**Everyone loses their moral compass at some point I suppose. **
As one of the few voices willing to face the paradox of Israel-as-it-is-now, and who as a jew (as am I) had the moral courage to live inside the terrible ambiguity of unexplainable and inexplicable suffering, I'm confused.
It doesn't work to tell me that I'm right to be "upset" but that I'm not upset in the "proper" way. And so you instruct me. (And the word "upset" is a rather dodgy and diminishing word for those of us who have had our conscience truly shocked.)
You dodge again with your characterization: "Folks who don't like what's happening". An almost jaunty phrase, as if we've all gotten undeserved parking tickets.
And when you describe the present moment as:
“an expression of the kinds of systems of oppression — settler colonialism, imperialism, ethno‑nationalism — that we’ve seen across history and all over the world", something essential gets lost.
By placing what’s happening into a historically familiar category, you create distance. You find a way to worm-hole your way far from the immediacy of the images and voices and stories. And the facts on the ground. Once you name it and categorize it, it becomes all but normalized by way of familiarity. The singular becomes generalized and thus diminished and neutered.
There's a new, easy certainty in this video that I haven't seen from you.
It bewilders in ways explanation doesn’t yet quite seem able to resolve. And it's unsettling.
The settlers claim abuse, violence and theft of land are all done in the name of religion. also, i don't think Tucker is the same as Fuentes or Candace. and don't leave out evangelist/religious Zionists who support all this in the name of religion as well.
Can you cite some specific times and dates that Tucker Carlson made these kinds of characterizations? Because I watch Tucker Carlson periodically and I find that he’s actually very altruistic and seems to support the idea of coexistence and diversity. I don’t get the sense that he’s blaming all Jews or creating a civilizationally conflictual argument. Now he is definitely a conservative, and maybe even more of a libertarian at times, but he doesn’t strike me as a rabid antisemite. His biting commentary on Israeli policy is definitely worth listening to and dwelling upon. So if you can cite some concrete examples, I would like to evaluate them further. I am quite sure some on the Right do mistakenly conflate all Jews with Israeli policy, just as some do on the hard Commie Left do the same thing too—-which is definitely anti-Semitic. But having listened to Tucker Carlson, his commentary on Israel usually seems pretty balanced, spot-on and rather insightful most of the time, I think.
Do you really think he is an antisemite or is this schtick more just about making sure that the Left and the Right remain divided and do not unite? Why not criticize the ravings of Ben Shapiro or Mark Levin with equal ferocity that you reserve for Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens?
I think we should be congratulating some of those on the Right For criticizing immoral, inhumane Israeli policy because that is where the last vestiges of remaining blind support for Israel still exist. So shouldn’t we be thanking the commentators on the Right who are making a legitimate case of why we should not blindly support all Israeli policy? Isn’t this something the Left and the Right can unite on? And shouldn’t we be welcoming more support in the cause to make sure Israel abides by international law? Together, uniting the Left and the Right on this vital issue, we can serve to remind that Judaism should not be conflated with Israeli policy. So instead of bashing the Right, do you think that perhaps it might be wiser to build bridges to them instead, in a way that allows us to bear influence on their thinking? If we gain their trust and approval, we can influence them by reminding that associations between Israeli policy and Judaism and other such falsities is unfair. Just some questions worth asking, I think.
Peter - while I appreciate your necessary and important commentary on the increasing conflation between Judaism and Israel on the far right and acknowledge that this is a much bigger threat for a variety of reasons, I also think it is vital that Progressives also call out anti-Semitic “dog whistles” that are increasingly being amplified on the Left. In your interview with Cenk Uygar last week, he tried to launder some of his more “controversial” views by flagging them in advance but nevertheless his describing Israel as an all-powerful actor on U.S. policy that the U.S. is simply unable to resist implied all sorts of conspiratorial thinking in a similar vein to Tucker Carlson’s “just asking questions” move. When you pushed back on him with factual history (eg the U.S. did not invade Venezuela to do Israel’s bidding), he simply deflected to another topic. Similarly, he named Jewish neo-cons (Kristol, Feith et al) as simply a stand-in for Israel and described the “legacy media” as completely in the pocket of Israel. Both he and his co-host, Ana Kasparian, have uncomfortably gotten in bed with Tucker Carlson (giving him a certain amount of “street cred” that he has friends on the progressive side), and her going on the Candace Owen’s show is of a piece with this mindset.
Peter, like so many other “liberal” Jews in the media you are playing the part of trying to distract from Israel daily atrocities by claiming much of the criticism against Israel is antisemitism. We can criticize Israel, as long as we somehow don't criticize Jews in general. Sorry, not going to work. The smear of antisemitism has becomed a badge of honor and I'll wear it proudly.
But please if you would, stop your fellow Jews from slaughtering non Jews and destroying communities across the Middle East and we can have a honest conversation about antisemitism.
Stop American Jewish organizations from giving unconditional support to that safe haven for Jewish pedophiles and traitors and we can have an honest conversation about antisemitism.
Stop our government’s political and military support for that abomination among the nations and we can have an honest conversation about antisemitism.
Israel is exceptionally evil, in part because the American Jewish community has made exceptions for it to do evil. Stop that and we can have a honest conversation about antisemitism.
You are of a generation of Jews that has allowed and facilitatated the greatest atrocities since world war II, largely in part of a deeply ingrained sense of supremacy coupled with victimhood within the Jewish community. And that is a stain on Jews everywhere, including you and your children, that will last centuries.
So Peter in the spirit of Helen Thomas, fuck you and your Jewish feelings.
The current US regime is controlled by numerous people who identify as “Christian” and who are unabashedly racist and hateful in both word and deed. Do you hold all Christians responsible for the reprehensible actions of the US government?
Let me know when he starts acting accordingly - and more to the point - let me know when those words or actions have any ameliorating effect on the racist and hateful among us.
Will do. And in case I get distracted let me know when American Jewish organizations and American Jews stop supporting Israel and trying to silence everyone who speaks out against its daily atrocities.
I actually think Peter does a halfway decent job of the things you're saying need to be done, albeit on the level of a pundit and a bridge-builder, which are inherently limited levers.
I agree that Tucker crosses a line, but at the same time, I was disgusted by the recent NYT interview and my disgust was mostly with the interviewer. I will get back to thie NYT. First, Tucker.
Tucker on the one hand was slippery and downplayed the antisemitism of Fuentes, though at the same time Tucker denies being antisemitic. Yes, bigots do this, but in my experience people who are Islamophobes respond to the label by saying they are right to hate Islam and people who hate any ethnic group generally come out and say bigoted things about that group.
I am a believing Christian and haven’t read the Talmud or the Quran. But I know full well that the Bible, both the NT and the OT ( as we Christians call it) contains plenty of passages which can be and have been used by Christians to justify slavery, antisemitism, imperialism, and war crimes. That is just a fact. If that were all it contained I wouldn’t be Christian, but the ugly parts and the misinterpreted parts are there.
So I find it very plausible that the Quran and the Talmud contain similar passages and surely we all know that there are Muslims and Jews who use those passages the way Christians have used their ugly passages— to justify atrocities.
Where I grew up, in Memphis, the boast was that they had more churches than gas stations. Maybe so. But the white churches were if anything in the wrong side on civil rights. That said something about their Christianity.
And when I started reading seriously about the Israeli- Palestinian issue, what popped out at me, decades ago, was how damn close the pro- Israel side with its condescension and racism about Palestinians sounded like the white racists I knew. But you couldn’t say that in public.
So what did that tell me about Jewish institutions that whitewashed Israel’s crimes? That they seemed a lot like white Southern Christians who had to be dragged out of the Jim Crow era.
As for the NYT, by all means go after Tucker’s soft- pedaling of Fuentes and his bigotry. But when Tucker said Cruz and Huckabee ( both Christians) were worse than Fuentes because they supported policies that killed children, rather than take it seriously by recognizing what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon, the NYT asked Cruz and Huckabee if they supported killing children. Of course they denied it.
This is how our mainstream culture brushes off support for crimes against humanity when done by “ respectable” people.
I sounded too forgiving of Tucker above, but I agree that he does use this “ Christian morality vs Jewish morality” framing and this is both dangerous and wrong. Probably every religion can be turned into a framework for oppression, so if someone ever gets around to doing a serious interview with Tucker, they should pin him down on that.
So don’t destroy the tunnel network if the only way to do it is inhumane. Palestinians deserve freedom and we could spend decades listening to people blather about the peace process and get nowhere. Does this justify Hamas terrorism? No.
People on both sides have this “ the end justifies the means” attitude, which is why defenders of Hamas and Israel sound the same.
Since Oct. 7 the issues of antisemitism, Israel, Judaism, Zionism, anti-Zionism and other related Jewish matters - including the impact on American Jews - has changed constantly, sometimes weekly, even daily. While Peter's book came early during the Gaza War, which kicked off the fussing and fighting involving practically everyone (Jews and Christians and Muslims here and abroad), the ideas he's shared have become mainstream on the left and criminal to the right amongst Jews themselves. If radical Islam has been the central issue in this century, from 9/11 on, the flip side of that coin is the War on Terrorism, an endless war involving Iran, Iraq, the Arab nations, Afghanistan, and all the rest, wars which are never really won. Yet a recent visit to Israel proved to me (and I was also in the West Bank and the Gaza envelope) a few things: everyone wants peace; the people on both sides are tired of war; the Israelis are faced with an identity crisis (Netanyahu is unpopular, yet he may win again, their democracy is under siege, yet the current war has strong popular support nonetheless.) The people of the West Bank are abused by the settlers, but the Palestinians have been terribly led for decades, and their leadership corrupt. American Jews are now divided, Iran is indeed a problem that may not be resolved by this war, and Israel has become a proxy state of the USA, much the way Hezbollah and Hamas are for Iran. Oil prices are up, but so is the stock market, so the pain of the war has perhaps just begun, at least for Americans. Few have faith in Trump's judgment, but fewer still are in a position to do anything about it. Such is also the case with Netanyahu. It makes it seem as if war itself is obsolete: either peace or nukes: drones and missiles, battleships and fighter planes are no longer enough to secure a win (see: Russian and Ukraine). No one wants their children to die fighting a useless war, but only half feel the same about their enemies' children. And most agree that all that money is better spent on things that will improve the lives of the people wherever they live.
"The people of the West Bank are abused by the settlers, but the Palestinians have been terribly led for decades, and their leadership corrupt."
This tells me a lot about the worldview you projected on the situation and the fact that you are in fact profundly pro-israel and profundly dismissive of Palestinian rights and dignity.
There is so much to say about this sentence that is often trotted around as some sort of virtue signaling aka "look I'm a good guy I even said the word "palestinian"".
A. The people of the West Bank are abused by the settlers AND oppressed by the IDF military and Israel as a whole. 40 % of adults in the west bank have at least once spent time in prison, most of the time uncharged. This is not the work of "the settlers", is it ? it's a system, a deeply, southerner supremacist system that has evolved over decades to keep Palestinians in their place as submissive underlings. And it works.
B : "never say BUT", remember ? the fact that "Palestinians have been terribly led for decades, and their leadership corrupt", whether true or not, is irrelevant. Repeat : IRRELEVANT. Palestinians are humans. Humans have rights. Universal rights. Among those rights is the right to not be occupied and colonized, by *anyone*. Palestinians could be the most despicable people on earth which they absolutely aren't, there is nothing they could be or do that would be ok to put after a "but and a sentence mentioning that their rights are infringed. *Nothing*. The best proof being that Israelis have been terribly led for decades and their leadership is corrupted and they are not occupied and colonized.
C : whatever happens next, be sure of one thing : Palestinians as a people are damaged. For generations. Obviously, Gazans will need generations to move on from the trauma of the genocide. But West bankers and east jerusalemites too, are in a very bad shape. They have been maintained in criminal submission, humiliation, oppression for 4 generations now. So they will need generations to heal. And the world owes them help, and Israel owes help and tolerance for their trauma. Israelis are traumatized too ? yes, of course. But they did choose this. They chose the colonization and racial supremacism and they chose the outcome. They chose this war, because colonization can't be anything else than a war. Plus they have been helped a lot already. In the tremendous pile of money and soft power the West deversed on them, there must be amply enough to deal with Israel's self created trauma, isn't it ?
So somewhere in the future, there will need to be a vast marshall plan to spend on Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, paid by israeli and american and european money, while the help to Israel dries up.
PS : my take on the situation would be 100% different if Israel had chosen to just occupy, not colonize, Palestine in 1967. The colonization is the damning part. No amount of "it's for security" BS will ever whitewash this. Colonization is nothing else than armed robbery, and supremacism.
Let's say out loud what isn't stated Anytime one wants to belly ache about the government it falls on the head of Cheeto And since he has such a big head the belly aching stays on his head
But the issue is that all the government dysfunction that has led to Cheeto’s lowest polling on all governance issues is at the feet of ALL Nazi Republicans not just on their titular head The Nazi Republicans are completely complicit in the corruption taking place in Washington, unwilling to put guardrails up on an out of control executive branch The party of “law and order” is anything but confronting lawlessness They have lost their moral compass
So it's not enough to complain about Cheeto It's time for accountability of the Nazi Republicans that are involved in the Cheeto organized crime family and the blatant corruption in government Of course the solution is to vote these corrupt politicians out of office
Yes. This is my problem with Jay Shapiro asking "Why are there so many Jews in the Epstein files?" There are so many Jews in the Epstein files because Epstein was a Jewish supremacist and planned it that way. The much more interesting question (which he raised and hen dropped) is why the Epstein files haven't led to a huge outpouring of antisemitism.
I wonder - is right-wing hostility to Jews AND Muslims so different from the Klan's targeting of groups beyond Black Americans? That is, Jews, Catholics, Italians... Is current antipathy to Jews and Muslims not a part of America's history of hostility towards the "Other"??
About the class you give I find it an interesting experiment and as usual my mind went searching for caveats (innate developmental or trained habit of mine, gets rambly, exhausting and even annoying at times)
And there I read that you also put some room for that
So I went searching with my own recent experience that I am not very happy with or proud. Where the amount of distance between my current understanding of things and the amount of my perceived worldview and emotional moral compass not sharing much common ground where I subjectively feel that I did lots of work myself of cognitive or other type of empathy based moral ruminations self check and all
Using my caveat seeking inner engine as I breath
That almost triggered me at each hasbara smelling argument thst seemed like a sisiphean task to have to deal with in a discussion with someone I value enough to have been in a prison of discourse and emotional overload of some kind
Thst the work of self check felt perhaps in error to have been done only by me
And the moral ground emotional signals became too loud
Thst I could not see n a single discussion not written exchanged which offers a mirror as I write but real time real voice where emotions are on display and reflection is hard to dialog with above certain level of distance perception.
Single mind task to bridge calmly too far a distance too hard. Some kind of despair of not being able to manifest my own past ruminations having tried to see many angles of moral reasoning for possibly different subjectivities or perception trajectories or inner worldview evolution
I am not necessarily the good guy here but there can be two persons limitations I bridging a distance while in the premises
And this was not even really enemy. Although one wonders sometimes what is?
**Everyone loses their moral compass at some point I suppose. **
As one of the few voices willing to face the paradox of Israel-as-it-is-now, and who as a jew (as am I) had the moral courage to live inside the terrible ambiguity of unexplainable and inexplicable suffering, I'm confused.
It doesn't work to tell me that I'm right to be "upset" but that I'm not upset in the "proper" way. And so you instruct me. (And the word "upset" is a rather dodgy and diminishing word for those of us who have had our conscience truly shocked.)
You dodge again with your characterization: "Folks who don't like what's happening". An almost jaunty phrase, as if we've all gotten undeserved parking tickets.
And when you describe the present moment as:
“an expression of the kinds of systems of oppression — settler colonialism, imperialism, ethno‑nationalism — that we’ve seen across history and all over the world", something essential gets lost.
By placing what’s happening into a historically familiar category, you create distance. You find a way to worm-hole your way far from the immediacy of the images and voices and stories. And the facts on the ground. Once you name it and categorize it, it becomes all but normalized by way of familiarity. The singular becomes generalized and thus diminished and neutered.
There's a new, easy certainty in this video that I haven't seen from you.
It bewilders in ways explanation doesn’t yet quite seem able to resolve. And it's unsettling.
Dan B.
The settlers claim abuse, violence and theft of land are all done in the name of religion. also, i don't think Tucker is the same as Fuentes or Candace. and don't leave out evangelist/religious Zionists who support all this in the name of religion as well.
What about Huckabee?
yes, of course, included in evangelist/religious Zionist group.
Can you cite some specific times and dates that Tucker Carlson made these kinds of characterizations? Because I watch Tucker Carlson periodically and I find that he’s actually very altruistic and seems to support the idea of coexistence and diversity. I don’t get the sense that he’s blaming all Jews or creating a civilizationally conflictual argument. Now he is definitely a conservative, and maybe even more of a libertarian at times, but he doesn’t strike me as a rabid antisemite. His biting commentary on Israeli policy is definitely worth listening to and dwelling upon. So if you can cite some concrete examples, I would like to evaluate them further. I am quite sure some on the Right do mistakenly conflate all Jews with Israeli policy, just as some do on the hard Commie Left do the same thing too—-which is definitely anti-Semitic. But having listened to Tucker Carlson, his commentary on Israel usually seems pretty balanced, spot-on and rather insightful most of the time, I think.
Do you really think he is an antisemite or is this schtick more just about making sure that the Left and the Right remain divided and do not unite? Why not criticize the ravings of Ben Shapiro or Mark Levin with equal ferocity that you reserve for Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens?
I think we should be congratulating some of those on the Right For criticizing immoral, inhumane Israeli policy because that is where the last vestiges of remaining blind support for Israel still exist. So shouldn’t we be thanking the commentators on the Right who are making a legitimate case of why we should not blindly support all Israeli policy? Isn’t this something the Left and the Right can unite on? And shouldn’t we be welcoming more support in the cause to make sure Israel abides by international law? Together, uniting the Left and the Right on this vital issue, we can serve to remind that Judaism should not be conflated with Israeli policy. So instead of bashing the Right, do you think that perhaps it might be wiser to build bridges to them instead, in a way that allows us to bear influence on their thinking? If we gain their trust and approval, we can influence them by reminding that associations between Israeli policy and Judaism and other such falsities is unfair. Just some questions worth asking, I think.
Peter - while I appreciate your necessary and important commentary on the increasing conflation between Judaism and Israel on the far right and acknowledge that this is a much bigger threat for a variety of reasons, I also think it is vital that Progressives also call out anti-Semitic “dog whistles” that are increasingly being amplified on the Left. In your interview with Cenk Uygar last week, he tried to launder some of his more “controversial” views by flagging them in advance but nevertheless his describing Israel as an all-powerful actor on U.S. policy that the U.S. is simply unable to resist implied all sorts of conspiratorial thinking in a similar vein to Tucker Carlson’s “just asking questions” move. When you pushed back on him with factual history (eg the U.S. did not invade Venezuela to do Israel’s bidding), he simply deflected to another topic. Similarly, he named Jewish neo-cons (Kristol, Feith et al) as simply a stand-in for Israel and described the “legacy media” as completely in the pocket of Israel. Both he and his co-host, Ana Kasparian, have uncomfortably gotten in bed with Tucker Carlson (giving him a certain amount of “street cred” that he has friends on the progressive side), and her going on the Candace Owen’s show is of a piece with this mindset.
You also have a problem when the Israeli government justifies its bellicose actions using the Torah.
Peter, like so many other “liberal” Jews in the media you are playing the part of trying to distract from Israel daily atrocities by claiming much of the criticism against Israel is antisemitism. We can criticize Israel, as long as we somehow don't criticize Jews in general. Sorry, not going to work. The smear of antisemitism has becomed a badge of honor and I'll wear it proudly.
But please if you would, stop your fellow Jews from slaughtering non Jews and destroying communities across the Middle East and we can have a honest conversation about antisemitism.
Stop American Jewish organizations from giving unconditional support to that safe haven for Jewish pedophiles and traitors and we can have an honest conversation about antisemitism.
Stop our government’s political and military support for that abomination among the nations and we can have an honest conversation about antisemitism.
Israel is exceptionally evil, in part because the American Jewish community has made exceptions for it to do evil. Stop that and we can have a honest conversation about antisemitism.
You are of a generation of Jews that has allowed and facilitatated the greatest atrocities since world war II, largely in part of a deeply ingrained sense of supremacy coupled with victimhood within the Jewish community. And that is a stain on Jews everywhere, including you and your children, that will last centuries.
So Peter in the spirit of Helen Thomas, fuck you and your Jewish feelings.
Israel delenda est!
The current US regime is controlled by numerous people who identify as “Christian” and who are unabashedly racist and hateful in both word and deed. Do you hold all Christians responsible for the reprehensible actions of the US government?
Yes! Christians are called to care for all people everywhere, and make sure no evil is done to the innocent. Tucker makes that argument every show.
Let me know when he starts acting accordingly - and more to the point - let me know when those words or actions have any ameliorating effect on the racist and hateful among us.
Will do. And in case I get distracted let me know when American Jewish organizations and American Jews stop supporting Israel and trying to silence everyone who speaks out against its daily atrocities.
Israel delenda est.
Peter's comments reflect the pernicious effects of Identity Politics (left or right) as practiced (not as theorized).
ID Politics result in judging, describing people of behaviors and worth based on their ID traits (skin color, gender, age, religion).
Even statements are often judged as truthful based on the ID traits of the speaker, not the statement
Identity politics is a massive failure
I actually think Peter does a halfway decent job of the things you're saying need to be done, albeit on the level of a pundit and a bridge-builder, which are inherently limited levers.
I agree that Tucker crosses a line, but at the same time, I was disgusted by the recent NYT interview and my disgust was mostly with the interviewer. I will get back to thie NYT. First, Tucker.
Tucker on the one hand was slippery and downplayed the antisemitism of Fuentes, though at the same time Tucker denies being antisemitic. Yes, bigots do this, but in my experience people who are Islamophobes respond to the label by saying they are right to hate Islam and people who hate any ethnic group generally come out and say bigoted things about that group.
I am a believing Christian and haven’t read the Talmud or the Quran. But I know full well that the Bible, both the NT and the OT ( as we Christians call it) contains plenty of passages which can be and have been used by Christians to justify slavery, antisemitism, imperialism, and war crimes. That is just a fact. If that were all it contained I wouldn’t be Christian, but the ugly parts and the misinterpreted parts are there.
So I find it very plausible that the Quran and the Talmud contain similar passages and surely we all know that there are Muslims and Jews who use those passages the way Christians have used their ugly passages— to justify atrocities.
Where I grew up, in Memphis, the boast was that they had more churches than gas stations. Maybe so. But the white churches were if anything in the wrong side on civil rights. That said something about their Christianity.
And when I started reading seriously about the Israeli- Palestinian issue, what popped out at me, decades ago, was how damn close the pro- Israel side with its condescension and racism about Palestinians sounded like the white racists I knew. But you couldn’t say that in public.
So what did that tell me about Jewish institutions that whitewashed Israel’s crimes? That they seemed a lot like white Southern Christians who had to be dragged out of the Jim Crow era.
As for the NYT, by all means go after Tucker’s soft- pedaling of Fuentes and his bigotry. But when Tucker said Cruz and Huckabee ( both Christians) were worse than Fuentes because they supported policies that killed children, rather than take it seriously by recognizing what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon, the NYT asked Cruz and Huckabee if they supported killing children. Of course they denied it.
This is how our mainstream culture brushes off support for crimes against humanity when done by “ respectable” people.
I sounded too forgiving of Tucker above, but I agree that he does use this “ Christian morality vs Jewish morality” framing and this is both dangerous and wrong. Probably every religion can be turned into a framework for oppression, so if someone ever gets around to doing a serious interview with Tucker, they should pin him down on that.
You never mention the tunnel network under Gaza that couldn’t be destroyed except by the inhumane measures Israel used.
So don’t destroy the tunnel network if the only way to do it is inhumane. Palestinians deserve freedom and we could spend decades listening to people blather about the peace process and get nowhere. Does this justify Hamas terrorism? No.
People on both sides have this “ the end justifies the means” attitude, which is why defenders of Hamas and Israel sound the same.
Since Oct. 7 the issues of antisemitism, Israel, Judaism, Zionism, anti-Zionism and other related Jewish matters - including the impact on American Jews - has changed constantly, sometimes weekly, even daily. While Peter's book came early during the Gaza War, which kicked off the fussing and fighting involving practically everyone (Jews and Christians and Muslims here and abroad), the ideas he's shared have become mainstream on the left and criminal to the right amongst Jews themselves. If radical Islam has been the central issue in this century, from 9/11 on, the flip side of that coin is the War on Terrorism, an endless war involving Iran, Iraq, the Arab nations, Afghanistan, and all the rest, wars which are never really won. Yet a recent visit to Israel proved to me (and I was also in the West Bank and the Gaza envelope) a few things: everyone wants peace; the people on both sides are tired of war; the Israelis are faced with an identity crisis (Netanyahu is unpopular, yet he may win again, their democracy is under siege, yet the current war has strong popular support nonetheless.) The people of the West Bank are abused by the settlers, but the Palestinians have been terribly led for decades, and their leadership corrupt. American Jews are now divided, Iran is indeed a problem that may not be resolved by this war, and Israel has become a proxy state of the USA, much the way Hezbollah and Hamas are for Iran. Oil prices are up, but so is the stock market, so the pain of the war has perhaps just begun, at least for Americans. Few have faith in Trump's judgment, but fewer still are in a position to do anything about it. Such is also the case with Netanyahu. It makes it seem as if war itself is obsolete: either peace or nukes: drones and missiles, battleships and fighter planes are no longer enough to secure a win (see: Russian and Ukraine). No one wants their children to die fighting a useless war, but only half feel the same about their enemies' children. And most agree that all that money is better spent on things that will improve the lives of the people wherever they live.
"The people of the West Bank are abused by the settlers, but the Palestinians have been terribly led for decades, and their leadership corrupt."
This tells me a lot about the worldview you projected on the situation and the fact that you are in fact profundly pro-israel and profundly dismissive of Palestinian rights and dignity.
There is so much to say about this sentence that is often trotted around as some sort of virtue signaling aka "look I'm a good guy I even said the word "palestinian"".
A. The people of the West Bank are abused by the settlers AND oppressed by the IDF military and Israel as a whole. 40 % of adults in the west bank have at least once spent time in prison, most of the time uncharged. This is not the work of "the settlers", is it ? it's a system, a deeply, southerner supremacist system that has evolved over decades to keep Palestinians in their place as submissive underlings. And it works.
B : "never say BUT", remember ? the fact that "Palestinians have been terribly led for decades, and their leadership corrupt", whether true or not, is irrelevant. Repeat : IRRELEVANT. Palestinians are humans. Humans have rights. Universal rights. Among those rights is the right to not be occupied and colonized, by *anyone*. Palestinians could be the most despicable people on earth which they absolutely aren't, there is nothing they could be or do that would be ok to put after a "but and a sentence mentioning that their rights are infringed. *Nothing*. The best proof being that Israelis have been terribly led for decades and their leadership is corrupted and they are not occupied and colonized.
C : whatever happens next, be sure of one thing : Palestinians as a people are damaged. For generations. Obviously, Gazans will need generations to move on from the trauma of the genocide. But West bankers and east jerusalemites too, are in a very bad shape. They have been maintained in criminal submission, humiliation, oppression for 4 generations now. So they will need generations to heal. And the world owes them help, and Israel owes help and tolerance for their trauma. Israelis are traumatized too ? yes, of course. But they did choose this. They chose the colonization and racial supremacism and they chose the outcome. They chose this war, because colonization can't be anything else than a war. Plus they have been helped a lot already. In the tremendous pile of money and soft power the West deversed on them, there must be amply enough to deal with Israel's self created trauma, isn't it ?
So somewhere in the future, there will need to be a vast marshall plan to spend on Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, paid by israeli and american and european money, while the help to Israel dries up.
PS : my take on the situation would be 100% different if Israel had chosen to just occupy, not colonize, Palestine in 1967. The colonization is the damning part. No amount of "it's for security" BS will ever whitewash this. Colonization is nothing else than armed robbery, and supremacism.
Corruption And Nazi Republicans
Let's say out loud what isn't stated Anytime one wants to belly ache about the government it falls on the head of Cheeto And since he has such a big head the belly aching stays on his head
But the issue is that all the government dysfunction that has led to Cheeto’s lowest polling on all governance issues is at the feet of ALL Nazi Republicans not just on their titular head The Nazi Republicans are completely complicit in the corruption taking place in Washington, unwilling to put guardrails up on an out of control executive branch The party of “law and order” is anything but confronting lawlessness They have lost their moral compass
So it's not enough to complain about Cheeto It's time for accountability of the Nazi Republicans that are involved in the Cheeto organized crime family and the blatant corruption in government Of course the solution is to vote these corrupt politicians out of office
Yes. This is my problem with Jay Shapiro asking "Why are there so many Jews in the Epstein files?" There are so many Jews in the Epstein files because Epstein was a Jewish supremacist and planned it that way. The much more interesting question (which he raised and hen dropped) is why the Epstein files haven't led to a huge outpouring of antisemitism.
I wonder - is right-wing hostility to Jews AND Muslims so different from the Klan's targeting of groups beyond Black Americans? That is, Jews, Catholics, Italians... Is current antipathy to Jews and Muslims not a part of America's history of hostility towards the "Other"??
About the class you give I find it an interesting experiment and as usual my mind went searching for caveats (innate developmental or trained habit of mine, gets rambly, exhausting and even annoying at times)
And there I read that you also put some room for that
So I went searching with my own recent experience that I am not very happy with or proud. Where the amount of distance between my current understanding of things and the amount of my perceived worldview and emotional moral compass not sharing much common ground where I subjectively feel that I did lots of work myself of cognitive or other type of empathy based moral ruminations self check and all
Using my caveat seeking inner engine as I breath
That almost triggered me at each hasbara smelling argument thst seemed like a sisiphean task to have to deal with in a discussion with someone I value enough to have been in a prison of discourse and emotional overload of some kind
Thst the work of self check felt perhaps in error to have been done only by me
And the moral ground emotional signals became too loud
Thst I could not see n a single discussion not written exchanged which offers a mirror as I write but real time real voice where emotions are on display and reflection is hard to dialog with above certain level of distance perception.
Single mind task to bridge calmly too far a distance too hard. Some kind of despair of not being able to manifest my own past ruminations having tried to see many angles of moral reasoning for possibly different subjectivities or perception trajectories or inner worldview evolution
I am not necessarily the good guy here but there can be two persons limitations I bridging a distance while in the premises
And this was not even really enemy. Although one wonders sometimes what is?