Our Zoom call this week will be at the regular time: Friday at Noon EST. (I’ve decided to stop mentioning Friday’s guest at the beginning of these Monday videos.)
Our guest will be Ghassan Abu-Sittah, an award-winning Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon based in London. Professor Abu-Sittah is also a Palestinian who travelled to Gaza to perform surgeries during Israel’s recent bombardment. His Twitter/X feed has been a harrowing chronicle of what it’s like to work as a doctor in those horrifying conditions. I’ll ask him what he saw in Gaza.
As usual, 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 Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
While October 7 and its catastrophic aftermath may have produced greater anger at Hamas in Gaza, the group’s ability to get prisoners released appears to be strengthening it in the West Bank.
Nathan Thrall’s book, The Only Language They Understand.
When Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad admitted defeat.
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane writes about the effort to ban Students for Justice in Palestine on campus.
Israelis and Palestinians returning home.
If you think Israel’s attack on Gaza will bring it security, watch this video.
In an interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Ben Cardin tries to reconcile his support for human rights with his opposition to conditioning aid to Israel.
New Yorkers flock to support a halal street vendor who endured racist harassment.
When Palestinians and other Arabic speakers call their dead “martyrs,” what do they mean?
Last week, I talked about the Gaza war and the Anti-Defamation League with Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC. I also recorded a podcast interview for the Review of Democracy.
See you on Friday at Noon,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, when it comes to Israel-Palestine, this is probably the first moment of joy that there’s been since October 7th. And the joy is watching the Israelis who’ve been released, the hostages, and also watching Palestinians who’ve been released go free and reunite with their families. And it’s just incredibly powerful and moving to watch. But, of course, it comes against the backdrop of this ongoing immense tragedy: the tragedy and immorality of Hamas continuing to hold other people who they should release, all of them immediately, unconditionally; and separately, the tragedy of Israel holding Palestinians in administrative detention without trial, maintaining a whole military court system that fundamentally violates the most basic notions of due process; the tragedy of the fact that so many Israelis were killed on October 7th; and the tragedy of the fact that so many Palestinians have been killed and their homes have been destroyed and, tragically, that it seems likely that more will if Israel resumes its attack.
But there’s another tragedy to what’s happening, which is interconnected with the release of the hostages and the joy that I wanted to focus on for a second. And that tragedy is, in releasing some of these Palestinian prisoners, Hamas is growing politically stronger. Maybe not politically stronger in Gaza. Khalil Sayegh, who was my guest a couple weeks ago, and others have suggested there may be actually resentment in Gaza because of the unbelievable destruction that Israel has done that was a response to Hamas’s horrific attack on October 7th. But certainly in the West Bank, it appears anecdotally, just looking at what people are chanting in the streets, and what people are saying with these prisoner returns, that they give Hamas credit. They give Hamas credit for fighting, even though it fought in a terribly immoral, unethical, evil way. And also, they give Hamas credit for getting results, for getting Palestinian prisoners released. The issue of Palestinian prisoners is a huge issue in Palestinian society because Israel has imprisoned so many Palestinians for such a long time. Again, very frequently, you know, in the West Bank under military law, in cases where they had no actual real due process.
And so, the tragedy of this is that this prisoner release strengthens Hamas. And it didn’t have to be this way. This is what Israel has done again and again and again, which is that it has actually given Palestinians more concessions when they have responded with violence, even violence against civilians that violates all the rules of war than it has when is when Palestinians have responded ethically, nonviolently. Nathan Thrall noticed this in a book he wrote a few years ago called The Only Language They Understand. This was his basic thesis that contrary to what Israel says, what Israel actually does is that it gives more Palestinians concessions when they respond violently than when they respond nonviolently. And there are many examples of this, but the Gilad Shalit deal, right? The fact that after Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier, was taken prisoner by Hamas, that Hamas managed to get in exchange for him more than a thousand prisoners released. The fact that it was after the murderous Second Intifada, that with suicide bombings that Ariel Sharon withdrew Israeli settlements from Gaza, even though Israel kept Gaza under blockade. The fact that Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon after Hezbollah militarily resisted. Compare that, right, those concessions to what has been achieved by the Palestinians who have used nonviolence or ethical resistance, right? Because people are always saying when are the Palestinians going to produce Gandhis? Well, the truth is when Palestinians produce Gandhis, they get nothing from it, from either Israel or Israel’s supporters in the United States and the rest of the world, right? When Palestinian tried to go to the United Nations, when they tried to go to the International Criminal Court, when they’ve tried to call for boycotts, disinvestments, and sanctions. Again, you don’t have to support every single one of these efforts, right, but it’s worth recognizing that when you defeat, and even criminalize, these efforts again and again and again, you are sending a message.
Even when Palestinians have essentially collaborated with Israel, done security cooperation that allows Israel to make it easier for Israel to control the West Bank and control Palestinians at lower cost, they did that precisely with the bet—Mahmoud Abbas and also Salam Fayyad, his prime minister for a while—that this would reassure Israel and bring them closer to a Palestinian state. Did it do that? No. It’s the opposite. It moved them further from a Palestinian state. And I want to quote Salam Fayyad from 2013. Remember, Salam Fayyad was the Palestinian Prime Minister that Israelis and establishment Jews around the world loved. He was the best Palestinian politician from their point of view to ever come along because he was so moderate. He was fighting corruption. He was working hand in glove with Israel to make sure there was no violence against Israelis. This is what he said as he was leaving office to Roger Cohen of the New York Times, talking about the fact that he had not managed to stop settlement growth in the West Bank for even a single day. He said, ‘we have sustained a doctrinal defeat. We have not delivered. I represent the address for failure. Our people question whether the P.A.’—the Palestinian Authority—‘can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.’ It’s been the same story. When Palestinians, when people in Gaza, tried the Great March of Return, yes, it wasn’t entirely non-violent, but it was largely nonviolent. What did they get? Did they get any prisoners released from that? Did they get any concessions from that? No, they got thousands of people maimed by Israeli sharpshooters, right? They got less than what Hamas did with this evil attack on October 7th.
And what frustrates me so much about establishment Jewish discourse—and so much American political discourse—is it doesn’t recognize that what Israel and the United States do has an impact on Palestinian behavior. It’s like the Palestinians are this kind of unchanging monolith evil mass like Amalek, right, this figure of evil from the Bible that Netanyahu says. Or, if there’s any recognition that Palestinians might respond, it’s only that they respond to Israeli force, right, that they are these kind of dumb beasts that you basically just hit them and hit them and then they get so scared that they respond in some Pavlovian way. There’s not a recognition, right, that Palestinians are political actors who want desperately to have freedom as all people would. And look at how Israel and America respond to various tactics they use, and then shift course accordingly, as any group of human beings would do in their circumstance, right? And in those circumstances when you shut down and defeat avenues of ethical resistance, you empower people like Hamas who use unethical resistance. And then when you reward them now—I’m not against the prisoner swap, we had to get those hostages out; some of those Palestinians, many of them deserve to be free—but you’ve gotten yourself in this cycle in which you’re then doubling down on basically rewarding unethical resistance and essentially weakening people who believe in ethical resistance.
And the Biden administration deserves a lot of blame for this, you know. I will vote for Joe Biden. He at least believes in fighting climate change. He’s not an existential threat to American democracy. He supports abortion rights. I will vote for him. But I’m not going to lie about what he did. That’s not the role of political commentators and journalists to lie for people just because they’re better than the alternative. And the truth is that Joe Biden bears a lot of blame for this continuing pattern of defeating ethical Palestinian resistance and making it easier for Hamas to make the argument that the Palestinians get better results when they kill Israelis, right? And Biden did this by never using America’s leverage with its $3.8 billion in military aid or its protection of Israel in international forums; never using that to stop settlement growth even as it ramped up under this radical government by basically opposing Palestinian elections that could have produced a more legitimate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank; and sticking with this kind of corrupt, discredited Mahmoud Abbas by moving towards a Saudi normalization deal that essentially was going to sideline Palestinians except maybe with the barest of fig leaves. The Biden administration decided it didn’t want to deal with the politics of Washington that would have been required to do anything to try to create a horizon for Palestinian freedom and to show Palestinians that ethical resistance might actually succeed. Of course, the politics was shaped by establishment American Jewish organizations and others that virulently opposed any concessions to Palestinians in response to nonviolent and ethical Palestinian efforts to create freedom. And those are the conditions that made it easier for Hamas to act on October 7th.
Of course, they don’t justify what Hamas did. Hamas bears the moral responsibility for the people it killed, period. But it made it easier for Hamas to do that. And now Israelis are further going down this same very pattern by again showing Palestinians that it is this kind of immoral resistance that gets better results. And the lesson of October 7th has to be that the United States has to pursue a policy that shows Palestinians that they can move towards a horizon for freedom by presenting a vision of mutual coexistence and by fighting for freedom in ways that respect international law and basic morality. And the tragedy is that the people who say they hate Hamas the most have actually been doing the opposite. And that is part of the reason that this moment, although it’s a moment of some joy at least for those families, it’s also a moment of ongoing tragedy. Our guest this Friday at noon is going to be Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British surgeon who was working in Gaza during this horrifying past few weeks. His Twitter feed was truly just extraordinary and very painful to listen to talking about what he saw, and he’s going to talk about his experience in Gaza. That’s Friday at noon for paid subscribers.
