There will be no zoom call this week. We’ll resume on Friday, November 1 at 11 AM with Seth Anziska discussing Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. I’ve been deeply moved by Fida Jiryis, Stranger in My Own Land, which charts her family’s painful and surreal journey, from Mandatory Palestine to Lebanon to Israel. It’s a book I wish I could make required reading in all the places, in America, Israel and beyond, where Palestinians are routinely dehumanized.
I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medglobal. I’m grateful to people who have sent suggestions. Please keep sending them.
Sources Cited in this Video
A list of the Palestinian and Arab leaders Israel has assassinated since the 1950s.
The Book of Ecclesiastes.
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 talks to Daniel Levy about US policy and Israel’s military escalation.
Adam Shatz on the Middle East after Hassan Nasrallah.
Some listeners took issue with my praise for Ta-Nehisi Coates book, The Message, and sent me two essays critical of it. The first, in The Forward, criticizes Coates’ book for analogizing America’s treatment of Blacks to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The second, in The New Yorker, suggests that Coates’ has abandoned the commitment to reporting that characterized his prior work. They didn’t convince me but read them for yourself.
Upcoming Talks
I’m headed to Canada. On October 22, I’ll be speaking at the University of Alberta and on October 29 I’ll be speaking at the University of Victoria.
See you a week from Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. So, one of the things about observing Jewish holidays, especially this time of year when there’s a ton of Jewish holidays, is that it takes you offline. And so, big events happen in the world, and you kind of hear about them through the grapevine, but you don’t really fully experience them in the way that you would when you’re online. But you also have a little bit of distance from events and some time to think. And, sometimes, even the Jewish texts that you end up reading when you’re in synagogue can put those events in some kind of perspective.
And this happened for me this Shabbat. This Shabbat, which is the Shabbat during the holiday of Sukkot, Jews read the book of Ecclesiastes, which is called in Hebrew, Kohelet. It’s a really fascinating text. There are a lot of famous kind of aphorisms that come from the book of Ecclesiastes, one of which is there’s nothing new under the sun. And early in Kohelet, in Ecclesiastes, there’s this line in which the author says, ‘sometimes there is a phenomenon of which they say, look, this one is new. But it occurred long ago, in ages that went by before us. Ergo, there is nothing new under the sun.’
And that seemed to me pretty fitting to read a couple of days after the news that Israel had assassinated Yahya Sinwar, and then of course before that, Hassan Nasrallah. I don’t think many Americans today know who Abbas Al-Musawi was, or Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, or Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Well, al-Musawi was Nasrallah’s predecessor as the head of Hezbollah. He was assassinated by Israel in 1982. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was the first chairman of Hamas’ Shura Council. He was assassinated by Israel in 2004. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi was the second chairman of Hamas’ Shura Council. Israel assassinated him also in 2004, according to a tally by the Jewish Virtual Library. I don’t exactly know how they assembled this. Israel has assassinated 337 Palestinian and Arab kind of high-level leaders in a list that they have going back to 1956. For instance, in 1972, Israel famously—or infamously—assassinated Ghassan Kanafani, who was then a central command member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Israel has been doing this a really, really long time.
And so, when you hear people in Israel, and Israel supporters, and folks in the American Jewish community saying what a huge victory this was, what an enormous accomplishment this was, and everyone kind of beating their chests about this and the military prowess and all of this stuff, just ask yourself a simple question: how did all those other assassinations going back years and decades and decades, how did they work out for Israel? Have they made Israel safer? Again and again, Israel assassinates folks, right. And then these organizations promote new leaders. Now, maybe the new leaders are less capable than the old leaders. Maybe they’re more moderate. Often, they’re not, right? Israel had no idea when it assassinated Abbas al-Musawi that they would get Hassan Nasrallah, who was actually a lot better, a more effective leader than Musawi. Maybe the next guy won’t be as good.
But the problem is you’re not actually dealing in any sense with the underlying problem, right. Maybe when you are dealing with wars where you’re not occupying a people, right, maybe as in America’s wars against al-Qaeda or ISIS, these assassinations could be more effective because you are working hand-in-hand with states, with sovereign states that are your allies, in the case of the fight against ISIS, the Iraqi government and the Kurds, for instance, that you can work with and they can potentially take control of this area, and kind of decimate an insurgent organization.
But the Palestinian issue is fundamentally—again, and it’s extraordinary that one would even need to say this, right—but it’s fundamentally not about Hamas. Because Hamas was only created in 1987, right. When Israel killed Kanafani in 1972, it wasn’t thinking about Hamas. Hamas didn’t exist. And it wasn’t thinking about Islamists because the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was a leftist group that was involved with armed resistance, including against civilians, against Israel. And at that point, Israel was thinking about this threat more in terms of groups like the PFLP that were leftist groups. But it wasn’t about the PFLP, just as it’s fundamentally not about Hamas. And it’s not about Sinwar, which is not a way of apologizing for Sinwar. Sinwar has did terrible, terrible things. Of course he did. Many leaders have done terrible, terrible things.
But the point is that Sinwar will pass. Even Hamas may pass. The Palestinian people will remain. The Palestinian problem for Israel will remain in that you are holding millions of people without the most basic rights. And so, at best, maybe you create some disarray in an organization. Even the organization gets supplanted by some other organization, and for a while people are licking their wounds, and they haven’t organized yet. But they will. Sooner or later, they will. Another organization, another leader, because it is human to fight against your oppression, for your freedom.
Now, there are ethical ways of fighting. There are unethical ways. October 7th was an unethical way. There are effective ways and there are ineffective ways. Those things are really important. But what is sure is that you will not break a people’s will to fight for their freedom by killing one particular leader, right. And it is astonishing to me, and deeply depressing, that we still get sucked into this. We in the Jewish community get sucked into this frankly absurd idea, right, which is so insulting to Palestinians and so ignorant of this history, right. That you’re going to solve some kind of problem by killing one particular leader, even if he was a particularly effective leader, and even if he was a particularly brutal and nasty leader, right. You’re not going to solve anything ultimately.
And all of this military power and technological wizardry is a substitute for a political strategy. And it’s not just a substitute for a political strategy because a political strategy would have to take seriously the Palestinian desire to live as something other than an oppressed people. It’s a substitute for a human recognition of the Palestinian people, right? So, you focus everything on Sinwar and on Hamas, and on Hezbollah and Nasrallah, as these epitomes of evil, right? And these groups have done terrible things. These leaders have done terrible things.
But what you avert your eyes from in doing that is the fact that you have a very large number of people—just people, the same cross-section of good, bad, in the middle, human people with human desires that you are crushing, right, by not recognizing that they have the same right to freedom that you have. And that if you don’t have that basic human recognition, you are simply going to be like Groundhog Day. As it says in Ecclesiastes, you think this is new, you’ve done it before. You did it before that. You did it before that. You will be doing it again and again and again. And more and more people will die and suffer and live in misery, and it won’t be only on the Palestinian and Lebanese side. It will be also among Israeli Jews.
And that to me is the tragedy of this war, of this moment. It’s why I’m not going to celebrate these assassinations, even though obviously I would have liked to see Yahya Sinwar in front of the International Court of Justice, it’s not going to solve any problems. And people who think it is are simply reflecting their lack of understanding of the long history of this tool, which is ultimately proved ineffective for Israeli Jews and Jews in general in creating the security and safety and peace that they—that we—deserve.
Israel’s Been Assassinating Palestinian Leaders For Decades