Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be on Thursday (not our regular Friday) at Noon EDT.
Our guest will be Aparna Gopalan, news editor of Jewish Currents, and author of the important new investigation, “The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook.” We’ll talk about Hindu nationalism’s rise within Hindu diaspora communities and the reason that some Hindu organizations have embraced “Hinduphobia”—modeled on the IHRA definition of antisemitism—as a tactic to prevent criticism of Narendra Modi’s ethnonationalist government.
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
Israeli officials admit they will have to keep re-invading Jenin.
The many figures in this Israeli government who have discussed mass expulsion.
Bezalel Smotrich’s 2017 “Decisive Plan.”
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), the editors explain how Holocaust memory became weaponized against Palestinian rights in Germany.
On Sunday, July 16, I’ll be in conversation with Professor Eve Illouz at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.
Last week I talked about the attack on Jenin, and US foreign policy, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and the Mehdi Hasan show.
In The New York Times, I argued that the US has pushed Iran and Cuba into the arms of its great power foes.
Some hilarious differences between Britain and America.
See you on Thursday (not Friday),
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Our call this week is gonna be on Thursday, not the usual Friday. It’ll be at noon ET. And our guest is gonna be Aparna Gopalan, my Jewish Currents colleague, who’s written this remarkable investigation of the way in which Hindu nationalist groups are modeling their efforts to protect Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government on the language that is in the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and the general effort by pro-Israel groups in the United States and around the world to say that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. So, that’ll be this Thursday at noon for paid subscribers. Of course, paid subscribers also get access to our whole library of previous conversations with people like Noam Chomsky, Thomas Friedman, Bret Stephens, Ilhan Omar, etc.
I wanted to say something about what happened last week in the Israeli attack on Jenin, and why I think, or at least I fear, that we are moving in a logic that is going to move us closer to the possibility of mass expulsion of Palestinians in the West Bank. And in order to do that, I wanna try to kind of step back for a minute and talk about the kind of basic dilemma that I think the Israeli government faces. So, the Israeli government is controlling these millions of people in the West Bank who live under its control, but lack basic rights. They can’t become citizens of Israel. They can’t vote for the Israeli government even though the Israeli government controls them. They live under military law even though their Jewish neighbors live under civil law. So, these are the kind of basic kind of realities.
I’m often struck that when I say this sometimes on Twitter, people will say, ‘that’s ridiculous! You know, they can vote, they have their own country—it’s the Palestinian Authority.’ Well, if the Palestinian Authority were a state, then Israel wouldn’t be sending its army into Jenin to go and arrest people and kill people, right? When you have a state, you have your own army. The Palestinian Authority doesn’t have an army. The only army that controls that area and can go into any square inch of the West Bank areas A, B, or C, and arrest anyone they want, including officials with the Palestinian Authority—who they arrest sometimes, right—is the Israeli government. So, Israel controls this territory. But the people, the Palestinians, under this control lack basic rights.
So, how do you deal with a population like that? I think there are basically five options. Option number one is you could give them citizenship in the state in which they live. They live essentially under Israeli control. You could make them citizens in an equal state. But, of course, that’s not on the agenda of this Israeli government or anyone in mainstream Israeli politics. Only lunatics like me support that. Option number two is you could give them citizenship in their own state, in the sovereign Palestinian state. Of course, that’s been a view that has been pushed by many people over a long period of time, but it has zero support in this Israeli government, which is emphatically against it. And in fact, it has no real support among any major political party in Israel today. It’s completely off the agenda. The third is you can control these Palestinians through a subcontractor, and a Palestinian intermediary that does the policing. And you kind of sit on top of that and only go in and really destroy in extreme circumstances. But that makes controlling them much cheaper because you don’t have to do it directly. You have a Palestinian subcontractor doing it. This was historically in another context been called indirect rule. It’s how you rule in a colonial context. By colonial, I mean you have all these people who are subjects of a state, but they’re not citizens. So that’s number three. Four, you can control them directly. You can have your army basically be the folks on the ground policing all the villages and towns and cities. And number five is you can expel them. So, they’re just not there anymore at all. Now, there is an even more horrifying number six in which you could kill them all, but I’m gonna just leave that aside. That’s too horrifying to contemplate and I don’t think it’s a possibility.
So, if you look at how we got to this place where we are now, and as represented by what happened in Jenin, I think you can kind of see how Israel is moving through options one, two, three, and four, and moving closer to option five, which is expulsion, right. So, Israel takes over the West Bank in 1967. From 1967 to 1987, it can do a version of four, which is to rule the Palestinians directly. Yes, there are mayors, there are these village leagues, but there’s no large-scale Palestinian kind of policing subcontractor and Israel doesn’t really need it. There is Palestinian resistance, certainly, but Israel doesn’t need that because there’s no massive uprising across the entire West Bank. And so, the cost of direct control from 1967 to 1987 are manageable for Israel.
Then the critical break is the First Intifada in the late 1980s, in which there’s a huge Palestinian uprising, and Israeli leaders basically say, ‘holy shit, we’ve got a big problem here! Like we can’t have our 18- and 19-year-old soldiers basically chasing Palestinians year after year after year through every Palestinian village and city while they are throwing stones at us, and we’re, you know, breaking their bones,’ as Yitzhak Rabin said. ‘It’s bad for our reputation. The Israeli people don’t want it. It’s too costly to have this form of direct rule. It only works when the population is quiescent, but the population’s not quiescent anymore. We need another solution.’
And that’s when Israel really moves to options number two and three. Option two is you solve the problem by giving Palestinians their own state. So, Palestinians are doing their own security, their own control. You don’t have to worry about this population because they are in another country called Palestine. It’s not your problem, right? And option number three is you maintain overall control, but you create a security subcontractor or a form of indirect rule. So, they’re still under your control, but you don’t have to do the dirty work every day because you have a Palestinian subcontractor who’s doing it.
Now, historians can debate to what degree different Israeli leaders were interested in number two, which is a Palestinian state, or number three, which is a Palestinian subcontractor. But this was essentially what happened during the Oslo process, right? The Palestinian Authority was created in the Oslo process, so now Israel had a subcontractor across the entire West Bank. The Palestinians wanted it to be the embryo of a state. Some Israeli leaders might have wanted that. Many others definitely did not. The point is it didn’t become a state. Another intifada, the Second Intifada, breaks out in 2000. At the end of 2004, when it’s put down, there’s another effort to kind of to strengthen the Palestinian authority. Again, not totally clear at that point if it’s number two or number three. Is this ever gonna become its own state or is it just gonna remain a subcontractor? But this it does become a stronger security subcontractor under Mahmoud Abbas, who’s really committed to working with the Israelis to maintain that things are under control. And over time, it becomes clearer and clearer as the years pass that it’s going to be number three. It’s going to be indirect rule. It’s going to be a security subcontract. It’s not gonna be a Palestinian state.
So, that’s where we’ve been. The problem is that the PA as the security subcontractor in this form of indirect rule loses legitimacy, right? Because this situation is great for Israel, right? Indirect rule is great. Colonial powers always love it because it allows you to control territories on the cheap. It’s not great for the population that’s being controlled, right? And so, the PA loses its legitimacy because people see it’s not bringing the Palestinians freedom or much of anything. It’s not leading them towards their own state. And it starts to lose control.
In addition to that, the Israeli governments are not necessarily always doing that much to try to strengthen their security subcontractor. Sometimes they do a bit. So, for instance, if you look at the previous Israeli government under Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, they have this thing what they call ‘shrinking the conflict.’ And what I would say that really means is strengthening indirect rule. Which is to say they want the PA to stick around and be around because they know it’s in their interests. So, they try to help the PA make things a little bit better, more job permits to work inside Israel, maybe a little bit more freedom of movement to try to kind of buttress the PA because they can see it’s weakening, right.
But Benjamin Netanyahu is not interested in that. This right-wing government of his is certainly not interested in that, right. They basically see the Palestinian Authority as the enemy. And so, on the one hand they need the Palestinian Authority as the security subcontractor. On the other hand, they kind of humiliate it and weaken it at every turn by just massively increasing settlement growth, for instance. And so, the PA is growing weaker and weaker. And what happens in Jenin is a sign of that, right, because now the PA has lost control over Jenin. There are Palestinian armed groups that are in control of it, so the PA can’t even play the security subcontractor role in this particular part of the West Bank.
So, what is the Israeli government do? Again, it’s not really going to strengthen the PA and try to restore it to power in Jenin even if that was even possible, which it’s probably not. You may have noticed the pictures that when Palestinian Authority officials went into Jenin to try to console the mourners—I only know the Jewish term is a shiva call, I don’t know what it’s called in Arabic—but essentially, they were chased out of Jenin, right? The PA has zero legitimacy. It’s very unlikely to restore control. But Israel can’t do direct control in Jenin or anywhere else. It’s just too costly for Israel to keep its army there on the ground in Jenin fighting pitch battles day in and day out. So, what are they doing? They basically go into Jenin and blow up a lot of stuff, and kill a lot of people, and arrest a lot of people, and try to degrade the armed infrastructure there, the military infrastructure. And then they get out with the understanding that they’re going to keep having to do that, right. If that sounds familiar, it should, because that’s what Israel does in Gaza. It can’t control Gaza on the ground. It’s too costly. And so, it kind of goes in now and then and does a lot of destruction, kills a lot of people, tries to kill a lot of military infrastructure, and you know this is what they call this horrible term, you know, ‘mowing the lawn.’
You could say, well, this is a new equilibrium. Israel’s just going to go in periodically and do this in Jenin, and kind of degrade the military apparatus that’s in Jenin like they do in Gaza. But I don’t necessarily think this is a sustainable equilibrium for a couple of reasons. First of all, Jenin, and the West Bank in general, is not nearly as self-enclosed as Gaza. So, the potential for resistance is much greater, especially if what’s happening in Jenin spreads across the rest of the West Bank. It’s much harder to continually do that than it is in Gaza where you can basically particularly just kind of attack from the air. And the second really important difference between Jenin and the West Bank in general, and Gaza, is the Israeli right really wants that land in the West Bank. Remember, they’re building massive settlements all over the place, enclosing Jenin and all these other Palestinian cities with Israeli settlements. They want the land in the West Bank in a way that they don’t want it in Gaza.
And so, it seems to me you have a dynamic in which every time Israel goes in with one of these operations—and then of course it produces a response of more Palestinian armed resistance—that this is radicalizing inside of Israel, and voices in Israel will say this is not a sustainable answer. We need a solution, right? This is actually what Bezalel Smotrich wrote even back in 2017, where he basically said we need what he called a ‘decisive plan,’ right. We can’t keep kind of managing this situation, and especially we can’t manage it in the absence of a strong Palestinian Authority. And Smotrich’s answer was, you basically give the Palestinians a choice. You say, ‘listen, you’re not gonna be citizens of Israel. You’re not gonna have citizenship of your own country. If you accept your situation of apartheid quietly, you can stay. If you resist, we’re gonna try to get you out . We’re gonna try to expel you.’
And I think the logic of what’s happening as the PA collapses, and as Israel has to continually move in again and again and again, and there’s more Palestinian armed resistance, I think is going to move more people into the Smotrich camp, especially because the Smotrich vision offers a permanent solution to this problem, right? If the Palestinians in the West Bank aren’t there, they’re not a problem. Of course, Israel has in its political DNA this history of a mass expulsion at its founding, and another mass expulsion that people don’t talk about so much in 1967, and smaller scale expulsions kind of in-between. And also this is already the stated preference of most of the people who vote for the parties in this Israeli government. If you look at polls, you find that between a third or half of Israeli Jews support some version of expulsion, and those are the people on the right. So, if you’re talking about Likud voters, let alone people who vote for parties like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s, these are people who already say they support expulsion of Palestinians. And even in addition to Smotrich, who’s talked about this, to Itamar Ben-Gvir in the government who’s talked about this, you have prominent Likud leaders: Yoav Gallant, the defense minister; Avi Dichter, the former Shin Bet head who’s the agriculture minister; Tzachi Hanegbi, the national security adviser. I detailed this in a piece in Jewish Currents a while back. They’ve all basically talked about the potential need for another Nakba. Prominent religious figures like Lubavitcher Rebbe talked about this when he was alive. The historian, Benny Morris.
So, I think that this seems unimaginable to most Americans and maybe even to many Israeli Jews. It does not seem unimaginable to Palestinians who say in polls that they fear this. The mayor of Jenin actually said during the attack it reminded him of the days of the Nakba. Palestinians are acutely aware of this as a possibility. But I think that it needs to be entertained as a possibility in American public discourse. Politicians need to be asked about this. American Jewish leaders need to be asked about it. Because if you want it not to be possible, if you want it to be unthinkable, you actually need to take actions to make it so. And you would need to make very forceful statements that if something like this were to happen, it would break the US-Israel relationship, that the US would no longer be willing to subsidize Israel under those circumstances.
And it’s important to ask that question, to get people on the record on that question because right now they say it’s unthinkable so they can maintain a position of unconditional US support no matter what. Well, it’s important to force them to face the fact that the no matter what may become not just the apartheid that we have now, but indeed another Nakba, another act of mass expulsion. And I think the reason for that, again, as I said is that I think Israel has kind of cycled through the other potential options and progressively rule them out. And this is what’s left, and that’s what really frightens me. Again, our conversation will be on Thursday this week with Aparna Gopalan, and I hope many of you will join us.
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