The Beinart Notebook

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

Our guest will be Laila Al-Arian, an investigative journalist and executive producer of Fault Lines, an Emmy and Peabody award-winning show on Al Jazeera English. She’s also the executive producer of “The Night Won’t End,” an extraordinarily powerful documentary about three families in Gaza during this war. We’re going to talk about how the documentary was made, what it reveals about how Israeli is waging this war, and about how the media is covering it. 

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

Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s response to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump versus Trump’s response to the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

J.D. Vance and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise claim that Democrats are inciting violence by calling Trump a threat to democracy.

Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind.

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 reports on the rise of October 7 tourism.

Although overshadowed by the horror in Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank have grown desperate economically as Israel has further restricted their right to travel and work since October 7. Please consider supporting this crowdfunding campaign for two West Bank families in dire need.

Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq on burning books for fuel in Gaza.

For the Foundation for Middle Peace, I talked to Professor Rashid Khalidi about the threat to his family’s library in Jerusalem.

A new podcast about Palestinian citizens of Israel.

In the Jewish News of Northern California, Ben Linder writes about the bulldozing of the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair.

Professor Alon Confino died last month. I got to know him when I began writing about the Nakba and how it is—or isn’t—remembered by Israeli Jews. I was struck not only by the depth of his knowledge but by the quality of his spirit. Here is a memory of him by a colleague. And here is a lecture he gave about antisemitism and Zionism in Italy, the country of his grandparents’ birth. May his memory be a blessing.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, every time it seems like things can’t get worse in American politics and American society, they do. And now we have the attack, the assassination attempt, on Donald Trump, which is just a catastrophe for a variety of reasons.

First of all, it’s a catastrophe because political violence is simply wrong. Period. It doesn’t matter who it’s against. It’s very, very dangerous for this to be kind of re-injected into American politics. So, that’s the most important thing. No matter how one feels about Donald Trump, it’s just appalling that someone tried to murder him. Secondly, it’s a disaster because this will help Trump, I think, who was already clearly ahead, maybe even heading towards a landslide victory, and now defeating him will be that much harder. And thirdly, because I think everything we know about Donald Trump, and the entire Republican party at this point, suggests that they will use this as an excuse for further authoritarian crackdowns on their enemies.

And so, it’s really I think important to kind of be clear about the political environment in which this actually took place, right? That this is not a political environment in which the two parties have equal relationships to the question of violence and the question of conspiracy theories, right? So, Joe Biden, you know, responded to this as any decent politician would. He said, ‘there’s no place in America for this kind of violence. Everybody must condemn it.’ He took down his television ads. Barack Obama said, ‘there’s absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,’ right?

It is worth contrasting that with Donald Trump’s reaction when a man attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer in his home. And Trump said, ‘it’s weird things going on in that household. The glass it seems broken from the inside to the out. So, it wasn’t a break in. It was a break out,’ playing into various conspiracy theories that were floating around in the Republican party at that time, right? So, it’s just important to remember that there is a difference between the way the leaders of the two political parties respond to acts of violence.

And it’s also extremely important that people reject this line, which is now coming out from Republicans, which is to say that because Democrats were saying they were worried about Trump as a threat to democracy, that that emboldened or is responsible for this shooter right? So, you had J. D. Vance—I mean, gosh, J. D. Vance. I mean, there’s so many people who one can look at—I don’t know if anyone is familiar with this book, Czesław Miłosz’s book, The Captive Mind, which is an extraordinary book about basically how people’s characters are transformed, or things inside their characters are brought out, as a society is overtaken by totalitarianism. But I think, you know, you could do a study, a chapter in a book like that, on Lindsey Graham, on Marco Rubio, on all of them, but especially on J. D. Vance. I mean what a horrifying person he’s turned out to be.

So, J. D. Vance says, ‘today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.’ I mean, that’s just a complete bald-faced lie. It is true that the central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Trump is an authoritarian fascist who should be stopped, but not at all costs. They want to stop him by defeating him in the election, and they also believe that he should be subject to the rule of law when he commits crimes. There’s nothing that President Biden has said, or come close to suggesting, that he wants to stop by trump at all costs, meaning by shooting him or having people shoot him. It’s just it’s an utter lie!

And yet, you see, the Republicans repeating this. This is their line, right. House majority leader Steve Scalise: ‘for weeks, Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning reelection would be the end of democracy in America. Clearly, we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.’ Sorry, it is not incendiary rhetoric to say that Donald Trump represents a threat to democracy when he tried to overturn the last election and has said he won’t respect the result of this election unless he wins, right. And to suggest that by saying that somebody is a threat to democracy is an incitement to violence is so perverse because the whole reason that you need to protect liberal democracy is that liberal democracy puts constraints on the violence that the state can enact. States are violent entities. But liberal democracy checks and balances some popular will. Those things can be some restraint on the violence of the state. And when you eliminate those, or strip those away as Donald Trump tried to do and clearly will try to do again, you are actually creating environment of much greater state violence.

So, it’s just Orwellian to say that you’re emboldening violence by trying to stop someone from overthrowing liberal democracy and turn the country into an authoritarian state. And yet that is what the Republicans are saying in this terrible, terrible frightening moment. I don’t know that I can remember another moment in my adult life where I felt things were this bleak. But here we are.

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 be James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute, and a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee. Last week he offered a proposal for how to replace President Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee. We’ll talk about the pressure inside the party on Biden to bow out, and what might happen if he does.

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, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

The transcript of Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos.

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!), Rabea Eghbariah talks about why the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews tried to censor his article on the Nakba as a legal concept.

Although overshadowed by the horror in Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank have grown desperate economically as Israel has further restricted their right to travel and work since October 7. Please consider supporting this crowdfunding campaign for two West Bank families in dire need.

A long and fascinating interview with Rashid Khalidi in The New Left Review.

Olivia Nuzzi on the conspiracy of silence to conceal Biden’s decline.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

It seems pretty clear at this point, to me, that Joe Biden is probably not going to be the Democratic nominee, that there’s been a kind of a tipping point that’s gonna play out in the days to come. And I almost—almost—feel a little bad for Biden because he wasn’t that bad in the George Stephanopoulos interview on Friday compared to the debate. He was, actually, I think significantly better. But people now realize they’re judging him on such a low bar and have so little faith that he can come back and defeat Donald Trump.

And I think the media is in a kind of remorse because they didn’t actually put more pressure on this question earlier in the reporting, has now swung into in a direction where they’re basically just nitpicking every single phrase, looking for some signs of mental decline that I just don’t see how this is sustainable. And I think that’s a good thing. I think the Democrats are a lot better off rolling the dice, and at least giving themselves a chance of beating Donald Trump since I just don’t see how Joe Biden could change the dynamics of this race and make it a race about Trump because it is now really a race about his fitness to serve. And even many of the people who tend to agree with him ideologically just don’t think he is.

But what I thought was interesting about the Stephanopoulos interview that’s gotten less attention was less what it revealed about Biden’s mental decline in the kind of how old he is, but more just about the way his thinking is very old. And I think this is a problem that still hasn’t gotten enough attention. This is a man who, I think, when he thinks about America’s relationship with the world, is really in a Cold War paradigm that I’ve always thought was very, very dangerous, and since the war in Gaza just seems to me even more so.

So, in that interview, when he was trying to tell George Stephanopoulos why he had been a good president and why Americans needed to reelect him, if you notice the thing that Biden kept coming back to again and again—he mentioned it six times—is NATO. He says, ‘I was the guy that expanded NATO.’ He talked about what he’s doing in Europe with regard to expansion of NATO. ‘I’m the guy that put NATO together,’ he says. ‘I’m doing a hell of a lot of other things, like wars around the world, like keeping NATO together. Who’s gonna be able to hold NATO together like me?’

He talks about NATO again and again and again. And it seems to me somewhat disconnected from reality. Where is the chorus of people in America who want to be expanding NATO? I think, morally, the case for defending Ukraine was a very strong case. But it’s really clear at this point that that policy on Ukraine has not really been a success. Maybe it was a success initially in preventing the Russians from taking Kyiv. But the sanctions have not basically been able to get Russia to stop this war. And Ukraine is closer to losing than it is to winning. And there’s gonna have to be some peace agreement that’s probably gonna leave Ukraine worse off than it was before this war.

And so, I think that this notion that what he’s falling back on again is the fact that they kept pushing NATO forward rather than, in retrospect, thinking that maybe actually some kind of negotiation with the Russians—at least in retrospect—might have been a better deal just to me suggests a disconnection from reality, and a way in which this Cold War kind of great power competition really dominates Biden’s way of thinking about what his purpose is as president.

And he also talks that way about China. He talks about the South Pacific Initiative with AUKUS. This is with, you know, the United Kingdom and Australia to get them these better nuclear submarines. And he says, ‘we’re checkmating China now.’ He never mentions climate change. He is a Democratic president. When he’s talking about the most important issues, and he actually does have some accomplishments on climate change, he never mentions that. He never mentions the word Gaza. He does say he has a peace agreement that’s coming with the Middle East. But this, again, seems to me like completely delusional, right? This notion that there’s gonna be some peace agreement that’s gonna bring us towards a Palestinian state when the Israeli government is vehemently opposed to it, and when the Biden administration is not willing to hear any pressure to make it happen, right.

So, to me what struck me about this interview that made me even more, you know, relieved that I think we may be headed toward a new nominee is that a new nominee could rethink this paradigm that Joe Biden is not just old in terms of, you know, his age, and is not just experiencing mental decline, but his paradigm for America’s role in the world is so much a kind of repeat of the Cold War with this kind of moral Manicheanism between America and its enemies, in which the world is just automatically a better place when America has more power.  And it’s just assumed that America is standing for these values like, you know, the rule of the international liberal order and these kind of things, even when the war in Gaza that America’s support of has made a complete mockery of that now in the eyes of so many people, and in which it’s more and more obvious that climate change, not geopolitical competition, is the existential threat to the world, and that that needs stronger international cooperation and international institutions.

Now, this is not what Trump is saying, of course. But Trump, in a way at least, is recognizing and responding to—even, you know, in his kind of horrific and disastrous ways—the sense that Americans have that actually they don’t want to be fighting another cold war, right? That they want a less-costly form of intervention around the world, even though, again, he has no moral code, and though he doesn’t recognize climate change and all these things. But there is at least a possibility, I think, that a new nominee—a younger nominee, less formed by the set of experiences that Biden has been formed by, perhaps with a different set of advisors—might think anew a little bit about America’s role in the world, about the war, about the relationship with Israel, about the war in Gaza, and with a less Cold War-driven view of foreign policy. And that would be a kind of change that would mean not only that we’re getting someone who is younger and had more energy and who is mentally sharper, but I think someone wh…

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 be Rami Khouri, Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the American University of Beirut, 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. We’ll talk about the terrifying reports that a full-scale war may break out between Israel and Hezbollah.

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, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat, and Michelle Cottle on whether Biden can not only win, but govern.

Jonathan Sacks on the fear of freedom.

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 explains why ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas are stuck.

Although overshadowed by the horror in Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank have grown desperate economically as Israel has further restricted their right to travel and work since October 7. Please consider supporting this crowdfunding campaign for two West Bank families in dire need.

Al Jazeera’s chilling new documentary, “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza.”

An extraordinary essay by Ayelet Waldman about her family’s history and the delusions of liberal Zionism.

A Pennsylvania voter pledges to vote Biden even if he’s dead.

A fascinating thread on the scholarship of Raz Segal, the Israeli-born genocide scholar whose appointment at the University of Minnesota is now in doubt.

Former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon says the occupation puts Israelis in danger.

Last week, I talked to MSNBC’s Joy Reid about Jamaal Bowman’s congressional primary.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I interviewed Hebrew University Professor Yael Berda about Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s de facto annexation of the West Bank.

John Judis, one of the writers I admire most, has launched a Substack. Please check it out.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I’m beginning to fear that when we look back at this moment in history, people will look at Democrats, influential people in the Democratic Party, and ask the question of why it was that they lacked courage? Why it was indeed that their lack of courage was perhaps their essential defining characteristic, and it had disastrous and historic consequences? It’s interesting because, throughout the Trump era, so many of us have talked about the lack of courage of Republicans. That there was, you know, again and again reporters would say, you know, that privately Republican politicians would laugh about Trump, denounce Trump, that many of the same people who had even publicly earlier on when Trump wasn’t so formidable said that he was an autocrat, a dictator, then became these obsequious fawning supporters of him. So, we got used to—as people who were more progressive kind of denounced these people for their lack of courage.

But I actually think, at this point, Democrats are actually showing even less courage than Republicans. Because, in a way, the Republican Party has transformed itself, certainly among people in Congress. I think there are fewer actually of those people who snicker about Trump privately because this has become a Republican party, more a party of true believers. I think, actually among Republican voters, there is a genuine tremendous amount of support for Trump. Now that’s horrifying. It’s incredibly frightening, but it’s not actually cowardice. It’s a kind of psychosis to me. It’s an embrace of white Christian nationalism, authoritarianism. But it’s not exactly cowardice because I actually think that in the Republican Party today, compared to the Republican Party let’s say five years ago, there’s actually more a broader sense of true belief for Trump. Many of the members of Congress who really didn’t like Trump, most are no longer in Congress.

Whereas among Democrats, I think you actually have a situation where people genuinely don’t believe that Biden should be the nominee. But they’re too afraid to do anything about it. And it’s not just with Biden. I think there is a kind of parallel between the party’s response to Gaza and the party’s treatment of Trump. Which is, on Gaza too, I think if you put a lot of Democratic members of Congress to a lie detector test—and a lot of people in the Biden administration to a lie detector test—and they said, is American policy on this war in Gaza, is it ethical? Is it ethical? They would say: no! And yet, they shrug their shoulders and they go through their day because they want to preserve their political support. They don’t want to end up like Jamaal Bowman. They don’t want to end up without a job if they’ve spent their lives working their way up through the foreign policy establishment.

And now we see, basically, a version of the same thing when it comes to Biden’s re-election. I’m not going to rehearse all the arguments that everyone’s making, but just suffice to say, to remember, that Biden is behind in this race. He’s significantly behind. And remember, Trump has over-performed his polls both in 2016 and in 2020 when he was behind. Now, Trump is clearly ahead; not just in polls, but in the electoral college, which favors him even more. And Biden’s advisors themselves basically took the view that they needed an early bait to try to change the dynamic. They’ve made this dynamic worse. And it’s not clear that there would be a second debate. And there’s certainly no particular reason to believe that Biden would perform any better even if there was.

And yet, Democrats are too afraid—many of them—of taking the risk of trying something different. Yes, it is very risky for a whole bunch of reasons that people are talking about. But I don’t see how anyone in their right mind could not say that any potential replacement for Biden would not have been better on that stage than Joe Biden was against Donald Trump. It’s inconceivable to me that any of them, including Kamala Harris, could be worse. And yet, despite the fact that all of these people in the media, and ordinary voters, are saying they want somebody else, the Democratic politicians are not willing to say that. And when they do say it, they say it off the record.

I was talking to someone who’s on the Democratic National Committee about this. And he said, ‘Peter, it’s like the Bulgarian Communist Party in the 1950s. In the hallways, privately, they whisper to each other what a catastrophe this is. But when they actually get in a room and they have to act publicly or in some official capacity, they won’t do it because they’re too scared.’ Why is this generation of Democratic politicians and foreign policy people, why is it so fearful? Why is it not able to put the country’s interest, the moral interest, both in in terms of Biden and in terms of Gaza, ahead of their own personal interests? I don’t know. I think it’s something that we’re going to have to try to understand, and maybe we will be having to wrestle with for many, many years. It’s important also, I think, to remember that Biden’s failure is not only a failure to be able to beat Donald Trump. I think Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat have been making this point and they’re exactly right. It’s false to make a clear distinction between your ability to run effectively and your ability to govern because to govern as president has to do with your ability to communicate to the public, and also to communicate in private forcefully.

And I want to bring, again, bring this back to Gaza. Any president who wanted to try to do anything but supporting Israel unconditionally in this war would have fa…

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

I made a second video this week because I wanted to say something about Jamaal Bowman, who lost his primary race for Congress last night. He lost because he had the courage to visit the West Bank and speak about what he saw. He lost because he’s an unusual politician. He has moral courage.

Sources Cited in This Video:

A Politico article about Bowman’s trip to the West Bank.

A Jewish Currents article I wrote about how Pro-Israel groups keep US foreign policy white.

Our guests this Friday at 11 AM will be Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson, 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.

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, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, last night, Jamaal Bowman lost his race for re-election to Congress. And I wanted to say something about him and that race. Now, it’s important not to be willing to overlook the flaws of people just because you profoundly agree with them on really important policy issues. So, I don’t want to suggest that Jamaal Bowman didn’t make any mistakes in this race. I think it was unfortunate when he said that Jews in Westchester segregate themselves. If you look at the context, I think you can understand what he was trying to say, which was essentially that people would understand him better if people live together more, and that would actually break down antisemitism. But still, I think it was probably a territory that he shouldn’t have ventured into. But that said, again, even though we need to be willing to be critical of people we disagree with, it’s also important that we not be naive.

And that comment had nothing to do with the onslaught that Jamaal Bowman faced from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. That onslaught was fundamentally about one thing. It was about the fact that Jamaal Bowman was a passionate supporter of Palestinian freedom. When members of Congress are staunch supporters of Israel, they can say things that are far, far more problematic vis-à-vis Jews than anything that Jamaal Bowman ever said, and get a complete pass. The reason that Jamaal Bowman had a target on his back was really simple. It’s because he went to see what life was like for Palestinians in the West Bank. Now, that might not seem like a big deal, but it actually is because the vast majority of members of Congress avert their eyes. They make a conscious choice to go to Israel on AIPAC junkets that don’t show them the reality of what it’s like for Palestinians to live their entire lives without the most basic of human rights. I suspect perhaps they just don’t want to know because they know that if they did see, it would only cause problems for them. But Jamaal Bowman went to see. He even went to Hebron, which is perhaps the most brutal of all the places in the West Bank, a place where Palestinians can’t even walk on certain streets in their own city. And he had the courage to see. And he had the courage to talk about it. And that’s unusual for a member of Congress.

And the thing you always need to remember about these people, you know, who spent untold amounts of money, unprecedented amounts of money, on trying to defeat him—the people who gave all this money to AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups to defeat him—is that, overwhelmingly, they have not seen the things that Jamaal Bowman has seen. I have lived in proximity to those people my entire life. I’m telling you they may have been to Israel 40 times. But those kind of AIPAC donors, they don’t go to see what life is like for Palestinians who have lived their entire lives in the West Bank without the right to vote for the government that has life and death power over their lives under a different legal system, a military legal system, while they’re Jewish neighbors enjoy free movement, and due process, and the right to vote, and citizenship. If they had gone to see those things, I think many of them would not be AIPAC donors because it would shake them to their core. But one of the reasons I think they find the kind of things that Jamaal Bowman says so frightening is because they haven’t had the courage to go and actually face these realities for themselves. But Jamaal Bowman did go to face these realities and then he took it upon himself to talk about what he had seen. And he paid a political price.

The second thing I want to say about Jamaal Bowman and this race is that you can’t disentangle the attack that he came under because of his views about Israel from the opposition to him simply because he was a courageous and passionate progressive on a whole range of issues. The thing that’s important to remember about people who give a lot of money to AIPAC is it’s not just that they’re pro-Israel, or that they’re generally Jewish. They’re also extremely wealthy. And it’s often difficult to disentangle their pro-Israel politics from their class perspectives. But things fuse together, right? They don’t want supporters of Palestinian rights in Congress. But they also don’t want people who are going to raise their taxes or try to fundamentally change the American economic system.

And so, when you defeat Jamaal Bowman, it’s kind of a twofer because you get rid of a critic of Israel, but you also get rid of someone who potentially could threaten your own bottom line. And one of the dirty little secrets, I think, about kind of American Jewish organizational life is that people find it often easier to say that they oppose progressives because those progressives are anti-Israel or supposedly ‘antisemitic’ than to admit that partly they’re doing it for economic self-interest because they’re just really rich people who don’t want progressives like Jamaal Bowman because those people might threaten their bottom line. So, that’s another reason I think that progressives like Jamaal Bowman come under such fierce assault. It’s much nicer if you’re one of the very, very wealthy people who gave all this money to AIPAC to have a kind of milquetoast moderate like George Latimer who won’t rock the boat on Israel. And he won’t really rock the boat by challenging corporate interests on anything.

The third point I want to make about Jamaal Bowman has to do with race. Now, it’s not true that AIPAC opposes Black members of Congress simply because they’re Black. Which is to say if there’s a really, really pro-Israel Black member of congress, like Ritchie Torres, they’re thrilled about that, right. But it’s also not coincidental that so many of the people that AIPAC tries to destroy politically are Black or other people of color. And that’s because people who have a family history of oppression in the United States are more likely—not always, by any means—but, on average, are more likely to identify with the Palestinians because of their own experience. They’re more likely to feel, as Jamaal Bowman did, a kind of moral obligation to themselves and their own ancestors to go and see what’s actually going on to Palestinians who lack basic rights in the West Bank.

And so, when you go to politically destroy people who care about Palestinians, you’re going to end up destroying a disproportionate number of those people who will be Black or other people of color. And there’s a whole history to this. It didn’t start with Jamaal Bowman. You can think about Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter’s Ambassador to the United Nations, who, coming out of th…

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 guests will be Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson, 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.

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, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Mehdi Hasan’s interview with Representative Dean Phillips.

The New York Times’ investigation of Israel’s Sde Teiman detention center. Hasan’s reference to a prisoner who reportedly died by rape comes from an UNRWA interview with a 41-year-old detainee who gave an account similar to the one that Younis al-Hamlawi gave The New York Times about being forced to sit on a hot metal stick. That prisoner claimed another detainee subjected to the procedure had died as a result.

Why the history of Israel’s restrictions on movement from Gaza dates back to 1991.

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!), Shane Burley and Jonah Ben Avraham explain the flawed methodology that the ADL uses to measure antisemitism.

Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.

Aziz Abu Sarah on the absurdity of pro-Palestinian demonstrators protesting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The deputy assistant secretary for Israeli-Palestinian affairs resigns after opposing Biden’s policies on the war.

Israel’s military spokesman says “anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.”

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I wanted to say something about an extraordinary interview that Mehdi Hassan did last week with Congressman Dean Phillips from Minnesota, who had been a candidate for president against Biden this year. This was for Mehdi’s new platform, Zeteo. What makes the interview so remarkable, I think, is that it kind of offers a glimpse of what American public and media discourse about this war, and about Israel and Palestine more generally, might be like if Palestinian lives were considered equal to Israeli lives.

So, Mehdi Hassan starts by asking Dean Phillips: was it okay in your view for Israel to kill all of these Palestinians, including many children in the military operation that freed for Israeli hostages? And Philip says, ‘it’s an unacceptable price, but I think it’s a price that has to be paid.’ So, he says, basically, it was really awful, but it was necessary. And then, Mehdi Hasan takes the question in a direction that I really don’t think Dean Phillips was expecting because it’s so rarely asked. And he says, ‘if you’re saying that to free people from the clutches of horrible captivity’—this is Mehdi Hasan speaking—‘hostages, people possibly being abused in captivity to free them, you have to pay a price, a horrible price. Does that ratio work the other way?’

And then, Medhi Hasan continues: ‘how many Israelis can Palestinians kill to free Palestinian detainees who are currently being tortured in Israeli captivity, some of them being raped to death according to the New York Times last week. Can they kill 200 Israelis to free four Palestinians who are being tortured in an Israeli prison?’ And Phillips’ response is kind of remarkable. And by the way, I don’t think Phillips is a dumb guy. I actually think if you listen to the interview, he’s probably more thoughtful on these issues than your average member of Congress, although that may be a low bar. And to give him credit, he’s also appearing on an interview with Mehdi Hasan, which he probably knew was going to be a really challenging interview.

But so, here’s what Dean Phillips says. He’s quite startled. You can listen in the interview. He’s clearly surprised by the allegation. He says—Philips says—‘you said Palestinian prisoners are being raped to death by Israeli soldiers? I don’t believe that to be true,’ right. Hasan has just quoted The New York Times, which is about as respectable a media outlet as you can have. And then Philips said, ‘I don’t believe that to be true.’ And then Mehdi Hasan goes into detail about the allegations that he’s talking about. And if you read The New York Times report that they did on this military base called Sde Teiman, where Israel has been holding a lot of Palestinian prisoners, first there was an UNRWA report that was done where they interviewed Palestinians who had been released from Sde Teiman.

I know people will say, oh, you can’t believe anything UNRWA says. But then actually The New York Times kind of went and did a lot of these interviews itself. It found, for instance, that eight former detainees had said they had been punched, kicked, and beaten with batons, rifle bats, and a hand metal detector while in custody. One said his ribs were broken when he was kneed in the chest. A second detainee said his ribs were broken after he was kicked and beaten with a rifle. Seven said they been forced to wear only a diaper while being interrogated. Three said they had received electric shocks during interrogations. Three said they had lost more than 40 pounds during their interrogation. The IDF denied abuse, but an Israeli soldier who the Times talked to said that he and several fellow soldiers had regularly boasted of beating detainees. And a general named Younis al-Hamlawi, who was a nurse who was arrested when Israel was raiding the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, said that a female officer had ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground. Mr. al-Hamlawi said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him with unbearable pain. He also recalled being forced to sit in a chair wired with electricity. He said he was shocked so often that after initially urinating uncontrollably, he then stopped urinating for several days.

And, by the way, I know some people’s immediate response to this is: how on earth could you compare these people to the Israeli hostages? These were Hamas fighters. The people that The New York Times was interviewing were the people who were released from Sde Teimon. They were about 1,200 people. They had about 4,000 people there, according to the Times. They released 1,200 because the Israeli military didn’t think they were Hamas fighters. If the Israeli military thought they were Hamas fighters, they would still be there. The Times was only talking to people who the IDF had basically said, sorry, we picked you up, but actually we don’t think you did anything, right? So, those are the people who were making these allegations.

Now again, there are obviously lots of differences between Israeli prisons in general and the hostage situation. And I don’t, by any means, am not saying this to undermine in any way the severity of what Israeli hostages have been through, which is horrifying. But the point is that, according to The New York Times, which is a pretty credible source, right, that Dean Phillips would probably believe The New York Times if The New York Times did a report about the abuse of I…

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: Thursday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest this week will be Geoffrey Levin, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University and author of the new book, Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978, which explores a largely unknown history of American Jewish criticism of Israel in the first decades of its existence, and how it was quashed. It’s a particularly relevant history today given the rise of Jewish organizing against the war in Gaza. 

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, 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.)

The Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast discusses the challenges of being part of an American synagogue community during this war.

Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.

A beautiful statement by the Deputy Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the United Nations, Majed Bamya, about Noa Argamani’s release from captivity.

Is the global outcry over Israel’s actions starting to hit its high-tech sector?

What happens to Palestinian Gandhi’s?

Masculinity and the New York Jewish Intellectuals.

Wajahat Ali’s new newsletter, Left Hook.

See you on Thursday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. As I’ve been following the news of the increased escalation between Israel and Hezbollah, which is really terrifying, my mind has kept going back to a conversation I had with an Israeli friend soon after October 7th. And my friend said, ‘you don’t understand, Peter. If we don’t destroy Hamas, people will never feel safe living in the south of Israel again. And we will have lost that part of our country.’ And what he was saying made a huge amount of sense, it seems to me, in terms of Israeli political culture, Israeli political psychology given the trauma of what had happened after October 7th. And so, he was saying because that is non-negotiable, we have to defeat Hamas. And what I was thinking was: but I don’t think you can defeat Hamas. I think that’s non-negotiable. So, we were essentially at loggerheads because he was saying that, for a political reason, Israel had to do something militarily that I didn’t think could be done. And now, more than eight months later, I think it seems clear to me that it cannot be done.

And so, now I feel like there’s a version of this playing out in terms of Israel’s debate in its north vis-a-vis Hezbollah, but in some ways with even more frightening stakes. Which the argument is: Israelis cannot return to the north because all of these people have been displaced from their homes unless we push Hezbollah away from that border. And that beyond that, Israel can no longer accept the kind of situation that it accepted before October 7th, which is to say the precariousness, the uncertainty, the unsatisfactory nature of the fact that Hezbollah was always there with this huge arsenal. That was acceptable before October 7th. We can no longer accept these things now because we have a greater sense of threat and also perhaps because we have lost our deterrent, and it needs to be re-established.

This reminds me a lot of the debate in the United States around Iraq after September 11th where people were saying maybe we could muddle through with Saddam Hussein, who we thought was kind of rearming and, you know, eluding the sanctions regime. Maybe that was okay before September 11th. But now, given that we’ve seen the potential peril—and given that we look weak—we need a decisive answer. Again, but like my friend in Israel, it all assumes that a decisive answer is possible, right? It’s as if to say, militarily, this has to become possible because politically we need it to be possible.

And yet, I have not heard—just as I did not hear as Israel was going into Gaza—anyone offering a convincing explanation of how Israel was going to defeat and destroy Hamas. I haven’t heard anyone say that about how Israel is going to destroy Hezbollah, force Hezbollah off of Israel’s borders. Again, it seems to me more like this situation of kind of you start from a political necessity, and then you assume that there’s a military solution. And to me, what this suggests is that the way in which Israeli Jewish leaders, and Israeli Jewish political discourse—and much Jewish discourse in the diaspora because it tends to often kind of follow along—has a sense of the political terms of discussion that can’t imagine political solutions that don’t require these military solutions.

Again, military solutions seem to me fantastical, which are not actually possible. That in reality, Israel going to war against Hezbollah, Israel might be able to destroy a lot of southern Lebanon and a lot of Lebanon period, and destroy a lot of Hezbollah’s weaponry, but at a massive cost to Israel. I mean, right now, it’s just the North is unlivable. I mean, Hezbollah could kind of make Tel Aviv unlivable, at least for a while, right? And in terms of what this would do in terms of Israel’s international isolation given what’s already happened, it just seems to me strategically really, really disastrous for Israel. If you want to kind of move Israel closer to a point where people can really imagine the country no longer being able to exist, it seems to me going to war in Lebanon would be a really good way of doing that in terms of ramping up even more international isolation, just making larger sections of the country unlivable. And yet, to be able to avoid that you have to imagine political responses, again, just like you would have vis-à-vis Gaza, which would have been political responses, which are not really within the Jewish Israeli terms of mainstream debate. Which would involve substantial compromise and kind of reimagining of the whole question of what brings security fundamentally from a political lens, not from a military lens. Which in the Palestinian Gaza case would mean that basically there is no solution problem that Hamas represents unless you offer Palestinians a clear pathway towards basic human rights and freedom. That’s the central problem you have to answer if you want to deal with the military problem that Hamas faces.

And similarly with Hezbollah, there is no answer vis-a-vis Hezbollah unless you change the dynamic with Palestinians since Hezbollah is fundamentally doing this as a kind of an ally, almost as kind of an adjunct to the Palestinian case. And beyond that, that you need a different relationship with Iran, that you need some kind of thaw and detente in this cold war with Iran given the influence that Iran has over Hezbollah. And it seems to me, what frightens me so much is that those political ways of thinking—that it seems to me could be an alternative to the military answer and could offer a vision of Israelis returning to the north as returning to the south that did not involve a second, even more potentially catastrophic war—are just not really on the table in terms of the debate.

And I don’t feel like when I look at American discourse, American political discourse, American Jewish discourse, I don’t see an effort to really or push Israelis, to challenge Jewish Israelis, to ask them to think outside of their own political terms—again, in an Israel right now where basically the terms of political debate run from the very far right to essentially the center right, right, in which people who genuinely…

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

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest this week will be Raef Zreik, associate professor of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College in Israel, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, and a former member of the executive committee of Balad, one of Israel’s predominantly Palestinian parties. He’s one of the most brilliant theorists of Palestine and Israel, and I want to ask him to step back from the nightmarish events of the moment to talk about their long-term consequences for relations between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.

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, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Elliott Abrams’ essay in Foreign Affairs.

The Pew Research Center on Israeli opinion.

George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”

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.)

The Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast discusses secularism and the Jewish left.

Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.

A Holocaust survivor’s talk is cancelled in Detroit because he protested the Gaza war.

Mexico, El Salvador and their ironic relationship to Israel-Palestine.

The importance of the halakhic left.

Adam Shatz on Israel then and now.

A message about Noam Chomsky.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I’d encourage you to do an experiment. Go on Google or some other search engine, and type in the phrase, ‘Israelis feel’ or ‘Israelis believe.’ I suspect that what you’ll find is that many of the things that you turn up about how Israelis feel, or Israelis believe, are not actually statements about how all of Israel’s citizens feel, or what they believe, but are using essentially Israelis as a synonym for Jewish Israeli.

So, for instance, here’s one example in Foreign Affairs in April, Elliott Abrams, the former Bush and Trump administration official, wrote, ‘Israelis across the ideological spectrum agree that Hamas must be crushed.’ Now, he’s clearly using Israelis here as a synonym for Jewish Israelis. And it’s true that for Jewish Israelis that statement is probably true. A Pew research center poll in May found that only 4% of Jewish Israelis think that Israel’s war in Gaza has gone too far. But if you use Israelis to mean all of Israel’s citizens, then his statement is completely wrong because according to Pew, 74% of Israel’s Palestinian citizens or Arab Israelis, as they’re sometimes called, think that Israel’s war has gone too far.

So, what’s happening here is it that Americans in our public discourse are very often embracing the kind of ethno-nationalist language that comes from Israel. So, because Israel defines itself as a Jewish state, indeed the word Israeli itself, right, Israel is another name for the Jewish people. It’s the name that Jacob is given when he wrestles with the angel and becomes a name for the Jewish people. So, because the very name of Israel, and Israeli, is essentially a synonym for Jew, what happens is the fact that 20% of the Israeli citizens who are not Jewish gets erased from our public discourse, and we essentially adopt the terms of the ethno-nationalist terms of debate. And so, what we end up doing is we basically use Jewish Israeli as a synonym for Israeli, even though I think in the United States where Black Americans are only 10% of the population—significantly less than Palestinian citizens are of the Israeli citizenry—we would really object if someone used American and white American as synonyms. But essentially, we do a version of that when we talk about Israelis all the time.

And it’s an even bigger problem, right, when you realize that Israel controls millions and millions of Palestinians who don’t have any citizenship at all. That 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control, those in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, have lived under Israeli control, in many cases their entire lives, but can’t become citizens. So, we would never call them Israelis. And the problem here, I think, is that when we talk about other groups of people—let’s say Americans, right—we’d mean citizens, but we also mean perhaps a little more vaguely, just kind of long-term residents, people who are spending their lives here, people who are not tourists, right, even if they don’t have citizenship.

But in the United States, there’s more of a close alignment between those two categories. It’s true we have long-term undocumented people, but for the most part most of the people who are going to be here their entire lives are citizens. And so, we essentially talk as if the same thing is true in Israel. But in Israel, it’s really not true at all because Israel has controlled since 1967 these very large populations of Palestinians that can’t become citizens, and therefore would never be described as Israelis, right? And yet, in a certain sense, one should describe them as Israeli, again because they have lived their entire lives under the control of this state.

So, we would never say something like, you know, 50% of the Israelis oppose a Jewish state or oppose Zionism. But if we were to actually refer to all the people under Israeli control, 50% of whom were Palestinian, that would be a reasonably accurate statement. Again, it’s just that we would never think to call them Israelis, but the reason we wouldn’t call them Israelis is because Israel doesn’t extend them citizenship, and more deeply, because the very term Israeli itself has an ethno-nationalist connotation, which essentially erases Palestinians, the non-citizens, and even the citizens, right?

And I think the reason this is important is that one of the points that George Orwell makes in his famous essay, ‘Politics and the English language,’ is that if you want to critique the actions of a state, or the actions of people in power, you have to challenge the language that people in power create. That if you essentially replicate that language in your own usage, then even if you think you were in opposition to those policies, you were actually complicit with that power structure because you are using its language and accepting its terms of debate. And that’s why I think if we want to question the idea of an ethno-nationalist project, the idea of Jewish supremacy, the idea of a state that has a different legal regime for Jews and Palestinians—most blatantly among those Palestinians who don’t have citizenship, but even in significant ways for that minority of Palestinians who do have citizenship because they are not equal citizens in a state that has a special set of responsibilities to members of one ethno-national group—we have to be explicit in the language we use and not simply erase Palestinians from our discourse when we use the term Israeli.

And so, I think this is something for us to think about as we go forward, and we try to have a better American public debate about what genuine liberal democracy and equality under the law might mean for people in Palestine and Israel.

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

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest this week will be Congressman Ro Khanna, who represents the 17th district of California and is a leading progressive voice in Democratic foreign policy. He has called on Israel to immediately halt its attack on Rafah and also tried to convince protesters against the war to support Joe Biden’s reelection. We’ll talk about US policy toward the war, whether Biden can win back progressives who feel betrayed by it, and about the relationship between progressivism and Zionism more generally.

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, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

The Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast discusses the end of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Shraddha Joshi and Asmer Safi, Harvard students whose degrees are being withheld because of their activism for Palestinian rights.

An open letter from academics in Gaza. 

The descendants of Nazis march for Israel.

Viewer Response:

After my last video, David Lelyveld questioned my suggestion that the war would dog Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan after they leave government. He wrote, “McGeorge Bundy went from the Johnson administration to the presidency of the Ford Foundation for some 15 years. Walt Rostow had a comfortable, well-endowed chair at the University of Texas for 30. As we say in New York, not chopped liver. I wouldn't weep for Biden's subordinates.”

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

America’s relationship with Israel is a little bit like imagine there’s a person in a house, two groups of people in a house, but one is vastly more powerful. And they’re fighting with one another. And the vastly more powerful side, as you might imagine, is doing a tremendous amount of violence to the weaker side. The weaker side is doing some violence as well, but it’s very disproportionate. And this being Israel and the Palestinians. And the United States is giving weapons to the side that’s stronger and allowing it to kind of pummel the weaker side more and more. And the United States is continuing to do that, and then kind of making suggestions from the side.

So, a while back, Chuck Schumer said that it would be good if Benjamin Netanyahu were not Israel’s prime minister anymore. So, it’s kind of the equivalent of saying to that stronger side in the house, you know, we think that you should have someone else from your group actually be in charge of this conflict. Or now, we have Joe Biden basically laying out this plan for a ceasefire over multiple stages, again basically giving his advice to both sides about how maybe this conflict could end, but all the while continuing to give the weapons that continue to fuel the conflict and allow the stronger side to continue to inflict all this violence on the weaker side.

And it’s just really bizarre. Because America’s primary responsibility is not actually to choose Israel’s leaders. And America’s primary responsibility is not even actually to end this war. America’s primary responsibility is to figure out what it does with its money and its weapons. That’s what America has direct control over. America doesn’t have actual direct control over how this war in Gaza ends. From a moral perspective, its primary responsibility is its own role. And there’s this weird way in which, in establishment American discourse, we essentially ignore our own role in this and suggest that we are some kind of neutral arbiter, and then throw out various proposals for how the situation may be solved as if we are not an active participant in it, right? And then we seem disappointed when Israel, or sometimes the Palestinians, basically reject these proposals—but often Israel—because they know that we’re not a neutral observer, that we are a participant, but we are on their side, and that that participation will continue irrespective of what they say about our proposal. So, there’s not very much cost for them in rejecting the proposal.

It seems to me this is exactly the wrong way to think about it. It’s a cliché. But it’s true that in the long run, ultimately, this war and this conflict in this situation will have to be solved by Israelis and Palestinians, not by America. So, America’s fundamental moral responsibility is not to solve to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, not even to end the Gaza war. It’s to act ethically with the power that we have. And the power that we have is our power to give weapons and other forms of diplomatic support to one side that continues this.

So, what Joe Biden should be saying is not, ‘here’s our 11-point plan for ending the war.’ It should be, simply: ‘it’s not ethical for the United States to continue to arm and diplomatically protect Israel as it inflicts this horrible violence against Palestinians. I’m the American president. I’m in charge of how we spend our money and who we send our weapons to, and I’m not going to do that.’ Now that might have—or could have—a real impact on Israeli politics, on whether Netanyahu stays prime minister, on how Israel prosecutes this war, or even whether it does. We don’t know what the consequences of that would be.

But in some ways, the consequences are not America’s primary responsibility. America’s primary responsibility is our involvement in the conflict. And yet so often it’s that question, which essentially recedes. And because the Biden administration doesn’t want to have to deal with that central question, with the political fallout of actually addressing America’s role, it tries to sidestep that by suggesting America continue to be this active participant, but also be this supposedly neutral umpire that can basically come out with a way of solving the conflict. And that doesn’t work. It’s not America’s fundamental job.

The president’s job is to be able to say to the American people: ‘I am ethically and wisely using your money in the way we interact with other countries.’ That’s the question that Joe Biden should have addressed when he spoke to the nation a few days ago. Instead, he continues to evade that question and ends up in these kinds of cul-de-sacs that make him look weak, make him look impotent, and ultimately don’t respond to his fundamental moral responsibility as the president of the United States.

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

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest this week will be Jamil Dakwar, a human rights lawyer, adjunct professor at New York University, and former senior attorney with Adalah, which advocates for the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. He’ll be speaking in his personal capacity. We’ll talk about the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and the case against Israeli and Hamas leaders at the International Criminal Court.

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, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Raphael Magarik talks with Maya Wind about her book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom.

Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Sapir Sluzker Amran about being a queer, feminist, Mizrachi activist in Israel—and about her decision to go to the border with Gaza to challenge people preventing the delivery of aid.

Muhammad Shehada on the danger of selective empathy.

Michael Sfard on the failure of the Israeli media.

Mehdi Hasan vs Jonathan Schanzer on the ICC’s warrants against Israeli leaders. 

Former Israeli combat soldier Ariel Bernstein on how Israel is fighting in Gaza.

Imagine if US leaders talked like Irish leaders about Gaza.

M.J. Rosenberg has renamed his Substack (and subscribers must resubscribe).

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. So, I’ve been thinking about why the Biden administration has made the decisions that it’s made on this war. Decisions that seem to me to have been disastrous and catastrophic, not just for the people in Gaza though that’s obviously the most important thing—all the people who’ve died and been injured and who’ve been forced from their homes—but also has been politically disastrous, and I think actually potentially disastrous also for the careers of top Biden administration officials themselves. Politically disastrous because Joe Biden now is in a situation, as we enter into the kind of the meat of the presidential campaign, in which he literally can’t go speak to his own party’s base. He can’t go speak at a university. He can’t go speak at a Black church. He can’t even go speak at a union event without the very real prospect of his speech being protested, even interrupted, because there’s so much anger at his policy on Gaza.

It’s one thing not to have a hugely enthusiastic voter base, as Biden, you know, never really had a hugely enthusiastic support from his party’s base. But to have people be so angry at you in your own party’s base that you can’t go to the institutions of your own party’s base without literally having people protest you, that’s a huge warning sign for a presidential campaign. Yes, it would have been very challenging for Biden to take a different line on the Gaza War as well. But it doesn’t seem to me that they recognized early on how bad, politically, how dangerous this path they were on was.

And secondly, I don’t get the sense that people in the Biden administration, the foreign policy team, understand the potential ramifications for their careers over this. I mean, there has been a pattern that, if you leave an administration, you can go to work on Wall Street, you can be a consultant. But often times, people also go to universities. They become deans of colleges, universities. They teach at universities. This is a kind of an enjoyable thing for folks to do in the few years while they wait for their party to regain power. This is what people did after the Clinton administration, after the Obama administration.

I think we’re in a very different world now. I think if you are a top Biden foreign policy official, and think that you can go for a couple of pleasant years to some leafy university campus, and teach a couple classes, and hang out for a while, I think you’re sorely mistaken. I think the experience of a Biden official who was involved in this war going to a university in the coming years would be not that different than the experience of people like McGeorge Bundy and and Walt Rostow experienced when they tried to go back to the universities that they had been in before the Vietnam War. These people are gonna be treated with a lot of anger for what they’ve done.

And so, I think about why was it that the administration took this path. And this is my theory. My theory is that if you work in Washington foreign policy for a long period of time, you become more and more divorced from how ordinary progressive minded people think about the world, especially on Israel-Palestine. And the reason you become divorced from them is that when people in Washington talk and work in Washington foreign policy, they always have to think in terms of constraints of what’s politically possible.

I used to work at Washington think tanks. I used to spend a lot of time with people who came in and out of Democratic foreign policy jobs. And one of the things that always struck me was that, even in relatively private settings, when people would talk about policy, they would always adopt the framework of what is politically possible; what was politically salable, could be sold in their view, politically. And they just were not generally interested in thinking outside of those terms. Because if you talk in terms of policy ideas or moral perspectives that are outside of the bounds of what’s considered politically possible, you kind of make yourself irrelevant. I think that’s the kind of the idea in Washington. You become someone who’s not really useful, who’s actually a kind of pain in the neck to have around, right? Because the last thing that a policymaker or politician wants is to be told to do something that basically, politically, they don’t feel like they can do. So, people adopt these really narrowing constraints in terms of how they talk about policy in general, but especially on Israel-Palestine, because that’s the foreign policy issue on which the political pressures are the greatest.

And so, what I noticed was that even to make moral arguments about what Israel was doing to the Palestinians, and to suggest that there should be consequences for those moral decisions, was often essentially to speak outside of the political constraints that people were interested in talking about. That essentially people almost like shut off that entire conversation, almost like shut off that entire part of their brain. I think these were people who, had they gone in a different course in life, would have understood that what America was helping Israel do towards Palestinians was deeply immoral. But they recognize that if they were to adopt that perspective, let alone vocalize it within Washington, it would be very injurious to their careers.

I mean, imagine you are a junior or mid-level foreign policy official in a Democratic administration, and you go on record, or you’re heard to say that, you know, five years ago that you think America should condition military aid, or there should be international legal consequences for what Israel is doing. That would be a good way of basically ending your career in government. And so, I think what happens is that people, essentially over time, they shut that part o…

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

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.

Our guest this week will be Lily Greenberg Call, former Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff at the Department of Interior, who last week resigned to protest US policy in Gaza. She is the first Jewish Biden administration staffer to resign over the war. For ten years, until 2022, she was a youth activist for AIPAC. Her resignation constitutes perhaps the most remarkable illustration yet of the speed with which many young American Jews are abandoning previously held views about Israel and joining the struggle for Palestinian freedom.

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, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) impact on Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Senator J.D. Vance proposes Viktor Orban’s takeover of Hungary’s universities as a model for the US.

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, I talked with Arielle Angel, Mari Cohen, and Daniel May about Zionism and anti-Zionism.

Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.

What Israeli leaders mean when they talk about Gaza’s future.

How American universities are purging pro-Palestinian faculty.

A child of Holocaust survivors speaks about why he’s protesting the war.

An Israeli risks her life to try to stop Israelis from preventing aid from entering Gaza.

Rick Perlstein on why the current crackdown on campus protest is worse than the 1960s.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I want to say a couple more things about the campus protests that have really roiled universities this spring. There’s always the danger, of course, that attention to this distracts us from what’s happening in Gaza, which is much, much more significant. But this is really, I think, a movement whose impact will kind of resound in terms of American politics and American life for a long time to come. And so, I think that thinking about a couple of more of its dynamics might be useful. And I want to make three points based on some other campuses that I visited since a video I did a couple weeks ago.

The first is, I think, one of the things the media has not sufficiently emphasized is the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on this movement. That it is not a coincidence that we had this huge upswell in protesting around the George Floyd incident several years ago. Now we have this. I was at Whitman College in Washington and talked to a number of students who were involved in the encampment there. This is, you know, a fairly small college. And what struck me again and again was how many of them had been introduced to protest by the George Floyd moment back when they were still in high school, and that often around the edges of that movement was when they got connected to issues about Palestinian organizing, that someone handed them a pamphlet or there was someone who was Palestinian in that movement or someone who was connected to that.

And it was essentially through that movement of Black Lives Matter that they came aware of this issue that has now become so central to them. And I think if you look at American history, this is the way things often work, which is that you have clusters of different movements that cross-fertilize. So, if you think about the early 1960s, and you think about Students for a Democratic Society, which became this crucial element of the kind of the new left organizing against Vietnam, some of its key members like Tom Hayden and Alan Haber had been influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s against segregation by Black students in the South.

And so, there you see the way in which one protest movement feeds into another at a time of broader protest. And again, we know that there were veterans of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements who then influenced the feminist movement and the LGBT movement. And so, I think what we’re seeing in this moment is that we are in an era again of youth-led—not only youth but with a large youth participation—grassroots activism, and people move from one subject to another. I also heard people who have been involved in climate protest, which has obviously been a huge issue for young people. And it was through climate that they became interested in the question of Palestinian freedom. We can see that Greta Thunberg, who was kind of like the icon of young climate activism, has been involved in this question of Palestinian liberation. So, I think that’s one thing to keep in mind about how this seemed to come out of nowhere. It really wasn’t coming out of nowhere. It was partly coming out of people who have been involved in other movements that had the Palestinian cause kind of adjacent to it.

The second thing that has struck me going to many, many campuses is the way in which among Jewish students who were involved in this pro-Palestine organizing, it is awakening a kind of much greater interest that they had in what it means to be Jewish, and even a greater level of commitment to Jewish religious practice. This runs so counter kind of to the mainstream narrative, which is essentially that, you know, this is a movement against Jews, or maybe if there are a few Jews in this pro-Palestine movement then they are somehow self-hating or kind of completely deluded or tokenized. But what I actually find is, what’s fascinating to me is the way in which, for a lot of these young people, it seems to me that becoming interested in protesting against what Israel is doing has made them much more interested in Judaism than it was before. I mean, I met a student at Whitman College who, because they were interested in this question of land in Israel-Palestine, had decided they wanted to start studying about Shmita and Yovel. Shmita is this is the Jewish law that says that land has to remain fallow every seven years. Yovel is that after 49 years the land has to go back to his original owner. So, her interest in the question of land and Palestinian right of return had led her to want to study these things. I was told by some students at another campus that they were very proud that at their Shabbats—they had this Jews for a ceasefire group—that the Shabbats at their campus were attracting, they claim, more people to their Shabbat for a ceasefire than we’re going to Shabbat services at Hillel.

I was told by someone else that at the GW encampment—again, this is second hand so I haven’t verified it—that they said that at the encampment, three Jewish students had B’nai Mitzvah, which is a Bar or Bat Mitzvah that they evidently didn’t have when they were 12 or 13. They had it at the encampment as, you know, as college students. So, what’s fascinating to me about this is that you did not see this, I think, among Jews who were involved in the Civil Rights movement, at least not that I’m aware of. Again, if people know more, but I’ve never heard really about—I mean, yes, you have people like, Rabbi Heschel and some other rabbis, but among the young Jewish kids who were going from northern universities to be involved in Freedom Summer and these kind of things, I’ve really never heard of them particularly wanting to hold a lot of Shabbat services and even Passover Seders, which have become a kind of feature of this. Certainly…

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