I’ll be on book tour for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza for the next few months. You’ll find a list of book-related events below.
I’m happy people are reading my book. But I know that many talented Palestinian authors don’t get the same attention. So, I hope people who buy my book also buy one by a Palestinian author. For instance, Rashid Khalid’s classic exploration of the roots of Palestinian nationalism, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness.
I hope readers also donate to people in Gaza. For instance, Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.
Here is a new message about Hossam’s condition from his sister, Abir:
“Hossam has been diligently reaching out to various offices, holding on to hope for the progress of his passport application. Recently, he visited the hospital where he and his son, Moayad, spent a challenging four months undergoing treatment. The hospital staff informed him that the archives and reception department would be reopening next week, which filled him with optimism. Hossam has scheduled an appointment to discuss Moayad's case and to collect the essential reports needed for his treatment in Egypt.
Additionally, Hossam has requested the latest reports on his son Momen and his daughter Malak's hearing aids, as he wishes to consult with specialists in Egypt. During this challenging journey, please continue to support Hossam and his family as they seek a brighter, more peaceful future filled with dignity and relief from their struggles. Your compassion truly makes a difference in their lives.”
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern on Friday, our regular time. Our guest will be Jordan Elgrably, Editor in Chief of The Markaz Review and co-editor with Malu Halasa of the new anthology, Sumud: A New Palestinian Reader. We’ll talk about themes in contemporary Palestinian writing and how that writing can help us better understand the horrors in Gaza and across Palestine and Israel.
Friday’s zoom call is for paid subscribers.
Book Tour
(We’ll update this every week.)
On Monday, March 3, I’ll be speaking with Professor Atalia Omer at Notre Dame University.
On Monday, March 10 and Tuesday, March 11, I’ll be giving four talks in Michigan. On March 10 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and at St David’s Episcopal Church, and on March 11 at St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church and at T’chiyah synagogue.
On Monday, March 17, I’ll be speaking at Mishkan Shalom synagogue in Philadelphia.
On Tuesday, March 18, I’ll be debating an old classmate, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, on the proposition “The oppression of Palestinians in non-democratic Israel has been systematic and profound” at the Soho Forum in New York.
On Monday, March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of Vermont.
On Tuesday, March 25, I’ll be speaking at Middlebury College.
On Monday, April 7, I’ll be speaking at the Harvard Divinity School.
On Wednesday, April 9, I’ll be speaking at United Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.
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 details a progressive nonprofit’s refusal to grapple with the assault on Gaza.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to Harvard Medical School Professors Eman Ansari and Aaron Shakow about censorship on campus.
In Haaretz, Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard suggests that “Israel Is losing the justification for its existence,” a statement that could be considered an example of antisemitism under the IHRA definition recently adopted by Harvard University.
Juan Cole on the way Trump’s treatment of Zelensky resembles US treatment of the Palestinians.
Joy Reid speaks after the cancellation of her show on MSNBC.
Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham’s comments upon winning an Oscar.
See you on Friday, March 7,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s kind of public humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Oval Office was the kind of most extreme version of the way Donald Trump treats a lot of foreign leaders, a lot of foreign countries. Which is, he basically says were being ripped off by you and we’re going to extort you, right? Basically, if you want America’s continued help or if you frankly just don’t want us to destroy your economy through tariffs, or you don’t want us to take over your land in the case of Greenland or Panama, basically you just have to start giving us stuff. In the case of Ukraine, your mineral resources. Or with, you know, in the case of Colombia, you have to take our migrants. Or with Canada and Mexico, it seems to change, but basically the claim is we’re getting ripped off and then that’s the pretext for basically these frankly kind of thuggish imperialist kind of claims that basically you’re just going to have to start paying us if you don’t want us to really kind of wreck you.
And so, the question that I think is interesting to ask is why doesn’t Trump treat Israel that way? Right? I mean, you could imagine a world where Trump makes a version of these same arguments vis-a-vis Israel, right. Where he says, you know, why are we giving you all these weapons? Why are we protecting you from Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas? What are we getting in return? We’re being played for suckers. You should pay us twice as much money or you should give us some of your natural resources or you should basically just hand over some of your high-tech companies to us or something. I mean, it wouldn’t be really entirely logical, but it never is logical with Trump.
But you could see how this impulse, right, could be applied to Israel just as easily as it could be applied to Ukraine, you know, again, because America gives Israel a lot of a lot of military assistance. Now, it’s true that military assistance is mostly in the form of a credit card that America gives Israel to buy American weaponry. Trump probably doesn’t even know that, right. And I’m sure he could still spin some way in which America is being ripped off. And yet, he doesn’t, right? I mean, the contrast between his meeting with Zelensky on the one hand, and his meeting with Netanyahu at the Oval Office couldn’t be more extreme, right. He didn’t humiliate Netanyahu. To the contrary, Netanyahu was beaming as Trump basically gave him a series of policies that Netanyahu was thrilled about, most of all, America’s support now for mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in Gaza.
So, why the difference? I mean, one answer would be that simply the domestic politics are very different, right. That even a country like Ukraine, which had a lot of support in Washington, doesn’t have a kind of permanent infrastructure of lobbying organizations like that Israel has, like, you know, pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC, for instance, and the Christians United for Israel, this kind of evangelical group. So, that sustains a level of domestic political support. And now, especially in the Republican Party, right, that has an impact on Trump’s behavior, that the blowback to Trump would be greater if he did this to Netanyahu than if he did this to Zelensky or any other government, right.
But I think that in a way only begs the further question itself, right. Well, then why do we have this infrastructure, right? Why is Israel unusual in that way? And partly, it has to do with the role of the American Jewish community as an unusually politically articulate community that really, since the 1970s, has kind of reoriented its institutional life around kind of unconditional defense of Israel. But that’s not the entire story, right, because Christians United for Israel, an evangelical organization is not a Jewish organization. And even though the American Jewish organizations wield influence, especially when it comes to the Republican Party, they’re really pushing against an open door, right. I mean, which is to say that there’s a lot of a lot of Republicans who are predisposed to support Israel, whether there was an AIPAC or not.
And I think this gets at part of the answer, which is the deeper answer, which is that Israel really doesn’t function in American politics really quite like a foreign policy issue. It really functions as a culture war issue. That Israel has kind of integrated into the culture war. You can see this in the way in which antisemitism and the fight against antisemitism—or I maybe should say ‘antisemitism,’ I think a lot of it’s not antisemitism—but the way in which the right organizes to fight what it calls antisemitism as part of its attack on DEI. And it’s part of its attack on wokeism, as if the left’s antisemitism from the perspective of pro-Israel folks is kind of connected in with the left’s, you know, calling America a racist country or wanting to put in gender pronouns. It’s all kind of part of the same basket. I don’t think there’s another country which functions that way, right, in which to be anti-Israel is to be on the opposite side of the culture war struggle that Donald Trump is on.
And I think that really has to do with the fact that Israel is seen in large chunks of America, and certainly in large chunks of the Republican Party, as not exactly a foreign country, but more like an image of what they would like America to be: a country that is openly ethno-nationalist in that it has clear legal hierarchies between different groups—in this case, ethno-religious groups, Jews and Palestinians. It has an immigration policy that essentially only allows a path to citizenship for people who are of the dominant group. That it’s very militaristic. It’s very nationalistic. It’s very sovereignty oriented. It’s openly dismissive of international law. It’s quite religious. These are all things that I think offer a kind of vision of what for Donald Trump and many Republicans were like America to be.
And so, in some ways, Israel functions as a kind of not exactly a mirror, but almost like an aspiration for America. The only other country that I could think off the top of my head functions at all that way is Hungary, which I think has also become really because it’s been so frankly anti-Muslim and also anti-LGBT and whatever serves also as a kind of a model. And that’s why I think that it would be very unlikely that Donald Trump would treat Viktor Orban that way. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe Narendra Modi or I suppose Jair Bolsonaro when they were in power in Brazil also. Because I think these are countries where Donald Trump is not likely to think about the relationship so much in transactional terms because he thinks of these countries as kind of countries that embody what he would like America to be.
And I think Israel above all, because it’s the country in which ethno-nationalism is the most firmly entrenched, and it’s also because it’s also so technologically and economically dynamic, and militarily strong, that it really represents a kind of almost a fantasy of what America could be. And I think that’s why you have this dramatic dissonance between how Trump treats Zelensky and many, many other sometimes longtime US allies and the way he treats Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.
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