Afleveringen
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I spoke with my friend, political analyst, and president of The Agora Initiative, Khalil Sayegh, about why he condemned Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family and other Israeli civilians, and why that angers some on the global left.
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I’ll be on book tour for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza for the next few months. You’ll find a list of book-related events and reviews below.
I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture, edited by Mahmoud Muha and Matthew Teller with Juliette Touma and Jayyab Abusafia.
I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.
Here is a message about Hossam’s condition from his sister, Abir:
“Hossam reached out to the passport office to inquire about the resumption of services. In a glimmer of hope, he learned that officials are anticipating the start of the second phase of the armistice agreement, which could lead to the reopening of travel offices and border crossings as early as the beginning of March. This news brings a sense of relief to many who have been waiting for this opportunity.
However, Hossam is also facing another daunting task. He is diligently working to recover the medical reports that were tragically lost during the raid on the displacement camp, which was completely devastated. These documents are crucial for their medical journey to Egypt.
Through all of this, Hossam and his family are holding on to the hope that your kindness has instilled in them. Your support means the world to them and plays an essential role in their journey toward healing.”
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guests will be two important progressive American rabbis who disagree on some fundamental questions regarding Palestine and Israel. Rabbi Alissa Wise, Lead Organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, former Co-Deputy Director at Jewish Voice for Peace and co-author of Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing, is anti-Zionist. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, supports partitioning Israel-Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. Despite these differences, they both signed a recent letter in The New York Times titled “Jewish People Say No to Ethnic Cleansing.” We’ll talk about the ideological differences that separate “anti-Zionist” and “progressive Zionist” Jews—I’m using quotation marks because even the terms are contested— and whether, despite them, there are opportunities for cooperation in the age of Netanyahu and Trump.
Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.
Book Tour
(We’ll update this every week.)
On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.
On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.
On Monday, March 10 and Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be giving four talks in Michigan. On March 10 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at St David’s Episcopal Church, and on March 11 at St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church and at T’chiyah synagogue.
On Monday, March 17, I’ll be speaking at Mishkan Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia.
On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.
On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.
On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.
On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Book Interviews
Last week, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza was reviewed critically from the right in Quillette and from the left in Middle East Eye and Religion Dispatches.
Here’s a video of my discussion last week at San Diego State University with Professors Jonathan Graubart and Manal Swarjo and in Los Angeles with Professor David Myers.
NPR chose Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza as its book of the day.
Sources Cited in this Week’s Video
Muhammad Shehada on Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family.
Khalil Sayegh on Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family and other Israeli hostages.
Khalil Sayegh on his late father.
“Don’t call for revenge-call for peace,” retweeted by We Are All Hostages.
Commentary editor John Podhoretz on the people of Gaza (27 minutes in).
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Parshat Mishpatim.
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!), Nora Caplan-Bricker reviews Rachel Kushner’s No Exit.
Matt Duss and Jeffrey Sachs debate Ukraine.
For the Foundation of Middle East Peace, I interviewed Palestine Legal’s Dima Khalidi about repression in the Trump era.
Check out Liz Shulman’s new book, Good Jewish Girl: A Jerusalem Love Story Gone Bad.
Reader Responses
In response to my interview with Educational Bookshop co-owner Mahmoud Muna, subscriber Therese Mughannam wrote:
“I was born in the hospital in the Russian Compound in 1947, (now a prison Mahmoud was taken to) months before the partition of Palestine. I’ve tried to visit the compound during past trips, but the courtyard was as far as I once was allowed ‘for security reasons’ and only for ‘5 minutes and no pictures!’ Unfortunately, my American passport revealed to them that I was born in Jerusalem. But once in there, sitting on a cold stone bench, time stood still for me and I prayed for them all, Israeli soldiers, Palestinian prisoners, the whole lot of them. Sigh. ‘How long O, Lord…’”
See you on Friday, February 28,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, as I’ve been on my book tour now, people sometimes ask me, you know, is it hard to be a Jew, particularly maybe an observant Jew who’s critical of Israel? And I always feel embarrassed a bit by the question because the truth is my life is so privileged and safe compared to Palestinians in Gaza, or Palestinians in the West Bank and other places, and even compared to Israeli Jews who are dying, or suffering, or whose family members are at risk or injured. And so, my problems are just minuscule. It is true that I have lost some friends, as I document in the book, but I still have a beautiful place to daven, to pray, with people who are willing to study Jewish texts with me despite our political differences.
And if I’ve lost some members, people in the Jewish community who are not interested in being my friends anymore, I also feel like I’ve gained a kind of a moral community that I could not have imagined, which includes many, many Palestinians and people from all different backgrounds. And what I mean by a moral community is people who simply believe in the preciousness of all life—all Palestinian life, all Israeli Jewish life—and refuse to be drawn into a politics of inhumanity, a politics of cruelty regardless of what happens and regardless of what is done to their side. And those people are my heroes. And I feel like that’s what I think of as my moral community.
I want to give a couple of examples of that. In the last few days, in the wake of the terrible news about the Bibas family there, the terrible way in which they were returned kind of paraded around, and the news that the person who was initially said to be their mother, Shiri Bibas, was not her. And the first person I want to quote is my friend Muhammad Shehada, who wrote after that, ‘our principles,’ he’s talking about the Palestinian freedom struggle. He says, ‘our principles should never be contingent on the behavior of our oppressor.’ This is from Muhammad, someone who, as I document in my book, lost his best friend in a terrible, terrible way during this war, who has lost so many relatives, whose family has suffered so much in Gaza. And yet, he condemns what Hamas has done. He’s done it consistently. He did it again in terms of their treatment of the Bibas family and the dead Bibas children because he says that the Palestinian struggle must hold itself to a higher moral standard.
The second is my friend Khalil Sayegh, also from Gaza. Khalil wrote about the way the Bibas family’s dead children and family were paraded. He wrote, ‘I opened my Facebook account where my friends who live in Gaza are and found many condemning Hamas’s parade of kids’ coffins. Most of these friends have endured the horror of the genocide and lost family members. I turned to X and find warriors from the West doing whataboutism.’ So, Khalil is himself from Gaza and he has it within him, despite everything, to condemn Hamas even though some leftists in the West who haven’t suffered in that personal way at all are making excuses for what Hamas has done.
And just to understand the significance of what Khalil is able to say here. It’s not only others in Gaza who have lost their closest family members, but himself as well. His father, Jeries Sayegh, died because of medical neglect and lack of access to medicine and hospital when the Holy Family Catholic Church, where he was taking refuge, was besieged. And I want to quote what Khalil wrote after his father’s death, about his father, Jeries Sayegh. He wrote, ‘my father always taught me to love everyone, forgive, and never give desire for revenge space in my life. He always looked up to Christ as his model and told me I should too. As hard and painful as it is, I promise you, Dad, to stay true to those principles.’ That’s what I mean by sharing a moral community. And this was also, by the way, a sentiment reflected by the group We Are All Hostages, the hostage group in its Twitter account, which tweeted out in response after this a quote from a tweet from a Palestinian who wrote named Ehad Hassan, who wrote, ‘Don’t call for revenge-call for peace.’
And it’s really striking to me that this came on the same week as Parshat Mishpatim. You know, Khalil is a devout Christian. I try, as best as I can, to be an observant Jew. And in this week’s Parshat, in this week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim, there is this line, which says, ‘if you see an enemy’s donkey sagging under its burden, you shall not pass by. You shall surely release it with him.’ And Jonathan Sachs notes that the Aramaic translation, which is called the Targum, has a very interesting different translation of this phrase. On the phrase, ‘you shall surely release it,’ it interprets this phrase as not, you shall surely release ‘it’ referring to the donkey, that you shall release the donkey from the burden it’s facing, but you shall let go of your own burden. You shall release the hatred in you. That by acting to do something, an act of humanity towards your enemy, you are releasing the hatred inside of you. That’s what it means by you shall surely release ‘it.’
Maimonides goes on to write as a general principle, ‘you shall blot any offenses against you out of your mind and not bear a grudge. For as long as one nurses a grievance and keeps it in mind, one may come to take vengeance. The Torah therefore emphatically warns us not to bear a grudge, so that the impression of the wrong should be completely obliterated and no longer remembered. This is the right principle. It alone makes civilized life and social interaction possible.’ This is such a precious and important and fragile message now with the possibility that Israel seems poised to not go further to a second round of a hostage deal, despite the fact that that’s what the hostage organizations want, but to launch a more aggressive war, a war that is more explicitly aimed at the mass expulsion of Palestinians in Gaza. And it has filled me with horror to see the way in which people with great prestige and credibility in Israel and the United States—people who are not associated with the far marginal right, but people in the center of our community, people who can walk into Jewish institutions and be respected and dignified—have in recent weeks jumped on board this idea of mass expulsion.
And I want to just quote one. I usually don’t quote people by name, but I just want to quote this. And you can think about this in contrast to Khalil Sayegh and Muhammad Shehada. This is from John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary Magazine, one of the most venerable Jewish magazines for many, many decades, the editor. And he’s talking about the way the Israeli public is now responding with fury to what they’ve seen of the Bibas family being paraded, but he’s also endorsing this view. This is what he says. This is what he says. This is from the Commentary podcast, and I’ll link to it. ‘The hell with Gaza. To hell with everybody who lives in Gaza. The hell with it. We don’t care. Stop talking to me about humanitarian aid. Stop talking to me about the suffering Gazan people.’
The message of Mishpatim is a profound rejection of this kind of inhumanity. Khalil Sayegh’s life, Muhammad Shehada’s life, even though they have endured, and their families have endured, a thousand, a million times more than what John Podhoretz has living on the Upper West Side of New York. They can bring themselves to reject cruelty, to recognize that all human beings, all Israeli Jews, all Palestinians, the Bibas family, Khalil Sayegh’s father, they’re all created in the image of God. Their lives are infinitely precious. It’s people who believe that who are my moral community. That’s the moral community that I take faith in that will bring us to a better place.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Palestinian legal scholar Raef Zreik is a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Sometimes the most penetrating analysts of a society are those who see it from below because they are members of an oppressed caste. I’ve often found that Raef, as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has striking insights about Israeli Jewish society. So, in this horrifying moment, in which so many Israeli politicians and pundits have embraced mass ethnic cleansing, I wanted to hear his views.
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On Sunday, February 9th, Israeli police raided both branches of the East Jerusalem Educational Bookstore and arrested its owners, Mahmoud and Ahmed Muna. They were released on bail after two days in jail, but are banned from entering their stores for the next two weeks. During this difficult time, Mahmoud graciously agreed to talk with me about his experience.
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My new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, is (still) on The New York Times Bestseller List.
You’ll find a list of book-related events, interviews and reviews below.
I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, the latest work by the essayist Raja Shehada, What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?
I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s zoom call, for all paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guest will the Guardian columnist and novelist Jonathan Freedland. I’ve been looking for opportunities to discuss my book publicly with Jews who disagree with my criticisms of Israel, and it’s been hard. Almost everyone I’ve asked has said no. I’m grateful that Jonathan is an exception. He’s critical of Israel himself but still disagrees with aspects of my book. I’m looking forward to hearing those criticisms this Friday.
Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.
Book Tour
(We’ll update this every week.)
On Monday, February 17, I’ll be speaking at San Diego State University.
On Tuesday, February 18, I’ll be speaking with UCLA historian David Myers at the Lumiere Music Hall in Los Angeles. (The venue was changed after the Skirball Cultural Center cancelled the event).
On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.
On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.
On Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be speaking at T’chiyah synagogue in metro Detroit.
On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.
On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.
On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.
On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Book Interviews
Last week, I spoke about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza with The New Yorker, The Forward and Rumble. And in a public conversation sponsored by Jewish Currents with Ta-Nehisi Coates.
The book was reviewed in The Financial Times, Jacobin, the Sydney Morning Herald and Good Faith Media.
Sources Cited in this Week’s Video
Dan Senor’s podcast conversation with Israeli journalists Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal.
Amos Harel in Haaretz on Israel’s new war plan.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says “Preparations have begun with the Americans for implementing voluntary migration. I estimate that migration will begin within weeks.״
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!), I reviewed the antisemitism reports recently issued by task forces at Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and the University of Washington.
David Brooks on Trump and Musk’s reign of terror and incompetence inside America’s government.
In The New Yorker, Mosab Abu Toha outlines a plan for Gaza’s reconstruction.
In the London Review of Books, Alex de Waal discusses Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war.
See you on Friday, February 21,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
When things are already really horrible, it’s often hard for people to imagine that they could get even worse. Perhaps it’s especially hard for people to imagine that if those people, like many White Americans, have kind of grown up in relatively comfortable and secure environments. But I think we need to face the very real possibility that, in the weeks to come, Israel will renew its military assault on Gaza, that the ceasefire will end, and not just that Israel will renew its military assault, but that that military assault would be more ferocious, more savage than anything we have seen so far. And I want to suggest why I think there’s a real possibility of that terrible prospect.
One of the podcasts that I listen to is a podcast by a guy named Dan Senor called Call Me Back. Now, Dan and I kind of morally operate in really, I would say, fundamentally different kind of universes. I mean, we see Israel-Palestine in just fundamentally different ways. But I get a lot from listening to his podcast because Dan is very, very plugged in in Israeli political and national security circles. And he has guests on who are very, very plugged in.
And I think it’s really important for anybody, regardless of your political views, to not just listen to people who agree with you, but to listen to people who disagree with you because they often are part of a discourse that you might be inclined to overlook or not take seriously, but that actually is really, really important. And especially, given that this is a discourse that Dan is engaged in, which is operating off in a kind of near the highest echelons of the Israeli government and, especially under Trump, also the US government.
And so, in a recent episode, Dan was having a conversation with two very, very plugged in Israeli journalists, Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal. And one of the points they make is that they think it’s very unlikely that Benjamin Netanyahu would go to a second round of the ceasefire deal because his government is now down to 63 seats and an Israeli government needs 61 to stay in power. And Bezalel Smotrich, who was still in the government, the far-right finance minister, said he will leave the government if Israel doesn’t resume the war. He will leave the government if Israel goes to the second phase of the ceasefire. And that Netanyahu’s government could fall, in particular, because they have to pass a budget by early March, which would be very, very difficult to pass if there’s a rebellion inside their coalition. And beyond that, Netanyahu, if he went to an election this spring, would have to go into election having failed to deliver on his core promise of the war, which was to destroy Hamas. So, Segal and Eyal’s kind of view is that Netanyahu will look for an opportunity to not go to a second round of a ceasefire deal.
The second point that Nadav Eyal makes, which I think is really, really significant to understand, is the political impact of Donald Trump’s proposal for mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, the political impact in Israel. That Eyal makes the point, which I think is a very reasonable point, that the only entity that actually could force Palestinians out of Gaza is Israel. The United States is not going to do it on its own. The United States is not going to send its own troops into Gaza to put Palestinians on buses and force them out. If Trump’s plan is going to go into effect, it will have to be that Israel does that work.
And in a sense, what I think Nadav Eyal suggests on Senor’s podcast is that what Trump has done by saying that he wants the outcome of this war not to be the Palestinian Authority coming in, not to be a negotiated solution, but indeed to be the mass expulsion of Palestinians is essentially given a green light to Israel to wage a war in Gaza, which would be even more than the last war, a war aimed at mass expulsion. And this seems to fit what some people in the Israeli government are now saying.
So, Amos Harel, the longtime Haaretz writer, reported a couple of days ago that Israel’s defense minister, Yisrael Katz, had said that Israel would launch a new war in Gaza ‘exactly as the president promised.’ What does it mean to launch a new war exactly as the president promised? So, Harel quotes an Israeli Brigadier General Eival Gilady, who was head of the IDF Strategic Division, that he believes that Netanyahu has gotten a green light from Trump ‘for a very aggressive plan in Gaza. A focused Israeli offensive will cause large-scale death and destruction, along with curtailing humanitarian aid and will lead to Palestinians leaving the Strip.’ He goes on to talk about a plan that would lay siege to parts of the Strip, prevent the supply of humanitarian aid, and lead to ‘considerable destruction, if not total devastation of the areas in which the IDF will operate. Such tactics reek of ethnic cleansing.’
It is hard for a lot of people to imagine that Israel could fight a war in a more destructive fashion than it did for the first 15 months of this war. But remember it was then dealing with Joe Biden. Not that Joe Biden imposed costs on Israel. But that at least his administration was saying behind closed doors, we want you to try to be a little bit more restrained in your actions. The Trump administration, in a certain sense, has now said exactly the opposite. Not that we want you to be more restrained, but that we want you to create conditions for mass expulsion, which Trump has now said he believes in the interests of the United States, right.
And so, that seems to me a green light for Israel to resume the war in a way that is explicitly aimed at trying to create so much destruction in Gaza and permit so little humanitarian aid in as to try to force the population out. Of course, there’s still the question of whether you can force Egypt to go along with that, right. But that’s the other part of this element, given that Netanyahu has a political interest, it seems, in returning to military operations because otherwise his government would likely fall. And given that the Israeli assessment, understandably in a way, is that the only way you could implement Trump’s plan is if Israel created the expulsionary force from inside Gaza, and then you were able to get Egypt or Jordan or various other countries to agree to take some of these people. That I think, in a sense, what Trump’s musings may have really done is offered Israel a green light for an even more destructive, even more genocidal war than what we have seen before.
I hope I’m wrong. But listening to the Israeli journalists who follow and are very close to the Israeli political and national security establishment, that seems to be the way that Trump’s statements are being interpreted in Israel. And so, my fear is that we could be headed for something, God forbid, which is even worse than what we’ve seen before, unless there are forces around the world, and in the United States, that can somehow protest and try to stand in the way and block this. Because, on their own, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, I think, will have no compunction about not just doing what Israel has already done in Gaza, but doing something even worse.
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Palestinian legal scholar Raef Zreik is a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Sometimes the most penetrating analysts of a society are those who see it from below because they are members of an oppressed caste. I’ve often found that Raef, as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has striking insights about Israeli Jewish society. So, in this horrifying moment, in which so many Israeli politicians and pundits have embraced mass ethnic cleansing, I wanted to hear his views.
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The Israeli and American Jewish establishments embrace mass ethnic cleansing.
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Deborah Dash Moore is a Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She’s been studying a number of surveys of American Jewish opinion which suggest that the American Jewish establishment’s claims that an overwhelming percentage of American Jews support the concept of a Jewish state—even if it denies Palestinians’ basic rights—is wrong.
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Daniel Immerwahr is a professor of history at Northwestern University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of How to Hide an Empire. We spoke about Trump’s shocking announcement on Gaza and what it might mean.
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What Greenland and Gaza Have in Common
The New American Imperialism
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The Bible Doesn’t Grant Jews Unconditional Sovereignty Over the West Bank
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Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi discusses my new book and the state of the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
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Gaza is What Happens When You Treat a State Like a god
This Tuesday, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.
You’ll find a list of book-related events, interviews and reviews below.
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Jamaal Bowman lost his seat in Congress last year after his support for Palestinian rights prompted a ferocious attack by AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations. Very few politicians risk their careers on questions of moral principle. I ask Jamaal why he did, and what it would take to convince other Democrats to do the same.
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I spoke with my friend, the brilliant, Gaza-born, political analyst Muhammad Shehada, about the ceasefire agreement, the horrific conditions in Gaza, and what might come next.
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Romi, Emily, and Doron Are Home
Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 24, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.
Our guest will be Jamaal Bowman, who lost his seat in Congress last year after his support for Palestinian rights prompted a ferocious attack by AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations.
I’ve met many politicians. Very few risk their careers on questions of moral principle. I want to ask Jamaal why he did, and what it would take to convince other Democrats to do the same.
I’ve also recorded another Zoom video, without a live audience, with my friend, the brilliant Gaza-born political analyst Muhammad Shehada. He explained why this agreement shows that Israel never really had a strategy against Hamas. He argued that the ceasefire just might endure. And when he described conditions in Gaza, I put my head in my hands. As much as I try to understand the horror there, I’m reminded again and again that its worse than I even imagine. We will send out my conversation with Muhammad to paid subscribers on Wednesday.
Ask Me Anything
Our next “Ask Me Anything,” for premium subscribers, will be on Monday, January 27, at 1 PM Eastern. I’ll answer questions about the ceasefire, the Trump administration, and anything else on your mind. We’ll do another “Ask Me Anything,” in February, about my new book.
Book Tour
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28, in just over a week. I’ll be honored if readers buy it. But I hope you’ll also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author given that Palestinian writers still get much less exposure in the US media. (Here are some suggestions). And that you’ll also consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be doing many book-related events. We’ll be adding them as they go online. Here’s what we have so far:
On Wednesday, January 29, I’ll be speaking with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The event is being sponsored by Jewish Currents and the registration link is here. Paid subscribers can view a code at the very bottom of this page (after video transcript) to receive a free ticket or a discounted price on the ticket plus the book.
On Tuesday, February 18, I’ll be speaking with UCLA historian David Myers at the Lumiere Music Hall in Los Angeles.
On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.
On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.
On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.
Sources Cited in this Week’s Video
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book, The Prophets.
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!), Ussama Makdisi revisits Edward Said to understand Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
Dave Chappelle talks about Gaza.
Tamer Nafar asks where God was during Gaza’s destruction.
A new poll suggests that anger over Gaza may have dissuaded people from voting in 2024.
The farewell tour continues. Antony Blinken speaks to David Remnick and Jake Sullivan speaks to Ezra Klein.
See you on Friday, January 24 and Monday, January 27,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, there’s a lot to say about the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, whether it will continue, whether Israel has achieved the goals of this catastrophic war, all of these things. But I don’t think that’s the conversation for today. At least it’s not where my heart is. I’m just thinking about the three Israeli hostages that have been released: Romi and Emily and Doron.
And I want to suggest that I think that for this particular day, for those of us who are Jews, that that’s okay. It’s okay to have one day where we put aside our very, very harsh criticisms of the Israeli government, and of the horrifying things that it does. And even, we put aside for a moment our anger and fury about the destruction of Gaza. And we just participate in the relief and solidarity and joy of the Jewish people as we see three people being relieved from captivity, knowing that the release of hostages is among the most sacred principle in Judaism, and is meant to unite Jews across whatever divides we face.
I think that if the danger of the mainstream public discourse about Israel is that it loses sight of the humanity of Palestinians, which happens again and again and again, there is another danger that can exist on the Left that people on the Left lose sight of the humanity of Israelis. And this is a moment to make sure that that does not happen.
It’s also, I think, important to remember that if in the mainstream kind of establishment Jewish discourse, that a sense of love and solidarity for the Jewish people can often blind Jewish leaders and Jewish organizations to the necessity of judgment, the necessity of moral judgment for the things that Israel does, there is the danger that Jewish critics on the Left can have the reverse problem. Which is to say that the constant focus on judgment, on moral judgment—as crucial as it is, it’s never been more crucial than in these horrifying last 15 months—that that can blind us to the necessity of solidarity and love. And that it’s important to remember that we can have these different feelings, but we don’t have to have them in the same proportions every day.
It famously says in Ecclesiastes that ‘a season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven.’ So, this can be a time, a day, to just delight in the release of these three young women. And there can be another day, another season. There will have to be tragically again and again and again to return to our anguish and our fury about what Israel has done in Gaza.
As I was thinking about this, I was thinking a little bit about re-reading a little part of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous legendary book about the prophets. Of course, neither I nor I think anyone who’s listening to this is a prophet. But there are lessons to be taken from the lives of the prophets. And the point that Heschel makes is that the prophets were trying to imitate what he called ‘God’s divine pathos,’ which is to say the emotions that God felt towards humanity, but also, according to Torah and the Hebrew Bible, God’s feelings, special feelings towards the Jewish people, towards the people of Israel. And so, the prophets then are trying to emulate in a way this combination of God’s anger, righteous anger, which very, very present, but also God’s love.
And I think one of the points that Heschel makes is that the prophets were furious, furious, brutal critics of the Jewish people. Ferocious, ferocious critics. And yet, they tried not to forget that although anger was one attribute of God’s relationship with humanity, and indeed particularly God’s relationship with the Jewish people, it was not the paramount emotion. The paramount emotion was love, and that therefore the profits should also try to have—even amidst their moral fury at the corruption, the barbarism, the degradation that they were seeing around them—they should always try to remember that the supreme element of God’s pathos is actually, the more enduring one, is love.
And Heschel writes, ‘as a mode of pathos, it may be accurate to characterize the anger of the Lord as suspended love, as mercy withheld, as mercy in concealment. Anger prompted by love is an interlude. It is as if compassion were waiting to resume.’ So, the point he’s making is that even when God is most angry, that it is always temporary, and there was always the love underneath it. And this is what the prophets were striving to emulate. And this is what we, perhaps as critics of Israel, even though we’re far from prophets, should also try to emulate: the notion that underneath the fury and anger and profound disappointment must always be this love that can return whenever there is a moment of opportunity for it to return.
Heschel goes on: ‘the pathos of anger is further a transient state. What is often proclaimed about love’—and then he quotes from the book of Jeremiah—‘for the Lord is good for his steadfast love endures forever is not said about anger. The normal and original pathos is love or mercy, not anger.’ And I think that, just as it was a model for the prophets, should be a model for all of us. That despite what has happened over the last 15 months, that I think is increasingly being recognized as a genocide, really just about the worst thing that we could imagine a state ever doing. And even though that calls us to resist, to oppose, to fight against this profound, profound form of injustice again and again and again, that the love and solidarity that we have—not just for all human beings, but that we are allowed to have as Jews for our own people, for the Jewish people, imagined throughout Jewish text as an extended family—that that should never be lost.
And whenever there is a moment for it to return, for it to come back to the surface, even if it’s only temporary, for us to join with other Jews in sense of solidarity and grief and, indeed, in joy when there is a moment of suspension of the fighting, and a moment of seeing Jews come back from the hell of captivity in Gaza, to see them come back alive. It seems to me that’s what we’re called to do in this moment: just to put aside for a moment the anger, the condemnation, the fury, the pain, and to share in that love.
Surely, if the prophets could do that—given their acute sense of human injustice in the world that those of us who are so much lesser than them—that we can try to do that as well. And we can take just this moment to delight, along with other Jews, in the fact that Romi and Doron and Emily, and hopefully many, many, many more other hostages, will come back safe to be with their family—indeed to be with our family, the family of the Jewish people.
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Jamil Dakwar is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program and a former senior attorney at Adalah, which defends the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. We talk about the Trump administration’s coming crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and activism.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com
Mairav Zonszein is Senior Israel-Palestine Analyst for the International Crisis Group. She kindly agreed to talk with me about this breaking news.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com
Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. He has long written a weekly column for Haaretz. In our conversation, Gideon tells about his younger days, how he evolved away from racism, and how he now lives in a society he regularly accuses of grave crimes. I was struck by his openness and intimacy and expect you will be too.
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The Outgoing National Security Advisor’s Orwellian Interview at the 92nd Street Y
Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 17, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.
Our guest will be Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program and a former senior attorney at Adalah, which defends the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. We’ll talk about the Trump administration’s coming crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and activism.
I’ve also recorded another Zoom video, without a live audience, with the longtime Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy. I have long wanted to ask Gideon what it’s like to be one of Israel’s most hated men. And how he lives in a society that he regularly accuses of committing grave crimes. I was struck by the openness and intimacy of his answers. He told me, among many other things, that every morning when he goes for a jog in the park, he sees the same woman jogging alongside him. And that every morning she greets him with the same phrase: “traitor.”
This video is for paid subscribers too.
My New Book
On January 28, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”
Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.
Sources Cited in this Video
Jake Sullivan’s interview at the 92nd St Y.
The new Lancet study on the number of dead in Gaza.
Oxfam’s comparison of deaths in Gaza to those in Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen chronicles the movement to establish Jewish settlements in southern Lebanon.
Former Representative Cori Bush explains why it was worth losing her seat to defend Palestinian rights.
Vivian Silver’s son denounces Israel’s president for exploiting his mother’s memory.
See you on Friday, January 17,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, we’re in this interesting moment where top Biden administration foreign policy officials are kind of going out into the country, trying to craft a public narrative about what they did in office as they prepare to leave office. There was Antony Blinken’s interview with the New York Times a week ago or so, which I commented on last week. And then, recently I just came across the video that was put out of a public conversation that Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, did at the 92nd Street Y with Ian Bremmer.
And these are really remarkable documents because they are really exercises in what George Orwell wrote about so famously, which is, the creation of a kind of dishonest and euphemistic language to try to defend things that if stated in kind of clear concrete ways, would clearly be too brutal for most people to accept. And so, I think they’re worth looking at at the level of language, which is what Orwell urged political writers to do to challenge the dishonesty of language as a way of getting at the brutality of government and the action of people in power who act brutally.
So, I want to quote something from what Sullivan says at the 92nd Street Y. He’s asked about Israel’s policies vis-a-vis the people of Gaza. And he says: ‘We believe Israel has a responsibility as a democracy. As a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law, that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.’
So, the formulation is really fascinating, right. He’s being asked about what Israel’s doing, but he starts by just stipulating a set of assumptions, right, which don’t need to be proved, right, because these are the assumptions that he begins with, right. And they’re never challenged by the interviewer. The first is that Israel is a democracy. Again, something one hears constantly, but if you think about it, it’s not a democracy for Palestinians, right?
About 70% of the Palestinians who live under the control of the Israeli government, those in the West Bank and in Gaza and in East Jerusalem. And nobody who knows anything about the reality of how Israel operates in Palestinian life could deny that the Israeli government has power—indeed life and death power—over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem. And yet, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza cannot become citizens of the state of Israel. They can’t vote for its government. The vast majority of Palestinians in East Jerusalem are not citizens either, right. And that’s about 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control. About 30% are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are sometimes called Arab Israelis, who have a kind of second-class citizenship, but do enjoy citizenship and the right to vote.
So, if 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control are not citizens and can’t vote, it’s not a democracy for Palestinians. It’s a democracy for Israeli Jews. In many ways, quite a robust one. But it is about as democratic, one might say, for Palestinians as the United States was under Jim Crow for Black Americans, right, when a minority of Black Americans—those in the North—had the right to vote. But the majority of Black Americans who lived in the South did not have the right to vote. These are not esoteric or complicated things, right? They’re very basic things, right?
But you just notice how they’re basically shoved completely aside in the assumption that Sullivan starts with—that Israel is a democracy—which is simply to say that there’s a basic benevolence that he’s kind of assuming here, right. Which makes his conversation about Israeli behavior completely different than he would if he were talking about Russia or some other some other adversary because he’s essentially putting it in the camp of democracies. But, in fact, when it comes to Palestinians, it really should not be considered to be in the camp of democracies. And that’s not challenged, right. That’s an assumption that doesn’t even need to be defended.
And then he continues. He called Israel ‘a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life.’ It’s such a strange statement. He’s being asked about what’s happening in Gaza, right. Oh, the evidence in Gaza is not hard to find. It’s plentiful, right. The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal just came out with a report just recently suggesting that by the end of June, the death toll in Gaza was over 64,000 people, with almost 60% of those being women, children, and people over the age of 65. And it’s worth noting, by the way, that even men under the age of 65, most of them are not Hamas fighters. So, we’re talking about a very large majority of these people killed who are not fighters, right.
And just by kind of comparison, according to Oxfam, Israel has been killing 250 people per day in Gaza. By comparison, Ukraine, where the United States has literally imposed sanctions and sent weapons to fight against what Russia is doing, that’s more than five times the number of people who’ve been dying since the escalation of the war in Ukraine in 2022. It’s also about five times as many people dying per day as in Sudan, which the United States has now declared a genocide, right.
But what Sullivan does is he simply stipulates that Israel is committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, even though there’s literally no humanitarian aid agency, no United Nations investigative group, no journalist who’s actually really investigated what’s happening with Gaza who would suggest that Israel is committed to the basic principle of innocent life when it comes to Gaza. But Sullivan doesn’t think that’s something that actually needs to be justified. He simply stipulates it as an assumption.
Again, I use this phrase, kind of ‘mental prison,’ when I was talking about Antony Blinken. Like this is a kind of discourse that exists in Washington and could also exist at a place like the 92nd Street Y, which simply bears no reality whatsoever to the lived experience of people in Gaza, as reported by basically every humanitarian and journalist organization that has actually delved deeply into what’s happening there, right. But this is what Sullivan says before he even starts to make the argument, right. This is his kind of stated assumptions. And then he goes on to say, ‘We believe too many civilians have died in Gaza over the course of this conflict. And at too many moments, we felt we’ve had to step up publicly and privately and push on the humanitarian front to get more trucks, more aid, more life-saving assistance,’ right.
So, you know, it’s fascinating. He starts by saying Israel is a democracy. Israel is committed to the principle of human life. And then, later on, he basically says: ‘We think too many people have died.’ You know, this famously, as so many people notice, this goes all of a sudden turns into the passive tense. So, all of a sudden, Israel as a subject, as an actor, disappears from the conversation, right. Too many people have died, right. Why have too many people died? Is it because perhaps because Israel is dropping all these bombs on them, perhaps because Israel is not allowing the aid to go in, right. But it’s as if somehow there was a kind of Israel’s committed to the protection of human life. But, unfortunately, there was a kind of natural disaster, which led too many people in Gaza to die. All of a sudden Israel as the subject basically disappears from the sentence. And he says, ‘we’ve had to step up publicly and privately and push on the humanitarian front,’ never saying even who the United States has had to push, right?
And also, again, the implication, what does it mean to say you’re pushing, right, when the United States is still protecting Israel in all these international forums and continuing to send virtually unconditioned military aid? Pushing, right, in any other context in American foreign policy means using America’s diplomatic leverage in terms of our military and other kind of assistance to get countries to do what we want. If you’re not doing any of those things, you’re not actually pushing. A better verb would be you’re asking, you’re pleading, you’re begging, you’re cajoling, right. You’re not actually pushing if you’re not willing to use the leverage that the United States uses routinely when it comes to other countries.
As I said last week, we have to change the public discourse in the United States, such that if people like Jake Sullivan or Tony Blinken are going to go out and tell these lies, right, in this kind of Orwellian discourse of dishonesty, that they receive pushback, right. Obviously, we need a public discourse in which there is a cost, right. The cost is not that, you know, these people should be endangered in any way, G-d forbid. It’s simply that they should have to feel the experience of being forced to answer really hard questions by people in public forums who will not accept this dishonest language.
And we don’t have a public culture in the United States nearly enough—we have some exceptions like the interviews that Mehdi Hassan does, for instance—but in general, we don’t have a public culture which holds people like Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken to account. There are too many institutions, whether it’s the 92nd Street Y or the Council on Foreign Relations, where they can go and know that basically they can peddle this—for lack of a better word—b******t, right, and basically never really have to be taken to task for it. And that I think, is part of what’s produced this tremendous alienation and cynicism that exists in so much of the American public about the fact that ordinary Americans face consequences for the things they do in their professional lives, and people at the very apex of the American government, like Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, don’t face those consequences.
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