Our guest will be the eminent historian Deborah Dash Moore, who is Jonathan Freedman Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She’s been studying a number of surveys of American Jewish opinion (including this one) which suggest that the American Jewish establishment’s claim that an overwhelming percentage of American Jews support the concept of a Jewish state—even if it denies Palestinians’ basic rights—is wrong. We’ll discuss that data, and what it says about larger historical trends among American Jews.

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TRANSCRIPT

So, Donald Trump has now said that he wants the United States to take over the Gaza Strip and expel all the people there. This, in a way, is what I feared. This is the nightmare scenario that has been like kind of haunting me for even before October 7^th. And it’s something that gradually emerged for me over the years when I watched Israel do ever more terrible things, really even going back to Avigdor Lieberman when he became foreign minister in 2009. It’s quaint now, but that was considered kind of a shocking event.

I watched my community. I watched my people in the United States. And I began to notice something. There was no limit. There was nothing that Israel could do where the organized Jewish community in the United States would say: enough. There was no independent moral standard. Israel would act, and then there would be a post hoc justification of explaining why actually this was totally legitimate and in fact quite praiseworthy, or at the very least necessary.

So, people had said in the organized American Jewish community for years: Israel really, really wants a Palestinian state. No, they really, really want one. The Palestinians won’t accept one. When Netanyahu came back in 2009, you had Israeli governments that very frankly said: we passionately oppose a Palestinian state. We will never allow one to happen. And then the response from the organized American Jewish community said: well, how can you blame them? It’s far too dangerous to have a Palestinian state.

And you’re like, but wait a second. I thought just the day before yesterday, you were saying that Israel really wanted a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians wouldn’t accept one, right. This is just an example of what we see again and again. And because when you treat—this is the central point of my book—when you treat a state as a God, when you worship a state, when you see a state as having unconditional inherent value rather than having to be judged against something else, judged against the standard of international law, judged against the standard of the human dignity of the people under its control, then that state can do whatever it wants.

And so, I feared that Israel, after October 7^th happened, after the horror of October 7^th, immediately there were reports that Israel wanted to expel Palestinians en masse from Gaza. There were reports in the Washington Post that Netanyahu was trying to convince Western leaders to pressure Egypt to do this. And I remember right at the beginning, I started hearing the discourse. The discourse was: well, that would be a tremendous humanitarian gesture. How noble of Israel to allow the Palestinians to leave Gaza given how terrible Gaza is. And so, you could already see the justifications that were building.

And now, this idea is now back on the table, right, because it was the position of the Israeli right, but it wasn’t sure that it was going to be possible because Sisi, the Egyptian leader, had adamantly opposed it. And now, Donald Trump has put it smack back on the table. And the very American Jewish leaders, watch this, watch the response in the next days. The same people who would have accused you of being a vicious antisemite two days ago if you had suggested that there was any possibility of mass expulsion of Palestinians will now defend that prospect, AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish community. I would love to be proven wrong. I don’t think I will be.

Just watch the pro-Israel politicians. Instead of saying, this is monstrous. This violates a moral red line we have. We might have been willing to bomb Gaza to smithereens, but we don’t believe in mass ethnic cleansing. They will move the bar and say, actually, this is a humanitarian gesture because Gaza is unlivable, right—not mentioning who made Gaza unlivable, right—Gaza is unlivable. And therefore, it would be better for all concerned if the Palestinians had a chance to start a new life in some other country. This is what it means to treat a state as a God. This is what idolatry means in practice. The most horrifying barbarism. It’s in the Tanakh. It’s in the Hebrew Bible. The connection between idolatry, which is the worship of something human and the destruction of human life, right. This is what we’re seeing, right. So, this is from the position of the organized American Jewish community, right. And Netanyahu, you notice, immediately started applauding this when Trump said it.

The second question is: why Trump is doing this? Why, right? It’s not something that most other American politicians, indeed even most Republicans, were talking about, right. They might have been open to Israel expelling Palestinians, but they weren’t suggesting that America take this over. I think it has everything to do with Greenland. To understand Gaza, you have to understand Greenland. And what you have to understand is that Donald Trump has gone beyond the Republican position, which was just to [not] apologize for America’s past history of imperialism and reject criticism. He’s such a passionate believer in that American imperialist project that he wants to revive it in its most naked form, right. Not just kind of neo-imperialism where America basically, you know, tells other countries what to do, but actually where America actually physically takes control of the territory and the resources. This is the way he talks about Panama, and Canada, and Greenland.

And now, Gaza is part of this project, right. And so, this is directly related to this ferocious attack on diversity, equity, inclusion, this massive backlash, right. The idea is we will crush anyone who challenges America’s myths of 19^th century and early 20^th century conquest. And part of the process of crushing those critics will be that we will reenact that process of conquest in its most brutal and crude form, right. And so, it’s astonishing, you know, people have gotten literally like, you know, canceled for using the term settler colonialism, right. It actually turns out to be a pretty darn good description of what’s happening here, right. You’re expelling the population and it’s just that what’s different is that Donald Trump seems to want to make sure that some of those settlers who will settle Gaza will be not just Israelis, but maybe actually Americans, that America will get a share of the pie as you expel these people.

And it’s directly connected to the other intolerance in Trump’s Republican Party of any questioning of America’s founding myths and the genocide and conquest that took place in America’s founding and the desire to have a kind of new form of 19^th century American imperialism in Canada, in Greenland, in Panama, now in Gaza, anywhere America could do it. This is the world without moral limits. The world with absolute disregard for the humanity of people who are not white and Christian, or Judeo-Christian, and Western. And this is the barbarism of our time. It’s monstrous to watch, but this has been a long time in coming. Every American politician, every rabbi, every Jewish leader who was not willing to say enough years and years and years ago has now found themselves in a position and will not be able to say enough now. And because we have a mad king in Donald Trump who wants to be a 19^th century imperialist, he will help Israel in that project today, and people will go along with it.

Last Tuesday, Knopf published my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.

You’ll find a list of book-related events, interviews and reviews below.

As I’ve mentioned before, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author (for instance, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness by last week’s Zoom guest, Rashid Khalidi). I hope they also donate to a charity working in Gaza.

Our guest for this Friday’s zoom call will be the eminent historian Deborah Dash Moore, who is Jonathan Freedman Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She’s been studying a number of surveys of American Jewish opinion, including this one, which suggest that the American Jewish establishment’s claim that an overwhelming percentage of American Jews support the concept of a Jewish state—even if it denies Palestinians’ basic rights—is wrong. We’ll discuss that data, and what it says about larger historical trends among American Jews.

Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

Share

Book Tour

(We’ll update this every week.)

On Tuesday, February 4, I’ll be speaking at the Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY with my brilliant colleague, Alia Malek.

On Wednesday, February 5, I’ll be speaking online to “Reconstructionists Expanding Our Conversation on Israel/Palestine.”

On Saturday night, February 8, I’ll be speaking with Ta-Nehisi Coates at the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn. When Beinart Notebook subscribers register, they can use the code at the bottom to receive a free ticket.

On Monday, February 17, I’ll be speaking at San Diego State University.

On Tuesday, February 18, I’ll be speaking with UCLA historian David Myers at the Lumiere Music Hall in Los Angeles.

On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.

On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.

On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.

On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.

On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.

On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Book Interviews

Last week, I spoke about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, NPR’s Morning Edition, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, Pod Save the World, Breaking Points, Robert Wright’s Substack podcast, Marc Lamont Hill’s “Office Hours,” Speaking Out of Place and For the Sake of Argument.

I did print interviews with The Guardian, Religion News Service and Columbia Journalism Review.

The book was reviewed (I include negative as well as positive reviews!) by Prospect Magazine, Counterpunch and The Jerusalem Post.

Sources Cited in this Week’s Video

Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro’s book, The Empty Wagon.

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!), Arthur Asseraf asks what people committed to Palestinian freedom should learn, and not learn, from decolonization in Algeria.

In The Third Narrative, Ralph Seliger critiques my, and Rashid Khalidi’s, visions for a future Israel-Palestine.

Why the documentary “No Other Land” can’t find a US distributor.

See you on Friday, January 31,

Peter

TRANSCRIPT

Hi. So, Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Elise Stefanik, said in her Senate confirmation testimony that she believes that Israel has a biblical right to the West Bank. Now, as a statement in American public discourse, this is an absurd statement, right. America should not be making public policy based on appeals to sacred texts that are sacred to some people but not others, right. We have a framework of international law, which determines whether Israel has the right to control the West Bank, and also we should be thinking in terms of basic questions of human rights and what it means for Israel to control that territory in terms of the rights of all of the people—most of whom are Palestinian—who live in that area.

But I also think it’s worth noting that Stefanik’s understanding of the Bible, as I understand it, is completely wrong from the perspective of Jewish tradition. Which is to say the Jewish tradition, at least as I understand, does not grant Jews unconditional political control over the West Bank or any other part of what we call Eretz Israel, the land of Israel. And I think one of the writers who make this point most clearly is Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, who’s written this book called The Empty Wagon. It’s quite a remarkable book. Not an easy book. It’s 1,400 pages; much of it kind of citing dense citations of Jewish texts and rabbinic authorities. But one of the points that Shapiro makes that I think is really significant is this distinction between the way Jewish tradition thinks about the holiness of the land, and the question of political sovereignty over the land—certainly unconditional political sovereignty.

So, Shapiro writes: ‘Eretz Israel is not a state at all.’ He’s talking within the perspective of Jewish tradition. ‘It is an area of land, its borders demarcated by the parameters of its holiness, not by political sovereignty. If the Romans own Eretz Israel, then one acquires the mitzvah of living in Eretz Israel by moving to that part of the Roman Empire. Today, southern Lebanon is Eretz Israel. Someone living in some Arab town in southern Lebanon is thus basking in all the holiness of Eretz Israel.’ Because he’s making the point that the biblical borders of Eretz Israel are not the same as the borders of the contemporary state of Israel.

His point is that the land has a particular holiness because there are certain religious commandments, certainly mitzvot, that can only be performed in the land of Israel, especially agricultural mitzvot. And so, anyone who’s living in that land has access to a greater kind of holiness because there are commandments they can fulfill there that they can’t fulfill somewhere else. But that’s true if the land is controlled by the Romans or if it’s in southern Lebanon. It doesn’t matter whether there is a Jewish state there.

Now, of course, the Bible does tell the story of Jewish kingdoms in part or all of the land of Israel. But then Shapiro also goes on to make the point that even according to Jewish tradition, when Jews do have sovereignty over all or part of this land, it’s never unconditional. It’s always conditional on whether they are fulfilling these obligations, right. And indeed, when they don’t fulfill these obligations, the Bible repeatedly tells the story of Jews being exiled from the land.

So, he quotes the great 19th century German Orthodox Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch as saying: ‘the gifts of a land and statehood are not an end in and of itself, but solely a means for carrying out the Torah. Whether or not Israel would possess and retain its land, therefore, depended on whether or not it would fulfill the demands of the Torah.’ And Shapiro also offers a couple of sourced citations from the book of Leviticus, one of which God says: ‘the land belongs to me. You are strangers and settlers in it with me,’ right. That the only true unconditional owner of the land is God and Jews have sovereignty over the land to the degree that they fulfill their obligations, right. And if not, they lose sovereignty over the land. He also quotes this famous line from Leviticus where God says: ‘and do not let the land vomit you out for defiling it as it vomited out the nations that were before you.’

So, the point is, first of all, that the holiness of land is separate from the question of political sovereignty, and that political sovereignty to the extent that Jews have it or anybody else has it, again in Jewish tradition is conditional, not unconditional, right, with the ultimate owner being God, and God determining whether Jews or any other group of people deserve the right to have that political sovereignty based on how they behave. And in the case of Jews, whether they’re living up to Jewish religious commandments. Now, again, those religious commandments are complicated. Many of them might seem obscure. But surely, given the centrality of human dignity in Jewish tradition, one would have to think that the question of how you treat the dignity of the people in the land is one important condition in terms of your right to sovereignty, right.

And this is what Stefanik—with her crudely racist view of Palestinians and, frankly, deep ignorance of Jewish tradition—completely misses, right. When she says that the Bible is basically a grant of unconditional political sovereignty over the land of Israel to Jews. It’s an absurd argument in a secular political context, and in a very dangerous one. But it’s also an absurd argument in Jewish tradition, which I think is worth noting as well.

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This week’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be tomorrow at our regular time: Friday, January 31, at 1 PM Eastern.

I’ll be talking about my new book with Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi. We’ll discuss what the struggle for Palestinian liberation requires of Jews, a question at the heart of my book.

Zoom link is below for paid subscribers. Once it airs, they’ll get the video and podcast.

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This Tuesday, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.

You’ll find a list of book-related events, interviews and reviews below.

I’ll be talking about the book in this week’s zoom call, on Friday, January 31, at 1 PM. My conversation partner will be the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi. We’ll discuss what the struggle for Palestinian liberation requires of Jews, a question at the heart of my book.

As I’ve mentioned before, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author (for instance, Rashid’s groundbreaking Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness) and donate to a charity working in Gaza.

Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

Ask Me Anything

Our next “Ask Me Anything,” for premium subscribers, will be today (Monday, January 27) at 1 PM Eastern. I’ll answer questions about the ceasefire, the Trump administration, Elon Musk, and anything else on your mind. We’ll do another “Ask Me Anything,” in February, about my new book.

Book Tour

(We’ll update this every week.)

On Wednesday, January 29, I’ll be speaking with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The event is being sponsored by Jewish Currents and the registration link is here. Paid subscribers can view a code at the very bottom of this page (after video transcript) to receive a free ticket or a discounted price on the ticket plus the book.

On Tuesday, February 4, I’ll be speaking at the Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY with my brilliant colleague, Alia Malek.

On Wednesday, February 5, I’ll be speaking online to “Reconstructionists Expanding Our Conversation on Israel/Palestine.”

On Saturday night, February 8, I’ll be speaking with Ta-Nehisi Coates at the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn. This event is being sponsored by Jewish Currents and the registration link is here. Paid subscribers can view a code at the very bottom of this page (after video transcript) to receive a free ticket.

On Monday, February 17, I’ll be speaking at San Diego State University.

On Tuesday, February 18, I’ll be speaking with UCLA historian David Myers at the Lumiere Music Hall in Los Angeles.

On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.

On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.

On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.

On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.

On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Book Interviews

Last week, I spoke about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Errol Louis of NY1, Guardian columnist and podcaster Owen Jones, Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali, and twice (!) on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Kirkus calls Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza “learned” and “powerful.”

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 asks “Can Genocide Studies Survive a Genocide in Gaza?”

For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” Podcast, I interviewed Katherine Franke, who recently left her position as a professor at Columbia law school, about the climate for Palestinian rights activists there.

I also did an interview with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin about Joe Biden’s foreign policy legacy. Here are some snippets.

Donald Trump’s nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations, Elise Stefanik, says the Bible entitles Israel to control the West Bank.

My friend, the brilliant professor of Jewish thought, Rabbi Shaul Magid, has launched a newsletter on Substack.

See you on Monday, January 27 and Friday, January 31,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

One of the things that you hear most frequently from Israel’s defenders is that it has a right to exist. And I think this phrase is really important to think about.

One of my heroes is the Orthodox Jewish Israeli philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibowitz. And Leibowitz was very explicit about this. Leibowitz said Israel has no right to exist because no state has a right to exist. States are instruments. States are instruments to protect human life and to allow for human flourishing. Leibowitz came at this from a theological perspective as an Orthodox Jew. It was very clear to him that the only thing that was created in the image of God were human beings.

This is the point that Abraham Joshua Heschel made very clearly as well. When speaking about idolatry, Heschel made the point that to see anything as created in the image of God, other than the human being—whether it’s a building or a statue or a tree or a star, any of that—is idolatrous. Because the only thing, according to Torah, that is created in the image of God is the human being.

And so, what Leibowitz was saying was when you see an inherent value in states beyond their instrumental value, you are imagining that they have a value in and above the value of the human beings who reside within those states. And that is idolatry because it makes them sacred, and it places their value above the lives of the human beings who live within that state. And it is the human beings, not the state, that is created in the image of God.

And that’s why I think that much of the establishment Jewish discourse about Israel has become, in Leibowitz’s terms, idolatrous. Because this phrase, ‘right to exist,’ is again and again used as a way of trumping the value of the people who live within this territory, and saying: no, no, I’m not going to take moral responsibility for what is being done to those people who live under the control of the state of Israel—half of whom are Palestinian—because the rights of the state trump the rights of those individuals. And that is to make the state an idol.

And that is what Leibowitz saw as a grave, grave sin. It is important to remember that idolatry is just about the most serious sin there is in Judaism. It’s one of only three that you cannot perform, even at risk of death. The Talmud says that opposing idolatry is the very definition of being a Jew. And that’s why I think it’s so important to understand the idolatry that has crept into Jewish discussion of Israel and to oppose that idolatry.

Free Ticket/Discount Code

Beinart Notebook paid subscribers will see a code below for a free ticket, or a discounted price on the ticket plus the book, for the January 29 event with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin, and/or a free ticket for the February 8 event with Ta-Nehisi Coates:

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I’ve met many politicians. Very few risk their careers on questions of moral principle. I ask Jamaal why he did, and what it would take to convince other Democrats to do the same.

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Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 24, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.

Our guest will be Jamaal Bowman, who lost his seat in Congress last year after his support for Palestinian rights prompted a ferocious attack by AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations.

I’ve met many politicians. Very few risk their careers on questions of moral principle. I want to ask Jamaal why he did, and what it would take to convince other Democrats to do the same.

I’ve also recorded another Zoom video, without a live audience, with my friend, the brilliant Gaza-born political analyst Muhammad Shehada. He explained why this agreement shows that Israel never really had a strategy against Hamas. He argued that the ceasefire just might endure. And when he described conditions in Gaza, I put my head in my hands. As much as I try to understand the horror there, I’m reminded again and again that its worse than I even imagine. We will send out my conversation with Muhammad to paid subscribers on Wednesday.

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Ask Me Anything

Our next “Ask Me Anything,” for premium subscribers, will be on Monday, January 27, at 1 PM Eastern. I’ll answer questions about the ceasefire, the Trump administration, and anything else on your mind. We’ll do another “Ask Me Anything,” in February, about my new book.

Book Tour

Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28, in just over a week. I’ll be honored if readers buy it. But I hope you’ll also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author given that Palestinian writers still get much less exposure in the US media. (Here are some suggestions). And that you’ll also consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be doing many book-related events. We’ll be adding them as they go online. Here’s what we have so far:

On Wednesday, January 29, I’ll be speaking with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The event is being sponsored by Jewish Currents and the registration link is here. Paid subscribers can view a code at the very bottom of this page (after video transcript) to receive a free ticket or a discounted price on the ticket plus the book.

On Tuesday, February 18, I’ll be speaking with UCLA historian David Myers at the Lumiere Music Hall in Los Angeles.

On Monday, February 24, I’ll be speaking with Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC.

On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.

On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.

Sources Cited in this Week’s Video

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book, The Prophets.

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!), Ussama Makdisi revisits Edward Said to understand Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

Dave Chappelle talks about Gaza.

Tamer Nafar asks where God was during Gaza’s destruction.

A new poll suggests that anger over Gaza may have dissuaded people from voting in 2024.

The farewell tour continues. Antony Blinken speaks to David Remnick and Jake Sullivan speaks to Ezra Klein.

See you on Friday, January 24 and Monday, January 27,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there’s a lot to say about the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, whether it will continue, whether Israel has achieved the goals of this catastrophic war, all of these things. But I don’t think that’s the conversation for today. At least it’s not where my heart is. I’m just thinking about the three Israeli hostages that have been released: Romi and Emily and Doron.

And I want to suggest that I think that for this particular day, for those of us who are Jews, that that’s okay. It’s okay to have one day where we put aside our very, very harsh criticisms of the Israeli government, and of the horrifying things that it does. And even, we put aside for a moment our anger and fury about the destruction of Gaza. And we just participate in the relief and solidarity and joy of the Jewish people as we see three people being relieved from captivity, knowing that the release of hostages is among the most sacred principle in Judaism, and is meant to unite Jews across whatever divides we face.

I think that if the danger of the mainstream public discourse about Israel is that it loses sight of the humanity of Palestinians, which happens again and again and again, there is another danger that can exist on the Left that people on the Left lose sight of the humanity of Israelis. And this is a moment to make sure that that does not happen.

It’s also, I think, important to remember that if in the mainstream kind of establishment Jewish discourse, that a sense of love and solidarity for the Jewish people can often blind Jewish leaders and Jewish organizations to the necessity of judgment, the necessity of moral judgment for the things that Israel does, there is the danger that Jewish critics on the Left can have the reverse problem. Which is to say that the constant focus on judgment, on moral judgment—as crucial as it is, it’s never been more crucial than in these horrifying last 15 months—that that can blind us to the necessity of solidarity and love. And that it’s important to remember that we can have these different feelings, but we don’t have to have them in the same proportions every day.

It famously says in Ecclesiastes that ‘a season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven.’ So, this can be a time, a day, to just delight in the release of these three young women. And there can be another day, another season. There will have to be tragically again and again and again to return to our anguish and our fury about what Israel has done in Gaza.

As I was thinking about this, I was thinking a little bit about re-reading a little part of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous legendary book about the prophets. Of course, neither I nor I think anyone who’s listening to this is a prophet. But there are lessons to be taken from the lives of the prophets. And the point that Heschel makes is that the prophets were trying to imitate what he called ‘God’s divine pathos,’ which is to say the emotions that God felt towards humanity, but also, according to Torah and the Hebrew Bible, God’s feelings, special feelings towards the Jewish people, towards the people of Israel. And so, the prophets then are trying to emulate in a way this combination of God’s anger, righteous anger, which very, very present, but also God’s love.

And I think one of the points that Heschel makes is that the prophets were furious, furious, brutal critics of the Jewish people. Ferocious, ferocious critics. And yet, they tried not to forget that although anger was one attribute of God’s relationship with humanity, and indeed particularly God’s relationship with the Jewish people, it was not the paramount emotion. The paramount emotion was love, and that therefore the profits should also try to have—even amidst their moral fury at the corruption, the barbarism, the degradation that they were seeing around them—they should always try to remember that the supreme element of God’s pathos is actually, the more enduring one, is love.

And Heschel writes, ‘as a mode of pathos, it may be accurate to characterize the anger of the Lord as suspended love, as mercy withheld, as mercy in concealment. Anger prompted by love is an interlude. It is as if compassion were waiting to resume.’ So, the point he’s making is that even when God is most angry, that it is always temporary, and there was always the love underneath it. And this is what the prophets were striving to emulate. And this is what we, perhaps as critics of Israel, even though we’re far from prophets, should also try to emulate: the notion that underneath the fury and anger and profound disappointment must always be this love that can return whenever there is a moment of opportunity for it to return.

Heschel goes on: ‘the pathos of anger is further a transient state. What is often proclaimed about love’—and then he quotes from the book of Jeremiah—‘for the Lord is good for his steadfast love endures forever is not said about anger. The normal and original pathos is love or mercy, not anger.’ And I think that, just as it was a model for the prophets, should be a model for all of us. That despite what has happened over the last 15 months, that I think is increasingly being recognized as a genocide, really just about the worst thing that we could imagine a state ever doing. And even though that calls us to resist, to oppose, to fight against this profound, profound form of injustice again and again and again, that the love and solidarity that we have—not just for all human beings, but that we are allowed to have as Jews for our own people, for the Jewish people, imagined throughout Jewish text as an extended family—that that should never be lost.

And whenever there is a moment for it to return, for it to come back to the surface, even if it’s only temporary, for us to join with other Jews in sense of solidarity and grief and, indeed, in joy when there is a moment of suspension of the fighting, and a moment of seeing Jews come back from the hell of captivity in Gaza, to see them come back alive. It seems to me that’s what we’re called to do in this moment: just to put aside for a moment the anger, the condemnation, the fury, the pain, and to share in that love.

Surely, if the prophets could do that—given their acute sense of human injustice in the world that those of us who are so much lesser than them—that we can try to do that as well. And we can take just this moment to delight, along with other Jews, in the fact that Romi and Doron and Emily, and hopefully many, many, many more other hostages, will come back safe to be with their family—indeed to be with our family, the family of the Jewish people.

For Beinart Notebook paid subscribers, register here, and you can use the code “NOTEBOOK2025” to receive a free ticket or a discounted price on the ticket plus the book.

Note: As mentioned in this video, we will be holding an “Ask Me Anyt…

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Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Friday, January 17, at 1 PM Eastern, our regular time.

Our guest will be Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program and a former senior attorney at Adalah, which defends the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. We’ll talk about the Trump administration’s coming crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and activism.

I’ve also recorded another Zoom video, without a live audience, with the longtime Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy. I have long wanted to ask Gideon what it’s like to be one of Israel’s most hated men. And how he lives in a society that he regularly accuses of committing grave crimes. I was struck by the openness and intimacy of his answers. He told me, among many other things, that every morning when he goes for a jog in the park, he sees the same woman jogging alongside him. And that every morning she greets him with the same phrase: “traitor.”

This video is for paid subscribers too.

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My New Book

On January 28, Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.

So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. I’m grateful to readers for offering their favorites. One reader suggested In Search of Fatima, by the British-Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, which The New Statesman has called “one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement.”

Readers have also suggested additional charities working in Gaza. One is Donkey Saddle, which “has been providing ongoing support for over 15 extended families” in Gaza.

Sources Cited in this Video

Jake Sullivan’s interview at the 92^nd St Y.

The new Lancet study on the number of dead in Gaza.

Oxfam’s comparison of deaths in Gaza to those in Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere.

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 chronicles the movement to establish Jewish settlements in southern Lebanon.

Former Representative Cori Bush explains why it was worth losing her seat to defend Palestinian rights.

Vivian Silver’s son denounces Israel’s president for exploiting his mother’s memory.

See you on Friday, January 17,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, we’re in this interesting moment where top Biden administration foreign policy officials are kind of going out into the country, trying to craft a public narrative about what they did in office as they prepare to leave office. There was Antony Blinken’s interview with the New York Times a week ago or so, which I commented on last week. And then, recently I just came across the video that was put out of a public conversation that Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, did at the 92nd Street Y with Ian Bremmer.

And these are really remarkable documents because they are really exercises in what George Orwell wrote about so famously, which is, the creation of a kind of dishonest and euphemistic language to try to defend things that if stated in kind of clear concrete ways, would clearly be too brutal for most people to accept. And so, I think they’re worth looking at at the level of language, which is what Orwell urged political writers to do to challenge the dishonesty of language as a way of getting at the brutality of government and the action of people in power who act brutally.

So, I want to quote something from what Sullivan says at the 92nd Street Y. He’s asked about Israel’s policies vis-a-vis the people of Gaza. And he says: ‘We believe Israel has a responsibility as a democracy. As a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law, that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.’

So, the formulation is really fascinating, right. He’s being asked about what Israel’s doing, but he starts by just stipulating a set of assumptions, right, which don’t need to be proved, right, because these are the assumptions that he begins with, right. And they’re never challenged by the interviewer. The first is that Israel is a democracy. Again, something one hears constantly, but if you think about it, it’s not a democracy for Palestinians, right?

About 70% of the Palestinians who live under the control of the Israeli government, those in the West Bank and in Gaza and in East Jerusalem. And nobody who knows anything about the reality of how Israel operates in Palestinian life could deny that the Israeli government has power—indeed life and death power—over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem. And yet, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza cannot become citizens of the state of Israel. They can’t vote for its government. The vast majority of Palestinians in East Jerusalem are not citizens either, right. And that’s about 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control. About 30% are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are sometimes called Arab Israelis, who have a kind of second-class citizenship, but do enjoy citizenship and the right to vote.

So, if 70% of the Palestinians under Israeli control are not citizens and can’t vote, it’s not a democracy for Palestinians. It’s a democracy for Israeli Jews. In many ways, quite a robust one. But it is about as democratic, one might say, for Palestinians as the United States was under Jim Crow for Black Americans, right, when a minority of Black Americans—those in the North—had the right to vote. But the majority of Black Americans who lived in the South did not have the right to vote. These are not esoteric or complicated things, right? They’re very basic things, right?

But you just notice how they’re basically shoved completely aside in the assumption that Sullivan starts with—that Israel is a democracy—which is simply to say that there’s a basic benevolence that he’s kind of assuming here, right. Which makes his conversation about Israeli behavior completely different than he would if he were talking about Russia or some other some other adversary because he’s essentially putting it in the camp of democracies. But, in fact, when it comes to Palestinians, it really should not be considered to be in the camp of democracies. And that’s not challenged, right. That’s an assumption that doesn’t even need to be defended.

And then he continues. He called Israel ‘a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life.’ It’s such a strange statement. He’s being asked about what’s happening in Gaza, right. Oh, the evidence in Gaza is not hard to find. It’s plentiful, right. The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal just came out with a report just recently suggesting that by the end of June, the death toll in Gaza was over 64,000 people, with almost 60% of those being women, children, and people over the age of 65. And it’s worth noting, by the way, that even men under the age of 65, most of them are not Hamas fighters. So, we’re talking about a very large majority of these people killed who are not fighters, right.

And just by kind of comparison, according to Oxfam, Israel has been killing 250 people per day in Gaza. By comparison, Ukraine, where the United States has literally imposed sanctions and sent weapons to fight against what Russia is doing, that’s more than five times the number of people who’ve been dying since the escalation of the war in Ukraine in 2022. It’s also about five times as many people dying per day as in Sudan, which the United States has now declared a genocide, right.

But what Sullivan does is he simply stipulates that Israel is committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, even though there’s literally no humanitarian aid agency, no United Nations investigative group, no journalist who’s actually really investigated what’s happening with Gaza who would suggest that Israel is committed to the basic principle of innocent life when it comes to Gaza. But Sullivan doesn’t think that’s something that actually needs to be justified. He simply stipulates it as an assumption.

Again, I use this phrase, kind of ‘mental prison,’ when I was talking about Antony Blinken. Like this is a kind of discourse that exists in Washington and could also exist at a place like the 92nd Street Y, which simply bears no reality whatsoever to the lived experience of people in Gaza, as reported by basically every humanitarian and journalist organization that has actually delved deeply into what’s happening there, right. But this is what Sullivan says before he even starts to make the argument, right. This is his kind of stated assumptions. And then he goes on to say, ‘We believe too many civilians have died in Gaza over the course of this conflict. And at too many moments, we felt we’ve had to step up publicly and privately and push on the humanitarian front to get more trucks, more aid, more life-saving assistance,’ right.

So, you know, it’s fascinating. He starts by saying Israel is a democracy. Israel is committed to the principle of human life. And then, later on, he basically says: ‘We think too many people have died.’ You know, this famously, as so many people notice, this goes all of a sudden turns into the passive tense. So, all of a sudden, Israel as a subject, as an actor, disappears from the conversation, right. Too many people have died, right. Why have too many people died? Is it because perhaps because Israel is dropping all these bombs on them, perhaps because Israel is not allowing the aid to go in, right. But it’s as if somehow there was a kind of Israel’s committed to the protection of human life. But, unfortunately, there was a kind of natural disaster, which led too many people in Gaza to die. All of a sudden Israel as the subject basically disappears from the sentence. And he says, ‘we’ve had to step up publicly and privately and push on the humanitarian front,’ never saying even who the United States has had to push, right?

And also, again, the implication, what does it mean to say you’re pushing, right, when the United States is still protecting Israel in all these international forums and continuing to send virtually unconditioned military aid? Pushing, right, in any other context in American foreign policy means using America’s diplomatic leverage in terms of our military and other kind of assistance to get countries to do what we want. If you’re not doing any of those things, you’re not actually pushing. A better verb would be you’re asking, you’re pleading, you’re begging, you’re cajoling, right. You’re not actually pushing if you’re not willing to use the leverage that the United States uses routinely when it comes to other countries.

As I said last week, we have to change the public discourse in the United States, such that if people like Jake Sullivan or Tony Blinken are going to go out and tell these lies, right, in this kind of Orwellian discourse of dishonesty, that they receive pushback, right. Obviously, we need a public discourse in which there is a cost, right. The cost is not that, you know, these people should be endangered in any way, G-d forbid. It’s simply that they should have to feel the experience of being forced to answer really hard questions by people in public forums who will not accept this dishonest language.

And we don’t have a public culture in the United States nearly enough—we have some exceptions like the interviews that Mehdi Hassan does, for instance—but in general, we don’t have a public culture which holds people like Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken to account. There are too many institutions, whether it’s the 92nd Street Y or the Council on Foreign Relations, where they can go and know that basically they can peddle this—for lack of a better word—bullshit, right, and basically never really have to be taken to task for it. And that I think, is part of what’s produced this tremendous alienation and cynicism that exists in so much of the American public about the fact that ordinary Americans face consequences for the things they do in their professional lives, and people at the very apex of the American government, like Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, don’t face those consequences.

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This week’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at our regular time: tomorrow, Friday, January 10, at 1 PM Eastern.

Our guest will be the Israeli-born British journalist Rachel Shabi, author of the new book, Off-White: The Truth about Antisemitism. Last week, she published a column on the subject in The Guardian. She’s particularly knowledge about antisemitism, and its weaponization, in Britain, a subject of ferocious contention since Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader. We’ll discuss all that tomorrow.

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