Our Zoom call this week will be at our regular time: Friday at Noon EDT.
Our guest will be the Israeli feminist activist and theorist Hannah Safran, author of Don’t Wanna Be Nice Girls: The Struggle for Suffrage and the New Feminism in Israel. We’ll talk about the role of gender and women’s rights in the Israeli government’s effort at judicial overhaul, and the protest movement against it. We’ll also talk about the relationship between Israeli feminism and the struggle for Palestinian freedom.
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
Jake Sullivan on why a Saudi-Israel deal will promote stability in the Middle East.
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Mari Cohen, Alex Kane, Sam Adler-Bell, and I— in partnership with the podcast Know Your Enemy—spoke about the Anti-Defamation League’s fights with the right and left.
Rabbi Adina Alpert’s raw and powerful Yom Kippur sermon about Jewish supremacy.
Leah Cohen Hager on what happened when she tried to use PayPal to support Friends of Alrowwad USA, the organization founded by recent Zoom guest Dr. Abdelfattah Abusrour.
On October 15, I’ll participate in a zoom panel on the new documentary, “Israelism.”
A eulogy for Alice Shalvi.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Our call this week will be on Friday at noon ET, our normal time, for paid subscribers. Our guest will be Hannah Safran, who’s one of the most important activists and kind of theorists of Israeli feminism, author of the book Don’t Wanna Be Nice Girls: The Struggle for Suffrage and the New Feminism in Israel. So, we’re going to talk about gender dynamics in Israeli politics, the state of the feminist movement in Israel, how it intersects with this struggle over judicial overhaul, and of course, how the question of feminist activism interrelates with the question of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. So, that’ll be Friday at noon ET for paid subscribers who also get access to our previous calls with folks like Benny Morris, Ilhan Omar, Bret Stephens, Thomas Friedman, Omar Barghouti, and Noam Chomsky, and many others.
I was struck by a quote that I came across this morning by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on this question of Israeli-Saudi normalization, which, according to news reports, seems to be becoming more and more likely, maybe even more and more imminent. And this was the quote from Sullivan. He says, ‘So what are we trying to do with Saudi and Israel? Reinforce, deepen, and sustain that out in the future because we believe that regional integration and normalization between significant countries in the Middle East can create a greater and more stable foundation as we go forward.’ So, his argument is that normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia will create a more stable Middle East. And I think it’s worth looking at.
First of all, it’s striking here that the rhetoric is a complete departure from Biden’s rhetoric about democracy, or about the international rules-based order, right, which is the language that Biden tends to use when he’s talking about Russia and China, right? When he’s talking about what Russia and China are doing that’s wrong, we hear this language about America and democracy and international rules-based order. That’s kind of out the window in this case when it comes to what America is actually doing, right? Because both Saudi Arabia and Israel are serious violators in various different ways of international law, right, the international rules-based order. The Saudis, for instance, by murdering an American-based journalist; the Israelis by overseeing a political system that has been called apartheid by its own human rights organizations and the world’s leading human rights organization. So, the justification is completely different.
Now, really the justification for this is about regional stability, that Israeli-Saudi normalization will create more regional stability. But will it, really? I mean, if it were the case that Israel and Saudi Arabia had been at war, or potentially likely to go to war, and this peace agreement would stop their fighting or prevent them from going to war, then you might say, OK, well, that’s going to create a more stable and peaceful Middle East. But of course, that’s not the case at all. They have been kind of de facto allies already. What this would do would be to kind of formalize that and kind of lubricate it by large amounts of US military and other aid to Saudi Arabia, and potentially greater security guarantees to Israel. So, the threat of instability between Israel and Saudi Arabia in their relationship with war, violence was already very, very minimal.
I think that the much greater threat to stability comes from within both countries because both countries are deeply repressive, and both countries also undermine the stability of other countries. And so, what I think Sullivan’s argument misses completely is the way in which helping Israel and Saudi Arabia entrench both of their repressive political systems doesn’t actually create stability, but actually is likely a recipe for long-term instability. The irony is that there was a time when an American president made exactly these kinds of arguments. This was George W. Bush. One of the things that George W. Bush said after 9/11 was that a deep American support for highly repressive governments was in fact the source of the instability that we saw expressed on September 11th because people hated the United States for subsidizing and bankrolling their deeply oppressive governments. Now, that argument that Bush made got wrapped up with his disastrous American military interventions and policies of torture and all these other things. But that basic idea, which was that when America supported highly repressive governments, it wasn’t producing stability, but it was actually producing instability, because these governments were basically sitting on a powder keg of their own discontented citizens who then took their discontent out in part on the United States.
I think there was something to that insight. And in some ways, this is what Jake Sullivan is completely forgetting when he’s arguing that Israeli-Saudi normalization will be a recipe for stability. Will it be a recipe for stability in Israel? Assuming that what happens is that Saudi normalization with Israel with kind of a few crumbs for the Palestinians basically means the Palestinians have even less leverage, which means it’s even easier for Israel to accelerate not just the de facto annexation of the West Bank, but increasingly de facto ethnic cleansing of at least parts of the West Bank. Is that likely to make the situation more stable? I don’t think so. Even Israeli generals have repeatedly said that Palestinian hopelessness and despair is a driver of Palestinian violence. And this seems to me it will move us closer towards another intifada and Palestinian active armed resistance against Israel, because there’s no hope whatsoever for the international community—be it the Saudis or anybody else—for putting the pressure on Israel that would ultimately lead Israel to move towards giving Palestinians basic rights.
It’s also worth remembering the US completely turning its back on the idea of the Arab Peace Initiative, which the Saudis led, which said we will recognize Israel, but only in return for a Palestinian state. Now America is gonna bless a deal in which the Saudis recognize Israel without Israel doing anything like that. So, I don’t think it produces more stability in Israel. I don’t think it produces more stability in Saudi Arabia because what this is going to mean is further deepening of American and Israeli support for a regime in Saudi Arabia that has proved extremely reckless: reckless in the way it treats its own citizens, who it brutalizes; reckless in the way it’s dealt with other countries, its kind of devastation of Yemen; the Saudi and Emirati roles in fueling warlords and civil wars and dictators across the Middle East and into Africa in places like Libya, Somalia, Sudan.
These are not forces for stability. They’re forces for profound instability. And when you give someone like Mohammed bin Salman essentially a blank check, what you’re doing is you’re emboldening him to be even more reckless in the way he intervenes regionally, and in the way he brutalizes his own citizens. And it seems to me, the likely result of that is going to be instability around the Middle East, and potentially even ultimately instability in Saudi Arabia. Right now, he can kind of buy people off. But one of the lessons of 9/11 was in fact how profound a discontent there was in these repressive Arab governments at their regimes and the US for supporting those regimes. So, I think it seems to me striking that we have a return to a language of stability that you saw in America, a lot of American policy towards the Middle East during the Cold War. And I think there’s anything we should have learned from 9/11, it was in fact that we were not making the region or ourselves more secure by bank rolling and supporting deeply repressive governments. And yet it seems like the Biden administration is about to double down on doing just that. Again, on Friday, we’ll be joined by Hannah Safran at noon ET. I hope many of you can join us.
Jake Sullivan is Wrong. A Saudi-Israel Deal Won’t Stabilize the Middle East