I’ll be on book tour for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza for the next couple of months. You’ll find a list of book-related events below.
I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestine Lives and Culture, edited by Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller with Juliette Touma and Jayyab Abusafia.
I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guest will be Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland. I’ve known and liked Jonathan for years, and we agree on many things. But he also has criticisms of my book. Although I don’t know if he’d put it this way, I suspect he thinks that in my rejection of the very idea of a Jewish state, I’ve gone too far. I’ll ask him about that, and about the way being a British—as opposed to an American—Jew shapes his perspective. I’m grateful to him for joining us. As always, Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.
Book Tour
(We’ll update this every week)
On Monday, April 21, I’ll be speaking with Sahar Aziz at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
On Monday, April 28, I’ll be speaking at Princeton University.
On Tuesday, April 29, I’ll be speaking twice in Washington, DC: with Khaled Abu El Fadl at Noon at Georgetown University and at 6 PM with Mehdi Hasan at Busboys and Poets.
On Wednesday, April 30, I’ll be speaking with Barnett Rubin via Zoom to the Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library.
On Sunday, May 4, I’ll be speaking at Kehilla Synagogue in Oakland/Piedmont, California.
On Monday, May 6, I’ll be speaking at Stanford University.
On Monday, May 12, I’ll be speaking at Parkdale Hall in Toronto.
On Tuesday, May 13, I’ll be speaking at the Woodstock Jewish Congregation.
On Sunday, May 25, I’ll be speaking with Debbie Whitmont at the Sydney Writers Festival in Sydney, Australia.
On Tuesday, May 27, I’ll be speaking at the Wheeler Center in Melbourne, Australia.
Book Reviews
I discussed Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza on Chris Hayes’ Why Is This Happening? Podcast. The book also received a shout-out from Hannah Einbinder of the HBO show, Hacks.
Sources Cited in this Week’s Video
The ADL mostly cheered Trump’s deportations of pro-Palestinian activists when they began. Now it has changed its mind and says Trump is going too far.
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!), Eli Valley explains how he draws cartoons about Jews.
The speech at Buchenwald by a Holocaust survivor’s grandson that the Israeli embassy helped cancel.
A Jewish mother and daughter discuss their differing perspectives about October 7, and the destruction of Gaza.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, the Anti-Defamation League has now reversed itself and says that they oppose the kind of disappearance of non-citizens because they’ve expressed pro-Palestinian views. It’s also come out with a statement saying that, although they do want you know pressure on American universities, they don’t support the kind of thing that’s being done with Harvard now threatening kind of federal funding of these.
So, I guess one should express some degree of satisfaction that at least there is a point that is too far for the Anti-Defamation League to go when it comes to Trump’s kind of utter thuggishness in his response to individuals, and also to these institutions. But I also think that does not mean that groups like the ADL don’t bear a tremendous amount of complicity for the situation we’re in now. And not just the ADL. There are a whole series of figures, including some of the people who wrote these antisemitism task force reports on university campuses, and certain journalists and politicians, who are now coming and saying, oh, wait a second, wait a second. What the Trump administration is doing now is going way too far. We didn’t think you were actually going to kind of cripple these universities. We didn’t think you were actually going to be basically sending non-citizens to black sites because they wrote an op-ed.
But this is at best naive, at best naive. Because the truth of the matter is that a whole series of individuals and institutions like the ADL, but many others as well, have essentially laid the predicate. They have opened the door that Trump has now walked through because they have a whole series of people—Chuck Schumer is one of them. You can just read his book where he says very explicitly, essentially, a) that the Palestine Solidarity Movement on campus is saturated with antisemitism. And b), that the universities haven’t cracked down enough.
Now, when you say those things, you are essentially making it much easier for Trump to do what he’s doing because Trump is saying, yes, this is an epidemic of antisemitism that we’re seeing from these pro-Palestinian activists. The universities aren’t cracking down, so we’re going to take matters into our own hands. We’re going to have to get tough. And if you’ve already conceded the premise you’re in a very weak position to all of a sudden say, yes, all of those things are true, but you’re going way too far.
And the tragedy, the failure, that has partly gotten us into this place is that people have conceded a premise that is simply not true. It’s simply not true. Is there antisemitism that exists in pro-Palestinian circles? Of course there is. Are there chants of slogans, individual things that I would not like? I do not approve of disrupting classes, for instance, as happened at Columbia a little bit while back, where people disrupted this professor’s class on Israel history. I fundamentally think that it’s wrong to ever interfere with the ability of a professor to continue to teach their class. But the only way that you can sustain the idea that these pro-Palestinian activists on campus, that they are suffused with antisemitism, is to adopt a definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionism. That’s the only way you can get from these individual instances to the idea that these are permeated by antisemitism, right. Because to go there, you have to manage to get around the fact that there are so many Jews involved in these pro-Palestinian protests. And then you have to start defining all of their slogans, which are anti-Zionist—from the river to the sea, etc.—as antisemitic. And if you do that, if you equate anti-Zionism and antisemitism, as Schumer does, as the ADL does, then you can get to the place where you say basically this is overwhelmingly dominated by antisemitism, right?
But this argument doesn’t make any sense. It just doesn’t make any sense to define anti-Zionism with antisemitism given that Zionism is the ideology of a state that is now considered to be practicing apartheid by the world’s leading human rights organizations. Is it really an act of bigotry for a Palestinian to say that they oppose this ideology, or anyone else to say they oppose this ideology, and they would prefer a state that treats everybody equally? That’s not antisemitism. That’s not bigotry. Equality isn’t bigotry. Equality is the opposite of bigotry, right? And there are so many figures in our popular discussion—politicians, journalists, some of the academics who worked on these antisemitism reports, almost all of whom have no expertise on Israel-Palestine—who basically in various ways accepted this basic premise rather than subjecting it to actual critical thought. And that critical thought would mean listening to Palestinians, right? This is the connective tissue between all of these people who basically accepted this premise that the pro-Palestinian movement on campus is basically defined by its antisemitism. Almost invariably. Read their articles. Look at their reports. You will almost never find any actual listening, any genuine engagement with the Palestinian experience, right? It’s almost a case study in the refusal to allow what Edward Said famously said was Palestinians permission to narrate.
So, they can see that premise, right? That this movement is suffused with antisemitism on campus. And then they say the universities haven’t cracked down enough, which of course what gives Trump is pre-taxed to do the things he’s doing now. But to say the universities haven’t cracked down enough is insane, right? Universities like Columbia started suspending Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine in the fall of 2023, right? I mean, anyone who goes to a campus now like Columbia, or I was just at Harvard, will see how much more securitized they are than they were a year ago. The restrictions on time, place, and manner, on the ability of people to protest have become so much more draconian than they were a year and a half ago. So many students have been expelled and suspended and arrested and beaten up, including faculty beaten up. Columbia’s former president testified before Congress and threw some of her own faculty members under the bus in order to try to appease these things.
The idea that the universities haven’t cracked down enough is absurd, right, even if you compare the way they’ve responded to this to the way they responded to protests during the anti-apartheid movement, for instance. The crackdowns have been so much more severe in this case. But when you say they haven’t cracked down enough, again, you open the door to exactly the horror that we have found ourselves in now. And now these institutions like the ADL and other kinds of figures are saying essentially, oops, oops, like I didn’t think it would go this far. Well, you know what, if those folks had actually been more thoughtful and more serious about actually listening to Palestinians and questioning their assumptions about this in the first place, they would not have ceded the debate to the people like Elise Stefanik and Donald Trump, which has now brought us to the place we are. I’m glad to see that some people are starting to fight back. But frankly, they should have been fighting back a long time ago.
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