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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 children’s educator and entertainer Rachel Griffin-Accurso, better known as Ms. Rachel, who is often described as this generation’s Mr. Rogers. We’ll talk about her decision— despite outside pressure— to denounce the killing and starving of children in Gaza. This conversation will be cosponsored with Jewish Currents.
Cited in Today’s Video
Richie Torres’ tweet about aid to Gaza.
Some of the voices who were right after 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!), Arielle Angel calls for new Jewish institutions in the wake of the genocide in Gaza.
Rashid Khalidi on why he cancelled his class at Columbia.
I talked to NPR’s The World about antisemitism, to B’Tselem’s Yuli Novak for the Foundation for Middle East Peace about their report accusing Israel of genocide and on CNN about US policy toward Gaza.
What the data actually says about antisemitism at Columbia.
Krystal Ball and Saager Engeti challenge Senator Elisa Slotkin on US policy toward Gaza.
Rajan Menon on the genocide debate.
David Polsky and Barnett Rubin on Tisha b’av in a time of genocide.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So last week, Richie Torres, who’s one of the most kind of well-known defenders of the Israeli government, tweeted something somewhat surprising. He tweeted, ‘the free world has a moral responsibility to Palestinians in distress. Flood Gaza with food.’ And I think it was just one illustration of this sense over the last week or so that a kind of dam has broken in American public discourse. It hasn’t yet changed U.S. policy, tragically, but that in mainstream media discourse and public discourse more generally, that people are much more willing to say things that they were reluctant to say in the past, that there is starvation in Gaza, that it is Israel’s fault, and that beyond that, that this slaughter and starvation, this assault on the people of Gaza, has to end, and that it’s immoral.
And I think this kind of dam breaking raises some really interesting questions for people who care about ending the starvation and slaughter, and more generally, who care about Palestinian freedom. And I’m not saying that Richie Torres is about to become part of a Palestinian movement for freedom, but the broader issue of people who come to these things late I think is something that now is very much on the table.
And I would say I have a few thoughts about the right way to respond to this. The first is that I think it’s worth being generous to people who come to realizations that one believes are morally correct, even if they come painfully late, and much, much later than one would like. And I take this vision partly because I feel like I have to, because I myself feel like I have been very painfully late to a lot of things that I now believe are true and didn’t just hold views that I now think are wrong and perhaps immoral, but actually championed them. And so, who am I basically to stand in judgment of someone who evolves slowly, more slowly than I would like, on a set of issues when I myself have done so and have needed the kind of forgiveness and understanding and grace of other people.
The second point is that I think pragmatically, if you look at moral movements that try to change U.S. policy, that to succeed, to gain the power to change policy, they have to swell beyond the initial group of activists and bring in people who may not be as morally pure as those people. But you need those growing numbers. You need these kinds of concentric circles, right?
If you think about the movement to end the war in Vietnam and the people who, by 1974, the Democrats in Congress who cut off military aid, I don’t think most of those people held that view a decade earlier in 1964 and 1965 when you started to see the first real protests against U.S. ground troops in Vietnam. They weren’t as morally pure. They weren’t as radical in their critique. But it was their entrance into this movement that ultimately gave it the political heft to make change. And so, I just think it’s counterproductive to say to people who come late to these things, sorry, basically, you know, you’re not welcome because you didn’t realize this earlier.
And beyond that, I think when you’re talking about politicians in particular, most politicians respond to political incentives. And so, the role of activists, of people of conscience, is to act to try to change the political incentives. And then you can’t really blame politicians for responding and shifting in terms of political incentives. I mean, it would be great if they were truly morally driven, but most will not be. And if you can change the political incentive so a politician who’s fundamentally concerned about winning reelection therefore does the right thing, then that’s a success. That’s what you’re supposed to do. And I don’t think it really makes a huge amount of sense to basically dwell on the fact that they came to this too late or that their motives were not pure.
But even as one, I think, kind of really welcomes people who are now kind of in more mainstream positions into recognizing things that people who were kind of in the pro-Palestine solidarity circles or kind of leftist circles recognized, you know, a year or two years ago, it’s also really, really important to remember and kind of elevate the voices of people who were correct initially, who said things early on that I think have turned out to be factually and morally correct. Because the danger is, if you don’t do that, then you kind of end up, you just replicate, you don’t change the kind of structure of discourse that exists in a lot of American foreign policy conversations, which is kind of radically unmeritocratic, right?
I mean, think about Iraq and Afghanistan. How many times have we seen on a debate about Iran or China or Russia or whatever, you see an interview with someone like John Bolton or someone like Lindsey Graham, and you think, surely there should be some consequence for these folks for having been wrong on these things. And it would make sense when you have another foreign policy question, especially a question about war and peace, that you might look to interview people who actually have a track record of being correct in their views about wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than recycling the same people who have a worldview that has turned out to be really, really disastrous.
And so, I think even as one welcomes people who are kind of more mainstream credentials, it’s really, really important to remember and honor and elevate those people who are more politically radical and whose political radicalism actually allowed them to say things very early on that I think have turned out to be absolutely morally and empirically correct, even though they were often not just marginalized, but kind of slandered and attacked for doing so, right.
So, I remember when rabbis for ceasefire started doing the first protest calling for a ceasefire and how harshly the calls for ceasefire were attacked not just on the right, but in mainstream Jewish circles and by the Biden administration and by most Democrats and many, many people in the mainstream media. Those people were right. You know, the student protesters who started protesting for a ceasefire and who said that you can’t fully understand the horror of the massacre of October 7th without understanding the structure of oppression and violence in which it took place, those people were right, and I think they’ve been validated by events since.
And I hate this line where people say, you know, they started protesting after October 7th, therefore they’re illegitimate. No, they were protesting right at the beginning because they could see, right, what was likely to happen. And they’ve been proven correct. They could see that a government with people like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, in which a defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on October 9th was talking about cutting off food and fuel and water to Gaza, and in which Benjamin Netanyahu was talking about Amalek. They could foresee that this would be the way Israel would behave in Gaza.
They should not be slammed for having started these protests earlier than other people. In fact, they should be honored for having done this earlier and for having trying to change U.S. policy at a time before all of these people started to be slaughtered to death and started to go hungry. And beyond the rabbis for ceasefire and some of these student protesters who, by the way, were greeted with for being prematurely correct, right, with being suspended and being expelled and by beaten up by the police who were called in. I also think it’s really, really important to remember the writers, the intellectuals who said things about Israel’s attack that have proven to be correct. People who said that this would be a moral horror, and people who also said that Israel would not achieve its stated goals, that it would not be able to destroy Hamas, which is now basically something that even Israel’s defenders pretty much admit. And that Israel would not, you know, retrieve the hostages this way, which I think is now unquestionably true since Israel has killed more hostages through military action than it is saved and has only brought those it’s brought back mostly through ceasefires.
And so, I want to read off the names of some people who I think were correct in those early days because, unfortunately, these folks are still not present and still not elevated in mainstream media discussion, which has a structure of kind of who is considered a credible spokesperson to elevate into platform in mainstream conversations, which still tends to privilege oftentimes people who said things in November of 2023 that have turned out to be wrong, not the people who’ve been right.
So, here are some people who I think have been proven right. Jehad Abusalim. Yousef Munayyer. Shibley Telhami. Iyad el-Baghdadi. Muhammad Shehada. Noura Erakat. Rula Jebreal. Diana Buttu. Rashida Tlaib. All of those people, not coincidentally, are Palestinians, right? Not that there weren’t other non-Palestinians, too. But one of the reasons that it’s such a disaster, that even after all this, that Palestinian voices are still so absent from mainstream American media conversation—it’s not just a question of representation, like we need some diversity for the sake of diversity. No, the point is to be meritocratic. The point is to actually have people who have a track record of getting things right and whose insights are actually more in line with what’s actually happening on the ground so that American policy discussion can be better, right?
And so, the reason that folks like the ones that I’ve named should have a higher profile in American mainstream media and political discussion is not just because they’re Palestinian, it’s because actually they have insights that we desperately need and that had we listened to them in the early days after October 7th, we could have saved many, many, many lives. And all of this destruction that is not making Israelis safer in the long term, but I profoundly believe is actually making Israeli Jews less safe and has laid waste to Gaza and produced what, you know, I think now there’s an overwhelming consensus among human rights organizations and scholars is a genocide.
So yes, welcome people who come to these realizations late, but also elevate and honor people who came to them early in the hopes that we won’t forever be in this cycle in which people who turn out to be right still remain marginalized and slandered and ignored.
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