Sources cited in this video:
Rashida Tlaib’s speech to American Muslims for Palestine.
The Intercept dissects the dishonesty of the response to it.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946.
Other Stuff:
Last week, Jewish Currents published an open letter to American Jewish intellectuals that Edward Said wrote in 1989 but never sent. I was honored to write a response.
In light of the uprising in Iran, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s devastating response to politicians who wanted him to require the hijab in Egypt.
I had the privilege of moderating a discussion among activists resisting the demolition of the villages of Masafer Yatta.
David Makovsky is a lovely man whose politics are far from mine. Nonetheless, this is a useful horse race analysis of the upcoming Israeli elections.
A fascinating and moving discussion of the struggle of LGBT Orthodox Jews in light of Yeshiva University’s refusal to permit an LGBT club on campus.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, this is Peter Beinart. I’m trying another video again this week. The response to last week’s was pretty positive. I don’t know if people really liked it. Maybe they were just trying to humor me because they felt like, you know, this would take a little bit less time for me. Some folks said that they’d prefer to read, so we’re trying with the transcription. We’ll see if the transcription is of a sufficiently good quality that the people like it again. Please let me know. But I thought I would try it again this week, especially because the holiday’s coming, the Jewish New Year is coming on Sunday night, and I wanted to try to get something out quickly before then.
Before I forget, this Friday, we’ll be talking on our weekly zoom call with the well-known Palestinian pollster, Khalil Shikaki. A really brilliant man, also fascinating family story, given that his brother is one of the key figures in Islamic Jihad. And just in case you think Jews are the only one who have fierce ideological rivalries in differences inside their families, I wanted to talk to him because it seems clear to me from what I’ve been reading that there’s some really significant, important shifts going on in Palestinian politics. A younger generation, more sympathetic to armed struggle, willing to take on the Palestinian Authority, especially in cities like Jenin and Nablus. And I think this is a big story, and I thought he would help us understand.
So, I’m gonna try to make this video a little bit quicker. I wanted to talk about an incident that happened last week, which is the kind of incident that frankly happens so often that you can just become inured to it. But Rashida Tlaib gave a speech in which she said, “you cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel’s apartheid government.” Basically, she said that apartheid and progressive values are not compatible. Now, saying that Israel’s an apartheid state, and though there are many people who disagree with it, it’s still a very controversial assumption. It is a position that has been taken by the world’s most important human rights organizations, Israel’s most important human rights organizations, the most important Palestinian human rights organizations, almost all the leaders of South Africa’s African National Congress, and two former Israeli Prime Ministers, Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, both said many, many years ago that Israel was on its way to being an apartheid state, and everything it’s done since then would suggest that it had probably gotten there.
But when Rashida Tlaib says things, people respond to them very different in Congress and the organized American Jewish community than when Ehud Barak or Ehud Olmert say them. And I wanted to focus a little bit on the nature of the response. I think it says something about the degraded nature of political speech on this subject. So, what happened, if you follow Twitter, was basically a whole series of Democrats in Congress started sending out tweets, kind of ritual denunciations of Rashida Tlaib, all of which said basically exactly the same thing. So, I’ll just give you, read you a few. So, AIPAC retweeted them, one after another after another. It was a kind of like a parade of tweets, or, you know, a kind of a show of force, right? This is clearly not something that people just thought to do on their own, right, that it was clearly orchestrated as a kind of a show of power.
So, Ted Deutsch from Florida said: “there are progressive activists, progressive students, and progressive members of Congress who support of democratic Israel is fundamentally a part of their progressive values. We will not be silenced.” Jerry Nadler from New York: “I fundamentally reject the notion that one cannot support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state and be a progressive.” Congressman Juan Vargas: “It’s not progressive to advocate for the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “proud progressives do support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.”
You could almost kind of imagine each of these Congressmen basically figuring out, how do I say exactly the same thing as all the other people do, ten minutes after the other person, but change the words slightly? But all the tweets you notice have the same element: Israel’s a democratic state; it’s progressive to support Israel; I’m a progressive, i.e., how dare Rashida Tlaib suggest that there’s some incompatibility between supporting Israel and being a progressive. Now, by the way, Rashida Tlaib didn’t even say that you can’t be a progressive and support Israel. She said you can’t be a progressive and support Israel’s apartheid government, which was actually a narrower claim.
But these tweets have a ritualistic, sloganeering quality. I mean there is a certain brain-dead quality to them, right? Of course, if you think that Israel is a robust, liberal democracy, then there would be no problem in supporting it as a progressive. If it’s a robust liberal democracy, it’s not an apartheid state. Apartheid state under international law means a political system in which one racial or ethnic or religious group has kind of legal domination and oppression over another, right? But calling Israel a liberal democracy again and again and again and again, and saying that it’s progressive to love Israel because progressives love democracy, doesn’t actually make it so, right? In fact, if you look at the realities on the ground, this is not some esoteric thing, right? Most of the Palestinians under Israel’s control in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, in Gaza, live under the control of the Israeli state. As I said in a recent newsletter, if you don’t think they live under the control of the Israeli state, just try going to East Jerusalem, the West Bank, or Gaza without Israel’s permission. It’s virtually impossible to do, right? Israel controls those territories, even though there are some local institutions that have some that kind of work closer to the ground, Israel is the ultimate power in all of those areas. And most of those people can’t vote. They can’t vote because they’re Palestinians. It’s not like they came there, and they need to go through some immigration citizenship process. They just can’t vote, period. They can’t become citizens, right? And even the Palestinian citizens, the minority of Palestinians who live inside Israel’s original borders, they can vote, but they are structurally second-class citizens. The fundamental institutions of the state are built around the idea of focusing on the needs and welfare of Jews rather than on Palestinians. Just look at the Israel Land Authority, which gives 10 of its 22 seats to the Jewish National Fund, which is explicitly an organization designed to develop land for the sake of Jews. And the Israel Land Authority controls 93% of the land in Israel proper.
So, these are pretty basic facts. Like you don’t have to read all 297 or whatever pages of all these apartheid reports. They’re pretty basically known, right? But the strategy seems to be to relentlessly say again and again and again a set of kind of formulaic stock phrases and, therefore, to kind of make them seem true by sheer dint of repetition. Which is something that I think we tend to recognize more when it’s done by political forces that are opposed to us, right? If Vladimir Putin says again and again and again, Ukraine is a threat to Russia, right? We would recognize that that’s not an argument. It’s simply a kind of propaganda that you say again and again and again in order to give it a certain plausibility, right? Or if Donald Trump says, you know, election fraud threatens the sanctity of the safety of American elections, right? You just say it a million times on Fox News and then it has this plausibility. But we would recognize it’s not an argument, right? It’s not an actual response.
And this made me think about this famous essay some of you may know. If you don’t, I very much encourage you to read it: George Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English language,” which is an essay that I teach actually to my students. And I really love teaching because what Orwell is really interested in is the relationship between bad writing, bad use of language, and oppressive, unjust, barbaric politics. And he talks a lot about the way people use language in a way that doesn’t reflect any thinking behind it, but just becomes a kind of a slogan, a ritualistic incantation, which gains political power not because it’s designed to convince you but simply because it’s designed to kind of have a deafening power, especially if it’s conveyed by people who have a certain power in society. He has this wonderful phrase, which I think captures these tweets so well. He says about this kind of bad political writing or bad political speech, he says, “the prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases packed together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse,” right? So, it’s not as if these people who are putting these together, these tweets, are actually thinking about this question, and to what degree Israel actually is representing the principles of liberal democracy, meaning everyone can vote, irrespective of race, religion, and sex. They have these phrases that they’re putting together like a prefabricated henhouse, right? Democratic and Jewish State. Democratic and Jewish State. It’s progressive to support a democratic and Jewish State. And then Orwell talks specifically about the way people use the word democracy, right, as a word that’s often drained of any particular meeting, right? Orwell is particularly influenced by the fact that he’s writing this in 1946 at a time when the Soviet Union, right, is claiming—and a whole series of other communist countries will go on to claim—that they are the real democracies. They are people’s democracies, right? North Korea still has it in its official name of the country: the people’s democratic republic. And so, he talks about how the word democracy is actually denuded of any meaning. He says: “in the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic, we are praising it. Consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning,” right?
So, you notice that the insistence that Israel is a democracy, there’s no relationship to the fact that the two-state solution has receded, which means that the possibility of actually giving Palestinians—in the West Bank, in Gaza, in East Jerusalem—citizenship, such that Israel might not be a country that rules over millions and millions of people who can’t vote for the government by virtue of the fact that they’re not of the right ethnicity and religion, right, that that essentially has no bearing on the fact that you keep calling Israel a democracy, irrespective of what it does, right? That this term democracy gets completely divorced from actually an analysis of what the principles of democracy might be, which at its base level isn’t that complicated, right? Essentially, democracy is government by the people. If very, very large chunks of the people in a country are barred from voting because they’re the wrong ethnicity or religion, then actually that should lead you to be a little bit more cautious about simply deploying the word, “democracy.” But in this case, it’s used as a kind of a hammer in some ways as a substitute for argument and careful thought.
And then the last point, which is this metaphor that Orwell uses to describe what happens when people talk this way, when they use language this way. And he says he talks about the experience of reading this language. And he says, “one has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being, but some kind of dummy, a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank disks, which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine.”
And I think this is the ultimate point that these set of tweets—retweeted again and again by AIPAC, one member of Congress after another—this is a machine. These are not actually individuals who are in good faith with intellectual critical intellectual distance, trying to wrestle with what Rashida Tlaib is saying, trying to look at events on the ground. Right, the American Jewish leaders and the members of Congress relentlessly refused to go to look at the very events on the ground when they go to visit Israel, in places like Masafer Yatta, where people’s homes will be bulldozed because they lack citizenship and therefore are at the mercy of the Israeli state. They refused to do that because that’s that would force a kind of critical thinking, maybe even a kind of moral reckoning. And instead, what you see instead is this machine which pumps out a set of phrases which again have the form, the content of a kind of religious incantation, or one might even say a kind of threat, which is to say, this is the slogan. This is the party line. People who oppose it will face a political price, and what you need to do is not think critically, but you need to actually just learn how to repeat these slogans, and then your political career will be fine. If you have the misfortune of being someone who wants to actually think critically and try to come up with an authentic language that is actually true to what you believe to be the facts on the ground as you’ve actually engaged them as a human being, then you are in opposition to the machine. And then you’re likely to be a politician who has a lot of trouble. But it’s those politicians, those rare politicians, who I really, really, deeply admire, and who Orwell, I think, thought were the great hope that we might overcome forces of oppression in his time, and which I still think are the hope for overcoming forces of repression in our time. I’ll pass for now and for those of you who are celebrating Shana Tova, and I look forward to seeing you all on Friday for our conversation with Khalil Shikaki.
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