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Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian-American green card holder abducted by the Trump administration in retaliation for his activism at Columbia University— and later released. We’ll talk about his childhood in the West Bank, his experience at Columbia, his detention, and what he’s learned from the experience.
Ask Me Anything
Our next Ask Me Anything session, for premium subscribers, will be this Monday, August 25, from 2-3 PM Eastern time.
Cited in Today’s Video
Jonathan Greenblatt’s recent appearance on CNBC.
Marwan Barghouti on the Second Intifada.
The polls about Zohran Mamdani’s support among New York Jews.
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!), Maya Rosen and Erez Bleicher remember slain Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen.
The Israeli military’s own data suggests that over 80% of the people it has killed in Gaza are civilians.
How Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro influenced the University of Pennsylvania’s response to pro-Palestinian protest on campus.
Omer Bartov predicts that the International Court of Justice will find Israel guilty of genocide.
Eyal Press on Columbia’s disastrous decision to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
I talked to Harrison Berger about Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.
“Home? A Palestinian Woman's Pursuit of Life, Liberty, & Happiness” is playing in San Francisco and New York this fall.
See you on Monday and Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I think when this horror in Gaza is over—this destruction, this slaughter, starvation, which so many human rights organizations and legal scholars now call genocide—when it’s over, there’s gonna have to be a reckoning in the United States. Not just in the U.S. government providing the weapons and diplomatic support, but a kind of broader cultural reckoning. Because there’s so many institutions that I think are culpable in this, that will need to look themselves in the mirror. And one of them is the U.S. mainstream media. Because even now, even after almost 2 years into this, it’s still so easy for people who support unconditional support of what Israel’s doing to go on the U.S. media and say things that are palpably, obviously untrue, and not be challenged on these things, right?
And so, one example is from last week. The ADL, Anti-Defamation League, head, Jonathan Greenblatt, goes on a show called ‘Squawk Box’ on CNBC, and just says one thing after another that are just obviously untrue, right? First, he says that Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York ‘has visited churches and mosques, not a single synagogue. Not once has he gone to a Jewish neighborhood.’ Immediately, people started tweeting pictures of Zohran Mamdani in his mayoral campaign having gone to synagogues, because he went to multiple synagogues, he went to multiple Jewish neighborhoods, he had multiple meetings with New York Jews and different Jewish officials, right?
And then Greenblatt kind of incredibly, lamely says, I just meant that he hasn’t done so since he won the primary, which is not what he said at all. But the striking thing is that he wasn’t challenged on the show when he said that, right? And then he goes on to say in reference to the Intifada, this is how Greenblatt defines the Intifada. He says, ‘the Intifada was a violent uprising in the Palestinian territories where they murdered over 1,000 people simply because they were Jewish.’ Again, obviously, factually incorrect, right? First of all, there were two Intifadas since 1967. Intifada is an Arabic word that means, kind of, uprising or shaking off. But if one’s talking about in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, there’s a First Intifada in the late 1980s, and a second in the early 2000s, right? Greenblatt is only referring to the second, probably because the first one was actually much, much more non-violent. So first of all, that’s dishonest, right, to begin with.
Secondly, he says that they murdered over a thousand people, Israeli Jews. Greenblatt never mentions that at least three times as many Palestinians were murdered, right? So, these are really, I think, blatant dishonesties by omission. But then the last part is that these people were murdered simply because they were Jewish. I don’t think there’s a single scholar who has genuine academic credentials, who studied the Second Intifada, including in Israel, who, you know, or in Jewish scholars in the United States, who believe that, right? The Second Intifada was a violent uprising against Israeli oppression. Yes, it was an uprising that committed war crimes, that violated international law by targeting civilians. There were clearly civilians targeted to a significant degree, and that’s a violation of international law. You cannot, no matter what your circumstances, target civilians. It’s a war crime. It’s fundamentally immoral. That is totally legitimate to say.
But to say that these people were targeted because they were Jewish, rather than because they were part of a state that’s committing oppression, it makes about as much sense as saying that people who were killed in Kenya in the Mau Mau Rebellion were killed because they were white or British. Or that people who were killed in Algeria were killed because they were French, right? Or people who were killed by Native Americans in the United States in the 19th century in violent uprisings that targeted civilians often were killed because they were white Americans. It’s nonsense. It just completely erases the structure of oppression that exists. Again, the structure of oppression, I want to be very clear, does not excuse legally or morally everything that’s done. Not at all. But to simply erase it and suggest—because again, Jonathan Greenblatt has one hammer, which is antisemitism. So, everything has to become a nail. So, essentially, everything the Palestinians do has to become antisemitism because he will never actually discuss the political, legal reality of oppression that is the context for what Palestinians do. It doesn’t justify everything that Palestinians do but is the crucial context to understand why there was an Intifada to begin with. That’s completely erased, right?
Marwan Barghouti, who’s probably the most prominent leader of the Second Intifada, said—this is how Barghouti describes the Second Intifada, just compare it to what Jonathan Greenblatt says—Barghouti says, ‘how would you feel if on every hill in territory that belongs to you, a new settlement would spring up? If your best friends with whom you fought shoulder to shoulder continue to rot in jail. I reached a simple conclusion. You, Israel, don’t want to end the occupation, and you don’t want to stop the settlements, so the only way to convince you is by force.’ Now, one can critique Marwan Baghouti on strategic grounds. One can criticize him on moral grounds. But the idea that these uprisings, these attacks were done simply because they were Jews, it’s just nonsense, right? Again, and even among pro-Israel scholars, they would recognize that this is nonsense.
And yet, Jonathan Greenblatt can say these things. He’s not challenged. And then, one of the interviewers, to their credit, when Jonathan Greenblatt is basically saying that he’s positing himself as the arbiter of how Jews feel about Zohran Mamdani, because evidently someone made Jonathan Greenblatt pope. I wasn’t around for that election, but evidently we made Jonathan Greenblatt our pope. And this one interviewer, to her credit, on CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box’ starts to quote polls to Jonathan Greenblatt. She quotes one poll suggesting that he won a third of the Jewish vote, which was a plurality in the primary, and a second one suggesting that among younger Jewish New Yorkers, I think under the age of 44, there was a poll that showed him with 67% of the vote.
And what does Jonathan Greenblatt do? Right? Pope Greenblatt? Pope Greenblatt says repeatedly, I don’t believe those polls. I don’t believe those polls. And they just let him say this? I mean, this is nonsense, this is unbelievable. Why on earth would you allow Jonathan Greenblatt, who’s not got no expertise in polling, right, to basically say you should listen to me, you should believe me about what Jewish New Yorkers think, rather than actually several scientifically conducted polls about what Jewish New Yorkers think, which suggest that actually Zohran Mamdani has a lot of support among Jewish New Yorkers, which is something which is very uncomfortable for Jonathan Greenblatt to admit, and so he just dismisses it, and he says the polls are lies, right? And then he gets away with it, right?
And if this were going to be Jonathan Greenblatt’s last interview on this show, or on any mainstream show, because there was a general understanding in the media that if you lie this blatantly, there should be some consequence, then we could be getting somewhere in terms of the discourse, right? I certainly think that if there was a Palestinian or a pro-Palestinian advocate who went on one of these shows and lied as blatantly as Jonathan Greenblatt did, that person would not be getting invited back, right? But all the evidence suggests that Jonathan Greenblatt will be get invited back to talk to interviewers who either don’t know enough to challenge him, or are ideologically so sympathetic that they don’t challenge him even when he’s saying falsehoods.
This is emblematic of a broken mainstream media environment. And that broken mainstream media environment is absolutely connected to the fact that the United States continues to send the weapons that Slaughter and starve people in Gaza, and it is absolutely connected to the fact that the Trump administration, with the support of American universities, can blatantly infringe upon the freedom of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists, even to the extent of sending them into gulags in Louisiana. These things are directly implicated. The American media is directly implicated in the horror that is happening both in Gaza and in the United States under the Trump administration, because they allow people like Jonathan Greenblatt to lie and get away with it.
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