Our call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at 11 AM EST (not 11:30 as I said on last Friday’s call).
Our guest will be Barak Ravid, who covers Israel for Axios. Barak has established himself as the reporter most knowledgeable about the relationship between the Biden and Netanyahu governments. Last March, in a joint press-conference with Yair Lapid, Secretary of State Antony Blinken commented to him that “I often discover what I’m thinking or doing before I even know that I’m thinking it or doing it by reading you.”
I want to ask Barak whether Biden dislikes Netanyahu as much as previous US presidents have, about what reassurances (if any) Netanyahu has given the US about the actions of his new government, and about whether there’s anything Netanyahu could do that would make the Biden administration reconsider its policy of unconditional military and diplomatic support for Israel.
As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week.
Sources Cited in this Video
The letter from Doug Elmendorf, Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, apologizing for denying Ken Roth’s fellowship.
Anti-Defamation League Director Jonathan Greenblatt’s column calling the claims that pro-Israel donors influenced the Kennedy school antisemitic.
The 1975 lecture at Portland State University where Toni Morrison declared, “the function, the very serious function of racism…is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.”
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe), the editors meditate on Shabbat and the movement against the tyranny of work.
In Haaretz, Gideon Levy explains why he won’t join the protests in Tel Aviv against Israel’s new government.
On Sunday, January 29 at 7 PM EST, I’ll be speaking on a Zoom panel sponsored by the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church entitled, “Apartheid and Anti-Semitism: A Conversation Between Two Words.”
On Thursday, February 2 at 5:30 EST, I’ll be speaking on an in-person panel at the University of Pennsylvania entitled, “Middle East Authoritarianism and the Western Academy.”
On Thursday, February 16 at 7 PM EST, I’ll be speaking in person at Temple Israel of New Rochelle at an event entitled, “A Country for All its Citizens.”
Correction: In last week’s video I said that Edwin Montagu was the only Jew in the British cabinet during World War I. That’s incorrect. While Montagu was the only Jew in the cabinet when the Balfour Declaration was issued in November 1917, Herbert Samuel had served in the cabinet from 1915-1916, before later becoming Britain’s first high commissioner in Palestine.
See you on Thursday at 11,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Our call this week will be on Thursday at 11am ET, Thursday at 11am ET, not the usual Friday. And our guest on Zoom will be Barak Ravid, longtime Israeli reporter, now reporting for Axios. And Ravid has really emerged in the last few years as the most well-sourced, most plugged in reporter on the US-Israel relationship—the person I think who probably knows more about the relationship between the Biden administration and the new Israeli government than any other reporter, either in the US or Israel. And so, the kind of perfect person to talk to about what that relationship was really like. Is the Biden administration, you know, insisting on any red lines vis-à-vis Netanyahu? And is Netanyahu’s government making any promises about things that it will not do with the Biden administration? What’s happening behind closed doors? Can Biden and Netanyahu actually really be friends as they claim to be? So, that’ll be Thursday at 11 ET. And, of course, that’s for paid subscribers. And then we’ll send the video out to those folks the following week.
I wanted to say something about the Ken Roth affair at the Harvard Kennedy School of government, which has now played itself out. As I’m sure many of you know, the Dean of the Kennedy School, Doug Elmendorf, wrote essentially a letter of apology, apologizing for not giving Ken Roth, a long-time head of Human Rights Watch, a fellowship at the Kennedy School. And so now he will have that fellowship. And so, many have understandably seen this as a kind of a victory—maybe a rare victory—against the cancel culture that is quite prevalent among those who support Palestinian rights. And it suggested that perhaps this could be a really valuable turning point, and that maybe the climate for Palestinians and their supporters might begin to change. Of course, it’s much easier for Ken Roth, who’s a very high-profile person and not Palestinian himself, to be un-cancelled. But some have expressed hope that perhaps this may spread to the many more vulnerable people in universities, particularly Palestinians and Palestinian Americans, who often face the threat of cancellation, firing, not getting hired because of their support of Palestinian rights.
But I wanted to suggest a different and somewhat less happy way of looking at this story. And it’s this. We’ve been talking for the last several weeks about the question of Ken Roth getting his job at the Kennedy School, this fellowship, which is really not what we should be talking about. What matters—Ken Roth may be a very admirable guy—but what matters is really not Ken Roth. What matters is the work that Human Rights Watch has done. And what the work that Human Rights Watch has done matters because it’s documenting what’s actually happening to Palestinians on the ground. What’s valuable about Human Rights Watch is they are documenting the systematic oppression of Palestinians—a systematic oppression whose very tangible effects day in and day out, as we can see in the ongoing demolitions of buildings in Masafer Yatta, where thousands of people will be rendered homeless, the Palestinians who keep dying day in and day out as Israel continues these raids into the West Bank. Those are the things that we should be talking about, because those are the lived realities where human beings are being denied the basic rights that would allow them to have a free and decent life. And what instead we end up talking about are these things which are very separate from those, right? We end up talking about what it was that happened at the Kennedy School that prevented Ken Roth from getting this fellowship. And then we get, on top of that, the head of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, saying that it’s antisemitic to suggest that pro-Israel donors may have played a role in Ken Roth not getting his fellowship. And so, what you see is that, continually, these conversations—and this is I think not an accident, I think this is really by design—this is one of the main techniques the defenders of the Israeli government continually use. They turn the conversation from the substance of what Human Rights Watch is doing to the question of what are the motivations of people making these criticisms, of course often with the implied claim that they may be antisemitic, or the discourse around Israel in the United States and the West may be antisemitic. So, we end up talking about whether it’s antisemitic for The Nation to report on the possibility that pro-Israel donors may have played a role in Ken Roth not getting a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School, rather than talking about the things that Human Rights Watch has been documenting, which are the daily oppression of Palestinians.
And watching this dynamic play out, it reminded me of a quote that I recently came across by the great African American author, Tony Morrison. I came across it in an essay by the Israeli American historian, Alon Confino, whose work I really admire, teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And Alon quotes Tony Morrison, and Tony Morrison writes this. She writes—this is from a lecture she gave in 1975—she writes: ‘the function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.’ And it seems to me that Morrison is capturing something about what’s playing out in the debate over Israel-Palestine today. The work is the struggle for Palestinian freedom. The work is to face the fact that Palestinians are being denied the most basic of rights, and to struggle to change that unjust reality. That’s the work.
But what anti-Palestinian racism does—this kind of culture of dehumanization, this kind of almost unstated invisible assumption that Palestinian rights and lives are not that important—is that it continually turns the conversation away from that. It serves as a distraction. So, we end up talking about what was Doug Elmendorf’s motivations? Who was wielding influence at the Kennedy School? Is it antisemitic to speculate about the idea that Elmendorf might have been influenced or worried about pro-Israel donors? Is that antisemitic? All of these things are a distraction from the conversation that we really should be having, the one that is really urgent because it has to do with whether people can live decent basic lives, and that’s the conversation about what’s happening on the ground. And so I think the challenge for those of us—and I include myself in this that I really struggle with—on questions of like, you know, Ken Roth, or whether it’s the episode at Berkeley Law School about Zionist speakers—we also did an episode about that—is how do you engage with those questions while also recognizing that those debates are really so often a distraction, a distraction rooted in anti-Palestinian racism, which distracts us from focusing on the thing that we should be focusing on, which is not what’s happening at Harvard’s Kennedy School and not what’s happening at Berkeley, but what’s happening in a place like Masafer Yatta. And how do we be conscious of the fact that there are institutions whose very work is the work of distraction, the work of continually turning the conversation away from those lived realities of people who live without basic rights, because those things are fundamentally indefensible? And it’s only by distracting and turning the conversation to something else that you can actually find a way of essentially defending the indefensible.
Again, our conversation this week will be on Thursday at 11 ET with Barak Ravid of Axios. I hope some of you who are not subscribers would consider becoming subscribers. I think you’ll enjoy it, and you’ll also have access to all of the library of Zoom calls that we’ve done over the last couple of years. Take care.
The Politics of Distraction