Folgen
-
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com
Israeli religious thinker and activist Mikhael Manekin is one of the founders of smol emuni, the faithful left. We discuss Mikhael’s new book, so far available only in Hebrew, entitled, Sermons from the Abyss, which uses the five Megillot that Jews read during the year in synagogue to reflect on the horrors of the last several years. I don’t know of any…
-
The Outgoing Secretary of State’s Astonishing Interview with the New York Times
Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 10, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.
Our guest will be the Israeli-born British journalist Rachel Shabi, author of the new book, Off-White: The Truth about Antisemitism. Last week, she published a column on the subject in The Guardian. She’s particularly knowledge about antisemitism, and its weaponization, in Britain, a subject of ferocious contention since Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader. We’ll discuss all that on Friday.
I’ve also recorded an interview with the Israeli religious thinker and activist Mikhael Manekin, one of the founders of smol emuni, the faithful left. We discussed Mikhael’s new book, so far available only in Hebrew, entitled, Sermons from the Abyss, which uses the five Megillot that Jews read during the year in synagogue to reflect on the horrors of the last several years. I don’t know of any Jewish thinker who is grappling more deeply than Mikhael with the theological ramifications of Israel’s destruction of Gaza. This call, which I’ll post this Wednesday, is for paid subscribers too.
My New Book
On January 28, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”
Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.
Sources Cited in this Video
The New York Times’ interview with Antony Blinken.
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!), Theia Chatelle details the Yale police department’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters.
An extraordinary interview with Muhammad Shehada about realities in Gaza.
A song about living in a society that is committing genocide.
I talked to the CBC about why Jimmy Carter deserves an apology.
See you on Friday, January 10,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken did a big interview with the New York Times this weekend about his legacy, the Biden administration’s legacy. And a big part of that interview was about Gaza. And I think it’s worth noting a number of things he said because I think they show the way in which people like Blinken live inside kind of intellectual and moral prison, in which basic truths are things that they cannot bring themselves to see or will not bring themselves to see. And they end up saying these things which are completely, utterly incoherent, and I think just morally inexcusable.
And so, the first thing that’s striking if you listen to Blinken’s comments on Gaza is that for him, the problem of Gaza and Palestinians in Gaza is a problem that begins on October 7th. He says, ‘since October 7th,’ this is Blinken, ‘we’ve had some core goals in mind. And what are those goals,’ he says, ‘make sure October 7th can’t happen again, prevent a wider war, and protect Palestinian civilians.’ Now, what he means by make sure October 7th can’t happen again, and he says it explicitly, is destroying Hamas’s military capacity, right. There’s no recognition that October 7th doesn’t just happen because Hamas has a bunch of weapons. October 7th happens because Palestinians are living in what Human Rights Watch calls an open-air prison, what the UN has said is a place that’s unlivable. This is before October 7th. That Palestinians are living in what all the world’s major human rights organizations call an apartheid state, right. All of that is completely absent.
So, Blinken thinks that the problem that he’s trying to solve begins on October 7th. And then he says astonishingly, he says, ‘when it comes to making sure that October 7th can’t happen again, I think we’re in a good place.’ No, you’re not in a good place. Not only because Gaza has been utterly destroyed, but you’re not in a good place in terms of making sure that things like October 7th can’t happen again because the fundamental reason behind the horror of October 7th isn’t just because Hamas has a bunch of weapons, it’s because Palestinians don’t have freedom, and because their ethical and legal paths towards fighting for freedom—whether it’s boycotts, efforts at international institutions, all of these things, peaceful marches like happened in 2018—that they have all been blocked. That’s the context if you really want to make sure that future October 7ths don’t happen, you have to address that. But that’s basically completely absent from Blinken’s framework.
And what’s really striking is it’s so striking how Blinken is able to empathize with Jewish Israelis in a way that he can’t empathize with Palestinians. So, he says, this is Blinken, he says, ‘you had in Israel in the days after October 7th a totally traumatized society. This wasn’t just the Prime Minister or a given leader in Israel. This was an entire society that didn’t want any assistance getting to a single Palestinian in Gaza.’ He says Israelis didn’t want any assistance to go to Gaza after October 7th. And he says you have to kind of understand that given the trauma in that society.
First of all, you notice the way in which he buys completely into the ethno-nationalist frame, right? What does he mean by society? Twenty percent of Israel’s own citizens are Palestinians—Palestinian citizens of Israel, sometimes called Arab Israelis. They wanted assistance to go into Gaza. So, you notice that when Blinken talks about Israeli society, he’s actually only talking about Jews, as if even the Palestinian citizens in Israel don’t actually matter, are not actually real Israelis. He’s completely bought into this ethno-nationalist framework. And then he says, yes, it’s unfortunate that they didn’t want any aid to go into Gaza. But after all, you have to understand they were really traumatized, right.
But there’s no recognition, right, that in understanding October 7th, and the horror of what Hamas and others did on October 7th, that it might be worth understanding that Palestinians were also totally traumatized, and that we should factor that in in understanding their actions—again, not excusing their action, but in understanding their action, right. So, Blinken can see Israelis through this kind of empathetic humanizing frame in a way he can’t vis-a-vis Palestinians.
The second point is the way Blinken talks about America’s leverage vis-a-vis Israel. He essentially talks about the US relationship with Israel as if America doesn’t give Israel weapons, or as if the notion that we would actually question whether we give Israel these weapons simply cannot be discussed, right. It’s completely outside of his mental framework, right. So, he says, ‘no one needs to remind me of the sufferings’—this is Palestinians—‘because it’s something that drives me every single day.’ Okay, so first of all, let’s just be honest. That’s b******t. It’s a bold-faced lie. Antony Blinken might say that to make him fall asleep at night, but nothing in his actual actions suggests that he’s driven every single day by Palestinians suffering in Gaza because he keeps supporting the sending of those weapons, right.
And when he says, ‘we’ve done everything in our power to find a way to get to the end of the conflict,’ that statement only makes sense if somehow the question of US arms sales to Israel, right, is kind of an exogenous question, as if that doesn’t bear on American behavior, right. But it’s the single most important factor, right. That America is literally giving Israel the weapons it’s using to kill the people that Antony Blinken says he’s so concerned about.
And then Blinken tells this remarkable story. What’s remarkable about it is that he thinks it makes him look good. He says, ‘the very first trip that I made to Israel five days after October 7th, I spent with my team nine hours in the IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, six stories underground, with the Israeli government, including the Prime Minister, including arguing for hours on end about the basic proposition that the humanitarian assistance needs to get to Palestinians in Gaza,’ right. So, he’s proud of this, right. He’s proud of the fact that he was arguing for hours and hours and hours just about the idea that there should be any aid getting in, right. But why should Antony Blinken have had to argue for hours and hours and hours and hours, right. He only had to argue for hours and hours and hours because he wasn’t actually using the obvious leverage that was at America’s disposal. He would have not had to argue for hours and hours and hours if he simply said, no, we’re not going to provide you the weapons to destroy this society and to starve people to death. Then he wouldn’t have needed to argue for hours and hours and hours. But because he had taken the most important point of U.S. leverage off the table, he’s proud of himself for trying to convince the Israelis, acting like a supplicant, right, instead of the Secretary of State of the superpower that provides Israel the weapons that it needs to prosecute this devastating war.
And then when he’s explicitly asked by the interviewer of the New York Times about American weapon sales, he says ‘that support’—meaning the US arms—‘is vital to make sure Israel has an adequate defense. And in turn, that means we’re not going to have an even broader wider conflict that results in more death and more destruction.’ Sorry!? I mean, like, again, I understand in the nature of these interviews with the Times, the Times reporter has to be respectful, there’s a certain kind of way in which you’re supposed to address a Secretary of State, but what the f**k? I mean, the US, we give unconditional weapons to prevent a wider war and Blinken is saying that this strategy has worked. Has he not been noticing the utter destruction of Lebanon that’s taken place? And also, now Israel’s bombing of Syria? I mean, it’s just, again, this is like a man speaking in some kind of closed room in which he’s hermetically sealed off from reality.
And then to me, the most astonishingly pathetic and arrogant moment in the conversation is when the New York Times reporter says, ‘do you worry you’ve been presiding over what the world sees as a genocide?’ And Antony Blinken simply says, ‘no, it’s not.’ No, it’s not. That’s it. No suggestion that he might have read the Amnesty or United Nations reports. No suggestion that he needs to rebut these claims. No suggestion that the fact that Israel has destroyed most of the hospitals, most of the universities, most of the agriculture, that 90% of the people are dislocated from their homes, right, that there’s been report after report of mass starvation that even some of Israel’s former security officials like Moshe Bogie Ya’alon are calling this an ethnic cleansing, right.
None of this makes Antony Blinken feel like he has to give any justification for why he doesn’t think it is a genocide. He doesn’t feel the need to make the argument. He simply says, ex cathedra categorically no it’s not, and then moves on. This is what William Fulbright famously called during Vietnam the arrogance of power. The arrogance of power. The arrogance and, frankly, the intellectual idiocy of power. We need to create an environment in this country, in the media, and in whatever institutions that people like Antony Blinken are going to be spending their time in when they leave the Biden administration, that will not accept those answers, in which you simply can’t say, no, it’s not, and then walk away.
If Antony Blinken thinks he’s going to become a professor at American University, or go to some think tank, or give interviews, or write op-eds in the New York Times, or show up on TV, or do whatever he’s going to do, it is critical for us as a country, as a society, to have the kind of accountability that means that he cannot get away with that. He does not have the right to simply say, no, it’s not end of conversation, right. He must be forced actually answer these charges because they are ultimately charges in part against him, right.
And I think the New York Times didn’t do enough in this interview to force him. We have to go outside of our comfort zones in some ways in these elite institutions to be a little bit less polite and be willing to make a little bit more uncomfortable when it comes to these situations, right. Given the magnitude of the horror that is happening, it’s simply not good enough to allow Antony Blinken to say, no, it’s not a genocide, next question. Because if we do let him do those kinds of things, then we’re laying the conditions, laying the seeds for this kind of thing to happen again. And it simply can’t happen again. The elite institutions in America have to change to ensure that there is never again a president like Joe Biden and never again a secretary of state like Antony Blinken who do this. It can never be allowed to happen again.
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 -
Fehlende Folgen?
-
Carter’s Break with the White South Over Civil Rights Offers a Model for Jews
Our guest for the Zoom call this Friday, January 3rd, at 1 Eastern, for paid subscribers, will be Paul O’Brien, Executive Director at Amnesty International USA. We’ll discuss Amnesty’s new report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28, 2025. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: first, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”
Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.
Sources Cited in this Video
Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman’s claim that Carter was “engaging in antisemitism.”
Deborah Lipstadt’s 2007 Washington Post column, “Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem.”
The attacks on Carter by Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton.
The attacks on Carter’s book in The New York Times and Slate.
“Great is repentance, which hastens redemption” from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yoma (86b).
Kenneth E. Morris’ biography, Jimmy Carter: American Moralist.
Carter’s inaugural addresses as Georgia governor and president.
Carter’s 1977 speech at Notre Dame questioning the Cold 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!), Will Alden details how, since October 7, foundations have withdrawn funding from groups that support Palestinian rights.
Alan Dershowitz vs Norman Finkelstein, the musical.
Doris Bittar on Christmas in Lebanon.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I interviewed two young Israelis who refused their country’s draft.
I’ve written about Jehad Abusalim, a Gaza-born scholar currently based in Washington who is completing a PhD in history, Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University. The warnings he issued about Israel’s response to October 7 have proven prescient and were tragically ignored by American media. He has now launched a newsletter on Substack. Please consider subscribing.
See you on Friday, January 3,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, Jimmy Carter has died. It’s worth going back to the moment in 2006 when he published his book, Peace Not Apartheid, to remember what happened there. Abe Foxman, then the head of the Anti-Defamation League, said that Carter was ‘engaging in antisemitism.’ Deborah Lipstadt, who went on to be appointed by a Democratic president to be the antisemitism czar wrote a column in the Washington Post entitled ‘Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem.’ Carter was attacked by Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton. His book was attacked in reviews in the New York Times and Slate in large measure for using the term apartheid, a term which is now been endorsed by Israel’s own leading human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Yesh Din, and by the most prominent human rights organizations in the world, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
A couple of years ago, I did a newsletter actually suggesting that leaders of the organized American Jewish community like Foxman, but also American politicians like Clinton and Pelosi, should offer a public apology to Jimmy Carter. I quoted at that time a line from Tractate Yoma and the Babylonian Talmud, ‘Great is repentance which hastens redemption.’ But I think there are a great number of people who need to do Teshuva, who need to ask for forgiveness for their attacks on Carter for saying things that have been deeply vindicated by the course of events in the years since then, and in fact, if you look back at them, seem extremely tame. Because it’s worth remembering that Carter wasn’t actually accusing Israel of being an apartheid state in 2006. All he was saying was that it risked becoming one, which is also, by the way, something that Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak and numerous Israeli security officials have been saying around that time. And yet, the man was viciously pilloried by people who I think at this point should have the decency to offer their apologies.
But I think there is also something really important to say about Carter and the roots of his position on Palestinian freedom. He was, of all of the American presidents, the one who I think felt the strongest sense of identification with the Palestinian plight. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think there’s a lot to learn from Carter’s own life that can instruct us as we think about Israel and Palestine and that particularly Israelis and other Jews can learn from.
So, Carter’s family story is really remarkable. He grew up not just in the South, but in the deep, deep South. I’m quoting here from a biography of his by Kenneth E. Morris called Jimmy Carter: American Moralist. Morris writes that Carter grew up in rural southwest Georgia, in a place where people spoke a rural dialect that was so thick that many outsiders thought of it as a foreign language altogether. There was a very large Black population. It was a profoundly, viciously racist environment. Morris suggests that Carter’s father, Earl, may indeed have participated in a lynching. He also tells the story that although Carter grew up playing with Black children all the time, that Carter’s father actually ordered the Black children to lose all of the games they played with little Jimmy so he could always come out on top.
And to understand the fact that Carter was the president who took this position on Palestinian freedom—and not a perfect position, but much more progressive than most of the other presidents—you have to understand that it’s an outgrowth of his experience as a White Southerner turning against his own community, his own people to support Civil Rights. In 1953, when Carter was a young businessman, he refused to join the racist Citizens’ Councils that led to a boycott by Whites in the town of his business. He supported school consolidation, which would bring Black and White students together. Also, in the 1950s, which led to a rift with his own cousin, Hugh, that the two men did not speak for more than a decade. You know, some Jews who support Palestinian freedom may identify with these kinds of stories. After a vote on this question of school integration, opponents of desegregation nailed a sign to Carter’s warehouse door saying, ‘Coons and Carters go together.’
Carter’s key political moment in his political career in Georgia was in January 1971, when in his gubernatorial inaugural speech, he denounced segregation. That was when Time magazine put him on the cover and this completely obscure governor began to launch the political career that would allow him to this upset victory in the 1976 presidential campaign. Morris argues it’s impossible to understand Carter’s view of foreign policy without understanding the way it springs from the moralism that came out of the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, his Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, was one of the key Civil Rights leaders in Georgia. That Carter was the only president of the Cold War who explicitly came out against the Cold War framing, very famously in a speech that he gave at Notre Dame, arguing in fact for a kind of an idea of a global community based on cooperation that was very clearly modeled, Morris argues, on Martin Luther King’s notion of the beloved community.
And Carter, in his inaugural address as president, who kind of harkened back to the gubernatorial address he gave as governor of Georgia, spent one third of that address speaking about human rights, which was for him very clearly the kind of international extension of the principle of civil rights that he had fought for, that he indeed had suffered for, that he had alienated himself from his own community for supporting. And then you may know that Young was ultimately forced to be fired under tremendous criticism by the organized American Jewish community. Carter did not stick up for him because Young had committed the sin of meeting with members of the PLO.
It is impossible to understand Carter’s sympathy for Palestinians, Carter’s kind of moral framework, in which he put Israel’s domination of Palestinians, without seeing that connection to his support as a White Southerner for civil rights. And I think one of the things that we should think about as we mourn Jimmy Carter is him as a model for Israeli and other Jews. Carter risked something. He risked the opprobrium of his own community, his own people, to come out for civil rights. And that became the basis of his entire political worldview.
So, it’s not just that Carter has been proven right in his criticism of Israel’s policies for the Palestinians. It’s also that in Carter’s own life, in his own moral courage, we see a model for the moral courage that is necessary by Jews today to be willing to take positions that will alienate us from our community because we believe in the central moral principle to which Carter devoted much of his life: the principle of human equality, the principle of human dignity of all people, irrespective of their religion, their ethnicity, or their race.
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 Communal Leaders Keep Conflating Discomfort with Unsafety
Something happened earlier this month in December that might seem like—given the scale of all the magnitude of the horrors that are happening around Palestine and Israel—might not seem so significant, but I think really is emblematic of something that’s gone terribly, terribly wrong in the organized American Jewish community.
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 guests are Mahmoud Muna, Matthew Teller, and Juliette Touma, editors of the new anthology, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture, which includes close to a hundred stories about the lives of people in Gaza, both before and after its recent destruction. This interview is co-sponsored with Jewish Currents.
-
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com
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.
-
It’s not about the legal definition. It’s about Western and Jewish exceptionalism.
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
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.
-
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.
-
When Even Billionaires Are Afraid to Criticize Trump, What Does That Mean for the Rest of US?
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 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…
-
It’s a Test of Whether International Law Applies to the West
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 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.
-
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.
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 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…
-
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.
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 -
Just Because People Vote For Something Doesn’t Make It Right
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 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.
-
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.
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 - Mehr anzeigen
