The Beinart Notebook

Cited in Today’s Video

The video of Marine veteran Brian McGinnis shouting “No one wants to fight for Israel.”

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Our guest is Aslı Ü. Bâli, the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law at Yale. Given the magnitude of what the US, with Israel, has now done, I wanted to talk about more than just Iran, about the kind of global power the United States has become, and what it means, not just for the safety of people in the Middle East, but for people across the world. Aslı is the most brilliant thinker I know about international law, American foreign policy, and the Middle East. I’m grateful she made time for this conversation.

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Nader Hashemi is Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and an Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at Georgetown University. We spoke about the roots of America’s antagonism with the Islamic Republic, comparisons between Iran and Cuba, and why Iranians deserve a democratic revolution but Trump and Netanyahu won’t create one.

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Topics include:

* Mark Carney’s speech

* the role of University Hillels

* the intelligence of Zionists

* Gaza and the West Bank today

* Report from Minnesota

* how we speak of our opponents

* weighing truthfulness against political expediency

* speaking to progressives and liberals

* polling Jews

The monthly AMA live session and full video is a special perk for Premium paid subscribers. Sample Q&A from last month’s session is for everyone. Thanks so much to all for your support at any level.

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A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Negar Mortazavi, Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and host of the excellent Iran Podcast. We’ll talk about the potential for another US and Israeli attack on Iran, how Iranian dissidents view such a move, the role of the Iranian diaspora, and America and Israel’s efforts to boost Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed shah.

Ask Me Anything

Our next Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY, will be this Tuesday, February 24, from 11-12 AM Eastern time.

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 the Jewish community’s reckoning over Les Wexner, patron of Jeffrey Epstein.

Muhammad Shehada on how Europe might develop an alternative vision to Trump’s plans for Gaza.

My friend, the Swedish writer Goran Rosenberg, has published a beautiful memoir, Israel: A Personal History.

Give a Purim gift to Israelis who resist the draft.

Appearances

I talked about white Christian nationalism on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNOW.

On February 24, I’ll be speaking via Zoom to the Britain Palestine Project.

On March 9, I’ll be speaking to Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina. On March 10, I’ll be attending a fundraiser for Gaza in Asheville.

On March 30, I’ll be speaking at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, Donald Trump has moved this massive military arsenal to near Iran, and there’s a lot of reports that any day now, the U.S. could launch a military assault on Iran. And when I watch the debate about this kind of thing in the United States, I find it very frustrating, because I find that even people who are against Donald Trump attacking Iran, it seems to me, don’t necessarily raise the most fundamental questions. They say, well, how do we know this would work in overthrowing the regime, or how do we know it would work in eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, or, you know, why hasn’t Congress had a vote on this, or why hasn’t Donald Trump explained it to the American people, or why isn’t he focusing on domestic issues?

I mean, all of these are legitimate points to make, but it seems to me, they miss a far more fundamental point, which is: by what right does the United States have to attack a country that clearly poses no threat to the United States, and that the American exceptionalism is so deep in mainstream American political culture that almost never are Americans asked to flip things, and imagine the idea of Iran or China, for that matter, attacking the United States, right? To reverse the lens, the notion that the United States somehow has the right to do things to other countries that we would never, in a million years think it was okay to do to us is just so baked into American conversation. But I think it’s just worth doing the thought experiment, right?

Think about the justifications for America’s attack on Iran, right? And think about how they could be applied if a foreign country wanted to attack the United States. So, one is that Iran has this nuclear program, right? Doesn’t have nuclear weapons, but it supposedly has some kind of nuclear program that could be used to make nuclear weapons one day, right? But Iran has done a much better job of complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty than the United States does. Iran actually signed the Obama nuclear deal, which actually went beyond the obligations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, right?

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty basically says that countries that don’t have nuclear weapons cannot get them, but crucially, it also says that nuclear-armed countries need to move in the direction of disarmament, right? Donald Trump has moved exactly in the opposite direction, right, basically scrapping the remaining nuclear arms control treaties that exist, moving to modernize and build more and more nuclear weapons, right? So, if the claim is that you have the right to attack countries, because they’re not meeting their obligations on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, I think that would be a better justification for attacking the United States than for the United States attacking Iran.

The second claim is that Iran represents a threat to its neighbors. Now, it’s true Iran has supported groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah and groups in Iraq that have taken violent actions against Israel or against American troops. But the level of aggression that Iran has been involved in vis-a-vis its neighbors absolutely pales to the degree of aggression that the United States has been involved in vis-a-vis its neighbors, right? The United States literally just sent the U.S. military in to kidnap, to abduct a foreign leader in Venezuela. The U.S. is basically, as Donald Trump has threatened to use military force to take over Greenland. He’s threatened to use, kind of, economic coercion to take over Canada, right?

Israel’s also used much more aggression in terms of just the number of bombs that they’ve been dropping, the number of troops they’ve deployed outside of their borders, but if the claim is that you have the right to attack Iran because it represents a threat to its neighbors. Well, ask the people in Venezuela, or Colombia, or Mexico, or even Canada how much of a threat the United States represents to its neighbors; a far greater threat than Iran does.

And the third argument that, you know, for the U.S. use of military force against Iran is that Iran is oppressing its own people. Now, again, I mean, if you think that Donald Trump is actually, genuinely concerned about the Iranian people, you just have to have been sleeping under a rock for the last 10 years. I mean, the idea is so absurd, right? We even see in Venezuela that Donald Trump shows no interest in actually trying to support actual democracy in Venezuela. He basically just wants, you know, autocrats who will basically allow him and his cronies to take more oil. So, there’s no reason whatsoever to believe that the U.S.’s goal in Iran would actually be to produce a more decent government that treats Iran’s people better, right?

But again, if the argument is that you have the right to take military action against Iran, a country that does not, clearly does not threaten the United States, and because it’s doing terrible things to its people, well, the United States under Donald Trump is not as repressive as Iran, you know, towards its… domestically. It’s very repressive. It’s not as repressive as Iran, but if we’re looking at the human rights violations that the United States has committed around the world, right, with eliminating the USAID, which is going to lead to the death of millions and millions of people, right? Or America’s contributions to climate change, which are also going to lead to the deaths of huge numbers of people, as the United States is the largest emitter and basically has refused any efforts to curtail its emissions, right?

Again, if the claim is that you have the right to attack countries because they’re committing grave human rights violations, well, again, by that logic as well, people might say that countries have the right to attack the United States. Of course, they don’t have the right to attack the United States, and even raising the conversation in America would make people think that this was an absurd idea. But it is American exceptionalism that prevents us from recognizing that it is just as morally absurd for the United States to bomb Iran as it would be for another country to bomb the United States.

We still have so much work to do in the United States in overcoming this legacy of the idea that the United States is somehow on some different kind of moral or legal plane from other countries. If that was …

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Our guest is Sabri Jiryis, who for more than half a century has been among the most important Palestinian intellectuals trying to understand Zionism and promote Palestinian freedom. As a young man, he helped found al-Ard, the first Palestinian political movement in Israel, which called for Palestinian national rights and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In 1966, he wrote The Arabs in Israel, his landmark book on the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the Nakba. In 1970, Jiryis was exiled to Lebanon, where he became a close advisor to Yaser Arafat and director of the Palestine Research Center, the research and publication center of the PLO. In 1977, he published the first volume of his seminal Arabic-language book, A History of Zionism, and followed it up with a second volume in 1986. That book has now been translated into English by his daughter Fida. Following the Oslo Accords, Jiryis was one of the few Palestinians allowed to return to Israel and now lives in his native village, in the Galilee. We discussed his understanding of Zionism, and his extraordinary life.

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Sabri Jiryis, who for more than half a century has been among the most important Palestinian intellectuals trying to understand Zionism and promote Palestinian freedom. As a young man, he helped found al-Ard, the first Palestinian political movement in Israel, which called for Palestinian national rights and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In 1966, he wrote The Arabs in Israel, his landmark book on the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the Nakba. In 1970, Jiryis was exiled to Lebanon, where he became a close advisor to Yaser Arafat and director of the Palestine Research Center, the research and publication center of the PLO. In 1977, he published the first volume of his seminal Arabic-language book, A History of Zionism, and followed it up with a second volume in 1986. That book has now been translated into English by his daughter Fida. Following the Oslo Accords, Jiryis was one of the few Palestinians allowed to return to Israel and now lives in his native village, in the Galilee. We will discuss his understanding of Zionism, and his extraordinary life, on Friday.

Reader Survey

We created a super-short, four question, survey to see how subscribers feel about the Beinart Notebook. If you have 5 minutes, please fill it out. It will help us figure what topics to cover, and what guests to interview, in the coming year. Thanks to everyone who has already filled it out.

Cited in Today’s Video

The open letter claiming that accusing Israel of genocide constitutes a “blood libel.”

The letter’s link to one paper published on the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ website accusing Hamas of genocide.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars accuses Israel of genocide.

Scholars estimate that Israel has killed roughly 100,000 people 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!), Daniel May writes about the lessons of Minneapolis’s resistance to ICE.

In 972Mag, Sophia Goodfriend explains how ICE is adapting surveillance practices pioneered by Israel.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I interviewed Adalah’s Myssana Morany and B’Tselem’s Sarit Michaeli about the forced displacement of Palestinians in both the West Bank and the Naqab/Negev.

Appearances

On February 17, I’ll be speaking on a panel for the World Policy Forum about Muslim-Christian-Jewish Coexistence in the Holy Land.

On February 24, I’ll be speaking via Zoom to the Britain Palestine Project.

On March 9, I’ll be speaking to Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina. On March 10, I’ll be attending a fundraiser for Gaza in Asheville.

On March 30, I’ll be speaking at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there’s this open letter which has been signed by a bunch of people that accusing Israel of genocide constitutes a blood libel. Some of the initial signatories are the Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, Rabbi Shmuly Yankolovich. I mention them in particular because part of what is so depressing to me, dispiriting to me about this letter, is that these are people who, in other aspects of their lives, I actually think are really, really talented and thoughtful people.

I mean, Yossi Klein Halevi—I disagree with his political views—but he’s a very talented narrative journalist. If you read books of his, like, you know, We Were Like Dreamers about the Israeli soldiers in the 1967 war and what happened to them. Yitz Greenberg is one of the most important American rabbis of his generation, really a giant in the kind of field of post-Holocaust theology who shaped, you know, whole generations of Orthodox American Jews. Shmuly Yankielovich, who’s based in the United States, runs an Orthodox organization that, in domestic American politics, on questions of the rights of immigrants, on opposing ICE, has actually done some really, really, you know, wonderful, wonderful work.

And so, this letter, to me is a kind of an example of how there’s something about this question, about the question of Israel and the Palestinians that I think takes people’s best qualities—their qualities of intellectual curiosity, and their qualities of empathy—and it kind of drains them. And this letter, I think, is a specimen of kind of what has happened to establishment American Jewish and Israeli discourse.

And I just want to explain why I find it so dispiriting. The first point is if you wanted to write an intellectually and morally honest, you know, letter opposing the claim that Israel has committed genocide—you know, and to be fair, genocide is a very particular kind of crime, right? It’s different than crimes against humanity, for instance, right? Genocide has to do with intent. One could make an intellectually honest argument that Israel has not met the standard of genocide. But to be intellectually honest, you would have to start by acknowledging what Israel actually has done, right? That whatever term you claim it meets under international law, just talk about the brute facts of what has happened on the ground, right?

The best scholars we have in terms of estimating direct and indirect deaths from war now suggest that Israel has killed 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Remember, Gaza’s not a big place, right? It’s only a bit more than 2 million people. 100,000 people, right? That Gaza has the largest population of child amputees per capita of any place in the world. That 80% of the homes have been destroyed. That 70% of farmland has been destroyed. And the reconstruction is not happening, right? In fact, what’s actually happened is Israel has cut the Gaza Strip in half and now confined people in Gaza in this completely destroyed area, where there’s no concrete coming in to actually rebuild homes. Israel has basically confined that population into only now half of the Gaza Strip.

So, if you want to argue this is a genocide, okay, but at least ask yourself what the human cost has been, right? There’s nothing in this open letter which does that at all. This is the closest you get. This is the closest you get. I’m gonna read the sentence. It says: ‘There is a vigorous debate within the Jewish community over aspects of how this war was fought, and that is a sign of moral health. So is our pain over every innocent life lost.’

So, you noticed the only acknowledgement of any Palestinian death and suffering at all is turned into a kind of self-congratulatory claim about Jews that actually Jews are so moral because we are pained by this, right? And because we’re having a debate about it, right? So, it’s actually, to me, the very opposite of a kind of moral reckoning with what’s happening, which I think, again, to be honest in arguing against genocide, you would have to have some human reckoning with what actually Israel has done, even if you want to say it shouldn’t be called genocide.

The second thing that’s so dishonest about this open letter is that intellectually honest arguments acknowledge the arguments and face the arguments of people on the other side and try to respond to them, right? This letter does not acknowledge that among the groups that have said Israel is committing genocide are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem—an Israeli human rights organization—Physicians for Human Rights, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, right? It doesn’t acknowledge any of that. It doesn’t actually answer their arguments, which have been documented hundreds and hundreds of pages of reports from on the ground reporting from people, you know, in Gaza.

And in fact, what’s even more remarkable, is that the authors of the letter claim that Israel has not committed genocide, but that Hamas was trying to commit a genocide.…

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Sari Bashi, is the founder of Gisha, the Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, the leading Israeli human rights group offering legal assistance to Palestinians. She’s also author of the new memoir, Upside-Down Love, about her love affair with a Palestinian professor confined by Israel to the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Ethan Katz is Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. He’s the faculty director of the Center for Jewish Studies and co-founder of both the Antisemitism Education Initiative and the Bridging Fellowship Dialogue program.

His most recent co-edited book is When Jews Argue: Between the University and the Beit Midrash.

He recently wrote an essay for Sources entitled When Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitic? Getting Beyond the Polemics and, while I didn’t agree with all of it, I found it an interesting good faith exploration of these issues, so I invited him to discuss it.

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