Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Thursday at 11 AM ET (not our usual Friday at Noon).
Our guest will be Sally Abed, a member of the national leadership of Standing Together, which advocates for peace, equality, and climate justice in Palestine-Israel. Sally is one of the sharpest observers of what Israel’s intra-Jewish civil war over judicial overhaul means for its Palestinian citizens. As that struggle resumes with the Knesset’s return to session this week, I’m grateful she’s decided to join us.
As usual, 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, Maggie Haberman, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
A New York Times column I wrote last year about the roots of Tucker Carlson’s anti-war views.
Carlson’s critique of Donald Trump’s 2020 assassination of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.
Carlson’s vicious attack on his old Weekly Standard colleague, Max Boot (from 3 minutes, 40 seconds into the video).
Why Carlson’s anti-interventionism is inseparable from his racism.
For High School and College Students
A couple of years ago, Ezra Beinart (who, as the name might suggest, is my son) started a group that invites Palestinian speakers to answer questions from high school students via Zoom. They’ve now expanded it to college students as well. On Monday, May 8, from 8-9 PM EST, they’ll be joined by Representative Rashida Tlaib. If you know any students who might want to take part, they can register here.
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane chronicles House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ trip to Israel.
A fascinating moment (begins 27 minutes in) at the 92nd Street Y’s panel on Israel’s 75th Anniversary. Lucy Aharish, an Israeli television broadcaster and Palestinian citizen, explains why she cried at a rally against the judicial overhaul when protesters sang Hatikvah, an anthem she cannot sing.
Israel’s government is spending more than 25% of its road budget in the West Bank.
A Sudanese reporter for Sky News reports on a column of refugees leaving the country—and finds her uncle.
What it’s like to share a name with a public figure whose views you hate.
Rabbi Harold Kushner’s final message to the world.
See you on Thursday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Our guest will be this Thursday at 11 am ET, not our normal Friday. It will be Sally Abed, who’s one of the national leaders of a group called Standing Together (Omdim B’Yachad). She’s a Palestinian citizen from Haifa, and Omdim B’Yachad, Standing Together, is a really interesting organization that brings together Palestinian citizens in Jewish citizens of Israel. And Sally, I think, is one of the most incisive and thoughtful figures about what this particular moment in Israel, with these massive protests and fight over the judicial overhaul, what it means for Palestinian citizens and how Palestinian citizens should think about this particular moment. Again, that’ll be on Thursday at 11am, not Friday for paid subscribers. And paid subscribers, of course, also get access to all of our previous calls with people like Noam Chomsky and Thomas Friedman and Brett Stephens and Omar Barghouti and Francis Fukuyama. Also, if you know any high school or college students for interested in these questions, my son Ezra is doing a call with Rashida Tlaib—I’m very excited for him—which is on Monday, May 8th. And so, there’ll be a link in in the newsletter text to how you can register for that if you are a high school or college student.
I wanted to talk for a moment about Tucker Carlson. And the point I wanted to make about Tucker Carlson who I’m sure you know was booted from Fox News last week is, to understand who Tucker Carlson is, or at least who his public persona is, that you have to understand that the Tucker Carlson that we have seen over the past few years is a product of the Iraq War. That so many of the things that are toxic in American politics these days really have their roots in that disastrous decision in the way America responded to 9/11, and Tucker Carlson is one of them. And Tucker Carlson’s career arc—and I actually knew Tucker Carlson a little bit, you know, early in his career before he had this particular political persona—really reveals the impact of Iraq.
So, Carlson’s first big break when he was a young journalist was to go to work at The Weekly Standard. You may remember The Weekly Standard was the most important journalistic vehicle pushing for the Iraq War and, more broadly, pushing for a kind of American imperialist response to 9/11. It was led by people like Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, David Frum, Max Boot, and others. And that’s where Carlson went to work, and interestingly when the Iraq War goes south, Carlson starts to feel deeply betrayed. He starts saying as early as 2004 that he feels ashamed for supporting the Iraq War. And he feels betrayed by his elders, by his mentors. Now that was something that we saw among liberals in that period, a whole series of liberals, who then developed more anti-war politics. I think of someone like Spencer Ackerman, for instance, did so in part because of their sense of betrayal by the fact that they were hawkish liberals, like The New Republic, my magazine, which tragically supported the Iraq War.
But this also happened on the conservative side. And so, Carlson goes on this journey out of this sense of betrayal. He does something really interesting. He calls and apologizes to Pat Buchanan. Now, you’ll remember Pat Buchanan represented this completely different isolationist, anti-interventionist strain in conservative thinking, which had a lot of resonance in the 1990s. If you remember Buchanan actually won the New Hampshire Primary in 1996, and for a moment looked like he could be the Republican nominee in 1996. The Weekly Standard was influential in running Buchanan out of the Republican party, especially after 9/11, for his anti-imperialist views, and of course for his flirtations with antisemitism. And Carlson, who is ashamed of having been part of that effort, calls Buchanan to apologize, and then in 2008 he goes and starts giving speeches for Ron Paul. Remember, Ron Paul is running as again a kind of isolationist, anti-interventionist conservative. And so, when Donald Trump then becomes the Republican nominee, and essentially takes these Ron Paul-Buchanan impulses, this very harsh critique of the Republican foreign policy class for its disastrous interventions, Carlson surfs that once he gets this 8 o’clock slot at Fox News to essentially make that a much more powerful mainstream kind of conservative foreign policy position.
It’s important to recognize that although Carlson says some valuable things, his overall world view, like Buchanan’s, is fundamentally different from progressive internationalists. So, for instance, Carlson does say some useful things. In 2020, he breaks with Trump after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. And he doesn’t just say that attack was wrong and dangerous and could bring us to the brink of war. He makes the point that, he says ‘it’s harder to get rich and powerful in Washington during peace time, so our leaders have a built-in bias for war.’ One of the things that Carlson goes back to again and again is this idea that there is a structural bias and a structural incentive, both politically and economically, in Washington for militarism. He’s absolutely right about this. This is the point that Dwight Eisenhower famously made. If you just look at how many people in both parties work for think tanks, they get money from defense contractors, or work directly for defense contractors before and after government as consultants, this really is a huge structural kind of corruption. And Carlson calls it out very aggressively and consistently. And there’s some real value to that.
But his overall view about why America should not intervene comes from essentially, not a kind of humanitarian place, a sense of solidarity with people abroad, but really from that same racist impulse that characterizes his discourse on domestic affairs. So, he basically believes that America shouldn’t give economic or humanitarian support to people in the non-white non-Christian world. We should not let them in as refugees. And we shouldn’t even bother going to war because they don’t deserve any of our energy, right, because they’re inferior. So, he actually says in 2008, he’s reported as saying ‘Iraq is a crappy place, filled with a bunch of you know, semi-illiterate, primitive monkeys. That’s why it wasn’t worth invading,’ which is just like we’re too good for these people, so they don’t deserve us going and invading their countries. And this is a fundamentally different worldview than a kind of progressive internationalism that you might see from Ilhan Omar or Bernie Sanders, who would talk in terms of international law, in terms of trying to help people around the world by supporting human rights through efforts at solidarity, through recognizing that peace is an essential element of human rights, and recognizing that America is just as prone to barbaric behavior as any other country in the world.
I think one of the tragedies of this period is that there has been more space for Tucker Carlson because the Democratic party has not centered those kinds of critiques as much itself. And so, for instance, if you look at the fact that the Democratic party was not really willing to defend Ilhan Omar, the irony is that Ilhan Omar was making some of the same points as Tucker Carlson. She was talking about the corruption of American foreign policy. She was asking really difficult questions about why America’s military footprint was all over the world, doing the things that we were doing when we had so many domestic needs at home. But she was doing it from a fundamentally different moral proposition than Tucker Carlson was. And because the Democratic party has not centered those people like her or Bernie Sanders, because there are very, very few voices like that in the Biden Administration, because the Biden Administration continues a lot of this kind of corruption that Tucker Carlson was talking about. If people who have deep ties to defense contractors are in high positions, I think it creates more space for the Tucker Carlsons of the world.
So those folks can’t, I think, they cannot be allies to progressive internationalists in a fundamental way because, morally, they’re just kind of in a different universe. But I think that the way to respond to them has to be to take the legitimate points of what they’re saying and combine it and put it inside a worldview which says not that America is too good to bother with other countries, but in fact that America should deal with other countries and other peoples as an equal in a joint effort at solidarity to creating a better world rather than either a kind of racist imperialism or a kind of racist anti-imperialism, which is what Tucker Carlson represented. Hope to see many of you on Thursday at 11am with Sally Abed.
How the Iraq War Created Tucker Carlson