Our call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at a special time: Wednesday at 11 AM Eastern.
Our guest will be the Gaza-born journalist Muhammad Shehada, whose writing has been indispensable over the last year. I cited him in a recent essay in The Guardian, which noted that some of the most prescient predictions about what would happen if Israel invaded Gaza came from Palestinian commentators whose views were almost totally ignored in the US media. Here’s a fascinating piece Muhammad wrote recently about the way people in Gaza think about October 7. And his thoughts on the toll the last year has taken on him personally.
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 Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
There will be no zoom call on the week of Monday, October 21.
My New Book
Click image to preorder now.
Knopf will publish my new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, on January 28 of next year. I hope the book will contribute, in some small way, to changing the conversation among Jews about what is being done in our name. But I’m keenly aware of two things: First, Jewish voices like mine usually get more attention in the US than do Palestinian ones. Second, while I’m publishing my book, Palestinians in Gaza— and beyond— are suffering in unspeakable ways.
So, while I hope you consider buying my book, I hope you also consider buying a book by a Palestinian author. As the weeks go by, I’ll offer different suggestions, but readers should feel free to email me their own. I’ve been deeply moved by Fida Jiryis, Stranger in My Own Land, which charts her family’s painful and surreal journey, from Mandatory Palestine to Lebanon to Israel. It’s a book I wish I could make required reading in all the places, in America, Israel, and beyond, where Palestinians are routinely dehumanized.
I also hope you’ll consider donating to a charity that works in Gaza. One good option is Medical Aid to Palestinians. If you have other suggestions, please send them.
Sources Cited in this Video
The Atlantic’s review of The Message.
A transcript of Ezra Klein’s interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Jordan’s Foreign Minister refutes the claim that the Arab governments won’t accept Israel.
The Arab Peace Initiative, which was endorsed by the 57 members of states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and amended in 2013 to include land swaps.
The legislation calling for equality proposed in 2018 by Palestinian members of the Knesset.
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.)
On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Noura Erakat, Fadi Quran, Dana El Kurd, Amjad Iraqi, and Ahmed Moor discuss the Palestinian liberation struggle.
What American doctors, nurses, and paramedics saw in Gaza.
Laura Kraftowitz on learning Arabic in Gaza.
After years covering his native Gaza, Mohammed Mhawish has launched a newsletter. Check it out.
I spoke recently to The Jewish Council of Australia, New York One and Slate.
Upcoming Talks
On October 29, I’ll be speaking at the University of Victoria.
See you on Thursday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. I want to say a couple last things about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, The Message, and all of the controversy that’s been associated with it in the book tour that he’s been on, a couple of things that I think have not gotten the attention they deserve. The first is that one of the things that Coates has been saying as he’s been promoting the book is a very clear affirmation of the value of international law and the value of nonviolence and, particularly, the importance of not using violence that violates international law against civilians, including in reference to what Hamas did on October 7th.
And he’s making a point that I think is really crucially important. This is from his interview with Ezra Klein. He says that he’s come to the feeling that ‘violence is corrupting, that the first thing you end up doing is folks end up killing each other,’ talking about people whose movements become accustomed to using violence against civilians, that that undermines the moral character of a liberation struggle and ultimately can lead to violence even against people on your own side. And he goes on to say ‘there was just no part of my politics at this point in my life that allows me to see a thousand people massacred and say, I don’t know, whatever the excuses are, I don’t have that. And I’m not saying that I really want to drill down on this. I feel like if you lose sight of the value of individual human life, you have lost something.’
I think this is really important. Again, so much of the way his book is being discussed is this kind of like people on the left love him and pro-Israel folks are attacking him. But this message is a bit different than some of what you’re hearing on the kind of pro-Palestine left, or on the student left. Again, I want to be careful because often times people tend to kind of caricature the Palestine solidarity movement. But I think this clear repudiation of violence against civilians, and the statement that violence against civilians is corrupting of a liberation movement itself, is something that Coates is saying clearly that you don’t often hear as clearly from some of the voices in the Palestine solidarity movement and the protests and the rallies and the slogans and all those things that you’ve been seeing over the last year. And I think it’s really, really valuable. And I think it fits with his general humanism, his belief, as he said, in the preciousness of all life and his ability to center that even amidst even when it comes to a struggle that he deeply, deeply identifies with, as he should, which is the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
The second point I want to make about Coates in the debate is that if you look at his critics, famously in that CBS interview, but you just see it all over the place if you look at criticisms of his book. Again and again, people come down to the idea that he doesn’t recognize the complexity of the problem. So, for instance, this is from The Atlantic’s review about the book. It says, ‘his habitual unwillingness just to recognize conflicting perspectives and evidence, even if only to subject them to counterarguments undermines his case. Might it have been worth noting that Israel is surrounded by Arab states and populations committed to its annihilation. That to a great degree, Palestinian leadership, as well as many Palestinian people, share this eliminationist view, which might help explain the forbidding roads and onerous checkpoints.’
So, you see the move here in this Atlantic review, but you see all the time in response to Coates’ view, which is essentially a set of assertions, which basically are designed to say, yes, what Coates saw was bad, but Israel was justified in doing it because the Palestinians and the Arabs have acted so badly, or Iran has acted so badly, and they’re so menacing. And it’s true that Coates doesn’t respond in his book to these set of counterarguments. But what is crucial to remember is that in these set of statements about Coates’ lack of complexity, they very often themselves betray a real lack of understanding of the scholarly evidence and historical record themselves, right. In the guise of complexity, they’re actually offering very frequently a set of kind of propaganda points that actually aren’t very sophisticated and complex at all, right.
So, the claim that Israel is surrounded by Arab states and populations committed to its annihilation, right. This author in The Atlantic just kind of throws that out as if it’s a settled fact. Why doesn’t Coates respond to that? Well, actually, because it’s mostly really not true. First of all, the entire Arab League, endorsed by the Islamic Conference, for decades now has offered to accept Israel’s existence if Israel returns to the 1967 lines. They even later adapted that to include land swaps, and if there’s a ‘just an agreed upon solution to the refugee problem,’ right. The Jordanian foreign minister recently just reiterated this very passionately. So, it’s simply not factually true to say that all of the Arab countries or even any of the Arab countries really are dedicated to Israel’s annihilation when they’ve said, very explicitly, they will accept Israel; they just won’t accept its occupation, and they require that there be some just and agreed upon—by the way, agreed upon presumably involving Israel too, right—agreed upon solution to the refugee question, which is as required by international law, right. So, this supposedly complex critique of Coates’s lack of complexity actually just ignores that altogether, right.
And then, you see, he goes on. He says, ‘to a great degree, Palestinian leadership, as well as many Palestinian people, share this eliminationist view,’ right. You notice, again, the words ‘annihilation’ and ‘eliminationist,’ right, which is, again, so much a feature of the kind of mainstream pro-Israel rhetoric that we may not notice it. What about if a Palestinian wants legal equality, right? In 2018, a bunch of Palestinian members of the Knesset tried to put forward a basic law, which is a law of constitutional level and weight in Israel, saying that this should be a country in which there’s no discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race, that it would be a state for all its citizens rather than a state based on Jewish supremacy over Palestinians.
By this definition, that is an eliminationist view, right. You see, again, that in this attempt to suggest that Coates is not dealing with complexity, you find a very superficial and, I would say, misleading kind of set of discourse around what’s actually happening, such that if a Palestinian says that I want legal equality with Israeli Jews, that makes them an eliminationist or an annihilationist. And the implication clearly is that they just want to kill all of the Israeli Jews, right. So, legal equality is equated with the death or expulsion of Jews, right. And this is kind of the complex perspective that Coates is not grappling with.
Now, again, one can argue back and forth whether Coates should have written a book in which he had talked to settlers, and in which he had tried to grapple with the reasons for their perspective, or the reasons that other Israelis might hold the perspectives they had, and whether it would have been worth him kind of responding in some of the ways that I’m responding here. But the point I want to make is that a lot of the people who were lording their supposed sophistication and complexity over Coates in their responses are actually showing at the very time that they actually don’t have a very sophisticated or deep understanding of this. And in some ways, that is actually part of what Coates is saying, which is that the mainstream establishment conversation about this in the American press, because Palestinians are so absent, actually just isn’t often very well informed at all. And so, the people who claim that Coates doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about actually betray often in their criticisms that they don’t really necessarily understand what they’re talking about all that well themselves.
Two Final Thoughts about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Book