The Beinart Notebook

Her Own Life Story Disproves Trump and Vance’s Lies

Kamala Harris never spoke to the camera and said, you know what, my parents are immigrants. And they contributed a lot to this country. And we have something to thank them for, and immigrants actually make this country better.

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Rami Khouri is a Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the American University of Beirut, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC, and a regular columnist for Al Jazeera Online. Rami lived in Beirut for 17 years and has for many years written about relations between Israel and Lebanon.

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

Shouldn’t the US Care as Much about Americans Killed by the IDF as it Cares about Americans Killed by Hamas?

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest will be Simon Fitzgerald, a trauma surgeon in Brooklyn who has worked in telemedicine in Gaza, particularly at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis with Dr. Khaled Alser. According to colleagues, Dr. Alser has been abducted by Israeli forces and tortured at Ofer Prison and at the notorious Sde Teiman prison camp in the Negev Desert. Dr. Fitzgerald will talk about his experience doing telemedicine in Gaza and about the fate of Dr. Alser.

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, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

LIVE DEBATE CHAT

I’ll be hosting a live chat during this Tuesday night’s presidential debate for paid subscribers. I’ll be participating along with all of you. Just click the “Join chat” button below:

PREMIUM MEMBERSHIP - ASK ME ANYTHING

We’ve also added a new membership category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Zoom interviews, Premium Members will get access to a monthly live “ask me anything” zoom call and video of that call the following week.

Our next “ask me anything” will be on Thursday, Sept 17 at 11 AM Eastern.

If you’re interested in becoming a premium or regular member, hit the subscriber button below or email us with any questions.

Sources Cited in this Video

The Americans injured or killed by Israeli troops in the West Bank.

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.)

On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Arielle Angel talks with Ben Lorber and Shane Burley, authors of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, about antisemitism and the left.

The Biden administration’s double standard on “river to the sea.”

Israel’s Radio Rwanda.

Orly Noy on the death of Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

Remembering Rabbi Michael Lerner.

On September 25, I’ll be speaking at Vanderbilt University.

Please consider supporting a scholarship fund for displaced students in Gaza who want to study in the US.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, last week, my video was about Hersh Goldberg-Polin and the other Israeli hostages that were killed by Hamas. And Hersh Goldberg-Polin got a particular a lot of attention in the United States because he was American. His parents spoke of the Democratic National Convention, and he became someone who many, many Americans knew. And many Americans mourned his murder by Hamas, which is as it should be. I mean, we should care about all human lives. And we have, as Americans, a particular right to be concerned about the fate of other Americans.

And now we found that an American has been shot and killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces. On Friday, an American activist named Aysenur Eygi was shot while she was protesting at an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. And this has been happening fairly frequently in recent years. Several weeks earlier, another American, Amado Sison, was struck by live ammunition in the back of the leg by Israeli forces. Earlier this year, two 17-year-old Palestinian Americans were killed in the West Bank: Tawfic Abdel Jabbar from Louisiana and Mohammad Khdour from Florida. In 2020, a 78-year-old Palestinian American, Omar Assad, was dragged from his car by Israeli forces bound and blindfolded, and then had a heart attack, while in Israeli custody after he’d been left under those conditions for like an hour so by Israeli forces. In 2021, a prominent Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed by an Israeli sniper while she was wearing a press vest, covering an Israeli Defense Forces raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.

There is, I think, by any honest assessment, a tremendous difference between the way in the United States in public conversation, and indeed the American government, respond when American Jews are killed in Israel versus what happens when Palestinian Americans, or in the case of this young woman, Aysenur Eygi, a Turkish American, were killed in the West Bank. The US government does not respond in the same way. There’s not the same level of public outcry, and there’s not the same level of demand by the US government that the people who committed these killings be held responsible.

And what disturbs me about this so much, and I think makes this so important beyond the preciousness of the individual lives at stake, is that the Biden administration—and remember, all of these deaths have been happening, these killings by Israelis of Americans, have been happening under the Biden administration. The Biden administration is engaged in a fight against Donald Trump—Kamala Harris and Joe Biden—essentially about the idea of ethnonationalism, about the idea of whether America is a country in which all of its citizens are considered equal under the law, that their lives are equally valuable, irrespective of what their race, religion, and ethnicity is.

That, of course, is not the principle that governs Israel as a Jewish state, which elevates the rights and the lives of Jews over Palestinians. But what you see in the way that even a Democratic administration responds to the deaths of Americans in Israel is that they essentially adopt the ethnonationalist prism, in which certain lives are more valuable than others that exists in Israel, and they essentially therefore end up taking the position that the Trump campaign is arguing about what kind of country America should be, right. This is Donald Trump’s vision of America. An America in which there are hierarchies between different citizens based on religion, ethnicity, race, etc.

And the Democratic party is ostensibly fighting in a desperate fight to make sure we are not that kind of a country. And yet, when it comes to the Americans who are killed in Israel, either by Hamas or by the Israeli Defense Forces, we essentially adopt that very hierarchy, and the American lives matter more if they’re Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a American Jew, then they are if they are Shireen Abu Akleh, an American Palestinian, or Omar Assad, an American Palestinian, or indeed I center as Aysenur Eygi, a Turkish American. And so, it seems to me, as a fundamental matter of principle in terms of what the Biden Administration and what the Harris campaign says they want to stand for, that this represents a portrayal of their of the vision of America that they are fighting for. And on that basis alone, it seems to me, they should be that that there is every bit as much justice for the Palestinian and other Americans who are killed by Israel, as there are for the American Jews like Hersh Goldberg-Polin who were killed by Hamas.

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

Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson are co-authors of the book, The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other. Since October 7, dialogue between Palestinians and Jews has become even more difficult, and there are those in both communities—and on the left and right—who question its value. I’m excited to ask Raja and Jeffrey to respond to those criticisms, and to explain how they believe that greater dialogue between Palestinians and Jews can contribute to the struggle for equality, freedom, and safety for everyone.

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 call this week will be at a special time: Wednesday at 11 AM Eastern

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.

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, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

We’ve added a new membership category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Zoom interviews, Premium Members will get access to a monthly “ask me anything” zoom call.

Our first “ask me anything” will be this Thursday, August 29 at 11 AM Eastern. Premium Subscribers will get a Tuesday email that includes links to both our Wednesday call with Trita and the “ask me anything” on Thursday. (If you have any questions, email me).

If you’re interested in becoming a premium or regular member, hit the button below.

We’re also slightly increasing the prices of regular paid subscriptions. It’s the first time I’ve done this since I launched the newsletter a few years ago. Starting September 1, regular subscriptions will be $79 per year (up from $72) and $7.99 per month (up from $7). This will apply to all new subscriptions and to everyone whose subscription renews. If this increase creates a hardship for you, email me and we’ll figure it out.

Sources Cited in this Video

The cancellation of Joshua Leifer’s book launch event.

A poster calls for “Zionists” to leave a London neighborhood.

Mira Sucharov’s study of what American Jews mean by the word “Zionist.”

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 the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen investigates the Israelis who want to settle southern Lebanon.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jon Stewart on the exclusion of Palestinian speakers at the DNC.

A Black and Palestinian Mississippian reflects on the Democratic conventions of 1964 and 2024.

Benjamin Netanyahu never pays the bill.

Please consider supporting a scholarship fund for displaced students in Gaza who want to study in the US.

See you on Wednesday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. There was a fair amount of attention last week to the experience of my friend, Josh Leifer, who’s launch event for his excellent new book, Tablets Shattered, was closed because the bookstore wouldn’t permit him to be speaking alongside a moderator who was a ‘Zionist’ rabbi. It produced a lot of commentary. And I do think this is something which is growing as a tendency, this tendency to say that if you are a Zionist, then you are kind of excluded from conversations. There was even a thing that happened in the UK where there was a march, which said that Zionists had to leave a certain neighborhood in London.

I wanna explain why I think this is self-defeating and unwise. The first reason is that Palestinians, and Jews who support Palestinian freedom, have been excluded from a very, very long time, and still are, sometimes even by force of law. And the argument against that is that these are restrictions on free speech, and that people should have the right to be heard, and to make their case. So, this is what many of us have argued about: the rights of, you know, Jews who don’t support a Jewish state to speak at Hillel, for instance, or the rights of Palestinians to express their point of view and not be called antisemites just because they don’t support a Jewish state.

And I do think you undermine the clarity of that argument when people on the Left turn around and then basically say, Zionists are not allowed to have a platform in our spaces, right? I think it undermines the effort, the really important effort to say that in other spaces, whether they’re establishment Jewish spaces or kind of more mainstream American political spaces, that Palestinians—the vast majority of whom, of course, don’t support the idea of a Jewish state, or other people who don’t support a Jewish state—should have the right to speak, right. That was something that tragically didn’t happen at the Democratic National Convention. But I think it makes it harder to make that case if you’re excluding people on your own turf.

Secondly, I of course understand the logic, which would say, well, Zionism is the ideology of the state. This state is classified as an apartheid state by a lot of human rights organizations. It’s therefore racist ideology, and we wouldn’t have, you know, white supremacists come and speak in our bookstores, or whatever. But I think there are some important differences, and some problems with that logic.

The first is that for many Jews, Zionism has an intimate, and often somewhat vague, meaning, which does not actually line up with supporting the actions of the state, and sometimes doesn’t even actually line up with supporting Jewish statehood at all. There is a tradition of cultural Zionism, which opposed the Jewish state. And, even among people who have never heard of cultural Zionism, what Mira Sucharov’s polling has found, which is really fascinating, is that American Jews define themselves as Zionists under certain definitions. But if you tell American Jews that Zionism means a state in which Palestinians are not treated equally to Jews, then they actually say they’re not Zionists.

So, the point is that the discourse in the Jewish community about what Zionism means can often be quite different than I think what it is on the Left. And I’m not saying that the Jewish one is right. It’s understandable that people on the Left would say, Zionism is what Israel does. But I think when you close down conversations with Jews for whom Zionism means essentially a kind of an affinity, a connection with that place, with those people, but who haven’t actually necessarily grappled that much with the contradictions of the principles of equality and liberal democracy, those are in some ways, I think, the very people that you want to be in conversation with if you’re trying to change the American debate, trying to change the American Jewish debate.

Because what Mira Sucharov’s polling shows is that when you confront people who call themselves Zionists with the reality that Israel is fundamentally unequal under law towards Palestinians, that actually many of them rethink their perspective and may even rethink the term Zionist and whether it applies to them. So, do you really want to not give the opportunity to have those conversations? I think that we are in a moment—it’s been true for quite a long time, but especially now—in which people who are making a critique of the idea of Jewish statehood based on the idea of equality under the law, based on the idea that ethnonationalism, tribal supremacy, is wrong in Israel-Palestine, and just like it’s wrong in the United States, like it’s wrong in France, like it’s wrong in Hungary, like it’s wrong in India, those people have a very powerful argument.

And the more they can get into those discussions with people who have been raised to believe in the idea of a Jewish state, but have not necessarily thought a lot about what a Jewish state means from—as Edward Said famously said—from the standpoint of its victims, those conversations, I actually think, can be extremely productive in terms of changing debate inside the American Jewish community and changing debate inside the United States as well. And when you basically say, no Zionists are allowed in that conversation, I actually think you’re forfeiting a chance to make change. And what you end up doing is basically just making people become very alienated and very angry. And that exclusion doesn’t, I think, actually move one toward…

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 call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest will Joshua Leifer, author of the new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life. It’s the best history of American Jewish politics I’ve read and offers a provocative analysis of the American Jewish future.

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, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky and Bret Stephens.

We’ve added a new membership category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Friday calls, Premium Members will get access to a monthly “ask me anything” zoom call.

Our first one will be on Thursday, August 29 at 11 AM Eastern.

We’re also slightly increasing the prices of regular paid subscriptions. It’s the first time I’ve done this since I launched the newsletter a few years ago. Starting September 1, regular subscriptions will be $79 per year (up from $72) and $7.99 per month (up from $7). This will apply to all new subscriptions and to everyone whose subscription renews. If this increase creates a hardship for you, email me and we’ll figure it out.

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 the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane profiles Florida State Representative Randy Fine, one of a new breed of MAGA Jewish Republicans.

In The New York Times, I argued that Kamala Harris could radically change Joe Biden’s policy on Gaza by simply enforcing US law.

Israeli-born Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov on how Jewish Israelis justify what he now considers a genocide.

An Uncommitted delegate who grew up being bombed by Israel on what it’s like to watch the destruction of Gaza.

Please consider supporting a scholarship fund for displaced students in Gaza who want to study in the US.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

TRANSCRIPT

So Monday night at the first night of the Democratic Convention. It's going to be devoted to Joe Biden, and I think to say it will be a love fest is probably an understatement. There will be raucous applause and tears, and the whole thing will be devoted to the heroism, the courage, the magnanimity of Joe Biden, what he's achieved, particularly the fact that he was willing to abandon his own ambition to step aside and give the Democrats a better chance of defeating Donald Trump. And, to be clear, I do think it's a very good thing that he did that. But I don't think he should be celebrated. Certainly not in that unambiguous way.

And it really bothers me that so many people in the US center, even center-left people, will be doing that tomorrow night. They'll be saying, "Joe Biden is that rarest of person in American politics, someone who really puts country above himself as an individual." I just don't think when you're analyzing a Presidency or a person, you sequester what's happened in Gaza. I mean, if you're a liberal-minded person, you believe that genocide is just about the worst thing that a country can do, and it's just about the worst thing that your country can do if your country is arming a genocide. 

And it's really not that controversial anymore that this qualifies as a genocide. I read the academic writing on this. I don't see any genuine scholars of human rights international law who are saying it's not indeed there. People like Omer Bartov, holocaust scholar at Brown, who initially were reluctant to say that, and now, indeed, have said that they consider it a genocide. So if you believe that a genocide is just about the worst thing that America can do in terms of its foreign policy, arming and funding at genocide, how can you simply say that you're gonna put that aside even for a night, and focus entirely on the fact that Democrats now have a better chance of beating Donald Trump? 

I see so many people in media who somehow feel like they get to define their work as focused on the election, focused on the mechanics of the election, and those domestic issues. And somehow Gaza is not their beat. They don't focus on that. They don't write on foreign policy. That's difficult. That's controversial. And they're making these moral judgments as if they don't have to take a position on this. And I just don't think it makes any sense. I really don't. 

If you're gonna say something about Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, you have to factor in what Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, has done, vis-a-vis Gaza. It's central to his legacy. It's central to his character. And if you don't, then you're saying that Palestinian lives just don't matter, or at least they don't matter this particular day, and I think that's inhumane. I don't think we can ever say that some group of people's lives simply don't matter, because it's inconvenient for us to talk about them at a particular moment.

And so I really would hope that people who want to say something nice about Joe Biden on Monday, because he stepped aside, put that in the larger moral context, because I really do think, or at least I desperately hope, that historians certainly will, when they look back on this horrifying and shameful moment in the history of our country.

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 call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest will Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, the largest city with an Arab-American majority in the United States. We’ll talk about how residents of Dearborn have reacted to the war in Gaza and whether Kamala Harris is doing enough to win their votes.

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, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

We’re slightly increasing the prices of paid subscriptions. It’s the first time I’ve done this since I launched the newsletter a few years ago. Starting September 1, subscriptions will be $79 per year (up from $72) and $7.99 per month (up from $7). This will apply to all new subscriptions and to everyone whose subscription renews. If this increase creates a hardship for you, email me and we’ll figure it out.

We’ve also added a new category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Friday calls, Premium Members will get access to a monthly “ask me anything” zoom call, which will start later this month. If that interests you, or you’d just like to do more to support the newsletter, please consider signing up. Whatever you decide, I appreciate it.

Sources Cited in this Video

Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1982 interview with Pat Robertson.

Merriam-Webster’s definition of “proxy.”

When Hamas broke with Iran over Syria.

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!), Raphael Magarik spoke to Rania Batrice about what Jewish texts can teach us about whether to vote for the lesser of two evils.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I spoke to Harrison Mann, who resigned from the Defense Intelligence Agency to protest his office’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

In The New Yorker, David Remnick writes about Yahya Sinwar.

Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I recently came across an interview that Benjamin Netanyahu did all the way back in 1982. So, this was before his political career, before his diplomatic career at the United Nations, and at the Israeli embassy in the United States. Back then, he was really known in 1982 fundamentally as the brother of Yoni Netanyahu, who famously died in the Entebbe raid. And Bibi had kind of fashioned himself as an expert on international terrorism. And so, he’s doing this interview with the evangelical broadcaster, Pat Robertson. And Robertson asks, ‘what is the source of terrorism?’ And Netanyahu replies, ‘the more we look, the more we found that terrorist incidents are not just isolated. There is a major force behind most of these groups that is the Soviet Union. If you take away the Soviet Union, it’s chief proxy, the PLO, international terrorism would collapse.’

So, of course, as it turned out, within a decade of that interview, the Soviet Union itself had collapsed. But the PLO had not collapsed. And international terrorism—whatever exactly Benjamin Netanyahu meant by that, presumably he meant armed actions against Israel or against the West—had not collapsed either, right? Because, in fact, the PLO was not a proxy of the Soviet Union. It wasn’t being controlled by the Soviet Union. It was getting weapons from the Soviet Union. But the PLO was fundamentally an organization that emerged out of Palestinian opposition to Israel and Zionism, which went back a very, very long time, and grew out of the Palestinian experience, and indeed existed before the Soviet Union was supporting that resistance and continued after the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

So, why bring this up now? It’s because when one hears about the relationship between Iran and Hamas, one very frequently in the American media—if you listen to American politicians, or Israeli politicians, or kind of American Jewish communal discourse—you will hear again and again this word: proxy. The same word that Netanyahu used to describe the PLO’s relationship with the Soviet Union. Now, a proxy, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is ‘a person authorized to act for another.’ Some of the synonyms are: agent, surrogate, representative, stand- in. So, the idea is there is a person or an entity that has the authority. It makes the decisions. And it authorizes, it delegates some other entity to do a certain action for it, right? So, when you say that Hamas is a proxy for Iran, what you’re saying is that Iran is making the decisions. Iran is the fundamental actor here. And Hamas is basically doing its bidding and acting as an agent, a surrogate, a delegate, a proxy, right?

In fact, I think this completely misunderstands the relationship between Hamas and Iran. It’s true that Hamas gets weaponry from Iran, and that’s very valuable for it. And if Iran were to stop that support, that would be a significant problem for Hamas. But Hamas is not an agent or a proxy of Iran in the sense that it exists because Iran wants there to be an organization like Hamas around. Hamas exists because the Palestinians have been fighting against Israel for a very, very long time, and because one of the branches of that Palestinian resistance against Israel is an Islamist branch. And that for various reasons Hamas has become a very, very important actor in Palestinian politics, kind of fusing this desire to resist against Israel with its own, I think, quite problematic and deeply illiberal kind of Islamist ideology.

And so, if Iran were to cease to exist, Hamas would still very much exist because it is embodying this Palestinian resistance—not embodying it in ways that I would like, certainly, but embodying it, along with a range of other organizations. And it would look for other external entities to support it. And indeed, so Hamas has gotten support from forces in Turkey, from people in the Gulf. And it would try to rely on those more if it didn’t have Iran as a supporter. But Iran is not the reason that Hamas exists. And Palestinians have been fighting against Israel since long before the Islamic Republic revolution in 1979 meant that Iran suddenly became interested in supporting various different Palestinian groups.

This tendency to not want to face the reality that your problem is the people amongst you who you’re denying basic rights, who are resisting that oppression, is not unique to Israel. So, in South Africa, for instance, under apartheid, it was very common to hear the idea that the African National Congress was simply a proxy for the Soviet Union because it was more convenient to imagine that the real problem was far away, rather than recognizing that your fundamental problem was to deal with the people amongst you who were resisting their lack of freedom.  

And it’s worth remembering, in fact, that Hamas actually broke with Iran just to show that it’s an independent actor, broke with Iran over the Syrian Civil War around decade or so ago, a little more, because Iran supported the Assad regime and Hamas supported the Sunni resistance in Syria. So, this idea that Hamas is a is a proxy for Iran is fundamentally a kind of another way that people used to not take Palestinians seriously, right, to not recognizing that the central problem that Israel has, the thing that makes it unsafe in Israel, is the lack of safety of the Palestinians that Israelis are living amongst.

And I think one of the reasons that Americans tend to kind of find it quite plausible to imagine this as the way the world works is this language of Hamas as a proxy for Iran mirrors the way Americans talked during the Cold War, right? Whereas Americans often, for our own reasons, didn’t want to face the fact that the movements that we were having trouble wi…

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 call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Given the growing chance of a regional war in the Middle East, our guest will be one of the best analysts of Palestinian and Middle Eastern politics, Mouin Rabbani, Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, a publication of the Arab Studies Institute, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. We’ll talk about the attack in Majdal Shams, the spate of recent Israeli assassinations, and the potential for a conflict that envelopes the entire region.

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, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Israeli columnist Nadav Eyal on Israel’s lack of preparedness for a Hezbollah assault. (His comments are near the end of the podcast. In my video, I’ve slightly compressed his remarks, but the substance is the same.)

Even Israeli security officials admit that Israel can’t destroy Hamas.

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 the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon discuss Israel’s use of “human shields” as a justification for the Gaza war.

Why Iran may not want a regional war.

The problem with Josh Shapiro.

Joe Biden’s long relationship with AIPAC.

Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I’m recording this on Sunday. So, by the time people see it on Monday or later, there may have been more serious retaliation by Hezbollah and/or Iran for Israel’s recent spate of assassinations of a Hezbollah operative in Lebanon, of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in Iran, and perhaps even for the Hamas leader Mohammed Deif in Gaza. This whole trajectory is not only so frightening, but I find it so deeply depressing for so many reasons. One of which is just that, for me, as someone who cares about the safety of Israelis, worries about that a lot, I think that what Benjamin Netanyahu is doing just from the perspective of the safety of Israelis is incredibly, incredibly reckless, a kind of Trump-level action of just complete disregard for the safety of your own people.

And I just want to give a quote. This is from Nadav Eyal, who’s a columnist at the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. Not a leftist by any means. Someone with very, I think, generally establishment views. Very close to the Israeli security apparatus. And he’s talking about the question of whether Israel is prepared for the kind of attack that Hezbollah is capable of. Remember, Hezbollah has a much stronger arsenal, a more formidable arsenal than Hamas, one that could really overwhelm the Iron Dome system, devastate Tel Aviv.

And this is what Nadav Eyal is saying about whether the Israeli security officials believe that Israel is prepared for what Hezbollah might do in response, or Iran. And Nadav Eyal says—and this is from Dan Senor’s podcast, Call Me Back—Eyal says, we have numerous reports by the defense community that the home front isn’t ready. I didn’t see any report saying that the home front is to any extent ready. And by ready, I mean, I’m talking about electricity. I’m talking about infrastructure. The Israeli administration is saying to itself that they’re not ready. That Israelis are not prepared from the perspective of civil defense for the kind of retaliation that Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu would have had to know was very likely after this spate of assassinations, which followed the attack of the Druze town of Majdal Shams earlier.

But it’s part of this larger cycle that’s been going on since October 7th. And I’ve been worried about this for a few months now because if you listen to Israeli officials and kind of commentators who are close to the Israeli government, the dynamic of their conversation in the past few months, if you notice, has really changed. If you listen to Israeli discourse and kind of pro-Israel discourse in the US in, you know, in the winter, even into, let’s say, the early spring of this year, you heard people saying, we have to destroy Hamas, right? That of course was the Israeli government line. We are gonna go into Gaza. We’re going to destroy Hamas.

But I started to notice over the last few months a real shift. And some of this even came from official Israeli spokespeople. Like Daniel Hagari, the spokesperson, said, ‘we can’t destroy Hamas.’ And you notice that people started to kind of acknowledge, or at least implicitly stop saying we’re going to destroy Hamas because it’s becoming more and more obvious that Israel cannot destroy Hamas. It may ultimately end up with a situation where Hamas is no longer in charge of picking up the garbage in Gaza. But there’s lots of reporting that Hamas doesn’t actually particularly want to be doing that anyway. But in terms of whether Hamas still is a rebel force that can be attacking Israel, there’s no question now that that will remain after this war. And, in some ways, Hamas will be more formidable because it’s more popular in the West Bank. It has a huge new group of potential recruits.

And so, Israel, in some ways, has kind of given up on that goal in Gaza, the central goal of the war as stated by the Netanyahu administration. And as it has moved away from that goal, we’ve seen more and more of this conversation of kind of turning towards this focus on the north, right? It’s almost as if, kind of, well, you can’t win this war. But this war, now, it turns out is not the most important war anyway. That Hezbollah is much more dangerous. And so, let’s go and focus on the war in the north. It’s a deeply distressing, to me, and an incoherent kind of line of argument, right? If you can’t defeat Hamas, which is a much weaker force in terms of military arsenal than Hezbollah, why on earth would you think you can defeat Hezbollah, right?

But you see this, kind of, in some ways, I feel like, almost like a compensating for the failure of this war in Gaza. Instead of asking some really fundamental questions about the limitations of military force as a strategy in general, you basically up the ante and say, okay, maybe we haven’t won this war, but we’re going to win an even bigger war, right? And the logic one often hears is, well, Israel has to go to war against Hezbollah, and maybe even Iran, because it has all of these people who had to evacuate the north of Israel because of Hezbollah rocket fire. Which again also reminds me very much of the things that I heard right after October 7th, which is that people said, we have to destroy Hamas because otherwise people will never feel safe living in the south of Israel again in all these communities, in what was called the Gaza Envelope, that people had to flee or be evacuated from after the massacre on October 7th, right?

But there’s a fundamental flaw in this logic, right, which is to say, we have to go and do something that we’re not actually able to do because that’s the only way of returning these people to these areas from which they’ve been evacuated, right? It’s all well and good to say, we have to go and defeat Hezbollah, because that’s the only way we can convince people to return to the north of Israel. But it only makes sense if you can actually do it, right, if you can actually defeat Hezbollah. And I haven’t heard anyone explain how Israel could do that. I mean it could do massive, massive damage to Lebanon, to Beirut, as it’s done massive, massive damage to Gaza. But there’s no reason to believe that that actually will destroy Hezbollah. Israelis talk in terms of restoring deterrence, right, by basically just bombing the crap out of everything. But whatever you buy, it seems to me, in terms of buying deterrence has to be balanced against, right, the …

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

Sources Cited in this Video

Senator Josh Hawley’s speech at the National Conservativism Conference.

Suzanne Schneider discusses Israel’s model for the nationalist right.

Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Dr. Mohammed Al-Hindi, the deputy leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the International Court of Justice.

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.)

On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Jonathan Shamir interviews Hana Morgenstern, Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud, and Moshe Behar about Arab-Jewish identity.

Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.

Last week the Knesset voted to reject the two state solution. Not a single Knesset member from a Jewish party opposed the resolution.

Pete Buttigieg on J.D. Vance.

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. You’ll notice that if you listen to defenders of the Israeli government, one of the things—in the United States in particular—one of the things they hate the most is when people make analogies between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and basically any other place in the world, whether it’s apartheid South Africa or, you know, Black Americans. They hate these analogies. And I think it’s because the defense of what Israel is doing requires a kind of an exceptionalization of Israel. That if you step back, and you actually just try to apply kind of broad basic principles—you know the idea of equality under the law irrespective of race, religion, ethnicity, etc.—if you see Israel and the Palestinians in that light, according to some kind of universal criteria that you apply to all places, you’re going to have a big problem with what Israel’s doing.

So, this exceptionalization of what Israel does is really, really important to defending what Israel does because it’s a way of saying, basically, you have to check those universal principles at the door because this is so complicated, sui generis, whatever, basically that you have to look at it in a completely different light. But I think it’s really important to de-exceptionalize this conversation and see the things that it has in common with many other struggles in the world today. Of course, every place is different in its own way, but the idea that there are common universal principles that one applies in all circumstances, I think, is really important.

And in this regard, I want to try to draw an analogy between Benjamin Netanyahu and the things that he believes, and that he’s going to speak about in Congress on Wednesday, and two other figures that one might not immediately think of as having a lot in common with him. And those two other figures are: Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, and Mohammad Al-Hindi, who’s the deputy leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And I want to give three quotes: one from Hawley, one from Al-Hindi, the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and then one from Netanyahu to illustrate this common point. All three of these people basically believe that countries should be dominated by members of a particular ethnic, religious, racial group. And those people can be trusted to treat everybody else fairly, even though those other people will not have equality under the law. And this is a huge central struggle in our time across the world, between the idea of equality under the law, and the idea that basically countries are properties of one particular tribe, whether they’re defined racially, religiously, ethnically, or some combination of both. And those tribes can be trusted—because they are somehow benign—to treat everybody else well, even those other people who are not equal members of the nation.

So, let’s start with Josh Hawley. This is Josh Hawley from the National Conservatism Conference, which, not coincidentally, who’s guiding spirit, Yoram Hazony, is actually an Israeli who’s taken a lot of the ways he thinks about Israel and is exporting them to the United States, but also Hungary, India, many other places. There is a great podcast discussion of this, which I’ve linked to with Suzanne Schneider. And so, this is Hawley. Hawley says: ‘I’m calling America a Christian nation. Some will say I’m advocating Christian nationalism. And so I am.’ And then he goes on: ‘Religion unites Americans. Most Americans share broad and basic religious convictions: theistic, biblical, Christian. Working people believe in God. They read the Bible. They go to church, some often, some not. But they consider themselves, in all events, members of a Christian nation.’ And he goes on to say that other people are gonna be treated fine who are not Christians. But they have to recognize that they live in a Christian nation. But because Christianity is so benign and such a unique special tradition, that they have nothing to worry about. Because in this Christian nation run by Christians, they’re gonna be treated fine.

And then this is Mohammed Al-Hindi, who’s the deputy leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And he’s being interviewed by Jeremy Scahill. Now, I think it’s good that Jeremy Scahill, who’s formerly The Intercept now has this new site called Drop Site News. He went out and interviewed a whole bunch of Palestinian Islamist leaders. And I think that’s good. It’s good to hear from these folks because often times one doesn’t hear from them in the Western media. And this is what Mohammed Al-Hindi says about the principles of Islamic Jihad, and he also speaking about Hamas. He says: ‘in terms of the founding principles, Islam constitutes the faith, culture, and history of our Palestinian people. It is a faith for Muslims and a culture for Christians. Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad use the faith of our people and their culture in the creation of Christians as a point of departure.’

Now, of course, there are lots of lots of differences between Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Josh Hawley. Palestinian Islamic Jihad represents Palestinians who are being oppressed. It’s also done terrible, terrible things in terms of purposely targeting Israeli civilians. Josh Hawley has a whole different set of things that he should be held responsible for that he’s done. But you notice the similarity. Islamic Jihad, even though they’re representing a group that doesn’t have a country, when it talks about its vision of a country it’s actually not so different than Hawley’s. The idea is Islam will be the defining culture. And Christians will accommodate themselves to an Islamic culture because Islam is benign, and we don’t need to define this territory that we imagine to be in kind of secular, equal terms. But basically, Muslims will treat everybody in a benign way, even though they have a special superior status, which is exactly what Josh Hawley is saying about his vision of a Christian nation. That Hawley and Al-Hindi are both, in a certain sense, kind of right-wing figures in this global struggle, alongside Victor Orban and Narendra Modi and Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, right. It’s obscured by the fact that, again, that that Al-Hindi’s group, Palestinians, are on the bottom and don’t have their own country now. But when he thinks about the vision he wants, it actually quite fits quite well into this global right-wing vision of basically every country being controlled by a particular religious or racial or ethnic tribe.

And then here’s Netanyahu, who again is going to speak on Wednesday. This is Netanyahu responding to the International Court of Justice, saying that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza is illegal. And Netanyahu says: ‘the Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land. Not in our eternal capital …

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 call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

In light of Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race, we’re going to talk to two Democratic strategists about what happens now, and what impact it could have on US policy towards the Gaza War. Rania Batrice is a Palestinian-American political consultant. She served as deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and this year has been the media consultant for the Uncommitted campaign. Matt Duss is executive vice-president of the Center for International Policy and served as foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders from 2017-2022. I’m excited to talk to them both.

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, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

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.)

On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Jonathan Shamir interviews Hana Morgenstern, Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud, and Moshe Behar about Arab-Jewish identity.

Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.

Last week, the Knesset voted to reject the two state solution. Not a single Knesset member from a Jewish party opposed the resolution.

Pete Buttigieg on J.D. Vance.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, I’m recording this on Sunday. Just heard the news that President Biden is gonna drop out of the presidential race. And obviously there’ll be just a tremendous amount of commentary and all this. I would just say, for me, this is the first thing that’s happened in a while that kind of reminds me why—with all its flaws—the Democratic Party is still the party that I associate with. And it’s because both of these parties faced a situation in which they were under pressure to deny basic reality. In the case of the Republican Party, the denial of reality is the idea that Donald Trump is not what he palpably is, which is: an authoritarian racist, misogynist, pathological liar. And the Republican Party has really coalesced around denial of those really obvious truths.

And the Democratic Party was headed down a path of doing something which was in some ways similar, which was that the leadership of the party was going to coalesce around the denial of the reality that Joe Biden is no longer fit to be a presidential candidate, in the sense that he cannot vigorously make a case for himself to the American people, and I think cannot be, certainly for years going forward, an effective president. Because part of the job of being present is making a case to the public to rally them in support of what you want to do—sometimes rallying the entire world behind a certain policy—and being forceful in private, whether it’s foreign leaders, or members of Congress.

And we were entering this situation, and what was so profoundly depressing was to see the Democratic Party, which I thought is the more benign of the two parties and the more in touch with reality of the two parties, essentially going down that same road of denial of reality that the Republican Party was. And what we saw was because of the different constituency groups in the Democratic Party, because of its different relationship with the media, because of its different relationships with members of Congress, for variety of reasons, that Democrats were able to force Joe Biden to face this reality in a way that Republicans have never been able to do vis-à-vis Donald Trump. And so, that to me is just a sense of tremendous relief. Of course, there are very, very, very major concerns about Kamala Harris—assuming she is the nominee—above all, for those of us who care about Israel-Palestine, the fact that she was still implicated in this administration’s just horrific policy towards the Gaza War.

But I at least think that there is the hope that this recognition of reality in the party could perhaps be the beginnings of a reckoning with other kinds of reality. The reality that just as the party cannot continue to deny the reality of the fact that Joe Biden is no longer fit to be a presidential candidate, he’s not fit to serve as president for the next four years, that it will move towards—under pressure again from the from the party, from members of the party coalition—that it could move towards the recognition that this claim that this war is just and necessary is a denial of reality as well. And so, it shows that there is just some possibility that the Democratic Party can be moved to the place where it faces things as they actually are, as opposed to the Republican Party, which is living in a very, very dangerous fantasy about who Donald Trump is, and indeed what America is.

And so, it’s for that reason that I would say this is the first time that I felt hopeful about this presidential campaign in at least a month, probably more than a month. And it’s the first time that I haven’t felt just utterly demoralized thinking about this presidential campaign. It’s not that Kamala Harris would have been my chosen, you know, Democratic nominee, if I was given a list of, you know, a dozen or a hundred people, but there is at least the chance for movement, for change, for energy, for making a case, and perhaps ultimately for coming to reckon with some of the really, really important moral truths that Joe Biden was not able to reckon with.

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