Note: I’m sending this out early because the Jewish holiday of Shavuot starts tonight.
Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi 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 our regular time, 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University and author of several recent New York Times op-eds, including “Trump is Selling Jews a Dangerous Lie” and one subtitled “Higher Education Should be Tolerant but Never Neutral.” We’ll talk about the Trump administration’s assault on independent universities, the claim of rampant campus antisemitism and the argument that universities should be neutral on political issues.
There will be no newsletters on Monday, June 9 and 16 and no Zoom calls on Friday, June 13 and 20, as I’ll be on book tour in Britain.
Book Tour in Britain
I’ll be speaking in Oxford on June 12 and London on June 15.
Cited in Today’s Video
Piers Morgan admits Mehdi Hasan was right about Gaza.
Criticism of the novelist Zadie Smith for belatedly calling Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide.
The Babylonian Talmud on repentance.
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 analyzes the American movement for Palestinian freedom in a moment of repression and fear.
Piers Morgan asks Israel’s Ambassador to Britain why she doesn’t know how many children Israel has killed.
Jehad Abusalim on a letter to a Zionist friend, written in 1937.
See you on Friday,
Peter
Transcript
So, I think that over the last week or two, the debate over Israel's assault on Gaza in mainstream Western circles, that that debate has in some fundamental sense ended. What I mean by ended is that it's now very rare to find people with any credibility in kind of mainstream circles vocally arguing that Israel, through continuing its assault on Gaza, can A) destroy Hamas, B) free the hostages, and C) do so without committing massive war crimes, including perhaps genocide. I think the voices that were arguing those three propositions, which were quite strong in mainstream Western circles, political circles, and in media circles, you know, earlier on, have really, really faded. And we've even seen some people publicly apologize and say that they were wrong. Piers Morgan, in a segment he did with Mehdi Hassan, basically said to Mehdi Hassan, you had opposed the war, I had supported the war, but I think now it's turned out that you were right, basically. Zadie Smith, the novelist who initially refused to oppose the war, has now signed a letter with a bunch of, important kind of literary figures in Britain denouncing it.
But unfortunately, the way that the debate is ending in mainstream Western circles is not mostly with actions like Piers Morgan or even Zadie Smith. It's mostly with people who had supported the war, vocally, essentially just not talking about it anymore, kind of turning the conversation somewhere else. So, if you look at high-profile defenders of Israel who credibility and large presences in mainstream Western discourse, what you tend to find is much, much, much more discussion of antisemitism, and a lot of discussion of Iran, but really much less defense of this war as being capable of achieving its aims with an acceptable humanitarian cost. And I think, unfortunately, this is the way that I've noticed over the years, that the debates generally end, at least in the United States, the ones that I've followed, which is to say, debates don't end with one side saying publicly, “you know, we were wrong. We recognize we were wrong.” They end when one side basically just stops talking about the subject and kind of concedes by omission.
Let's think about the debate about gay marriage. Those of us who are old enough will remember that this debate really raged in the 1990s, even into the early 2000s, with strong public voices arguing against it. You don't really see that much, again, in the kind of mainstream American media and political discussion anymore, but it's not like most of those people who were passionately against gay marriage came out and said, “I was wrong.” Mostly, they basically just stopped talking about it and turned their conversation to other things. I think it was similar with Iraq. Most people who supported the Iraq War basically just kind of moved on and quietly crept away from the scene of the catastrophe.
Now, I'm talking about the West. The debate in Israel, I think, is a bit different, because the debate in Israel has this unusual feature to it, which is that most Israeli Jews want to end the war because they want to release hostages. But they also support mass expulsion of Palestinians, i.e. the Trump plan. So, in a way, the pro-war position in Israel now, I think, is not that Israel can free the hostages, and destroy Hamas at acceptable humanitarian cost. It's basically that Israel should free the hostages now, but its long-term goal should still be mass expulsion of Palestinians, because the humanitarian concern isn't that great in the mainstream of Jewish Israelis, unfortunately. But when we talk about the West, in the United States and Europe, I think it's really, really important to encourage people to end this debate in an upfront way, the kind of way that Piers Morgan did, by saying, “You know what, I said something, and it turned out I was wrong.” As opposed to in the much more common way, which is basically to just quietly move away and start talking about other things, and hope that nobody remembers basically what you said a little while ago.
And I think that, to be honest, one of the reasons that people don't publicly go out and say that they were wrong is because people have a tendency to pillory them when they do, right? There's a bit of a tendency to kick people when they're down. They're like, aha, now we've got you, now you admitted you were an idiot, right? And so one of the things I noticed about the response to Zadie Smith's public kind of letter in The Guardian was a lot of people saying, you know, why the hell did it take you so long? Look at these terrible things that you said earlier on. And I mean, I understand that sentiment, especially when it's coming from people on the left, people on the pro-Palestinian left, who are so used to getting kind of beaten up rhetorically and marginalized themselves, and feeling really angry at people who they feel like didn't take a courageous for a thoughtful position early on. And kind of wanted to take this opportunity to now make it clear how wrong those people were, and basically to not want to give them any credit for recognizing something very late that most supporters of Palestinian rights, and of course Palestinians themselves, recognized very early on.
But although that's understandable, I think it's important to resist that tendency, and to encourage people to come out and say that they were wrong. Because when people come out and say that they are wrong publicly, I think it invites them, or sometimes even forces them to actually talk about what their assumptions were, about what their logic was, to think publicly about why they got it wrong in a way that actually can have implications for the positions they take in the future. That that process of public reckoning is valuable, not because you can undo the harm of the position you took in the past, but because it can have a positive impact on the position you take in the future. Right, I mean one of the problems with America's foreign policy debate, for instance, has been that many people who supported military interventions that were disasters, like Iraq, were able to kind of resurface and support military intervention in Iran. John Bolton is like a paradigmatic case of this, right? And because they weren't asked to actually really force themselves to publicly reckon with why they got this first military intervention wrong, it didn't have an impact on how they saw things in the future.
I think it's especially, especialy important that Biden administration officials, that people like Jake Sullivan, that people like Tony Blinken, that other top Biden officials, that they be invited and encouraged to come out publicly and say that they were wrong. As opposed to what I think they seem to be doing now, which is basically just to try to avoid the subject, not do difficult interviews, not go and speak in places where they're going to be challenged on this, because it's super uncomfortable. It is going to be uncomfortable. But I think it's much better for people to say, we would rather you publicly come out and reckon and say why you're wrong, than basically just pretend this didn't happen, because I think that will have an impact on the next Democratic administration. If people like Sullivan and Blinken and others publicly come out and say this, I think that sends a message to the next group of Democratic officials who will probably be, in many cases, you know, their deputies. So, I think that's really valuable.
And, you know, I say this as somebody who has spent a fair amount of my time talking about having been wrong, particularly about the Iraq War, although I've been publicly admitted being wrong about other things. And there have been times when I've been a little annoyed, to be honest, because I know that there were plenty of other people who supported the Iraq War who didn't really talk much about being wrong, and, I think now I notice that not as many people remember what position they held to begin with. People who were, you know, journalists, liberal journalists in particular.
But I think one of the things that has been really valuable for me is that it has given me the opportunity to rethink things in ways that have been really, really valuable, necessary for me and my writing. And in general, I've been very grateful that people, including many people who were right in opposing the Iraq War, have generally been very gracious about how they've received this apology. And I think that's how we should be here. Again, I understand the rage that people feel, you know, given the genocide that is happening in Gaza, but I think these public apologies make it more likely that this genocide will move towards an end, and that, more fundamentally, the structural condition of Israeli impunity that has allowed this genocide to take place will end sooner, which it desperately must.
There is in the Talmud, in Masechet Berachot, this line from Rabbi Abbahu, who says that “In the place where pennitents stand, even the most righteous do not stand.” This is Jewish tradition, one of the reasons that human beings are considered better than angels, because angels don't sin, but human beings do, and therefore have the opportunity to do tshuva, to do repentance. Now, again, the Talmud speaks with many voices. I know that last week I talked about, a passage in the Talmud which said there is no atonement for the sin of Chillul Hashem, so I think, again, one has to recognize that these aren't hard and fast rules. There are perhaps certain things for which, again, there is no atonement. And we don't know, at the end of the day, fundamentally, whether somebody can atone in terms of their own relationship with God, but I think what we can say is that in terms of the public discourse, in terms of bringing us to a place where this horrifying slaughter ends sooner, and in which Israel can never do something like this again, we are much better off if people are encouraged to publicly come out and say they were wrong, and grapple with why they were wrong, so that it influences how they think in the future, than if people do what many, I think, are doing now, which is basically just quietly slinking away from this debate altogether, because they realize that their position has been disproven, but they don't want to say so out loud.
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