Episódios
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In Their Attack on US Universities, Trump and the ADL are Trying to Redefine Jewishness Itself
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Because of the free speech crisis engulfing Columbia University, we changed the topic of today’s Zoom call.
Our new guest is Columbia Professor James Schamus, award-winning screenwriter, producer, and author of this public letter to fellow Jewish faculty at the university.
We discuss the Trump administration’s assault on pro-Palestinian protest and on Ame…
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I’ll be on book tour for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza for the next few months. You’ll find a list of book-related events below.
I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, Fida Jiryis’ beautiful memoir, Stranger in My Own Land.
I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.
Even Palestinians from Gaza who have made it to the United States can use assistance. For instance, Salah El Sadi, who is looking for help finding work in his field. He writes:
“I am originally from Gaza, Palestine. I arrived in the United States as a Fulbright Scholar in mid-September 2023 to participate in a professional training program. However, due to the outbreak of war in Gaza, I have been unable to return home and currently find myself in a challenging situation. My wife and two children were evacuated to Oman, while many of my relatives remain in Gaza under extremely difficult conditions. Despite these challenges, I remain committed to my professional journey and contributing my expertise in meaningful ways. I have a strong background in environmental sustainability, water purification, chemistry, laboratory management, and climate resilience. I am currently seeking job opportunities, research collaborations, or consulting roles where I can contribute my expertise in environmental sustainability, chemistry, laboratory science, or climate innovation.”
If you can help Salah, his resume and contact information are here.
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. This Friday is the holiday of Purim, in which Jews read the Book of Esther, a fascinating and troubling text whose themes of political intrigue, imperial power and catastrophic violence are deeply relevant to contemporary Jewish discourse about the destruction of Gaza. Our guest will be Rabbi Lexie Botzum, a faculty member at Yashrut, who last year authored this provocative essay about Purim, “Discarding Haman’s Garb: Refusing the Roles of Empire.”
Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.
Book Tour
(We’ll update this every week.)
On Monday, March 10 and Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be giving four talks in Michigan. On March 10 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at St David’s Episcopal Church, and on March 11 at St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church and at T’chiyah synagogue.
On Monday, March 17, I’ll be speaking at Mishkan Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia.
On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.
On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.
On Monday, April 7, I’ll be speaking at the Harvard Divinity School.
On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.
On Tuesday, April 29, I’ll be speaking twice in Washington, DC: at Noon at Georgetown University and at 6 PM with Mehdi Hasan at Busboys and Poets.
Book Interviews
I talked with the Haaretz and Wisdom of Crowds podcasts about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.
Sources Cited in this Week’s Video
The Trump administration’s attack on Columbia University.
The University of Chicago’s 2024 study on campus antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
Professor Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden’s 2021 study of antisemitism and political ideology in the US.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Alex Kane talks to Tariq Kenney-Shawa and Mouin Rabbani about Trump’s fantasy of expelling Palestinians from Gaza.
Raef Zreik, Monica Marks and 972Mag on the Palestinian Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott (PACBI)’s claim that the Oscar-winning film, No Other Land, violates the BDS movement’s guidelines on “normalization.”
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I talked with Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani about Israel’s plans for Gaza and Syria, and the film No Other Land.
Cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco on Gaza.
Fewer than half as many Democrats hold a favorable opinion of Israel as did four years ago.
See you on Friday, March 14,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, the Trump administration is making an example of Columbia University. They’re saying they’re going to cut $400 million in federal aid to Columbia University, thus throwing the university into financial turmoil because of the claim that Columbia University has permitted a culture of antisemitism. And this is part of a broader assault on American universities, throwing many of them into financial turmoil, based on this claim that these universities have become hotbeds of antisemitism.
Now, there is antisemitism on college campuses. Of course, there’s other forms of bigotry that exist on college campuses, of course. But to understand how Orwellian the Trump administration’s move is, you have to understand that the best data we have about antisemitism, first of all, shows that college students are less antisemitic than Americans as a whole. And secondly, that the Americans who tend to have the highest and the most antisemitic attitudes tend to be exactly the kinds of Americans who are part of Trump’s political coalition. So, the Trump administration, which is claiming that it’s acting to protect Jewish students against antisemitism, the best evidence we have suggests that the Trump coalition is much, much more antisemitic itself than are the college students that they are claiming are these hotbeds of antisemitism.
I want to look at a couple of data points that I think illustrate this. The first is a University of Chicago study from last March. And the University of Chicago study did something important. It asked college students, and Americans as a whole, about their attitudes towards Zionism and also their attitudes towards Jews. It asks them these questions separately. Now, groups like the Anti-Defamation League don’t ask these questions separately because they’re deeply invested in suggesting that the two are one and the same, right. Again, they again and again say that essentially to be Jewish is to be Zionist, and therefore, that anti-Zionist attitudes for them are inherently antisemitic.
But, in fact, it’s simply not true empirically, because when you ask people about their attitudes towards Israel or Zionism on the one hand, and their attitudes towards Jews on the other, you find that the opinions about the two actually radically diverge, right. So, the University of Chicago found that college students were indeed far more anti-Zionist than Americans as a whole, which reflects the kind of age breakdown that we’re seeing more generally, that they were three times as likely to be anti-Zionist. But college students were less likely—less likely—to express anti-Jewish attitudes than were Americans as a whole.
So, when the University of Chicago asked questions like, do the Jews have too much power? Do Jews care about anyone but themselves? When Jews are violently attacked, do they deserve it? They found that college students were significantly less likely to give antisemitic answers to those questions even though they were more likely to be anti-Zionist than Americans as a whole. And when you look at Americans as a whole, and you say, which are the group of Americans who have the highest degree of antisemitic attitudes, you find that those Americans who express the most antisemitic attitudes are not on the anti-Israel left. They are on the pro-Trump right.
The best study we have of this is from a 2021 study by Tuft University’s Eitan Hersch, who’s done a lot of really, really interesting work on this, and Laura Royden from Harvard University. And they ask people to say yes or no to these questions: ‘Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America’; ‘it is appropriate for opponents of Israel’s policies and actions to boycott Jewish American-owned businesses in their communities’; and ‘Jews in the United States have too much power.’ They find in response to this, I’m going to quote, that they say, ‘for overt measures, we find antisemitic attitudes are rare on the ideological left, but common on the ideological right.’
So, just like the University of Chicago studied their finding that even though Jews on the left are more critical of Israel and Zionism, they’re less likely to answer these questions about Jewish power and Jewish loyalty in an antisemitic way than are Americans on the right. And Hersch and Royden note that, even on the question of whether Jews should be boycotted because they support Israel, people on the left are less likely to say they should than people on the right. Which, again, shows the same thing that the University of Chicago study is showing, which is that actually Americans on the left are quite able to distinguish between their negative attitudes towards Israel and Zionism on one hand, and their attitudes towards Jews on the other. Even though American Jewish established groups like the Anti-Defamation League are constantly insisting that basically, if you’re anti-Zionist, you are also anti-Jewish.
So, we have this completely Orwellian situation in which a Trump administration whose political base consists of the most antisemitic people in the country, right, and a president who, let’s not forget, in the closing days of the 2016 campaign ran almost certainly the most antisemitic ad ever run by a major party political candidate in modern American history, right, when he ran an ad showing pictures of Lloyd Blankfein, Janet Yellen, and George Soros—three high-profile Jews— and basically said they were responsible for wrecking the global economy and as immiserating ordinary Americans, right.
That president and that political coalition are now—we’re supposed to believe that their assault on these universities is because they’re so concerned about Jewish students, and they’re so concerned about antisemitism. In fact, what they’re doing is using Jews as a pretext for an attack on universities that they hate because these universities are outside of their control and because these universities, as universities have been in America for a long time, are centers of progressive dissent against right-wing authoritarian and kind of more generally establishment or kind of capitalist politics, right. They’re a set of entities that are outside of the control of the Republican Party, outside of the control of the Trump administration.
And if you’re trying to create an authoritarian state, you’re going to crack down on all of the institutions inside the government and then beyond the government, like in the media, universities, etc. that are outside of your control so you can centralize control, right, so you can destroy and cripple any institution that might be areas that could breed resistance to your power. That’s what’s happening. And in a kind of transparently false way, Jewish safety is being used as the excuse for this. And what makes it all the more infuriating and tragic is that mainstream Jewish organizations like the ADL are essentially going along with this, right, because they see universities as places that are incubating opposition to Israel, criticism of Israel, and a desire to change US policy. And they have put the interest of defending the Israeli state above the interests of what’s actually an interest of most American Jews, and indeed above the interest of protecting American liberal democracy.
There’s something just astonishing about watching the American Jewish establishment be complicit in an attack on American universities when American universities have been so central to American Jewish success and flourishing. And yet, in an effort to prevent these universities from producing political resistance to the state of Israel, groups like the ADL and other establishment American Jewish organizations are willing to be complicit in an assault on these universities, which is also an assault on American liberal democracy.
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 -
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Our guest is Jordan Elgrably, Editor in Chief of The Markaz Review and co-editor with Malu Halasa of the new anthology, Sumud: A New Palestinian Reader. We talk about themes in contemporary Palestinian writing and how that writing can help us better understand the horrors in Gaza and across Palestine and Israel.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com
The NYU Professor wrote a negative review of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. She joined me to discuss her criticisms.
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I’ll be on book tour for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza for the next few months. You’ll find a list of book-related events below.
I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, Rashid Khalid’s classic exploration of the roots of Palestinian nationalism, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness.
I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.
Here is a new message about Hossam’s condition from his sister, Abir:
“Hossam has been diligently reaching out to various offices, holding on to hope for the progress of his passport application. Recently, he visited the hospital where he and his son, Moayad, spent a challenging four months undergoing treatment. The hospital staff informed him that the archives and reception department would be reopening next week, which filled him with optimism. Hossam has scheduled an appointment to discuss Moayad's case and to collect the essential reports needed for his treatment in Egypt.
Additionally, Hossam has requested the latest reports on his son Momen and his daughter Malak's hearing aids, as he wishes to consult with specialists in Egypt. During this challenging journey, please continue to support Hossam and his family as they seek a brighter, more peaceful future filled with dignity and relief from their struggles. Your compassion truly makes a difference in their lives.”
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guest will be Jordan Elgrably, Editor in Chief of The Markaz Review and co-editor with Malu Halasa of the new anthology, Sumud: A New Palestinian Reader. We’ll talk about themes in contemporary Palestinian writing and how that writing can help us better understand the horrors in Gaza and across Palestine and Israel.
Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.
Book Tour
(We’ll update this every week.)
On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.
On Monday, March 10 and Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be giving four talks in Michigan. On March 10 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at St David’s Episcopal Church, and on March 11 at St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church and at T’chiyah synagogue.
On Monday, March 17, I’ll be speaking at Mishkan Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia.
On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.
On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.
On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.
On Monday, April 7, I’ll be speaking at the Harvard Divinity School.
On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.
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 a progressive nonprofit’s refusal to grapple with the assault on Gaza.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Harvard Medical School Professors Eman Ansari and Aaron Shakow about censorship on campus.
In Haaretz, Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard suggests that “Israel Is losing the justification for its existence,” a statement that could be considered an example of antisemitism under the IHRA definition recently adopted by Harvard University.
Juan Cole on the way Trump’s treatment of Zelensky resembles US treatment of the Palestinians.
Joy Reid speaks after the cancellation of her show on MSNBC.
Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham’s comments upon winning an Oscar.
See you on Friday, March 7,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s kind of public humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Oval Office was the kind of most extreme version of the way Donald Trump treats a lot of foreign leaders, a lot of foreign countries. Which is, he basically says were being ripped off by you and we’re going to extort you, right? Basically, if you want America’s continued help or if you frankly just don’t want us to destroy your economy through tariffs, or you don’t want us to take over your land in the case of Greenland or Panama, basically you just have to start giving us stuff. In the case of Ukraine, your mineral resources. Or with, you know, in the case of Colombia, you have to take our migrants. Or with Canada and Mexico, it seems to change, but basically the claim is we’re getting ripped off and then that’s the pretext for basically these frankly kind of thuggish imperialist kind of claims that basically you’re just going to have to start paying us if you don’t want us to really kind of wreck you.
And so, the question that I think is interesting to ask is why doesn’t Trump treat Israel that way? Right? I mean, you could imagine a world where Trump makes a version of these same arguments vis-a-vis Israel, right. Where he says, you know, why are we giving you all these weapons? Why are we protecting you from Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas? What are we getting in return? We’re being played for suckers. You should pay us twice as much money or you should give us some of your natural resources or you should basically just hand over some of your high-tech companies to us or something. I mean, it wouldn’t be really entirely logical, but it never is logical with Trump.
But you could see how this impulse, right, could be applied to Israel just as easily as it could be applied to Ukraine, you know, again, because America gives Israel a lot of a lot of military assistance. Now, it’s true that military assistance is mostly in the form of a credit card that America gives Israel to buy American weaponry. Trump probably doesn’t even know that, right. And I’m sure he could still spin some way in which America is being ripped off. And yet, he doesn’t, right? I mean, the contrast between his meeting with Zelensky on the one hand, and his meeting with Netanyahu at the Oval Office couldn’t be more extreme, right. He didn’t humiliate Netanyahu. To the contrary, Netanyahu was beaming as Trump basically gave him a series of policies that Netanyahu was thrilled about, most of all, America’s support now for mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in Gaza.
So, why the difference? I mean, one answer would be that simply the domestic politics are very different, right. That even a country like Ukraine, which had a lot of support in Washington, doesn’t have a kind of permanent infrastructure of lobbying organizations like that Israel has, like, you know, pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC, for instance, and the Christians United for Israel, this kind of evangelical group. So, that sustains a level of domestic political support. And now, especially in the Republican Party, right, that has an impact on Trump’s behavior, that the blowback to Trump would be greater if he did this to Netanyahu than if he did this to Zelensky or any other government, right.
But I think that in a way only begs the further question itself, right. Well, then why do we have this infrastructure, right? Why is Israel unusual in that way? And partly, it has to do with the role of the American Jewish community as an unusually politically articulate community that really, since the 1970s, has kind of reoriented its institutional life around kind of unconditional defense of Israel. But that’s not the entire story, right, because Christians United for Israel, an evangelical organization is not a Jewish organization. And even though the American Jewish organizations wield influence, especially when it comes to the Republican Party, they’re really pushing against an open door, right. I mean, which is to say that there’s a lot of a lot of Republicans who are predisposed to support Israel, whether there was an AIPAC or not.
And I think this gets at part of the answer, which is the deeper answer, which is that Israel really doesn’t function in American politics really quite like a foreign policy issue. It really functions as a culture war issue. That Israel has kind of integrated into the culture war. You can see this in the way in which antisemitism and the fight against antisemitism—or I maybe should say ‘antisemitism,’ I think a lot of it’s not antisemitism—but the way in which the right organizes to fight what it calls antisemitism as part of its attack on DEI. And it’s part of its attack on wokeism, as if the left’s antisemitism from the perspective of pro-Israel folks is kind of connected in with the left’s, you know, calling America a racist country or wanting to put in gender pronouns. It’s all kind of part of the same basket. I don’t think there’s another country which functions that way, right, in which to be anti-Israel is to be on the opposite side of the culture war struggle that Donald Trump is on.
And I think that really has to do with the fact that Israel is seen in large chunks of America, and certainly in large chunks of the Republican Party, as not exactly a foreign country, but more like an image of what they would like America to be: a country that is openly ethno-nationalist in that it has clear legal hierarchies between different groups—in this case, ethno-religious groups, Jews and Palestinians. It has an immigration policy that essentially only allows a path to citizenship for people who are of the dominant group. That it’s very militaristic. It’s very nationalistic. It’s very sovereignty oriented. It’s openly dismissive of international law. It’s quite religious. These are all things that I think offer a kind of vision of what for Donald Trump and many Republicans were like America to be.
And so, in some ways, Israel functions as a kind of not exactly a mirror, but almost like an aspiration for America. The only other country that I could think off the top of my head functions at all that way is Hungary, which I think has also become really because it’s been so frankly anti-Muslim and also anti-LGBT and whatever serves also as a kind of a model. And that’s why I think that it would be very unlikely that Donald Trump would treat Viktor Orban that way. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe Narendra Modi or I suppose Jair Bolsonaro when they were in power in Brazil also. Because I think these are countries where Donald Trump is not likely to think about the relationship so much in transactional terms because he thinks of these countries as kind of countries that embody what he would like America to be.
And I think Israel above all, because it’s the country in which ethno-nationalism is the most firmly entrenched, and it’s also because it’s also so technologically and economically dynamic, and militarily strong, that it really represents a kind of almost a fantasy of what America could be. And I think that’s why you have this dramatic dissonance between how Trump treats Zelensky and many, many other sometimes longtime US allies and the way he treats Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.
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Our guests are two important progressive American rabbis who disagree on some fundamental questions regarding Palestine and Israel. Rabbi Alissa Wise, Lead Organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, former Co-Deputy Director at Jewish Voice for Peace and co-author of Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing, is anti-Zionist. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, supports partitioning Israel-Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. Despite these differences, they both signed a recent letter in The New York Times titled “Jewish People Say No to Ethnic Cleansing.” We talk about the ideological differences that separate “anti-Zionist” and “progressive Zionist” Jews, and whether, despite them, there are opportunities for cooperation in the age of Netanyahu and Trump.
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.com
I spoke with my friend, political analyst, and president of The Agora Initiative, Khalil Sayegh, about why he condemned Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family and other Israeli civilians, and why that angers some on the global left.
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I’ll be on book tour for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza for the next few months. You’ll find a list of book-related events and reviews below.
I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture, edited by Mahmoud Muha and Matthew Teller with Juliette Touma and Jayyab Abusafia.
I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.
Here is a message about Hossam’s condition from his sister, Abir:
“Hossam reached out to the passport office to inquire about the resumption of services. In a glimmer of hope, he learned that officials are anticipating the start of the second phase of the armistice agreement, which could lead to the reopening of travel offices and border crossings as early as the beginning of March. This news brings a sense of relief to many who have been waiting for this opportunity.
However, Hossam is also facing another daunting task. He is diligently working to recover the medical reports that were tragically lost during the raid on the displacement camp, which was completely devastated. These documents are crucial for their medical journey to Egypt.
Through all of this, Hossam and his family are holding on to the hope that your kindness has instilled in them. Your support means the world to them and plays an essential role in their journey toward healing.”
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guests will be two important progressive American rabbis who disagree on some fundamental questions regarding Palestine and Israel. Rabbi Alissa Wise, Lead Organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, former Co-Deputy Director at Jewish Voice for Peace and co-author of Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing, is anti-Zionist. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, supports partitioning Israel-Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. Despite these differences, they both signed a recent letter in The New York Times titled “Jewish People Say No to Ethnic Cleansing.” We’ll talk about the ideological differences that separate “anti-Zionist” and “progressive Zionist” Jews—I’m using quotation marks because even the terms are contested— and whether, despite them, there are opportunities for cooperation in the age of Netanyahu and Trump.
Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.
Book Tour
(We’ll update this every week.)
On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.
On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.
On Monday, March 10 and Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be giving four talks in Michigan. On March 10 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at St David’s Episcopal Church, and on March 11 at St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church and at T’chiyah synagogue.
On Monday, March 17, I’ll be speaking at Mishkan Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia.
On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.
On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.
On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.
On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Book Interviews
Last week, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza was reviewed critically from the right in Quillette and from the left in Middle East Eye and Religion Dispatches.
Here’s a video of my discussion last week at San Diego State University with Professors Jonathan Graubart and Manal Swarjo and in Los Angeles with Professor David Myers.
NPR chose Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza as its book of the day.
Sources Cited in this Week’s Video
Muhammad Shehada on Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family.
Khalil Sayegh on Hamas’ treatment of the Bibas family and other Israeli hostages.
Khalil Sayegh on his late father.
“Don’t call for revenge-call for peace,” retweeted by We Are All Hostages.
Commentary editor John Podhoretz on the people of Gaza (27 minutes in).
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Parshat Mishpatim.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Nora Caplan-Bricker reviews Rachel Kushner’s No Exit.
Matt Duss and Jeffrey Sachs debate Ukraine.
For the Foundation of Middle East Peace, I interviewed Palestine Legal’s Dima Khalidi about repression in the Trump era.
Check out Liz Shulman’s new book, Good Jewish Girl: A Jerusalem Love Story Gone Bad.
Reader Responses
In response to my interview with Educational Bookshop co-owner Mahmoud Muna, subscriber Therese Mughannam wrote:
“I was born in the hospital in the Russian Compound in 1947, (now a prison Mahmoud was taken to) months before the partition of Palestine. I’ve tried to visit the compound during past trips, but the courtyard was as far as I once was allowed ‘for security reasons’ and only for ‘5 minutes and no pictures!’ Unfortunately, my American passport revealed to them that I was born in Jerusalem. But once in there, sitting on a cold stone bench, time stood still for me and I prayed for them all, Israeli soldiers, Palestinian prisoners, the whole lot of them. Sigh. ‘How long O, Lord…’”
See you on Friday, February 28,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, as I’ve been on my book tour now, people sometimes ask me, you know, is it hard to be a Jew, particularly maybe an observant Jew who’s critical of Israel? And I always feel embarrassed a bit by the question because the truth is my life is so privileged and safe compared to Palestinians in Gaza, or Palestinians in the West Bank and other places, and even compared to Israeli Jews who are dying, or suffering, or whose family members are at risk or injured. And so, my problems are just minuscule. It is true that I have lost some friends, as I document in the book, but I still have a beautiful place to daven, to pray, with people who are willing to study Jewish texts with me despite our political differences.
And if I’ve lost some members, people in the Jewish community who are not interested in being my friends anymore, I also feel like I’ve gained a kind of a moral community that I could not have imagined, which includes many, many Palestinians and people from all different backgrounds. And what I mean by a moral community is people who simply believe in the preciousness of all life—all Palestinian life, all Israeli Jewish life—and refuse to be drawn into a politics of inhumanity, a politics of cruelty regardless of what happens and regardless of what is done to their side. And those people are my heroes. And I feel like that’s what I think of as my moral community.
I want to give a couple of examples of that. In the last few days, in the wake of the terrible news about the Bibas family there, the terrible way in which they were returned kind of paraded around, and the news that the person who was initially said to be their mother, Shiri Bibas, was not her. And the first person I want to quote is my friend Muhammad Shehada, who wrote after that, ‘our principles,’ he’s talking about the Palestinian freedom struggle. He says, ‘our principles should never be contingent on the behavior of our oppressor.’ This is from Muhammad, someone who, as I document in my book, lost his best friend in a terrible, terrible way during this war, who has lost so many relatives, whose family has suffered so much in Gaza. And yet, he condemns what Hamas has done. He’s done it consistently. He did it again in terms of their treatment of the Bibas family and the dead Bibas children because he says that the Palestinian struggle must hold itself to a higher moral standard.
The second is my friend Khalil Sayegh, also from Gaza. Khalil wrote about the way the Bibas family’s dead children and family were paraded. He wrote, ‘I opened my Facebook account where my friends who live in Gaza are and found many condemning Hamas’s parade of kids’ coffins. Most of these friends have endured the horror of the genocide and lost family members. I turned to X and find warriors from the West doing whataboutism.’ So, Khalil is himself from Gaza and he has it within him, despite everything, to condemn Hamas even though some leftists in the West who haven’t suffered in that personal way at all are making excuses for what Hamas has done.
And just to understand the significance of what Khalil is able to say here. It’s not only others in Gaza who have lost their closest family members, but himself as well. His father, Jeries Sayegh, died because of medical neglect and lack of access to medicine and hospital when the Holy Family Catholic Church, where he was taking refuge, was besieged. And I want to quote what Khalil wrote after his father’s death, about his father, Jeries Sayegh. He wrote, ‘my father always taught me to love everyone, forgive, and never give desire for revenge space in my life. He always looked up to Christ as his model and told me I should too. As hard and painful as it is, I promise you, Dad, to stay true to those principles.’ That’s what I mean by sharing a moral community. And this was also, by the way, a sentiment reflected by the group We Are All Hostages, the hostage group in its Twitter account, which tweeted out in response after this a quote from a tweet from a Palestinian who wrote named Ehad Hassan, who wrote, ‘Don’t call for revenge-call for peace.’
And it’s really striking to me that this came on the same week as Parshat Mishpatim. You know, Khalil is a devout Christian. I try, as best as I can, to be an observant Jew. And in this week’s Parshat, in this week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim, there is this line, which says, ‘if you see an enemy’s donkey sagging under its burden, you shall not pass by. You shall surely release it with him.’ And Jonathan Sachs notes that the Aramaic translation, which is called the Targum, has a very interesting different translation of this phrase. On the phrase, ‘you shall surely release it,’ it interprets this phrase as not, you shall surely release ‘it’ referring to the donkey, that you shall release the donkey from the burden it’s facing, but you shall let go of your own burden. You shall release the hatred in you. That by acting to do something, an act of humanity towards your enemy, you are releasing the hatred inside of you. That’s what it means by you shall surely release ‘it.’
Maimonides goes on to write as a general principle, ‘you shall blot any offenses against you out of your mind and not bear a grudge. For as long as one nurses a grievance and keeps it in mind, one may come to take vengeance. The Torah therefore emphatically warns us not to bear a grudge, so that the impression of the wrong should be completely obliterated and no longer remembered. This is the right principle. It alone makes civilized life and social interaction possible.’ This is such a precious and important and fragile message now with the possibility that Israel seems poised to not go further to a second round of a hostage deal, despite the fact that that’s what the hostage organizations want, but to launch a more aggressive war, a war that is more explicitly aimed at the mass expulsion of Palestinians in Gaza. And it has filled me with horror to see the way in which people with great prestige and credibility in Israel and the United States—people who are not associated with the far marginal right, but people in the center of our community, people who can walk into Jewish institutions and be respected and dignified—have in recent weeks jumped on board this idea of mass expulsion.
And I want to just quote one. I usually don’t quote people by name, but I just want to quote this. And you can think about this in contrast to Khalil Sayegh and Muhammad Shehada. This is from John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary Magazine, one of the most venerable Jewish magazines for many, many decades, the editor. And he’s talking about the way the Israeli public is now responding with fury to what they’ve seen of the Bibas family being paraded, but he’s also endorsing this view. This is what he says. This is what he says. This is from the Commentary podcast, and I’ll link to it. ‘The hell with Gaza. To hell with everybody who lives in Gaza. The hell with it. We don’t care. Stop talking to me about humanitarian aid. Stop talking to me about the suffering Gazan people.’
The message of Mishpatim is a profound rejection of this kind of inhumanity. Khalil Sayegh’s life, Muhammad Shehada’s life, even though they have endured, and their families have endured, a thousand, a million times more than what John Podhoretz has living on the Upper West Side of New York. They can bring themselves to reject cruelty, to recognize that all human beings, all Israeli Jews, all Palestinians, the Bibas family, Khalil Sayegh’s father, they’re all created in the image of God. Their lives are infinitely precious. It’s people who believe that who are my moral community. That’s the moral community that I take faith in that will bring us to a better place.
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Palestinian legal scholar Raef Zreik is a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Sometimes the most penetrating analysts of a society are those who see it from below because they are members of an oppressed caste. I’ve often found that Raef, as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has striking insights about Israeli Jewish society. So, in this horrifying moment, in which so many Israeli politicians and pundits have embraced mass ethnic cleansing, I wanted to hear his views.
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On Sunday, February 9th, Israeli police raided both branches of the East Jerusalem Educational Bookstore and arrested its owners, Mahmoud and Ahmed Muna. They were released on bail after two days in jail, but are banned from entering their stores for the next two weeks. During this difficult time, Mahmoud graciously agreed to talk with me about his experience.
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My new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, is (still) on The New York Times Bestseller List.
You’ll find a list of book-related events, interviews and reviews below.
I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, the latest work by the essayist Raja Shehada, What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?
I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s zoom call, for all paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guest will the Guardian columnist and novelist Jonathan Freedland. I’ve been looking for opportunities to discuss my book publicly with Jews who disagree with my criticisms of Israel, and it’s been hard. Almost everyone I’ve asked has said no. I’m grateful that Jonathan is an exception. He’s critical of Israel himself but still disagrees with aspects of my book. I’m looking forward to hearing those criticisms this Friday.
Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.
Book Tour
(We’ll update this every week.)
On Monday, February 17, I’ll be speaking at San Diego State University.
On Tuesday, February 18, I’ll be speaking with UCLA historian David Myers at the Lumiere Music Hall in Los Angeles. (The venue was changed after the Skirball Cultural Center cancelled the event).
On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.
On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.
On Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be speaking at T’chiyah synagogue in metro Detroit.
On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.
On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.
On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.
On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Book Interviews
Last week, I spoke about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza with The New Yorker, The Forward and Rumble. And in a public conversation sponsored by Jewish Currents with Ta-Nehisi Coates.
The book was reviewed in The Financial Times, Jacobin, the Sydney Morning Herald and Good Faith Media.
Sources Cited in this Week’s Video
Dan Senor’s podcast conversation with Israeli journalists Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal.
Amos Harel in Haaretz on Israel’s new war plan.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says “Preparations have begun with the Americans for implementing voluntary migration. I estimate that migration will begin within weeks.״
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I reviewed the antisemitism reports recently issued by task forces at Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and the University of Washington.
David Brooks on Trump and Musk’s reign of terror and incompetence inside America’s government.
In The New Yorker, Mosab Abu Toha outlines a plan for Gaza’s reconstruction.
In the London Review of Books, Alex de Waal discusses Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war.
See you on Friday, February 21,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
When things are already really horrible, it’s often hard for people to imagine that they could get even worse. Perhaps it’s especially hard for people to imagine that if those people, like many White Americans, have kind of grown up in relatively comfortable and secure environments. But I think we need to face the very real possibility that, in the weeks to come, Israel will renew its military assault on Gaza, that the ceasefire will end, and not just that Israel will renew its military assault, but that that military assault would be more ferocious, more savage than anything we have seen so far. And I want to suggest why I think there’s a real possibility of that terrible prospect.
One of the podcasts that I listen to is a podcast by a guy named Dan Senor called Call Me Back. Now, Dan and I kind of morally operate in really, I would say, fundamentally different kind of universes. I mean, we see Israel-Palestine in just fundamentally different ways. But I get a lot from listening to his podcast because Dan is very, very plugged in in Israeli political and national security circles. And he has guests on who are very, very plugged in.
And I think it’s really important for anybody, regardless of your political views, to not just listen to people who agree with you, but to listen to people who disagree with you because they often are part of a discourse that you might be inclined to overlook or not take seriously, but that actually is really, really important. And especially, given that this is a discourse that Dan is engaged in, which is operating off in a kind of near the highest echelons of the Israeli government and, especially under Trump, also the US government.
And so, in a recent episode, Dan was having a conversation with two very, very plugged in Israeli journalists, Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal. And one of the points they make is that they think it’s very unlikely that Benjamin Netanyahu would go to a second round of the ceasefire deal because his government is now down to 63 seats and an Israeli government needs 61 to stay in power. And Bezalel Smotrich, who was still in the government, the far-right finance minister, said he will leave the government if Israel doesn’t resume the war. He will leave the government if Israel goes to the second phase of the ceasefire. And that Netanyahu’s government could fall, in particular, because they have to pass a budget by early March, which would be very, very difficult to pass if there’s a rebellion inside their coalition. And beyond that, Netanyahu, if he went to an election this spring, would have to go into election having failed to deliver on his core promise of the war, which was to destroy Hamas. So, Segal and Eyal’s kind of view is that Netanyahu will look for an opportunity to not go to a second round of a ceasefire deal.
The second point that Nadav Eyal makes, which I think is really, really significant to understand, is the political impact of Donald Trump’s proposal for mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, the political impact in Israel. That Eyal makes the point, which I think is a very reasonable point, that the only entity that actually could force Palestinians out of Gaza is Israel. The United States is not going to do it on its own. The United States is not going to send its own troops into Gaza to put Palestinians on buses and force them out. If Trump’s plan is going to go into effect, it will have to be that Israel does that work.
And in a sense, what I think Nadav Eyal suggests on Senor’s podcast is that what Trump has done by saying that he wants the outcome of this war not to be the Palestinian Authority coming in, not to be a negotiated solution, but indeed to be the mass expulsion of Palestinians is essentially given a green light to Israel to wage a war in Gaza, which would be even more than the last war, a war aimed at mass expulsion. And this seems to fit what some people in the Israeli government are now saying.
So, Amos Harel, the longtime Haaretz writer, reported a couple of days ago that Israel’s defense minister, Yisrael Katz, had said that Israel would launch a new war in Gaza ‘exactly as the president promised.’ What does it mean to launch a new war exactly as the president promised? So, Harel quotes an Israeli Brigadier General Eival Gilady, who was head of the IDF Strategic Division, that he believes that Netanyahu has gotten a green light from Trump ‘for a very aggressive plan in Gaza. A focused Israeli offensive will cause large-scale death and destruction, along with curtailing humanitarian aid and will lead to Palestinians leaving the Strip.’ He goes on to talk about a plan that would lay siege to parts of the Strip, prevent the supply of humanitarian aid, and lead to ‘considerable destruction, if not total devastation of the areas in which the IDF will operate. Such tactics reek of ethnic cleansing.’
It is hard for a lot of people to imagine that Israel could fight a war in a more destructive fashion than it did for the first 15 months of this war. But remember it was then dealing with Joe Biden. Not that Joe Biden imposed costs on Israel. But that at least his administration was saying behind closed doors, we want you to try to be a little bit more restrained in your actions. The Trump administration, in a certain sense, has now said exactly the opposite. Not that we want you to be more restrained, but that we want you to create conditions for mass expulsion, which Trump has now said he believes in the interests of the United States, right.
And so, that seems to me a green light for Israel to resume the war in a way that is explicitly aimed at trying to create so much destruction in Gaza and permit so little humanitarian aid in as to try to force the population out. Of course, there’s still the question of whether you can force Egypt to go along with that, right. But that’s the other part of this element, given that Netanyahu has a political interest, it seems, in returning to military operations because otherwise his government would likely fall. And given that the Israeli assessment, understandably in a way, is that the only way you could implement Trump’s plan is if Israel created the expulsionary force from inside Gaza, and then you were able to get Egypt or Jordan or various other countries to agree to take some of these people. That I think, in a sense, what Trump’s musings may have really done is offered Israel a green light for an even more destructive, even more genocidal war than what we have seen before.
I hope I’m wrong. But listening to the Israeli journalists who follow and are very close to the Israeli political and national security establishment, that seems to be the way that Trump’s statements are being interpreted in Israel. And so, my fear is that we could be headed for something, God forbid, which is even worse than what we’ve seen before, unless there are forces around the world, and in the United States, that can somehow protest and try to stand in the way and block this. Because, on their own, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, I think, will have no compunction about not just doing what Israel has already done in Gaza, but doing something even worse.
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
Palestinian legal scholar Raef Zreik is a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Sometimes the most penetrating analysts of a society are those who see it from below because they are members of an oppressed caste. I’ve often found that Raef, as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has striking insights about Israeli Jewish society. So, in this horrifying moment, in which so many Israeli politicians and pundits have embraced mass ethnic cleansing, I wanted to hear his views.
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The Israeli and American Jewish establishments embrace mass ethnic cleansing.
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Deborah Dash Moore is a Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She’s been studying a number of surveys of American Jewish opinion which suggest that the American Jewish establishment’s claims that an overwhelming percentage of American Jews support the concept of a Jewish state—even if it denies Palestinians’ basic rights—is wrong.
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Daniel Immerwahr is a professor of history at Northwestern University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of How to Hide an Empire. We spoke about Trump’s shocking announcement on Gaza and what it might mean.
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What Greenland and Gaza Have in Common
The New American Imperialism
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The Bible Doesn’t Grant Jews Unconditional Sovereignty Over the West Bank
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Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi discusses my new book and the state of the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
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