Our call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at 11 AM Eastern.
Our guest this week will be Geoffrey Levin, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University and author of the new book, Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978, which explores a largely unknown history of American Jewish criticism of Israel in the first decades of its existence, and how it was quashed. It’s a particularly relevant history today given the rise of Jewish organizing against the war in Gaza.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
The Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast discusses the challenges of being part of an American synagogue community during this war.
Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.
A beautiful statement by the Deputy Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the United Nations, Majed Bamya, about Noa Argamani’s release from captivity.
Is the global outcry over Israel’s actions starting to hit its high-tech sector?
What happens to Palestinian Gandhi’s?
Masculinity and the New York Jewish Intellectuals.
Wajahat Ali’s new newsletter, Left Hook.
See you on Thursday at 11 AM,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. As I’ve been following the news of the increased escalation between Israel and Hezbollah, which is really terrifying, my mind has kept going back to a conversation I had with an Israeli friend soon after October 7th. And my friend said, ‘you don’t understand, Peter. If we don’t destroy Hamas, people will never feel safe living in the south of Israel again. And we will have lost that part of our country.’ And what he was saying made a huge amount of sense, it seems to me, in terms of Israeli political culture, Israeli political psychology given the trauma of what had happened after October 7th. And so, he was saying because that is non-negotiable, we have to defeat Hamas. And what I was thinking was: but I don’t think you can defeat Hamas. I think that’s non-negotiable. So, we were essentially at loggerheads because he was saying that, for a political reason, Israel had to do something militarily that I didn’t think could be done. And now, more than eight months later, I think it seems clear to me that it cannot be done.
And so, now I feel like there’s a version of this playing out in terms of Israel’s debate in its north vis-a-vis Hezbollah, but in some ways with even more frightening stakes. Which the argument is: Israelis cannot return to the north because all of these people have been displaced from their homes unless we push Hezbollah away from that border. And that beyond that, Israel can no longer accept the kind of situation that it accepted before October 7th, which is to say the precariousness, the uncertainty, the unsatisfactory nature of the fact that Hezbollah was always there with this huge arsenal. That was acceptable before October 7th. We can no longer accept these things now because we have a greater sense of threat and also perhaps because we have lost our deterrent, and it needs to be re-established.
This reminds me a lot of the debate in the United States around Iraq after September 11th where people were saying maybe we could muddle through with Saddam Hussein, who we thought was kind of rearming and, you know, eluding the sanctions regime. Maybe that was okay before September 11th. But now, given that we’ve seen the potential peril—and given that we look weak—we need a decisive answer. Again, but like my friend in Israel, it all assumes that a decisive answer is possible, right? It’s as if to say, militarily, this has to become possible because politically we need it to be possible.
And yet, I have not heard—just as I did not hear as Israel was going into Gaza—anyone offering a convincing explanation of how Israel was going to defeat and destroy Hamas. I haven’t heard anyone say that about how Israel is going to destroy Hezbollah, force Hezbollah off of Israel’s borders. Again, it seems to me more like this situation of kind of you start from a political necessity, and then you assume that there’s a military solution. And to me, what this suggests is that the way in which Israeli Jewish leaders, and Israeli Jewish political discourse—and much Jewish discourse in the diaspora because it tends to often kind of follow along—has a sense of the political terms of discussion that can’t imagine political solutions that don’t require these military solutions.
Again, military solutions seem to me fantastical, which are not actually possible. That in reality, Israel going to war against Hezbollah, Israel might be able to destroy a lot of southern Lebanon and a lot of Lebanon period, and destroy a lot of Hezbollah’s weaponry, but at a massive cost to Israel. I mean, right now, it’s just the North is unlivable. I mean, Hezbollah could kind of make Tel Aviv unlivable, at least for a while, right? And in terms of what this would do in terms of Israel’s international isolation given what’s already happened, it just seems to me strategically really, really disastrous for Israel. If you want to kind of move Israel closer to a point where people can really imagine the country no longer being able to exist, it seems to me going to war in Lebanon would be a really good way of doing that in terms of ramping up even more international isolation, just making larger sections of the country unlivable. And yet, to be able to avoid that you have to imagine political responses, again, just like you would have vis-à-vis Gaza, which would have been political responses, which are not really within the Jewish Israeli terms of mainstream debate. Which would involve substantial compromise and kind of reimagining of the whole question of what brings security fundamentally from a political lens, not from a military lens. Which in the Palestinian Gaza case would mean that basically there is no solution problem that Hamas represents unless you offer Palestinians a clear pathway towards basic human rights and freedom. That’s the central problem you have to answer if you want to deal with the military problem that Hamas faces.
And similarly with Hezbollah, there is no answer vis-a-vis Hezbollah unless you change the dynamic with Palestinians since Hezbollah is fundamentally doing this as a kind of an ally, almost as kind of an adjunct to the Palestinian case. And beyond that, that you need a different relationship with Iran, that you need some kind of thaw and detente in this cold war with Iran given the influence that Iran has over Hezbollah. And it seems to me, what frightens me so much is that those political ways of thinking—that it seems to me could be an alternative to the military answer and could offer a vision of Israelis returning to the north as returning to the south that did not involve a second, even more potentially catastrophic war—are just not really on the table in terms of the debate.
And I don’t feel like when I look at American discourse, American political discourse, American Jewish discourse, I don’t see an effort to really or push Israelis, to challenge Jewish Israelis, to ask them to think outside of their own political terms—again, in an Israel right now where basically the terms of political debate run from the very far right to essentially the center right, right, in which people who genuinely see Palestinian freedom as the essence of trying to provide Israeli security, those voices among Jewish Israelis are basically off the table. And that’s part of what frightens me so much about this moment.
