Episoder
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I talked with the Palestinian-Norwegian writer Iyad el-Baghdadi about the regional implications of the Assad regime’s fall in Syria and Israel’s military intervention there.
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It’s not about the legal definition. It’s about Western and Jewish exceptionalism.
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Manglende episoder?
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com
I talked with my extraordinary CUNY colleague, the Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek, author of The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria.
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It’s Wonderful Assad is Gone. But Neither He, Nor Iran, Was Ever Israel’s Real Problem.
There will be no Zoom call this Friday. We’ll resume on Friday, December 20 at 1 PM with a conversation with Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller, author of the new anthology, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture.
But I’ve recorded a Zoom interview (without a live audience) with my extraordinary CUNY colleague, the Syrian-American journalist Alia Malek, author of The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria. Paid subscribers will get it today. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Rebecca Traister, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky and Bret Stephens.
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader recently recommended Naomi Shihab Nye’s young adult novel, Habibi, about Liyana, a Palestinian-American girl from St. Louis whose family returns to West Bank, a place she struggles to make home.
Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.
Sources Cited in this Video
Discussing Israel’s enemies in 1982, Benjamin Netanyahu said, “There is a major force behind most of these groups that is the Soviet Union. If you take away the Soviet Union, it’s chief proxy, the PLO, international terrorism would collapse.”
The Nkomati Accords between South Africa and Mozambique.
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!), Gary Monroe chronicles the end of Jewish Miami Beach and the rise of Little Haiti.
If you’re in New York, you can still catch the end of the always-excellent Other Israel film festival.
I talked to The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill about the debate over Gaza.
Housekeeping
We’re using a new system to share transcripts from Zoom interviews. They’ll no longer appear in emails but are still available for anyone who wants them by opening this post in your web browser (not the Substack app) and clicking the “transcript” button just below the video.
See you a week from Friday,
Peter
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com
Our guest is Muzaffar Chishti, Senior Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, and one of America’s foremost experts on immigration policy. We’ll talk about Donald Trump’s plans for the mass deportation of undocumented—and perhaps even legal— immigrants. We’ll talk about the human cost of such a roundup and what it might do to the United States.
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When Even Billionaires Are Afraid to Criticize Trump, What Does That Mean for the Rest of US?
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com
Our guest is the renowned, Israeli-born, Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, who teaches at Brown University. In August, he described returning to Israel and encountering students whose “rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history.” This month he concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. We’ll discuss the genocid…
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It’s a Test of Whether International Law Applies to the West
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Our guest is The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, author of one of the most famous essays of the first Trump presidency, which he turned into a book: The Cruelty is the Point. We’ll talk about what is similar, and different, as Trump returns, and how Americans should respond to our country’s capacity for cruelty, both at home and abroad.
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Our call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday at 1 PM Eastern, our new regular time.
Our guest will be The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, author of one of the most famous essays of the first Trump presidency, which he turned into a book: The Cruelty is the Point. We’ll talk about what is similar, and different, as Trump returns, and how Americans should respond to our country’s enormous capacity for cruelty, both at home and abroad.
Paid subscribers will get an email with the Zoom link, and then once it airs, they’ll get the video. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Rebecca Traister, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader recently recommended Naomi Shihab Nye’s young adult novel, Habibi, about Liyana, a Palestinian-American girl from St. Louis whose family returns to West Bank, a place she struggles to make home.
Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.
Sources Cited in This Video
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Parshat Vayera.
Parshat Vayera and the Pittsburgh shooting.
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 details the Trump administration’s coming crackdown on campus speech.
Progressive New York State Representative Zohran Mamdani interviews Trump voters in Brooklyn and Queens.
Israeli reporter Barak Ravid tells the Jewish Federations of North America that “we are much closer to Israeli settlements being built in Gaza than hostages coming home from Gaza.”
Upcoming Talks
On Tuesday, November 19, I’ll be speaking at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst about “Protest, Zionism and Gaza.”
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. So, Rabbi Jonathan Sachs tells this story about the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe. And the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe tells his students: ‘you must live according to the times.’ And the students are a little puzzled by what exactly that means. And the Sith Libavitcher Rebbe explains, and I’m paraphrasing here, essentially that what ‘live by the times’ means is that you should use the weekly Torah portion as a lens through which to understand your time. You should see it as a reflection of the events that are happening around you in the world. And I think that’s a very powerful concept right now.
Yesterday, many Jews read in shul Parshat Vayera, and I want to read a little snippet from that week’s Torah portion. It goes: ‘G-d appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. He lifted his eyes and looked, and lo, three men were standing over against him; and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent entrance and bowed down to the earth.’
And Sachs makes the point that, as this passage is interpreted in Jewish tradition, the way it’s interpreted is that G-d comes to Abraham to speak to Abraham. And then Abraham sees these three men, these three strangers who are coming towards him, and he essentially tells G-d to pause. Says G-d, sorry, I can’t talk to you right now. There is a greater imperative that I have, which is to welcome these strangers. And then Abraham feeds them and bathes them.
And from this passage, the rabbis in tractate Shabbat in the Babylonian Talmud take the principle that greater is hospitality than receiving the divine presence. And then as the story continues, those three men, who turn out to be angels after giving Abraham and Sarah the news that Sarah will have a child, they go on to Sodom, the city of Sodom, where Abraham’s relative Lot lives. And Lot also welcomes them into his home, but because the city of Sodom is ferociously hostile to strangers, to outsiders, the people of Sedon come and demand that Lot hand over these strangers to them so they can do violence, indeed sexual violence, to these strangers. And when Lot refuses, they threaten him, and then the angels take Lot and his immediate family out and the city is destroyed.
I think to go back to the point of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, to read these Parsha according to the times, it seems to me really hard not to read this Parsha against the backdrop of the impending mass deportation of potentially millions of extremely vulnerable Americans by the Trump administration. And, you know, what happens in the wake of elections is that people want to be politically savvy. And so, they feel like, well, people have voted for a tough on immigration policy, so there must be some merit in this. There might be some wisdom in this. No, it’s certainly true that our immigration system is deeply, deeply problematic, that we need many, many, many more judges and officers to handle asylum claims, that our asylum system doesn’t work very well, that we need a much, much higher levels of legal immigration, that the whole system absolutely is very, very dysfunctional.
But the answer to that dysfunction, again, is to have an asylum process that works, and to have an immigration process that actually responds to the needs of the United States to bring a lot of people into the country, because actually our economy needs that, even though it also needs to redistribute the economic benefits better of that immigration. But the fact that many Americans voted for Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan doesn’t change the fact that it is a brutal, cruel policy that if implemented, even partially, will be a tremendous stain on this country. People need to remember that oftentimes things that are done in America that we feel most shameful about enjoyed widespread support from both the populace and many elites at the time.
And I think what Parshat Vayera, the point it makes, is you can’t actually have an authentic, genuine relationship with G-d if you don’t also care about vulnerable people in your midst. And in this case, the vulnerable people being the stranger, the outsider. Many of these undocumented immigrants, and again, this will also affect many, many legal immigrants as well, including people who’ve risked their lives for the United States, like people who were brought from Afghanistan, who fought alongside the United States in America’s long war there. These are many of the hardest working, most vulnerable, most decent people in the United States who are contributing the most and getting the least from our country. And to watch them be treated in this kind of brutal, dehumanizing, vicious way that we’re seeing is exactly the opposite of the message from this week’s Parsha.
And I think there’s something else to say about this week’s Parsha that should be particularly important for Jews to remember. Interestingly, again, in this spirit of living according to the times, it was also during Parshat Vayera that the Pittsburgh shooting massacre in the synagogue took place. And if you think about Lot as representing the role of the Jew, what does Lot do? He extends sympathy to the stranger and then is turned upon for having extended sympathy to the stranger himself. The Torah tells us 36 times that you should remember the heart of the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt. In a way, that’s what Lot does. And that makes him vulnerable to people who, because they hate the stranger, they then decide that he is also a stranger, that he is also an outsider.
And this is what happened in the Pittsburgh massacre in a way that the shooter initially was obsessed with the supposed threat of an immigrant invasion from Central America. But then because he saw that there was a synagogue nearby that was partnering with a Hebrew immigrant aid society to support the rights of immigrants and asylum seekers in the United States, he decided that Jews were complicit in this ‘invasion,’ that they were a danger. And so, he turned on them, just as the people of Sodom turned on Lot because Lot had welcomed the strangers in his midst.
And so, I think there is a very, very important message from our tradition here for Jews as well, and for the forces in the Jewish community that either support Trump outright or are going to accommodate to Trump in various ways, that this brutal nativist xenophobia that is going to blight and destroy the lives of so many undocumented immigrants mostly from the Global South is unlikely to end there. That this kind of cruelty, this kind of dehumanization doesn’t usually end with one group of people. And precisely because Jews have it in our tradition to stand up for the stranger and will disproportionately oppose what Trump wants to do, that will increase the risk that people turn on Jews just as the Pittsburgh shooter did and just as happened in the story with Lot in Sodom. And it’s why we need to not fall into the trap of thinking that because most Jews in America today are not immigrants, are not undocumented, have a relative degree of privilege that we can stand back from our gated kind of, you know, kind of worlds and look at this and say it doesn’t really affect us. I think the message of Parshat Vayera is that when you violate the stranger, you make everybody unsafe. And you disconnect yourself from G-d.
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Our guest is New York Magazine Editor-at-Large Rebecca Traister, among the best writers on gender and politics (and many other things) in America. This essay she wrote after Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 still captures many painful truths about the brutal burden facing not only women presidential candidates, but American women as a whole. They talked…
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These monthly conversations are usually reserved for Premium members, but given the gravity of this moment, we decided to make this one available to everybody.
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Just Because People Vote For Something Doesn’t Make It Right
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Our guest is Yale Philosophy Professor Jason Stanley, a world-renowned scholar of fascism and author of the new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. We talk about Donald Trump’s victory and what it means for liberal democracy in the United States.
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Our call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday at 1 PM Eastern. That will be our new regular time. (West Coast subscribers, we’ve heard you.)
Our guest will be Yale Philosophy Professor Jason Stanley, a world-renowned scholar of fascism and author of the new book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. We’ll talk about what happened in Tuesday’s election and the fate of the struggle between liberal democracy and fascism in the United States.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. One of the books that helped me understand the Nakba better is Raja Shehadeh’s Strangers in the House, a beautiful portrait of a relationship between a father and his son in a political environment made impossible by expulsion and oppression.
I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medical Aid to Palestinians. If you have other suggestions, please send them.
Responses to My Last Video
The unnamed newsletter subscriber I cited in this week’s video about the interconnectedness between American liberal democracy and the movement for Palestinian rights is David Goldstein. Here’s how he made the case in an email to me:
“We know that the trendlines among Democrats and independents are bending inexorably towards Palestinian support and away from blind Israel fealty. If those trendlines continue - and there’s every reason to believe they will – it’s only a matter of time before a democratic America stops financing Israel’s immoral/objectiveless wars and, in turn, conditions military support on reasonable behavior. It's inevitable. There’d be no way for a candidate to emerge from a Democratic primary without professing a saner and more humane stance on the issue. That's just where the party is.
But if Trump is elected and America ceases to be a functioning democracy, this burgeoning groundswell of Palestinian support won’t have any influence on American foreign policy. A democratic regime, even a benighted spineless one, will have no choice but to respond to the political pressure an increasingly pro-Palestinian constituency exerts on it if it wishes to remain in power. A Trump-led totalitarian regime that doesn't have to worry about getting voted out of office will not only ignore this pressure, but likely criminalize it, unleash violence to suppress it.
Put another way, the choice isn't just between the two candidates on the ballot; it's a choice between 1) voting to preserve a democratic political system in which pro-Palestinian support will inevitably change the fundamentals of the conflict and 2) voting to burn this system to the ground, thus rendering this political trend irrelevant and dooming future generations of Palestinians to the status quo or worse.
So, a vote for Harris isn’t a tacit endorsement of her disappointing stance on the conflict; nor is it a willingness to countenance America’s financial support of war crimes; it’s a vote to allow an increasingly Pro-Palestinian sentiment to matter in the future. It’s about fighting for the greater long-term Palestinian (and, ultimately, Israeli) good. It’s not holding one’s nose and sacrificing principles; it’s about providing the groundwork and infrastructure to continue the fight, flawed as the vehicle to do so may be.”
Another reader, Omar Khan, emailed to argue the opposite point:
“I happen to disagree with you in a most profound way regarding your logic around voting for VP Harris for the presidential ticket. We have no argument that Trump is the far worse candidate by a long shot. The only trouble is that relativism is fairly useless here: both candidates are essentially pro genocide, which already takes up the entire moral discussion. *After* being complicit with genocide, whether one is then better on reproductive rights, immigrant issues, tax policy, and so forth – while not exactly a moot point, becomes morally much less relevant.
Many years ago, I was privileged to be taught introduction to psychology at Penn by the professor who wrote the book – Dr. Gleitman. He had as a guest professor, Dr. Marty Seligman (the originator of the theory of learned helplessness). To my 17-year-old self, it was the first time of being presented with the famous ethical dilemma of ‘the trolley problem.’ In this case, he asked, ‘you’re driving and there’s a fork in the road; on the one side is a mother with two children, and on the other side are three old people crossing the road. Whom do you hit?’ And after the class had given its view on the matter, he said – ‘you hit…The brakes.’ It didn’t quite sidestep the dilemma as much as point out that sometimes we put ourselves in moral conundrums which are completely unnecessary – by assuming that they are created by ossified, unyielding conditions and people, when in fact we need to change the question.
Before then, I was the product of a Quaker high school education and some things were clear: first, let’s not define ‘evil’ that easily; it’s a pretty high bar for something to be called that. Second, once you have called something evil, then you know what you call the lesser of two evils? Evil.”
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 reads Parsha Bereishit against the backdrop of Gaza’s destruction.
My Beinart Notebook colleague Daniel Kaufman (pen name “cooper lit”) pens a comic about the people we love who defend the indefensible.
The best debate on voting for Harris I’ve heard. Between Mehdi Hasan and the Makdisi brothers on their podcast. (Starts at 43 min, 45 seconds.)
Donald Trump meets the New Yorker’s cartoon page.
Haaretz accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
For a special Pod Save the World series about the election, I talked to Ben Rhodes about Harris, Trump, and Gaza.
Last month, I was interviewed about Zionism, antisemitism, and Gaza at the University of Alberta.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I completely understand why people are struggling to support Kamala Harris, given what the Biden administration has done and its responsibility for the destruction of Gaza, and now the destruction of significant parts of Lebanon as well. But I think that there are arguments for Harris even on the question of Palestinian rights that are worth thinking about. And there are a couple that I want to mention that are really not mine. They’re ideas that I’ve heard from other people who I really respect.
And one of them is made by the Palestinian American Democratic strategist Rania Batrice. Rania makes the point that this movement for Palestinian freedom, which has grown so much over the last year, will struggle to continue to grow under a Trump presidency in the same way, in part because the Trump presidency will put such tremendous pressure on people of progressive values, on so many issues. There will be so many crises. The crisis of mass deportation. The crisis of a government that doesn’t care about climate change. The crisis of a government that supports massive police brutality. The crisis of a government that’s appointing judges that basically put women’s lives in danger, and the lives in danger of anyone who’s having an abortion.
That all of that pressure will mean that there is less time for people to organize and work on this question of ending the war in Gaza, ending the war in Lebanon, and moving towards ending apartheid in Israel, and giving Palestinians basic human rights. And that under a Harris campaign, even though Harris herself hasn’t shown a lot of evidence that she would be better, at least it means that there won’t be much of a crisis on these other fronts, and people will afford to have more time to focus on this issue.
Somebody else who has thought about this, and I think in a real interesting way, is a subscriber to my newsletter, the Beinart Notebook, who made the point to me that I thought was a really interesting point recently that the future of the movement for Palestinian rights depends on America remaining a liberal democracy. That if we hope to see these shifts in public mood, especially in the democratic party, transform itself into a shift in government policy, that is much more likely to take place if the United States still has relatively free elections, right.
The more successful Donald Trump is in moving America towards an authoritarian system, the harder it is to translate these kinds of shifts in public opinion—especially among young people—into the political process. Trump’s threat to American liberal democracy is also a threat to the folks who want to change US policy because liberal democracy is the mechanism through which you would change US policy on Israel and Palestine. And a more authoritarian political system, one more dominated by political elites who are less accountable, is likely to be one that keeps the status quo when it comes to Palestine and Israel.
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Our guest is Gaza-born journalist, Muhammad Shehada, whose writing has been indispensable over the last year. While we usually reserve audio of our Friday zoom calls for paid subscribers, Muhammad’s description of life in Gaza, and life outside of Gaza when your family is there, was so eloquent and haunting that I felt it needed as wide a distribution as possible.
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The Consequences of a Trump Presidency Are Simply Too Dire
This Week’s Call: Palestinian-American political strategist Rania Batrice
Our guest this week will be Rania Batrice, former deputy campaign manager for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, and an advisor on paid media for the Uncommitted campaign. I don’t know if Rania agrees with my arguments for supporting Harris, but she’s one of the smartest and most ethical people in Democratic politics, and I’m keen to hear how she sees the election in its final days.
Our call, for paid subscribers, will be at our normal time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Thursday to join the call live, as well as the video, which will go up later in the day. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. One of the books that helped me understand the Nakba better is Raja Shehada’s Strangers in the House, a beautiful portrait of a relationship between a father and his son in a political environment made impossible by expulsion and oppression.
I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medical Aid to Palestinians. If you have other suggestions, please send them.
Sources Cited in this Video
Eric Levitz on why a Harris loss will push Democrats to the right.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on how she decides who to support for president.
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!), four Palestinians describe how they left Gaza.
Natasha Gill on how Jews are abandoning their children to face a moral reckoning alone.
A Palestinian and Israeli psychoanalyst talk about home.
Upcoming Talks
On October 29, I’ll be speaking at the University of Victoria. The event is online.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. So, I’ve kind of been putting this off because I’ve been really struggling with it at a number of levels but I want to explain why, if I lived in a swing state, I would vote for Kamala Harris. And I say this as somebody who thinks that Joe Biden and some of his top advisors should be brought before international courts as war criminals for their role in the utter destruction of the Gaza Strip. Surely, if I support the international proceedings that I hope will one day begin against the leaders of Hamas and against Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Golant, how could I not also support such proceedings against the top Biden administration officials who gave Israel the weapons that Israel has used to utterly destroy human life in the Gaza Strip.
So, I say that as someone who feels that way about Biden’s policies, and also someone who’s found that Harris’s response during the campaign on this question of Palestinian humanity has been worse than I could have imagined, utterly depressing and infuriating. The fact that they could not do the bare minimum—by which I mean have a Palestinian American state representative who had endorsed Harris come to give a speech at the Democratic Convention in which she simply spoke about Palestinian suffering and about Palestinian humanity, about principles like equality and peace, principles that supposedly Democratic Party believes in—the fact that even that could not be done, showed to me a level of just kind of moral cowardice and political idiocy that still I find staggering.
And I also want to say that I’m obviously saying this as a person with the good luck that my family is safe, you know. There’s no reason I deserve to be safe any more than the people whose families are in Gaza, or other parts of Israel and Palestine, and in Lebanon, whose families are being destroyed and living with daily terror of being killed. And, for those people, it is not my place to judge or lecture those folks. I can’t possibly imagine how I would be thinking and feeling were I in those circumstances. And I also want to say that I think that folks who are not in swing states and in safe blue states, I do think there is a case for registering a protest vote for president and voting Democratic for the other races.
But I do think there are some arguments to be made for why, if I were in a swing state, I would vote—with a heavy heart—I would vote for Kamala Harris. Some of these are going to be obvious, but I think that they’re worth going through. The first is that even though there is not nearly as big a difference on the question of Palestinian freedom between Harris and Trump as I would like, there is a really big difference on other issues that are also profoundly, profoundly important. Starting with climate, right, can we really even begin to come to terms with the consequences for all of our lives of four more years of a president Donald Trump, who essentially does not believe in climate change as a problem, and who would be moving aggressively with all of his kind of corporate industry allies to rolling back whatever the Biden administration was able to put in to place to try to move towards a kind of greener economy? The consequences of that are just incalculable.
Secondly, on abortion. How many women and other people who have abortions are going to die if Trump is allowed to appoint all these judges who will uphold these incredibly draconian, strict abortion laws that basically put women’s lives at risk because they basically say that you can’t get reproductive medical care because they prioritize the fetus over the life and well-being of the person who’s carrying that fetus?
And thirdly—and again, these things are obvious, but they’re worth saying—is we simply don’t know what kind of state American liberal democracy would be left in after four years of Donald Trump. We know that American liberal democracy is profoundly flawed as it is, but we do have some separation of powers. We do have some ability to have free elections. We simply don’t know how much of that will be left standing after four years of Donald Trump. We learned in his first term that many of these foundational things that keep us a somewhat moderately free society are based on custom. They’re much more fragile than we realize. That they really exist because people respect certain kinds of norms. We learned that when you have a president who simply does not respect those norms—and he’s worse than he was four years ago—that those things can really start to buckle, especially when you have a Republican Party just completely dominated by cowards who will support whatever he wants. And potentially those Republicans could control the House and the Senate. And they already control the Supreme Court. This is really existential for the future and standing of American liberal democracy.
And on those issues—climate, abortion, liberal democracy—there is an important difference between Harris and Trump, a very, very important difference. And I think one has to keep that in mind. Secondly, even on the question of Israel and Palestine, I think there is a difference between Trump and Harris. Not as big a difference, of course, as I would like, but there is a difference. And there would be a difference I think for this reason: because the political realities that they face are very different. Harris comes into the presidency facing some pressure from the Democratic base and even from some Democrats in Congress to end unconditional US military and diplomatic support for Israel. We don’t know what the outcome of that will be, but we know that she will face some pressure to do that from within our party. Trump would face no pressure from within the Republican Party at all. To the contrary, the pressure would be entirely from folks in Congress who want to maintain unconditional US support for Israel no matter what.
And I’ve heard some people say that, you know, Trump doesn’t like Netanyahu, and he doesn’t like wars, and maybe he wouldn’t be worse than Biden. But I actually think if you look at the record of the Trump presidency, and I actually read the kind of memoirs of Jason Greenblatt and Jared Kushner and David Friedman—for my sins—you know, the kind of three architects of Trump’s Israel policy, what you see from those books is that Trump is saying all kinds of things and he’s got all kinds of ideas. But the truth is he doesn’t really make policy because he doesn’t have the discipline to really focus in on anything. And so, those guys were really making policy. And they were pushing very much in the direction of letting Israel do whatever they want. Remember, they proposed a peace plan that created basically the most absurd of kind of Palestinian Bantustans. I think they were open to the idea of Israel annexing the West Bank legally, even though it didn’t come to fruition because of the Abraham Accords. I think they would be open to a legal annexation of the West Bank beyond the de facto annexation that we have now. I think that they would be more open to America entering a full-scale war with Iran. Remember the incredibly reckless decision they took to assassinate Soleimani in Trump’s first term.
And I also think they would be more supportive of mass ethnic cleansing in Gaza, right. There clearly are people in the Israeli government who would like not just a kind of moderate level of ethnic cleansing we’ve seen in Gaza now, where basically because life is impossible kind of getting across the border into Egypt. But to push Egypt to open the border so that you would have a mass exodus out of Gaza, and from which people would not be allowed to return, there are clearly people in the Israeli government who want that. There’s been a lot of reporting about this. And the Biden administration, while it didn’t do that much to stop it, when Egypt said early on, we’re not going to open our border and allow this to happen, the Biden administration does not appear, from the reporting I’ve read, to have turned the screws on Egypt to try to force them to do that. I think it’s quite possible that a Trump administration would do that using America’s economic leverage, maybe the leverage of Gulf countries over Egypt, to try to force Egypt to basically open its borders and basically have a situation where you don’t have tens of thousands of Palestinians leaving Gaza, but you have millions of Palestinians leaving Gaza without the ability to return. So, I think that’s a difference.
And beyond that, there is a difference, I think, in that the conditions for pro-Palestinian organizing would be different under Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris. This is a point that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a while back, which I think is really important. Which is to say the level of oppression—although it’s significant now on people who want to organize for Palestinian rights, quite significant—I think would be substantially worse under Donald Trump than it would be under Kamala Harris. I mean, I think you could really imagine a situation under Donald Trump, first in which the police brutality would make everything we’ve seen so far look absolutely like child’s play. But beyond that, in which the administration could really put real financial pressure on universities, threatening to defund American universities unless they basically ban pro-Palestinian activism, fire pro-Palestinian professors. I think that’s really imaginable under a Trump presidency. I think it’s less imaginable under a Harris presidency.
And the last point—and this is a point made by Eric Levitz—is I don’t think that defeating Kamala Harris will move the Democratic Party to the left and make it more progressive and more sympathetic to Palestinian rights. It may be on a trajectory of becoming more progressive to Palestinian rights on its own for reasons of generational change. But I actually think that the kind of establishment mainstream media discourse that will dominate the discussion after a Trump victory will be that the Democrats mistake was to nominate someone who was a progressive from the Bay Area who ran to the left of when she ran for president in 2020, and that they should have nominated a swing state moderate, and that they need to get back to doing that again—a kind of a reprise of the kind of Bill Clinton kind of strategy of when the Democrats nominated him in 1992. I just don’t think it’s the case that defeating Kamala Harris produces a Democratic Party that is more progressive on anything, including on this issue, than it would be if she were elected.
So, it’s for those reasons that I—I don’t live in a swing state—that if I were in a swing state, I would, with a very heavy heart, vote for Kamala Harris, and then do everything I could to try to influence and pressure her presidency so that it’s far, far better than her campaign has been. But even if it isn’t far better, I still think it will be better than a Trump presidency because one thing we have learned to our horror over the last year is that as terrible as things are, they can get worse. They can get much worse. They can get worse there in Palestine and Israel, and they can certainly get much worse here.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
Our guests are Efrat Machikawa and Boaz Atzili. Efrat’s uncle, Gadi Mozes, was abducted on October 7. Boaz's cousin, Aviv Atzili, was killed on October 7th in Kibbutz Nir Oz and his body was taken to Gaza. Aviv's wife, Liat Atzili, was released in the ceasefire and hostages deal in November. Both Efrat and Boaz are activists for a ceasefire. I’m grateful to them for taking the time to talk to me in this agonizing and critical moment.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
There will be no zoom call this week. We’ll resume on Friday, November 1 at 11 AM with Seth Anziska discussing Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. I’ve been deeply moved by Fida Jiryis, Stranger in My Own Land, which charts her family’s painful and surreal journey, from Mandatory Palestine to Lebanon to Israel. It’s a book I wish I could make required reading in all the places, in America, Israel and beyond, where Palestinians are routinely dehumanized.
I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medglobal. I’m grateful to people who have sent suggestions. Please keep sending them.
Sources Cited in this Video
A list of the Palestinian and Arab leaders Israel has assassinated since the 1950s.
The Book of Ecclesiastes.
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 talks to Daniel Levy about US policy and Israel’s military escalation.
Adam Shatz on the Middle East after Hassan Nasrallah.
Some listeners took issue with my praise for Ta-Nehisi Coates book, The Message, and sent me two essays critical of it. The first, in The Forward, criticizes Coates’ book for analogizing America’s treatment of Blacks to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The second, in The New Yorker, suggests that Coates’ has abandoned the commitment to reporting that characterized his prior work. They didn’t convince me but read them for yourself.
Upcoming Talks
I’m headed to Canada. On October 22, I’ll be speaking at the University of Alberta and on October 29 I’ll be speaking at the University of Victoria.
See you a week from Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. So, one of the things about observing Jewish holidays, especially this time of year when there’s a ton of Jewish holidays, is that it takes you offline. And so, big events happen in the world, and you kind of hear about them through the grapevine, but you don’t really fully experience them in the way that you would when you’re online. But you also have a little bit of distance from events and some time to think. And, sometimes, even the Jewish texts that you end up reading when you’re in synagogue can put those events in some kind of perspective.
And this happened for me this Shabbat. This Shabbat, which is the Shabbat during the holiday of Sukkot, Jews read the book of Ecclesiastes, which is called in Hebrew, Kohelet. It’s a really fascinating text. There are a lot of famous kind of aphorisms that come from the book of Ecclesiastes, one of which is there’s nothing new under the sun. And early in Kohelet, in Ecclesiastes, there’s this line in which the author says, ‘sometimes there is a phenomenon of which they say, look, this one is new. But it occurred long ago, in ages that went by before us. Ergo, there is nothing new under the sun.’
And that seemed to me pretty fitting to read a couple of days after the news that Israel had assassinated Yahya Sinwar, and then of course before that, Hassan Nasrallah. I don’t think many Americans today know who Abbas Al-Musawi was, or Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, or Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Well, al-Musawi was Nasrallah’s predecessor as the head of Hezbollah. He was assassinated by Israel in 1982. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was the first chairman of Hamas’ Shura Council. He was assassinated by Israel in 2004. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi was the second chairman of Hamas’ Shura Council. Israel assassinated him also in 2004, according to a tally by the Jewish Virtual Library. I don’t exactly know how they assembled this. Israel has assassinated 337 Palestinian and Arab kind of high-level leaders in a list that they have going back to 1956. For instance, in 1972, Israel famously—or infamously—assassinated Ghassan Kanafani, who was then a central command member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Israel has been doing this a really, really long time.
And so, when you hear people in Israel, and Israel supporters, and folks in the American Jewish community saying what a huge victory this was, what an enormous accomplishment this was, and everyone kind of beating their chests about this and the military prowess and all of this stuff, just ask yourself a simple question: how did all those other assassinations going back years and decades and decades, how did they work out for Israel? Have they made Israel safer? Again and again, Israel assassinates folks, right. And then these organizations promote new leaders. Now, maybe the new leaders are less capable than the old leaders. Maybe they’re more moderate. Often, they’re not, right? Israel had no idea when it assassinated Abbas al-Musawi that they would get Hassan Nasrallah, who was actually a lot better, a more effective leader than Musawi. Maybe the next guy won’t be as good.
But the problem is you’re not actually dealing in any sense with the underlying problem, right. Maybe when you are dealing with wars where you’re not occupying a people, right, maybe as in America’s wars against al-Qaeda or ISIS, these assassinations could be more effective because you are working hand-in-hand with states, with sovereign states that are your allies, in the case of the fight against ISIS, the Iraqi government and the Kurds, for instance, that you can work with and they can potentially take control of this area, and kind of decimate an insurgent organization.
But the Palestinian issue is fundamentally—again, and it’s extraordinary that one would even need to say this, right—but it’s fundamentally not about Hamas. Because Hamas was only created in 1987, right. When Israel killed Kanafani in 1972, it wasn’t thinking about Hamas. Hamas didn’t exist. And it wasn’t thinking about Islamists because the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was a leftist group that was involved with armed resistance, including against civilians, against Israel. And at that point, Israel was thinking about this threat more in terms of groups like the PFLP that were leftist groups. But it wasn’t about the PFLP, just as it’s fundamentally not about Hamas. And it’s not about Sinwar, which is not a way of apologizing for Sinwar. Sinwar has did terrible, terrible things. Of course he did. Many leaders have done terrible, terrible things.
But the point is that Sinwar will pass. Even Hamas may pass. The Palestinian people will remain. The Palestinian problem for Israel will remain in that you are holding millions of people without the most basic rights. And so, at best, maybe you create some disarray in an organization. Even the organization gets supplanted by some other organization, and for a while people are licking their wounds, and they haven’t organized yet. But they will. Sooner or later, they will. Another organization, another leader, because it is human to fight against your oppression, for your freedom.
Now, there are ethical ways of fighting. There are unethical ways. October 7th was an unethical way. There are effective ways and there are ineffective ways. Those things are really important. But what is sure is that you will not break a people’s will to fight for their freedom by killing one particular leader, right. And it is astonishing to me, and deeply depressing, that we still get sucked into this. We in the Jewish community get sucked into this frankly absurd idea, right, which is so insulting to Palestinians and so ignorant of this history, right. That you’re going to solve some kind of problem by killing one particular leader, even if he was a particularly effective leader, and even if he was a particularly brutal and nasty leader, right. You’re not going to solve anything ultimately.
And all of this military power and technological wizardry is a substitute for a political strategy. And it’s not just a substitute for a political strategy because a political strategy would have to take seriously the Palestinian desire to live as something other than an oppressed people. It’s a substitute for a human recognition of the Palestinian people, right? So, you focus everything on Sinwar and on Hamas, and on Hezbollah and Nasrallah, as these epitomes of evil, right? And these groups have done terrible things. These leaders have done terrible things.
But what you avert your eyes from in doing that is the fact that you have a very large number of people—just people, the same cross-section of good, bad, in the middle, human people with human desires that you are crushing, right, by not recognizing that they have the same right to freedom that you have. And that if you don’t have that basic human recognition, you are simply going to be like Groundhog Day. As it says in Ecclesiastes, you think this is new, you’ve done it before. You did it before that. You did it before that. You will be doing it again and again and again. And more and more people will die and suffer and live in misery, and it won’t be only on the Palestinian and Lebanese side. It will be also among Israeli Jews.
And that to me is the tragedy of this war, of this moment. It’s why I’m not going to celebrate these assassinations, even though obviously I would have liked to see Yahya Sinwar in front of the International Court of Justice, it’s not going to solve any problems. And people who think it is are simply reflecting their lack of understanding of the long history of this tool, which is ultimately proved ineffective for Israeli Jews and Jews in general in creating the security and safety and peace that they—that we—deserve.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe -
Our guest is the award-winning author and journalist, Ta-Nehisi Coates. His new book, The Message, chronicles his trip to Palestine and Israel (alongside trips to Senegal and South Carolina) and meditates on why some people’s stories are told and others are erased. We’ll talk about how he came to write about Israel-Palestine, about how victims become victimizers, about the backlash he’s experienced since the book came out, and about the forces that keep Black writers from shaping public debate about America’s role in the world.
The event was cosponsored by Jewish Currents and the Foundation for Middle East Peace, so it’s free for all subscribers. To get conversations like this every week, and support my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.
Edited by Jesse Brenneman
Intro/outro music by Nathan Salsburg
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe - Vis mere
