Our Zoom call this week will be at our regular time: Friday at Noon EDT. Our guests will be Sally Abed, a Palestinian from Haifa and leader of Standing Together, which brings Jews and Palestinians together to struggle for justice and peace, and Avrum Burg
It takes true humanity to see G-d in the Gentile and not just in the Jew. It takes objectivity and honesty to look at the reality of the Zionist takeover of Palestine over the last century and not just accept lies that help people sleep at night. If Israelis are told to think Palestinians are just 'human animals' and perpetrate a bloodbath in Gaza to crush them once and for all, doesn't that sound eerily like a 'final solution'?
This was exactly what was needed to be said .it was truth be told .Thank you for your courage ,it’s so upsetting to see the suffering on both sides .It could be so different if the collective will was present .Sending love and light of God to
Israel and Palestine . Blessings to all for a better tomorrow .Communication is key to achieve peace and understanding with the collective will to achieve it .yes set all the captives free in both sides .🙏
Jesus Christ, Peter. My mouth hung open when I read this. What do you mean, you "have no patience for people who justify those things"? YOU ARE THAT PERSON.
Don't try to pretend you give a shit about keeping the Jews in Israel safe. This time next week, you'll be back to calling them apartheid racists and Jewish supremacists. The book has already been written.
When the loudest voice is all I (we) hear, it feels unjust. Thanx for keeping me (us) informed on BOTH viewpoints, so I can contemplate my own feelings in a rational way.
Beinart, how dare you preach and pretend to know or care about what will make Jews safe. This essay is absolutely disgusting. You must know that you are partially to blame for all of this, correct?
Every time you promote the Palestinian narrative of “Israel's apartheid regime,” and that the Palestinians are "the victims of Jewish supremacy", and Zionism should not exist, and that Jews don't have a right to a state, and the blatant lie that 750,000 Palestinians were expelled in 1948, and that Israel exists on stolen land, every time you dehumanize Israelis as occupiers and colonizers and settlers and apartheid racists, you legitimize and justify Hamas and their unspeakable atrocities.
After all, you have made it pretty clear that you agree with Hamas that a world without Israel would be a better place, you just slightly disagree about how to get there.
If you don't actually approve of what happened this weekend, if you actually cared about the victims, you would write a full throated apology for everything you’ve done and said, delete this substack, and spend the rest of your life serving the poor of Israel in a soup kitchen. But if you can't handle that, maybe post a picture of a large check from you to Magen David Adom? I think $5,000 is a reasonable amount to start with, considering all the damage you've done? You should be begging for forgiveness from your fellow Jews right now, and you don't deserve any.
Your message is very sincere and not being Jewish it is hard to understand what you feel. But you are reaching out and giving insight you are not making excuses you are trying to cope. Thank you I appreciate your words. I visited my son in Israel 2 years ago he’d was working at the Embassy and Israel is a very different place then the world I have grown up in. I was not comfortable I saw the beauty but couldn’t;d not understand the attitude. Your are so correct in the insight this is not working. We do need patience, love, kindness. There is not enough in this world. I’m afraid Evil and selfishness are a dominate force. I wish you peace and keep reaching out, your father would be proud of you.
I share in the grief, horror, and agony of everyone suffering in this spasm of senseless violence--the Israeli people, the Palestinian people, those people from other countries who have been murdered and kidnapped. As someone who tries to follow the Jewish carpenter from Nazareth--a man who sought to liberate the Jewish people from the yoke of empire by nonviolence--I add my voice to Peter’s anguished prayer and wrenching cry for God.
I remember the rage I felt over 9/11--an unprovoked and evil attack on civilians --my desire for justice and vengeance through an overwhelming military response. Through war, not prudent, targeted, intelligent security and diplomatic responses. We Americans got our wars, and they proved ruinous to us and hundreds of thousands of others. If this is Israel’s 9/11, I beg of its leaders to learn from our failures and find a smarter path.
Those wars did not make us safe, did not bring justice, and in the end sowed the seeds for the erosion of our own freedoms and civil liberties. They led to occupations that destroyed whole nations and sapped America of immense blood and treasure. It led to the increased radicalization of our domestic politics and the deep divisions that are now threatening our society at a fundamental level. We let our pain and justified wrath cloud our judgment and overwhelm our reason. We got down to the level of terrorists and became torturers and terrorists in kind. We let them win by losing our humanity. We forgot the words of Scripture: “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. I will repay.” I was guilty of this.
As a person of Irish descent, I also bear in my blood the anguish of the Irish people under the heal of oppression. They suffered unfathomable atrocities for centuries, including genocide. Yet that did not justify the atrocities of the IRA against innocents and civilians--many of whom were their own people. Sadly, the response of the British state to that violence--including assassinations of their royal family--merely contributed to the unending cycle.
It was not until all parties sat down and found a way--against all pain and memory and justified anger--to bury the gun and share power and guarantee civil rights to all that peace and coexistence came about. This included treating with and accommodating Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, complicit in numerous horrific crimes and atrocities. And it required that Sinn Fein renounce violence in return and recognize the rights and cultural identity of the Ulster community, and the acceptance of ongoing British sovereignty over Northern Ireland.
I pray that the Israeli and Palestinian people and leadership--with the help of the global human family--can come to that shared mutuality again, as they have before. And recognize that, like the Republicans and Unionists in Ireland, their lives--their fates--are inextricably intertwined. Today, amidst the wails of mothers and children and elderly people, that path feels very far away indeed.
I’ve been curious how you would respond. Your kids are right -- you are hated. You are sick. Your first comment after 260 young people attending a concert were machine gunned to death, families butchered in their homes, IDF soldiers brutalized and killed while lying in their bunks, and women and children kidnapped and marched into Gaza to cheering crowds and likely tortured and killed -- is to tell Israel to stop behaving badly. Are you fucking kidding me???
These are the barbaric people you think can live in peaceful harmony with Israel? Who does this to fellow human beings? Hamas is a terrorist organization that has taken $1 billion of aid and rather than helping its people, builds tunnels, weapons, and plans only for one thing: killing Jews. And you defend them???
Did you join the pro Palestinian rallies in Times Square and elsewhere celebrating this wonderful achievement? These sick bastards.
Iran orchestrated this to end the Saudi-Israel normalization. Part of the plan is to make the West Bank a better place for Palestinian citizens. The Saudis would provide financial assistance. In time, with a better life, the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Israel would show the better alternative than rejection and terrorism that the Palestinians have only known. And the Iranian backed Hamas and Hezbollah version would be the losers. Iran wants this stopped and helped coordinate this crime against humanity. And you dare to lecture Israel???
You are disgusting; drawing moral equivalency between colonialists and Israeli Jews; mentioning the ANC, which by the way now rule corruptly over a failed and truly declining South Africa, American blacks and trying to draw parallels and congruency by ignoring Palestinian rejectionism, Salafism, mass murder and praying for “Palestinian captives.” Why don’t you ask your Jewish friend,who you mentioned several weeks ago, spoke to Hamas what the solution is…you could not be more wrong…Palestinians don’t want your patronizing neo-third world morally bankrupt garbage…
Rather than speaking about what Hamas did with the help of Iran you suggest destroying/attacking Hamas and keeping Israel and the Palestinians suffering under them is not the answer…Hamas does not want to hear your revolutionary solutions they want you dead because you are a Jew…instead of praying and implicitly begging them to accept you maybe you should wake up and realize true peace for both people will only come when religious fanatics on both sides are quashed by their own people…you are the kind of “educated idiot” wracked by a ghetto mentality of guilt that helped cause this and should be ashamed of your pseudo intellectualism…you need a really good psychiatrist/or maybe a better one because you do not live in the real world…every week I listen to you to see how far the Jewish left has sunk and you never cease to amaze me with just how deluded your views really are…shame on you “ professor”
Professor Beinart, I am extremely disappointed. If I were a Palestinian I would be even more disappointed. Everyone knows that Hamas charter is dedicated to killing and specifically killing Jews wherever they are. Any Palestinian who identifies with Hamas, oops let me correct myself, any person who identifies or supports Hamas is in fact a supporter of Nazism. A supporter of a racial war against Jews.
If Palestinians were to fully support Hamas, there is no way they will achieve a Palestine in the West Bank let alone a Palestine from the River to the Sea. I understand that in the West Bank many do support them, but I attribute that support to the inaction and failure of the Palestinian Authority.
The Hamas charter has much to say about Jews. Here is one quote “"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem). “
If this is the face of Palestinians with regards to Israel and Jews then Israel is justified in destroying Hamas and all who support it. Why wait till they gain enough strength to deliver on their threats?
My point here is simply to differentiate legitimate Palestinian interest in statehood from those people who advocate another genocide of the Jews.
Another point that needs to be stated is that Gaza is not the West Bank. Israel withdrew completely form Gaza. In fact, it left an agricultural industry intact for Gazans to pursue and the world banking community was ready to invest in Gaza including Israel. But that did not happen because Hamas took over and decided to continue its genocidal mission. We hear how Gaza is a prison managed by Israel and how goods and services are blocked from entering Gaza. The truth? The only goods that were blocked were dual use goods that could be turned into armaments or tunnels. So, for example, Israel stopped sending cement to Gaza because instead of building housing for the people there the lion’s share of it was used to build tunnels. (and by the way Egypt shares a border with Gaza too).
I am not thrilled at Israel bombing Gaza. But I do find it odd when I saw on TV a Gazan complain that Israel stopped warning Gazans when they bomb. In the past Israel has called occupants of buildings they were about to destroy and tell them to get out. I found it odd, somehow Hamas didn’t let the civilians it killed, raped, beheaded, or kidnapped know in advance that they were coming, and they should get out of the way. And that is because that is exactly what they wanted to do.
Professor Beinart on your website is a lead article that appears on the right on my screen that claims if Hamas were eliminated nothing would change. A cheap shot would be to say tell that to the communities bordering Gaza. The reality is when genocidal Palestinian groups are eliminated so too is the toxic atmosphere they bring with them, making it possible for Israel and Palestinians who want to live in a Palestinian state (not from the River to the Sea) to discuss a solution approach.
Trying to equate Israel with colonialism and/or Apartheid after this horrific and brutal massacre is beyond the pale…we do not seek revenge we seek to kill those that have and will try to exterminate us and their own…you either don’t want to see it or have your head so far up the Professors ass that you can’t see it because your point reeks of cronyism and makes as much sense as his pathetic ramblings and ghetto begging
Peter, It takes true courage to speak this way in the midst of a frenzy of grief, rage and revenge. G-d is with you.
God bless you. Now is the time when humanity among Jews is hardest. Your remarks moved me to tears. Courage, Peter.
David Blumenfeld
You said it all, Peter, the way it needs to be said. You are a true Mensch.
Peter
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
It takes true humanity to see G-d in the Gentile and not just in the Jew. It takes objectivity and honesty to look at the reality of the Zionist takeover of Palestine over the last century and not just accept lies that help people sleep at night. If Israelis are told to think Palestinians are just 'human animals' and perpetrate a bloodbath in Gaza to crush them once and for all, doesn't that sound eerily like a 'final solution'?
This was exactly what was needed to be said .it was truth be told .Thank you for your courage ,it’s so upsetting to see the suffering on both sides .It could be so different if the collective will was present .Sending love and light of God to
Israel and Palestine . Blessings to all for a better tomorrow .Communication is key to achieve peace and understanding with the collective will to achieve it .yes set all the captives free in both sides .🙏
Trust me, Peter. Your words are adequate. Thank you.
Jesus Christ, Peter. My mouth hung open when I read this. What do you mean, you "have no patience for people who justify those things"? YOU ARE THAT PERSON.
Don't try to pretend you give a shit about keeping the Jews in Israel safe. This time next week, you'll be back to calling them apartheid racists and Jewish supremacists. The book has already been written.
When the loudest voice is all I (we) hear, it feels unjust. Thanx for keeping me (us) informed on BOTH viewpoints, so I can contemplate my own feelings in a rational way.
Beinart, how dare you preach and pretend to know or care about what will make Jews safe. This essay is absolutely disgusting. You must know that you are partially to blame for all of this, correct?
Every time you promote the Palestinian narrative of “Israel's apartheid regime,” and that the Palestinians are "the victims of Jewish supremacy", and Zionism should not exist, and that Jews don't have a right to a state, and the blatant lie that 750,000 Palestinians were expelled in 1948, and that Israel exists on stolen land, every time you dehumanize Israelis as occupiers and colonizers and settlers and apartheid racists, you legitimize and justify Hamas and their unspeakable atrocities.
After all, you have made it pretty clear that you agree with Hamas that a world without Israel would be a better place, you just slightly disagree about how to get there.
If you don't actually approve of what happened this weekend, if you actually cared about the victims, you would write a full throated apology for everything you’ve done and said, delete this substack, and spend the rest of your life serving the poor of Israel in a soup kitchen. But if you can't handle that, maybe post a picture of a large check from you to Magen David Adom? I think $5,000 is a reasonable amount to start with, considering all the damage you've done? You should be begging for forgiveness from your fellow Jews right now, and you don't deserve any.
Your message is very sincere and not being Jewish it is hard to understand what you feel. But you are reaching out and giving insight you are not making excuses you are trying to cope. Thank you I appreciate your words. I visited my son in Israel 2 years ago he’d was working at the Embassy and Israel is a very different place then the world I have grown up in. I was not comfortable I saw the beauty but couldn’t;d not understand the attitude. Your are so correct in the insight this is not working. We do need patience, love, kindness. There is not enough in this world. I’m afraid Evil and selfishness are a dominate force. I wish you peace and keep reaching out, your father would be proud of you.
I share in the grief, horror, and agony of everyone suffering in this spasm of senseless violence--the Israeli people, the Palestinian people, those people from other countries who have been murdered and kidnapped. As someone who tries to follow the Jewish carpenter from Nazareth--a man who sought to liberate the Jewish people from the yoke of empire by nonviolence--I add my voice to Peter’s anguished prayer and wrenching cry for God.
I remember the rage I felt over 9/11--an unprovoked and evil attack on civilians --my desire for justice and vengeance through an overwhelming military response. Through war, not prudent, targeted, intelligent security and diplomatic responses. We Americans got our wars, and they proved ruinous to us and hundreds of thousands of others. If this is Israel’s 9/11, I beg of its leaders to learn from our failures and find a smarter path.
Those wars did not make us safe, did not bring justice, and in the end sowed the seeds for the erosion of our own freedoms and civil liberties. They led to occupations that destroyed whole nations and sapped America of immense blood and treasure. It led to the increased radicalization of our domestic politics and the deep divisions that are now threatening our society at a fundamental level. We let our pain and justified wrath cloud our judgment and overwhelm our reason. We got down to the level of terrorists and became torturers and terrorists in kind. We let them win by losing our humanity. We forgot the words of Scripture: “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. I will repay.” I was guilty of this.
As a person of Irish descent, I also bear in my blood the anguish of the Irish people under the heal of oppression. They suffered unfathomable atrocities for centuries, including genocide. Yet that did not justify the atrocities of the IRA against innocents and civilians--many of whom were their own people. Sadly, the response of the British state to that violence--including assassinations of their royal family--merely contributed to the unending cycle.
It was not until all parties sat down and found a way--against all pain and memory and justified anger--to bury the gun and share power and guarantee civil rights to all that peace and coexistence came about. This included treating with and accommodating Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, complicit in numerous horrific crimes and atrocities. And it required that Sinn Fein renounce violence in return and recognize the rights and cultural identity of the Ulster community, and the acceptance of ongoing British sovereignty over Northern Ireland.
I pray that the Israeli and Palestinian people and leadership--with the help of the global human family--can come to that shared mutuality again, as they have before. And recognize that, like the Republicans and Unionists in Ireland, their lives--their fates--are inextricably intertwined. Today, amidst the wails of mothers and children and elderly people, that path feels very far away indeed.
I’ve been curious how you would respond. Your kids are right -- you are hated. You are sick. Your first comment after 260 young people attending a concert were machine gunned to death, families butchered in their homes, IDF soldiers brutalized and killed while lying in their bunks, and women and children kidnapped and marched into Gaza to cheering crowds and likely tortured and killed -- is to tell Israel to stop behaving badly. Are you fucking kidding me???
These are the barbaric people you think can live in peaceful harmony with Israel? Who does this to fellow human beings? Hamas is a terrorist organization that has taken $1 billion of aid and rather than helping its people, builds tunnels, weapons, and plans only for one thing: killing Jews. And you defend them???
Did you join the pro Palestinian rallies in Times Square and elsewhere celebrating this wonderful achievement? These sick bastards.
Iran orchestrated this to end the Saudi-Israel normalization. Part of the plan is to make the West Bank a better place for Palestinian citizens. The Saudis would provide financial assistance. In time, with a better life, the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Israel would show the better alternative than rejection and terrorism that the Palestinians have only known. And the Iranian backed Hamas and Hezbollah version would be the losers. Iran wants this stopped and helped coordinate this crime against humanity. And you dare to lecture Israel???
Shame, shame, shame on you Peter Beinart.
You are disgusting; drawing moral equivalency between colonialists and Israeli Jews; mentioning the ANC, which by the way now rule corruptly over a failed and truly declining South Africa, American blacks and trying to draw parallels and congruency by ignoring Palestinian rejectionism, Salafism, mass murder and praying for “Palestinian captives.” Why don’t you ask your Jewish friend,who you mentioned several weeks ago, spoke to Hamas what the solution is…you could not be more wrong…Palestinians don’t want your patronizing neo-third world morally bankrupt garbage…
Rather than speaking about what Hamas did with the help of Iran you suggest destroying/attacking Hamas and keeping Israel and the Palestinians suffering under them is not the answer…Hamas does not want to hear your revolutionary solutions they want you dead because you are a Jew…instead of praying and implicitly begging them to accept you maybe you should wake up and realize true peace for both people will only come when religious fanatics on both sides are quashed by their own people…you are the kind of “educated idiot” wracked by a ghetto mentality of guilt that helped cause this and should be ashamed of your pseudo intellectualism…you need a really good psychiatrist/or maybe a better one because you do not live in the real world…every week I listen to you to see how far the Jewish left has sunk and you never cease to amaze me with just how deluded your views really are…shame on you “ professor”
Professor Beinart, I am extremely disappointed. If I were a Palestinian I would be even more disappointed. Everyone knows that Hamas charter is dedicated to killing and specifically killing Jews wherever they are. Any Palestinian who identifies with Hamas, oops let me correct myself, any person who identifies or supports Hamas is in fact a supporter of Nazism. A supporter of a racial war against Jews.
If Palestinians were to fully support Hamas, there is no way they will achieve a Palestine in the West Bank let alone a Palestine from the River to the Sea. I understand that in the West Bank many do support them, but I attribute that support to the inaction and failure of the Palestinian Authority.
The Hamas charter has much to say about Jews. Here is one quote “"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem). “
If this is the face of Palestinians with regards to Israel and Jews then Israel is justified in destroying Hamas and all who support it. Why wait till they gain enough strength to deliver on their threats?
My point here is simply to differentiate legitimate Palestinian interest in statehood from those people who advocate another genocide of the Jews.
Another point that needs to be stated is that Gaza is not the West Bank. Israel withdrew completely form Gaza. In fact, it left an agricultural industry intact for Gazans to pursue and the world banking community was ready to invest in Gaza including Israel. But that did not happen because Hamas took over and decided to continue its genocidal mission. We hear how Gaza is a prison managed by Israel and how goods and services are blocked from entering Gaza. The truth? The only goods that were blocked were dual use goods that could be turned into armaments or tunnels. So, for example, Israel stopped sending cement to Gaza because instead of building housing for the people there the lion’s share of it was used to build tunnels. (and by the way Egypt shares a border with Gaza too).
I am not thrilled at Israel bombing Gaza. But I do find it odd when I saw on TV a Gazan complain that Israel stopped warning Gazans when they bomb. In the past Israel has called occupants of buildings they were about to destroy and tell them to get out. I found it odd, somehow Hamas didn’t let the civilians it killed, raped, beheaded, or kidnapped know in advance that they were coming, and they should get out of the way. And that is because that is exactly what they wanted to do.
Professor Beinart on your website is a lead article that appears on the right on my screen that claims if Hamas were eliminated nothing would change. A cheap shot would be to say tell that to the communities bordering Gaza. The reality is when genocidal Palestinian groups are eliminated so too is the toxic atmosphere they bring with them, making it possible for Israel and Palestinians who want to live in a Palestinian state (not from the River to the Sea) to discuss a solution approach.
Trying to equate Israel with colonialism and/or Apartheid after this horrific and brutal massacre is beyond the pale…we do not seek revenge we seek to kill those that have and will try to exterminate us and their own…you either don’t want to see it or have your head so far up the Professors ass that you can’t see it because your point reeks of cronyism and makes as much sense as his pathetic ramblings and ghetto begging