you have to take our migrants. Or with Canada and Mexico, it seems to change, but basically the claim is we’re getting ripped off and then that’s the pretext for basically these frankly kind of thuggish imperialist kind of claims that basically you’re just going to have to start paying us if you don’t want us to really kind of wreck you.

And so, the question that I think is interesting to ask is why doesn’t Trump treat Israel that way? Right? I mean, you could imagine a world where Trump makes a version of these same arguments vis-a-vis Israel, right. Where he says, you know, why are we giving you all these weapons? Why are we protecting you from Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas? What are we getting in return? We’re being played for suckers. You should pay us twice as much money or you should give us some of your natural resources or you should basically just hand over some of your high-tech companies to us or something. I mean, it wouldn’t be really entirely logical, but it never is logical with Trump.

But you could see how this impulse, right, could be applied to Israel just as easily as it could be applied to Ukraine, you know, again, because America gives Israel a lot of a lot of military assistance. Now, it’s true that military assistance is mostly in the form of a credit card that America gives Israel to buy American weaponry. Trump probably doesn’t even know that, right. And I’m sure he could still spin some way in which America is being ripped off. And yet, he doesn’t, right? I mean, the contrast between his meeting with Zelensky on the one hand, and his meeting with Netanyahu at the Oval Office couldn’t be more extreme, right. He didn’t humiliate Netanyahu. To the contrary, Netanyahu was beaming as Trump basically gave him a series of policies that Netanyahu was thrilled about, most of all, America’s support now for mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in Gaza.

So, why the difference? I mean, one answer would be that simply the domestic politics are very different, right. That even a country like Ukraine, which had a lot of support in Washington, doesn’t have a kind of permanent infrastructure of lobbying organizations like that Israel has, like, you know, pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC, for instance, and the Christians United for Israel, this kind of evangelical group. So, that sustains a level of domestic political support. And now, especially in the Republican Party, right, that has an impact on Trump’s behavior, that the blowback to Trump would be greater if he did this to Netanyahu than if he did this to Zelensky or any other government, right.

But I think that in a way only begs the further question itself, right. Well, then why do we have this infrastructure, right? Why is Israel unusual in that way? And partly, it has to do with the role of the American Jewish community as an unusually politically articulate community that really, since the 1970s, has kind of reoriented its institutional life around kind of unconditional defense of Israel. But that’s not the entire story, right, because Chr…

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Our guests are two important progressive American rabbis who disagree on some fundamental questions regarding Palestine and Israel. Rabbi Alissa Wise, Lead Organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, former Co-Deputy Director at Jewish Voice for Peace and co-author of Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing, is anti-Zionist. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, supports partitioning Israel-Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. Despite these differences, they both signed a recent letter in The New York Times titled “Jewish People Say No to Ethnic Cleansing.” We talk about the ideological differences that separate “anti-Zionist” and “progressive Zionist” Jews, and whether, despite them, there are opportunities for cooperation in the age of Netanyahu and Trump.

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

I spoke with my friend, political analyst, and president of The Agora Initiative, Khalil Sayegh, about why he condemned Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family and other Israeli civilians, and why that angers some on the global left.

I’ll be on book tour for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza for the next few months. You’ll find a list of book-related events and reviews below.

I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture, edited by Mahmoud Muha and Matthew Teller with Juliette Touma and Jayyab Abusafia.

I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.

Here is a message about Hossam’s condition from his sister, Abir:

“Hossam reached out to the passport office to inquire about the resumption of services. In a glimmer of hope, he learned that officials are anticipating the start of the second phase of the armistice agreement, which could lead to the reopening of travel offices and border crossings as early as the beginning of March. This news brings a sense of relief to many who have been waiting for this opportunity.

However, Hossam is also facing another daunting task. He is diligently working to recover the medical reports that were tragically lost during the raid on the displacement camp, which was completely devastated. These documents are crucial for their medical journey to Egypt.

Through all of this, Hossam and his family are holding on to the hope that your kindness has instilled in them. Your support means the world to them and plays an essential role in their journey toward healing.”

Friday Zoom Call

This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guests will be two important progressive American rabbis who disagree on some fundamental questions regarding Palestine and Israel. Rabbi Alissa Wise, Lead Organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, former Co-Deputy Director at Jewish Voice for Peace and co-author of Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing, is anti-Zionist. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, supports partitioning Israel-Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. Despite these differences, they both signed a recent letter in The New York Times titled “Jewish People Say No to Ethnic Cleansing.” We’ll talk about the ideological differences that separate “anti-Zionist” and “progressive Zionist” Jews—I’m using quotation marks because even the terms are contested— and whether, despite them, there are opportunities for cooperation in the age of Netanyahu and Trump.

Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.

Book Tour

(We’ll update this every week.)

On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.

On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.

On Monday, March 10 and Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be giving four talks in Michigan. On March 10 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at St David’s Episcopal Church, and on March 11 at St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church and at T’chiyah synagogue.

On Monday, March 17, I’ll be speaking at Mishkan Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia.

On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.

On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.

On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.

On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Book Interviews

Last week, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza was reviewed critically from the right in Quillette and from the left in Middle East Eye and Religion Dispatches.

Here’s a video of my discussion last week at San Diego State University with Professors Jonathan Graubart and Manal Swarjo and in Los Angeles with Professor David Myers.

NPR chose Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza as its book of the day.

Sources Cited in this Week’s Video

Muhammad Shehada on Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family.

Khalil Sayegh on Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family and other Israeli hostages.

Khalil Sayegh on his late father.

“Don’t call for revenge-call for peace,” retweeted by We Are All Hostages.

Commentary editor John Podhoretz on the people of Gaza (27 minutes in).

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Parshat Mishpatim.

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!), Nora Caplan-Bricker reviews Rachel Kushner’s No Exit.

Matt Duss and Jeffrey Sachs debate Ukraine.

For the Foundation of Middle East Peace, I interviewed Palestine Legal’s Dima Khalidi about repression in the Trump era.

Check out Liz Shulman’s new book, Good Jewish Girl: A Jerusalem Love Story Gone Bad.

Reader Responses

In response to my interview with Educational Bookshop co-owner Mahmoud Muna, subscriber Therese Mughannam wrote:

“I was born in the hospital in the Russian Compound in 1947, (now a prison Mahmoud was taken to) months before the partition of Palestine. I’ve tried to visit the compound during past trips, but the courtyard was as far as I once was allowed ‘for security reasons’ and only for ‘5 minutes and no pictures!’ Unfortunately, my American passport revealed to them that I was born in Jerusalem. But once in there, sitting on a cold stone bench, time stood still for me and I prayed for them all, Israeli soldiers, Palestinian prisoners, the whole lot of them. Sigh. ‘How long O, Lord…’”

See you on Friday, February 28,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, as I’ve been on my book tour now, people sometimes ask me, you know, is it hard to be a Jew, particularly maybe an observant Jew who’s critical of Israel? And I always feel embarrassed a bit by the question because the truth is my life is so privileged and safe compared to Palestinians in Gaza, or Palestinians in the West Bank and other places, and even compared to Israeli Jews who are dying, or suffering, or whose family members are at risk or injured. And so, my problems are just minuscule. It is true that I have lost some friends, as I document in the book, but I still have a beautiful place to daven, to pray, with people who are willing to study Jewish texts with me despite our political differences.

And if I’ve lost some members, people in the Jewish community who are not interested in being my friends anymore, I also feel like I’ve gained a kind of a moral community that I could not have imagined, which includes many, many Palestinians and people from all different backgrounds. And what I mean by a moral community is people who simply believe in the preciousness of all life—all Palestinian life, all Israeli Jewish life—and refuse to be drawn into a politics of inhumanity, a politics of cruelty regardless of what happens and regardless of what is done to their side. And those people are my heroes. And I feel like that’s what I think of as my moral community.

I want to give a couple of examples of that. In the last few days, in the wake of the terrible news about the Bibas family there, the terrible way in which they were returned kind of paraded around, and the news that the person who was initially said to be their mother, Shiri Bibas, was not her. And the first person I want to quote is my friend Muhammad Shehada, who wrote after that, ‘our principles,’ he’s talking about the Palestinian freedom struggle. He says, ‘our principles should never be contingent on the behavior of our oppressor.’ This is from Muhammad, someone who, as I document in my book, lost his best f…

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Palestinian legal scholar Raef Zreik is a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Sometimes the most penetrating analysts of a society are those who see it from below because they are members of an oppressed caste. I’ve often found that Raef, as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has striking insights about Israeli Jewish society. So, in this horrifying moment, in which so many Israeli politicians and pundits have embraced mass ethnic cleansing, I wanted to hear his views.

On Sunday, February 9th, Israeli police raided both branches of the East Jerusalem Educational Bookstore and arrested its owners, Mahmoud and Ahmed Muna. They were released on bail after two days in jail, but are banned from entering their stores for the next two weeks. During this difficult time, Mahmoud graciously agreed to talk with me about his experience.

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

My new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, is (still) on The New York Times Bestseller List.

You’ll find a list of book-related events, interviews and reviews below.

I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, the latest work by the essayist Raja Shehada, What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?

I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.

Friday Zoom Call

This Friday’s zoom call, for all paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guest will the Guardian columnist and novelist Jonathan Freedland. I’ve been looking for opportunities to discuss my book publicly with Jews who disagree with my criticisms of Israel, and it’s been hard. Almost everyone I’ve asked has said no. I’m grateful that Jonathan is an exception. He’s critical of Israel himself but still disagrees with aspects of my book. I’m looking forward to hearing those criticisms this Friday.

Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.

Book Tour

(We’ll update this every week.)

On Monday, February 17, I’ll be speaking at San Diego State University.

On Tuesday, February 18, I’ll be speaking with UCLA historian David Myers at the Lumiere Music Hall in Los Angeles. (The venue was changed after the Skirball Cultural Center cancelled the event).

On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.

On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.

On Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be speaking at T’chiyah synagogue in metro Detroit.

On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.

On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.

On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.

On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Book Interviews

Last week, I spoke about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza with The New Yorker, The Forward and Rumble. And in a public conversation sponsored by Jewish Currents with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The book was reviewed in The Financial Times, Jacobin, the Sydney Morning Herald and Good Faith Media.

Sources Cited in this Week’s Video

Dan Senor’s podcast conversation with Israeli journalists Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal.

Amos Harel in Haaretz on Israel’s new war plan.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says “Preparations have begun with the Americans for implementing voluntary migration. I estimate that migration will begin within weeks.״

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 reviewed the antisemitism reports recently issued by task forces at Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and the University of Washington.

David Brooks on Trump and Musk’s reign of terror and incompetence inside America’s government.

In The New Yorker, Mosab Abu Toha outlines a plan for Gaza’s reconstruction.

In the London Review of Books, Alex de Waal discusses Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war.

See you on Friday, February 21,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

When things are already really horrible, it’s often hard for people to imagine that they could get even worse. Perhaps it’s especially hard for people to imagine that if those people, like many White Americans, have kind of grown up in relatively comfortable and secure environments. But I think we need to face the very real possibility that, in the weeks to come, Israel will renew its military assault on Gaza, that the ceasefire will end, and not just that Israel will renew its military assault, but that that military assault would be more ferocious, more savage than anything we have seen so far. And I want to suggest why I think there’s a real possibility of that terrible prospect.

One of the podcasts that I listen to is a podcast by a guy named Dan Senor called Call Me Back. Now, Dan and I kind of morally operate in really, I would say, fundamentally different kind of universes. I mean, we see Israel-Palestine in just fundamentally different ways. But I get a lot from listening to his podcast because Dan is very, very plugged in in Israeli political and national security circles. And he has guests on who are very, very plugged in.

And I think it’s really important for anybody, regardless of your political views, to not just listen to people who agree with you, but to listen to people who disagree with you because they often are part of a discourse that you might be inclined to overlook or not take seriously, but that actually is really, really important. And especially, given that this is a discourse that Dan is engaged in, which is operating off in a kind of near the highest echelons of the Israeli government and, especially under Trump, also the US government.

And so, in a recent episode, Dan was having a conversation with two very, very plugged in Israeli journalists, Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal. And one of the points they make is that they think it’s very unlikely that Benjamin Netanyahu would go to a second round of the ceasefire deal because his government is now down to 63 seats and an Israeli government needs 61 to stay in power. And Bezalel Smotrich, who was still in the government, the far-right finance minister, said he will leave the government if Israel doesn’t resume the war. He will leave the government if Israel goes to the second phase of the ceasefire. And that Netanyahu’s government could fall, in particular, because they have to pass a budget by early March, which would be very, very difficult to pass if there’s a rebellion inside their coalition. And beyond that, Netanyahu, if he went to an election this spring, would have to go into election having failed to deliver on his core promise of the war, which was to destroy Hamas. So, Segal and Eyal’s kind of view is that Netanyahu will look for an opportunity to not go to a second round of a ceasefire deal.

The second point that Nadav Eyal makes, which I think is really, really significant to understand, is the political impact of Donald Trump’s proposal for mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, the political impact in Israel. That Eyal makes the point, which I think is a very reasonable point, that the only entity that actually could force Palestinians out of Gaza is Israel. The United States is not going to do it on its own. The United States is not going to send its own troops into Gaza to put Palestinians on buses and force them out. If Trump’s plan is going to go into effect, it will have to be that Israel does that work.

And in a sense, what I think Nadav Eyal suggests on Senor’s podcast is that what Trump has done by saying that he wants the outcome of this war not to be the Palestinian Authority coming in, not to be a negotiated solution, but indeed to be the mass expulsion of Palestinians is essentially given a green light to Israel to wage a war in Gaza, which would be even more than the last war, a war aimed at mass expulsion. And this seems to fit what some people in the Israeli government are now saying.

So, Amos Harel, the longtime Haaretz writer, reported a couple of days ago that Israel’s defense minister, Yisrael Katz, had said that Israel would launch a new war in Gaza ‘exactly as the president promised.’ What does it mean to launch a new war exactly as the president promised? So, Harel quo…

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Palestinian legal scholar Raef Zreik is a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Sometimes the most penetrating analysts of a society are those who see it from below because they are members of an oppressed caste. I’ve often found that Raef, as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has striking insights about Israeli Jewish society. So, in this horrifying moment, in which so many Israeli politicians and pundits have embraced mass ethnic cleansing, I wanted to hear his views.

The Israeli and American Jewish establishments embrace mass ethnic cleansing.

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