Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.
Our guest will Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, the largest city with an Arab-American majority in the United States. We’ll talk about how residents of Dearborn have reacted to the war in Gaza and whether Kamala Harris is doing enough to win their votes.
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Sources Cited in this Video
Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1982 interview with Pat Robertson.
Merriam-Webster’s definition of “proxy.”
When Hamas broke with Iran over Syria.
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!), Raphael Magarik spoke to Rania Batrice about what Jewish texts can teach us about whether to vote for the lesser of two evils.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I spoke to Harrison Mann, who resigned from the Defense Intelligence Agency to protest his office’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
In The New Yorker, David Remnick writes about Yahya Sinwar.
Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.
See you on Friday at 11 AM,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. I recently came across an interview that Benjamin Netanyahu did all the way back in 1982. So, this was before his political career, before his diplomatic career at the United Nations, and at the Israeli embassy in the United States. Back then, he was really known in 1982 fundamentally as the brother of Yoni Netanyahu, who famously died in the Entebbe raid. And Bibi had kind of fashioned himself as an expert on international terrorism. And so, he’s doing this interview with the evangelical broadcaster, Pat Robertson. And Robertson asks, ‘what is the source of terrorism?’ And Netanyahu replies, ‘the more we look, the more we found that terrorist incidents are not just isolated. There is a major force behind most of these groups that is the Soviet Union. If you take away the Soviet Union, it’s chief proxy, the PLO, international terrorism would collapse.’
So, of course, as it turned out, within a decade of that interview, the Soviet Union itself had collapsed. But the PLO had not collapsed. And international terrorism—whatever exactly Benjamin Netanyahu meant by that, presumably he meant armed actions against Israel or against the West—had not collapsed either, right? Because, in fact, the PLO was not a proxy of the Soviet Union. It wasn’t being controlled by the Soviet Union. It was getting weapons from the Soviet Union. But the PLO was fundamentally an organization that emerged out of Palestinian opposition to Israel and Zionism, which went back a very, very long time, and grew out of the Palestinian experience, and indeed existed before the Soviet Union was supporting that resistance and continued after the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
So, why bring this up now? It’s because when one hears about the relationship between Iran and Hamas, one very frequently in the American media—if you listen to American politicians, or Israeli politicians, or kind of American Jewish communal discourse—you will hear again and again this word: proxy. The same word that Netanyahu used to describe the PLO’s relationship with the Soviet Union. Now, a proxy, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is ‘a person authorized to act for another.’ Some of the synonyms are: agent, surrogate, representative, stand- in. So, the idea is there is a person or an entity that has the authority. It makes the decisions. And it authorizes, it delegates some other entity to do a certain action for it, right? So, when you say that Hamas is a proxy for Iran, what you’re saying is that Iran is making the decisions. Iran is the fundamental actor here. And Hamas is basically doing its bidding and acting as an agent, a surrogate, a delegate, a proxy, right?
In fact, I think this completely misunderstands the relationship between Hamas and Iran. It’s true that Hamas gets weaponry from Iran, and that’s very valuable for it. And if Iran were to stop that support, that would be a significant problem for Hamas. But Hamas is not an agent or a proxy of Iran in the sense that it exists because Iran wants there to be an organization like Hamas around. Hamas exists because the Palestinians have been fighting against Israel for a very, very long time, and because one of the branches of that Palestinian resistance against Israel is an Islamist branch. And that for various reasons Hamas has become a very, very important actor in Palestinian politics, kind of fusing this desire to resist against Israel with its own, I think, quite problematic and deeply illiberal kind of Islamist ideology.
And so, if Iran were to cease to exist, Hamas would still very much exist because it is embodying this Palestinian resistance—not embodying it in ways that I would like, certainly, but embodying it, along with a range of other organizations. And it would look for other external entities to support it. And indeed, so Hamas has gotten support from forces in Turkey, from people in the Gulf. And it would try to rely on those more if it didn’t have Iran as a supporter. But Iran is not the reason that Hamas exists. And Palestinians have been fighting against Israel since long before the Islamic Republic revolution in 1979 meant that Iran suddenly became interested in supporting various different Palestinian groups.
This tendency to not want to face the reality that your problem is the people amongst you who you’re denying basic rights, who are resisting that oppression, is not unique to Israel. So, in South Africa, for instance, under apartheid, it was very common to hear the idea that the African National Congress was simply a proxy for the Soviet Union because it was more convenient to imagine that the real problem was far away, rather than recognizing that your fundamental problem was to deal with the people amongst you who were resisting their lack of freedom.
And it’s worth remembering, in fact, that Hamas actually broke with Iran just to show that it’s an independent actor, broke with Iran over the Syrian Civil War around decade or so ago, a little more, because Iran supported the Assad regime and Hamas supported the Sunni resistance in Syria. So, this idea that Hamas is a is a proxy for Iran is fundamentally a kind of another way that people used to not take Palestinians seriously, right, to not recognizing that the central problem that Israel has, the thing that makes it unsafe in Israel, is the lack of safety of the Palestinians that Israelis are living amongst.
And I think one of the reasons that Americans tend to kind of find it quite plausible to imagine this as the way the world works is this language of Hamas as a proxy for Iran mirrors the way Americans talked during the Cold War, right? Whereas Americans often, for our own reasons, didn’t want to face the fact that the movements that we were having trouble with—whether it was the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, or the Sandinistas, or various other groups—we didn’t want to face the fact that these were national anti-colonial, anti-imperial, often leftist organizations that were getting support from the Soviet Union, but that fundamentally were fighting us because they didn’t want the United States to be kind of controlling their country. And it was easier for Americans to, instead of taking them seriously on their own terms, think that they were basically kind of being puppeteered by the Soviet Union. If you could just basically deal with the Soviet Union, then you wouldn’t have a problem with Vietnam, for instance. That always turned out to be fundamentally wrong. And it’s fundamentally wrong in this case as well.
Now, it’s true Iran has more influence with some of these different groups than with others. So, Hezbollah, for instance, is more closely militarily integrated in with Iran than Hamas. It’s a Shia organization like Iran. It shares a kind of more similar perversion of Islamist ideology. But even Hezbollah, which of all of these groups is the one that’s most closely tied into Iran, even Hezbollah is still a group that emerges in response to Lebanese political realities and plays a certain role in internal Lebanese politics and in the Lebanese conflict with Israel and hostility and resistance to Israel that goes all the way back to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
And so, I think that one of the real dangers of this moment is precisely because Israel doesn’t have a way of dealing with Hamas on its own terms because it’s invasion of Gaza, which was supposed to destroy Hamas has manifestly failed, that this language of proxy becomes particularly appealing. Then you can locate the problem externally in Iran and say, we’re going to turn and focus our attention there. I think this is a disastrously delusional way of thinking, first of all, because it wouldn’t solve the problem. Even if by some miracle, you could destroy Iran or change the regime, or basically get rid of all of their weaponry, you would still not be dealing with the root of the problem, which is Palestinians. And Palestinians are resourceful enough that if Iran doesn’t support them in their fight, they will find somebody else who will.
But beyond that, the other tremendous danger is that in this desire to find a solution to Israel’s problem outside of the Palestinians, you literally then are leading yourself towards a really cataclysmic regional war that doesn’t address the root of the problem you have, and potentially creates enormous, enormous dangers. And so, George Orwell said, if you wanna critique the actions of people in power, you have to critique their language. And so, unless we critique words like ‘proxy,’ it seems to me we can’t actually do the political criticism that’s necessary in this moment to try to avoid war, and to try to ultimately move towards greater justice and greater peace.
