I know why Israelis are happy Nasrallah is dead. But this war will make everyone less safe.
Our call this week will be at a special time: Wednesday at 11 AM Eastern.
Our guest will be James Zogby, founder of the Arab-American Institute. As a Lebanese-American who has done academic research in Lebanon, James is a longtime observer of Hezbollah and Lebanese politics more generally. For decades, he’s also closely watched, and participated in, US policy toward the Middle East, especially in the Democratic Party, where he’s served on the party’s executive committee. We’ll talk about Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah Leader Hassan Nasrallah and the spiraling Middle Eastern regional war.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Vice Presidential Debate
I’ll be hosting a live chat for paid subscribers during this Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate as we did with the Presidential debate. I’ll be participating along with all of you.
Hope you can join. The last one was a lot of fun.
Just click the “Join chat” button below:
Premium Membership
We’ve added a new membership category, Premium Member, which is $179 per year (or higher, if you want to give more). In addition to our weekly Zoom interviews, Premium Members get access to a monthly live “ask me anything” zoom call and the video of that call the following week.
Our next “ask me anything” will be on Wednesday, October 9 at 11 AM Eastern.
If you’re interested in becoming a premium or regular member, hit the subscriber button below or email us with any questions.
My New Book
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. As the weeks go by, I’ll make different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me to their own. I’m starting with a classic that has profoundly shaped my thinking, Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine. What comes through is not only Said’s knowledge about Palestinian history and politics but his humanism, his refusal to dehumanize anyone, even as his people have been dehumanized in such profound ways.
I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medical Aid to Palestinians. If you have other suggestions, please send them.
Sources Cited in this Video
Iyad el-Baghdadi on Israel’s tactical success and strategic failure.
Moody’s downgrades Israel’s economy.
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!), Aparna Gopalan speculates about the future of campus protests after this spring’s encampments.
Lara Friedman on the false claims—never fully retracted— that Rashida Tlaib criticized Michigan’s attorney general because she’s Jewish.
Jared Kushner hints at war with Iran.
The first tenured professor to lose her job because of her views on Israel-Palestine is an anti-Zionist Jew.
Yousef Munayyer on Israelis and Palestinians who want to return home.
Upcoming Talks
On October 29, I’ll be speaking at the University of Victoria.
See you on Wednesday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. I’ve been trying to think about how to describe how it feels to be a Jewish critic of Israel, and a Jewish critic of this war and of Israel’s military escalation in Lebanon in this moment when so many Jewish Israelis and so many around the world are kind of so giddy about Israel’s series of apparent military successes, culminating in the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. And it reminds me a little bit of what it was like to try to be a critic of US policy after 9/11—not that I did frankly that good of a job of it back then, to be fair—but what it was like for those people who really were trying.
Because there’s this sense in this moment of kind of profound nationalist kind of giddiness, enthusiasm, you know. And to be opposed to it, to criticize it, creates this almost instinctive feeling in a lot of people that you don’t want your side ‘to win.’ It’s almost like, you know, watching a football game, and your team has just sacked the quarterback and slammed the other guys to the ground, and everybody’s cheering, and so thrilled. And you’re saying, well, gosh, you know, that was really violent. I think you might have injured that guy. If you thought about the consequences of this play for the end of the game, for the brain injuries that are gonna endure. And you know, this is not only gonna affect the other side, it’s gonna affect our team as well. Trying to inject a kind of universalistic framework at a moment of such nationalist passions, it almost seems like designed to make you really, really unpopular.
But I still believe very strongly that nothing good will come of this, not just for Lebanese people, but for Israelis as well. I mean, I understand that Israelis, like Americans after 9/11, still feel this keen sense of humiliation, which they want to overcome. And they’re overcoming it with this, you know, very, very potent military they have. And I also understand that Israelis have this very real problem, which is that Israelis were forced from the north of the country after October 7th, and the Israeli government—any government—would feel the necessity to return those people to the north. But if you stand back from the kind of jingoistic, kind of visceral sense of oh, you know, we got them, look how tough we are, look how tough Israel is, look how tough the Jews are, and actually try to think strategically, I think you immediately run into huge kinds of problems in addition to the very serious moral problems of killing all of these innocent people, right.
And it reminds me of a tweet that Iyad el-Baghdadi, the Palestinian commentator, that he wrote on October 17th. He said, ‘the Israelis are masters at winning tactically while losing strategically.’ So, let’s try to think about this strategically, right. Israel’s problem is that it wants to return these Israelis to the north of the country. These Israelis in the north say we’re not going to live in these communities in the north of the country if Hezbollah is right on our border because we fear that Hezbollah will do what Hamas did in the south on October 7th. So, the only way that you’re gonna get those people back on the border is, according to the logic that I hear from a lot of people in Israel, is if Hezbollah is not on the border. This is why some Israeli kind of hawks and Israeli centrists say it’s not enough to get a ceasefire in Gaza, and then get a ceasefire with Hezbollah, because even if Hezbollah stops firing, it’s still gonna be there on the border. And after October 7th, Israelis are never gonna feel safe in the north of the country with Hezbollah right on their border. I mean, you know, I don’t think the Lebanese have ever particularly felt safe with Israel on the other side of the border, but putting that aside, right.
But based on this logic, right, that people can only return to the north if Hezbollah is not on the border, that means someone has to secure the border and keep Hezbollah off of it. Because even though Hezbollah’s been dealt a very serious military blow, no one thinks they’re gonna cease to exist, right. So, who is gonna keep them off of that border? Certainly, Israelis don’t believe the UN could do it. The Lebanese Army doesn’t have the capacity to do it, right. So, it seems to me the only logical kind of extension of this policy that Israel has now is that Israel has to go in and occupy a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, so its troops keep Hezbollah far away from the Israeli border so that Israelis feel comfortable going back and living there again, right.
But there’s a reason that Israel withdrew from its occupations of southern Lebanon, right? Because once your soldiers are in Lebanon, occupying southern Lebanon, sooner or later it seems very, very likely people are going to start shooting at them. And the Israelis are going to start taking casualties in southern Lebanon. You were going beyond just occupying the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Now you’re gonna be occupying parts of Lebanon as well, and you don’t think that that’s going to be the beginning of—sooner or later—of some kind of quagmire, in which you’re facing an insurgency that can bleed you for a long time to come? What is the answer to that problem? I don’t hear anyone answering that strategic problem as they kind of delight in this tactical military victory.
Beyond that, what do people think the consequences of this are going to be on Iran, right. Again, the Israelis seem really emboldened at the fact that Iran seems too terrified to basically retaliate in a serious way, right. I mean, the irony of the people in Washington warning about America pursuing a strategy of appeasement, or Israel pursuing a strategy of appeasement; the country that’s been pursuing a strategy appeasement has basically been Iran. They’ve been being punched in the nose again and again and have done very little to respond because they clearly fear they’re outmatched in a war against Israel.
But how does Israel think Iran is gonna respond to this? Do they think they’re gonna disband the regime? Do they think they’re gonna cut their ties with Hezbollah and their other regional proxies, which are the thing that give them some degree of deterrence? It seems much more likely that Iran will go even more aggressively to try to get a nuclear weapon, right. Because if you lack deterrence, if you feel extremely threatened, if you can’t combat Israel in a conventional fight, then the lesson of North Korea certainly is that you need nukes because that’s the thing that will preserve your regime and prevent Israel from it from launching an attack, and America from launching attack, and that’s what the Iranian regime cares most about: regime self-preservation. So, you’re only, it seems to me, increasing the chances that Iran is basically gonna go full scale ahead towards getting a nuclear bomb, and testing it, and putting on nuclear missiles so they can protect themselves. So, how well will this have been seen to work out then?
In addition to that, while everyone was focusing on the news about Nasrallah, Moody’s, the credit rating agency, just downgraded Israel’s economy in a very significant way. And Israel is facing very, very serious economic challenges as a result of this war and the growing international economic isolation that it’s facing, right. These are real long-term strategic threats to Israel that I don’t think Israel has any chance of solving through this kind of military high-tech wizardry.
And then the last point is ultimately just that it’s not realistic—putting aside morality—it’s just not fundamentally realistic that you can perpetually operate in a world in which you give yourself the right to act with impunity and think that others are not gonna do the same thing to you, right. There are, of course, a lot of people in Lebanon who really didn’t like Hezbollah and Hassan Nasrallah, and for good reason, right. Nasrallah and Hezbollah have a lot of blood on their hands of a lot of different people, including a lot of Syrians by the way, and many people in Lebanon recognize that, right.
But imagine how the Israelis who hate Benjamin Netanyahu—and there are many of them—would feel if someone assassinated Benjamin Netanyahu and blew up the building that he was living in, right. Now, someone might say, how dare you compare Netanyahu and Nasrallah. Well, obviously, they’re different in a lot of ways. But let’s remember the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, right, has said that he wants a warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest. So, when we think about Netanyahu as being an international war criminal, that’s not just something that kind of some left-wing fantasists came up with. This is the International Criminal Court, which the Biden administration actually thought was really great when it was going after the Russians, right. They want a warrant for Netanyahu.
So, imagine if some other power had done to Netanyahu what Israel has now done to Hassan Nasrallah. And I think Israelis and Americans have for a very long time gotten into this mindset that basically, there’s one law for everybody else, and another law for us, right. And, morally, that’s fundamentally, in my mind, profoundly problematic given that human beings are human beings, and no human beings are so angelic that they can be trusted to not have to proceed along the terms of international law. But beyond that, the more you destroy international law, the more you create these precedents that powerful countries can do whatever they want, the more vulnerable you become when some other country gains the power and the chutzpah to start doing to you what you’ve been doing to them, right.
And this is the world that America helped to start to produce when we invaded Iraq in violation of international law in 2003. And this is the world that Israel is now creating with all of these attacks in foreign countries. And, you know, we in America say, you know, ‘what comes around goes around.’ In Hebrew, the phrase, you know, from Jewish texts is ‘middah k’neged middah,’ that you will suffer in the way that you have brought suffering onto other people. I dread that prospect. I really do dread that prospect. But this is the world, it seems to me, that these Israeli actions are taking us towards. They’re taking us to a world that is more savage, more dangerous, more lawless. And although the current victims are people in Lebanon who are suffering massively, ultimately, I believe that the victims of this environment that Israel is creating will be Israeli Jews themselves, in addition to people in the rest of the Middle East. And that’s why, I’m sorry, I can’t get on this nationalist, kind of jingoistic chest thumping campaign. I’ve just seen too many times that this ends in tears.
Tactical Success, Strategic Failure