Every week, I link to the GoFundMe page for Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who live in Gaza with their four children and have been injured by Israeli bombs and displaced ten times since October 7, and are trying to leave. I know putting up a Go Fund Me for one family is totally inadequate given the scale of the horror in Gaza, and the millions of people there who need our help—and most of all, need an end to this monstrous slaughter. Still, it’s something.
Please considering helping.
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at our regular time, 1 PM Eastern. Our guests will be the Gaza-born Palestinian writer Ahmed Moor, a regular contributor to The Guardian and a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace and Mairav Zonszein, Israel analyst for the International Crisis Group and a regular contributor to the New York Times. We’ll talk about what a ceasefire in Gaza might look like, what politics and society in Gaza will be like if and when the bombs stop falling, what the political repercussions will be in Israel, and about the broader legacy of this assault on an entire society.
Cited in Today’s Video
Three pro-Israel podcasts now admit that Israel can’t defeat Hamas in Gaza.
The (mostly Palestinian) analysts who predicted that—and were ignored—after October 7.
Israel has killed roughly four percent of Gaza’s population since October 7.
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!), I wrote about what Democrats can learn from the way Zohran Mamdani talks about Israel and antisemitism.
In The New York Times, I argued that Mamdani’s victory illustrates how rapidly Democratic public opinion is changing on Israel.
I talked about Mamdani’s victory with Yousef Munayyer and Heba Gowayed for the Arab Center and on WCPT 820 in Chicago.
I talked to Rudy Rochman about whether the world treats Israel unfairly.
A reporter who covered the Palestinian intifadas reflects on what the term means.
The (mostly Palestinian) analysts who predicted Israel’s defeat—and were ignored—after October 7.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, I spend a fair amount of time kind of listening to people I disagree with. I try to do it on our Friday Zoom calls for this newsletter. But I just do it a lot on my own time, too. I generally find, to be honest, that actually I learn more listening to people who I disagree with than those who I generally agree with. And so, on Israel and Palestine, I spend a fair amount of time kind of listening to pro-Israel podcasts and reading pro-Israel writers. First of all, I just find that there are sources of information they have that I wouldn’t have, or people who have views more like mine wouldn’t have. I don’t find those podcasts to be very useful at all in terms of understanding what’s happening to Palestinians, or really how Palestinians might react to things. But they are quite useful in kind of giving you a sense of the perspective of Israeli political insecurity establishment, the kind of Israeli political mainstream, and often the American Jewish kind of political mainstream as well.
And so, it really, really struck me, kind of listening last week to several podcasts that there was this really, really frank acknowledgement that this destruction of Gaza has failed. The destruction of Gaza has failed on its own terms. Even if you didn’t give a shit about the humanity and the lives of people in Gaza, which, of course, you should care about profoundly. That on its own terms, it has failed, right? What were the two goals of the war? Not as defined by me, but as defined by Benjamin Netanyahu, right? The first was the release of the return of the hostages. We know, it’s been clear for such a long time now, that the only way Israel has gotten significant number of hostages back has been by ending the war, through ceasefire deals, that military action has actually led to the death of more hostages than it has gotten them released, right?
But the second goal, of course, was the destruction of Hamas. Total victory over Hamas, right? And what’s astonishing to me is how you find these very, very pro-war establishment Israeli Jewish voices, now saying, very frankly, ain’t gonna happen. It’s not going to happen. That has failed. And I want to quote a few of them. So, the first is Nadav Eyal, who’s a columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth. This is him on Dan Senor’s “Call Me Back” podcast. Nadav Eyal is a kind of, you know, very centrist establishment journalist, very close to the Israeli security establishment. This is what he says about the prospect of disarming Hamas at any point.
He says, ‘disarming is really not going to happen for two reasons. First of all, Hamas isn’t going to agree to that in the way we think about disarmament. And secondly, even if they will, no one will be able to verify it.’ So, he’s saying, in any future deal with Hamas, Hamas will not be disarmed, right? The disarmament of Hamas is not going to happen. Yes, Israel has destroyed a lot of Hamas’s weaponry, but Nadav Eyal is smart enough to recognize that Hamas will be able to, you know, build new weaponry. In fact, it’s using a lot of weaponry, as he acknowledges now, from the massive amounts of armaments that Israel has dropped on Hamas. So, he’s saying that Hamas will not be disarmed. He also quotes Ronen Bar, the outgoing head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, who said recently, ‘as long as there will be Palestinians in Gaza, there will be Hamas in Gaza.’ I’ll read it again. ‘As long as there will be Palestinians in Gaza, there will be Hamas in Gaza.’ This is Ronen Bar, the outgoing head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service. So, Hamas will be there, Hamas will not be disarmed.
This is a quote now from another podcast from an Israeli journalist named Haviv Rettig Gur. Again, also, I would say, very centrist, very hawkish, you know, ideologically in a very, very radically different place than me, but a smart guy, right? And he says, ‘what’s the grand strategy to take a thousand little battles over 21 months and turn them into a great and significant win?’ And then he goes on, ‘nobody has articulated one in public or anywhere.’ Twenty-one months in to this destruction of Gaza, Haviv Rettig Gur, who’s been a strong supporter of the war, says, nobody has articulated any plan for how to take these individual battles where Israel’s killing Hamas members, it’s killing lots of civilians, it’s destroyed hospitals and buildings. Nobody has articulated, after 21 months, a vision for how to turn that into victory, right?
And then the third, I’m gonna quote from Donniel Hartman, who’s the head of the Hartman Institute, which is a Jerusalem-based think tank, kind of liberal Zionist, quite influential among establishment American Jews, a lot of American rabbis have strong connections. This is Donniel Hartman, again who’s been a supporter of the war. He says, ‘the ability of completely wiping out Hamas is really off the table. It’s just off the table. There’s no deal in which Hamas agrees to waive the white flag.’ And then later he says, ‘the total victory is as far away as it was on October 8th.’
So, here’s what I think is likely to happen, right? There is going to be some kind of ceasefire deal likely. And, clearly, in it—as these guys are suggesting—Hamas will not be defeated. Hamas will not be defeated. Now, Hamas may not be the titular government in Gaza. They may claim that there’s some new government, if some mishmash of Arab regimes and maybe the Palestinian Authority, maybe some other Palestinians that they managed to drum up to claim that they’re in control. Maybe they’ll even be a couple of, you know, a few Hamas people who go into exile. But, essentially, underneath the surface, on the ground in Gaza, Hamas will be there. It will be an extremely powerful force. It will have its weapons, and it will create new weapons, and it will be there. And it will not in any way have been defeated or destroyed. In fact, it will claim victory precisely because it is survived when Benjamin Netanyahu said it must be totally destroyed, right?
And so, I think when I listen to these folks, I think, how the fuck can you think that this was worth it. I mean, there’s a report in Haaretz that quotes a professor named Michael Spagat, who’s an economist at Holloway College at the University of London. This guy is not a radical lefty. He’s a guy who basically spends his time doing statistical analysis about violent conflicts all over the place: Iraq, Syria, Kosovo. He estimates that 4% of the population of Gaza has been killed since October 7th. Four percent. And he says, ‘I’m not sure there’s another case in the 21st century that’s reached that high,’ right? The highest percentage of any population killed in this century, right? And just by comparison—I did some back-of-the-envelope math—4% of the population killed, if you think about the percentage of people killed in Ukraine, 4% is probably 20 to 40 times higher than the percentage of people who have been killed in Ukraine, given that Ukraine has a significantly larger population, of course, than Gaza, right?
So, this is, as a percentage of the population, the largest slaughter of human beings on the planet in this century. And the goals have not been met. They have not been achieved. And, you know, there were people who were saying this from the very, very beginning. They were protesting against this slaughter from the very, very beginning. And they were mocked, they were reviled, many of them were kicked out of school, they were suspended, they were expelled, they were called antisemites, all of these things, and you know what? They were right. They were right. They weren’t just morally right in seeing that this would lead to a cataclysmic loss of life, massive, massive war crimes, something that even, you know, that more and more scholars—most scholars at this point—are calling a genocide.
But they could see that this would not achieve its goals, because it wasn’t possible, because slaughter and starvation doesn’t actually defeat a guerilla insurgency. Because the only way to defeat an insurgency, which Hamas is, is to deal with the root of the political grievance. And Palestinians in particular, and I’ve written about this, we’re saying this from the very beginning. They weren’t only saying that their people in Gaza would be slaughtered and starved on an astonishing scale. They were saying that Israel’s goals were unachievable. And these people also were marginalized, were mocked, were reviled. And all of these people who have much, much more prestige in the mainstream media, in mainstream establishment Jewish circles, who don’t have any problem, you know, speaking and being considered serious, serious people, now, after 21 months, after all of this, after most of the hospitals, and the schools, and the buildings, and the bakeries, and the agriculture have been destroyed, after Gaza has more child amputees than any other place on Earth, now they tell us, oh! Oops! It turns out it’s not possible. It turns out we can’t do it.
And they’re gonna dress this up by saying that because Israel had, you know, bombed Iran and Hezbollah, and there was a shift in regime in Syria that supposedly, somehow, that they’ll dress that up as a win. Because they’ll say, yes, okay, we didn’t get rid of Hamas, but we restored our deterrence by basically bombing Syria and Iran, and that will be the substitute victory that’s used to mask the failure of what Israel has done in Gaza. And you know what? And it’ll be bullshit because, in fact, because no matter what Israel did in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iran, it doesn’t solve the core of the problem, which is Palestinians, right? And that problem has been made massively worse, actually, from Israel’s perspective by this because it has now created, I mean, a vast generation of people who’ve grown up seeing their parents, their cousins, their brothers, their sisters killed and starved to death, and those people will be fighting against Israel probably for the rest of their lives. And God help us, probably the political organizations they create will be more radical than Hamas, because people will seek revenge for the horrors that they have seen, right?
And it would be just great if there were some kind of public reckoning for all this, some kind of acknowledgement that the things that people in prestigious positions, close to power, said about this turned out not to be only to be profoundly immoral in terms of the enormous, unimaginable suffering of people in Gaza, but that even on their own strategic, military terms, they have been a failure, right? Some accounting, right? Some, maybe, apology to those people who were protesting the war from the beginning, to the Palestinian analysts and activists who said, not only is this immoral, but it’s not gonna work, right? Instead, people have the ability from the comfort of their sinecures to basically say, oops, it turned out it didn’t work, right? Oops, it turned out it didn’t work. Now we have to revise, you know, the terms on which we’re willing to end this, right?
I mean, say that to a mother in Gaza who’s lost multiple children, right, who’s seen her children go day after day without food, begging, begging for food, right? I mean, somebody should be trying to create some dynamic in American and Israeli public discourse in which people are held to account for these things, you know? And my fear, my fear is just that they never will, that they never will.
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