To Save the Remaining Hostages, End the War Now

Thoughts on the horrifying news that six hostages are dead.

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Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern

Our guests will be Efrat Machikawa and Boaz Atzili. Efrat’s uncle, Gadi Mozes, was abducted on October 7. Boaz's cousin, Aviv Atzili, was killed on October 7th in Kibbutz Nir Oz and his body was taken to Gaza. Aviv's wife, Liat Atzili, was released in the ceasefire and hostages deal in November. Both Efrat and Boaz are activists for a ceasefire. I’m grateful to them for taking the time to talk to me in this agonizing and critical moment.

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Sources Cited in this Video

The six hostages— Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino— who were found dead this weekend.

Most Israelis want a ceasefire.

America’s establishment Jewish organizations aren’t calling for one.

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!) Jonathan Shamir writes about “The Zone of Interest.” 

Hala Alyan on Kamala Harris’ failure.

How the struggle for Palestinian freedom is dividing the American labor movement.

Please consider supporting a scholarship fund for displaced students in Gaza who want to study in the US.

Reader Responses

My video last week criticizing a Brooklyn bookstore for denying a “Zionist” rabbi the right to speak sparked some emails criticizing my position. With the emailers’ permission, I’m excerpting some of them here:

From Ahmed Moor, co-author of After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine.

Consider replacing the word Zionist with White Supremacist in the text you shared, and I think you'll see why the idea of working with Zionists is so problematic. Some points:

1. Asking a Black person to work alongside someone who believes that they are racially superior, and has worked to maintain racist systems, diminishes the dignity of the black person - as if they're required to bring their abuser along for their own good.

2. To say that Blacks were excluded for a long time from the institutions of American life and therefore, it would be wrong to exclude white supremacists, implies a false equivalence.

3. Bear-hugging white supremacists doesn't work - their whole worldview is predicated on the inferiority of Blacks. Changing minds is hard work which should be rooted in principles, not tactics.

4. White supremacists may argue that they're really white nationalists, and they love the idea of existing in white communities and sending their kids to white schools - nothing against anyone else - and do you know how many whites have won Nobel prizes? The argument is... not a nice one.

5. Finally, on tactics: Zionists can go out and learn about the world through the internet - they don't need the hand-holding and gentleness of liberal consideration in the midst of their genocide. And I don't think the movement for Palestinian rights loses much by it. If people can't figure out why white supremacy is bad, and whether their own brand of supremacy is bad, they may not be worth engaging with in the first place. It's a tautological argument for sure, but correct I think.

From Nora Lester Murad, author of I Found Myself in Palestine: Stories of Love and Renewal From Around the Globe.

I agree that Zionists have a right to speak but I do not think anyone has an obligation to platform them, and that distinction is important. I also think that if Zionists want to demonstrate that "Zionism" does not mean Jewish supremacy, then they need to have a lot more public forums about the diverse meanings of Zionism on their own, without involving Palestinians. Non- or anti-Zionists can go to those forums to learn. But I don't think that anyone should expect any airtime to be taken away from Palestinians so that Zionists can try to distance themselves from the actual implementation of Zionism on Palestinians that we're seeing in real time. The fact that person A or B has a different definition of Zionism than the Israeli government doesn't mean much to me. They should stand 1000% with Palestinians and try to reclaim their nomenclature from Israel later if that's important to them. If we are worried about terminology, we ought to be worried about Judaism. The ADL and friends are redefining "Jew" to include Zionism (as you know, NYU) and THIS is a crossing in Jewish history. I'd rather fight for "Jew" to include anti-Zionists than I would to fight for Zionism to mean XY or Z.

I always appreciate people, whatever their perspective, who take the time to write a thoughtful reply to something I say.

See you on Friday,

Peter 

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

On Sunday, we got the terrible news that 6 hostages have been found dead.  Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Ori Danino, Almog Sarusi, and Alexander Lobanov.  May their memories be a blessing. 

The first thing, which I think should be obvious, is that the responsibility for their deaths lies with Hamas, which should never have abducted them in the first place, and that to do so, to abduct, to kill civilians is a war crime. Period. 

And this is why I think it's really important that the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court is going after some of Hamas's top leaders. I do think there's a fundamental difference between people who believe in the justice of the Palestinian freedom struggle, and believe in international law and the rules of war, which means that what Hamas did on October seventh or what Hamas has just done now, are war crimes, and should be considered war crimes, and another group of people on the left, who, in the name of decolonization, seem to have a much more "by any means necessary" vision, one that, in my mind, abdicates the moral responsibility that any movement, any group of people, no matter how brutal their oppression is, is obligated to maintain. And I think that's a really fundamental distinction which has really been underscored on this horrifying day.

I think the other thing to say about this is that it's much more likely that those six Israelis would still be alive if there had been a ceasefire, and both Hamas and the Israeli Government bear blame for the fact that we have not gotten a ceasefire. But it's been really striking and distressing to me that in the United States, in the organized American Jewish community, and indeed among many politicians, that the hostages are invoked again and again and again, by people who want to continue the war, as if supporting the hostages and caring about the hostages is consistent with a pro-war position.

Maybe one might have been able to believe that early on. Although I think it was pretty clear from even the early weeks and months of the war, that Israel had very, very little chance of liberating many hostages by force, and that it was likely to kill a significant number of those hostages. Because when you bomb and starve Gaza, and these Israeli hostages are in Gaza, some of those people are also going to suffer and indeed perish, in addition, of course, to the ones who were killed by Hamas.

And so I think it's been clear from pretty early on that the pro hostage position was a ceasefire. Now I understand that there are Israelis who felt--some of them in Israel were quite honest--that the hostages needed to be subordinated to the goal of destroying Hamas. But as we've gotten further on, it's become more and more obvious that Israel cannot destroy Hamas. I think the number of people who are still really full-throatedly even saying that, is dwindling every week as Israel returns again and again to neighborhoods from which they have supposedly cleared Hamas. But lo and behold, they have to go back, because they're not holding the territory. They're just going in, basically destroying everything. And then, lo and behold, they find that basically Hamas has come back, and that then they have to go back again. So at this point, almost 11 months into the war, to claim that that it is a pro-hostage position to say you support this war when the war is clearly unwinnable.

And it's now painfully obvious that the war has endangered the lives of so many hostages, and liberated only a small number of them, and that the only thing that has gotten a significant number of them out is a negotiation, which in this case, would need to mean a ceasefire.

It's really distressing that there are so many people who still, in the public discourse, can claim that what they care about most is the hostages when they won't call for a ceasefire. And I think that the fundamental problem in the organized American Jewish community is that the default position in the organized American Jewish community, the American Jewish establishment, is to support the position of the Israeli Government.

So in reality, the position of the Israeli government is not a is not a position that is prioritizing the safety of the hostages. It is prioritizing destroying Hamas over the safety of the hostages, which was dubious to begin with, and is now kind of an absurd position, given that Israel can't even destroy Hamas. And Israeli public opinion has clearly now shifted towards wanting to prioritize the return of as many hostages as are still alive, even though that means a ceasefire. That is what most Israelis want. And yet the American Jewish establishment cannot come out in support of even the position that Israelis support, let alone kind of reflect the interests and concerns of Palestinians, because they're wedded to this basic idea that you can't be in fundamental conflict with the Israeli Government. This has been, for a very long time, I think, what's essentially broken about the relationship between the Israeli Government and the organized American Jewish community, which is that the organized American Jewish community doesn't give itself the right to disagree with the Israeli government, not just to support the right of Palestinians to freedom, which they should do, but not even when most Israelis want a different kind of policy. And so I hope now, as Israelis are going out onto the streets en masse, which is reported to be a general strike, that people in the United States, will really reckon with this, and reckon with whether they genuinely want to try to save the lives of as many hostages as possible, or whether they want to stand with this government of Benjamin Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir and all the rest.

I don't think it should be a hard question, and the fact that so far we haven't been able to get to that place in the organized American Jewish community just shows how much the infrastructure of the organized American Jewish community is broken.