Our Zoom call this week will be at the usual time: Friday at Noon EST.
Our guest will be Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi, America’s most eminent historian of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian struggle. We’ll talk about this latest iteration of what he’s called “The Hundred Years' War on Palestine”— what’s new and what’s old since October 7. We’ll talk about where the Palestinian national movement goes from here, why Palestinian freedom has become a defining issue for progressive activists and what the crackdown on that activism means for America’s universities.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday 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.
This Friday’s call will also be open to Jewish Currents members. Currents members will gain access to my Friday Zoom calls roughly once a month.
Sources Cited in this Video
Mairav Zonszein on why some families of Israeli hostages support a cease-fire. In my video, I accidentally called her the ICG’s representative in Gaza. I meant to say Israel.
Former Mossad head Tamir Pardo, former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert call for releasing Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages.
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.)
A friend who disagrees with my views on Israel-Palestine says that despite the disclaimer above, I rarely share writing that defends Israel’s policies. Fair enough. Here’s an essay by Michael Walzer that argues that destroying Hamas is a moral necessity.
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane talks to two Biden administration staffers organizing from the inside against Biden’s support for this war.
Why South Africans care so much about Palestinian freedom.
Nimer Sultany on how the genocide case at the International Court of Justice pitsthe global north against the global south.Nimer Sultany on how the genocide case at the International Court of Justice pits the global north against the global south.
Fadi Quran on why this war is destroying Israel’s image of military invincibility across the Middle East.
I’ll be speaking about Israel, Gaza and the US debate about the war at the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke on January 16 and at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School on January 25.
See you on Friday at Noon,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the Israeli hostages who are in Gaza because we’ve reached the 100-day mark of their captivity. And in Jewish communities there have been a series of events around that 100-day mark. And watching these events for the hostages, what strikes me is that the organizations that are organizing these events, and have been organizing throughout these 100 days to keep the focus on the hostages and to demand their release, are also generally organizations that support the war. And emotionally, that makes a lot of sense because I think in a period of agony and grief and pain like this, there’s a desire for Jewish solidarity, which I feel as well. I understand.
And so, the impetus for solidarity is to say: a) solidarity with the hostages, so demanding their release; and b) solidarity with the state of Israel itself, and therefore supporting its policies—in this case, the policies of war. Emotionally, I understand why these two things go together. But it seems to me that actually, analytically, it makes no sense whatsoever. Which is to say, if you actually care passionately about getting as many of the hostages as possible released alive, you should be adamantly opposed to this war because the imperatives of continuing the war and the imperatives of getting the hostages out—as many of them as possible alive—are in direct contradiction. And let me just try to explain why I think they are.
So, first of all, one of the things that I think has become clear over these several months is that Israel’s military force in Gaza is not leading to the rescue of Israeli hostages. There may have been one person who was rescued very early on, but Israel has not since then rescued any hostages despite having all of these soldiers there. So, that might have been considered to be one potential benefit from the point of view of saving hostages of this war. It’s not. Secondly, there was an argument that we used to hear a lot, which was that the military pressure that Israel was putting on Hamas was going to lead Hamas to kind of come to the table on better terms to release a lot more of the hostages. Well, that seems to me it’s pretty frankly disproven. We’ve now gone quite a long time since the hostage exchange earlier in the war. And Hamas’ terms are not getting better. They’re actually getting tougher. So, the military pressure is not actually making it easier to get these hostages released through negotiation.
And thirdly, and this is perhaps the most obvious, but I feel like it’s somehow not mentioned that much, is it that the bombs that Israel is dropping in Gaza—and the denial of food, water, fuel, the things that are leading to starvation and to public health catastrophe in Gaza—these don’t only endanger the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, they endanger the lives of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Mairav Zonszein, my friend who’s a very gifted journalist, who’s also the International Crisis Group representative in Gaza, has an op-ed in the New York Times recently making exactly this point that she notes that some of the hostages who have been released from Gaza have said that among the things that terrified them while they were there were the Israeli bombs that were dropping all around them. They were terrified. They were probably also terrified for good reason of their Hamas captors, but they were also terrified like everybody else in Gaza of being killed by this massive destruction that Israel was raining on Gaza. And so, that’s another very obvious way in which the prosecution of the war endangers the lives of the hostages.
And I think that’s why—this is the point that Mairav makes—in the United States that the focusing on the hostages and supporting the war seem to go hand in hand, [but] that actually in Israel to focus on the hostages is much more of an anti-war position. That many of the hostage families have now come forward and said we want the government to be willing to do whatever it takes to release our relatives, our family members, even if that means ending the war because Hamas does seem, from the reporting, like it said that one of the things it would demand for release of the hostages is a ceasefire.
Now, the argument against that, of course, is that Israel will then have had a ceasefire without destroying Hamas, so it will not have achieved its goals. But that really is only a concession if you believe that the goal was achievable to begin with—the goal of destroying Hamas. Now, I think Israel could probably have deposed Hamas from power in Gaza already. I think that it could do that even under, you know, even with a ceasefire that happened tomorrow. But the argument against stopping the war is that you will not have destroyed Hamas. But I want to quote a former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who makes this point very bluntly. He says, ‘the odds of achieving the complete elimination of Hamas were nil from the moment that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the chief goal of the war.’ Which is to say, yes, you’re giving up on the idea of destroying Hamas by negotiating a ceasefire that’s part of a hostage release, but that was not a realistic goal to begin with.
Another argument against this would be that releasing the hostages would require not only a ceasefire but very likely the release of a large number of Palestinian prisoners—Israel has 7,000 Palestinians in prison—maybe as many as all of them. And so, people will understandably say, well, look what happened when Israel released 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to get abducted soldier Gilad Shalit back a number of years ago. Many of those soldiers took up arms against Israel, and indeed some of them are key figures in the Hamas October 7th attack. So, how could Israel do that again?
But it seems to me, the critical point is that yes, if you do this deal and release all these prisoners, and then maintain an Israeli policy which is to deny Palestinians basic freedom in perpetuity, to maintain Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and control over Gaza as far as the eye can see, yes, then it’s very, very likely that many of these people will come back and pick up arms. But if you thought about this prisoner release, and this prisoner deal for the hostages, and a ceasefire, as part of the beginnings of a political strategy that gave Palestinians a horizon for freedom, then it might be less likely that some of those folks would take up arms because I think historically Palestinians have been less inclined to use armed resistance at times when they had a greater degree of hope that there was a horizon for Palestinian freedom and self-determination.
And this, I think, is what former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon has been talking about. He’s one of a number of former top Israeli officials now who are arguing for some kind of swap of Palestinian prisoners for hostages, among them former Mossad Head Tamir Pardo. But Ayalon makes the specific point that he would want Marwan Barghouti to be one of the prisoners that Israel released as part of such a deal. Marwan Barghouti is the most famous Palestinian prisoner. And what Ami Ayalon is getting at is not just a hostage-for-prisoner exchange, but doing so in the context of an effort to revive the Palestinian Liberation Organization as a legitimate and functional body, and potentially that becoming the basis for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
I think for such an effort to have any chance of success, Israel would have to take dramatic steps to show Palestinians that it is serious, as it has not been for a very, very long time, about negotiations with Palestinians towards the horizon for Palestinian freedom, whether that was in a separate Palestinian state or in some kind of integrated one state. So, for instance, one thing Israel could do would be to start to remove settlements deep in the West Bank, particularly those from which settler violence is terrorizing Palestinians. Another would be to declare publicly that there will be no normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, absent the blessing of a legitimate Palestinian leadership. These things, it seems to me, would change the political climate in such a way that the consequences of releasing Palestinian prisoners would be somewhat different. Now, I don’t think these things are very likely to happen at all. But I think this is the path that would be most likely to save as many of the hostages as possible.
And one of the terrible ironies, it seems to me, of the moment we’re in now is that the Israeli hostages in Gaza and the Palestinians in Gaza have something very fundamental in common: and that is that they’re not actually most of them from Gaza. The Israelis were abducted and taken to Gaza on October 7th. But most of the Palestinians in Gaza are not from Gaza either. Most of them come from families that were expelled or who fled in fear during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. And now, all of them are in terrible, terrible danger because of this war. And it seems to me that we should have a united desire for all of them to be safe, to end the war that is endangering all of their lives. And beyond that, to see the moral imperative of the right of all of them to return safely to the places from which they were forcibly taken or expelled. And so, that means that the Israeli hostages should be allowed to return safely to the places that they were from, but also in the longer term, in this political horizon that I hope could emerge, that the Palestinians from Gaza who are not from Gaza, they should also have the right to go back to the places that their families are from. That the right to be safe, and the right to live in the place that you were from, rather than being forcibly evicted from that place, that that’s a right that both Israeli Jews and Palestinians have. And that that’s something that we need to fight for for all of the people in Gaza: the Palestinians in Gaza and the Israelis in Gaza, all of whom today are in a form of captivity.
