Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.
Our guest will be Norman Finkelstein, someone who has long fascinated me but whom I’ve never met. I want to ask about his upbringing as the child of Holocaust survivors, how his parents imparted the Holocaust’s moral lessons to him, and about how he understands the very different ways that many other children of Holocaust survivors interpret that horror. I want to ask how he first encountered Palestinians, how he decided to make their cause his life’s work, and what it was like to break with many Palestinian activists over the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Finally, I want to ask about his reaction to the October 7 massacre, and to the mass slaughter and starvation unfolding 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.
Sources Cited in this Video
I discussed Bezalel Smotrich’s “Decisive Plan” last spring in a Jewish Currents essay entitled, “Could Israel Carry Out Another Nakba?”
I wrote about Israeli efforts at mass expulsion from Gaza earlier this year in The New York Times.
Israel’s plan to expand its “buffer zone” inside Gaza.
UN officials called Gaza “unlivable” in 2018.
Ta-Nehisi Coates on why he doesn’t agree with Barack Obama that “the arc of the moral universe bends to justice.”
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!), Alex Kane examines the limits and possibilities of the Biden administration’s new sanctions against Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. This request is from Abir Elzowidi, who is trying to evacuate the family of his brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. Abir writes, “I've lost 33 of my family members in Gaza since the war started and I am very scared to lose Tamer and his family. I could never forgive myself for not trying to help them.” If you can help, please do.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I interviewed Steve Simon, a Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa in President Obama’s National Security Council, about how his experience making policy toward Israel-Palestine helps him interpret the Biden administration’s actions since October 7.
Tel Aviv University Professor Aeyal Gross on how people who deny Hamas’ atrocities replicate the tactics of Israeli hasbara.
Pankaj Mishra on “The Shoah after Gaza.”
I’ll be speaking on March 11 at the City University of New York, March 27 at Quinnipiac College, March 28 at Hofstra University and April 7 at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC.
See you on Friday at Noon,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Every now and then, someone says, ‘why are people paying so much attention to what’s happening in Gaza? After all, there are really, really terrible things that happen all over the world and don’t get very much attention.’ And there are certain standard answers to this. One answer for Americans is that the United States is very deeply complicit in the slaughter in Gaza in the way that it’s not in many other places where people are suffering a great deal. Another more general answer is that people tend to pay more attention to what’s happening in Israel-Palestine because it’s so central to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. But I want to suggest another answer. And it has to do with the way in which what Israel is doing, and maybe trying to do, in Gaza, and how the world reacts, is a kind of a referendum on the very notion of historical progress itself. The question of whether we are fundamentally in a different and better world today than we were in previous centuries.
So, let me try to explain what I mean. As I understand what Israel is doing in Gaza, this is the way I think about it. There’s a pretty overwhelming consensus in Israel today among Israeli Jews—there was even before October 7th but even more strongly since October 7th—that Israel cannot give the Palestinians their own state, certainly not any time in the foreseeable future, and certainly that Israel is not going to give Palestinians citizenship in the country in which they live, in Israel, right, and in this territory, which Israel controls. So, Israel is going to control these people, millions of people in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem in different ways who lack basic rights, the basic right of citizenship.
And I think until October 7th, Israeli leaders felt like they were managing that system pretty well. Things were pretty quiet in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority was working with Israel. Even Hamas, they felt like in a strange kind of way, was working with Israel to keep things relatively quiet. Israel had policies of kind of carrots and sticks. They would let more Palestinian workers come into Israel from the Occupied Territories, which they thought would give people an incentive to keep things kind of relatively calm because they didn’t want to lose that. Of course, there was the ever-present threat of his Israeli violence, greater violence if the Palestinians upset the apple cart. And Israel was moving on to bigger and better things in its view, you know, normalization with Saudi Arabia, you know, having relations with all kinds of important countries all over the world.
I think that’s where Israeli political leadership was on October 6th. October 7th showed actually this management process has really broken down because actually it’s really difficult to manage over a long period of time people who you deny basic rights to because those people are going to resist. And, of course, the way they resisted on October 7th was horrifying to me, right? I much prefer the many other ways of Palestinians have resisted in ways that are much more ethical. But the point is that people are likely to resist systems of oppression. You can’t pretend that they’re going to basically sit back and take it for a long time.
So, the Biden administration wants to recreate a kind of, I think, a system of managing this situation. I mean, they talk about two states. But I think what they really want to do is basically try to kind of put Humpty Dumpty back together again, put someone in charge in Gaza that will kind of keep things quiet, maybe refurbish the Palestinian authority a little bit, and basically move on to be able to talk about other things. But I think that’s gonna be extraordinarily difficult to do. The truth is that Gaza was unlivable before October 7th. According to the UN, it was unlivable in 2017. Now it is catastrophically unlivable, right? I mean, most of the hospitals are destroyed. Most of the housing is destroyed. Almost everyone displaced. The universities destroyed. And it’s extremely difficult for me to see how Gaza is ever rebuilt. Israel has already said that it wants to increase the buffer zones, which means that there will be less space for people in Gaza than there is today. This is already one of the most overcrowded places on earth. The blockade is likely to be tighter than it was before because Israel is gonna say we can’t allow Hamas to get the means to rearm or anyone else to get the means to rearm, right.
So, it doesn’t seem to me it’s remotely plausible that Gaza is really going to be able to rebuild. And I think that there are differences of opinions inside the Israeli government, but I think the people in the Israeli government who have the most coherent vision of what they want to do beyond just muddling through are the people on the right side of the Israeli government who want to create conditions in Gaza that create so much pressure that sooner or later Egypt opens its border and there’s a mass exodus from Gaza—because, again, because Gaza is unlivable—and then those people will not be allowed to return.
Egypt’s taken a very hard line against this. But Egypt is a quite vulnerable country. I think it’s $28 billion in debt. It’s very beholden to the Gulf countries. There have been reports that Egypt actually has already been building a wall inside Egypt, essentially to contain people that it imagines might get across from Gaza, particularly from Rafah, which is where this Palestinian population is so kind of centered now because Israel has moved through the rest of the Gaza Strip.
So, I think that the people—not everyone in the Israeli government, not everyone in Israeli politics—but the people with the clearest vision, who are on the right, have a vision of expulsion. And some of them have been very clear about this for a long time. And I’ve written about this. Bezalel Smotrich in 2017 essentially said if Palestinians don’t accept their lack of citizenship and they rise up, they’re gonna have to leave. And a whole series of other people in the Israeli government, from Tzachi Hengbi, the national security advisor, to Avi Dichter, the agricultural minister, to Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, over the years have made statements about the potential necessity of expulsion. And it polls pretty well in Israel.
So, what does this have to do with the course of history? It seems to me one of the reasons that people have difficulty imagining this as a possibility is it just doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that countries can get away with in this era of history. If we step back, and we think about it a little bit, we’re very aware actually that many countries did do this in the past. Indeed, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, these were how those countries were created, right, with acts of mass destruction of a native population, which cleared the way for a new country, a kind of a new society. Israel itself could not have been created as a Jewish state without the act of mass expulsion at Israel’s founding because there simply weren’t enough Jews there, even in the territory designated as a Jewish state by the UN to create a large Jewish majority, which was necessary for a Jewish state. The dirty little secret that people often don’t talk about about the UN partition plan is that even in the Jewish state that was allocated, there was only a bare Jewish majority in that territory. Again, only a third of the population at that time of the entire Mandatory Palestine was Jewish.
So, Israel itself was born through this kind of act of mass expulsion. But I think that the inclination towards believing that history has a trajectory towards progress makes people think that this is the kind of thing you could do in the 19th century. Maybe it was even the kind of thing you could do in the mid-20th century—and there were large population expulsions back in the mid-20th century—but you can’t do it today. We now, after World War II, we created a system of international norms, institutions, a kind of higher ethics that governs the way countries behave, and you simply can’t do that anymore. And so, it seems to me one of the things that’s really at stake in whether this mass expulsion of people from Gaza can occur is the question of whether in fact that’s true: whether we are in a different era of history, whether there has been some fundamental kind of progress that means that countries can’t do what they could do in the past. Which would mean that Israel cannot solve the Palestinian problem in the way that the United States solved its Native American problem in the 19th century, which is basically so reducing the population that it was no longer a threat.
And I think there is evidence, horrifyingly, that these ideas of progress that people had may not actually be accurate. It’s interesting. One of the things that Barack Obama—you know, Barack Obama was a kind of quintessential progressive in the sense that he was often quoting Martin Luther King saying, you know, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ And he and John Kerry were often saying to Benjamin Netanyahu at that point, ‘you know, you can’t really get away with this controlling all these Palestinians who lack basic rights. It's not the way the world works anymore. We’re no longer in a colonial age.’ And Netanyahu, who is the son of a historian, I think was in his own way saying, ‘why are you so sure that the history is moving in that particular direction?’
And I fear that events are in fact proving Netanyahu right. We had an act of mass expulsion, which didn’t get nearly the attention, I think, in the world that it should have last September when 100,000 Armenians were expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh. We have Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which now looks very likely, will not be regressed in the sense that, that Russia will ever be forced back, and Ukraine will regain all of the control over its sovereignty, you know, beginning with the invasion in 2014 by Russia and then continuing in 2020. We have a government in India that is moving India from a secular state into a very, very aggressive Hindu supremacist state, and really dramatically and very violently rolling back the rights that Muslims had in India. We have of course China as a kind of still-rising global power. And the United States, we have the possibility of a Trump presidency and the possibility of kind of Trump-like figures in various places in Europe.
So, under those conditions, it seems to me that we face the real prospect, in fact, that we are taking a historical turn in which the very fragile norms that we had about state behavior are actually really eroding, and that the kind of mass expulsions that we’ve seen in earlier periods of history that now are returning again and being thinkable again. And I think if Israel succeeds in doing what many in the Israeli government want to do in Gaza, I think that will open the door to Modi and others around the world, seeing it as a possibility to their restive minority populations that they don’t want to fully enfranchise. That seems to me what’s on the table in terms of what’s going on in Gaza. And one way of answering the question of why it matters so much, because it matters so much not only because of the fate of those individual people in Gaza, and because of what it says about the United States in the way it behaves around the world, and what it says about Israel, but because of what it says about the course of history. I think that’s one of the things that’s on the line in this moment.
