Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.
Our guest will be Rami Khouri, Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the American University of Beirut, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC, and a regular columnist for Al Jazeera online. Rami lived in Beirut for 17 years and has for many years written about relations between Israel and Lebanon. We’ll talk about the terrifying reports that a full-scale war may break out between Israel and Hezbollah.
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
Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat, and Michelle Cottle on whether Biden can not only win, but govern.
Jonathan Sacks on the fear of freedom.
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!), Alex Kane explains why ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas are stuck.
Although overshadowed by the horror in Gaza, many Palestinians in the West Bank have grown desperate economically as Israel has further restricted their right to travel and work since October 7. Please consider supporting this crowdfunding campaign for two West Bank families in dire need.
Al Jazeera’s chilling new documentary, “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza.”
An extraordinary essay by Ayelet Waldman about her family’s history and the delusions of liberal Zionism.
A Pennsylvania voter pledges to vote Biden even if he’s dead.
A fascinating thread on the scholarship of Raz Segal, the Israeli-born genocide scholar whose appointment at the University of Minnesota is now in doubt.
Former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon says the occupation puts Israelis in danger.
Last week, I talked to MSNBC’s Joy Reid about Jamaal Bowman’s congressional primary.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I interviewed Hebrew University Professor Yael Berda about Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s de facto annexation of the West Bank.
John Judis, one of the writers I admire most, has launched a Substack. Please check it out.
See you on Friday at 11 AM,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. I’m beginning to fear that when we look back at this moment in history, people will look at Democrats, influential people in the Democratic Party, and ask the question of why it was that they lacked courage? Why it was indeed that their lack of courage was perhaps their essential defining characteristic, and it had disastrous and historic consequences? It’s interesting because, throughout the Trump era, so many of us have talked about the lack of courage of Republicans. That there was, you know, again and again reporters would say, you know, that privately Republican politicians would laugh about Trump, denounce Trump, that many of the same people who had even publicly earlier on when Trump wasn’t so formidable said that he was an autocrat, a dictator, then became these obsequious fawning supporters of him. So, we got used to—as people who were more progressive kind of denounced these people for their lack of courage.
But I actually think, at this point, Democrats are actually showing even less courage than Republicans. Because, in a way, the Republican Party has transformed itself, certainly among people in Congress. I think there are fewer actually of those people who snicker about Trump privately because this has become a Republican party, more a party of true believers. I think, actually among Republican voters, there is a genuine tremendous amount of support for Trump. Now that’s horrifying. It’s incredibly frightening, but it’s not actually cowardice. It’s a kind of psychosis to me. It’s an embrace of white Christian nationalism, authoritarianism. But it’s not exactly cowardice because I actually think that in the Republican Party today, compared to the Republican Party let’s say five years ago, there’s actually more a broader sense of true belief for Trump. Many of the members of Congress who really didn’t like Trump, most are no longer in Congress.
Whereas among Democrats, I think you actually have a situation where people genuinely don’t believe that Biden should be the nominee. But they’re too afraid to do anything about it. And it’s not just with Biden. I think there is a kind of parallel between the party’s response to Gaza and the party’s treatment of Trump. Which is, on Gaza too, I think if you put a lot of Democratic members of Congress to a lie detector test—and a lot of people in the Biden administration to a lie detector test—and they said, is American policy on this war in Gaza, is it ethical? Is it ethical? They would say: no! And yet, they shrug their shoulders and they go through their day because they want to preserve their political support. They don’t want to end up like Jamaal Bowman. They don’t want to end up without a job if they’ve spent their lives working their way up through the foreign policy establishment.
And now we see, basically, a version of the same thing when it comes to Biden’s re-election. I’m not going to rehearse all the arguments that everyone’s making, but just suffice to say, to remember, that Biden is behind in this race. He’s significantly behind. And remember, Trump has over-performed his polls both in 2016 and in 2020 when he was behind. Now, Trump is clearly ahead; not just in polls, but in the electoral college, which favors him even more. And Biden’s advisors themselves basically took the view that they needed an early bait to try to change the dynamic. They’ve made this dynamic worse. And it’s not clear that there would be a second debate. And there’s certainly no particular reason to believe that Biden would perform any better even if there was.
And yet, Democrats are too afraid—many of them—of taking the risk of trying something different. Yes, it is very risky for a whole bunch of reasons that people are talking about. But I don’t see how anyone in their right mind could not say that any potential replacement for Biden would not have been better on that stage than Joe Biden was against Donald Trump. It’s inconceivable to me that any of them, including Kamala Harris, could be worse. And yet, despite the fact that all of these people in the media, and ordinary voters, are saying they want somebody else, the Democratic politicians are not willing to say that. And when they do say it, they say it off the record.
I was talking to someone who’s on the Democratic National Committee about this. And he said, ‘Peter, it’s like the Bulgarian Communist Party in the 1950s. In the hallways, privately, they whisper to each other what a catastrophe this is. But when they actually get in a room and they have to act publicly or in some official capacity, they won’t do it because they’re too scared.’ Why is this generation of Democratic politicians and foreign policy people, why is it so fearful? Why is it not able to put the country’s interest, the moral interest, both in in terms of Biden and in terms of Gaza, ahead of their own personal interests? I don’t know. I think it’s something that we’re going to have to try to understand, and maybe we will be having to wrestle with for many, many years. It’s important also, I think, to remember that Biden’s failure is not only a failure to be able to beat Donald Trump. I think Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat have been making this point and they’re exactly right. It’s false to make a clear distinction between your ability to run effectively and your ability to govern because to govern as president has to do with your ability to communicate to the public, and also to communicate in private forcefully.
And I want to bring, again, bring this back to Gaza. Any president who wanted to try to do anything but supporting Israel unconditionally in this war would have faced enormous, enormous political challenges given how strong the pro-Israel lobby is in Washington, given how formidable an opponent Benjamin Netanyahu is, all of these reasons. Now, we don’t know that Joe Biden ever really even wanted to do that. But if he had wanted to do that—if he had wanted to say much earlier that America would not support this war because it’s catastrophic for the people of Gaza and it’s actually going to make Israel less safe—that would have been an enormous, enormous task of communication: going to the American people, going to members of Congress, to making the case, to pushing them, to convincing them, to inspire them to do something that’s very hard in America’s political system, which is to challenge Israel and to publicly care about the lives of Palestinians.
And even if Joe Biden had wanted to do that—I don’t know that he did—he does not have the capacity to do that. He does not have the capacity to go to the country, to go to Democratic members of Congress, to take on Benjamin Netanyahu, both privately and publicly. Bill Clinton could have done it. Barack Obama could have done it. Joe Biden can’t do it. So, in some ways I think his options in terms of taking a different path on Gaza were limited by his political infirmity.
And the question of why it is that Democrats facing the enormity of the threat to the existence of American liberal democracy, and the enormity of what’s happening in Gaza, where I saw a statistic that said that 5% of the population is either missing, injured, or killed—five percent, right—a level of destruction and horror that will haunt the entire world for generations and lay down a precedent for what other leaders will feel emboldened to do that is frankly terrifying, why is it in the face of these two enormous challenges that more people have not been able to actually rise to this challenge? And I do wonder whether we’re gonna have to go back and look at some of the writing that was done in the 1930s and 40s in the face of the rise of fascism and look at writers who questioned whether in fact people wanted freedom that much. Faced with the inability of people to fight for it, was there an unwillingness to actually want freedom, or at least want it enough?
This was the Parshah that Jews read over last Shabbat, which was Parashat Sh’lach, which has to do with the question of the spies and why they’re not willing to urge B’nai Israel to enter into the land. And there are a lot of debates about this question. And I recognize that it’s also in some ways problematic to make this idea of conquering Canaan into a test of moral courage, given of course that it meant that the destruction of those people. But still, if you kind of take it in a more metaphorical sense, not thinking about the conquering of the land itself, but just the larger question of what it takes to do something that’s really hard, right? What it takes to overcome your fears and take an action that’s risky, but if you know that the consequences of not action acting are really disastrous?
One of the points that the Lubavitcher Rebbe makes about this is that he suggests that perhaps B’nai Israel didn’t want to enter into the land, not because they feared defeat, but because they feared victory. Which is to say they feared the consequences of actually truly having freedom. And one of the points that Jonathan Sacks makes about this point is he relates it to the question of what happens, according to the Torah, if a Jewish servant, a Jewish slave, decides that they don’t want to be free, even after the requisite period of time when they are allowed to be free? And he notes that what happens is that there’s a ceremony in which their ear is pierced if they willingly give up their freedom. And then he quotes Rabbi Yochanan Ben Yochai in the Palestinian Talmud as saying, “the ear that heard God saying at Sinai, ‘the Israelites are my slaves. They are my slaves because I have brought them out of Egypt. I am the Lord your G-d.’ But, nevertheless, preferred subjection to men rather than to G-d deserves to be pierced.” The point they’re making is there is a stigma, a shame, in when you have the opportunity to fight for freedom, to voluntarily relinquish it.
And it seems to me that is what this class of Democratic leaders is doing. There is an opportunity to fight for freedom in the United States by taking the best possible shot at defeating Donald Trump. Yes, it’s uncertain. But at least it gives you a better shot—a real shot—at defeating Donald Trump in a way that you don’t have with Joe Biden. And there is a fight—again, uncertain—but a political fight to be waged for the principle of human rights, the principle of international law, the principle that Palestinians deserve to live and be free. And that would also be enormously difficult. But the question is: are you willing to actually take on that fight? And the answer we’re getting from leading Democrats is: no. And that there is a shame to that. There’s a deep shame to that and we’re going to be living with the consequences I fear for a very long time.
