A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be the Gaza-born political analyst Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He’s been explaining why Trump’s ceasefire isn’t even a ceasefire, let alone a path to Palestinian freedom. And he’s been discussing the clashes inside Gaza between Hamas and Israeli-supported clans. We’ll talk about the Trump plan, Gaza’s future, and the long-term consequences of this genocide.
Cited in Today’s Video
Why Israeli doves like former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon want Israel to release Marwan Barghouti but the Israeli government won’t, despite Hamas’ request.
Why Barghouti’s son fears for his father’s life.
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!), I wrote about what Israeli “victory” in Gaza really means.
Bernie Sanders on why Americans care about Gaza.
Lara Friedman on Trump’s Gaza “plan.”
A new journal for a post-American world, Equator.
I’ll be speaking on October 20 in Santa Fe and October 21 in Albuquerque.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, there’s been a tremendous amount of news coming out of Gaza and Israel-Palestine, more generally, obviously over the last couple of weeks. But one of the things that I think hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves that I want to highlight is Israel’s refusal to release Marwan Barghouti, the most famous Palestinian prisoner. And the reason I think it’s so significant is that I think it exposes the lie that Israel’s fundamental problem is with Hamas, that Israel’s fundamental goal is to destroy Hamas. It shows that actually Israel’s strategy is not as much focused on destroying Hamas as it is on subjugating the Palestinian people and really trying to control as much land as possible with as few Palestinians on it as possible.
Now, in saying that, I think that Hamas is not the fundamental object of Israel’s strategy, I’m not suggesting that Hamas hasn’t committed terrible crimes. It has. It targeted civilians on October 7th, which is a war crime. It did that during the Second Intifada. It did that during the 1990s. These are violations of international law. No matter how oppressed you are under international law, you can’t target civilians. And Hamas’s Islamist ideology is one that I fundamentally oppose. I don’t believe in the idea of Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, or for that matter, Jewish states. I believe in the idea of states that provide everybody equality under the law, irrespective of their religion, ethnicity, or race.
But to say that Hamas has committed grave crimes is very different than saying that Hamas is really at the core of this conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. And you hear very frequently from Israel’s supporters, particularly actually its liberal Zionist supporters, that if you could just get rid of Hamas with its particular ideology, that then Israel would treat Palestinians in some fundamentally different way, then Israel’s need to subjugate and oppress Palestinians would no longer be the case if Hamas wasn’t there, and that Gaza could be this wonderful, beautiful, free place, and the West Bank.
I just think it’s really nonsense. And I think what’s happened with Barghouti really exposes it. But even before Barghouti, this argument that Hamas explains the dynamic between Israel and the Palestinians is ahistorical. I mean, Hamas was only created in 1987. So, if Hamas is the core of the problem, how do you explain the fact that Israel, after taking control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, kept millions of Palestinians, denied basic human rights in those areas for 20 years before Hamas was created?
Indeed, there’s a lot of evidence that Israel actually was quite sympathetic to Hamas in Hamas’s early years as it was emerging from the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s because Israel couldn’t imagine any Palestinian force that was more antagonistic to it than the nationalist Fatah, and kind of leftist Marxist groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. They thought that Islamists were the moderates at that point, which is why they gave some support to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, which came out of the Muslim Brotherhood.
So, the problem with suggesting that kind of Israel only has a problem with Palestinians when they organize in Islamist forces is that most of the resistance against Israel, most of the armed resistance, most of the armed resistance against civilians, most of the war crimes that have been committed historically since 1948 have not been committed by Islamists. They’ve mostly been committed by nationalist and leftist forces long before Hamas was even created.
The second piece of evidence, even before we get to Barghouti, against the idea that Hamas is Israel’s fundamental problem is that Israel just doesn’t treat Hamas like its fundamental problem. If Israel’s fundamental goal was to weaken, if not destroy Hamas, it would then try to strengthen Hamas’s political opponents, particularly the ones who have accepted Israel’s existence, as the PLO did in 1988.
But Israel hasn’t done anything of the kind, right? Israel’s continued to build settlements in the West Bank, thus completely discrediting Fatah, which as part of the Palestinian Authority adapted the strategy of collaborating with Israel in hopes of winning Israel’s trust that Palestinians could be trusted with a state that wouldn’t endanger Israel. Israel’s made a kind of complete mockery of that strategy, even under Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister who Israelis love the most, who they considered him the most moderate, the most opposed to armed resistance. When Fayyad left Palestinian politics in 2013, he did an interview with Roger Cohen of the New York Times and he basically said, Israel destroyed me politically. I couldn’t stop settlement growth for a single day and Hamas will grow stronger as a result of this.
So, if Israel were really fundamentally focused on seeing its problem as Hamas, rather than seeing its problem as how to subjugate the Palestinian people more generally, and again control more land with fewer Palestinians on it, then it would have strengthened Hamas’s opponents. It’s not done that at all. In fact, many people have noticed over the last two years that the Benjamin Netanyahu in particular was supporting the Qataris giving money to Hamas in Gaza because he preferred the idea of Hamas remaining in power in Gaza than the possibility of Palestinians uniting under some kind of united political leadership that would have meant that Israel didn’t have an excuse to say, well, of course we can’t negotiate with the Palestinians for a Palestinian state because the Palestinians are divided.
But all of that is kind of prelude to the Barghouti case, which I think again just makes this case so clearly that Israeli supporters claim that Hamas is the root of the problem, but Israel doesn’t actually itself behave as if it thinks that Hamas is a root of the problem. So, one of the things that Hamas did in these negotiations in which they are going to release the Israeli hostages and that Palestinian prisoners were going to be released, is that Hamas said, reportedly, that it wanted Marwan Barghouti released. The report said that they put him on the top of the list of Palestinian prisoners they wanted released. Now, that’s striking, because Barghouti is not a member of Hamas. He’s not an Islamist. He’s a longtime member of their rival Fatah. Maybe Hamas thought they would get some political benefit from releasing a very prominent Palestinian prisoner who wasn’t there from their political party.
But what’s significant is less that Hamas asked for him to be released than that Israel adamantly refused to. Israel refused to, even though those Israeli doves who actually want to support a Palestinian state have been calling for him to be released for many, many years. Former Shinbet head Ami Ayalon, for instance, said last year that ‘Barghouti is the only leader who can lead Palestinians to a state alongside Israel, first of all, because he believes in the concept of two states, and secondly, because he won his legitimacy by sitting in our jail.’
So, those Israelis on the Israeli left who actually want a Palestinian state alongside Israel—whether that’s possible or not is a separate question—but those who actually want Israel to try to bring that about understand that letting Barghouti out would actually be a step in that direction. It would also clearly be a step towards weakening Hamas. Because the polls show that while Mahmoud Abbas probably couldn’t beat Hamas in an election because he’s completely discredited by his corruption and his kind of compliance with Israel, that Barghouti would win an election over Hamas.
And these are all the reasons I think that a dove like Ami Ayalon wants to let him out of prison. But the Israeli government adamantly refused to let Barghouti out of jail. Now, they might say we wouldn’t let him out of jail because we think he has blood on his hands because he was involved in organizing violent attacks against Israelis during the Second Intifada. But that’s not actually the reason because Israel allowed other Palestinian prisoners, right, who they claimed were involved in violence against Israel, out, not Barghouti.
And in fact, there’s this remarkable quote by a former, retired Israeli brigadier general who says, ‘Israel is willing to release people who did really bad things, but not those who are famous,’ right? So, the reason that Israel doesn’t let Barghouti out isn’t because he may have been involved in armed attacks during the Second Intifada because they let people out who were involved in armed attacks. They don’t want to allow someone in out who is that famous, meaning that who is that popular, someone who has the possibility of actually potentially uniting Palestinians and creating a more stronger Palestinian leadership, right? Because that’s what Israel wants to avoid.
And not only has Israel not allowed Marwan Barghouti out of jail, but according to his son Arab Barghouti, who I’m hoping to interview later this week, that his father, Marwan, has been beaten by prison guards at least four times since October 7th. And just this September, he was beaten unconscious by prison guards. Now Israel denies this. But the Barghouti family says that five separate detainees confirm that they have evidence that he was beaten unconscious just last month by Israeli prison guards.
Right now, this is the guy who could most effectively, politically defeat Hamas, right, and create a united Palestinian political leadership that could potentially restate its support for Palestinian statehood alongside Israel, which the PLO accepted in 1988 and reaffirmed in the Oslo Agreement in 1993. And Israel is not only not allowing him out of jail, they’re beating him brutally, right? His son, Arab Barghouti, says that they literally fear for Marwan Barghouti’s life.
So, does that suggest that Israel’s fundamental focus is on weakening or defeating and destroying Hamas? Or does it suggest that Israel wants to keep Palestinians weak and divided, not allow them to have legitimate popular leaders, so that it has the pretext to maintain this subjugation of Palestinians, in which Palestinians not only are denied basic rights, but are crowded in both the West Bank and in Gaza now—which is going to be basically roughly half the size for Palestinians that it was before October 7th—in which Palestinians are crowded and crowded into smaller and less and less livable areas with the ultimate goal of hoping they will go somewhere else.
