The Beinart Notebook

James Zogby is founder of the Arab American Institute, and a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee. He recently offered a proposal for how to replace President Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee. We’ll talk about the pressure inside the party on Biden to bow out, and what might happen if he does. Interview co-sponsored with Jewish Currents. 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

Her Own Life Story Disproves Trump and Vance’s LiesKamala Harris never spoke to the camera and said, you know what, my parents are immigrants. And they contributed a lot to this country. And we have something to thank them for, and immigrants actually make this country better. 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

Rami Khouri is a Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the American University of Beirut, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC, and a regular columnist for Al Jazeera Online. Rami lived in Beirut for 17 years and has for many years written about relations between Israel and Lebanon. 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

Shouldn’t the US Care as Much about Americans Killed by the IDF as it Cares about Americans Killed by Hamas?Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.Our guest will be Simon Fitzgerald, a trauma surgeon in Brooklyn who has worked in telemedicine in Gaza, particularly at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis with Dr. Khaled Alser. According to colleagues, Dr. Alser has been abducted by Israeli forces and tortured at Ofer Prison and at the notorious Sde Teiman prison camp in the Negev Desert. Dr. Fitzgerald will talk about his experience doing telemedicine in Gaza and about the fate of Dr. Alser.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.LIVE DEBATE CHATI’ll be hosting a live chat during this Tuesday night’s presidential debate for paid subscribers. I’ll be participating along with all of you. Just click the “Join chat” button below:PREMIUM MEMBERSHIP - ASK ME ANYTHINGWe’ve also added a new membership category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Zoom interviews, Premium Members will get access to a monthly live “ask me anything” zoom call and video of that call the following week.Our next “ask me anything” will be on Thursday, Sept 17 at 11 AM Eastern.If you’re interested in becoming a premium or regular member, hit the subscriber button below or email us with any questions.Sources Cited in this VideoThe Americans injured or killed by Israeli troops in the West Bank.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 talks with Ben Lorber and Shane Burley, authors of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, about antisemitism and the left.The Biden administration’s double standard on “river to the sea.”Israel’s Radio Rwanda.Orly Noy on the death of Hersh Goldberg-Polin.Remembering Rabbi Michael Lerner.On September 25, I’ll be speaking at Vanderbilt University.Please consider supporting a scholarship fund for displaced students in Gaza who want to study in the US.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. So, last week, my video was about Hersh Goldberg-Polin and the other Israeli hostages that were killed by Hamas. And Hersh Goldberg-Polin got a particular a lot of attention in the United States because he was American. His parents spoke of the Democratic National Convention, and he became someone who many, many Americans knew. And many Americans mourned his murder by Hamas, which is as it should be. I mean, we should care about all human lives. And we have, as Americans, a particular right to be concerned about the fate of other Americans.And now we found that an American has been shot and killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces. On Friday, an American activist named Aysenur Eygi was shot while she was protesting at an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. And this has been happening fairly frequently in recent years. Several weeks earlier, another American, Amado Sison, was struck by live ammunition in the back of the leg by Israeli forces. Earlier this year, two 17-year-old Palestinian Americans were killed in the West Bank: Tawfic Abdel Jabbar from Louisiana and Mohammad Khdour from Florida. In 2020, a 78-year-old Palestinian American, Omar Assad, was dragged from his car by Israeli forces bound and blindfolded, and then had a heart attack, while in Israeli custody after he’d been left under those conditions for like an hour so by Israeli forces. In 2021, a prominent Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed by an Israeli sniper while she was wearing a press vest, covering an Israeli Defense Forces raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.There is, I think, by any honest assessment, a tremendous difference between the way in the United States in public conversation, and indeed the American government, respond when American Jews are killed in Israel versus what happens when Palestinian Americans, or in the case of this young woman, Aysenur Eygi, a Turkish American, were killed in the West Bank. The US government does not respond in the same way. There’s not the same level of public outcry, and there’s not the same level of demand by the US government that the people who committed these killings be held responsible.And what disturbs me about this so much, and I think makes this so important beyond the preciousness of the individual lives at stake, is that the Biden administration—and remember, all of these deaths have been happening, these killings by Israelis of Americans, have been happening under the Biden administration. The Biden administration is engaged in a fight against

Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson are co-authors of the book, The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other. Since October 7, dialogue between Palestinians and Jews has become even more difficult, and there are those in both communities—and on the left and right—who question its value. I’m excited to ask Raja and Jeffrey to respond to those criticisms, and to explain how they believe that greater dialogue between Palestinians and Jews can contribute to the struggle for equality, freedom, and safety for everyone. 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 call this week will be at a special time: Wednesday at 11 AM EasternOur guest will be Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute and one of the most thoughtful and best-informed observers in Washington about the relationship between Israel, Hezbollah and Iran. We’ll discuss Israel’s recent attack, US policy and the danger of a regional war.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.We’ve added a new membership category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Zoom interviews, Premium Members will get access to a monthly “ask me anything” zoom call.Our first “ask me anything” will be this Thursday, August 29 at 11 AM Eastern. Premium Subscribers will get a Tuesday email that includes links to both our Wednesday call with Trita and the “ask me anything” on Thursday. (If you have any questions, email me).If you’re interested in becoming a premium or regular member, hit the button below.We’re also slightly increasing the prices of regular paid subscriptions. It’s the first time I’ve done this since I launched the newsletter a few years ago. Starting September 1, regular subscriptions will be $79 per year (up from $72) and $7.99 per month (up from $7). This will apply to all new subscriptions and to everyone whose subscription renews. If this increase creates a hardship for you, email me and we’ll figure it out.Sources Cited in this VideoThe cancellation of Joshua Leifer’s book launch event.A poster calls for “Zionists” to leave a London neighborhood.Mira Sucharov’s study of what American Jews mean by the word “Zionist.”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 the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen investigates the Israelis who want to settle southern Lebanon.Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jon Stewart on the exclusion of Palestinian speakers at the DNC.A Black and Palestinian Mississippian reflects on the Democratic conventions of 1964 and 2024.Benjamin Netanyahu never pays the bill.Please consider supporting a scholarship fund for displaced students in Gaza who want to study in the US.See you on Wednesday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. There was a fair amount of attention last week to the experience of my friend, Josh Leifer, who’s launch event for his excellent new book, Tablets Shattered, was closed because the bookstore wouldn’t permit him to be speaking alongside a moderator who was a ‘Zionist’ rabbi. It produced a lot of commentary. And I do think this is something which is growing as a tendency, this tendency to say that if you are a Zionist, then you are kind of excluded from conversations. There was even a thing that happened in the UK where there was a march, which said that Zionists had to leave a certain neighborhood in London.I wanna explain why I think this is self-defeating and unwise. The first reason is that Palestinians, and Jews who support Palestinian freedom, have been excluded from a very, very long time, and still are, sometimes even by force of law. And the argument against that is that these are restrictions on free speech, and that people should have the right to be heard, and to make their case. So, this is what many of us have argued about: the rights of, you know, Jews who don’t support a Jewish state to speak at Hillel, for instance, or the rights of Palestinians to express their point of view and not be called antisemites just because they don’t support a Jewish state.And I do think you undermine the clarity of that argument when people on the Left turn around and then basically say, Zionists are not allowed to have a platform in our spaces, right? I think it undermines the effort, the really important effort to say that in other spaces, whether they’re establishment Jewish spaces or kind of more mainstream American political spaces, that Palestinians—the vast majority of whom, of course, don’t support the idea of a Jewish state, or other people who don’t support a Jewish state—should have the right to speak, right. That was something that tragically didn’t happen at the Democratic National Convention. But I think it makes it harder to make that case if you’re excluding people on your own turf.Secondly, I of course understand the logic, which would say, well, Zionism is the ideology of the state. This state is classified as an apartheid state by a lot of human rights organizations. It’s therefore racist ideology, and we wouldn’t have, you know, white supremacists come and speak in our bookstores, or whatever. But I think there are some important differences, and some problems with that logic. The first is that for many Jews, Zionism has an intimate, and o

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.Our guest will Joshua Leifer, author of the new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life. It’s the best history of American Jewish politics I’ve read and offers a provocative analysis of the American Jewish future.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky and Bret Stephens.We’ve added a new membership category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Friday calls, Premium Members will get access to a monthly “ask me anything” zoom call.Our first one will be on Thursday, August 29 at 11 AM Eastern.We’re also slightly increasing the prices of regular paid subscriptions. It’s the first time I’ve done this since I launched the newsletter a few years ago. Starting September 1, regular subscriptions will be $79 per year (up from $72) and $7.99 per month (up from $7). This will apply to all new subscriptions and to everyone whose subscription renews. If this increase creates a hardship for you, email me and we’ll figure it out.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 the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane profiles Florida State Representative Randy Fine, one of a new breed of MAGA Jewish Republicans.In The New York Times, I argued that Kamala Harris could radically change Joe Biden’s policy on Gaza by simply enforcing US law.Israeli-born Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov on how Jewish Israelis justify what he now considers a genocide.An Uncommitted delegate who grew up being bombed by Israel on what it’s like to watch the destruction of Gaza.Please consider supporting a scholarship fund for displaced students in Gaza who want to study in the US.See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterTRANSCRIPTSo Monday night at the first night of the Democratic Convention. It's going to be devoted to Joe Biden, and I think to say it will be a love fest is probably an understatement. There will be raucous applause and tears, and the whole thing will be devoted to the heroism, the courage, the magnanimity of Joe Biden, what he's achieved, particularly the fact that he was willing to abandon his own ambition to step aside and give the Democrats a better chance of defeating Donald Trump. And, to be clear, I do think it's a very good thing that he did that. But I don't think he should be celebrated. Certainly not in that unambiguous way.And it really bothers me that so many people in the US center, even center-left people, will be doing that tomorrow night. They'll be saying, "Joe Biden is that rarest of person in American politics, someone who really puts country above himself as an individual." I just don't think when you're analyzing a Presidency or a person, you sequester what's happened in Gaza. I mean, if you're a liberal-minded person, you believe that genocide is just about the worst thing that a country can do, and it's just about the worst thing that your country can do if your country is arming a genocide. And it's really not that controversial anymore that this qualifies as a genocide. I read the academic writing on this. I don't see any genuine scholars of human rights international law who are saying it's not indeed there. People like Omer Bartov, holocaust scholar at Brown, who initially were reluctant to say that, and now, indeed, have said that they consider it a genocide. So if you believe that a genocide is just about the worst thing that America can do in terms of its foreign policy, arming and funding at genocide, how can you simply say that you're gonna put that aside even for a night, and focus entirely on the fact that Democrats now have a better chance of beating Donald Trump? I see so many people in media who somehow feel like they get to define their work as focused on the election, focused on the mechanics of the election, and those domestic issues. And somehow Gaza is not their beat. They don't focus on that. They don't write on foreign policy. That's difficult. That's controversial. And they're making these moral judgments as if they don't have to take a position on this. And I just don't think it makes any sense. I really don't. If you're gonna say something about Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, you have to factor in what Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, has done, vis-a-vis Gaza. It's central to his legacy. It's central to his character. And if you don't, then you're saying that Palestinian lives just don't matter, or at least they don't matter this particular day, and I think that's inhumane. I don't think we can ever say that some group of people's lives simply don't mat

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.Our guest will Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, the largest city with an Arab-American majority in the United States. We’ll talk about how residents of Dearborn have reacted to the war in Gaza and whether Kamala Harris is doing enough to win their votes.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.We’re slightly increasing the prices of paid subscriptions. It’s the first time I’ve done this since I launched the newsletter a few years ago. Starting September 1, subscriptions will be $79 per year (up from $72) and $7.99 per month (up from $7). This will apply to all new subscriptions and to everyone whose subscription renews. If this increase creates a hardship for you, email me and we’ll figure it out.We’ve also added a new category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Friday calls, Premium Members will get access to a monthly “ask me anything” zoom call, which will start later this month. If that interests you, or you’d just like to do more to support the newsletter, please consider signing up. Whatever you decide, I appreciate it.Sources Cited in this VideoBenjamin Netanyahu’s 1982 interview with Pat Robertson.Merriam-Webster’s definition of “proxy.”When Hamas broke with Iran over Syria.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!), Raphael Magarik spoke to Rania Batrice about what Jewish texts can teach us about whether to vote for the lesser of two evils.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I spoke to Harrison Mann, who resigned from the Defense Intelligence Agency to protest his office’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.In The New Yorker, David Remnick writes about Yahya Sinwar.Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. I recently came across an interview that Benjamin Netanyahu did all the way back in 1982. So, this was before his political career, before his diplomatic career at the United Nations, and at the Israeli embassy in the United States. Back then, he was really known in 1982 fundamentally as the brother of Yoni Netanyahu, who famously died in the Entebbe raid. And Bibi had kind of fashioned himself as an expert on international terrorism. And so, he’s doing this interview with the evangelical broadcaster, Pat Robertson. And Robertson asks, ‘what is the source of terrorism?’ And Netanyahu replies, ‘the more we look, the more we found that terrorist incidents are not just isolated. There is a major force behind most of these groups that is the Soviet Union. If you take away the Soviet Union, it’s chief proxy, the PLO, international terrorism would collapse.’So, of course, as it turned out, within a decade of that interview, the Soviet Union itself had collapsed. But the PLO had not collapsed. And international terrorism—whatever exactly Benjamin Netanyahu meant by that, presumably he meant armed actions against Israel or against the West—had not collapsed either, right? Because, in fact, the PLO was not a proxy of the Soviet Union. It wasn’t being controlled by the Soviet Union. It was getting weapons from the Soviet Union. But the PLO was fundamentally an organization that emerged out of Palestinian opposition to Israel and Zionism, which went back a very, very long time, and grew out of the Palestinian experience, and indeed existed before the Soviet Union was supporting that resistance and continued after the Soviet Union ceased to exist.So, why bring this up now? It’s because when one hears about the relationship between Iran and Hamas, one very frequently in the American media—if you listen to American politicians, or Israeli politicians, or kind of American Jewish communal discourse—you will hear again and again this word: proxy. The same word that Netanyahu used to describe the PLO’s relationship with the Soviet Union. Now, a proxy, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is ‘a person authorized to act for another.’ Some of the synonyms are: agent, surrogate, representative, stand- in. So, the idea is there is a person or an entity that has the authority. It makes the decisions. And it authorizes, it delegates some other entity to do a certain action for it, right? So, when you say that Hamas is a proxy for Iran, what you’re saying is that Iran is making the decisions. Iran is the fundamental actor here. And Hamas is basically doing its bidding and acting as an agent, a surrogate, a delegate, a proxy, right?In fact, I think this completely misunderstands the relationship between Hamas and Iran. It’

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.Given the growing chance of a regional war in the Middle East, our guest will be one of the best analysts of Palestinian and Middle Eastern politics, Mouin Rabbani, Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, a publication of the Arab Studies Institute, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. We’ll talk about the attack in Majdal Shams, the spate of recent Israeli assassinations, and the potential for a conflict that envelopes the entire region.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoIsraeli columnist Nadav Eyal on Israel’s lack of preparedness for a Hezbollah assault. (His comments are near the end of the podcast. In my video, I’ve slightly compressed his remarks, but the substance is the same.)Even Israeli security officials admit that Israel can’t destroy Hamas.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 the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon discuss Israel’s use of “human shields” as a justification for the Gaza war.Why Iran may not want a regional war.The problem with Josh Shapiro.Joe Biden’s long relationship with AIPAC.Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. I’m recording this on Sunday. So, by the time people see it on Monday or later, there may have been more serious retaliation by Hezbollah and/or Iran for Israel’s recent spate of assassinations of a Hezbollah operative in Lebanon, of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in Iran, and perhaps even for the Hamas leader Mohammed Deif in Gaza. This whole trajectory is not only so frightening, but I find it so deeply depressing for so many reasons. One of which is just that, for me, as someone who cares about the safety of Israelis, worries about that a lot, I think that what Benjamin Netanyahu is doing just from the perspective of the safety of Israelis is incredibly, incredibly reckless, a kind of Trump-level action of just complete disregard for the safety of your own people.And I just want to give a quote. This is from Nadav Eyal, who’s a columnist at the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. Not a leftist by any means. Someone with very, I think, generally establishment views. Very close to the Israeli security apparatus. And he’s talking about the question of whether Israel is prepared for the kind of attack that Hezbollah is capable of. Remember, Hezbollah has a much stronger arsenal, a more formidable arsenal than Hamas, one that could really overwhelm the Iron Dome system, devastate Tel Aviv. And this is what Nadav Eyal is saying about whether the Israeli security officials believe that Israel is prepared for what Hezbollah might do in response, or Iran. And Nadav Eyal says—and this is from Dan Senor’s podcast, Call Me Back—Eyal says, we have numerous reports by the defense community that the home front isn’t ready. I didn’t see any report saying that the home front is to any extent ready. And by ready, I mean, I’m talking about electricity. I’m talking about infrastructure. The Israeli administration is saying to itself that they’re not ready. That Israelis are not prepared from the perspective of civil defense for the kind of retaliation that Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu would have had to know was very likely after this spate of assassinations, which followed the attack of the Druze town of Majdal Shams earlier. But it’s part of this larger cycle that’s been going on since October 7th. And I’ve been worried about this for a few months now because if you listen to Israeli officials and kind of commentators who are close to the Israeli government, the dynamic of their conversation in the past few months, if you notice, has really changed. If you listen to Israeli discourse and kind of pro-Israel discourse in the US in, you know, in the winter, even into, let’s say, the early spring of this year, you heard people saying, we have to destroy Hamas, right? That of course was the Israeli government line. We are gonna go into Gaza. We’re going to destroy Hamas.But I started to notice over the last few months a real shift. And some of this even came from official Israeli spokespeople. Like Daniel Hagari, the spokesperson, said, ‘we can’t destroy Hamas.’ And you notice that people started to kind of acknowledge, or at least implicitly stop saying we’re going to destroy Hamas because it’s becoming more and more obvious that Israel cannot destroy Hamas. It may ultimately end up with a situation where Hamas is no longer in charge of picking up the garbage in Gaza. But there’s lots of reporting that Hamas doesn’

Paid subscribers will get the link to Friday Zoom calls on Tuesdays and the video and podcast the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoSenator Josh Hawley’s speech at the National Conservativism Conference.Suzanne Schneider discusses Israel’s model for the nationalist right.Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Dr. Mohammed Al-Hindi, the deputy leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the International Court of Justice.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, Jonathan Shamir interviews Hana Morgenstern, Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud, and Moshe Behar about Arab-Jewish identity.Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.Last week the Knesset voted to reject the two state solution. Not a single Knesset member from a Jewish party opposed the resolution.Pete Buttigieg on J.D. Vance.PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. You’ll notice that if you listen to defenders of the Israeli government, one of the things—in the United States in particular—one of the things they hate the most is when people make analogies between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and basically any other place in the world, whether it’s apartheid South Africa or, you know, Black Americans. They hate these analogies. And I think it’s because the defense of what Israel is doing requires a kind of an exceptionalization of Israel. That if you step back, and you actually just try to apply kind of broad basic principles—you know the idea of equality under the law irrespective of race, religion, ethnicity, etc.—if you see Israel and the Palestinians in that light, according to some kind of universal criteria that you apply to all places, you’re going to have a big problem with what Israel’s doing.So, this exceptionalization of what Israel does is really, really important to defending what Israel does because it’s a way of saying, basically, you have to check those universal principles at the door because this is so complicated, sui generis, whatever, basically that you have to look at it in a completely different light. But I think it’s really important to de-exceptionalize this conversation and see the things that it has in common with many other struggles in the world today. Of course, every place is different in its own way, but the idea that there are common universal principles that one applies in all circumstances, I think, is really important.And in this regard, I want to try to draw an analogy between Benjamin Netanyahu and the things that he believes, and that he’s going to speak about in Congress on Wednesday, and two other figures that one might not immediately think of as having a lot in common with him. And those two other figures are: Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, and Mohammad Al-Hindi, who’s the deputy leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And I want to give three quotes: one from Hawley, one from Al-Hindi, the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and then one from Netanyahu to illustrate this common point. All three of these people basically believe that countries should be dominated by members of a particular ethnic, religious, racial group. And those people can be trusted to treat everybody else fairly, even though those other people will not have equality under the law. And this is a huge central struggle in our time across the world, between the idea of equality under the law, and the idea that basically countries are properties of one particular tribe, whether they’re defined racially, religiously, ethnically, or some combination of both. And those tribes can be trusted—because they are somehow benign—to treat everybody else well, even those other people who are not equal members of the nation.So, let’s start with Josh Hawley. This is Josh Hawley from the National Conservatism Conference, which, not coincidentally, who’s guiding spirit, Yoram Hazony, is actually an Israeli who’s taken a lot of the ways he thinks about Israel and is exporting them to the United States, but also Hungary, India, many other places. There is a great podcast discussion of this, which I’ve linked to with Suzanne Schneider. And so, this is Hawley. Hawley says: ‘I’m calling America a Christian nation. Some will say I’m advocating Christian nationalism. And so I am.’ And then he goes on: ‘Religion unites Americans. Most Americans share broad and basic religious convictions: theistic, biblical, Christian. Working people believe in God. They read the Bible. They go to church, some often, some not. But they consider themselves, in all events, members of a Christian nation.’ And he goes on to say that other people are gonna be treated fine who are not Christians. But they have to recognize that the

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.In light of Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race, we’re going to talk to two Democratic strategists about what happens now, and what impact it could have on US policy towards the Gaza War. Rania Batrice is a Palestinian-American political consultant. She served as deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and this year has been the media consultant for the Uncommitted campaign. Matt Duss is executive vice-president of the Center for International Policy and served as foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders from 2017-2022. I’m excited to talk to them both.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.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, Jonathan Shamir interviews Hana Morgenstern, Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud, and Moshe Behar about Arab-Jewish identity.Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.Last week, the Knesset voted to reject the two state solution. Not a single Knesset member from a Jewish party opposed the resolution.Pete Buttigieg on J.D. Vance.See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. So, I’m recording this on Sunday. Just heard the news that President Biden is gonna drop out of the presidential race. And obviously there’ll be just a tremendous amount of commentary and all this. I would just say, for me, this is the first thing that’s happened in a while that kind of reminds me why—with all its flaws—the Democratic Party is still the party that I associate with. And it’s because both of these parties faced a situation in which they were under pressure to deny basic reality. In the case of the Republican Party, the denial of reality is the idea that Donald Trump is not what he palpably is, which is: an authoritarian racist, misogynist, pathological liar. And the Republican Party has really coalesced around denial of those really obvious truths.And the Democratic Party was headed down a path of doing something which was in some ways similar, which was that the leadership of the party was going to coalesce around the denial of the reality that Joe Biden is no longer fit to be a presidential candidate, in the sense that he cannot vigorously make a case for himself to the American people, and I think cannot be, certainly for years going forward, an effective president. Because part of the job of being present is making a case to the public to rally them in support of what you want to do—sometimes rallying the entire world behind a certain policy—and being forceful in private, whether it’s foreign leaders, or members of Congress.And we were entering this situation, and what was so profoundly depressing was to see the Democratic Party, which I thought is the more benign of the two parties and the more in touch with reality of the two parties, essentially going down that same road of denial of reality that the Republican Party was. And what we saw was because of the different constituency groups in the Democratic Party, because of its different relationship with the media, because of its different relationships with members of Congress, for variety of reasons, that Democrats were able to force Joe Biden to face this reality in a way that Republicans have never been able to do vis-à-vis Donald Trump. And so, that to me is just a sense of tremendous relief. Of course, there are very, very, very major concerns about Kamala Harris—assuming she is the nominee—above all, for those of us who care about Israel-Palestine, the fact that she was still implicated in this administration’s just horrific policy towards the Gaza War.But I at least think that there is the hope that this recognition of reality in the party could perhaps be the beginnings of a reckoning with other kinds of reality. The reality that just as the party cannot continue to deny the reality of the fact that Joe Biden is no longer fit to be a presidential candidate, he’s not fit to serve as president for the next four years, that it will move towards—under pressure again from the from the party, from members of the party coalition—that it could move towards the recognition that this claim that this war is just and necessary is a denial of reality as well. And so, it shows that there is just some possibility that the Democratic Party can be moved to the place where it faces things as they actually are, as opposed to the Republican Party, which is living in a very, very dangerous fantasy about who Donald Trump is, and indeed what America is.And so, it’s for that reason that I would say this is the first time that I felt hopeful about

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.Our guest will be Laila Al-Arian, an investigative journalist and executive producer of Fault Lines, an Emmy and Peabody award-winning show on Al Jazeera English. She’s also the executive producer of “The Night Won’t End,” an extraordinarily powerful documentary about three families in Gaza during this war. We’re going to talk about how the documentary was made, what it reveals about how Israeli is waging this war, and about how the media is covering it. Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoJoe Biden and Barack Obama’s response to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump versus Trump’s response to the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.J.D. Vance and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise claim that Democrats are inciting violence by calling Trump a threat to democracy.Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind.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 the rise of October 7 tourism.Although overshadowed by the horror in Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank have grown desperate economically as Israel has further restricted their right to travel and work since October 7. Please consider supporting this crowdfunding campaign for two West Bank families in dire need.Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq on burning books for fuel in Gaza.For the Foundation for Middle Peace, I talked to Professor Rashid Khalidi about the threat to his family’s library in Jerusalem.A new podcast about Palestinian citizens of Israel.In the Jewish News of Northern California, Ben Linder writes about the bulldozing of the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair.Professor Alon Confino died last month. I got to know him when I began writing about the Nakba and how it is—or isn’t—remembered by Israeli Jews. I was struck not only by the depth of his knowledge but by the quality of his spirit. Here is a memory of him by a colleague. And here is a lecture he gave about antisemitism and Zionism in Italy, the country of his grandparents’ birth. May his memory be a blessing.See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. So, every time it seems like things can’t get worse in American politics and American society, they do. And now we have the attack, the assassination attempt, on Donald Trump, which is just a catastrophe for a variety of reasons.First of all, it’s a catastrophe because political violence is simply wrong. Period. It doesn’t matter who it’s against. It’s very, very dangerous for this to be kind of re-injected into American politics. So, that’s the most important thing. No matter how one feels about Donald Trump, it’s just appalling that someone tried to murder him. Secondly, it’s a disaster because this will help Trump, I think, who was already clearly ahead, maybe even heading towards a landslide victory, and now defeating him will be that much harder. And thirdly, because I think everything we know about Donald Trump, and the entire Republican party at this point, suggests that they will use this as an excuse for further authoritarian crackdowns on their enemies.And so, it’s really I think important to kind of be clear about the political environment in which this actually took place, right? That this is not a political environment in which the two parties have equal relationships to the question of violence and the question of conspiracy theories, right? So, Joe Biden, you know, responded to this as any decent politician would. He said, ‘there’s no place in America for this kind of violence. Everybody must condemn it.’ He took down his television ads. Barack Obama said, ‘there’s absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,’ right?It is worth contrasting that with Donald Trump’s reaction when a man attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer in his home. And Trump said, ‘it’s weird things going on in that household. The glass it seems broken from the inside to the out. So, it wasn’t a break in. It was a break out,’ playing into various conspiracy theories that were floating around in the Republican party at that time, right? So, it’s just important to remember that there is a difference between the way the leaders of the two political parties respond to acts of violence.And it’s also extremely important that people reject this line, which is now coming out from Republicans, which is to say that because Democrats were saying they were worried about Trump as a threat to democracy, that that emboldened or is responsible for this shooter right? So, you had J. D. Vance—I mean, gosh, J. D. Vance. I mean, there’s so many people who one can loo

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.Our guest will be James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute, and a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee. Last week he offered a proposal for how to replace President Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee. We’ll talk about the pressure inside the party on Biden to bow out, and what might happen if he does.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoThe transcript of Biden’s interview with George Stephanopoulos.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!), Rabea Eghbariah talks about why the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews tried to censor his article on the Nakba as a legal concept.Although overshadowed by the horror in Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank have grown desperate economically as Israel has further restricted their right to travel and work since October 7. Please consider supporting this crowdfunding campaign for two West Bank families in dire need.A long and fascinating interview with Rashid Khalidi in The New Left Review.Olivia Nuzzi on the conspiracy of silence to conceal Biden’s decline.See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:It seems pretty clear at this point, to me, that Joe Biden is probably not going to be the Democratic nominee, that there’s been a kind of a tipping point that’s gonna play out in the days to come. And I almost—almost—feel a little bad for Biden because he wasn’t that bad in the George Stephanopoulos interview on Friday compared to the debate. He was, actually, I think significantly better. But people now realize they’re judging him on such a low bar and have so little faith that he can come back and defeat Donald Trump.And I think the media is in a kind of remorse because they didn’t actually put more pressure on this question earlier in the reporting, has now swung into in a direction where they’re basically just nitpicking every single phrase, looking for some signs of mental decline that I just don’t see how this is sustainable. And I think that’s a good thing. I think the Democrats are a lot better off rolling the dice, and at least giving themselves a chance of beating Donald Trump since I just don’t see how Joe Biden could change the dynamics of this race and make it a race about Trump because it is now really a race about his fitness to serve. And even many of the people who tend to agree with him ideologically just don’t think he is.But what I thought was interesting about the Stephanopoulos interview that’s gotten less attention was less what it revealed about Biden’s mental decline in the kind of how old he is, but more just about the way his thinking is very old. And I think this is a problem that still hasn’t gotten enough attention. This is a man who, I think, when he thinks about America’s relationship with the world, is really in a Cold War paradigm that I’ve always thought was very, very dangerous, and since the war in Gaza just seems to me even more so.So, in that interview, when he was trying to tell George Stephanopoulos why he had been a good president and why Americans needed to reelect him, if you notice the thing that Biden kept coming back to again and again—he mentioned it six times—is NATO. He says, ‘I was the guy that expanded NATO.’ He talked about what he’s doing in Europe with regard to expansion of NATO. ‘I’m the guy that put NATO together,’ he says. ‘I’m doing a hell of a lot of other things, like wars around the world, like keeping NATO together. Who’s gonna be able to hold NATO together like me?’He talks about NATO again and again and again. And it seems to me somewhat disconnected from reality. Where is the chorus of people in America who want to be expanding NATO? I think, morally, the case for defending Ukraine was a very strong case. But it’s really clear at this point that that policy on Ukraine has not really been a success. Maybe it was a success initially in preventing the Russians from taking Kyiv. But the sanctions have not basically been able to get Russia to stop this war. And Ukraine is closer to losing than it is to winning. And there’s gonna have to be some peace agreement that’s probably gonna leave Ukraine worse off than it was before this war.And so, I think that this notion that what he’s falling back on again is the fact that they kept pushing NATO forward rather than, in retrospect, thinking that maybe actually some kind of negotiation with the Russians—at least in retrospect—might have been a better deal just to me suggests a disconnection from reality, and a way in which this Cold War kind of great power competition really

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.Our guest will be Rami Khouri, Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the American University of Beirut, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC, and a regular columnist for Al Jazeera online. Rami lived in Beirut for 17 years and has for many years written about relations between Israel and Lebanon. We’ll talk about the terrifying reports that a full-scale war may break out between Israel and Hezbollah.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoEzra Klein, Ross Douthat, and Michelle Cottle on whether Biden can not only win, but govern.Jonathan Sacks on the fear of freedom.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane explains why ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas are stuck.Although overshadowed by the horror in Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank have grown desperate economically as Israel has further restricted their right to travel and work since October 7. Please consider supporting this crowdfunding campaign for two West Bank families in dire need.Al Jazeera’s chilling new documentary, “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza.”An extraordinary essay by Ayelet Waldman about her family’s history and the delusions of liberal Zionism.A Pennsylvania voter pledges to vote Biden even if he’s dead.A fascinating thread on the scholarship of Raz Segal, the Israeli-born genocide scholar whose appointment at the University of Minnesota is now in doubt.Former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon says the occupation puts Israelis in danger.Last week, I talked to MSNBC’s Joy Reid about Jamaal Bowman’s congressional primary.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I interviewed Hebrew University Professor Yael Berda about Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s de facto annexation of the West Bank.John Judis, one of the writers I admire most, has launched a Substack. Please check it out.See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. I’m beginning to fear that when we look back at this moment in history, people will look at Democrats, influential people in the Democratic Party, and ask the question of why it was that they lacked courage? Why it was indeed that their lack of courage was perhaps their essential defining characteristic, and it had disastrous and historic consequences? It’s interesting because, throughout the Trump era, so many of us have talked about the lack of courage of Republicans. That there was, you know, again and again reporters would say, you know, that privately Republican politicians would laugh about Trump, denounce Trump, that many of the same people who had even publicly earlier on when Trump wasn’t so formidable said that he was an autocrat, a dictator, then became these obsequious fawning supporters of him. So, we got used to—as people who were more progressive kind of denounced these people for their lack of courage.But I actually think, at this point, Democrats are actually showing even less courage than Republicans. Because, in a way, the Republican Party has transformed itself, certainly among people in Congress. I think there are fewer actually of those people who snicker about Trump privately because this has become a Republican party, more a party of true believers. I think, actually among Republican voters, there is a genuine tremendous amount of support for Trump. Now that’s horrifying. It’s incredibly frightening, but it’s not actually cowardice. It’s a kind of psychosis to me. It’s an embrace of white Christian nationalism, authoritarianism. But it’s not exactly cowardice because I actually think that in the Republican Party today, compared to the Republican Party let’s say five years ago, there’s actually more a broader sense of true belief for Trump. Many of the members of Congress who really didn’t like Trump, most are no longer in Congress.Whereas among Democrats, I think you actually have a situation where people genuinely don’t believe that Biden should be the nominee. But they’re too afraid to do anything about it. And it’s not just with Biden. I think there is a kind of parallel between the party’s response to Gaza and the party’s treatment of Trump. Which is, on Gaza too, I think if you put a lot of Democratic members of Congress to a lie detector test—and a lot of people in the Biden administration to a lie detector test—and they said, is American policy on this war in Gaza, is it ethical? Is it ethical? They would say: no! And yet, they shrug their shoulders and they go through their day because they want to preserve their political support. They don’t want to end up like

I made a second video this week because I wanted to say something about Jamaal Bowman, who lost his primary race for Congress last night. He lost because he had the courage to visit the West Bank and speak about what he saw. He lost because he’s an unusual politician. He has moral courage.Sources Cited in This Video:A Politico article about Bowman’s trip to the West Bank.A Jewish Currents article I wrote about how Pro-Israel groups keep US foreign policy white.Our guests this Friday at 11 AM will be Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson, co-authors of the book, The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other. Since October 7, dialogue between Palestinians and Jews has become even more difficult, and there are those in both communities—and on the left and right—who question its value. I’m excited to ask Raja and Jeffrey to respond to those criticisms, and to explain how they believe that greater dialogue between Palestinians and Jews can contribute to the struggle for equality, freedom, and safety for everyone.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, last night, Jamaal Bowman lost his race for re-election to Congress. And I wanted to say something about him and that race. Now, it’s important not to be willing to overlook the flaws of people just because you profoundly agree with them on really important policy issues. So, I don’t want to suggest that Jamaal Bowman didn’t make any mistakes in this race. I think it was unfortunate when he said that Jews in Westchester segregate themselves. If you look at the context, I think you can understand what he was trying to say, which was essentially that people would understand him better if people live together more, and that would actually break down antisemitism. But still, I think it was probably a territory that he shouldn’t have ventured into. But that said, again, even though we need to be willing to be critical of people we disagree with, it’s also important that we not be naive.And that comment had nothing to do with the onslaught that Jamaal Bowman faced from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. That onslaught was fundamentally about one thing. It was about the fact that Jamaal Bowman was a passionate supporter of Palestinian freedom. When members of Congress are staunch supporters of Israel, they can say things that are far, far more problematic vis-à-vis Jews than anything that Jamaal Bowman ever said, and get a complete pass. The reason that Jamaal Bowman had a target on his back was really simple. It’s because he went to see what life was like for Palestinians in the West Bank. Now, that might not seem like a big deal, but it actually is because the vast majority of members of Congress avert their eyes. They make a conscious choice to go to Israel on AIPAC junkets that don’t show them the reality of what it’s like for Palestinians to live their entire lives without the most basic of human rights. I suspect perhaps they just don’t want to know because they know that if they did see, it would only cause problems for them. But Jamaal Bowman went to see. He even went to Hebron, which is perhaps the most brutal of all the places in the West Bank, a place where Palestinians can’t even walk on certain streets in their own city. And he had the courage to see. And he had the courage to talk about it. And that’s unusual for a member of Congress. And the thing you always need to remember about these people, you know, who spent untold amounts of money, unprecedented amounts of money, on trying to defeat him—the people who gave all this money to AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups to defeat him—is that, overwhelmingly, they have not seen the things that Jamaal Bowman has seen. I have lived in proximity to those people my entire life. I’m telling you they may have been to Israel 40 times. But those kind of AIPAC donors, they don’t go to see what life is like for Palestinians who have lived their entire lives in the West Bank without the right to vote for the government that has life and death power over their lives under a different legal system, a military legal system, while they’re Jewish neighbors enjoy free movement, and due process, and the right to vote, and citizenship. If they had gone to see those things, I think many of them would not be AIPAC donors because it would shake them to their core. But one of the reasons I think they find the kind of things that Jamaal Bowman says so frightening is because they haven’t had the courage to go and actually face these realities for themselves. But Jamaal Bowman did go to face these realities and then he took it upon himself to talk about what he had seen. And he paid a political price.The second thing I want to say about Jamaal Bowman and t

Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.Our guests will be Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson, co-authors of the book, The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other. Since October 7, dialogue between Palestinians and Jews has become even more difficult, and there are those in both communities—and on the left and right—who question its value. I’m excited to ask Raja and Jeffrey to respond to those criticisms, and to explain how they believe that greater dialogue between Palestinians and Jews can contribute to the struggle for equality, freedom, and safety for everyone.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoMehdi Hasan’s interview with Representative Dean Phillips.The New York Times’ investigation of Israel’s Sde Teiman detention center. Hasan’s reference to a prisoner who reportedly died by rape comes from an UNRWA interview with a 41-year-old detainee who gave an account similar to the one that Younis al-Hamlawi gave The New York Times about being forced to sit on a hot metal stick. That prisoner claimed another detainee subjected to the procedure had died as a result.Why the history of Israel’s restrictions on movement from Gaza dates back to 1991.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!), Shane Burley and Jonah Ben Avraham explain the flawed methodology that the ADL uses to measure antisemitism.Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.Aziz Abu Sarah on the absurdity of pro-Palestinian demonstrators protesting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.The deputy assistant secretary for Israeli-Palestinian affairs resigns after opposing Biden’s policies on the war.Israel’s military spokesman says “anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.”See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. I wanted to say something about an extraordinary interview that Mehdi Hassan did last week with Congressman Dean Phillips from Minnesota, who had been a candidate for president against Biden this year. This was for Mehdi’s new platform, Zeteo. What makes the interview so remarkable, I think, is that it kind of offers a glimpse of what American public and media discourse about this war, and about Israel and Palestine more generally, might be like if Palestinian lives were considered equal to Israeli lives.So, Mehdi Hassan starts by asking Dean Phillips: was it okay in your view for Israel to kill all of these Palestinians, including many children in the military operation that freed for Israeli hostages? And Philip says, ‘it’s an unacceptable price, but I think it’s a price that has to be paid.’ So, he says, basically, it was really awful, but it was necessary. And then, Mehdi Hasan takes the question in a direction that I really don’t think Dean Phillips was expecting because it’s so rarely asked. And he says, ‘if you’re saying that to free people from the clutches of horrible captivity’—this is Mehdi Hasan speaking—‘hostages, people possibly being abused in captivity to free them, you have to pay a price, a horrible price. Does that ratio work the other way?’And then, Medhi Hasan continues: ‘how many Israelis can Palestinians kill to free Palestinian detainees who are currently being tortured in Israeli captivity, some of them being raped to death according to the New York Times last week. Can they kill 200 Israelis to free four Palestinians who are being tortured in an Israeli prison?’ And Phillips’ response is kind of remarkable. And by the way, I don’t think Phillips is a dumb guy. I actually think if you listen to the interview, he’s probably more thoughtful on these issues than your average member of Congress, although that may be a low bar. And to give him credit, he’s also appearing on an interview with Mehdi Hasan, which he probably knew was going to be a really challenging interview.But so, here’s what Dean Phillips says. He’s quite startled. You can listen in the interview. He’s clearly surprised by the allegation. He says—Philips says—‘you said Palestinian prisoners are being raped to death by Israeli soldiers? I don’t believe that to be true,’ right. Hasan has just quoted The New York Times, which is about as respectable a media outlet as you can have. And then Philips said, ‘I don’t believe that to be true.’ And then Mehdi Hasan goes

Our call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at 11 AM Eastern.Our guest this week will be Geoffrey Levin, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University and author of the new book, Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978, which explores a largely unknown history of American Jewish criticism of Israel in the first decades of its existence, and how it was quashed. It’s a particularly relevant history today given the rise of Jewish organizing against the war in Gaza. Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.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.)The Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast discusses the challenges of being part of an American synagogue community during this war.Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.A beautiful statement by the Deputy Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the United Nations, Majed Bamya, about Noa Argamani’s release from captivity.Is the global outcry over Israel’s actions starting to hit its high-tech sector?What happens to Palestinian Gandhi’s?Masculinity and the New York Jewish Intellectuals.Wajahat Ali’s new newsletter, Left Hook.See you on Thursday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. As I’ve been following the news of the increased escalation between Israel and Hezbollah, which is really terrifying, my mind has kept going back to a conversation I had with an Israeli friend soon after October 7th. And my friend said, ‘you don’t understand, Peter. If we don’t destroy Hamas, people will never feel safe living in the south of Israel again. And we will have lost that part of our country.’ And what he was saying made a huge amount of sense, it seems to me, in terms of Israeli political culture, Israeli political psychology given the trauma of what had happened after October 7th. And so, he was saying because that is non-negotiable, we have to defeat Hamas. And what I was thinking was: but I don’t think you can defeat Hamas. I think that’s non-negotiable. So, we were essentially at loggerheads because he was saying that, for a political reason, Israel had to do something militarily that I didn’t think could be done. And now, more than eight months later, I think it seems clear to me that it cannot be done.And so, now I feel like there’s a version of this playing out in terms of Israel’s debate in its north vis-a-vis Hezbollah, but in some ways with even more frightening stakes. Which the argument is: Israelis cannot return to the north because all of these people have been displaced from their homes unless we push Hezbollah away from that border. And that beyond that, Israel can no longer accept the kind of situation that it accepted before October 7th, which is to say the precariousness, the uncertainty, the unsatisfactory nature of the fact that Hezbollah was always there with this huge arsenal. That was acceptable before October 7th. We can no longer accept these things now because we have a greater sense of threat and also perhaps because we have lost our deterrent, and it needs to be re-established.This reminds me a lot of the debate in the United States around Iraq after September 11th where people were saying maybe we could muddle through with Saddam Hussein, who we thought was kind of rearming and, you know, eluding the sanctions regime. Maybe that was okay before September 11th. But now, given that we’ve seen the potential peril—and given that we look weak—we need a decisive answer. Again, but like my friend in Israel, it all assumes that a decisive answer is possible, right? It’s as if to say, militarily, this has to become possible because politically we need it to be possible.And yet, I have not heard—just as I did not hear as Israel was going into Gaza—anyone offering a convincing explanation of how Israel was going to defeat and destroy Hamas. I haven’t heard anyone say that about how Israel is going to destroy Hezbollah, force Hezbollah off of Israel’s borders. Again, it seems to me more like this situation of kind of you start from a political necessity, and then you assume that there’s a military solution. And to me, what this suggests is that the way in which Israeli Jewish leaders, and Israeli Jewish political discourse—and much Jewish discourse in the diaspora because it tends to often kind of follow along—has a sense of th

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.Our guest this week will be Raef Zreik, associate professor of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College in Israel, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, and a former member of the executive committee of Balad, one of Israel’s predominantly Palestinian parties. He’s one of the most brilliant theorists of Palestine and Israel, and I want to ask him to step back from the nightmarish events of the moment to talk about their long-term consequences for relations between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoElliott Abrams’ essay in Foreign Affairs.The Pew Research Center on Israeli opinion.George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”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.)The Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast discusses secularism and the Jewish left.Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.A Holocaust survivor’s talk is cancelled in Detroit because he protested the Gaza war.Mexico, El Salvador and their ironic relationship to Israel-Palestine.The importance of the halakhic left.Adam Shatz on Israel then and now.A message about Noam Chomsky.See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. I’d encourage you to do an experiment. Go on Google or some other search engine, and type in the phrase, ‘Israelis feel’ or ‘Israelis believe.’ I suspect that what you’ll find is that many of the things that you turn up about how Israelis feel, or Israelis believe, are not actually statements about how all of Israel’s citizens feel, or what they believe, but are using essentially Israelis as a synonym for Jewish Israeli.So, for instance, here’s one example in Foreign Affairs in April, Elliott Abrams, the former Bush and Trump administration official, wrote, ‘Israelis across the ideological spectrum agree that Hamas must be crushed.’ Now, he’s clearly using Israelis here as a synonym for Jewish Israelis. And it’s true that for Jewish Israelis that statement is probably true. A Pew research center poll in May found that only 4% of Jewish Israelis think that Israel’s war in Gaza has gone too far. But if you use Israelis to mean all of Israel’s citizens, then his statement is completely wrong because according to Pew, 74% of Israel’s Palestinian citizens or Arab Israelis, as they’re sometimes called, think that Israel’s war has gone too far.So, what’s happening here is it that Americans in our public discourse are very often embracing the kind of ethno-nationalist language that comes from Israel. So, because Israel defines itself as a Jewish state, indeed the word Israeli itself, right, Israel is another name for the Jewish people. It’s the name that Jacob is given when he wrestles with the angel and becomes a name for the Jewish people. So, because the very name of Israel, and Israeli, is essentially a synonym for Jew, what happens is the fact that 20% of the Israeli citizens who are not Jewish gets erased from our public discourse, and we essentially adopt the terms of the ethno-nationalist terms of debate. And so, what we end up doing is we basically use Jewish Israeli as a synonym for Israeli, even though I think in the United States where Black Americans are only 10% of the population—significantly less than Palestinian citizens are of the Israeli citizenry—we would really object if someone used American and white American as synonyms. But essentially, we do a version of that when we talk about Israelis all the time.And it’s an even bigger problem, right, when you realize that Israel controls millions and millions of Palestinians who don’t have any citizenship at all. That 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control, those in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, have lived under Israeli control, in many cases their entire lives, but can’t become citizens. So, we would never call them Israelis. And the problem here, I think, is that when we talk about other groups of people—let’s say Americans, right—we’d mean citizens, but we also mean perhaps a little more vaguely, just kind of long-term residents, people who are spending their lives here, people who are not tourists, right, even if they don’t have citizenship.But in the United States, there’s more of a close alignment between those

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.Our guest this week will be Congressman Ro Khanna, who represents the 17th district of California and is a leading progressive voice in Democratic foreign policy. He has called on Israel to immediately halt its attack on Rafah and also tried to convince protesters against the war to support Joe Biden’s reelection. We’ll talk about US policy toward the war, whether Biden can win back progressives who feel betrayed by it, and about the relationship between progressivism and Zionism more generally.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoThings 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.)The Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast discusses the end of Curb Your Enthusiasm.Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Shraddha Joshi and Asmer Safi, Harvard students whose degrees are being withheld because of their activism for Palestinian rights.An open letter from academics in Gaza. The descendants of Nazis march for Israel.Viewer Response:After my last video, David Lelyveld questioned my suggestion that the war would dog Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan after they leave government. He wrote, “McGeorge Bundy went from the Johnson administration to the presidency of the Ford Foundation for some 15 years. Walt Rostow had a comfortable, well-endowed chair at the University of Texas for 30. As we say in New York, not chopped liver. I wouldn't weep for Biden's subordinates.”See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:America’s relationship with Israel is a little bit like imagine there’s a person in a house, two groups of people in a house, but one is vastly more powerful. And they’re fighting with one another. And the vastly more powerful side, as you might imagine, is doing a tremendous amount of violence to the weaker side. The weaker side is doing some violence as well, but it’s very disproportionate. And this being Israel and the Palestinians. And the United States is giving weapons to the side that’s stronger and allowing it to kind of pummel the weaker side more and more. And the United States is continuing to do that, and then kind of making suggestions from the side.So, a while back, Chuck Schumer said that it would be good if Benjamin Netanyahu were not Israel’s prime minister anymore. So, it’s kind of the equivalent of saying to that stronger side in the house, you know, we think that you should have someone else from your group actually be in charge of this conflict. Or now, we have Joe Biden basically laying out this plan for a ceasefire over multiple stages, again basically giving his advice to both sides about how maybe this conflict could end, but all the while continuing to give the weapons that continue to fuel the conflict and allow the stronger side to continue to inflict all this violence on the weaker side.And it’s just really bizarre. Because America’s primary responsibility is not actually to choose Israel’s leaders. And America’s primary responsibility is not even actually to end this war. America’s primary responsibility is to figure out what it does with its money and its weapons. That’s what America has direct control over. America doesn’t have actual direct control over how this war in Gaza ends. From a moral perspective, its primary responsibility is its own role. And there’s this weird way in which, in establishment American discourse, we essentially ignore our own role in this and suggest that we are some kind of neutral arbiter, and then throw out various proposals for how the situation may be solved as if we are not an active participant in it, right? And then we seem disappointed when Israel, or sometimes the Palestinians, basically reject these proposals—but often Israel—because they know that we’re not a neutral observer, that we are a participant, but we are on their side, and that that participation will continue irrespective of what they say about our proposal. So, there’s not very much cost for them in rejecting the proposal.It seems to me this is exactly the wrong way to think about it. It’s a cliché. But it’s true that in the long run, ultimately, this war and this conflict in this situation will have to be solved by Israelis and P

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.Our guest this week will be Jamil Dakwar, a human rights lawyer, adjunct professor at New York University, and former senior attorney with Adalah, which advocates for the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. He’ll be speaking in his personal capacity. We’ll talk about the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and the case against Israeli and Hamas leaders at the International Criminal Court.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoThings 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!), Raphael Magarik talks with Maya Wind about her book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom.Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Sapir Sluzker Amran about being a queer, feminist, Mizrachi activist in Israel—and about her decision to go to the border with Gaza to challenge people preventing the delivery of aid.Muhammad Shehada on the danger of selective empathy.Michael Sfard on the failure of the Israeli media.Mehdi Hasan vs Jonathan Schanzer on the ICC’s warrants against Israeli leaders. Former Israeli combat soldier Ariel Bernstein on how Israel is fighting in Gaza.Imagine if US leaders talked like Irish leaders about Gaza.M.J. Rosenberg has renamed his Substack (and subscribers must resubscribe).See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. So, I’ve been thinking about why the Biden administration has made the decisions that it’s made on this war. Decisions that seem to me to have been disastrous and catastrophic, not just for the people in Gaza though that’s obviously the most important thing—all the people who’ve died and been injured and who’ve been forced from their homes—but also has been politically disastrous, and I think actually potentially disastrous also for the careers of top Biden administration officials themselves. Politically disastrous because Joe Biden now is in a situation, as we enter into the kind of the meat of the presidential campaign, in which he literally can’t go speak to his own party’s base. He can’t go speak at a university. He can’t go speak at a Black church. He can’t even go speak at a union event without the very real prospect of his speech being protested, even interrupted, because there’s so much anger at his policy on Gaza.It’s one thing not to have a hugely enthusiastic voter base, as Biden, you know, never really had a hugely enthusiastic support from his party’s base. But to have people be so angry at you in your own party’s base that you can’t go to the institutions of your own party’s base without literally having people protest you, that’s a huge warning sign for a presidential campaign. Yes, it would have been very challenging for Biden to take a different line on the Gaza War as well. But it doesn’t seem to me that they recognized early on how bad, politically, how dangerous this path they were on was.And secondly, I don’t get the sense that people in the Biden administration, the foreign policy team, understand the potential ramifications for their careers over this. I mean, there has been a pattern that, if you leave an administration, you can go to work on Wall Street, you can be a consultant. But often times, people also go to universities. They become deans of colleges, universities. They teach at universities. This is a kind of an enjoyable thing for folks to do in the few years while they wait for their party to regain power. This is what people did after the Clinton administration, after the Obama administration.I think we’re in a very different world now. I think if you are a top Biden foreign policy official, and think that you can go for a couple of pleasant years to some leafy university campus, and teach a couple classes, and hang out for a while, I think you’re sorely mistaken. I think the experience of a Biden official who was involved in this war going to a university in the coming years would be not that different than the experience of people like McGeorge Bundy and and Walt Rostow experienced when they tried to go back to the universities that they had been in before the Vietnam War. These people are gonna be treated

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be held at a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.Our guest this week will be Lily Greenberg Call, former Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff at the Department of Interior, who last week resigned to protest US policy in Gaza. She is the first Jewish Biden administration staffer to resign over the war. For ten years, until 2022, she was a youth activist for AIPAC. Her resignation constitutes perhaps the most remarkable illustration yet of the speed with which many young American Jews are abandoning previously held views about Israel and joining the struggle for Palestinian freedom.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoThe Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) impact on Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).Senator J.D. Vance proposes Viktor Orban’s takeover of Hungary’s universities as a model for the US.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, I talked with Arielle Angel, Mari Cohen, and Daniel May about Zionism and anti-Zionism.Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.What Israeli leaders mean when they talk about Gaza’s future.How American universities are purging pro-Palestinian faculty.A child of Holocaust survivors speaks about why he’s protesting the war.An Israeli risks her life to try to stop Israelis from preventing aid from entering Gaza.Rick Perlstein on why the current crackdown on campus protest is worse than the 1960s.See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:I want to say a couple more things about the campus protests that have really roiled universities this spring. There’s always the danger, of course, that attention to this distracts us from what’s happening in Gaza, which is much, much more significant. But this is really, I think, a movement whose impact will kind of resound in terms of American politics and American life for a long time to come. And so, I think that thinking about a couple of more of its dynamics might be useful. And I want to make three points based on some other campuses that I visited since a video I did a couple weeks ago.The first is, I think, one of the things the media has not sufficiently emphasized is the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on this movement. That it is not a coincidence that we had this huge upswell in protesting around the George Floyd incident several years ago. Now we have this. I was at Whitman College in Washington and talked to a number of students who were involved in the encampment there. This is, you know, a fairly small college. And what struck me again and again was how many of them had been introduced to protest by the George Floyd moment back when they were still in high school, and that often around the edges of that movement was when they got connected to issues about Palestinian organizing, that someone handed them a pamphlet or there was someone who was Palestinian in that movement or someone who was connected to that.And it was essentially through that movement of Black Lives Matter that they came aware of this issue that has now become so central to them. And I think if you look at American history, this is the way things often work, which is that you have clusters of different movements that cross-fertilize. So, if you think about the early 1960s, and you think about Students for a Democratic Society, which became this crucial element of the kind of the new left organizing against Vietnam, some of its key members like Tom Hayden and Alan Haber had been influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s against segregation by Black students in the South.And so, there you see the way in which one protest movement feeds into another at a time of broader protest. And again, we know that there were veterans of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements who then influenced the feminist movement and the LGBT movement. And so, I think what we’re seeing in this moment is that we are in an era again of youth-led—not only youth but with a large youth participation—grassroots activism, and people move from one subject to another. I also heard people who have been involved in climate protest, which has obviously been a huge issue for young people. And it was through climate that they became interested in the q

For the foreseeable future, our Zoom calls will be moving to a new time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.Our guest this week is someone I admire greatly, Tel Aviv University History Professor Yael Sternhell. We’ll talk about repression in Israeli academia following the arrest of Palestinian legal scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who teaches at Hebrew University. We’ll also talk about Israeli discourse about the Gaza War and the response in Israel to protests in the US. As an Israeli who is also a historian of the United States, Sternhell is uniquely positioned to discuss the way each country understands the other at this terrible and historic moment.Paid subscribers will get the link this Monday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoIsrael returns to fight in places where it claimed Hamas was defeated.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 the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Zvi Ben-Dor Benite talks to Avi Shlaim about his family’s journey from Iraq and what it means to be an Arab Jew.Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do.Last week’s link to the latest edition of The Ideas Letter, which includes essays on Gaza and its reverberations by Mark Mazower, Chris Ngwodo, and Daniel Levy, didn’t work. Here’s the correct one.Rick Perlstein on how the current campus protests—and the repression they elicit—aren’t like the protests of the 1960s.The mother of Hind Rajab talks about students naming a building at Columbia University after her daughter.Hard to believe this appeared on Fox News.Hadas Thier in The Nation on whether the encampments threaten Jewish students.In last week’s video, while rebutting the claim that today’s protesters are privileged and narcissistic, I incorrectly suggested that anti-Vietnam protesters were motivated by self-interest because they were trying to avoid the draft. A number of protesters from that era registered their displeasure. I’m reprinting part of an email from subscriber Merrill Goozner, who rightly takes me to task.“The earliest protests led by SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] in 1965 called attention to the horrific slaughter of innocent civilians (pro-Viet Cong, perhaps, but non-combatants nonetheless). That’s the direct correlation to today’s situation in Gaza, which has sparked similar protests. By the most conservative estimates, non-combatants totaled more than a half million of the 1.3 million who died during the war. As someone who came of age during that era and participated in the antiwar movement, I can assure you that moral outrage of what was being done ‘in our name,’ and the betrayal of the nation’s ideals that the war represented, played a much larger role in motivating the era’s antiwar students than fear of the draft.Moreover, there was a widespread recognition among antiwar activists that the draft and its student deferment were egregiously unfair, represented by the slogan, ‘Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight.’ The draft resistance movement (I have a close friend who refused to register and went to jail) consistently called attention to this inequity.I know plenty of people who found a doctor to write up a phony excuse to get out of the draft during that era. This was especially prevalent after the Tet offensive when public opinion turned against the war. But I would argue that even this behavior, for most, was because they believed that participation in the war was immoral and senseless.”See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:This will come out on Monday, which is Yom HaZikaron in Israel. It’s Israel’s Memorial Day. It’s always a very painful day in Israel when Israelis mourn their dead from war. But it will be immensely painful this year because Israelis will be thinking about the people killed on October 7th, and indeed the Israelis who are still held hostage. And I think it will be even worse because it seems increasingly clear to me that this war in Gaza is nowhere near an end, and that tragically Israeli soldiers are going to continue to die in Gaza and be mourned on future Yom HaZikarons. And that this was very predictable.And I wanna read something from The New York Times from yesterday. They write, ‘close-quarters ground combat between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops raged in parts of northern Gaza over the weekend. The fighting fit into a now-familiar scenario. Israeli forces returning to an area where they had defeated Hamas earlier in the war, only to see the group reconstitute in the power vacuum left behind.’ Thi

Our Zoom call this week will be at a Special Time: 1 PM Eastern.Our guests will be two professors— one Palestinian and Jewish— with deep insights into the protests on their campus: The first is Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia who gave this blistering speech about the university’s crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters. The second is David Myers, the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA, who was present during the attack on UCLA’s encampment, and wrote about his experience.Paid subscribers will get the link this Monday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoCorrection: When comparing Zionist Jewish students on campus to Israel’s position in the Middle East, I mistakenly referred Israel being “popular” in its region. I meant to say “unpopular.”The attacks on Pro-Palestine protesters at UCLA and Columbia.Edward Said’s vision for Palestine and Israel: “There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such. This does not mean a diminishing of Jewish life as Jewish life or a surrendering of Palestinian Arab aspirations and political existence. On the contrary, it means self-determination for both peoples.”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, Adam Haber and Matylda Figlerowicz write about the “moral panic” fueling repression on campus.A recent guest, Dr. Musallam Abu Khalil, runs a charity that promotes the health and wellness of people in Gaza’s Nusierat Refugee Camp. Please consider supporting it.Norman Finkelstein’s address to the encampment at Columbia.A Jewish student writes about the protests and antisemitism at Northeastern.In April, I spoke about Zionism and American Jews at Brown University.Last week, I spoke about the protests on Slate’s “What Next” podcast and with Ali Velshi and Nick Kristoff on MSNBC.Check out Waleed Shahid’s new newsletter.In the Ideas Letter, Daniel Levy, Mark Mazower, and Chris Ngwodo write about the global implications of the Gaza War.On May 6 I’ll be moderating a panel entitled, “How to Report on Liars and Haters” at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism.I’ll be speaking on May 8 at Whitman College.See you on Friday at 1,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. I wanted to talk about what’s happening on college campuses, and to make six different observations. And these come from my travels speaking at colleges this semester. I’ve probably spoken at at least a dozen, maybe fifteen, I’m not sure. And I also spent a lot of time at Columbia, in particular, several days before the encampment was taken down. Now, the colleges I’ve been to, I should say, are not representative. They’re more of the kind of elite kind of campuses that have been disproportionately in the news. So, it’s important to say that not everything I’m saying is gonna hold for all campuses in America. And probably the media should be paying a lot more attention to some of these campuses that don’t have such fancy names and to see what’s actually happening there. So, what I’m going to say is not necessarily representative of campuses as a whole, but they may be representative of the ones that have been in the news a lot.The first is that the most important political dynamic is not happening among either Jewish or Palestinian students. It’s happening among non-Jewish progressive and non-Palestinian progressive students, and most of these students are progressive. And what’s happening is that for a lot of these students, the question of Palestinian liberation has become a central part of their political identity when it wasn’t before. It wasn’t that they were hostile to Palestinian freedom. If they thought about it, they probably would have been sympathetic, but it wasn’t one of their top burning issues. Now it’s become a central part of their political identity.One way of thinking about this is that a large number of the progressive students on these campuses have moved from being non-Zionists to being anti-Zionists. They weren’t supporters of Israel before, but they weren’t involved in activism against Israel either, and now they are. And the reason this matters so much is that these campuses don’t have many conservative students, right? They don’t have, for instance, a lot of conservative Christian white evangelical students. So, the dynamics on the campus are very different than the dynamics in the country as a whole. In the country as a whole, most Zionists in America are not Jewish. You have huge numbers of Christian Zionists out there in Congress, out there in the country, in the Republican Party. But in these campu

Our Zoom call this week will be at our regular time: Noon on Friday.Our guests will be two Columbia University undergraduates with differing views on the protests at their campus: Ilan Cohen, a senior who attends Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Gabi Frants, a senior who attends Barnard College. They’ll talk about the student movement that has swept Columbia, and the nation.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday night and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoIn today’s video, I accidentally said Gaza has been under blockade since 2017. It’s 2007.Scenes from the campus protests that give me hope.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 interviews Jewish student organizers at the Columbia Palestine solidarity encampment.Last week’s guest, Dr. Musallam Abu Khalil, runs a charity that promotes the health and wellness of people in Gaza’s Nusierat Refugee Camp. Please consider supporting it.What it’s like to be a Jewish Pro-Palestine organizer at Columbia.Amira Hass on how people in Gaza feel about Hamas.Ahmad Moor on why he can’t vote for Joe Biden.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts Podcast, I spoke to Seth Binder about what it means to condition US aid to Israel.I’ll be speaking on May 8 at Whitman College.See you on Friday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:We’re witnessing something that I’m not sure I ever thought we would witness, which is that the struggle for Palestinian liberation has really captured the minds of kind of a whole generation of young Americans—and very quickly—and is convulsing America’s universities in a way that no foreign policy issue has in at least a generation. And I’m very keenly aware that, for many American Jews, including many American Jewish college students, this provokes tremendous fear. And I don’t want to belittle or minimize that. I have some understanding myself of where this fear comes from. I feel it even myself. We are a people that, I think, in our marrow as Jews, we have the sense that history can turn very quickly. And this is the really the story of many of our holidays, but also of our secular history that things can seem settled, and safe, and Jews can be okay, and even have some degree of influence. And then, quite quickly, things can turn, and we can become the scapegoats, that people can turn on us often in a kind of popular upsurge of something.And so, seen through that lens, I can understand why this moment can provoke great fear in a lot of people. Because the truth is that the organized American Jewish community has for many decades now wielded a lot of influence over the terms of debate on Israel, been able to circumscribe those debates—circumscribe those debates in ways that I have been criticizing for much of my adult life. But still, for many American Jews, and even myself at certain moments, I must admit creates a sense of security, of safety, that we have a certain influence, even a certain kind of control that things are not getting out of hand, that we understand the terms of these debates. And now something that’s changing, something really radically new is being born in progressive circles, and I think increasingly inside the Democratic party, in which those debates will not be, you know, circumscribed by the American Jewish establishment in the way that they were.And I also understand that people see in this movement things that frightened them, things that seem hostile and hateful, and indeed are hostile and hateful. But it’s worth remembering that all great social movements, all large social movements, attract different kinds of people and different kinds of voices. And so, you could have seen in the anti-war movement, people carrying North Vietnamese flags, people who were chanting for the victory of the North Vietnamese over American soldiers and a Marxist triumph. You could have seen people in the anti-apartheid movement chanting ‘one settler, one bullet,’ kind of a violent dehumanizing vision of how apartheid South Africa should should end.There is a tendency in some parts of the media, and certainly online, to amplify and focus on the most hateful, disturbing things that you see from this movement. And I think that those things must be condemned. They must be criticized. And I’m not suggesting, not for a moment, that this movement or any movement should be worshiped, that people should abandon their critical faculties. Not at all. I don’t like this discourse that you sometimes hear on the left that to be an ally of a group means that you have to salute at whatever is done in its name. It’s important to always maintain the right to

Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at Noon EDT.Our guest will be Musallam Abu Khalil, a doctor in Gaza. Musallam works for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) running a primary care clinic in a makeshift school shelter in the Nusierat refugee camp in central Gaza, which houses thousands of internally displaced people. In his personal time, he runs the Dignity for Palestinians Campaign, which aims to preserve the dignity of Palestinians in Gaza through an emergency health and wellness assistance program. He will be speaking in his personal capacity and not as an UNRWA representative.Paid subscribers will get the link this Monday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoA complete video of last Wednesday’s congressional hearings featuring Columbia University officials.The number of children in Gaza injured or killed.Genesis 16 and Genesis 21, which discuss the story of Hagar.Rabbinic teachings about Hagar and Ishmael.Rabbi Shai Held’s book, Judaism is About Love.A statue of Hagar and Ishmael in Nazareth. As James Zogby notes, “Her skirt’s a tent, representing the refugees. She’s facing north to Lebanon,” to which many Palestinians were expelled in 1948.In Genesis, Hagar and Ishmael are expelled into the desert of Beer Sheva. Today, the only school in Beer Sheva that teaches both Jewish and Palestinian children in both Arabic and Hebrew bears Hagar’s name.If you’re looking for Haggadah supplements that speak to this moment, consider these.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 the Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Maya Rosen writes about the challenge of Palestinian and Jewish co-resistance in Gaza.Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are several requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Inessa Elaydi is trying to evacuate her family from an overcrowded refugee camp in Khan Younis. Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza. Please help if you can.A conversation between two remarkable men, Maoz Inon and Abu Aziz Sarah.Chaim Levinson in Haaretz on why Israel has lost the Gaza War.Students celebrate Kabbalat Shabbat at the Columbia Free Palestine encampment.Is Columbia University cursed by God?I spoke last week to Khalil Sayegh about Gaza’s present and future for the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts Podcast.I’ll be speaking on April 26 at Georgetown University and May 8 at Whitman College.See you on Thursday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. I watched a good chunk of last week’s hearings with the president of Columbia, and the heads of the Board of Trustees, and one of the people leading their antisemitism commission in front of Congress. And there was one moment in particular that stuck out to me. A congressman named Congressman Banks got a hold of some kind of pamphlet that had been put out I think by students of the School the Social Work, which referenced the term, Ashkenormativity.Ashkenormativity, I guess, is the idea that you kind of make Ashkenazi Judaism normative, and you kind of, you know, don’t pay attention to the fact that many Jews are not Ashkenazi and not from European heritage. Whatever. So, this Congressman was very upset that the term Askanormativity had showed up in some document that was given out to Columbia students and went around and asked the people on the panel what they thought. And one of the heads of the Board of Trustees said the phrase Ashkenormativity was ‘shockingly offensive.’Now, I don’t really see what’s shockingly offensive about a term which tries to suggest that people tend to kind of assume that the culture of Ashkenazi Jews is the culture of all Jews. But what bothered me—and deeply, deeply depressed me—was this discourse of the use of a phrase, Askanormativity, in some pamphlet at Columbia University as being shockingly offensive when in this entire hearing—at least the long stretches that I

Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Friday at 11 AM EDT.Our guest will be Vali Nasr, Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, author of The Shia Revival, former official in the Obama administration and one of America’s leading experts on Iranian foreign policy. We’ll talk about the dangers of a full-scale war between Israel and Iran and what the Biden administration can do to avoid it. Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoMouin Rabbani: “We are where we are because it never occurred to Biden to say ‘don't’ to Israel.”How Israel grew more reckless in its attacks on Iran after October 7.The UN Secretary General condemns Israel’s April 1 strike on Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus as a violation of international law.The US, Britain, and France prevent a UN Security Council condemnation of Israel’s April 1 attack.Israel’s April 1 attack employed US-made F-35s.Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin complained that Israel had not warned the US of its April 1 attack, which put US troops at greater risk.The Director of National Intelligence warns that Israel’s response to October 7 increases the risk of terrorism against the US.Iran’s cautious behavior after October 7.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.)For the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) Podcast, I spoke with Arielle Angel, Mari Cohen, and Daniel May about antisemitism on campus.Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are several requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Inessa Elaydi is trying to evacuate her family from an overcrowded refugee camp in Khan Younis. Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza. Please help if you can.Israel’s artificial intelligence war on Gaza.Sigal Samuel on solidarity between Palestinians and Mizrachi Jews.Goran Rosenberg on Israel at Road’s End.Joe Scarborough versus Israel’s Minister of Economy and Industry.A small act of kindness amidst the horror in Israel-Palestine.I spoke last week about liberalism and Zionism at Washington DC’s Sixth and I Synagogue with Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Michael Koplow.I’ll be speaking on April 16 at Sarah Lawrence, April 17 at Brown, April 18 at MIT, April 19 at Tufts, and April 26 at Georgetown.See you on Friday at 11 AM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. I’m recording this on middle of the day Sunday in the US after Iran launched a large number of drones and rockets against Israel, which seemed to have been almost entirely shot down. And I think when one looks at this situation we’re in—the possibility of an Iran-Israel war, not a proxy war, but actually a real direct war—we can see the Biden administration having done some really valuable things in the last 24-48 hours. But I think we can also see that the decisions they made over the past six months actually put them in this very difficult situation that they’re now trying to get out of.So, I give the Biden administration credit for helping to shoot down this large-scale Iranian attack. Thank goodness very, very few Israelis were killed. No one would want that, least of all me. And also, in addition to the importance of just saving Israeli life by shooting down these rockets, it also makes it easier for Israel not to respond. And the reports that the Biden administration has been pushing Israel not to respond, to say basically you got away with this very audacious attack in Damascus on the Iranian embassy. Now you’ve basically gotten away fairly unscathed because you shot down these Iranian rockets. Let’s leave it there. You’re lucky the way it’s turned out. So, I give the administration credit for that. There are lunatics like John Bolton, and even—I’ll say it—lunatics like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman who’ve basically been going around saying that the United States should suppo

Our Zoom call this week will be at our normal time: Friday at Noon EDT.Our guest will be Abdalhadi Alijla, a Gaza-born political scientist who has done some intriguing writing about Gaza’s political future after this war. We’ll talk about Israel’s stated plans to empower Gaza’s families and tribes, the Biden administration’s effort to empower the Palestinian Authority, and what will become of Hamas.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.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 shifting politics inside the Democratic Party on the Gaza War.Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are several requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Inessa Elaydi is trying to evacuate her family from an overcrowded refugee camp in Khan Younis. Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza. Please help if you can.Annelle Sheline, who resigned from the State Department to protest US policy toward Gaza, talks about being impacted by Aaron Bushnell.Ramy Youssef prays for the people of Palestine on Saturday Night Live.I talked about the war in Gaza with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.I’ll be speaking on April 5, with Rabbi David Wolpe, at City University of New York; and April 7, with Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Michael Koplow, at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC; and on April 10 at the Phoenix Committee for Foreign Relations.Dr. Guy Shalev and Dr. Lina Qassem-Hassan, who recently joined me on one of our Friday zooms, will be speaking in Boston on March 31st at the Palestinian Cultural Center and April 1 at Temple Beth Zion, and in New York on April 4 at Judson Memorial Church.See you on Friday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:A lot of Democrats—starting with Chuck Schumer in his speech a couple weeks ago, but a lot of others as well, and some commentators—seem to feel like the sweet spot for them in responding to Israel’s war in Gaza is to attack Benjamin Netanyahu personally and say the problem with this war, and the reason that America and Israel not on the same page about it, is because of Netanyahu. That they love Israel, they support Israel, there is a good Israel that would be conducting this war in the way that America would like, but it’s been hijacked by Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government represents the bad Israel. Now, I can see why that’s a kind of politically appealing position for Democrats to be in because it tries to refute the argument that they’re anti-Israel and it tries to suggest that Americans and Israelis are actually really on the same page about this war.Unfortunately, the evidence suggests this is really not the case. The war is very popular among Israeli Jews. Now, it’s true that there’s a deep division about whether to pause the war as part of a hostage deal. But even people who want to pause the war as part of a hostage deal don’t want to end it for good and certainly don’t question the legitimacy of the war—again, most Jewish Israelis. So, that puts them in a different place from the Biden administration. In fact, even though Netanyahu has become much more unpopular since October 7th, the Israeli political mood has moved to the right. It’s also not the case that there is a kind of majority of Israelis underneath Benjamin Netanyahu waiting to support a two-state solution if Netanyahu were to be gotten rid of. Again, Palestinian citizens of Israel may, but most Jewish Israelis even before October 7th weren’t wild about a Palestinian state if one meant a sovereign state that controlled the Jordan Valley, that had a capital in East Jerusalem—a genuine state. Netanyahu’s main rivals, Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, don’t really support that kind of state. And again, that the opposition to a two-states has even grown since October 7th.So, this desire to suggest that the problem is Netanyahu is politically po

Our Zoom call this week will be at our normal time: Friday at Noon EDT.This Friday, I’ll be answering questions. Feel free to ask me anything during the Zoom call and I’ll do my best to answer. Since I just published an essay in the New York Times about the historic rupture between American Jewry’s two dominant creeds— liberalism and Zionism— I thought it might be a good moment to talk directly with you.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoThe studies showing a correlation between Israel’s killings of Palestinians and reported antisemitic incidents in the US, Belgium, and Australia.Why pro-Israel donors objected when Harvard and Stanford appointed Jewish scholars who study antisemitism to study antisemitism on campus.A pro-Israel speaker’s talk is disrupted at Berkeley. (The speaker returned and was allowed to speak.)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!), on the occasion of Purim, which features Amalek’s supposed descendant, Haman, Maya Rosen writes about how to understand the Bible’s call for genocide during what the International Court of Justice has called a “plausible” genocide in Gaza.Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are four requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza.Almost every day brings new evidence that the debate about conditioning aid to Israel is shifting among Democrats in Congress. Here’s Representative Katie Porter making the case.Josh Leifer on trying to understand Hamas.How Joe Biden threw in his lot with Benjamin Netanyahu after October 7.If you want to understand what the Israeli government is thinking right now, Dan Senor’s interview with Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer is quite instructive.My New York Times essay on the rupture between Zionism and liberalism for American Jews.I talked about the war in Gaza with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and Ali Velshi.I’ll be speaking on March 27 at Quinnipiac College, March 28 at Hofstra University, April 5 with Rabbi David Wolpe at City University of New York, and April 7 with Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Michael Koplow at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC.See you on Friday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:I wanna say something about the debate in the US today over antisemitism. I was a little ambivalent about this because the most important story right now, I think it should go without saying, is the destruction of Gaza, the mass slaughter there. But adjacent to that is this conversation about antisemitism in the US. I engaged in that conversation myself to some degree with a piece that just came out in the New York Times. Franklin Foer, my old colleague at The New Republic, had a cover story in The Atlantic. And I think it’s important to engage that conversation partly because antisemitism is a genuine problem, but also because if we don’t talk about antisemitism in the right way, it seems to me, then the conversation about antisemitism becomes a way of not having to face what’s happening in Gaza. So, it seems to me to some degree one has to engage with this conversation of antisemitism to try to say how to talk about it and how not to talk about, precisely so it doesn’t become a way of evading the reality of the horror in Gaza.So, I want to try to suggest kind of six ways that I think are important to think about and not to think about antisemitism. The first is, which might be obvious, but I think is in some ways not said clearly enough, is that the rise in Israel-related antisemitism that we’re seeing in the United States is related to this war. There are three academic studies—one in the US, one in Belgium, one in Australia—over the last 20 years all show a strong correlation between substantial Israeli military operations that kill a lot of Palestinians and rise in reported antisemitic in

Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at Noon EST.Our guest will be Avner Gvaryahu, Executive Director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli military veterans who oppose the occupation. We’ll discuss his recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Myth of Israel’s ‘Moral Army’” as part of a broader discussion about the way Israel is fighting in Gaza and why it is wreaking such devastation there.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoChuck Schumer’s speech last week on the Senate floor.When Harry Reid repudiated Barack Obama in 2011.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!), Emma Saltzberg talks to Professor Geoffrey Levin about the hidden history of American Jewish dissent about Israel.Every few days I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are three requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I interviewed Gaza-born writer and activist Ahmed Moor about the consequences, human, moral and political, of this war.I discussed American Jewish politics on the Makdisi Street Podcast.Naomi Klein on the meaning of the film “Zone of Interest.”I’ll be speaking on March 27 at Quinnipiac College, March 28 at Hofstra University, April 5 at City University of New York, and April 7 at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC.See you on Thursday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer gave a speech last week that got a lot of attention. And I think it is actually a pretty big deal, but not really for the reasons that people are suggesting it is. I want to pick up on something that actually Norman Finkelstein said in our Zoom call on Friday for paid subscribers that I think was correct, and I want to try to elaborate on it in explaining why it matters. Now, the headline was that that Schumer called for new elections in Israel. I don’t know whether that will increase the likelihood of new elections in Israel. Certainly, Schumer’s speech was not, by my lights, a kind of commensurate moral response to the destruction of Gaza. He didn’t call for an end to military aid to Israel’s war. He didn’t call for an immediate ceasefire and hostage release. But he did say other things that I think suggest how much the discourse inside the Democratic Party, even in Washington now, has changed in a very short period of time.To illustrate that, I want to go back to a speech that his predecessor, Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid, gave in 2011. In the spring of 2011, Barack Obama gave a speech calling for a Palestinian state near the 1967 lines with land swaps. And he had previously, over the past couple of years—Obama—pushed for a settlement freeze, which had put him in conflict with Netanyahu. And so, Harry Reid went to AIPAC, and he completely threw Obama under the bus. And he said, ‘no one’—this is Harry Reid—he said, ‘no one should set premature parameters about borders, about building, or about anything else.’ Building. That refers to settlements. Harry Reid was saying basically no US policy of restriction on settlement growth.To fast forward to Schumer’s speech, two things about it that I think suggest how much the discourse has changed. The first is that he says in a slightly oblique way, but he says it, that if Netanyahu doesn’t begin to wind down the war and ‘continues to pursue dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing US standards for assistance, then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.’ Now, that’s a little euphemistic. But when he talks about ‘existing US standards for assistance,’ it seems to me he’s referenced something called the Leahy Law. The Leahy Law says the US cannot give military aid to units of foreign militaries that commit gross human rights violations. We do apply that to plenty of countries. We don’t apply it to Israel. It’s not enforc

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.Our guest will be Norman Finkelstein, someone who has long fascinated me but whom I’ve never met. I want to ask about his upbringing as the child of Holocaust survivors, how his parents imparted the Holocaust’s moral lessons to him, and about how he understands the very different ways that many other children of Holocaust survivors interpret that horror. I want to ask how he first encountered Palestinians, how he decided to make their cause his life’s work, and what it was like to break with many Palestinian activists over the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Finally, I want to ask about his reaction to the October 7 massacre, and to the mass slaughter and starvation unfolding in Gaza.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoI discussed Bezalel Smotrich’s “Decisive Plan” last spring in a Jewish Currents essay entitled, “Could Israel Carry Out Another Nakba?”I wrote about Israeli efforts at mass expulsion from Gaza earlier this year in The New York Times.Israel’s plan to expand its “buffer zone” inside Gaza.UN officials called Gaza “unlivable” in 2018.Ta-Nehisi Coates on why he doesn’t agree with Barack Obama that “the arc of the moral universe bends to justice.”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 examines the limits and possibilities of the Biden administration’s new sanctions against Israeli settlers in the West Bank.Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. This request is from Abir Elzowidi, who is trying to evacuate the family of his brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. Abir writes, “I've lost 33 of my family members in Gaza since the war started and I am very scared to lose Tamer and his family. I could never forgive myself for not trying to help them.” If you can help, please do.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I interviewed Steve Simon, a Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa in President Obama’s National Security Council, about how his experience making policy toward Israel-Palestine helps him interpret the Biden administration’s actions since October 7.Tel Aviv University Professor Aeyal Gross on how people who deny Hamas’ atrocities replicate the tactics of Israeli hasbara.Pankaj Mishra on “The Shoah after Gaza.”I’ll be speaking on March 11 at the City University of New York, March 27 at Quinnipiac College, March 28 at Hofstra University and April 7 at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC.See you on Friday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. Every now and then, someone says, ‘why are people paying so much attention to what’s happening in Gaza? After all, there are really, really terrible things that happen all over the world and don’t get very much attention.’ And there are certain standard answers to this. One answer for Americans is that the United States is very deeply complicit in the slaughter in Gaza in the way that it’s not in many other places where people are suffering a great deal. Another more general answer is that people tend to pay more attention to what’s happening in Israel-Palestine because it’s so central to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. But I want to suggest another answer. And it has to do with the way in which what Israel is doing, and maybe trying to do, in Gaza, and how the world reacts, is a kind of a referendum on the very notion of historical progress itself. The question of whether we are fundamentally in a different and better world today than we were in previous centuries.So, let me try to explain what I mean. As I understand what Israel is doing in Gaza, this is the way I think about it. There’s a pretty overwhelming consensus in Israel today among Israeli Jews—there was even before October 7th but even more strongly since October 7th—that Israel cannot give the Palestinians their own state, certainly not any time in the foreseeable future, and certainly that Israel is not going to give Palestinians citizenship in the country in which they live, in Israel, right, and in this territory, which Israel controls. So, Israel is going to control these people, millions of people in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem in different ways who lack basic rights, the basic right of citizenship.And I think until October 7th, Israeli leaders felt like they were managing that system

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.Our guest will Ussama Makdisi, Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley, author most recently of Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World and co-host of the Makdisi Street Podcast. I want to ask Ussama, who is one of America’s leading historians of the Middle East and of the long encounter between Palestinians and Zionism, what makes this current moment distinct. I also want to ask how his scholarship into the history of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Arab world can help us think about a future of coexistence and equality in Israel-Palestine and across the Middle East.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoBill Clinton’s comments after first meeting Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House are recorded in books by both Aaron Miller and Dennis Ross.When Netanyahu said “America is something that can be moved easily.”The problem with dropping humanitarian aid from the air.Why America’s military support for Israel’s war likely violates US law.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!), Dahlia Krutkovich and Jonathan Shamir write about the fight over Gaza inside Britain’s Labour Party.Khalil Sayegh, a former guest on one of my Friday Zoom interviews and someone from whom I’ve learned a great deal, has launched a Go Fund Me page to evacuate his family from Gaza. It’s horrifying that so many people need to do this. I hope you’ll take a moment to imagine how you’d feel if your family were in such desperate straits and consider supporting him.“I love Israel, but not more than Judaism itself. Not more than humanity.” Rabbi Kate Mizrahi on why she supports a ceasefire.Jon Stewart on how US officials talk about war crimes in Ukraine versus Israel. I spoke with Rania Batrice about anti-war mobilization inside the Democratic Party for the Foundation for Middle East Peace.I spoke with Ali Velshi on MSNBC about the political problems the war in Gaza is creating for Joe Biden.I’ll be speaking virtually at Southern Connecticut State University on March 4 and in person on March 6 at the University of Texas at Austin, March 11 at the City University of New York, March 27 at Quinnipiac College, and March 28 at Hofstra University.I sometimes get emails that strike me as deserving a wider audience. The following is from a professor at a prestigious liberal arts college. Although I’ve been highly critical of the way charges of antisemitism are wielded to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, this email—which I’ve edited for concision and clarity—captures something that worries me about the Israel-Palestine debate on at least some campuses.“I have had two students recently ask me for letters of recommendation to transfer to other colleges on account of anti-Semitism…in asking one of the two students who wants to transfer what happened, it became clear that his fellow students had blocked him from phone chats and systematically blanked him in face-to-face interactions after he first expressed support for Israel's right to exist and then showed up on campus in a yarmulke after Temple, which was taken as a political declaration. It seems to me that there is a form of anti-Semitism that consists in treating Zionism per se (as opposed to support for Netanyahu or the settlers or whatever) as morally equivalent to Nazism, rather than being on a par with other mistaken ideologies like Hindutva - retrograde but not the kind of thing that ought to put one beyond the pale.”See you on Friday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:There’s a famous story about the first time that Benjamin Netanyahu met Bill Clinton after Netanyahu had been elected in 1996. And Netanyahu started lecturing Clinton about the Middle East and about Israel Palestine, and then Netanyahu left the room. And, according to Aaron Miller’s book, Bill Clinton turns to his advisors and said, ‘who the f**k does he think he is? Who’s the f*****g superpower here?’ A similar version of this story shows up in Dennis Ross’s book. I’ve been thinking about this line of Bill Clinton’s—who’s the f*****g superpower here—because the United States is now in a truly bizarre situation in which Israel is prosecuting a war that is starving the people of Gaza to death. They’re starving because very few trucks are getting through to provide the aid they need to live and the medicines they need to live. Now, this aid is not getting through because Israel has a very, very laborious inspection process that really reduces the number of trucks that can get t

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.Our guests will Dr. Lina Qassem-Hassan, the Chairperson of the Board of Directors of Physicians for Human Rights Israel and Guy Shalev, the organization’s Executive Director. They’ll talk about the unfolding public health catastrophe in Gaza.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoUS officials tell the New York Times that Israel can’t destroy Hamas’ military capacity.Mouin Rabbani on why Israel can’t win the war.Jean-Pierre Filiu on Israel’s attacks on Gaza in the 1950s.David Shipler on Israel’s initial support for Hamas.Hamas recruits from families of people Israel has killed.Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to reduce the size of the Gaza Strip.Israel announces it will build thousands more housing units in the West Bank.Professor Heba Gowayed on Palestinian resistance.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I wrote about the campaign to abolish UNRWA.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I interviewed UNRWA’s former Spokesman and Director of Strategic Communications, Chris Gunness.Given my last newsletter about Abraham Joshua Heschel’s moral fury during the Vietnam War, I thought it might be useful to highlight rabbis and other Jewish leaders who are taking similar stands about Gaza today. If you have anyone to suggest, let me know. Here is British Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, who declared on February 13 that an Israeli invasion of Rafah “may haunt us, and the good name of Israel and the Jewish People, for generations.”Jon Stewart’s on Joe Biden’s rhetoric about Israeli’s war.Zaid Jilani argues that Palestinian activists could draw broader support with different rhetoric.Ayelet and Paul Waldman on their father’s liberal Zionism.An Australian student’s Go Fund Me to evacuate her family from Gaza.An online discussion on March 6 with Professor Geoffrey Levin about the history of American Jewish dissent over Israel.I’ll be speaking virtually at Southern Connecticut State University on March 4 and in person on March 6 at the University of Texas at Austin.See you on Friday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, I would like to believe, I would really like to believe that drawing people’s attention to the horror in Gaza—the absolute horror in Gaza, what’s happening to ordinary people—could convince the leadership in my community, in the Jewish community, and most American politicians, to oppose this war. But the harsh reality is that for many of the most powerful people inside the American Jewish community, and for many in American politics as well, there is only one metric that matters. And that metric is the safety of Israeli Jews. Essentially, any number of Palestinian deaths are acceptable if it produces an increased safety for Israeli Jews. That’s essentially the equation that leads the American Jewish establishment to continue to support this war, even as the number of people who are dying and wounded and displaced goes up and up and up.So, I want to accept that framework for the purpose of this video. It’s not my view, but I want to argue in those terms because, frankly, I think those are the only terms that for many people who matter will reach them. And the argument that I want to make is that this war will make Israel less safe—not more safe but less safe. And I want to start with a massive concession. I want to imagine that Israel in this war can destroy Hamas. Now, by the way, US officials say that’s not possible. Palestinian commentators say it’s not possible. Even some Israeli officials are saying it’s not possible within their lifetime. But I want to grant this for the sake of argument. I want to grant that Israel can destroy Hamas and eradicate it. And still, I want to argue that Israel is going to end this war less safe than it began.And the first thing for people who find that hard to believe—what I would really encourage them to do is—look around at what Palestinians are saying. Listen to what Palestinians are saying. See if you can find a single credible Palestinian commentator on Palestinian politics and on this war who believes that destroying Hamas would make Israel safer. I suggest that you will have an extremely difficult time finding a single reputable Palestinian commentator who says that destroying Hamas, if that were even possible, would make Israel safer. Now, why is that? Because Palestinians recognize that Palestinians do not resist Israel because of Hamas. They began resisting Israel long before Hamas was even created and Palestinians resist Israel because Palestinians are not free.And to illustrate this point, I want to go back to a pe

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.Our guests will be James Zogby, President and Co-Founder of the Arab American Institute, and Abdelnasser Rashid, a Palestinian-American State Representative from Illinois. We’ll talk about how the war in Gaza is affecting Arab Americans and whether they will vote for Joe Biden this fall.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.There will be no newsletter on Monday, February 19 or Zoom interview on Friday, February 23.Sources Cited in this VideoBenjamin Netanyahu orders the Israeli military to make plans to invade Rafah.Life in Rafah.Starvation in Gaza.Edward Kaplan’s biography of Abraham Joshua Heschel, Spiritual Radical.I searched the following X (Twitter) accounts (@AIPAC, @ADL, @AJCGlobal, @StandWithUs, @OrthodoxUnion, @OUAdvocacy, @RCArabbinical, @URJorg, @JTSVoice, @HUCJIR, @Conf_of_Pres, @jfederations, @HillelIntl, @RRC_edu, @YUNews, @HolocaustMuseum, @simonwiesenthal) of establishment American Jewish political and religious Jewish institutions to see if any of them had used any of the following words or phrases (“Rafah,” “famine,” “starvation,” “starve,” “amputate,” “amputee,” “rubble,” “disease,” “cholera,” “diarrhea,” “bread,” “water,” “humanitarian disaster”) since October 7, 2023. None had.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 buffer zone Israel is building inside the Gaza Strip.Marshall Ganz recounts being investigated for antisemitism at Harvard.A rabbinical student challenges American Jewish leaders for supporting the war.The father of a Palestinian-American stabbing victim challenges Joe Biden.On March 6, I’ll be speaking at the University of Texas at Austin.See you on Friday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly asked the Israeli military to begin planning its invasion of Rafah. Now, Rafah is this tiny little area of the Gaza Strip right up against the border with Egypt, which was already incredibly overcrowded before October 7th. It had 275,000 people in a very small area. It now has 1.4 million people— more than half of the population of the Gaza Strip—living there because people have been forced from the rest of the Gaza Strip. Many of those people are living in tents. They don’t have access to fresh water, many of them. They don’t have access to food. Many are eating one meal a day. There have been outbreaks of Hepatitis C, scabies, lice. There are very few showers or toilets; episodes of diarrhea and cholera. A hundred people are dying a day from Israeli attacks, according to reports. And Israel hasn’t even begun the real invasion yet. And this is what Alex DeWaal, who’s an expert on famine at Tufts University, recently said about living conditions in Gaza. He said, ‘there is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed.’And so, now Netanyahu wants to send the Israeli military in there. And the people, he says, are going to be told to go somewhere else where they’ll supposedly be safe. But there is no safe place in Gaza. Israel is attacking everywhere. And these people have no homes to go to because most of the buildings have been destroyed. And there’s no food. And there are no hospitals, right? And Netanyahu says it’s necessary because they’re supposedly 4 Hamas battalions still in Rafah. What about the 400 Hamas battalions, or battalions of some future Palestinian army, that are going to be created because of the hatred and fury and revenge that is being created among Palestinians—particularly young Palestinians—seeing their people being slaughtered at this massive, massive pace, right?So, a professor I know and admire emailed me and urged me to try to do something about this impending, you know, invasion of Rafah. And I thought, you know, what the f**k can I do? I feel totally powerless, you know, in many ways. But then I found myself—so kind of just in frustration, I picked up Edward Kaplan’s wonderful biography of Abraham Joshua Heschel, which is called Spiritual Radical, just looking for some kind of solace. And I want to be clear: I don’t know what Abraham Joshua Heschel would be doing if he were alive. He died in 1972. He was a lover and supporter of Israel, although his daughter Susannah Hashel has said that near the end of his life he did start to speak out on behalf of Palestinians, and with very strong criticism of what Israel was doing with him. I’m not making a claim about what Abraham Joshua Heschel would have done. What I would like to do is say something about what perhaps we might do in this mo

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.Our guest will be Rabbi David Wolpe, a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School and the Inaugural Rabbinic Fellow at the Anti-Defamation League. Rabbi Wolpe has argued that “the reactions that occurred at Harvard in the wake of Oct. 7 considered Jews oppressors and, in some way, unworthy of human consideration.” He says the “overlap” between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is “striking.” I disagree. Since October 7, it’s become even more difficult to have civil disagreements about Israel-Palestine across ideological lines. But I still believe it’s important. Which is why I’m grateful that Rabbi Wolpe has agreed to join me this Friday.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Omar Barghouti, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoThe Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, a founding member of the BDS movement, attacks Standing Together for “serving Apartheid Israel’s propaganda.”Read these statements by Standing Together and its leaders and judge for yourself whether that charge is true.Israeli Knesset Member Ayman Odeh on “ordinary people — Jewish and Arab, Palestinian and Israeli — who have stepped up in the face of unspeakable tragedy.”Nelson Mandela on liberating the oppressor as well as the oppressed.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!), Aparna Gopalan writes about the United Auto Workers’ endorsement of Joe Biden.In The Guardian, I wrote about why liberal hawks can’t come to terms with Israel’s war in Gaza.Yousef Munayyer, Mike Omer-Man, and Udi Ofer offer three different takes on what Biden’s sanctions against violent Israeli settlers could mean.Sasha Polakow-Suransky on why the International Court of Justice case matters so much for South Africa.Laila al-Arian on how it feels today to be Palestinian.Geoffrey Levin on the hidden history of American Jewish dissent over Israel.Here’s a video of a conversation I did recently at Harvard’s Kennedy School and an interview I conducted for the Foundation for Middle East Peace with Tareq Habash, who recently resigned from the Biden administration.If you’re in Cambridge, Massachusetts on February 7, two people I greatly admire, Mikhael Manekin and Shaul Magid, will be speaking together about their new books.On March 6, I’ll be speaking at the University of Texas at Austin.Mitchell Plitnick, one of America’s smartest commentators on Israel-Palestine and much else, has launched a Substack.See you on Friday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. So, the most important issue of the day when it comes to Israel-Palestine is of course ending this horrifying war, and that’s what I talk about most weeks. But I want to talk about something else today, which is not as important, but I think is important in its own right. And it has to do with something in the Palestine solidarity movement—a particular action that really bothered me. And it’s tricky to talk about that for someone like me who’s not Palestinian but is Jewish. I think one of the things that Jews who kind of become critics of Israel, even critics of the idea of a Jewish state, we face the loss of our community that many of us have grown up in.And so, I think what happens for some Jews is that they find a new community in the kind of Palestine solidarity world. And, in some ways, that can be really beautiful because I actually think it’s so important that the struggle for Palestinian freedom be an environment that brings together Jews and Palestinians and people of all different backgrounds. So, it’s not a tribal movement. It’s a movement about certain basic principles. But the challenge is that if you’ve kind of lost the community that you grew up in, which is I think the way some Jews feel who moved towards a kind of a politics that’s very critical of Israel, and then you join this new community, the prospect of losing that community is really, really frightening, right? Because you’ve already lost the one you grew up with. You don’t want to lose another one. And so, it becomes really, really hard to criticize that community.I remember really being just so struck watching Norman Finkelstein years ago. Norman Finkelstein was, you know, a very, very harsh critic of Israel. Someone who, you know, many in the organized American Jewish community, you know, really reviled. And then he came out and criticized the BDS movement in really harsh ways. And I remember when I saw that, my first thought was, my gosh, is anybody gonna be left for this guy to hang out with? You know, and that might sound silly, but I actually think the truth is that a lot of people’s politics on any

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.Our guest will be Fadi Quran, a Senior Campaigner at Avaaz, a Popular Struggle community organizer in the West Bank and one of the most eloquent voices I know about the moral principles undergirding the struggle for Palestinian freedom. Since October 7, his writing has been desperate and enraged, but never lost its ethical core. We’ll talk about what it’s like to be a Palestinian watching Western governments tolerate—if not assist—Gaza’s destruction.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Rashid Khalidi, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoIsrael’s charge that UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 massacre.Israel’s longstanding effort to abolish UNRWA.The Biden administration’s decision to suspend aid to UNRWA.UNRWA’s role in combatting the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), three aid workers describe life in Gaza.A few weeks ago, on one of our Friday zoom calls, I interviewed Musallam Abukhalil, a doctor in Gaza. After treating thousands of displaced people, he has now been forced to flee his own home and is living in a tent in Rafah. He’s desperately trying to leave Gaza, and a friend has established a Gofundme page to help. If you can, please do.In 972Mag, an anonymous Palestinian journalist in Gaza asks hard questions about both Israel and Hamas.Israeli intelligence believes the death counts reported by Gaza’s ministry of health are reliable.For Holocaust Memorial Day, incredible photos of resistance.Last week, I spoke at Trinity-St. Paul's United Church in Toronto (here’s a video excerpt of that talk) and talked to the Parallax podcast.Some listeners asked for a list of the Palestinian writers that Rashid Khalidi recommended in a recent call. Here’s what he subsequently sent to me:The play “Tennis in Nablus” in Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace, eds., Inside/Outside: 6 Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora.Ghassan Kanafani's, Returning to Haifa, adapted for the stage by Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace.He also recommends Mahmud Darwish, Fadwa Touqan, Sahar Khalifeh, Murid al-Barghouti, Elias Khouri, Raja Shehadeh, Adania Shibli, Ibtisam Azem, and Suad Amiri. See you on Friday at Noon,PeterSo, this presidential campaign will be narrated as a struggle of good against evil—evil being of course Donald Trump and the prospect of the end of American democracy. And good is the Biden administration, Joe Biden—maybe not great, but good, at least in the very basic sense that Joe Biden is not trying to put an end to American democracy. I believe that. I will vote for Joe Biden for those reasons. But to me, what’s so painful and frankly surreal when I think about what’s happening in Gaza is that I have to admit that I see a certain amount of evil in the policies of the administration that we’re being asked to see as the good guy in this domestic narrative.For me, the entire experience of October 7th has been most surreal in the way that I have seen people who I generally think of in many contexts as good people, as decent people, supporting things that for me seem so fundamentally, profoundly indecent. And I think about the people who lead Biden’s foreign policy. People who went to schools very much like mine, whose life experience in many ways has been very much like mine, and people that I think I generally describe as kind of fundamentally benign figures and may in their personal lives be very benign. And then I see the things that the US is doing, and I feel just a very profound cognitive dissonance. And particularly in the last couple of days given the Biden administration’s decision to suspend US funding for UNRWA, which is the UN agency that works with Palestinian refugees.And let me back up and kind of tell the story here. So, the International Court of Justice, in its ruling, ruled that ‘Israel must take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance who address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.’ Now, that’s kind of antiseptic language. But what the International Court of Justice is getting at here is that 90% of people in Gaza, according to reports, have gone a day without eating in their last few days; that 600,000 Palestinians in Gaza face catastrophic hunger; that there are breakouts of cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis; a 300% rise in miscarriages. Alex DeWaal, who’s an expert on famine at Tufts University, has said that the speed of this human-made famine in Gaza is unlike anything the world has witnessed in 75 years.So, one would think under that

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.Our guests will be two of America’s most insightful commentators on Israel-Palestine, and foreign policy more generally: Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah and Terrell Starr, author of the Black Diplomats newsletter on Substack. We’ll talk about the evolution of Black political discourse on Israel-Palestine and the way race structures debates over America’s role in the world.Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Rashid Khalidi, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoMy essay in Jewish Currents about Harvard’s old antisemitism task force.Harvard’s new antisemitism task force, co-chaired by Professor Derek Penslar.Penslar’s book, Zionism: An Emotional State.Abe Foxman and Bill Ackman attack Penslar.Alan Dershowitz calls for disbanding Jewish Studies departments (14 minutes into the video).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 Jonathan Shamir explain the dangers of a regional war in the Middle East.Joe Biden admits that US strikes against the Houthis in Yemen aren’t working—then says they’ll continue.A Breaking the Silence explainer answering the claim that Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2005.I’ll be speaking about Israel, Gaza and the debate about the war on campus at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School on January 25.The night before my event, Harvard Medical School is sponsoring a symposium on the public health crisis in Gaza.See you on Friday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:Hi. There’s been a lot of talk of course about antisemitism since October 7th. And there has been, I think, clearly a rise of antisemitism, and I’ve talked about that before. But I also think that underneath this discussion of antisemitism are also dynamics among American Jews inside the American Jewish community that are sometimes obscured from view that the media doesn’t quite pick up on. And these are a kind of, I would say, an intra-Jewish civil war. The civil war is partly generational with younger American Jews often expressing views about Israel that are deemed antisemitic by major American Jewish organizations, for instance, boycotting Israel and not supporting Israel as a Jewish state. But there’s another divide, I think, kind of hidden divide, inside the American Jewish community that is often overlooked, that gets described in the language of antisemitism. And that’s a kind of a divide around class between different elements in the Jewish community that have different views about Israel and that are in different positions in terms of class. And I want to try to give an example of how this is playing itself out.So, after October 7th, the president of Harvard University, then-president Claudine Gay, came under pressure to appoint a kind of a committee to look into antisemitism at the campus. Now, almost nobody on the committee had any scholarly credentials in the study of antisemitism. What it did have was a whole group of people who had either said that they believed that anti-Zionism was antisemitism, which would be to say that a lot of the pro-Palestinian activism at Harvard was therefore antisemitic, and people who had ties to the Anti-Defamation League, which has said that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And that was a set of views that, although again none of these people really had scholarly credentials on this question, that made establishment American Jewish organizations happy, and made many of the donors who were upset at Harvard, it made them happy. And I wrote a column in Jewish Currents about the absurdity of the fact that Harvard and these other universities were creating committees to study antisemitism on their campuses, and often ignoring their own experts who studied antisemitism, and going to choose people instead for these committees whose qualifications that they had views that were similar to the views of donors who were upset by pro-Palestinian activism. So, for instance, the University of Pennsylvania, when they created an antisemitism commission, the person who they named to head the committee was the head of the dental school. But interestingly, at Harvard, things have now taken a turn. So, Claudine Gay was essentially pushed out and now the interim president of Harvard has essentially scrapped that earlier antisemitism committee and created a new one. And its co-chair is a guy named Derek Penslar. Now, Derek Penslar runs Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. He’s a professor of Israel studies and he’s one of the world’s experts on both Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism. He recently wrote an acclaimed book called Zionism: an Emotional State, which

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.Our guest will be Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi, America’s most eminent historian of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian struggle. We’ll talk about this latest iteration of what he’s called “The Hundred Years' War on Palestine”— what’s new and what’s old since October 7. We’ll talk about where the Palestinian national movement goes from here, why Palestinian freedom has become a defining issue for progressive activists and what the crackdown on that activism means for America’s universities.Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.This Friday’s call will also be open to Jewish Currents members. Currents members will gain access to my Friday Zoom calls roughly once a month.Sources Cited in this VideoMairav Zonszein on why some families of Israeli hostages support a cease-fire. In my video, I accidentally called her the ICG’s representative in Gaza. I meant to say Israel.Former Mossad head Tamir Pardo, former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert call for releasing Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages.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.)A friend who disagrees with my views on Israel-Palestine says that despite the disclaimer above, I rarely share writing that defends Israel’s policies. Fair enough. Here’s an essay by Michael Walzer that argues that destroying Hamas is a moral necessity. In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane talks to two Biden administration staffers organizing from the inside against Biden’s support for this war.Why South Africans care so much about Palestinian freedom.Nimer Sultany on how the genocide case at the International Court of Justice pitsthe global north against the global south.Nimer Sultany on how the genocide case at the International Court of Justice pits the global north against the global south.Fadi Quran on why this war is destroying Israel’s image of military invincibility across the Middle East.I’ll be speaking about Israel, Gaza and the US debate about the war at the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke on January 16 and at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School on January 25.See you on Friday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the Israeli hostages who are in Gaza because we’ve reached the 100-day mark of their captivity. And in Jewish communities there have been a series of events around that 100-day mark. And watching these events for the hostages, what strikes me is that the organizations that are organizing these events, and have been organizing throughout these 100 days to keep the focus on the hostages and to demand their release, are also generally organizations that support the war. And emotionally, that makes a lot of sense because I think in a period of agony and grief and pain like this, there’s a desire for Jewish solidarity, which I feel as well. I understand.And so, the impetus for solidarity is to say: a) solidarity with the hostages, so demanding their release; and b) solidarity with the state of Israel itself, and therefore supporting its policies—in this case, the policies of war. Emotionally, I understand why these two things go together. But it seems to me that actually, analytically, it makes no sense whatsoever. Which is to say, if you actually care passionately about getting as many of the hostages as possible released alive, you should be adamantly opposed to this war because the imperatives of continuing the war and the imperatives of getting the hostages out—as many of them as possible alive—are in direct contradiction. And let me just try to explain why I think they are.So, first of all, one of the things that I think has become clear over these several months is that Israel’s military force in Gaza is not leading to the rescue of Israeli hostages. There may have been one person who was rescued very early on, but Israel has not since then rescued any hostages despite having all of these soldiers there. So, that might have been considered to be one potential benefit from the point of view of saving hostages of this war. It’s not. Secondly, there was an argument that we used to hear a lot, which was that the military pressure that Israel was putting on Hamas was going to lead Hamas to kind of come to the table on better terms to release a lot more of the hostages. Well, that seems to me it’s pretty frankly disproven. We’ve now gone quite a long time since the hostage exchange earlier in the war. And Hamas’ terms are not getting better. They’re actually getting tougher. So, the military pressure is not a

Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.Our guest will be Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown. Omer is one of the world’s most prominent scholars of the Holocaust. He’s also an Israeli who has warned about the genocidal rhetoric of some Israeli leaders since October 7. Now that South Africa has brought a case to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide for its actions since October 7, I want to ask Omer what he thinks of that legal argument. In the wake of the controversy over Masha Gessen’s declaration that in Gaza, “the ghetto is being liquidated,” I also want to ask him when, if ever, it’s appropriate to compare Israel’s actions to that of the Nazis. Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoMahmoud Mamdani’s book, Neither Settler nor Native.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 analyzes the public health catastrophe that Israel’s war is causing in Gaza.In the London Review of Books, Mahmoud Muna writes about selling books in Jerusalem after October 7.In the Boston Review, Barnett Rubin probes the relationship between Zionism and colonialism.Mairav Zonszein on why Israel faces the “most unstable and precarious situation it has ever been in, certainly in a generation.”A Beinart Notebook subscriber, David Mandel, is running for Congress on a platform that includes a ceasefire in Gaza.In The New York Times, I wrote about the Israeli government’s growing threats to expel people in Gaza.I’ll be speaking about Israel, Gaza, and the US debate about the war at the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke on January 16 and at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School on January 25.See you on Friday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:I want to say something about the firing of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, not because I’m so particularly interested in Harvard or Claudine Gay, but because I think it’s a window into a question that I think is really important. And the question is: why does pro-Palestine activism produce such a ferocious response in the United States? So, the straw that broke the camel’s back was these allegations of plagiarism. But really, what got this whole thing going was her response to October 7th, and the claim that she hadn’t responded aggressively enough to students who blamed the October 7th massacre on Israel, and then that she hadn’t condemned the phrase ‘intifada’ in her congressional testimony, which was claimed to represent a genocidal threat towards Jews. So, there were people who clearly didn’t like her to begin with because they identified her with diversity, equity, inclusion as the first Black president of Harvard. And they were hostile to her, but they didn’t have the political juice really to get rid of her until there was this added element of the debate over Israel, ‘antisemitism,’ and especially her response to pro-Palestine activism.So, the question is: what makes that pro-Palestine activism so scary that it produces such a ferocious reaction? We’ve seen this for quite a few years now, right? Why is it that in many states in the United States you can’t work for state government unless you promise not to boycott Israel? Why is it that Students for Justice in Palestine chapters are now being banned on college campuses? I mean, they’re not banning the anti-abortion groups or the young Republicans groups even in the age of Trump. Why is it that they’re banning, or suspending, the Students for Justice in Palestine? Why is it that Rashida Tlaib gets censured? All of the different members of Congress with serious problems. Why is it that social media is banning pro-Palestine activists? My suggestion is there’s something particular about the nature of pro-Palestine activism that produces this really ferocious response in the United States.Now, some might say, well, this is just because, you know, there are a lot of pro-Israel Jewish organizations out there that mobilize because they feel like this activism represents a threat to Israel. I don’t think that’s a sufficient answer. It is true, of course, that AIPAC and other kinds of American pro-Israel Jewish groups, you know, wield their influence. But especially when you’re talking about conservative white Americans, like a lot of those members of Congress, for instance, who were berating Claudine Gay and the other presidents, they don’t have a lot of Jewish constituents. And frankly, if AIPAC goes to them, and tells them that they should be against pro-Palestinian activism, I think AIPAC is walking into an open door. Ideological

Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.Our guest will be Mikhael Manekin. For me, some of the most unsettling scenes from Gaza have been the images of Jewish worship— a soldier using a knife as his yad (pointer) as he reads Torah, a soldier reciting the Shema from the balcony of a mosque, soldiers singing to welcome Shabbat at the Islamic University of Gaza. It’s not the liturgy itself that unnerves me. It’s the images of religious conquest, which make me fear this war’s consequences not just for Palestinians and Israelis, but for Judaism. Mikhael is the perfect person to ask about this. He’s one of the leaders of Faithful Left, a new movement of religious Israelis fighting Occupation and ethnic superiority. He’s a former director of Breaking the Silence, the organization of former Israeli soldiers that works to expose the reality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And he’s the author of a new book about violence, morality and Judaism entitled, End of Days: Ethics, Tradition and Power in Israel.Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoBenjamin Netanyahu demands that Palestinians in Gaza be “deradicalized.”The UN estimates that 85 percent of people in Gaza have been displaced their homes.The Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza estimates that 40 percent of the Strip’s people risk starvation.According to The Wall Street Journal, almost 70 percent of Gaza’s homes are destroyed or damaged.Prof. Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, warns that in the coming year, 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza could die of disease.Mairav Zonszein on the absence of Palestinians in Israeli media.In a December poll, 83 percent of Israeli Jews said they support encouraging “voluntary migration” from Gaza.Nikki Haley says Palestinians in Gaza should leave.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I wrote about how Harvard’s new antisemitism task force is ignoring its own antisemitism scholars.For Jewish Currents’ podcast, On the Nose, I interviewed Muhammad Shehada and Khalil Sayegh about growing up in Gaza under Hamas. In The New York Times, I wrote about how Israel might have responded differently to October 7Bernie Steinberg, former executive director of Harvard Hillel, condemns the “McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare, which, in effect, turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine.”Sara Roy on Israel’s long war on Gaza.The New York Times on Hamas’ use of sexual violence on October 7.Abdalhadi Alijla, Rajan Menon, and Daniel Byman on why Israel can’t destroy Hamas.Mosab Abu Toha’s exit from Gaza.I talked about Israel’s war in Gaza and the debate about it in the US on Democracy Now, the Majority Report with Sam Seder, Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith podcast and with Aaron Miller on WBUR.See you on Friday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. A few days ago, Benjamin Netanyahu published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, laying out Israel’s war aims in Gaza. And among them was that Gaza’s population would have to be ‘deradicalized.’ And what Netanyahu meant by that was that they could no longer support violence against Israeli civilians, essentially. It’s really important that Palestinians don’t support violence against Israeli civilians. I just happen to think that this is exactly the wrong way to go about it since the right way to convince Palestinians not to support violence against Israeli civilians is to show that ethical resistance actually works, not to hold Palestinians under permanent occupation and cause massive catastrophe in Gaza, as Israel has done.But putting that aside, it made me start to think about this idea of radicalization. Because if we take Netanyahu’s definition, essentially, that radicalization means support of violence against civilians, then it seems to me that we should be reckoning with the radicalization of many Jews both in Israel, and the United States, and around the world—and indeed, the radicalization of many Americans. Just look, after all, at the scale of the violence against civilians that most Israeli Jews, and almost all establishment American Jewish organizations, support. The United Nations now estimates that 85% of Gaza’s people have been displaced from their homes. The UN estimates that 40% risk starvation, that 70% of the homes in Gaza have been damaged or totally destroyed. And I’m going to read a quote from Professor Devi Sridhar, who’s the c

Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at 1 PM EST. There will be no zoom call on the week of Friday, December 22 or 29.Our guest will be Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute and the author of three highly acclaimed books on the relationship between the United States, Iran, and Israel. We’ll talk about the response by Iran and its allies to October 7 and the risks that Israel’s Gaza war could convulse the entire Middle East.As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoCSPAN video of the Congressional hearings on campus antisemitism.Uprisings against Arab governments are called intifadas too.Elise Stefanik’s flirtation with Great Replacement Theory.Marwan Barghouti on the motivations for the second intifada.How pro-Israel pundits and organizations use allegations of antisemitism to avoid talking about what Israel does to Palestinians.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!) Mari Cohen examines the way liberal Zionist groups have responded to Israel’s war in Gaza.John Judis on the value and limits of calling Israel a “settler-colonial” state.Mouin Rabbani on Israel’s role in boosting Hamas.Robert Pape and Tony Karon and Daniel Levy on why Israel is losing the war.Most American scholars of Middle East studies censor themselves when talking about Israel-Palestine.Last week, I spoke at a Chanukah-themed ceasefire rally in New York.I also talked to Joy Reid on MSNBC about why Israel’s war won’t make Israelis safe.See you on Thursday at 1 PM,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:I want to say something about the series of events that have now led to the resignation of the president of University of Pennsylvania and could perhaps lead to the resignation of other university presidents for allegedly not opposing calls for genocide of Jews on college campuses. And the key thing to understand about what’s happened here is this. This I think is the key context. If you look at the way establishment American Jewish organizations operate, going back a whole bunch of years, they continually make this particular move. They try to turn conversations away from what’s happening on the ground to Palestinians to questions about the alleged motivations and actions of Israel’s critics in the United States or in other places. This is the reason I think in recent years there’s been this entire kind of obsessive focus on equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism because it’s a way of focusing attention on the motivations of critics of Israel in a condition which has become harder and harder for people to defend what’s happening on the ground.So, you’ve had over the past few years—as you’ve had Israeli governments really going back to Benjamin Netanyahu taking power in 2009 that have been essentially explicitly opposed to a Palestinian state and working hard to make one impossible—it’s become harder for people whose job it is to defend Israel to actually claim as they used to that Israel really wants to create a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians won’t take one. It’s been harder to deal with the fact that now you have human rights organizations calling Israel’s behavior apartheid. So, what do you do? You turn the conversation towards the alleged antisemitism of people who were calling for one equal state, i.e., anti-Zionists. And the more difficult it becomes to defend Israel’s actions on the ground, the harder one needs to work to again create a new conversation about what’s happening among Israel’s critics. And, certainly since October 7th, after the horrifying massacre of Israelis, what’s been happening in Gaza has been pretty terrible to Palestinians.And so, from the point of view of establishment American Jewish organizations, any conversation about what’s happening in Gaza, essentially, or even the West Bank for that matter, you’re already losing if you’re engaged in that conversation. Much better to have a completely different conversation, not about what’s happening to Palestinians there, but about the actions of Israel’s critics here. Now, I don’t want to suggest this is like just some big conspiracy theory. I don’t think it’s that. I think there are organizations that have this mission. But I also just think frankly it’s a natural desire by a lot of people who support Israel to not focus on something which is really, really difficult and unpleasant, which is what’s happening in Gaza, and doesn’t allow Jews to be in the role of the victims, right? Whereas turning the conversation to discussions of antisemitism in the United States is a much more familiar position for American Jews to be in given that estab

Our Zoom call this week will be at the regular time: Friday at Noon EST. (I’ve decided to stop mentioning Friday’s guests at the beginning of these Monday videos.)Our guests this week will be Diana Buttu and Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man. Diana is a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer and a former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Emily is a Jewish Israeli human rights lawyer. They’ll talk about the challenges and opportunities that this terrible war poses for Palestinians and Jews who want to work together on behalf of Palestinian freedom and mutual coexistence.As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.Sources Cited in this VideoEighty percent of Gaza’s people have been forced from their homes.The Director-General of the World Health Organization calls conditions in Gaza’s hospitals “unimaginable.”Biden officials warn Israel about its actions in Gaza.Joe Biden’s longstanding opposition to conditioning military aid to Israel.Congressional Democrats debate conditioning aid.When Benjamin Netanyahu said “America can be easily moved.”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!), Dan Berger examines the call from families of some Israeli hostages for an “all for all” swap of Israeli captives and Palestinian prisoners.+972 Magazine’s blockbuster report on how the Israeli military loosened its rules to allow more killing of civilians in Gaza.A Jewish Israeli teacher recounts being jailed for criticizing the Gaza war.Iyad Baghdadi on how to think (and not think) about decolonization in Israel-Palestine.Rabbi Shai Held on Jews and the left after October 7.From Maha Nasser, the best discussion I’ve heard of the historical roots of the phrase, “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.”Fadi Quran shares a personal story about Palestinian children in prison.Haya Alyan on what it’s like to have to audition for people’s empathy.I talked on Slate’s “What’s Next” podcast about the exchange of hostages and prisoners.This Thursday, December 7, in Brooklyn I’ll be talking to Shaul Magid about his new book, The Necessity of Exile.See you on Friday at Noon,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:Hi. I’m recording this on Sunday, December 3rd, and it seems like we’re at a kind of critical turning point or juncture. The pause and release of hostages and prisoners has ended for the time being. And Israel, having cleared out the northern Gaza Strip, is now going into the southern Gaza Strip. And what that means is that the level of dislocation and death, which has already been extraordinary, will even grow higher. Remember, Israel has already forced everyone from the northern Gaza Strip out of the northern Gaza Strip, and largely reduced much of it to rubble. Eighty percent of the people of Gaza are displaced, which is just a staggering number. When you think about how shocked the world has been that 25% of the people in Ukraine were displaced from their homes, it’s now already at 80%. And now, Israel is telling people in parts of the southern Gaza Strip that they have to leave their homes. Many of them are people who only moved there because they were forced out of the northern Gaza Strip. It’s provided some kind of map of supposedly safe places. But since October 7th, the evidence has been that there really is no safe place for Palestinians in Gaza, and certainly there’s no infrastructure to really support human life in the places that they might go where they have no homes. There’s no infrastructure for food. The hospitals are in a circumstance that the head of the WHO said on Sunday that the condition was ‘unimaginable.’So, we are witnessing, we are right in the middle of one of the—certainly present proportion—one of the largest acts of slaughter and dislocation as a percentage of the population that we’ve seen in the 21st century. And the Biden administration has responded to this by changing its rhetoric. So, right after Hamas’ massacre on October 7th, the Biden administration gave Israel full complete rhetorical support. Now what we’re seeing is that the rhetoric has changed, and the Biden administration is offering a series of kind of warnings. They’re saying: don’t kill so many civilians; leave open the possibility of a Palestinian state; be willing to bring back the Palestinian Authority; don’t expel Palestinians out of Gaza into Egypt. They’re saying all these things, and they’re clearly showing that there’s a difference of opinion between the United States and certainly elements of the Israeli government, if not the entire Israeli government.But there’s something, I have to say, somewhat farcical and Kabuki-like about this, right? Because the Biden administra