Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at its regular time, Friday at Noon ET.
Our guest this week will be former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Last month, de Blasio made a “progressive case for Israel” to students at Harvard Law School. I invited him to reprise that argument for our listeners and I’m grateful he agreed.
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
My new Jewish Currents essay, “Could Israel Carry Out Another Nakba?”
Keith Ellison suggests in 2015 that Donald Trump could become president—and his fellow panelists laugh.
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 interviews the incomparable Amira Hass about Israel’s protests.
A moving plea by my friend, Rabbi Brian Walt, based on his experience growing up in South Africa, to the Reconstructionist Movement to acknowledge the Nakba and support historical justice for its victims.
What the Nation-State Law Means to Druze Parents whose Children Died Fighting for Israel.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Our zoom call this Friday is going to be with Mayor Bill de Blasio, former Mayor of New York City, who gave a talk recently I think at Harvard Law School making a progressive case for Israel. So, I wanted to kind of invite him to make that case to our listeners and to talk about it. As always, paid subscribers will get the link on the Wednesday for the call, which will be Friday at noon. And being a paid subscriber, you also have access to all of our previous conversations over the last couple of years.
I wanted to talk a little bit about an essay that I wrote for Jewish Currents this week, which is about the possibility that Israel could attempt another mass expulsion of Palestinians. When I was writing this story, I came across an interview with the Black Minnesota politician, Keith Ellison. It was just after Donald Trump had announced his presidential candidacy, and Ellison says ‘Democrats need to take the possibility of Trump as president seriously.’ And what happens is kind of astonishing, if you watch the video. All the other participants in the conversation on this ABC Sunday morning show were all white by the way, all burst out laughing. And the host, George Stephanopoulos, says to Ellison, ‘I know you don’t believe that.’ To which Ellison retorts, ‘stranger things have happened.’
And I was thinking about that when I was thinking about this essay about the possibility of another Nakba, which is the term the Palestinians use for the mass expulsion that happened at Israel’s birth, where roughly 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of the country. Which is to say that people who have a history of oppression at the hands of a certain state don’t generally find it so hard to imagine that that state could revert to those behaviors. So, it was less difficult for Black Americans to imagine that given their history with American white supremacy, that America could allow elect someone like Donald Trump where it was harder for white Americans to believe that.
Similarly, I think if you talked to vast majority of Israelis and American Jews, they would say, no Israel is not going to try to expel Palestinians en masse and maybe they might even say it’s a slander to bring it up. But among Palestinians, we can see from polling by Khalil Shikaki that actually this is exactly what most Palestinians think Israel wants to do. This is what they think Israel’s long-term strategy is. And the point of my piece was that just as we would have done well to recognize that America, given its history and given the fact that it hasn’t really taken full account of that history, had the capacity to elect Donald Trump. We should take seriously the possibility that, given Israeli history and given the politics in Israel today, that Israel could attempt another mass expulsion of Palestinians.
And the history, you know, is not something again, in the Jewish community that’s talked about all that much. But it wasn’t just that Israel began with this mass expulsion of Palestinians—by the way, maybe roughly 300 of those 750,000 Palestinians were expelled before the Arab armies declared war in May of 1948 (i.e., between November 1947 when the partition plan was voted on and when Israel declared independence, and the following May and then the armies attacked)—but that also Israel continued those expulsions afterwards. So, if you look at Benny Morris’ book on Israel’s border wars, he talks about the expulsions of an estimated 17,000 Bedouins from Israel in the early 1950s when Israel took the Jordan Valley, and took the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, several hundred thousands more Palestinians were expelled from places like East Jerusalem, and from the Jordan Valley, from place called the Latrun salient. In fact, Ariel Sharon talked about Israel’s policies of deporting Palestinians after 1967. And there have been smaller scale deportations that have continued up to this day, especially because, for instance, Israel has had policies that mean that Palestinians, for instance, who leave East Jerusalem for a period of time are not allowed to return. Israel had policies for many decades that Palestinians who left the West Bank or Gaza could not return.
So, that’s, I think, part of the reason that Palestinians may think of this as kind of in Israel’s political DNA. But it’s true that the expulsions of Palestinians have been relatively small scale in since 1967. The reason I argue in my essay that I think it’s possible to imagine them again becoming a kind of mass expulsion is, first of all, the possibility of greater armed resistance and even an Intifada coming out of the West Bank, and maybe Gaza as well. Because I think there is evidence that in times of war, expulsionist sentiment goes up, but also because there is a constellation of figures in Israel that support expulsion, that expulsion is not a marginal idea among Israeli Jews as much as we might like it to be.
Among the figures historically who have supported the idea of expulsion in recent decades were: the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who said it was unfortunate that Israel had not expelled all the Palestinians when it conquered the West Bank in 1967; more recently, figures like the former Brigadier General and Israeli Minister Effi Eitam; in his book Saving Israel, Daniel Gordis, the prominent Israeli English language political commentator, says it would be great if Israel could reach an accommodation with its Arab neighbors so they could take Israel’s Palestinian citizens. A series of polls suggest that somewhere between a third and half of Israeli Jews in polls say they would like the government to try to convince Palestinians voluntarily, or even coercively, to leave the country.
And you have in this government a whole series of figures who are on record as suggesting that they think the expulsion of Palestinians could be a good idea. One of them, of course, is Bezalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister who’s in charge of civil admission in the West Bank, who in 2017, came up with something called the Decisive Plan, in which Palestinians in the West Bank would be offered a choice. If they accepted that they would live in the West Bank without basic rights, i.e., without their own state and without citizenship and the right to vote in Israel, then they could stay. But if they did not accept that bargain, they would be offered assistance in leaving. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister, has talked during the campaign about creating a migration ministry, and Ben-Gvir and Smotrich both at times essentially told Palestinian citizens, Palestinian political leaders inside Israel themselves that they wish they could be banished. But it’s not just them. This is one of, I think, the things that is so important to realize how mainstream this idea is. If you look at prominent members and people in Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government in the Likud party, for instance Tzachi Hanegbi, his National Security Advisor; Avi Dichter, the Agricultural Minister who was a pillar of the Israeli security establishment and former Head of Shin Bet; and also, the fired and now reinstated Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant. All three of them have at some point over the years talked about the idea that another Nakba might be necessary.
So, these are not nearly as marginal ideas as I think, sometimes, we might want to admit. And one of the things that hasn’t gotten very much attention in the coalition agreements that brought about this new government is a call for a land registration system in the West Bank. And, as I argue in the piece, that might sound technical, but in reality if you look at the analysis done by Israeli human rights organizations, what they say is that because the standards for proving land ownership are different in Israel than they were before Israel took the West Bank in 1967, and given the Palestinians don’t have access to the databases that would be needed to acquire additional documents, very large numbers of Palestinians in the West Bank under this proposed land registration system would not be able to prove land ownership, in which case they would be at risk of their land being taken and given to the state. Which is the process by which Israel takes Palestinian land, and then gives it for settlements or for other kinds of Jewish-owned, you know, kind of focused development. And so that could be a process by which large numbers of Palestinians might find themselves being in the position of being evicted from their homes in the way that we now see happening with Palestinian villages in Area C, for instance, like Masafer Yata and Khan al-Ahmar.
The fundamental reason I wrote this piece was to suggest that if we want to make sure that this does not happen, that the first thing we need to do is to recognize that it’s possible. That I think the point that Ellison was making was that if you want to fight against something terrible happening—in his case the election of Donald Trump; in this case, another, a third mass expulsion of Palestinians, 1948, 1967, and then a third—one has to first admit that it’s possible. And that doesn’t happen yet. Neither in the organized American Jewish community nor the US
government is their willingness to recognize that this could happen.
It reminds me a little bit of the kind of denial that existed when Donald Trump was elected. And what’s happened, interestingly, is that that denial has been somewhat punctured in the United States, such that Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-defamation League, wrote a book called It Could Happen Here, right, about the possibility of kind of white nationalism, even you know potentially even a holocaust. I mean, that’s what it’s referencing, It Could Happen Here, Jonathan Greenblatt’s book. But we don’t have a conversation about the idea that it could happen there, right. That if someone were to write a book called It Could Happen There, suggesting there could be some horrifying event in Israel-Palestine, Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL might accuse them of antisemitism for making a kind of a Nazi analogy, even though Greenblatt was able to make that analogy about the United States. I’m not talking about a genocide in which all Palestinians are all killed. But I do think that Palestinians have good reason to think it is possible, that Israel could attempt another mass expulsion, particularly with the confluence of rising Palestinian armed resistance, and the radicalism of this government, and the fact that there is widespread support—not just marginal support—for this position in Israel. One of the people I didn’t mention is Benny Morris, the esteemed Israeli historian who ironically had documented the Nakba of 1948, and then later said in an interview with the journalist Ari Shavit that he thought this might need to be done again for Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
I hope you’ll take a look at the piece, and my hope is to create more of a conversation in mainstream and in Jewish circles about the possibility of this so that we make sure that we don’t give the kind of unconditional support to Israel that makes Israeli leaders think that they can do anything, including this without any consequences. Again, I hope folks will join us on Friday for Bill de Blasio.
If It Can Happen Here, It Can Happen There