Paid subscribers will get the link to Friday Zoom calls on Tuesdays and the video and podcast the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
Senator Josh Hawley’s speech at the National Conservativism Conference.
Suzanne Schneider discusses Israel’s model for the nationalist right.
Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Dr. Mohammed Al-Hindi, the deputy leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the International Court of Justice.
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.)
On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Jonathan Shamir interviews Hana Morgenstern, Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud, and Moshe Behar about Arab-Jewish identity.
Help Abir Elzowidi rescue her brother from Gaza.
Last week the Knesset voted to reject the two state solution. Not a single Knesset member from a Jewish party opposed the resolution.
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. You’ll notice that if you listen to defenders of the Israeli government, one of the things—in the United States in particular—one of the things they hate the most is when people make analogies between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and basically any other place in the world, whether it’s apartheid South Africa or, you know, Black Americans. They hate these analogies. And I think it’s because the defense of what Israel is doing requires a kind of an exceptionalization of Israel. That if you step back, and you actually just try to apply kind of broad basic principles—you know the idea of equality under the law irrespective of race, religion, ethnicity, etc.—if you see Israel and the Palestinians in that light, according to some kind of universal criteria that you apply to all places, you’re going to have a big problem with what Israel’s doing.
So, this exceptionalization of what Israel does is really, really important to defending what Israel does because it’s a way of saying, basically, you have to check those universal principles at the door because this is so complicated, sui generis, whatever, basically that you have to look at it in a completely different light. But I think it’s really important to de-exceptionalize this conversation and see the things that it has in common with many other struggles in the world today. Of course, every place is different in its own way, but the idea that there are common universal principles that one applies in all circumstances, I think, is really important.
And in this regard, I want to try to draw an analogy between Benjamin Netanyahu and the things that he believes, and that he’s going to speak about in Congress on Wednesday, and two other figures that one might not immediately think of as having a lot in common with him. And those two other figures are: Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, and Mohammad Al-Hindi, who’s the deputy leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And I want to give three quotes: one from Hawley, one from Al-Hindi, the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and then one from Netanyahu to illustrate this common point. All three of these people basically believe that countries should be dominated by members of a particular ethnic, religious, racial group. And those people can be trusted to treat everybody else fairly, even though those other people will not have equality under the law. And this is a huge central struggle in our time across the world, between the idea of equality under the law, and the idea that basically countries are properties of one particular tribe, whether they’re defined racially, religiously, ethnically, or some combination of both. And those tribes can be trusted—because they are somehow benign—to treat everybody else well, even those other people who are not equal members of the nation.
So, let’s start with Josh Hawley. This is Josh Hawley from the National Conservatism Conference, which, not coincidentally, who’s guiding spirit, Yoram Hazony, is actually an Israeli who’s taken a lot of the ways he thinks about Israel and is exporting them to the United States, but also Hungary, India, many other places. There is a great podcast discussion of this, which I’ve linked to with Suzanne Schneider. And so, this is Hawley. Hawley says: ‘I’m calling America a Christian nation. Some will say I’m advocating Christian nationalism. And so I am.’ And then he goes on: ‘Religion unites Americans. Most Americans share broad and basic religious convictions: theistic, biblical, Christian. Working people believe in God. They read the Bible. They go to church, some often, some not. But they consider themselves, in all events, members of a Christian nation.’ And he goes on to say that other people are gonna be treated fine who are not Christians. But they have to recognize that they live in a Christian nation. But because Christianity is so benign and such a unique special tradition, that they have nothing to worry about. Because in this Christian nation run by Christians, they’re gonna be treated fine.
And then this is Mohammed Al-Hindi, who’s the deputy leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And he’s being interviewed by Jeremy Scahill. Now, I think it’s good that Jeremy Scahill, who’s formerly The Intercept now has this new site called Drop Site News. He went out and interviewed a whole bunch of Palestinian Islamist leaders. And I think that’s good. It’s good to hear from these folks because often times one doesn’t hear from them in the Western media. And this is what Mohammed Al-Hindi says about the principles of Islamic Jihad, and he also speaking about Hamas. He says: ‘in terms of the founding principles, Islam constitutes the faith, culture, and history of our Palestinian people. It is a faith for Muslims and a culture for Christians. Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad use the faith of our people and their culture in the creation of Christians as a point of departure.’
Now, of course, there are lots of lots of differences between Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Josh Hawley. Palestinian Islamic Jihad represents Palestinians who are being oppressed. It’s also done terrible, terrible things in terms of purposely targeting Israeli civilians. Josh Hawley has a whole different set of things that he should be held responsible for that he’s done. But you notice the similarity. Islamic Jihad, even though they’re representing a group that doesn’t have a country, when it talks about its vision of a country it’s actually not so different than Hawley’s. The idea is Islam will be the defining culture. And Christians will accommodate themselves to an Islamic culture because Islam is benign, and we don’t need to define this territory that we imagine to be in kind of secular, equal terms. But basically, Muslims will treat everybody in a benign way, even though they have a special superior status, which is exactly what Josh Hawley is saying about his vision of a Christian nation. That Hawley and Al-Hindi are both, in a certain sense, kind of right-wing figures in this global struggle, alongside Victor Orban and Narendra Modi and Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, right. It’s obscured by the fact that, again, that that Al-Hindi’s group, Palestinians, are on the bottom and don’t have their own country now. But when he thinks about the vision he wants, it actually quite fits quite well into this global right-wing vision of basically every country being controlled by a particular religious or racial or ethnic tribe.
And then here’s Netanyahu, who again is going to speak on Wednesday. This is Netanyahu responding to the International Court of Justice, saying that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza is illegal. And Netanyahu says: ‘the Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land. Not in our eternal capital Jerusalem. Not in the land of our ancestors in Judea and Samaria.’ You notice what’s missing there, right? Any recognition that this is not only the land of Jews but also the land of Palestinians, right? That it’s not the property, this land, this country, of one ethno-religious group, one tribe, but that it actually should be shared by people across religious ethnic differences, all of whom should be equal in the eyes of the law. That is what Netanyahu rejects, just as Hawley rejects, just as Al-Hindi rejects.
And so, this is why it’s such a moral and intellectual disaster for the Biden administration and the Democrats to allow Benjamin Netanyahu to come and speak. Because it’s not just morally reprehensible in terms of what Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinians and what he’s done to Gaza. It guts the central logic that Biden has been talking about since he came in, which is that his struggle against Trumpism is part of a global struggle for liberal democracy, which means equality under the law. And this is a point that Sam Adler makes in that podcast with Susan Schneider: you can’t coherently say that when you’re basically feting Benjamin Netanyahu who holds exactly that same ideology—basically tribal supremacy—and you trust people of that tribe to be benign, because somehow that’s just the way they are, rather than believing that all people have equal rights under the law, irrespective of who they are.
