Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.
Our guest will be Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown. Omer is one of the world’s most prominent scholars of the Holocaust. He’s also an Israeli who has warned about the genocidal rhetoric of some Israeli leaders since October 7. Now that South Africa has brought a case to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide for its actions since October 7, I want to ask Omer what he thinks of that legal argument. In the wake of the controversy over Masha Gessen’s declaration that in Gaza, “the ghetto is being liquidated,” I also want to ask him when, if ever, it’s appropriate to compare Israel’s actions to that of the Nazis.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday 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, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
Mahmoud Mamdani’s book, Neither Settler nor Native.
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!), Maya Rosen analyzes the public health catastrophe that Israel’s war is causing in Gaza.
In the London Review of Books, Mahmoud Muna writes about selling books in Jerusalem after October 7.
In the Boston Review, Barnett Rubin probes the relationship between Zionism and colonialism.
Mairav Zonszein on why Israel faces the “most unstable and precarious situation it has ever been in, certainly in a generation.”
A Beinart Notebook subscriber, David Mandel, is running for Congress on a platform that includes a ceasefire in Gaza.
In The New York Times, I wrote about the Israeli government’s growing threats to expel people in Gaza.
I’ll be speaking about Israel, Gaza, and the US debate about the war at the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke on January 16 and at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School on January 25.
See you on Friday at Noon,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I want to say something about the firing of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, not because I’m so particularly interested in Harvard or Claudine Gay, but because I think it’s a window into a question that I think is really important. And the question is: why does pro-Palestine activism produce such a ferocious response in the United States? So, the straw that broke the camel’s back was these allegations of plagiarism. But really, what got this whole thing going was her response to October 7th, and the claim that she hadn’t responded aggressively enough to students who blamed the October 7th massacre on Israel, and then that she hadn’t condemned the phrase ‘intifada’ in her congressional testimony, which was claimed to represent a genocidal threat towards Jews. So, there were people who clearly didn’t like her to begin with because they identified her with diversity, equity, inclusion as the first Black president of Harvard. And they were hostile to her, but they didn’t have the political juice really to get rid of her until there was this added element of the debate over Israel, ‘antisemitism,’ and especially her response to pro-Palestine activism.
So, the question is: what makes that pro-Palestine activism so scary that it produces such a ferocious reaction? We’ve seen this for quite a few years now, right? Why is it that in many states in the United States you can’t work for state government unless you promise not to boycott Israel? Why is it that Students for Justice in Palestine chapters are now being banned on college campuses? I mean, they’re not banning the anti-abortion groups or the young Republicans groups even in the age of Trump. Why is it that they’re banning, or suspending, the Students for Justice in Palestine? Why is it that Rashida Tlaib gets censured? All of the different members of Congress with serious problems. Why is it that social media is banning pro-Palestine activists? My suggestion is there’s something particular about the nature of pro-Palestine activism that produces this really ferocious response in the United States.
Now, some might say, well, this is just because, you know, there are a lot of pro-Israel Jewish organizations out there that mobilize because they feel like this activism represents a threat to Israel. I don’t think that’s a sufficient answer. It is true, of course, that AIPAC and other kinds of American pro-Israel Jewish groups, you know, wield their influence. But especially when you’re talking about conservative white Americans, like a lot of those members of Congress, for instance, who were berating Claudine Gay and the other presidents, they don’t have a lot of Jewish constituents. And frankly, if AIPAC goes to them, and tells them that they should be against pro-Palestinian activism, I think AIPAC is walking into an open door. Ideologically, they are already have a strong proclivity, I think, to see pro-Palestine activism as a threat.
Remember, the biggest pro-Israel organization in the United States is Christians United for Israel. It’s not a Jewish organization. When the state legislature in Arkansas passes a law that basically makes it impossible to work for the state of Arkansas if you want to boycott Israel, I don’t think that’s only about Israel. I think it has, in a state like Arkansas where there are very few Jews, it has also to do with America. Now, people say, well, there’s a Christian tendency to want to support Israel. It’s not just about Christianity. Remember, Black Christians, Hispanic Christians don’t have the same view about Israel that many white evangelical Christians do. What I think is lurking beneath all of this is the deep association between Israel and the United States as kind of promised lands forged on a hostile frontier that only came into existence because they dispossessed the people who were there.
The suggestion that I want to make about the reason that pro-Palestine activism is so frightening to certain groups of Americans, particularly Americans who are the most deeply invested in America’s founding myths, the reason they find pro-Palestinian activism’s threat to Israel’s legitimacy so frightening is not just because they care so much about Israel. It’s because they see the assault on Israel’s legitimacy as an assault on America’s legitimacy because the foundations of the two countries have a tremendous amount in common. And I would even go so far as to say that there is a figure that is lurking behind the US-Israel-Palestine debate, lurking behind the Palestine solidarity activism, that makes it so terribly frightening to a whole cast of Americans, particularly white conservative Americans. And that figure is the American Indian.
So, because pro-Palestine activism offers a model that if applied to America would be profoundly threatening to many people in the United States. Why is it that Americans respond so many so viscerally to terms like ‘settler colonialism,’ ‘decolonization,’ ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’? I don’t think it’s only because people have an investment in Israel. I think because at some level, maybe only semi-conscious, people recognize that that same intellectual framework, that decolonization framework, would be profoundly destabilizing for the United States as we know it.
You know, it’s just one of these things about America that Americans in political discourse talk so rarely about Native Americans, and yet it’s there under the surface. And I want to read something from Mahmoud Mamdani’s, the Columbia professor, you know, really important book, Neither Settler nor Native, because the book is really all about these interconnections. And he writes about America. He writes, ‘our nation was born in genocide. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today, we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode.’
America’s settler colonial project has been much further along, much more successful than Israel’s, right? We don’t have the kind of hostile frontier anymore that Israel has with Gaza. But the United States did at one point. That is in the deep recesses of, I think, the American political consciousness. And there’s a way in which Palestine solidarity activism brings that to the fore. If you read the literature of pro-Palestine activism, in fact it often makes this explicit. So, if you look at Palestine solidarity discourse, often it doesn’t refer to the United States. It calls it ‘Turtle Island,’ right? Which is a term that essentially challenges the legitimacy of the United States by giving it an American Indian pre-colonial name. You hear the phrase ‘land back,’ right, a phrase from American Indians wanting land back, very often used in pro-Palestine activism.
And this is what I think it adds to the DEI conversation because when Americans think about DEI, they tend to think in terms of Black and white Americans and the threat of full Black equality, or historical justice, reparations, etc., for Americans. And there’s been a lot of conversation about the analogies between Israel and Palestine and the situation of Black Americans. But I think that’s not the really frightening analogy for Americans who are deeply invested in America’s founding myths. It’s not the analogy between Palestinians and Black Americans. That’s actually a more manageable one. It’s the analogy between Palestinians and American Indians.
And here, this is Mamdani again. Mamdani is talking about the different way in which Americans talk about Black people and talk about American Indians. He writes, ‘Blacks have been governed by a regime of white supremacy, the struggle against which has been incorporated into the American sense of self, a fact demonstrated by the comfort with which racists cite Martin Luther King and other icons of Civil Rights. Indians, by contrast, have been governed by colonialism, which, if recognized, would destroy the American sense of self.’ I think what he’s saying is a conversation even about full equality and historical justice for Black Americans would fundamentally change the United States in a way that many Americans don’t want it to be changed, but doesn’t actually fundamentally challenge the legitimacy of the United States because Black Americans in the main have been asking for full equality. They haven’t been asking for decolonization. The Black challenge does not necessarily represent a threat to the existence of the United States itself.
And you can think about just this in terms of the debate about monuments, right? So, there’s been a lot of debate about all of these Confederate monuments that people want to, you know, want to get rid of. That’s destabilizing to a lot of white Americans but doesn’t threaten the legitimacy of the project. Those people were, after all, rebels, right? But if you try to apply that same logic to all of the people that we celebrate in the United States who were Indian killers—just go into the United States West in particular. And you think about the celebration of people like generals like Sheridan and Sherman, or even presidents like Lincoln and Grant or Jackson who were profoundly implicated in the genocide of Native Americans. And you realize that for Americans to start to wrestle with the question, seriously wrestle with the demands of American Indians, is more destabilizing to the legitimacy of the American project than the challenges of Black Americans. And it’s precisely that, I think, that makes the pro-Palestine activist movement so frightening. Because whether Americans are fully conscious or not, there is at some level a recognition of the analogy between the demands that are made in the pro-Palestine activist world increasingly for decolonization and a sense of what that would mean if we were to go down that road at all in United States.
And this is why there’s a part of me that is somewhat pessimistic about the ability of changing US policy towards Israel because there’s a part of me that thinks that, at its deepest level, the reason that America has its policy is not just because of Joe Biden or because of AIPAC or because of that kind of stuff, that fundamentally perhaps the biggest obstacle to America having a fundamentally different attitude towards Israel-Palestine is the American willingness to actually grapple with ourselves as a settler colonial nation, and to think about what it would mean to actually think in any terms about undergoing a decolonization process in the United States. And because that question is so frightening. But that’s a big part of what makes pro-Palestine activism in the United States so frightening. Thanks very much. I hope to see many of you on our call on Friday.
