The Beinart Notebook

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Just Because People Vote For Something Doesn’t Make It Right

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Our guest is Yale Philosophy Professor Jason Stanley, a world-renowned scholar of fascism and author of the new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. We talk about Donald Trump’s victory and what it means for liberal democracy in the United States.

Our call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday at 1 PM Eastern. That will be our new regular time. (West Coast subscribers, we’ve heard you.)

Our guest will be Yale Philosophy Professor Jason Stanley, a world-renowned scholar of fascism and author of the new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. We’ll talk about what happened in Tuesday’s election and the fate of the struggle between liberal democracy and fascism in the United States.

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 Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

My New Book

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. 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. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. One of the books that helped me understand the Nakba better is Raja Shehadeh’s Strangers in the House, a beautiful portrait of a relationship between a father and his son in a political environment made impossible by expulsion and oppression.

I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medical Aid to Palestinians. If you have other suggestions, please send them.

Responses to My Last Video

The unnamed newsletter subscriber I cited in this week’s video about the interconnectedness between American liberal democracy and the movement for Palestinian rights is David Goldstein. Here’s how he made the case in an email to me:

“We know that the trendlines among Democrats and independents are bending inexorably towards Palestinian support and away from blind Israel fealty. If those trendlines continue - and there’s every reason to believe they will – it’s only a matter of time before a democratic America stops financing Israel’s immoral/objectiveless wars and, in turn, conditions military support on reasonable behavior. It's inevitable. There’d be no way for a candidate to emerge from a Democratic primary without professing a saner and more humane stance on the issue. That's just where the party is.

But if Trump is elected and America ceases to be a functioning democracy, this burgeoning groundswell of Palestinian support won’t have any influence on American foreign policy. A democratic regime, even a benighted spineless one, will have no choice but to respond to the political pressure an increasingly pro-Palestinian constituency exerts on it if it wishes to remain in power. A Trump-led totalitarian regime that doesn't have to worry about getting voted out of office will not only ignore this pressure, but likely criminalize it, unleash violence to suppress it. 

Put another way, the choice isn't just between the two candidates on the ballot; it's a choice between 1) voting to preserve a democratic political system in which pro-Palestinian support will inevitably change the fundamentals of the conflict and 2) voting to burn this system to the ground, thus rendering this political trend irrelevant and dooming future generations of Palestinians to the status quo or worse.

So, a vote for Harris isn’t a tacit endorsement of her disappointing stance on the conflict; nor is it a willingness to countenance America’s financial support of war crimes; it’s a vote to allow an increasingly Pro-Palestinian sentiment to matter in the future. It’s about fighting for the greater long-term Palestinian (and, ultimately, Israeli) good. It’s not holding one’s nose and sacrificing principles; it’s about providing the groundwork and infrastructure to continue the fight, flawed as the vehicle to do so may be.”  

Another reader, Omar Khan, emailed to argue the opposite point:

“I happen to disagree with you in a most profound way regarding your logic around voting for VP Harris for the presidential ticket. We have no argument that Trump is the far worse candidate by a long shot. The only trouble is that relativism is fairly useless here: both candidates are essentially pro genocide, which already takes up the entire moral discussion. *After* being complicit with genocide, whether one is then better on reproductive rights, immigrant issues, tax policy, and so forth – while not exactly a moot point, becomes morally much less relevant.

Many years ago, I was privileged to be taught introduction to psychology at Penn by the professor who wrote the book – Dr. Gleitman. He had as a guest professor, Dr. Marty Seligman (the originator of the theory of learned helplessness). To my 17-year-old self, it was the first time of being presented with the famous ethical dilemma of ‘the trolley problem.’ In this case, he asked, ‘you’re driving and there’s a fork in the road; on the one side is a mother with two children, and on the other side are three old people crossing the road. Whom do you hit?’ And after the class had given its view on the matter, he said – ‘you hit…The brakes.’ It didn’t quite sidestep the dilemma as much as point out that sometimes we put ourselves in moral conundrums which are completely unnecessary – by assuming that they are created by ossified, unyielding conditions and people, when in fact we need to change the question.

Before then, I was the product of a Quaker high school education and some things were clear: first, let’s not define ‘evil’ that easily; it’s a pretty high bar for something to be called that. Second, once you have called something evil, then you know what you call the lesser of two evils? Evil.”

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 reads Parsha Bereishit against the backdrop of Gaza’s destruction.

My Beinart Notebook colleague Daniel Kaufman (pen name “cooper lit”) pens a comic about the people we love who defend the indefensible. 

The best debate on voting for Harris I’ve heard. Between Mehdi Hasan and the Makdisi brothers on their podcast. (Starts at 43 min, 45 seconds.)

Donald Trump meets the New Yorker’s cartoon page.

Haaretz accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

For a special Pod Save the World series about the election, I talked to Ben Rhodes about Harris, Trump, and Gaza.

Last month, I was interviewed about Zionism, antisemitism, and Gaza at the University of Alberta.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I completely understand why people are struggling to support Kamala Harris, given what the Biden administration has done and its responsibility for the destruction of Gaza, and now the destruction of significant parts of Lebanon as well. But I think that there are arguments for Harris even on the question of Palestinian rights that are worth thinking about. And there are a couple that I want to mention that are really not mine. They’re ideas that I’ve heard from other people who I really respect.

And one of them is made by the Palestinian American Democratic strategist Rania Batrice. Rania makes the point that this movement for Palestinian freedom, which has grown so much over the last year, will struggle to continue to grow under a Trump presidency in the same way, in part because the Trump presidency will put such tremendous pressure on people of progressive values, on so many issues. There will be so many crises. The crisis of mass deportation. The crisis of a government that doesn’t care about climate change. The crisis …

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Our guest is Gaza-born journalist, Muhammad Shehada, whose writing has been indispensable over the last year. While we usually reserve audio of our Friday zoom calls for paid subscribers, Muhammad’s description of life in Gaza, and life outside of Gaza when your family is there, was so eloquent and haunting that I felt it needed as wide a distribution as possible.

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

The Consequences of a Trump Presidency Are Simply Too Dire

This Week’s Call: Palestinian-American political strategist Rania Batrice

Our guest this week will be Rania Batrice, former deputy campaign manager for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, and an advisor on paid media for the Uncommitted campaign. I don’t know if Rania agrees with my arguments for supporting Harris, but she’s one of the smartest and most ethical people in Democratic politics, and I’m keen to hear how she sees the election in its final days.

Our call, for paid subscribers, will be at our normal time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Thursday to join the call live, as well as the video, which will go up later in the day. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

My New Book

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. 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. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. One of the books that helped me understand the Nakba better is Raja Shehada’s Strangers in the House, a beautiful portrait of a relationship between a father and his son in a political environment made impossible by expulsion and oppression.

I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medical Aid to Palestinians. If you have other suggestions, please send them.

Sources Cited in this Video

Eric Levitz on why a Harris loss will push Democrats to the right.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on how she decides who to support for president.  

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!), four Palestinians describe how they left Gaza.

Natasha Gill on how Jews are abandoning their children to face a moral reckoning alone.

A Palestinian and Israeli psychoanalyst talk about home.

Upcoming Talks

On October 29, I’ll be speaking at the University of Victoria. The event is online.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, I’ve kind of been putting this off because I’ve been really struggling with it at a number of levels but I want to explain why, if I lived in a swing state, I would vote for Kamala Harris. And I say this as somebody who thinks that Joe Biden and some of his top advisors should be brought before international courts as war criminals for their role in the utter destruction of the Gaza Strip. Surely, if I support the international proceedings that I hope will one day begin against the leaders of Hamas and against Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Golant, how could I not also support such proceedings against the top Biden administration officials who gave Israel the weapons that Israel has used to utterly destroy human life in the Gaza Strip.

So, I say that as someone who feels that way about Biden’s policies, and also someone who’s found that Harris’s response during the campaign on this question of Palestinian humanity has been worse than I could have imagined, utterly depressing and infuriating. The fact that they could not do the bare minimum—by which I mean have a Palestinian American state representative who had endorsed Harris come to give a speech at the Democratic Convention in which she simply spoke about Palestinian suffering and about Palestinian humanity, about principles like equality and peace, principles that supposedly Democratic Party believes in—the fact that even that could not be done, showed to me a level of just kind of moral cowardice and political idiocy that still I find staggering.

And I also want to say that I’m obviously saying this as a person with the good luck that my family is safe, you know. There’s no reason I deserve to be safe any more than the people whose families are in Gaza, or other parts of Israel and Palestine, and in Lebanon, whose families are being destroyed and living with daily terror of being killed. And, for those people, it is not my place to judge or lecture those folks. I can’t possibly imagine how I would be thinking and feeling were I in those circumstances. And I also want to say that I think that folks who are not in swing states and in safe blue states, I do think there is a case for registering a protest vote for president and voting Democratic for the other races.

But I do think there are some arguments to be made for why, if I were in a swing state, I would vote—with a heavy heart—I would vote for Kamala Harris. Some of these are going to be obvious, but I think that they’re worth going through. The first is that even though there is not nearly as big a difference on the question of Palestinian freedom between Harris and Trump as I would like, there is a really big difference on other issues that are also profoundly, profoundly important. Starting with climate, right, can we really even begin to come to terms with the consequences for all of our lives of four more years of a president Donald Trump, who essentially does not believe in climate change as a problem, and who would be moving aggressively with all of his kind of corporate industry allies to rolling back whatever the Biden administration was able to put in to place to try to move towards a kind of greener economy? The consequences of that are just incalculable.

Secondly, on abortion. How many women and other people who have abortions are going to die if Trump is allowed to appoint all these judges who will uphold these incredibly draconian, strict abortion laws that basically put women’s lives at risk because they basically say that you can’t get reproductive medical care because they prioritize the fetus over the life and well-being of the person who’s carrying that fetus?

And thirdly—and again, these things are obvious, but they’re worth saying—is we simply don’t know what kind of state American liberal democracy would be left in after four years of Donald Trump. We know that American liberal democracy is profoundly flawed as it is, but we do have some separation of powers. We do have some ability to have free elections. We simply don’t know how much of that will be left standing after four years of Donald Trump. We learned in his first term that many of these foundational things that keep us a somewhat moderately free society are based on custom. They’re much more fragile than we realize. That they really exist because people respect certain kinds of norms. We learned that when you have a president who simply does not respect those norms—and he’s worse than he was four years ago—that those things can really start to buckle, especially when you have a Republican Party just completely dominated by cowards who will support whatever he wants. And potentially those Republicans could control the House and the Senate. And they already control the Supreme Court. This is really existential for the future and standing of American liberal democracy.

And on those issues—climate, abortion, liberal democracy—there is an important difference between Harris and Trump, a very, very important difference. And I think one has to keep that in mind. Secondly, even on the question of Israel and Palestine, I think there is a difference between Trump and Harris. Not as big a difference, of course, as I would like, but there is a difference. And there would be a difference I thi…

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 guests are Efrat Machikawa and Boaz Atzili. Efrat’s uncle, Gadi Mozes, was abducted on October 7. Boaz's cousin, Aviv Atzili, was killed on October 7th in Kibbutz Nir Oz and his body was taken to Gaza. Aviv's wife, Liat Atzili, was released in the ceasefire and hostages deal in November. Both Efrat and Boaz are activists for a ceasefire. I’m grateful to them for taking the time to talk to me in this agonizing and critical 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

There will be no zoom call this week. We’ll resume on Friday, November 1 at 11 AM with Seth Anziska discussing Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.

My New Book

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. 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. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. I’ve been deeply moved by Fida Jiryis, Stranger in My Own Land, which charts her family’s painful and surreal journey, from Mandatory Palestine to Lebanon to Israel. It’s a book I wish I could make required reading in all the places, in America, Israel and beyond, where Palestinians are routinely dehumanized.

I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medglobal. I’m grateful to people who have sent suggestions. Please keep sending them.

Sources Cited in this Video

A list of the Palestinian and Arab leaders Israel has assassinated since the 1950s.

The Book of Ecclesiastes.

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 talks to Daniel Levy about US policy and Israel’s military escalation.

Adam Shatz on the Middle East after Hassan Nasrallah.

Some listeners took issue with my praise for Ta-Nehisi Coates book, The Message, and sent me two essays critical of it. The first, in The Forward, criticizes Coates’ book for analogizing America’s treatment of Blacks to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The second, in The New Yorker, suggests that Coates’ has abandoned the commitment to reporting that characterized his prior work. They didn’t convince me but read them for yourself.

Upcoming Talks

I’m headed to Canada. On October 22, I’ll be speaking at the University of Alberta and on October 29 I’ll be speaking at the University of Victoria.

See you a week from Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, one of the things about observing Jewish holidays, especially this time of year when there’s a ton of Jewish holidays, is that it takes you offline. And so, big events happen in the world, and you kind of hear about them through the grapevine, but you don’t really fully experience them in the way that you would when you’re online. But you also have a little bit of distance from events and some time to think. And, sometimes, even the Jewish texts that you end up reading when you’re in synagogue can put those events in some kind of perspective.

And this happened for me this Shabbat. This Shabbat, which is the Shabbat during the holiday of Sukkot, Jews read the book of Ecclesiastes, which is called in Hebrew, Kohelet. It’s a really fascinating text. There are a lot of famous kind of aphorisms that come from the book of Ecclesiastes, one of which is there’s nothing new under the sun. And early in Kohelet, in Ecclesiastes, there’s this line in which the author says, ‘sometimes there is a phenomenon of which they say, look, this one is new. But it occurred long ago, in ages that went by before us. Ergo, there is nothing new under the sun.’

And that seemed to me pretty fitting to read a couple of days after the news that Israel had assassinated Yahya Sinwar, and then of course before that, Hassan Nasrallah. I don’t think many Americans today know who Abbas Al-Musawi was, or Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, or Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Well, al-Musawi was Nasrallah’s predecessor as the head of Hezbollah. He was assassinated by Israel in 1982. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was the first chairman of Hamas’ Shura Council. He was assassinated by Israel in 2004. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi was the second chairman of Hamas’ Shura Council. Israel assassinated him also in 2004, according to a tally by the Jewish Virtual Library. I don’t exactly know how they assembled this. Israel has assassinated 337 Palestinian and Arab kind of high-level leaders in a list that they have going back to 1956. For instance, in 1972, Israel famously—or infamously—assassinated Ghassan Kanafani, who was then a central command member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Israel has been doing this a really, really long time.

And so, when you hear people in Israel, and Israel supporters, and folks in the American Jewish community saying what a huge victory this was, what an enormous accomplishment this was, and everyone kind of beating their chests about this and the military prowess and all of this stuff, just ask yourself a simple question: how did all those other assassinations going back years and decades and decades, how did they work out for Israel? Have they made Israel safer? Again and again, Israel assassinates folks, right. And then these organizations promote new leaders. Now, maybe the new leaders are less capable than the old leaders. Maybe they’re more moderate. Often, they’re not, right? Israel had no idea when it assassinated Abbas al-Musawi that they would get Hassan Nasrallah, who was actually a lot better, a more effective leader than Musawi. Maybe the next guy won’t be as good.

But the problem is you’re not actually dealing in any sense with the underlying problem, right. Maybe when you are dealing with wars where you’re not occupying a people, right, maybe as in America’s wars against al-Qaeda or ISIS, these assassinations could be more effective because you are working hand-in-hand with states, with sovereign states that are your allies, in the case of the fight against ISIS, the Iraqi government and the Kurds, for instance, that you can work with and they can potentially take control of this area, and kind of decimate an insurgent organization.

But the Palestinian issue is fundamentally—again, and it’s extraordinary that one would even need to say this, right—but it’s fundamentally not about Hamas. Because Hamas was only created in 1987, right. When Israel killed Kanafani in 1972, it wasn’t thinking about Hamas. Hamas didn’t exist. And it wasn’t thinking about Islamists because the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was a leftist group that was involved with armed resistance, including against civilians, against Israel. And at that point, Israel was thinking about this threat more in terms of groups like the PFLP that were leftist groups. But it wasn’t about the PFLP, just as it’s fundamentally not about Hamas. And it’s not about Sinwar, which is not a way of apologizing for Sinwar. Sinwar has did terrible, terrible things. Of course he did. Many leaders have done terrible, terrible things.

But the point is that Sinwar will pass. Even Hamas may pass. The Palestinian people will remain. The Palestinian problem for Israel will remain in that you are holding millions of people without the most basic rights. And so, at best, maybe you create some disarray in an organization. Even the organization gets supplanted by some other organization, and for a while people are licking their wounds, and they haven’t organized yet. But they will. Sooner or later, they will. Another organization, another leader, because it is human to fight against your oppression, for your freedom.

Now, there are ethical ways of fighting. There are unethical ways. October 7th was an unethical way. There are effective ways and there are ineffective ways. Those things are really important. But what is sure is that you will not break a people’s will to fight for their freedom by killing one particular leader, right. And it is astonishing to me, and deeply depressing, that we still get sucked into this. We in the Jewis…

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Our guest is the award-winning author and journalist, Ta-Nehisi Coates. His new book, The Message, chronicles his trip to Palestine and Israel (alongside trips to Senegal and South Carolina) and meditates on why some people’s stories are told and others are erased. We’ll talk about how he came to write about Israel-Palestine, about how victims become victimizers, about the backlash he’s experienced since the book came out, and about the forces that keep Black writers from shaping public debate about America’s role in the world.

The event was cosponsored by Jewish Currents and the Foundation for Middle East Peace, so it’s free for all subscribers. To get conversations like this every week, and support my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Edited by Jesse Brenneman

Intro/outro music by Nathan Salsburg

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Our guest will be Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute and one of the most thoughtful and best-informed observers in Washington about the relationship between Israel, Hezbollah and Iran. We’ll discuss Israel’s recent attack, US policy and the danger of a regional war.

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