Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Thursday at 11 AM EDT.
Our guests will be Joshua Leifer, a prominent progressive critic of Israel who has also been highly critical of the unwillingness of some progressives to condemn Hamas’ killing of civilians, and Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian-American activist born in Gaza who is the co-editor of After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine. For years I’ve watched hopefully as Palestinians, Jews, and other people of goodwill have begun building a mass movement in the US for Palestinian freedom. I’m fearful now that it’s falling apart. This moment of agony, rage, and terror is driving many Jews and Palestinians away from each other. How should an ethical movement for Palestinian liberation respond to Hamas’ attack on Israelis and Israel’s attack on Gaza? And how can Jews and Palestinians who believe in mutual liberation remain allies amidst this horror. I’ll ask Joshua and Ahmed on Thursday.
This week, we’ll send out the zoom link early. Paid subscribers will get it, along with last Friday’s video, on Monday. 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.
Sources Cited in this Video
Martin Luther King on the 1967 riots.
Antony Blinken on “pure evil.”
Fadi Abu Shammalah on growing up in Gaza.
Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine.
Vladimir Jabotinsky on Palestinians and American Indians.
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Raz Segal warns of genocide in Gaza and Arielle Angel writes about what this moment means for the progressive movement.
A Jewish Israeli whose brother was murdered by Hamas tells CNN not to use his death as a justification for killing Palestinians.
What it’s like to be five years old in Gaza.
I wrote a New York Times essay about ethical resistance.
I was interviewed in Slate about Hamas’ attack and Israel’s response.
I talked about Israel’s impending invasion on MSNBC.
“cursed be the man who says/Avenge! No such revenge - revenge for/the blood of a little child - has yet been/devised by Satan.”-Nachman Bialik (courtesy of Yair Wallach)
See you on Thursday at 11 AM,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Our call this week is going to be at a special time. It’ll be 11am ET on Thursday. Our guest is going to be Joshua Leifer who writes for Jewish Currents, the New York Review of Books, Dissent, I think one of the most important progressive American writers on Israel-Palestine; and Ahmed Moor, who is a long-time Palestinian-American activist with deep involvement in Palestinian solidarity circles. He was also born in Gaza and we’re really going to talk about what this means for people who want to be involved in fighting for Palestinian freedom, particularly in the United States, and talk about some of the critiques that have been made of the Palestinians some in the Palestinian solidarity world, including by Josh himself and talk about what it takes to rebuild I think alliances between Jews and Palestinians who believe in Palestinian freedom and the preciousness of all life. So that’ll be Thursday at 11am, a special time for paid subscribers.
So, since last Saturday’s horrifying events, a number of people have invited me to think about what I might have gotten wrong. Some of them haven’t done it in the nicest of ways. One particular person emailed me and said, ‘if you would like help in doing t’shuvah’—which means repenting—’for all of the terrible things that you’ve done to our community, essentially, I’m willing to help you do that.’ But the truth is that it is really, really important, even if it’s really hard to think about, what it is that we get wrong. I’ve been writing long enough to have gotten a lot of really, really big things wrong. There’s no reason I wouldn’t continue to do that. And I’m really aware that, you know, when one gets really invested in a particular perspective, it builds a kind of life around it in certain ways—relationships, work—you know, that it can be really, really hard to then take account of new information and rethink things. And some of the intellectuals I admire the most have been the people who have been willing to do that. And it is true that I did not anticipate this attack by Hamas. I mean, I did think that maybe there would be more increased violence, but I didn’t see this coming.
So, I wanna talk about that a little bit. And I also wanna say that there is a part of me—and Josh is going to talk about this, we’re gonna talk about this on Thursday—that has been a bit jarred by some of the responses by some people on the left. I wrote about this in the piece I wrote for the New York Times over the weekend that I—you know, maybe it’s my grandmother’s voice in me, just deep kind of fears and anxieties. But you know, the sense that, you know, I am a white Jew, and that sometimes the language of the left makes me feel like that in the process of decolonization, people like me might be the eggs that need to be broken in order to create the omelet of a decolonized world. And that’s a little frightening. And I do fear sometimes that on the left, that terms like decolonization take on a meaning that allows them to obscure the preciousness of life, you know, in the same way that in earlier periods in the left, terms like, you know, ‘the dictators’ or ‘the proletariat’ or ‘the march of dialectical materialism’ or whatever, you know, were then justified to say, well, we gotta kill all the Kulaks.
You know, sometimes when I hear people on the left using this term like decolonization, it reminds me of the way Orwell talked about the way in which in the ‘40s that people would basically use terms in ways that ended up then justifying barbaric actions. And so, that’s another reason for me to think about like whether I need to reconsider certain things. And I wanna basically try to explain why—although there will be specific things that I do think I probably need to rethink in my head and formulate over the weeks to come—my basic core premise, which is that I think that the oppression of Palestinians sits at the heart of this conflict, that that hasn’t changed. And I want to just try to go a little bit into my logic about why I still believe that fundamentally even in the wake of Hamas’s horror.
So, I think there are a couple of different fundamental ways to understand what happened a week ago Saturday. One of them was articulated by Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State, and he said, ‘in many ways,’—talking about what Hamas did—‘the simplest explanation may be the most compelling. This is pure evil.’ And other people describe it in various other different ways: Jew hatred, antisemitism, wanting to destroy Israel, but essentially as if there is some inherent and pure evil in Hamas and maybe in the Palestinian national movement more generally that maybe is connected somehow to other previous kind of genocidal efforts to kill Jews and that’s kind of fundamentally what you need to know.
The other argument is that the horror of what Hamas did comes out of the conditions in which people in Gaza, including those people who were in Hamas, were living. And you know, and one of the people who makes a kind of version of that argument, which is a kind of you could say a root causes argument, in a fundamentally different context in 1967 is Martin Luther King. So, in the wake of urban riots in 1967, this is what Martin Luther King writes. He writes, ‘a million words will be written and spoken to dissect the ghetto outbreaks. But for perspective and vivid expression of culpability, I would submit two sentences written a century ago by Victor Hugo: if the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin but he who causes the darkness.’ And then King goes on, ‘the policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness. They created discrimination. They created slums. They perpetuate unemployment, ignorance, and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes, but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.’ I think to be fair, that is what a lot of Palestinians have said over the last ten days. There have been some who just celebrated these, but I think those voices were fewer than people who were saying something along the lines of Martin Luther King.
Now, I want to make it clear. I have problems with simply taking King’s formulation and applying it to this. Israel-Palestine and the United States are not the same thing. What Hamas did was far, far worse than, you know, a kind of uprising in a Black neighborhood in the United States in the late 1960s. And even just more fundamentally, I worry that King’s formulation from Victor Hugo, which says, you know, point blank basically the guilt is the one who creates the darkness, meaning the societal conditions rather than one who actually commits the sin. That just seems to me to deny too much moral agency and moral responsibility to any person. And King’s own life is evidence of the fact that you can be a Black American in the South, have seen all of the horrors of that and not done unethical things. And as similarly, as I mentioned in the New York Times essay, the ANC makes the same point. Those people, they were subjected to horrors in some ways as terrible as what’s happened to Palestinians and the ANC did not act in any way like Hamas. So, I believe that there is a very, very important aspect of moral responsibility that exists for all people no matter what they’ve gone through.
But I think that it is the pure evil argument of Anthony Blinken, which I think is what a lot of the people who were asking me to kind of repent and apologize are really asking for: which is basically asking me to recognize that the fundamental problem here is the pure evil of Hamas and maybe Palestinian society in some ways more generally. And that’s fundamentally what you need to know. I just find that at the end of the day, even as I try to be as honest with myself as possible, I find it completely unconvincing. And I want to try to explain why that I think why in order to understand what happened a week ago Saturday. One also in addition to understanding that Hamas bears moral responsibility, one also has to understand the conditions that produced Hamas and the conditions that exist in Gaza. And I think one way I want to try to do that is by trying to move this outside the Israel-Palestine situation to a couple of other kind of times and places. Because especially for those of us who are so invested in the Jewish community and others, I think it’s sometimes easier for us to see things when we move it to a different place.
So, one analogy I want to think about is the analogy of Native Americans. Now, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the famous Zionist revisionist leader, compared in his famous essay, ‘The Iron Wall,’ Palestinians to Native Americans. Something that I don’t think he was denying that Jews have a very, very deep connection to what we call the land of Israel, but he was basically saying the Palestinians are gonna resist us because the Zionist movement came there and tried to establish a Jewish state. And Palestinians would resist just like they resisted white people who came from Europe to North America. And so, if you think about Native Americans in the 19th century who were being dispossessed of their land, more and more and more being pushed off of their land into smaller and smaller enclaves of territory, growing more and more desperate, we saw that when Native Americans had the opportunity to come across defenseless white populations, generally, they did not do so in Gandhian style carrying banners of peace and coexistence, right? They often massacred white European civilians, right? And that was tragic.
And I think some Native Americans, to be fair, did have other forms of protest. But when Native Americans retaliated that way, right, which was kind of horrifying in the kind of same kind of way, just wanton slaughter that Hamas did on a week ago Saturday, and we think about that in historical retrospect, I don’t think many of us would say that the reason is because those Native Americans were pure evil, right? I think a lot of Americans at the time would have said that, perhaps, you know, they’re pagan soulless monsters. But I think now we would say, those were terrible, terrible acts. But to understand those acts, one has to understand the context of what was being done to those people. And Palestinians—it’s not exactly the same of course—but Palestinians, especially in Gaza, have been dispossessed of their land, forced into more and more crowded, desperate conditions. It was a state of greater and greater hopelessness. And then Hamas has responded this way. And so, I think it’s worth asking ourselves: would we accept the pure evil argument were it made in 19th century America vis-à-vis Native Americans?
Another analogy I would offer is the analogy of Ukraine versus Russia. I was talking to a friend who went to Ukraine recently. He has some family in Ukraine, and he was talking to his cousin. His cousin is a Ukrainian woman. And he asked her what she wants to see come out of this conflict. And she said, ‘I want to see Moscow burn,’ right. ‘I want to see Moscow burn.’ Now, the Ukrainians have not carried out a massacre like this. Again, which is to say there is important moral agency and responsibility. They have killed Russians, including Russian civilians. But my point is if the Ukrainians did carry out a massacre like this, what would we say, right? And I think we would say something a little bit like what we say about Native Americans. We would not say it’s pure evil. We would recognize the context, right? The context of the brutality that Ukrainians are experiencing, the dispossession, the suffering they are experiencing. That would be almost self-evident, which is not to say we would justify, not at all, but we would understand that context.
And the last reason that I believe this is just that to understand Hamas, and to understand what Hamas has done, you have to understand the conditions, the darkness of the conditions that exist in Gaza, and even for Palestinians more generally is simply—this is what Palestinians, at least as far as I can tell, are trying to tell us again and again and again, right? If you look at Palestinian writing about Hamas and about Palestinian violent resistance against civilians over a long period of time, this is the theme that comes up again and again and again, right? So, for instance, there’s a quote in the New York Times from a man in Gaza who works for a wonderful organization called Just Vision, Fadi Abu Shammala. And he writes this. He writes, ‘many of the fighters who breach those walls are probably just a few years older than Ali’—Ali is his son—‘Many of them were born during the Second Intifada. Their entire experience has been Israeli military occupation, siege, and devastating military assault in an enclave of 140 square miles with unemployment and poverty rates of approximately 50%. This is the history and these are the conditions that have shaped so many in Gaza. Not a justification. Israel helped create these fighters by starving them of hope, dignity, and a future.’
And when I went back for my New York Times essay, I went back and read some of Edward Said’s famous book, The Question of Palestine, in 1979. And you hear almost exactly the same note when Said is denouncing, condemning Palestinian acts against civilians. This is what he writes. He writes, ‘I have been horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicide missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels.’ And he goes on. ‘Horrified both at the terror visited upon its victims and horrified by the terror in Palestinian men and women who were driven to do such things.’ It is very powerfully clear to me that when Palestinians, including Palestinians who fundamentally oppose and condemn and are revolted by what Hamas did, when they talk about this, they are much closer to the Martin Luther King perspective of having to see this as deeply intertwined with the violence and horror that Palestinians experience. And that the people who talk about this as pure evil, whether they’re commentators on TV or in the media or American government officials, the ones who talk about pure evil, they seem to be the ones who are listening to Palestinians least.
Almost invariably that would encourage you to do this exercise. When you hear someone making some version of it’s just because Hamas and the Palestinians are pure evil, look at whether that person is quoting Palestinian sources, whether they seem to be engaged in a conversation with Palestinians. In my own journey on this subject, I have been transformed in the way I think about things just by listening to Palestinians. It doesn’t mean the Palestinians are angels. Doesn’t mean I agree with every particular Palestinian in any particular, anything like that. I still have the right to my own decisions. But I really do fundamentally believe that this problem of the lack of permission to narrate, which Edward Said famously wrote about in 1982 and still remains a very big problem, and I would think frankly has been an even bigger problem since the attacks than it was in the years before in terms of just the kind of paucity of Palestinian voices, is making it harder for people to hear this truth. And this truth, which is that that the conditions that the Israeli oppression creates has a powerful impact on what kind of Palestinian response and what kind of Palestinian resistance you’re going to get is so important as we think about what’s happening now, right.
All these people who want to just go in and destroy Hamas, right, and do unbelievable damage in Gaza, I really believe that if they were listening more to Palestinians, they would be asking themselves the question: what kind of Palestinian response? What kind of Palestinian resistance? Because people are going to resist oppression. You can’t blame them. That’s just what human beings do. What kind of response and what kind of resistance are you going to get after you’ve killed ten times more people and demolished ten times more buildings and produced overwhelming trauma in children even more than they already traumatized. And what terrifies me is the idea that you’ll get something worse than Hamas, that you’ll get something worse than Hamas. These are not the conditions that are likely to produce the kind of humane and ethical resistance that we desperately need. And that’s why my perspective fundamentally remains the same. I would like to have some guests in the weeks and months to come who challenge me on that because that’s something that we try to do here. But fundamentally, as a matter of conviction and learning that I take Palestinians seriously enough to listen to them as they tell this story and it seems to me it’s a convincing one. Just again, it’s not to excuse what Hamas did in any way. Next Thursday at 11am, we’ll be on with Josh Leifer and Ahmed Moor. I hope many of you will join us.
What I Still Believe, Even After October 7