Our Zoom call this week will be at our normal time: Friday at Noon EDT.
Our guest will be Abdalhadi Alijla, a Gaza-born political scientist who has done some intriguing writing about Gaza’s political future after this war. We’ll talk about Israel’s stated plans to empower Gaza’s families and tribes, the Biden administration’s effort to empower the Palestinian Authority, and what will become of Hamas.
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.
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 writes about the shifting politics inside the Democratic Party on the Gaza War.
Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are several requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Inessa Elaydi is trying to evacuate her family from an overcrowded refugee camp in Khan Younis. Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza. Please help if you can.
Annelle Sheline, who resigned from the State Department to protest US policy toward Gaza, talks about being impacted by Aaron Bushnell.
Ramy Youssef prays for the people of Palestine on Saturday Night Live.
I talked about the war in Gaza with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.
I’ll be speaking on April 5, with Rabbi David Wolpe, at City University of New York; and April 7, with Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Michael Koplow, at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, DC; and on April 10 at the Phoenix Committee for Foreign Relations.
Dr. Guy Shalev and Dr. Lina Qassem-Hassan, who recently joined me on one of our Friday zooms, will be speaking in Boston on March 31st at the Palestinian Cultural Center and April 1 at Temple Beth Zion, and in New York on April 4 at Judson Memorial Church.
See you on Friday at Noon,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
A lot of Democrats—starting with Chuck Schumer in his speech a couple weeks ago, but a lot of others as well, and some commentators—seem to feel like the sweet spot for them in responding to Israel’s war in Gaza is to attack Benjamin Netanyahu personally and say the problem with this war, and the reason that America and Israel not on the same page about it, is because of Netanyahu. That they love Israel, they support Israel, there is a good Israel that would be conducting this war in the way that America would like, but it’s been hijacked by Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government represents the bad Israel. Now, I can see why that’s a kind of politically appealing position for Democrats to be in because it tries to refute the argument that they’re anti-Israel and it tries to suggest that Americans and Israelis are actually really on the same page about this war.
Unfortunately, the evidence suggests this is really not the case. The war is very popular among Israeli Jews. Now, it’s true that there’s a deep division about whether to pause the war as part of a hostage deal. But even people who want to pause the war as part of a hostage deal don’t want to end it for good and certainly don’t question the legitimacy of the war—again, most Jewish Israelis. So, that puts them in a different place from the Biden administration. In fact, even though Netanyahu has become much more unpopular since October 7th, the Israeli political mood has moved to the right. It’s also not the case that there is a kind of majority of Israelis underneath Benjamin Netanyahu waiting to support a two-state solution if Netanyahu were to be gotten rid of. Again, Palestinian citizens of Israel may, but most Jewish Israelis even before October 7th weren’t wild about a Palestinian state if one meant a sovereign state that controlled the Jordan Valley, that had a capital in East Jerusalem—a genuine state. Netanyahu’s main rivals, Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, don’t really support that kind of state. And again, that the opposition to a two-states has even grown since October 7th.
So, this desire to suggest that the problem is Netanyahu is politically popular because Netanyahu is perceived in American circles as a right-wing or a Republican, someone who’s been personally obnoxious to American presidents. But it’s based on a kind of fiction about where Israeli politics are and what the kind of majority of Israelis actually believe. And also, I don’t think it’s going to be very effective in bringing down Netanyahu. A public fight with an American president—a rhetorical fight—isn’t necessarily undermining politically for Netanyahu. In many ways, he can actually use it to rally his base and to kind of call on nationalist sentiment. And it’s particularly not an effective tactic if you want to bring down Netanyahu because it’s only rhetorical. Netanyahu has a long history of embracing rhetorical battles with American presidents, going back to Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama over the Obama speech, for instance, calling for a Palestinian state near the ‘67 lines in 2011.
If you wanted to actually try to undermine Netanyahu politically, and increase the chances that Israel might shift course, you would actually have to condition or cut off military aid for the war and maybe change America’s positions in international institutions. The reason I think that would have a greater likelihood of success is that Netanyahu’s really entire political career at some level has been based on telling Israelis they can have their cake and eat it too. That they can do whatever they want vis-à-vis the Palestinians, essentially: destroy the possibility of a two-state solution, in particular, and Israel will remain deeply integrated into the rest of the world. It won’t face tangible consequences. Indeed, that it’ll actually become more integrated into the rest of the world, as it has been.
So, if you want to undermine that case that Netanyahu is making, you can’t do it effectively simply by saying we don’t like Benjamin Netanyahu. Israelis felt well aware that previous Democratic presidents also didn’t like Benjamin Netanyahu. But it doesn’t cost them anything. The way to undermine Netanyahu’s argument, at least with some sliver of maybe center or center-right Israelis, would be to show them that his policies are incurring tangible costs vis-à-vis Israel in terms of American weapons, in terms of America’s support in international institutions. Again, I don’t want to suggest that this would lead to some kind of left-wing peacenik Israeli government. There really isn’t the basis for that politically, especially given that most Palestinian political parties—which are the most peacenik, the most anti-war, the most pro-two-states—are not considered legitimate partners for an Israeli government. I’m talking about Balad and Hadash, in particular.
But it would, I think, change the calculus in Israel politically in a way that’s simply saying that you don’t want Netanyahu to be there doesn’t at all. And so, the Biden administration, I think, if it wants a change in government in Israel, the thing it has to do is take concrete actions to actually use the leverage it has vis-à-vis Israel and impose consequences. And if it doesn’t, its anti-Netanyahu rhetoric I think is actually completely counter-productive and won’t get the Biden administration what it wants, which is a different Israeli government.
