Our call this week will be back at our regular time, Friday at Noon EST.
Our guest will be Jamil Dakwar, director of the Human Rights Program at the American Civil Liberties Union and a former senior attorney at Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. Here’s a profile of Jamil in Haaretz. I want to talk to Jamil because so much of the criticism of Israel’s new right-wing government for threatening Israeli democracy focuses—wittingly or unwittingly—on what this government means for Jews. But truly understanding Israeli democracy requires understanding what means for all its citizens—Palestinians as well as Jews—not to mention the millions of Palestinians who live under Israeli control with no citizenship at all. It’s one thing to join an anti-Netanyahu protest if you’re a Jewish leftist in Tel Aviv. It’s quite another if you’re a Palestinian—as illustrated by the fact that just last weekend an attorney at Adalah was detained merely for participating in a protest where demonstrators flew the Palestinian flag. Jamil is an immensely talented lawyer and thinker and I’m grateful he’s taking the time to chat with us. The opinions he shares will be his own, not those of the ACLU or any other organization.
As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week.
Sources Cited in this Video
The killing of seven Jews in East Jerusalem last Friday night.
The killing of nine Palestinians in Jenin last Thursday morning.
The “Four Sons/Children” from the Passover Haggadah.
Maimonides on a Jew who “shows himself indifferent [to other Jews] when they are in distress.”
My 2021 essay, “Reclaiming The Covenant of Fate,” about what Jews owe each other across our ideological divides.
The 1956 essay by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, which coined the term “Covenant of Fate.”
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Joseph Leone explains that the anti-Palestinian atmosphere at Harvard’s Kennedy’s School of Government began long before Ken Roth applied for a fellowship there.
An extremely important twitter thread on the extraordinary dangers of the current moment in Israel-Palestine by Jehad Abusalim.
Last week, I spoke to Chris Hayes on MSNBC about Mike Pompeo’s disparaging comments about the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
I also recorded a podcast for the Arab Center in Washington with Yousef Munayyer about how American Jews are responding to Israel’s new government.
Rutgers Law Professor Sahar Aziz argues that cancel culture at universities has everything to do with the decline of tenure.
This Thursday, I’ll be speaking at the University of Pennsylvania on a panel entitled, “Middle East Authoritarianism and the Western Academy.”
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Our guest this Friday is going to be Jamil Dakwar, who runs the Human Rights Program for the American Civil Liberties Union, and was formally a senior attorney at Adalah, the NGO that works for the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. I’ve been looking for a way to talk about the issues inside Israel, about judicial reform that claims that the Netanyahu government represents a grave threat to Israeli democracy, and have been concerned that a lot of those conversations—wittingly or unwillingly—essentially talk about Israel really as Israel relates to Jews. That kind of Israel was this strong, thriving liberal democracy and is now imperiled. And I wanted to talk to Jamil because I think he can talk about the issues that are at play with the Netanyahu government, but also from the perspective of what these issues look like for Palestinian citizens of Israel, who I think most of whom did not find Israel was for them a thriving liberal democracy even before this new right-wing government. So, that’ll be Friday at noon, back to our regular time. And I hope folks will consider becoming a paid subscriber. Jamil is really an enormously talented guy who has a lot to offer on these subjects.
There’s been a rising—as I tape this on Sunday—we just seem to be in a period of escalation where every day brings new incidents of violence, more of them against Palestinians, as is usually the case, but also against Israeli Jews. And, at moments like this, I find myself a little bit paralyzed and really struggle to know how to respond to someone who kind of comments on these things. Not intellectually. Intellectually, I feel like the basic analysis that I hold I think does help to explain events like this in a way that makes sense to me, which is pretty simple. It’s a kind of a language, a kind of perspective that I take from Martin Luther King and many others, which is that if you have a system of violent oppression which denies millions of people their rights, that that violence is also going to be visited, sooner or later, in some way or another, on the people who benefit from the system of that violence. That doesn’t mean that that’s good. It doesn’t mean those people deserve to suffer violence. Of course not. It simply means that if one wants to tackle the problem of violence, get to the roots of the cause of violence, including the violence that that hurts people like Israeli Jews, or in case of the United States, white Americans, one has to deal with the roots of the violence that are visited on the population that is being oppressed, that is being denied basic rights, which in this case is Palestinians.
But that’s intellectually. You know, emotionally, like when I came to shul on Saturday and was told that there had been Jews in East Jerusalem shot outside of the synagogue, and then there I was in synagogue, and then we were saying Tehillim. We were saying psalms because that’s what Jews traditionally do when other Jews are in distress. In that moment, I feel it becomes really challenging to balance the anger and frustration I have about the Israeli policies that I believe have set these terrible dynamics into motion, and also to find some way of just expressing my own solidarity with my fellow Jews. Because, at the end of the day—at least speaking for myself, I can’t speak for other people—no matter how deeply one identifies with Palestinians and wants to be an ally and a supporter of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, at the end of the day, I’m still a Jew. And I can’t not be that, and I don’t want to not be that. I’m not a neutral deracinated observer. I am a member of one people. And that people is based on the metaphor, in Jewish text, of a family. And I feel that sense of being part of a family that’s wounded. Even if my family that’s being wounded is doing very bad things that’s partly responsible for the wounds that we suffer, I still feel those wounds in a special way because it’s my family. It’s my people.
And it’s interesting because last week’s parsha Torah portion was Parshat Bo, which recounts the final three plagues in the Exodus story. And it also has the verses that are then used in the Haggadah that Jews read over Passover at the Passover seder, which form the basis of the story of the four sons, or the four children. And one of those is—people who are familiar with this will know—is the wicked child, the wicked son. And the text in the Haggadah goes, “what does the wicked son say? What does this ceremony mean to you?”—speaking of the of the seder. Now, there are different interpretations of the wicked son, but one of the interpretations is—if I use the term “you”—the wicked son disassociates himself from the Jewish people, as if to say, I’m not part of this. And this is the thing that I feel like I struggle with sometimes in moments like this, when it’s Israeli Jews that are suffering. How do I maintain my moral conscience as someone who believes that what Israel is doing is profoundly wrong, and yet not become a version of the wicked son who essentially emotionally distances myself from the suffering of my own people?
And the Jewish commentators, the kind of famous medieval commentators, are very harsh about Jews who distance themselves from the suffering of other Jews. So Maimonides, writing about this figure of the wicked son, the wicked child, writes—Maimonides is one of the most famous medieval Jewish commentators—writes, “one who separates himself from the community,” meaning the Jewish community, “even if he does not commit a transgression, but only holds aloof from the congregation of Israel, does not fulfill religious precepts in common with his people, shows himself indifferent when they are in distress, does not observe their fasts, but goes his own way as if he were one of the gentiles and did not belong to the Jewish people. Such a person has no share in the world to come.” And I am very aware that there are plenty of people in the Jewish community in the United States, in Israel, and beyond, who look at people like me, and maybe some others on this call who are very strong critics of Israel—some of them like me don’t believe in the concept of Jewish state but rather in the concept of an equal binational state—and would see us as exactly the kind of person that Maimonides, that Rambam, was talking about. Someone who holds ourself aloof from our community, from the community of Israel, from the family of the Jewish people, because we don’t identify with it. We don’t suffer with it. We stand aside from it while it suffers and is in pain. And I think that one of these that I struggle with, but never feel like I know really how to get quite right, is to try to find ways of showing that that’s not how I see myself. I don’t think it’s how most Jews who are passionate critics of Israel see ourselves. I think most of us see ourselves as people who care very, very deeply about the welfare of our people, and yet struggle to hold that sense of belonging, that sense of solidarity, with a sense that it’s not in the interests of our people to oppress another people. That it’s not what we should be doing in the world, and that it’s not good for us. Not just good for our souls, but not ultimately good for our bodies as well. But the challenges that holding these—sometimes that it’s hard to hold these two things in the moment. There are times, it seems to me, there are times to express the moral outrage, and there are times perhaps to not express the moral outrage, and just express a sense of sorrow and solidarity and sadness.
When I am in shul and then I see other Jews who are coming out of shul on Shabbat, who were murdered, maybe at that particular moment the right thing to say is simply that as a Jew I feel that we have an obligation to one another, and that I should try to feel the pain of my fellow Jews, and to care and to and to read psalms, and to mourn for their loss. Maybe the next day I can then say, you know what, the policies that Israel is pursuing are wrong, and are largely to blame I think for this violence. But it seems to me that’s always the balance that I struggle with—and I think a lot of us who are in this particular political position struggle with—is how to hold these two things, knowing that there are many others in the Jewish community who don’t think that we care enough about our fellow Jews and their safety, and knowing that there are many Palestinians who understandably want to know that their lives are considered as valuable as Jewish lives, given that the Israeli government doesn’t consider them equally valuable, and the United States government doesn’t consider them equally valuable. So, holding those things is a struggle. And I honestly feel it’s going to be a struggle. And it’s gonna get more difficult in the days and weeks to come since the violence seems tragically only likely to increase. Maybe we’ll talk about some of this with Jamil and what it’s like for him. And I hope to see many of you on the call on Friday.
Jewish Solidarity, Palestinian Freedom, and the Violence to Come