Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at our regular time: Friday at Noon EDT.
This Friday, instead of a guest, we’ll have a conversation. I’ll ask folks to put questions or reflections in the chat and do my best to answer them. We did this once before and it seemed to work well. Generally I prefer to let our guests do most of the talking but this is an opportunity for us to talk as a community.
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
The story of Kamtza and bar Kamtza.
My essay on Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s notion of a shared Jewish “Covenant of Fate.”
Establishment Democrats question US aid to Israel.
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), a teacher of Torah and a leftist writer discuss Jewish texts on procreation.
In The Guardian, I defended the progressives who boycotted Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s speech to Congress.
I also talked to Joy Reid about Herzog’s visit.
Seth Anziska reviews a new biography of Golda Meir in The London Review of Books.
Journalist Basel Adra, from Masafer Yatta, speaks about his recent detention by the Israeli military.
The US military accidentally sent millions of emails to Mali.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. This Friday at noon ET, our normal time, we’re not gonna have a guest. We’re just gonna have a conversation. We did this once before. Basically, I’ll invite people to offer any questions or reflections they have in the chat, and I’ll do my best to answer them. An usually, I like being the one who’s asking the questions myself, not kind of trying to answer them, but I think that it’s good for folks, you know, as a kind of community to be able to have these conversations with one another. There may be things that people have been thinking about, but not had a chance to air. And I’m very much looking forward to the questions that folks have. So, that’ll be Friday at noon ET.
I’m recording this on Sunday. I don’t know where things will stand in Israel on Monday. It is certainly an extraordinary confluence of events, one of those moments in history that literally I think if you were to make it up in a novel or a script people wouldn’t believe you because it would seem too theatrical. You have mass numbers of reservists claiming that they are going to stop serving in the army; a potential general strike; this huge march to Jerusalem all of people trying to stop Benjamin Netanyahu’s government from passing this law that would weaken the power of the Supreme Court; Netanyahu himself rushed to hospital; and to make it even more kind of cinematographic, this is all happening in the run-up to—let’s say, the gravest intra-Jewish crisis in the history of the state of Israel—and it is happening in the run-up to the holiday of Tisha B’av, which starts on Wednesday night. The holiday of the Tisha B’av is when Jews commemorate the destruction of the temples. And, famously, the reason for the destruction of the Second Temple, according to Chazal, to Jewish sources, is Sinat Chinam—baseless hatred, hatred among Jews.
And to add one more layer to that, in the Daf Yomi cycle, the cycle of Talmud study that I like thousands and thousands of other Jews around the world are doing, we are in the tractate of the Talmud, tractate Gittin, where we just recently read the most famous story about Sinat Chinam, about baseless hatred of Jews among Jews that is usually discussed on Tisha B’av to talk about the consequences of intra-Jewish kind of fratricidal conflict of the kind that now seems Israel is on the verge of. That story some of you may be familiar with is the story of Kamtza and bar Kamtza, in which a man has a kind of a feast, a gathering, wants to invite a guy named Kamtza, but by accident a guy named bar Kamtza comes, and the host decides to throw out bar Kamtza. And bar Kamtza pleads to be allowed to stay and finish his food, and then offers to pay for half of the feast, and then offers to pay for all of the feast. But the man is unmoved and throws him out. And then this essentially creates a kind of Rube Goldberg-like chain of events that ultimately happened between the Jews and the Romans that ultimately lead to the destruction of the temple, the kind of greatest calamity that is considered to have befallen the Jewish people.
So, what does this mean for people who care about the rights of Palestinians? If you think about this only as an intra-Jewish story, then the moral is pretty clear, right? Jews shouldn’t hate one another. Jews should reconcile across their religious and class and ethnic divides—the things that are currently tearing Israel apart. And they should come to some compromise about this judicial overhaul. And the Jewish people should come together and in unity. That that’s what should have happened in the days of the temple, and that’s what should happen today. Of course, if you see the fundamental problem in Israel not just, or not even primarily, as this problem of intra-Jewish division and the erosion of rights for Israeli Jews, but the fact that Israel runs a state that denies the most basic of human rights to Palestinians and doesn’t treat any of the Palestinians under its control equally, then one needs to think about this question of baseless hatred among Jews in a very different way. The goal cannot be Jewish unity in and of itself, right, because if Jews unify across these class, ethnic, religious divides, and even go back to a government that was a supposed kind of unity government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, right, all that just means is that kind of government can be unified in its oppression of Palestinians. So, that’s not a moral answer if you care about Palestinian human rights.
But I do think there is a lesson here in Tisha B’av, and in this question of intra-Jewish hatred. For those of us who fundamentally care about transforming the Jewish conversation in a way that puts Palestinian equality and Palestinian freedom at its heart. There are those who have suggested for many years that the answer to the problem of baseless intra-Jewish hatred, Sinat Chinam, is Ahavat Chinam—baseless love. Which is to say, love for other Jews even if there is no good reason to love them. Now, this is an idea that is quite difficult to swallow for those Jews who care passionately about Palestinian rights because it suggests a kind of tribalism that is itself the problem, right? Why should we love other Jews who have views or even do take actions that we find fundamentally immoral. What about loving people in the rest of the world? But I want to make an argument that having an approach of baseless love, of unconditional love, towards one’s fellow Jews is actually the right lesson to learn from Tisha B’av—not for those Jews who don’t care about Palestinians, but for those who do, that is a very important lesson for us as well.
I say this partly for instrumental purposes. I think that if Jews who want to fundamentally change our communities’ relationship to Palestinians, want to be more successful in convincing our fellow Jews to make those changes, showing unconditional love for our fellow Jews—by unconditional love, I don’t mean by any means support or complicity in immoral policies, but I mean acknowledging a deep connection between us and other Jews, and accepting the metaphor, which I think is really central in Judaism, the metaphor of extended family. I think that is absolutely crucial for those of us who are progressive to make inroads among other Jews. The family metaphor is really, as I read Jewish texts, really essential to the way that Jews have historically seen ourselves as a people.
The Torah is the story of a family in the Book of Genesis that becomes in the Book of Exodus a people, a nation, but still imagined as an extended family—B’nai Israel, the children of Israel, Israel being the name that Jacob takes after he wrestles with the angel. And the people who become the Jewish nation are the 12 children of Jacob. The term Jew itself comes from Yehuda, from Judah, who is Jacob’s fourth son. And I think the critical moment in Jews’ life that gives him the kind of merit of having the name Jew come from him is when he offers to sacrifice his own freedom for the sake of his younger brother Benjamin, who is being held hostage by Joseph. So, this act of loyalty and solidarity with another Jew, at someone imagined as a member of the family, I think is really, really central to the way many, many Jews and much of Jewish tradition sees being Jewish. And I think that we need to embrace that if we are to have more success in convincing other Jews that when we call for Palestinian freedom, and for historical justice for Palestinians, we do so not from a position of indifference to the welfare of Jews, but from a place of love—indeed of baseless love.
And I think right now, if you look at the data, what you find is that Jews who are on the left who have a greater concern for Palestinian rights tend to exhibit less concern for their fellow Jews than do Jews as a whole. So, for instance, the Pew Research Center—a while back for something I wrote, I asked them to crunch some data—and what they found is that, for instance, Jews who support BDS were less than half as likely to say they feel a great deal of belonging to the Jewish people, or to say they feel a responsibility to help Jews in need as Jews who oppose BDS. And I think that’s something to work against, to try to find ways of exhibiting that sense of common bond with other Jews. Firstly, because I think it’s showing that it is crucial to making greater inroads in changing the Jewish conversation. And, also, because I believe—some may disagree with me, of course—that this bond actually, really, genuinely matters. That if one takes being Jewish seriously, that one must recognize that Judaism is not simply a kind of individual spiritual or even moral pursuit. It is part and parcel of having obligations to other Jews.
In a funny way, I think that one of the models that left-wing Jews—Jews who are involved in Palestinian activism—may want to think about when we think about how we deal with other Jews, is to think about Lubavitch Chabad. Lubavitch Chabad is an ultra-orthodox outreach group. It has obviously a completely different value system than I do. But one of the reasons that I think it has been so successful is its ability to manifest love for other Jews, even Jews whose ideologies and religious practices are utterly profoundly different than Chabad’s own. I think that should be the way that we approach other Jews who have fundamentally different visions than us. And I think if we do so, we will be more effective in being able to make our case because we will help to overcome their preconception that progressive Jews don’t really care that much about the welfare of other Jews. And I think in doing so, we will become better advocates for Palestinian rights. And we will also do a better job of upholding our obligations to other Jews.
The other reason that I think this is important beyond the fact that I think it will make us more effective, and beyond the fact that I actually do think there is a duty to other Jews if one takes Judaism seriously, is I think that the conversation among Americans about Israel-Palestine, at least in the Democratic Party, is changing. I think that we are likely to see over time more pro-Palestinian politics becoming more mainstream. It’s true right now that if you look at the votes in Congress, there’s only a small number of Democrats in Congress who take a pro-Palestinian view. But I think one of the things that I think we’ve learned about American politics in recent years is that political establishments tend to be weaker than they appear, right? If the Republican political establishment had been strong, Donald Trump would never have been the kind of nominee. There is a political and financial establishment—groups like AIPAC and others—that want to preserve the Democratic Party’s pro-Israel stance. But there is an organic shift in political culture that is taking place at the Democratic Party grassroots in the views people have of Israel and of Palestinians. I don’t see anything that’s likely to change that. It’s accelerating. It’s being led by younger people. It’s certainly being accelerated by the fact that Israel seems almost inexorably to be moving further and further to the right, and towards entrenching its apartheid control over Palestinians. And I think that one thing we’ve seen from both Bernie Sanders’ and Donald Trump’s insurgencies is that, even if strong political establishments that are very, very well-funded as AIPAC and its associated groups are, if there is a fundamental shift in the political culture at the grassroots, that is very, very hard to resist.
And I think that is happening on Israel-Palestine. And I think it will also be activated because tragically there’s likely to be more violence on the ground. Things are likely to become more chaotic and more horrifying, which will activate this shift in political culture and increase the salience of Israel-Palestine among Americans more. And for that reason, the position of those of us who are now kind of on the outside in the Jewish community as supporters of Palestinian equality, I think our influence is likely to grow. And I think that as there is this shift that’s taking place, I think that Jews who have more conventional right-wing or kind of pro-establishment, pro-Israeli government positions, will become more and more fearful. And I think the power balance between us and those people will start to shift a little bit. I think it’s already happening. And I think that’s the last reason. In that context in particular, as people who have invested so much in trying to create a kind of culture in the Democratic Party and in Jewish organizations in which Israel has impunity, and in which Israel cannot be fundamentally challenged, as those people see that hegemony is slipping away, I think it will be a terrifying experience for them— genuinely terrifying for many of them.
Again, many of those people, remember, associate harsh criticisms of Israel or questioning the idea of Jewish supremacy with antisemitism itself. And I think it’s in this moment of transition, which I think is coming—maybe we can only see it in the distance now, but I think it is likely coming—I don’t think there’s going to be another Democratic president who behaves towards Israel in the way that Joe Biden does. The position of conditioning aid, for instance, is rapidly becoming a more mainstream Democratic Party position. You can even see that many people like Martin Indyk and Aaron Miller and Dan Kurtz are very kind of fairly establishment pro-Israel Democrats, have now taken this view. In this moment of transition, it’s that much more important that those of us who are part of trying to create that transition, that we reach out to other Jews from a position of baseless love, that we find ways of expressing through our behavior towards them that they don’t need to be so afraid of the prospect of Palestinian equality and Palestinian freedom. And I think we will have to start thinking about how we operate from a position of greater influence and greater power, and use that in a way that helps people with compassion and love for people who have to go through a kind of fundamental transition in their worldview—from a worldview that believes that the only way that Jews can be safe is to have legal supremacy, to a worldview that allows them to imagine that actually Jews will be likely more safe over the long term under conditions of equality. And that’s why I think this idea of responding to baseless hatred with baseless love is a really, really important idea for us to think about as we come up to Tisha B’av in the shadow of these convulsions in Israel, not because we want Israel and Jews around the world to come together at the expense of Palestinians, but because we want to show that love so the Jewish community can ultimately develop a consensus that is in favor of Palestinian freedom and of Palestinian equality. Again, our call this Friday will just be with us, a kind of question-and-answer session. I hope many of you will join us.
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