This week’s Zoom call will be at a special time: Thursday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories and author of the new book, When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine. She has been sanctioned by the Trump administration, which has barred her from entering the United States and frozen her assets in the country. We’ll talk about her new book, her investigations into Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank, her views of US, European, and United Nations policy toward Israel, and about the criticisms of her. We’ll also talk about what it’s like to live under US sanctions.
Special Offer
This week only, all subscribers (including free subscribers) of The Beinart Notebook get a 40 percent discount on a one-year paid subscription to Robert Wright’s Nonzero Network, a group of independent Substack voices, including mine, as well as Glenn Loury, Kaiser Kuo, and others with whom I may not always agree, but who share a commitment to intellectual honesty and reasoned analysis.
Cited in Today’s Video
Muhammad Shehada’s comments about life in Gaza, in conversation with Jehad Abusalim and Adam Shatz for the London Review of Books podcast.
The Israeli human rights group Gisha on Israel’s restrictions on the import of toilets—and other essential civilian goods—into Gaza.
The World Health Organization on the surge of “ectoparasite infections and rodent-borne illnesses” in Gaza.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Will Alden profiles Curt Mills, one of the intellectual architects of the anti-Israel right.
See you on Thursday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, there are a lot of Jews—I know some of them well myself—who are kind of both bewildered and enraged by this turn in American public opinion and in American politics against Israel, as reflected in my own city, New York, for instance, and the fact that Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the first mayor in many years not to march in the Israel Day parade, or that there’s this effort to boycott Israeli goods at this Brooklyn co-op. And there’s this sense that, kind of, why is it, people ask, many Jews ask, that there’s this fury against Israel, this rage?
And the answer that’s so frequently given is that this is just an eruption of age-old antisemitism, right? A kind of return to the ancient art of Jew-hating. And of course, there is antisemitism. There is Jew-hating. Antisemitism is rising, but I just wish that some of those folks who are enraged and bewildered by this turn in public opinion, in American politics against Israel, would just spend a little bit of time looking at what Israel does, looking at what life is like for Palestinians under Israeli control.
Because if you start to look even just a little, if you’re willing to open your eyes even just a little, then this anger at Israel, even this rage at Israel, and this desire to fundamentally change the way America interacts with Israel, it stops looking so pathological. It stops looking so antisemitic, because you can start to understand why people would be so upset, right?
But so frequently, the people in our community who most need to look, just never look. And I just want to give one little example of what it looks like to take even a tiny peek at what it’s like to be a Palestinian under Israeli control, in this case, in Gaza. This is an extended quote from my friend Muhammad Shehada, who is from Gaza, and he was interviewed for the London Review of Books podcast by Adam Shatz in a recent episode. And I’m going to quote what Muhammad says about life in Gaza now.
Muhammad says:
The biggest struggle at the moment is basic shelter. Almost everyone I know is on the street. Every single member of my family, every friend that I have, every colleague, every neighbor had their homes either bombed, burned to the ground, bulldozed, detonated from the inside, or heavily damaged to the point that it cannot house any human habitation. The luckiest of my friends is Anas. Anas lives in a bombed-out building on the first floor. The building was bombed from the very top, so the last two floors are gone. The staircase connecting the multiple floors in that condominium is cut in half. The bottom floor was bombed repeatedly, so it’s also burned completely. In the apartment where Anas lives, it doesn’t have any windows, doesn’t have any doors, there’s no door to even enter the apartment. There’s a giant hole in the living room from an unexploded 2,000-pound bomb that Israel dropped on that tower that went right through it, and it landed on the ground floor, so he literally lives above that unexploded bomb.
His daily occupation during the day is finding water or food. It has become one of the most insane struggles. Or just a place to relieve yourself. A restroom is becoming a dream. Israel is literally banning toilets from entering Gaza up until this moment, so you have to improvise, and the nighttime struggle is Anas sleeping with one eye open to protect his only daughter from mice, rats, scorpions, spiders, snakes, cockroaches, mosquitoes, flies that have had this sort of unprecedented nesting ground in either infinite piles of garbage that Israel does not allow to be collected, or disposed of, or in destroyed sewage systems, or in the rubble of homes where those rodents and insects have been feasting on the decomposing bodies of thousands of Palestinians under the rubble.
Now, if you think Muhammad is being hyperbolic, I’ll link to the Gisha report—Gisha, an Israeli Human Rights Organization—which notes that portable toilets, along with sleeping bags, tarps, non-electric wheelchairs, and flashlights, and other items like that, have all been deemed dual-use items by Israel, which means it’s very, very difficult to bring them in to Gaza. And another report by the World Health Organization, which has recorded that since the beginning of 2026, there have been more than 70,000 cases of ectoparasitic infections and rodent-borne illnesses in Gaza. And health workers, according to the World Health Organization, say that, ‘the collapse of sanitation systems, mountains of rubble, overflowing sewage, and overcrowded displacement camps have created fertile conditions for disease to spread.’
So, the Israeli government will say, well, this is because Hamas has not disarmed. So, first of all, it’s fundamentally and profoundly immoral to deny people the basic necessities of life—toilets, toilets, basic sanitation systems—because you are upset that Hamas has not disarmed. Secondly, Hamas’ criteria for disarming is that they’re not willing to do so absent some horizon by which Israel’s control over Gaza and the Palestinian people will end, right? I have lots and lots of criticisms of Hamas, and I’ve registered them many, many, many times. But this basic idea that you don’t disarm absent any possibility that you are going to get your freedom is not a Hamas-only idea. Hamas didn’t invent this.
Nelson Mandela vehemently refused to give up armed resistance in negotiations with the South African government when they tried to get him to foreswear armed resistance in the 1980s, and he said repeatedly, we will abandon armed resistance, we will turn over our guns when we have a date for a free election. The Irish Republican Army, similarly, was not willing to disarm until they knew that Catholics would get political equality.
So, this demand that Hamas has to disarm, without any reason for Hamas whatsoever to believe that it would bring Palestinians closer to freedom, an end to the blockade, an end to occupation, is a very typical perspective of a group that’s representing a population that’s lacking basic rights. And Palestinians can also look at the West Bank and see the consequences of what happens when you do disarm without any guarantee that your occupation will end. They can look at the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority has been for 20 years, not only not turning to armed resistance, but collaborating with Israel to stop armed resistance, and they can see what’s happening. Palestinians losing more and more and more land, more and more violence against Palestinians who are completely defenseless as Israel takes their land and often takes their lives, right?
This is just completely indefensible at the most basic, gut, human level. And the problem in the Jewish community, the problem with so many of these peoples, many of whom I know who are otherwise really good people, is they’re just not willing to look at these things. What they do is they look at the people who are enraged at Israel, or they look at Zohran Mamdani, or they look at people who are boycotting, and they don’t understand where this anger comes from. But if they would just pay attention to what Israel is actually doing, they would understand where this anger comes from. They could see it as something other than pathological and antisemitic, and they themselves might actually start to feel that kind of anger themselves.
Because the right human response to what Israel is doing to Muhammad Shehada’s family and Muhammad Shehada’s friends is anger. It is anger. And it is a demand that the United States should not be supporting this kind of behavior. But you have to see that. You have to see that in order to understand the actual dynamics of what’s happening in the shifting debate about America and America’s relationship with Israel. And if you systematically ignore it, you’re trapped in this bubble in which you can only understand this response as antisemitism because you’re not willing to look in the eye the very, very painful and very brutal truths that we as Jews have to face about what is being done in our name as Jews, and with our money as Americans, to people like Anas, and to millions of other people in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank whose lives are being made hell.
