A new way to donate to people in Gaza.
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be the renowned activist and educator Angela Davis. We’ll talk about how the Palestinian freedom struggle resembles, and differs from, the struggles of other oppressed groups, and what US policy toward Israel-Palestine says about the United States. This call will be cosponsored by Jewish Currents.
Cited in Today’s Video
Adam Friedland interviews Ritchie Torres.
Israel moves closer to building settlements in E1.
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!), Simone Zimmerman asks why so many Jewish leaders took so long to condemn Israel’s assault on Gaza.
The Economist offers an “anatomy of a famine” in Gaza.
Why MAGA is turning against unconditional US support of Israel.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I interviewed Al Jazeera’s Laila Al-Arian about Israel’s targeting of journalists in Gaza.
I talked to the Brave New Something Podcast about the need for a Jewish reckoning over Gaza.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, there’s been a fair amount of attention, at least kind of that I’ve seen on social media, about an interview that a comedian named Adam Friedland did with Congressman Richie Torres that focused on the end of the interview a lot about Israel and Gaza. And it made me think about the role of comedians in often being able to say things that the mainstream media doesn’t say. You know, we think about people like Jon Stewart and John Oliver, and a lot of these folks. And I think that one of the reasons that these interviews with comedians often really break through, is that there is something fundamentally absurd about, especially about a lot of the American kind of establishment mainstream discourse about Israel and Palestine. And so often, the mainstream media, kind of takes this discourse as on the level, as credible, right, as sincere. And what comedians are more able to do is just recognize the absurdity of these things.
And one particular area where I think it would be really valuable if this just became much more common is this claim that we hear all the time by American politicians, by Jewish leaders, that they support the two-state solution, right? That’s kind of so often the refuge, right? Israel’s doing something bad for Palestinians, and people say, well, I support the two-state solution. The truth is that the vast, vast majority of people in American public office, in public life, people who lead American Jewish organizations who say they support a two-state solution simply do not. They obviously do not support the idea of a sovereign, contiguous Palestinian state. And yet, their claim to support a two-state solution is taken as serious, sincere, when it’s self-evidently not, right?
So, for instance, last week we heard news that Israel is kind of taking the final steps to build settlements in a territory called E1. Now, E1 basically would completely sever East Jerusalem, which is the largest Palestinian population center in the West Bank, from the rest of the West Bank, and also largely cut off the northern part of the West Bank from the southern part of the West Bank. So, it’s pretty obvious, right, that if you wanted a Palestinian state that was worth the name ‘state,’ right, which was a contiguous piece of territory, you could not possibly think it was a good idea to build Jewish settlements in E1. And yet, if you survey the vast, vast majority of politicians in Washington or Jewish leaders, or whoever, you know, who say they support a two-state solution, you will not hear them condemning what Israel’s doing in E1. And if you say to them, do you think the United States should condition military aid to try to stop Israel from building an E1? Should the US deploy sanctions to prevent this action that would clearly make a Palestinian state much, much more difficult, they would say no, right? And yet, they still say they support the two-state solution.
The Israeli government, since Netanyahu, you know, returned to power with this constellation, with Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, has been passionately doing everything in its power to destroy the possibility of a Palestinian state by funding massive new settlement growth. And yet, the vast majority of people in Washington who say they support a two-state solution are not willing to support and would in fact actively resist any meaningful U.S. effort to stop that settlement growth that clearly makes a Palestinian state much, much harder—I would argue, at this point, actually, impossible.
So, it’s an absurd position to take, and there’s something ridiculous. It’s a dereliction of duty for people in the media to take claims seriously when they’re confronted by a politician or a Jewish official whose own actions so obviously make it clear that they don’t actually hold the position they claim to hold, right? I mean, I often think when I hear these people saying they support the two-state solution, that it would be a little bit like me saying that my position is that I support running the New York Marathon, right? And if I said that, the next question I think that would be legitimate for someone to ask would be, well, do you do any running? Are you practicing for the New York Marathon? Do you run at all? And if the answer is, no, I don’t do any running. I mostly sit on my couch and eat chocolate cake, right? And I’m actively opposed to anyone who actually tries to get me to go running, then the right response to the claim that my position is that I’m going to run the New York Marathon would be laughter, right?
And while I don’t believe in mocking people, being cruel to people, there should be an element of laughter when politicians, year after year, go and say they support a two-state solution, when what they’re doing effectively is to prevent the United States from stopping Israel from doing the things that manifestly make a Palestinian state more difficult or more impossible. And the fact that so often the mainstream media doesn’t do that, that it takes these claims as serious, as on the level when they’re manifestly not, I think is part of what’s created this space in which so many people are hungry for a kind of alternative discourse, in which people will simply say often in a kind of humorous way, that this the emperor has no clothes here. That the whole thing is a farce, right? And I think if politicians were forced to answer for that farce, and they had people who said that to them—this is a farce—we would make progress towards facing the real questions that I think exist in terms of our vision for Israel-Palestine.
Which is: do we believe in the fundamental principle that Israelis and Palestinians should have equality under the law? Because if you believe in that fundamental principle, right, then, I actually think the question of whether you support one state or two states is not as important as the question of the nature of those states, right? Are they going to be states in which people are treated equally irrespective of their ethnicity or their religion or their race? But this claim that I support the two-state solution becomes a kind of a barrier to having that more fundamental, deeper question, and that it needs to be punctured first before we get to, I think, the meaningful question about principles, which will make it clear how many American politicians, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, actually support not the principle of equality under the law, but the principle of Jewish supremacy.
