The Beinart Notebook

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Mairav Zonszein is Senior Israel-Palestine Analyst for the International Crisis Group. She kindly agreed to talk with me about this breaking news.

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Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. He has long written a weekly column for Haaretz. In our conversation, Gideon tells about his younger days, how he evolved away from racism, and how he now lives in a society he regularly accuses of grave crimes. I was struck by his openness and intimacy and expect you will be too.

The Outgoing National Security Advisor’s Orwellian Interview at the 92nd Street Y

Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 17, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.

Our guest will be Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program and a former senior attorney at Adalah, which defends the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. We’ll talk about the Trump administration’s coming crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and activism.

I’ve also recorded another Zoom video, without a live audience, with the longtime Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy. I have long wanted to ask Gideon what it’s like to be one of Israel’s most hated men. And how he lives in a society that he regularly accuses of committing grave crimes. I was struck by the openness and intimacy of his answers. He told me, among many other things, that every morning when he goes for a jog in the park, he sees the same woman jogging alongside him. And that every morning she greets him with the same phrase: “traitor.”

This video is for paid subscribers too.

My New Book

On January 28, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”

Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.

Sources Cited in this Video

Jake Sullivan’s interview at the 92nd St Y.

The new Lancet study on the number of dead in Gaza.

Oxfam’s comparison of deaths in Gaza to those in Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere.

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 chronicles the movement to establish Jewish settlements in southern Lebanon.

Former Representative Cori Bush explains why it was worth losing her seat to defend Palestinian rights.

Vivian Silver’s son denounces Israel’s president for exploiting his mother’s memory.

See you on Friday, January 17,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, we’re in this interesting moment where top Biden administration foreign policy officials are kind of going out into the country, trying to craft a public narrative about what they did in office as they prepare to leave office. There was Antony Blinken’s interview with the New York Times a week ago or so, which I commented on last week. And then, recently I just came across the video that was put out of a public conversation that Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, did at the 92nd Street Y with Ian Bremmer.

And these are really remarkable documents because they are really exercises in what George Orwell wrote about so famously, which is, the creation of a kind of dishonest and euphemistic language to try to defend things that if stated in kind of clear concrete ways, would clearly be too brutal for most people to accept. And so, I think they’re worth looking at at the level of language, which is what Orwell urged political writers to do to challenge the dishonesty of language as a way of getting at the brutality of government and the action of people in power who act brutally.

So, I want to quote something from what Sullivan says at the 92nd Street Y. He’s asked about Israel’s policies vis-a-vis the people of Gaza. And he says: ‘We believe Israel has a responsibility as a democracy. As a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law, that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.’

So, the formulation is really fascinating, right. He’s being asked about what Israel’s doing, but he starts by just stipulating a set of assumptions, right, which don’t need to be proved, right, because these are the assumptions that he begins with, right. And they’re never challenged by the interviewer. The first is that Israel is a democracy. Again, something one hears constantly, but if you think about it, it’s not a democracy for Palestinians, right?

About 70% of the Palestinians who live under the control of the Israeli government, those in the West Bank and in Gaza and in East Jerusalem. And nobody who knows anything about the reality of how Israel operates in Palestinian life could deny that the Israeli government has power—indeed life and death power—over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem. And yet, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza cannot become citizens of the state of Israel. They can’t vote for its government. The vast majority of Palestinians in East Jerusalem are not citizens either, right. And that’s about 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control. About 30% are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are sometimes called Arab Israelis, who have a kind of second-class citizenship, but do enjoy citizenship and the right to vote.

So, if 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control are not citizens and can’t vote, it’s not a democracy for Palestinians. It’s a democracy for Israeli Jews. In many ways, quite a robust one. But it is about as democratic, one might say, for Palestinians as the United States was under Jim Crow for Black Americans, right, when a minority of Black Americans—those in the North—had the right to vote. But the majority of Black Americans who lived in the South did not have the right to vote. These are not esoteric or complicated things, right? They’re very basic things, right?

But you just notice how they’re basically shoved completely aside in the assumption that Sullivan starts with—that Israel is a democracy—which is simply to say that there’s a basic benevolence that he’s kind of assuming here, right. Which makes his conversation about Israeli behavior completely different than he would if he were talking about Russia or some other some other adversary because he’s essentially putting it in the camp of democracies. But, in fact, when it comes to Palestinians, it really should not be considered to be in the camp of democracies. And that’s not challenged, right. That’s an assumption that doesn’t even need to be defended.

And then he continues. He called Israel ‘a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life.’ It’s such a strange statement. He’s being asked about what’s happening in Gaza, right. Oh, the evidence in Gaza is not hard to find. It’s plentiful, right. The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal just came out with a report just recently suggesting that by the end of June, the death toll in Gaza was over 64,000 people, with almost 60% of those being women, children, and people over the age of 65. And it’s worth noting, by the way, that even men under the age of 65, most of them are not Hamas fighters. So, we’re talking about a very large majority of these people killed who are not fighters, right.

And just by kind of comparison, according to Oxfam, Israel has been killing 250 people per day in Gaza. By comparison, Ukraine, where the United States has literally imposed sanctions and sent weapons to fight against what Russia is doing, that’s more than five times the number of people who’ve been dying since the escalation of the war in Ukraine in…

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Israeli-born British journalist Rachel Shabi is the author of the new book, Off-White: The Truth about Antisemitism. Last week, she published a column on the subject in The Guardian. She’s particularly knowledge about antisemitism, and its weaponization, in Britain, a subject of ferocious contention since Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader.

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Israeli religious thinker and activist Mikhael Manekin is one of the founders of smol emuni, the faithful left. We discuss Mikhael’s new book, so far available only in Hebrew, entitled, Sermons from the Abyss, which uses the five Megillot that Jews read during the year in synagogue to reflect on the horrors of the last several years. I don’t know of any…

The Outgoing Secretary of State’s Astonishing Interview with the New York Times

Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 10, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.

Our guest will be the Israeli-born British journalist Rachel Shabi, author of the new book, Off-White: The Truth about Antisemitism. Last week, she published a column on the subject in The Guardian. She’s particularly knowledge about antisemitism, and its weaponization, in Britain, a subject of ferocious contention since Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader. We’ll discuss all that on Friday.

I’ve also recorded an interview with the Israeli religious thinker and activist Mikhael Manekin, one of the founders of smol emuni, the faithful left. We discussed Mikhael’s new book, so far available only in Hebrew, entitled, Sermons from the Abyss, which uses the five Megillot that Jews read during the year in synagogue to reflect on the horrors of the last several years. I don’t know of any Jewish thinker who is grappling more deeply than Mikhael with the theological ramifications of Israel’s destruction of Gaza. This call, which I’ll post this Wednesday, is for paid subscribers too.

My New Book

On January 28, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”

Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.

Sources Cited in this Video

The New York Times’ interview with Antony Blinken.

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!), Theia Chatelle details the Yale police department’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters.

An extraordinary interview with Muhammad Shehada about realities in Gaza.

A song about living in a society that is committing genocide.

I talked to the CBC about why Jimmy Carter deserves an apology.

See you on Friday, January 10,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken did a big interview with the New York Times this weekend about his legacy, the Biden administration’s legacy. And a big part of that interview was about Gaza. And I think it’s worth noting a number of things he said because I think they show the way in which people like Blinken live inside kind of intellectual and moral prison, in which basic truths are things that they cannot bring themselves to see or will not bring themselves to see. And they end up saying these things which are completely, utterly incoherent, and I think just morally inexcusable.

And so, the first thing that’s striking if you listen to Blinken’s comments on Gaza is that for him, the problem of Gaza and Palestinians in Gaza is a problem that begins on October 7th. He says, ‘since October 7th,’ this is Blinken, ‘we’ve had some core goals in mind. And what are those goals,’ he says, ‘make sure October 7th can’t happen again, prevent a wider war, and protect Palestinian civilians.’ Now, what he means by make sure October 7th can’t happen again, and he says it explicitly, is destroying Hamas’s military capacity, right. There’s no recognition that October 7th doesn’t just happen because Hamas has a bunch of weapons. October 7th happens because Palestinians are living in what Human Rights Watch calls an open-air prison, what the UN has said is a place that’s unlivable. This is before October 7th. That Palestinians are living in what all the world’s major human rights organizations call an apartheid state, right. All of that is completely absent.

So, Blinken thinks that the problem that he’s trying to solve begins on October 7th. And then he says astonishingly, he says, ‘when it comes to making sure that October 7th can’t happen again, I think we’re in a good place.’ No, you’re not in a good place. Not only because Gaza has been utterly destroyed, but you’re not in a good place in terms of making sure that things like October 7th can’t happen again because the fundamental reason behind the horror of October 7th isn’t just because Hamas has a bunch of weapons, it’s because Palestinians don’t have freedom, and because their ethical and legal paths towards fighting for freedom—whether it’s boycotts, efforts at international institutions, all of these things, peaceful marches like happened in 2018—that they have all been blocked. That’s the context if you really want to make sure that future October 7ths don’t happen, you have to address that. But that’s basically completely absent from Blinken’s framework.

And what’s really striking is it’s so striking how Blinken is able to empathize with Jewish Israelis in a way that he can’t empathize with Palestinians. So, he says, this is Blinken, he says, ‘you had in Israel in the days after October 7th a totally traumatized society. This wasn’t just the Prime Minister or a given leader in Israel. This was an entire society that didn’t want any assistance getting to a single Palestinian in Gaza.’ He says Israelis didn’t want any assistance to go to Gaza after October 7th. And he says you have to kind of understand that given the trauma in that society.

First of all, you notice the way in which he buys completely into the ethno-nationalist frame, right? What does he mean by society? Twenty percent of Israel’s own citizens are Palestinians—Palestinian citizens of Israel, sometimes called Arab Israelis. They wanted assistance to go into Gaza. So, you notice that when Blinken talks about Israeli society, he’s actually only talking about Jews, as if even the Palestinian citizens in Israel don’t actually matter, are not actually real Israelis. He’s completely bought into this ethno-nationalist framework. And then he says, yes, it’s unfortunate that they didn’t want any aid to go into Gaza. But after all, you have to understand they were really traumatized, right.

But there’s no recognition, right, that in understanding October 7th, and the horror of what Hamas and others did on October 7th, that it might be worth understanding that Palestinians were also totally traumatized, and that we should factor that in in understanding their actions—again, not excusing their action, but in understanding their action, right. So, Blinken can see Israelis through this kind of empathetic humanizing frame in a way he can’t vis-a-vis Palestinians.

The second point is the way Blinken talks about America’s leverage vis-a-vis Israel. He essentially talks about the US relationship with Israel as if America doesn’t give Israel weapons, or as if the notion that we would actually question whether we give Israel these weapons simply cannot be discussed, right. It’s completely outside of his mental framework, right. So, he says, ‘no one needs to remind me of the sufferings’—this is Palestinians—‘because it’s something that drives me every single day.’ Okay, so first of all, let’s just be honest. That’s b******t. It’s a bold-faced lie. Antony Blinken might say that to make him fall asleep at night, but nothing in his actual actions suggests that he’s driven every single day by Palestinians suffering in Gaza because he keeps supporting the sending of those weapons, right.

And w…

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Carter’s Break with the White South Over Civil Rights Offers a Model for Jews

Our guest for the Zoom call this Friday, January 3rd, at 1 Eastern, for paid subscribers, will be Paul O’Brien, Executive Director at Amnesty International USA. We’ll discuss Amnesty’s new report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.

My New Book

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28, 2025. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: first, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”

Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.

Sources Cited in this Video

Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman’s claim that Carter was “engaging in antisemitism.”

Deborah Lipstadt’s 2007 Washington Post column, “Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem.”

The attacks on Carter by Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton.

The attacks on Carter’s book in The New York Times and Slate.

“Great is repentance, which hastens redemption” from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yoma (86b).

Kenneth E. Morris’ biography, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist.

Carter’s inaugural addresses as Georgia governor and president.

Carter’s 1977 speech at Notre Dame questioning the Cold War.

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!), Will Alden details how, since October 7, foundations have withdrawn funding from groups that support Palestinian rights.

Alan Dershowitz vs Norman Finkelstein, the musical.

Doris Bittar on Christmas in Lebanon.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I interviewed two young Israelis who refused their country’s draft.

I’ve written about Jehad Abusalim, a Gaza-born scholar currently based in Washington who is completing a PhD in history, Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University. The warnings he issued about Israel’s response to October 7 have proven prescient and were tragically ignored by American media. He has now launched a newsletter on Substack. Please consider subscribing.

See you on Friday, January 3,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, Jimmy Carter has died. It’s worth going back to the moment in 2006 when he published his book, Peace Not Apartheid, to remember what happened there. Abe Foxman, then the head of the Anti-Defamation League, said that Carter was ‘engaging in antisemitism.’ Deborah Lipstadt, who went on to be appointed by a Democratic president to be the antisemitism czar wrote a column in the Washington Post entitled ‘Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem.’ Carter was attacked by Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton. His book was attacked in reviews in the New York Times and Slate in large measure for using the term apartheid, a term which is now been endorsed by Israel’s own leading human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Yesh Din, and by the most prominent human rights organizations in the world, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

A couple of years ago, I did a newsletter actually suggesting that leaders of the organized American Jewish community like Foxman, but also American politicians like Clinton and Pelosi, should offer a public apology to Jimmy Carter. I quoted at that time a line from Tractate Yoma and the Babylonian Talmud, ‘Great is repentance which hastens redemption.’ But I think there are a great number of people who need to do Teshuva, who need to ask for forgiveness for their attacks on Carter for saying things that have been deeply vindicated by the course of events in the years since then, and in fact, if you look back at them, seem extremely tame. Because it’s worth remembering that Carter wasn’t actually accusing Israel of being an apartheid state in 2006. All he was saying was that it risked becoming one, which is also, by the way, something that Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak and numerous Israeli security officials have been saying around that time. And yet, the man was viciously pilloried by people who I think at this point should have the decency to offer their apologies.

But I think there is also something really important to say about Carter and the roots of his position on Palestinian freedom. He was, of all of the American presidents, the one who I think felt the strongest sense of identification with the Palestinian plight. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think there’s a lot to learn from Carter’s own life that can instruct us as we think about Israel and Palestine and that particularly Israelis and other Jews can learn from.

So, Carter’s family story is really remarkable. He grew up not just in the South, but in the deep, deep South. I’m quoting here from a biography of his by Kenneth E. Morris called Jimmy Carter: American Moralist. Morris writes that Carter grew up in rural southwest Georgia, in a place where people spoke a rural dialect that was so thick that many outsiders thought of it as a foreign language altogether. There was a very large Black population. It was a profoundly, viciously racist environment. Morris suggests that Carter’s father, Earl, may indeed have participated in a lynching. He also tells the story that although Carter grew up playing with Black children all the time, that Carter’s father actually ordered the Black children to lose all of the games they played with little Jimmy so he could always come out on top.

And to understand the fact that Carter was the president who took this position on Palestinian freedom—and not a perfect position, but much more progressive than most of the other presidents—you have to understand that it’s an outgrowth of his experience as a White Southerner turning against his own community, his own people to support Civil Rights. In 1953, when Carter was a young businessman, he refused to join the racist Citizens’ Councils that led to a boycott by Whites in the town of his business. He supported school consolidation, which would bring Black and White students together. Also, in the 1950s, which led to a rift with his own cousin, Hugh, that the two men did not speak for more than a decade. You know, some Jews who support Palestinian freedom may identify with these kinds of stories. After a vote on this question of school integration, opponents of desegregation nailed a sign to Carter’s warehouse door saying, ‘Coons and Carters go together.’

Carter’s key political moment in his political career in Georgia was in January 1971, when in his gubernatorial inaugural speech, he denounced segregation. That was when Time magazine put him on the cover and this completely obscure governor began to launch the political career that would allow him to this upset victory in the 1976 presidential campaign. Morris argues it’s impossible to understand Carter’s view of foreign policy without understanding the way it springs from the moralism that came out of the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, his Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, was one of the key Civil Rights leaders in Georgia. That Carter was the only president of the Cold War who explicitly came out against the Cold War framing, very famously in a speech that he gave at Notre Dame, arguing in fact for a kind of an i…

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Our Communal Leaders Keep Conflating Discomfort with Unsafety

Something happened earlier this month in December that might seem like—given the scale of all the magnitude of the horrors that are happening around Palestine and Israel—might not seem so significant, but I think really is emblematic of something that’s gone terribly, terribly wrong in the organized American Jewish community.

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Our guests are Mahmoud Muna, Matthew Teller, and Juliette Touma, editors of the new anthology, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture, which includes close to a hundred stories about the lives of people in Gaza, both before and after its recent destruction. This interview is co-sponsored with Jewish Currents.

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I talked with the Palestinian-Norwegian writer Iyad el-Baghdadi about the regional implications of the Assad regime’s fall in Syria and Israel’s military intervention there.