Our Zoom call this week will be at the regular time: Friday at Noon EST.
Our guest will be Gershon Baskin, an Israeli writer and activist who has been talking to leaders of Hamas, and negotiating with them for the release of Israeli captives, since 2006. He’s written a recent column for The New York Times about the fate of the current hostages and penned a scathing open letter to Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad about Hamad’s call for more attacks like the one on October 7. We’ll talk to Gershon about his long experience with Hamas, Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and the fate of the hostages.
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, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
The studies showing a correlation between Israel’s killings of Palestinians and reported antisemitic incidents in the US, Belgium, and Australia.
Iyad el-Baghdadi’s call for pro-Palestinian activists to expel antisemites in their midst.
Things to Read
On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, a discussion of the surge in American Jewish organizing for Palestinian rights.
What each Israeli political party wants to do about Gaza.
Brandeis Professor Yehuda Mirsky critiques my argument about South Africa’s lessons for ethical Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression.
A story of Palestinian and Jewish heroism and survival in Kibbutz Be’eri.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East in the exact same way that the United States is the oldest democracy in the world.” [35 minutes in.]
I talked to Joy Reid on MSNBC about America’s post-9/11 lessons for Israel.
Housekeeping
Unfortunately, we’ve had to disable newsletter comments. The discussion was getting too nasty and we don’t have the capacity to monitor it. Readers are still welcome to email me their responses to these videos and I’ll try to feature some of them in future newsletters.
Correction
Someone came up to me the other day who was quite upset about something I said in my first video after October 7. He accused me of defaming the Jewish community. He felt I had accused Jewish leaders of endorsing a policy of “no mercy” toward Palestinians in Gaza. At first, his anger provoked my anger, and I felt that viewed in context of the entire video, his criticism was unfair. But upon reflection, he has a point. I regret using that phrase: “no mercy.” It’s too categorical and harsh. What I was trying to say was that in establishment Jewish discourse, expressions of sorrow for, and solidarity with, Israeli Jewish suffering are often conflated with support for Israel’s actions in Gaza, policies I believe will only cause more Jewish and Palestinian suffering. But I didn’t express that point clearly in my video and made a statement that he understandably considered unfair. So, this is my effort to set things right.
See you on Friday at Noon,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Our call this Friday at noon ET is going to be with Gershon Baskin. Gershon is an Israeli who has been talking to Hamas mostly in negotiations over hostages since 2006. I don’t think they’re very many Israelis who have spent nearly as much time as he has talking to leaders of Hamas. And so, we’re going to talk about that organization, and what he’s learned, and about his very, very, very harsh criticisms of it in recent days, and about the question of hostages, and what he’s learned that hopefully would give us some shred of hope that maybe these Israeli captives will be released soon. That’ll be Friday at noon for paid subscribers.
There’s been a lot of discussion, understandably, since October 7th about a rise in antisemitism. And it seems to me indisputable that there has been a rise in antisemitism—in pro-Palestinian antisemitism. I don’t want to call it ‘left antisemitism’ necessarily because I’m not sure that all the people who are involved in this can be said to have the values of the left in the sense that they believe in equality, right? So, you know, by example, Hamas is a pro-Palestinian organization in a certain sense, but I don’t think I would call that a left organization because it doesn’t share basic values of equality. But there are some people in the United States and in Europe and others who seem to identify with the pro-Palestinian cause, and who are committing antisemitic attacks. In particular what they’re doing is they’re taking out their hostilities against the state of Israel on individual Jews or Jewish institutions. And this is horrifying and very frightening for many diaspora Jews, including myself. And it’s also tragically somewhat predictable. The reason it’s somewhat predictable is we have a number of academic studies that show a correlation between violence in Israel-Palestine and an increase in reported antisemitic incidents around the world. And the correlation is particularly between the numbers of Palestinians who were killed in a given period of time and the number of reported antisemitic incidents.
So, for instance in a 2020 article by the political scientist Ayal Feinberg, he found that during Israeli military operations between 2001 and 2014 where they produced a hundred or more casualties, there was a 35% increase in reported antisemitic hate crimes in the United States. There was a 2011 study in Belgium that showed that complaints about antisemitism rose significantly during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009. And a 2021 study in Australia saw a significant increase in certain kinds of antisemitic incidents in Australia during the 2014 conflict between Israel and Gaza.
So, before I go on further, I want to try to be as absolutely unambiguous and clear as I can. I am not suggesting that Israel is to blame for antisemitism around the world. Not at all. The people who are responsible for antisemitic incidents are the ones who are committing antisemitism. I believe it’s a really fundamentally important kind of moral principle that people have moral responsibilities for their actions. This is the same reason that I’ve said again and again that I believe Hamas—and only Hamas—bears primary responsibility for what it did on October 7th because it was members of Hamas who killed people. It’s, by the way, of that same logic that is the reason that I believe that Israel bears primary moral responsibility for what it does in Gaza because even though Israel was provoked in a very, very profound way by what Hamas did, and even though Hamas is, you know, tunneling underneath buildings and all these things, ultimately, the primary responsibility in any act lies with the person who commits that act, right? And that is very much the case here for people who commit antisemitic incidents in the United States or in Europe or wherever else.
An analogy I might give would be, for instance, it also seems very likely that there was an increase in anti-Muslim attacks after September 11th, right? But the people who bore the primary responsibility for those Islamophobic attacks was not Al-Qaeda. I mean, Al Qaeda, G-d knows, bears a lot of moral responsibility for other people it killed, and all the other terrible, horrific things it’s done. But the people who bore primary moral responsibility for the Islamophobic attacks that they may have carried out because they were blaming ordinary Muslim people for what Al Qaeda did, they were the ones primarily to blame, not Al Qaeda. Similarly, if let’s say China invades Taiwan, and then some people take out their anger at China on some Chinese or Asian American people in the United States, we can blame China for invading Taiwan, but we can’t blame China for those acts of anti-Asian violence.
So, I want to try to be as kind of unambiguous as I can about that. The people who bear the responsibility for antisemitic attacks are the people who bear antisemitic attacks. The question for the rest of us, right, is how do we combat those things? Now, I do think, again, the studies suggest that were there to be a reduction in violence, and particularly reduction in the number of Palestinians killed, antisemitic incidents would probably decline. So, probably the evidence suggests that were there to be a ceasefire, for instance, there would probably be a reduction in antisemitic attacks. But that leads us into a whole other conversation about what Israel’s policy should be towards Gaza, towards Hamas. I talked about that last week. That’s not what I want to primarily discuss. I wanna primarily talk about what people in the diaspora can do, people around the world can do—regardless of their point of view about Israel-Palestine and Hamas, regardless—to fight against this rise in pro-Palestinian antisemitism.
And the first, and maybe obvious, thing is that people who are supporters of Palestinian rights need to show absolutely no tolerance for people who take out their hostility towards Israel and the actions of the Israeli government on Jewish people or on Jewish institutions. And I just want to give an example of kind of what that looks like. It actually comes from Iyad el-Baghdadi, a guy for whom I have enormous respect, who was our guest last Friday, a Palestinian who lives now in Norway. This is what he tweeted just a few days ago: ‘I am saying it again as a Palestinian. If you see antisemitism, you need to shut it down. If someone takes a stage to spout something antisemitic, pull them down from the stage. Do not tolerate antisemitism. It’s poison. You do not support Palestine by being racist against Jews.’ It seems to me that if everyone were to take his advice, and that activists across the country and across Europe were to do that, then it seems to me that the number of antisemitic attacks would go down.
There are also, of course, a lot of things that Jews can do to try to fight against antisemitism. And I think some of those things that mainstream American Jewish organizations do are totally reasonable, and valid, and makes sense, and sometimes you need to increase security. Certainly, I’ve noticed that in our shul and other Jewish institutions that I frequent security has gone way up. Those are just kind of normal precautions that people take. But I think the other thing, which is much harder for establishment Jewish organizations to think about, is to think about how they—and we in the Jewish community—can fight against people who are conflating Israel and Jews, right? Because this is the fundamental error that is leading to this antisemitism, right, is that people are taking out their hostility—it appears—against Israel towards Jews.
Now it may be more complicated than that. It may be that, essentially, they’re just using Israel as an excuse for some pre-existing hostility they had. That’s entirely also true. But again, the evidence shows that the antisemitic incidents are going up when more Palestinians are dying. So, there does seem to be something about what’s happening that Israel is doing that is at least bringing this out of the woodwork in a way that it was not before, right? And it seems to me what we want Palestinians to say, and Palestinian supporters to make a very, very clear distinction between however you feel about Israel, however you feel about Zionism, right, and the way you treat ordinary Jews, or you treat Jewish institutions, right, around the world. And it seems to me if we want to insist that Palestinian rights supporters make that distinction, then it’s also important that Jewish institutions make that distinction as well. Which is to say, being Jewish is one thing. Supporting Israel, which is a state or the policies of that state, is a different thing. Now it is true that most Jews around the world, in general, kind of support Israel—not everything that Israel does, but they support basically the project, and that’s fine. But there’s a difference between that and saying that there is something inherent in being Jewish that means that you are a supporter of Israel or that you are a political Zionist. If you say that, then it seems to me you’re contributing to the very confusion and the very error that we want Palestinian rights supporters to fight against, right?
And let me give an example of I think what that confusion can look like, right? So, the chief rabbi of the UK said a while back, ‘open a Jewish prayer book used in any part of the world and Zionism will leap out at you,’ right? He didn’t say ‘Zion,’ right, because of course there are lots of references to the biblical idea of kind of Zion, a Jewish homeland. But he said Zionism, which is actually a political movement that starts in the late 19th century, right? If you say that, if you say that the siddur, the prayer book, is an inherently Zionist document, right, then if someone goes and writes ‘Free Palestine’ on a Jewish prayer book, right, you have contributed, it seems to me, to the error, right, that allows them to do that—something that I, and I think most people, would find fundamentally appalling, right? Again, I’m not saying that Jews should not be pro-Israel if they are pro-Israel. That’s a choice that they can absolutely make to be political Zionist or not to be political Zionist. But making the choice is one thing. Saying that it is an inherent feature of Jewishness, it seems to me, is to make the very conflation that we need to demand that pro-Palestinian activists not make.
And I wanna make one more point that some people probably will dislike but I believe it’s true, so, I’m gonna make it anyway. And it is this. It is that regardless of what you think of the politics of those Jewish activists in groups like If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace that are fighting for Palestinian freedom and going on these marches and these sit-ins, right, and obviously these are groups that provoke often a lot of hostility in certain quarters of the Jewish community because people just fundamentally disagree with their views. They may even see them as traitors. But, I actually think that those Jewish groups are doing something very important in the fight against antisemitism, right, because they are showing Palestinians and others that this is not a fight between Palestinians and Jews, in which case you could you could say to be pro-Palestinian is to be anti-Jewish, right? They’re showing through their activism for Palestinian freedom that it is actually a struggle about a set of ideals, right, about a set of principles about how states behave, about how human beings are treated. And if you don’t believe me, I would really just encourage you to go on social media and look at the comments you find from Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims in response to these protests by Jewish groups like JVP and If Not Now for a ceasefire. I think that you see in that response a tremendous kind of sense of solidarity across ethnic and religious lines, and in a deep sense that this is combating the idea that what this is is just a tribal fight.
And there’s an interesting analogy here, which I want to end with. I’ve been thinking a lot about South Africa since October 7th. And Jeff Goodwin, who’s a sociologist at NYU, makes this really fascinating point in his study of the Africa National Congress about why the African National Congress held to its vision of multiracial democracy and did not see the struggle against apartheid is just a struggle of Blacks versus whites. And there were figures in the Black consciousness movement in the Pan-Africanist Congress that had a much more racialized view. But Goodwin makes the case that a fundamental reason the ANC didn’t see the struggle against apartheid as just a tribal struggle, and therefore didn’t see white people as their enemies, but in fact saw it as a struggle for a certain set of ideals about multiracial democracy and equality was because of the way in which white South Africans—mostly, by the way, many of them Jewish; vastly disproportionate number of those white people were Jewish because those white South Africans, mostly white communists, mostly Jewish white communists—put their bodies on the line to fight against apartheid, they made it essentially impossible for the Black leaders of the ANC to purely see this as a white versus Black racial struggle. And in that way, they actually contributed, I would say, fought against the kind of racism that might have emerged in Black South African political circles against white South Africans.
And it seems to me—although again, the ANC is very distinct organization from the kinds of pro-Palestinian organizations we see today—that groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now are doing something a little bit similar. They are, through their very actions, essentially a living refutation of the idea that this is a struggle of Palestinians against Jews, and therefore all Jews are fair game because all Jews are on the wrong side. And they are actually showing that this is a struggle of a group of people—Palestinians, Jews, and other people—for a set of principles. And I think whether you even agree or disagree with the policy agenda of a ceasefire, et cetera, et cetera, those actions, I actually think, combat antisemitism. They combat pro-Palestinian antisemitism, which is really important in this frightening moment when pro-Palestinian antisemitism is on the rise. Again, our guest on Friday at noon ET will be Gershon Baskin for paid subscribers. I hope many of you will join us.
