The Beinart Notebook

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Munther Isaac, a Palestinian minister and theologian based in the West Bank. He gained international attention for his Christmas 2023 sermon, Christ in the Rubble. We’ll talk about Palestinian life in the West Bank, Munther’s critique of Christian Zionism, his views of Hamas and his interview with Tucker Carlson. Please join us.

I also recorded a conversation with former US ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro, where we debated the reasons the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” didn’t produce a Palestinian state, and whether a Jewish democracy is a contradiction in terms. We’ll send that conversation to subscribers this week as well.

Cited in Today’s Video

Sam Harris on why he won’t debate critics of Israel.

B’Tselem on Military Order 101.

Salam Fayyad’s exit interview with the New York Times.

Neve Gordon on “human shields.”

Yoav Gallant’s statement on October 9, 2023.

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!), Josh Nathan-Kazis writes about how the Israel Day Parade backfired.

In the New York Times, I argued that America will keep launching disastrous wars until the people who champion them are held to account.

Nikole Hannah-Jones on the end of the civil rights era.

Israel’s new strategy for changing global opinion.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there’s a guy named Sam Harris, been a pretty prominent political commentator in the U.S. for quite a few years. He really kind of specializes a lot in what he claims is the kind of thread of jihadism or Islamism to the West. And he’s also a supporter, a defender of the state of Israel.

And he wrote a post a couple days ago that’s been getting a lot of attention—I’ve seen it sent around a lot—about why he won’t debate critics of Israel. His argument is that he won’t debate critics of Israel because the things that he believes are so self-evidently true that it would be a waste of time to subject them to interchange with someone who holds a different point of view. And, because Sam Harris is a pretty kind of highbrow defender of Israel, I just think it’s worth looking at the statements that he considers to be self-evident statements of fact. And you can ask yourself whether, in fact, you think they are the case or not.

The first thing he claims is that you should understand the conflict in Israel-Palestine as a struggle between a free society, Israel, and jihadism. So, let’s take the first part of that equation: the idea that Israel is a free society. Sam Harris offers no evidence for this. He doesn’t quote any human rights organizations, he doesn’t quote any laws, anything, he just asserts it, ex cathedra: Israel is a free society.

Okay, well, imagine you’re reading that, you’re sitting there in the West Bank. The West Bank has been under Israeli control since 1967. You’re a Palestinian. You’ve lived your entire life without citizenship in the state in which you live. A government that has life and death control over you does not give you the right to vote. You live under military law, with a 99% prosecution rate, even though your Jewish neighbors enjoy full due process as Israeli citizens. You need military permission to travel, even though they can travel freely, and you’re also subject to something called Military Order 101, which says that you need military permission if you want to congregate with 10 or more people for a political purpose, even in a private home. Even in a private home, you can’t congregate for a political purpose with 10 or more people without military permission. This is what Sam Harris says, without any evidence, he describes as a free society. I suspect for that West Bank Palestinian, it doesn’t feel all that free.

The second part is the idea that you can understand Palestinians and Palestinian politics in the Israel-Palestinian conflict through the prism of jihadism. This is what Sam Harris writes. ‘The problem in the Middle East’—actually not just Israel-Palestine, the entire Middle East—’is not, and never has been the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam, or whatever words you want to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.’

So, for Sam Harris, Muslims and Palestinians are synonymous, and the problem is that too many of those Muslims are jihadis. There’s no evidence that Sam Harris has ever heard of a guy named George Habash, for instance. George Habash, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the most radical Palestinian organizations in the 1970s. It was responsible for some of the most spectacular and terrible acts of violence, of armed resistance, including against civilians.

Why am I mentioning George Habash? Because he was a Greek Orthodox Christian who grew up singing in a choir, right? The head also of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another Palestinian group that was more radical than Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, that denounced Arafat for accepting Israel’s existence in 1988, also a Christian. Edward Said, perhaps the most prominent English-language Palestinian intellectual in the world, a Christian. Azmi Bishara, perhaps the most important Palestinian politician in Israel proper at a certain period of time, a Christian. Hanan Ashrawi, famous as one of the key figures in the First Intifada and the early Oslo years, also a Christian.

Sam Harris shows no evidence of any understanding whatsoever that there are Palestinian Christians, that many of the people who have been the harshest critics and activists against Zionism in Israel, even violently, have been Christian. And, not to mention the fact that even many Palestinian Muslims, for instance, in a party like Fatah, are not actually Islamists. So, all of this is considered not mentioned at all by Sam Harris, and it’s just self-evident for him that you can understand Palestinians and Palestinian politics through the prism of jihadism. And this is a guy who’s considered to be kind of like an intellectual defender of the state of Israel.

Then he says, you may have heard this one before, he says, if the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. Now, it’s first worth noting, right, that peace can mean a lot of different things, right? I mean, peace just means the absence of conflict. You might say that the Native Americans got peace from the United States government in the 19th and then through the 20th century, because actually, there’s really no open-armed warfare between Native Americans and the United States anymore, because the Native population was largely destroyed in the United States. So, this category of peace says nothing about things like freedom and justice that we might think are also important values.

But even on the question of peace, this idea that Sam Harris has, that Palestinians have never put down their weapons, and if they did, everything would be fine. He evidently is not aware that for the last 20 years since the end of the Second Intifada, the Palestinian Authority has put away its weapons. Not only has it not done any significant amount of armed resistance itself, it’s actually worked with the Israeli Defense Force to prevent other Palestinians from committing armed resistance.

This, by the way, is something that the African National Congress in South Africa, or the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland never did—never would have thought of doing—because it would have been considered so wildly collaborationist. This has actually been the strategy of the Palestinian Authority for the last 20 years. And for several of those years, the Palestinian Prime Minister was a guy named Salam Fayyad, who was considered the most moderate Palestinian politician, the one who was most popular in Washington, the one who was most popular in Israel, right? The person who went furthest in essentially doing the test that Sam Harris is sure that could get the Palestinians everything they want: putting down their arms—not just putting down arms—but preventing other Palestinians from picking up their arms.

When Salaam Fayyad left politics in 2013, he did a kind of exit interview with Roger Cohen of the New York Times. And he said that he could not get the Israelis to stop settlement growth in the West Bank for a single day through his strategy of renouncing armed conflict and preventing other Palestinians from using armed resistance. And he writes, ‘we have sustained a doctrinal defeat. We have not delivered. I represent the address for failure. I question whether the PA delivered. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.’ Again, no evidence in Sam Harris’s writing that he knows who Salam Fayyad is, or has any understanding or familiarity with the experience of Salam Fayyad.

He goes on to say, Sam Harris, that the Palestinians bear responsibility for this conflict because ‘Hamas is a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields.’ There’s something uniquely pathological about Hamas and Palestinians because they fight from within an urban territory. Evidently, Sam Harris is unfamiliar with the work, for instance, of the Israeli political scientist Neve Gordon, who’s written and co-authored an entire book about this idea of human shields. I’m going to quote from Neve Gordon here. He writes, ‘from the American Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento to anti-colonial struggles in Malaya, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, as well as Algeria, Angola, and Palestine, militants have hidden among civilians. Hamas, in this sense, is no outlier,’ right?

Sam Harris shows no, evidently, knowledge whatsoever of the fact that Hamas is not the only insurgent group that fights in from among a civilian population. That it is actually the norm among insurgent groups. Insurgent groups don’t generally put on brightly colored uniforms, go out into an open space, and then fight against one of the world’s most powerful armies and say, here we are, right? People act as if Hamas is the first insurgent group to ever build a lot of tunnels. They ever heard of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese who built massive, massive networks of tunnels because they, too, were facing a military with an extremely powerful air force that they had no defense against, so they built tunnels underneath their population, right?

And so, I think there’s lots and lots of things that you can criticize Hamas for. I have spent much of my time doing exactly that. It’s attack on civilians, first and foremost among them. But the idea that there’s something uniquely pathological about an insurgent group fighting from within a population, it’s the norm among insurgent groups. It’s part of the reason that fighting insurgent groups is so difficult. And by the way, it’s not only insurgent groups that do this. I don’t know if Sam Harris knows what the Kirya is, Israel’s military headquarters? I don’t know if he’s ever thought about where it’s located, but it’s not located in a remote area. It’s located in downtown Tel Aviv, surrounded by office buildings, by schools, by civilian infrastructure. So, is the Israeli Defense Force, the Israeli government, therefore, a death cult that uses its own civilian populations as human shields because it has placed its own version of the Pentagon right in downtown Tel Aviv, surrounded by civilian areas? No evidence that Sam Harris has ever contemplated that whatsoever, but he considers his point of view so self-evident that it doesn’t need to actually be argued for.

Then he goes on to say that the opposition to Israel must be fueled by antisemitism because ‘we supplied arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for a war in Yemen that has killed an estimated 377,000 people. Where were those protests,’ right? That nobody cared about these things. Actually, I don’t know how closely Sam Harris has followed the debate over U.S. arming of the Saudi war in Yemen but, in fact, there was tremendous pressure coming from Congress, from people like Bernie Sanders, from Chris Murphy, from organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, denouncing America’s funding of Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen. And they actually had some degree of success. The Obama administration, at the very end, decided to limit military support for the Saudi campaign in Yemen because of this pressure that was coming from human rights groups and from Democrats, but also some Republicans in Congress. And then when the Biden administration took over, it announced that it was ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen. Not all weapons, but in offensive operations. And then the Saudi effort actually ended in the ceasefire in 2022. Again, I’m not saying that the U.S. was not complicit in horrible, horrible crimes in the Saudi and Emirati war in Yemen. Of course it was.

But what Sam Harris seems not to be aware of is the same kind of human rights-oriented folks who are appalled by what Israel is doing in Gaza were also appalled by what Saudi Arabia was doing. I don’t know that Sam Harris was on the front lines of doing that. He seems to be one of these guys who gets mostly upset about human rights abuses in other places when he can use them to deflect against criticism of human rights abuses in Israel. But the kinds of people who are most upset about what Israel has done in Gaza were also, generally, people like Bernie Sanders, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, were very, very upset about what the Saudis were doing.

But perhaps the reason you didn’t get as many big protests was that actually there was much less resistance. These folks who wanted to limit U.S. military support for the Saudis and the Emiratis succeeded much more quickly than the effort against Israel, and they were able to put serious restrictions on U.S. military aid in a way that they haven’t been able to do in Israel, because the Saudis and the Emiratis didn’t have supporters like Sam Harris, basically, who defend whatever Israel does.

Then, Sam Harris goes on to say, ‘there’s only one state whose legitimacy is still debated everywhere. There’s only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist.’ Again, this is considered by Sam Harris so self-evident that it doesn’t even need to be debated. I don’t know if Sam Harris has noticed that there’s a war that the United States and Israel have been engaged in vis-a-vis Iran, in which we’ve explicitly called for the Islamic Republic to be overthrown, right? There’s no other country in the world whose political system the United States calls illegitimate. Actually, we did a regime change war in Iraq because we considered its political system illegitimate. We called for the overthrow of the political system and the regime in Syria. We’re currently raging a war in order to try—not very successfully—to topple the political system in Iran. The Trump administration has also declared that the Cuban political system is illegitimate, and we’re imposing vicious sanctions and potential military force to do that. We literally abducted the president of Venezuela because we said their political system is illegitimate. We’ve said many, bipartisanly, American political leaders have said that Vladimir Putin’s regime is illegitimate because it’s authoritarian and undemocratic. And you can find many, many American prominent leaders, from Mike Pompeo over the years to Marco Rubio, to saying the Chinese Communist Party political system is illegitimate, not to mention the regime in North Korea.

The United States says this all the time, right? This is what this right to exist language masks, which is that the question is about the legitimacy of Israel’s political system, a political system that has been declared to be an apartheid system by the world’s leading human rights organizations and Israel’s own. And in fact, the United States ultimately did come around to the idea that apartheid in South Africa was an illegitimate political system, and we call lots of political systems illegitimate. And in many cases, we impose sanctions on those political systems, and sometimes we invade them, right? Again, Sam Harris shows no evidence, knowledge of this whatsoever.

And then another example for him that shows that the criticism of Israel must be antisemitic is that he said that even right after October 7th ‘when the corpses of the young people mutilated and murdered at the Nova Music Festival were still being identified, we had students at Harvard and professors at Columbia and demonstrators in New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto celebrating their killers.’ Now, there were people who celebrated October 7th, which I think was despicable, but actually the vast, vast majority of people were saying two things. First of all, that you have to understand the terrible violence of October 7th within the context of the brutal oppression that the Palestinian people face, A. And B, that Israel’s attack on Gaza was likely to be horrifying, and that there therefore should be a ceasefire.

And this idea that Sam Harris has, that it was antisemitic to start calling for a ceasefire, and criticizing Israel’s attack, assault on Gaza on October 8th, October 9th, right, evidently forgets the fact that we had a pretty good idea, as early as October 8th and 9th, that Israel’s response in Gaza was going to be absolutely horrifying, right? I don’t know, again, if Sam Harris is familiar with this quote from Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, where he says, there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly, right? This is one of the things cited by the International Criminal Court in indicting Yoav Galant.

So, the idea that you had to be an antisemite to say that, right, early in October, there should be a ceasefire, and to be protesting what Israel was doing and starting to do in Gaza, anybody who knew the history of what Israel had done in previous rounds of violence in Gaza, and was simply listening to Israeli leaders, could have predicted that what Israel would do in Gaza would be utterly horrifying. And in fact, it’s been horrifying beyond even what most people could have imagined.

So, these are a series of things that Sam Harris says that he thinks are so self-evident, he’s so sure of himself, that he doesn’t think he needs to engage, they don’t have to be interrogated by someone of a different point of view. I’m glad that there are people who are supporters of Israel who don’t take that view. I recently did an interview, a conversation with Coleman Hughes from the Free Press. I just did one for my substack with Dan Shapiro, the former ambassador from Israel, and before that with the author Ariel Beery, who wrote the book Being Israeli After the Destruction of Gaza.

I’m glad that there are supporters of Israel who don’t take the view that their views are so self-evident, they don’t need to be interrogated in a respectful conversation with someone who differs, because I think that actually having conversations with people who you differ from is a good way of being reminded that your views are not self-evident. That actually other people, including other people who consider themselves thoughtful and smart and well-meaning, actually see things from a different point of view. There’s something humbling about realizing that no matter how fervent you are in your views, that other people may see things in a different way, and may be able to gather evidence from their different perspective. I would really suggest that Sam Harris could benefit from a little bit of that humility. And if he decides that he’s humble enough to recognize that not everything that he believes and states in his Substack is so self-evident, I’d be more than happy to discuss it with him in some kind of public conversation.

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

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James Zogby is a scholar on Middle East issues and a Visiting Professor at New York University Abu Dhabi. From 2001 to 2017, he was part of the Executive Committee of the Democratic National Committee. He was appointed by Barack Obama to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. He is the founder of the Arab American Institute.

Topics include:

Why is Israel in constant conflict with Lebanon?

What will become of Gaza and its people?

The history of the fight for Palestinian rights within the Democratic Party

Right-wing opponents of Israel like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor-Greene

The need for a new generation of presidential advisors

This week’s Zoom call will be at a special time: Thursday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories and author of the new book, When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine. She has been sanctioned by the Trump administration, which has barred her from entering the United States and frozen her assets in the country. We’ll talk about her new book, her investigations into Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank, her views of US, European, and United Nations policy toward Israel, and about the criticisms of her. We’ll also talk about what it’s like to live under US sanctions.

Cited in Today’s Video

Muhammad Shehada’s comments about life in Gaza, in conversation with Jehad Abusalim and Adam Shatz for the London Review of Books podcast.

The Israeli human rights group Gisha on Israel’s restrictions on the import of toilets—and other essential civilian goods—into Gaza.

The World Health Organization on the surge of “ectoparasite infections and rodent-borne illnesses” in Gaza.

Things to Read

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

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Will Alden profiles Curt Mills, one of the intellectual architects of the anti-Israel right.

See you on Thursday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there are a lot of Jews—I know some of them well myself—who are kind of both bewildered and enraged by this turn in American public opinion and in American politics against Israel, as reflected in my own city, New York, for instance, and the fact that Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the first mayor in many years not to march in the Israel Day parade, or that there’s this effort to boycott Israeli goods at this Brooklyn co-op. And there’s this sense that, kind of, why is it, people ask, many Jews ask, that there’s this fury against Israel, this rage?

And the answer that’s so frequently given is that this is just an eruption of age-old antisemitism, right? A kind of return to the ancient art of Jew-hating. And of course, there is antisemitism. There is Jew-hating. Antisemitism is rising, but I just wish that some of those folks who are enraged and bewildered by this turn in public opinion, in American politics against Israel, would just spend a little bit of time looking at what Israel does, looking at what life is like for Palestinians under Israeli control.

Because if you start to look even just a little, if you’re willing to open your eyes even just a little, then this anger at Israel, even this rage at Israel, and this desire to fundamentally change the way America interacts with Israel, it stops looking so pathological. It stops looking so antisemitic, because you can start to understand why people would be so upset, right?

But so frequently, the people in our community who most need to look, just never look. And I just want to give one little example of what it looks like to take even a tiny peek at what it’s like to be a Palestinian under Israeli control, in this case, in Gaza. This is an extended quote from my friend Muhammad Shehada, who is from Gaza, and he was interviewed for the London Review of Books podcast by Adam Shatz in a recent episode. And I’m going to quote what Muhammad says about life in Gaza now.

Muhammad says:

The biggest struggle at the moment is basic shelter. Almost everyone I know is on the street. Every single member of my family, every friend that I have, every colleague, every neighbor had their homes either bombed, burned to the ground, bulldozed, detonated from the inside, or heavily damaged to the point that it cannot house any human habitation. The luckiest of my friends is Anas. Anas lives in a bombed-out building on the first floor. The building was bombed from the very top, so the last two floors are gone. The staircase connecting the multiple floors in that condominium is cut in half. The bottom floor was bombed repeatedly, so it’s also burned completely. In the apartment where Anas lives, it doesn’t have any windows, doesn’t have any doors, there’s no door to even enter the apartment. There’s a giant hole in the living room from an unexploded 2,000-pound bomb that Israel dropped on that tower that went right through it, and it landed on the ground floor, so he literally lives above that unexploded bomb.

His daily occupation during the day is finding water or food. It has become one of the most insane struggles. Or just a place to relieve yourself. A restroom is becoming a dream. Israel is literally banning toilets from entering Gaza up until this moment, so you have to improvise, and the nighttime struggle is Anas sleeping with one eye open to protect his only daughter from mice, rats, scorpions, spiders, snakes, cockroaches, mosquitoes, flies that have had this sort of unprecedented nesting ground in either infinite piles of garbage that Israel does not allow to be collected, or disposed of, or in destroyed sewage systems, or in the rubble of homes where those rodents and insects have been feasting on the decomposing bodies of thousands of Palestinians under the rubble.

Now, if you think Muhammad is being hyperbolic, I’ll link to the Gisha report—Gisha, an Israeli Human Rights Organization—which notes that portable toilets, along with sleeping bags, tarps, non-electric wheelchairs, and flashlights, and other items like that, have all been deemed dual-use items by Israel, which means it’s very, very difficult to bring them in to Gaza. And another report by the World Health Organization, which has recorded that since the beginning of 2026, there have been more than 70,000 cases of ectoparasitic infections and rodent-borne illnesses in Gaza. And health workers, according to the World Health Organization, say that, ‘the collapse of sanitation systems, mountains of rubble, overflowing sewage, and overcrowded displacement camps have created fertile conditions for disease to spread.’

So, the Israeli government will say, well, this is because Hamas has not disarmed. So, first of all, it’s fundamentally and profoundly immoral to deny people the basic necessities of life—toilets, toilets, basic sanitation systems—because you are upset that Hamas has not disarmed. Secondly, Hamas’ criteria for disarming is that they’re not willing to do so absent some horizon by which Israel’s control over Gaza and the Palestinian people will end, right? I have lots and lots of criticisms of Hamas, and I’ve registered them many, many, many times. But this basic idea that you don’t disarm absent any possibility that you are going to get your freedom is not a Hamas-only idea. Hamas didn’t invent this.

Nelson Mandela vehemently refused to give up armed resistance in negotiations with the South African government when they tried to get him to foreswear armed resistance in the 1980s, and he said repeatedly, we will abandon armed resistance, we will turn over our guns when we have a date for a free election. The Irish Republican Army, similarly, was not willing to disarm until they knew that Catholics would get political equality.

So, this demand that Hamas has to disarm, without any reason for Hamas whatsoever to believe that it would bring Palestinians closer to freedom, an end to the blockade, an end to occupation, is a very typical perspective of a group that’s representing a population that’s lacking basic rights. And Palestinians can also look at the West Bank and see the consequences of what happens when you do disarm without any guarantee that your occupation will end. They can look at the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority has been for 20 years, not only not turning to armed resistance, but collaborating with Israel to stop armed resistance, and they can see what’s happening. Palestinians losing more and more and more land, more and more violence against Palestinians who are completely defenseless as Israel takes their land and often takes their lives, right?

This is just completely indefensible at the most basic, gut, human level. And the problem in the Jewish community, the problem with so many of these peoples, many of whom I know who are otherwise really good people, is they’re just not willing to look at these things. What they do is they look at the people who are enraged at Israel, or they look at Zohran Mamdani, or they look at people who are boycotting, and they don’t understand where this anger comes from. But if they would just pay attention to what Israel is actually doing, they would understand where this anger comes from. They could see it as something other than pathological and antisemitic, and they themselves might actually start to feel that kind of anger themselves.

Because the right human response to what Israel is doing to Muhammad Shehada’s family and Muhammad Shehada’s friends is anger. It is anger. And it is a demand that the United States should not be supporting this kind of behavior. But you have to see that. You have to see that in order to understand the actual dynamics of what’s happening in the shifting debate about America and America’s relationship with Israel. And if you systematically ignore it, you’re trapped in this bubble in which you can only understand this response as antisemitism because you’re not willing to look in the eye the very, very painful and very brutal truths that we as Jews have to face about what is being done in our name as Jews, and with our money as Americans, to people like Anas, and to millions of other people in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank whose lives are being made hell.

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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com

Palestinian-American Georgia State Representative Ruwa Romman recently wrote on X of former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene: “I’m tired of Palestine being used to erase every other misdeed once someone with a platform says anything for us.”

Ben Lorber is the co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, and a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, who writes frequently about the American right.

Topics include:

Why have segments of the American right turned against Israel?

Whether and how to challenge right wing hosts when progressives appear on their shows

Is right-wing antisemitism influencing the left?

How to talk about Israel’s undue influence on American politics without playing into antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories

Is it even possible at this point to disentangle Jewishness from Israel and Zionism?

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com

Ariel Beery believes American progressives should listen more carefully to Israeli liberal Zionists. I listened to him, and asked some questions.

Topics include:

Is Israel a liberal democracy?

Is America a Christian state like Israel is a Jewish state?

Beery’s decision not to include Palestinian voices in his book

Should Palestinian refugees have the right to return?

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. We will talk about how progressives should respond to the anti-Israel right. Our first guest will be Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American State Representative from Georgia, who in a recent comment on X about former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote, “I’m tired of Palestine being used to erase every other misdeed once someone with a platform says anything for us.” Our second guest will be Ben Lorber, co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, and a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, who writes frequently about the American right. Join us.

Ask Me Anything

This Tuesday, May 26, at 1 PM Eastern, we will hold an Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.

Cited in Today’s Video

B’Tselem’s report, Settler Violence = State Violence.

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!), Mari Cohen reflects on the legacy of former ADL head Abe Foxman.

In Current Affairs, Andrew Ancheta examines the similarities between defenses of apartheid South Africa and today’s defenses of Israel.

In Equator, Eva Menasse discusses Germany’s warped debate about antisemitism.

Reader Comment

In response to my recent video criticizing Tucker Carlson, Mujahid Sarsur, author of the forthcoming book, Palestinians at the Holocaust Museum, writes:

I believe the efforts of pro-Palestinian human rights liberal Jews (including you, Michelle Goldberg, and Naomi Klein) to contribute to the Democratic/Republican establishment goal of dismissing Carlson as a bigot are extremely harmful to the Palestinian cause, and I believe such efforts, although primarily justified by focusing on Carlson’s statements that may be perceived as bigoted, partly stem from a need to defend a construct of a “Jewish peoplehood”—a construct which has been substantially shaped not by traditional Jewish ethics, but by the Zionist movement’s ethnocentric influence on the Jewish community.

My deeper point is illuminated by coining the term “anti-Zionist Zionist Jews”: a person who does not believe in the need for a Jewish state but still embraces the ideological structures underlying Zionism, wanting to defend and be part of a “Jewish peoplehood,” and unwilling to look at the link between that construct and the extermination of Palestinians.

The Palestine issue cannot be understood without a deep exploration of Jewish identity; few questions are more relevant to the Palestinians than “Who is a Jew?” In my upcoming book, I rely on the writings of Jewish and Israeli authors who illustrate how Zionism is ideologically dependent on the construct of “Jewish peoplehood” and who argue that Jews are no more than a faith group, to show how this construct is existentially linked to the future of Palestinians:

The concept of the Jewish people has been at the center of Zionist ideology and what it did to the Palestinians. Israeli intellectual Boaz Evron argues that “the problematic situation in which modern Israel finds itself is derived, inter alia, from assumptions and ideologies about the nature of the Jewish people and the Jewish state that have largely been refuted by historical developments.” Israeli historian Shlomo Sand writes that Israel’s attachment to an “unbridled ethnocracy that grossly discriminates against certain of its citizens, rests on the active myth of an eternal nation that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land.” Professor of Jewish history, Yakov Rabkin, writes that what “underlies Zionist ideology” is “the concept of the Jewish people.” Israeli government policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians have always been about how to defend this “Jewish peoplehood” and whatever the definition of that peoplehood encompasses.

Indeed, Jewish identity does not only concern the Palestinians, but it is also existentially relevant to them. The Nakba—the destruction of over 500 Palestinian towns and villages and the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinian refugees—was a direct result of this vision of Jewish peoplehood that needs to be preserved and protected. The Gaza genocide was rationalized and justified by Israel and its supporters by the need to protect the “Jewish people.” When Israel commenced its genocide, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken came to Israel and explicitly cited his Jewishness to explain why he feels personally required to support Israel and its military.

By equating genocide with Jewishness, as the American Jewish establishment wants him to do, Carlson is challenging the essence of why Antony Blinken may not be a practicing Jew but feels part of a “Jewish peoplehood.” By extension, Carlson is also challenging you, Peter, and Goldberg and Klein to reflect on the essence of contemporary Jewishness. You are confronted with a choice: the easy route of dismissing him as a bigot or asking tough questions. What does it mean that the majority of synagogues and Jewish community centers have Israeli flags? What does the removal of these flags entail? How much of contemporary Jewishness is left without Zionism? Why do many American Jews insist on Jewishness as an “ethnicity” even though ample books have collapsed that idea? Why would 540 Columbia students feel a need to call themselves Zionists and defend Israel in the midst of the genocide?

Many in the Palestinian community view the Carlson phenomenon as miraculous because, for the first time, they see in Carlson the possibility that the structures that have been leading to the expulsion and extermination of Palestinians are being fundamentally challenged. Carlson is holding a sledgehammer and is destroying these structures. Dismissing him as a bigot helps stop this sledgehammer and, from the vantage point of many Palestinians, feels like a deeply Zionist act.

This is, of course, not to accept Carlson’s other views, but to focus on his impact on the Palestine issue.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Now and then, there’s an episode of settler violence in the West Bank that’s so grotesque that it kind of breaks through a little bit in American media. I mean, settler violence—again, especially under this government, especially since October 7th—is so pervasive that generally, it’s just kind of noise for the American media. It doesn’t really get picked up very much, or in the American Jewish community. But occasionally something is so terrible that it breaks through, and it’s interesting to watch the way that Israel’s defenders in the United States tend to respond to this.

Generally, you find that there’s a kind of condemnation of settler violence, and people say this is really terrible. And this is not, you know, this is not who Israel is, this is not who Israel should be. That kind of thing. It’s a little bit similar sometimes to the way those same people talk about Itamar Ben-Gvir. When they have to talk about Itamar Ben-Gvir, they’ll say, Itamar Ben-Gvir is an extremist, he’s a radical, you know, he’s not a good guy, he’s not like those other mainstream Israeli politicians.

I want to suggest that there’s something fundamentally incoherent about this response. That just as Itamar Ben-Gavir can’t be disassociated from Israeli politics as a whole, given that his rise was facilitated by Benjamin Netanyahu, who needed to help broker the deal with him and the other national religious parties in order to bring him into the government to create a coalition. So, he’s not a rogue actor. He’s actually a very critical ally, someone who’s been very critical to Benjamin Netanyahu’s continuing in power.

Settler violence is also not a rogue activity. It’s not something that happens separate from the Israeli state, or the Israeli mainstream. And I want to quote from a report that B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, did, which was called, Settler Violence = State Violence. And they write: ‘the state takes over land openly.’ They’re talking about Israeli state taking over land in the West Bank from Palestinian land. They’re saying:

‘The state takes over land openly using official methods sanctioned by legal advisors and judges, while the settlers, who are also interested in taking over land to further their agenda, initiate violence against Palestinians for their own reasons. Yet in truth, there is only one track. Settler violence against Palestinians is part of the strategy employed by Israel’s apartheid regime, which seeks to take over more and more West Bank land. The state fully supports and assists these acts of violence, and its agents sometimes participate in them directly. As such, settler violence is a form of government policy aided and abetted by official state authorities with their active participation.’

Now, that’s not to say there aren’t Israeli officials who might be genuinely upset or even appalled by things that settlers do. They may think it’s terrible PR. They may even think that they’re morally wrong.

Again, to use a kind of crude analogy, we can imagine a situation in the Jim Crow South where there were things that the Ku Klux Klan did that segregationist leaders wished they hadn’t done. It was a bad reputation. It just wasn’t the way they wanted to do business. But the general thrust of the policy, right, in the Jim Crow South was to keep Black people down, to deny them their basic rights, their basic freedom, through a whole mechanism of violence, some state-sanctioned and some outside of the state, but which could not take place—the Ku Klux Klan could not have operated without the fact that the white-controlled judicial system gave them, you know, almost total impunity.

Similarly, settlers can only do what they do, the settlements require government support to exist in the first place, and the settlers could not continue to act this way against Palestinians without the base large-scale impunity that they exist in a political system in which the people who they are victimizing don’t have citizenship, don’t have the right to vote, are not truly represented by the state, and therefore can’t take meaningful legal action against them, except in the rarest of circumstances.

So, Israel’s defenders who say, this settler violence is terrible. I’m opposed to it. They may genuinely think it’s terrible. They may genuinely think they are opposed to it. But they’re not really opposed to it unless they’re willing to do something that would make it stop. And the thing that would make it stop would be to change U.S. policy towards Israel, right? The only thing that would make it stop would be if there were severe consequences for the Israeli government for allowing it to continue, right?

And so, the question I think one should ask any defender of Israel, whether it’s a, you know, Jewish official, or a politician, or a kind of someone in the media who says, I’m against settler violence, is, would you be willing to condition American military aid—all of it, or even some of American military aid on Israel stopping this settler violence? Would you be willing to support a process in international legal institutions to punish Israel for allowing the settler violence that terrorizes Palestinians?

Overwhelmingly, the answer to that question will be, no, we are not willing to support that. Because although we say we oppose settler violence, our most fundamental commitment is unconditional U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support for Israel. And so, because of that, we will say we oppose settler violence, but we’re not actually willing to support any of the tangible consequences by which the U.S. could use its substantial leverage over Israel to actually end the status of impunity that allows Israel to do this.

And that’s why I think the claim by supporters of Israel and the United States that they oppose settler violence is fundamentally hollow. Again, they may believe they oppose settler violence, but there’s often a difference between what people believe and what their actions actually do, right? We can tell what people’s truest belief systems are by the actions they pursue, right? And if the actions you pursue is unconditional U.S. support for Israel period, then you’re not actually opposed to settler violence, because you don’t want your government, the United States government, to do the things that might actually stop settler violence.

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Issa Amro is a renowned non-violent human rights activist in the West Bank, and Sari Bashi is the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. Both were referenced in the recent New York Times op-ed by Nicholas Kristof entitled The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians. Given the strong reaction against the piece by supporters of Israel, I wanted to dig deeper with them into the atrocities it described, and what must be done.

* This conversation includes frank descriptions of torture and sexual violence. *

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Our guest is Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate for Senate in Michigan, whose Democratic primary has become the most hotly contested in the nation. El-Sayed has been attacked for saying that both Israel and Hamas have acted in evil ways, for campaigning with Hasan Piker and for calling Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal. He recently declared that “AIPAC and Israel are not the same as Judaism and the Jewish people” and that “The most dangerous thing they’ve tried to do is extend the definition of antisemitism to include a foreign government.”

(If El-Sayed’s opponents want to do an interview as well, they’re welcome to be in touch).

This conversation was co-sponsored by Jewish Currents.

Topics include…

Polarization may not be as bad as we think

Sanctions against Israel

Money in politics and fundraising ethically

El-Sayed’s relationship with Jews and Judaism

Problematic allies like Tucker Carlson

Using the term “genocide”

Running in America as a Muslim

How to deal with the Supreme Court

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Professor Omer Bartov, is the author of the newly released, Israel: What Went Wrong. Haaretz Columnist Gideon Levy, in a recent column, criticized an interview about the book that Bartov conducted with Haaretz. I invited both of them to join me in a discussion.

Topics include…

The difficulty for some Jews of declaring oneself anti-Zionist

Did Zionism go awry or was it always meant to be what it has become?

What might a more moral Israel have looked like at its inception?

The morality and necessity of BDS

The loneliness of the anti-Zionist Israeli

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate for Senate in Michigan, whose Democratic primary has become the most hotly contested in the nation. El-Sayed has been attacked for saying that both Israel and Hamas have acted in evil ways, for campaigning with Hasan Piker and for calling Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal. He recently declared that “AIPAC and Israel are not the same as Judaism and the Jewish people” and that “The most dangerous thing they’ve tried to do is extend the definition of antisemitism to include a foreign government.” We’ll talk about US policy towards Israel, about antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, about the mood of voters in Michigan and about the state of the Democratic Party. (If El-Sayed’s opponents want to do an interview as well, they’re welcome to be in touch). This conversation will be co-sponsored by Jewish Currents. Join us.

This week I’m also hosting a conversation between Professor Omer Bartov, author of the newly released, Israel: What Went Wrong, and columnist Gideon Levy, who in a recent column criticized an interview about the book that Bartov conducted with Haaretz. Unlike our Friday interviews, that conversation won’t include a live audience. We’ll distribute the video to subscribers this week.

After this Friday’s call, we’ll take a week off and resume on Friday, May 29.

Cited in Today’s Video

Tucker Carlson’s interview with Tyler Oliveira.

Naftuli Moster, a long-time activist for reforming the ultra-Orthodox school system, condemns Tyler Oliveira.

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!), Josh Nathan-Kazis writes about how J Street is responding to the turn in public opinion against Israel.

Gilbert Achcar, Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, analyzes the reasons for America and Israel’s war against Iran.

Shaul Magid on the fracturing of American Jewish “peoplehood.”

I talked about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza with the Real News Network.

Appearances

On May 11, I’ll be speaking at the New Millennium Church in Little Rock, Arkansas.

On May 18, I’ll be speaking to Town Hall Seattle and Third Place Books in Seattle, Washington.

Reader Comment

Daniel Brumberg, associate professor of government at Georgetown, writes:

I only watched ten minutes of your interview with Molly Crabgrass, but I have watched enough similar interviews with Molly Crabapple to appreciate how she has abused and misrepresented the history of the Bund to advance her own ideological project.

I say this as the son and grandson of Bundists; my grandfather was co-director of the Bund’s Medem Sanatorium, and my father was a leading scholar of the Bund who spoke fluent Yiddish and Polish, maintained lifelong friendships with Bundists, and never disowned his own Bundism, having grown up in Poland. Both of them would have been deeply offended by the propaganda campaign that Crabapple has launched, which is misplaced, misdirected, and misinformed. She doesn’t grapple in a clear and honest way with the meaning of the Bund before World War II, and after the Holocaust.

Instead, she implies that the Bund’s critique of Zionism had the same meaning during both eras. This is nonsense. Apart from decimating the Bund’s leaders and followers, the Holocaust decimated its central premise, even if the warnings of its leaders about the dangers of chauvinism were correct. Many Bundists moved to Israel because they concluded that, after the Holocaust, the basic idea that Jews needed a state of their own seemed compelling. I might add that a lot of folks came to Israel looking for a safe haven, not because of some deep embrace of “Zionism.” Their motive was not unlike the motive of many Muslims who supported the creation of Pakistan--a home of refuge for Muslims.

My father was born in Tel Aviv: his parents fled there in 1926 after the Soviet secret police issued a warrant for my grandfather’s arrest. Palestine was the only country on the planet where they could get a visa (that path was closed in 1930). They returned to Warsaw in 1930, and my grandfather began his work at the Medem Sanatorium. They fled Warsaw on September 5, 1939, and were almost killed by Nazi planes. The 350 or so children who remained at the sanatorium were all gassed at Treblinka. My father’s Bundism endured, but he was never “anti-Zionist,” whatever that means. We went to Israel together and met with many Bundists.

The world is a complicated place, and when we let our own ideological priorities drive our analyses, we get Crabapple’s ahistorical abuse of a complex story, one that does an injustice to the Bund.

Molly Crabapple responds:

It is a sad but common phenomenon that descendants are unable to accept the actual views of their ancestors. During his four years in Tel Aviv, the writer’s grandfather Yoysef Brumberg was the Palestine correspondent for the Bund’s newspaper Naye Folkstsaytung. In this capacity, he reported on the brutal Zionist evictions, racism and deliberate impoverishment of Palestinian farmers, writing “where Zionism speaks, socialism is silent.” (see Yoysef Brumberg, Naye folkstsaytung, March 22nd, 1929, translated by Eyshe Beirich). I hope that the writer will read the trailblazing book of Bundist anti-Zionist writings that Beirich and Nathan Tankus are publishing with Haymarket in 2027. It might enlighten him.

The writer’s misrepresentation of Yoysef Brumberg’s legacy is sadly in line with other attempts to conceal the Bund’s principled internationalism. Built by socialists who believed in human equality, the Bund was an anti-Zionist organization throughout its entire pre-Holocaust history and maintained this view afterwards. I will quote one of the many articles condemning Zionism written in the Bund’s postwar Bulletin, written in 1948. “What a bitter irony that after the utter destruction brought upon the Jewish people by Fascism, the latter’s methods of terror are now triumphant in Jewish life. . . . It is as if the slaughterer had infected his victims with his germs during the slaughter.”

This is by Shloyme Mendelson, a great Bundist pedagogue who was a comrade of the writer’s grandfather.

Finally, despite how he addressed me, my name is Molly Crabapple. He should learn it.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I want to talk about a video that Tucker Carlson just put out yesterday because I think in the whole question now about who is Tucker Carlson, and what he believes today, I think it’s a kind of a smoking gun. Now, some people might say, well, why are you talking about Tucker Carlson? You’ve been talking about Tucker Carlson already. You wrote a New York Times column about it.

Most of what I tend to focus on in these videos are the human rights abuses committed by the state of Israel, and also the arguments, which I consider unconvincing, to justify those human rights abuses and the war that Israel and the United States are now in in Iran. I do that not only because, you know, not because Israel is, of course, the only country committing terrible human rights abuses in the world, but because I feel special obligation to be in that conversation as a Jew, and also as an American taxpayer whose money goes to fund these crimes.

And the reason I’m focusing on Tucker Carlson, the reason I think it’s important, is also because I feel a special obligation to talk about Tucker Carlson in this moment, because he’s enormously influential in the United States, and in the future struggle of whether America will move towards being a multiracial democracy, or move towards being a white Christian supremacist nation, but also especially because I’m on the left, because I’m a progressive. And so, I feel a special obligation to speak out when I see progressives normalizing someone who I believe is trafficking in bigotry, as I believe that Tucker Carlson is.

And I think we are at a dangerous moment, in which some high-profile progressives, because they’re so eager to find allies on the right who are willing to criticize Israel and criticize the Iran war. And to be clear: I think it is very good that Tucker Carlson is criticizing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, its aggression in Lebanon. I think it’s very good that he’s turned against Trump and that he’s turned against Iran.

But none of that changes the fact that this man remains a white Christian nationalist. And you can be glad that he’s criticizing human rights abuses against Palestinians and Lebanese, but if you allow that to lead you to silence yourself on the question of his white Christian nationalism, then I think you’re doing a disservice to the struggle for American liberal democracy, and you’re doing a disservice to the struggle against all bigotry.

When I say Carlson traffics in antisemitism, I want to be clear. This is very different than the kind of accusations, weaponized accusations, of antisemitism against people who criticize Israel. I’m not saying Carlson traffics in antisemitism because he criticizes Israel. I’m saying that his antisemitism is part and parcel of his general white Christian nationalism. And just as that white Christian nationalism comes out in anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Black statements, it also comes out in antisemitism.

And the video that he just did, which just came out a couple days ago, is so revealing in that regard for this reason. It’s not about Israel. This video barely ever mentions Israel at all, so it so clearly shows the way in which Carlson’s antisemitic and bigoted attitudes are not about Israel, they’re about Jews, just as they’re about Black people, and they’re about Muslims.

And this is the video. So, Carlson chooses to interview a guy named Tyler Oliveira. Who is Tyler Oliveira? Tyler Oliveira is a YouTube influencer who goes around with a camera and a video crew trying to create YouTube videos that will go viral. And one of the things that made him best known was that a year ago, he did a video called ‘Inside the Ohio Town Invaded by Cat-Eating Haitians.’ Invaded by cat-eating Haitians. He’s one of the people who spread the racist slander, right, that Haitians were eating cats in Springfield, Ohio.

Then, he went on from there to do the same thing to ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Earlier this year, he did a video in the New York ultra-Orthodox town of Kiryas Joel, entitled, ‘Inside the New York Town Invaded by Welfare-Addicted Jews.’ Invaded by welfare-addicted Jews. And then, just more recently, he went to Lakewood, New Jersey, another town with a very large ultra-Orthodox community, and he did a video entitled, ‘I Exposed New Jersey’s Jewish Invasion.’ I Exposed New Jersey’s Jewish Invasion.

So, let’s just be entirely clear here, right? There are legitimate questions to ask about ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, about the way they run their school systems, about questions about how they use government benefits. There are serious people who deal with those questions. One of them is Naftuli Moster, who grew up ultra-Orthodox himself, and was for many years the leader of this group of ex-ultra-Orthodox people called Yaffed.

Naftuli Moster has denounced Tyler Oliveira because, as should be obvious from the titles of this video, this is not a guy with a good faith interest in looking at issues, troubling issues within alternative Orthodox communities, just like he’s not a good faith actor trying to understand the issues in Springfield, Ohio. This is a bigot who talks about Jewish invasion, welfare-addicted Jews, and cat-eating Haitians. So please don’t give me the nonsense that this is a good faith effort to look into issues of ultra-Orthodox Jews, unless you’re willing to say that that’s also the spirit that Tyler Oliveira brought to Springfield, Ohio, and the Haitian community there.

So, Carlson has him on his show. Carlson has him on his show, and Oliveira starts to talk about the work he did in Minneapolis, where he said—this is Oliveira speaking—he said that there is ‘blatant retardation, if you will, of people from Somalia who can’t even spell the word learning.’ People who can’t even spell the word learning. He goes on to talk about how the generous Scandinavian population in Minnesota, its generosity inevitably attracts some of the world’s most opportunistic, parasitic, if you will, population of people from a destabilized country in Africa. This is the way Tyler Oliveira is talking about Somalis in Minneapolis. Incidentally, it was that racist claim about Somalis and fraud in Minneapolis that led to the ICE invasion of Minneapolis.

How does Carlson respond to this? How does Carlson respond to this blatant bigotry? Carlson says, thank you for saying that. And then he goes on to note that what Oliveira is talking about in Minnesota is also happening in Maine, where Carlson now lives. He says, ‘Maine’—this is Carlson—‘Maine, which has similar demographics. Overwhelmingly, Northern European whites, who have no idea what an idyllic place they have, who hate themselves, because they’ve been taught to hate themselves. And so, to atone for sins they didn’t commit’—this is Carlson—‘they import the most destructive, parasitic populations they can find, and then sort of revel in the squalor, because it’s kind of self-abasement that turns them on. It’s sadomasochism.’ This is Tucker Carlson talking about people from Africa who have moved to Maine.

So, then, Oliveira in the interview goes on to say that after going through dealing with Haitians in Springfield, and then dealing with Somalis in Minnesota, he decided to Google Jewish ethnic enclaves, because this is what he does, right? So, he found out that there were these large Orthodox communities in the New York-New Jersey area, and he went to look to see if they, like the Haitians and the Somalis, were also taking advantage of the good-hearted generosity of white Americans.

And Carlson is deeply impressed. And so, Carlson says, ‘so, you still believe in principles? You must be a legacy American.’ This is what he says to Oliveira. ‘You must be a legacy American. You must be from here if you actually believe in higher principles.’ The supposed higher principle of ferreting out welfare fraud, except that it only turns out that you’re ferreting it out among Haitians, Somalis, and ultra-Orthodox Jews.

And then Oliveira goes on to talk about what he found in the ultra-Orthodox community of Kiryas Joel in New York, and he uses that same word again. He talks about their high welfare use, their many kids, and he calls them a ‘parasitic, insulated Jewish community.’ And then Carlson mentions that these videos are getting high ratings, and Carlson says, ‘I just love that you’re being rewarded for this.’ I just love that you’re being rewarded for this.

Then Oliveira goes on to say that while it was easy to get Republicans angry about what the Haitians and Somalis were supposedly doing, it’s harder with the ultra-Orthodox Jews because they have more political influence in New York and New Jersey. And so, Carlson says, ‘so, democracy has literally been subverted or hijacked here, in exactly the same way it has been in Lewiston, Maine, and Minneapolis, Minnesota by the Somalis.’

And then Oliveira says, you know, there are religious communities that don’t leech off the government. For instance, the Amish. They’re also very religiously conservative and traditional, but they don’t leech off the government and get all of this welfare money. And so, Carlson says, so the Christian community pays for itself, but the others don’t. So, the Christian community pays for itself, but the others don’t.

Then, Oliveira later goes on to say that the heritage residents—the heritage residents—I don’t know, by the way, why ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose families might have come here, you know, 75 or even 100 years ago, are not considered heritage residents, but obviously, it’s a euphemism for white Christians. And Oliveira says that the heritage residents are upset about the Orthodox Jews in Lakewood, New Jersey because they have to pay for their buses that they take to their private yeshivot, their private Jewish schools, and those buses can be gender segregated. And so, Carlson says, ‘there seems to be less religious freedom for some people, but a lot more for others’, right? That the Christians don’t have religious freedom, but the Jews have religious freedom.

And then, in explaining why it is that these ultra-Orthodox Jews seem so willing to basically take federal money, right, welfare money, which is Carlson’s and Oliveira’s claim, right, that they’re doing so legally, but still it’s reprehensible because they’re leeches on the system, and good, honest, hard-working white Christian Americans wouldn’t do that. Carlson turns to the Bible. And he says, ‘I think what you’re seeing is a clash of worldviews. One is a legalistic worldview.’ This one he’s talking about, the Jewish worldview. ‘A legalistic worldview. This is the law, and we’re within the bounds of the law, which I think is totally defensible. On the other, well, there is a higher law having to do with your ethics, honor, shame, decency, and you see this repeatedly in the New Testament’, right?

I mean, so, the Jews don’t have honor, shame, and decency because they just have a legalistic religion rooted in the ‘Old Testament’, but white Christians who follow the New Testament actually have these higher values because those are the values in the New Testament. And then, you see that, Carlson goes on to basically say all of these different groups, the Haitians, the Somalis, all of these people, the ultra-Orthodox Jews, all of them are able to look out for themselves, but there’s one totally unprotected group, and that is white people.

And then Carlson goes on to say, it’s like normal whites who are like, I think we’re going to get necklaced at some point. If necklace, if you don’t reference that, it’s very telling. Necklace was the…there was the attack that the ANC used against Black collaborators when it was fighting apartheid, right? So, and this comes immediately after Carlson and Oliveira have been talking about how America’s becoming like post-apartheid South Africa, and in which white people are going to become oppressed, white people are going to become necklaced.

None of this is about Israel. Again, Israel barely comes up in this conversation. It’s super obvious what’s happening here. It’s exactly the same thing that Nick Fuentes has been doing. Nick Fuentes, his whole argument is basically, I’m an anti-Black bigot, I’m an anti-Muslim bigot, I’m super misogynistic, and you know what? I’m going to extend those same principles to Jews as well. And Carlson and Oliveira are doing exactly the same thing. They’re taking the template of this vicious bigotry against Haitians, against Somalis, and they’re doing the same thing now with ultra-Orthodox Jews.

So, the antisemitism, the claim that this is antisemitic, has nothing to do with what Carlson says about Israel, or even his views about Jews in particular. It’s that the antisemitism, as with Fuentes, is a natural extension of the white Christian nationalism that also makes him bigoted towards Muslims, towards African immigrants, towards Black and brown immigrants more generally, and to believe absurdly, right, that it is white Christians who are both the only truly noble group in America that doesn’t look out for themselves, and the only one that is really discriminated against and really is in danger.

And I say all of this, I think it’s important to say to progressives, because there are high-profile progressives who go on Tucker Carlson’s show. They go on Tucker Carlson’s show, and they do not challenge him on this bigotry, right? Again, I don’t have a problem with people going on Tucker Carlson’s show, but I do have a problem when people go on Tucker Carlson’s show, and it’s a love fest, and they talk only about the things that they agree about: Israel, Iran, you know, vague claims about how the two-party system is totally corrupt, blah blah blah blah blah. And they never call out the guy on this really blatant antisemitism, and the really blatant bigotry in white Christian nationalism more generally, right?

And there are a whole series of these figures, right, from Cenk Uygur, who I had a conversation with the other day, and would be very happy to talk to him more about. Glenn Greenwald, who goes on Tucker Carlson’s show repeatedly. Jeffrey Sachs. Jewish figures, like Dave Smith, the comedian, right? My plea to them, my plea to them and to anybody else who’s thinking about engaging with Tucker Carlson is not that you shouldn’t talk to Tucker Carlson, but that you should not leave your principles at the door. If you’re against bigotry, if you are against this kind of hateful targeting of people, and the argument that somehow white Christians are superior to these Black and brown immigrants and these Jews, and that the real problem in America is that white Christians, who are the only truly noble group that sees beyond their self-interest, are being persecuted. If you think that’s b******t, which it is, then say it’s b******t to Tucker Carlson’s face. Don’t go on this show and ignore all of that because you may think, right, that you’re just working with him to try to turn U.S. policy against Israel and to end the war in Iran, both of which I support, but you are actually giving him more credibility, making him more mainstream, and you’re assuming that the kind of politics that Tucker Carlson brings to bear will be fundamentally different than Donald Trump?

No, it may be different in its view of America’s wars abroad and Israel policy, but when it comes to the question of multiracial democracy in the United States, it’s every bit as vicious as what Trump is peddling. Carlson has been intimately involved in Trump’s rise and Trump’s racism, and Carlson is doing exactly the same thing. If anything, the only difference is he’s now clearly expanding it to Jews as well. And that should not be acceptable, it should not be normalized, and every time people have the opportunity, when they’re talking to Tucker Carlson, they should call it out.

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