The Beinart Notebook

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guests are brothers Yehuda and Joel Beinin and the director of the 2025 documentary about them, Holding Liat. On October 7, 2023, Yehuda’s daughter, Liat Atzili, was abducted by Hamas, and spent 54 days in captivity in Gaza before being released. Yehuda’s son-in-law, Aviv Atzili, was killed. In the film, Yehuda and Joel offer different understandings of the political context in which October 7 occurred. I asked them to elaborate on their views, and to talk about how an ideologically diverse Jewish and Israeli family grapples with an experience of terrible trauma.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comCherien Dabis is an actor, director, producer, and screenwriter. In March 2022, Dabis was named Laureate for Cultural Excellence by the Takreem foundation for her work on authentic Arab representation in Hollywood.Dabis produced, wrote, directed, and acted in her latest film, All That’s Left of You. It follows a Palestinian family across three generations.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM Eastern time. Our guests will be two brothers, Yehuda and Joel Beinin. Yehuda is a landscape architect in Kibbutz Shomrat in northern Israel. Joel (“Joey” to his family and friends) is Emeritus Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University. On October 7, 2023, Yehuda’s daughter, Liat Atzili, who lives in Kibbutz Nir Oz, was abducted by Hamas, and spent 54 days in captivity in Gaza before being released. Yehuda’s son-in-law, Aviv Atzili, was killed in the October 7th attack. The experience of Liat and her family are recounted in the 2025 documentary, Holding Liat. In the film, Yehuda and Joel offer different understandings of the political context in which October 7 occurred. I’ll ask them to elaborate on their views, and to talk about how an ideologically diverse Jewish and Israeli family grapples with an experience of terrible trauma.Cited in Today’s VideoNoam Chomsky vs David Frum on human rights.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!), Eric Baker argues that to preserve academic freedom, US universities should cut their ties to the US military.972 Mag chronicles the spike in emigration from Israel.Nader Hashemi on potential US strikes on Iran.On January 19, I’ll be speaking at the Free University of Brussels.On January 26, I’ll be speaking with Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina.On January 27, I’ll be hosting a fundraiser near Asheville for the Gaza Soup Kitchen, a grassroots initiative, led by people in Gaza, which serves hot meals to thousands daily across ten kitchen sites. Ninety-nine percent of funds raised go directly to feeding and supporting the people of Gaza. Register here: https://givebutter.com/FairviewNC (donation amount is $100 and address to be provided after registration).On February 12, I’ll speaking at the Conference on the Jewish Left at Boston University.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, one of my favorite things is when I get emails from people who disagree with me but have a genuine kind of question or argument they want to make. You know, it’s very different than when people just kind of email to say, you know, what an a*****e I am. But, you know, people who have, like, a genuine argument that they want to hear responded to.And I got an email like that the other day, and it was kind of in the wake of these demonstrations in Iran. And the person said, about progressives, he said, ‘I often see intense focus on Israel without proportional attention to severe human rights violations in Iran, China, Russia, and elsewhere.’ And it’s a really, really important point, I think, to answer. And, and it’s a debate that’s been going on for a long time.And his question reminded me of this remarkable video, this remarkable clip, of a conversation decades ago between Noam Chomsky and David Frum—Chomsky and Frum, of course, both much younger at that time. David Frum was quite a young man but still appears to be having some of the kind of hawkish tendencies that he became later well known for. And, in their interaction, Frum says, when we think what we focus on as Americans in terms of our foreign policy concerns, Frum says there should be, ‘an equality of corpses,’ by which he means we should treat all deaths in which people are killed by a regime equally, irrespective of who does it.And Chomsky argues no. Chomsky says, actually, we should care more about those deaths that are committed with American participation, with American complicity. Not, of course, because the lives matter more, but simply because we have a greater moral obligation because we participated in their killing. And Chomsky says, ‘it’s a very simple ethical point. You’re responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions. You’re not responsible for the predictable consequences of somebody else’s actions.’And I think this is something that we kind of intuitively kind of understand if we take it out of the realm of foreign policy and just think about interpersonal, you know, interactions, right? If I am, God forbid, beating up on someone, I have a greater responsibility to stop doing so than I do to stop my neighbor who is beating up on someone, partly, again, because I am the one who’s committing this despicable action.It’s also, just as a practical matter, a lot easier for me to stop that action than me to stop the neighbor, right? Again, I may well also have an obligation to do something about what my neighbor is doing, but it’s a much more complicated business. I have to literally go, what am I gonna go kind of fight my neighbor to make sure my neighbor is not fighting against the other person? That might well be a valuable thing to do, but in the hierarchy of things that I should do, if I have a limited

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comTrita Parsi is an expert on Iran, author, and executive vice president of The Quincy Institute. I asked him to help make sense of the current situation in Iran.

Note: Apologies for the poor video quality here. I’m making do with spotty WiFi. A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.There will be no Zoom call this week. We’ll return next week.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 reports on efforts by Israeli universities to lure American Jewish students alienated by pro-Palestinian activism on American campuses.Last week, I spoke on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun Synagogue in New York.On January 19, I’ll be speaking at the Free University of Brussels.On January 26, I’ll be speaking with Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina.On January 27, I’ll be hosting a fundraiser near Asheville for the Gaza Soup Kitchen, a grassroots initiative, led by the people of Gaza, which serves hot meals to thousands daily across ten kitchen sites. Ninety-nine percent of funds raised go directly to feeding and supporting the people of Gaza. Register here: https://givebutter.com/FairviewNC (donation amount is $100 and address to be provided after registration).See you next week,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, there are really remarkable protests taking place in Iran, and I think the first thing to say about them is that they deserve the support of progressives because progressives should care about human rights.And there are pro-American regimes that can commit horrific violations of human rights, and there are anti-American regimes that can commit horrific violations of human rights. This is not a new story. You can go back to Joseph Stalin to realize that’s the case, and also to see that there have been times historically, where some progressives have forgotten that, and judged regimes less on the way they treat their people than how they treat the United States. And that seems to me, it’s as wrong to give countries a pass when they brutally violate human rights because they’re anti-American, as it is to give them a pass when they brutally violate human rights, because they’re pro-American, if you’re someone who cares and believes in the universality of human rights.But saying that the Iranian protesters were protesting against this really, really autocratic and brutal regime deserve the support of progressives around the world—all people around the world—doesn’t answer the question of what the United States should do. It’s really important to remember that just because people hate their regime doesn’t mean they want a foreign country to attack their regime, let alone occupy their regime.You know, many Iraqis—probably most Iraqis—loathed Saddam Hussein. It didn’t mean that they wanted the United States to occupy Iraq. And the United States learned the hard way—or those Americans who didn’t know beforehand learned the hard way—that Iraqis could both loathe Saddam Hussein and also loathe and fight against an American occupation.And it’s also just important to remember that even if you could establish—and I don’t know how one could establish—the fact that Iranians might want some kind of American military intervention in their country, that there are questions of international law here that have global repercussions, right? Which is to say, even if you could establish that people in a certain country wanted, you know, wanted an attack by another country—and again, I don’t know how you would do that—one of the things we’ve clearly learned in the last 20-25 years is the way in which when one country, when the United States gives itself the right to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of another country, that emboldens other powers, you know, China and Russia in particular, to do exactly the same thing.It’s different when you have the support of the United Nations, right, because support of the United Nations suggests that you have, essentially, some kind of consensus among many countries around the world. Then that is a check on the inclination of various powers—the U.S. in Iraq, or, you know, Russia in Georgia, Ukraine—to basically come up with some spurious claim to justify its imperial interests, right? So, it would be one thing if there was some kind of international UN support for some kind of intervention in Iraq. But I think that’s fundamentally different than the United States doing it on its own.And the other thing I think is worth thinking about when we think about what we would want if we were Iranians, what kind of support we might want from countries around the world, is to imagine ourselves in their shoes. And I actually think that’s a little bit easier for many Americans than it was before Donald Trump. Now, obviously, the United States remains a much, much freer country than Iran does. But it doesn’t take that much imagination to imagine that if Donald Trump got his way, he could move the United States towards being the kind of really brutal dictatorship that Iran is today—a cou

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is one of the foremost scholars of US policy towards Latin America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian, Greg Grandin, author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and America, América: A New History of the New World. We talked about how the Trump administration’s abduction of Nicolás Maduro fits into the long-history of US imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the world.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This week’s zoom call will be at a special time, Wednesday at 1pm ET. Our guest will be one of the foremost scholars of US policy towards Latin America, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian Greg Grandin, author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and America, América: A New History of the New World. We’ll talk about how the Trump administration’s abduction of Nicolas Maduro fits into the long-history of US imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, and the world.Cited in Today’s VideoThe attacks on Zohran Mamdani for repealing two orders by Eric Adams related to antisemitism and Israel.The texts of the Israel-related orders Mamdani repealed.A Philosopher for All Seasons, a film about Yeshayahu Leibowitz.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!), Aron Wander and Nathan Goldman discuss Jewish sources about rebuking other Jews.Israel bans Doctors without Borders and other NGOs from operating in Gaza.On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan and on January 26 with Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina.On January 27, I’ll be hosting a fundraiser near Asheville for the Gaza Soup Kitchen, a grassroots initiative, led by the people of Gaza, that serves hot meals to thousands daily across ten kitchen sites. Born from a vow to ensure no neighbor grows hungry, their mission continues in honor of founder Mahmoud Almadhoun, guided by his word, Mostamreen, “we will continue,” said right before he was killed by a drone strike. 99% of funds raised go directly to feeding and supporting the people of Gaza. Register here: https://givebutter.com/FairviewNC (donation amount is $100 and address to be provided after registration).See you on Wednesday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, Zohran Mamdani has just been inaugurated as mayor of New York and, unsurprisingly, he’s already under attack from establishment Jewish organizations. And these attacks are really predictable and, honestly, they’re really brain-dead, and, in a way, just engaging with them at all is kind of depressing because I think they serve, in a lot of ways, not as good faith arguments, but just basically as a way to, you know, create a political headache and a kind of cloud over Mamdani, and basically make it harder for him to focus on the work that he actually wants to do. But I still think, despite that, it’s worth explaining why these arguments just don’t make any sense. And they’re all basically based on this fundamental incorrect conflation of Jews as a group of people with the state of Israel.So, the first thing that Mamdani did was he repealed an order by his predecessor, Eric Adams, to kind of make the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, kind of encoded in New York City policy and law. And the IHRE definition of antisemitism has very little support from actual scholars of antisemitism, especially scholars who work on antisemitism and Israel-Palestine. Its major supporters are the Israeli government and its kind of allied pro-Israel organizations around the world. And you can see why it has so little scholarly support when you actually look at it, right? You can see why it makes so much sense that actually Mamdani would have repealed it, right?So, it has these examples of antisemitism. So, basically, if you do these things, this is like prima facie evidence that you are antisemitic. One of them is denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination—I’m quoting—e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor. But the State of Israel is explicitly premised on the idea that, basically, that Jews should rule, right? That this is a state for Jews, in which Jews have superior rights to Palestinians.This is not a secret, right? David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel, said, this country has to have an 80% Jewish majority, because otherwise Jews couldn’t be sure that Jews would rule. And it was because of this, in large measure, that for more than half of the Palestinians who lived in Palestine under the British Mandate were expelled when Israel was created in 1948 in order to create this large Jewish majority. Many of them were expelled before the Arab armies even attacked Israel in May 1948.And then Israel created a very different set of laws for the Palestinians that remained vis-à-vis, versus those of Jews, right? So Palestinian citizens were under military law from 1948 to 1966. When Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it took control of millions of Palestinians who didn’t have the right of citizenship and the right to vote. It’s for all these reasons that Israel has now been declared an apartheid state by the world’s leading human rights organiza

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is Philip Gordon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. We talked about the Biden-Harris administration’s actions regarding Israel and Gaza, Kamala Harris’s statements about Gaza during the campaign, and what policies Democrats should pursue toward Israel-Palestine in the future.

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

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This week’s zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Philip Gordon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. We’ll talk about the Biden-Harris administration’s actions regarding Israel and Gaza, Kamala Harris’s statements about Gaza during the campaign, how she might have governed as president and what policies Democrats should pursue toward Israel-Palestine in the future.Cited in Today’s VideoBari Weiss pulls a 60 Minutes report on Trump administration deportations to El Salvador.Donald Trump has reportedly said he expects better treatment by CBS now that David Ellenson and Weiss are in charge.Weiss’ Free Press co-hosted a Trump administration inauguration party with Elon Musk’s X.Weiss’ resignation letter from The New York Times.The ACLU denounced Weiss’ efforts to punish pro-Palestinian professors when she was a student at Columbia.The Trump administration leaked the news that it was withholding funds from Columbia to Weiss’ Free Press.Weiss’ support for Israel is reportedly one of the reasons Ellison hired her at CBS.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane talks to immigration expert Samah Sisay about how Trump’s new travel ban targets Palestinians.Tareq Baconi on how the genocide in Gaza radicalized the world.On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan.Reader ResponseBenjamin Langer responded to last week’s video about banning the phrase “globalize the intifada.” He writes:The word in the phrase that troubles me is not “intifada,” but “globalize.” If, as you say, “intifada” can mean a call for either violent or non-violent uprising, then globalizing the intifada could mean bringing civil disobedience and political pressure to international spaces, or could mean bringing violence to international Israel-associated targets. It’s not a stretch for many people to consider a synagogue with a JNF billboard outside, or a demonstration like Toronto’s 50,000-strong (roughly 1/4 of Toronto’s Jews) Walk For Israel as Israel-associated enough. To your Ukraine example, if people were using a phrase in Ukrainian solidarity protests that left open for interpretation that Russian-Canadian or Russian-American people or political and cultural institutions, were legitimate targets for violence, I think there would also be significant concern.I don’t think that “globalize the intifada” should be banned, and I think that people saying it contributes a vanishingly small fraction of the added risk to Jews compared to the now innumerable and extensively documented Israeli war crimes paired with overwhelming diaspora Jewish institutional support for their necessity. The phrase is the voice of the rage, not its source! But I wonder how the movement could do better to be more surgical in its approach. A phrase that opens it up to culpability for those who take violence into their own hands provides easy ammunition for the well-organized forces of censure and suppression.A Holiday GiveawayOver the years I’ve had some requests to make certain interviews to be free and shareable for all in their entirety. So, I’m going to permanently remove the paywall for 8 posts from 2025. The first is my recent conversation with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove as there have already been many requests for that one. For the rest, we’ll go with your most popular choices in the comments to this post. (Please look at other comments and if your preference has already been nominated, you can have your vote counted by just tapping like on that comment.)See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:There’s been a lot of discussion recently about CBS News, which is now under the control of Bari Weiss, and in particular about this segment that was done by 60 Minutes, which is the kind of flagship CBS News program about people who were deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador—Venezuelans who were deported and then who were treated really, really terribly there. And that this was all ready to go, this segment, and Bari Weiss stepped in, and, reportedly, she said that they shouldn’t air it unless they had an interview with Stephen Miller.And it produced a big furor, I think in part because it’s one of a number of series of things that have happened since this guy, David Ellison, who runs Paramount Skydance became the owner of CBS, and then brought in Bari Weiss as head of CBS News, which suggests that—although CBS isn’t full-on Fox, in the sense that it’s just doing pure propaganda sycophancy for Trump—it is really trying not to offend the Trump administration in various different ways. In fact, it has been reported that Trump has privately said that he believed David Ellison and his father, Larry Ellison, w

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guests this week are two remarkable people, Musya Herzog and Meyer Labin. Musya is a neuropsychologist who grew up in the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Meyer is a Yiddish-language journalist and writer from the Satmar community. They talk about the discourse about Israel and Zionism in ultra-Orthodox communities, and what it might take to make them more sympathetic to Palestinian rights.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West BankA way to directly help victims of the massacre in SydneyThis week’s zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM. Our guests will be two remarkable people, Musya Herzog and Meyer Labin. Musya is a neuropsychologist who grew up in the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Meyer is a Yiddish-language journalist and writer from the Satmar community. Both are now active in Smol Emuni, the religious left. They’ll talk about the discourse about Israel and Zionism in ultra-Orthodox communities, and what it might take to make them more sympathetic to Palestinian rights.Cited in Today’s VideoThe premier of New South Wales calls for banning “globalize the intifada.”Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.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!), Samuel Stein reports on Zohran Mamdani’s looming struggle with the real estate industry.Gaza no longer faces famine. But its people are still hungry.Israel is preparing for a permanent presence in Gaza.On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan.A Holiday GiveawayWe’ve had many requests to open up certain interviews, so they are free and shareable for all. So, this holiday season, I’m going to permanently remove the paywall for 8 posts from 2025. The first is my recent conversation with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove. For the rest, we’ll go with your most popular choices in the comments to this post. (Please look at other comments and if your preference has already been nominated, you can have your vote counted by liking that comment.) If this goes well we’ll make it an annual tradition.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So now, a week or so after the terrible massacre in Sydney, Australia, the Australian government is considering doing some sensible things, like limiting the number of guns that any person in Australia can own, but also considering doing some things that would be really fundamental violations of people’s rights to free speech. Among them, the Premier of New South Wales, the Australian state that encompasses Sydney, said that he wants to ban the phrase “globalize the intifada.”Now, this is really stupid and dangerous at a number of levels. First of all, does anyone really think that banning the phrase “globalize the intifada” would have stopped this father and son, who were evidently connected to ISIS, from having committed this terrible attack? If these people had an ISIS ideology, banning the phrase “globalize the intifada” would do absolutely nothing to prevent them from committing this heinous terrorist attack. On its face, it’s just ridiculous to think that banning this phrase would have done anything to prevent the terrible violence that occurred. But beyond that, it’s simply a grave violation of people’s basic, fundamental rights to say that you can’t use the phrase “globalize the intifada.” Intifada is an Arabic word that means uprising. It doesn’t mean uprising against Israel or Jews. It means uprising in general. The Arab Spring was often referred to as an intifada. An intifada, like any uprising, or any revolutionary political movement, can be violent or nonviolent. The first Palestinian intifada, in the late 1980s, was largely nonviolent. The second one, in the early 2000s, was much more violent. It can be violent or non-violent.So, yes, “globalize the intifada” could be interpreted as a call for violence. It could also be interpreted as a call for an uprising that’s not violent. But even if “globalize the intifada” is interpreted, or meant by the speaker, as a call for violence, we allow people to call for violence on the streets all the time. Threatening violence against one individual person is one thing, but saying you support violence in general in some kind of political context is not at all. If people protest in defense of Ukraine’s right to fight against Russia, and protest for their government to give arms to Ukraine. They’re protesting in support of Ukrainians using violence in that cause.The fact that it’s a call for violence doesn’t mean that it should be banned. Similarly, if someone goes out in a protest and says Israel has the right to defend itself; I stand with the IDF. In the wake of what Israel’s been doing in Gaza, those are endorsements of violence. People have the right to say those things. People have the right to participate in political speech, and in political speech around a whole range of different things. People often endorse violence of various forms that they believe will serve their political ends. Sometimes those calls for violence are odious, sometimes those calls for violence, as—let’s say in the case of Ukraine—might be ones that are widely supported. But the point is that people have the right to make that kind of political speech.You know, I still rem

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comSarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer who grew up in Sydney, is the founding executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, a Jewish community organization founded to fight against antisemitism and all forms of racism, and to support Palestinian freedom and justice.

This week’s zoom call will be at A SPECIAL TIME: THURSDAY AT 2 PM Eastern. In light of the Chanukah massacre in Sydney, we’ll talk to Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer who grew up in Sydney, and is the founding executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, a Jewish community organization founded to fight against antisemitism and all forms of racism, and to support Palestinian freedom and justice. We’ll talk about the unique history of the Jewish community in Australia, about the rise of antisemitism there and about how to combat it while also opposing bigotry against all people.Cited in Today’s VideoThe Babylonian Talmud’s discussion of the dangers of lighting a Chanukiah in public.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!), Anne Irfan shows how the Trump plan for Gaza is crowding Palestinians there into even less land.Dana El Kurd talks to Matan Kaminer and Ben Schuman-Stoler about Gaza and the Abraham Accords.A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.See you on Thursday at 2,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:When I woke up on Sunday morning and read the news of this terrible massacre on the first night of Chanukah in Sydney, Australia, a couple of things went through my mind.The first is about the nature of Jews in Australia, and the second is about the nature of Chanukah. I’ve had the good fortune of spending a fair amount of time in the Jewish community in Sydney and Melbourne, and the Australian Jewish community is one of the most extraordinary that I have ever seen anywhere in the world. It’s a very, very cohesive Jewish community; very, very vibrant; very strong dedication to Jewish education. And it’s different than the American Jewish community in that it is closer to the European experience. Most American Jews came to the U.S. in the late 19th or early 20th century. Many Australian Jews came later, before or after the Holocaust. And so, you have a much larger percentage of families in Australia that are the direct descendants of people who survived the Holocaust, with many, many families being touched very, very deeply by that experience. It is really a community that is more, I think, affected, more closer to, more traumatized by the experience of the Holocaust than almost any other Jewish community on Earth. And so, for a community that has that deep trauma in so many Australian Jewish families, to now have this new trauma, this terrible, terrible massacre that killed—we now know—15 people on the first night of Chanukah is just horrifying beyond words.The second thing is about the fact that it happened on Chanukah. When I read the news, I was reminded that there’s not a lot of discussion about Chanukah in the Talmud, but in the relatively brief discussion there is, there’s a discussion in Tractate Shabbat about the nature, about the mitzvah to put the Chanukiah—the Chanukah lamp—in the entrance to one’s house.And the rabbis say that the mitzvah, the obligation, is to put the Chanukiah, the lamp, in the window, so it is visible to the public. But then, they say that the sages say that in a time of danger, in a time of religious persecution, when Jews are not allowed to perform the mitzvah of lighting the Chanukah lamp, it is permitted to place the Chanukiah on the table instead, so it can’t be seen from outside.And so, it was very, very poignant to think about this discussion in the Babylonian Talmud against the backdrop of this experience in Sydney, Australia, which did turn out to be extremely dangerous—deadly, actually—to perform the mitzvah of publicizing the miracle of Chanukah, and that the rabbis, you know, the rabbis close to 2,000 years ago, were worried about this very issue. Could Jews safely celebrate Chanukah, publicize the mitzvah of Chanukah, or did we need a special dispensation to say that in times of grave danger, that Jews can perform the Chanukah ritual, the celebration, in private?And so, to me, that seems to me, in some ways, kind of one way of thinking about what is at stake today, in a world of rising antisemitism. Do we live in a world in which it is safe for Jews to light Chanukiahs in public, as the rabbis prefer to publicize the miracle that happened, that we celebrate on Chanukah, or do we live in a time of such great danger that Jews should have to do so in private because the risk of doing what those Australian Jews did on the first night on Bondi Beach in Sydney is actually too dangerous?I am sure, I am sure, that the response by Jewish communities around the world will be to double down on the obligation to publicize the miracle, perform the celebration of Chanukah in public, to not be daunted, to not be scared by this. But it is terrible. It is terrible to imagine that there might be some who actually now need to go back to the Talmudic discussion, about whether it’s safe, in fact, to light a Chanu

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comMahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, and father of the mayor-elect of New York City. We’ll talk about Professor Mamdani’s new memoir about his family’s experience in Uganda, his research on the similarities—and differences—between settler-colonialism in South Africa, Israel-Palestine and the United States, and what it’s like to be a Muslim in Trump’s America.

. 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

Given the controversy over my talk at Tel Aviv University, I thought it would be interesting to talk to two experts on boycotts. Zackie Achmat is a veteran South African political activist and a leading authority on the role of boycotts in the anti-apartheid movement. Mazin Qumsiyeh is founder and volunteer director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University and the author of Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, which chronicles non-violent protest in Palestinian history. We spoke about the history of boycotts in both places, the ethical dilemmas they create, and whether or not they work. 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

Recently, Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote an essay criticizing my apology for speaking at Tel Aviv University. I thought it would be a good idea to have him on to explore our differences. 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

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This week’s call will be at a special time, WEDNESDAY at 1 PM. Given the controversy over my talk at Tel Aviv University, and subsequent apology, I thought it would be interesting to talk to two experts on boycotts: one South African and one Palestinian. Zackie Achmat is a veteran South African political activist and a leading authority on the role of boycotts in the anti-apartheid movement. Mazin Qumsiyeh is founder and volunteer director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University and the author of Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, which chronicles non-violent protest in Palestinian history. We’ll talk about the history of boycotts in both places, the ethical dilemmas they create and whether or not they work.This week’s live Zoom call will be for paid subscribers, as usual. But we will make the video available for everyone.Cited in Today’s VideoThe Trump administration’s agreement with Northwestern University.At Harvard, Muslim students are more than twice as likely as Jewish students to feel unsafe.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!), Lee Mordechai chronicles Israel’s “collective amnesia” about the genocide in Gaza.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I talked to Ahmed Moor about my apology for speaking at Tel Aviv University.I talked on the Know Your Enemy podcast about the varying Jewish reactions to Zohran Mamdani.Haaretz profiles Israel’s “Faithful Left.”Check our Terrell Starr’s excellent Substack newsletter.The New York Times named Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza one of the 100 notable books of 2025.I’ll be speaking on December 8 at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York City.Reader ResponseI occasionally publish letters from readers who take issue with something I’ve said. This one comes from Hillel Schenker, co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal:“I don’t understand why you felt you made ‘a serious mistake’ by speaking at Tel Aviv University. Virtually all of the humanities lecturers at the university are on the left, as are a good percentage of the students. They are highly critical of the extreme right-wing government policy, and the current Tel Aviv University President Prof. Ariel Porat has defended the right of Arab and left-wing students to protest against the war.My predecessor as Israeli Co-Editor of Palestine-Israel Journal was Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal. When he was the Co-Director of Tel Aviv University’s Walter Lebach Research Institute for Jewish-Arab Coexistence, together with Prof. Amal Jamal, a Palestinian-Israel, we arranged for them to host a presentation by Prof. Johan Galtung at the university, who is considered the father of peace research. That earned Bar-Tal the title of “enemy of Israel” from all the right-wing watchdogs. And Galtung himself (who was also on the enemy of Israel lists), who was highly critical of both Israeli and American government policies, had no problem appearing at Tel Aviv U. alongside an appearance we arranged for him at the Palestinian Al-Quds University in Abu-Dis in the West Bank.You could have found a way to show respect for the BDS movement while at the same explaining that you are critical of any support that any part of the university gives to the IDF. The literature departments definitely don’t supply arms to the IDF, and their curriculum is under attack from the right-wing ministers of education and culture.”See you on Wednesday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, the day after Thanksgiving, the Trump administration announced another agreement with an American university—in this case Northwestern University. And it’s really striking if you look at the language that Trump’s Department of Justice uses in describing the terms of this agreement.So, let me just quote a couple of elements from it. The Justice Department writes that Northwestern University will ‘safeguard its students, employees and faculty from unlawful discrimination based on race, religion, sex, and national origin, including race-based admissions practices and a hostile educational environment directed towards Jewish students.’ And then it goes on that the university will ensure that it ‘does not preference individuals based on race, color, or national origin in admission, scholarships, hiring, or promotion.’ And then it goes on to say that it will ‘implement mandatory antisemitism training for all students, faculty, and staff.’So, what do you notice about this language? On the one hand, the Trump administration is boasting that Northwestern is going to treat all students equally, irrespective of race, religion, national origin, etc. And then, literally in the next sentence, it says and it’s also going to do this special thing to protect Jewish students, this special thi

Anne Irfan is an expert on Palestinian refugee rights, the UN and UNRWA. She is a Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Race, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at University College London (UCL). She has previously taught at the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics, and the University of Sussex.I invited her to talk about her latest book, A Short History of the Gaza Strip. 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.comOur guest is Chapman University Professor Emeritus Nubar Hovsepian, author of the new book, Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual. We talked about Professor Hovsepian’s insights into Said, his close friend, and about what we might learn from Said’s work for this moment in Israel-Palestine and the United States.

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove is the rabbi of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City. He has written for a variety of Jewish publications, including The Jewish Week and The Forward. He is the author of the 2024 book “For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today” and the host of the podcast Common Faith.We have some strong disagreements so I’m grateful that he was willing to come on and discuss them with me. 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

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Chapman University Professor Emeritus Nubar Hovsepian, author of the new book, Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual. We’ll talk about Professor Hovsepian’s insights into Said, his close friend, and about what we might learn from Said’s work for this moment in Israel-Palestine and the United States.Ask Me AnythingOur next Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM subscribers only, will be this Wednesday, November 12, from 1-2 PM Eastern time.Cited in Today’s VideoRabbi Chaim Steinmetz’s message to his congregation that after Mamdani’s victory, life for New York Jews is “beginning to feel like the 1930s.”Jason Sokol’s, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I argued that Zohran Mamdani’s victory may herald a coalition between anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists that can transform the Democratic Party.Why the polls may understate Mamdani’s share of the Jewish vote.Yeshayahu Leibowitz, 50 years ago, on last week’s Parsha, Parshat Vayeira.Rabbi Aron Wander on the psychotheology of American Zionism.I’ll be speaking on November 10 at Cornell University and Congregation Tikkun v’Or in Ithaca, New York and on December 8 at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York City.Reader ResponseI occasionally publish letters from readers who take issue with something I’ve said. This one comes from Sophia (last name withheld):I’ve been reading your coverage of Mamdani and although I think a lot of it is very fair criticism of establishment Judaism, respectfully, I think you are missing one major point. Speaking only for myself, I can tell you that I *hate* Cuomo, and that the idea of voting for him is repellent to me. I too hate the Islamophobia that is showing in our community, and I hate the message that sexual harassment is acceptable in a way that antisemitism is not. These messages are embarrassing and offensive to me.Two things can be true at the same time, though. I have no issue with people being so-called critical of Israel, and of that criticism having grown in intensity in the last two years (it certainly has for me). However, I find Mamdani to be monomaniacally obsessed with Israel and its crimes in a way that I find concerning and even antisemitic. When people say what about North Korea, China, Sudan, etc., I don’t find that to be an excuse for Israel’s behavior. But when he identifies Israel in one way or another as the source of most evils here in the US, I think that is suspicious. Israel is not the cause of racist policing in the U.S., that predates Israel! I am not assuaged by him promising to protect synagogues; that would be his job as mayor, not a favor he hands out to Jews. If he is so concerned (correctly) about affordability in the city, stop campaigning on your commitment to defund the Technion; it is basically a dog-whistle at this point for the anti-Israel and even antisemitic Left (which are two descriptors that I distinguish between, as I don’t believe being anti-Israel is necessarily antisemitic)See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, there’s a rabbi on the Upper East Side of New York named Chaim Steinmetz. He is the rabbi of a synagogue called Kehilath Jeshurun. It’s probably the most prominent Orthodox synagogue on the Upper East Side of New York. It’s one of the most prominent Orthodox synagogues in all of New York, in fact, in all of America.And after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in last week’s election for mayor of New York, he wrote in a letter to his congregants, ‘it’s beginning to feel like the 1930s.’ It’s beginning to feel like the 1930s. He’s not the only person who feels this way. A prominent rabbi in the Hamptons on Long Island announced that he’s going to build an entire Jewish Day School, because he’s expecting so many Jews to flee New York City in fear, and come out to Long Island, and he’s going to build a day school for their children.Now, for many, many people, many non-Jews, but also many Jews, many progressive Jews, this is baffling. It’s just really, really hard to understand how people could look at Zohran Mamdani, a guy who won at least a third of the Jewish vote, a guy who’s got tons and tons of Jews in his campaign, a guy who speaks again and again and again about Jewish safety and about his opposition to antisemitism, a guy who smiles constantly, that they would feel this level of terror just because Mamdani believes that Israel should be a state in which Palestinians and Jews are treated equally.But it’s important to try to understand the reason for this terror, which I think in many, many people’s cases is actually genuine. And it’s also really important to understand t

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guests are Palestinian-American Georgia State Representative, and gubernatorial candidate, Ruwa Romman, who was denied the chance to speak at last year’s Democratic convention, and former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, co-host of the podcast, Pod Save the World.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. We’ll talk about the New York mayoral race’s ramifications for the Israel-Palestine debate nationally. Our guests will be Palestinian-American Georgia State Representative, and gubernatorial candidate, Ruwa Romman, who was denied the chance to speak at last year’s Democratic convention, and former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, co-host of the podcast, Pod Save the World.Cited in Today’s VideoThe Department of Justice alleged that Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed thirteen women.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!), Rhys Machold questions the “Start Up Nation” myth.Senator Rand Paul defends the Constitution against Donald Trump.The funeral of Rabbi Arthur Waskow, z’’l.Check out Arno Rosenfeld’s new Substack, Antisemitism Decoded.The Halachic Left on Parshat Lech Lecha.I discussed Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza on KALW public radio in the Bay Area.I’ll be speaking on November 3 at the University of Chicago, November 6 at Columbia Journalism School, and November 10 at Cornell University and Congregation Tikkun v’Or in Ithaca, New York.See you Friday, PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, when I started writing my book, I didn’t think it would be about idolatry. I mean, I knew it would be about Israel and the destruction of Gaza, but it ended up kind of being a book about idolatry because the more I wrote it, the more I began to feel that the organized American Jewish community was willing to sacrifice almost anything to preserve unconditional support for the state of Israel, that every other value, every other principle was subordinated to that.And I’m seeing that so dramatically and, to me, in what is such a disgraceful way in the final days of this campaign against Zohran Mamdani. What are you willing to sacrifice in order to prevent a New York mayor who says that Israeli Jews and Palestinians should live equally under the same law? What are you willing to try to do to destroy such a candidate? The answer is: lie with almost anyone, do almost anything.Let’s just look at the examples. We have now all of these rabbis who have either explicitly or implicitly endorsed Andrew Cuomo to be next mayor of New York. This is a man who the Department of Justice found had sexually harassed 13 women, sexually harassed 13 women according to the Department of Justice. And you have rabbis telling their congregants that they need to overlook this and support this man.Do these rabbis ever think about what message that sends to the women in their own congregations who are being sexually harassed, who might look to a rabbi for pastoral care? Your message it sends to those women when your rabbi gets up and says, I want you to vote for the serial sexual harasser, what does it say about how much you care about women’s right to be free of sexual harassment?It says it is much less important to you than the principle of ensuring that Israel never faces accountability for its crimes under international law, even when those crimes have been widely acknowledged by the world’s leading genocide scholars, including many Israeli-born genocide scholars, right? That maintaining Israeli impunity to commit genocide and ensuring that Israel doesn’t have to face pressure for equality with Palestinians, that that is more important than the principle that sexual harassment is wrong and that sexual harassers should not be in high public office.What else are these Jewish leaders willing to sacrifice for the idolatry of unconditional support for the state of Israel? Well, complicity in a mass campaign of anti-Muslim bigotry. We’re daily deluged in the final days of this campaign by just the crudest, most vicious anti-Muslim bigotry against Zohran Mamdani. Now, I’m not saying that everyone who opposes Zohran Mamdani is an anti-Muslim bigot. Of course not.But I wonder whether it should at least give some of these Jewish leaders a little bit of pause that they have thrown in their lot with a candidate, Andrew Cuomo, who laughed and suggested with a radio talk show host that Zohran Mamdani would have applauded 9/11. This is the people with whom you are throwing in your lot, a viciously anti-Muslim bigoted campaign, and you’re saying, well, you know, opposing anti-Muslim bigotry is less important to me than preserving unconditional support for the state of Israel to be able to perpetuate what the world’s leading human rights organizations have termed as apartheid and genocide.And then there’s the question of American democracy, right? Because this mayoral election is not happening under ordinary circumstances, right? It’s happening amidst the potential authoritarian takeover and destruction of America’s system of liberal democracy by Donald Trump. And so, one thing you might really wa

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is Jonathan Mahler, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and author of the new book, Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990. With New York on the verge of electing a socialist, Muslim, anti-Zionist mayor, I ask Jonathan how the city has changed over the last three decades, and how those changes enabled the rise of Zohran Mamdani.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comKat Abughazaleh, the 26-year-old Palestinian-American running for Congress in Illinois’s Ninth District, has been federally indicted after being arrested at an ICE protest. We talk about that and about her vision for a revitalized Democratic Party.

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

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Jonathan Mahler, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and author of the new book, Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990. With New York on the verge of electing a socialist, Muslim, anti-Zionist mayor, I want to ask Jonathan how the city has changed over the last three decades, and how those changes enabled the rise of Zohran Mamdani.Ask Me AnythingOur next Ask Me Anything session, for premium subscribers, will be this Tuesday, October 28, from Noon-1 PM Eastern time.Cited in Today’s VideoRabbi Ammiel Hirsch, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, and Bret Stephens attack Zohran Mamdani.According to CBS, Mamdani is winning 38 percent of the Jewish vote.According to the Washington Post, 39 percent of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide.Mamdani has called both Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin war criminals.When apartheid South Africa’s prime minister complained about “double standards.”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!), Suzanne Schneider analyzes the Trump administration’s grant to a neoconservative Jewish group.Waleed Shahid on Mamdani’s lessons for Democrats.Nathan Thrall on what Israelis and Palestinians have learned since October 7.Rabbi David Polsky argues that starving Palestinians in Gaza violates Jewish law.I’ll be speaking on November 2 at Tzedek Chicago, November 6 at Columbia Journalism School, and November 10 at Congregation Tikkun v’Or in Ithaca, New York.See you on Tuesday and Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, as we get near the New York mayoral race, the attacks on Zohran Mamdani have been become more intense, and in particular from a number of rabbis and Jewish commentators. And it’s really interesting to look carefully at the nature of these attacks on Mamdani to see what they say and what they don’t say.What you notice is the attacks on Mamdani do not actually engage in a substantive critique with any actual evidence against the positions that Mamdani has taken, for instance, that Israel’s committing genocide, or that the New York City should support the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes, or that Israel should be a state that treats all its citizens equally rather than one that gives Jews legal superiority. None of these arguments are actually made. What you see instead is a series of techniques that are all designed to suggest—although not always explicitly—that basically Mamdani is an antisemite. And I think there are two particular ways that are worth noting about the way in which these claims of antisemitism are created.The first is that these critics—Jewish critics of Mamdani—posit that they speak for a Jewish consensus, a kind of Jewish pro-Israel consensus. And the fact that Mamdani is against that Jewish pro-Israel consensus is evidence that he has something against Jews, right? So, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsh did this video where he said that most Jews are deeply offended by Zohran Mamdani saying that Israel has committed genocide. Now, that itself is kind of interesting, right? Hirsch is not presenting any evidence that the claim is wrong. He’s simply saying that most Jews are offended. So, it’s a kind of like an identity claim argument, right, that there must be something problematic about this charge of genocide because most Jews are offended, i.e., this probably, you know, suggests some anti-Jewish animus on Mamdani’s part.But it’s just factually wrong, actually. The Washington Post just recently came out with a poll showed that 39 percent of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide; fifty one percent don’t. So, it’s not a majority of American Jews who think Israel is committing genocide. But it’s a quite large minority of American Jews, right. So, by taking this position, Zohran Mamdani is essentially siding with the more progressive wing of the American Jewish community over the more conservative wing of the American Jewish community, which is hardly surprising given that he’s a political progressive, right, that he is in a way exposing a very deep and increasingly bitter divide among Jews in New York and other places. In fact, it’s probably not a coincidence that Zohran Mamdani is getting about in the polls around 40% of the Jewish vote, running close to Andrew Cuomo, which is roughly the same percentage of Jews nationally think Israel’s committing genocide, right?But Ammi Hirsch can’t acknowledge that. He has to portray himself as kind of someone who speaks for Jews as a whole, right, even though nobody has elected him, right? Very few Jewish New Yorkers even know who he is. There’s no reason to believe that he would have the right to do that. But he has to do it in order

Our guest is Gaza-born political analyst Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He’s been explaining why Trump’s ceasefire isn’t even a ceasefire, let alone a path to Palestinian freedom. And he’s been discussing the clashes inside Gaza between Hamas and Israeli-supported clans. We talked about the Trump plan, Gaza’s future, and the long-term consequences of this genocide. 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 public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

Cited in Today’s VideoWhy Israeli doves like former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon want Israel to release Marwan Barghouti but the Israeli government won’t, despite Hamas’ request.Why Barghouti’s son fears for his father’s life. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

Our guest is Israeli-born historian Ilan Pappé, author of the new book, Israel on the Brink. We discuss why he chose a life of political rebellion against the state in which he was born and what he thinks the ceasefire in Gaza will bring. We also talk about his book, which suggests that in the coming decades, Israel may cease to exist as a Jewish state. 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

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.If you’re in the US, consider joining the nationwide No Kings protests on October 18.This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Israeli-born historian Ilan Pappe, author of the new book, Israel on the Brink. I’ll ask Pappe why he chose a life of political rebellion against the state in which he was born and what he thinks the ceasefire in Gaza will bring. We’ll also talk about his book, which suggests that in the coming decades, Israel may cease to exist as a Jewish state.Cited in Today’s VideoNaftali Benett asks why Palestinians and their supporters aren’t happier about the Trump deal.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!), Abdullah Hany Daher reflects on the two years since October 7, 2023.James Talarico on why requiring Texas schools to post the Ten Commandments violates the Ten Commandments.Libby Lenkinski on how reparations for the Holocaust helped her family build a new life, and why Jews must demand reparations for the genocide in Gaza.Shaul Magid on being human after the destruction of Gaza.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:I’ve been struggling for days to try to find the words to express how I feel about the Trump deal because my feelings are so, like, profoundly conflicted. When this airs on Monday, it looks like the remaining Israeli hostages, and the bodies of the dead hostages will be returned. This is a kind of catharsis for Jews, for me, that is really one of the most profound and powerful things that I think I will have ever experienced in my life.This entire experience of Jewish solidarity over the last two years has been extraordinary. I mean, it really has been one of the most powerful manifestations I’ve ever seen of this, you know, phrase that people use a lot, Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Bazeh, that all Jews are responsible for one another. I am kind of in awe of the people in my synagogue, and that I see around New York, who I see have been wearing dog tags to remember the hostages every day. I hear stories about people, you know, who have had a place at their table for a particular hostage now for the last two years. You know, in my tiny way, I’ve had the names of the hostages on my refrigerator door. We pray for them every week.I mean, this has been incredibly, incredibly powerful. It’s been one of the most powerful Jewish experiences of my life, and I want to think tomorrow, as those hostages are coming home, and think about the Trump deal only through that vein, only through this vein of Jewish solidarity: us as a small, often brutalized, persecuted people who have learned and in accordance with our traditions, to really care for one another, to care for one another. And there’s so many people who have manifested that stuff so powerfully.And to see the joy of those families returning their loved ones, and to see the way that people rally around them in this moment, and rally around those who don’t have loved ones who are coming back, is… I wish I could just stop there. I really wish that that would be the end of my message. And I thought a lot about just saying that, just saying that. Because I know that there are a lot of people who think that people on the left, like me, who criticize Israel, we don’t feel those things. And I know for me, it’s not true. I feel them like they’re some of the most profound feelings I feel.But we’re also being told that the Trump deal should be a cause of celebration for Palestinians, right? Again and again, I’m seeing on social media people taunting, you know, pro-Palestinian activists. Why aren’t you celebrating? You claim this is a genocide. Why aren’t you celebrating? You’re unhappy because all you want is for Israel to be blamed. Now that actually something is good is happening to Palestinians and Israel, you can’t recognize that.But this isn’t a day of celebration for Palestinians because it’s not fair to ask Palestinians to celebrate simply for not being bombed, right? The standard should be higher than that. Yes, it is, of course, a terrific thing that the bombs hopefully will stop, at least for a while, that Palestinians will get more food in. But if we see Palestinians as full human beings, as full human beings, we have to understand that the bar is a little bit higher than that. How dehumanizing is it to suggest that Palestinians should leap for joy and celebration simply because a genocide may be ending, and they’re returning to a state of apartheid? A state that, you know, as even Israel’s own human rights organizations have stated, a situation of blockade.I mean, look at what we know about the Trump deal. It offers no path, no path, for Palestinians to gain citizenship, the most basic fundamental right that all human beings deserve, the right to be a citizen of the country and you’re i

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guests are former PLO negotiator, Hussein Agha and former Clinton, Obama and Biden administration official, Rob Malley. We talk about their new book, Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine and learn what they’ve learned from decades of seeing Israeli, Palestinian, and American policy from the inside.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza.This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guests will be the former PLO negotiator Hussein Agha and the former Clinton, Obama and Biden administration official, Rob Malley. They’ll talk about their new book, Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine. I’ll ask what they’ve learned from decades of seeing Israeli, Palestinian and American policy from the inside.Cited in Today’s VideoYeshayahu Leibowitz’s essay on colonialism and terrorism.Mouin Rabbani on the Trump plan.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!), Avigayil Halperin talks to Audrey Sasson about whether it’s possible to atone for genocide.39% of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide.Washington Democrats turn against AIPAC.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, I have these two kind of contradictory feelings about the Trump plan on Gaza. The first is that I hope it goes through. I hope it’s implemented. I just desperately, desperately hope that these Israeli hostages are returned and can go back to their families. And I desperately hope that Palestinians can wake up one day in the coming days, and just not worry that they’ll be killed by an Israeli bomb, and that their children will be able to have more to eat. I mean, just at a basic human level, that would be a really just a blessing.It’s also, though, really important just to remember, because I think there’s a certain kind of discourse that tends to take place about these diplomatic negotiations, a kind of insider-y discourse about how it’s going to be implemented, and what the role the Palestinian Authority is going to play, and what different Arab governments are going to do, and all this stuff, which just can often, I just find, kind of, like, completely obscure, like, the basic foundational realities, which always need to be kept front and center, right?The basic foundational realities are that Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem live under the control of a state that does not grant them the most basic of rights, the right of citizenship. This state, the Israeli state, has life and death power over them, and yet they can’t vote for that government that controls their lives. This will be true after the Trump plan is implemented, if it’s implemented. It may be that the genocide ends, which would be a blessing, but before the genocide, there was apartheid, and there will be actually an even worse form of apartheid now because Israel’s blockade of Gaza is likely to be stricter, and Israel’s already said that it’s basically going to take more control over parts of the Gaza Strip, herding Palestinians even into an even smaller area of the Gaza Strip.So, remember, Gaza was deemed unlivable by the United Nations before October 7th. Human Rights Watch called it an open-air prison. My friend Mohammad Shehada has written about how everyone he knew in Gaza growing up contemplated suicide, because there was just no prospect for a better life. And when people say, well, this is gonna fundamentally change if Hamas is no longer in charge in Gaza, unfortunately, that’s just a complete illusion, because Hamas has not been in charge in the West Bank. To the contrary, the West Bank, for the last 20 years now, has been run by a Palestinian Authority, which essentially serves as Israel’s subcontractor, which is basically doing Israel’s bidding to prevent armed resistance.And what is life like for Palestinians in the West Bank? A form of apartheid that gets worse and worse and worse as Israel takes over more and more land, confines Palestinians into smaller and smaller ghettos, in which Palestinians are subjected to more and more violence by the Israeli military and also by settlers who, unlike them, have citizenship and are protected by an Israeli state that doesn’t protect them. That’s what Palestinian life looks like in the West Bank, where you don’t have Hamas running things, right?So, anyone who thinks that you’re solving the problem for Palestinians by not having Hamas be in charge in Gaza is fundamentally missing the point. It would be a good thing for Hamas to not be in charge in Gaza. I have no love lost for Hamas whatsoever. It killed a friend of mine in a bus bombing in the 1990s. It’s committed terrible war crimes even before October 7th, and then in a massive way on October 7th.But the fundamental problem is a system of brutal, brutal oppression. And the problem is that so much Western journalism and so much Jewish discourse just ignores that basic oppression. And that system of violent oppression produces violence in return. It doesn’t justify violence against civilians. Violence that targets civilians is never justified, regardless of the level of oppression. But it’s a system of oppression that produces vio

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is the Palestinian journalist and activist Ahmed Abu Artema, a co-organizer of Gaza’s 2018 Great March of Return. In October 2023, Israel killed his eldest son, Abdullah, and five other relatives. A few weeks ago, he left Gaza for the Netherlands. He wrote about his departure in the Dutch newspaper, De Correspondent. He told us what it’s like to survive a genocide and live with the memory of those who did not.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is actor and comedian Hannah Einbinder. She recently used the huge platform of her Emmy acceptance speech to stand up for Palestinian freedom. Topics include:Her Zionist upbringing, and how she evolved away from itThe schism among Jews todayJewish fragility in the face of disagreement

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza.This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be the Palestinian journalist and activist Ahmed Abu Artema, a co-organizer of Gaza’s 2018 Great March of Return. In October 2023, Israel killed his eldest son, Abdullah. A few weeks ago, he left Gaza for the Netherlands. He wrote about his departure in the Dutch newspaper, De Correspondent. I’ll ask what it’s like to survive a genocide and live with the memory of those who did not.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 and attorney Shayana Kadidal discuss new US sanctions on Palestinian human rights groups.In The Guardian, David Adler details his reasons for joining the flotilla to Gaza.Kyle’s mom from South Park confronts Benjamin Netanyahu.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, at the heart of this period in the Jewish year, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, what we call the Yamim Noraim, is the basic idea that human beings are judged, that we don’t know how that judgment manifests itself in the world, but there’s a faith, a fundamental belief that there is some kind of accounting, there is some kind of reckoning, ultimately. And that notion fills me this year with a sense of really tremendous fear because I know that I have been inadequate to the monstrous evil of this period: the genocide in Gaza and the destruction of liberal democracy in the United States.There are so many times when I’ve just decided to turn away because it was easier to not look at the images, or to not participate in actions of protest that I could have done, just because I had other things that I wanted to do more, that were easier for me, that were more fun for me, so I really tremble at my own accountability for this. But I guess I also take some kind of comfort in the notion that there may be some collective accounting, some collective reckoning.Again, many of the prayers that we say during these High Holidays are in the plural. And when I think about collectively, in the Jewish community, and more generally in the United States, I do take some kind of comfort in the sense that there will be some kind of accounting, because the level of cowardice that we see around us is just beyond my wildest imagination. It’s beyond my wildest imagination.I mean, Donald Trump is a fundamentally kind of deranged and deformed person, someone who just doesn’t seem, I think, to really, really understand very basic ideas like the rule of law, right? But many, many other people around him do. I mean, we know this because many of the people who are his most fanatical supporters now—J.D. Vance, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio—they said earlier on, when they weren’t so afraid of him, they said, this man is a pathological liar, this man wants to be a dictator. We know that they believe these things. We know that they can see these things. These things are obvious, right? They’re not subtle.I mean, I almost chuckle now at the idea that Donald Trump was really concerned about antisemitism when he used antisemitism as the pretext to try to cripple the independence of American universities. Because we now see that Donald Trump doesn’t need any pretext at all. I mean, when he says that we should shut down television networks just because they criticize him, or that the Justice Department should investigate people just because they’re his political opponents, he doesn’t even need any pretext, right? It’s just the fact that they are limiting his power, and he wants dictatorial powers. That’s really all he needs.And when I see virtually the entirety of the Republican Party going along with this—you know, the Republican Party has always, you know, for as long as I can remember, liked to talk about appeasement, liked to talk about cowardice, always imagining themselves as the kind of the Churchills, the manly men, the people who could be counted on in the moment of peril to stand up to the forces of evil. You know, I mean, what an utter irony that has turned to be, right?Because it turned out that there is no greater group of appeasers, no greater group of cowards, than the people in the modern Republican Party today, who, because they’re afraid of Donald Trump, afraid that he could get them to lose their job, or afraid that he might go after them personally. Because, after all, Donald Trump goes after Republicans too, right? He’s going after John Bolton because John Bolton had the temerity to criticize him. These people who constantly talk about how tough they are and how manly they are, how they hate appeasement, and how they accuse their opponents of appeasement because they support diplomatic deals with Iran or other countries, now actually turn out to be willing to appease Donald Trump, even when he’s systematically moving to destroy equality under the law, which is the found

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is author and attorney Ken Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate. Ken was an important figure in the drafting of the definition of antisemitism now taken up by the IHRA but has been outspoken against its current uses.

Please Help Palestinians in Gaza.There is no Zoom call this Friday. We’ll return on Friday, October 3.With the Jewish High Holidays approaching, I’m opening up for all readers my conversation with Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, who argues that what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank constitutes a stain on Judaism itself.Cited in Today’s VideoEzra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates on the murder of Charlie Kirk.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane writes about the aid group favored by pro-Israel organizations.Leonard Benardo interviews Rob Malley for the Ideas Letter.In The New York Times, I wrote about the Trump Administration’s use of Charlie Kirk’s murder to crack down on dissentFor the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I interviewed David Adler, who is aboard the Sumud flotilla heading to Gaza.On Monday September 22, I’ll be discussing the parallels between Israel’s response to 10/7 and America’s response to 9/11 for the Quincy Institute.See you a week from Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, a really interesting debate broke out, last week between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates about the legacy of Charlie Kirk. Ezra Klein wrote a column in which he said that Charlie Kirk was practicing politics in the right way because he was trying to persuade people. He was going to college campuses where, you know, lefty students are around, and he was engaging them in argument. And he contrasted this persuasion with this rising political violence that we see in America.And Coates was challenging that binary, and I want to explain why I agree with Coates. As I understand it, I think the point that Coates is making is not just that the kind of persuasion that Charlie Kirk is engaged in isn’t really good faith discourse, that it’s more like demagoguery, right, in which he tries to kind of make his political opponents look like fools, especially through the kind of editing of these interactions he’s having on college campuses.But I think the point is actually deeper, which is to question what we mean when we use the term political violence. Generally, the way this is used is that we’re thinking about violence by non-state actors. So, a lot of people have been saying we’re in a rising era of political violence because of the murder of Kirk, and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and the attack on Paul Pelosi, and the killing of this Minnesota state representative, and that’s what we define as political violence.But it’s worth noting that what that leaves out is political violence by the state, right? Violence by the state for a political purpose. It’s a little like the way we use the term terrorism, which is also basically a synonym for political violence, but only gets applied, really, generally, to non-state actors. So, we generally don’t think of the things that states do as political violence or as terrorism, although sometimes we make an exception for states we really don’t like, like Iran, let’s say, right? But states commit lots and lots of political violence, and states create lots of terror, right? If terrorism is making people feel terrified for a political purpose, then states do that a lot. And I think what Coates is doing is he’s looking at the language that Charlie Kirk is employing, the way he’s talking about trans people, the way he’s talking about Muslim people. And, of course, Charlie Kirk is not directly using violence against anybody. And it should go without saying, it should be obvious, of course, that it was fundamentally, completely wrong for this person to murder him, and that person should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.But I think what Coates is getting at is that when we think about this binary between persuasion and violence, we have to think about the fact that Charlie Kirk was explicitly supporting a lot of violence by the state. Violence that now we’re seeing, particularly in the Trump era, right? Terrible, terrible violence that’s being used by the state against people who are claimed to be violating immigration laws, against people who are disfavored by the Trump administration in all kinds of ways. And to be fair, the definition of a state is that entity which has a monopoly on legitimate violence. But I think the question that Coates is raising is how we think about legitimate versus illegitimate political violence when it involves the state, rather than simply using the category of political violence to imply that all violence by the state is legitimate, and the only illegitimate political violence is used by non-state actors.And I think this, you know, this bears also on the question of Israel and Palestinians. As I’ve said many, many, many, many times, I think the terrorism that was used by Hamas on October 7th was fundamentally wrong. It targeted civilians

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is Avrum Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset, who has been using traditional Jewish religious forms in remarkable ways to challenge the genocide in Gaza. He has authored a poem entitled, “If God Were in the Heavens of Gaza” and a Kaddish “for the blessed memory of all innocent” victims. We read them during our call, and discuss, in these days leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, how Jews can repent for our complicity in the horror being committed in our name.

An Auction to Support the People of GazaWEDNESDAY Zoom CallThis week’s Zoom call will be at a special time, WEDNESDAY at 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Avrum Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset, who has been using traditional Jewish religious forms in remarkable ways to challenge the genocide in Gaza. He has authored a poem entitled, “If God Were in the Heavens of Gaza” and a Kaddish “for the blessed memory of all innocent” victims. He will read them during our Zoom call, and we will discuss, in these days leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, how Jews can repent for our complicity in the horror being committed in our name.Ask Me AnythingOur next Ask Me Anything session, for premium subscribers, will be this Tuesday, September 16, from 1-2 PM Eastern time.Cited in Today’s VideoBari Weiss on “Je Suis Charlie.”Bari Weiss on overcoming “Trump derangement syndrome.”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!), Sean Pergola reflects on the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum’s apology for saying “’Never Again’ Can’t Only Mean Never Again For Jews.”Sam Adler-Bell on how former Biden officials are spinning their actions on Gaza.Nadine Apelian Dobbs on a story of Palestinian survival.Daniel Levy on how Israel’s disengagement from Gaza laid the foundation for the current genocide.How many Democrats does New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand know?I was the subject of a profile in Haaretz’s magazineSee you on WEDNESDAY,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, in the wake of the terrible murder of Charlie Kirk, I was struck by this tweet by Bari Weiss. And Bari Weiss writes, ‘whether you agree with him or not is completely, utterly, totally beside the point. We won’t do it. Je suis Charlie.’ That’s a kind of reference to the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the French newspaper, where there were these terrible murders 10 years ago by people supposedly upset by the kind of the cartoons that the newspaper was doing of the prophet Muhammad. And Bari Weiss, as I understand it, is suggesting here that there’s something wrong with saying in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder that you think that some of his political views were reprehensible, that somehow that detracts from your opposition to his murder. This doesn’t seem to me to make any sense whatsoever.I think it’s obvious that the killing of Charlie Kirk was horrifying, that that person should be put in jail. They should be punished to the full extent of the law. No matter what someone’s political views, you absolutely have no right to resort to violence. It’s a horror for his family and all the people who cared about him. It’s just absolutely fundamentally wrong. But just because something that was fundamentally wrong was done to someone—a crime—doesn’t mean that when discussing that person’s legacy, you can’t talk about their political views. And the suggestion in this case, that Bari Weiss thinks that that conversation is illegitimate, I think is really quite revealing, right, about what she actually thinks about Charlie Kirk.Because let’s imagine, God forbid, that Rashida Tlaib were assassinated or Zohran Mamdani were assassinated. I think it’s really hard to imagine that Bari Weiss would be tweeting, you know, je suis Rashida, je suis Zohran. Of course, she wouldn’t. She would say that the murders were wrong, but she would not think it was illegitimate in any way to talk about the fact that their political views in her mind were ones that she fundamentally opposed, right?Or to take a different side of the ideological spectrum, let’s think about the assassination many years ago of the racist Israeli politician, Meir Kahane, who was assassinated, right? And that was wrong. He should not have been assassinated. That was a crime, right? But I think, I would hope no one would have responded to that by saying, je suis Meir, right? As if to say, I’m going to embrace everything about Meir Kahane simply because he was killed, right? You should be able to say, it’s wrong that he was killed. That person should be prosecuted under the law. And the man also had reprehensible racist views.And I don’t think Bari Weiss would have difficulty understanding that whatsoever if it was someone whose political views they really disagreed with. And here, I think, is really the critical point here, right, is that Charlie Kirk, among many other things, was someone who very actively supported Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He even organized to send buses of people to the rally that attacked the Capitol in trying to overthrow that democratic election. Charlie Kirk was therefore fundamentally an opponent of liberal democracy in the United States. When you try to overthrow free elections in the United States, you’re declaring war on American democracy.Again, to say it again and again and again, of course, it doesn’t mean that by any means he should ha

Our guest was Abdullah Awwad, a doctor in the orthopedic department of the Al Shifa Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. In his Fundraising page, he writes that his “once-vibrant city has been reduced to rubble” and that “we are currently living in overcrowded shelters, struggling for basic necessities like food, clean water, and medical supplies.” Because of the difficulty of connecting to WiFi in Gaza, I was only able to speak with Dr. Awwad sporadically. We used the remaining time to speak with others with information about Gaza. 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

Friday Zoom CallThis Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Abdullah Awwad, a doctor in the orthopedic department of the Al Shifa Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. In his Go Fund Me page, he writes that his “once-vibrant city has been reduced to rubble” and that “we are currently living in overcrowded shelters, struggling for basic necessities like food, clean water, and medical supplies.” I’ll ask him what it’s like to work as a doctor in Gaza today.The live call will be for paid subscribers only (due to capacity limits), but the full video will be made available Sunday to all subscribers, paid and unpaid. Please consider supporting Abdullah and other Palestinians.Cited in Today’s VideoMandla Mandela on why Israel’s version of apartheid is worse than South Africa’s.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, Arielle Angel, Mari Cohen, Nathan Goldman, and I answered readers’ questions.In the Guardian, Ahmad Ibsais asks why no one believed Palestinians when they called Gaza a genocide.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, Ahmed Moor talks to Marianne Hirsch, a scholar of Holocaust memory who withdrew from teaching at Columbia after it adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism.On MSNBC, I debated whether there was a meaningful difference on Gaza between Trump and Biden.I’ll be speaking this Tuesday, September 9, at the University of Virginia.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:It was an interesting interview last week with Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, in which Mandla Mandela says that what Israel’s doing to the Palestinians is far worse—those are his words—far worse than what apartheid South Africa did to Black South Africans. And I think he’s right, and I think it’s interesting to think about why that’s turned out to be the case. It’s kind of counterintuitive on its face, because there are some Palestinians under Israeli control who have the right to vote. Palestinian citizens, so-called Israeli Arabs, have the right to vote. They’re a minority of the Palestinians under Israeli control, because most of the Palestinians under Israeli control live in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, and don’t vote, basically can’t vote.But the fact that any Palestinians under Israeli control can vote distinguishes Israel from apartheid South Africa in which no Black South Africans had the right to vote. There were, in the 1980s, two other groups, Indians and so-called Coloreds, who got certain kinds of voting rights, but Black South Africans never did. So, for that reason, one, I think, would naturally think that Israel’s domination is more benign, that Palestinians under Israeli control have more rights than Black South Africans did. But I think Mandla Mandela’s point was that modern-day South Africa, apartheid South Africa, didn’t commit a genocide against Black South Africans in the way that Israel is now doing in Gaza, and so for that fundamental reason that what Israel is doing is fundamentally worse.And I think the reason for this difference is that the apartheid regime in South Africa was dependent on Black labor. Black South Africans were the backbone of the economy, so Israel… so South Africa could not engage in mass expulsion or mass destruction of the Black population. It could certainly oppress them very brutally, but it needed their labor. Israel doesn’t need Palestinian labor nearly as much. In recent decades, Israel has moved away from relying on Palestinian labor from the occupied territories, brought in a lot of guest workers from Asia, and that has made the Palestinian population ‘disposable’ from Israel’s point of view, which is part of the reason I think you can see this widespread support now in Israel for mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, and indeed, this just mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, because Palestinians are not valuable to the state as a labor force.And beyond that, in apartheid South Africa, because Black South Africans had the power of their labor, that became a very important part of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, when the Black South African trade unions went on strike and put a lot of pressure on the government. In fact, Cyril Romaphosa, the current president of South Africa, was the head of the National Union of Mine Workers, which is a critical ally of the African National Congress in the anti-apartheid struggle. Palestinians don’t have that kind of similar power, which makes them more vulnerable.The other reason that I think Mandla Medela is correct, that Israel’s version of apartheid, and Israel’s system has been declared an apartheid system by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B'Tselem, and many others, is that Israel’s version of apartheid simply lasted much longer. Apartheid in South Afr

Our guest is Angela Davis. We discuss…her history with Jewish peoplehow the civil rights movement saw the Palestinian strugle, and what lessons it offers todaywhen resistance turns violenthow student activism today compares to the activism of the 1960show she comes by her optimism 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.comShabbos Kestenbaum was a student at the Harvard Divinity School and famously has sued Harvard, charging they failed to adequately deal with antisemitism on campus. He has been an outspoken defender of Israel and critic of Palestinians and their advocates, so, as you can imagine, we disagree strongly on many things. As frustrating as they can be, I think these conversations are important to have, so I’m grateful Shabbos agreed to this one.

A new way to donate to people in Gaza.Friday Zoom CallThis Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be the renowned activist and educator Angela Davis. We’ll talk about how the Palestinian freedom struggle resembles, and differs from, the struggles of other oppressed groups, and what US policy toward Israel-Palestine says about the United States. This call will be cosponsored by Jewish Currents.Cited in Today’s VideoAdam Friedland interviews Ritchie Torres.Israel moves closer to building settlements in E1.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!), Simone Zimmerman asks why so many Jewish leaders took so long to condemn Israel’s assault on Gaza.The Economist offers an “anatomy of a famine” in Gaza.Why MAGA is turning against unconditional US support of Israel.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I interviewed Al Jazeera’s Laila Al-Arian about Israel’s targeting of journalists in Gaza.I talked to the Brave New Something Podcast about the need for a Jewish reckoning over Gaza.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, there’s been a fair amount of attention, at least kind of that I’ve seen on social media, about an interview that a comedian named Adam Friedland did with Congressman Richie Torres that focused on the end of the interview a lot about Israel and Gaza. And it made me think about the role of comedians in often being able to say things that the mainstream media doesn’t say. You know, we think about people like Jon Stewart and John Oliver, and a lot of these folks. And I think that one of the reasons that these interviews with comedians often really break through, is that there is something fundamentally absurd about, especially about a lot of the American kind of establishment mainstream discourse about Israel and Palestine. And so often, the mainstream media, kind of takes this discourse as on the level, as credible, right, as sincere. And what comedians are more able to do is just recognize the absurdity of these things.And one particular area where I think it would be really valuable if this just became much more common is this claim that we hear all the time by American politicians, by Jewish leaders, that they support the two-state solution, right? That’s kind of so often the refuge, right? Israel’s doing something bad for Palestinians, and people say, well, I support the two-state solution. The truth is that the vast, vast majority of people in American public office, in public life, people who lead American Jewish organizations who say they support a two-state solution simply do not. They obviously do not support the idea of a sovereign, contiguous Palestinian state. And yet, their claim to support a two-state solution is taken as serious, sincere, when it’s self-evidently not, right?So, for instance, last week we heard news that Israel is kind of taking the final steps to build settlements in a territory called E1. Now, E1 basically would completely sever East Jerusalem, which is the largest Palestinian population center in the West Bank, from the rest of the West Bank, and also largely cut off the northern part of the West Bank from the southern part of the West Bank. So, it’s pretty obvious, right, that if you wanted a Palestinian state that was worth the name ‘state,’ right, which was a contiguous piece of territory, you could not possibly think it was a good idea to build Jewish settlements in E1. And yet, if you survey the vast, vast majority of politicians in Washington or Jewish leaders, or whoever, you know, who say they support a two-state solution, you will not hear them condemning what Israel’s doing in E1. And if you say to them, do you think the United States should condition military aid to try to stop Israel from building an E1? Should the US deploy sanctions to prevent this action that would clearly make a Palestinian state much, much more difficult, they would say no, right? And yet, they still say they support the two-state solution.The Israeli government, since Netanyahu, you know, returned to power with this constellation, with Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, has been passionately doing everything in its power to destroy the possibility of a Palestinian state by funding massive new settlement growth. And yet, the vast majority of people in Washington who say they support a two-state solution are not willing to support and would in fact actively resist any meaningful U.S. effort to stop that settlement growth that clearly makes a Palestinian state much, much harder—I would argue, at this point, actually, impossible.So, it’s an absurd position to take, and there’s something ridiculous. It’s a dereliction of duty for people in the media to take claims seriously when they’re confronted by a politician or a Jewish official whose own actions so obviously make it clear that they d

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian-American green card holder abducted by the Trump administration in retaliation for his activism at Columbia University— and later released. We discuss…Growing up in a refugee campHis conversion to BuddhismHis abduction and confinementColumbia’s abandonment and why he chose to return to Columbia despite it

Rabbi Dr. Ismar Schorsch is chancellor emeritus of The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and the Rabbi Herman Abramovitz Distinguished Professor of Jewish history. He’s had a long, illustrious career of service to the Jewish community, so some where surprised by his recent essay, A Hard Tisha B’Av, which is critical of both Israel and the lack of response from Jewish leadership. I’m honored he agreed to discuss it with me. 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