Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.
Our guest will be Fadi Quran, a Senior Campaigner at Avaaz, a Popular Struggle community organizer in the West Bank and one of the most eloquent voices I know about the moral principles undergirding the struggle for Palestinian freedom. Since October 7, his writing has been desperate and enraged, but never lost its ethical core. We’ll talk about what it’s like to be a Palestinian watching Western governments tolerate—if not assist—Gaza’s destruction.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Rashid Khalidi, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
Israel’s charge that UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 massacre.
Israel’s longstanding effort to abolish UNRWA.
The Biden administration’s decision to suspend aid to UNRWA.
UNRWA’s role in combatting the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), three aid workers describe life in Gaza.
A few weeks ago, on one of our Friday zoom calls, I interviewed Musallam Abukhalil, a doctor in Gaza. After treating thousands of displaced people, he has now been forced to flee his own home and is living in a tent in Rafah. He’s desperately trying to leave Gaza, and a friend has established a Gofundme page to help. If you can, please do.
In 972Mag, an anonymous Palestinian journalist in Gaza asks hard questions about both Israel and Hamas.
Israeli intelligence believes the death counts reported by Gaza’s ministry of health are reliable.
For Holocaust Memorial Day, incredible photos of resistance.
Last week, I spoke at Trinity-St. Paul's United Church in Toronto (here’s a video excerpt of that talk) and talked to the Parallax podcast.
Some listeners asked for a list of the Palestinian writers that Rashid Khalidi recommended in a recent call. Here’s what he subsequently sent to me:
The play “Tennis in Nablus” in Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace, eds., Inside/Outside: 6 Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora.
Ghassan Kanafani's, Returning to Haifa, adapted for the stage by Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace.
He also recommends Mahmud Darwish, Fadwa Touqan, Sahar Khalifeh, Murid al-Barghouti, Elias Khouri, Raja Shehadeh, Adania Shibli, Ibtisam Azem, and Suad Amiri.
See you on Friday at Noon,
Peter
So, this presidential campaign will be narrated as a struggle of good against evil—evil being of course Donald Trump and the prospect of the end of American democracy. And good is the Biden administration, Joe Biden—maybe not great, but good, at least in the very basic sense that Joe Biden is not trying to put an end to American democracy. I believe that. I will vote for Joe Biden for those reasons. But to me, what’s so painful and frankly surreal when I think about what’s happening in Gaza is that I have to admit that I see a certain amount of evil in the policies of the administration that we’re being asked to see as the good guy in this domestic narrative.
For me, the entire experience of October 7th has been most surreal in the way that I have seen people who I generally think of in many contexts as good people, as decent people, supporting things that for me seem so fundamentally, profoundly indecent. And I think about the people who lead Biden’s foreign policy. People who went to schools very much like mine, whose life experience in many ways has been very much like mine, and people that I think I generally describe as kind of fundamentally benign figures and may in their personal lives be very benign. And then I see the things that the US is doing, and I feel just a very profound cognitive dissonance. And particularly in the last couple of days given the Biden administration’s decision to suspend US funding for UNRWA, which is the UN agency that works with Palestinian refugees.
And let me back up and kind of tell the story here. So, the International Court of Justice, in its ruling, ruled that ‘Israel must take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance who address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.’ Now, that’s kind of antiseptic language. But what the International Court of Justice is getting at here is that 90% of people in Gaza, according to reports, have gone a day without eating in their last few days; that 600,000 Palestinians in Gaza face catastrophic hunger; that there are breakouts of cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis; a 300% rise in miscarriages. Alex DeWaal, who’s an expert on famine at Tufts University, has said that the speed of this human-made famine in Gaza is unlike anything the world has witnessed in 75 years.
So, one would think under that context, especially in the wake of the International Court of Justice’s ruling, the Biden administration would at the very least not be doing anything to make those catastrophic conditions worse. And yet, this weekend, it did exactly that, which is it suspended aid to UNRWA, which works with refugees in Gaza. Now, the reason it did that was because Israel has made allegations that there were UNRWA employees—the US I think is saying there were 12 of them—that have been alleged to have participated in the October 7th attack. This evidence seems to have come from interrogations that Israel did with Hamas militants that they captured after October 7th.
Now, it should go without saying, of course, UN employees should never be allowed to be involved in violent attacks against civilians. UNRWA has fired these people, and they’ve called for an independent investigation. There’s a UN body that does investigations within the UN system. If other, you know, independent organizations should be involved in that, I think, that would be fine too. Israel is not an independent actor in this. So, you need an independent investigation, right? And if there needs to be new vetting in place to make sure that this doesn’t happen again, that seems to me all of course makes sense, right? But UNRWA employs 13,000 people in the Gaza Strip—the vast majority of them Palestinians, right? Twelve people have been accused so far that we know of being involved in this attack. And the Biden administration’s response to this, and then a whole bunch of European countries followed on, is to suspend US support for UNRWA. US is the biggest donor to UNRWA.
What does that mean in the midst of this humanitarian cataclysm? UNRWA is currently sheltering 1.2 million displaced people in Gaza, as 90% of people in Gaza have been displaced from their homes. It’s providing health care services to roughly 1 million people in Gaza. It is the lead actor in providing the humanitarian assistance—what little humanitarian assistance there is—that gives people in Gaza the chance that they might eat a bite of food that day, that their children might not die of typhoid or cholera. Probably the single most important institution in standing between people in Gaza and death right now is UNRWA. And the Biden administration is gonna suspend aid to UNRWA at this moment?
What makes this even more awful is that while the Israeli allegations may very well be true, again, that it’s also true that Israel has had a campaign for many years now to try essentially to abolish UNRWA because UNRWA’s existence represents a kind of embodiment of the fact that there are all these Palestinian refugees. UNRWA considers them refugees. Many of them are the children, grandchildren of people that Israel expelled in 1948. Israel wants to abolish UNRWA because it wants to abolish the issue of Palestinian refugees and never have to deal with that question so it can permanently foreclose the possibility that any Palestinians could ever return, right? This, by the way, in a state that allows Jews to return after 2,000 years, which is an irony that I find remarkable, right?
And so, the US has basically now become complicit in this effort at really the worst possible time one could ever imagine in terms of the need for UNRWA to keep people alive in Gaza. And it seems pretty clear to me that there are at least some folks in the Israeli government whose strategy here is to make sure that Gaza never becomes livable; that Gaza never becomes a place that people could actually live in any way that we would consider an even moderately decent life, right? And, therefore, to create more and more pressure to push those people out, to create more and more pressure on Egypt to open its border so large numbers of people leave the Gaza Strip, at which point Israel would almost certainly not let them back.
And so, the irony is even as Israel is trying to deny the existence of the refugee problem today, there’s a lot of evidence that some people in this Israeli government want to create a whole new refugee problem. And the United States government, the Biden administration—the good guys—are complicit in this because they are now suspending aid to the single most important institution on the ground that would have a chance of keeping people in Gaza alive. Adam Serwer wrote this kind of very remarked upon essay during the Trump administration about its policies where he said cruelty is the point. I don’t know if cruelty is the point of this policy by the Biden administration, but cruelty is very, very deeply, very profoundly the effect.
And so, I look at these people in this administration that we are taught to see as the good guys in our domestic politics and think, how are the people who are considered benign in American politics, how can they take such a profoundly cruel measure? And even if we’re willing to support them in this election—and I am—I just don’t think I can ever buy into this narrative of good versus evil if the people that I am being called on to call good are complicit in the starvation of children in Gaza. And that is what the Biden administration is complicit in by suspending aid to UNRWA at this moment.
