** Opinion | The Jewish Left Is Trying to Hold Two Thoughts at Once - The New York Times

Opinion | The Jewish Left Is Trying to Hold Two Thoughts at Once - The New York Times


Oct. 24, 2023
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The Jewish Left Is Trying to Hold Two Thoughts at Once

Spencer Ackerman and Peter Beinart navigate the tensions between grief and solidarity in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.

2023-10-24T05:01:59-04:00

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Ezra Klein

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

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I don’t really know how to start this. Grief moves slowly, and war moves quickly. One person said after last week’s audio essay, that, “To so quickly focus on the Israeli army’s response lacked a certain humanism.” And I understood and felt what they meant. I also want to stay in the grief I have for the Israelis killed and the fear I have for the hostages being held.

And I think there would have been wisdom, emotional and geopolitical, if Israel had given itself time to grieve and time to plan before fully committing to a response. But that’s not what happened. Israel dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza in just the first week. It tightened a noose around the territory, keeping out food and water and medicine and fuel.

A report I saw a few days ago said that Gaza is down to one week of insulin. One week of insulin — less now. My wife is a type I diabetic, dependent on insulin to stay alive. A detail like that carries force for me. What if it was my wife, the person I love most who couldn’t get insulin?

More than 5,000 Palestinians have been reported dead, many more injured. There’s a part of me that would like to stay in my feelings from right after Hamas’s attack, but that is not where this has held. And the decisions being made now, and that will be made soon, will decide a lot of lives.

My approach to this topic is going to be to try to keep the boundaries of what can be said and considered open, to try to add context and to try to hear out a lot of different perspectives. I said this last week — I’m not somebody who believes that I know how to solve this conflict. I’m not somebody who believes this conflict can currently be solved. I think we’re at a much more primitive point in it right now.

But the building toward somewhere better, I think, requires a lot of different experiences to be heard. So I have plans for shows right now with people who are much further right than me on this. I have plans that will center on Palestinian experiences and voices. But I wanted to begin with a show closer to where I am, which is not a popular or easy place to be at the moment, which is the Jewish left.

Many of us on the Jewish left on this felt abandoned and morally appalled at the comments of people who had once been our allies immediately after. What the left came to mean, quickly, in this conflict, the people who defined it, were people who seemed to give no consideration to the lives of Israelis. We do. In many cases, the point of our involvement here is that we are attached in a deep way to Israel.

Meanwhile, the force and ferocity of the Israeli response built. And if you believe, as many of us believe, that there is no answer to this for Israel, for anybody until Israel can live in security while Palestinians do not live inside a regime of oppression, and humiliation, and immiseration, and terror, then amidst the grief is a fear that this is only getting worse. Palestinians mourn their dead and hate their killers just as much and fiercely as Israelis do. And the two sides somehow must live next to each other. So what is the plan here?

There are ideas that float around, and they’ve become, I think, scarier in recent years. In 2017, Bezalel Smotrich wrote that, quote, “Any solution must be based on cutting off the ambition to realize the Arab national hope between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. The statement the Arab yearning for national expression in the land of Israel cannot be repressed is incorrect.” He now serves in Netanyahu’s cabinet as minister of finance.

This is the kind of thinking that has been in power in recent years — the thinking that says the repression has not been full enough. It has brought us here. But that does not mean it will weaken now. It may well strengthen. There are those who think a permanent occupation or an act of mass expulsion are the only true answers in this conflict.

So I want to have a conversation with some other people coming from a similar perspective but with a lot more expertise on the core issues here than I have. Spencer Ackerman is a national security reporter, Pulitzer Prize winner, author of the newsletter “Forever Wars,” author of the great book on post-9/11 politics, “Reign of Terror.” Peter Beinart writes for New York Times Opinion. He’s a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York. He’s the editor at large of Jewish Currents, and author of the Substack “The Beinart Notebook.” And they’ve both been writing pieces that I think are of deep relevance right now. Spencer has been particularly following up on the symmetries to post-9/11 politics in America and the way military planning happens in that kind of moment.

Beinart wrote a great piece thinking about the question, before you can ever get to any kind of settlement, you need groups in power on both sides that would want to see a settlement. So if you want nonviolence to take hold, if you want other tactics to work, how are they rewarded? What are the feedback loops that can be created to give more power to those who want to see something very different?

As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

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Peter Beinart, Spencer Ackerman, welcome to the show.

Spencer Ackerman

Thanks for having me.

Peter Beinart

Thanks.

Ezra Klein

So Spencer, I want to begin here. What is your sense now of what Hamas was trying to achieve in this attack?

Spencer Ackerman

So there have been some interesting reports that have come out this week that I think clarify that question, but not in a satisfying way. There was a report out of The Washington Post, where a Hamas senior official, sort of on the face of it meaning to heighten a message of Israeli vulnerability, nevertheless said that they didn’t reckon that Israel would respond the way that Israel has. That they thought they would take some hostages and negotiate them for the thousands of Palestinians who are in Israeli military prisons, and the status quo ante would prevail.

I think if it turns out that indeed Hamas was trying for a more limited sense of concrete achievement for liberating prisoners, that has turned out to be just catastrophically wrong.

Ezra Klein

I’ve seen some reporting, similarly, from Hamas on this, and I’ve found it truly bizarre. I mean, this was in planning, in scale, a kind of attack Hamas had never launched before. It’s a land, sea, and air attack. It involves mass killing of Israeli civilians, some things they probably didn’t know they would stumble into, like the rave which led to quite a bit of their body count. So maybe their soldiers, or whatever you want to call them, took a kind of gruesome initiative in that.

But they also spread videos of them killing Israelis on social media. They’ve been on people’s Facebook pages almost gloating about their death. There were a lot of hostages taken. There are a lot of ways people characterize Hamas, but it would take a kind of genuine madness and true irrationality to me for them to plan an attack of that scale and not believe it would create an overwhelming Israeli response.

Now, there’s been a lot of commentary saying, well, they must have known they would get this kind of response, and so they wanted it. They wanted to provoke Israel into this kind of attack. They wanted to disrupt the accords with Saudi Arabia, something like that. And those two narratives now seem in real tension. So I’m curious how you think about that piece of it?

Spencer Ackerman

So one thing that struck me from the first wave of Hamas statements during the weekend of the 7th, after Simchat Torah, was that they didn’t mention the Saudi deal. I was writing a piece for The Nation precisely about this when it happened and was looking very closely to see the degree to which, if at all, Hamas would mention it. And they didn’t. They were talking about more material facts closer to home rather than diplomatic facts on the horizon from 30,000 feet above — the freeing of the prisoners, the loosening of the Israeli strangulation of Gaza on down the line.

And again, I think there are ways after the fact — I’ve seen this a lot in the American national security community over the last 12 days — that we often try and reason backward from the actions that a given combatant like Hamas took and presume a greater strategy there, presume that they must have known X, Y and Z would happen.

That often is not the way combatants in war operate, from a planning stage to an execution stage, from a strategic to an operational to a tactical level. Should that be borne out by further reporting probably speaks to the way that miscalculation is an underappreciated factor in every wartime combatant.

This is something I’ve seen up close and personally. The ambitions we have, the opportunities we see, the desires that we have when we give into violence on an institutional level blind us not just in the banal way to the humanity of the people that come into our crosshairs, but to our own recognition of what reality is and what’s achievable here.

I hesitate to speculate or to put myself into a position of trying to read the minds of Hamas. All I can read are their statements and their actions, and through them, remember all of the times that I have seen optimistic, to the point of irrationality, statements from American, Israeli, all sorts of other combatants describing the glorious ways their war will go and why it will lead to the achievement of all of these grander objections that then go down in flames.

Peter Beinart

I would just add that although I don’t know what Hamas expected, I do think it’s important to remember that Hamas does have a multi-decade long history of intentionally targeting and killing civilians. They did it during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. They did it during the 1990s, during the Oslo process. So I don’t think anyone should have been surprised that Hamas members would kill civilians. Maybe they hadn’t had the opportunity to kill this many, but this is something that Hamas has repeatedly shown that it’s willing to do.

Ezra Klein

And let me then build on that, because, as you say, this has been the most horrific of Hamas’s attacks. They have tried many things. Nothing has, from a perspective of pure murder, worked as well as this. What is your sense of how the attack has changed — let me put it this way — both the politics and the mass psychology in Israel?

Peter Beinart

I think that the agony that Israelis are going through is unfathomable, greater than what Americans experienced after Sept. 11. Greater just because as a share of the population it was much higher. Greater because of the deeper level of trauma that Israeli Jews and other Jews carry. And greater because Al Qaeda was far away from us. I mean, they came to New York and they were mostly in other parts of the world. Gaza and Hamas are on Israel’s borders.

So that’s, I think, the profound reality. And I think there is, coexisting with that, a deep rage and anger at the Netanyahu government that eventually will probably produce some kind of political earthquake. But what kind of political earthquake, we don’t know. And I think an absolute resolute belief among Jewish Israelis — it’s important to remember that 20 percent of Israel’s citizens are Palestinians — but among Jewish Israelis, I think, overwhelming consensus that Hamas must be destroyed.

Now, when you actually try to ask what that means, things become a lot more cloudy, and I don’t think people have good answers. But that gut-level emotional reaction seems nearly consensus.

Ezra Klein

I want to put a pin in that question of what it means to destroy Hamas. But I want to get at something else on the psychology. One of the things that has been very present for me in some of the more upsetting commentary right after Hamas’s attacks, partly the commentary that couldn’t imagine there being any such thing as an Israeli civilian, one thing I noticed in that is a kind of rigid categorization of power in a matchup between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza. Israel is by far the more powerful party. And you can see that right now.

But you can’t understand Israeli psychology at all — you can’t understand, I think, Jewish psychology at all without understanding the fear of genuine eradication at the center of it. How many times Jews have been powerless. How many times Israel has faced, in living memory and the memory of people who are in power there now, attacks that if they had gone another way would have wiped Israel off the map.

And so I wanted to get you to talk a bit about the way those two — both realities and psychologies — interplay, the Israeli strength and Israeli — the genuine felt sense it is a small place surrounded by people who would try to wipe it out if they could.

Peter Beinart

There’s no question that those things are buried very deep for many, many Jews and then, for Israelis, exacerbated by the traumas that have taken place in Israel. This happened almost 50 years to the day of the Yom Kippur War, which was an extremely traumatic experience. Many, many Israelis have people who have been lost.

And I totally agree with you, one of the things that really disturbed me about some of the commentary on the left was that there was a language of things like decolonization that erased the humanity of Israeli Jews.

And it reminded me of — this is something George Orwell wrote a lot about — the way in which certain kind of rhetorical formulations that people become very invested in then become a way of covering over the human realities of what’s actually being done in their name. And I felt that way about some of the language of decolonization. Well, this is just what decolonization looks like. If you have to break some eggs to make an omelet, so be it. That is to me a kind of monstrous kind of thinking, very frightening.

I also think that this is fear that Israeli Jews have that has been fanned by a government that has dehumanized Palestinians and made it harder for Israeli Jews to see Palestinians as ordinary people who have ordinary human desires, who mostly just want to live and be able to raise their kids in the same kinds of ways that we all want to do. And I think because there has been so much dehumanization of Palestinians in Israel, it has made it even more difficult to see Palestinians in any other way than through as, essentially, the next group of people who threaten Jewish existence.

Ezra Klein

I want to ask you then about another side of this, which is how the attacks have changed psychology for Jews living outside Israel, and particularly those who have a very complicated or critical relationship with Israel, which I think describes everybody at the table here.

There’s the period running up to this where the right-wing turn in Israeli politics I think began to sever a lot of ties people had. I mean, my relationship to Israel had changed quite a bit as the left began to collapse there, as the peace process died, as Netanyahu and very, very, very far-right extremist cabinet ministers took and held power. And then there was also the attacks and the moment after them, and then there was — I saw online and in a lot of people I knew a real rupture between those same Jews, many of whom who’ve worked for peace for a long time, and what they were seeing among people they often thought of as their allies. And I’ve been watching a community I’m part of try to manage these two now very complicated relationships. And I’m curious how you’ve experienced that, how you’ve seen it.

Peter Beinart

I genuinely believe that at the heart of Judaism is the metaphor of family. This is what makes it different than Christianity and Islam. Genesis is the story mostly of a family. And in Exodus, it becomes a nation. And it’s imagined as a kind of extended family — B’nai Israel, the children of Israel. Israel being the name that Isaac — that Jacob is given, sorry, after he wrestles with the angel.

So I believe that very, very deeply. And so, for me, this has awoken that in some really, really, really powerful ways. And I struggle, and it’s. Very, very difficult to hold the sense of particular obligation, particular special connection that I feel to Israeli Jews, like Jews all over the world, with the fact that I know that so many people in my community are weaponizing that and using that in a way to lobotomize us so that we don’t care about what happens to Palestinians and so we are OK with whatever is done to them because we care only about our own families.

And that logic can become horrifying in the days to come.

So I have never felt as much of a sense of struggle with my own community and with my own love of a sense of community, and trying to hold that and also be desperately afraid of the way in which it’s leading some people to act.

Ezra Klein

Let’s talk then, Spencer, about what is actually being done. How would you describe what Israel is doing in response, both what the tactics are — what they have announced and shown themselves to be doing since Hamas’s attack —and then what the broader strategy is? What have they articulated, or what do they appear to be trying to achieve?

Spencer Ackerman

Tactically what Israel is producing is collective punishment against 2.3 million Gazans intensifying its strangulation of some of the most densely packed places on Earth, calling it as it will. I started seeing reports that Gaza is without painkillers, that doctors are operating on wounded people — of whom there are I believe more than 10,000 as of this recording — without anesthesia. This is Israel’s tactics against Gaza. Not against Hamas — against Gaza.

Ezra Klein

people.

Spencer Ackerman

Yes. And let’s just skip to the day after what Netanyahu describes as a long war. Israel can deal severe blows to human beings and has an unquestioned capability to perhaps kill members of Hamas and perhaps decapitate Hamas’s leadership structure as well. But there will be something that comes after whatever Israel’s operation is. And as long as Israel keeps the conditions of strangulation on Gaza, there will be something that comes after Hamas, whatever its form ends up taking. And when we see Israel flattening buildings, taking these kinds of collective punishment measures, then it looks to me less like a war against Hamas and more like a calling of Palestinians in Gaza with Hamas as a proximate target.

Ezra Klein

One thing I have heard many people say now, and that includes many Palestinians, but it also now includes some Israelis who have called for this openly, like a member of the Knesset, is that what Israel really wants to do here is what gets called a second Nakba, a second mass expulsion of Palestinians, creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees who don’t or cannot come back. And one reason people believe that is that there are those in the Israeli government who seem to want that before this. And so the fear is that Hamas’s atrocities become the excuse for something that the far right in Israel could not have achieved before, but now it has a political and military space to try to achieve. So can you first say what a Nakba is, what that word means in this context, and then whether you think that’s a reasonable fear?

Peter Beinart

Yeah, so Nakba is the Arabic word for catastrophe. And it describes the experience in which more than half of the Palestinian population was expelled or fled in fear during Israel’s war of independence, between, essentially, 1947 and 1949. But the point that Palestinians make again and again is that in a certain sense the Nakba never ended because there have been expulsions that have continued — drips and drabs. There was another large one in 1967. In some ways, it wouldn’t even be the second Nakba. You could actually say it would be the third Nakba. And smaller scale every year in between in various ways.

Most of the people in Gaza — and I don’t think this is sufficiently recognized in the mainstream American press sometimes — are not from Gaza. They are the children and grandchildren and some are original refugees who were forced from what is now Israel. And there is this profound collective trauma about the fact that this is happening again.

We know from what we’ve seen in the United States in recent years, the way that things in the deep history of a country, if they’re never dealt with, if they’re never acknowledged, if there’s never a process of reparation and historical justice, they remain there waiting for a moment of trauma to come back.

So when Israel said, leave the Northern Gaza Strip and go to the Southern Gaza Strip, many Palestinians, especially elderly Palestinians, were saying, I will not leave, because this is happening again. We know we will not be allowed to return. This is a very, very real threat that exists at this moment. And the American government needs to have, as one of its central policy goals, to ensure that Joe Biden is not judged by history as an American president who allowed yet another Nakba to take place on his watch.

Spencer Ackerman

I would add to that that before this past weekend, a tremendous amount of effort from the Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and the Biden administration was to create this, what they would call humanitarian corridor that they suggested would be a way of getting Palestinians out of Gaza into Sinai from the onslaught that Israel plans to put on Gaza. And they had to hear not just from Palestinians, who I’m not sure that they really properly interacted with, but from the regional governments, that that was — and this was Blinken’s term — a non starter, because everyone in the region, Palestinian and non Palestinan, recognized the historical reference point of the Nakba. I talked on Sunday, right after this began happening, with a formerly Palestinian-American who now lives in Turkey, named Sami Al-Arian, someone whom the war on terror railroaded out of this country. And I asked him about the intensification that Gaza was about to experience. We were talking in the context of a piece I was doing for The Nation about the Americans’ efforts to put together a Saudi normalization with Israel in the context of the war.

And he said, what else can they do? And I said, well, for instance, they could push you out of Gaza. And he said, that’s a fantasy. That’s a fantasy of the right. We’re not leaving. And I can’t stop thinking of these words that he said afterwards, which is that if we have to die, we’ll die in our homes. That now a government that purports to speak for the safety and national aspirations of Jews worldwide is inflicting upon another people. I cannot think of a less Jewish thing than to make another person a refugee.

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Ezra Klein

So recognizing, Peter, this is a very hard question to put to anybody, but something that I think people will think hearing this is, look, it’s easy sitting in New York to criticize. But as you said very eloquently earlier, one way this is different than 9/11 is that Israel and Gaza abud each other. The West Bank — that everybody is crammed in together.

So what would a moral response be, and not just a moral response, but one that took seriously the Israeli people’s need for security? And also, and I think this is not just a fair, but an important question of statecraft, that it can’t be costless to slaughter Israeli civilians and take Israeli hostages. I mean, no country on Earth would allow that.

Peter Beinart

So first of all, there has to be an effort to bring back these captives. And although this has very, very little purchase, probably, in Israel, I think if your number one overriding goal is the safety of those people, Israel would need to consider some kind of prisoner swap with Hamas, perhaps for elderly Palestinian prisoners who represent no actual threat once they leave prison.

I agree that the people who masterminded this attack, the people who carried those attacks, those people are war criminals. They should be dealt with. They should be brought to justice. Beyond that, my fear is that Israel is going to go into Gaza on the ground looking for security and safety, and what it’s ultimately going to get is less safety and less security than it has today.

Ezra Klein

Doesn’t a mass prisoner swap for the hostages create the incentive for Hamas to do this again and again? I mean, as Spencer said earlier, consensus view is one thing Hamas wanted out of this was a bunch of Israeli civilian hostages because they have done prisoner swaps in the past. And they saw that as a way to do another one here. To give them what they wanted on that, doesn’t that just create a reason for them to keep doing it, to make this a successful strategy for them?

Peter Beinart

Absolutely, that is a very real danger of that strategy. But I also fear that what Israel is doing now is going to lead ultimately to Hamas being stronger. And I don’t think that’s because all those Palestinians who are supporting Hamas believe in the killing of civilians. Some do tragically, but many don’t. It’s because they have seen no other form of resistance that has gotten them anywhere.

Israel has been blockading Gaza for 17 years. When the blockade began, Hamas’s rockets were these very, very primitive things. 17 years later, their arsenal is much more formidable than it was. And they were able to do this. This is not a good trajectory to be on for the safety of Israelis. Fundamentally, Palestinians are going to resist their oppression because all human beings resist their oppression.

Ezra Klein

There’s an interesting piece by Amjad Iraqi in the London Review of Books. And he writes, quote, “Young Palestinians — many of whom were raised under the false promises of the Oslo Accords signed 30 years ago last month — have been taking up arms and joining local militias unaffiliated with the major political parties. On the streets and online, Palestinian activists no longer care to tiptoe around diplomatic language or references to international laws that have failed them.”

And I feel like it’s something we’ve seen before, that even if you imagine a world where Israel’s quite successful in smashing Hamas, that doesn’t necessarily mean the world you get is no extremist violent groups dedicated to killing Israelis. That what you might get is a splintering into somewhat yet more extreme and dangerous groups that have no political arm whatsoever, which Hamas is this weird kind of — it has a political arm. It has a military arm.

You’ve watched this kind of thing happen before. So I’m curious what you make of it? It reminds me a little bit of the pre-ISIS conversation and the post-ISIS conversation. And ISIS has been back here as a metaphor a lot. But as you mentioned in the piece, not being used as a way you might think that metaphor would be used.

Spencer Ackerman

When the United States invaded Iraq, there was barely any Al Qaeda presence there. That quickly changed, and it became home to the most violent, nihilistic and ambitious affiliate of Al Qaeda. And then when the United States, in 2006, ‘07, ‘08, believed that it had dealt a fatal blow to that organization, that, along with the Syrian Civil War next door, combined to create an enemy far greater, far more loathsome and terrifying than the one that the United States went into Iraq to stop.

We have seen this again and again and again in conditions of occupation, apartheid, strangulation, whereby, as these conditions persist, they don’t empower the levelest heads among us. They create despair, and despair will have a reaction. Despair will emerge in ways that we who do not experience that despair will find barbaric, probably correctly so in many cases, and more importantly, won’t anticipate.

Only when you deal at the root with addressing the fundamental conditions of that despair can this dynamic change at all. And to expect this to be an exception is to be blind to a history that we have seen unfold not just in our lifetimes, but across 75 years of Israeli history and American sponsorship.

Peter Beinart

People act as if this conflict began with Hamas. Palestinians were fighting against Israel and Zionism, including by killing civilians. For instance, in the hijackings of the 1970s, the 1972 Munich Olympics. And that was not Hamas. Hamas didn’t exist. That wasn’t Islamists. Those were largely — a lot of them were leftist Palestinian organizations. So anyone who thinks you are going to end Palestinian attacks on civilians even if you could get rid of Hamas, unless you deal with the root of the violence of oppression, it seems to me is kidding themselves.

Ezra Klein

Something you often hear said is why isn’t there a nonviolent Palestinian movement? Why can’t this be more like the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa? Why can’t it be more like the Gandhian independence movement in India?

And you wrote a great piece for The Times kind of thinking through, particularly, the South African comparison. So how do you contrast that? And what is your answer to why the path of violence has been chosen and the path of nonviolence seems so now dormant?

Peter Beinart

Well, the African National Congress was not nonviolent. In the early 1960s, they actually adopted armed struggle. And yet, they worked pretty hard to not go after civilians. They felt like that was a moral red line, rightly. And the argument that I made in my piece — of course, there are many, many differences between these two situations — is to understand how the A.N.C. was able to maintain that moral code in which, at one point, they took responsibility and virtually apologized after some of their cadres, their commandos had killed civilians, was that their moral strategy was working.

They saw that, by the 1980s, an anti-Apartheid movement had emerged across the world, including in the United States, led by the Black community in the United States in particular, that had gotten to impose sanctions, that had led to divestment efforts. And it produced a virtuous cycle that made it easier for them to maintain their moral core.

Now, Hamas has never had the same moral core that the A.N.C. had, to be clear. But there are many Palestinians who have spoken in the language of human rights and international law and coexistence and opposed violence against civilians and called for boycotts and called for sanctions and tried to go to the International Criminal Court and tried to go to the United Nations. Tragically, in my view, unlike what we were able to do in America in the 1980s, which was to strengthen and empower those people, those people have been shut down, not just defeated, but often criminalized.

I’m not saying that everyone needs to sign up to every aspect of the boycott divestment sanction movement. But if there is no form of ethical or nonviolent Palestinian resistance that you support, then you were just telling Palestinians they should accept their oppression in silence, you are going to empower Hamas.

Spencer Ackerman

And not just accept their oppression in silence, disappear from the face of the Earth. Every single day Palestinians experience violence. That was true before Oct. 7. It is true certainly in the wake of it.

What happened to a Palestinian nonviolent effort?

Well, part of it is Israel killed those people. Israel put their leaders in jail. I’m so old that I remember — I guess back in the mid-2000s when people talked about the importance of releasing Marwan Barghouti from prison on the idea that he was a way out of the P.L.O. and Hamas in a different way.

Ezra Klein

Do you want to say who he is?

Spencer Ackerman

A Palestinian leader who tried to forge a different path, who emerged from conditions of violent resistance but was trying to move toward a different form of national struggle.

And this also is an important point here. The United States, as a matter of policy, suppressed that. The United States rejected Palestinian aspirations at the United Nations, vetoed resolutions.

Peter probably knows more than I do how many states in the United States it is forbidden to have any involvement with boycott, divestment and sanctions, where there are penalties for state interaction with those movements and those efforts. And more fundamentally, continued to fund and arm Israel and provide it diplomatic support while it suppressed legitimate Palestinian national aspirations.

And so I find it a little frustrating, certainly not as frustrating as a Palestinian would, but frustrating to hear from people who have no intention of honoring and bringing about Palestinian national aspirations, that they just don’t do it the right way.

The fact of the matter is people deserve freedom because they are people. And that I think speaks to a reality that we as Americans tend not to acknowledge.

Ezra Klein

And my sense, Spencer, is that in the same pier, there’s this very sharp break around the role America is trying to play. Barack Obama didn’t get a lot done here. But one thing he did try to do, more so than any president since Carter, was challenge Israel on the settlements. And I would say he had a showdown with Netanyahu on that and he lost.

Spencer Ackerman

Not only did he lose — I remember, in 2010, when Joe Biden went as an envoy to secure the first steps toward a return to the peace process. And Netanyahu’s response was to announce more settlement construction.

Ezra Klein

A very direct snub. I mean, that was very, very calculated.

Spencer Ackerman

And it was hard not to think about that as Netanyahu and Biden embraced. Forgive me for being the war on terror guy who constantly goes back to the war on terror, but among the things that happened during that period was the war on terror in which the position of the United States, certainly beginning in September of 2001, was that Israel was fighting in microcosm the circumstance that the United States was fighting.

And accordingly, there was no appetite to prompt Israel to return to any kind of negotiating posture when the prevailing view in Washington, and certainly embraced by the Israelis because of how well it suited them, was that the Palestinians were no different, functionally, from Al Qaeda. And that was a false equivalence that many in American politics and media were not particularly inclined to question.

And as those conditions continued, Israel built its wall around the West Bank, which was a term people policed very heavily so as not to call it a wall. And I think it’s very obvious that it was and remains a wall. That the United States reached the thing that we constantly talk about in this day and age not reaching, which is normalization.

Normalization of the persistent immiseration of the Palestinian people. Normalization of the sense that I think Peter has discussed quite eloquently of — and Tareq Baconi cited as well — a certain equilibrium that we saw on Oct. 7 where it leads. That if you would simply find a way to ignore Palestinian national aspirations and the basic facts of Palestinian material life, that the region would simply move on, that Israel would find normalization from the Gulf States and eventually Saudi Arabia.

And whatever else it is that Hamas might have sought to achieve, unrealistically through its attacks beginning on Oct. 7, that equilibrium has indeed been shattered. And the United States, were it to recognize itself as a central actor that it, in fact, is in this conflict, would come to a deep reckoning of the way in which it enabled this circumstance to take root and adjust course accordingly.

Ezra Klein

I’ve been very struck watching Biden. A lot of what he has said actually is opposed to things that have come out elsewhere in his administration I felt has been pretty on point. But the degree of immediate locking arms with Israel and Netanyahu, knowing him a bit, and knowing his history on these issues, knowing his fury after what happened with Netanyahu in the Obama administration, I’ve wondered a little bit about his longer term play.

That something that was happening in Israeli-American politics is that Israel is becoming right-wing coded. It was becoming something that Democrats had more complicated feelings on. Netanyahu had embraced Trump very fulsomely. Joe Biden is a guy who likes to imagine himself like one of the great diplomatic presidents of all time. As a Senate Foreign Relations Chair, he likes doing his shuttle diplomacy.

And he seems to me to be trying to rebuild a role for America as a broker, possibly at the cost of its capability of bringing together other players in the region. But trying to rebuild its influence in Israel, hopefully with, on his part, some end game. But that has struck me as a possible way of reading just the level of intense support and political capital he’s invested in this immediately.

Spencer Ackerman

The people who formed the highest echelons of the Biden administration were the people who formed the second highest echelons of the Obama administration. And particularly amongst his Middle East people, their takeaway from the experience is that Obama’s instincts throughout the Middle East failed and were a mess, that toward the end of the Obama administration, after the Iran deal, there was a strain that, I think it’s fair to say, the Biden administration has run with as the centrality of its foreign policy toward the Middle East.

And that is, embrace the old autocrats as hard as you can. Embrace the Petro states as hard as you can. Recognize that nothing you will want to see accomplished in the rest of the world will happen unless you unwind things like the way that Biden called Saudi Arabia a pariah state. It took the better part of a year for that to unwind.

And a central aspect of that experience was seeing the ways in which efforts by Obama to impose the barest outlines of a political settlement for a two-state solution on Israel came to nothing but tears, needless antagonism and struggle, and the acceleration of that what you call right-wing codedness. Biden wants none of that smoke. Absolutely none of it.

I think it is fair to question, after Oct. 7, the degree to which that strategy lies in ruins to simply look past as so much of the world and look past Israeli apartheid and the conditions of Palestinian deprivation and consider that a footnote to a glorious history in which the United States has this seamless interoperable network — this is often how they describe it from a security perspective — in which it is the security guarantor of the Middle East, and relations in the region with a rising China remain commercial and transactional, and that will secure the American position in the Middle East for generations to come. It doesn’t look like that’s really working out.

And we should also just say we have not seen the end of the way this war looks. Every day I wake up scared and checking the newsfeeds to see if a second front has opened up in Southern Lebanon. That’s a real possibility here. The United States has two aircraft carrier strike groups quite possibly to assist in an assault should Hezbollah decide to enter the war in force, at which point you really do have an expanded regional war that the United States is in directly. And I don’t know if the United States has really thought through the degree to which it itself is very close to being a combatant in this conflict.

Ezra Klein

I’m curious what you read and what the United States wants here?

Peter Beinart

I think the most generous interpretation is that Biden believes that if he hugs Netanyahu and he wins credibility among Israelis, he may have the leverage to, behind the scenes, restrain what Israel does, so it’s not totally apocalyptic. It doesn’t spur the regional war or the overthrow of the Jordanian regime or the overthrow of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank. That he can do that behind the scenes. That he kind of reasons that Obama didn’t have credibility in Israel — partly because of who he was, but partly because of public confrontation — so he’s going to do the opposite.

But I think history will not be kind to the Biden administration’s way of approaching with this. They just didn’t have any stomach for any political fight in Washington to do anything for the Palestinians and essentially acted as if that could just be managed as they went off to fight their new Cold War with China and then to deal with Russia. And they contributed to this feeling among Palestinians that they were being more and more marginalized, that they were more and more hopeless, and that contributed, that empowered Hamas to take this action.

And so part of the problem is they have accepted a political reality in Washington that essentially says you can’t have a fight with Israel. But by accepting that political reality, they have also strengthened that political reality. If a Democratic president had tried to do something different, given what we see among polling shifts among Democrats out there in the country, and actually led, he could have potentially changed the politics. Instead, what Joe Biden has done is he’s essentially strengthened a kind of consensus in Washington that many grass roots Democrats don’t support. And by doing so, I think he contributed to this explosion.

Ezra Klein

But do you think it changes now? I mean, do you think there is something to the idea that if Biden is able to win back credibility for democratic administration in Israel at a point of weakness for Netanyahu, when the U.S. government at this point was doing a lot of deals and working with the Gulf States — I mean, the idea that the equilibrium — that you can just forget about the Palestinian problem — has been shattered is true in America, too. That’s true for the Biden administration, too.

I do not want to suggest that all this ends in a happy ending. I basically couldn’t believe anything further from the truth. But I do wonder if there is not an opening here, if things do not go too far off the rails in the immediate near term, to try to begin the work that was being done before of are there not deals that can be made, are there not people who can be empowered, is there not some legacy other than the continuing dissolution of this?

Peter Beinart

I think it would be very difficult with this Israeli government given how radical it is. And I fear that the Biden administration, if it manages to somehow avert a regional catastrophe, will of go back and say, OK, things are now OK now.

The best case scenario might be, in the short-term, that there is some Israeli election that produces some kind of political earthquake. Now, that political earthquake could lead Israel even further to the right. We have no idea really what it would mean.

But things have been deeply destabilized. And in the best case scenario, perhaps you might, especially because of the forces that were leading against this judicial overhaul, that maybe there could be some new political leadership in Israel that Biden could work with and do something that no American government and no Israeli government has ever done, which is restrain settlement growth, for instance.

We’ve never done that. Israel has never done that, even during the peace process. That would be, I think, the best case scenario. It wouldn’t even bring us close to some kind of resolution. But it might at least create some kind of hope for Palestinians that they’re not just looking into despair as far as the eye can see.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ezra Klein

One thing that was in the piece you wrote, Peter, is a kind of idea that I’ve been thinking about since then, of the tactics that generate a response, that generate a kind of success then empower the people behind them. And you get into these cycles, right? Hardliners have a tendency to empower hardliners. Hamas throws rockets at Israel and gets some concessions. Hamas kidnaps an Israeli soldier and actually does get a prisoner swap. And that makes Hamas look stronger.

Netanyahu’s government is able to wall off the Palestinians, and build an Iron Dome, and fortify the wall, and attacks are going down and that makes him look stronger. Or similarly, there’s an attack and now you need the hard right, you need the more military-oriented leaders, because, of course, you have to avenge the attack.

And so you write that in the case of South Africa, that ethical resistance elicited international support, and international support made ethical resistance easier to sustain. And in Israel today, the dynamic is almost exactly the opposite.

So I guess this raises this kind of deep question for me, which is I’ve long ago given up on the idea that there is some kind of fantasy dealmaking to imagine here, that I can kind of in my head imagine the land swaps and the right of return dynamics and all the things that would get to a deal.

I think the thing you’re getting at in that piece, which is really quite powerful, is that until there are different empowered actors, there can be no deal. You have to change the political economy of the whole thing. You have to change who has strength. And I’m curious how you think that gets done.

Peter Beinart

We’re so far away from it. But I do think that one thing would be really important is 20 percent of Israel’s citizens are Palestinians. They are a really important group of people. Because although they’re severely discriminated against, they’re the only Palestinians who actually have the ability to act politically, to vote.

The problem in Israeli politics — one major problem is that there is no genuine joint Jewish and Palestinian party. The parties are essentially all based on tribe, on various different kinds of tribes. And so you don’t have a party that even models the vision of the kind of politics that I would ultimately like to see.

And if such a party could emerge and speak to Israelis and Palestinians, because it would be composed of Israelis and Palestinians, and say the way we behave in this party, coming together around a vision of humanity and equality under the law and liberal democracy, and fighting for it together as Jews and Palestinians inside Israel, I think that could resonate around the whole world and show a model of what might be possible. We desperately need models of what’s possible now for people not to lose all hope.

Spencer Ackerman

I agree that it looks as far away as it’s ever looked. But at the same time, I remember that when the United States imposes conditions on its allies and foreign clients, quite a great deal that doesn’t seem possible could, in fact, become possible.

If the United States is, as the Biden administration has done thus far, simply express solidarity with Israel, give it accelerated ammunition shipments, then we won’t have any of those incentives created. We won’t have any actors who could break this dynamic empowered. We won’t have movements and constituencies for Palestinian liberation taken seriously and sat across a negotiating table from Israel.

I don’t pretend that my perspective holds much in the way of a constituency in Israel right now. So I want to speak with some humbleness. But the thing is what’s possible is very often different from what’s necessary. And only when people of conscience hold true to what’s necessary, can we start to expand the limits of what is possible, until finally a way pointing out of this horrific reality can come to pass.

And that’s something that is not something that Israel would be granting Palestinians. It would be something Israel would be performing for the survival of its own people, the people who we have, particularly in the Jewish community in Israel and around the world, been agonizing over the fate of.

Ezra Klein

I want to make sure some of the competing Israeli narratives are felt here. And one of the very dominant ones has been that there were efforts towards peace, or many, many peace processes, and obviously the narratives of what happened at places like Camp David and in this or that negotiation are highly contested — I’m not going to try to untangle them here — but that it fundamentally, to many Israelis, didn’t work. There wasn’t enough of a negotiating partner. Intifadas got launched. There were still rockets coming over. There were suicide bombings.

And then it seemed to me — and this was a very depressing thing to watch happen — that a new consensus emerged, like, we’re done with that. The far right in Israel was highly empowered. We’re going to cordon off Gaza, cordon off the West Bank, have a blockade on Gaza, build the Iron Dome, build the wall, have intelligence operations mow the lawn by which it was a very bloodless way of saying launch repeated attacks to try to degrade the capabilities of Hamas, in particular, and other terrorist groups.

And that within that there are demands placed, if this is going to change, on the Palestinians, too. I mean, and particularly now that Israel has just suffered this attack. And so I’m curious how you think about that side of it as well. And in particular, what builds trust for Israelis?

Peter Beinart

Right. And that’s why I, like Spencer, am so afraid of the idea of mass ethnic cleansing, because, I think, if you’ve written off the possibility of giving people equality within the country in which they live, which is essentially Israel because they live under Israeli control in various ways, and you have given up on the idea of partition and says it’s no longer possible, and you’ve given up on this idea of what the Palestinian writer Tareq Baconi calls the kind of violent equilibrium in which you can manage this, then what are you left with but the idea of trying to get those people out of there.

I would say, first of all, it is very important for Israeli Jews and people around the world to know that there are Palestinians who have condemned these attacks, who have said that it is fundamentally antithetical to them to take civilian life of any group.

Ayman Odeh, for instance, who’s just about the most important — one of the most important Palestinian political leaders in Israel has said that unequivocally. Adalah, an organization of Palestinian Israelis. There have been people who have said that. I think it’s really important that we don’t lose their voices in this.

On the question of what happened during all these negotiations, both Palestinians and Israeli Jews believed that the other side was not acting in good faith. And if you really go through all of the details, I think what you come to at the end of the day is that they had two different conceptions of what this partition would look like that could never be bridged. But since Netanyahu came back to power in 2009, we have not had an Israeli government that has been interested in a Palestinian state on any terms.

So even if you say that Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas deserve blame for what happened in 2000, 2001, 2007, 2008 — and I think there is blame to go around — the problem with blaming the Palestinians since 2009 is there has been no Israeli partner to even test their willingness to accept the idea of a Palestinian state near the 1967 lines in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Ezra Klein

So let me begin to bring this to a close, and not with imaginings of a deal that isn’t going to happen, but with a more direct question, which is — I agree with your point, Peter, that with this Israeli government it’s very hard to imagine that kind of change. Who are figures — political leaders, thinkers, people with a constituency of some sort — on both sides of the conflict who you all have seen, heard from, and who are the kind of people you wish would begin to hold more power? Are there people who are for you folks charting a pathway forward that has some glimmers of something different?

Spencer Ackerman

I think Ayman Odeh is someone who does not command a substantial constituency in Israel — and we shouldn’t underestimate the left’s nearly 20-year marginalization in Israel — but, as Peter pointed out earlier, is someone whose politics represents something outside of the zero-sum nature of what Israeli politics that we’re seeing with the Netanyahu government represents.

And like Peter says, we don’t know the direction of a government that may take shape in response to fury at Netanyahu that Israelis have expressed for the last nearly two weeks over this. But that fury is not necessarily a left wing fury. That fury very often has to do with the ways in which Netanyahu’s gamble did not yield security.

And the question is going to be what Israelis take away from that lesson. Was the failure in security simply a failure of sufficiently militarizing Israel toward the South and away from the West Bank, or was it a more fundamental failure in which the policy of keeping Hamas strong and funded in order to never have to divest Israel of the West Bank was the fundamental failure here?

Ezra Klein

Peter, do you have any other people who spring to mind in that?

Peter Beinart

Yes, I think I mentioned in passing this group, which is in English called “Standing Together,” led by Sally Abed and Alon-Lee Green and many others. It’s an organization of Israeli and Palestinian citizens who, under the most extraordinarily difficult circumstances, especially now where they’re literally facing state repression, have tried to offer a vision of Israeli Jews and Palestinians standing together for mutual safety, mutual equality and coexistence. And those people give me hope.

Ezra Klein

Are there any politicians in Israel that you find — and here I mean actually Jewish politicians. The collapse of the Israeli left has been so stark from when I started being involved in this issue in my 20s or in my teens. Does anybody feel to you like they have any hope of reviving something?

Peter Beinart

The problem is in this — I think in this idea of the Jewish left. We would not talk in the United States about the white left or the Christian left. Inherent in being in the left is you don’t stand for tribe. And the problem in Israeli politics is there is not a robust politics that essentially sees itself as neither Jewish, nor Palestinian.

There is a Jewish member of the Knesset in the Hadash party, which is a mostly Palestinian party. That man, Ofer Cassif, was just basically banned from the Knesset for 45 days for public statements he made, just to give you a sense of how difficult it is to occupy that. But those are the people that I look to.

Ezra Klein

And then always our final question, what are three books you’d recommend to the audience? And Spencer, why don’t I start with you?

Spencer Ackerman

Sure. So three books, and I appreciate the question, Ezra. First, I would recommend reading “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine,” by the historian Rashid Khalidi. That is a Palestinian — a very accessible Palestinian history as precis to the conflict beginning of the 20th century to the early 21st.

A shattering book that people really ought to read is “An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba.” That’s edited by Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha. Reading the history from the people who experienced the Nakba around 1948 and periods both before and after is, for those who know Jewish history, shattering in its familiarity. And reading, as well, the accounts of people who survived the Nakba, who talk about how these were their neighbors, people that they loved, their children played with, who they had all sorts of social relationships with for a long period of time, turn on them and force them away is a shattering thing to remember and to hear.

And then finally, I would recommend Benny Morris and my former Guardian colleague Ian Black’s book, “Israel’s Secret Wars,” which is a history of the rise of the Israeli intelligence services and their role in statecraft in Israel. Also has some simply incredible stories that are amazing to believe are true.

Ezra Klein

Peter?

Peter Beinart

Because this has been a conversation among Jews and I know you’re going to have Palestinian guests, I’m going to mention three books by Palestinians, not because there are not so many books by Israeli Jews that I love, but just because since Palestinians have often had, as Edward Said said this, not had this permission to narrate, I think it’s really important in this moment that their voices be elevated.

The first is Edward Said’s classic book, “The Question of Palestine,” in 1979, which really lays out the Palestinian experience. And what I love about that book and find so moving about it is it’s a very, very profound critique of Zionism. And yet, Said is such a humanist that he’s also able to describe in that book to understand why Zionism was so appealing to so many Jews and why many Jews found it liberating even as he found it to be oppressive, and Palestinians did.

The second is Raja Shehadeh’s memoir, “Strangers in the House.” Spencer mentioned the Nakba. This is the story of growing up in a family of people who were expelled. And it gives you an intimate glimpse into that refugee experience, which is so central to the Palestinian experience, and yet I feel like so often is missing from the American discourse about Israel-Palestine.

And the third is — we’ve mentioned Tareq Baconi before — Tareq Baconi’s book, “Hamas Contained.” It’s a book about Hamas, which has no illusions, which is very, very critical in parts, but describes the history of Hamas as a political organization that one can understand certain decisions it’s made in response to certain incentives. And if there is to be a better future for Israelis and Palestinians than the one that Hamas envisions, part of that will require understanding Hamas better so that Jews and Palestinians together can create better alternatives.

Ezra Klein

Spencer Ackerman, Peter Beinart, thank you very much.

Spencer Ackerman

Thank you, Ezra.

Peter Beinart

Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Ezra Klein

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

188



Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’

Grief moves slowly, and war moves quickly. After Hamas assailants killed at least 1,400 Israelis and took hundreds more hostage, Israel dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza in the first week of a conflict that is ongoing. So far, more than 5,000 Palestinians are reported dead and many more injured. There’s no one way to cover this that reconciles all that is happening and all that needs to be felt.

My approach is going to be to try to cover it from many different perspectives, but I wanted to start with the one I’m closest to, which has felt particularly tricky in recent weeks: that of the Jewish left. So I invited Spencer Ackerman and Peter Beinart on to the show.

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

Ackerman is an award-winning columnist for The Nation and the author of “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump” and the newsletter Forever Wars. Peter Beinart is an editor at large of Jewish Currents, the author of the Beinart Notebook newsletter and a professor of journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. And they’ve each taken up angles I think are particularly important right now: the way that Sept. 11 should inform both Israel’s response and the need to empower different kinds of actors and tactics if we want to see a different future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.


Together we discuss the goals behind Hamas’s initial attack on Israeli Jewish civilians, how the attack changed the psychology of Jews living in and out of Israel and what Israel is trying to achieve in its military response.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

(A full transcript of the episode is available here.)


ImageCredit...Efrat Kussell and Courtesy of Peter Beinart


More on the Israel-Hamas war

Opinion | ‘The Ezra Klein Show’
Israel Is Giving Hamas What It Wants
Oct. 18, 2023

Opinion | Peter Beinart
There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive.
Oct. 14, 2023

Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
Israel Is About to Make a Terrible Mistake
Oct. 19, 2023


This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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P

Peter

Somewhere

Oct. 24

As a German I find it rather strange to listen to three Jewish men being so understanding of the plight of the Palestinians, who want to destroy them all. Do the people in Gaza suffer? Yes, they do. But why is no one holding their leaders responsible for their suffering? Would any of the leftist students protesting for the rights of Palestinians would want to live in a country ruled by Hamas? Or the PLO? Would they want to live in Lebanon? These are all corrupt countries, and no, you can not blame that on the existence of the state of Israel. Where are the voices that ask the Palestinians to protest against their corrupt leadership? Like hundreds of thousands Israelis protested against Bibi and his extremist government?

I do feel for all the innocent lives that have been lost during the last centuries. But right now, after what happened on 10/7, the full responsibility for what is happening lies with Hamas.

16 Replies207 RecommendShareFlag

Be Very commented October 24

B

Be Very

Careful what you wish for

Oct. 24

I applaud the Jewish left for attempting to reconcile both an existential attack on their homeland and an effort to minimize impacts to everyday Palestinian civilians.

I only wish I could hear similar voices of empathy from Palestinian and Arab leaders condemning baby-beheading, grandma-raping, women-parading, infant-dismembering barbarian thugs - but all that happens is attempting to blame the Jews for Islamists blowing up a hospital.

As a liberal, the disparity between the "two sides" is both glaringly obvious - and sickening to witness in real time.

2 Replies150 RecommendShareFlag

Chazak17 commented October 24

C

Chazak17

Rockville,MD

Oct. 24

Beinart & Ackerman are as representative of Jewish Americans as Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson are of Black America.  Both Beinhart and Ackerman are fringe players, virtually no one in the Jewish community, including the leftist Jewish community takes either one of them seriously.  Beinart makes a living criticizing Israel and acting like that is a badge of courage, as if there isn't an anti-Israel industrial complex.  I think he is still trying to get back in with the 'cool kids' after supporting Bush's mistaken invasion of Iraq. 

If they had any real courage they would be lecturing their far left, antisemitic friends about apologizing for anti-LGBTQ, anti-woman's rights, antisemitic Hamas.  That would take real courage.

2 Replies124 RecommendShareFlag

bejeweled commented October 24

B

bejeweled

New York

Oct. 24

I had hoped this conversation would be an introspective concerning the fundamental concerns of liberal Jews and the loneliness we are experiencing amongst our perceived allies. I for one feel so alone these past two weeks and have been absolutely stunned by the glee I witnessed amongst my so-called comrades as well as the sheer euphoria and might I say ignorance shown by the college "educated" youth after the butchering of Israelis (and I might add - before Israel had initiated its bombing campaign). 

This turned out to be another rote condemnation of Israel without any historical context, leaving out of course the multiple peace offers rejected since 1967 and by Arafat in the early 2000's which if accepted could have avoided all this human misery.

4 Replies108 RecommendShareFlag

Tim commented October 24

T

Tim

Mississippi

Oct. 24

I appreciate the attempt at nuance but am disturbed that nobody stated plainly that Hamas must be destroyed to the fullest extent possible. If you want a peace process to begin again you must accept that will not happen until Hamas is eliminated. Of course another form of Islamist extremism could rise up in the future but how is that an excuse for not taking care of Hamas now? To not destroy Hamas would lead to more violence in the long run and leave the Gaza Strip with no hope for a future.

10 Replies87 RecommendShareFlag

dontbeleveit commented October 24

D

dontbeleveit

NJ

Oct. 24

And there is something on the left that puzzles me.

The left supports:

1. women's equal rights

2. gay respect and equal rights

3. a somewhat atheist posture or at the minimum  the separation between religion and politics

Hamas, Iran  and Hezbollah otherwise:

1. treats women as either slaves, objects and/or a procreation factory

2. hang gays from public lamp posts

3. Scream Allah hu-Akbar while practicing their savage deeds believing that are fulfilling their Holly Koran religious precepts, precepts that according to them direct their whole political actions.

To me this phenomenon of the left supporting Hamas and Hezbollah and marching the streets screaming their sympathy is somewhat incredible.

6 Replies84 RecommendShareFlag

Heather commented October 24

H

Heather

New Jersey

Oct. 24

I must say that I am disappointed in today's episode. When you speak of "multiple nakbahs" without any sense of historical context, it stung. Israel declared a state in 48 with the UN Partition. The Arabs rejected theirs and the Arabs countries all declared war. Imagine if they hadn't and the Arabs living in the Palestinian Mandate had accepted. 

There are scores of Muslim countries in the Middle East. Not one of them is willing to absorb and welcome the Palestinian Arab refugees, while the one Jewish state welcomed all those Jews expelled from their Arab homes.

In 1948, Israel allowed the Arabs to stay and granted those who did citizenship. You speak of Apartheid? Arabs serve in every level of government. Name one Arab country that can claim the same about Jews? On that subject, how many Jews are even left in all those Arab countries.

If Jews on the Left are feeling melancholy about their abandonment, today's episode added salt to that wound.

1 Reply83 RecommendShareFlag

Ok commented October 24

O

Ok

NY

Oct. 24

How do we break past the old debates?  Why should we ever expect the extremists on either side to compromise?  Their views are mutually exclusive.

The fundamentalists on the Israeli side have been winning for decades and they have been thriving--the settlements have expanded, a contiguous Palestinean state gets harder to realize every day that passes, and they control the government and army.  

The fundamentalists on the Palestinean side are content to keep power at the expense of their people, for their leaders to enrich themselves at the expense of their people, and to push an impossible agenda at the expense of their people.  

Why are moderate people and moderate governments supporting the status quo?  It only favors the fundamentalists.

A solution based on justice and dignity will never accepted by either side--so why try to appease them?  

The moderates on the Israeli side have been co-opted by the extremists--everything is based on the manipulation of genuine trauma.  Hamas has only grown the cycle of violence and fed that trauma.  

It takes courage and reflection to break the cycle.

7 Replies80 RecommendShareFlag

Allan commented October 24

A

Allan

New York

Oct. 24

I have come to value this podcast for the intellectual rigor you bring to every subject.  This increased my disappointment at the intellectual laziness demonstrated on this .

Mr. Klein's guests repeated several times that Israel is making a mistake by attacking Gaza as a whole, rather than focusing on Hamas.  That’s like saying “in WWII, America should have attacked the Nazis, rather than Germany as a whole.”  

Hamas is the government of Gaza.  It embeds itself in, and hides behind the people of Gaza.  It steals the food, medicine, electricity and building materials Israel has supplied to Gaza for decades, often for free – supplies that continued to flow in the past even while Hamas was killing Israeli civilians – and uses those provisions to strengthen its ability to carry out its stated mission: the murder of as many Jews as possible.

Thus, while Israel’s goal is the elimination of Hamas and wishes no harm to those who suffer under its rule, Israel has not devised a way to bring about that elimination without, unfortunately and unavoidably, causing that suffering, even as Israel tries to minimize that harm.  If you have a way to neutralize Hamas without harming the people of Gaza, I know the government of Israel would love to hear it.

To make the point differently: international law and morality do not require that Israel accept with impunity the murder of its population because preventing the murder will harm those governed by the murderers.

71 RecommendShareFlag

Bill commented October 24

Bill

Bill

New York

Oct. 24

So strange how Mr. Klein and others of his ilk think an unmitigated angry and murderous response by Israel is going to do anything other than make things worse for Israelis. Americans made a similar mistake with 9/11 when we put revenge above a measured response that would have been commensurate to what happened. 

Instead, we invaded two nations that weren’t directly responsible for the attack on our nation, and meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, where the terrorists actually came from, was let entirely off the hook.

9/11 and the terrorist attack on Israel are dissimilar in many ways, but the unrestrained response of using overwhelming and indiscriminate force to exact revenge are very similar, and in the end Israel will make things harder on itself. Whatever short-term satisfaction is gleaned from killing thousands of civilians will end up costing far more in the long run. And the notion that Palestinian civilians deserve to be punished for harboring Hamas fighters is reckless.

Giving in to vengeful rage is already having a negative impact on Israel as video coming out of Gaza reflects the suffering and deaths of innocent people. Leveling residential communities to get at the bad guys is a failed objective, and the death and destruction that will result from an invasion will make things far worse. It is impossible to justify killing a few hundred innocent civilians to get at one terrorist. 

How many more children must die before Israel’s thirst for blood and revenge is satisfied?

7 Replies60 RecommendShareFlag

Colin Babb commented October 24

C

Colin Babb

Annapolis

Oct. 24

The last few weeks have led me to only one firm conclusion--and I'm saying this as someone who otherwise considers himself a progressive and leftist--anyone who is observing what is happening right now, and has seen what has happened there for the past 120 years, and comes away from all of this thinking that one side or the other is solely "to blame" for what is happening is blind. Completely, and utterly, blind. The Middle East is the graveyard of moral clarity. Unapologetic support for Palestine on the left is as misguided as unapologetic support for Israel on the right. It's disheartening to see how much misplaced certainty there is on display right now.

2 Replies58 RecommendShareFlag

History Guy commented October 24

H

History Guy

Connecticut

Oct. 24

As a Pentagon official said yesterday, there are simply no "good" options for Israel regarding its political and strategic position in the Middle East.

Invade Gaza and subdue Hamas as much as possible and new, radical resistance will arise. Do the same with Hezbollah and Lebanon will manifest another radical group, maybe worse. 

Iran lurks as a funder and supporter of both organizations and will do so again with whatever evolves after their suppression.

The question the 9 million Israelis have to ask themselves, the official went on, is how much of essentially an armed fortress do they want their country to become and how much perpetual war and violence are they willing to put up with?

There no peaceful solutions on the near or long-term horizons.

8 Replies55 RecommendShareFlag

RB commented October 24

R

RB

California

Oct. 24

Tunnel vision will not solve this problem and it's clearly evident that the interviewees are deeply rooted in their own perceptions of cause and effect. Israel is presented as a hawkish, soul crushing entity governed by one individual (a monolith of hate and Palestinian prosecutors). Palestinians are victims of the Nakbah and only seek freedom and proud self determination.  No consideration is given to the fact that much of Israels right leaning transition is a response to the Palestinians behavior. Living under constant treat of suicide bombing and rockets will do that to a nation. 

I will note one main point that has been swept over, to date, there has been no (barguti included) Palestinian leader that accepts Israels right to exist. If any is willing, in their endless abundance of goodwill to accept the existence of Israel, it is only under the condition that the country be flooded with refugees that are hostile to this very nation. What country would ever accept that consideration. 

But lets ignore that for a second and discuss this better future where these two statehoods live side by side. Which country in Israels surrounding would the Palestinian entity emulate? Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Iran? Freedom and self determination, as described by the interviewees, are foreign values that have no real adoption in the region with one exception, flawed as it might be, which is Israel.

2 Replies55 RecommendShareFlag

David commented October 24

D

David

California

Oct. 24

Two thoughts:

1. the Hamas invasion of Israel was inexcusable and unspeakably horrible.

2.  Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is inexcusable and unspeakably horrible.

There.  It's not so hard.

2 Replies54 RecommendShareFlag

RS commented October 24

R

RS

New Jersey

Oct. 24

I was disappointed that no one discussed why the left is so disempowered in Israel, but that's probably because the left failed to negotiate peace each and every time they worked on it. Every deal has resulted in Israeli deaths, and ineffectual to downright murderous Palestinian governments. The moderates within the Palestinian camp in the Middle East, briefly mentioned in this discussion, were ejected from the discourse by Palestinians. Failures from the left, Israeli, Palestinian, and American, all around. 

I am no fan of Netanyahu--I never have been--but the comfort the American left has found in reclining in their armchairs while self-righteously postulating about peace, safe from their children being murdered and raped by their neighbors, is generally repulsive and currently disgusting beyond comprehension. I will not identify myself as a member of the Jewish left even though I am not a member of the Jewish right if it means nodding my head along to conversations like these.

1 Reply49 RecommendShareFlag

barnaby33 commented October 24

barnaby33

barnaby33

San diego

Oct. 24

Demographics are the core elephant in the room. You can't negotiate with people who refuse to acknowledge not just your right to exist, but your right to peaceful safe co-existence. "People deserve freedom because they're people!" The underlying assumption is that people will use that freedom to build decent lives for themselves and their posterity. Show me one Arab society that enjoys freedom and uses that freedom to build decent lives.

1 Reply46 RecommendShareFlag

Rachel commented October 24

R

Rachel

NYC

Oct. 24

I would like to hear from the Palestinian equivalent of Peter Beinart.

1 Reply43 RecommendShareFlag

cali commented October 24

C

cali

san francisco, ca

Oct. 24

Remarkable that these two guests speak about Israel without explicitly stating that they oppose the two-state solution. Peter Beinart believes that the conflict can be settled by creating a new country called Palestine/Israel. I know this because he told me exactly that in response to my question at a public forum in San Francisco earlier this year. How can one realistically imagine this coming about when a significant part of the Palestinian leadership and its patron in Iran want no such thing, only that Israel be "wiped off the map"? The attacks on October 7 were so horrific, so unfathomably gruesome, that it is hardly unreasonable to conclude that Hamas is determined to murder every last Jewish Israeli. Where does one see a willingness on the part of Palestinians in the occupied territories to envision a peaceful future living alongside Jews? Who among them accepts the idea of a Jewish homeland in "Israel/Palestine" as legitimate? Even the Palestinian Authority leader Abbas denies any Jewish history in the land and describes the state of Israel as a "colonial project." (Where is the Hebrew-speaking mother country?) The land of Israel has been central to Jewish identity and practice for over 3000 years. I agree that it must be shared with the Palestinians, somehow, some way, but utterly reject the idea that this conflict is solely the fault of the Jews of Israel.

1 Reply42 RecommendShareFlag

Milliband commented October 24

M

Milliband

Medford

Oct. 24

My question is that when American bombers killed women and children in WWII - who was more responsible, Hitler or Roosevelt?

38 RecommendShareFlag

Worried Jew commented October 24

W

Worried Jew

McLean, VA

Oct. 24

It is disheartening that there is no in-depth discussion of the responsibility of Palestinians or the greater Arab world. What pragmatic solutions are they putting on the table? The false narrative that Israel is entirely to entirely responsible for the fate of the Palestinians is too one-sided to bear. The double standard that seems to be permanently applied to Israel is ugly and tiresome. Can anyone remember this much effort made to explore what opportunities the Palestinians flubbed? Let's hear Ezra ask Palestinians to accept their failure to create a better world for going on four generations. Let them admit what they should have done differently and what they could do differently now. It won't happen because the story has always been and is always going to be about Israel's mistakes.

38 RecommendShareFlag

Be Very commented October 24

B

Be Very

Careful what you wish for

Oct. 24

@Bill 

You know when there was a ceasefire and relative peace? October 6th - before Hamas brutally raped, dismembered, murdered infants, grandmothers, and teenage daughters. Any guess what happened on October 7th?

I haven't heard the condemnation of Hamas/ISIS bombing their own people 600 times in three weeks (I won't even mention bombing Israelis, since caring about Jews does not seem to be high on the priority list).

"Aiding and abetting" terrorists is actually a crime, too.

32 RecommendShareFlag

Sam commented October 24

S

Sam

NY

Oct. 24

@Tim How would you put those words into action if you’re a private citizen of the United States? Our country has relations with Israel and gives that country money. We have no relations with Hamas, for very obvious and good reasons - they’re evil. But that means there is no Hamas embassy to protest outside of. There are no American universities or NGOs that take money from, or give money to, Hamas or its affiliates. None of my elected representatives have any pro-Hamas leanings. I can therefore take no concrete action with the words “Hamas is bad,” unless my goal is to prolong the war or paper over Israel’s shameful treatment of all Palestinians by tying all Palestinians to Hamas. 

But I can ask my government to stop giving Israel a blank check. I can ask my school or NGO to cut ties with Israel or at least West Bank settlements. I can tell my representatives that they’ll lose my vote if they don’t take Palestinian rights seriously. These are all things I can actually do.

31 RecommendShareFlag

Mark Kessinger commented October 24

M

Mark Kessinger

New York, NY

Oct. 24

@dontbeleveit -- Most of the left does not support Hamas or Hezbollah, but rather recognizes that the Palestinians are human beings with human rights.

This business of making broad, sweeping statements about what "the Left" supports based on the public statements of a handful of student organizations, and also equating support for the Palestinians and people of Gaza with support for Hamas, Hezbollah or any other group with its own agenda in the region, is a vile, dishonest and specious tactic used by those who support ONLY Israel!

I speak as a gay man.  The fact that the groups that currently govern Gaza do not conduct their affairs in a manner compliant with my views doesn't change the fact that ordinary people in Gaza have endured injustices at the hands of the Israelis.

29 RecommendShareFlag

Sophia commented October 24

S

Sophia

WI

Oct. 24

@History Guy

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

Albert Einstein

There are a lot of actors in this scenario who benefit from the belief that peace canny be achieved.

28 RecommendShareFlag

bejeweled commented October 24

B

bejeweled

New York

Oct. 24

@Andrew 

Unfortunately I've come to believe that a ceasefire will only perpetuate the status quo. I have come to recognize after seeing the intentional malicious butchery of Hamas that the only solution is to eradicate them from Gaza. It will be very difficult and bloody but it would actually benefit the Palestinians even more than the Israelis in the long run.  A ceasefire will only prolong the misery. Alternatives are not rooted in the reality of the Middle East neighborhood. The Israelis need to think it through for themselves. I am not going to sit here on the Upper West side and dictate to them what they need to do.

28 RecommendShareFlag

horace commented October 24

H

horace

oregon

Oct. 24

@Peter The real "leaders" of the Palestinians are the Israeli government, who controls and holds the lives of millions of Palestinians in occupation. For decades now. Some people still neglect the roots of this conflict; it's not antisemitism, its imperialism/colonialism.

28 RecommendShareFlag

Francis Walsingham commented October 24

F

Francis Walsingham

Tucson

Oct. 24

One subject might be why so much of the non-Jewish Left has become anti-Semitic and what to do about that. And, how the political future looks when that part of the Left gains influence.

26 RecommendShareFlag

ph commented October 24

P

ph

California

Oct. 24

@Peter In 1984, I visited Germany, met many who fought in WWII. They desperately wanted me to know, they were not Nazis—stuck instead in a horrid reality. Trapped and afraid. (Not heroes!)  I think your German history teaches us (to some extent) why most Palestinians are not fighting against Hamas.  Torture and terror keeps regularly people from becoming heroes.

25 RecommendShareFlag

Liz commented October 24

L

Liz

NYC

Oct. 24

I have not finished this yet, I realize this is the beginning of a series and I'm veering. However the one thing this conversation seems to be missing, is the same thing that the leadership of both the Palestinians and Israelis seem to be missing. Women. I am finding it increasingly frustrating in some circumstances and infuriating in others. I also increasingly believe that any society that leaves one half of its population unrepresented and untapped is doomed to be unbalanced and unhealthy. If a major obstacle in this situation is empathy, I believe we will find strength in women. I hope to hear from more soon.

25 RecommendShareFlag

Ed Townes commented October 24

E

Ed Townes

NYC

Oct. 24

I'm not sure - it hardly matters - whether Tom Friedman could be described as "left-ish," but he - joined by quite a few op-ed columnists and "guests" - demonstrates that what this article implies is rare or difficult ... is actually NEITHER of those.

Anyone whose heart does not go out - UNRESERVEDLY - to the men, women and children (yes, especially the latter) who were killed in or near their homes for no other reason than their religion or nationality is simply too evil to waste time thinking about.

And anyone - particularly a Jewish someone - who doesn't think that all those West Bank settlements (exactly what - in essence - sees most Native Americans living on reservations, while their ancestral lands are now cities, ranches, etc. owned by people who assigned little-to-no value on their lives) are/were ALSO a form of violence ... is equally unable to value morality above expedience.

Mr. Friedman put it so well in a recent NYT podcast. To point out that Israel's GDP per person exceeds that of Germany, ... but the US comes close to giving them a blank check for arms every year WITHOUT insisting that they behave less badly than South Africa at its very worst is all one needs to hear in terms of being able to "hold two thoughts at once."

24 RecommendShareFlag

Patrick commented October 24

P

Patrick

Chicago

Oct. 24

@Lance Brown Israel would have to to more than "guarantee a two-state solution and peaces." That empty rhetoric is what they've used to appease gullible American governments for decades into believing they are actually willing to tolerate a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

They would have to actually dismantle settlements and guarantee a fully sovereign nation, without any ability of Israel to control movement or bomb at will. Otherwise, the Palestinians will realize that it's the same all game Netanyahu and his ilk have always played.

As for "dismantling" Hamas and 'turning in its members," only Hamas can do that, not the Palestinian people in general. I hope that Israel does eliminate the current Hamas leadership and military arm through surgical strikes, but if they do, another "Hamas" (whether or not it goes by the same name) will arise in its place as long as occupation continues, because "Hamas' is as much an ideology as an organization.

24 RecommendShareFlag

Be Very commented October 24

B

Be Very

Careful what you wish for

Oct. 24

@ABC 

At a time when the world is busy blaming Jews for a hospital that Islamist militants blew up, this critique is bears zero credibility.

Hamas/ISIS intended to massacre civilians on the largest scale possible. Israel has stated that if the terrorists surrender and hostages are released that hostilities would be ended. One deserves an "active" voice" while the deserves a "passive" voice.

24 RecommendShareFlag

Evan commented October 24

E

Evan

Redwood City, CA

Oct. 24

@Heather Completely agree. I was very disappointed that the mention of lost Palestinian land was not coupled with mention of the Jewish people who were forced out of Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, (etc.) and even Gaza.

24 RecommendShareFlag

KH commented October 24

K

KH

Oakland, CA

Oct. 24

You know that’s not accurate. The people speaking up for Palestine are speaking up against oppression and what the UN has labeled apartheid committed by Israel. Speaking up for the conditions of the people in Palestine is not an endorsement of Hamas.

24 RecommendShareFlag

Eudoxus commented October 24

E

Eudoxus

Westchester

Oct. 24

The one solution you see rarely discussed.  Israel should adopt a 100% secular written constitution and offer full citizenship to all residents of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza who swear allegiance to it.  To answer the expected response, Did the US cease to exist when it gave ex slaves and native Americans full citizenship?  Did white South Africans get mascaraed when that country adopted majority rule?

7 Replies23 RecommendShareFlag

Leigh commented October 24

L

Leigh

Washington

Oct. 24

Both Hamas leaders and Netanyahu's far-right coalition are *together* a danger to Israelis and a danger to all Palestinians.  I don't have to explain how Hamas leaders are carrying this out. We saw the videos from October 7th. But as this is about the Jewish left, let us agree that Bibi's government is/has been paving the path for the final solution of Palestinians, outlined by cabinet member Smotrich, which is essentially - if they don't leave, the IDF will kill them. They're not leaving. So we know what happens next. And we are supposed to accept this as the only safe solution for Israel? There is a word to describe this. I see it, my Jewish family sees it. It's clear as day.

There is no crushing Hamas without crushing the soul of Gaza. Are we expecting those crushed and impoverished souls to hug the person who bombed their mother to bits? Of course not. Bibi is not making Jewish people safer in this world. Why is that so hard to see? 

If Palestinians are supposed to condemn Hamas in the wake of Oct 7th, then why cant the Jewish left in the wake of >5,000 dead Palestinians at least vocally agree on the fact that Bibi and his militarized far-right friends are not okay? Killing civilians is never okay. Illegal expansion is not okay. Occupation... is not okay.

Finally, we all want to grieve, but must prevent the mass death of more civilians first. Im sorry if you feel sidelined by that. But I hope we have retained some humanity in all of this to see why it's necessary.

23 RecommendShareFlag

Grumpy Dirt Lawyer commented October 24

Grumpy Dirt Lawyer

Grumpy Dirt Lawyer

SoFla

Oct. 24

@horace Once again the Big Lie.  Israel is neither a colonialist nor an imperialist nation.  The Levant was held by various colonial empires for thousands of years, the last being the Ottoman Empire based in Turkey.  At the end of WW I, "mandates" to the UK and France established temporary control pending satisfaction of the desire for nationhood that had swept Europe (particularly the Balkans), Africa and the Levant.  The Jews are one of the indigenous people of the Levant, and the only one still extant that actually had a nation state, although in remote history.  There has also been a continuous Jewish presence, with few exceptions since the Roman conquest.  The Jews who were Zionists did not come to what is now Israel in the service of a foreign empire (imperialists) nor did they come merely as colonialists...they came to reclaim their home and to assert their nationhood, as so many other dispossessed people were doing at the time.

The Palestinians have been victimized by their Arab brothers to advance internal power struggles in neighboring countries and by their own ideology for 100 years.  Israel is certainly not blameless...settlements in the West Bank and military governance are a huge problem for Palestinian self-determination, but they are never called upon to take responsibility for their own internal political dysfunction.

16 Replies23 RecommendShareFlag

Mohammad Mountebank commented October 24

M

Mohammad Mountebank

Luang Prabang

Oct. 24

@ABC  Where do those reported death totals come from?   That’s right, the same people who blamed Israel for the Al Ahli bombing and claimed that hundreds died when it was at most dozens.   There are no accurate numbers of deaths in Gaza because the Hamas government recognizes that the world is happy to accept its lies no matter how many times they have been exposed.

22 RecommendShareFlag

SD commented October 24

S

SD

West of center

Oct. 24

I just finished this conversation, which confirmed much of my own thinking. Such an important conversation, and feels very bleak in all honesty. I'm politically progressive, Jew(ish) in my identity, a middle aged woman who was involved in the 1980s American Boycott Divestment movement against SA Apartheid. I found the discussion about the ANC and the Anti-Apartheid Boycott/Divestment movement to be really important, too easily overlooked.  Boycott/Divestment were one of the important pressures that pushed the de Klerk government towards negotiations with the ANC. That the American right is trying to outlaw B/D speaks a lot to their enduring investment in conflict. I'd like to listen to or read an analysis of the ways that American conservatives and fundamentalists are invested in Israeli autocracy and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

4 Replies22 RecommendShareFlag

Bascomb Lunsford commented October 24

B

Bascomb Lunsford

Montreal

Oct. 24

@Chazak17 

Exactly!

22 RecommendShareFlag

Kevin Cahill commented October 24

Kevin Cahill

Kevin Cahill

87106

Oct. 24

The US should seek a cease-fire in Palestine rather than vetoing UN cease-fire resolutions.

1 Reply21 RecommendShareFlag

Brian commented October 24

B

Brian

90275

Oct. 24

@Kevin Cahill Any ceasefire must be conditional on the safe return on the 220 hostages being held by Hamas.

21 RecommendShareFlag

Ian Wallace commented October 24

I

Ian Wallace

portland OR

Oct. 24

The Israeli state has cut food and water off to over 2 million people. Half of them children. This is a war crime. 

Hamas is a reactionary terrorist group that carried out an brutal massacre of a 1000 civilians. 

I don't know what scales one uses to weigh human suffering, but what ever one the US elites class is using, they are deeply flawed. 

The US cheerleading of what can only be seen as eliminationist (cutting off food and water to 2 million plus people, half of them children) response to a terrorist act will only further reduce it's international standing, as the part of the world that had their history shaped by colonialism will recognize the disregard for the lives of the colonized and occupied. 

So the US elites are also holding 2 ideas inn their head.  1 We are good and decent and 2. We can support the cutting off of food and water to 2 million people, half of them children.

20 RecommendShareFlag

Kath Anne commented October 24

K

Kath Anne

NYC

Oct. 24

@Bill You've completely mischaracterized Klein's position. Did you even listen to the episode? Or the one before it? Klein is one of the few commentators actually cautioning Israel to use restraint and not make the same mistakes as the US did after 9/11

20 RecommendShareFlag

HipOath commented October 24

H

HipOath

Berkeley, CA

Oct. 24

Truth telling is incredibly important in solving disputes.  The Gazans and PALS in the West Bank (WB) are subjugated peoples.  That is the truth. 

During the 1948 war, 700K PALS fled from their homes to avoid the conflict.  About 200K PALS settled in Gaza.  The remainder in the WB & elsewhere. 

In 1948, Jordan annexed the West Bank. PALS became Jordanian citizens. Half the seats in Jordan's parliament were reserved for PALS. The PALS were a free people, part of a state. 

Egypt controlled Gaza.  Gazans could leave/enter Egypt for the usual purposes. Necessities were delivered through that border. 

After the 1967 war, Israel took control of the WB and Gaza. It made both the PALS and the Gazans stateless & subjugated people - people who had been living in freedom.

Israel wanted the land but not the Arabs on the land.

What do subjugated people do?

The Irish used terror against the British starting in later 1800's.  Jewish groups Irgun, Haganah, Lehi used terror in Palestine in 30's & 40's.  During the Algerian war of independence, Algerian women dressed up as French women and left bombs in purses & bags at French colonialist watering holes.  In Kenya, the Mau-Mau murdered British civilians in terrorist attacks.  A full list is much longer. 

Gazans and the PALS want to be free.  Until they are free, or mostly killed, there will not be peace and they will launch terror attacks on Israel because that is the tool they have.  

A Palestinian state is required for peace.

4 Replies19 RecommendShareFlag

ABC commented October 24

A

ABC

UK

Oct. 24

I know this piece is trying hard to find moral clarity, which is commendable, but the authors should be more alive to the constant switching between the active and passive voice when discussing the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians in Western media:

'Hamas assailants killed at least 1,400 Israelis'

'more than 5,000 Palestinians are reported dead and many more injured'

The cumulative effect, coupled with the discrepancy between the abstracted and sterilised reporting of Palestinian suffering versus the (justifiable) in-depth, play-by-play, forensic investigation into Hamas' atrocities, is to minimise Israel's (and, by exstenion, the US's) agency in the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians. 

Thousands MORE innocent Palestinians have died in the past few weeks than Israelis, and shrapnel, collapsing buildings, fire, and now even dehydration are no kinder ways to die than the horrors that Hamas committed. While it is not some horrible numbers game, the imbalance in empathetic reporting by the Times among others creates a veneer of proportionality where there is not - and never has been - 'balance' between the constant violence meted out on Palestinian civilians and the horrible and unjustifiable, but also significantly rarer, not systematic, and not US taxpayer-funded violence inflicted on innocent Israelis.

5 Replies18 RecommendShareFlag

joe commented October 24

J

joe

atl

Oct. 24

To say that 20% of the Israeli population is "Palestinian “is to say that Israel doesn't exist as a real nation, much less as a Jewish state.  There are no Palestinian Israelis.  There are ARAB Israelis.  If 20% of the nation doesn't even acknowledge that they are Israelis, not Palestinians, then the situation is hopeless.  It’s pretty obvious the Arabs view a two state solution as just a prelude to a one state solution in which they can marginalize the Jews or simply drive them out of the Middle East, something they’ve been trying to do since 1948.

2 Replies18 RecommendShareFlag

ph commented October 24

P

ph

California

Oct. 24

Ezra, Spencer and Peter—thank you.  A difficult conversation.  I think you are brave to have it.  My grandfather spent most of his youth in Haifa, Palestine, immigrating to America pre WWII. The levant is complicated. My grandfather also spent time in family homes in Syria and Lebanon. The Haifa house lost when land was gifted to a horribly hurt people. As children, we were not allowed to discuss our heritage. My father had a small business, was dark skinned, Arab last name. Most of his friends were Jews, but even they did not know his true heritage. My dad was a dad first, and wanted us protected. When Peter, I think, said, Palestinians are not given “permission to narrate,” I thought, so true, they are not.

18 RecommendShareFlag

Have Had Enough in Cali commented October 24

H

Have Had Enough in Cali

Al

Oct. 24

@ABC 5,000 deaths out of 2.3 million, though tragic, is a demonstration of Israel's resolve to not target civilians. Otherwise, how else would 6,000 bombs over 3 weeks not cause a much larger number of deaths in Gaza? I repeat. 6,000.

17 RecommendShareFlag

RamS commented October 24

RamS

RamS

New York

Oct. 24

People just go back and forth when they take sides (not everyone does of course). Hamas/Palestinians did this, but then Israel did  that, and so on and so forth. Each side says the other is 100% responsible. Cynicism pervades. But all this is pointless. The only thing that matters now is solutions. Let's assume it's a given Hamas is taken out, whatever the cost. But then what?  If Gaza and WB aren't rebuilt into modern places like Germany and Japan were, then the cycle of violence will continue.  Maybe this region be the first to get 100 in the ME in terms of freedomhouse scores: https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores

Israel is at 77 - free

Gaza is at 11 - not free

West Bank is at 22 - not free

Islam needs to get rid of its more primitive traits like the treatment of women, etc. (so do conservative aspects of all religions) but this goes to show the value of secularism.

1 Reply17 RecommendShareFlag

Graham Rounce commented October 24

G

Graham Rounce

London UK

Oct. 24

@dontbeleveit

Yes it's incredible, because it's not true.

17 RecommendShareFlag

Colin Babb commented October 24

C

Colin Babb

Annapolis

Oct. 24

@horace Depicting Palestinians as pure victims--completely lacking in any agency whatsoever--seems like a far greater act of dehumanization than anything their supposed "imperial" oppressors are doing.

16 Replies17 RecommendShareFlag

Lance Brown commented October 24

L

Lance Brown

Canada

Oct. 24

One way to end the conflict is for each side to compromise.  Netanyahu should make an offer to the Palestian people that if the reject Hamas and Hezbollah, by dismantling them completely and turning in their members, then Israel guranatees a two-state solution and peace.  This would expose whether each side is serious about their independence and peace for the future generations.  If either side does not aquiesce, then their true colours will be exposed.

2 Replies16 RecommendShareFlag

Anne commented October 24

A

Anne

Delaware

Oct. 24

@Tim The obstacle to peace is the failure to accord Palestinians basic human rights.

16 RecommendShareFlag

Be Very commented October 24

B

Be Very

Careful what you wish for

Oct. 24

@Lance Brown 

Lance - this happened in Gaza. Israel withdrew. Israel dismantled settlements. October 7th is the (latest) Hamas response. It clearly exposes which side is for peace and which terrorist side is not. 

The true colors are not only exposed; Hamas brags about it on the internet. Terrorists filmed themselves raping infants, grandmothers, dismembering children in front of their parents, and parading nude, mutilated women around Gaza.

I know your comment is well-intentioned, but the ignorance is appalling and demonstrative of the biased media coverage you see in Canada.

16 RecommendShareFlag

RB commented October 24

R

RB

California

Oct. 24

@horace The arabs locals had murdered and killed Jews well before any consideration of so called imperialism/colonialism (which are not only irrelevant to this conflict, but signal an ignorant need to pigeon hole past events to popular trends).  The jewish population in Hebron, present for two thousand years, was slaughtered, murdered and raped to a point where all jewish inhabitants were forced to leave.  Prior to founding of the state of Israel, this happened to dozens of Jewish communities in Israel (including Gaza BTW).

16 Replies16 RecommendShareFlag

Al M commented October 24

A

Al M

Norfolk Va

Oct. 24

@Be Very 

America is my homeland. Being an ethnic Jew does not make me an Israeli. I do not support racism or brutal apartheid.

16 RecommendShareFlag

Ok commented October 24

O

Ok

NY

Oct. 24

@Peter  

Hamas should be eliminated, but actually doing it is harder than saying it.  And the process of elimination is more likely to produce horrific unintended consequences for all sides.  

However, it is cowardly and convenient to absolve Israel of its responsibilities for what came before and what is happening now. 

Israel is responsible for the children who are being crushed to death and for those that survive injured and are being operated on without anesthesia.  

Israel is responsible for starving a civilian population and for withholding clean water and sanitation.  When cholera and other diseases run rampant, Israel will be responsible.

Israel is responsible for settlement building and for the illegal occupation that is overseen by its fundamentalists.

Israel is also responsible for its zealots--they are not a fringe non-state actor--the Israeli extremists run the government and the army.  

If you rightly expect Hamas to be condemned, where is the condemnation of the Zionist fundamentalists that run Israel?

16 Replies16 RecommendShareFlag

Durtschi commented October 24

D

Durtschi

Brooklyn

Oct. 24

@ezra thank you for the nuance and commitment to ethics and reason that prevails in this conversation. These views resonate with me and help me consider various points of view that are not widely reported. I feel more empathy after listening.

15 RecommendShareFlag

Gal commented October 24

G

Gal

Brooklyn

Oct. 24

This is an interesting conversation, and I appreciate the diversity of opinion. One thing I think is a little naive here is the point about the Biden and Netanyahu relationship. As a person (and an Israeli) who strongly opposed Netanyahu from day one, I think Biden's people made the right reading, for a long time he's only looking at his political power and PR, he has no real principles, an empty coward leader who will sacrifice Israeli and Palestinian lives easily for his political survival and agendas. 

With that in mind, the only way to pressure Netanyahu to do anything is if you support him publicly and pressure him privately.  The delay of the ground invasion and anything that shows any sort of calculation from the Israeli side is a direct result of Biden's success in putting Netanyahu under pressure, without that SHOW of support, as bad as it is now, it would've been much much worse unfortunately.

3 Replies15 RecommendShareFlag

Clint commented October 24

C

Clint

Las Vegas

Oct. 24

Peter Beinart been an apologist  for Palestinian bad behavior for years. After 3 major existential wars, a few somewhat lesser wars, and numerous acts of terrorism, he cannot seem to comprehend that the majority of Israelis have little trust in the ability and willingness of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to live in an enduring peace with their neighbor. Israel shares a disturbing common status with Ukraine as the most threatened democracies in the world. Israel’s very existence is always under threat - Just listen to Iran and its proxies to confirm that point. Having a secure two state solution is a great idea, but that horse may have left the barn. The only possible solution, however small, is for the Palestinians to elect a moderate, younger and honest leader who might help to create an atmosphere of mutual trust. The Palestinians know that Abbas and his gang are only interested in their rackets and offshore bank accounts.

1 Reply15 RecommendShareFlag

Katye Holland commented October 24

K

Katye Holland

Brooklyn

Oct. 24

The actions of Hamas on October 7th were horrific and barbaric. We have gone round and round in the Middle East without a reasonable and peaceful end in sight for decades. Violence and war appear to be the only solution in the minds of the adversaries. Israel needs to keep in mind that half the population in Gaza is under the age of 18. An entirely new generation will never forget what happened to them while trapped in Gaza enduring endless bombing and then a ground invasion. As a result of this the next generation will be just as militant as Hamas. Meanwhile thousands more Palestinians will die as well as IDF soldiers and possibly the hostages. It is time for Israel (the actor with the most power) to think of alternative solutions other than simple violence and war.

15 RecommendShareFlag

Joshua Meyerson,MD MPH commented October 24

J

Joshua Meyerson,MD MPH

Petoskey, MI

Oct. 24

What a useless podcast. Your guests made no constructive insight into the central issue of the Israeli Arab conflict and instead used words such as Apartheid, Oppressors, and other inflammatory terms that neglect to tell the whole story of the conflict. No I don’t know what the best bad option Israel has, but Hamas , the governing body of Gaza, are terrorists and need to be held responsible for their actions. 

You were so busy pointing out the fault of Israel - which there are many- you failed to even mention the complicity of the Arab nations surrounding Israel, the role of Iran, and the fact that Palestinian misery has been promoted for political gain by all sides of the conflict. If you believe Israel has a right to exist then this podcast was of no help nor contributed to better understanding. 

I suggest everyone involved listen to their colleague Tom Friedman recent podcast on Israel’s morally impossible situation as it has a much better understanding and insight into the many difficult issues that lay before the Middle East and threaten all of us, rather than from some bleeding heart progressives who can pontificate peace from the comfort and privilege of their comfy American couch.

14 RecommendShareFlag

Guillermo commented October 24

G

Guillermo

Tirado

Oct. 24

It was a strange conversation of the Palestinian/Israeli ecosystem, as if it exists in a hermetically sealed bubble by the side of the Mediterranean Sea. It reminded me how the Left is very smart, eloquent, thoughtful and naive. The reason Israel has walls (literally and figuratively) around its only nation is that it exists within a sea of culturally intolerant Arab and Islamic intolerance for Jews (not to mention Christians). Larger actors are funding extremists. Larger actors are stoking the fires. At one time the region embraced pan Arabism, then leftist revolution, then Islamism. It seems the "religious" fundamentalists are now embracing the only mode left: Nihilism. The Arabs, if they continue down this violent road, will only be expelled. That is where this is going.

14 RecommendShareFlag

Juan Briceno commented October 24

J

Juan Briceno

Right here

Oct. 24

From the perspective of Humanism, the political leadership of Israel is pretty much on par with Hamas. Medieval barbarian butchers with a disgusting and severely twisted sense of morality.   

A moral compass derived form "divine" inspiration that allows one to justify indiscriminate bombing killing thousands makes me sick to the core. I never want to associate myself with this types or anyone who supports and justifies such actions. Brutish versions of humankind who are yet to understand basic principle of human dignity.

14 RecommendShareFlag

David commented October 24

D

David

Chicago

Oct. 24

As a Bernie-ite Jew, I would say this: (1) Words cannot properly convey my revulsion at Hamas's atrocities and my dismay at the "anticolonialist" glee of the identitarian left; (2) Israel has a right to exist and I am glad that the USA and the EU have not wavered on this;  (3) BUT, I sadly know that these terror attacks did not come out of the clear blue.  Israel's mad West Bank settlement project--brutal, totally illegal, and ongoing for decades, has mostly closed off the prospects for a negotiated settlement and has inflamed Arab and Muslim public opinion.  

Right now, I am hoping for an immediate ceasefire, followed by immediate release of the hostages.  Then, for the stability of the region and the world,  the USA and EU will have to insist on a two-state settlement along the '67 borders.

14 RecommendShareFlag

ABC commented October 24

A

ABC

UK

Oct. 24

@barnaby33 

Demographics are the core elephant in the room. - [Well, yes - there can't be a Jewish and a democratic state West of the Jordan, only one or the other, except maybe with a free and independent Palestine.]

You can't negotiate with people who refuse to acknowledge not just your right to exist, but your right to peaceful safe co-existence. [There's no prima facie reason you can't, but regardless, the Palestinians are explicitly open to negotiations and both the PLO and Hamas have recognised an Israeli state. It is a lie and a straw man argument to say they haven't]

"People deserve freedom because they're people!" The underlying assumption is that people will use that freedom to build decent lives for themselves and their posterity. [I would argue that is not the underlying assumption - I would say the statement in quotes in absolute and requires no further justification]. 

Show me one Arab society that enjoys freedom and uses that freedom to build decent lives. [(i) This seems rather racist; (ii) Jordan? Lebanon? Morocco? - People have free and decent lives in all of those even if their governments are flawed].

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Juarezbear commented October 24

J

Juarezbear

Los Angeles

Oct. 24

@Andrew It's relevant to the fact that until the Palestinians rise up against Hamas and their ilk, there's nobody for Israel to negotiate with.

16 Replies13 RecommendShareFlag

Be Very commented October 24

B

Be Very

Careful what you wish for

Oct. 24

@Al M 

Of course not.  Unfortunately, there has been a 10,000% rise in anti-Semitic attacks in the US since Oct 7th as many do not care about said distinction but are merely rabidly anti-Semitic.

I assume we find common ground in that Jews are not worthy of death threats across the US and the world, including the NYC subway. Remember, Israel is always open in case the "very good people on both sides" come to power in the US.

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Donna Gray commented October 24

D

Donna Gray

Louisa, Va

Oct. 24

@Bill Shouldn't you also be addressing Hamas, the elected government of Gaza? That is the group engaging in the latest escalation, which was cheered by residents of Gaza! Why wouldn't they sit down and talk with Israel instead of attacking?

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elleringo commented October 24

elleringo

elleringo

new york city

Oct. 24

I kept having to turn the volume down on these two guests, who seemed to be shouting, in contrast to Ezra's always calming voice. What we don't need are hysterics.

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horace commented October 24

H

horace

oregon

Oct. 24

@Peter To claim anyone is responsible for the hundreds dying in bombings everyday right now, other that the Israeli government and American officials sending them weapons and preventing a ceasefire, is incredibly wrong.

16 Replies12 RecommendShareFlag

John McFeely commented October 24

J

John McFeely

Miami, FL

Oct. 24

Mr. Ackerman posed the question we all must confront. What is the plan for after the bombing? What is the plan for after Hamas is rooted out from Gaza? What is the vision for a peaceful community of Palestinians in Gaza after these parocysms of violence? How will peacekeeping and rebuilding be done, by whom, and paid for? Is there a role for regional peaceful Muslim nations in the necessary nation building of a peaceful Palestine. Israelis and American Jews can be part of these conversations, but we need partners on the ground. Let's start by being honest. The policies of the past have failed spectacularly. And, it will take a million local partners to secure peace for future generations of Palestinian children.

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barnaby33 commented October 24

barnaby33

barnaby33

San diego

Oct. 24

@Eudoxus I'm guessing you're not Jewish. The state of Israel was founded as a Jewish state and a Democracy, not a Democracy that also happened to be a Jewish state. Leaving aside that the Jews don't trust the Arabs enough to engage in such an experiment, it's a non-starter for the Jews.

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Georgiana commented October 24

G

Georgiana

Alma, MI

Oct. 24

@New Yorker This will be an Arab Muslim state like the others in the region, where the Jews, secular or not, will be a minority.  Look around for the civil liberties record of every Arab state and wonder - or rather there is no reason to wonder - why Jewish citizens of Israel, religious and secular alike, would be reluctant to become a minority in such a state.  If a majority if Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would be committed to democratic political institutions, freedom of religion, speech and assembly, gender equality and LGBTQ right, artistic freedom etc, the politics, society, and cultural developments in these places would be different.  I know the retort to this is that Israel oppression is the root cause.  One fails to understand how Israel is at fault when local leaders suppress basic freedoms though.  Palestinians have agency too and are supported by hundreds of NGOs + aid keeps flowing.  Surely, another way of life is possible, should the majority and the leadership aspire to it.  As another commenter put it, we would love to hear from a Palestinian Peter Beinart.  Such voices would make Israeli citizens less reluctant to live in an Arab majority state.

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Andrew commented October 24

A

Andrew

Milwaukee

Oct. 24

@Peter Nice questions? Are they relevant to anything?

11 RecommendShareFlag

Brian commented October 24

B

Brian

90275

Oct. 24

@Eudoxus That's the "if both sides just stopped caring about the stuff that they care about" solution. Anyone trying to understand the Israel-Palestinian conflict primarily through imperfect analogies to American history or South African history is not trying to understand the particularities of the conflict...

7 Replies11 RecommendShareFlag

Casual Observer commented October 24

C

Casual Observer

Los Angeles

Oct. 24

Where does one begin this story, in 1948 or A.D. 60? For the interim period the Jewish people most lived as strangers in other places, subject to not just being excluded but were targets of unprovoked violence. The dream of returning to a homeland in which their ancestors had a long history never was forgotten. With the half hearted support of British imperialists who had no sympathy for the contemporary inhabitants of Palestine, Jewish settlements were established which led to the declaration of the state of Israel. The people who lived there did not give their consent but it happened, anyway. That set of a feud with not just Palestinians Arabs but Arabs with Israelis. Like many feuds it seems to be unending as long as any are left alive.

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Bill commented October 24

B

Bill

NYC

Oct. 24

Once again a story that only mentions Isreal dropping bombs, but fails to mention that Hamas has from the start kept dropping bombs on Isreal.  Thank the lord that the iron dome, prevents massive destruction for Isreali citizens, but what should a country do when their neighbor keeps firing rockets at them indiscriminately?

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Just Another commented October 24

J

Just Another

New York

Oct. 24

@adelante ,  These are the most "recommended" by other readers, not necessarily the "top", and I think often indicate more about the recommenders' views on the Israeli - Palestinian conflict than anything else.  Beinert and Ackerman represent a current dissenting view and are saying things supporters of Israel don't agree with or want to hear.  But U.S. history shows that voices in the wilderness are sometimes proven right later on.

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New Yorker commented October 24

N

New Yorker

New York

Oct. 24

It should be noted that a fast-growing number of educated Jews are agnostics or atheists, like myself, and don't believe the story in the Old Testament - particularly in the Five Books of Moses - that a god promised his Chosen People the land of Israel. 

If this god is a benevolent deity why favor one nation over another? And if he is omniscient, why give the Jews a land mouch of it arid and not particularly attractive? Why didn't he give to the Jews such geographically beautiful and fertile countries, a bit distant from Israel, like Italy and Switzerland?

The solution to the endless Arab-Israeli conflict is one state where Jews and Palestinians live in peace.

1 Reply10 RecommendShareFlag

Inspired by Frost commented October 24

I

Inspired by Frost

Madison, WI

Oct. 24

Thanks for the most enlightened discussion of this subject I've heard or seen since Oct 7. There should be talks like this every day in the U.S. We have ignored the problems there too long.

1 Reply10 RecommendShareFlag

Lefthalfbach commented October 24

L

Lefthalfbach

Philadelphia

Oct. 24

The 8 October Hamas Atrocities have essentially precluded a Two State Solution for another generation, at least.  

Had Hamas only attacked military bases- that would have been understandable as an Act of War. There would be an appropriate IDF ressponse.

Had Hamas just fired  missiles into Israel?  The Iron Dome would have stopped most of them and such things have happened before. There would have been apredictable reaction from the IDF and things would have settled back down.

Had Hamas just captured soldiers and male adults of military age?  Understandable as an Act of War, given that most Israelis serve an Active Duty stretch and then are Reservists until like Age 45. Again, there would have been an IDF response, followed by negotiations.

But, No. Hamas did not act like a rational combatant. Hamas paid no attention to the Rules of War. The Hamas men did unspeakable things. . 

We  know. We all know. 

We also know that Israel can never ever put itself in such a position again. When Gaza is over, there will be a buffer zone and a serious IDF military force  deployed in the South.

As for the WB?  maybe in 20 years there will be talks. But there will not be any West bank Stae Army close to Israel. That just will not happen.

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Andrew commented October 24

A

Andrew

Milwaukee

Oct. 24

First thought. There is no "the Jewish Left."  I was raised Jewish, I appreciate aspects of the faith. I am also progressive on practically every issue, yet I move with no group called "the Jewish left."  Maybe I'm not a part of it?

2 Replies9 RecommendShareFlag

RDJ commented October 24

R

RDJ

Charlotte NC

Oct. 24

"Left" and "Right" don't work for me here.

There is "informed" and "uninformed", and that's it.

9 RecommendShareFlag

John Dirlik commented October 24

J

John Dirlik

Montreal

Oct. 24

Explaining to Haaretz his reasons for Aliyah, a young Australian: “It was too easy back home. I needed a purpose.”

A country created for the persecuted now world-open summer camp, attracting the most disturbed. Before suicide bombings ever existed in Israel, New York Baruch Goldstein slaughtered 29 worshippers at a Hebron mosque (February, 1994).

Israel’s response was to slap a curfew, not on the 800 settlers who strutted with Uzis calling for the assassination of Yasser Arafat but on the town’s entire 130,000 Palestinian population. 

Unlike the home of Palestinian terrorists, Goldstein’s home became a shrine, while a settler rabbi proclaimed the life “of a million Arabs is not worth the fingernail of a Jews.”

Exactly 40 days after the massacre (traditional mourning period) Hamas unleashed its first-ever “martyrdom operation.”

But while Hamas for years abandoned suicide bombings (resurrected on 10-7) disciples of Baruch Goldstein are prominent players in Netanyahu’s coalition.  And while the Kach party founded by Meir Kahane was eventually banned in Israel because of its extremism, its ideological heirs are now in the Knesset.

1 Reply9 RecommendShareFlag

David commented October 24

D

David

MD

Oct. 24

@RS 

The labour government went all out to offer the Palestinians a state in response to President Clinton's 2000 parameters.  The Palestinians rejected it.  The Israeli left was effectively disempowered by its failure to get a peace deal done and by the horrific suicide bombing of the Second Intifada.  The result was to convince Israelis that the Palestinians wanted no peace.

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A commented October 24

A

A

US

Oct. 24

I think the proper headline would describe these as the views of anti-Zionist Jews more than simply “left”.  Totally your right to hold those views but let’s call it what it is.

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Ploni Almoni commented October 24

P

Ploni Almoni

Oklahoma

Oct. 24

Ironic that the podcast is on the Jewish left and neither interviewee recommended a single book by an Israeli or even Jewish person, instead directing us to the works of well-known israel foes.

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Mohammad Mountebank commented October 24

M

Mohammad Mountebank

Luang Prabang

Oct. 24

@History Guy

There are no perfect options…there rarely are.   But there are better options than others.   And the idea that fighting Hamas in Gaza is i’ll create the next generation is one of those terrible ideas that keeps being repeated as collective wisdom.   But it’s not necessarily true, nor is any other course less likely to produce the same.

8 RecommendShareFlag

TMDJS commented October 24

T

TMDJS

PDX

Oct. 24

@Bill 

The USA also hunted down and killed bin Laden after 9/11. Unlike the USA's adventure in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, Hamas actually IS located in Gaza.

7 Replies8 RecommendShareFlag

ABC commented October 24

A

ABC

UK

Oct. 24

@Joe You have no more right to deny Palestinian's identity in Palestine or in Israel than you do to deny that one can be Jewish and American at the same time. 

Insisting that Palestinian identity is somehow non-existent, and that there is only one monolithic 'Arab' identity is fully counter-factual. 

Palestinian Israelis call themselves that because they are from Palestine, a place and a political identity that is as real and legitimate as any state created in 1948 as a recreation of a mythic kingdom that hadn't existed for 2,000 years. 

By refusing to use their chosen name, are you not denying their right to exist?

8 RecommendShareFlag

Juarezbear commented October 24

J

Juarezbear

Los Angeles

Oct. 24

@Rachel You won't because if that person expressed the same sentiments from the other side they'd either be dead or in hiding.

8 RecommendShareFlag

Want2know commented October 24

W

Want2know

MI

Oct. 24

Seems most of the left should be supporting a UN or similar trusteeship for Gaza and deployment of international peacekeeping forces.  Yet few if any have.

8 RecommendShareFlag

FredTheCat commented October 24

F

FredTheCat

Philly

Oct. 24

If you compare the ratio of murdered people to the total Jewish population of Israel with the ratio of the people murdered on 9/11 to the population of the United States, the Hamas invasion was 30 times more devastating. For those of us who have been through 9/11 & especially for those of us who were first responders working at Ground Zero, it is all too easy to understand the Israelis putting aside the issues that have divided them & pushed half the population into the streets against Netanyahu, forming a coalition government & wanting - needing - a total revenge so that this will NOT happen again.  After the Holocaust, Jews around the world cried "NEVER AGAIN." There are something like 19 Arab nations, with untold trillions of dollars of oil money who do NOTHING for their Palestinian brothers except feed them arms & keep them in refugee status instead of resettling them. No Arab country wants these terrorist-infested hate-riddled people in their country. They've seen what Hezbollah has created out of southern Lebanon. Even Jordan exiled their Palestinian extremists in 1970 to Lebanon in the war they call Black September. Many tens of millions of people were displaced from their homelands in the latter '40s & all but one were taken in by other countries &  became citizens.  The descendants of  Polish refugees who fled to England are   called English. Descendants of Czech refugees who fled to Poland are Poles. Why will no Muslim country do the same for the Palestinians?

8 RecommendShareFlag

Liz Webster commented October 24

L

Liz Webster

Franklin Tasmania Australia

Oct. 24

With climate disasters displacing millions upon millions of people over the entire planet, the notion of eternal ownerships and dominion over a specific patch of earth, and belief that any one groups’ ancients stories and myths constitute absolute proof of a tribal god-given right of return, is being sorely tested everywhere.

Absolutely everywhere. Gaza is a microcosm of what lies ahead for us ALL.

Zionists should contribute to discussion of Lenape rights over Manhattan. Might be a way forward?

8 RecommendShareFlag

Andrew commented October 24

A

Andrew

Milwaukee

Oct. 24

@bejeweled I am terrified, and deeply saddened by the loss of so many lives (yes Israeli lives, and Palestinian lives).  What would help us with loneliness? There are people who share your perspective about the politics.  Its also ok to focus on grieving if that's what you want.  Grieving doesn't feel like progress to people, but the other way people seek progress in these circumstances is argument and war.  What is it that would help?  Even your appeal for comradeship seems to be completely steeped in people agreeing with where you feel sympathy ought to go.  Where does this leave us?  I think we should do what we can to stop more death and conflict, which begins with a ceasefire.  I'm tired of team sports.

7 RecommendShareFlag

Nicola commented October 24

N

Nicola

New York

Oct. 24

@barnaby33 the UK is a Church of England country. The King is the head of the church, public schools all hold assembly with hymns, and a nativity play each Christmas. And yet, people of all faiths are welcomed and enjoy equal rights. Why can't Israel do the same? I'm not sure it is possible (or fair) to want a country where only one faith is practiced (and frankly I think Israel's desire for this is a large part of the problem).

7 RecommendShareFlag

RC commented October 24

R

RC

Connecticut

Oct. 24

Dialectics offer no guidance to this fundamentalist issue.  It is not complicated. Palestinians in the main, peaceful or otherwise, do not and never have fully accept the de jure right of Israel to exist. The fact that it does is by virtue of de facto superior might and nothing else. 

We have here a biblical battle: the Jewish lobby supported by American evangelicals, maybe with ultimately different final outcomes in mind, are 100% behind Israel. The left wing and its equivocality, was vanquished long ago. Trump fully endorsed Netanyahu's expansionist approach, endorsing the conservative concept that the Palestinians should simply accept that they've lost and should give up the fight.  Biden has been handed a dead man's hand. 

Heed the words of Krishnamurti: 

"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Chris-

tian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent.

Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating

yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate your-

self by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.

So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not

belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party

or partial system; he is concerned with the total understand.

ing of mankind"

To move beyond this repetitive cycle that's dogged the western world since the dawn of Yahweh, we must move beyond Yahweh, God, and Allah themselves. Given the trends, I have little to no hope of a stable peace.

1 Reply7 RecommendShareFlag

Georgiana commented October 24

G

Georgiana

Alma, MI

Oct. 24

@Andrew They are relevant to the not-so-subtle suggestion that Jewish Israeli should accept a one-state solution where they will be a minority.

16 Replies7 RecommendShareFlag

Grumpy Dirt Lawyer commented October 24

Grumpy Dirt Lawyer

Grumpy Dirt Lawyer

SoFla

Oct. 24

@Nicola Israel is not a state where only one faith is practiced, unlike nearly all the surrounding Muslim states. Those who practice  Christianity, Islam, Druze, and Samaritan faiths are all free to do so in Israel, and the official rabbinate governs only Jewish practice.  The point is to have a state, for the first time in 2000 years where no one can dictate to the Jews how they can live or persecute them because of their faith, which happened all over Europe and the Middle East where simply being a Jew was grounds for discrimination and often death.  What is wrong with one out of 190 countries, a place the size of New Jersey, having an official policy that the culture and history (not only the religion) of the Jews has a special place?

7 Replies7 RecommendShareFlag

David Williams commented October 24

D

David Williams

San Diego county

Oct. 24

@David, You make them sound equivalent. If you've watch the images of what the terrorist did you'd know they are not.

7 RecommendShareFlag

Linda McKim Bell commented October 24

L

Linda McKim Bell

Portland Oregon

Oct. 24

I would like to see some interviews with ordinary Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.  I wonder about their opinions.

7 RecommendShareFlag

adelante commented October 24

A

adelante

Brooklyn

Oct. 24

I was surprised to see all the top comments on this episode are so negative. Just wanted to say I found this interview profoundly informative, compassionate, and moving! Thank you Ezra and guests!

1 Reply7 RecommendShareFlag

Georgiana commented October 24

G

Georgiana

Alma, MI

Oct. 24

@History Guy Re: 'The question the 9 million Israelis have to ask themselves, the official went on, is how much of essentially an armed fortress do they want their country to become and how much perpetual war and violence are they willing to put up with?' And if they do not want that and feel the moral weight constant accusations of criminal collective punishment on the unproven statement that Palestinians do not support Hamas's goals, they have a third option, implied in daily explicit and implicit statements that Jews are illegitimate colonial oppressors all over the entire area: their third bad option is to just disappear, go away once more, let Israel to become another Arab Muslim majority state, and yet another state where Jews are a minority, and then take their chances with anti-Semitism in this new state and everywhere else.  Then, there will peace in the area - of a sort.  Wars against Israel will probably be replaced by sectarian wars of the kind we have seen quite a lot of recently in the region.

8 Replies6 RecommendShareFlag

Darrel commented October 24

D

Darrel

Williamsburg

Oct. 24

@History Guy Yup, when Israel keeps Palestinians in ghettos there will be resistance. The simple answer is for Israel to obey Article 194 and get back to the Green Line. Israel will also have to make reparations and give up land so Gaza and the West Bank can become a Palestinian state. Then the $3.8B/year needs to go to NGOs to rebuild and modernize Palestine. No more WMD for Israel. Gaza will make a fine port city for exported olives from the West Bank and beaches for tourists. Simplistic I know but better than the current positions of both sides.

8 Replies6 RecommendShareFlag

Mabel commented October 24

M

Mabel

Massachusetts

Oct. 24

This is the best solution I've heard.

6 RecommendShareFlag

SRG commented October 24

S

SRG

Portland, OR

Oct. 24

@Bill Israel is not doing this for revenge. It is to eradicate Hamas once and for all.

7 Replies6 RecommendShareFlag

Anne commented October 24

A

Anne

Delaware

Oct. 24

@RB The PLO accepted Israel's right to exist at Oslo in 1993.

6 RecommendShareFlag

Azzy commented October 24

A

Azzy

Philadelphia

Oct. 24

I found this episode nuanced and balanced. As someone who is neither Arab, nor Jewish ( but with many Jewish friends), I found that the arguments resonated with me. We almost never hear any Palestinian voices in the mainstream media. Hence,  it takes particular courage to try and understand- and more importantly amplify another , in this case Palestinian, point of view. I found this to be a remarkable conversation.

6 RecommendShareFlag

Andrew Miller commented October 24

A

Andrew Miller

Baltimore

Oct. 24

@Michael Setting aside the current topic of the conflict in the Middle East, you do understand that Jews were prominent supporters of workers rights in the early 20th century, supporters of the civil rights struggle in the 50s and 60s, and even during the era of Bush and Trump were overwhelmingly supporters of Democratic candidates (as they still are)? I know there is a significant fraction who are on the right but the Republican party has never been a home to the vast majority of American Jews and neither have other brands of conservatism. In fact much of what progressives believe can be found in ancient Jewish texts. I suggest you go and read the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel, both his writings on Judaism and his writings on race and justice, before you spout nonsense about what Jews are or were.

6 RecommendShareFlag

nathan commented October 24

N

nathan

Santa Maria CA

Oct. 24

@RC people are allowed to have their own belief systems. I know its comforting to believe that enlightened secularism is the only path to peace but smugness is not a solution here and religious people Jew Christian Muslim are not “doomed” to violence

6 RecommendShareFlag

poohbah commented October 24

P

poohbah

Philadelphia

Oct. 24

@RamS 

Israel(suported by the US) needs to be held accountable for violating UN, Geneva conventions about occupied territories taken after 1967...can't move people on "occupied lands, for example)

  US

needs to stop blocking resolutions for ceasefires,etc

US needs to  to explain how " local politics" explains US being an enabler of Israel's settlement programs

6 RecommendShareFlag

RB commented October 24

R

RB

California

Oct. 24

@Anne They never gave up the "right of return".  Further to the fact that when the leader of the PLO, Mt. Arafat, was presented with the Clinton framework, which Israel (Barak) accepted, he was unwilling to give up the "armed struggle" and initiated the second intifada, utilizing the very arms Israel had supplied him against their forces.

6 RecommendShareFlag

Jeff N commented October 24

J

Jeff N

Boston

Oct. 24

@Bill

I’d you think this military response from Israel is “unrestrained” then I don’t think you understand modern military capabilities very clearly.

Israel could have leveled the entirety of Gaza by now. They haven’t, and they won’t.

I’ll believe hamas’ casualty reports when they correctly acknowledge the embarrassment of killing their own civilians at a hospital by accident. Take their word at your own risk.

7 Replies6 RecommendShareFlag

Want2know commented October 24

W

Want2know

MI

Oct. 24

@LDC   Right now, it is fair to say that most Israelis are supporting their country rather than their government.

6 RecommendShareFlag

Want2know commented October 24

W

Want2know

MI

Oct. 24

@ph    At minimum, the left should expect Palestinians to support reasonable compromise just as they do from Israel.  If all some on the left can offer is a demand for a single state solution, they are really not interested in peace or justice.

16 Replies6 RecommendShareFlag

Frank Delano commented October 24

Frank Delano

Frank Delano

Coasts

Oct. 24

@Grumpy Dirt Lawyer based on genetics there has also been a continuing presence of Palestinians on the land as far back as 1200 BCE. 

I don't think of the Jews who went to Israel as colonialists, but saying they were coming to "reclaim their home," appears to imply it was their home and not the home of Palestinians. There's no basis for that in the historical record, particularly when you keep the genetic record in mind. 

But also of note is the fact that as recently as the 19th century the area was over 80% Palestinian and hadn't been predominantly Jewish for over 1300 years. 

Then, of course, taking in a larger view of history, we can see that Palestinians descend from the tribes of the Levant just as the Jews did. 

I'm not here to make an argument that all of this land *belongs* to Palestine, or that Jews shouldn't be there or that Israel shouldn't exist. That's not at all what I'm saying. 

But the idea that's so often presented that the Jewish people have a unique right to this land isn't borne out by history. 

I pray for peace and condemn the atrocities of 10/7 committed by the morally disordered Hamas. I also condemn the current massacre.

16 Replies6 RecommendShareFlag

Joseph Katz commented October 24

J

Joseph Katz

Hamburg, Germany

Oct. 24

@History Guy 

As the cliche says "There is no alternative."

When you are surrounded by people who want to kill you, you must be an armed fortress.

8 Replies5 RecommendShareFlag

Al M commented October 24

A

Al M

Norfolk Va

Oct. 24

@Mohammad Mountebank 

The best option would be a ceasefire and an end to   dehumanizing apartheid. This means abandoning illegal settlements, granting everyone, including Palestinians equal citizenship, disarming  and repressing both Israeli and Palestinian extreme nationalist groups.

Anything less just perpetuates the problem.

8 Replies5 RecommendShareFlag

JayK commented October 24

J

JayK

CT

Oct. 24

That's a fascinating headline, given the fact that the author seems to have a very difficult time holding just one viable thought at once.

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Ron commented October 24

R

Ron

Montreal

Oct. 24

@Ok 

The 2 state solution with 1967 borders, including East Jerusalem, and mutually agreed land swaps  is consistent with official US foreign policy, with all UN resolutions, with the work of the UN Quartet, and with the Arab League Proposal.

This is what the world expects. This is what the world demands. Regardless of Netanyahu, his extremist government, and AIPAC.

Delay just wastes blood and treasure.

7 Replies5 RecommendShareFlag

Leigh commented October 24

L

Leigh

Washington

Oct. 24

@SD B/D is not only opposed by the right. It is opposed on the left as well. And is now banned in at least 35 states including NY, IL, CA, PA...

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Want2know commented October 24

W

Want2know

MI

Oct. 24

@John Dirlik 

"Before suicide bombings ever existed in Israel, New York Baruch Goldstein slaughtered 29 worshippers at a Hebron mosque (February, 1994)."

Actually, suicide bombing pre-dated that attack.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_attacks

5 RecommendShareFlag

that person commented October 24

T

that person

NYC

Oct. 24

@Peter 

What on earth? "The Palestinians" do not want to destroy them all. Hamas does not represent the views of all Palestinians. Why would anyone NOT be understanding of the plight of Palestinian civilians? They are being indiscriminately brutalized. 

Also, the leftist students do not want to be "ruled by Hamas". The VAST majority of people protesting for Palestinian freedom do not support Hamas.

16 Replies5 RecommendShareFlag

Anti-Marx commented October 24

Anti-Marx

Anti-Marx

manhattan

Oct. 24

@HipOath 

What does "free" mean, in this context? Does it mean the elimination of secular society?

5 RecommendShareFlag

Kate commented October 24

K

Kate

PA

Oct. 24

@dontbeleveit What an interesting litany of complaints. I presume you believe that Israel has a much better record on these fronts?

1. Women have equal rights in Israel, right? Except no, a woman who wants to divorce her husband needs HIS permission! He must give her a "get," and the many women unable to get these become "chained wives."

2. Israel must respect gay rights, surely? What year did they legalize gay marriage? Oh, that's right, they STILL haven't legalized it. Not such a haven for the gays, then.

3. I'm not going to dance around this one. Israel has a STATE RELIGION, and elements of the state show preference to Jews. Why should a secular leftist movement respect their religion more than another.

No serious leftist supports Hamas. Hamas is a right wing organization. Leftists support Palestinian liberation, and they can recognize that violent repression by the IDF provokes further violence. Even if Israel destroys Hamas, another violent organization will spring up in its place, because Israel has made nonviolent resistance impossible. When Palestinians marched peacefully to the Gaza fence in 2018, the IDF shot and killed more than 180 of them, and wounded thousands more. Leftists want the violence to stop. The only way is liberation.

6 Replies5 RecommendShareFlag

AJ commented October 24

A

AJ

Brooklyn

Oct. 24

After the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai in 2008 — seen as India’s 9/11 and in its face-to-face killings very similar to Israel’s Oct 7 — India decided not to retaliate against Pakistan, even though it is widely known to fund these groups. The geopolitical situation is of course very much different because of Israel’s fear of being wiped off the map, which would never happen to India. But it is instructive nonetheless. There is another way.

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tara commented October 24

T

tara

mi

Oct. 24

f you simply cancel the disputed notion of Jewish Exceptionalism, the picture gets clearer. One the one hand, the Jews are a People defined by the 2000-year diaspora, and 'exceptional' for that. That's their history and it colors the culture from country to country. On the other, there's nothing in moral law or international law that offers a Jewish citizen of any country 'exceptional' consideration if we're talking about being exempt from ethics and international law. Israeli governments have often argued that they are exempted from the second item. 

Other than that, if American Jews are left-wing, they're faced with 2 forms of 'left' position; the first is a neo-marxist one, that the Jewish People aren't really one, and should be assimilated into host societies. The second, far more common and longstanding, is ambiguous about assimilation, but is clear, that God commands respect for ALL creation, and freedom from arbitrary wrongdoings for peoples, no matter who commits them-- especially where captive nations are involved. And that it's precisely that Judaic tradition that is most valued.

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Tom J commented October 24

T

Tom J

Berwyn, IL

Oct. 24

In "The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem," actress Maya Thomas plays a wealthy British military wife (Stephanie Parker) who's trying to convince actress Swell Ariel Or (Luna, the beauty queen) to escape the WWII violence in Jerusalem, live in England and become a successful fashion designer. A skeptical Luna tells Stephanie that it would be no better moving to England because of the war. Stephanie acknowledges the strife, but convinces Luna by saying "but at some point, the war in England will end."

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sedanchair commented October 24

S

sedanchair

Tacoma WA

Oct. 24

@Tim Here's the problem: everyone who states that perfunctory idea has no idea how to do it. That's why Biden's approach has just been to say "tell me how you're going to destroy Hamas" and they can't give him an answer. That's why they're mobilized on the border looking awkward right now, rather than going into Gaza.

10 Replies4 RecommendShareFlag

Lefthalfbach commented October 24

L

Lefthalfbach

Philadelphia

Oct. 24

@Tim  

There is an interview on RCP today with a former Israeli Intelligence Chief, stiill involved and apparently speaking "...Unofficially...". He says that Israel is not only going to destroy hasmas in gaza but that it is going to track down the  Hamas leadership worldwide and kill them after they flee- no matter hoew long it takes. 

It is an interesting read.

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Brian commented October 24

B

Brian

90275

Oct. 24

@joe Arab citizens of Israel are divided on how they prefer to identify, whether as "Arab Israelis", "Palestinian citizens of Israel" or "48 Arabs."

I'm happy to call people what they prefer to be called.

4 RecommendShareFlag

LDC commented October 24

L

LDC

Woodside, CA

Oct. 24

"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." —Mark Twain

1 Reply4 RecommendShareFlag

David Williams commented October 24

D

David Williams

San Diego county

Oct. 24

@dontbeleveit "a somewhat atheist posture or at the minimum  the separation between religion and politics..."

These two things are in no way related.

6 Replies4 RecommendShareFlag

LRK commented October 24

L

LRK

Seattle

Oct. 24

@Chazak17 thank you for saying this. How insulting to see non-Jews parade these people around along with Jewish Voices for Peace, and If Not Now When. These organizations and individuals do not advocate for Jews unless the perpetrators are white. These organizations and individuals mostly advocate for Muslims, illegal immigrants, and Black people. Notice they will never criticize these three groups. But they will criticize Jews unrelentingly.

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jk commented October 24

J

jk

Brooklyn

Oct. 24

I definitely agree with this, but do you think the podcast is blaming Israel?  I don't.  just discussing what has happened and what might need to happen.

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sedanchair commented October 24

S

sedanchair

Tacoma WA

Oct. 24

@History Guy Not as long as religious extremists keep tight control over Israel's politics, taking every opportunity to empower Hamas.

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Michael commented October 24

M

Michael

Florida

Oct. 24

If you are a "progressive," you are Jewish only in that your parent(s) are Jewish (and they, likely, are as Jewish as you).  Your grandparents, assuming they survived the Holocaust, were likely Jewish.

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Bartlet for America commented October 24

B

Bartlet for America

Ann Arbor

Oct. 24

@Anne 

I think you mis-understood the original poster.

Please allow me to explain his thought. When the original poster says that "Hamas must be destroyed to the fullest extent possible", I think what he meant is that each and every member of Hamas, and those that facilitate them, must be eradicated from the earth. Totally eradicated. Only then will peace with Hamas be possible. Hamas has made it crystal clear that this is the only path forward for Israel to secure peace for its country. And we in the US will help gladly Israel achieve this for their nation.

So, I think your comment misses the point entirely. The true obstacle to peace is the continued existence of even one Hamas member or facilitator.

10 Replies3 RecommendShareFlag

John Dirlik commented October 24

J

John Dirlik

Montreal

Oct. 24

@Ok 

If it bleeds, it leads. Sadly, there have been countless "moderates" but their efforts were ignored by an clearly slanted corporate media.

During the first Palestinian uprising (‘89-’93) before suicide bombings or rockets from Gaza existed in Israel and when over a thousand protesters were killed by the IDF, and American-Palestinian activist (Mubarak Awad) opened the “Centre for Non-violent Civil Disobedience” in Jerusalem. He was promptly deported.

Earlier (’82) Israel had used the attempted assassination of one of its European ambassadors by a breakaway PLO group to invade Lebonon and “Crush PLO terror.” In reality, the PLO had been observing a US-brokered ceasefire for the 11 previous months. More importantly, it had for the first time been publicly debating a two-state solution and was rapidly gaining international legitimacy with even the Pope hosting Arafat.

It was this, that then-Israeli prime Minister Menachem Begin (a wanted terrorist during the British Mandate) found intolerable.

Israel has always feared Palestinian diplomacy and non-violence (witness the current panic over BDS) fair more than its violence.

7 Replies3 RecommendShareFlag

G Thompson commented October 24

G

G Thompson

Largo, Fl 33771

Oct. 24

I am not going to try to make an argument. I just hope that you are familiar with the ideas presented by the following authors on the issue of Human Shields.

Neve Gordon & Nicola Perugini discuss their new book, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press, 2020) with Ayça Çubukçu, Noura Erakat & John Reynolds.

3 RecommendShareFlag

ABC commented October 24

A

ABC

UK

Oct. 24

@Be Very 

That's a non sequitur. 

Firstly, people did not blame Jews, they blamed the Israeli Defence Force which is actively targeting civilian infrastructure, was credibly report to be targeting Red Cross ambulances in the lead-up to the hospital bombing, and has demonstrably no regard for Palestinian life or welfare - or the welfare of, to quote the Minister for Defence, 'human animals'. Frankly, to my mind it is sheer dumb luck on the Israeli's part that they didn't bomb the hospital, not some act of restraint or humanity on their part, an impression backed up by their more recent bombing of other hospitals and a church. 

Your second comment does not follow either. 

Firstly, they have not said they would end hostilities, they have said they would allow water and aid into Gaza; withholding it is a war crime, a crime against humanity, and hostage-taking on an even larger scale than Hamas. 

Secondly, the Israeli state is responsible for each decision it makes to bomb and kill innocent Palestinians. My point is that the NYT rhetorically obscures this fact through the passive voice: 'Palestinians died' linguistically erases the agency of Israel in choosing to make that happen 5,000+ time over. This is true regardless of any actions of Hamas, no matter how deplorable they are. Palestinian civilians are no more responsible for Hamas' actions than Israelis civilians are for the worst crimes of their government.

5 Replies3 RecommendShareFlag

Juarezbear commented October 24

J

Juarezbear

Los Angeles

Oct. 24

@David Thanks for being to the point and on point. The far left like these two guys can't bring themselves to say that.

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JerseyGirl commented October 24

J

JerseyGirl

Princeton NJ

Oct. 24

@Nicola The difference is that there are no rights specifically reserved for members of one religion in the UK and there are in Israel.  

For example, every Jew in the world can automatically immigrate to Israel.  No non-Jew can.  A Jew and a non-Jew cannot marry in Israel  because there is no such thing as secular marriage or divorce.  The religious courts control marriage and divorce and they do not permit intermarriage.  And on and on.

7 Replies3 RecommendShareFlag

Bah commented October 24

B

Bah

Paris

Oct. 24

@bejeweled I wonder what this ignorance is supposed to be about. The defenders of Israel always say that their opponents are ignorant or fail to appreciate the complexity of the history but never provide the context or redress that ignorance. The closest thing to an explanation I have read/heard is the supposed proposals that the Palestinians rejected. Why did the Palestinians reject those proposals? If you ask the question, then you will have to look into the proposals, which is not what the pro-Israel want to do.

4 Replies3 RecommendShareFlag

adelante commented October 24

A

adelante

Brooklyn

Oct. 24

@dontbeleveit 

"The left" does not support Hamas. There are tiny pockets of Hamas apologists within the left, and they have been widely, rightfully condemned. But the overwhelming majority of leftists and progressives have zero love for Hamas. 

Support for Palestinian freedom does not inherently equal antisemitism nor endorsement of Hamas. Until we can all accept this objective reality, we will always talk past each other.

6 Replies3 RecommendShareFlag

Frank Delano commented October 24

Frank Delano

Frank Delano

Coasts

Oct. 24

@Georgiana oh the horror of a multi-ethnic state that's an actual democracy with a constitution that protects the rights of all.

16 Replies3 RecommendShareFlag

Michael Jacobson commented October 24

M

Michael Jacobson

Bridgeport

Oct. 24

@cali Do you accept that there is blame on both sides?

3 RecommendShareFlag

horace commented October 24

H

horace

oregon

Oct. 24

@Juarezbear And that is why Israeli officials promoted the growth of Hamas. There plan is to always undermine a legitimate Palestinian leadership. Israel never intends to share anything equitably.

16 Replies3 RecommendShareFlag

Casual Observer commented October 24

C

Casual Observer

Los Angeles

Oct. 24

The issue is about self determination rights for Israelis and for Palestinian Arabs. That means sovereign states with full rights and capacities to assure self determination for themselves. Currently, neither side can have self determination when the other side has it, because both want the same lands to have it.

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Deficits Without Limits commented October 24

D

Deficits Without Limits

NY

Oct. 24

The notion of ends-justify-the-means, plainly violating justice, leads to breaking eggs for an omelet.

When omelet chefs control the government, the outcome certainly isn't going to be pretty. And, here we have three well-educated liberals who can't solve the problem peacefully and justly. Aside from the discussion of the traditional tribal blame game, perhaps they haven't understood yet the fundamental causes of the pesisting injustices; should we question their liberalism and reject it? If so, what is the ethically correct theory?

3 RecommendShareFlag

Bill commented October 24

B

Bill

NYC

Oct. 24

Once again a story that only mentions Isreal dropping bombs, but fails to mention that Hamas has from the start kept dropping bombs on Isreal.  Thank the lord that the iron dome prevents massive destruction for Isreali citizens, but what should a country do when their neighbor keeps firing rockets at them indiscriminately?

3 RecommendShareFlag

KTT commented October 24

K

KTT

NY

Oct. 24

@Peter 

I think it is because the US is funding Israel and it is not funding Hamas.  People know Hamas is horrible, but the US is not supporting them, so people don't protest against 'the US support of Hamas' because it doesn't exist.

16 Replies3 RecommendShareFlag

You commented October 24

Y

You

NY, NY

Oct. 24

Try Phillip Weiss as well.

2 RecommendShareFlag

Mohammad Mountebank commented October 24

M

Mohammad Mountebank

Luang Prabang

Oct. 24

@Ok We get stuck in the same debates because the same old people are voicing the same outmoded thinking.   Peter Beinart?   Really?  Your question answers itself.

2 RecommendShareFlag

DogMom commented October 24

D

DogMom

USA

Oct. 24

@Tim sort of like Al Queda which then converted a once tame Isis into extremists.  Sadly, destroying Hamas creates a whole lot of 6, 7, 8 year olds who have hate in their hearts. 

The escalation continues. Not sure when it ends or how. But I can’t help feel that destruction of any life is not the way.

10 Replies2 RecommendShareFlag

Yoandel commented October 24

Y

Yoandel

Boston

Oct. 24

@Tim I think all (most people?) agree that Hamas must be destroyed. 

But how? There seems to be an assumption of Hamas somehow deciding to fight to the death, versus hiding with civilians and reconstituting themselves later, with new recruits of which there will be many after all this violence. 

It seems that escalation and the destruction of Gaza will only favor the terrorists and the extremists.

10 Replies2 RecommendShareFlag

An Invincible Summer commented October 24

A

An Invincible Summer

Wisconsin

Oct. 24

I deeply appreciated this conversation, the reflections and insights of the participants, and their recommendations for reading.

2 RecommendShareFlag

Chris Martin commented October 24

C

Chris Martin

Alameda CA

Oct. 24

This is fantastic!

2 RecommendShareFlag

Grumpy Dirt Lawyer commented October 24

Grumpy Dirt Lawyer

Grumpy Dirt Lawyer

SoFla

Oct. 24

@Darrel You are making the assumption that this will satisfy Hamas and Fatah and that they will enter into peaceful coexistence (remember that term from the Cold War) with Israel as a Jewish majority state.  While the concessions and compromises you suggest would indeed benefit a lot of the Arab Palestinians, I have much less confidence in (a) the bona fides and willingness of Hamas and Fatah, not to mention the smaller terrorist groups, to drop their stated intent to end the existence of Israel and either drive its Jewish residents out, murder them all or subject them to a minority status, than I do in (b) the current government of Israel (which confidence is less than the volume of an olive, to put it in Talmudic terms).  I want peace in Israel and self-determination for the Arab Palestinian people, but I am not confident that their leadership is beyond Arafat's struggle for the sake of struggle, to the detriment of the people.  What to do?  I wish I knew.

8 Replies2 RecommendShareFlag

Juarezbear commented October 24

J

Juarezbear

Los Angeles

Oct. 24

@Gal As you point out, Bibi is a major problem and doing more to harm Israel than Arafat ever could have accomplished. He and his wife are terrified of going to prison. Israel should grant them immunity from prosecution in exchange for resigning and staying out of politics. That would be the only silver lining in this debacle for both sides.

2 RecommendShareFlag

fletzie commented October 24

F

fletzie

Maryland

Oct. 24

@Ok The bottom line is this is NOT our fight here in the United States. We have tried to put down extremists and terrorists in two countries. Have we not shed enoufh of our own military blood to help people have space to come to their senses when taht is not what they want to do? If Israel with the bigger military powoer refuses to negotiate they show what a tiny minded view of the world at large they have..."we want ours and you cannot have yours" . THAT is what their poliicy has been. They have no finesse for diplomacy or treaties or agreements because they break them as soon as their mind changes.

7 Replies2 RecommendShareFlag

Santa commented October 24

S

Santa

Cupertino

Oct. 24

@Colin Babb 

As an outside observer, I couldn't agree more!! I wish your comment would be pinned to the top for all to read and consider. It is possible to be horrified by Hamas's terrorist attacks, and simultaneously be moved by the plights of Gazans. But no, it seems we have fallen into this habit of simplistic binary thinking: Jews vs Arabs, Israel vs Palestine, and so on. 

I wonder how many of these outside observers who have decided that one side is right have actually read the history of the region and its people. It's complicated beyond belief and moral clarity is impossible to find.

2 RecommendShareFlag

Casual Observer commented October 24

C

Casual Observer

Los Angeles

Oct. 24

I have always been liberal with libertarian preferences. I recognize the need for communities to assure all have what they need but the need for individual agency is the only way for people to freely give government the consent to govern. I have never thought that groups have any moral superiority over serious and self aware individual's moral judgments. 

The left is always dominated by other directed people who see individual agency as just base selfishness. But it means that they can be just deaf, dumb, and blind as they turn over their individual judgment to follow the group. That is what happened in the days after the terrorist attacks by Hamas led Palestinians on October 7th. Those attacks were heinous and in no way justified nor excusable. 

But now, the vengeful acts by Israelis has further confounded the blame for the horrific deaths and injuries.

2 RecommendShareFlag

Michael Jacobson commented October 24

M

Michael Jacobson

Bridgeport

Oct. 24

@Clint The only solution is two states. Or perhaps Beinart's idea of a confederacy; that could work but I am certainly not qualified to say it will. 

However I do know that as long as the Palestinians have no state of their own, this war will continue. 

I worked for many years for this solution, in what used to be called the "peace process." I have always maintained that if there is no peace, there is war. Now we see the proof.

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