The Beinart Notebook

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Our guests are Molly Crabapple, author of the newly released, New York Times bestseller, Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, and Joshua D. Zimmerman, Professor of History and Chair in Holocaust Studies at Yeshiva University, and author of Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892–1914. We discuss the history of Jewish socialism in Eastern Europe and its legacy for debates about Zionism, antisemitism, and socialism today.

Topics include…

What was the Bund? What did it want?

Zionism versus Yiddish

The Bund versus Zionism

The argument that the Bund’s defeat was a defeat of its ideals

The Bund and Women

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

Ro Khanna is a U.S. representative from California's 17th congressional district and sits on the House Armed Services Committee. He also served in the Obama administration in the US Department of Commerce.

Topics include…

Should the US accept defeat in Iran?

How scared should Americans be of an Iranian nuke?

Should Trump officials be charged for war crimes?

Should the US sell weapons to Israel?

If ethnonationalism is wrong in India and the US, why is it OK in Israel?

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guests will be Molly Crabapple, author of the newly released, New York Times bestseller, Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, and Joshua D. Zimmerman, Professor of History and Chair in Holocaust Studies at Yeshiva University, and author of Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892–1914. We’ll be discussing the history of Jewish socialism in Eastern Europe and its legacy for debates about Zionism, antisemitism, and socialism today. Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

My New York Times column arguing that despite Tucker Carlson’s criticisms of Israel and the war against Iran, progressives should not see him as an ally.

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 analyzes the decision by the Jewish Theological Seminary to invite Israeli President Isaac Herzog to deliver its commencement address.

Basman Derawi and Michal Rubin, a Gaza-born Palestinian and Israeli-born Jewish poet, co-author a beautiful new book, Your Stories Look Me in the Eyes.

Appearances

On May 6, I’ll be speaking to the Joint Christian Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC.

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

Take My Class

As some of you may know, I’m a Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York. Every year I teach a seminar at the Newmark School of Journalism that I’m now calling, Arguing with the Enemy.

The idea is to have students engage seriously with perspectives with which they strongly disagree. We work through a series of contentious issues—Israel-Palestine, immigration, abortion, climate— and students write profiles of people with whom they disagree. They then write opinion essays expressing their own point of view but reacting in some way to what they’ve learned from listening to the other side. We also host high-profile guests on each side of these contentious issues. Last year, for instance, we heard from The New York Times columnist David French, who is anti-abortion, and Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, who is pro-choice. One of the central questions of the class is how we decide when an opposing view is worth engaging with, and under what circumstances. In other words, I ask students to question the premise of the class itself.

The class will meet in person (not online) from September through December of this year, at the Newmark School of Journalism, which is near Times Square in New York, on Thursdays from 9:30 AM-12:20 PM. Every year, 2-3 non-CUNY students, of any age, are welcome to enroll. They must just be approved by me. If you’re interested, there’s more information here.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, I think we’ve been seeing something really fascinating and disturbing in kind of public discourse over the last year or so, when it comes to the way that Jews are discussed in American public discourse. And the way I would put it is this: that I think we are seeing a kind of discussion about Jews that now resembles the discussion that we’ve been experiencing for decades and decades about Muslims.

What do I mean by that? In the wake of September 11th, it started before September 11th—you could probably go back decades before that—certainly since September 11th, the American public discourse has been trying to understand why there are certain Muslim organizations that do things that we don’t like.

So, for instance, obviously, Al-Qaeda after September 11th, and later ISIS, and one of the arguments that has been very dominant in American public culture, particularly on the right, is the idea that if there are Islamist organizations that are attacking the United States or committing, you know, human rights atrocities, that reflects something particular in Islam, right?

And so, all of us can remember people kind of cherry-picking quotes from the Quran, and basically suggesting that Islam itself is hostile to human rights, or preaches violence, basically an attempt to try to take an identity-based explanation for understanding why ISIS acts the way it does, or Al-Qaeda, or for that matter, the Iranian government, rather than understanding these movements and regimes as part of a world global political structure that’s responding in various different ways.

And I think what we’ve seen over the last year are kind of echoes of that on the American right about Israel. You can see it in Tucker Carlson’s commentary. You can see it in Candace Owen’s commentary. You can see it in most extreme form in Nick Fuentes’ commentary. When these people are seeing Israel doing things that they don’t like—and they’re right to be upset about what Israel is doing. Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza. It’s entrenching its apartheid system in the West Bank. It’s now displaced more than a million people’s homes in Lebanon.

People should be outraged about this, and they should want the U.S. to stop supporting these terrible abuses of human rights. But what we see on the right, and I wrote about this in a column in the New York Times, what we see often on the right now is that the attempt to make sense of the things that Israel’s doing that these folks don’t like, whether it’s abuses against Palestinians, or abuses against Lebanese people, or kind of trying to bring the United States into wars in the Middle East, that the explanation suggests that the reason Israel is doing this has to do with something about it being Jewish; that there’s a kind of identity-based argument.

So, just like you’re trying to explain what Al-Qaeda or ISIS is doing by reference to something about Islam, you try to make an argument that the way to understand what Israel is doing by reference to something about Jewishness or Judaism. And so, now you see people like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes literally quoting the Talmud to try to explain what Israel is doing as that’s the source of Israel’s violence or Israel’s inhumanity, again, just as people would be quoting the Quran in order to say, you see, this is why Al-Qaeda or ISIS or the Iranian regime is acting the way they’re acting.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that Islamophobia and antisemitism in the United States today are equivalent. They’re really not equivalent. They’re both rising. But Islamophobia is much, much more prevalent among people who hold positions of power in American government. We have politicians who speak in a way about Muslims that no American prominent politician speaks about Jews. Donald Trump literally said, Islam hates us, right? It’s still really inconceivable to imagine an American politician saying that Judaism hates us.

But what we are seeing rising from prominent figures on the anti-Israel right in the media is a discourse that I think, not surprisingly at all, in some ways recycles the way that people like Carlson have been talking about Muslims for many, many years. They’ve taken this same template, this civilizational template, this idea that the enemies of the United States, by which they really mean the enemies of kind of white Christian Americans and Europeans are motivated by some kind of civilizational difference that you can understand by virtue of their kind of alien religion and ethnicity.

And I think this is fundamentally wrong. And it’s really, really important that progressives recognize it’s wrong, and recognize that Israel, in its terrible misdeeds and crimes that it’s committing is not doing so because there’s anything peculiarly Jewish about displacing people from their homes, about attacking other countries, about overseeing a system of apartheid. That Israel is deeply integrated into a world system in which the United States and American imperialism is the most dominant fact. That Israel is acting in ways that are very, very reminiscent of the way that white Western Christian countries have behaved in the United States, in Canada, in Australia, in many different settler colonies.

And that it’s always important to have a universal language to describe what Israel is doing, just as it was so important to have a universal language to describe what Islamist terrorist organizations are doing, to see these as part of systems, and to understand that all human beings are capable of terrible crimes. And that the danger in the way that Carlson and Fuentes and Owens talk is that it’s actually a way of trying to let white Christian Western countries off the hook, is to say, you know, Israel is this other terrible thing that’s the product of this peculiarly anti-Western alien civilization called Judaism or Jewishness, and we are not like that, right?

This is what Carlson is getting at when he says things like, Israel hates Europeans, right? In fact, Israel could not do what it has done from the very beginning without the support of Europeans. To this day, it’s deeply entrenched and entangled in that system. And it’s important for people who want to change American policy towards Israel, and who want to oppose what Israel’s doing, to be clear about the terms in which they are making this criticism, and not to fall into this trap of suggesting a kind of civilizational divide between Jews on the one hand and white Western Christians on the other, or to suggest that Israel’s misdeeds are a result of a particular Jewish pathology. They’re not. They’re the one particular expression, a terrible expression in today’s moment of the kinds of systems of oppression, of settler colonialism, of imperialism, of ethno-nationalism that we have seen across history and that we see all over the world. And they must be fought as systems of oppression, not in opposition to one particular ethnic or religious group.

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Our guest is Cenk Uygur, co-creator and host of The Young Turks, a popular progressive political show. Cenk and I largely agree about the war in Iran and US policy towards Israel, but I’ve been uncomfortable with some of his comments about Israel’s role in America's wars. I’m grateful to Cenk for being willing to publicly discuss my concerns—as well as sharing his critiques of me.

Topics include…

Israel’s influence on American politics

Tucker Carlson, enemy or ally?

The responsibility of Jews and Jewish leadership in opposing Israel

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Cenk Uygur, co-creator and host of The Young Turks, a popular progressive political show. A month or so ago, Cenk and I were interviewed together by Piers Morgan and while we agreed about the war in Iran and US policy towards Israel, I was uncomfortable with some of the ways he spoke about Israel’s supporters in the US. Some of his subsequent comments have added to my concern. We spoke privately and then agreed to hold a public conversation. I’m struggling these days to find the right way of speaking to, and about, people who rightly demand a change in US policy toward Israel but sometimes express themselves in ways I find troubling. I’m grateful to Cenk for being willing to publicly discuss my concerns— and, of course, I’m open to hearing his critiques of me. Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid join forces to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu, and pledge not to govern with Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

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!), 23 Palestinians reflect on the impact of Israel’s genocide on their lives.

The disastrous legacy of Trump’s pullout from the Iran nuclear agreement.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Bard College Professor Ziad Abu-Rish about the roots of Israel’s aggression against Lebanon.

Appearances

On May 6, I’ll be speaking to the Joint Christian Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC.

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

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there’s been a big development in Israeli politics. Israel has elections that will be later this year, and in the effort to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu, two of his most prominent opponents, Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister, and Yair Lapid, the former Foreign Minister, have teamed up together. If you remember, they were in a short-lived kind of one-year-long government together as a kind of unity government, and they’ve joined up together in the election. And this is explicitly being billed as people coming together across the ideological spectrum to defeat Netanyahu and to save Israeli liberal democracy.

So, both Bennett and Lapid have cited what happened in Hungary, where the opposition forces kind of united in a broad tent to defeat Viktor Orban as a kind of model for defeating Netanyahu, and therefore kind of saving Israeli democracy through a coalition of the left and the right. Yair Lapid is conventionally described as a kind of figure of the center left. Bennett is a figure of the center-right, but Lapid described Bennett as, ‘a man of the right, but a man of the liberal, decent, law-abiding right.’

And you can see how this framing would apparently seem to make a lot of sense in a comparative perspective, right? There’s been this discourse for many years now about figures like Trump, and Orban, and Modi, and Bolsonaro, and Marine Le Pen in France, and all of these as kind of representing this illiberal ethno-nationalist force around the world. And the question has been: how do people who believe in liberal democracy come together across their different ideological divides, but consolidate the support of people who believe in the principle of liberal democracy? And so, this appears to be that same dynamic happening in Israel, and I suspect there will be a lot of coverage in the American press that looks at it in this way.

It’s fundamentally wrong. It fundamentally misunderstands Israeli politics and the nature of the Israeli state. It may be the case that Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid both want Israel to remain a democracy based on the rule of law for Israeli Jews, and that there is a significant contrast with Netanyahu, in his kind of Trump-like way, basically wants to weaken the checks on the power of the Prime Minister in Israel in a way that would essentially allow him to override the rights of Israeli Jews, and of institutions that protect the rights of Israeli Jews, like the Israeli Supreme Court.

But this is fundamentally different than what we’re talking about in Hungary or in the opposition to Trump in the United States, because Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid are not talking about preserving democracy and the rule of law for the 50% of the people who live under Israeli control who are Palestinian. Not at all, right? To understand Israeli politics, one has to always start with the recognition that there are about 7 million Jews and about 7 million Palestinians between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. All of the Jews have citizenship and the right to vote for the government that controls their lives.

Of the 7 million Palestinians, about 3 million live in the West Bank, under military law, without citizenship, without the right to vote for the Israeli government that has life and death power over them, and another 2 million in Gaza, similarly can’t become citizens of the Israeli state. The Israeli state has killed perhaps 100,000 of them, but there’s no voice they have over the Israeli government. And then you have 2 million of those 7 million Palestinians—a minority, less than a third—who are citizens of Israel, right?

And so, they could be said to be living within a democracy. But even they are not fully equal members of Israel’s political system. And if anyone had any doubt about how deep the consensus is in Israel that even the minority of Palestinians under Israeli control who hold citizenship, that they are not equal citizens, we only need to look to what Bennett and Lapid just said this week in coming together.

Bennett said, we—Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett—will create an Israeli government which includes only Zionist parties. What does that mean? That is a way of saying we will not allow any of the parties that get their votes primarily from Palestinian citizens of Israel. We will not allow them into our government coalition because they are not Zionist, right? This Zionist line is basically a code for Palestinian, right? Because actually, some of the ultra-Orthodox parties are not technically necessarily Zionists either, but they don’t have a problem with having them in the government.

The idea is that basically it has to be a government of Jews, and so even the minority of Palestinians who do have citizenship and the right to vote in Israel, even they cannot be part of this government, right, which is supposedly a government which is designed to protect Israeli democracy, right? But the entire discourse you see here of what democracy means is saturated with the underlying assumption that one is talking about democracy for Jews. It’s never even considered, right, that you might actually be talking about democracy for all people. After all, Naftali Bennett, one of the two figures who’s supposedly coming together to defend Israeli democracy is the former head of the Yesha Council, the former head of the settler movement in the West Bank. And Bennett also said that this new government would not concede one centimeter of land in the West Bank.

So, the idea of talking about this as if it’s the same as what happened in Hungary, or the same as a Democratic Party effort to defeat Donald Trump, or an effort to overturn the Hindu nationalism in India, is completely misguided, right? It misunderstands the fact that all of Israeli Jewish politics, essentially, takes place within an ethno-nationalist framework, in which the very language of democracy itself is really, largely confined to the idea of democracy for Jews. Democracy for Palestinians is almost not even a subject of conversation when people like Bennett and Lapid talk about the very idea of democracy because the idea of ethno-nationalism, of Jewish supremacy so saturates the Israeli discourse.

To understand Israeli politics, it really makes much more sense to think not about Israel as being similar to the US or Hungary, but to think about Israeli politics as being a bit like politics in the Jim Crow South, in which you could have fierce personal divisions between different political factions, and even different divisions about how they might govern as it related to white Southerners, right? But on the question of whether Black Southerners should have the right to vote, and should be considered part of the political process, that was simply off of the table. Because there was a very broad consensus up until the Civil Rights Movement that you had to maintain a system of white supremacy. So, even to talk, therefore, about democracy and maintaining and supporting democracy in Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia in the 1940s and 50s was understood to mean democracy for white people. That’s exactly the same way that Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid are talking about democracy in Israel today: democracy for Jews.

And the American politicians and American media, as they look towards this election season, should not fall into this trap. The differences between Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, and Benjamin Netanyahu, on certain issues, again, as it has to do with the relationship between religion and state for Jews in Israel, the role of the judiciary for Jews in Israel—because the Supreme Court in Israel overwhelmingly does not protect Palestinians, as many studies have shown—that distinction among how they might treat Jews is significant. But on the fundamental question of whether Israel would be a country that provides democracy for its Palestinian citizens, and provides them with equality under the law, this is no protection for democracy at all.

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Our guests are Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon, co-authors of the new book, The Future is Peace. Aziz, a Palestinian born in the West Bank, saw his brother die from injuries sustained while held in an Israeli prison. Maoz, a Jewish Israeli born on a kibbutz near Gaza, lost both of his parents on October 7, 2023. Somehow, both men have turned their suffering into activism for justice and peace. We talk about their personal journeys, about the challenges of joint Jewish and Palestinian struggle and about how they maintain their faith in a better future in Palestine and Israel despite the horrors occurring there every day.

Topics include…

how grieving is different depending on one’s side of the power dynamic

the charge of normalization

how to think about hatred as a response to trauma

the willingness to speak with those who killed loved ones

the changes that must happen in the US

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

Twitch streamer and political commentator Hasan Piker has been much in the news of late. He first rose to fame as a producer and host for The Young Turks, where he created the popular news series The Breakdown. Today, he’s one of the most-watched creators on Twitch, frequently collaborating with political figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to engage younger audiences in political activism. We agree on a lot, so I thought it would be better to focus in this chat on some of our disagreements, and thankfully, Hasan was game.

Topics include…

Defining Imperialism

The fall of the Soviet Union and its impact on the world

South African versus Israeli apartheid

Forms of resistance

using the term “Nazi”

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guests will be Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon, co-authors of the new book, The Future is Peace. Aziz, a Palestinian born in the West Bank, saw his brother die from injuries sustained while held in an Israeli prison. Maoz, a Jewish Israeli born on a kibbutz near Gaza, lost both of his parents on October 7, 2023. Somehow, both men have turned their suffering into activism for justice and peace. We’ll talk about their personal journeys, about the challenges of joint Jewish and Palestinian struggle and about how they maintain their faith in a better future in Palestine and Israel despite the horrors occurring there every day.

Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

Dan Shapiro’s comments on the Iran War

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!), Tanvi Misra writes about the relationship between the denial of the right of asylum and the rise of authoritarianism.

In The Nation, Ahmad Ibsais argues that under international law, Israel may be committing genocide not only in Gaza but in the West Bank as well.

Gavin Newsom endorses Donald Trump’s blockade of Cuba.

Appearances

On April 20, I’ll be speaking at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.

On April 23, I’ll be interviewing Mohammed R. Mhawish, the award-winning Palestinian journalist and writer from Gaza City, at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism.

On April 26, I’ll be speaking at Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland.

On May 6, I’ll be speaking to the Joint Christian Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

There’s been a fair amount of attention recently to the way the Democratic politicians are shifting in their attitudes towards Israel vote on weapons sales in Congress, and also a number of statements by Democratic presidential candidates on the subject of weapon sales.

But one of the things that I think doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves is the attitudes of the kinds of people who would be advising the next Democratic president, the foreign policy class that exists inside the Democratic Party, because it’s quite common for politicians to say one thing while they’re campaigning—presidential candidates in particular—and then to do other things in office. And part of the reason is because of the people they surround themselves with.

And in the Democratic Party in particular, there’s a history of presidential candidates sounding more dovish when they run but then being more hawkish in office. So, Jimmy Carter, for instance, questioned the whole paradigm of the Cold War, and yet, when he was elected in 1976, he chose as his national security advisor, a kind of Cold War hawk, as a visionary of Brzezinski.

Barack Obama, in 2008, was elected in part because he had opposed the Iraq War. That’s one of the reasons he defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. But then Obama turned around and chose Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, and she was more hawkish than he was, as were a number of his advisors.

So, I think it’s important to look at the kinds of people who would be advising the next Democratic president if we actually want to see a real shift in U.S. policy. And in that regard, I think it’s worth looking at a recent podcast interview done with a guy named Dan Shapiro.

Now, I say this not because I want to single out Dan Shapiro as a bad guy or anything like that. I’m sure he’s not a bad guy. I don’t like to kind of attack people in any ad hominem way. I’m sure he’s sincere in his views. But I think what Dan Shapiro says in this podcast interview just illustrates how, for a lot of the kinds of people who would likely go into the next Democratic administration and help to shape policy on Israel, that they have a set of views on Israel policy that actually are radically different from where the Democratic Party base is, and really actually would continue overwhelmingly the same kinds of policies of virtual unconditional support for Israel that I think have been so destructive.

And if the Democratic Party doesn’t actually face that and really try to cultivate people with a different view, I think the next Democratic Party president’s policies won’t be very different. Now, Dan Shapiro was on Barack Obama’s National Security Council. Then he was Obama’s ambassador to Israel for quite a number of years. Then Biden appointed him as the kind of special envoy to Israel dealing with the Iran issue.

Now, Dan Shapiro did a recent conversation with Mark Dubowitz. Mark, on a podcast that a guy named Dan Senior has called Call Me Back. Mark Dubowitz is probably, like, the most high-profile person who’s been pushing for maximum pressure, and indeed war, from any think tank in Washington in recent years. What’s really remarkable to listen to this guy, Dubowitz, who is kind of like, in some ways, like, perhaps the most prominent hawkish think tanker in Washington.

And Dan Shapiro, who’s a Democrat, it’s not about how much they disagree about, but it’s really the extraordinary amount on which they agree. They do disagree about the war—this current war. Shapiro says he thinks that it didn’t have a strategy, and that Trump didn’t explain to the American people, and he didn’t get support from America’s allies. But what’s striking about listening to this conversation between someone, again, who’s on the most hardline, hawkish edge of the Washington debate, you know, someone who would be on the right wing of the Trump administration, and a very prominent Democrat, the kind of person who could get a very prominent job making Israel policy, is that they agree so much more than they disagree, that Shapiro doesn’t question any of the fundamental legal or moral assumptions that underline this war.

So, for instance, when Dubowitz and Shapiro talk about this question of Trump’s decision to blockade Iranian ports, that Shapiro says, to do—I’m quoting—to do that properly is a massive naval force project that will take time, right? So, he’s saying, basically, this would be really difficult to do, right? There’s no discussion of whether it’s morally or legally acceptable for the United States to basically impose collective punishment on the entire population of Iran.

That Shapiro says that he opposes this war, but he says that he supported the 12-day War against Iran, and he says that there are other times when I think military force by the United States against Iran was and could be appropriate. Indeed, in talking about Israel’s military attacks on Iran, and also against the Palestinians, Shapiro says, Israel has a long-standing practice. It’s sometimes derided, but I think it has some value called mowing the grass. When a threat is present, you can’t necessarily be able to prevent it from periodically reconstituting, but you hit it as you need to hit it.

This is a Democrat, someone who was in the Obama and Biden administrations; the kind of person who could have a prominent position in the next Democratic administration, who is speaking about this collective punishment of the entire population, about mowing the grass, the most dehumanizing language that you can use; no conversation whatsoever about the humanitarian cost this imposes on ordinary Iranians, about the horror of what this policy of mowing the grass has meant for people in Lebanon, and Israel has attacked again and again and again over the years, or what it’s meant for people in Gaza, right? Where, again, just to rehearse the obvious, you have the International Association of Genocide Scholars saying that Israel committed genocide.

It’s just striking and deeply, deeply worrying to see that there are very prominent people who could likely populate the next Democratic administration whose disagreements with the most hawkish people in Washington is really comparatively…

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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Our guest is Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC and now founder and editor-in-chief of Zeteo. Mehdi isn’t only one of the most important progressive voices in American media. He’s also a Muslim who cares deeply about his faith, and about reconciling it with his progressive principles. For several years now, we’ve held a running conversation, mostly in private, about what it means to be a progressive Muslim, or a progressive Jew, when many who speak for our faiths scorn the principles of human equality, and when white Christian nationalists run the United States. I’m grateful we had a chance to continue that conversation in public.

Other topics include…

Mehdi’s upbringing

why the mainstream media is so docile

drawing the line on who he will or won’t engage with

distinguishing between Zionism and Judaism and confronting those who don’t

distinguishing between real antisemtism and false accusations

Mehdi’s influences

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC and now founder and editor-in-chief of Zeteo. It’s a little unnerving to be interviewing Mehdi, who may be the single best political interviewer in America. We’ll talk about why American journalists don’t ask tougher questions. But we’ll also talk about more personal things. Mehdi isn’t only one of the most important progressive voices in American media. He’s also a Muslim who cares deeply about his faith, and about reconciling it with his progressive principles. For several years now, we’ve held a running conversation, mostly in private, about what it means to be a progressive Muslim, or a progressive Jew, when many of the people who speak for our faiths scorn the principles of human equality, and when white Christian nationalists run the United States. I’m looking forward to continuing that conversation in public this Friday. Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

A few articles on South Africa’s attacks on its neighbors in the 1980s.

In 2003, Iran offered to endorse the Arab peace initiative.

Hassan Nasrallah’s 2024 statement about reaching a ceasefire when the Palestinians did.

A great article by my Jewish Currents colleague Jonathan Shamir on some other linkages between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and its conduct in Lebanon and Iran.

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!), Arielle Angel and Daniel May talk to the philosopher Elad Lapidot about antisemitism, Jewishness, and genocide.

Mona Ali on how the Strait of Hormuz crisis could end US hegemony.

Defending Academic Freedom

I’m grateful to teach at the City University of New York. But, sadly, it has not been immune to the crackdown on pro-Palestinian free speech that has swept campuses since October 7, 2023, and Donald Trump’s return to the White House. In 2025, four adjunct faculty members at Brooklyn College, which is part of the CUNY system, were fired in what appears to have been retaliation for their pro-Palestinian activism. This January, thanks in part to activism by CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress, three were reinstated. But a fourth has not been. Their plight has been covered in The Nation and some local politicians have taken up their cause. If you care about academic freedom—the principle that students and faculty should have the right to speak and protest about any controversial issue, especially genocide—and if you have a connection to CUNY, please consider signing this letter so that this injustice is fully remedied.

Appearances

On April 19, I’ll be speaking in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

On April 20, I’ll be speaking at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.

On April 23, I’ll be interviewing Mohammed R. Mhawish, the award-winning Palestinian journalist and writer from Gaza City, at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism.

On April 26, I’ll be speaking at Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland.

On May 6, I’ll be speaking to the Joint Christian Advocacy Summit in Washington, DC.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

In 1982, the South African Defense Forces crossed the border into neighboring Lesotho, into its capital, Maseru, and killed 42 people. In 1985, the South African Defense Forces crossed into neighboring Botswana, attacked its capital, Gaborone, and killed 12 people. In 1987, the South African Defense Forces executed an attack in Zambia, in the city and the town of Livingston. In 1986, the leader of Mozambique, Samora Machel, died in mysterious circumstances, and many people believe, although it’s not been proved, that South Africa may have had a hand in his death.

Overall, over the course of the 1980s, South Africa attacked six of its neighbors. Now, why am I saying any of this? Because there’s a clear parallel between what South Africa was doing during the 1980s under apartheid, and what Israel is doing now. Why was South Africa attacking these neighbors? Because the South African government would not face, at that point, the fact that its fundamental problem was its system of oppression over its own people, over people who lived within the borders of South Africa, because that would have meant confronting a system of apartheid.

And because the South African white supremacist government was not willing to do that, it came up with an elaborate argument, which suggested that the real security threat to South Africa was external by African governments that were connected to communism in some way, and that were harboring the people in the African National Congress or other Black South Africans who were fighting against the regime, right?

So, their argument was the Black South Africans, the ANC, Nelson Mandela, these guys, they’re not the root of the problem. They’re just proxies, right? Proxies: a word you hear a lot these days, right? They’re just proxies of Zambia, of the Soviet Union, of Tanzania, right, of these leftist African regimes. And if we can basically topple these regimes in Southern Africa, then we won’t have a problem with the ANC, or Black South Africans anymore who don’t like to live under apartheid, right?

This is basically the logic that governs the way Israel is behaving now and has been behaving for many years. People like to say that Netanyahu has always been obsessed with Iran. That’s actually incorrect. Netanyahu has not always been obsessed with Iran. He’s always been obsessed with the idea that there’s some external actor that controls the Palestinians, and that if you destroy that external actor, then the Palestinians won’t be a problem anymore, because the Palestinians aren’t actually independent forces, right? They’re just the tentacle of the octopus, which is another phrase you hear a lot from Israel and its supporters, right?

So, before Netanyahu was obsessed with Iran, back in the 1980s, at the beginning of his political career, he was obsessed with the Soviet Union. He said Israel’s real problem, the real problem in the Middle East, is the Soviet Union. They control the PLO. Then, after that, when the Soviet Union fell, he started talking about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. They were the real problem. People will remember that he famously testified in favor of invading Iraq after 9/11.

And then, as Iraq was decimated by the United States, and Iran grew more powerful, Benjamin Netanyahu since then, and a lot of other Israeli leaders, have been saying that Israel’s real problem is Iran, and also Hezbollah, right? And that if Iran weren’t there, and Hezbollah weren’t there, then the Palestinians wouldn’t really be such a problem for Israel. And if Iran and Hezbollah were to be destroyed—trust me—Benjamin Netanyahu and people like him would find yet another external actor who they would say is the real problem, who is controlling the Palestinians. In fact, Naftali Bennett, who might be Israel’s Prime Minister after Netanyahu, and who thinks very similarly to Netanyahu, who has said explicitly that actually, that after Iran, the big problem is going to be Turkey.

All of this stems from the same fundamental problem—analytical problem, moral problem—that governed apartheid South Africa, a failure to look in the eye, your system of oppression, and to recognize that that system of oppression is always going to produce resistance from within, from the people who are being oppressed. Some of that resistance will be ethical and nonviolent, or in accordance with international law. Some of that resistance may be violent and kill civilians, but there will be resistance—violent and non-violent—within the principles of international law and outside the principles of international law. There always is when you are fundamentally oppressing a group of people and denying them their basic rights.

And the fundamental misconception, what’s fundamentally wrong about the way Israel thinks about Iran and Hezbollah, is basically the same problem that was wrong about the way that South Africa saw Tanzania and Zambia, and for that matter, the Soviet Union, which was to think that they were the problem.

In fact, we know that Iran has said that if there were a peace agreement with the Palestinians in accordance with the Saudi Peace Initiative—they said this many, many years ago. They went to the Bush administration and said, listen, we will endorse the Arab Peace Initiative. If the Palestinians say that they have their own state, and their grievances with Israel are over, we will accept that.

Hezbollah has also repeatedly said—they said it after October 7th. Nasrallah, the former head of Hezbollah, said, on that day, when the shooting stops in Gaza, we will stop the shooting in the south, meaning in the south of Lebanon. That’s not to say that Hezbollah doesn’t have its own grievances with Israel. Again, it was formed in resistance to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s.

It’s not to say that Iran is not a regional competitor with Israel in various ways. But the fundamental source of the conflict, the single biggest fundamental source of the conflict between Iran and Hezbollah, on one hand, and Israel, is that they are supporting the Palestinians. They do it for ideological reasons. They do it for theological reasons. They also just do it for purely pragmatic political reasons because it’s a way of gaining prestige in the Middle East, because the Palestinian cause is popular.

This was the same reason that governments in various points in Mozambique, in Zambia, in Tanzania, even the Soviet Union itself were supporting Black South Africans. And South Africa only stopped having this problem with Tanzania, with Zambia, with Mozambique, once it actually faced the root of the problem, which is suppression of Black South Africans.

And because Israel has not been willing to do that, and because the United States, certainly under Donald Trump, is not willing to do that, Israel and the United States end up waging these unbelievably destructive, criminal, illegal wars, right, which kill and destroy so many people’s lives, right, and also, fundamentally, just simply don’t work, will not work on their own terms. Because unless you deal with the root of the problem, there will always be some external actor that is willing to come to support the Palestinians in some form. And the only way, ultimately, to come to terms with those external actors is to come to terms with the Palestinians themselves.

And that’s why, even though the Palestinians and their tremendous suffering and plight in the wake of the genocide in Gaza—while it’s not on the front page—it is the core thing one has to understand about why these terrible wars are happening in Iran and Lebanon, and they will keep happening in some form or another unless Israel and the United States, as Israel’s patron, face the fundamental root of the problem.

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