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Our guests are Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security advisor to Barack Obama, co-host of Pod Save the World, and author of All We Say: A History of the United States in 15 Speeches, and Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center, Washington DC.

We discuss the Democratic Party’s rapid transformation on Israel-Palestine.

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guests will be Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security advisor to Barack Obama, contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, co-host of Pod Save the World and author, more recently, of All We Say: A History of the United States in 15 Speeches, and Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center, Washington DC. We’ll discuss the Democratic Party’s rapid transformation on Israel-Palestine: What explains it, what are the new terms of debate, how will this shift shape the midterms and the 2028 presidential election. And will Republican politicians follow suit? Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

Congressman Jake Auchincloss’s previous statements about military aid to Israel.

B’Tselem declared Isarel an apartheid state in 2021.

Things to Read

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

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane reports on whether the left can continue its winning streak in the Senate race in Michigan.

Ben Linder describes what he saw while traveling with Representative Ro Khanna in the West Bank.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I talked to Abed Abou Shehada, a community organizer from Jaffa, about the tension between power and purity in Palestinian politics.

I talked about Israel-Palestine on the Comedy Cellar’s podcast, Live from the Table.

On August 23, I’ll be speaking in Sydney, Australia.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

The shift in the Democratic Party on Israel is so rapid that I think we really haven’t encountered anything like this in my lifetime in terms of the rapidity of a shift in what is considered mainstream political opinion within a party since the debate about gay marriage, you know. That’s the last debate that I think shifted as rapidly as this one. You’ll remember that Barack Obama was elected publicly opposing gay marriage, which was the position of virtually everyone in the Democratic Party. And virtually by the end of the Obama administration, an overwhelming number of Democrats are supporting it, and even the Republicans are throwing in the towel.

And now we’re seeing a kind of version of this on Israel-Palestine, where the condition of ending U.S. military aid, which even a year or two ago was a very marginal position among elected Democrats, really only the furthest left fringe of elected Democrats held this position. Now you see that it’s become the mainstream Democratic position, that roughly half the Democrats in the House voted for this amendment by Thomas Massey that would have ended all U.S. security assistance to Israel. And the Massey amendment was so broad that probably if you had a somewhat more narrowly tailored, carefully written amendment, it would have gotten more than even half of these votes. And again, this was a position that probably would have just had a handful of Democratic votes just a year or two ago.

I think part of the reason this shift is happening so rapidly is that, like the issue of gay marriage, this is an issue on which there was already a very large gap between what many Democratic politicians believe privately and what they would say publicly. And so, in a way, people could switch so fast because you didn’t really need to convince them of the position. They just needed to be convinced that they could publicly articulate views that they probably had already privately held. And once they realized that actually you could be against AIPAC and still win politically, that it might even be advantageous to be on that position, I think that helps to explain this stampede.

And this is the way politics is supposed to work, right? Most politicians are not conviction politicians in the sense that they take positions that put their political careers at risk because they believe it’s the right thing to do. They follow the wind politically, and that’s why activists focus on shifting their incentives and recognizing that politicians are usually going to come last after there’s been a shift in public opinion and at the grassroots.

So, on the one hand, this is normal. This is the way it’s supposed to work. And certainly, there should be a recognition that, it’s great when people get to moving in the right direction morally, even if they come late to this position. On the other hand, I think there is something frustrating about the fact that you now have all of these people getting all of this attention, not just politicians, by the way, but also foreign policy officials and even public commentators because lots and lots of people, not just politicians, respond when they see that there is a kind of shift in the public mood.

And so, you see people getting a lot of attention, and often a lot of applause, for taking positions that they didn’t hold a little while ago. And the people who actually did hold those positions a few years ago, when they were marginal positions, who were kind of prematurely correct, right, those people were marginalized, often slandered, sometimes even lost their jobs or even criminalized for holding positions that now other people are jumping on board and getting a lot of credit for. And oftentimes the people who were right early on when it was much harder to take that position are often ignored, and sometimes they were even slandered by the very people who now take the positions that they used to hold.

So, Rahm Emanuel is getting all of this attention, right, for saying now that there should be US pressure on Israel. But how about taking a look at Rashida Tlaib, who was trashed by her own party again and again and again, or Ilhan Omar, trashed by her own party again and again and again for taking some of the same positions now that Rahm Emanuel has gotten to later on.

I’m not saying that Rahm Emanuel and Rashida Tlaib agree on everything. They don’t. But the basic idea that the U.S. should seriously curtail military aid to Israel. Stop being complicit in Israel’s destruction of Palestinian life. This was at the core of the argument that’s been made for years by groups like Jewish Wars for Peace, right? And many of these people in the Gaza encampment, the same people who were basically, who were trashed as not just out of the mainstream, but in the case of the pro-Palestinian protesters, often described as radicals, as zealots, as even antisemitic.

And I just think it would be really, really wonderful if some of these people who have now adopted these newfound positions were willing to take a moment and turn and look at some of the people who held those views earlier, and say, you know what? You deserve credit for that, right? And maybe even, I’m sorry that it took me so long to take this view, right? I want to make clear: I’m not suggesting that I am one of those people who was right right at the beginning. I wasn’t. I myself am someone who came to a lot of the views that I currently hold really, really late.

And I remember years ago doing a debate with Yousef Munayyar, the Palestinian public intellectual and writer Yousef Munayyar, who’s a friend. And at that point, I was arguing directly opposing Yousef’s argument for equality under the law. I was still a believer in a Jewish state. And now I’ve come to the view that Yusuf had. And Yusuf has been gracious enough to respond to the fact that it took me quite a long time to get to the position that he already held.

But I think what’s important for us to remember is that while it’s great when people come to views later on, people who came to those views early, that we should take a moment to recognize people who were prematurely, quote-unquote, prematurely correct, and think about why it is that their voices still remain so marginal. Why is it that it would still be so hard for a Democrat to come along and say, you know what, I think Rashida Tlaib should be considered for a very prominent position in foreign policy in the next Democratic administration, right? Secretary of State. National Security Advisor. People would think that’s a crazy idea. Why is it a crazy idea? Rashida Tlaib was saying these things years before Rahm Emanuel and many of the other Democrats. Maybe that suggests that she has some insight, some wisdom that these people only came too much later, and that we should listen more carefully to her on a range of issues.

There’s one particular member of Congress who caught my eye because I’ve followed his career a little bit. He’s a congressman from Massachusetts, a young congressman named Jake Auchinloss. And Jake Auchinloss voted for the Massey Amendment to cut off all U.S. military aid, which is remarkable, because as recently as 2021, he had said in an interview that he was powerfully supportive of unconditional military aid to Israel. In 2020, he said it was a red line for him to have unconditional military support for Israel. Now, it’s good that Jake Auchinloss has changed his position, and maybe he might say, well, you know, I’ve changed because circumstances have changed. Of course, 2020 and 2021 were before the genocide in Gaza, but Benjamin Netanyahu had still been in power for a very, very long time by 2020, 2021. In January of 2021 was actually the month where B’Tselem, Israel’s most prominent human rights organizations, declared that Israel was practicing apartheid, right?

So, I think Jake Auchinloss is the kind of person. He’s a young, ambitious politician. It would be much easier for him to just kind of move on and move to a more politically safe position, and I really think that we should ask people like him to step back for a moment, and reflect on what they have learned, what they got wrong, and maybe to say something to the people who were right long before they were, especially Palestinian Americans, who so often are marginalized and slandered in this debate, and say something along the lines of:

I’m sorry I only came to understand this now. In the future, I will try to listen more carefully to the things that you say. We may not always agree. But I will listen more carefully to the people whose views ended up being correct. And I will recognize that voices from the political margins are often voices that can see realities that people who are in the political center, who are closer to political power, can’t. And I will honor the costs that people who were on the political margins paid for saying things early on that now are being widely adopted by people who have much bigger platforms and much bigger voices than them.

Our guest is Chris Van Hollen, Democratic Senator from Maryland. He’s been among the senators most vocal about changing US policy towards Israel. In May, he wrote a New York Times column calling for conditioning US arms sales to the Jewish state and suggested that “Democrats should pursue a last-gasp effort to salvage a two-state solution. If that effort fails, the United States will have to consider other options to secure equal political and legal rights for all.” We talk about his efforts to stop further US-Israeli military integration and defend Palestinian human rights.

Topics include:

The dramatic shift on Israel in US politics

What he expects with respect to Israel of the next Democratic presidential nominee

Whether the Iron Dome contributes to Israeli aggression

What level of divestment and sanctions he supports

Does international law give Palestinians the right to violent resistance against Israeli troops?

Should the US join the ICC?

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Chris Van Hollen, Democratic Senator from Maryland. He’s been among the senators most vocal about changing US policy toward Israel. In May, he wrote a New York Times column calling for conditioning US arms sales to the Jewish state and suggested that “Democrats should pursue a last-gasp effort to salvage a two-state solution. If that effort fails, the United States will have to consider other options to secure equal political and legal rights for all.” We’ll talk about how the Democratic Party is changing and about what it will take to transform US policy toward Israel-Palestine. Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

The five stages of grief.

Rahm Emanuel’s speech in Tel Aviv.

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!), Charlotte Ritz-Jack reports on how Israel’s withholding of tax revenues is undermining education in the West Bank.

Ro Khanna gets a taste of Palestinian life in the West Bank.

John Judis on what Democrats should learn from the Graham Platner fiasco.

On August 23, I’ll be speaking in Sydney, Australia.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I’ve been thinking about the speech that Rahm Emanuel gave in Tel Aviv last week, and I think it could be understood as a form of bargaining. I’m taking that term from these famous five stages of grief from the psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. She says the five stages—I’m sure many of you have heard this before—are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And I think if you look at the way that supporters of Israel have responded to this huge shift that we’re seeing in the United States, I think you can see it move through these stages.

So, it wasn’t that long ago that the standard line from people who wanted to maintain unconditional U.S. support for Israel was denial that the public opinion had changed, that the United States was no longer an overwhelmingly pro-Israel country in the sense that it wanted America to give Israel unconditional military and diplomatic support. And I think more recently, you’ve seen the second stage, which is anger, which is kind of like, you know, fury that there’s this kind of new anti-Israel, even anti-Zionist politics, and of course, generally defined from within the pro-Israel space as a kind of a tsunami of antisemitism.

But Rahm Emanuel’s speech, I think, is a third phase, which is bargaining. Now, Rahm Emanuel had always been, you know, a supporter of unconditional U.S. support for Israel, kind of on the liberal side, but certainly he had never supported the kind of sanctions that he’s talking about before. And I think Rahm Emanuel is now trying to essentially bargain with this new politics, which is emerging in the Democratic Party, and also among young Republicans, and trying to say, okay, the US is going to now pressure Israel more than it has, and especially put sanctions on the West Bank, and there can be a new bargain.

I think the problem—and I think, by the way, that the fourth stage, depression, is something we may start to see evidence of in the years to come as well. By depression, I mean people kind of bemoaning the fact that they’ve lost the American public, maybe doing a version, a pro-Israel Jewish version, even of what was called the Benedictine option, which was something we saw among Christian conservatives during the Obama years, where they said, we’ve lost the country. It’s becoming irredeemably progressive and woke. We need to retreat from it into our own kind of enclaves where we can maintain our own virtues. But in this case, being pro-Israel, you know, create your own institutions, this kind of thing.

But to go back to the nature of the bargain that Rahm Emanuel is suggesting. It is a significant step forward in that it is an end to unconditional U.S. support for Israel. It would be some form of pressure, although the devil is in the details, if you listen to the speech, that the United States would push Israel to be willing to negotiate towards the idea of a Palestinian state.

The problem with the bargain is, I think, in the way that Rahm Emanuel thinks about Palestinians, or you could say doesn’t think that much about Palestinians. So, the first thing that Emanuel says in his speech is he repeats this old kind of chestnut that basically Israel has again and again offered Palestinians everything they should have wanted, and then they said no. This is just really historically inaccurate. I mean, it’s repeated so frequently. It’s like mother’s milk for those of us who kind of grew up in pro-Israel Jewish environments. But really, there are very few, if any, historians who actually believe that as a rendition of what actually happened.

And it’s just also important to remember, you know, that Rahm Emanuel is saying that three times Israel offered Palestinian sovereignty. It’s really not true. Israel didn’t offer Palestinian sovereignty at all. When you say that Israel has to have, for instance, that the Palestinian state can’t have a military, and that Israel is going to have some control over its air flight, the airspace, the telecommunication spectrum, troops on part of Palestinian territory in the Jordan Valley, that is not actual sovereignty. There’s something inaccurate about Rahm Emanuel’s kind of precondition for this bargain that he’s suggesting.

But then, if you notice the way he goes on to talk about Palestinian leadership in the speech, he has this line where he says the Arab world must assume ‘its rightful place as the adult in the room with the Palestinian leadership.’ So, the clear implication is that the Arabs, as the proxies—by probably means the Saudis and the Emiratis, and maybe the Qataris—as the proxies of the United States, are going to force the Palestinians into accepting things that maybe they weren’t willing to accept in the past. What’s totally missing is the idea that Palestinians should be able to choose their own leaders, and that Palestinians should have the space to actually define for themselves their vision of what they want their freedom to look like. Now, again, that doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be a negotiation process with the Israelis.

But what Rahm Emanuel skips is taking seriously Palestinian politics and the right of Palestinians to actually choose a legitimate leadership for themselves. The implication is that essentially America and the Arabs will tell the Palestinians what to do, and then the US will move Israel aways, and then force the Palestinians to accept what Israel is now willing to offer.

That actually is part of the reason, actually, I think that the Oslo process failed, right? And it’s especially problematic today when Palestinians have not for many, many years had the opportunity to have a legitimate democratic process to choose legitimate leaders who can offer a vision of Palestinian freedom. And the whole notion of the idea that Palestinian freedom is central to this conversation as opposed to simply, you know, saving Israel from itself is really missing from the bargain that Rahm Emanuel is offering.

So, that’s why I think that, again, this represents a kind of progress, but the nature of the bargain that Rahm Emanuel is offering, I still think fundamentally doesn’t take seriously the notion that Palestinians have an inalienable right to freedom, and that they have the right to choose their own leaders, not have them chosen for themselves for them. That’s the part of the bargain that Rahm Emanuel, I think, is getting wrong, and it’s why we’re going to need people to come along who are going to revise that, and I think offer a new kind of formulation which centers the fact that this U.S. policy is not only about saving Israel from itself, that U.S. policy has to have at its center the belief that Palestinians deserve to be free.

Our guest is Darializa Avila Chevalier, who just won the Democratic nomination for Congress in New York’s 13th district. Avila Chevalier has attracted controversy for her views on Israel-Palestine, among other issues. But the interviews with her that I’ve seen haven’t probed those views in depth. I want to better understand her beliefs about October 7, about Zionism, and about what would constitute a just future in Israel-Palestine.

This conversation was co-sponsored by Jewish Currents.

Topics include:

What she saw in the West Bank

Why she went to a rally on October 8

Working with Zionists in the Democratic Party

How she wants Columbia University to change

Becoming Muslim in this anti-Muslim political environment

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Darializa Avila Chevalier, who last month won the Democratic nomination for Congress in New York’s 13th district. Avila Chevalier has attracted controversy for her views on Israel-Palestine, among other issues. But the interviews with her that I’ve seen haven’t probed those views in depth. I want to ask what she saw while living in the West Bank and as an activist at Columbia University’s Gaza encampment. I want to better understand her views about October 7, about Zionism and Zionists, and about what she believes would constitute a just future in Israel-Palestine. This conversation will be 45 minutes long, not the usual one hour. Please join us.

I’ll also be recording a conversation this week with California State Senator and congressional candidate Scott Wiener about the harassment he recently experienced at San Francisco’s Trans march, and about his views about Gaza and US policy towards Israel-Palestine. That conversation won’t include a live audience, but subscribers will receive it in the coming days.

Cited in Today’s Video

Bryan Stevenson’s conversation with Ezra Klein.

Donald Trump says the Smithsonian museums focus too much on slavery.

Israel’s law penalizing municipalities that acknowledge the Nakba.

Israel’s defense minister says his government wants Palestinians to leave 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!), I argued that Zohran Mamdani’s influence could help Democrats win back the presidency.

In the London Review of Books, Muhammad Shehada wrote about Marwan Barghouti and the Palestinian future.

In Politico, Steve Bannon says a democratic socialist could win the White House.

On July 9, I’ll be speaking in New York to the Halachic Left, a group of anti-occupation observant Jews.

On August 23, I’ll be speaking in Sydney, Australia.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

There’s been a ton of political commentary recently about the 250th anniversary of the United States, which was celebrated this weekend. And one of the things that I found most powerful was a conversation that Ezra Klein did for the New York Times with Bryan Stevenson. And Bryan Stevenson leads something called the Equal Justice Initiative. It’s an initiative that defends Black Americans and others who are discriminated against in the criminal justice system. And also, Stevenson created this extraordinary monument and memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, that, among other things, lists the names of 4,000 Black Americans who were lynched in the United States.

And Stevenson said something to Klein that really struck me. Stevenson said that he went to Holocaust museums, and that by the end of a Holocaust museum, the moral imperative is very clear: never again. But Stevenson said that there wasn’t the equivalent in the United States of these kind of museums that had the clear moral imperative—never again—which is why he created this monument and museum in Montgomery.

And I think he’s right, you know, it’s quite astonishing when you just step back and realize that there is no monument on the National Mall in Washington, DC to either slavery or to the genocide of Native Americans. It is true there are these museums, fairly recently constructed, one for the American Indian and one for African American history and culture. But even those are now under attack in the Trump administration for, as Trump said in the fall of 2025, for focusing too much on slavery.

So, even the very kind of modest degree of memorialization that we have—which is nothing like what you see in Germany and in other countries where the Holocaust was perpetrated—was considered too much for the current President of the United States. And I think there is a direct line between this refusal to look America’s history in the face, America’s history of genocide and white supremacy, and the fact that we now have this blatantly white supremacist politics that’s returned.

And you can see something similar in Jewish discourse as well. Which is to say, if America has not had its kind of never-again moment, if the United States doesn’t have a public culture that asks people to say never again as it regards white supremacy and the genocide of Native Americans, that Israel and the broader Jewish world doesn’t have that never-again culture as well.

That might sound very strange, of course, because Jews, most of us are raised to always think in terms of never again, as it relates to the Nazi Holocaust. So, we are accustomed to thinking, when we are the victims, of thinking about the importance of this idea of never again. But to even to suggest that Israeli Jews and Jews around the rest of the world might need to start having a public culture of saying never again about the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is in and of itself an extremely subversive and provocative claim.

In fact, though, it is precisely the unwillingness to have this public expression of never again, that just as in the United States, makes the continuing expulsion of Palestinians possible. So, there’s a direct line between the fact that Israel literally penalizes municipalities that commemorate the Nakba of 1948, and the fact that Israel’s stated policy today in Gaza, as recently expressed by Israel’s defense minister, is ‘voluntary migration of Palestinians.’ You know, voluntary, right? I mean, you, you make the place catastrophically unlivable. You prevent any rebuilding that might allow people to have anything resembling a decent life in Gaza. And then you say, you know, our policy is that we think you’d be better off somewhere else, and we’re really willing to help facilitate you. You know, we’ll buy you a plane ride, a plane trip to Somaliland or Rwanda or something, and get you out of here.

I think Stevenson’s point is this is the consequence of not having a culture of never again. In the United States, the consequence of not having this culture of never again is Donald Trump. In Israel and in the Jewish world, the consequence of not having a culture of never again, of the fact that whole entire generation after generation of Israeli Jews—but also American Jews, Jews in other parts of the world—grow up within institutions, synagogues, Jewish schools, camps, youth movements, et cetera, where there is no honest reckoning with the Nakba. There’s a direct line between that refusal to say never again when it comes to what a Jewish state did to Palestinians, and the fact that the Jewish state is continuing to do exactly that, to continue this process of mass expulsion.

And if we’re ever going to have a fundamental change, both in the United States and in Israel, and more broadly in the Jewish world, it starts with looking hard in the eye these historical crimes and committing to then not allowing them to happen again. I think that the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States is a good moment to remember that.

Our guest is Brad Lander, who last week won the Democratic nomination for Congress in New York’s 10th district. Brad’s victory is a milestone: A Jewish politician, running on his support for Palestinian rights, winning in one of the most Jewish districts in the country. Even a few years ago, it would have been unimaginable. We’ll talk about what Brad learned in his campaign, about where he agrees and disagrees with the other insurgents who won last week in New York City, about how he’ll deal with the AIPAC-aligned Jewish members of Congress he’ll meet in Washington, and about the 1920 congressional race in the Lower East Side, which he believes presaged the race he just won.

This conversation was co-sponsored by Jewish Currents.

Topics include:

What Lander’s victory says about shifting values in the Jewish community

Should Ben Gvir be arrested for war crimes?

Distinguishing antisemitism from legitimate protest about Israel

Why Lander, who believes Israel is guilty of apartheid and genocide, is still a Zionist

Why Lander does not participate in BDS

Our guest is Rachel Timoner, Senior Rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn. I’ve known her since college. Our political and religious trajectories have taken us in unexpected directions, and left us with different views about Israel-Palestine. I’m grateful she took the time to discuss them with me.

Topics include:

Is the BDS movement eliminationist?

Can a Jewish state be democratic?

Is Israel a settler-colonial project?

Does the left in the US help the left in Israel-Palestine?

Is it okay to call AIPAC “monstrous”?

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Brad Lander, who last week won the Democratic nomination for Congress in New York’s 10th district. Brad’s victory is a milestone: A Jewish congressman, running on his support for Palestinian rights, winning in one of the most Jewish districts in the country. Even a few years ago, it would have been unimaginable. We’ll talk about what Brad learned in his campaign, about where he agrees and disagrees with the other insurgents who won last week in New York City, about how he’ll deal with the AIPAC-aligned Jewish members of Congress he’ll meet in Washington, and about the 1920 congressional race in the Lower East Side, which he believes presaged the race he just won. This conversation will be co-sponsored by Jewish Currents. Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

Scott Wiener is forced to leave the San Francisco Trans march.

The UN report on Israel’s targeting of Palestinian children.

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 wrote about how radically the Democratic debate over Israel has changed.

In 972mag, Abed Abu Shehada wrote about power, purity and BDS.

In her Substack, Jill Jacobs argued that one can oppose AIPAC without viewing it as uniquely malevolent.

I spoke in Vienna about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there’s a video that’s been going around a lot of a Democratic state senator from San Francisco named Scott Wiener. He’s also running to succeed Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives, and he was at this trans march in San Francisco, and basically was kind of forced to leave the trans march by folks who really got in his face, and were really screaming at him, and are really, pretty nasty way about his policies on Gaza.

Now, they didn’t physically attack him, but it’s a pretty uncomfortable video to watch. Clearly, it was pretty intimidating behavior. And there’s another video of someone also screaming in a really nasty way, really getting in Wiener’s face at a bar where Wiener was watching a World Cup game.

And something about this video of Wiener, I think, has really triggered something in a lot of pro-Israel Jews in particular, and maybe Jews just more generally, because he looks really beleaguered and kind of haggard as he just silently takes all of this abuse. And I think it captured this sense that exists in some elements of the American Jewish community that this is kind of like torrent of hatred at Jews, and there’s kind of, like, nothing you can do about it.

And I think it’s worth saying a couple of things about this video. The first is that the people who, in these videos, who are captured in these videos, are kind of behaving like a******s. You know, they’re not physically attacking, but they’re really, really acting in a very intimidating and really kind of nasty way, and I think it’s just worth saying that I think the people that we admire, most people would admire, that certainly I admire, are people who have deep moral conviction and moral passion and fervor and are unyielding in it about what they believe is right, but still, in their interpersonal relations, in the way they treat people, act with a certain level of dignity, a certain level of decency. And I think these folks just didn’t. And I don’t think there’s a justification for just treating people that way. I don’t think you should be an a*****e.

Secondly, being an a*****e is not, I think, good politics. You know, Wiener is a classic liberal Zionist guy. He was far too late to recognize that what Israel is doing in Gaza is a genocide, far too late to support cutting off military aid to Israel. But now he actually has come to take those positions. He’s moving in his views in response to public opinion, in response to all the work that pro-Palestine activists have done.

And it’s not effective in moving people even further—and I would like him to go further than he is now—by treating people this way. In fact, what you do, I think, is you just allow people to turn the attention in a different direction, and you just make it a lot easier for those people who want to claim that the pro-Palestinian activist movement is motivated by hatred and by, you know, that it’s a kind of mob of hooligans, whatever, that it’s antisemitic. You just make all that a lot easier with these kind of videos. So, I also think it’s counterproductive.

And—I won’t say, not but—because I think what those folks did and the way they treated him was wrong. And, it’s really important that people who support Israel in the Jewish community try to understand where this rage is coming from because what’s so frustrating to me is that you have all of these people in my community who spend so much time looking at videos like this one with Wiener, in which people seem to be getting kind of accosted and victimized in some way because they support Israel. And those folks, in my experience, spend so little time trying to understand where this rage might actually be coming from by looking at what Israel is actually doing. And because they spend almost no time looking at what Israel is doing in a way that might help them understand why so many people are enraged, that allows them to then just chalk all of this up to, kind of, to Jew hatred, right?

But imagine that these people who are watching this Scott Wiener video were also reading the new UN report that just came out about what Israel has done to Palestinian children. I’m just gonna quote a couple of things from this UN report, because I just think it reminds us, again, as if we need reminding, of the utter horror of what Israel has done, horror that normal people will understandably respond to with grave anger. Again, doesn’t mean they should be a******s about it, but anger is an understandable reaction to the kinds of things that this UN report finds.

This UN report is based on a huge amount of evidence, of documentary evidence, of interviews with medical workers, with Palestinians themselves, with journalists, with lawyers, huge amount of documentation. By the way, it also does mention violence against Israeli children on October 7th. It also, the writers of this report gave Israel, I think 13 times they asked Israel to respond to some of the claims in this report, but Israel didn’t respond to any of them because Israel never responds to these things. It never actually engages with the evidence that the UN or human rights groups create. It basically just ignores them and then denounces these reports as kind of antisemitic blood libels, right?

The report finds that Israel has killed at least 20,000 children in Gaza since October 7th, injured at least 44,000. Of the children it’s killed, at least 5,000 were under the age of 5. It’s killed more than 5,000 children under the age of 5, and more than 1,000 children under the age of 1. The report quotes an NGO, Save the Children, as suggesting that there may be even more than 5,000 children in Gaza who were buried under the rubble, whose bodies could not even be found by their families.

It mentions that Israel dropped so many bombs in Gaza, and a percentage of these bombs don’t go off until, you know, at the time, right? So that 5-10% of them don’t go off, so that within the 61 million tons of debris that exist in Gaza, you have thousands and thousands of, maybe tens of thousands of unexploded ordinances that children in Gaza will be encountering for years and decades to come, especially because Israel isn’t allowing no reconstruction in Gaza, because it’s not allowing any heavy machinery in that would allow people to actually go through this debris and maybe make it a little bit less dangerous.

They mention in this report that at least 10,000 children in Gaza have lost their hearing as a result of Israel’s attacks, that more than 1,000 children have had their limbs amputated. Many of those amputations were done without anesthesia because Israel so destroyed the medical system. That there’s more child amputees in Gaza per capita than any other place on the face of the earth.

And this killing has not stopped. It’s continuing even after the so-called ceasefire, in part because Israel has established this yellow line and basically shoots people who cross onto the wrong side of the yellow line. But the report notes that the yellow line is not clearly demarcated. It’s often shifting. And so, you have a situation in which at least 100 children since just this January have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

And they also find real evidence of targeted killing of children. The commission interviews 17 medical practitioners in different hospitals, and they find that these medical practitioners reported ‘a consistent pattern of receiving children with single gunshot wounds either by quadcopters or snipers. The killing of a child from a single gunshot wound indicates a high degree of precision in the use of force, suggesting that the shot was carefully aimed rather than incidental or the result of indiscriminate fire.’

And I know Israel’s supporters would say, why would Israel ever do that, right? I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it. The point is that when you have mass dehumanization of a population, as you have had with Palestinians for decades, and especially after October 7th, and when you have virtual total impunity among soldiers, again, reared in that culture of dehumanization, also enraged by what Hamas and others did on October 7th, and they know that there’s going to be impunity, these kind of things happen. They happen in every army, but in particular, in this case, you have it at an extraordinary scale because of the degree of the dehumanization, and the fact that you have a completely defenseless population in Gaza, and so you have the targeted killing of children.

It’s also worth remembering that all of this is taking place in the context in which Israeli leaders have repeatedly said that what they would like in Gaza is for Palestinians to leave. The Israeli defense minister said this very recently, that Israel’s policy is ‘voluntary migration.’ Voluntary, right? You basically make the place completely uninhabitable, and then you say, ‘I think it would be great if you went somewhere else, we’ll help you go somewhere else,’ right? And in those contexts, terror towards the population incentivizes people to leave.

If people who watch that Scott Wiener video would also read this UN report, it wouldn’t, I think, make them believe that it’s right to act like an a*****e, or it’s wise to act like an a*****e, but it might allow them to understand this kind of rage, which is so bewildering to so many pro-Israel Jews, that they can’t imagine it could come from any other force other than the kind of historical recesses of antisemitism, which have now just bubbled up back up to the surface.

The thing that I think people in the pro-Israel world don’t understand, or they won’t face, is that just because they are turning a blind eye and systematically not looking carefully at what Israel is doing to Palestinians, it doesn’t mean that other people aren’t looking. Other people are looking. And those other people therefore feel a sense of anger, even rage, at what Israel’s doing because it’s not pathological to respond to a situation where Israel has killed 5,000 children under the age of 5 and be angry about it. That’s a pretty normal, I would say, healthy human reaction. And it doesn’t require any degree of antisemitism to have that anger, even that rage.

But when Israel’s supporters in the Jewish community don’t look at any of these things themselves, they can’t understand the rage as coming from any other place than antisemitism. And we can recognize that there are good ways to deploy that rage, constructive and decent ways to convey that rage, and ways that are counterproductive and that are nasty and vicious, and ones that we shouldn’t support.

But understanding the reasons for the rage I think is the beginning of understanding how we can get to a place where we don’t have politicians being treated like Scott Wiener was, but more importantly—more importantly, far more importantly—we don’t have Palestinian children being slaughtered like this. Because if you’re upset at the assault on Scott Wiener’s dignity that you see in these videos, surely you should be a hundred, a thousand, a million times more upset at the mass destruction of human life that Israel has committed in Gaza.

If you can’t understand that, it seems to me, then you’ve completely lost the plot. And my worry is that people, because they turn away again and again and again from looking in the eye what Israel is doing, they can’t have a rational diagnosis for the anger, indeed the rage, that we see reflected at Israel and Israel’s supporters today.

Our guests are Aslı Bâli, professor international law at Yale, and Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. These two are near the top of the list of people I’d want to advise the next Democratic president. They care deeply about the United States, but see past the exceptionalism that prevents so many in Washington from understanding American foreign policy’s actual impact on the world.

In a perfect illustration of the insanity of contemporary Washington, Trita—whose predictions about this criminal and catastrophic war in Iran have been proven entirely correct—is being threatened with deportation. We talk about why this war happened, how it has changed the Middle East, and whether Washington will ever learn.

Topics include:

How Trump, and America, got to this point

How the far right and far left have intersected on Israel

Stopping Israel’s aggression in Lebanon and the region generally

Trump’s repression of his critics

Trita’s appearance on Tucker Carlson

A monthly “Ask Me Anything” session is the one perk offered to Premium paid subscribers only. A sample question and answer is free for all.

Topics include:

* Israel bombing Lebanon

* Cenk Uygur

* The Brooklyn Food Co-Op Israel boycott

* The BDS movement

* Right of return negotiations in Oslo

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guests will be Aslı Bâli, professor international law at Yale, and Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. When I imagine the people I’d want to advise the next Democratic president, Asli and Trita are near the top of my list. They care deeply about the United States but they’re not American exceptionalists, which helps them see past the mythology that prevents so many in Washington from understanding American foreign policy’s actual impact on the rest of the world. In a perfect illustration of the insanity of contemporary Washington, Trita— whose predictions about this criminal and catastrophic war have been proven entirely correct—is being threatened with deportation. We’ll talk about why this war happened, how it has changed the Middle East and world, and whether Washington will ever learn. Please join us.

Ask Me Anything

This Thursday, June 25, at 4 PM Eastern, we will hold an Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.

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!), Zachary Jablow writes about why the US media still pretends that America’s Mideast wars are about democracy.

The Jewish candidate for New York City comptroller who wants to divest from Israel bonds.

On the Spiritually Incorrect podcast, I talked about American Christians, American Jews and the US debate over Israel.

See you on Thursday and Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I’ve done a couple conversations recently with folks who argued that if there were equality under the law in Israel-Palestine—if Jews and Palestinians, were treated equally under the law wherever they lived, whether that was in one state or in two states where Jews and Palestinians both lived and were treated equally under the law, or in a confederation, you know, something in between—that liberal democracy would fail, that there would be some kind of dictatorship or authoritarianism, and also that there would be tremendous, tremendous violence, terrible bloodshed. This was really their primary rejoinder to my argument that, equality under the law would better serve the people who live in Israel-Palestine today than the system where you have now, where Jews enjoy legal rights, and Palestinians either hold no citizenship or a kind of second-class citizenship.

And I think it’s just worth pausing on this argument that equality under the law would produce a dictatorship, you know, authoritarianism, and also tremendous bloodshed. What I find odd about the argument is that it’s imagining terrible things in the future that could happen if a true liberal democracy failed, without acknowledging that those same terrible things that folks are warning about exist now.

It’s odd to say that an Israel-Palestine that treated everybody equally under the law might not succeed as a liberal democracy, without acknowledging that Israel is not a liberal democracy for Palestinians today. Most of the Palestinians who live under Israeli control, those in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, don’t hold Israeli citizenship—a very small number in East Jerusalem, but generally, vast majority in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem live under the control of the State of Israel. It has life and death power over them, but they can’t be citizens of the state in which they live. They can’t vote for the government that has life and death decision-making power over them. In the West Bank, they live under military law, under a completely different legal system than their Jewish neighbors, right?

So, this is not by anyone’s definition, I think, could be considered a liberal democracy. This is the situation in which most Palestinians live. A minority of Palestinians, so-called Arab-Israelis, have a kind of second-class citizenship where they can vote, but the structure of the state is designed to prioritize, in many, many, many ways, prioritize the needs of Israeli Jews over them, right?

But when people say that liberal democracy might not succeed, they seem to be ignoring the fact that Israel is not a liberal democracy for Palestinians now. And then when they say, well, this situation, a situation in which people were treated equally under the law, might be tremendously violent, I wonder, are they paying attention to how violent the current situation is?

Israel has killed maybe 100,000 Palestinians, based on the best estimates we have in Gaza alone, right? That’s maybe roughly, you know, 5% of the population not even counting the injured. And the killing continues. Israel’s continuing to kill Palestinians despite this ceasefire, not to mention the many who are dying because there’s been no rebuilding of the medical infrastructure because there’s no sewage system, right? This is a recipe for continued death in Gaza on a pretty significant scale. And in the West Bank, you have attacks and killings of Palestinians virtually constantly, right?

So, when you say Israel-Palestine might succumb, might be a very, very violent place, you have to measure that against how extraordinarily violent it is for Palestinians today. And I think part of this move of saying Israel-Palestine might be very dangerous, might be very violent, is that it actually simply kind of ignores what the reality is for Palestinians today, and in a way, suggests that the only real question that we should be concerned about is, would it be more or less dangerous for Israeli Jews?

But even there Israel is a very dangerous place for Israeli Jews, too. Not nearly as dangerous as for Palestinians, but when you compare it to the life situations of Jews in virtually every other large Jewish community in the world, living as an Israeli Jew is much more dangerous. Twelve hundred Israeli Jews were killed on October 7th. Israelis have continued to die and be wounded in the wars in Israel’s assault on Gaza, in fighting against Hezbollah.

So, again, when one says this could be a dangerous place, one has to ask, compared to what Israel is currently an extraordinarily dangerous place for Palestinians. Really, probably being a Palestinian under Israeli control is one of the most dangerous situations you could possibly be in in the world, certainly in Gaza, and even in the West Bank, and even for Jews, despite their legal supremacy and their relative safety, this situation of domination and oppression, structural violence against Palestinians, produces this counter-violence, and also creates incentives for other groups, whether, like, Hezbollah or Iran, to come in on the Palestinian side, and also use violence against Israeli Jews. Which means that Israeli Jews are going into bomb shelters, right, all the time in a way that Jews in the United States, in France, in Australia, in Britain, in Canada, no matter what you think of the dangers of antisemitism, those places are simply not doing at all, right?

So, it just seems to me, if we’re going to have an honest conversation about the potential perils of trying to move towards equality under the law in Israel-Palestine, which is a very, very frightening prospect for many, many Jews—I think much less frightening prospect for Palestinians, but a frightening prospect for Israeli Jews—we have to compare that against the baseline of how authoritarian and how extraordinarily violent Israel-Palestine is today.

And unless you’re facing that squarely, it seems to me, you can’t have a productive conversation about the potential risks and the potential opportunities in trying to move from a situation that is now classified as apartheid by the world’s leading human rights organizations towards a legal reality in which people are treated equally under the law, regardless of whether they’re Palestinian or Jewish.

Our guest is Munther Isaac, a Palestinian minister and theologian based in the West Bank who runs the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice. He gained international attention for his Christmas 2023 sermon, Christ in the Rubble. We talk about Palestinian life in the West Bank, Munther’s critique of Christian Zionism, his views of Hamas and his interview with Tucker Carlson.

Topics include:

How Isaac’s understanding of scripture leads him to a very different worldview than American conservative Christians like Mike Huckabee

Maintaining faith in a just God in an unjust world

Christian-Islamic relations within Palestine

Responding to the argument that a Muslim-dominated Palestine would oppress other religions

The argument that resistance should be non-violent

How to think about Tucker Carlson

Dan Shapiro served as ambassador to Israel under the Obama administration. He’s currently Distinguished Fellow at the Scrowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council. Shapiro and I hold very different views about what needs to happen in Israel-Palestine, so I invited him to discuss them.

Topics include:

Why there has been no two-state solution

Should the US have conditioned aid on an end to settlement growth?

Does Israel practice apartheid?

Why should a Palestinian state be demilitarized but not Israel?

Why should Hamas be excluded from Palestinians elections but Ben Gvir be allowed to run in Israeli ones?

How power affects what is considered realistic and fair

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

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

Cited in Today’s Video

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

B’Tselem on Military Order 101.

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

Neve Gordon on “human shields.”

Yoav Gallant’s statement on October 9, 2023.

Things to Read

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

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Josh Nathan-Kazis writes about how the Israel Day Parade backfired.

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

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

Israel’s new strategy for changing global opinion.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Topics include:

Why is Israel in constant conflict with Lebanon?

What will become of Gaza and its people?

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

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

The need for a new generation of presidential advisors

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

Cited in Today’s Video

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

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

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

Things to Read

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

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

See you on Thursday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

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

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

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

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

Muhammad says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Topics include:

Why have segments of the American right turned against Israel?

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

Is right-wing antisemitism influencing the left?

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

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

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

Topics include:

Is Israel a liberal democracy?

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

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

Should Palestinian refugees have the right to return?

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

Ask Me Anything

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

Cited in Today’s Video

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

Things to Read

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

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Mari Cohen reflects on the legacy of former ADL head Abe Foxman.

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

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

Reader Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This conversation was co-sponsored by Jewish Currents.

Topics include…

Polarization may not be as bad as we think

Sanctions against Israel

Money in politics and fundraising ethically

El-Sayed’s relationship with Jews and Judaism

Problematic allies like Tucker Carlson

Using the term “genocide”

Running in America as a Muslim

How to deal with the Supreme Court

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

Topics include…

The difficulty for some Jews of declaring oneself anti-Zionist

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

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

The morality and necessity of BDS

The loneliness of the anti-Zionist Israeli

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

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

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

Cited in Today’s Video

Tucker Carlson’s interview with Tyler Oliveira.

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

Things to Read

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

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

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

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

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

Appearances

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

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

Reader Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Molly Crabapple responds:

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

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

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

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

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 at the margins. There are differences of tactics, but there’s no raising of fundamental questions, right? It seems to me the thing that we should be asking of anybody who wants to be involved in U.S. policy towards Iran or Israel in the next democratic administration is, first of all, that you never, ever talk about these military actions without centering the question of the cost to human beings, right? If you think that there is some value to military action, you always have to face it and look straight in the eye, the human lives that will be lost, right, which get no discussion in this conversation.

Secondly, that you should never discuss something like U.S. military or Israeli military action against Iran or Lebanon or anyone else without centering questions of international law. It is a profound and fundamental violation of international law to attack a country that does not pose an imminent threat. I actually think Iran poses no threat at all to the United States, let alone an imminent threat, and no actual genuine threat to Israel, which is vastly more powerful.

To have these conversations without centering international law, and indeed U.S. law, in which presidents don’t have the right to launch wars without Congressional support, it seems to me is to fundamentally buy into the set of assumptions that have cost the United States and cost the people in the Middle East so, so deeply.

And thirdly, that anyone who wants to be considered seriously for a position in a Democratic administration in the future should, if they’re going to talk about the question of Iran’s nuclear program, they should also talk about Israel’s nuclear program. It’s just nonsensical to talk about the danger of Iran having nuclear weapons, when it has no nuclear weapons, and not mention the fact that Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons and is not even a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The only justifiable kind of foundation for that would be to suggest that somehow Iran is uniquely aggressive in a way that Israel is not. But again, how can anyone possibly seriously argue that Iran is somehow uniquely aggressive in the Middle East, when, again, Israel has been now accused of genocide by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, when it’s displaced a million people from its homes in Lebanon. So, it seems to me these should be the foundations, I think, for this kind of conversation that we should expect from Democratic foreign policy figures: that the centering of the human lives that are lost when the United States goes to war, a centering of questions of international U.S. law, and no conversation about the nuclear issue without also a discussion of the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons as well.

All of this is so completely absent from this conversation that Dan Shapiro has with Mark Dubas that it seems to me a kind of a case study in what we need to make sure is avoided in terms of the kinds of people who enter into the next Democratic administration and make policy towards the Middle East.

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.

Our guest this week is Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of three remarkable books on the relationship between the United States, Israel and Iran. For as long as I’ve followed Trita’s work, he’s been warning that if hawks in Washington got their way, we would end up with the kind of catastrophe we’re witnessing in the Middle East. I invited him to give us a sense of what the Middle East and the world will look like going forward.

Topics include…

the likelihood of peace talks failing

the importance of Lebanon

how this war has affected Iran’s internal trajectory

Iran’s nuclear capabilities

the war’s effect on the US and Israeli militaries

how Trump came to the decision to fight this war

facing charges of self-hatred from the diaspora

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of three remarkable books on the relationship between the United States, Israel and Iran. For as long as I’ve followed Trita’s work, he’s been warning that if hawks in Washington got their way, we would end up with the kind of catastrophe we’re currently witnessing in the Middle East. I want to ask him how this war will end— if it ever truly does— and what Iran, the Middle East and the world will look like afterwards. Please join us.

Things to Read

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

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane writes about the Democratic presidential candidates who are turning against Israel.

Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti on how Iran will use the Strait of Hormuz to end sanctions and isolate the US.

Nate Silver on why Trump’s approval rating will likely never recover from this war.

Ziad Abu-Rish on why Lebanon won’t disarm Hezbollah.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Mara Kronenfeld, Executive Director of UNRWA USA, about what UNRWA does, and about the lies spread told about it.

I talked to the Wisdom of Crowds podcast about whether Israel, or any state, has a right to exist.

Last week, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.

Appearances

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

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

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, I’ve been noticing that some of the people who still support this war are saying that those of us who oppose it want America to lose. This is a kind of a common rhetorical strategy one hears during war. It kind of diverts the conversation away from the legitimacy and wisdom of a war to suggesting that people in that country who oppose the war are kind of unpatriotic. So, it’s the kind of thing that was said during Vietnam. It’s, I’m sure, the kind of thing that Vladimir Putin and his comrades have been saying in Russia to people who oppose the war in Ukraine.

And it is a tricky charge to deal with, right? Because even in an unjust war, one could imagine that feeling like you wanted your country to lose would be a difficult thing. But I think there are cases in which one has to forthrightly say, yes, I want my country to lose. Those circumstances would be one in which there was a war that had overwhelming popular support among the people in your country, but you thought it was wrong, and you wanted your country to lose.

In Israel, for instance, this is a war that has overwhelming popular support. Even Netanyahu’s Jewish political opponents support it. It has widespread support among Jewish Israelis. So, if you say, it’s hard to say in this war I want Netanyahu to lose without saying I want Israel to lose because Netanyahu is waging the war with the support of Israel’s Jewish citizens, who are the vast majority of Israel’s citizens.

In the United States, though, I think it’s different. Which is to say, I think one can say that I want Donald Trump to lose this war—and I do—without saying that I want America to lose the war, that I think we can distinguish this as Donald Trump’s war without saying it’s America’s war. Why? First of all, because the American public has never supported this war from the very beginning, and because there was never a process of consulting the American people about going to war, as should have been required by the Constitution, in which Congress would have voted to authorize the war. There hasn’t been such a vote, and I think if there were such a vote, the pro-war position would lose. So, this really is a war without popular support, without popular consultation, and in that way, I think one can distinguish it as Trump’s war without saying it’s America’s war.

It’s also the case that I think if Donald Trump loses this war, America will be better off. That America and Americans will be better off if Donald Trump loses than if Donald Trump wins. First of all, that’s because the consequences of Donald Trump losing this war will not be catastrophic for Americans. We can imagine circumstances where if you say you want your country to lose the war, that means you want… that means accepting that your country is going to be occupied, invaded.

Let’s say you were a German who wanted the Nazis to lose World War II. I would say that that person deserves a lot of—is an admirable person. But you would say so knowing that Germany losing that war would mean Germany ending up in ruins. You can say you want Donald Trump to lose this war against Iran, while recognizing the United States could lose the war, Trump can fail to achieve his aims vis-a-vis this war, and it will not lead to the United States being occupied, ruined, destroyed.

In fact, I think one can argue that Americans would be better off if Trump loses this war than if Trump wins, partly because Trump winning would empower him. This is already a man who’s seizing in blatantly unconstitutional ways, massive amounts of power, and extinguishing the rights of Americans, and potentially even extinguishing America as a liberal democracy. And the degree to which he’d be empowered by a victory in this war would actually empower him to go even further. And so, if one cares about America’s survival as a liberal democracy, you actually want Donald Trump to be disempowered, not to be empowered.

I also think it’s better for the world if Donald Trump loses this war, because if he wins this war, he will then likely use this as a template for further kinds of aggression. Part of the reason we’re in this place we are in the first place is because Donald Trump believes that he won the war in Venezuela by decapitating the regime. God only knows, imagine, can only imagine what he would do if he were able to do that same thing in Iran, what would be the next country that he—in his kind of mega-maniacal, imperial visions as kind of the world’s king—where else he might attack after that: Greenland or God knows where else.

So, I think one can say that the United States, and actually the world in general, will be better off if Donald Trump loses this war than if Donald Trump wins the war. And this kind of war, which is criminal, which is illegal, in which Donald Trump is every day boasting of the new war crimes that he’s going to inflict upon the Iranian people, this kind of war has to end in defeat if it’s going to be less likely that it continues, that it happens in the future, not only for Donald Trump, but for other leaders around the world, right? That leaders learn from one another, so the more successful this is, the more likely we will see more wars, criminal legal wars, with massive war crimes launched, not just for the United States, but by other countries around the world.

One might argue that we shouldn’t root for Donald Trump to lose, because then that means the Iranian regime stays in power, is even stronger, and so the Iranian people are losers. That one could make an argument, potentially, that we should want Donald Trump to win, because that would also be a victory for the Iranian people, who therefore would be liberated from their regime.

The problem with that argument, seems to me, is that Donald Trump’s real goal has never been, actually, to liberate the Iranian people. He’s been very clear that what he really wanted was a kind of Venezuela-style situation, in which he decapitated some level of the Islamic Republic and got some more compliant people there who, like Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela, would repress their own people, but would basically make oil deals with Trump and his friends and be compliant with Donald Trump.

So, I can understand the desire of people to not want the Islamic Republic to win. It’s a horrible regime. It’s done brutal and terrible things to its people. I very much do hope that that regime falls and is replaced by a more tolerant, more representative, you know, ideally a liberal democratic regime.

But I think to say that we should want Donald Trump to win because it would bring about that result for the Iranian people is very, very naive, given everything we know about Donald Trump and his deep preference for autocrats, particularly autocrats who put money in his pocket, as opposed to the messiness of actual democracy, which tends to mean that he has less control.

So, I think we can say, in this case, that we want, legitimately, that we want Donald Trump to lose this war. But for Donald Trump to lose this war is not for America to lose. Indeed, it may be part of America winning, in the sense that America survives as a liberal democracy, and that America can move away from the kind of utterly nakedly, appallingly, grotesquely lawless and violent state that it’s become, and I think America is more likely to move away from that if Donald Trump loses this war than if he wins.

Rabbi Dr. Ismar Schorsch is chancellor emeritus of The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and the Rabbi Herman Abramovitz Distinguished Professor of Jewish history. He’s had a long, illustrious career of service to the Jewish community. Last year, we spoke after he wrote critically about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. In a time when so many Jews are hungry for moral leadership, Rabbi Schorsch’s courage and decency have been all too rare.

I wanted to speak to him before the Passover holiday, as I and so many Jews are struggling to reconcile our Jewishness with opposition to Israel’s actions. I’m honored and grateful he agreed to speak with me again.

In the shadow of the war with Iran, Israel is doing terrible things in Lebanon: demolishing homes, killing more than one thousand people, displacing close to a million from their homes and perhaps pushing the country toward civil war. To discuss all this, our guest is Rami Khouri, a deeply knowledgeable commentator on Lebanese and international politics. He is Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, Director of the Anthony Shadid Archives Research Project, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center in Washington and author of the Rami G. Khouri Substack.

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. In the shadow of the war with Iran, Israel is doing terrible things in Lebanon: demolishing homes, killing more than one thousand people, displacing close to a million from their homes and perhaps pushing the country toward civil war. To discuss all this, our guest will be Rami Khouri, a deeply knowledgeable commentator on Lebanese and international politics. He is Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, Director of the Anthony Shadid Archives Research Project, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center in Washington and author of the Rami G. Khouri Substack. Please join us.

Cited in Today’s Video

I’m grateful to Dr. Dror Bondi, Corcoran Visiting Chair in Christian-Jewish Relations at Boston College, who brought the Heschel quote about Abravanel to my attention. He cites it in this lecture.

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 details the way Israel is using the current war to seize more Palestinian land in the West Bank.

On the It Could Happen Here podcast, Dana El Kurd explores intra-Palestinian debates about armed resistance.

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked with Sari Bashi, executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, about the dismissal of charges against five Israeli soldiers who were filmed violently abusing a Palestinian detainee in the Sde Teiman detention facility.

Appearances

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

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

Partnership

Starting today, all paid subscribers of The Beinart Notebook get a 50 percent discount on a one-year paid subscription to Robert Wright’s Nonzero Newsletter. I’ve known and respected Bob for decades — my earliest appearance on his show will turn 20 this year, and the latest happened earlier this month. He’s a rare voice of reason on questions ranging from foreign policy to psychology of tribalism to AI, and I think you’ll find a lot of value in his writing. The NonZero Newsletter is part of a broader effort Bob has been building called the NonZero Network — a group of independent Substack voices, including mine, as well as Glenn Loury, Kaiser Kuo, and others with whom I may not always agree on substance, but who share a commitment to intellectual honesty and reasoned analysis.

Reader Comment

A listener (who asked that their name be withheld) commented on last week’s video, in which I argued that synagogues should remove the “We Stand with Israel” signs that dot their lawns.

They write:

“I think you mischaracterize attacks on Zionist institutions. I have seen these attacks’ defenders on social media, and their line is not support for attacks of synagogues as such. It is, rather, support (or at least apologia) for attacking institutions that align themselves with the Israeli state. I saw some people claiming that Temple Israel [in Michigan] was sending money to the IDF. That sounds dubious—I’m not intimately familiar with the Israeli military’s funding strategies, but it seems unlikely that American congregations play a major role—but it is certainly true that many Jewish American institutions’ support for Israel goes beyond the purely notional. To say, then, that one should not attack Americans who ‘share a religion, an ethnic, national ancestry, a race,’ with some disfavored foreign country—in this case, Jews and Israel—is to box with a strawman. To the attack’s supporters, it’s not about Jewishness as such, under whichever of the four rubrics you name one wishes to conceive of it; it’s about Zionism, and it’s about Israel.”

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I recently came across a quote that just kind of stopped me, like, dead in my tracks, kind of almost dumbfounded, because it reflected a view of how Jews should live and think, which is so radically in contrast to the views propounded by the leadership of the organized American Jewish community today.

The quote is from a biography that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote of a remarkable Portuguese 15th century figure named Isaac Abravanel. Now, Abravanel was an advisor to the Portuguese king, as well as being a very distinguished commentator on the Bible and philosopher of Jewish thought—really a remarkable synthesis of the kind that you were able to have on the Iberian Peninsula for a period of time.

And then in some ways reflects the kind of possibilities that might be imaginable in the United States today, in which Jews have the freedom to both wield political power and also study Torah in a serious way. And this is what Heschel writes about Abravanel and the Jews of his period in the Iberian Peninsula.

Heschel writes, ‘the Jews, who had held imposing positions in the state, left their Spanish homeland. Had they remained on the Iberian Peninsula, they most probably would have taken part in the enterprises of the conquistadors.’ And then he says, this is the most astonishing line, then Heschel says, ‘the desperate Jews of 1492 could not know that a favor had been done them. That a favor had been done them.’

What Heschel is saying is that the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula were lucky to have been expelled because it meant that people like Abravanel, who had these positions of great power, that they then did not become morally complicit in the terrible crimes that the Spanish and the Portuguese were to commit as conquistadors in the New World.

Now, one can very legitimately argue with Heschel’s perspective, I mean, it is quite radical, and I’m not sure even I would necessarily endorse his view that one should say thank you for having been expelled from one’s home because it means that then one is not morally complicit in the terrible crimes that the kind of empire in which you played a prominent role has committed. It’s a very, very audacious thing to say. I don’t think I would go as far as what Heschel is saying.

But it is just an astonishing, astonishing contrast to contrast that moral perspective that Heschel is offering to the dominant attitude in the organized American Jewish community today. And if you look at the leaders of America’s most influential Jewish organizations, the Anti-Defamation League, but also the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, others, they’ve all been, in recent months, basically saying the same thing.

Which is that American Jews, because we’re in an era of rising antisemitism—which is true—that Jews have a responsibility only to themselves. Jonathan Greenblatt, in particular, has this new slogan, which he likes to repeat, which is, put your own mask on first. That basically, because we are in a precarious moment for Jews, and because, allegedly, other groups have abandoned Jews, you know, American Jews, in our hour of need, by which people like Greenblatt mean they didn’t wholeheartedly support the destruction and genocide in Gaza, therefore, Jews are relieved of their moral responsibilities to fight for other people in the United States, no matter what they’re going through.

Now, this is a radical contrast to the perspective that Heschel is offering in his biography of Abravanel. And one might be tempted to say, well, you know, I mean, this is a completely otherworldly, profoundly naive perspective. How could someone, make this argument, you know? But Heschel wrote his biography of Abravanel in Berlin in 1937 under the rule of the Nazis. In 1937, Heschel wrote those words, right?

And so, you just think a man who could write those words about Jewish moral responsibility, about the necessity that Jews not participate in the brutalization and of oppression of others, what right on earth do we have to tell Heschel that he’s naive for writing that? Because we’re worried about antisemitism in the United States in 2026. He’s writing in Berlin in 1937, and yet he still was not saying, let’s put on our own mask first, right? He was actually saying something radically the opposite.

Again, not to say that Heschel wasn’t concerned about the preservation of Jewish life. He himself escaped from Nazi Germany. Of course, he was profoundly concerned about that, but not at the expense of the notion that Jews had a responsibility to care about others. And I think what he’s saying by writing about Abravanel, and focusing on a Portuguese Jew who is, for a period of time at least, has great influence in the kingdom in which he lives is to suggest that when you have greater power, you have an even greater moral obligation to try to oppose the crimes that are being committed, to not be complicit, right?

I mean, I don’t think Heschel could have imagined a figure like Stephen Miller. I think he would have literally… it would have shaken him to the core to imagine America producing a Jew like Stephen Miller, with his power doing what he’s doing today. But in writing about Abravanel, he was in some ways warning about that possibility and making a kind of remarkable, even extreme statements about the importance of Jews never allowing ourselves to create figures like we, in the American Jewish community, have now created in Stephen Miller.

I can’t imagine, I can’t imagine what Abraham Joshua Heschel would say were he alive today about the people who claim to speak for the organized American Jewish community, people who have so radically repudiated his moral fervor in his belief that Jews have a profound, fervent responsibility to take moral responsibility for all of the people in the societies in which they live.

Our guest is Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and political analyst with Israeli citizenship. Since this war began, I’ve struggled to understand why most Israeli Jews support it. I discussed this last week with the Iranian, Jewish, and Israeli writer Orly Noy. But sometimes, the people who best understand a society are those who live within it as outsiders. It’s that experience of marginality, of seeing things from below, that often animates the insights of Black writers in the US and long animated the insights of Jewish writers in Europe. That’s why I’m turning to Diana, a Palestinian in Israel, to help understand Jewish Israeli society in this awful moment. She’s someone I’ve been learning from for a long time. I’m grateful I had the chance to do so again.

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and political analyst based in Israel. Since this war began, I’ve struggled to understand why most Israeli Jews support it. I discussed this last week with the Iranian, Jewish, and Israeli writer and translator Orly Noy. But sometimes, the people who best understand a society are those who live within it as outsiders. It’s that experience of marginality, of seeing things from below, that often animates the insights of Black writers in the US and long animated the insights of Jewish writers in Europe. That’s why I’m turning to Diana, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, to help understand Jewish Israeli society in this awful moment. She’s someone I’ve been learning from for a long time. And I’m grateful to have the chance to do so again this Friday. Please join us.

Things to Read

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

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane explains AIPAC’s attack on liberal Zionist politicians.

Greg Sargent on how the Iran War is hastening the end of the Trump coalition.

An insightful discussion with Esfandyar Batmanghelidj on the American Prestige podcast about how this war might change the long term trajectory of the Gulf countries.

Last week I spoke to Bob Wright (whose newsletter I strongly recommend) about Israel, antisemitism and this war.

On March 26, Jason Stanley will speak with Nikole Hannah-Jones in Brooklyn about his book, Erasing History.

Appearances

On March 17, I’ll be speaking at George Washington University.

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

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

I want to say two things about this terrible attack on a synagogue in Michigan. The first is that no matter what Israel does, no matter how immoral or brutal or horrifying, it doesn’t justify attacking a synagogue or justifying attacking American Jews in any way. There’s a basic principle here. The principle is that Americans are not responsible for the actions of foreign governments or foreign organizations just because they share a religion, an ethnic, national ancestry, a race, with that state or foreign organization.

So, by that principle, it is just as wrong to target a synagogue because you’re upset at what Israel did, as it was when people attacked Chinese Americans because they were angry at the Chinese government during COVID, or when people attack Muslim Americans because they’re angry at Al-Qaeda, or ISIS, or Hamas, or Iran, or as when the United States government itself held Japanese Americans responsible and put them in internment camps because of what the Empire of Japan had done in Pearl Harbor. These things are all fundamentally wrong.

And—not but, but and—Synagogues in the United States should take down the signs that many have on their lawn that say, ‘We stand with Israel.’ They should take them down, because those signs make the congregants less safe, and because they are immoral. Because they create a climate of… they make the Congress less safe, because they encourage exactly the same conflation between Israel and American Jews that we must resist, and because in this moment, doing so is immoral.

Now, if it were morally correct for our synagogues to say in this moment, ‘We stand with Israel,’ then I think you could make an argument that even though those signs may make the congregants less safe, that it would be legitimate to do so. You could say that it’s even courageous for Jews in a synagogue to come together and say: we’re going to take a moral action that’s going to create some risk to our safety because it’s the right thing to do.

But how could one possibly argue that this is the right thing to do in this moment? That it is morally right to put yourself at risk by conflating yourself with the Israeli government when the Israeli government is doing the things that it is doing now.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, that the Russian Orthodox churches in the United States, that they had signs saying ‘We stand with Russia.’ By putting those signs out there, they would be putting, to some degree, the people inside those churches at risk, because there would be people who were furious about what Russia had done in Ukraine, that might take out their anger against people in those churches. But beyond that, it would be immoral to say, given what Russia has done in Ukraine, for a church to say, ‘We stand with Russia.’

And what Israel has done over the past few years, to Palestinians, and now, also, in Lebanon and Iran, is worse than what Russia has done in Ukraine. It’s worse. Let’s just look, for starters, at the numbers. The best numbers we have suggest that since the war that began in 2022 with Russia’s invasion—expanded invasion, because they first invaded in 2014—that perhaps 100,000-150,000 Ukrainians have been killed, which is horrifying.

In Gaza, the best numbers we have is that perhaps 100,000 have been killed by Israel, directly and indirectly. So, that’s a slightly smaller number. But remember, Ukraine has 40 million people. There are only about 2.2 million people in Gaza. It’s a much, much smaller area, and yet almost as many people have been killed. The percentage of people in Gaza who have been killed is 4-5% of the population. In Ukraine, it’s perhaps a quarter of a percent.

The oppression and the violence that Israel has committed against the people in Gaza also is much older, long predates what Russia has done in Ukraine under Vladimir Putin. The people in Gaza are there because their families were expelled from what’s now Israel in 1948. Gaza has been under Israeli occupation since 1967, and that occupation never ended, contrary to what you often hear in American Jewish spaces. Because even when Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers in 2005, it maintained virtually all control over people and goods coming in and out of Gaza by air, land, and sea. Yes, with some assistance at the Rafah crossing with Egypt, but even there, Israel had a lot of control of what goes in and out.

So, Israel has killed many, many more people in Gaza than Russia has done in Ukraine. And the oppression of Palestinians in Gaza and beyond long predates Russia’s invasion in 2014, and then expanded invasion in 2022. And that doesn’t even include now what Israel has been doing over the last couple of weeks. Estimates suggest that Israel has killed 850 people in Lebanon, including perhaps 100 children. The U.S. and Israel have killed, estimates are, about 1,300 civilians in Iran. These attacks on the oil facilities have created this toxic black rain that will have health and environmental consequences for years, maybe even decades.

Now, I am very, very familiar that the Israeli government and its supporters have all kinds of justifications for all of these actions. And frankly, Vladimir Putin has his own justifications, and I think they’re all fundamentally wrong. They’re all fundamentally wrong. Because no justification, nothing justifies the targeting of, the mass killing of civilians, especially when you are targeting them, as Israel has targeted them in Gaza, for instance, when it shut off food, fuel, and water at various intervals after October 7th, or when you attacked oil refineries that you know are going to have these toxic environmental effects.

So, if it’s wrong to put out a sign, for a church to put out a sign that says ‘We stand with Russia,’ surely it’s also wrong. For a synagogue to say in this moment, ‘We stand with Israel.’ And it’s surely wrong to put yourself, your congregants, at risk for something that is also immoral. So, what could the synagogues say on these signs, on their lawns instead? They could say, ‘We stand with Israelis and Palestinians.’

Or they could do something more radical than that. They could say: ‘This is a house of Torah.’ This is a house of Torah. The reason I say this would be a more radical act is it would be a response, it would be a re-centering of Torah in American Judaism. What has happened in so many of the synagogues, as exemplified by the ‘We Stand with Israel’ side outside, is that Israel has eclipsed Torah as the object of veneration, the object of worship inside these religious holy spaces.

I say worship and veneration because when the synagogues put the sign out that says, ‘We stand with Israel,’ it’s not like they then reconsider that sign every year or a couple years based on what Israel’s doing. Oh, we stand with Israel, we don’t stand with Israel because we think Israel is acting in some moral or immoral way. You know, Israel’s human rights organizations have now just said that it’s committing apartheid and genocide. Maybe we should reconsider that sign. No, that’s not the way this operates. Because it’s not actually a statement of political support. It’s more like a statement of worship, that fundamental to our Judaism is our belief in this state, no matter what the state does. That’s what I mean by worship rather than mere support.

And replacing that with a sign that says ‘This is a home for Torah’ would be a moving away from this idolatrous centering of the state as an object of unconditional good, right? Unconditional value, irrespective of how it treats the people inside of that state, and a reassertion that what is at the center of this synagogue, what’s at the center of Judaism is Torah, is our religious texts that are far, far older and deeper than the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. And what this synagogue stands for is the study of those texts as a way to try to understand how we as individuals and how the Jewish people should live, right? And that would be a radical act in this moment because, in so many American Jewish spaces, Torah has been eclipsed by the idolatry of the worship of the state.

And now, now we see not only that that form of idolatry is making American Jews less safe, but it’s sapping the fundamental, moral core of what these synagogues are supposed to be about. Torah speaks in many, many voices. I don’t want to sanitize it. I don’t want to suggest that there are not horrifying things in Jewish religious tradition. But the best of our religious tradition suggests that by studying these texts, we can become more sensitive to the value of all human life, that we can become more ethically refined, and we can have a deeper understanding of the preciousness of the people with whom we share the world.

When you put out a sign that says, and keep it there, ‘We stand with Israel,’ even after something that has been called a genocide by Israel’s own leading human rights organization, B’Tselem, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, it seems to me you are contributing to a diminution, a denigration of our moral, ethical refinement.

If a synagogue wants to have a conversation about whether it’s moral to have this sign, ‘We stand with Israel,’ on its lawn right now, I would suggest do so after you have invited someone from Gaza to speak to you. Do so after you’ve invited someone whose family is now in Lebanon or in Iran under these bombs falling on them. Listen to what they’ve gone through, and then ask yourself, is this the best message that we can advertise to the world? ‘We stand with Israel’ in this moment? Or might a statement like ‘This is a home for Torah’ be a better way of understanding what it means to be a Jew in this moment.

Our guest is Chris Hayes, host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNOW and the Why Is This Happening? Podcast. He’s also author most recently of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. Chris sits at a difficult and crucial intersection, between the progressive world (he’s the former Washington editor of The Nation) and mainstream television. I want to talk about how he navigates it, including on Israel-Palestine, what progressives should understand about the American media, and how his work has changed given the perils now facing American democracy.

I taped a conversation with Orly Noy, an Israeli writer born in Iran who translates Farsi literature into Hebrew. We talked about the excruciating experience of watching her adopted country attack the other nation that she considers home.

Cited in Today’s Video

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

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.

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.

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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