Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.
Our guests will be Raja Khouri and Jeffrey Wilkinson, co-authors of the book, The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know About Each Other. Since October 7, dialogue between Palestinians and Jews has become even more difficult, and there are those in both communities—and on the left and right—who question its value. I’m excited to ask Raja and Jeffrey to respond to those criticisms, and to explain how they believe that greater dialogue between Palestinians and Jews can contribute to the struggle for equality, freedom, and safety for everyone.
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, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
Mehdi Hasan’s interview with Representative Dean Phillips.
The New York Times’ investigation of Israel’s Sde Teiman detention center. Hasan’s reference to a prisoner who reportedly died by rape comes from an UNRWA interview with a 41-year-old detainee who gave an account similar to the one that Younis al-Hamlawi gave The New York Times about being forced to sit on a hot metal stick. That prisoner claimed another detainee subjected to the procedure had died as a result.
Why the history of Israel’s restrictions on movement from Gaza dates back to 1991.
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!), Shane Burley and Jonah Ben Avraham explain the flawed methodology that the ADL uses to measure antisemitism.
Like so many people with family in Gaza, the political analyst Khalil Sayegh has endured unthinkable agony since this war began. He’s seen his father and sister killed. He’s trying to bring his remaining family members to safety. If you can help, please do. Please also consider helping the Alshawa family, which is sheltering in central Gaza and hoping to evacuate to safety.
Aziz Abu Sarah on the absurdity of pro-Palestinian demonstrators protesting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The deputy assistant secretary for Israeli-Palestinian affairs resigns after opposing Biden’s policies on the war.
Israel’s military spokesman says “anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.”
See you on Friday at 11 AM,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. I wanted to say something about an extraordinary interview that Mehdi Hassan did last week with Congressman Dean Phillips from Minnesota, who had been a candidate for president against Biden this year. This was for Mehdi’s new platform, Zeteo. What makes the interview so remarkable, I think, is that it kind of offers a glimpse of what American public and media discourse about this war, and about Israel and Palestine more generally, might be like if Palestinian lives were considered equal to Israeli lives.
So, Mehdi Hassan starts by asking Dean Phillips: was it okay in your view for Israel to kill all of these Palestinians, including many children in the military operation that freed for Israeli hostages? And Philip says, ‘it’s an unacceptable price, but I think it’s a price that has to be paid.’ So, he says, basically, it was really awful, but it was necessary. And then, Mehdi Hasan takes the question in a direction that I really don’t think Dean Phillips was expecting because it’s so rarely asked. And he says, ‘if you’re saying that to free people from the clutches of horrible captivity’—this is Mehdi Hasan speaking—‘hostages, people possibly being abused in captivity to free them, you have to pay a price, a horrible price. Does that ratio work the other way?’
And then, Medhi Hasan continues: ‘how many Israelis can Palestinians kill to free Palestinian detainees who are currently being tortured in Israeli captivity, some of them being raped to death according to the New York Times last week. Can they kill 200 Israelis to free four Palestinians who are being tortured in an Israeli prison?’ And Phillips’ response is kind of remarkable. And by the way, I don’t think Phillips is a dumb guy. I actually think if you listen to the interview, he’s probably more thoughtful on these issues than your average member of Congress, although that may be a low bar. And to give him credit, he’s also appearing on an interview with Mehdi Hasan, which he probably knew was going to be a really challenging interview.
But so, here’s what Dean Phillips says. He’s quite startled. You can listen in the interview. He’s clearly surprised by the allegation. He says—Philips says—‘you said Palestinian prisoners are being raped to death by Israeli soldiers? I don’t believe that to be true,’ right. Hasan has just quoted The New York Times, which is about as respectable a media outlet as you can have. And then Philips said, ‘I don’t believe that to be true.’ And then Mehdi Hasan goes into detail about the allegations that he’s talking about. And if you read The New York Times report that they did on this military base called Sde Teiman, where Israel has been holding a lot of Palestinian prisoners, first there was an UNRWA report that was done where they interviewed Palestinians who had been released from Sde Teiman.
I know people will say, oh, you can’t believe anything UNRWA says. But then actually The New York Times kind of went and did a lot of these interviews itself. It found, for instance, that eight former detainees had said they had been punched, kicked, and beaten with batons, rifle bats, and a hand metal detector while in custody. One said his ribs were broken when he was kneed in the chest. A second detainee said his ribs were broken after he was kicked and beaten with a rifle. Seven said they been forced to wear only a diaper while being interrogated. Three said they had received electric shocks during interrogations. Three said they had lost more than 40 pounds during their interrogation. The IDF denied abuse, but an Israeli soldier who the Times talked to said that he and several fellow soldiers had regularly boasted of beating detainees. And a general named Younis al-Hamlawi, who was a nurse who was arrested when Israel was raiding the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, said that a female officer had ordered two soldiers to lift him up and press his rectum against a metal stick that was fixed to the ground. Mr. al-Hamlawi said the stick penetrated his rectum for roughly five seconds, causing it to bleed and leaving him with unbearable pain. He also recalled being forced to sit in a chair wired with electricity. He said he was shocked so often that after initially urinating uncontrollably, he then stopped urinating for several days.
And, by the way, I know some people’s immediate response to this is: how on earth could you compare these people to the Israeli hostages? These were Hamas fighters. The people that The New York Times was interviewing were the people who were released from Sde Teimon. They were about 1,200 people. They had about 4,000 people there, according to the Times. They released 1,200 because the Israeli military didn’t think they were Hamas fighters. If the Israeli military thought they were Hamas fighters, they would still be there. The Times was only talking to people who the IDF had basically said, sorry, we picked you up, but actually we don’t think you did anything, right? So, those are the people who were making these allegations.
Now again, there are obviously lots of differences between Israeli prisons in general and the hostage situation. And I don’t, by any means, am not saying this to undermine in any way the severity of what Israeli hostages have been through, which is horrifying. But the point is that, according to The New York Times, which is a pretty credible source, right, that Dean Phillips would probably believe The New York Times if The New York Times did a report about the abuse of Israelis by Hamas, right? They’re saying the terrible things are happening to these people who the Israeli military ultimately admits basically didn’t do anything, right?
And so, Mehdi Hasan turns the question around and says: would it be okay for Hamas or some of the Palestinian faction to go and free such people if it led to a lot of Israelis being killed? And Dean Philips doesn’t answer the question. And I think the reason he can’t answer the question is because if you genuinely believe, speaking as an American—I’m not speaking about an Israeli who might have a natural sense of affinity for Israeli lives, or even let’s say a Jewish person or a Palestinian person who might have a particular loyalty, you’re talking about as an American here, right, whose stated view is that, as Phillips actually said in another part of the interview, he believes that Israeli Jewish and Palestinian are equal—that can you actually apply that framework to American policy? Can you actually follow it through to its conclusion as Mehdi Hasan asked him to do? And he can’t. He can’t answer the question, right? Because he can’t say ‘yes’ because he doesn’t actually operate within a framework in which Palestinian lives are considered equal to Jewish Israeli lives. That almost nobody, very few people in American public discourse, actually operate within that framework. It’s completely baked into American public discourse that they are not, right?
So, to give another example, right, we are a very frequently asked to imagine what it would be like for Israelis—what it was like for Israelis—when they were attacked brutally on October 7th, and how we would feel as Americans, and what we would do if that happened to us, right? That’s almost a cliche at this point, right? But when was the last time you heard a prominent person in the American media, or an American politician asked how you would feel as a Palestinian, right, if your family had been forcibly expelled from their homes in 1948 into this very, very overcrowded territory called Gaza, which has been—long before actually Hamas took over, even going back to the early 1990s— where movement in and out of Gaza has been very, very severely restricted by Israel, again, going back even long before Hamas took over. And since 2006, the legislative elections that Hamas won, you know, have a place which is called ‘unlivable’ by the United Nations, called an ‘open air prison’ by Human Rights Watch, which has been repeatedly bombed and not been able to rebuild its infrastructure, right?
So, nobody says, well, what would you do if you were a Palestinian under those circumstances, right? Because there is a natural kind of tendency to think that Israel’s Jews are fully human, and therefore like us, and therefore we should ask how we would respond in their position, which is a very legitimate question, right. But if you believe that Jewish and Palestinian lives are equal, you should also be asking the other question, which is: how would you react as a Palestinian given those things, and ask people to imagine how Americans would react were we in the situation the Palestinians are in? And yet, that doesn’t happen. And you see that when Mehdi Hasan does do that, does something extraordinary in American public discourse, which shouldn’t be extraordinary but is, you see how Dean Phillips—who’s not a stupid guy, right—simply can’t answer that question. He can’t respond to it, right, because there is such a huge gap between the stated belief, at least among Democrats, that human lives are equal, and the actual guiding assumptions that guide how they make policy on this question. And I think the more that is exposed in interviews like this, the more people can start to see that the basic fundamental principles that many Americans espouse are not being put into practice by our government, and that that represents a problem.
