The Beinart Notebook

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

Our guest this week is someone I admire greatly, Tel Aviv University History Professor Yael Sternhell. We’ll talk about repression in Israeli academia following the arrest of Palestinian legal scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who teaches at Hebrew University. We’ll also talk about Israeli discourse about the Gaza War and the response in Israel to protests in the US. As an Israeli who is also a historian of the United States, Sternhell is uniquely positioned to discuss the way each country understands the other at this terrible and historic moment.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Monday 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

Israel returns to fight in places where it claimed Hamas was defeated.

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!), Zvi Ben-Dor Benite talks to Avi Shlaim about his family’s journey from Iraq and what it means to be an Arab Jew.

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.

Last week’s link to the latest edition of The Ideas Letter, which includes essays on Gaza and its reverberations by Mark Mazower, Chris Ngwodo, and Daniel Levy, didn’t work. Here’s the correct one.

Rick Perlstein on how the current campus protests—and the repression they elicit—aren’t like the protests of the 1960s.

The mother of Hind Rajab talks about students naming a building at Columbia University after her daughter.

Hard to believe this appeared on Fox News.

Hadas Thier in The Nation on whether the encampments threaten Jewish students.

In last week’s video, while rebutting the claim that today’s protesters are privileged and narcissistic, I incorrectly suggested that anti-Vietnam protesters were motivated by self-interest because they were trying to avoid the draft. A number of protesters from that era registered their displeasure. I’m reprinting part of an email from subscriber Merrill Goozner, who rightly takes me to task.

“The earliest protests led by SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] in 1965 called attention to the horrific slaughter of innocent civilians (pro-Viet Cong, perhaps, but non-combatants nonetheless). That’s the direct correlation to today’s situation in Gaza, which has sparked similar protests. By the most conservative estimates, non-combatants totaled more than a half million of the 1.3 million who died during the war. As someone who came of age during that era and participated in the antiwar movement, I can assure you that moral outrage of what was being done ‘in our name,’ and the betrayal of the nation’s ideals that the war represented, played a much larger role in motivating the era’s antiwar students than fear of the draft.

Moreover, there was a widespread recognition among antiwar activists that the draft and its student deferment were egregiously unfair, represented by the slogan, ‘Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight.’ The draft resistance movement (I have a close friend who refused to register and went to jail) consistently called attention to this inequity.

I know plenty of people who found a doctor to write up a phony excuse to get out of the draft during that era. This was especially prevalent after the Tet offensive when public opinion turned against the war. But I would argue that even this behavior, for most, was because they believed that participation in the war was immoral and senseless.”

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

This will come out on Monday, which is Yom HaZikaron in Israel. It’s Israel’s Memorial Day. It’s always a very painful day in Israel when Israelis mourn their dead from war. But it will be immensely painful this year because Israelis will be thinking about the people killed on October 7th, and indeed the Israelis who are still held hostage. And I think it will be even worse because it seems increasingly clear to me that this war in Gaza is nowhere near an end, and that tragically Israeli soldiers are going to continue to die in Gaza and be mourned on future Yom HaZikarons. And that this was very predictable.

And I wanna read something from The New York Times from yesterday. They write, ‘close-quarters ground combat between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops raged in parts of northern Gaza over the weekend. The fighting fit into a now-familiar scenario. Israeli forces returning to an area where they had defeated Hamas earlier in the war, only to see the group reconstitute in the power vacuum left behind.’ This kind of thing will be very familiar to Americans who remember our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed in Vietnam, where Americans were told that the United States had cleared out entire swaths of territory where it defeated the enemy, only to find that the enemy was still there, and the United States needed to return again and again.

So, we were told also that Israel had defeated Hamas everywhere in Gaza except for this little corner in the south, in Rafah, and it just needed to go in there and defeat the last few Hamas units, and then Hamas would be defeated. And we now see that that’s a lie. And it’s a lie for the same reason it was a lie in Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam because countries with powerful armies like Israel and United States can topple governments, but they cannot defeat insurgencies unless they offer a solution to the underlying fundamental political grievance of the population. And this Israeli government has not even tried to pretend that it is offering a solution to the fundamental grievance of the Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond, which is their lack of freedom. And so, absent that, Israel can’t marginalize Hamas. And even if it could somehow miraculously marginalize or even defeat Hamas, it would simply face another resistance force that was just as dangerous.

Of course, what Hamas did on October 7th was horrifying. But Palestinians had been fighting Israel in a whole range of ways, including violence against Israeli civilians, since long before Hamas existed. And so, saying that you are going to make Israel safe by defeating Hamas without dealing with the underlying problem of Palestinian lack of freedom is a little bit like when Israel thought that it could solve its problem in the early 1980s by kicking the PLO out of southern Lebanon. And it did expel the PLO from southern Lebanon, and it laid waste to much of Lebanon, and it laid the foundation for Hezbollah, which is an even more formidable foe. We know that Hamas recruits its fighters from the families of people Israel has killed. Presumably, any other Palestinian resistance group would do the same thing.

And so, now that Israel has killed 40,000 or so Palestinians, forced 90% of Palestinians in Gaza from their homes, the population of people that will be easy recruits for future attacks against Israel is that much greater than it was before. And so, Israel is less safe. And this war, it seems to me, is likely to drag on for a very, very long time, leaving more and more Palestinians devastated in the more Israelis endangered and dead. And what’s so depressing to me is that this was predictable. Indeed, this was predicted. And the people who predicted it most clearly, not coincidentally, were Palestinians who have been saying from the very beginning that Israel’s fundamental problem is not with Hamas, it’s with the Palestinian people, and that Israel has to offer a solution to that fundamental problem.

And yet, their voices have been—as so often has been t…

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 Zoom call this week will be at a Special Time: 1 PM Eastern.

Our guests will be two professors— one Palestinian and Jewish— with deep insights into the protests on their campus: The first is Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia who gave this blistering speech about the university’s crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters. The second is David Myers, the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA, who was present during the attack on UCLA’s encampment, and wrote about his experience.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Monday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Correction: When comparing Zionist Jewish students on campus to Israel’s position in the Middle East, I mistakenly referred Israel being “popular” in its region. I meant to say “unpopular.”

The attacks on Pro-Palestine protesters at UCLA and Columbia.

Edward Said’s vision for Palestine and Israel: “There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such. This does not mean a diminishing of Jewish life as Jewish life or a surrendering of Palestinian Arab aspirations and political existence. On the contrary, it means self-determination for both peoples.”

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, Adam Haber and Matylda Figlerowicz write about the “moral panic” fueling repression on campus.

A recent guest, Dr. Musallam Abu Khalil, runs a charity that promotes the health and wellness of people in Gaza’s Nusierat Refugee Camp. Please consider supporting it.

Norman Finkelstein’s address to the encampment at Columbia.

A Jewish student writes about the protests and antisemitism at Northeastern.

In April, I spoke about Zionism and American Jews at Brown University.

Last week, I spoke about the protests on Slate’s “What Next” podcast and with Ali Velshi and Nick Kristoff on MSNBC.

Check out Waleed Shahid’s new newsletter.

In the Ideas Letter, Daniel Levy, Mark Mazower, and Chris Ngwodo write about the global implications of the Gaza War.

On May 6 I’ll be moderating a panel entitled, “How to Report on Liars and Haters” at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism.

I’ll be speaking on May 8 at Whitman College.

See you on Friday at 1,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I wanted to talk about what’s happening on college campuses, and to make six different observations. And these come from my travels speaking at colleges this semester. I’ve probably spoken at at least a dozen, maybe fifteen, I’m not sure. And I also spent a lot of time at Columbia, in particular, several days before the encampment was taken down. Now, the colleges I’ve been to, I should say, are not representative. They’re more of the kind of elite kind of campuses that have been disproportionately in the news. So, it’s important to say that not everything I’m saying is gonna hold for all campuses in America. And probably the media should be paying a lot more attention to some of these campuses that don’t have such fancy names and to see what’s actually happening there. So, what I’m going to say is not necessarily representative of campuses as a whole, but they may be representative of the ones that have been in the news a lot.

The first is that the most important political dynamic is not happening among either Jewish or Palestinian students. It’s happening among non-Jewish progressive and non-Palestinian progressive students, and most of these students are progressive. And what’s happening is that for a lot of these students, the question of Palestinian liberation has become a central part of their political identity when it wasn’t before. It wasn’t that they were hostile to Palestinian freedom. If they thought about it, they probably would have been sympathetic, but it wasn’t one of their top burning issues. Now it’s become a central part of their political identity.

One way of thinking about this is that a large number of the progressive students on these campuses have moved from being non-Zionists to being anti-Zionists. They weren’t supporters of Israel before, but they weren’t involved in activism against Israel either, and now they are. And the reason this matters so much is that these campuses don’t have many conservative students, right? They don’t have, for instance, a lot of conservative Christian white evangelical students. So, the dynamics on the campus are very different than the dynamics in the country as a whole. In the country as a whole, most Zionists in America are not Jewish. You have huge numbers of Christian Zionists out there in Congress, out there in the country, in the Republican Party. But in these campuses, once the progressive students turn to being anti-Zionists, pretty much the only Zionist people around are the Jewish students. Yes, they could be joined by the college Republicans. But there are not many college Republicans. And I think this is what creates this dynamic of ideological isolation among the Zionist Jewish students, as they see the large bulk of their classmates who are not Palestinian but have turned towards a pro-Palestine politics.

It’s not that the Zionist Jewish students don’t have allies. They have powerful allies. But the allies are not on campus. Their allies are the politicians in Congress, the national Jewish organizations, to some degree you could even say big elements of the mainstream media, the donors. But those forces are very unpopular on the campus itself. And so, in some ways their de facto alliance with those off-campus powers also contributes, I think, to their social isolation. In some ways, the position of the Jewish Zionist students is a little bit like the situation that Israel used to be in the Middle East, where it was very unpopular in its local region, but had very powerful allies externally in the West. And that’s the kind of situation that I think Zionist Jewish students find themselves in, which is very uncomfortable.

The second point I want to make is that the media sometimes depicts these students who are protesting as these kinds of coddled, privileged students, and compares them to the coddled, privileged students who tried to get out of the draft during Vietnam. I think that really gets a lot wrong. In my experience, the students who are most likely to be involved in the pro-Palestine activism are among the least privileged students on campus. They are disproportionately students of color, and many of them are from immigrant families, and a significant number of them are actually foreign students. And these are students who, again, because they’re people of color, are disproportionately more likely to identify with the Palestinian cause because they see things in their own family histories that they connect to the Palestinian struggle and the lack of Palestinian freedom. But these are not particularly privileged students. In fact, they’re often very vulnerable students, some of the most vulnerable students on campus. I was talking at Columbia to a young woman—a foreign student—who was saying that her parents were desperately asking her not to be involved in the protest because if you are a foreign student, and you get arrested, you can be deported. And she told me that she told her parents, I’m sorry I’m gonna take that risk because I’m following in your footsteps, and you were doing this kind of activism back in South Asia.

This is very different than the anti-Vietnam war protest. The campuses were much more white and male. And remember, one of the big reasons for the protests were the students’ fear of getting drafted and having to fight. So, their activism was a form of material self-interest…

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 Zoom call this week will be at our regular time: Noon on Friday.

Our guests will be two Columbia University undergraduates with differing views on the protests at their campus: Ilan Cohen, a senior who attends Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Gabi Frants, a senior who attends Barnard College. They’ll talk about the student movement that has swept Columbia, and the nation.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday night 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

In today’s video, I accidentally said Gaza has been under blockade since 2017. It’s 2007.

Scenes from the campus protests that give me hope.

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 interviews Jewish student organizers at the Columbia Palestine solidarity encampment.

Last week’s guest, Dr. Musallam Abu Khalil, runs a charity that promotes the health and wellness of people in Gaza’s Nusierat Refugee Camp. Please consider supporting it.

What it’s like to be a Jewish Pro-Palestine organizer at Columbia.

Amira Hass on how people in Gaza feel about Hamas.

Ahmad Moor on why he can’t vote for Joe Biden.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts Podcast, I spoke to Seth Binder about what it means to condition US aid to Israel.

I’ll be speaking on May 8 at Whitman College.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

We’re witnessing something that I’m not sure I ever thought we would witness, which is that the struggle for Palestinian liberation has really captured the minds of kind of a whole generation of young Americans—and very quickly—and is convulsing America’s universities in a way that no foreign policy issue has in at least a generation. And I’m very keenly aware that, for many American Jews, including many American Jewish college students, this provokes tremendous fear. And I don’t want to belittle or minimize that. I have some understanding myself of where this fear comes from. I feel it even myself. We are a people that, I think, in our marrow as Jews, we have the sense that history can turn very quickly. And this is the really the story of many of our holidays, but also of our secular history that things can seem settled, and safe, and Jews can be okay, and even have some degree of influence. And then, quite quickly, things can turn, and we can become the scapegoats, that people can turn on us often in a kind of popular upsurge of something.

And so, seen through that lens, I can understand why this moment can provoke great fear in a lot of people. Because the truth is that the organized American Jewish community has for many decades now wielded a lot of influence over the terms of debate on Israel, been able to circumscribe those debates—circumscribe those debates in ways that I have been criticizing for much of my adult life. But still, for many American Jews, and even myself at certain moments, I must admit creates a sense of security, of safety, that we have a certain influence, even a certain kind of control that things are not getting out of hand, that we understand the terms of these debates. And now something that’s changing, something really radically new is being born in progressive circles, and I think increasingly inside the Democratic party, in which those debates will not be, you know, circumscribed by the American Jewish establishment in the way that they were.

And I also understand that people see in this movement things that frightened them, things that seem hostile and hateful, and indeed are hostile and hateful. But it’s worth remembering that all great social movements, all large social movements, attract different kinds of people and different kinds of voices. And so, you could have seen in the anti-war movement, people carrying North Vietnamese flags, people who were chanting for the victory of the North Vietnamese over American soldiers and a Marxist triumph. You could have seen people in the anti-apartheid movement chanting ‘one settler, one bullet,’ kind of a violent dehumanizing vision of how apartheid South Africa should should end.

There is a tendency in some parts of the media, and certainly online, to amplify and focus on the most hateful, disturbing things that you see from this movement. And I think that those things must be condemned. They must be criticized. And I’m not suggesting, not for a moment, that this movement or any movement should be worshiped, that people should abandon their critical faculties. Not at all. I don’t like this discourse that you sometimes hear on the left that to be an ally of a group means that you have to salute at whatever is done in its name. It’s important to always maintain the right to criticize any group of people, including a movement that speaks in the name of Palestinian freedom.

And so, yes, I don’t like it when I hear people say something like ‘all resistance is legitimate’ in the wake of the horrifying attack of October 7th. That seems to me to blur a critically important distinction between resistance to oppression that follows international law, and that recognizes that it is wrong to take civilian life, and what we saw on October 7th. So yes, criticize that. Criticize slogans like ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,’ which don’t acknowledge a place for Israeli Jews in that vision. Because I don’t think it’s realistic to imagine that there will be a country called Palestine, in which all people will be Palestinians. This is a bi-national country. A country of two collectives, both of whom’s identity need to be recognized in a political system that provides complete equality and indeed historical justice and freedom. So, yes, Jews should feel they have every right, every right to criticize things that they find are disturbing or that dehumanize us.

And yet, for all of that, I think this movement is a tremendous opportunity, a tremendous opportunity. And for the Jewish community to ally itself with the Elise Stephaniks and Mike Johnsons and Donald Trumps, who want to crush this movement because they want to crush America’s universities, because they fear universities as places that produce critical thinking, and as places that can be a challenge to white Christian supremacist authoritarianism, it would be a terrible, terrible mistake to join forces with those people as they try to crush freedom of speech and freedom of expression. This movement holds the possibility in a way that no movement in America has in my entire lifetime to end American institutional complicity with the oppression of the Palestinian people.

It’s important not to get distracted by one particular video you might see and to focus attention on the core demands of this movement. And so, much of the journalism that I see, frankly, frustrates me because it doesn’t actually take seriously the core demands of this movement, and instead wants to focus on one particular slogan, or one particular speech, or one particular video. What’s important about the anti-war movement in Vietnam was that it wanted to end the war. What was important about the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa was that wanted to end American complicity, complicity in South Africa. That was the core of the movement. The core of this movement is the demand to end university and American governmental complicity with Israel’s system of oppression, which is now culminated in this horrifying slaughter of people in Gaza.

This complicity must end. It must end because, among other things, it puts Jews in danger. We must see the lie that you can construct a system of Jewish safety on the destruction and brutalization of another people. We should recognize that October the 7th is ju…

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 Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at Noon EDT.

Our guest will be Musallam Abu Khalil, a doctor in Gaza. Musallam works for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) running a primary care clinic in a makeshift school shelter in the Nusierat refugee camp in central Gaza, which houses thousands of internally displaced people. In his personal time, he runs the Dignity for Palestinians Campaign, which aims to preserve the dignity of Palestinians in Gaza through an emergency health and wellness assistance program. He will be speaking in his personal capacity and not as an UNRWA representative.

Paid subscribers will get the link this Monday 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

A complete video of last Wednesday’s congressional hearings featuring Columbia University officials.

The number of children in Gaza injured or killed.

Genesis 16 and Genesis 21, which discuss the story of Hagar.

Rabbinic teachings about Hagar and Ishmael.

Rabbi Shai Held’s book, Judaism is About Love.

A statue of Hagar and Ishmael in Nazareth. As James Zogby notes, “Her skirt’s a tent, representing the refugees. She’s facing north to Lebanon,” to which many Palestinians were expelled in 1948.

In Genesis, Hagar and Ishmael are expelled into the desert of Beer Sheva. Today, the only school in Beer Sheva that teaches both Jewish and Palestinian children in both Arabic and Hebrew bears Hagar’s name.

If you’re looking for Haggadah supplements that speak to this moment, consider these.

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 writes about the challenge of Palestinian and Jewish co-resistance in Gaza.

Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are several requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Inessa Elaydi is trying to evacuate her family from an overcrowded refugee camp in Khan Younis. Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza. Please help if you can.

A conversation between two remarkable men, Maoz Inon and Abu Aziz Sarah.

Chaim Levinson in Haaretz on why Israel has lost the Gaza War.

Students celebrate Kabbalat Shabbat at the Columbia Free Palestine encampment.

Is Columbia University cursed by God?

I spoke last week to Khalil Sayegh about Gaza’s present and future for the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts Podcast.

I’ll be speaking on April 26 at Georgetown University and May 8 at Whitman College.

See you on Thursday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I watched a good chunk of last week’s hearings with the president of Columbia, and the heads of the Board of Trustees, and one of the people leading their antisemitism commission in front of Congress. And there was one moment in particular that stuck out to me. A congressman named Congressman Banks got a hold of some kind of pamphlet that had been put out I think by students of the School the Social Work, which referenced the term, Ashkenormativity.

Ashkenormativity, I guess, is the idea that you kind of make Ashkenazi Judaism normative, and you kind of, you know, don’t pay attention to the fact that many Jews are not Ashkenazi and not from European heritage. Whatever. So, this Congressman was very upset that the term Askanormativity had showed up in some document that was given out to Columbia students and went around and asked the people on the panel what they thought. And one of the heads of the Board of Trustees said the phrase Ashkenormativity was ‘shockingly offensive.’

Now, I don’t really see what’s shockingly offensive about a term which tries to suggest that people tend to kind of assume that the culture of Ashkenazi Jews is the culture of all Jews. But what bothered me—and deeply, deeply depressed me—was this discourse of the use of a phrase, Askanormativity, in some pamphlet at Columbia University as being shockingly offensive when in this entire hearing—at least the long stretches that I watched—there was not a single reference to Palestinians being killed in Gaza that I heard. Not a single reference. You could watch that and literally not know that a single child in Gaza had died. Shockingly offensive? The term Askanormativity in a pamphlet is shockingly offensive? What about the fact that 26,000 children in Gaza, 2% of the children in Gaza, have either been killed or injured; that 1,000 children in Gaza have had one or both of their legs amputated; that all of the universities have been partially or entirely destroyed; that 30 of the 36 hospitals have been destroyed?

What pervaded that conversation about antisemitism was the assumption that Palestinian lives don’t matter at all, that Palestinian lives are worthless. And that’s what to me defiled the conversation. Of course, I care passionately about antisemitism. I care about antisemitism on campus. My kids will soon be Jewish students on campus. I recognize that antisemitism is rising on campus. I do not want a single Jewish student to have an experience in which they’re made to feel unwelcome, even if they have views that would be ones that I profoundly disagree with.

And yet, to me, when you have a conversation about antisemitism that treats Palestinian lives as worthless, Palestinian lives on those campuses—because there’s also no discussion that I heard whatsoever from the people of Columbia who were testifying about what’s happening to Palestinian students on campus. This is in a situation where we’ve had Palestinians killed and shot and doxxed since October 7th. That their lives are worthless and the lives of people in Gaza are worthless. And so, I feel like listening to one member after another basically talk about how they decry antisemitism, and they hate antisemitism, and what a huge problem is, and then even finding these kinds of absurd examples of what they claim is antisemitism, to me, I felt listening to it like I was revolted.

Again, not because I don’t care deeply about antisemitism, but because I hate a discourse of antisemitism, which makes it seem like our lives matter and Palestinian lives don’t matter. That’s not the fight against antisemitism that I want to be part of.  And it’s also not a fight against antisemitism that I think will be effective because it’s essentially a discourse led by Republicans who want to enlist Jews in a project of white Christian supremacism in the United States. Which treats Palestinian lives and the other lives of other kinds of people of color as worthless and invites American Jews to see our safety as part of that effort.

And I don’t trust them for one second as having our welfare at heart. I think that they’re using American Jews as part of their project of trying to establish, or re-establish, certain kinds of hierarchies in the United States about which lives matter and which lives don’t. And they’re inviting us to be on the dominant side, on the powerful side, a Judeo-Christian nation, i.e., not a Muslim nation, right? A…

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 Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Friday at 11 AM EDT.

Our guest will be Vali Nasr, Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, author of The Shia Revival, former official in the Obama administration and one of America’s leading experts on Iranian foreign policy. We’ll talk about the dangers of a full-scale war between Israel and Iran and what the Biden administration can do to avoid 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, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.

Sources Cited in this Video

Mouin Rabbani: “We are where we are because it never occurred to Biden to say ‘don't’ to Israel.”

How Israel grew more reckless in its attacks on Iran after October 7.

The UN Secretary General condemns Israel’s April 1 strike on Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus as a violation of international law.

The US, Britain, and France prevent a UN Security Council condemnation of Israel’s April 1 attack.

Israel’s April 1 attack employed US-made F-35s.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin complained that Israel had not warned the US of its April 1 attack, which put US troops at greater risk.

The Director of National Intelligence warns that Israel’s response to October 7 increases the risk of terrorism against the US.

Iran’s cautious behavior after October 7.

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.)

For the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) Podcast, I spoke with Arielle Angel, Mari Cohen, and Daniel May about antisemitism on campus.

Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are several requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Inessa Elaydi is trying to evacuate her family from an overcrowded refugee camp in Khan Younis. Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza. Please help if you can.

Israel’s artificial intelligence war on Gaza.

Sigal Samuel on solidarity between Palestinians and Mizrachi Jews.

Goran Rosenberg on Israel at Road’s End.

Joe Scarborough versus Israel’s Minister of Economy and Industry.

A small act of kindness amidst the horror in Israel-Palestine.

I spoke last week about liberalism and Zionism at Washington DC’s Sixth and I Synagogue with Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Michael Koplow.

I’ll be speaking on April 16 at Sarah Lawrence, April 17 at Brown, April 18 at MIT, April 19 at Tufts, and April 26 at Georgetown.

See you on Friday at 11 AM,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. I’m recording this on middle of the day Sunday in the US after Iran launched a large number of drones and rockets against Israel, which seemed to have been almost entirely shot down. And I think when one looks at this situation we’re in—the possibility of an Iran-Israel war, not a proxy war, but actually a real direct war—we can see the Biden administration having done some really valuable things in the last 24-48 hours. But I think we can also see that the decisions they made over the past six months actually put them in this very difficult situation that they’re now trying to get out of.

So, I give the Biden administration credit for helping to shoot down this large-scale Iranian attack. Thank goodness very, very few Israelis were killed. No one would want that, least of all me. And also, in addition to the importance of just saving Israeli life by shooting down these rockets, it also makes it easier for Israel not to respond. And the reports that the Biden administration has been pushing Israel not to respond, to say basically you got away with this very audacious attack in Damascus on the Iranian embassy. Now you’ve basically gotten away fairly unscathed because you shot down these Iranian rockets. Let’s leave it there. You’re lucky the way it’s turned out. So, I give the administration credit for that. There are lunatics like John Bolton, and even—I’ll say it—lunatics like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman who’ve basically been going around saying that the United States should support some Israeli response now in retaliation to the Iranian one. The Biden administration deserves credit for not taking that view.

But if you want to understand how we got to this very dangerous place in the first place, then I think the Biden administration deserves some real criticism. Mouin Rabbani wrote yesterday, ‘we are where we are because it never occurred to Biden to say ‘don’t’ to Israel.’ And that’s exactly right. That’s true for Iran as it’s true for Gaza. And to understand why it’s important to kind of rehearse the history of events here. Israel has been for quite a long time attacking military supplies that come from Iran through Syria into Lebanon to Hezbollah because they don’t want Hezbollah to have a more potent military arsenal that could threaten Israel.

But since October 7th, Israel has become much more reckless. You know, Benjamin Netanyahu actually has the reputation for not being militarily reckless, but what Israel has done vis-à-vis Iran since October 7th has indeed been reckless and gone far beyond what they did before. Israel, in December, assassinated a high-ranking Iranian general in Damascus. And then on April 1st, it attacked a building, which was part of the Iranian embassy consulate in Damascus, killing several high-ranking Iranian military officials. Now, this is a very serious escalation of what Israel had done in the past. And it’s really reckless. The Iranian embassy in Damascus is Iranian soil. And there’s a strong notion in international law that you don’t attack other people’s embassies. Indeed, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, said in response to Israel’s attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus that ‘it’s a violation of the inviolability of diplomatic and consular premises.’ And they did that with US F-35s and, according to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, without telling the Biden administration ahead of time.

Now that’s very, very reckless behavior. I think it reminds me of the recklessness of the ways the US responded after September 11th: the sense that the things that we had been doing before weren’t good enough; we needed to take it up several notches but without really thinking about what the consequences were. This act of attacking the Iranian embassy in Damascus puts American forces at risk. We already saw in January that three US soldiers were killed in Jordan because of Iraqi proxies of Iran that were responding to the Gaza attack. And then when you have US planes bombing what is under international legal terms Iranian soil, this also puts the Americans at risk. The US intelligence services have been saying—Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, testified to Congress that ‘it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism.’ So, already US unconditional support for Israel and Gaza is increasing the risk of terrorism.

And now, we saw that Israel’s attack on April 1st increases the risk of terrorism even further. They’re making the US complicit…

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 Zoom call this week will be at our normal time: Friday at Noon EDT.

Our guest will be Abdalhadi Alijla, a Gaza-born political scientist who has done some intriguing writing about Gaza’s political future after this war. We’ll talk about Israel’s stated plans to empower Gaza’s families and tribes, the Biden administration’s effort to empower the Palestinian Authority, and what will become of Hamas.

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.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane writes about the shifting politics inside the Democratic Party on the Gaza War.

Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are several requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Inessa Elaydi is trying to evacuate her family from an overcrowded refugee camp in Khan Younis. Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza. Please help if you can.

Annelle Sheline, who resigned from the State Department to protest US policy toward Gaza, talks about being impacted by Aaron Bushnell.

Ramy Youssef prays for the people of Palestine on Saturday Night Live.

I talked about the war in Gaza with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.

I’ll be speaking on April 5, with Rabbi David Wolpe, at City University of New York; and April 7, with Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Michael Koplow, at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC; and on April 10 at the Phoenix Committee for Foreign Relations.

Dr. Guy Shalev and Dr. Lina Qassem-Hassan, who recently joined me on one of our Friday zooms, will be speaking in Boston on March 31st at the Palestinian Cultural Center and April 1 at Temple Beth Zion, and in New York on April 4 at Judson Memorial Church.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

A lot of Democrats—starting with Chuck Schumer in his speech a couple weeks ago, but a lot of others as well, and some commentators—seem to feel like the sweet spot for them in responding to Israel’s war in Gaza is to attack Benjamin Netanyahu personally and say the problem with this war, and the reason that America and Israel not on the same page about it, is because of Netanyahu. That they love Israel, they support Israel, there is a good Israel that would be conducting this war in the way that America would like, but it’s been hijacked by Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government represents the bad Israel. Now, I can see why that’s a kind of politically appealing position for Democrats to be in because it tries to refute the argument that they’re anti-Israel and it tries to suggest that Americans and Israelis are actually really on the same page about this war.

Unfortunately, the evidence suggests this is really not the case. The war is very popular among Israeli Jews. Now, it’s true that there’s a deep division about whether to pause the war as part of a hostage deal. But even people who want to pause the war as part of a hostage deal don’t want to end it for good and certainly don’t question the legitimacy of the war—again, most Jewish Israelis. So, that puts them in a different place from the Biden administration. In fact, even though Netanyahu has become much more unpopular since October 7th, the Israeli political mood has moved to the right. It’s also not the case that there is a kind of majority of Israelis underneath Benjamin Netanyahu waiting to support a two-state solution if Netanyahu were to be gotten rid of. Again, Palestinian citizens of Israel may, but most Jewish Israelis even before October 7th weren’t wild about a Palestinian state if one meant a sovereign state that controlled the Jordan Valley, that had a capital in East Jerusalem—a genuine state. Netanyahu’s main rivals, Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, don’t really support that kind of state. And again, that the opposition to a two-states has even grown since October 7th.

So, this desire to suggest that the problem is Netanyahu is politically popular because Netanyahu is perceived in American circles as a right-wing or a Republican, someone who’s been personally obnoxious to American presidents. But it’s based on a kind of fiction about where Israeli politics are and what the kind of majority of Israelis actually believe. And also, I don’t think it’s going to be very effective in bringing down Netanyahu. A public fight with an American president—a rhetorical fight—isn’t necessarily undermining politically for Netanyahu. In many ways, he can actually use it to rally his base and to kind of call on nationalist sentiment. And it’s particularly not an effective tactic if you want to bring down Netanyahu because it’s only rhetorical. Netanyahu has a long history of embracing rhetorical battles with American presidents, going back to Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama over the Obama speech, for instance, calling for a Palestinian state near the ‘67 lines in 2011.

If you wanted to actually try to undermine Netanyahu politically, and increase the chances that Israel might shift course, you would actually have to condition or cut off military aid for the war and maybe change America’s positions in international institutions. The reason I think that would have a greater likelihood of success is that Netanyahu’s really entire political career at some level has been based on telling Israelis they can have their cake and eat it too. That they can do whatever they want vis-à-vis the Palestinians, essentially: destroy the possibility of a two-state solution, in particular, and Israel will remain deeply integrated into the rest of the world. It won’t face tangible consequences. Indeed, that it’ll actually become more integrated into the rest of the world, as it has been.

So, if you want to undermine that case that Netanyahu is making, you can’t do it effectively simply by saying we don’t like Benjamin Netanyahu. Israelis felt well aware that previous Democratic presidents also didn’t like Benjamin Netanyahu. But it doesn’t cost them anything. The way to undermine Netanyahu’s argument, at least with some sliver of maybe center or center-right Israelis, would be to show them that his policies are incurring tangible costs vis-à-vis Israel in terms of American weapons, in terms of America’s support in international institutions. Again, I don’t want to suggest that this would lead to some kind of left-wing peacenik Israeli government. There really isn’t the basis for that politically, especially given that most Palestinian political parties—which are the most peacenik, the most anti-war, the most pro-two-states—are not considered legitimate partners for an Israeli government. I’m talking about Balad and Hadash, in particular.

But it would, I think, change the calculus in Israel politically in a way that’s simply saying that you don’t want Netanyahu to be there doesn’t at all. And so, the Biden administration, I think, if it wants a change in government in Israel, the thing it has to do is take concrete action…

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 Zoom call this week will be at our normal time: Friday at Noon EDT.

This Friday, I’ll be answering questions. Feel free to ask me anything during the Zoom call and I’ll do my best to answer. Since I just published an essay in the New York Times about the historic rupture between American Jewry’s two dominant creeds— liberalism and Zionism— I thought it might be a good moment to talk directly with you.

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 studies showing a correlation between Israel’s killings of Palestinians and reported antisemitic incidents in the US, Belgium, and Australia.

Why pro-Israel donors objected when Harvard and Stanford appointed Jewish scholars who study antisemitism to study antisemitism on campus.

A pro-Israel speaker’s talk is disrupted at Berkeley. (The speaker returned and was allowed to speak.)

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!), on the occasion of Purim, which features Amalek’s supposed descendant, Haman, Maya Rosen writes about how to understand the Bible’s call for genocide during what the International Court of Justice has called a “plausible” genocide in Gaza.

Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are four requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza.

Almost every day brings new evidence that the debate about conditioning aid to Israel is shifting among Democrats in Congress. Here’s Representative Katie Porter making the case.

Josh Leifer on trying to understand Hamas.

How Joe Biden threw in his lot with Benjamin Netanyahu after October 7.

If you want to understand what the Israeli government is thinking right now, Dan Senor’s interview with Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer is quite instructive.

My New York Times essay on the rupture between Zionism and liberalism for American Jews.

I talked about the war in Gaza with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and Ali Velshi.

I’ll be speaking on March 27 at Quinnipiac College, March 28 at Hofstra University, April 5 with Rabbi David Wolpe at City University of New York, and April 7 with Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Michael Koplow at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I wanna say something about the debate in the US today over antisemitism. I was a little ambivalent about this because the most important story right now, I think it should go without saying, is the destruction of Gaza, the mass slaughter there. But adjacent to that is this conversation about antisemitism in the US. I engaged in that conversation myself to some degree with a piece that just came out in the New York Times. Franklin Foer, my old colleague at The New Republic, had a cover story in The Atlantic. And I think it’s important to engage that conversation partly because antisemitism is a genuine problem, but also because if we don’t talk about antisemitism in the right way, it seems to me, then the conversation about antisemitism becomes a way of not having to face what’s happening in Gaza. So, it seems to me to some degree one has to engage with this conversation of antisemitism to try to say how to talk about it and how not to talk about, precisely so it doesn’t become a way of evading the reality of the horror in Gaza.

So, I want to try to suggest kind of six ways that I think are important to think about and not to think about antisemitism. The first is, which might be obvious, but I think is in some ways not said clearly enough, is that the rise in Israel-related antisemitism that we’re seeing in the United States is related to this war. There are three academic studies—one in the US, one in Belgium, one in Australia—over the last 20 years all show a strong correlation between substantial Israeli military operations that kill a lot of Palestinians and rise in reported antisemitic incidents.

Now, this is not to say that Israel is responsible for people who take out their anger against Israel on Jews. It’s not. Israel is responsible for the Palestinians it kills, but it’s not responsible for people who take out their anger on Israel against ordinary Jews. Just like Hamas is responsible for the Israelis it killed on October 7th, but Hamas is not responsible for the violent actions that have been taken against Palestinians in the United States by people who might have been inflamed by what Hamas did. And for that matter, the Chinese government is responsible for many, many terrible things, but the Chinese government is not responsible for the fact that during COVID, some people took out their anger against the Chinese government on Asian Americans in the United States. But it is just worth saying that if the war were to end, and the Israeli military were to stop killing so many Palestinians, likely the number of reported incidents of antisemitism would go down. Again, we have academic evidence that shows a pretty strong correlation here.

The second point I want to make is that if we want to fight against this Israel-related antisemitism and make it clear that it’s unacceptable to take out your anger against Israel against Jews, we may need to make a distinction between the Israeli government—its actions and its character—and Jews. We need to make it clear they’re not the same thing, just as we would make it clear that Muslims are not responsible for the actions of Iran or Saudi Arabia or Hamas, and Chinese Americans are not responsible for what China does because to support a government is a political choice. And a religion or an ethnicity is something very different.

And so that distinction is really, really important to make. And it’s important to make to fight against Israel-related antisemitism. And we have the problem that many established American Jewish organizations don’t want to make that distinction. They don’t want to distinguish Jewishness or Judaism on the one hand from Israel, and Zionism on the other, because they want to suggest that being a Zionist or supporting Israel is inherent in being Jewish. Now, it is true that a majority of American Jews—a majority of Jews around the world—I think would identify as supporting Israel, identify as Zionists, although they might mean different things by that. And if you say it is an inherent part of what it means to be a Jew, you’re actually contributing to exactly the conflation, it seems to me, that makes Jews in the US and in other parts of the world less safe because it makes it harder to maintain the distinction between Israel and Jews and harder to tell people that it is unacceptable for them to take out their anger against Israel—its actions, even its state ideology—on Jews.

The third point I want to make is that not everything bad that happens, even everything bad that happens to Jews, is antisemitism. Which is to say there’s bad behavior that takes place, including ag…

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 Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Avner Gvaryahu, Executive Director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli military veterans who oppose the occupation. We’ll discuss his recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Myth of Israel’s ‘Moral Army’” as part of a broader discussion about the way Israel is fighting in Gaza and why it is wreaking such devastation there.

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

Chuck Schumer’s speech last week on the Senate floor.

When Harry Reid repudiated Barack Obama in 2011.

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!), Emma Saltzberg talks to Professor Geoffrey Levin about the hidden history of American Jewish dissent about Israel.

Every few days I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are three requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I interviewed Gaza-born writer and activist Ahmed Moor about the consequences, human, moral and political, of this war.

I discussed American Jewish politics on the Makdisi Street Podcast.

Naomi Klein on the meaning of the film “Zone of Interest.”

I’ll be speaking on March 27 at Quinnipiac College, March 28 at Hofstra University, April 5 at City University of New York, and April 7 at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC.

See you on Thursday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer gave a speech last week that got a lot of attention. And I think it is actually a pretty big deal, but not really for the reasons that people are suggesting it is. I want to pick up on something that actually Norman Finkelstein said in our Zoom call on Friday for paid subscribers that I think was correct, and I want to try to elaborate on it in explaining why it matters. Now, the headline was that that Schumer called for new elections in Israel. I don’t know whether that will increase the likelihood of new elections in Israel. Certainly, Schumer’s speech was not, by my lights, a kind of commensurate moral response to the destruction of Gaza. He didn’t call for an end to military aid to Israel’s war. He didn’t call for an immediate ceasefire and hostage release. But he did say other things that I think suggest how much the discourse inside the Democratic Party, even in Washington now, has changed in a very short period of time.

To illustrate that, I want to go back to a speech that his predecessor, Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid, gave in 2011. In the spring of 2011, Barack Obama gave a speech calling for a Palestinian state near the 1967 lines with land swaps. And he had previously, over the past couple of years—Obama—pushed for a settlement freeze, which had put him in conflict with Netanyahu. And so, Harry Reid went to AIPAC, and he completely threw Obama under the bus. And he said, ‘no one’—this is Harry Reid—he said, ‘no one should set premature parameters about borders, about building, or about anything else.’ Building. That refers to settlements. Harry Reid was saying basically no US policy of restriction on settlement growth.

To fast forward to Schumer’s speech, two things about it that I think suggest how much the discourse has changed. The first is that he says in a slightly oblique way, but he says it, that if Netanyahu doesn’t begin to wind down the war and ‘continues to pursue dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing US standards for assistance, then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.’ Now, that’s a little euphemistic. But when he talks about ‘existing US standards for assistance,’ it seems to me he’s referenced something called the Leahy Law. The Leahy Law says the US cannot give military aid to units of foreign militaries that commit gross human rights violations. We do apply that to plenty of countries. We don’t apply it to Israel. It’s not enforced. We don’t even collect the data that would allow us to determine if certain units of the US military had committed gross human rights violations.

Schumer is referencing that. That’s a big deal. Prior to October 7th and the war in Gaza, there was, as far as I know, one US Senator, Bernie Sanders, who was open to the idea in a meaningful way of conditioning US aid. Now, Chuck Schumer is talking about it. And Chuck Schumer is not on the left edge of the Democratic Party in Congress. He’s on the center right edge when it comes to foreign policy. Let’s remember, this is the guy who opposed Barack Obama’s nuclear deal in 2015, and he’s putting the idea of conditioning military aid to Israel on the table. The US has not conditioned aid to Israel since the early 1990s under George H. W. Bush. The fact that Chuck Schumer is now talking about it suggests how dramatic a transformation there has been inside the Democratic Party in Congress in a relatively short time.

The second thing that Schumer said that I thought was quite remarkable is he refers to the debate between one equal state and two states. Now, two states is his position. But he says, ‘I can understand the idealism that inspires so many young people, in particular, to support a one-state solution. Why can’t we all live side by side and house by house in peace?’ Now, then Schumer goes on to say he disagrees with that. He doesn’t think Jews would be safe. Those are very familiar rebuttals. But the fact that Schumer has to engage this argument at all is really new. A Democratic leader in the Congress would not have had to even acknowledge this as a topic that he needed to discuss. And it’s worth remembering that the establishment Jewish organizations like the Anti-defamation League, which equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, view this position—the position that I hold, one equal binational democratic state—as antisemitism. And which is their way of saying it shouldn’t be discussed, as part of the policy debate. But Schumer is discussing it! He’s disagreeing with it, but he’s discussing it, and he’s acknowledged that he’s calling it an idealistic position that many young people share.

This would not have happened up until very recently. And it suggests that Schumer understands the transformation that’s underway at the grassroots of his party, especially along generational lines. He’s trying to forestall it in a way, but he’s recognizing it is essentially a legitimate part of the discourse, which is something that establishment American Jewish organizations have been trying to forestall, make sure that it can’t be a legitimate part of the discourse by equating it with antisemitism. And Schumer is actually doing something very different here. It suggests to me he’s someone who knows that things in his party are really shifting. He may not be so happy about it, but he recognizes that. That is a big deal. And so, while there’s so many reasons for despair in this nightmarish moment, I think Schumer’s …

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 Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will be Norman Finkelstein, someone who has long fascinated me but whom I’ve never met. I want to ask about his upbringing as the child of Holocaust survivors, how his parents imparted the Holocaust’s moral lessons to him, and about how he understands the very different ways that many other children of Holocaust survivors interpret that horror. I want to ask how he first encountered Palestinians, how he decided to make their cause his life’s work, and what it was like to break with many Palestinian activists over the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Finally, I want to ask about his reaction to the October 7 massacre, and to the mass slaughter and starvation unfolding 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.

Sources Cited in this Video

I discussed Bezalel Smotrich’s “Decisive Plan” last spring in a Jewish Currents essay entitled, “Could Israel Carry Out Another Nakba?”

I wrote about Israeli efforts at mass expulsion from Gaza earlier this year in The New York Times.

Israel’s plan to expand its “buffer zone” inside Gaza.

UN officials called Gaza “unlivable” in 2018.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on why he doesn’t agree with Barack Obama that “the arc of the moral universe bends to 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.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane examines the limits and possibilities of the Biden administration’s new sanctions against Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. This request is from Abir Elzowidi, who is trying to evacuate the family of his brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. Abir writes, “I've lost 33 of my family members in Gaza since the war started and I am very scared to lose Tamer and his family. I could never forgive myself for not trying to help them.” If you can help, please do.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I interviewed Steve Simon, a Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa in President Obama’s National Security Council, about how his experience making policy toward Israel-Palestine helps him interpret the Biden administration’s actions since October 7.

Tel Aviv University Professor Aeyal Gross on how people who deny Hamas’ atrocities replicate the tactics of Israeli hasbara.

Pankaj Mishra on “The Shoah after Gaza.”

I’ll be speaking on March 11 at the City University of New York, March 27 at Quinnipiac College, March 28 at Hofstra University and April 7 at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC.

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. Every now and then, someone says, ‘why are people paying so much attention to what’s happening in Gaza? After all, there are really, really terrible things that happen all over the world and don’t get very much attention.’ And there are certain standard answers to this. One answer for Americans is that the United States is very deeply complicit in the slaughter in Gaza in the way that it’s not in many other places where people are suffering a great deal. Another more general answer is that people tend to pay more attention to what’s happening in Israel-Palestine because it’s so central to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. But I want to suggest another answer. And it has to do with the way in which what Israel is doing, and maybe trying to do, in Gaza, and how the world reacts, is a kind of a referendum on the very notion of historical progress itself. The question of whether we are fundamentally in a different and better world today than we were in previous centuries.

So, let me try to explain what I mean. As I understand what Israel is doing in Gaza, this is the way I think about it. There’s a pretty overwhelming consensus in Israel today among Israeli Jews—there was even before October 7th but even more strongly since October 7th—that Israel cannot give the Palestinians their own state, certainly not any time in the foreseeable future, and certainly that Israel is not going to give Palestinians citizenship in the country in which they live, in Israel, right, and in this territory, which Israel controls. So, Israel is going to control these people, millions of people in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem in different ways who lack basic rights, the basic right of citizenship.

And I think until October 7th, Israeli leaders felt like they were managing that system pretty well. Things were pretty quiet in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority was working with Israel. Even Hamas, they felt like in a strange kind of way, was working with Israel to keep things relatively quiet. Israel had policies of kind of carrots and sticks. They would let more Palestinian workers come into Israel from the Occupied Territories, which they thought would give people an incentive to keep things kind of relatively calm because they didn’t want to lose that. Of course, there was the ever-present threat of his Israeli violence, greater violence if the Palestinians upset the apple cart. And Israel was moving on to bigger and better things in its view, you know, normalization with Saudi Arabia, you know, having relations with all kinds of important countries all over the world.

I think that’s where Israeli political leadership was on October 6th. October 7th showed actually this management process has really broken down because actually it’s really difficult to manage over a long period of time people who you deny basic rights to because those people are going to resist. And, of course, the way they resisted on October 7th was horrifying to me, right? I much prefer the many other ways of Palestinians have resisted in ways that are much more ethical. But the point is that people are likely to resist systems of oppression. You can’t pretend that they’re going to basically sit back and take it for a long time.

So, the Biden administration wants to recreate a kind of, I think, a system of managing this situation. I mean, they talk about two states. But I think what they really want to do is basically try to kind of put Humpty Dumpty back together again, put someone in charge in Gaza that will kind of keep things quiet, maybe refurbish the Palestinian authority a little bit, and basically move on to be able to talk about other things. But I think that’s gonna be extraordinarily difficult to do. The truth is that Gaza was unlivable before October 7th. According to the UN, it was unlivable in 2017. Now it is catastrophically unlivable, right? I mean, most of the hospitals are destroyed. Most of the housing is destroyed. Almost everyone displaced. The universities destroyed. And it’s extremely difficult for me to see how Gaza is ever rebuilt. Israel has already said that it wants to increase the buffer zones, which means that there will be less space for people in Gaza than there is today. This is already one of the most overcrowded places on earth. The blockade is likely to be tighter than it was before because Israel is gonna say we can’t allow Hamas to get the means to rearm or anyone else to get the means to rearm, right.

So, it doesn’t seem to me it’s remotely plausible that Gaza is really going to be able to rebuild. And I think that there are differences of opinions inside the Israeli government, but I think the people in the Israeli government who have the most coherent vision of what they want to do beyond just muddling through …

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 Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.

Our guest will Ussama Makdisi, Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley, author most recently of Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World and co-host of the Makdisi Street Podcast. I want to ask Ussama, who is one of America’s leading historians of the Middle East and of the long encounter between Palestinians and Zionism, what makes this current moment distinct. I also want to ask how his scholarship into the history of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Arab world can help us think about a future of coexistence and equality in Israel-Palestine and across the Middle East.

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

Bill Clinton’s comments after first meeting Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House are recorded in books by both Aaron Miller and Dennis Ross.

When Netanyahu said “America is something that can be moved easily.”

The problem with dropping humanitarian aid from the air.

Why America’s military support for Israel’s war likely violates US law.

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!), Dahlia Krutkovich and Jonathan Shamir write about the fight over Gaza inside Britain’s Labour Party.

Khalil Sayegh, a former guest on one of my Friday Zoom interviews and someone from whom I’ve learned a great deal, has launched a Go Fund Me page to evacuate his family from Gaza. It’s horrifying that so many people need to do this. I hope you’ll take a moment to imagine how you’d feel if your family were in such desperate straits and consider supporting him.

“I love Israel, but not more than Judaism itself. Not more than humanity.” Rabbi Kate Mizrahi on why she supports a ceasefire.

Jon Stewart on how US officials talk about war crimes in Ukraine versus Israel.    

I spoke with Rania Batrice about anti-war mobilization inside the Democratic Party for the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

I spoke with Ali Velshi on MSNBC about the political problems the war in Gaza is creating for Joe Biden.

I’ll be speaking virtually at Southern Connecticut State University on March 4 and in person on March 6 at the University of Texas at Austin, March 11 at the City University of New York, March 27 at Quinnipiac College, and March 28 at Hofstra University.

I sometimes get emails that strike me as deserving a wider audience. The following is from a professor at a prestigious liberal arts college. Although I’ve been highly critical of the way charges of antisemitism are wielded to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, this email—which I’ve edited for concision and clarity—captures something that worries me about the Israel-Palestine debate on at least some campuses.

“I have had two students recently ask me for letters of recommendation to transfer to other colleges on account of anti-Semitism…in asking one of the two students who wants to transfer what happened, it became clear that his fellow students had blocked him from phone chats and systematically blanked him in face-to-face interactions after he first expressed support for Israel's right to exist and then showed up on campus in a yarmulke after Temple, which was taken as a political declaration. It seems to me that there is a form of anti-Semitism that consists in treating Zionism per se (as opposed to support for Netanyahu or the settlers or whatever) as morally equivalent to Nazism, rather than being on a par with other mistaken ideologies like Hindutva - retrograde but not the kind of thing that ought to put one beyond the pale.”

See you on Friday at Noon,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

There’s a famous story about the first time that Benjamin Netanyahu met Bill Clinton after Netanyahu had been elected in 1996. And Netanyahu started lecturing Clinton about the Middle East and about Israel Palestine, and then Netanyahu left the room. And, according to Aaron Miller’s book, Bill Clinton turns to his advisors and said, ‘who the f**k does he think he is? Who’s the f*****g superpower here?’ A similar version of this story shows up in Dennis Ross’s book.

I’ve been thinking about this line of Bill Clinton’s—who’s the f*****g superpower here—because the United States is now in a truly bizarre situation in which Israel is prosecuting a war that is starving the people of Gaza to death. They’re starving because very few trucks are getting through to provide the aid they need to live and the medicines they need to live. Now, this aid is not getting through because Israel has a very, very laborious inspection process that really reduces the number of trucks that can get through. Also, because Israel is still bombing in places, which makes it hard for the trucks to travel safely with that aid. And because, in the north of Gaza where Israel has largely decapitated Hamas, there is total lawlessness, so it’s not safe to deliver trucks. The trucks are getting stormed by starving people. We saw this tragically last week in this massacre that killed roughly a hundred people.

And these policies are being carried out with America’s deep participation, right? America is supplying Israel the weaponry that it is using to prosecute this war. And America is protecting Israel at the United Nations and other international forums from the consequences of its policies, right? So, the US is deeply involved in these policies that are starving the people of Gaza to death. And you might think that because the Biden administration is now publicly saying it’s very, very concerned about this famine that’s taking place, that it would say, ‘we will no longer participate in these policies that are people starving people in Gaza to death.’ But that’s not what the Biden administration is saying. The Biden administration is essentially saying, ‘well, we can’t do much about that. But here’s this brilliant workaround. We’ll drop the aid from the air,’ right?

It’s actually not such a brilliant workaround because, according to humanitarian experts, it’s very, very expensive and inefficient to deliver aid from the air. The aid can land very far away from where you want it to land. So, let’s say you have possible supplies. They may not land near the hospital. Also, there’ve been suggestions that some of this aid may land in the sea, and it may be dangerous for people in Gaza to retrieve it. The obvious answer is to start the delivery of aid by land. And yet the Biden administration still is kind of essentially shrugging its shoulders or saying, ‘pretty please, we’d really like you to let more of this aid in,’ as if the United States doesn’t have any leverage here, right? It is with US weapons that Israel is prosecuting this war.

And indeed, the US is probably violating its own law by participating in this starvation of Gaza because under the Foreign Assistance Act, it’s illegal for the US to provide arms to countries that are committing grave human rights violations. And remember the International Court of Justice has said that this could plausibly be a genocide. And it’s also under the Foreign Assistance Act illegal for the US to provide arms to countries that are impeding the delivery of US humanitarian assistance, which Israel is also doing, right?

So, rather than complying with US law, and saying that America will not be complicit in these policies, the Biden administration shrugs its shoulders and says, ‘well, we’ve got a creative workaround. Since we can’t do anything about that, let’s drop things from the air.’And you know, it’s funny, there’s a whole group of people in Washington who are really obsessed with this idea of credibility, right?…

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