Shouldn’t the US Care as Much about Americans Killed by the IDF as it Cares about Americans Killed by Hamas?
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Our guest will be Simon Fitzgerald, a trauma surgeon in Brooklyn who has worked in telemedicine in Gaza, particularly at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis with Dr. Khaled Alser. According to colleagues, Dr. Alser has been abducted by Israeli forces and tortured at Ofer Prison and at the notorious Sde Teiman prison camp in the Negev Desert. Dr. Fitzgerald will talk about his experience doing telemedicine in Gaza and about the fate of Dr. Alser.
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Sources Cited in this Video
The Americans injured or killed by Israeli troops in the West Bank.
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.)
On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Arielle Angel talks with Ben Lorber and Shane Burley, authors of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, about antisemitism and the left.
The Biden administration’s double standard on “river to the sea.”
Israel’s Radio Rwanda.
Orly Noy on the death of Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
Remembering Rabbi Michael Lerner.
On September 25, I’ll be speaking at Vanderbilt University.
Please consider supporting a scholarship fund for displaced students in Gaza who want to study in the US.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. So, last week, my video was about Hersh Goldberg-Polin and the other Israeli hostages that were killed by Hamas. And Hersh Goldberg-Polin got a particular a lot of attention in the United States because he was American. His parents spoke of the Democratic National Convention, and he became someone who many, many Americans knew. And many Americans mourned his murder by Hamas, which is as it should be. I mean, we should care about all human lives. And we have, as Americans, a particular right to be concerned about the fate of other Americans.
And now we found that an American has been shot and killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces. On Friday, an American activist named Aysenur Eygi was shot while she was protesting at an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. And this has been happening fairly frequently in recent years. Several weeks earlier, another American, Amado Sison, was struck by live ammunition in the back of the leg by Israeli forces. Earlier this year, two 17-year-old Palestinian Americans were killed in the West Bank: Tawfic Abdel Jabbar from Louisiana and Mohammad Khdour from Florida. In 2020, a 78-year-old Palestinian American, Omar Assad, was dragged from his car by Israeli forces bound and blindfolded, and then had a heart attack, while in Israeli custody after he’d been left under those conditions for like an hour so by Israeli forces. In 2021, a prominent Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed by an Israeli sniper while she was wearing a press vest, covering an Israeli Defense Forces raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.
There is, I think, by any honest assessment, a tremendous difference between the way in the United States in public conversation, and indeed the American government, respond when American Jews are killed in Israel versus what happens when Palestinian Americans, or in the case of this young woman, Aysenur Eygi, a Turkish American, were killed in the West Bank. The US government does not respond in the same way. There’s not the same level of public outcry, and there’s not the same level of demand by the US government that the people who committed these killings be held responsible.
And what disturbs me about this so much, and I think makes this so important beyond the preciousness of the individual lives at stake, is that the Biden administration—and remember, all of these deaths have been happening, these killings by Israelis of Americans, have been happening under the Biden administration. The Biden administration is engaged in a fight against Donald Trump—Kamala Harris and Joe Biden—essentially about the idea of ethnonationalism, about the idea of whether America is a country in which all of its citizens are considered equal under the law, that their lives are equally valuable, irrespective of what their race, religion, and ethnicity is.
That, of course, is not the principle that governs Israel as a Jewish state, which elevates the rights and the lives of Jews over Palestinians. But what you see in the way that even a Democratic administration responds to the deaths of Americans in Israel is that they essentially adopt the ethnonationalist prism, in which certain lives are more valuable than others that exists in Israel, and they essentially therefore end up taking the position that the Trump campaign is arguing about what kind of country America should be, right. This is Donald Trump’s vision of America. An America in which there are hierarchies between different citizens based on religion, ethnicity, race, etc.
And the Democratic party is ostensibly fighting in a desperate fight to make sure we are not that kind of a country. And yet, when it comes to the Americans who are killed in Israel, either by Hamas or by the Israeli Defense Forces, we essentially adopt that very hierarchy, and the American lives matter more if they’re Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a American Jew, then they are if they are Shireen Abu Akleh, an American Palestinian, or Omar Assad, an American Palestinian, or indeed I center as Aysenur Eygi, a Turkish American. And so, it seems to me, as a fundamental matter of principle in terms of what the Biden Administration and what the Harris campaign says they want to stand for, that this represents a portrayal of their of the vision of America that they are fighting for. And on that basis alone, it seems to me, they should be that that there is every bit as much justice for the Palestinian and other Americans who are killed by Israel, as there are for the American Jews like Hersh Goldberg-Polin who were killed by Hamas.
The Biden Administration’s Backdoor Ethnonationalism